#i find this ‘discrepancy’ (for want of a better word) FASCINATING

[aroanthy]

(anthytouga voice) why would i be compassionate to nanami ew disgusting nanami’s literally the worst nanami is a cockroach i hope she dies she’s so fucking stupid oh my god being compassionate to nanami is the worsttttttt so what if the worst things ever happen to her and it’s my fault that’s just lifeohhhhhhhhhhh oh? utena is experiencing the worst things ever and i helped? and i helped? oh well i should just kill myself. oh well i should just kill myself and save her because actually utena is Good. and stupid. but Good. unlike nanami lol nanami was born cursed to suffer haha nanami’s got that karmic punishment coming lollllll But Utena Does Not <3

[delimeful]

the end of being alone (3)

Ch 1 | Ch 2 |

warning: mentions of fear, crocodiles, discussion of teeth

-

Logan found himself grateful that he’d made arrangements to postpone their other jobs for a bit, because it looked as though they’d be staying firmly on this planet’s surface for a while.

There had been all of one attempt to bring Virgil aboard the Mindscape, and it had resulted in a significant amount of crying from both the child and Patton. Whatever circumstances had led the Human to this planet, it had left them deeply fearful of any sort of spacefaring vessel.

… This did not annul Logan’s suspicions about smuggling, though he was careful not to say as much in front of Virgil. The child was keen, and any time the fact that they were a Human was mentioned, they withdrew and began displaying body language that Logan believed indicated a desire to flee. Checking that exits were still there, putting space between themself and any of the Mindscape’s crew, anxious tics, and so forth.

Needless to say, they avoided the topic.

However, to Logan’s surprise, the child didn’t seem at all adverse to basic questions about themself. Understanding their responses was rare, of course, but the kid was picking up on Common with a shocking quickness, and Roman had turned out to be rather talented at interpreting their gestures when they didn’t have the right words.

The data that Logan had collected from these inquiries was both strange and intriguing. He’d carefully woven a mental list of it all.

1. Virgil seemed to identify by he/him, though whether that was an actual gender preference or simply a child wanting to be called the same pronouns as the three of them was up for debate. Either way, Logan seriously doubted that there was any way to convey the nebulous concept of gender through a language barrier, so he let the matter lie.

2. After eating too fast, Virgil would convulse slightly in a semi-rhythmic pattern for a short period. He didn’t seem alarmed or pained by this, only slightly irritated when it would interrupt him mid-sentence. The condition of ‘hiccups’ was thankfully temporary, since it made Roman quite jumpy. For their tiny, squeaking nature, Patton had called them ‘hicchirps’, which was ridiculous, but Virgil seemed to enjoy any and all wordplay that made it through his grasp of the language, so Logan stowed his complaints.

3. Virgil was terrified of the locals. Despite being plainly evident, this observation didn’t make sense at first, seeing as the nearby town consisted primarily of native Hiiynal and a few offplanet transfers, none of which could be described as particularly dangerous or violent. After a few days of gentle questioning and no reprimands for not answering, Virgil finally told them that the locals would ‘chase monsters far away’ and so he couldn’t risk getting near. Questioning was temporarily halted in favor of showing the Human the art of shadow symmetry, for purely scientific reasons, of course. 

(Supposition: Human children enjoyed movement games.)

4. While the synthetic meat from the ration kits was accepted by Virgil, he showed a surprising preference for sweeter food items, such as fruit and sugar crystals. Seeing as Humans were rumored to be obligate carnivores or even raw flesh-eaters, this was a strange discrepancy. Virgil had even eaten some of the leafy vegetables Logan had brought, face pinched up in disgust but insisting that eating ‘greens’ would make one tall. It was unclear to Logan what color had to do with nutrients or growth. He was also slightly alarmed at the implication of Virgil being short for his age.

5. Virgil seemed, for all intents and purposes, fixated on Roman.

The latest data point was a work in progress. Logan hadn’t mentioned it to Roman himself, because the Cravon was already fairly worked up over everything the Human did as it was. Nobody seemed sure if this jumpiness was because of the Human child, or on behalf of it.

Still, it was present in little ways. For example, even as he answered Logan’s latest series of questions, his gaze would occasionally flicker up from his hands to Roman, who sat at the mouth of the little cave, carefully peeling more fruit. It wasn’t about the food; Patton had taken it upon himself to make sure the child knew he only had to ask to get something to eat. No, this  ‘almost-staring’ was a frequent occurrence, no matter what Roman preoccupied himself with.

“You were saying you met… Susan… when another predator was attacking it?”

Virgil nodded, hurriedly looking back to his hands. “It was a big bite monster, and Susan was loud crying, so I did, uh,” he lifted his arms up, hands spread wide, “this, and I was loud at it until it ran away. Like raccoons back on Dirt.”

Dirt was apparently Virgil’s name for his home. Logan hadn’t heard of ‘raccoons’ before. He decided not to get sidetracked. “I’d estimate the creature you saw was a Lifel. They are the natural predators of Humlilts.”

“Natural?” Virgil mimicked.

“It means ‘of nature’,” Logan attempted to clarify, gesturing around them. “In the wild.”

Virgil only grew more confused with the wide, encompassing gesture. “Sky? Was not flying.”

Logan glanced at Roman, checking that he was still preoccupied. Patton was back at the ship, contacting a friend for advice. There seemed no better opportunity if he wanted to avoid overwhelming Virgil.

“Virgil, would you like to try something new?” he asked, carefully neutral. It wouldn’t do to put any pressure on the child.

The Human squinted at him slightly, quick to use his most common phrase. “Will it hurt?”

“It will not hurt,” Logan replied, ignoring the tightening in his core with careful practice. It always felt so wrong, that a mere pupa would be so familiar with hurt. “I will always tell you if something might hurt.”

“Mmm.” The Human hummed, the way he always did when they told him such things. Like he wasn’t sure if he could believe it. “What’s it?”

“What is it,” Logan corrected automatically. “It is something I can do, to show you new words. Want to try a little bit, first?” That was the phrase they used for new foods, but it applied well enough to mindsharing.

Virgil clenched and unclenched his hands for a moment longer before nodding, going a little tense like he expected something unpleasant. Logan held a hand out to him, waiting until he’d reached out in return to start sharing.

Small, simple flashes of images and sensations. Quiet forests, shallow oceans, clean air. Plants, bugs, animals, humanoids, living and dying and living again. Nature.

Virgil had pinched his eyes closed immediately at the start of the low-level telepathy, and Logan only had a moment to worry that maybe it had hurt him in some manner.

Then, there was a feeling of recognition. Without a moment to spare, Virgil had grasped the nature of the Vidi and was projecting his own thoughts. Walking on a crunchy leaf-covered trail with other Human young, a winged insect emerging from a cocoon, the crack of thunder and heavy rain on a windowsill. Nature.

“Wow!” Virgil whispered, imprint thoughts flickering like flames, too quick for Logan to really see. “You see into heads!”

Logan pulled back slightly, offering a bit of content-smug in return to the Human’s awe. “That is one way of framing it, yes. So, you understand what I mean, about the Lifel being a natural predator?”

“Carnivore,” Virgil mumbled, and then offered image-thoughts of several creatures that Logan could only assume were from the deathworlder’s home planet. He watched with morbid curiosity as Virgil remembered a clip from a screen, displaying large ungulates with twisting horns crossing a river, and then being dragged underwater by a dark, writhing shape.

“That’s a crocodile,” Virgil told him, his eyes still closed tight in concentration. “They’ve got big teeth and they do death rolls. They look like alligators, but I know they aren’t because gators live in Florida.”

“Florida?” Logan asked. He wondered if perhaps ‘gators’ were kept in captivity for species preservation. Or perhaps they were too dangerous left in the wild?

Virgil showed him a memory of a long, reptilian form with a narrow, tooth-filled jaw. It was wading steadily through a swimming pool, not paying any mind to Virgil, who was sitting with his legs dipped in the pool, watching in fascination. “I lived there!”

“Oh,” Logan managed, his ears going numb with fear at the idea of a child being so near a creature like that. “So it would seem.”

The Human patted him carefully, a gesture of comfort. “It’s okay. The bad guys didn’t take any gators or crocodiles from Dirt. Just people.”

Virgil’s words trailed off, a sense of melancholy overwhelming him. Rather than find out more about the Human’s past, Logan felt an unreasonably strong urge to stop that sadness. “Could you perhaps tell me more about these… ‘crocodiles’? You seem to be quite informed on them.”

“I had a book about them,” Virgil managed, slowly dragging his thoughts away from his abduction. “Did you know some crocodiles have a… a ‘biting force’ of five thousand pounds?”

He had lapsed into English, the sentence sounding well-recited, but Logan still got the general idea of what he meant, and a strong image of a picture book, covered in writing he couldn’t read but still understood. If Logan was right about the measurement conversions, the fact was terrifying.

“That’s very interesting,” he mused, because terrifying and interesting often went hand in hand. “Are there any other predators that can bite like that?”

Virgil scrunched his face up in thought. “Maybe sharks. Oh, but for sure a T. Rex!”

Logan saw a very concerning glimpse of a large fish with too many teeth before Virgil’s mind switched to a cartoon depiction of a larger creature with also too many teeth. He was beginning to see a trend in deathworlder species. “I… see.”

“They’re all dead, though,” Virgil told him sadly, projecting a memory of a huge display of bones. He then seemed to perk up, glancing over at Roman again. “Except for in space!”

Logan narrowly avoided laughing out loud, covering his throat before the vibrating chirps could get far. So, this was the truth behind the Human’s interest!

“Roman is not a ‘dinosaur’,” he clarified, once he felt composed enough to do so. “In fact, I believe he rarely even eats meat.”

Virgil squinted at him. “Are you sure? Maybe he’s a secret dinosaur.”

Logan wiggled his fingers thoughtfully. “I suppose we’ll just have to check.”

---

“Roman, would you come here for a moment?”  

Roman looked up from his task, immediately suspicious. Logan sounded strangely amused, like he was on the brink of laughing at him. That was never a good sign.

Still, the Human was looking over at him with those wide, strange eyes, and he wasn’t about to run away. He got to his feet, leaving his pile of dana peels behind as he crossed the cave floor. “What is it, dear esteemed companion who would never take advantage of me?”

“I need you to show us your teeth,” Logan said, very much not being a dear esteemed companion who would never take advantage of him. Roman resisted the urge to hang his head in resignation. He should have expected this. The Ulgorii was shameless when it came to exploiting his friends for science.

“How about absolutely not?” he replied, because there were actually limits to his tolerance for shenanigans, and one of those limits was threat-displaying at a baby Human.

“Hold on, look,” Logan said, and then bared his own ridged teeth with a click.

The Human did his small grimace-smile back, entirely unphased. They both looked to him expectantly. Roman felt as though he was being ganged up on.

“Um,” Virgil said, painfully tentative, “please?”  

Roman felt extremely ganged up on.

He squatted, tail keeping him perfectly balanced, and pulled at the corner of his mouth to show some of his teeth.

“Woah,” Virgil breathed.

“See how the back teeth are narrow but dull? They’re designed to crack bones and get to the marrow at the center,” Logan narrated, like the nerd he was. “Roman doesn’t have the small incisors or sharp molars required for proper full-time carnivores.”

Roman almost reminded his crewmate to use small words, but Virgil seemed to get the idea, leaning uncomfortably close to stare. He then opened his own mouth, like he was planning to take a bite out of something, displaying a shocking number of tiny little bone-teeth crammed inside. Some of them were uncomfortably sharp.

Rather than attack anyone, though, Virgil touched his own teeth, carefully inspecting the shape of them. Roman resisted the urge to get him to sanitize his hands. Kits would be kits, he supposed.

Logan was patiently watching as Virgil pointed to each tooth in turn, and he obligingly recited the name of each type of tooth for the kit. His two lower arms took frantic notes on Human jaw structure, probably to prepare more elaborate meal plans better suited to a deathworlder diet. The kid soaked every bit of information in like a sponge.

Finally, after a long moment of thought, he announced, “My ‘lower canine’ is going to fall out in close time!”

“Soon,” Logan offered, always quick to interpret the Human’s occasional nonsense Common. “'My lower canine is going to fall out soon.'” And then, after a moment’s pause. “Wait, it’s going to what?”

And then, because Roman’s day needed more nightmare fuel, the kit bared his tiny fangs at them and poked one with his tongue, revealing that it did indeed seem to be sickeningly loose. In fact, Roman could see a few other gaps in the curved row of teeth, some with little bits of bone peeking out.

“Stars above,” Roman said, feeling a little faint. Logan was already interrogating a very confused Virgil on whether or not losing teeth was indicative of an illness or not.

“They’re just my little teeth,” Virgil told them, seemingly unconcerned with holes in his mouth. “I get big ones later.”

“There are plenty of species that have milk teeth, but to have their adult set not fully-formed by the time the milk teeth are ready to fall out…,” Logan quickly devolved into muttering, hands flicking.

“Doesn’t that hurt?” Roman asked despite himself, eyeing the kit just in case he was going to burst into tears all of the sudden. Roman himself had lost one or two front teeth before his next set had fully formed, and each time it had felt like biting on hot metal.

“Nuh-uh.” Virgil seemed to have moved from confused to amused, still not entirely sure what the fuss was all about. “Not unless I,” he mimed pulling on the tooth, and Roman made a click-click-click of parental don’t-do-that chiding before he’d even fully registered the alarm he’d felt at the motion.

Virgil clicked back at him curiously, sounding exactly like a tiny version of an exasperated parent. Roman tucked his face against his shoulder, unsure if he should laugh or despair.

This Human was really going to be the death of him.

[lux-i-fer]

S5 Trailer Thoughts Part One: Major plot/ characters

Intial thoughts: Fascinating plotline!! The Lucifer team really seems to have a cohesive storyline this time around. But let's talk about the elephant in the room, yeah?

Michael is here and what an interesting villain he is! What does he want and why does he want it? Well we know he wants to take over Lucifer's life on Earth but his reasoning behind it is less clear. My initial thought is that his motive has something to do with both Chloe's miracle status and Lucifer's redemption arc last season (i.e. Dad seemingly forgiving Lucifer). Based on what we've seen of Michael's personality so far, I'd say he's quite depraved himself; however, I theorize that Dad isn't so forgiving with the other siblings as he is with Lucifer 😉. While we're on this topic, let's talk more about Michael's character!

This shot is honestly what sold me on Michael as a character and Michael as a threat. I feel like this is the scene where we truly see who Michael is as a person, not as an embodiment of his twin, Lucifer. In this shot I truly believe Michael is the other side of Lucifer's coin. They share many facial quirks, such as the cold eyed stare and sardonic grin; however, there are discrepancies. Where Lucifer stares with almost righteous rage, Michael's stare is filled with so much contempt that it seems to devalue whoever it's directed at and whittles them down to an ant to be crushed under his heel. If that truly is indicative of his personality, what does that mean for the humans in Lucifer's life? Sure, Michael claims he doesn't want to destroy Lucifer's life on Earth, he simply wants to hijack it, but what is his definition of hijacking? Michael doesn't seem to value humanity in the way Lucifer does, what happens if/when he grows tired of their petty mortal lives?

Then we have their smiles, which is equally the most similar and dissimilar thing between the two. What I see in Michael's smile is a sadist type of joy that Lucifer's "laughing but it ain't funny" smile lacks. Michael seems to revel in pain, both as the punisher and punishee, if his fight with Maze is anything to go by. If Lucifer feels too much, I'd almost define Michael as feeling nothing at all. I view Lucifer as the morning star (obviously) and Michael as a black hole: devoid of humanity and absorbing everything in his path. He just seems to command this scene. We know that Maze just beat the shit out of him, and normally a fight like that would be the highlight of the scene, yet Michael just seems to suck all that attention away from Maze and to himself the moment he opens his mouth. He's fascinating and otherworldly in a way we've only seen from the likes of Mom, Uriel, Remiel, and s1 Amenadiel. To close out this section I'd like to put words to what many people are already thinking: Michael represents who and what Lucifer could have become had he let himself waste away in Hell. He is the embodiment of the callous Other living amongst humanity, detached and uncaring of anyone or anything that isn't himself.

But let's steer away from analyzing Michael and back to the plot at hand: Michael is attempting to pull the ol' Parent Trap scheme, except nobody's happy and there's more at stake than just some botched camp ear piercing and a London plane ticket. I know I've already seen some anxiety surrounding this plotline and to that I say: why? In my opinion I feel as though this bait and switch will fool no one. Just look at him for God's sake! There is simply something wrong about Michael's interpretation of his brother. To a stranger, perhaps Michael could pass as Lucifer; however, to people who know him, I'd find it very difficult to keep up the charade successfully. Sure, it may fool #TeamLucifer for a little bit (Michael bought himself some time by telling Chloe "thousands of years in hell has changed me") however I doubt this will fly for very long. Chloe may have turned a blind eye to some glaring things about Lucifer in the past, but I don't think she can quite convince herself to do it again for s5.

Take this shot, for example. Chloe's face tells me that something is Very Off. And not to mention Dan! Dan, of course, seems to look to be more exasperated than anything, although I wouldn't be surprised if he noticed something off as well. Dan has spent a season and a half (and the better part of his down spiral) hyperfocused on Lucifer. He knows Lucifer better than Lucifer himself would probably care to admit. We see in episodes like 1x05 and 2x07 that they do have things in common both interest-wise and personality-wise. I feel as though discounting Dan's intuition just because of his current (erratic) mental state is extremely preemptive. The show has already showed us that we shouldn't be doubting characters who possess paranoia towards Lucifer. Some of the most paranoid characters (Reese, Jimmy Barns, the Street Preacher from 1x13) every criminal ever) have all been correct about Lucifer's true identity. Why would that change now? I think Dan has always been the character to watch regarding the supernatural, and I stand by that claim even more so for s5.

This is a change of pace from character analysis, but I'm just curious about this shot! It's clearly a Shining reference, but why? Is this symbolic of Lucifer wasting away trapped in hell, similar to how Jack wastes away trapped in the Outlook Hotel? I'm curious to find out!

The last screencap I want to discuss is this one. Right off the bat what I notice is the wing color; they're not white!

Later on in the trailer we see that Michael's wings are a different color than Lucifer's white ones! So is this Lucifer or is this Michael? The wing color would imply this is Michael; however, as we've theorized up above, it seems uncharacteristic of Michael to care this much about humanity (especially when that human is Chloe!). Is Michael willing to feign emotion to pass as Lucifer? It's hard to know from the trailer alone!

Closing Thoughts:

This season seems to have a lot going for it. S4 set up this arc beautifully and I can't wait to see where the cast and crew take us. I firmly believe based on what we've seen so far that Michael will be the perfect character to tie up this five season story. (Obviously s6 has been greenlit but considering that to my knowledge s5 has not been altered to accommodate for it, I'm treating s5 as the conclusion to the previous overarching plotline.)

Part Two

[theuniversitychallengereview]

UC 51.03 - London Business School vs Hertford, Oxford

Since it was introduced at the 1988 Olympics, every single Gold Medal in the Women’s Team event in the Archery has gone to South Korea. Including yesterday’s win that’s nine straight victories, and their period of unparalleled dominance continues. The men’s team have also won six of the nine they have contested, and a mixed team won the first staging of that event in Tokyo too. Adding their success in the individual events, South Korea have won 26 gold medals, and 42 in total, in the 43 archery events which have been thus far staged at the Olympic Games. 

As Twitter’s own @tarequelaskar pointed out in the brilliant article which alerted me to this story, this is a perfect example of specialisation, an economic concept whereby countries or companies focus intensely on one particular aspect of a given industry and come to serve that niche in such a specialised fashion that they become the ultimate experts and nigh-on irreplaceable. This is done in government and business by providing companies with incentives to specialise, and supporting those who succeed at it. 

With respect to Korean archery, similar forces are at play. There are a bunch of professional teams and leagues in the country, giving archers financial stability while they focus on their training, something not as common across the world. Said training involves such things as practicing in live baseball stadiums and replicas of the Olympic venues, to mimic first the atmosphere and then the conditions that will be present on the day of the actual tournament. 

