#i neither have the time to run so many surveys nor am i active enough on other platforms to even like. find 2-5 people willing to take the

[duckduckngoose]

I'll forever be sad i wasnt into taz back in 2019-2020 and i couldnt run surveys back than because id LOVE to compare the fandom from then to how it is now

[incognito-lionbeast]

The Right Kind of Idiot, Ch. 2-1

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First light had already broken a while ago, but Lio let his lieutenants rest, sharing the morning’s companionable silence with Aina alone. Productive as ever, she still wore Gueira’s jacket as if it was the most normal thing in the world—a little too large in the shoulders, but not a bad fit. Neither were the long sleeves she’d gifted Lio before, bunched up to his elbows so he could better help the effort to tidy the mess they’d made. Tsk.

Returning from one of many voyages back to her bike—parked just where they’d left it, thank god—Aina paused, leaning against the back of a chair in the dappling sunlight. She smiled, hair a mess and disheveled beyond what combing it with her fingers could do. Still, she surveyed the scene before them fondly, catching Lio’s eyes as they passed—begging some question or another, although neither of them spoke. It was a beautiful morning, but they had work to do. First, though, she dug a phone from her pocket and took a picture. A memory.

“Are you planning to blackmail us later?” Lio asked to tune of another shutter click—this time centered squarely on his face. Well, if it was blackmail—and he didn't really think it was—then it wasn’t very good. Although the sun was shining, the room was still mostly dim, and it was hard to tell exactly where they were with how drastically they'd reinvented the office's floor plan the night before. Too bad for her.

“Hm, what? No.” Aina put her phone away, cheerful despite all of the subtle aches and pains. A nice cup of coffee might do some good once they got back. Whenever that was. For Lio, it was probably sooner rather than later. For Aina, she was less sure. There was still plenty to do here, and she wasn't the one people were waiting on. “The first one is for me, and the second—”

He had a feeling that he already knew where this was going. “—is for Galo. We’re running behind, so I was giving him an update. You’re still here.”

Lio was right, but of course he was. That man never gave up. It was admirable, really. Although, Lio disapproved of being photographed solely for that purpose—or in general. Still, she meant well; he knew that. So, for now, that was enough to settle his uneasiness. Yet, in the future—and he was sure there was a long one ahead of them—Lio made a note to discuss this with his captors. Friends. They were friends. Galo was his friend. Lio’s expression softened at the thought, ruffling the sleepy head of one of their charges as they awoke.

“I am,” Lio agreed. “Will Galo be joining us?”

Aina shook her head, “No, we’ll meet him down at the station—or you will. I might stay here with the boys to make sure the other Rescue Team gets here okay. Can I trust you with my bike?”

Another rhetorical question, he knew, because combined with her playful posturing—Lio caught the keys as they sailed overhead. Their alliance was new, but less fragile than they gave it credit for. Even so, turning the keys over in his hands, Lio kept a special reservation within himself for how well this would all work out in the end. Though, he’d keep hoping, believing in himself and the Galo that believed in all of them. Was that too corny?

“Can I trust you to handle them?” Lio finally answered, brow raised and gesturing to his lieutenants. They were a handful and loyal to a fault; although, he was pleased to see how well they’d been getting along, even if it was mostly just this one person so far. Aina. For what it was worth, he respected her for that. Then again, if she handled Galo on a daily basis, what were a few extra punks? Surely, they couldn't be any worse. Perhaps different in their mischief, but not worse.

“They'll have to listen to me.” Aina tugged on the lapels of Gueira’s her jacket, proudly displaying it for all those slowly waking to see. This was silly, and her serious expression was quickly foiled by her own bobbing shoulders. She laughed, undeterred by the rustling of their teammates. Even Gueira, himself. Good morning, sunshine. Don’t mind her and her empty threats, because that’s all they were. “If he wants this back. I’m comfortable.”

Black leather wasn’t really her thing nor did it match any of her aesthetics, but she was cozy and warm. So, that had to count for something. Besides, it was the highest honour she could've ever hoped to receive from the two of them, and that—above all else—made her the happiest. It was progress. It was trust, quite frankly, that she wasn't that bad. So, Aina wanted to hold onto it for as long as possible, shoving her hands into its pockets.

Lio allowed it, waving her off to regroup and inform his lieutenants of the situation. He’d leave soon, and what remained between Aina and Gueira was her battle to fight. Albeit, Lio anticipated an early surrender—or else they'd never hear the end of it. Still, everything was set. Everything except for the few still struggling with sleep in their eyes, but anything that needed repacking was packed and ready to rock 'n roll. Lio, most of all, was prepared. As prepared as anyone could be with a world of questions and a long, toilsome day ahead of them. Galo had some of the answers; he'd certainly enough to talk about before.

So, Lio left Aina to handle the aftermath--to the banter and the struggle of dealing with more than just the lost children. Such a strange feeling. Since his induction as leader, they weren’t apart often nor for very long. Yet, there he was... commandeering a Burning Rescue vehicle through the same side streets and rubble he knew from the night before. Away. The journey back was shorter than he’d remembered and busier. Encroaching on the FDPP building, Lio avoided the swarm of activity as best as he could. Although, they didn’t pay him much mind. Far too busy to question someone arriving with a standard-issue bike and matching shirt (thanks, Aina).

To his continuing surprise, Galo wasn’t the first person demanding his attention--front and center!--after he parked. Wasn’t she... cold? She wore less than Aina. Somehow. Bouncing on her heels, Lucia flagged him down across the garage with all the intensity of a person twice her size. And she showed no signs of slowing down yet, either, yelling his name as if he’d somehow forgotten it in the few hours he’d been awake. Well, someone has to keep him on his toes, right?

Her enthusiasm simmered a fraction as Lio approached, “C’mon, slowpoke, we don’t got all morning! And before ya ask--”

Lio asked anyway, “Is Galo inside?”

“I was getting to that, geez.” Lucia rolled her eyes. Both of them! ‘Has Aina checked in?’ ‘Is Lio here yet?’ ‘Where’s Galo?’ And Lio didn’t even thank her for saving him the trouble of being bowled over first thing by their enthusiastic--but not literal--golden retriever. The things she did for her friends. Although, all of this only served to give her better ammunition for later, so she couldn’t be too mad about it. She started walking.

“He’s here, don’t worry,” Lucia said, waving. “He got slammed with paperwork that ‘absolutely couldn’t wait’ -- orders from up top. So, he’s been grounded all morning.”

And Galo hated it.

"You should probably proofread it.” A shrug, casting a sideways glance at Lio. Legal things, ugh. It’s all hugs and happy endings 'til the world reminds you that you live in a society with rules and junk. Lucia was just glad it wasn’t her stuck in the office. Yet. She suspected it’d be her turn eventually. Still, until then, she was much happier shoving Lio into a room with Galo and calling it a day. What could go wrong? “Unless you wanna let Galo tell the whole story, but I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

Rounding on another set of doors, Lucia all but pushed Lio through them before he could get another word in. “So, good luck, have fun. See you in two years.”

[klanced]

soooooo i was late on asking for the second movie but i call dibs for whenever ur organized enough to infodump it: What Happens In The /Third/ Movie Katie Klanced?

I meant to post this last year but then I got suspended and forgot smh -_-

Anyway it’s been almost a year, so here are a few links to refresh your memory on the masterpiece that is my Despicable Me au. In fact, here’s the tag because I love this au.

In my correct opinion, the third DM movie is definitely the weakest in the franchise, and I pretty much ignored its canon plot and wrote my own. So sorry if there’s a few loose-ends/plot-holes. But this is a Despicable Me au, I am beholden to no gods, no rules.

Roughly a year has passed since the events of the second movie. Coran and Alfor have finally gotten together (they’re either dating or married, I haven’t decided yet). Allura is away at college because I have way too many characters on my hands and I have to sideline out of necessity. Sorry, Allura.

The movie opens up with the entire family getting ready for an award ceremony at the AVL happening that night. It’s about as hectic a scene as you can imagine. Lance is running around without a shirt on. Pidge is wearing three shirts. One is her pajama top, the second is Lance’s aforementioned missing shirt. No one has any idea where the third shirt came from.

When suddenly, the phone rings!

Krolia picks it up, paying only 1/3 attention to the person on the line before she yells that it’s for Coran. Coran limps over, half a chewed shoe in his hand, the other half still on his foot. His right eyebrow is smoking. He is, understandably, a little terse when he shouts to be heard over the background din into the phone.

The screen diagonally bisects, to show Coran on the phone and… Shiro on the other side of the line!

Shiro introduces himself as the new CPS worker assigned to Lance/Hunk/Pidge’s case. Coran immediately has a heart attack and runs to his soundproofed study, slamming the door behind him as Shiro continues to just. Awkwardly talk on the phone lol.

Coran, internally: oh shit oh shit oh FUCK oh shit why now why nowwww oh lord is he calling to take away the kids? is he going to take away my BABIES??

Shiro: sorry for the late phone call sir, i meant to call earlier but i dropped my phone in a puddle and- i mean! the life of a cps worker is just packed hahahahahahahahahaah (WHY are you still laughing you IDIOT) ha-ahem! anyway. i’m the new cps worker, have i mentioned that yet? because i am. it’s just that, after we realized that the kids’ last foster home and agent let a supervillain just walk out with them - uh, no offense, sir! i just meant that, well, supervillains are generally understood to be bad- not to imply that you’re evil of course! Haha of Course Not, even though you were Literally voted the world’s most evil and accomplished supervillain several years in a row, but! That’s neither here nor there. Of course. :)

DM!Verse Shiro is a bit of a nervous doof but he also has a spine of steel when it comes to kids and making sure their living situations are safe. And he is very skeptical of Coran and his parenting skills, which is honestly pretty reasonable considering he’s an outsider looking in. 

I mean, someone who was arguably the world’s greatest villain suddenly deciding to move to suburbia with his three (stolen) adopted kids does… seem like a bit of a stretch. And pretty sus lmfao.

Coran and Shiro eventually stutter their way into a productive conversation and arrange for Shiro to conduct a home visit/other CPS survey stuff very soon. Coran politely bids Shiro farewell, hangs up the phone, and has a panic attack because suddenly it feels like all his worse fears are coming true. Because the other shoe has finally dropped.

Life has been so kind to Coran lately, between his loving marriage and his lovable kids. It’s sad to say, but he’d half-expected something like this to happen for a while. Because people like him don’t deserve this kind of uninterrupted happiness.

Alfor quietly knocks on the door and takes in the scene before him. Coran reaches out, and he immediately rolls to his husband’s side.

Coran collapses against him and catches him up to speed. There’s a pause as Alfor pauses, absorbs, and digest the information, before he starts making calming shushing noises.

Insert Supportive Spouse Speech. Alfor reminds Coran that, for all he’s done in the past, he has damn well earned his present life. Alfor can attest to that, as can Krolia and, most importantly, their children. 

It also doesn’t hurt that the internationally recognized Anti-Villain League is both a sponsor of and willing to provide a character reference for Coran. That counts for something, and Coran finally calms down.

This is what we in the writing business like to call “foreshadowing” :)

Scene cut to the AVL award ceremony. Krolia and Coran are both being recognized for their incredible heroics from the past year, etc etc, blah blah blah. Their speeches are very true to their character.

At the end of it, Kolivan goes up and stage and announces he’s retiring. Krolia, who knew this was happening in advance and fully expects to be named as his replacement, starts checking her lipstick in her hand mirror- only for Kolivan to introduce a ‘Commander Hira’ to the crowds.

FML, this is exactly the plot to the Spongebob Squarepants movie.

The entire Wimbleton Smythe-Altea Family freeze, mid-applause. Hunk awkwardly puts away his ‘CONGRATULATIONS KROLIA!!!!!!!!’ banner. Krolia shatters her hand mirror in her fist.

Within her first month, Hira makes some dramatic changes to the AVL. One of which is the agency’s complete separation from anything having to do with villains, including its rehabilitation program.

“Once a villain always a villain” essentially. Hira insists that villains are simply too evil to ever truly become good again, and that so-called “former” criminals are simply biding their time until they can enact their revenge.

As a result, Coran is fired. Alfor protests Hira’s decision, and resigns out of solidarity. Krolia calls Hira a bitch and is also fired.

The kids are ecstatic that their dads + aunt are home 24/7 now. Krolia is less pleased. She’s been an active agent for more than half her life, so this sudden and forced turn for domesticity has her clawing at the walls.

One of the sub-plots is Alfor trying to convince Coran to become a superhero, “just like the old times.” (Coran: Love, I was literally your supervillain arch-nemesis).

Coran is hesitant, because 1) He still has low self-value and doesn’t see himself as a hero, and 2) He’s perfectly content to mooch off his billionaire boyfriend and spend his time as a stay-at-home dad.

To take their mind off their sudden unemployedness, Coran and Alfor throw themselves into preparing for Shiro’s house visit. This mainly entails Alfor calming Coran down from an anxiety attack every other hour. 

There is a lot of tension in the house.

And then, like magic! An invitation to the biggest supervillain symposium of the year appears, because villain mailing lists are especially evil and refuse to take Coran off their register even though he literally arrests villains for a living.

“So you’re telling me,” Krolia says, and Coran instinctively inches for the door. “That you’ve had an opening into the world’s biggest villain convention, this entire time, and you didn’t tell anyone?”

“W-e-ll,” Coran stutters, slapping blindly behind him for the doorknob, “It just didn’t seem very fair, you know? To ambush them like that, all because of their lazy office workers. That’s not very good sport.”

Krolia and Alfor try to convince Coran that he should go. Krolia is convinced this is the in they need to reclaim their jobs; they’ll infiltrate the Supervillain Symposium, arrest all the biggest bads, call the AVL, rub it in Hira’s face, take a selfie while she’s sobbing in the background, celebrate as the masses drag Hira to the guillotine-

Coran: Krolia I love you, I really do. But you have issues.

Krolia: I happen to be perfectly adjusted for someone in my situation.

Coran is still hmming and hawwing because, now that he doesn’t have to fight villains for a living, he quite likes Not Being In Constant Danger. But then Krolia reminds him that he is both unemployed AND now blacklisted by the AVL, two things which might very well doom him in the eyes of Shiro (and the rest of CPS). He needs to do this if he wants his job back and, therefore, keep his kids.

(…. At some point, Coran shaves off his mustache in a stress-filled attempt at appearing as a better guardian, but no one recognizes him so he has to wear a fake mustache for the rest of the movie)

Coran of course is immediately super gung-ho for this plan and declares they’re leaving ASAP.

The kids of course are raring to go, the adults are vehemently hell no to that idea, and in the ensuing argument everyone forgets that Shiro is coming today. 

A series of events thus follows, which can be summarized as:

The adults say that the kids can’t come.

The kids decide that yes, in fact, kids can come and plan accordingly.

The kids are preparing to tail after the adults (after waiting a reasonable amount of time of course (this isn’t their first rodeo) in their own modified plane when they hear what sounds like their babysitter, the Reformed Lotor, coming around the corner.

The kids immediately go into attack mode only to realize, after the dust has settled, that they’ve actually knocked out Shiro.

In their infinite pre-teen wisdom, the kids decide to stick with the plan and load Shiro into their equivalent trunk and take off.

A few moments later, Lotor finally arrives, looks up from his phone, realizes there are no kids to be watched, and shrugs and goes home.

The scene cuts to Shiro groggily stumbling out of the corner the kids have stashed the plane in, only to realize, to his absolute horror, that he’s on an island filled with Supervillains attending a Supervillain Convention.

Hunk: Man… I feel like we forgot something.

*Shiro screaming in the distance*

For brevity’s sake I’ll cut off here, but just know that this is only the FIRST THIRD (IF EVEN THAT) of the movie. I am absolutely off the CHAINS. I still haven’t even introduced Keith yet. I love this au.

[mst3kproject]

Short: Once Upon a Honeymoon

           When I started this blog I really wasn’t planning to do anything with the shorts.  Mr. B Natural changed all that by being impossible to ignore, so here I am, coming back around to episodes I’ve already seen so that I can visit the shorts that precede them.  I’ve seen Night of the Blood Beast many, many times, and every time I do, this short makes a bigger impression than the movie.  It’s so colourful.  So catchy. So sexist.  So fucking weird.

           Jeff and Mary are a wholesome fifties couple who are just about to go on their honeymoon when they get a phone call – the score Jeff wrote for a musical doesn’t meet the star’s approval, and his boss, Gordon, wants him to come up with a new melody!  Lucky Jeff’s guardian angel, Wilbur, is around to provide him with some inspiration… except that instead of inspiring Jeff to write music, Wilbur’s angel dust inspires Mary to daydream about redecorating her house and putting telephones in every room.  Finally, the sound of the rotary phone gives Jeff an idea for his music. He dashes off a tune in five minutes, and he and Mary head out to have a wholesome fifties honeymoon with wholesome fifties sex.

           I assume that the original version of the ‘wishing song’ is the one Mary sings to herself while making coffee.  If so, I’m not sure what’s wrong with it, because it seems an awful lot more memorable than the final version we’re given at the end – it’s the one I’m humming to myself right now as I type this.  Ah, well.

           In the Thanksgiving version of the episode, Pearl gives Dr. Forrester the short and tells him it’s about ‘telephones or some damn thing’.  There are, indeed, many telephones in this short. Wilbur the guardian angel keeps one under his robe.  Jeff’s boss Gordon has one with speakerphone, which I can only assume was considered technological wizardry in 1956.  Jeff and Mary have one in their living room, and Mary’s fantasy home has telephones in the kitchen and bedroom, too.  The short was sponsored by Bell, so one must assume it’s supposed to be advertising phones in some capacity.

But Once Upon a Honeymoon kind of makes more phones look like a bad idea. True, his portable phone allows Wilbur the angel to keep in touch with heaven while he’s out on a job, but the short also looks ahead to the disadvantages of having telephones everywhere.  As long as you’ve got a phone near you all the time, it’s impossible not to take your work home with you.  If Jeff and Mary didn’t have a telephone, they could have gone on their honeymoon and Jeff’s boss would simply have had to wait until he got back.  The self-important diva who’d rejected the song in the first place wouldn’t have been able to call up and bother them.  If ignorance is bliss, then more phones equals entirely too much knowledge.

           Then there’s Gordon’s attitude towards re-writing the song, as if he’s asking Jeff to run down to the corner for coffee instead of, you know, writing an entire two-to-five-minute piece of music over again from scratch.  This speaks to a point I already made in my review of The Stone Flower – people who don’t make art often don’t understand that it is hard work.  Gordon says, you must have a dozen old tunes sitting around, as if he can’t imagine that there might be reasons why Jeff rejected these, or that they might not fit into the soundscape of the show.  Worse, both Gordon and his star, Sonia, keep calling Jeff’s house impatiently to ‘see how it’s coming’.  Apparently it never occurs to either of them that constant interruptions are not very inspiring.

           All this makes me wonder: if Wilbur’s job is to give Jeff inspiration so he can get this obstacle out of the way and go on his honeymoon, why does he instead inspire Mary to sing about telephones?  This doesn’t seem like an accident – she says I just wish I had a decent kitchen! and he smiles and sprinkles his angel dust to make her dream of one.  Maybe he’s keeping her occupied so she can’t join the chorus nagging Jeff to get on with it, but it didn’t seem like she would have done that anyway.  The film implies that Mary has spent the day keeping busy and staying out of Jeff’s way to let him work.

           Mary’s behaviour in the short has always struck me as odd, but when I think about it, it’s not just what she’s doing – it’s also what she’s not doing.  I can accept that she’s twirling around and singing about her desire to renovate the kitchen, because that sort of thing goes on in short advertising films from the 50’s.  What I’m confused about is why her badly-decorated home is her primary complaint on a day when she’s just been told she might not be going on her honeymoon.

           The honeymoon is clearly a big deal to this couple.  They’ve waited until a year after their wedding, which implies that they don’t have a lot of money and have had to save up.  Jeff secured a promise from his boss that he would have the time off – a promise the man seems happy to break without a moment’s lost sleep. Jeff is bitterly disappointed and annoyed by this development, calling Gordon a ‘vulture’ and Sonia a ‘temperamental ballerina’.  We see him sulk, skip lunch, chainsmoke, and bang on the piano in frustration.

           Mary doesn’t express anything similar, which is weird because it’s her honeymoon, too.  She’s been waiting for it just as long as Jeff has.  She’s got the bags packed and the place cleaned up in preparation for them to leave.  When in the same room as her husband she is supportive, trying to encourage him while ignoring his bad mood for fear of making it worse – this seems like a sensible way to treat a grouchy artist.  But even in private, she shows no sign that the delayed honeymoon has upset her.  Jeff talks back to Gordon on the phone, while Mary is polite and cheerful with Sonia. Mike and the bots try to fill in what is missing here, as for example when they have Mary call the other woman a copper-bottomed bitch, but that just makes the absence more conspicuous.

           If Mary wishes she had a kitchen phone, shouldn’t it be so she can call her friend Vy and complain about the situation without Jeff having to listen to her? If she’s going to fantasize herself into a musical, why doesn’t it involve the sandy beaches and romantic dinners she’s missing out on?  Mary literally has greater patience than an angel – the chief angel gets far more frustrated with Wilbur than Mary is with anything!

           The answer, as you may have guessed by now, is that it’s because Mary is not a character.  She’s just here to sell us telephones.  Although she gets the majority of the screen time, the only characters in this little film are Jeff and the two angels – they’re the ones who display some form of personality.  The rest are mere stock figures: a Demanding Boss, a Prima Donna, and a Perfect Wife.

           Mary has no opinion about the honeymoon because the ideal housewife should not want vacations or sexual fulfillment – all she’s supposed to want is to cook meals and clean house and be support staff for her husband.  This is Mary’s fantasy: a redecorated home and fully-equipped kitchen that will allow her to be an even better housewife, and to impress her friends and neighbours with her superior domesticity (as in the phone conversation she imagines with Vy).  She has no ambitions or desires outside of Jeff. The ideal housewife of the 50’s is not a person in her own right, merely an accessory to her husband.

           This extends to the bedroom, which she imagines as having twin beds rather than one large enough for a couple.  This was pretty standard in the media of the time, but it seems to imply that her fantasy life doesn’t even include sex.  Female sexuality was a taboo topic in the first half of the twentieth century, and sex was supposed to be a duty wives performed, lying back and thinking of England, rather than something they actively wanted.  Mary’s fantasy includes neither children nor any room for them.  Children would just make a mess of her beautiful, squeaky-clean new home.  She doesn’t want to be a mother, she only wants to be a wife.

           The house is Mary’s entire world.  She does not leave it until the end, when Jeff literally carries her out. Although she receives telephone calls from Gordon, from Sonia, and from her possibly imaginary friend Vy, the only time Mary makes one is when Jeff orders her to.  She never initiates contact with the outside, only reacts to it and to her husband’s wishes concerning it… which is actually really creepy. It’s like women are zoo animals kept in habitats designed to stimulate them and keep them in ignorance of the idea of freedom.