This philosophy of marginal gains - the same system used by Team Sky and Chris Froome to win multiple Tour De Frances on the trot - puts their preparation miles ahead of the competition, which goes some way to explaining their dominance. It is not the only reason. Before the fine-tuning of the elite shooters comes the discovery of the promising young ones, and the inspiring nature of past success (along with a historic national love of the sport) helps to create a virtuous cycle which give Korea a far larger number of archers to choose from than any other country. This greater choice means that there is a greater chance of finding the next Gold medallists.

Making the argument that professional footballers are at a higher level than other elite sportspeople, Michael Cox used this same argument in a recent article for The Athletic. To summarise, he stated that because there are a far higher number of people who wish to become professional footballers, that must mean that the ones who do make it are at a higher standard than those who make it in other sports. Initially, I was drawn in by the pure maths of this point, but having thought about it some more I’m no longer sure to what extent I agree. 

Now, the fact that hundreds of millions more people play football than rugby, or basketball, will certainly confer some level of “eliteness”, but only up to a certain point. Because football has been so popular for so long, the general standard of the play, relative to what it used to be, has had longer to improve. In the same way that if you transplanted a 100m runner from the Olympic final in the early 20th century to now they probably wouldn’t even qualify for the games, a footballer from the 80s would stand less of a chance of making it were they playing today. Many other sports don’t have that level of natural progression, afforded by decades of technical and tactical advancement - at least not globally. 

But the numbers argument only goes so far, as can be demonstrated by the Korean archers. Yes, there are more archers in Korea than anywhere else, relatively, giving them a higher chance of uncovering those with a natural aptitude, but the reason behind their bow and arrow dynasty is the specialisation. The hyper-detailed level of training and focus which allows them to be the best they can possible be. 

Now, archery is unique in that there is a theoretical maximum score (I understand that this is to some extent arbitrary, and related to the rules of the game as defined by some human being, semi-randomly, but it works in terms of this argument, because it gives a percentage score of how good the archers are based on the agreed-upon parameters of the sport), which, at the Olympics, is 720. The Olympic record is 700 (held by Korean Kim Woo-jin, giving an implied “eliteness level” of 97.2%. 

The best player in the history of football (don’t @ me) is Lionel Messi, and few would doubt that he operates at or above that level of perfection in his sport. But I also don’t think you could doubt that Novak Djokovic, or Serena Williams in her pomp, were similarly magnificent at tennis. Cyclists on the Tour De France put their bodies through more in three weeks than most people endure in a decade, and have every aspect of their training and diet strictly controlled so as to bring them as close to perfection as possible. There will certainly be a higher number of these elite performers in football, because there are a higher number of paying jobs for said elite performers, and because more people attempt to become elite performers, but I don’t think that it follows on from that that they are better at their sport than other elite athletes, all of whom have undergone years and years of specialised training to get them where they are.

Does any of this matter, in terms of how each sport should be enjoyed? Probably not, but its interesting to think about, and kind of awe-inspiring to try and appreciate just how good those at the top of their respective games are. And if there is some discrepancy in the level of eliteness between the different sports it doesn’t detract from the fact that they would handily dispatch any civilian challengers without breaking a sweat. The joy comes from watching people who are good at stuff doing that stuff - and, as evidenced by the crowds which gather for non-league football, it doesn’t matter whether or not they are at the absolute pinnacle of said stuff. They’re still going to be much better than the rest of us. 

Competitive quizzing is different from the activities previously mentioned in that any normal person can have a guess at pretty much any question, with a chance that they’ll get it right. What sets the contestants apart on shows like University Challenge is the speed of their recall under pressure - the quickness of their knowledge as well as the knowledge itself. But there are plenty of armchair quizzers who think they could wipe the floor on the show, so just how good are the actual contestants? (Compared to an elite footballer or archer on an imaginary scale that accounts for relative skill in all disciplines?). I don’t know (and in case you hadn’t noticed by now I’m just fascinated by people who are really good at anything, and wanted to share some of that fascination with you all), but I’ll try and have a go at answering it anyway. 

So, the World Quizzing Championships have been dominated by British and Irish quizzers since its inception in 2003, with 16 of the 18 winners coming from either Britain or the Republic of Ireland (who have four wins courtesy of The Egghead Pat Gibson). This, in my mind, makes this neck of the woods comparable to South Korean archery. It is a hotbed of talent, and the infrastructure is in place to encourage and aid talent maximalisation. Indeed, if you scroll down the list of highest ranking players at the WQC in any given year you can see a significant cohort of UC alums, so clearly there are a number of elite quizzers who have passed through the show. 

This specialisation can be seen in microcosm with the preponderance of top-level quizzers produced by Oxford and Cambridge, who both have a long-standing culture of competitive quizzing far beyond other Universities. The debate is there to be had on the fairness of each institution having so many teams, but clearly they produce enough elite players to compete with far bigger Unis when entering as (sometimes tiny) colleges. 

In conclusion, I think it is pretty obvious that UC is a breeding ground for world-class quizzers, and though no one has won a World title straight off the bat after appearing on the show, there are top-50 and top 100 finishes abound, which is still greatly impressive, and helps to give an idea of just how good these students really are. 

Hoping to justify the 1000 words I’ve just written about their exceptional talents are two teams from the London Business School and Hertford College, Oxford. The Oxford side have never made it beyond the second round, but LBS reached the semi-finals in 2006, their only previous appearance on the show. Anyway, there is quite literally no time for me to recite the rules; here’s your first starter for ten... 

Paxman mentions that LBS were in the show in 2006, but doesn’t mention that they reached the semi final, which is lazy imo. A bunch of them are studying for MBAs, which makes sense. He doesn’t mention Hertford’s previous appearances either, but that’s more understandable.

Hertford’s Hitchens takes the first starter with Kennedy, and the Oxonians added a full set of bonuses on words made up by authors - including a couple of educated guesses. LBS hit back with the next question, but can only manage one bonus on famous scientists. One of the two they miss is Rosalind Franklin, and Paxman teases them for not spotting an apparently obvious clue within the question.

The first picture round is on national emblems, and LBS are first to recognise that of Vietnam for the starter. They don’t know Laos or Belarus, but do know that Mozambique has a machine gun on its one. Butterworth then jumps the gun with argon on the next starter, giving his answer just as Paxman says it in the question. Butterworth makes up for it with the music starter, recognising Fat Boy Slim before anyone else, and LBS know Primal Scream and Wu Tang Clan too. They’re still fifty points behind though, and will need a big second half to turn things around.

This task gets more difficult for them, as Hitchens takes another starter. Lloyd adds a second in a row for Oxford and they are nearly one hundred points clear. LBS really need to get some points on the board, and Ruess duly obliges, knowing that there is a massive sculpture of a spider called Maman, which sounds needlessly scary, to the extent that I’m not even going to google it.

The comeback is ended before its even begun as Oswald takes a starter for Hertford, which gives them the picture bonuses - the starter having been dropped by both teams. Lloyd produces another excellent guess of Reuben, demonstrating how useful it is to have vague knowledge as well as specific knowledge. This is one of probably five questions he has answered in a throwaway manner, but which turned out to be correct. 

By this point LBS seem to have accepted defeat. Ruess takes another starter, but there is little to no urgency on the bonus questions. They’re right, granted, to have none, they have no chance of winning, but if they gave it a go they might scrape a high scoring loser spot. Ruess is the only one who seems bothered, and bags himself ten more points. They have an amusing discussion about methods of poisoning in Agatha Christie novels (’it was used as a curry ingredient?’, Ruess wondered aloud, trying to figure out which spices could be poisonous, before Butterworth pointed out that it wasn’t something commonly used as a curry ingredient, prompting respectful mirth from the audience) on the bonuses, but still languish miles behind. 

Lloyd grabs the last starter of the night for Hertford, who win by eighty at the gong.

Final Score: London Business School 100 - 180 Hertford, Oxford

At the end, Paxman mentions Hertford’s stellar guesswork, which means I wasn’t chatting nonsense (at least on that front, the jury is out on the rest of it), and says that they’ve done a really good job. Incredibly effusive praise for a score of 180. He really is going soft in his old age.

Phew, that was a long one. If you made it through the intro you deserve a prize. And that prize is that you get to come back next week for the next episode of this blog!! Woop woop! 

And if this wasn’t quite enough UC content for you then you can subscribe for extra blogs on my Patreon, which features Retro Reviews from the 2015/16 series of the show. Ta x

[ghost-band-aids]

Interview with GHOST and TRIBULATION

The Undisguised Truth

TOBIAS FORGE and JONATHAN HULTÉN have a lot in common. While one of them currently slips into the role of the exalted charmer Cardinal Copia as the singer of GHOST, the introverted TRIBULATION guitarist on stage transforms into a fascinating, expressive being who exists beyond genre and gender boundaries. What is real, what is an artificial figure? METAL HAMMER met both of them during their tour together for a conversation that allows far more than just a look behind the scenes of two of the most popular metal bands at the moment, but also unexpectedly intimate insights.

Tobias, originally you didn't want to be the singer of Ghost. Did the mask help you to come to terms with this exposed role?

Tobias Forge: Yes, well, at least from today's point of view. But I never wanted to be unknown.

What function does your stage make-up have, Jonathan?

Jonathan Hultén: It helps me to put myself in a certain mood. The idea behind it is to isolate and reinforce a fraction of myself, an aspect of my personality. To immerse myself in this is an experience beyond the everyday state of mind.

Strengthen also Cardinal Copia or Papa Emeritus facets of your personality, Tobias?

Tobias Forge: I'm not shy, but I'm not as sociable as Cardinal Copia - and also not a "physical clown" like him. What I do is a kind of mixed bag. I imitate people I find funny or interesting.

Basically, the way actors do it. If you asked Robert DeNiro how he came up with the young Don Corieone, he would probably say: Well, there was this guy in my old neighborhood... The costume gives you the opportunity to completely surrender yourself in that moment and just be that new person. That's interesting, because you only reveal it to a few people for a limited time. You don't have to see how that person lives the other 22 hours of the day. Like with actors: James Bond is cool because you only see certain sides of him. Never in the bathroom or shower. Well, not in the toilet, in the shower. But always in the company of a snake or something he kills.

How long does the transformation take?

Tobias Forge: But you finished much sooner than I did.

Jonathan Hultén: For pragmatic reasons. I like to get it done as soon as possible so as not to get in a bind later. How about you?

Tobias Forge: We have a very tight schedule. Pretty much exactly one hour before the show starts I walk in the door as Tobias and come out as someone else.

What does this transformation do to you?

Jonathan Hultén: You have to enter a stage with emphasis. So it's good to be prepared.

Tobias Forge: And that's what happens within this hour. You slowly start to move differently... I love being a different person for two hours and then changing back. But I need some time for that, usually I stay alone for an hour after the show.

Jonathan Hultén: That's good. As far as I can, I try to do the same. Mostly by doing something that I can be introspective about... ...carry things back and forth or something.

Tobias Forge: I think that's very important. There is potential suffering in art, especially in mental health. The smaller the discrepancy between yourself and the person you are portraying on stage, the harder it is to deal with. If you are merely associated with your stage character, people expect you to behave like that in real life.

And that can be problematic...

Tobias Forge: Exactly, because they created this super human being who can do anything, who has a carte blanche. Everyone applauds, everyone laughs, and everything you do is funny or cool. And if you take it to the bar afterwards... There are bad examples of people who can't get down in normal life, become alcoholics or, well, die.

Jonathan Hultén: Sure, all that can be destructive. But in my case it was very helpful to discover my more explosive, extroverted sides. And to dare to give them more space, because privately I am quite shy. That's also part of the process of building up, which takes a long time.

I gradually gain self-confidence from this, so that I can now express myself better in everyday situations.

Tobias Forge: I think they are one and the same. It's like mental martial arts, where the person who doesn't like the fight, but still has to face it - within the limits of the dojo, of course, so as not to hurt anyone. And, yes, art is basically good for anyone who has the desire to become someone else. It's a generalization, but I think there's a lot of truth in it: many artists choose this path because they weren't very popular at school. Or they can't come out of themselves, but their art offers them an opportunity to do so. It's fun to go on stage, to transform and feed off the energy or admiration.

How you interact with the audience has changed over the years.

Tobias Forge: Sure. The masked person has an advantage of about 70 concerts, so 1,000 hours on stage. If I had given myself the same amount of time to develop without the make-up, without the role, just with acoustic guitar, I might have created a completely different stage personality. But this is completely uninteresting for me, because I prefer this super character! (laughs)

Jonathan Hultén: transformation would then no longer be so dramatic, but much more subtle.

Tobias Forge: And you'd have to be comfortable in your own skin.

Jonathan Hultén: I'm working on it. (laughs)

Jonathan, your solo debut, CHANTS FROM ANOTHER PLACE, will be released soon and you will also be touring with Chelsea Wolfe. Will you be different on stage there than you are here with Tribulation?

Jonathan Hultén: It has become harder to separate the two. They are like different shades of the same color. And I've found that they both borrow a lot from each other. The tribulation performer exists much longer, so he has much more experience. He/she is like an archaeologist who explores an inner wildness and passion. Over the years a lot of weird stuff has been dug up and included.

On the other hand, the solo performer, who has only been around for about three yen and is still is at the beginning of the excavations. However, I expect that also here many interesting things will appear

What can we expect from you live?

Jonathan Hultén: Just like with Tribulation, the atmosphere will be very important. But apart from some dramatic excursions, the show will be mostly silent and contemplative. The silence gives more room for more complex emotions to unfold in a way that I miss in the energetic performances of Tribulation.

These in turn defy the unwritten rules of a traditional metal show, not least thanks to you. Tribulation are considered a death metal band...

Tobias Forge: I wouldn’t call you guys like that.

Do you see yourselves as pioneers? Do you enjoy being different?

Jonathan Hultén: I stopped thinking about whether people see me as stupid, weird or whatever. It's the only way I can do it. Headbanging just wasn't enough. I felt there had to be something bigger, some kind of ectase. This may be weird, but it feels good.

How important are grace and style to you?

Jonathan Hultén: Both are important, but it's equally important not to be obsessively attached to them. Someone once said that grace is a combination of spontaneity and control. It's a good rule of thumb - on and off stage. It's always about balance. Every situation is unique and requires a unique approach.

Tobias Forge: You should be really proud of it, apart from the fact that your music is great. Your performance is dramatically different from any other. Besides the music, your physical attributes and the way you present yourself make you a very unique and interesting person. Strange, cash, different. You should definitely pursue that. Yes, I think you should see yourself as a pioneer.

Jonathan Hultén: Mm, thank you. (chuckles)

What does that do to your audience?

Tobias Forge: If you are a live musician, have an antenna for it and you don't completely care, you always enter a symbiosis with the fans. Give and take, almost like in a physical relationship. You will try to perfect ways to give pleasure to each other. I know it sounds weird, but every decent relationship changes with age. You grow together, you have new needs or ideas. That's why some couples bring in other people, or whips or plugs. It's the same with you and the audience. During our second show I noticed that our audience is very positive, but I couldn't make a rhyme out of it.

Why that?

Tobias Forge: The room was filled with Hard Rock people, the kind of people I've been playing to since I was a teenager. But they weren't headbanging as usual. Instead they did something else.

Jonathan Hultén: Wiggle.

Tobias Forge:  Yeah, they were wiggling around. (laughs) And singing and laughing, very different from what I knew from Death or Black Metal shows.

Are there any other special features of your fans?

Tobias Forge: When we played the first headliner shows in America, I noticed for the first time the gender diversity in our audience. Our fans are a lot of girls, a lot of guys, and a lot in between. We've always been a magnet for people who are unhappy with their gender or don't feel they belong anywhere: Kids, many outsiders and outcasts in various fragile states.

Jonathan, Tobias' words seem to resonate with you.

Jonathan Hultén: Yes, they do. I don't speak for tribulation as a whole when I say this, but I personally don't feel I belong to either gender. But I've never felt the need to choose either. Androgyny is what I feel most comfortable with. This tendency probably also applies to performance, whether tribulation or solo.

Tobias Forge: The best portrayal of the devil I've ever seen is from the movie 'The Passion of Christ'. Satan is portrayed by a woman, but speaks in a man's voice and thus becomes the epitome of androgyny, completely genderless. For incorporating this aspect into your stage personality, I give credit to you and the band. Especially when you get together with Adam (Zaars, guitarist of Tribulation) on stage, it seems elfish and feminine, but also masculine. This is incredibly interesting and unusual, especially in the rigid heavy metal genre with this "men are men" and "women are women" thing: Doro Pesch, girl, Manowar, guys, great. But when I think of all the metal bands I like, there are also examples of very attractive androgyny, which is not necessarily sexual. Not to mention seventies rock bands.

You have been confronted with different kinds of music and art forms from a very young age. Does that give you an artistic advantage?

Jonathan Hultén: It helps me to keep my relationship to art fresh, to get excited. Whether in childhood or in adulthood: open-mindedness helps the creative process. If you're not afraid of opening up to all kinds of different music styles, you can find inspiration in the most surprising places. No matter where the idea comes from - the important thing is whether it works. Certainly, this is reflected in all areas of creative work. Become the medium through which the flow of inspiration flows - then collect the gold pieces that this flow carries with it and create something beautiful out of them.

Does the metal context limit your expressiveness?

Tobias Forge: I don' t feel restricted with Ghost at all. There are only a few ideas I can' t realize with the band, because Ghost is a combination of all the things I like about music, cinema and theatre. But if there is enough time in the future, I would love to be in a completely different band where I am not the center of attention. I am a guitarist and would like to sing backup. That corresponds to me much more.

Jonathan Hultén: I'm exploring something new, and it's been quite interesting - and different. There are endless possibilities to discover yourself, artistically and as an artist. Only unfortunately there is not enough time.

I'm afraid that we don't have enough time either.

Tobias Forge: Yes, but these things are existential. They are not only about art and being an artist, but also about how both are connected to the human psyche and why people, artist or not, need art to function in modern times. That, by the way, is also one of the things I appreciate about tribulation: You are artists, not just any death metal band. I don’t want to hang anybody on the fence but especially in metal many musicians claim that they make music for themselves first and foremost. That’s not true! As soon as you go on stage you want to get something back. Even GG Allin! And his gigs were really a confrontational and bad experience for every lover of the fine arts. Playing just for yourself? That's not how it works. You either do it to please or to deliver something. People laugh, cry, clap, scream, whatever... And when they leave, they feel a little bit better. That's entertainment!

Anja Delast/ Metal Hammer

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Please do not share without naming the origin. I have taken a lot of effort with it and unfortunately it is distributed without stating the origin. It's somehow sad...

[green-blooded]

So, I want to talk about Bread and Circuses. Or, I want to talk about Spock and McCoy in Bread and Circuses... plus the rest of the first half of the second season, because this episode isn’t actually good aside from the Spock and McCoy moments.

We start with this:

SPOCK: Fascinating. This atmosphere is remarkably similar to your twentieth century. Moderately industrialized pollution containing substantial amounts of carbon monoxide and partially consumed hydrocarbons. MCCOY: The word was smog. SPOCK: Yes, I believe that was the term. I had no idea you were that much of a historian, Doctor. MCCOY: I am not, Mister Spock. I was simply trying to stop you from giving us a whole lecture on the subject. Jim, is there anything at all we know about this planet?

(This post got long--nearly 4000 words???--so here’s a cut to save your dashboard!)

Which is kind of an odd argument for them? McCoy gets on Spock for a lot of things, but not usually for talking too much. In fact, it’s usually the reverse. In Trouble with Tribbles (the previous episode by production order), they have this exchange:

MCCOY: Spock, I don't know too much about these little tribbles yet, but there's one thing that I have discovered. SPOCK: What is that, Doctor? MCCOY: I like them better than I like you. SPOCK: Doctor? MCCOY: Yes? SPOCK: They do have one redeeming characteristic. MCCOY: What's that? SPOCK: They do not talk too much. If you'll excuse me, sir.

Far be it from me to accuse Star Trek of having continuity, but don’t these arguments seem related? In fact, both of these episodes have had particularly heated arguments between Spock and McCoy for no apparent reason in the plot. There are also a few heated exchanges in The Deadly Years (about Spock’s health, and then Kirk’s dementia).

Put a pin in this. Let’s return to Bread and Circuses.