           Am I reading way too much into a little film that’s just supposed to make me want to buy a second telephone?  Yes, I’m pretty sure I am, but I’m also pretty sure real women don’t normally fantasize about kitchen appliances.  In the interests of science, I tried to take a survey of my co-workers to find out what their fantasies are.  The first one I asked told me she thinks about meeting a guy at a party, getting him falling-down drunk, then taking him home and putting on a penguin costume before getting into bed with him.  The idea was that when the guy woke up, he would see the strategic hole cut in the penguin costume and think drunk-him had slept with a furry.

           On second thought, I’m happy with Mary’s new kitchen.  I don’t want to see a short where somebody sings about that.

[surveys-at-your-service]

Survey #157

hey instead of lyrics, there’s a warning for a religiously offensive answer.

How many kids do you want to have?  Only too many scaly and furry ones. <3 Who’s the last person you smoked weed with?  I've never smoked it. Who is the person you have hurt the most?  Probably Mom. Who is the person that has hurt you the most?  Jason. Who was the last person who cried around you?  Mom when she found out about my cousin Brenna. What was the last thing you cried about?  Emotional conversation with Sara. What’s your current problem?  Just friendship stuff after breaking apart from Colleen again and being ignored when I've been reaching out to old friends, something I've been putting a lot of effort into lately.  I just don't get what's wrong with me/what's that damn unlikable about me that I can't make or maintain friendships. What brand of face wash do you use?  Biore.  Or I think Neutrogena if I have a pimple. Do you know anyone who owns a boat?  Dad. Did you get carded the last time you ordered an alcoholic drink?  I surprisingly didn't.  Nor did I get carded when I bought something from the liquor store for Mom and me.  Do I look 30 or something now that my hair's cut. Did your parents give you an allowance as a kid? No. Do you know anyone who’s died in childbirth? No, thankfully. Are you (or have you ever been) a vegetarian?  I am.  Took a brief break for weight loss purposes but seeing as that did nothing, I went back to it and plan on staying that way. Do you ever use Snapchat?  No. What was the last show that you watched a full episode of? The Good Doctor. Do you get your feelings hurt easily?  Yup. When you go to McDonalds, what drink do you usually get?  Coke. What’s the nickname of your home state?  The Tar Heel State. What’s the worst type of weather in your opinion?  Hot and humid. Do you have a Kindle or iPad or neither?  Neither. Would you rather read or write? Write. Is there a dead end road near where you live?  Most likely. Have you ever had to call and complain about a product you bought?  No. Do you have a sensitive gag reflex?  YUP. Are you at risk for any medical issues?  Heart issues run in my family, and I'm finding out if I have hypoglycemia like.  Tomorrow. Is there an upcoming concert you want to go to?  Metallica in January, desperately. Do you own a robe?  No.  Don't really need one.  I get dressed right after showering. What is your favorite mark of punctuation?  Question mark. How many deep dark secrets do you have?  I don't really keep it a secret, but I don't just happily share it either.  One. Where is your father right now?  I'd assume at work. How comfy is your bed on a scale of 1-10?  I guess like... 7? What was the spiciest thing you’ve ever eaten?  Hot wings at BWW doused in like the... fourth-hottest sauce. Who last called you sexy?  The only one who is insane enough to call me that is Sara. Do you want any more piercings?  Collarbones when they're prominent again, more in my ears, and then if/when I lose enough weight probably lower back dermals and bellybutton. Do you believe in heaven and hell?  Not in the Christian concept, but in some manner, probably.  Certainly a heaven of some sort for the good.  I don't know about a hell, but maybe purgatory as earth-bound spirits?  I mean there's no way the evil are going to a lovely place. Which do you think you're most likely to go to?  Hopefully a heaven, but if it turns out the Christian god is real, happily to Hell because fuck him for a multitude of reasons. How will the world end?  A meteor strike seems logical.  Flooding from global warming (I don't know how much it actually would cover if all ice melted, but).  The sun dying, if Earth is lucky enough to possibly survive that long. Are you scared of the dark?  No. How many true friends would you say you had?  Like 2-3, lol. Do you have a motto?  Not really. When was the last time you went on a trampoline?  Couldn't guess. What’s your best memory with each of your parents?  Dad, maybe him teaching me to ride a bike.  Or playing softball.  As for Mom, maybe the time we were driving around one night, grabbed some milkshakes, and jammed out to Judas Priest way too loud lol. Do you believe that leaving a significant other for someone else is ever a good idea?  I mean, sure.  If you truly loved your s/o, you wouldn't even consider someone else.  Better than cheating. Is it possible to ‘fix’ a ‘broken’ relationship?  I'm not sure, honestly.  This will never in any universe happen, but let's just say Jason and I got back together.  It wouldn't work.  At all.  Our relationship was Heaven to me until it ended, and I know it could never be repaired. If you found someone seemingly perfect for you, but it turned out they had a child… would you still give the relationship a chance?  Nope.  I could never take on the role of a parent figure for a child.  Nevermind one that wasn't mine or Sara's. Is it possible to ‘fall out of love’?  Yeah, been there. Why do you think people choose to get married?  Some people just enjoy the idea of a legal union with each other to signify their love, some don't want sex or kids before marriage, etc. Would you have sex with the last person you text messaged?  We're both girls, but if it was physically possible, definitely. Who do you feel most comfortable talking to about anything?  Mom or Sara, depending on the subject. Who was the last person you danced with?  Sara. How many tattoos would you get?  Arms covered, hands, knuckles, neck, sternum, hips, back, ribs... lots.  The only place I'm not very interested in tattooing are my legs, but it'll probably happen if I find something I love and also to balance things out.  Might look kinda weird to have so many but then none below my hips. Abusive relationship: leave him/her or keep it a secret?  TELL.  SOMEONE.  I'm sure the idea is terrifying, but what's scarier is staying with someone abusive.  Tell someone who can do something. Besides your mouth, where is your favorite spot to get kissed?  Breasts. Who was the last member of the opposite sex you laid in a bed with?  Jason. Do you prefer broccoli or asparagus?  I like the broccoli, the latter is disgusting. Do you like gore?  Sometimes it's aesthetically pleasing to me, sometimes it gives me a quick gag if it's something real gross with humans because then I can actually imagine it on myself. Have you ever read Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov?  No.  Pretty sure I know the basis of it, though, if it's about the lolita fashion.  My friend had a phase where she was deeeep into it and told me about a book of that name.  Gross. Do serial killers fascinate you?  Not especially, but sometimes it is intriguing to learn just how fucked they can be.  I wonder how the mind can make up some shit. Besides your own, what’s your favorite country?  That I'm at least somewhat aware of, I find Japanese culture quite interesting. Would you ever get a septum piercing?  Nah, don't think it'll look good on me. Are you lactose intolerant?  No. Are you allergic to gluten?  No. Do you know anyone who is missing a toe?  No. Do any lights stay on while you sleep?  My snake's and iguana's lamps. If you have a notepad in your phone, what do you use it for the most?  Lmao tattoo ideas. Have you ever had a crush on someone of the same gender?  At least three girls.  Two before I even realized I was bi lmao.  Just looking back, my bond with them on my end wasn't straight, Alon especially. What store do you shop at the most for clothes?  HotTopic. Would you ever get your nipples pierced?  I very recently actually briefly considered it lmao.  I wouldn't tho.  Tbfh mainly just because of foreplay reasons shhhh. How many pets do you own?  Six. What’s your least favorite season? I loathe summer. Do you like tacos? Omg no. Are you an introvert or an extrovert? Introvert. Do you like to play board games?  Not really, no. Are you fond of romantic novels? When I read, I wouldn't actively seek them out, but I enjoyed quite a few. Fruit Loops or Cocopops?  Fruit Loops = Good Shit. Would you eat a live spider for one million dollars? Biiiitch yes for that much. Do you believe in aliens? I've been more open to the possibility lately.  Maybe. If you were the last person alive besides one other person you get to chose, who would it be?  My Sara Jane. Dogs or cats?  Cats. Do you like cotton candy?  I can only manage a couple bites.  Too sweet. Would you ever use a dating site? I like to pretend that never happened lmao neeeever again. Do you believe in ghosts?  Absolutely. Rap or pop? Pop, if I had to pick between the two. Do you like Lady Gaga?  Some of her songs are super catchy. What about Nick Minaj?  She's very talented in her genre, but I'm not a fan of her music. How many pairs of jeans do you own? None. Do you have an addiction to anything?  Technology. Do you like cheeseburgers?  Probably what I miss most being a vegetarian.  I love burgers. Do you have a Flickr? Yes. When did you last vacuum your room? Few days back. Who was the last person to sit on your bed?  Mom. Do you have a favorite flower?  Orchids. Do you like to cuddle with your S.O. or do you prefer your space?  Depends on how comfortable I am in the relationship.  In my current one, I am like.  Soooo cuddly. Do you like being called pet names or not?  Depends on the person.  Parents, s/o, friends, sure. Do you care if your produce is organic or not?  Not really, but I mean if I was to pick between something organic or not and I was aware, I'd certainly pick the organic. Do you get enough calcium?  I love milk, bro. Who is it that you’re in love with?  Sara 100% 100% 100% my babygirl. Is your significant other of the same ethnicity as you?  Yes. Do you have any friends in a band?  An old friend is the guitarist of a pretty nice metal band. What’s your favorite flavor of potato chip?  Classic, probs. What’s the worst thing that’s ever happened to you?  Suicidal depression. Do you ever donate money to charity? If so, which charity and why? Once I have a source of income, I plan on donating to every charity livestream Mark does.  One, because it's just being a generous human, but also because I try to actively support everything he does. How many are too many partners for one person, in your opinion? Basically, I only support monogamy. What has been the most exciting moment of your life thus far? Meeting Sara. What’re your plans for your next birthday?  Lemme get my Mark tattoo, man.  Go out to my favorite restaurant.  Family time. Have you ever kissed anyone with a tongue ring?  No. Thinking back to the last person you kissed, have you ever kissed them on their bed?  Yeah. Have you ever slept in the same bed with the last person you kissed?  Yeah. Thinking back to the last person you really, truly passionately kissed, how many times have you cried because of them?  Waaaaaaaay too many times. How cold does it have to be before you put on a sweater?  Like low 50s. Has anyone ever pulled a gun on you?  Whoa no. Kisses on the cheek or the neck?  If you're not in the mood to make out, don't kiss me on the neck lmao. One word to describe your most recent ex? Hilarious. Fried, poached, boiled or scrambled eggs? I only like scrambled. Have you ever gotten into a club, whilst being underage?  Never been to one. When do you plan on moving out?  When Sara and I are ready to move in together. Before Facebook became popular, did you use any other social networking site like Bebo or MySpace?  I had MySpace. Do you think when someone says “I love you” that you are obliged to say it back?  Definitely not.  Those are strong words. Which Disney princess do you think is the most beautiful and why?  Hmmm, I think Pocahontas.  I just think she's very pretty. What’s the best food to have at a sleepover?  PIZZA. How did you meet the last person you shared a bed with?  YouTube. Do you have any half-siblings?  Four. When going shopping for junk food, what’s the first thing you pick up?  Usually chips. At sleepovers, do you usually stay up all night or actually go to sleep?  Go to sleep. Is there anything in the room you’re in that’s really dusty?  I neeeed to dust my fan. Do you know anybody with different colored eyes?  No. Are any of your relatives vets?  Not to my knowledge. How many minutes do you consider late?  More than 5. What kinds of food do you dunk into milk?  Just cookies. Do you have any current or past teachers on your Facebook friends?  Yes. How much sugar do you like in your tea/coffee?  I hate both. Have you ever seen your mom or dad drunk?  Yeah. After seeing a movie, do you go to a site to enter a review about it?  No. Do your parents vote?  I know Mom does.  Guessing Dad does. How would you react if your best friend was pregnant/got someone pregnant?  My best friend is my girlfriend, and I'd support whatever she decided.  She doesn't want kids at all, nor do I think her body could handle it, so I'd understand if she aborted, and if she didn't, I'd try damn hard to be an amazing parent. What restaurant has the best fries?  Bojangle's fries got all her challengers SHOOK. What does your mailbox look like?  Just a normal 'ole mailbox. Would your mom make a good president?  No. What’s your favorite thing to eat during a movie?  Popcorn. Do you consider cooking to be an art?  Sure, it can be. What browser do you prefer to use?  Chrome. What genre of films do you like the best? Paranormal horror. Have you ever had a crush on someone several years older than yourself?  No. Does your best friend have any tattoos?  No. Who was the last person you were rude to? Did you have a good reason?  Probably Mom.  There's never a good reason to be rude.

[stripesthesupervillain]

The Mad Hatter’s Guide to Happiness: Chapter 11

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Summary:  Batman takes an interest in the two villains' week out, deciding to get personally involved. Scarecrow and Mad Hatter find a place to stay after the day's events.

Don’t want to read this on Tumblr? Read it here! (I’ll add links to more chapters tomorrow.)

“As of now, police are unable to locate the two criminals, Jervis Tetch and Jonathan Crane, better known by their criminal personas as the Mad Hatter and the Scarecrow.”

Bruce Wayne was drawn away from his phone call upon hearing the two familiar names on the television. He raised a brow, initially confused as he watched the news report., he leaned back on his chair, paying more attention to the woman presenting herself on TV rather than his friend on the other end of the line.

“With a count of twenty-one confirmed kills by the pair, including twenty SWAT and the chief of police, Walter Paloozi, the town now lives in fear every waking hour of the night. No one knows why they’ve come to the small town, nor why they have decided to join forces, but one thing is for sure: they won’t slow down if they aren’t stopped.”

“Hey, Lucius, I'm sorry, but something just came up. Yeah, trouble. We'll talk about the device later. I’m gonna have to call you back,” Bruce sighed, quickly hanging up the phone and rising from his chair. “Alfred, turn up the volume.”

“We’ve had several reports that the kill count is higher than originally expected, with two new bodies having appeared so far fitting Tetch’s MO. Without the town's personal Batman to stop them, and the police force showing to have been a poor match for them, it seems that anything can happen at this point, and we can only pray for their safety as they are forced to adapt to Gotham's special breed of crime. Stay tuned for more as the story develops.”

The two stared at the TV as they quickly flashed images of the criminals, both in costume and out of costume. “It seems that I may have to work out of state, Alfred,” Bruce sighed, turning off the television and heading to the bookcase that hid his biggest secret. Alfred followed after him dutifully, standing by as they waited for the bookcase to shift out of the way to reveal the entrance to the Batcave. “Usually I wouldn’t suggest having other states outsource your services, Master Bruce,” Alfred sighed, “as you are only one man. However, this seems to be a different matter altogether, so I suppose there's no point in trying to convince you, is there?” Bruce gave a curt nod as he trotted down the stairs, the floodlights to the cave activating to shine down on the complex series of computers and vehicles he used for his secret hobbies. “Usually I would let them solve their own problems, Alfred, but this is Scarecrow and Mad Hatter we’re talking about. While Tetch's predictability is limited to the Lewis Carrol books, he's still a deranged schizophrenic and still a threat, and Crane is a sadist with enough fear gas to bomb an entire country. I need to go to Georgia and stop them before they can hurt any more people.”

“Master Bruce, these two are not your responsibility,” Alfred reasoned, following at a steady pace as Bruce got onto the batcomputer to get the coordinates for the last known location of the masked men. “Maybe not,” he replied, “but I am responsible for helping to protect this city, and I let these Crane and Tetch slip under the radar. I didn’t even realize they were gone until literally three minutes ago, Alfred, and now another town is paying for this mistake,” he sighed, going over to begin putting on his infamous batsuit. Alfred didn’t reply, merely watching from afar as he occasionally checked the computer for updates. Wayne had just put on the chest plate and had begun to fit on his boots when he stopped, considering a thought. “They killed over twenty people, Alfred,” he murmured, clutching his mask in his left hand in simmering anger. “If there is a chance I can stop them before anyone else just to save a few more lives, I’m more than willing to go any distance.”  

Once his mask was on and he was fully suited up, he moved over to the computer, collecting any information that he would need. “I’m going to need to use the batmobile,” he told his butler, typing into the computer in order to see which roads he would need to use to get there the fastest. “I’ll have to go at full speed if I want to get there quickly. There’s no time to plan anything else.”

“What do you expect to do once you get there?” Alfred questioned, watching him as he began to head towards the batmobile. “Find them. I’ll have to set up a few crime scenes and check for anything they’ve left behind, and once I get ahold of them, I'm bringing them back to Gotham,” Batman informed him. “I know them, Alfred. Crane isn’t one to just run away from his problems, and Tetch loves Gotham too much to move away.”

“Not a common interest between Englishmen, I can assure you,” Alfred commented.

“They came there for a reason, most likely of Crane’s own interest. From what the computer says, Tetch has no connection with Georgia, much less even stepped foot in it. Crane must be after something. Something important, I’m sure. I’ll make sure he won’t get it. Check the computer for any linking factors between Crane and the town. Make sure you hit all bases, including profession and personal life. Oh, and make sure Robin keeps the city safe while I’m gone.”

“Understood, Master Bruce,” Alfred nodded as Bruce hopped into the armored vehicle. “Stay safe, sir. You’ve stopped several villains at once before, but there’s always a risk.”

“I’ll be home before next week, I can assure you,” Batman said confidently, lowering the roof of the batmobile and revving up the engine. It was going to be a long couple of days, he was sure of that. Even as he drove off, he couldn’t help but wonder why these two criminals would travel such a far distance to wreak havoc.

Little did he know, someone else was wondering the same thing, and they were determined to figure out this little enigma.

The Mad Hatter and Scarecrow were more than overjoyed by the time they broke through the line of trees, their run slowing to a steady walk. Breathing heavy, Scarecrow was still laughing lightly to himself, still a bit animated after the day’s events. Bits of blood was still visible on his costume, but neither of them really seemed to care. Jonathan would care when he would have to wash the damn thing, but that's for another time.  

“Oh, I honestly wish I could have recorded all of that,” Scarecrow chuckled, one hand on his scythe and the other on the duffle bag slung around his shoulder. The two were still in costume, of course, attempting to find a good point to where they were safe to change. “You’ve said that at least three times,” Mad Hatter grinned, looking up at him. “I have to say, I’ve never seen you look so spirited about anything before.”

“I enjoy a good adrenaline rush every now and again,” Scarecrow murmured, calming down as he looked over the parking lot they had come across, sparsely populated by only a few cars. “It beats sitting in an office and listening to the problems of everyone else. Now, which one should we pick?” They surveyed the area. While it was still the black of night, street lights were able to illuminate the area and give them a clear picture of where they were heading.

“Oh, I like the red one,” Hatter pointed out, gesturing to a small red car that would perfectly seat the two of them. It looked cheap and rather plain and unnoticeable, which was perfect for them. “The red one it is,” Scarecrow declared, beginning their trek through the lot. “So how many of those cards do you have left?”

“Quite a few,” Hatter replied, not bothering to check his bag. “I always bring a chess set’s worth.” They stopped at the car, where he watched Scarecrow skillfully break in and begin to fiddle with the wires. “So how much toxin would you say you have left?”

“A few canisters,” the taller villain replied, grunting as the wires didn’t seem to be connecting. “So I’d say enough to break at least a hundred minds. In case that fails, I still have a scythe and an axe, whereas you don’t have a weapon of any kind.”

“Well, I usually I have other people do my bidding who usually have weapons,” Hatter huffed, watching him move the wires in the obviously wrong places. “Er, Hare, I don’t believe-“

“I know what I’m doing,” Scarecrow spat, before cursing when one of the wires gave him a little shock, although it wasn’t felt through the gloves. Hatter rolled his eyes, grabbed the other’s arm before he could protest, and ducked under the steering wheel. Within seconds, the car came to life. When he came back up, he dusted his dinner gloves on his coat. “I suggest you leave the technology to me. Hares don’t climb trees and haberdashers don’t live in burrows. It’s just not practical,” he chuckled, going and getting into the driver’s seat. “Says the one in Wonderland,” Scarecrow scoffed, getting into the passenger seat. Normally he wouldn’t let Hatter drive the car, as it was akin to trusting him with his very life, but he decided to let him have it this time. With a sigh, he pulled off his hat and mask as they began to pull off, revealing unusually unkempt red hair and a man with a stupid grin on his face, which slowly faded with time.

“Ah, Wonderland seems to be more exciting than usual, doesn’t it?” Hatter sighed, adjusting his hat. Jonathan knew he wasn’t going to take that thing off until he was asleep and didn’t bother to tell him off. “It sure does,” he muttered, now feeling more worn out. “Let’s just find a place to stay for the night and get out once daylight hits. I don’t want to spend another second here.”

“How about one of the neighborhood houses?” Jervis suggested, looking at an intersection that led to a cluster of houses. “That’s risky,” Jonathan replied, shaking his head. “We don’t want to wake any neighbors. They’re probably already high strung as it is.”

“Well you lived here, didn’t you?” Tetch said, looking over at him. “Where do you suggest we stay, then?” Jonathan had to think about this for a good few seconds, going through his terrible memories for any place they could stay that the police wouldn’t check out.

“On the next intersection, turn left and keep driving until you hit Duley Road,” he instructed. “There’s a small plaza that used to be filled with vacant shops. With any luck, a few of them may still be empty.”

Jervis nodded, beginning to follow as instructed as he began to rest against the car seat. He felt more tired than usual, which was understandable. Today was undoubtedly the third most eventful day of his life. He nearly died several times, so it was at least in the top five. Today was a good day, he’d say.

The car was filled with silence, with Jonathan now quieted and recounting the day’s events with a small smile. Jervis couldn’t help but become curious about some words shared several minutes earlier.

“Hey Hare,” he hummed, only receiving a grunt in response as a sign that he had his attention. “Do you really prefer this life over the life you could have had?”  

Jonathan paused, looking over at him silently. Tetch took this as a sign to keep going. “It’s the question we all ask ourselves, isn’t it? If we could go back in time and stop ourselves from become this, would we?” He glanced over at the unamused Crane, who only let out a sigh after a minute and shook his head. “Tetch,” Jonathan sighed, “as much as I appreciate the conversation and attempts to keep away the silence, I really can’t bear any more questions for today. Save it for tomorrow.” Jervis let out a small titter of amusement, but nodded in understanding. If Jonathan was sick of questions and answers, it must have been a really long day for him. He just hummed a tune to himself and kept driving.

They soon came to the plaza his companion had mentioned, looking around the dimly lit area in search of anyone. Besides one lone car, there was really no one there. Sure enough, a few of the stores were empty, the signs torn down and the windows covered to show there was no longer any occupants.  

It only took a few seconds and the door was soon opened, thanks to Catwoman’s helpful lessons. They trudged in with their things, locked the door, and took a look around. Jervis noticed the wallpaper still clinging to the interior was a light green with the occasional flower print. There was also an area where things were clearly meant to be on display, with lights and nozzles for misting water hanging above each display.