MCCOY: Odd that these people should worship the sun. SPOCK: Why, Doctor? MCCOY: Because, my dear Mister Spock, it is illogical. Rome had no sun worshipers. Why should they parallel Rome in every way except one?

Let’s just ignore the fact that yes Rome did have sun worshipers and that there have been a hell of a lot more than one discrepancy, because if we talk about inaccuracies we’ll be here all day. The point is, they’re both postulating about this odd ‘parallel’ Earth, but McCoy’s interjection seems to annoy Spock for some reason... To the point that he brings it up again later, but in the meantime, they also have this exchange:

SPOCK: Even more fascinating. Slavery evolving into an institution with guaranteed medical payments, old-age pensions. MCCOY: Quite logical, I'd say, Mister Spock. Just as it's logical that twentieth-century Rome would use television to show its gladiator contests or name a new car the Jupiter Eight. SPOCK: Doctor, if I were able to show emotion, your new infatuation with that term would begin to annoy me. MCCOY: What term? Logic? Medical men are trained in logic, Mister Spock. SPOCK: Really, Doctor, I had no idea they were trained. Watching you, I assumed it was trial and error.

Hey guys, remember an episode called Amok Time (only 9 episodes earlier in production order instead of a whole season apart), where McCoy said this:

MCCOY: My orders were to give you a thorough physical. In case you hadn't noticed, I have to answer to the same commanding officer that you do. Come on, Spock. Yield to the logic of the situation.

And it, y'know, worked to convince Spock to listen to him that time. BUT let's also look at I, Mudd where they have one of those curiously heated arguments again:

MCCOY: All right. There's something wrong about a man who never smiles, whose conversation never varies from the routine of the job, and who won't talk about his background. SPOCK: I see. MCCOY: Spock, I mean that it's odd for a non-Vulcan. The ears make all the difference. SPOCK: I find your argument strewn with gaping defects in logic. MCCOY: Maybe, but you can't evaluate a man by logic alone. Besides, he has avoided two appointments that I've made for his physical exam without reason. SPOCK: That's not at all surprising, Doctor. He's probably terrified of your beads and rattles.

(Notice, McCoy realizes he’s offended Spock and immediately tries to fix it, but Spock remains annoyed with him.)

A couple of things here. First, like in Trouble with Tribbles (the next episode), Spock seems actually offended by McCoy. This was almost entirely absent from the first season, and not particularly prevalent in the first few episodes of the second season. There was plenty of banter and teasing before, but Spock seems more sensitive to it in this middle section of the second season. Then, again, McCoy brings up logic. McCoy argues that logic can't be the only means to evaluate a person. Then, Spock insults McCoy's medical skills. AGAIN, this is a newer development that makes it into almost every episode in the middle of the second season, including I, Mudd, Trouble with Tribbles, and Bread and Circuses. All back-to-back episodes in production order! 

So we have some things repeating in their arguments over multiple episodes. McCoy's interpretation of logic, Spock being offended by McCoy's teasing/insults, and Spock insulting McCoy's skill as a doctor. PUT A PIN IN IT. Returning to Bread and Circuses again. 

MERIK: There's been no war here for over four hundred years, Jim. Could, let's say, your land of that same era make that same boast? I think you can see why they don't want to have their stability contaminated by dangerous ideas of other ways and other places. SPOCK: Interesting, and given a conservative empire, quite understandable. MCCOY: Are you out of your head? SPOCK: I said I understood it, Doctor. I find the checks and balances of this civilization quite illuminating. MCCOY: Next he'll be telling us he prefers it over Earth history. SPOCK: They do seem to have escaped the carnage of your first three world wars, Doctor. MCCOY: They have slavery, gladiatorial games, despotism. SPOCK: Situations quite familiar to the six million who died in your first world war, the eleven million who died in your second, the thirty seven million who died in your third. Shall I go on?

I think this is one of the better exchanges that speak to the themes of this episode, which they should’ve elaborated on but instead went the Jesus Saves route... Whatever. The important thing is that this is another example of their philosophical differences AND very similar to an argument they had in The Apple a few episodes ago.

SPOCK: In my view, a splendid example of reciprocity. MCCOY: It would take a computerized Vulcan mind such as yours to make that kind of a statement. SPOCK: Doctor, you insist on applying human standards to non-human cultures. I remind you that humans are only a tiny minority in this galaxy. MCCOY: There are certain absolutes, Mister Spock, and one of them is the right of humanoids to a free and unchained environment, the right to have conditions which permit growth. SPOCK: Another is their right to choose a system which seems to work for them. MCCOY: Jim, you're not just going to stand by and be blinded to what's going on here. These are humanoids, intelligent. They need to advance and grow. Don't you understand what my readings indicate? There's been no progress here in at least ten thousand years. This isn't life. It's stagnation. SPOCK: Doctor, these people are healthy and they are happy. What ever you choose to call it, this system works, despite your emotional reaction to it. MCCOY: It might work for you, Mister Spock, but it doesn't work for me. Humanoids living so they can service a hunk of tin.

It’s super interesting to me that Spock is using relativistic contract theory to judge these cultures while McCoy is just a straight up anarchist, let’s be real. He hates hierarchical structures and authority figures, and believes that they go against human nature. Which you might say is weird for a Starfleet officer, but he also yells at people above his rank constantly and gets really upset in episodes like The Doomsday Machine when Spock refuses to ignore rank. He’s in Starfleet because he wants to help people, but I can’t imagine him staying if his captain weren’t someone he totally trusts. I mean, you could forget that McCoy has any rank at all with the way he carries himself. Meanwhile, Spock is Very, Very strict in his understanding of hierarchy and rank.

This is one of those deep divisions between the two of them. Put a pin in it. Let’s move on to the gladiator fight.

SPOCK: Need any help, Doctor? MCCOY: Whatever gave you that idea? ACHILLES: Fight, you pointed-ear freak! MCCOY: You tell him, buster. Of all the completely ridiculous, illogical questions I ever heard in my life!

The fact that McCoy is not a fighter is really brought out in this episode, and I have a lot to say about it in another post. The main thing here is McCoy bringing up logic again and agreeing with an argument that is, in my opinon, a step beyond something that McCoy would actually say. He makes fun of the ears, but freak is a little far, I think.

And all of this leads to the Big Scene in the prison, which I will break into parts. Part #1:

MCCOY: Angry, Mister Spock, or frustrated, perhaps? SPOCK: Such emotions are foreign to me, Doctor. I'm merely testing the strength of the door. MCCOY: For the fifteenth time...

McCoy is lightly teasing Spock for being more emotional than he lets on, while Spock denies having any emotion at all... this is a pretty typical part of the exchange. What really makes it work is Deforest Kelly's delivery. He says these lines with a degree of affection. He's not yelling, and he's not even using the tone he usually has when teasing Spock. In this moment, you can see that McCoy points out Spock's incongruous moments of emotion because he likes that about him. While it sometimes comes across as a 'gotcha' moment (like at the end of The Galileo Seven), the sheer number of times McCoy mentions Spock's emotions shows more than just a passing amount of interest in them.

Then, McCoy continues:

MCCOY: Spock, I know we've had our disagreements. Maybe they're jokes. I don't know. As Jim says, we're not often sure ourselves sometimes, but what I'm trying to say is-- SPOCK: Doctor, I am seeking a means of escape. Will you please be brief? MCCOY: Well, what I'm trying to say is you saved my life in the arena. SPOCK: Yes, that's quite true. MCCOY: I'm trying to thank you, you pointed-eared hobgoblin!

Before I talk about this, I need to take a moment. I think that McCoy often gets painted at someone with his heart on his sleeve, who feels a lot and expresses all of his feelings. And it's just not true! He's very expressive when it comes to some things, sure. He can yell all day about how much he cares about people in general, but when it comes to expressing how much he cares about an individual? It's pretty damn rare. Look at his words AND his body language in Balance of Terror when he has a vulnerable moment with Kirk.

KIRK: I look around that Bridge, and I see the men waiting for me to make the next move. And Bones, what if I'm wrong? MCCOY: Captain, I-- KIRK: No, I don't really expect an answer. MCCOY: But I've got one. Something I seldom say to a customer, Jim. In this galaxy, there's a mathematical probability of three million Earth-type planets. And in all of the universe, three million million galaxies like this. And in all of that, and perhaps more, only one of each of us. Don't destroy the one named Kirk.

McCoy himself says here that he doesn't usually say this kind of thing, and if you look at the series, that bears out. He does NOT find it easy to tell people he cares about them, and when he does, he does it in this abstract way, barely able to make any eye contact. This is AGAIN why the conflict between Spock and McCoy is NOT logic vs. emotion. McCoy is not fully emotional, and he doesn't find emotion easy to express. I would argue that he has almost as much difficulty expressing his feelings for another person as Spock does. I would also argue that McCoy does not LIKE this about himself, and that is part of why it frustrates him so much when he sees it in Spock. 

 So, when he tries to be vulnerable and thank Spock, first of all, he doesn't just say "Hey, thanks for saving me in the arena." He starts with a lot of waffle, and when Spock interrupts him and insists that he keep it short (again, callback to the arguments in this episode and Trouble with Tribbles about which one of them talks too much), McCoy tries to simply thank him, but gets upset when Spock is still impassive and reverts to his usual way of talking to Spock. One remark from Spock, and McCoy loses his ability to be vulnerable and resorts to a sharp tone and insults. Leading into part three of this conversation: 

SPOCK: Oh, yes. You humans have that emotional need to express gratitude. You're welcome, I believe, is the correct response. However, Doctor, you must remember I am entirely motivated by logic. The loss of our ship's surgeon, whatever I think of his skill, would mean a reduction in the efficiency of the Enterprise and therefore-- MCCOY: Do you know why you're not afraid to die, Spock? You're more afraid of living. Each day you stay alive is just one more day you might slip and let your human half peek out. That's it, isn't it? Insecurity. Why, you wouldn't know what to do with a genuine, warm, decent feeling. SPOCK: Really, Doctor? MCCOY: I know. I'm worried about Jim, too.

The last bit is powerful, and I think generally something people remember more than the rest of the conversation, but I really need to focus on that first exchange first, because there is a LOT going on, and I've been pinning things through this whole overly long post for this moment.

PIN 1: Their arguments have become more heated in the middle portion of season 2.

This is a very clear example of that. McCoy doesn't drop the issue after the insult and Spock insists he wouldn't have saved McCoy if he weren't logically useful to the ship. Ouch.

PIN 2: The repetition in these heated arguments. McCoy's view of logic, Spock getting offended, Spock insulting McCoy's skill as a doctor.

What Spock says here brings up all three of those issues. Spock has been frustrated by McCoy bringing up logic throughout this episode, and now he's shooting back at him with a logical view of why he saved McCoy's life--while still maintaining that he doesn't think McCoy is a good doctor. McCoy's been using logic against him, and now Spock is returning the favor. Spock understands Human interaction better than this! Something as simple as a "thank you" and "your welcome" is everyday for him, not only on the Enterprise but with one of the people who RAISED him. He is exaggerating his own non-Human qualities throughout this conversation to a truly absurd extent, because McCoy has repeatedly offended him for several episodes. However, McCoy seems unaware that his usual teasing has actually gotten under Spock's skin, because he has been surprised, again and again (especially in I, Mudd where he chases after Spock to apologize to him) when Spock actually acts hurt by him.

And then there's McCoy's response.

It's not "damn your Vulcan logic" or ending the conversation. He grabs Spock and forces him to look at him--which Spock has been avoiding throughout the conversation--and tells Spock that he's so afraid to be human that he doesn't fear death, because that would put an end to the fear that his Human side would show.

IF WE ARE ONLY LOOKING AT THIS ONE EPISODE, this doesn't make sense. This didn't build from the conversations in Bread and Circuses, which is why I keep bringing up several different episodes and why I'm insisting on production order.

PIN 3: These two have deep, deep philosophical differences that they are constantly discussing.

As I said in another post, Spock and McCoy have a different standard for morality which causes the two of them to butt heads a whole lot. In the first season, it was pretty much the same argument over and over again (should we risk a larger number of people to save a smaller number of people), but it's been evolving in this season to the discussion of freedom and cultural differences and more.

If these two men did not have any respect for one another, I don't think these arguments would continue. Yes, they work together, but they don't actually need to interact as much as they do, and they are VERY often seeing walking into a scene on the bridge together or walking down a corridor together, etc. It's not just missions. They choose to spend time together.

So, when Spock says he only saved McCoy because he's useful as the ship's surgeon, McCoy doesn't respond to THAT, because 1) he knows he's a good doctor and never seems fazed by Spock insulting him about that and 2) he knows Spock is not being honest with him here.

This is one of the reasons why I think McCoy gets frustrated with Spock because they have a similar difficulty showing how much they care about other people, and they have an especially difficult time showing affection toward one another.

While the ending of Operation: Annihilate! where McCoy tells Kirk not to tell Spock he called him the best first officer in the fleet is memorable, it's hardly the most vulnerable moment for McCoy in that episode. No, it's when he thinks he's blinded Spock because he didn't consider using the non-visible parts of the light spectrum to kill the parasitic aliens. McCoy can't even say for himself the deep guilt he's feeling about harming Spock--he never says that he's blaming himself. It's Kirk who tells him he's not at fault, and McCoy can't even bring himself to respond. If you look at those last lines about Spock being the best first officer in the fleet in context of how devastated McCoy was when he thought he'd blinded Spock permanently, it definitely hits different, right?

And then there are the times in the first season when Spock believes McCoy is badly hurt or dead. In Miri, Shore Leave, and City on the Edge of Forever, Spock has a strong reaction to seeing McCoy injured, but he does not verbalize this obvious emotional reaction at any time.

They don't know how to say that they care about each other, because that's something they both struggle with in general. They also both struggle with being emotionally vulnerable and allowing other people to know them on a deeper level. Spock uses his Vulcan otherness to keep people at a distance, while McCoy uses a the charm offensive of his "bedside manner" as his defense system.

So, McCoy says this thing about Spock not being afraid to die because he's so terrified of his Human side coming out IN DIRECT RESPONSE to Spock being unable to even look at him when McCoy is not only trying to thank him for saving his life but ALSO putting it into the context of how difficult their friendship is and how rarely they show any straight-forward affection for each other. And the most telling thing is, McCoy didn't seem to know for sure that he was right until he sees Spock’s reaction. Look at his expression when Spock turns away from him.

And look at his intensity when he says that Spock wouldn't know what to do with a "genuine warm, decent feeling."

When Spock turns to him and says "Really, Doctor?"

THAT is when McCoy is the one who breaks eye contact and changes the subject to someone that they both feel affection for, but who isn't in the room to hear it. I understand that there are other readings of this moment, and that's fine, but... I don't think this has to do with Kirk specifically. For one thing, it never comes up in the episode when they are reunited with Kirk, and for another Kirk is in the least danger out of the three of them. Instead, this moment is about how both of them struggle so deeply with showing affection when someone's right there in front of them.

By the end of the episode, we can see the two of them spending time together again, apparently by choice, and seeming very comfortable with each other... and the next episode is Journey to Babel, in which they are very friendly again with The Immunity Syndrome only four episodes after that, and the episodes in between showing them with much less contentious banter again.

Dare I say it, but I think this is a legitimate arc! And it's a shame that most people see the episodes in broadcast order, because it makes their relationship much more incoherent and makes this little escalation of frustration with each other more random and may make it seem like they genuinely dislike each other.

Anyway... this was. Not supposed to be such a long post, but I have a lot of Thoughts and Feelings about these two, and I can't help myself sometimes.

[a-tiny-frog-girl]

Of Magic and Mistakes ch 2

chapter 1 (chapter 2) chapter 3 AO3

Warnings: Blood, head injuries, fear (tell me if I missed anything!)

Words: 1089

Summary:  In proving Virgil wrong, Logan ends up in another universe. In Patton’s universe to be precise. So how does Logan get home, and why is he a giant here?

Logan guessed he must have hit his head pretty hard. Hopefully not hard enough to need medical help, goodness knows he didn’t have the money. But he felt different. The warm Florida air felt cold and drafty. He shivered. A possible concussion, then? He opened his eyes carefully to test them. It was too dark to tell if his eyes could stand light.

“Virgil?” He muttered into the darkness. His voice seemed to echo.  He let his eyes adjust as he stared up to the ceiling. It was a very un-ceiling like ceiling. It looked as if it were a gently glowing painting of the night sky. But as Logan admired it, he noticed a few discrepancies. Those stars were supposed to be over there, and that cluster was long gone. Logan’s arm rose on its own to trace them. It was so far away…

He sat up quickly, which made it feel like his brain swam. While his ears rang, he swore he heard another, smaller sound.

"Are you- you okay?" A small voice whispered. It trembled with fear, but it was asking him if he was okay. A strange contradiction.  He touched his forehead gingerly and winced when his finger came off red.

"I'm fine," Logan lied. "Who are you?" He looked around but could see no one else.

"I'm just um, me. Patton." Patton stuttered.

Following the voice, Logan looked down. A small blue something stood in a tense stance, ready to flee. And with it being so small, it being on guard made sense. What didn’t make sense was it staying near him. Logan bit his lip, considered the pros and cons for a moment, then scooped up the tiny thing. Patton squeaked, making Logan halt suddenly.

“Patton?” Logan squinted down at the form so small in his hand. Where were his glasses when he needed them?

“Y-yeah?” Patton sounded on the edge of hyperventilation. When Logan carefully brought his hands to his eye level, he found himself face to face with a tiny human.

“What are you?” Logan murmured, almost to himself.

“Um, I’m pretty sure I’m h-human.” Patton glanced down at the ground, so far away for him. He took a deep breath and looked up towards Logan’s gigantic eyes.

“You’re quite small to be human.” Logan mused, practically not noticing Patton’s stress.

Out of the blue, Patton gasped. Logan jumped, careful to keep a hold of Patton.

"I'm in a forest in the middle of nowhere?" Logan sighed. Great way to make this already confusing day better. And that means he's a giant or something.

“Sorry, I-I just, um. Your head.” Patton said apologetically. He pointed to where Logan had hit the ground. “Do you want me to fix it for you?” Patton asked.

"I suppose that would be adequate. I just need to stop the bleeding." Logan said.

"With what?" Patton asked.

Logan gave Patton a confused look. Something to cover a small head wound should be easy to find. He looks up to find something to answer only to realize he has no idea where he is. He's surrounded by strange sticks that only barely pass his head while he sits. If it's to Patton's size, he thought...

"So what, um, can I do for your head?" Patton asked hesitantly.

"I'm not sure." Logan did not like those words.

"W-well I could uhh," Patton sticks his tongue out to think, Logan notes. Then, Patton looked cartoonishly excited. "I could probably cover it with my sweater!" He pulls it off his back and held it up like a gold medal.

"I am not sure about that, Patton. It would be completely soaked in blood quickly." Logan said.

"It's fine. Um, but could you lie down so I could reach it?" Patton shakily grinned.

Logan could use some relief from the dizziness that threatened to overtake him, so he nodded. With calculated precision, he set Patton back on the ground and put his head near him. He watched as Patton trekked up to his face, fascinated by the tiny being that shouldn't possibly exist. A sudden pressure on his wound made a sharp pain sting Logan, but he stayed still. It did feel slightly better after a moment.

"Wait," Logan said.

"I can hold it," Logan assured Patton. Logan felt like sitting up, but it would be a pain, and it was interesting to be at the same level as Patton.

"So um, what's your n-name?" Patton asked with a fake cheery smile. Logan had to go cross-eyed to see him.

"Logan Tudor." He held his hand out to shake.

Patton flinched, then walked to Logan's hand. His whole hand barely covered Logan's fingertip, but he shook it anyway.

"I'm um, Patton Hirsch. Nice to meet you." His voice was still slightly shaky, but he sounded much more confident.

"I've um, got to go..." Patton trailed off.

Logan nodded. "Goodbye, then Patton. Your help is greatly appreciated."

"See you later, then." Patton waved shyly.

"Okay? Um, why?" Patton asked.

"You said 'see you later'." Logan pointed out.

"Yeah?" Patton fidgeted with his hands.

"Why?" Logan watched Patton's face carefully.

"I don't um, understand?" Patton tilted his head like a confused puppy.