“I believe this place may have been for floristry, Hare. Oh, you know how I enjoy flowers,” Jervis mused, before frowning. “Except daisies. Those are always irritating to listen to.” Jonathan emerged from another room, now in his more citizen-type clothing, looking rather normal except for the unkempt hair. “It doesn’t matter what this place is for,”  he scoffed, peering out the small cracks visible between the coverings of the windows. He could already see the red streaks of dawn starting to make their way towards the center of the black sky. “What matters is that we get some rest. News travels fast, Jervis. I’d rather not take the chance of Batman taking interest. Get some sleep.”  

Tetch gave a curt nod, but gave a quick knowing smile to the doctor. “No pills, right?” he chuckled, watching as Crane turned to give him a small glare. He just shrugged it off. He soon found a good place to take a rest, before setting his hat to the side and nearly passing out then and there, not bothering to change out of his dirtied costume. Jonathan did the same, sitting nearby as he finally began to relax for the first time today. Well, the first time that didn’t involve being drugged. That time didn’t count. He let out a soft yawn, noticing it was becoming even brighter outside. He just grumbled in annoyance, turning away from the windows and closing his eyes.

Once they woke up, they would immediately head straight back to Gotham and nowhere else. He was already sick and tired of this town after just two days of being back. No one would stop them, and soon he would be back to terrorizing the people of Gotham. Those thoughts gave him some comforts as he began to rest up and drift off to sleep.

However, he would have to stay up a bit more, as soon enough, the phone rang.

Jervis audibly groaned in vexation, covering his ears. Jonathan just sighed and ignored the ringing until it finally stopped. Whoever it was could wait a few hours.  

Of course, when the phone rang again, he knew he wouldn’t be able to sleep without answering it. Even if he wasn’t called again, just not knowing who it was would be enough to keep him up a good hour or so. He angrily snatched up the phone, noticing Jervis sit up with an expression of both curiosity and slight annoyance. Jonathan recognized the caller ID as being from his base back in Gotham. It was Rockwell, most likely. Anyone else wouldn’t be a good sign. He let out an annoyed huff and answered the phone.

“Yes?” he greeted, going into an impatient stance as he leaned against a counter. “Whatever it is, it must be pretty damn important, Rockwell.” He could hear his henchman clear his throat in a nervous fashion. Something else could also be heard in the background, but he couldn’t identify it. It almost sounded like a voice.

“Well, Mister Scarecrow, sir,” Rockwell began, “I caught this guy sneaking around the base. Messing with all your chemicals and notes and stuff before I caught him. You know, the things you told me never to touch unless I want to end up in an Asylum?”

Jonathan furrowed his brow in initial confusion, before quickly becoming angry once again. “An intruder? Messing with my things? Well tell me you at least killed the imbecile.”

“Well, that’s the thing,” Rockwell replied. “I was going to, but he told me to cal you specifically. Told me I would regret it if I killed him. Called me a bunch of things, too.”  

At this point, Crane was simply puzzled at the situation. “Who gives a damn who he is?” he scoffed. “What sort of brainless halfwit would even think to intrude upon my lair? If he was caught by you, he obviously can’t be of much importance. I won’t be shedding any tears, trust me on-“

That’s when he heard it. Whatever voice that was in the background soon became loud and clear.

“HALF-WIT? I’ll have you know that I was able to find both your base and figure out the access code in a mere hour, not an easy task for a mere simpleton. If it’s anyone lacking the brains of the bunch, it’s you for only hiring a single guard to protect the supplies that are integral to your potato sack visaged alter-ego!”

Jonathan had to pull the phone back in order to not damage his ear drums. He blinked in surprise, looking over at Jervis, who had heard the yelling man on the other end. Both recognized that voice clear as day, but both seemed unable to make sense of it.

“Is that…?” Tetch murmured slowly.

“It is…” Crane replied.

They looked at each other and back down at the phone. They practically said it at the same time, equally as confused.

“Nygma?”

[qqueenofhades]

so what are you made of [flesh and bone]

Happiest of early birthdays to my dearest @extasiswings, who wanted Jack and Sam in Scotland after the end of The Rose and Thorn. As requested, I am posting it for you now, since reasons. I love you.

Edinburgh, Scotland

March 1742

Sam awoke to the sound of dripping water. For a long moment, he lay with his eyes clamped shut in the hopeful notion that it was just the rain running down the window (as neither water nor dripping was in any lack around here) but when it changed from a light plink to an active splashing, he knew for an unhappy fact that the bucket had overflowed again. There was a crack in the plasterwork of the roof, right by the corner, and if they did not attend vigilantly to the bucket’s upkeep, it would overflow and cover the floorboards in a wet, frigid sheen, which was the absolute worst way to wake up on a cold morning. Sam had complained to the landlady at least three times about it, and got either irritated looks or a cursory promise to fix it sometime when her son was down from Aberdeen. It was just a leak, Mrs. MacKay’s face seemed to say. Wee bit o’ water. Whatever was the harm in that?

Of course, Sam thought balefully, trying to decide if he possessed the necessary ambition to get up and empty the bucket at this exact moment, they would see it that way. They had only been here for six months, having arrived the previous September for Jack to begin his education at the University of Edinburgh’s famed medical school, and Sam was quite sure that he would never again live in any place he hated as much as this one. For a start, it rained literally all the damn time, including sideways. For the next, it was bloody freezing. For a third, it was a city crammed within the boundaries of a medieval old town, meaning that people moved upwards, not outwards. Twelve-story stone tenements crowded the narrow closes that branched off the Royal Mile, packed cheek by jowl with people, and as Sam had very nearly learned the hard way, if you tried to shortcut down them during the appointed “gardyloo!” hours of morning and evening, you would be caught in a literal shitstorm. The countless stoves and chimneys enveloped the place in a yellow fog of coal and woodsmoke even on the rare occasions it was sunny, and everyone squinted at him and complained that they couldn’t understand his accent (which was bloody rich of them, considering theirs). Greyfriars Kirkyard up the way was supposedly haunted (though after Skeleton Island, any piddling Scottish ghosts were small potatoes) and something horrible had happened around every other corner: torturing Covenanters or burning witches or blowing up Mary Queen of Scots’ unfortunate husband. At least it was a hundred years since the Great Plague of 1645 had wiped out half the city. That was a real relief.

Bloody hell, it was no good. With a muttered curse, Sam rolled out of bed and stumped across the creaky floorboards to the bucket. Sure enough, it was brimful, and he picked it up very gingerly, trying to avoid slopping it down his front, as had also happened on numerous disreputable occasions. He lugged it to the back window, bumped up the sash, and had nearly succeeded in dumping it without calamity when a gust of wind, scouring the steep slate roofs, abruptly changed direction and blew it straight into his face. His resultant “FUCK!” was not at all under his breath, and he stood there, dripping and fuming.

Jack stirred drowsily from the bed. “Eh? Something wrong?”

“I… not really.” Sam pulled the window shut, feeling abashed. “This place just keeps finding new ways to drench me, that’s all.”

Jack pushed himself up on one elbow to survey Sam’s presently tragic estate, then raised an eyebrow. “What time is it?”

“Almost eight.” Among Edinburgh’s other terrible features was a bristling fortress of churches, manned by an army of humorless Scots Presbyterian vicars, whose bells rang the hours at punctilious intervals. Sam had mostly learned to sleep through the racket, as he was adaptable in that sense, though the first time had scared the wits out of him. “Do you have lecture today?”

“Anatomy,” Jack said. “Nine sharp, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays. And Monro will notice if I’m late. I should be up anyway.”

“Oh.” Sam was slightly disappointed, as he had been hoping for Jack to offer to dry him off and warm him up. Still, Alexander Monro, the university’s esteemed anatomist, awaited with another three-hour monologue on the intricacies of the human skeletal and muscular system, which was clearly far more important. “Could we meet for lunch?”

Jack rolled over and grabbed his book of appointments. “Maybe, but it’d be better for supper. I’m on observation shift at the Royal Infirmary all afternoon. I’ll be off at five o’clock if nothing comes up, though.”

“All right.” In Sam’s experience, some idiot carter was always to be counted on to run over and gruesomely crush his own foot on every night that he wanted Jack to get off on time, but he tried not to be jealous. This, after all, was the reason they were here, and Jack was good at it. At helping people, at learning quickly, at more or less keeping up with a curriculum targeted at young men who had been privately and expensively educated their entire lives, who had been trained in Latin and Greek from early ages, and who had actually planned for this as a career, rather than falling into it completely arse over teakettle. Sam was willing to endure all the horrors Scotland could possibly throw at him, if it meant seeing Jack do well and be happy, and he smiled. “Supper. I’ll meet you at World’s End?”

“Aye, half past.” Jack was already up, striding toward his trunk and pulling out his clothes. He was still not quite used to dressing as a gentleman every day, since his previous wardrobe had been, at best, functional, and he did his cravat in the looking glass with intent, frowning attention. Then he shrugged on his jacket, pulled out a comb, and tugged it through his long black hair, sweeping it back in a queue and tying the ribbon. “How do I look?”

“Very magisterial,” Sam said, feeling quite grubby by comparison in his damp nightshirt, loose hair, and bare feet. He padded over and tucked Jack’s cravat beneath the buttoned waistcoat, then spit on his finger and polished up one of the buttons. “I’m proud of you, eh?”

Jack smiled at him and bent to kiss his nose lightly, with the tentative air he always had when venturing to show physical affection. Then he turned away, hoisted his groaning bag of books, and slung it over his shoulder. He crossed the floor, vanished through the door, and Sam listened to his footsteps clunking downstairs. The door opened in the street below, and Jack emerged into the drizzle, striding through it without hat or halt like a true Scotsman. Then again, at least he had been raised in the British Isles and was accustomed to its utterly dismal meteorology. It hadn’t been easy for him to come back, either.

Sam hesitated, then turned away, grabbed the towel off the chair, and dried himself off. He thought about crawling back into bed, but it was less appealing without Jack in it, and the rest of the house would soon be up anyway. They rented a top-floor room in Teviot Place, just across from the university campus, which – while it was certainly more comfortable than the jammed and filthy tenements – was still not exactly luxury accommodation. Aside from the leaking roof, the bloke in the room below coughed all the time (seeing as he was living a stone’s throw from the finest school of medicine in the English-speaking world, he really should get that checked out) and the couple in the room next door were either arguing or fucking very loudly, depending on what day it was. This had finally offended Mrs. MacKay’s devout Kirk sensibilities to the point where she threw them out just a fortnight ago, which had been, in Sam’s view, cause for celebration. As long as she never cottoned on to what was happening just next door.

The pair of them wanting to rent a room together had not been outwardly suspicious in the least. Bachelors and students and poor scriveners and parsons between posts and other penurious young men lived together all the time, and slept in the same bed – indeed, Sam had the feeling that one person wanting a whole bed all to themselves would be regarded as a heathen indulgence to the deeply frugal Scots. Given how many people could be packed into a one-room flat, nobody thought anything of it. They were model tenants, had paid their rent for the year upfront, and Mrs. MacKay, despite her bafflement at Sam’s complaining about the leak, had developed a soft spot for him, as most people usually did. She was certainly in no present hurry to kick them out, but if she discovered the truth, that could quickly change. Sam wasn’t entirely sure what the Kirk’s precise theological position on sodomites was, but he somehow doubted that it was warm and friendly.

Thus, on the few occasions that he and Jack ventured to have intimate relations of whatever sort – they were both still cautious about it, Jack was often exhausted from his long days, and they were working everything out from the bottom up – they did so very, very quietly. There was nothing more guaranteed to kill the mood than the idea of an apoplectic Presbyterian matron storming in to – Sam didn’t know, chuck them in the stocks probably, or something even worse. The Scots were nice enough folk, but they were extremely set in their opinions, and having spent a lot of time killing each other in inventive ways over differing interpretations of the Bible, took it very seriously indeed. Christ, this place is the worst.