"You are clearly anxious around me, why would you come back? Why did you help me in the first place?"

"You were just lying there bleeding! I couldn't just run away." Patton said as if it were obvious.

"But you physically could," Logan replied.

"No! I wouldn't just let you stay there hurt. I needed to help." Patton shook his head adamantly.

"Well, I am not bleeding anymore. You can leave now and be fine by your logic." Logan noted.

"Um, but..." Patton shifted slightly to avoid looking directly in Logan's eyes. "I think you're cool, and I want to be friends." He said as fast as possible, turning tomato red.

Logan had to take a minute after that. The shock of someone wanting to be his friend right away certainly took him off guard.

Long after Patton had skipped out of Logan's line of sight, Logan laid on his back admiring what he now knew to be the night sky. There was a lot to take in. Being a giant, being in Hell-knows forest, even Patton himself. It was all so new and peculiar. What had Logan gotten himself into?

"By the very definition of the word friend, I'd say we already were." Logan kept his composure as best as possible.

"Really?" Patton lit up like the sun.

Logan nodded.

[everydayanth]

Let’s talk about talking about politics! Yay! Everyone’s favorite!

Over the past few weeks/months/years, I have had this strange insider seat to a bunch of criminal justice/poly sci professionals (as in, they get paid as professors or scientists or compliance officers, etc.) as they talk about politics and get angry at the general public for our lack of understanding, without having the patience to teach or explain. 

Two problems: 1. the ivory tower issue of watching and not actively engaging in the social part of social science, but as their friend, I will note much of this comes from burnout through negative engagement and attacks; 2. expecting others to have had an adequate education to even know many of these tools exist in order to discuss things beyond our average public school education that cuts out Fridays and makes random half days because we can’t afford teachers or textbooks. 

As an awkward observer, here are some things I never talked about in school, despite having a better political/civil/economics education included in my curriculum than many of my friends:

1. When we vote for someone, we are voting on a trend in politics. Not as a result, but a direction to move, and most voters vote for the candidate who is closest to their current values already, rather than following the trend of voting for who would move policy to match their needs. 

2. Our values change far more than we think they do and they almost always align with a problem we require a solution to or a fear we would like to stabilize or go away, such as property taxes. Because we need to trust the person to solve our problems, especially if we are projecting large fears, candidates who are most likable. We don’t like to stir the pot, we just want it to go where we want, fighting for something is exhausting for everyone.

3. We consider political agendas to be moral agendas but do not agree on obligations. Many feel powerless, others are powerless, we talk about responsibility, but without acknowledging those first two things, it sounds more like blame. We also imagine many things to be wishful thinking that are enacted successfully elsewhere and fail to understand or use logical reasoning to really discuss issues. Anything will be an experiment because the US is so huge, but it is a scalable experiment working in other places, often we don’t understand that until we’re abroad and sick.

4. We’re not sure how to translate policy, and our country was built by and for lawyers. There are very little areas where we agree as a society on black/white right/wrong, and in many ways that’s good, but when it comes to discussing policy, it can be very confusing.

To account for these aspects, people use charts and grids. Much like personality tests, these are useful for creating a foundation upon which to debate and discuss, but are ultimately made by humans in order to generalize and will have errors and discrepancies. But the political spectrum has rarely been the single line most of us were taught. Instead, it is often a grid used to navigate the direction and preference of trends. Most people are much more moderate than they think, but have problems that need cooperative solutions, like the water crisis and fires on the west coast, disaster relief in the south, crop failure in the midwest, and ticks and diseases in the northeast. We all have huge problems and some areas are insulated from them for now, but they will come. How we navigate and demand solutions for those problems is what creates policy and the policies we agree with because of our value is what dictates our vote. 

So here’s some charts that human people made to talk about these things with and they have helped ground a lot of engaging conversations with people as I watch them argue but not get angry, because there’s a visual thing to talk around. Those kinds of tools should be everywhere. 

The political compass:

via Wikipedia: political spectrum

^

^A generalization of what different areas might look like. I’ve seen so many versions of this, but I liked the way this one because it gave me a better understanding of words I’m more familiar with and where they fall within the broad concepts. I couldn’t find the source. 

^ Here is another one from Google that took me to a shady site, so I didn’t link it, but the goal is to just be familiar with the different ways people structuralize and use definitions and terms to divide them up, in the end, the general understanding is all that matters, and our goal is to be functional, for the government to be usable by the people. Hamilton, the musical, was/is so important for many reasons, but one of the big ones is that it reminded us that this fight of trends and moving around the board has been going on since the very first election of a president to America. It’s always about one group pulling another, creating a tug-of-war that keeps us near the middle, hopefully.

This is a graph showing the individual party ideologies of past presidents by a site called Fact Myth. It is showing the party split between individuals and while we could argue and speculate about accuracies and meanings, whether a president was pushed to make a decision as a person, etc. in the end, they represent the will of the people and the trends we with to follow to solve problems at the time. 

^An outline someone made of 2020 candidates on Reddit that has been going around for a while. Jake showed this to me and while he was perfectly receptive to me saying that yeah, but a person made this and they can have agendas and just put people places, he also had some really great points on how Americans often think we’re moderates, but what we perceive to be in the middle is often skewed by capitalism. That’s not to say it’s bad, simply that if we’re talking trends and problems and solutions, we have to understand where we are on the real scale, not just our own. We will also tend to vote for those who are closest to us, rather than moving in the direction of us, so, say someone sits right where Ryan is, Ryan drops out; now, despite their personal political preference being on the edge of the middle moderate square, they move to Biden rather than Warren or Sanders because Biden is closer to their original place, even if, coming from Trump, moving to Warren/Sanders would pull the political trend back toward their moderate preference. 

Not everyone does this, obviously, but I’m fascinated by how our individual personalities affect how we decide politics. Are you a “next best thing” kind of person? Are you a “obsess relentlessly until it’s done” kind of person? Are you a “don’t fix it if it ain’t broke? Or what about “out of sight out of mind, doesn’t bother me, I don’t care” kind of person? So many of the ways we solve our daily problems are reflected in the ways we move our own political affiliations during voting times. I just think that’s interesting because I’m a social science nerd though. 

A friend from Brown who is much older than us (also a social science nerd <3) pointed out that she grew up with such antagonizing propaganda during the cold war and beginnings of technological boom and peak oil, and it all said the same thing, anything outside the blue is morally wrong and heavily corrupt. I thought that was an interesting point about exposure and remembering past problems, how voting ages overlap to find new solutions or rely on old ones, and what it would cost us to see American politics on a global scale. 

^This is a global scale of values (not politics) from the wikipedia page on political spectrums, and I thought it tied into the conversation in interesting ways, especially when we look at American generation differences in individualism and social cooperation and how they are viewed by each other to both be equally negative. There’s a whole world of solutions and different ways things our done, but we’ve been taught from birth that some are bad and others are exceptions and ours is good. 

Vox has an interesting tool to figure out where abouts you would lie on the compass. I think debating it with others is a better way, since it’s a primarily relative scale (unless you prefer those structuralist ones, but keep in mind that it’s a preference, not a requirement). But I thought I’d include it for those who may not have access to that kind of conversation. 

In the end, consider your morals and how they are different from your current values, and how your current values are affected by your current problems, and how you want the world to look, how you want trends to move, and how your biases of experience or ignorance might play a role in that. I honestly didn’t really think about healthcare until I was in Ireland and saw how simple an alternative was and how freeing it felt. My parents can’t even imagine it (and they are of the class who should most desire those changes), they don’t have enough of a base knowledge to understand how it works, it’s electricity after gaslamps. 

Anyway, just thought I’d share some of those tools. As a skeptical person, I want to remind everyone that these are tools, not documented facts, and fighting about where people are on the graph and where we might be is part of how we come to conclusions about rights and wants and solutions and needs and what we actually value. Most of us, in the end, value comfort and hope, and we vote for the people we think provide that to us. The problem often lies in people misunderstanding their own comfort and relying on ignorance rather than hope. I found these graphs useful in grounding my talks with overwhelming professionals and finding some semblance of peace in what I wanted to hope for and I hope maybe for some of you they can provide that as well. ❤️

If, like me, you reached your 20s and realized a gaping hole in your education, I also recommend the Crash Course series on US Politics. It helped me understand a lot of things that were skimmed over in textbooks or left as multiple choice answers on a standardized test. Politics are a series of solutions to the problems we face as a social group, and knowing how to talk about them completely changed my own feelings of helplessness when communicating to others. 

[paradife-loft]

part 2 of Watership Down thoughts.... a lot longer than part 1, oops.

BLACKAVAR, oh my gosh, Blackavar is also my favourite and I love him a lot ;____; (this is also a lot of what I mean w/ the Efrafans behaving like humans - the specific punishment given to him is very much a calculated thing to make an example, and a wound that even once healed is never going to look normal and unmarked. it doesn’t seem like the sort of thing most other rabbits would come up with, since they tend to be so much more concerned with what’s right in front of them.)

the part where Hyzenthlay is also a prophet like Fiver! I’d completely forgotten that angle as well; it’s very cool.

re: my earlier note about the purpose of Efrafa’s social structure - it’s interesting; the line about preventing the white blindness is what Holly brings back to tell the rest of the warren, but then when we get the bit of Woundwort’s POV, that seems like only a latecoming portion of the rationale for all of it? I wonder if that’s an intentional discrepancy to point out, maybe what the lower-ranking members of the warren are told and believe, versus Woundwort’s actual power-centric motivations? but it explains why I’d forgotten the former bit, in any case.

BLACKAVAR FEELS 2 ELECTRIC BOOGALOO or: oh my god, the bit where he follows Hazel under the bridge just because he figured well, it was an order? and then went to go find the others anyway even though he was exhausted???? the part where he tries to convince the group to continue on because it’s fox country out of nothing but general patrol intuition, gets voted down, and then up and forgets he made the suggestion bc that’s how you do things under Totalitarian Hell Warren, even though he’s later proved right??!?! I love him and I love the insight into Efrafan culture, and everything. also when we find out that he and the Efrafans in general have A DIFFERENT ACCENT? how is this fellow so precious. how.

This Fucking Passage, omg - ““Probably he really has. But whether or not, you’d never get him to admit that he warned you or to listen while you told him he’d been right. He could no more do that than pass hraka underground.” // “But you’re an Efrafan. Do you think like that, too?” // “I’m a doe,” said Hyzenthlay.”

this occurred to me several times beforehand, but I kept forgetting to include it - everything takes such a short period of time, by human standards! there’s barely a day or two between every major event that happens; I think in total the novel can’t cover more than a month of time, and that’s on the far side? it’s such a weird position to occupy, because you naturally want to stretch the events out to a longer timescale that better “matches” the intuitive/emotional sense portrayed (and allows for all these injuries to heal, holy shit?), but in the context of a rabbit’s lifetime, the way they experience just a few days feels very different from how we think of just a few days.

this is just a hypothesis, but - I’ve been trying to figure out what’s going on between the switching between Lapine and English translations, w/ names especially, and - I think it essentially works in the same way as how/why I switch between standard Sindarin names in narration, and Quenya in dialogue, when writing Silm material?? which is very cool. something something old English dudes who like plants and language...

Bigwig getting bad language past the radar and literally saying “eat shit, stinklord” XD fucking iconic. (also frequently quoted, as I recall, by all of us ten year olds reading the book for class who were delighted by any and all ways of insulting people in words the adults around wouldn’t understand.)

it’s honestly fascinating just how many different non-rabbit animals the main characters end up establishing alliances with or otherwise using to their advantage in their conflict with Efrafa? Kehaar, the fox, the mouse, the dog? most of them due to Hazel’s instincts and strategising, too, aside from the fox, which is pretty cool as an even further extension of his main strength as a Chief Rabbit, knowing his people and their particular gifts and trusting them to use them. and beyond that - this idea that the Efrafans, who aggressively suppress their natural instincts as rabbits, despite being very skilled at perception and analysis of their surroundings, end up repeatedly at the short end of the stick in interactions with all sorts of other parts of nature? I dunno; there’s no exact dividing line “this group acts rabbit-like and this group doesn’t” to try and force on the dynamics here, and I’m really quite glad of that and think it makes for a much better story than the alternative, but. it definitely feels like some manner of emergent theme, for sure.

there’s something that just hits fucking deep about the passage: ““My Chief Rabbit has told me to defend this run and until he says otherwise I shall stay here.” // It had never occurred to Woundwort or any of his officers that Thayli was not the Chief Rabbit of his warren.... And if he was not the Chief Rabbit, then somewhere close by there must be another, stronger rabbit who was. A stronger rabbit than Thlayli.” -- especially in context with Woundwort’s meeting/failed parlay with Hazel earlier. like damn.

FUCK YEAH SCARY FIVER!!! “I am sorry for you with all my heart... Believe me, I am sorry for your death.”

“Come back, you fools! Dogs aren’t dangerous!”

god the last like, three chapters of this book have the most metal goddamn quotes ever

Vilthuril telling an embellished version of the first quarter of the book as a story of El-ahrairah’s people to her kids??!! I love that as a worldbuilding detail so much, oh my gosh. (also uhhhh, telling that the snare warren is rewritten in as “the rabbits of Prince Rainbow”, lmao. Prince Rainbow is an asshole XD)

aaaand that’s all! what a good ending. what a good book.

[ask-de-writer]

DARING DO and the ADVENTURE of the X'IBIAN VASE! : MLP Fan Fiction : Part 4 of 21

Return to theMaster Story Index

Return to MLP Fan Fiction

DARING DO and the

ADVENTURE of the X'IBIAN VASE!

by

De Writer (Glen Ten-Eyck) @ask-de-writer​

And

Carmen Pondiego @askcarmenpondiego​

Cover Art by

Doctor Dimension

52630 words

© 2020 by Glen Ten-Eyck

Writing begun 08/26/15

All rights reserved.  This document may not be copied or distributed on or to any medium or placed in any mass storage system except by the express written consent of the author.

//////////////

Copyright fair use rules for Tumblr users

Users of Tumblr.com are specifically granted the following rights.  They may reblog the story.  They may use the characters or original characters in my settings for fan fiction, fan art works, cosplay, or fan musical compositions, provided that such things are done without charge.  I will allow those who do commission art works to charge for their images.  

All sorts of fan art, cosplay, music or fictions is actively encouraged.

///////////////////////

Horsetense looked up from reading a romance novel, to judge by the cover art.  Smiling, she replied, “I really did not expect to see you again, after yesterday’s little upsets!  Here, let me send it up!”

She took Daring Do’s envelope and put it into a vacuum cartridge and dropped it into a tube.  With a whoosh, it was gone.  In a few minutes there was a whoosh and clunk as a cartridge returned.  It held a copy of the original document and a note:

“This is the ONLY acceptable agreement.  We will not back you at all if you do not sign!

Isa Robber

Mystic Overthrow

Crule Tyranny”

Reading the note, Daring smiled and wrote across the Document in deep soaking indelible marker, “These terms are the sort of toxic trash that the composting facilities will refuse!  I do too!  Find another sucker!  D.D.”

Horsetense looked sour as she returned the document with a clack and whoosh.  She observed, “The Partners won’t like that!”

Daring Do patted her hoof and replied, “They don’t seem to like anything that is honest.  I hope that you find a better position than this one soon.”

She turned on her hoof and was leaving when the system did its whoosh-clack.  The note in it said:

“Our generous offer is withdrawn.

Good luck in your year long wait to sell your latest major find to the Royal Museum! R.O.T.”

Daring Do smiled serenely, showed the receptionist the note and told Horsetense, “See this? You might find the noon news amusing!”

She sauntered out, the note safely in her saddle bag.

She was about to return to the Adventurer’s Guild for a nice luncheon when her brows drew down in a V of concentration.  Not only the waiter’s news but many other things began to fall out of their accustomed places, making a mess of her orderly mind.

It was a feeling that she knew well.  It had led her to almost all of past expeditions.  When things are not as they should be, the first stop is the Royal Library.

As she climbed the steps, she admired the allegorical carving of the doors.  The sun and moon arising together over the field of knowledge.  The doors, obeying an ancient spell, opened impressively for her.

Inside, she was greeted by the wonderful odor of books, scrolls, manuscripts, codices of many sorts. This was the scent of her true heart.  

Lurking in the overall scent, was the recent addition of fire proofing and extinguishing spells. They were a wise precaution whose necessity was shown by the Golden Oak Library disaster of Ponyville.  Some still wondered how one of the most magically powerful beings of Equestria, Twilight Sparkle, could have forgotten something so basic as fire suppression spells, just when she most needed them.  That, however, was not germane to her visit.

She walked up to the research desk and presented her Royal Pass, personally sealed by both Luna and Celestia.  “I need full access to the Closed and Sealed Stacks, please,” she smiled at the young librarian.

Wide eyed, after staring at the pass, she turned and almost galloped to a Senior Librarian.  She whispered, pointing back at Daring Do.

The senior came over and asked, “Reason for your visit, Antiquarian Do?”

“I have come across some discrepancies in research concerning the ancient X'ibian Empire.  I already know, from previous work here, that the answers are not to be found in the ordinary open or closed stacks.”

The senior took Daring Do’s pass and inserted it into a spell reader.  It chimed.  The four nearest Closed Research Stacks simply faded away leaving a huge pair of doors appearing to be iron bound ancient oak.  Daring Do was not deceived. She knew that the reality behind the glamor spell was four tonne Military Armor Grade steel, sealed from forced entry or exit.  She also knew that there were excellent reasons for being sealed against both!  This was not a library for the faint of heart!

Resuming her pass, she asked, “May I have Apprentice Librarian Blendin to assist my studies, please?  He and I have worked together before this.  I have found him to be an excellent assistant.”

Before setting the opening spell, the Senior Librarian made a note and called over a Magic Net system, “Apprentice Librarian Blendin to the Canterlot Main Doors, please.”

It took a few minutes before the signal that he was present lit.  The Senior Librarian tapped the opening spell.  The great doors did not swing or retract, as one might expect.  They became a thin seeming vapor.

Daring Do trotted through it without any problem.  She smiled at her half brother and said, “We have a fun one!  The Heart of Discord not only might be real, it might even be something that belongs here or in the Warehouse!”

Blendin’s brows shot up.  “I would be laughing right now, Sis, if it was anypony but you who said that.  What brings this on?”

Daring Do snickered and replied, “Disorder in what I thought I knew and a conversation with somepony from an organiation that I ran into while searching for the Darkling’s Tomb.”

Showing a side that was rarely seen when he was off work, Blendin promptly asked, “The Ancient Guardians?”

“Exactly.  One told me today that they lost the location of Im Farst’s tomb during the Chineighese invasions of a thousand years ago.  In short, THEY are certain that the Heart of Discord is there.  They just don’t know any longer, where, exactly.”

Blendin’s eyes got a far-away look to them as he dug through the encyclopedic knowledge that even an Apprentice Librarian needed.

“Where do you want to start, Sis?”

“At the beginning.  With the death and funeral of Im Farst.”

Blendin nodded briskly.  “That is easy, then.  There are only three contemporary documents of it. They are followed by the wall painting but it is later.  It will take a few to access them.  Are you willing to use a Twilight Closed Reading spell to keep from disturbing the actual documents.  They are very fragile.”

“If you recommend it, Blendin, yes.  What are they?”

“One is an actual scroll painting on lotus root paper.  It is likely the most delicate.  It is a traditional Xibian landscape with a weeping dragon and a eulogy to Im Farst.  The eulogy is signed Wisdom.  The other two are thin sliced bamboo fold books, both with fire damage.”

He actually went to an OLD physical card file and leafed gently.  Puzzled, he checked again.  “I wonder how long ago this happened?” he inquired of empty air. “There are FOUR things here.  I found two cards stuck together.  I will have to speak to a Senior Librarian about that.”

Daring Do overheard him and looked up from her magically generated pages of perfectly duplicated documents.  They WERE fascinating in their own right.

“What did you find, Blendin?”

“A carved stone inventory made at the time of interment.  It is cracked across but otherwise intact. I assume that you want it?”

“Absolutely!  Also, any provenance or location of finding!  Not only the stone, but everything known of it!”