Sam finally got back in bed anyway, because he was cold, and dozed until the nine o’clock bells went off like a cannon brigade, right on schedule. The sun was showing some meager attempts at peering through the clouds, which around here was top weather, and he really should try to pick up a hobby or a gainful occupation. All his previous skills – videlicet, going on adventures and getting into a lot of trouble – had not translated particularly well to his new life in Edinburgh, and he did not want to spend three more years sitting on his arse in the boarding house while Jack learned to be a brilliant physician. Maybe there was some shop or tavern or trader’s firm that was in need of a new assistant. He wanted to do something. He’d be here as long as Jack was, but he did not want to go insane in the bargain. Likely because those ghouls at the school would then strap him down and analyze him too.

Sam got up, got dressed, and went down to the dining room, where Mrs. MacKay was just clearing away the leavings of breakfast – honest folk were up several hours before now, was the implication of her look – but she was persuaded to fetch back a plateful for him. “Mr. Bellamy out, then?” she asked. She was slightly wary of Jack, because he looked like the sort of man who could kill someone (she was not wrong about that) and because she had heard various colorful stories about medical students paying local criminals to snatch bodies from fresh graves for dissection. Sam had finally convinced her that Jack was not going to smother anyone in their bed and drag their twitching corpse off to the university, but still. “It’s his first year nearly done, isn’t it?”

“Aye.” Sam shoveled sausage into his mouth. It was extremely hard to get a meal that did not consist of ale, baked beans, and fish, prone to be served for any of the three each day. The Scots regarded vegetables as either outright poison or something that had to be boiled to within an inch of their lives to be safe, and while there were a few greengrocers on the Royal Mile, Mrs. MacKay did not appear to patronize any of them. Sam had been forced to buy from them himself, hearing his father caviling like Jeremiah the prophet about the imminent onset of scurvy. “His exams are in May, and if he passes those, he’ll be into the second year.”

“You’ll be staying, then?” Mrs. MacKay tipped another rasher of sausages onto his plate, as she took Sam’s perpetually stick-thin skinniness as a personal affront to her cooking, and had embarked on a campaign to put some flesh on his bones. Sam could have told her that it was useless, as he had always resembled a garden rake, but he was never one to complain about second portions. “For another term?”

“Most likely,” Sam said. “We’d really appreciate it if you could finally get Davie to fix that leak, though. It’s filling up a whole bucket every six hours.”

“Ah, you’re from the Colonies,” Mrs. MacKay said, in the tone of voice which meant that she considered this the general excuse for all his peculiarities. “Used to something else, are ye?”

“Yeah,” Sam said. “I was raised in Georgia, it’s sunny there. And warm. Been around the West Indies a bit too.”

Mrs. MacKay looked intrigued. She had never been further than up to Aberdeen to visit Davie, and a few times to Peebles to see her daughter. “The Indies? How’d ye end up there? Are they chockful with savages?”

“Well,” Sam said. “First, they’re not savages. And my, uh, my family were based there for quite a while.” He did not think that his landlady needed to know the exact nature of his family’s past occupation. Sodomites would be one thing, pirate sodomites would be the Devil Unleashed. “We were… we were sailors.”

“Ah.” Mrs. MacKay likewise considered that slightly iffy. “My sister’s husband, his father was ruined in the Darien scheme. Always thought the Indies sounded verra dangerous.”

“I see,” Sam said politely. The Darien scheme, the short-lived and massively expensive failure of Scotland’s attempt to become a colonial power by settling on a part of the Panama isthmus smack in the middle of Spanish territory, had bankrupted almost the entire Lowlands in 1700. “Really, though, they should have guessed that Spain would pitch a fit. And that just about everything else they did was doomed, far as I can tell.”

Mrs. MacKay gave him a severe look, clearly disapproving of him making light of her relatives’ misfortunes, and Sam scoffed the rest of the sausages and shut up. As he was making ready to go out for the morning, he asked if there was anywhere she knew of that might want to hire a man, and was informed that they were always looking for butchers in Cowgate. As this sounded like exactly the sort of occupation he would prefer to avoid, Sam thanked her, promised to ask with no intention of doing so, and departed.

The rain had almost stopped as he trucked up the steep, slippery cobblestones, trying to avoid stepping in any puddles (since as he had also discovered, some of them could be a good foot deep). He decided to head for the bookshop in Cockburn Street (the name of which had alarmed him until Jack, grinning, had assured him that it was pronounced “Coburn”) since he quite often found himself drafted in to assist with Jack’s studies. Sam had the benefit of a proper education, and since Jack had all sorts of charts and books and medical treatises that he didn’t always understand, Sam had assumed the role of loyal amanuensis. He usually translated the Latin, since Jack had never been formally taught it, and Latin was a terrible language that needed to be killed with fire, so it was very difficult to learn it and what it was trying to tell you at the same time. It was the first time in a while that Sam had been grateful for grumpy old Mr. Grimsby at the grammar school in Savannah.

After several minutes’ brisk walk, Sam crossed the Royal Mile and wended his way down into Cockburn Street and the premises of the mad old coot Alasdair MacGillivray, bookseller, printer, and polymath. He turned out to have a few new books from the university of Leiden in the Low Countries, one of the other medical schools of repute in Europe, but since they were all in Dutch, that was not particularly useful. There were a few in Latin, though, mostly about plants, and since Jack spent several hours a week at the Edinburgh Botanic Gardens to be instructed in medicinal herbs, Sam decided it couldn’t hurt and bought them. They had money, after all. His portion of the Skeleton Island treasure had amounted to at least the yearly income for a well-off duke, and more would be forthcoming if necessary. They could afford to move somewhere nicer, somewhere the roof did not leak and there was not the constant threat of being caught in flagrante delicto. But Jack insisted that they conserve their money and spend it carefully, that they still had three years to go here and anything could happen, and so in the garret they stayed.

“Hey,” Sam said, as MacGillivray was wrapping his books in brown paper. “You’re not looking for an assistant, are you? I’m educated, I could help you with printing or translation or something like that. My – friend is at the medical school, and I’ve got some extra time on my hands. Know of anything you might like to have me do?”

MacGillivray squinted at him. The bugger was at least seventy, white-haired and stoop-shouldered, and Sam couldn’t imagine that there weren’t at least some tasks he would like to delegate to a younger and more able-bodied man. “Is it work you’re after, laddie?”

“Aye,” Sam said. “You wouldn’t have to pay me much, I don’t really need the money. I just want some kind of occupation, really. I’m not fussy.”

MacGillivray considered that, then nodded. “It happens there’s a delivery I’m expectin’, later today. Meet the man at the White Horse Inn, two o’clock, he’s on the stagecoach from Newcastle. Name o’ Balfour, looks like a soldier. Tell him I sent ye, and bring the package straight here. Dinna talk to anyone or tell them what it is, mind. Ken?”

“Er, yes,” Sam said, blinking. “What exactly is it?”

MacGillivray gave him a narrow look. “I thought ye were a clever lad?”

“Right.” This sounded distinctly on the downlow side of things – where, after all, Sam was fairly used to operating, but still. “That’s what you want me to do?”

“Ye do it well, I may find more uses for ye.” MacGillivray cackled. “Dinna worry, I promise I willnae get ye hangit. Here.” He pulled the signet ring off his littlest finger and tossed it to Sam. “So Balfour knows for a fact I sent ye. He asks for a password, it’s ‘clavicula’.”

Sam frowned. He and MacGillivray knew each other a bit, as he was often in here and bought books for Jack regularly, but that still seemed like a considerable amount of trust for the man to be placing in him, if this was some sort of contraband that could get him turned in. “You’re not worried I’m going to – I don’t know, run to the castle and tell them to have a good look?”

“Are ye?” MacGillivray fixed his watery eyes on Sam. “Not that I’d think that the sort o’ thing that Captain Flint’s own grandson would do, but I could be surprised, no?”

“What?” Sam was jolted. He had told MacGillivray his family name, but “Jones” was hardly distinctive, and he certainly had not let on about any other extra-legal circumstances or connections. “How the devil do you know that?”

The barmy old codger gave him an unhelpful stare, then shrugged. “Ye want it or nae?”

“Yes, fine, I want it.” If nothing else, his curiosity was now well engaged, and that was always dangerous. “Two o’clock, White Horse Inn, bloke’s name is Balfour, password’s clavicula, bring it to you straightaway. Anything I’ve left out?”

“No, that’s it, then.” MacGillivray tied the books with twine and took Sam’s shilling with an arthritic-clawed hand. “Be on wi’ ye, now.”

Feeling as if he probably should have kept his damn mouth shut, Sam showed himself out, dropped the books back at the house, and spent an aimless hour or two wandering past the university campus, hoping to spot Jack between lectures, before he headed for the White Horse around noon. He didn’t want to draw attention to his meeting with the mysterious Balfour, so he settled in, ordered some food, and kept an ear out for the bells, hoping the courier was punctual. White Horse Inn was in Canongate, at the foot of the Mile and just adjacent to Holyrood Palace, and it was the usual point of departure for travelers heading to England on the stagecoach circuit, so it was crowded and busy with footmen, servants, drivers, grooms, passengers, and hopeful vagrants trying to earn a penny or two by shining boots or carrying trunks. In fact, Sam was not sure how he was supposed to spot his quarry in all this commotion, but finally, a few minutes past Holyrood sounding two o’clock, the door opened and a tall, square-jawed man in a soldier’s coat stepped inside. His eyes swept the patrons, clearly looking for MacGillivray.

Sam swallowed, reminded himself this was nothing, and got to his feet. Affecting to be heading to the bar for another drink, he brushed past. “Balfour?”

He felt the other’s start of surprise. “You are?”

“A friend,” Sam said. “MacGillivray sent me. Somewhere we can talk?”

The man eyed him suspiciously, confirming Sam’s hunch that this package was something he did not want to be handing off to just anyone. “Did he? Password?”

“Clavicula,” Sam said, low-voiced, and allowed him a glimpse at the ring. “Out back?”

Balfour considered, then jerked his head. They made their way through the human tide out to the courtyard, which smelled richly of horse shit, and to an unobserved spot at the corner of the coach house. Then Balfour said, “Alasdair’s not sent anyone else before.”

“Well,” Sam said. “He’s getting old, it’s a long totter back up the Mile from here, and I needed some work. Whatever you are trading in, believe me, I don’t care. I’ve got my instructions, take it to him straightaway. So…” He shrugged. “That’s it, really.”

The older man snorted, in people’s usual surprise at Sam’s completely forthcoming nature. “You could have beaten the password out of him.”

“I look like someone who could beat something out of a little old man?” Sam was insulted.

“Actually, no, you don’t. I’d have chosen someone quite a bit more intimidating.” Balfour considered, then reached into his jacket, pulled out a rectangular paper-wrapped object, and thrust it at him. “I’ll know if he doesn’t get this, boy.”

“Keep your bloody hair on. I told you, I don’t care.” Sam took it, stowed it in his jacket, and wondered if he was going to be tipped for the delivery, but nothing else appeared to be forthcoming. “Right then. That’s me off. Have a good afternoon, Bally.”

With that, he strolled away, through the inn and out onto the Mile, and resigned himself to the steep climb up to MacGillivray’s premises. He was about halfway there when, having to dive out of the way of a maniac hackney carriage, the parcel spilled out of his jacket. Sam grabbed it at once, then happened to notice that the wrapping was torn. He could just see a bit of a strange symbol, and some crabbed old Latin writing. It looked like a manuscript of some sort, though of what provenance he had no idea.