Blendin smiled sadly and gave her a thin file.  “The stone was found in a Chineighese open air market about eight hundred years ago and given into Royal Care.  Not much help there.”

He did develop the copy spell, giving Daring Do all of the visible surfaces of the stone, top, thin sides and back.

Daring Do began to scan the stone, her brows knitting now and again as she found and solved an ideogram that was new to her.  She pulled out a magnifier for much of it.  The ancient engraving was surprisingly small and tightly compacted.

Blendin watched his half sister’s reading with awe.  “How can you do that, Sis?  I know at least a hundred scholars of Ancient X'ibian and not one of them can just snap out the meaning of a new ideogram like that!”

She looked up for a moment. “It’s really not too hard, Blendin.  The construction of ancient X'ibian ideograms follows a rigidly logical system from about a hundred bases.  Once you know those, the rest follows, except for bad handwriting, of course.”  She grinned.  “That is nothing new at all.”

Blendin nodded agreement and then brightened up.  “I need to do an advancement paper in the Library.  Mind if I take that tip and develop it?”

Absently muttering, “Be my guest,” Daring Do returned to her study.

“Pardon, Sis.  I need more space for you.”  Blendin grabbed the end of the Library table and pulled.  It stretched out another three meters, growing extra legs as it did so.

Daring Do raised her eyebrows as she watched.  “Handy trick, that!”

“You know it, Sis.  I needed the space to set out the more modern works, you know, from four hundred PNW to the End of Exile.”

“Four hundred Post Nightmare Wars?  Nothing earlier?”

“According to the Master Index, nope.  A long dry spell there.  Then the liter-ature explodes.  All the mystical shit and such.”

She nodded and returned to deciphering the fold books and the painting.  She was nearly done with the painting when she asked, “Can I get modern paper copies of these old documents?  I just spotted something curious.”

“Not a problem, Sis.  I will do a contagion duplication on them.  You will be able to take those copies if they pass the Security of Information checks.  I did not bother looking at that info when I set them up for you.”

Blendin was systematically setting out the later documents by date when he stopped cold.  

“This makes no sense at all, Sis.  Check me on this.  When Im Farst was buried in his hidden tomb there was no trace of the Heart of Discord.  

“Then, IN EQUESTRIA, the tales of the Heart of Discord begin to show up in print about four hundred PNW.  The wall painting that is the only known documentation of it was not found until 653 PNW.  

“It gets worse.  The tomb that the painting is in dates quite exactly.  It was made 150 years after the death of Im Farst but not found until 653 PNW.”

Daring Do stared at Blendin’s work in rising excitement.

“It makes perfect sense after all!  Who was the wife of Im Farst?”

Blendin actually took time to consult the Index again.  “Her name was Wisdom.  Legend says that she was a dragon.  How does that make any sense at all?”

Daring Do took a sheet of paper and a writing brush.  Inking it professionally, she wrote a character.

“First, remember that there were no male or female names in ancient X'ibian.  This thing called a SHI was added to a surname or single name to indicate female and left off for male names!  It was silent in ancient X'ibian.

“Now look at this!”  She quickly drew another character.  “That is the ancient character for Wisdom.  This one is Discord, the Dragonequis.  Add a Shi to Discord and what do you see?”

Blendin stared at the two characters in consternation.  “Wisdom!  Discord with a Shi and Wisdom look the same!”

“Right!  Im Farst really was married to a dragon.  Eris, the female form of Discord.  

“The Vase of Wisdom is in all of these inventories!  A hundred and fifty years later, on a tomb wall, the vase was named without the Shi and the Heart of Discord was born!”

Blendin looked carefully at his time-line of publications and written down tales.  He thoughtfully accessed the Index again.

He added a whole selection of more material from the Last Nightmare War onward.  

Softly, he said, “Here she is. It all begins with the Tales of Aleax the Blind.  This dates to only 115 PNW.  Eris, the Dragonequis, is asked if ever she knew love.  Her reply is, ‘In a land far to the East, I left my love a vase that I made.  I left my Heart in his tomb.  Im Farst was his name.’  She shed a few tears and asked what reward was wanted for bringing her that memory.”

Daring Do sadly offered, “That explains so much.  Blendin, I need these inventories, including the stone’s upper surface and that landscape painting with the Im Farst eulogy on it.”

Blendin went to the Index and lifted a very modern Magic Net mirror up from a concealed pocket.  He tapped codes and looked carefully at the results.  Grinning, he tapped a whole set of new codes.

“They will accept my paper on the reading of Ancient X'ibian ideograms!  They also cleared modern paper copies of the things you asked for.  They are now locked to the papers that they are on.  Feel free to take them, Sis!”

Returning, Daring Do saw the enormous steel doors simply go to mist again.  She paused long enough to say, “Best of fortune on the paper, Blendin.  It is going to keep you busy, I promise it.”

With a grin, he replied, “I know, Sis.  I do know.  Thanks for the tip.”

Daring Do walked out to the Research Desk and Logged out, showing her copies to the Senior Librarian.  There was no sign behind her of the massive secret doors. Just the ordinary closed stacks.

If Daring Do was walking like nothing of any importance had changed, her mind was racing!  It WAS real!  The Vase, the Heart of ERIS, rather than Discord, was there. The tomb of Im Farst was a fact!

She was pretty sure how to find it too!  That, she had failed to mention to her half brother, Blendin.  Best not to give any possible rumor a root to grow.

Ensconced in the Adventurer’s Guild’s secure communication room, Daring Do tapped up codes on the Secure Magic Net Mirror there.  She was greeted by the surly face of Count Umber.  He still had a plaster on the bruise over his right eye from their earlier altercation.  He reached to cut off the call.

With a smile that could have flash frozen a polar bear, Daring Do said serenely, “Please do, Count.  Princess Luna audits all incoming calls.  When she finds that you cut off a Private Antiquities Emergency call, you will be in so much hot water that you will be lucky to retain your County.  Luna herself gave me this code after the debacle of the Golden Necklace of Pharow Underrock.”

Putting the knife in deeper and twisting, she added, “That was at the same time that she gave you your present work.  It is amazing how much better the Museum Acquisition Policy has become.  I have already been paid for the balance of the Pharow Underrock Collection.”

With a growl that would have done credit to hungry bear, Count Umber put her through.  Princess Luna was sitting in a bath up to her withers, gently fanning her wings in the warm water.  There was a squadron of blue bath duckies hidden by lumps of bubble foam.  They were preparing to ambush a similar squadron of yellow bath duckies.

She looked up from her bath game and said, “What is the problem with the Underrock Collection? Umber has noted that you are calling about it.”

“With due respect, your Highness, he is absolutely wrong.  I am calling about a thing connected to the legal firm of R.O.T.”

Princess Luna sat up suddenly, water cascading off her shoulders.  “COUNT UMBER!  GET OFF THIS LINE!  ALL CALLS ON THIS CODE GROUP ARE ABSOLUTELY PRIVATE!  You were given strict instructions about the call system.  YOU HAVE VIOLATED ONE OF THE MOST BASIC ONES!  We will discuss your position in Canterlot when this call is done!”

She tapped a few codes in her bathroom mirror.  “There.  The nuisance is removed.  By Royal Guards.  Now we are private.  What do you need to discuss?”

“R.O.T. is mounting an expedition to X'ibia, in the far desert regions of the Chineighese Empire.  They are searching for the Heart of Discord.  Their care with priceless antiquities  was shown during the break in at my University office.”

“There have been many expeditions to search for the Heart of Discord, Daring Do.  None has ever succeeded, lending much credence to the notion that it is legendary.  Why are you so concerned now?”

“Because, your Highness, today, doing research at the Great Library, I discovered that the Vase of Wisdom is perfectly real.  Wisdom was Im Farst’s wife, the Dragon Queen of ancient X'ibia.

“How well do you know the writing of that ancient land?”

“Excellently, my dear.  So, what you found is the connection between Eris now and Wisdom, the Dragon Queen then?”

“You do not seem surprised, your Highness.”

“Only saddened that it will arouse such heartbreaking memories in my friend.  We must tell her that the secret is out.  How much more do you know of this matter?”

“I believe that I know where Im Farst’s tomb is.  Wisdom painted a landscape with a weeping dragon and inscribed her eulogy to him.  I have a copy from the Library.  I am fairly sure that it shows the tomb’s hidden location.”

Luna sort of sank into her bath. “You are correct.  We must tell her.  Now.  Together.  I cried with her for many nights when he died.”

Stiffing up, Luna tapped some other codes to the mirror.

The call was answered by an amazingly lovely pony with one perfectly centered cyclops like eye. “ERIS, Inc.!  How may I direct your call please, Princess Luna?”

“Hello, Cy.  I hate to interrupt whatever Eris is doing but I have urgent news for her. Just tell her that Wisdom has been found.  She will know what I mean.”  

“Wisdom has been found.  I will tell her.”

Almost instantly, the mirror switched to show Eris, wearing the silken robes of the Chineighese. An eye as trained as Daring Do’s saw that they were in the style of ancient X'ibia.

There was a copy of the Wisdom Eulogy to Im Farst hung to the wall and both incense and tea being offered before it on an ornate, low table of black wood, richly inlaid with natural woods of many colors.

Eris asked mildly, “Luna, if it was any but you calling, I would have required them to wait.  What do you mean that Wisdom has been found?”

Daring Do spoke up.  “A Shi is supposed to be silent and only indicate gender.  A Shi added to Discord, the dragonequis, makes Eris, that is you.  It also turns the ideogram into Wisdom, the name that you used when you lived your life with Im Farst, whom I see that you still love.”

There was a small tear at Eris’ eye.  “That is true, all of it.  What do I need to know beyond the fact that you found it out?”

“The law firm of R.O.T. is mounting an expedition to X'ibia to locate the Heart of Discord.  Of course, THAT really is legendary, the result of twisting the words of Aleax the Blind to say that you left a Vase, your heart, in his tomb. That is where the legends of the Heart of Discord come from.

“Even with the trickery that they use, they have begun to set up the expedition.  R.O.T. could find the tomb.”

Eris said softly, “Their care with Antiquities is amply shown by the break in at your office.  I see.  What do you need from me?”

Daring Do smiled and replied, “Two sorts of things.  One is your permission to open the tomb and conserve the things in it.  The other is a little more personal. Anything that you can think of that might mess up the R.O.T. expedition and throw them off the trail.”

Eris began to smile hugely around her fang.  “Doctor Do, I know your reputation in detail.  I will trust you to open my love’s tomb and conserve all as well as it can be done.  Expect my document of permission within the hour.  Cy will deliver it in person.

“As for your other request, let us say that I will consider it favorably.

“Now, I have much to attend to, including letting my love know that you are coming.”  The mirror blanked.

Luna’s bath duckies were all joined into a large squadron, attacking the bath bubble foam furiously!  She looked up with a serious face.  “While you were talking to Eris, I set it up with my sister, Celestia.  We are putting your Expedition under the Royal Wing.  

“You mentioned being able to manage the cost.  You will not have to.  We will cover it all with letters of credit and passage permissions that are being prepared now.  Celestia has summoned the Chineighese Ambassador to prepare your documents for free travel and official assistance.  All the papers should arrive in a few hours.  They are addressed to you at the Adventurer’s Guild.”

“Thank you, your Highness.” Daring Do blanked the mirror and emerged from the room.  The waiter from this morning was there, tears in his eyes.  “Our long Guardianship is over.  We have heard from the most exalted one. Wisdom herself has put us at your disposal.  What then shall we do for you?”

Daring Do gave him a deep formal bow and replied, “We will need you still.  There are more than Im Farst to guard.  If you will come with me, I will show you what I mean.”

Deepest concern in his voice, brows drawn in honest worry, he asked, “What will become of Im Farst and all of his things?”

Daring Do replied honestly, “I do not know.  I will gather him and all of those things and they will be given to the Most Exalted Wisdom.  She will then decide what may be kept for study, placed in museums on display and what she will keep for her own.   All will be a gift of my Princesses to Wisdom. This plan has been made and will be kept.”

He needed no thought.  “This is the best that can be hoped for.  He will be reunited with Wisdom. May they find all the joy that can be between Mortal and the Dragon.”

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[oswald-privileges]

Imperfect Specimen

(Written for @pilesofnonsense and the RQBB event! You can also read it here on ao3.

Also, it’s a companion piece to @throwaninkpot‘s podfic! You can listen to it here and here. They also put together a really nice moodboard which is just. So perfect.)

Statement of Llewellyn Morgan. Regarding the donation of an unusual specimen jar to the Magnus Institute, originally resident in the archival basement of Shropshire County Natural History Museum. Recording by Kat Vandemeer, Assistant Archivist to the Usher Foundation. Statement begins.

I am not here because I changed my mind about your offer.

I feel as though it’s important that you understand that. I like the job I’ve already got. It took a long time to get everything just how I like it, and I can work to my own schedule without oversight from people who think they know better. So, in spite of everything that’s happened to bring me here, I am not about to go abandoning that.

And maybe if I fill in one of your forms and give you something for your archives, you’ll stop trying to drag me out of mine.

For all that we call ourselves after the county, I don’t think the museum building is actually in Shropshire. The turning is just after the “Welcome to” sign, but the road doubles back over the border almost immediately, meaning most visitors end up here by accident. Anyone actively trying to find us doesn’t seem to have a hope. So it’s not unusual for me to find myself standing at the turning, looking to wave down a delivery I’m expecting. It saves a lot of arduous conversation over the phone.

Unfortunately, it also means that if a driver wants to just pull over, drop the donations on the pavement, and take off again, there’s very little I can do to stop them. And that’s pretty much exactly how that morning started. With me ankle deep in cardboard boxes, sheaves of string-bound papers, and bubble-wrapped display trays, shouting after a disappearing van.

Now, I wouldn’t say I’m a stereotype of my profession, but doing delicate work for long hours indoors has certain drawbacks. I had to call the front desk and ask the receptionist to give me a hand. It’s not like it was her responsibility to come and help me- after all, her job description is visitor check-ins and answering the phone, not lugging crates of dead insects around. But on my own, I would have been trekking back and forth along the road all morning.

Still, there were no complaints from her. Just rather a lot of professionally chirrupy chatter. The obligation to make conversation is not one I shoulder with enthusiasm, but happily for the both of us, she seemed not to need her conversation partner to really say anything, or even give much of an indication that they’d been listening. All I had to do was occasionally say things like “Right” and “Mmhm” and “Please, please be careful with that.”

She was the one to find the jar first.

“Were you leaving this for me to carry?” She asked. It was probably a joke. I told her no, just in case it wasn’t. I hadn’t even seen the thing before she’d called me over to take a look.

“How could you have missed this?” She said, “It’s huge!”

She was right. It was maybe two feet tall, and bulky with it. A sealed specimen jar, poorly made and poorly maintained. The solution was a dullish, near-opaque brown, obscuring the specimen itself almost completely.

The receptionist didn’t seem phased by this. She was crouched on her heels, turning the jar back and forth.

“What do you think’s inside it?” She asked.

Her fascination was beginning to irritate me. The jar wasn’t listed on my inventory, but then neither were half the items surrounding it. The other half that were listed were missing from the delivery entirely. Add to that the way that the specimen was floating and therefore clearly rotten, and it was like finding a dead mouse in your post. If the post was mostly addressed to someone else, and the mouse was starting to ooze.

I let the receptionist know all of this, and finished by telling her that it didn’t matter what it had been to begin with, as by this point it was just a hazard and disposing of it was just another thing taking up space on my to-do list.

I probably came off as rather terse. But I rather feel that bridge was never even built, let alone there to be burned.

Here is what happened next; I remember relocating most of the donations to my darkroom to reduce any further light damage. I remember getting in the car, the trip to the waste centre, and I remember talking to the front desk worker, explaining the problem. I handed over the butterfly trays I had in the boot. He gave me a bit of a look, but was very polite as he explained that he didn’t think that there was any alcohol or formaldehyde in there, and that they didn’t accept material over the counter anyway. Besides, didn’t the museum already have a collection contract with the company?

I already knew this, and told him so. Possibly less politely than he really deserved. Then I took the butterfly trays back, and drove away.

Something had gone wrong somewhere, and I couldn’t work out exactly what. I turned the past half hour over in my head as I drove. Darkroom, car, front desk, butterflies - no step in that process was missing. But something wasn’t there. Wasn’t right.

I missed the turning, as everyone does, and spent twenty minutes trying to find a place to turn around. By the time I got back, the mental itch was maddening.

To make matters worse, I found the receptionist was in my workroom, waiting for me. Actually in my workroom- not waylaying me at the front desk or hovering around the doorway, actually in there. I asked her what she thought she was doing.

“I wanted to watch while you changed the alcohol,” she said, bright as anything, “If that’s okay?”

Over her shoulder, the jar was squatting in the centre of my work bench.

I knew I had taken the thing to be destroyed. The jar wasn't listed-

No. No, I knew that I had gotten into the car, to go to the waste centre. That was not the same thing as knowing that I had taken the jar with me. I hadn’t, I obviously hadn’t. The proof was there, solid and filthy as ever.

But I had decided to destroy it. And then I had gotten into the car, with the butterfly trays. Somewhere between deciding and acting, something had gotten lost. Or, not lost. Cut. A taut thread of intent, or control, or direction, neatly split.

Somehow, that idea felt so much worse.

That realisation came coupled with another; I was still speaking. The receptionist was staring at me, attentive as a schoolchild, and I listened with her as my lungs and throat and tongue worked without my input. I was in the middle of promising her, or maybe asking for, or maybe ordering, “The other necessary things.”

If I had already said what those things were, I don’t remember. If I hadn’t, I didn’t want to allow it. My voice stumbled and died, and for a moment, my tongue was limp and alien in my mouth. I was intruding on myself.

The feeling passed almost instantly, and at once I told her to get out of my archive. Those were my exact words. I do remember that. I know it wasn’t professional, and I know for certain that I hurt her feelings, but I needed to be alone.

The receptionist retreated without a word, and I was left trying to work out what the hell had been happening to me all morning. Not for a minute did I think that I might be going mad, or that some form of early on-set dementia might be manifesting. I didn’t believe in the supernatural, but neither did I make a habit of doubting myself or my senses. Something had interfered, that much I couldn’t argue with.

I needed to take another look at that jar.

Trying to examine the thing was- strange. It was right there, in plain view, but- it’s difficult to explain. It wasn’t that I couldn’t see it, just that what I could see didn’t… prompt anything. No connections, no fear, no interest, nothing. And that wasn’t right, it’s very lack of wrongness was wrong, because everything you can see has a connection to something else.

I sat in front of it, hands at the sides of my head to tunnel my vision, and looked.

It was big, I could see that much. And it was sealed with rubber in a way that should have immediately called up the word “antique” or “old fashioned” or “obsolete”. But I can only add those words now, without it here in front of me. The seal also hid the central point of an expanding pattern of fractures. They spread outwards from the rim, and they didn’t look like anything other than the cracked glass of a jar.

The fluid inside was just as opaque, concealing the specimen it held. That, though, was something I could fix, with a bit of direct light.

I looked up, reaching for the overhead lamp.

I picked up a block of notecards from the shelf. The butterfly trays at the end of my work bench needed relabelling, but were otherwise in remarkably good condition. Perhaps they could form the centre point of a new exhibit. Not for too long, though, of course. Overexposure would ruin them completely.

It wasn’t until I was driving home that I realised vaguely that it had happened again. A cut. The connection between what I had meant to do and what I had done had been severed.

But by that time, well. Since the discrepancy didn’t cause any problems like it had at the waste centre, and my cassette player had just that moment decided to throw a fit, I was more concerned about the tape that was being chewed. After all, nowhere nearby sells the damn things any more.

After that - and this is going to sound stupid, but - I just sort of forgot. I don’t know how much of it was the quiet severing of mental threads, but for the next few days, when I came into work and saw the jar on my workbench, or the floor, or up on a shelf, I would think, I really must get around to throwing that horrible thing away, and then I would go on to do something else. And when it vanished entirely, I didn’t even think that.

It never sat quite right with me, but there were... other things to occupy my attention. At first it was just the usual work things - restoration, admin, trying to keep the photosensitives from fading too quickly. Then things started to go missing. First it was from the archives themselves; I would pick up a tray and find a handful of the pins no longer held their insects. Any inventory I tried to make would come up full of holes. Then the branch of mounted lorikeets that was the centrepiece of our exhibit on Non-Native Taxidermy vanished, and nothing was really done. We all just stood around, looking at the gap, and someone said something about phoning the police and then we all just… drifted away.

And then there was the receptionist. At some point, she stopped showing up to work. It was generally agreed that she had left, had better prospects elsewhere, and there was some vague mention of setting up a leaving do. But since she seemed to have already gone, the idea sort of fizzled out. A replacement was hired, a boy barely out of his teens who typed at the speed of someone trying to win a slow bicycle race against a glacier. I think his name was Adam, or something.

I didn’t even know what the previous receptionist’s name had been.

If anybody else felt the same unease as I did, they didn’t show it. I tried to talk to the general manager about the missing lorikeets, and then again when I first realised that I hadn’t seen the receptionist in a while, but she genuinely did not seem concerned.

“Don’t worry about it,” was all she’d say to me, “Don’t worry about a thing.”

I always worry about things.

It was kind of a clever trick, really, all those little disruptions in the workplace. They distracted me from that nagging half awareness, the feeling that something was wrong. But it wasn’t enough. The lack of knowledge bothered me. It shifted in my head, unmoored, the itching ache of a loose tooth.

Even so, a vague feeling wouldn’t have done me much good if I hadn’t spent so much time at work. It’s always been kind of habit of mine to stay longer than I really need to, to the point where in the winter months I doesn’t always get a chance to see the sunlight hours. It’s a point of much entertainment amongst my colleagues. I’m fairly sure they even make bets about it at times.

Still, the point remains that nobody knows the building better than I do, especially not its archives. They’re more of a home to me than the flat where I happen to sleep. I’m more comfortable surrounded by my papers and my specimens than I am anywhere else.

Except I wasn’t any longer. Coming into work, shutting the door behind me - instead of relief, I would begin to feel almost claustrophobic. Only imperceptibly at first, but getting worse as the days inched by. It was like putting on a pair of shoes you’ve owned for years, only to discover that for no discernible reason, they’ve begun to pinch and give you blisters.

When it got to the point where I found myself standing there, outside the door, wrist locked and physically willing myself to turn the handle, I decided that I’d had enough.

Instead of setting to work and giving anything the opportunity to distract me, I put the back of a chair against the door, sat down, and looked at the room in front of me. Now that I was paying attention - really paying attention - the feeling of something missing was stronger than ever. But nothing seemed to be actually out of place. Books on my desk, desk itself to my left. Specimens on the workbench and the lamp that hung overhead. Cabinets and cases to my right. The pattern of items didn’t change, no matter how many times I went over it.

Obviously I needed to try something else.

I allowed myself a moment to fetch a pen and paper, an errand that had me organising and reorganising the books on my desk for nearly half an hour before I was able to drag my focus back to what I had intended to do. Then, without looking up, I made a list of what I should be able to see. Desk on the left, a list of the titles I knew were there. Another list of specimens, workbench and lamp in front of me, door to the darkroom beyond that. Three filing cabinets on my right, only two of which locked. Then I scanned the room, slowly, marking off what I saw against my list.

I stayed in my archive for a long while that day, long after everyone else had gone home. The words I wrote on the page writhed in the corners of my vision, squirming from the grip of my memory the second I looked up. I would write things down twice, or not at all, and eventually have to start over again when the page became more crossing-out than word.

I sat. I wrote. I checked. Crumpled paper forming a small pile around my ankles.

And then - oh, then - I caught it.

“Got you now, you little bastard,” I told it. “You can’t hide from me here.”

The handle to the door of the darkroom was covered in a very fine layer of dust. I hadn’t opened it in weeks, even as the butterflies and ink on paper faded right in front of me. Why would I? There had been nothing in my head to connect the need to use a darkroom and the fact that I had one. Another thread cut.

I opened the door.

The smell hit me first. Thick, and chemical, and dead. The greasy stink of formaldehyde. No time even to choke, though, because I was pulled in, and the door shut behind me.

Whatever the jar had been doing to hide itself, hide this room, didn’t apply here. It distorted space like a huge weight, skewing the outline of everything towards it. The floor sloped upwards, the ceiling, down, the bench it rested on splintered under the pressure of it. I skidded towards it, impossibly, uphill.

I flailed to keep my balance, and ran into resistance immediately. Strands of- what, fishing wire? Hair?- webbed out from the jar, strung with things I couldn’t make out at first. Dead insects and butterfly wings, photographs of people I recognised from work. Bright feathers that must have come from the stolen lorikeets. The strands all thrummed with a horrible, living energy, squirming against my vision like an afterimage.

I could regain my footing, but not stop myself from stumbling towards the jar. The pressure of it’s pull, the weight of it, physically hurt to look at. The fluid inside wasn’t opaque any longer, but luminescent, like filthy amber, and I could finally see what was inside.

A bundle of chitinous legs, suspended under a flattish mass the size of my palm, stretching and bumping against the glass. Gently shifting mouthparts causing flakes of dead matter to swirl in tiny eddies. A studding of blank, bead-like eyes. A spider. Not of any genus or species I could have named. More like someone had taken all the worst possible ideas of a spider, observable or imaginary, and jammed them together into one horrible, twitching creature.

I am not afraid of spiders. But, confronted with the raw spider-likeness in that jar, somehow that didn’t matter in the slightest.

My impossible upwards fall was brought to a halt. The jar didn’t take up any more room in my line of sight than it ought to, but I could see every detail of the thing inside it. It’s pedipalps weren’t moving idly. They were latching onto flecks of something that was drifting downwards through the fluid. With an effort of will, I forced my gaze upwards.

The receptionist was standing over the jar’s unsealed mouth. She bent and twisted with the warped dimensions of the room, but either it didn’t hurt her, or she didn’t care. Her hair hung down in patchy sheets, her scalp scabbed.

She had a box cutter in one hand, and was carving slivers of flesh from her fingertips. They left a tiny ballooning trail of blood as they drifted down towards the waiting spider.

I tried to call out to her, but my voice was swallowed immediately by the dead air. And, of course, I didn’t even know her name. I didn’t know anything, not how to move, how to blink, how to breathe. All ties between my mind and my body were cut, and with no connection, no strings to pull them, my limbs just hung there, useless.

The receptionist kept carving away.

I am not afraid of spiders. I was very, very afraid of the thing in the jar. The fear kept me paralysed, a familiar paralysis, the feeling I have after a nightmare. I wake and the terror is still real, some animal instinct keeping me locked still.

I am not afraid of spiders.

Move, I thought, move.

If I could move, then the nightmare would have lost. It’s logic would collapse, the whole structure would break up into a hundred odd-shaped pieces that never fitted together to begin with. Strange, but not frightening, only ever faintly ridiculous. Get up, I told myself, Time to start the day. There is work to do. You don’t have time to be frightened.

I still couldn’t move. I was being pumped full of fear as though it were venom, and that, I realised, that was important, because it was not my fear. And spiders do not kill their prey with similes.

The thing in the jar was not a spider. It was inconsistent, contradictory mess. It didn’t matter whether it had eight eyes or six or four, so long as it had too many, whether it spun web or hunted, so long as it was a predator. If I were to take it from the jar and clean it and dry it and cut it open, I’d find no venom glands, no internal structure at all. It matched nothing, and it was not real.

And it was trying to frighten me with that.

It had invaded my archives, filled my memory and my inventory with holes, stolen a room from me to hide in, and then, as if that weren’t enough, it had the audacity to tell me that I should be scared of it? Why? Because it was a made-up spider hiding a receptionist in my back room?

I was moving again, reaching for the jar. The ties were not longer cut, because that is not how brain and nerves and muscle work, not in the real world, and, for just a moment, not in this nightmare-world either. Just for a moment. The flare of anger that powered me was drowning already, overwhelmed by fear that wasn’t mine.

The receptionist slammed into me, wrapping me in arms and wire and hair. My mouth was full of butterfly wings. But she must have been down here since she disappeared; her limbs were nothing but bone, and any strength she had came entirely from rage. I lunged forward and through the humming, living wire, and the jar shattered on the ground.

The receptionist screamed, hurling herself at the spider-thing as it slithered across the floor. I hung onto her, not thinking about why or what to do next. Her howls thrummed along the wires and bit into my skin and I could do nothing but tighten my grip and wait.

The air contorted, and slowly, far too slowly, it relaxed. The receptionist was slumped in my arms, unmoving. It wasn’t until I had dragged her out into the electric light of the main room that I saw how much damage she’d done to my arms and side with her box cutter. Of course, I wasn’t until after I’d noticed it that it started to hurt.

The next few hours were the cliche, post-trauma blur. Bandages from the first aid kit, helping her into the passenger seat, waiting at A&E. The receptionist barely moved the whole time, except when I directed her. Even if the cutting of ties wasn’t real for me, it seemed to have had a much worse effect on her.

I returned to the museum in the early hours of the morning. I didn’t feel like having to explain my bandages to any of my co-workers, and I was hardly going to waste my time with the police. They might try to poke through my archive, and I already had enough cleaning up to do.

The darkroom was as I’d left it - strung with wire, smelling of formaldehyde. But that’s all it was, a tangle of garbage and a bad smell. Whatever power had been channelled, whatever awful weight the thing in the jar had had was gone.

Almost gone. The spider-thing still pulsed weakly as I scooped it out of the pool of fluid and broken glass and into a plastic container. Looking at it, it seemed kind of shrunken and vulnerable out in the open.

I decided to take it to be incinerated with the rest of the rubbish.

I cleared out everything that the receptionist had brought into my darkroom. The decorated strings of wire and hair, containers of chemicals and empty plastic tubs that seemed to have once held mealworms, all of it. I bagged it up, and left it and the container with the spider-thing outside in the courtyard. Then I went back into the archive.

After a bit of digging, I found what I was looking for. A jar, one of the old glass ones with an antique seal, dusty from years spent sitting in the corner, repeatedly forgotten every time the recycling came around. With the spider thing inside it, and the alcohol in place, it might as well have never been broken. The solution was already starting to cloud.

I could have resisted. I’m certain of that. But honestly, the thing seemed to want to move on, and by that point I was more than happy to speed it on its way. I don’t need to explain why I thought to send it to you. Either you actually deal with things like this, and will know what to do with it, or you don’t, and I’ll have given you the first genuine piece of supernatural nastiness you’ve seen. Possibly the last, as well.

Either way, it’s your problem now.

So you can stop sending me emails.

Statement ends. It’s always such a pleasure to hear from our sister institute, even if this is the wrong place to file complaints. Their recruitment drive seems to be proceeding apace.

It’s always a pity when someone promising won’t share their talent. Selfish, some would say. And there’s always a risk that another side will poach them off us. But I don’t think there’s any need to worry about his turning into a spider freak, at least.

What does worry me is the fact that this statement turned up so far away from home, and without the jar it was supposedly attached to. The intake form lists both an artefact and a statement, but the statement was all I could find.

If she had succeeded in hatching the jar, we would have had another Amalgam on our hands, and that’s always a pain. Why dear old Mother keeps trying to make them, I’ll never know. They’re always unstable, they always collapse, and they always make a mess. Still. I suppose it’s nice to have a hobby.

[manychocolatefactories]

About Violet Beauregarde, a gum-chewer (book)

The second/third bratty kid is Violet Beauregarde, formerly known as Violet Strabismus and (maybe) as Violet Glockenberry. Who is she? A girl who chews gum all day long. Third winner of the Golden Ticket, and the second child to find her demise.

The book makes some mentions about her physical appearance. It talks of her “fat hands”, of her “huge jaws”, “huge rubbery lips” and of her “great big mop of curly hairs”. In Quentin’s Blake illustrations, she has ginger hair and is wearing a T-shirt and long pants, giving her a tomboyish look. And all her clothes are shades of blue, of course.

Her most defining trait is her obsession with gum. When she presents herself, she begins with “I’m a gum-chewer”. She literally adores gum, to the point where she claims that she can’t live without it. She chews it all day long (except for the meals), and so ferociously that it’s difficult to understand what she says. Even when she stops to chew she keeps her gum close, right behind her ear, or on her bedpost (apparently, without a gum near her, she can’t feel “comfortable”. It’s basically her security blanket). Of course, such a sick obsession only adds to the grotesque and makes her quite revolting (and also makes us worry a bit about her mental state), but for many people it doesn’t seem to be enough to punish her.

So, some quick reminders: at the time the book was written, chewing gum was seen as a disgusting habit, and whenever children talked to adults while chewing, it was considered as a sign of disrespect. Which leads us to another side of Violet (because yes, in the book she isn’t just a “gum-chewer” and that’s all. No, there’s more to her).

 If Augustus Gloop was the incarnation of gluttony, Violet Beauregarde is the incarnation of rudeness and bad manners. She is always talking “very fast”, “very loudly”, and she always answer back to her parents in very nasty ways (If you ask me, I’d say that her jaws are going up and down almost as much as mine are just from yelling at me every minute of the day + All right, Mother, keep your hair on! Plus, she is a truly competitive girl.

After hearing that her “friend”, Cornelia Prinzmetel, had won the record of the longest chewing (three months nonstop), she decided to beat her, and thus went on chewing non-stop, just to see her “friend” humiliated and furious (which is apparently one of Violet’s greatest joy). We can also add that, if Violet stopped the gum for chocolate, it was only because of the contest Wonka created, only because she wanted to win. During her interview, she even brags about her previous chewing record while nobody ever asked her anything about it, assuming that it “may interest” the reporters. Violet in the book is definitively a prideful, ambitious, fame-hunting and attention-seeking girl. (Plus, it shows that the trope of two girls pretending to be friends while hating each other and acting as rivals is not that recent as we may believe.)

Her last defining trait is a simple but efficient one: she is a jerk. It’s clearly told in the book. It is said that before deciding to try to beat the chewing world record, she was only using one gum per day, and once this gum was finished she put it on one of the buttons of her lift (indicating that she lives in a tenement). And whenever someone got his finger or his glove stuck with the gum, Violet was there, watching and laughing. For her, the more annoying, the funnier.

 During the tour, she isn’t showing much of her personality. She just asks practical questions (Why are they laughing? + How can they see where they are going?). At one point she is called a “has-been” by Wonka, and at another “silly” by the narrator. Her obsession with gum is also shown when she is presented with the Everlasting Gobstoppers. Despite “gobstoppers” being in the name, she thinks at first that they are gums. (It seems indeed that she isn’t the brightest of the bunch).

As for her demise… When visiting the Inventing Room, Violet is super-excited to see Wonka’s new invention: a gum! And not any gum, a three-course meal gum! Of course, upon seeing it, what does she decide? To chew it. “As long as it’s a piece of gum and I can chew it, that’s for me.” She asks Wonka to give her the gum, which he refuses, explaining that there’s one or two things not quite well prepared. Violet just goes “to blazes with that!” and take away the gum from Wonka’s hand to chew it. In her defense, we could think that she interpreted the “one or two things not quite right” as “the taste isn’t exactly what we wanted it to be”, she had no clue it was a dangerous mutagen, but still, that’s a bratty way to act. Rudeness, impatience and forcibly taking away things from other’s hands.

When she starts chewing, Mr. Wonka screams many times that she has to stop, but she doesn’t care, too fascinated by the wonders of the gum. She even thinks that she knows better than Wonka: when he tells her that the gum is not right, she answers “Of course it’s right!”, placing her judgement over the one of a wiser adult (and the creator of said gum by the way). (Also, given how she treats her mother, we could think that Violet is constantly in conflict with the adults because she thinks that they don’t know anything, or that they always believe the wrong things, while she has the right and correct knowledge).

When the gum arrives to the blueberry pie phase, Violet starts turning blue (or, more accurately, a purplish-blue) and her parents shout at her, but she still doesn’t care at all. And we can note that she specifically doesn’t care about what her mother has to say (Oh, be quiet, mother, and let me finish!). She only starts to worry when her father starts talking, clearly showing here the discrepancy between the two parents. But it’s too late! After turning entirely blue (skin and hair included), she starts to swell up “like a balloon” until her body becomes an “enormous round blue ball – a gigantic blueberry, in fact – and all that remained of Violet Beauregarde herself was a tiny pair of legs and a tiny pair of arms sticking out of the great round fruit and a little head on top”.

After that, she is rolled to the Juicing Room, where all of the juice is squeezed out of her, before being “repaired” by the Oompa-Loompas. When she gets out of the factory, she is now back to her normal size, except that she kept the purplish-blue color.

 Now let’s go on with the parents.

Her mother is not at all on good terms with her. She is the opposite of Mrs. Gloop: Mrs. Beauregarde doesn’t encourage at all her daughter’s bad habits, always reproaching her to not be “ladylike” and always criticizing her. As a reaction, Violet always talks back to her and disrespects her. In the Inventing Room, when her mother advise her to not “do anything silly” (aka, take the gum), Violet answers “I want the gum, so it’s not silly.” (showing again how little she cares for her mother’s opinion, and how much she thinks of herself).

When she starts chewing the gum, there’s a sudden change with the parents Her mother starts saying that she is a “clever girl” while her father (and that’s the first time he is mentioned in the book) encourages her, proud that his little girl will be the “first person in the world to have a chewing-gum meal!”. What to say of that? Well, there are many different ways of interpreting that. The fact that he is not saying anything about her verbal violence and lack of respects shows that he isn’t the strictest or invested parent in the world. Plus, the fact that he is not mentioned up until his point (which means he doesn’t speak and doesn’t do anything of interest until now) makes me believe that he is a self-effacing man, or a distant father/husband. The only trait he shows here is his encouraging of Violet and his pride in her. Which makes me believe that he is the one that made her into such a competitive and prideful little girl in the first place

When their daughter starts transforming into a blueberry, Mrs. Beauregarde is the first one to react, with panic and horror. Mr. Beauregarde, much calmer, orders Violet to spit out the gum, but his daughter is too obsessed with the gum’s taste to listen. As the transformation goes on, both parents are struck with disgust and despair, not really realizing what’s happening (they repeat the same facts other and other) and looking for help (Call a doctor!). Once the transformation is done, only Mrs. Beauregarde speaks, but it doesn’t add much to her character.

The absence of words from Mrs. Beauregarde once the transformation is done may indicate that he is in a state of shock, which may give the impression of a weak man. Hence his previous silence and inactivity, that could be interpreted as disinterest and emotional distance, may very well just be the ones of a shy and meek man, unable or unwilling to fight with his daughter, submitting himself to her by only agreeing with everything she does. Take your pick.

 In conclusion, a little competitive jerk with some disgusting chewing habits, in eternal conflict with her mother, and with this mysterious shadow-man of a father.

Note that, if in the adaptations of the book, it’s her competitive side that will become her main trait, in the book it’s her chewing that is clearly emphasized, and that’s what makes her a “disgusting brat” more than anything. I personally agree with Dahl on that one: I’m not fond of gum-chewers. I often see chewing gum as something quite disgusting, I don’t know why, but it can sometimes give me strong nausea.

Anyway, we’re not here to talk about me, so let’s end this post here.

[dcarevu]

The Underdwellers

“Rise and shine, Master Leprechaun!”

While Batman The Animated Series is generally considered to be a masterpiece, with some near-perfect episodes making up a lot of it, any show with as many episodes as it has is bound to have some that don’t quite measure up to the rest. A couple pieces of chewed up gum hidden on a floor covered in pillows. The Under-Dwellers is one of those gobs to a lot of people. But what about to Char and I? Well, here’s a game I like to play called It’s Not As Bad As It Gets Credit For. One that I usually play with Spider-Man 3, so let’s give a dark and brooding hero a chance. Well. One that doesn’t have emo hair and an all black suit. SPOILERS BEYOND THIS POINT

Villain: Sewer King Robin: No Writer: Tom Ruegger (Story), Jules Dennis, Richard Mueller (Teleplay) Director: Frank Paur Animator: Studio Junio Airdate: October 21, 1992 Episode Grade: C

Yup. A C rating. I can hear some of you laughing me off of this website already.