Sam hesitated, smoothed the torn corner back into place, and mightily resisted the urge to tear it a bit more and lie to MacGillivray that it had all happened in the fall. This was risky enough as it was, since he looked like the sort of berk who couldn’t do so much as carry a package from point A to point B, and not very convincing for his future employment. MacGillivray couldn’t know what sort of paper Balfour had put it in, could he? And Sam had of course bought some books earlier, so if he went back to the house, carefully undid that paper, and wrapped this one up freshly instead…

He considered, wondered if MacGillivray was expecting it at any particular time, jimmied his finger into the tear slightly, then snatched his hand back. After a final moment failed in talking himself out of it, he started down toward Teviot Place, back into the house, and galumphed upstairs. Sam burst into the bedroom, occupied with all sorts of plans to pull this off smoothly and with no complications at all – and stopped short.

Jack was sitting at the desk and swearing at a pile of surgery notes, scribbling his quill hard enough to fray it. He was scowling at some charming diagram of a half-dismembered body, at least from what Sam could see of it, then spun around. “What are you doing here?”

“What are you doing here? I thought you were on shift at the infirmary!”

“I was,” Jack said. “But William Grant wanted to switch since he’s going home for Easter tomorrow. So I decided to come back here and try to make some headway on these bloody notes. Why do you look guilty?”

“What? I don’t look guilty.”

Jack wore a distinct “sure, mate” expression, and Sam cursed to himself. While ordinarily he would have been delighted that Jack had gotten an unexpected afternoon off, it was delicate in the present circumstances. “I bought you some books,” he said, pointing. “Do you want to see if they’re any good?”

“In a minute.” Jack continued to regard him narrowly. “What have you been up to?”

Sam sighed deeply. He didn’t even know why he was keeping things from Jack, other than a certain sense that Jack might not be very pleased to hear that he had blithely contracted himself to smuggle mysterious manuscripts for a local crackpot who was clearly keen to avoid run-ins with the authorities. Sam had managed not to die (well, mostly) for twenty years before meeting Jack, he didn’t need to be mother-henned all the time, and while he knew why Jack worried about him, it could be irritating. Still, he didn’t want to lie outright. “You know old MacGillivray the bookseller, over on Cockburn Street? He had me pick up a package for him, down at the coach inn. Only I tore it, and I didn’t want to look like a careless idiot, so I came back here to do it up again.”

“MacGillivray?” Jack’s black brows drew down sharply. “Funny rumors about him.”

“I could have guessed that, yes. But it’s fine, you don’t have to – ”

“What’s this package, exactly?” Jack pushed his chair back and got to his feet, holding out his hand. “I’ll have a look.”

Sam shirked. “I did promise him I’d bring it over without anyone else seeing it.”

“Well, you’re already not doing that, aren’t you?” Jack repeated his gesture, more impatiently. “And why would you agree to it in the first place?”

“Not all of us can be genius doctors-in-training like you, all right? I needed something to do, and I don’t need to ask your permission for it! I’m not going to sit here on the off-chance I might get into some terrible scrape if I went outside, so – ”

“Look, I know you’re not fond of Edinburgh.” Jack seemed to be striving for a reasonable tone, but his knuckles clenched white on the back of the chair. “Maybe it was a mistake for you to come here. In a few more weeks, ships will start departing for the Americas again, and if you… if you wanted to go back home…”

Sam stared at him, feeling as if all the blood had drained out of his head. “Wh – do you – do you want me to leave? Is that what you’re saying?”

“What? No. No!” Jack looked just as stunned. “No, I don’t – I don’t want you to go. No. I just – I want you to be happy, and if you’re not – ”

“I’m not going to pretend I like Edinburgh very much,” Sam said. “I don’t. But none of that matters, because you – you’re so happy, you’re good at what you’re doing, it makes a difference, it’s finally something that you really want to do. I know it wasn’t bloody easy to come back to Britain at all, and sit with everyone who’s been better educated than you, and hack through this nonsense, but you are. I would so much rather be in Scotland with you, much as I hate this utter toilet of a country, than back in Georgia alone. And that’s the truth.”

Jack blinked. “You wouldn’t be alone,” he pointed out. “You’d be with your family.”

“I’d still be alone, though,” Sam said. “I’m not – I’m not leaving. I’m always happy to help you, you know that. I just – I need more to do.”

“I should have guessed you’d miss getting into trouble.” Jack raised a wry eyebrow. “Always has to be something, doesn’t it.”

“Hey.” Sam was stung. “Speak for yourself, mate.”

Jack acknowledged that with a grunt. Then he said, “All right. Give me the package.”

Sam was tempted to hedge one more time, but if he did, Jack would probably tackle him and rip it out of his hands (his manners had much improved on some fronts, less so on others). Besides, he had come back here intending to snoop the bejesus out of it anyway. He handed it over.

Jack put it on the desk, tore perfunctorily through the paper in a way that made Sam wince, and then pulled out something that appeared to be a rather old manuscript, tied together with cords and stamped with the odd symbols that Sam had glimpsed through the tear. The title across the top was Clavicula Salomonis Regis, and underneath, in foreboding capitals, LEMEGETON. Part of it was printed, but the leaves below looked to be handwritten, covered in cramped diagrams and illuminations and detailed tables and names. It was completely incomprehensible to Sam, nor could he think why MacGillivray would want it, aside from a general interest in arcane rubbish. “What the hell is this?”

“Key of King Solomon,” Jack translated, his Latin having been unavoidably much improved over the last six months. He flipped to what looked to be the index page, and ran his finger down the list. “Comprising five books, the Ars Goetia, Ars Theurgia-Goetia, Ars Paulina, Ars Almadel, and Ars Notoria, thus to instruct the reader in the practice of…” He trailed off, frowning, then reared back like a snake. “Jesus Christ. Why the hell, quite literally, would you be so bloody stupid as to get caught with this?”

“Why?” Sam was annoyed. “I didn’t know what it was, now did I? MacGillivray collects all kinds of alchemical manuscripts and that sort of thing, and I doubt your average customs officer has a clue what it is either. Key of King Solomon, maybe it’s some sort of Bible commentary, or – ” At that moment, he got a glimpse of the page Jack was looking at, and blinked. “Well, that doesn’t look terribly biblical, I’ll admit.”

“No,” Jack said. “Because it’s a bloody grimoire. A book of demonology, black magic. It’s supposed to instruct you how to summon the Seventy-Two Demons and how to scry with angels and divine the truths of the universe and whatever else.” He turned a page with an expression somewhere between horror and fascination. “Jesus, Sam, someone catches you with this, they wouldn’t even go to the bother of a trial before burning you at the stake!”

“Well, that assumes they’d open it,” Sam said feebly. “And if so, why the blazes does MacGillivray want it, anyway? Thinks he’ll get up to a wee spot of demon-summoning before his warm milk and bedtime?”

“Don’t ask me what that mad old loon wants.” Jack remained staring down at the book with a grim expression. “We should destroy this and tell him it was lost.”

“What? Burn it? What if that makes the whole demonic lot appear anyway?” This sounded all very akin to breaking Sam’s cardinal rule of not meddling with the supernatural, especially in a place like Edinburgh, which was up to its eyeballs in ghost stories anyway. “This flat is small as it is, it would be a lot smaller with King Bael and his diabolical minions right up our arses. Bloody hell. Pirates, sodomites, and demons from hell. It’s like we’re actively competing to make Mrs. MacKay keel over and die of horror.”

Jack gave him a very austere look. “Mind where you say that.”

“Of course I wasn’t just going to go blabbing in front of her.” Sam was miffed. “Look, how was I supposed to know that MacGillivray is crazy enough to be smuggling books of black magic into the country? Though I admit, that does explain why he was willing to let me go get it. If I did get caught, better me than him. Evil old blighter! I thought we were friends!”

Jack looked as if no matter Alasdair MacGillivray’s advanced age and distinguished intellect, nothing would stop him from snapping him over his knee like a twig. Restraining himself from several more curses with difficulty, he spun back on the offending manuscript. “Either way, we have to get it out of here, I don’t want it near us. Get some paper, we’ll wrap it up and take it over, and I’ll have a small talk with the bastard about what sort of errands he’s recruiting you in. And in the future, it may be best to buy your books elsewhere.”

Sam supposed that he could not really object, and they fished out enough paper and twine to rewrap the Lemegeton more or less satisfactorily. Jack was still mumbling under his breath as he put back on his jacket, hat, and shoes, and shoved the parcel into an inner pocket. Then they headed downstairs, back outside into what had become a rather forebodingly gloomy late afternoon, and started up toward Cockburn Street.

They were delayed crossing the Royal Mile because an ox-cart had overturned, which clearly shredded Jack’s nerves, and finally made it down into the close. They reached MacGillivray’s shop, whereupon Jack yanked the bell until it almost fell off, but this did not succeed in producing the proprietor. Jack vaulted over the counter to check in the back, ignoring Sam’s protests that this was probably trespassing, but MacGillivray wasn’t there either. Just as they were about to leave the package in some dark drawer and scarper for it, the door opened again. “Hey! Who are you two?”

Sam straightened up in a hurry, suddenly and horribly aware that they looked to be burgling the place. Even worse, he could tell that the two soldiers who had just entered were from the Tolbooth, Edinburgh’s ancient and notorious prison, where torture, filth, and terror were routine. It had long served as an exhibition point for the heads of famous traitors, gazing down with ghastly and rotted visage over the High Street. None of them, thankfully, had been mounted while Jack and Sam were there, but Sam certainly had to hope with all his might that they weren’t about to get new tenants. “Can I… help you, gentlemen?”

“Who are ye?” The soldier jerked a thumb at Jack, who had just appeared from down the hallway in unmistakable readiness for a fight. “And who’s that?”

“I’m, uh – ” Sam blanked on anything except the false names he had once given Matthew Rogers, upon being pulled out of the sea. “James Cocker. That’s Richard Jones.”

The soldier scowled at him, as he was clearly not Scottish and thereby likely up to no good by his very nature. “Are ye, then? What are you pair o’ louts doin’ here?”

“We were… looking for a book,” Sam said. “A book to buy, but the – the owner wasn’t here.”

“So what, decided to help yourself?” The second soldier eyed Jack narrowly, obviously sensing that he would be the more dangerous if he put his mind to it. “Either o’ ye met a man named Balfour? Ross Balfour. So happens we’d like to speak with him.”

“No,” Sam said. “Never heard of him. Can we go?”

“Where is it in the city you’re staying, Mr. Cocker?”

“The bloody hell do we have to tell you that for?” Jack stepped up protectively next to Sam.  “We’ve done nothing wrong. We came here looking to buy a book, that’s all. You can tell us why you want this Balfour, or you can let us go.”

“Smuggler,” the first soldier said. “Sneaks all sorts o’ things into the city, evaded us for years. We received word that he might ha’ been spotted earlier today, down Canongate, and we’re fair sure that he and Mr. MacGillivray have worked together before, so…” He stared pointedly at them. “Sound familiar to either of ye?”

Sam had to be impressed, as they had of course cottoned onto exactly what was happening, but it was a massively inconvenient moment for this display of shrewd legal sleuthing. “No.”

“Someone claims they saw him down at White Horse Inn,” the first soldier said. “Said a young man, dark hair, was speaking wi’ him.” He glanced between Sam and Jack, both young men and both dark-haired. “Still nothing?”