There are very valid reasons for this episode getting the criticism it does. Despite my grade, there are things that I complained about as well. The first scene involving the kids playing chicken on top of the train, for example. First of all, these kids are idiots, and it’s pretty hard for me to maintain the suspension of disbelief here, especially since this part was not overly entertaining. I did like Batman’s line, “You play chicken long enough, you fry” (Char didn’t so much, though) and overall how he handled the children, but other than that, no. The kid getting his ankle stuck is a trope I’ve seen enough times, and of course Batman is going to swoop in last second.

After that scene once we start with our real episode, we have a kid dressed in green running down the streets, stealing a purse from an old lady. She screams and tells the cops that a leprechaun was the culprit. Okay, this is well and good. A bit of comic relief, right? Plus, she’s old. Maybe she’s not as on things as she used to be. But when we get to the part where Batman tries to convince Alfred that it was a leprechaun, that’s where I start rolling my eyes. I mean, this is Batman. The Dark Knight. He sees a kid wearing a green hood. Why the hell would his first thought be that it’s a damn leprechaun? This is probably the most stupid thing I’ve ever seen on this show. I get that this is a world with a psychotic, murderous clown, man-eating plants, and a talking, stalking scarecrow. But this is something I can picture coming from Adam West, and not so much Bruce Wayne, especially when we are supposed to take this episode seriously.

Then later when we cut to under the sewers and see the child slavery in action. When this popped on screen, my internal thoughts were, “Oh no…” This episode was headed downhill quickly. Those of you familiar enough with Batman The Animated Series know that episodes about children is often where the writers just didn’t know what they were doing a lot of the time. We have a certain later episode focused on kids that I already know I’m giving a straight-up F, mark my words. Then we see the villain of the episode, who looks like he should be in a Disney Afternoon special. And I mean, he’s got an eyepatch built into his glasses. Jesus, how corny are we gonna get here?? But luckily from here, things didn’t really get worse to me. They got better. Hence the C. There are things in this episode I hate, then things I really liked.

What are some things I liked? While not 100% awesome, Alfred dealing with Frog, the under-dwelling child Batman finds, is cute. Despite having raised Bruce Wayne and, in a way, Dick Grayson, he insists that with children, he doesn’t know what he’s doing. And you almost believe it, watching him. But Frog is a real shithead, misbehaving in virtually every way possible. Some nice comic relief, because other than that, the episode is pretty dark as usual. Even with the concept of a guy running a sweatshop under the sewer (complete with gators!). I think that this is the main reason that people dismiss the episode. The concept alone. And yeah, I’m kinda surprised that this was Tom Ruegger who wrote the main story. Judging by this episode and the last, I think he’s more of a teleplay guy. The teleplay in this episode is actually pretty decent, though!

Also the animation! For most of the time, it’s the best we have seen so far, if you ask me. Granted, I’m no animation expert, so I can’t talk about technicals, but I loved the way it looked. There was some nice lighting, especially on Batman’s face, and wow, watching Batman fight those alligators! It’s the best fight scene we’ve gotten yet, and it actually looked like I remembered the action scenes from this show looking. Watching them slowly find their fitting when it comes to Batman kicking ass is super interesting. Their more cartoony Tiny Toons background is clear, where real fist fights were certainly not nearly as common (at least not to my memory). Char next to me gasped a couple times watching Batman take on those alligators. I always find it fascinating to watch Batman deal with animals other than humans. The thing with animals is that they aren’t thinking about what they’re doing like humans do. You can’t beat the shit out of them in the same way. The idea is simply to stop them from attacking, and then not going any further. When it comes to giant reptiles that could devour any human, yeah, that does involve some slamming around (admittedly, the one alligator who gets its mouth forced open was something that could have been left out). But I mean, I personally can say that I wouldn’t prefer to reason with them. Maybe compliment their lovely eyes? Yeah, no. And look how well-fed those gators are. What, you think their living so well on garbage people throw in the sewers? No. It was Char who brought this up to me, but y’know what the most likely thing is? Think about it. Gators eat pretty big meals. They eat meat. And the Sewer King was pretty quick to almost feed one of his slaves to them. They’ve probably been feeding on the kids. The ones who disobey too much…maybe the ones who get too old (it’s pretty unclear how this operation has been going on)…either way, yikes, these kids have it bad. I mean, these children are not even allowed to express vocal pain, as we see at the beginning as one of theme slams his shin with the tool he was using. It makes me cringe every time I see it. If Fox had allowed blood, man, lemme tell you, that would have bled.

So while some of the animation was great, for some reason on almost all of the scenes on the streets, it got really bad. Namely, at the beginning and end of the episode. When I started watching, Char and I both noted how it just didn’t look right. I was so afraid that the entire episode would look like this, and it just wasn’t the case. Why we had this discrepancy, I have no idea. Maybe all the damn budget went to the action? It’s the only thing I can think of. The whole episode, as far as I know, was done by the same studio. I’m not familiar with this studio’s work at all, and it really excites me to finally be able to pay attention and compare the work of all these studios who worked with the show. I’ll be going back occasionally to make sure I can comment on other episodes different studios have done occasionally. So if Junio pops up again, I’ll likely mention it. Hopefully their next episode (if there is one) keeps the good quality the entire show.

Most of the rest of the episode was mixed too. The villain was pretty shallow, and just kind of generic evil. On the other hand, Batman getting as pissed as he did and hunting this guy down was awesome. The voices of the children were pretty annoying. On the other hand, most of the children were completely mute (a truly wonderful thing). There were a lot of really corny lines from some of the characters. On the other hand, we had a guy in an even more ridiculous getup than a spooky bat costume yell, “Destroy that costumed freak!” Irony! Yeah, I don’t know guys. When you add in the fact that these children are gonna have some serious PTSD, and this type of thing, while exaggerated and made more accessible for the 7-year-olds, really does happen in the real world. Children are enslaved undoubtedly more than I realize, and more than I even want to know. I wish we had a Batman in real life to destroy these monsters, I truly do. Add all this together, with the fact that I simply didn’t feel the discomfort/displeasure throughout much of the episode, I can’t rate it too harshly. I’m not a professional critic. I’m just a guy with a blog, who makes his own rules. Because of that, yes. A C. I hope that’s fair.

Char’s grade: B

Major firsts: Batmobile’s transforming capabilities, Sewer King, a children-focused episode

Next time: P.O.V.

[shiningamongdarkness]

Chapter 06. Orphan

Shining among Darkness

By WingzemonX

Chapter 06. Orphan 

The long black limo, just washed and waxed, was moving at careful step through that low neighborhood of southern Los Angeles. Since they left the main avenue to enter those streets, the appearance of the buildings and sidewalks seemed to be degrading gradually. The driver, with the stereotypical black, suit, pants and tie, and a matching driver's hat, was visibly nervous. Traces of sweat made his forehead and nose shine. His hands were clinging to the steering wheel, and steadily looked in the rear-view mirrors to make sure no one was following them, or there was no one nearby suspicious.

On the contrary, his passenger in the back seat not only looked calm: he seemed fascinated. The young man, perhaps sixteen or seventeen years old, was looking out the window at his right hand, admiring the dirty sidewalks, the graffiti on the walls, and the people with unique appearances. It was already close to sunset, and slowly everything became darker. It seemed as if the atmosphere of the place adjusted and modified accordingly.

From the neck of the young man, was hanging a professional camera, black, clean and shiny, almost like new. When he saw something interesting enough on the way, without any hesitation, he raised the camera, placed it in front of his face, and took a picture from the moving car. He portrayed without problem some boys playing basketball on a public court. A beefy man, tall enough to perhaps double his height, with a dark sweatshirt, and his hands hidden in its pockets; he was standing on the stool, with his headphones on, and doing nothing more than waiting. The boy took another picture of a young girl in a white nurse's suit, although somewhat opaque in parts, who walked hastily down the sidewalk with her eyes downcast as if she didn't want to look at anyone on her way to the bus stop.

But what was most abundant, and what he managed most to capture with his camera, were women. But not women like the young nurse: women in small outfits, high heels, extravagant makeup, and flashy hairstyles. Not everyone had all of these at the same time, but at least two. All of them standing at some point on the sidewalk, doing nothing but wait, like the man in the black sweatshirt, but surely not expecting the same.

He noticed that several of those girls turned to see his beautiful vehicle sideways. That was not weird. The weird thing was in fact, that none seemed surprised, scared or surprised by his presence.

Sure, that was supposed to be the kind of place that "good" people did not visit. The type of locale where honorable and respectable people of society, never put a foot. But that was just a bad joke, wasn't it? More than one of those supposed good people, put more than their feet in those parts, and he knew that. For the same reason, more than surprised, those girls were waiting for it. They were waiting for that elegant limousine to edge right next to them, for the rear window to open and for a man to stick his head out of it, shaking a wad of bills in his fingers.

That was, in fact, the kind of place where people with indiscreet vehicles like that went in search of discreet fun for those hours. A funny discrepancy, he thought.

"Is not it fascinating, Billy?" Asked the boy, a moment after having taken a picture.

"Sir?" The driver murmured, turning to look him confused in the mirror. The young man moved away from the window and settled into his seat, but did not withdraw his eyes from the outside.

"How long did it take us to get here?"

"Forty minutes, sir; because of the traffic."

"Forty minutes, because of the traffic," he repeated it slowly as if saying it out loud made it more meaningful. "That's what separates the most luxurious and luminous place in this city... from this. For many, it would be enough. But if you put it in perspective with the distances that separate entire countries, is not it, in fact, quite a bit?"

The driver didn't answer anything, and he didn't expect him to do either.

They continued for about another minute. After turning a corner, the number of those women on the street appeared to be relatively higher. That should be the right place.

"Stop here," the boy said to the driver in a commanding tone, leaning his body slightly forward. The man obeyed, bringing the vehicle to the sidewalk.

Once edged, the young man did not waste time and immediately got out, with his camera in his neck, in addition to a black sports bag that was hung over his shoulder.

"Are you sure it's here, Mr. Thorn?" The driver said worriedly, leaning out the window.

"Completely," he replied in turn, with a wide and candid smile, while adjusting the lens of his camera. "Thanks, Billy. I'll call you when I want you to pick me up."

"Do not you want me to...?"

"No, I don't want you to come with me," he interrupted abruptly, finishing easily the sentence he was about to utter. "Go, now."

The boy started walking along the sidewalk at a calm pace, so the driver had no choice but to obey and leave. Not far away, but enough so that his order was considered fulfilled.

The vehicle that transported the boy perhaps did n0t stand out as much among the people. Or his black suit jacket and trousers perfectly ironed and trimmed, his Armani shirt without a tie, or his shoes polished and shiny. But what could draw the attention of several of the individuals who crossed with him by the stick, or saw him from the other side of the street, was his apparent age: quite young, at least for the average of men who used to walk in those parts. And besides, he was alone, with such expensive clothes, a much more expensive watch on his wrist, and a camera even more than this on his neck.

He realized without the slightest problem that several individuals looked at him from afar and whispered to each other. What were they saying? He supposed it, and no need to dig deeper than necessary. People like them were always the clearest, especially their evil intentions. But he was not worried, because as well as his intentions, his cowardice was also apparent. If they knew what was in the bag, would that give them more brave? He would love it that way; with one of them being encouraged to try, it would be quite fun. But none did; they all let him go his way, without bothering him beyond his prying eyes.

The boy continued walking, taking some photos in his advance, of everything he saw interesting.

He could have gone with the one closest to him when he got out of the car, but it would not have helped him. He was busy finding the right one, the one who could tell him exactly what he needed to know, without causing more problems than necessary.

After turning around that block, he found two women in a corner facing each other; one blonde and the other brunette and dark skin, and both with small and tight clothes, and a lot of makeup. Both smoked a cigarette. He felt it almost immediately after putting his eyes on them: they were the right ones, or at least one of them was.

He approached them with naturalness, and when they noticed him, both looked at him with slight confusion in their eyes.

"Aren't you too young to be around these parts, kid?" Questioned the blond girl, letting out a puff of smoke.

The boy looked at her, and a half smile emerged on his lips. He stopped a meter and a half from them, adjusted the lens of his camera with his fingers, lifted it, and pointed it directly at the blond girl.

"What about you, Kelly?" He suddenly released while he held the camera in front of his face. "Aren't you too young?"

His finger pressed the camera button just when that girl's face was filled with stupefaction, and was just that expression what was captured in the photograph.

"What did you say?" She murmured nervously, barely a trace of her voice.

The boy took a step towards them and activated the camera's trigger again.

"Tell me, was going against the wishes and warnings of your parents worth it?" He said with a mocking tone, approaching her carefully, still taking pictures. The young blonde started to back scared, staggering in her high red heels. "Get away from your house and come alone up here, with nothing more than a childish desire to be an actress? Was your life really that bad in that little town in Iowa? How things turned out, was it better to have stayed with the buried dagger of what would have happened if...? This at least I tried allows you to sleep at night, while you have at your side the hot and sweaty body of a man more disgusting than the previous one?"

The blonde stepped back more and more nervous, panicked by every word that came from that boy's mouth. Irremediably she fell to the floor, but even then she didn't stop. She crawled back along the sidewalk with her miniskirt getting completely dirty until her back was against a wall. And when she was having nowhere else to run, she only had the option of raising her arms in front, and cover herself. Her entire body began to tremble uncontrollably, and the boy seemed more than happy to photograph that deplorable state in which she had fallen just by hearing the truth; her truth.

The other woman was slow to react because she did not understand what all that was about. However, seeing her friend on the ground trembling was enough to make her step forward to help.

"What's your problem, brat?! Leave her alone!" She shouted angrily, quickly approaching to the stranger. "And get that damn thing down...!"

She took him by his arm with the firm determination to knock his camera down, smash it into the pavement, stomps on it, and then do the same with his head if necessary. But she was unable to do any of those things because when her fingers pressed against the dark fabric of his sleeve, she stopped short; No, she was instead paralyzed, unable to move even a single muscle. Her throat closed, her fingers began to tremble, her eyes bulged, and some sweat began to cross her face. There was no word coming from her lips; just some nervous gasps.

The boy slowly pulled the camera away from his face and turning his head towards her. She only took a small look at those cold, penetrating blue eyes, only occupied that he looked at her for a moment, to make her retreat in fear as if she had seen the most horrible of the beasts face to face. That was not an ordinary fear: it was the worst sense of terror she had ever felt in her life, a terror she was not aware she could sense. Her back was stuck against a poster, and her hands clung to it as a support, because otherwise, she would have fallen.

The boy smiled, quite satisfied by her reaction, and still took the audacity to make a quick picture of her in that position.

"Wonderful," he murmured happily, and then began to review all the photographs he had taken, on the small digital screen of the camera. "Besides good models, you look like smart girls. Maybe you can help me with something. I am looking for a person who is supposed to live in this neighborhood." He paused, placed the lens cover, and looked at both of them, something more severe than before. "I think you know her in the streets as the Orphan."

— — — —

She had read some time ago about people who looked at themselves in the mirror and felt that the face they were looking at was not theirs. It was a concept hard to understand unless one came to live it in the flesh. Most likely, those sensations that invaded her suddenly were not something as serious as that, but they allowed her to get an idea.

In recent years, she felt less and less than the person in that mirror was her. But, who else could it be? That eternal face was her. She understood that well. But it was precisely that perpetuity that made her feel that she was looking at a photograph, a drawing, a caricature ... something that did not really represent her. Especially when she put on make-up, and she did it frequently.

And she did not really need much: a little dust here and there, hide a couple of wrinkles and Voilà! It was the adorable, innocent, white and soft face of a ten-year-old girl, adorned with flirtatious freckles. Because that's what her customers expected. They didn´t go to that corner forgotten by God of the city to feel that they fuck a fortyish woman of short stature, that was what she really was. No, nothing like that. They wanted to imagine that they did it with their daughter, their little sister, their niece, their student, the girl who lives across the street... or let them know in whom that people thought exactly while they did it. But that didn't matter to her.

The only thing that really mattered was their money, the money she used to pay the rent for that small and nauseating hole in which she had ended, in addition to food, water... And of course, makeup and accessories; those definitely nobody gave them away.

After finishing with the first of them, who had decided to appear much earlier than usual because he had an important appointment more night, she sat in the chair in front of her dressing table, to smoke a cigarette. Her black hair, slightly curly, was loose, falling on her shoulders. She pulled on only a thin white nightgown, which, due to her short stature, reached too far below her knees.

The subject was finishing arranging on the other side of the bed. The woman could see him through the reflection of the mirror, but she tried not to do that. In fact, she had her eyes crouched down on the surface of the dresser. That was precisely one of those days when she was disgusted to see that face in the mirror.

"How much is it going to be?" She heard the sturdy, gray-haired man in a two-piece gray suit, ask her. When she glanced at his reflection, she noticed that his tie was poorly arranged, but she was not interested in even pointing it out.

"The same as always," she replied indifferently, just after releasing a thick puff of smoke from her pink lips. "Leave it at the desk."

The woman looked at him through the mirror, noticing how he pulled a wad of bills from his bag, separated several and left them on the bureau as she said. What had he told her he worked for? Something in the government, surely. Or was she confusing him with another?

She hoped that was all and next he left without saying anything else. But, instead, he came up behind her, bouncing proudly.

"I've told you before, but I'll tell you again," he said with a lewd tone that was quite direct and not very subtle. He stopped then just behind the chair; she continued without looking directly at him. "A beautiful girl as you, shouldn't be doing these things." The man suddenly placed his thick and hairy hands on her bony shoulders, squeezing them a little between his fat fingers like sausages. "I could get you out of this place, you know? Give you a house... hot food... be your daddy full-time."

The caresses of that man became more and more suggestive as he spoke, moving from her shoulders to her arms, and then daring to venture towards her torso.

She looked at him in the mirror in silence. He looked like a stupid dog, euphoric to see his own face while he touched her that way. Another day she would have endured and let him continue; but that day, even though she was just beginning his busy day... she was not in the mood for that in the least.

In fact, she felt disgusted by his mere closeness, by his only smell.

She lowered her gaze, now contemplating a pair of scissors that landed just above the dressing table. How easy it would be to take them and stick them in one of those thick hands. She imagined for a moment that it burst like a balloon, although she knew that was not how it worked; but what a funny image that would be. For sure he would scream learned by pain and confusion. She would go back, and then she would throw herself at him. She would knock him to the bed, put herself on top of him, and begin to repeatedly nail the sharp tip of the scissors to his neck. First ten or fifteen times on one side, and when it became boring or felt that the metal no longer had opposition on that side, she would start doing it on the other.

Seeing his eyes wide open, looking at her pleadingly, would surely be enough to really turn her on properly, although at that point those eyes were just shuttered windows because behind them there would be nothing. And then, and only then, could she finally do with pleasure all the disgust things that he liked so much.

Yes, that would be fine... but she would not do that. Instead, with the hand that did not hold her cigarette, she took one of his little fingers and folded it back, also bringing it dangerously close to the breaking point, to force him to release her.

"I've had enough daddies," she said bitterly, and then pulled his hand to one side violently. "Now go away."

"Ok, ok, don't be angry," the man grumbled, rushing back to the door, rubbing his finger. She did not take her eyes off his reflection until she saw him go out the door of the room.

She remained seated, finishing her cigarette, and plunged a little while longer into the same thoughts of a while ago. Again, she no longer looked at the mirror, but at the surface of the dressing table. To her hair comb, to her makeup, her powder box, her lipstick, and her scissors... those scissors that she wanted so much to nail in the neck of that man, and so many more. Sometimes, they left it too easy. Some liked to be tied up and cover their eyes; they would not even see it coming. No, but it was better than if they saw, to contemplate their eyes... those eyes of despair and horror...

"Good place," she heard a strange voice behind her suddenly. "Very adorable."

She did not even turn around or look in the mirror; just listening to that voice put her entirely on alert. Without even thinking about it, she opened the left drawer of the dressing table, took from it a long dark revolver, considerably more prominent than her hand, stood up and turned so violently that her chair fell in motion. She raised both hands to the front, holding the gun without letting go of the cigarette, and pointed firmly at the intruder: a boy, with straight black hair, combed to the side, in a black suit, blue shirt, a camera to the neck and a sports bag on the shoulder. He was standing right in the doorway of the room, looking around with a curious look and a calm smile.

"How did you get in here?!" She shouted angrily, without any trace of false sweetness in her voice.

The boy seemed to downplay her demand or the fact that she was pointing a gun at him. He continued looking at the rest of the room while allowing himself to enter a couple more steps inside.

"If I told you that your friend who has just left kept the door open, would you believe me?" He replied with a mocking tone, whose only response was the sound of the hammer of the weapon, getting into position. "I suppose not."

"Who the fuck are you?" The woman questioned again, a little calmer, but not without demand. "What are you doing here? What do you want?!"

"I understand the type of environment in which you work, dear; but that is not an excuse to use that vocabulary."

With a normal attitude, he approached the bed and allowed himself to leave his nag on it.

"Are you not listening to me, blunder head?!" The owner of the place yelled with even more force than before. "I'll give you ten seconds to get your ass out of here, or else..."

"Is this the way you treat a potential client?"

"Fuck you. I choose my clients, and I don't get into brats with more milk on their lips than hairs between their legs."

Although indeed, except for his age, he was the most handsome boy she had ever seen put a foot in that apartment. He, for his part, gave a loud laugh in response to her comment.

"That's good, I like it. You are ingenious, as well as beautiful."

The face of the girl did not lighten a bit. He could feel and read without a problem that the only reason why she had not shot him already, was because she was still thinking about all the implications of doing so. Beginning with the noise it would make, the attention it would cause, the cleanliness she would have to do; well, if she wouldn't have to flee from there right away. And that idea did not exactly convince him; in spite of everything, she liked where she lived.

Although perhaps there was another factor, perhaps unconscious and more hidden, which forced her not to do such a thing. The same fear that inspired all those on the street not to approach that guy, not to dare to take his camera or take his bag. A feeling that was saying her if she did, the gun might explode in her hands, or the bullet would end up not hitting him, bouncing off the wall, and piercing her forehead right through the middle. It was something that could, in fact, happen.

But whatever it was, the reasons that had led him there forced him to try to take this situation a little calmer. So, instead of remaining defensive and pedantic, the guy made a couple of steps back, and raised his hands in submission, to try to calm her down a bit. His face, however, remained peaceful.

"Let's start again, ok? My name is Damien, Damien Thorn."

That name created a slight, barely noticeable, intrigue reaction in his forced hostess.

"Thorn? Like Thorn Industries?"

"Yes, it is written the same way," he replied with a shrug. "And you are... Leena, right?"

The girl's eyes widened and her face, more than surprised, became furious; even her milky white face turned reddish in a second.

"How do you know that name?!" She screamed at him entirely heated, and quickly circled the bed and approached him threateningly, gun still in hand. "Who you are?! Who you are?!"

The distance between them was shortened so much that the tip of his cannon and his chest separated them only about half a meter.

"As I said, I'm a potential client," he repeated, without losing a single molecule of his almost disturbing tranquility, "but not the kind you think. No offense; I'm sure you're very good at what you do, but it's not those skills that made me look for you."

He put his hands in his pockets, and put all his weight on one foot, taking a much more relaxed posture.

"I need you to find two people for me."

"Do I have the face of help to missing persons?"

"No," he replied with a mocking tone." I think you have the face of someone who throughout her life has cultivated many special skills, which have allowed her to survive and hide. The face of someone who knows very well the dark side of many cities and corners of this country; and that even better, she knows how to move around them. And most important of all," he leaned toward her then, making his penetrating eyes stare at her, "the face of someone who when she stares into the abyss, holds its gaze..."

There was silence, absolute silence, the seconds after. They did not even blink.

Incoherent as it sounded, something in him made her feel... confidence, something she had not felt in the presence of anyone, much less of a man.

After a while, she cautiously lowered her gun.

"What exactly do you want?"

"I said it, I want you to find two people, and bring them to me. Two little girls, in fact."

The woman snorted in annoyance and headed towards her dresser again.

"So, you are another degenerate after all. They are becoming younger."

She left the handgun on the table and extinguished her cigarette in the ashtray, only to relight another almost immediately.

"It's not what you think," he said, accompanied by a small chuckle. With a confident step, he approached her. "They are two extraordinary people, just like you. You know what kind of extraordinary I mean, right?"

"Not even the most little idea."

She lifted the chair and sat down on it again. After that, she extended her arm to throw some ashes in the ashtray. But, just then, the stranger guy rushed his hand forward, took the same scissors that had fascinated her a few moments ago, and in the blink of an eye, he stuck them in her hand, making it pass through his palm and fit into the table's wood.

"Ah!!" The woman cried, full of pain and confusion.

Bursts of blood came from the wound when he immediately after removed the improvised weapon from her skin, staining the entire dressing table. Before she could take her gun back, or at least hold her injured hand to press it, the boy grabbed her first from her wrist, and pushed the palm of her hand against the mirror, causing her blood to stain it, and begin to drip through it. With his other hand, the boy held her chin tightly, forcing her to stare straight ahead, toward her own reflection, the very one she had no desire to look at.

"Of course you know, Leena," he murmured in her ear gravely. "You know very well that you should be dead right now. Your body should be rotting under the frozen water of that lake where you were thrown, and where you were considered finished. But instead, you are here, satisfying the low and forbidden desires of the old, sick and horrible men, in exchange for a few dollars. How is this possible? I bet you've asked yourself often."

While both were contemplating together in the same direction, they could see how that vertical wound that was drawn on her hand, began to close slowly. The blood stopped flowing, and in the blink of an eye her skin was again intact, as white and smooth as an instant before the stabbing ... or even more.

Damien smiled, amazed by such a show.

"It's funny how any wound you get now is cured right away." He then turned her head to the side, leaving the right side of her neck exposed; or, more specifically, the scars of past wounds that ran all around his neck. "But these scars that you got escaping from that Mental Asylum will forever mark your skin, as a horrible reminder. I bet that not all your clients find them so attractive."

Any trace of fear or anger that arose in the woman after that treacherous attack had vanished as the strange visitor spoke. All this had been far outweighed by the enormous confusion that caused her to hear everything he said, and the incredible accuracy of the data.

He not only knew her name: he knew absolutely everything about her. And for the first time in a long, long time, she felt entirely weak, naked, and under the mercy of another person. Impotent, unable to do anything beyond listening and let him do what he wanted. And the worst thing is that he was a simple teenager, one who was barely about to become an adult.

It was a feeling that overwhelmed her and twisted her stomach. However, at the same time, and although it seemed impossible to understand... it caused her arousal as intense as she had not felt in years; so much that she felt that her whole body was tingling, and not because of the pain of his recent wound, already cured at that moment.

Who was that guy really? And more importantly...

"How do you know all that?" She moaned with some weakness, because of the immense amount of emotions that ran through her body. She felt her nose impregnated with the sweet scent of his cologne; nothing to do with the rotten and unpleasant smell of the other bastard who had just left. "How did you find me? Are you a cop?"

"Of course not," he whispered softly in her ear. He still held her, both his wrist and his chin. "I'm not even old enough to enlist. But I know a lot more about you than you think; much more. For example, I know that night someone, or something, took you out of those cold waters, made the air return to your lungs, and your wounds were closed. And, do you think he did it so that you would spend the rest of your life opening leg and mouth to sick perverts in a dirty apartment like this? Do you think this is the only thing for which you are still alive? You are much better than that, I know it. But, do you know?

Only then he released her completely, and he slowly moved away from her. The girl still left her hand against the mirror for a few moments, and then let it slip through it, leaving a trail with the blood still left in her palm.

Shy, she turned to see him over her shoulder. He was already relatively far from her, leaning against one of the bunk beds, with his arms crossed; he was staring at her with enough intensity.

Yes, he was definitely the most handsome man who had gone to that place in the almost eight years she had been living there... pity he was an impertinent child.

"Do you know what happened that night?" She murmured, little by little more recovered. "Do you know why I'm still alive?"

Damien smiled once more.

"Make this assignment for me, and I assure you that you will answer that question and more."

He nodded toward the bag he had placed on the bed. The woman looked at it, and then stood up and approached with the same caution she would have if she were approaching an active bomb.

"There you will find all the information I've gathered from both girls I told you about," the boy informed a moment before she opened the bag. "It's not much, but I think it will be enough. In addition to a little advance payment for your expenses."

When she opened the bag, inside it were two files, one with a brown folder, and another with a blue folder; both full of papers. But more importantly, under both, there were bundles and bundles of bills; of twenty, fifty and one hundred. The bag was practically full, and it was impossible to guess how much money there was really there. But, reaching a certain amount, of which she was sure that it exceeded, it hardly mattered a few dollars less or a few dollars more.

Was that a little advance payment?

She put the money aside for a few moments and concentrated on the files. First, she checked the brown one. When she opened it, the first thing she found was a newspaper clipping, apparently from Portland. It was the front-page, and it read in big black letters:

MAD PARENTS COUPLE TRIES TO COOK HER OWN DAUGHTER IN THE OVEN 

She arched her eyebrow, intrigued. A pretty yellow press title. But, if in fact, they did what it said there, it would be difficult not to sound yellowish whatever the title was.

"Nice," she exclaimed sarcastically. "I guess it was not because she failed algebra."

She suspected that the daughter was one of the two little girls he wanted her to find. She lowered the file, and her attention focused on the boy on the other side of the bed.

"And what is special about her?"

"You will know when you find her, and the other one."

"And, what should I do if I find them?"

"Bring me to both. Healthy and safe, please."

"If you have so much money and interest, why don't you do it yourself? This newspaper is from Portland, so at least you know where one is. If you don't want to do it yourself, you could hire any private detective, mercenary, or whatever. Why are you asking me?"

Damien laughed in a somewhat exaggerated way, which seemed to try to demonstrate more the absurdity of the question, than the humor that caused him.

"You haven't understood anything yet, right? Do not worry, you'll find out." He started at that moment to walk to the door, with the same calmness with which he had entered. "As I promised, find both girls, and you'll discover more about yourself than you think."

He kept advancing and was practically at the exit when he heard her speak again.

"Esther," she murmured slowly, but hard enough for him to hear. "Call me Esther. Leena Klammer died a long, long time ago."

Damien looked at her, shrugged and continued on his way.

"Esther, then."

He left, and she stayed.

Esther sat on the bed, trying to digest what had happened, or at least what she understood of what had happened. She looked again at the contents of the bag; she had never seen so much money gathered at one point. She imagined everything she could do with it. Buy a false identity, pay someone to take her out of the country, maybe go to a southern country. Perhaps she could get another family to adopt her as their daughter, and do things right that time... at least as long as possible.

But there was another side to that plan. If that guy had left her such a large amount of money, it was surely nothing for him compared to all he had. And with resources like those, it would not take much time to find her; in fact, she did not understand how he had found her in the first place. And her name? And her story? How had he found out about all this?

She did not like games like that, especially when she felt she had all the disadvantages and someone else was controlling the game.

She took out the other file, the blue one, to review it. There were also newspaper clippings on it, but they were talking about an incident on an island in Washington, about horses that had jumped into the sea for no reason. The name of the ranch was "Morgan."

After digging a little deeper among all the papers in the file, she came up with a name, possibly the name of the second girl she supposed to look for: Samara Morgan.

END OF CHAPTER 06

AUTHOR'S NOTES:

—Damien Thorn is based mainly on the same character as the movie: The Omen (2006), which is, in turn, a remake of the film of the same title from 1976. Although in terms of continuity I will take more the facts and times from 2006 film, for his story, and some additional details of the character, will also be taken from the other movies Damien: Omen II (1978) and Omen III: The Final Conflict (1981), and the television series Damien (2016). Concerning his personality and powers, they will be based in part on those mentioned above, but also on a more personal interpretation.

—Leena Klammer, aka Esther, is based entirely on the antagonistic character of the film Orphan (2009), standing eight years after the events of that film. What happened in this will be fully respected, but some adjustments will be made to its end that will be explained more clearly later.

I must admit that this chapter took me a bit out of my comfort zone, because of the themes touched and the language. It is not the style of things that I usually write, but the characters that I have decided to use so deserve it, I think. It is likely that this will be repeated often from now on so I will give everything to do it well.

[tatsuki-machida]

Tatsuki Machida, from the ice philosopher to the Waseda University doctor

Interview with Waseda Weekly

Machida-san, in December 2014 you suddenly announced your retirement to the press and your intention to study sport sciences at the Waseda University. Why did you throw away your career as an athlete and decide to go on the road of scholarship? 

First of all, I had been walking on the road of a figure skating athlete since I was a child. During that time I was blessed with both happy moments and troubled by many hardships at the same time. In a career full of mountains and valleys, I began embracing many questions and problems and decided I wanted to settle with science and take the chance of studying. Most of the media was reporting it as an abrupt retirement but to me it seemed the most suitable time to take that decision. 

Finishing 5th at the Olympics and then winning the silver medal at the World Championships, 2014 must have been the peak you have reached as an athlete. Looking back, don't you feel attached to that time? 

It's very fulfilling for an athlete to say I gave up at the peak of my career but my decision was clear and so I don’t have any lingering feelings about that time. Especially because of the fact that in figure skating, the sport that is said to be for the youth, the majority of the medalists are from teens to their mid twenties. With age, a skater can no longer be competitive with jumps or spins and their strength and ability goes on a descending path. If I really wanted to get into research, I had to make up my mind as soon as possible. I was eagerly looking forward to starting my second career after retiring from the sport and so with the helpful advice from the people around me, I decided to start grad school. It’s been 3 years since I retired but to this day I don’t think I made the wrong decision. 

There was a strong will behind your retirement announcement. 

In the 2013-2014 season, I started to produce results as an athlete and I became known worldwide but I was already planning on going to grad school and doing research so the next natural step was to retire. Of course, I dedicated my last year to competing and completing my programs. 

At the moment, figure skating is portrayed in a very showy way in mass media, but in reality there are many problems. By exposing these problems from the standpoint of research, people can learn about the real image of competition. I wanted to do research with the goal of contributing to solving figure skating’s many problems and passing it on to the next generation as a better culture. 

The world of figure skating attracts a lot of attention from television and mass-media. What is its problem? 

As an example, the problem of the rinks is very serious. In the 1980s, there were around 750 skating rinks country-wide. However, there are only about 130 left at the moment in 2018. 

That few!?

In addition, many of the rinks are turned into swimming pools during the summer. There are only 27 rinks in 15 prefectures that are able to allow skaters to train throughout the year (based on information from the Japanese skating federation). Moreover, most of these skating rinks are inside the metropolitan areas of the big cities so that creates discrepancy between the quality of those around the cities and those in other regions. Many skaters start their careers because there is a skating facility near their homes and that is also the case with me, I started skating because there was a rink near my home. 

Because the number of skating rinks has been decreasing over the years, not a lot of people live nearby anymore. No matter the amount of attention figure skating gets from mass-media, there is a real danger that there might not be as many athletes in the future. This is the first problem that needs to be addressed as soon as possible. 

The next generation is losing its practice environment... 

That’s right. There’s another problem, that of the eating disorders many of the female athletes are suffering from. From what I know, there are a lot of female skaters facing such struggles. On the other hand there are many male senior skaters facing the wall of challenging the quadruple jump and often suffer very serious injuries in their attempt to land it. 

The power of expression and maturity that comes with entering your 20s has also become different as there are changes that happen with the body and skaters struggle with their jumps and spins. 

As a result, most of the Olympic and World medalists are teenagers. As a competitor that has been inside and outside of the country, I have seen the real condition of such issues and they need to be addressed and recognized. Of course, I lack the medical preparation to be able to come up with suggestions to approach the problem of eating disorders and the problem of severe injuries, but I would like to find a way to manage the artistic and athletic challenges of skaters that have reached their point of maturity at the age of 20 and over, so that they can continue their active duty. 

I have noticed many other problems, such as choosing the second career after retiring from competition and the relationship between the sport and mass-media. 

It is believed that sport management means studying the business side of the sport but for Machida-san it’s not only a way to do research but also to solve problems. 

In the past 3 years of tackling the process, I feel like I have explored questions such as why are people fascinated with sports or what is the best thing to do in order to keep its charm and allow it to coexist with society. 

We should be able to think ahead to the next 50, 100 years and come up with responsible suggestions. My point of view is still that of a graduate student but I feel like it would be great if I could solve some of the problems with my suggestions. 

After graduating from the literature department of the Kansai University, you entered Waseda University to study sport management. Why did you choose Waseda? 

When I decided to pursue grad school, there was no possibility to study sport management at Kansai University. As I was preparing for my second career, I was aware that the sport science department at Waseda was one of the best in the country so I wanted to get in. My specialty is for sports that are accompanied by music, such as figure skating, rhythmic gymnastics and artistic swimming (priorly named synchronized swimming). These are known as artistic sports. In a specialty like this, not only is the general sport research important, but also the knowledge of a wide field of arts. 

At Waseda, sports and arts are both strong fields. 

That’s right. Since I was doing my masters degree program, I wasn’t only studying sports science but also lessons of dance theory taught by Amagasaki Akira-sensei, one of the leaders in artistic research, and it was an experience that was very important to me. 

What is the theme of your research at the moment?

Because it’s an artistic and athletic specialty, I would like to pay attention to interdisciplinary research. Copyright is important. In figure skating, the music, costumes, choreography, everything is copyrighted. How can we manage that? What do we do when copyright is approved for a skating performance such as choreography? My research is the relationship between sport and author rights from the standpoint of law. 

The problem with the decreasing rinks, that I mentioned earlier, needs to be approached with economic and industrial knowledge as well as sports medicine, nutrition and psychology, all of which are necessary to face problems such as eating disorders. 

It’s been 3 years since you chose the road of research, how has it been?

I feel like I’m doing the right thing advancing on this path. I just finished my masters degree and entered my doctoral course and on my road to advancing in the study of science I have enountered feelings of fear and profoundness. 

Fear and profoundness?

I’ve encountered fear in my masters degree working towards graduation and having learned new things, and in my doctoral course as the knowledge I’ve acquired needs to be presented to the scientific society. In a word, there’s a strong sense of responsibilty when you face the society. I cannot present superficial things as research results. I think it’s important to approach scholarship with modesty at all times. 

What about the profoundness?

Research doesn’t really have a goal. If I think I’m close to solving one problem, another one gets in the way. The world of research doesn’t have an end, diversity and possibilities are spread to infinity. Unlike athletes who are easily tied to the physical limits, we can still advance no matter the number of years piling up. 

How long does research specializing in artistic sports last?

There’s already mental and physical related research, but there is almost no research on management. I would like to open that path. 

As a researcher, you are trying to walk in an unknown field. 

We must never forget that unknown fields are present in the vast system of academic disciplines. Based on the academic system that the predecessors struggled with, we can learn and we can finally accumulate our own research. I want to continue exploring this road without forgetting all this. 

the second part of this interview will be published on April 9

translation by @iguana012 

interview is not a word for word translation

[insidetheinsight]

Understanding

Joma tech said something pretty funny in one of his videos.

Verbal communication- low bandwidth medium - causes many intellectual discrepancies (something along those lines)

I’ve been juggling with this idea in my head for like literally two weeks. I felt like my brain was over clocking trying to compute how to effectively communicate without being misinterpreted. I came to the conclusion that it’s virtually impossible. Everyone has their own individual life experience which filters the information they receive. This is a constant process that happens whenever information enters the brain. We use memory of past experiences to reference the new information; which in return, gives us a more accurate method of determining what we do to get what we want. It’s how we’ve evolved. I figured…if you have the ability to ACTUALLY understand someone, then you would effectively be a mind reader, our have lived millions of lives. Contrarily though, we use words and language to express ourselves to other people for communication in hopes that others will understand. Without going on too big of a tangent, we can sometimes understand people better than other times but it’s impossible to always understand. Trying to get someone to always understand you would take longer than the time we have allocated to us and wouldn’t serve much of a purpose. So…with all this being said….those who get it…get it ….those who don’t…don’t. You can’t help everyone understand; so do your best to effectively communicate, and then move on.

What I find fascinating is that the things we use to progress out civilizations forward are often times what hold us back because of the innate human condition. What’s also interesting in regards to this communication conundrum is that computers don’t have this problem. They need a lot of data and information to understand very basic concepts unlike humans. But they can never misinterpret anything once they’ve gathered enough data. They can reference millions of things at once and doing it all very quickly. Computers do what humans can’t and vice versa.