Jack was clearly restraining with all his might from glaring ferociously at Sam, not just for trafficking books of black magic but being so artless as to get himself spotted with their provider. Sam, for his part, supposed that he could have thought this through somewhat more thoroughly, but that was presently beside the point. Even worse, Jack could hardly take out the Lemegeton in front of the soldiers and try to leave it behind, as they would then confiscate it, open it, and realize what it was (really, did they have to draw so many pentacles over the damn thing)? Which meant they had to keep it for the time being, the exact thing they had wanted to avoid, and continue to run the risk of whatever might happen to them by association. After an extremely delicate moment, when the soldiers continued to glare at them and they continued to glare right back, the former finally backed down. “Fine. Be on your way, lads. But you hear anything of Balfour, you’d best be along to report it.”

“Aye,” Sam said, as they edged across the floor, ducked under the lintel, and back out into the darkening close. Lamps and lanterns were starting to be lit along the Royal Mile, but the side streets were nearly dark, except for the glow of windows here and there. Evidently MacGillivray, realizing that his book was late and something had gone sideways, had thought it prudent to instantly disappear in anticipation of unwelcome guests paying a call. Just to get us stuck with it instead. Bloody brilliant. Sam looked at Jack, keeping his voice down. “What are we – what are we going to do?”

Jack glanced both ways, terse and wary. They could hear the voices of what sounded like more soldiers waiting at the top of Cockburn Street, and running into them and having to talk their way through again might be one gamble too many. If nothing else, they would likely order them to turn out their pockets, which for obvious reasons was a problem. After Jack had said something under his breath that would have scandalized Mrs. MacKay all over again, he jerked his head at a nearby drainpipe. “You. Up.”

“You’re sure?” Sam eyed the pipe leerily. It looked very insubstantial, as if one good yank could tear it free, and it led a considerable distance above the street, toward the crammed roofs of the tenements. “I don’t think this is a good – ”

Jack gave him a look that clearly said he had no right to judge anyone else on their good ideas or lack thereof, gave him a smart shove in the back, and as torches rounded the corner, that provided Sam with enough of a healthy jolt of terror to start climbing. He shimmied up the drainpipe, hoping nobody chose this moment to look out their window and spot two literary fiends on the lam. The stone was rough enough to make for decent footholds, but the fall would still be enough to seriously injure him, if not outright crack his head open on the cobbles like a melon. He determinedly did not look down, squirreled across to a more substantial section of the pipe, and checked to make sure that Jack was following him. They had just reached the ledge between buildings, a precarious perch no more than a foot wide and almost forty feet off the ground, when they saw the soldiers tramp around the corner and make for MacGillivray’s shop. They were dragging someone Sam vaguely recognized as one of the grooms at the White Horse Inn, who must have spotted him and Balfour out the back. “You’re sure this is where he was heading?” one of the soldiers said. “You’re sure?”

“Aye, he took a parcel and started this way, but…” The groom frowned. “Wait. Nearly got hit by a hackney, in the Royal Mile, and then he went that way.” He pointed. “Off in the direction of the university, I think?”

Sam had just enough time to realize that the scurrilous wee sneak had been following him (admittedly, he probably would have done the same if he had seen someone slinking suspiciously around his place of business in company with a known smuggler) before it struck him in horror that if the soldiers followed it up, and somehow worked out where they lived and who they were – Jack would lose his place at the university, they’d be thrown out of Scotland in disgrace (that part at least might not be so bad, but the disgrace would be) and would otherwise be lucky to escape with their necks. He and Jack exchanged a horrified look, still perched on the ledge like pigeons, as it was all Sam could do not to burst out in a torrent of apologies. That, however, would be highly detrimental to their aims of avoiding capture, deportation, and (probably) death, so he didn’t. God, I’m such an idiot.

The soldiers mulled this over for an exquisitely nerve-wracking moment. Then one of them said, “Send a few of the lads over to check if there’s anything. The rest of you, wait and see if Balfour comes here. Doubt it, but have to be sure. Off wi’ ye, then.”

Sam and Jack held very still, despite their elevated hiding spot, until the soldiers had dispersed, a few to keep watch on the shop and the rest, presumably, to ramble in the direction of Teviot Place and start sniffing around. It was horribly plain, to Sam at least, that they were stuck. They couldn’t go home, at least until the soldiers decided there was nothing there, and they couldn’t just ditch a bloody book of demonology and leave it lying around – who knew who might get their hands on it, or if Balfour had friends to make life very difficult for them if they lost it. After all, Balfour, if he wasn’t clapped in some noisome dungeon this very moment, could easily recall the last person he had handed the parcel off to, with an explicit warning to be sure it reached its destination. They couldn’t climb down and leave it at MacGillivray’s shop with the place garrisoned, and they couldn’t destroy the damn thing outright. All of which, in Sam’s head, added up to a very unpleasant night indeed.

After a pause, Jack jerked his head at him again, and they started to clamber very carefully over the steep, sliding rooftop, doing their best not to think about how far a fall it would be if they lost their footing. Sam couldn’t deny that at least the view was great – the March spring night was long, the light low and blue, and he could see Edinburgh Castle on its lofty crag to one side, the distant hill of Arthur’s Seat and the dark water of the Firth of Forth to the other. Below them, the people of the city carried on with their lives as usual, dispersing into taverns and supper clubs and other earthier entertainments, talk and laughter drifting up to them like disembodied spirits. It occurred to Sam that they could open the bloody book, have a go at conjuring up whichever demon was supposed to get you out of tight corners, and see if that worked, since if they had to be stuck with the damn thing, they might as well get something out of it. That, however, was definitely a bad idea.

Once they gingerly clambered their way to a somewhat flatter and more sheltered spot, on top of one of Edinburgh’s several coffeehouses – one where they went when not hiding out from the law, even – they eased themselves down to sit, leaning against a brick wall. At least it wasn’t cold, or raining (yet), so their enforced overnight exile could be far worse. They remained there, staring into the darkening distance and catching a foul whiff from the tenements’ evening gardyloo, until Sam finally said tremulously, “Are you mad at me?”

“I’m…” Jack blew out a long breath. “I’m not mad. I’m just… you frightened me, that’s all. I’m sorry. For snapping.”

Sam glanced sidelong at him, then back down. “I just wanted something to do.”

“Aye, I know.” Unexpectedly, Jack reached out, pulled Sam’s hands out of their anxious tangle, and took hold of them with both of his own. “But what you said about my genius doctoring, as if I’m the one who knows everything and is doing everything and is so much better than you… Jesus. I wouldn’t even know where to start without you. You’re the one who translates the Latin bits and tells me what words mean and what that reference is from and how to write a paper, and how to dress in the morning and how to speak to gentlemen and how to act in polite company, and that I can’t tell my shift partner to his face that he’s a fucking idiot, even if he is. I wouldn’t last a day here without you. And I don’t want you to stay because you think you need to help me, but you do. All the time. With everything. And I understand if that’s not enough, and you want more. I just… don’t want you to get into trouble. I don’t want you out like this, alone. At least bring me along.”

Sam blinked. He was deeply touched, not least because Jack, who was still not the best with talking about his feelings, had given such a lovely speech, and because it made him feel somewhat better about his own participation in the enterprise. He hadn’t even noticed it, hadn’t thought anything of it, just that of course he was here and he was going to help Jack make the best of it. “You’re gone a lot,” he said, looking down at their hands. “And likewise, I don’t want you not to be. I want you to do everything and make the most of it. I just… feel a little trapped. I need to get out and do things. You know, maybe we should move. If I didn’t have to wake up in a cold, miserable, leaking attic every day, that could help.”

“I know it’s not the best,” Jack said. “But it’s affordable, it’s close to university, and remember, three more years. We don’t know what could – ”

“But we have money,” Sam said. “We have a lot of money. We only brought some of it with us in cash, but before we left, I had Uncle Thomas write me a letter of introduction to the Bank of England, and have the rest of my portion of the treasure sent on one of their vessels. So it’s all in London. If I catch a stagecoach down there and make a withdrawal, we’d have whatever we needed. That way, we could – ”

“No.” Jack tensed. “No, I don’t want you going to London.”

“It’s – look, I know what happened to you there, and why, but… it’s just a city, Jack. It’s not actively malevolent on its own. And Howe’s… you know, not there. It’s not as if the universe will mark me out as knowing you when I arrive, and smite me down accordingly.”

“Someone could see you going to the bank, or try to rob you. What if – ”

“So what, if it’s a choice between me making one trip to London to get some money, or us continuing to almost die of consumption in a drafty garret, it’s the latter?” Sam turned to face him. “I know you’ve never had a choice in how you lived before, you just had to scrape out every penny and every bit you could find and hope it worked. But we don’t – we don’t have to do that anymore, all right? I want to stay, I want to help you. But that doesn’t mean that the barely least terrible option is the only one we have.”

Jack didn’t answer, a lock of hair falling in his face and hiding his expression. At last he said, as if striving to be reasonable, “Maybe if Mrs. MacKay fixed it – ”

“It’s not just about the leak, Jack. It’s about having a place I want to be, with you. If I didn’t constantly feel like I had to run away from what is supposed to be our home, I would be happier about waiting until the right thing comes up, rather than grabbing at whatever looks likely. As I said, I don’t like Edinburgh. But it can be better than it is.”

“The money – ”

“We paid your student fees out of it, remember?” Sam said. “That was three guineas, which means three pounds, three shillings. Our room right now is two pounds per twelve months. My portion of the treasure comes out to close to eight thousand. There’s no way we can spend eight thousand pounds in three years, unless we went completely mad, and I had Uncle Thomas help me make some investments and such. And there’s interest on the deposit, and the Bank gave me an excellent rate since it was such a large amount. I’ve probably made several shillings just while we were sitting here. We don’t have to rent bloody Holyrood, but we can at least get a proper townhouse.”

“We might have to hire a housekeeper,” Jack said. “Or a cook. I don’t want you stuck doing all the household work yourself. And if they worked it out about us – ”

“Don’t tell me there’s not at least one person in this whole city who wouldn’t overlook us acting like what’s his face, that Roman emperor, if it meant the pay was good,” Sam said. “Caligula? Or Nero? We’re not going to act like them, that’s not the point, but either way. I’m just saying, it’s also not the case that everyone we meet is going to burn us.”

There was a pause. He could hear Jack struggling with that, the absurd idea that there was anyone in the world, beyond a precious few, who could be trusted in the slightest degree. At last Jack said, “You think so?”

“Aye, I do. As I said, we don’t need to live anywhere large or fancy. Have someone who pops by to do some of the cleaning and cooking a few times a week, that would be it. It’s not like we’d be baldly fornicating in front of them. I’d try, but I really can’t cook.”

Jack laughed, though his face remained shadowed. “I don’t want you to be my servant,” he said, after another pause. “As I said, you already do enough. I just… I don’t… all right, fine. If you do want to go to London for some money, I’ll… I’ll go with you.”

“You sure?” Sam stared at him. “Christ, you’d be justified in never seeing that place again in a thousand years.”

“I know.” Jack leaned his head against the wall, staring up at the stars coming out through the haze. “I don’t – I don’t want to go back, I don’t want to see it, I don’t want to smell it, I don’t want to think about it in any way at all. But I’d rather do that then have you go alone.”

Sam opened and shut his mouth. He wondered if anyone could see them up here, decided that he did not care, and moved to kiss Jack quickly and shyly, still as ever expecting to be pushed away. Then he said, “Honestly, if you don’t – ”

“You came to Edinburgh for me.” Jack looked at him with weary affection. “I think I can return the favor. Besides, if I’m not there, you’d probably get saddled with another bloody evil spell book, wouldn’t you?”

“I’d like to think this was just a one-off.” At that, Sam remembered that they still hadn’t decided what to do with their current one, and frowned. “Should we – I don’t know, drop it down some bookseller’s chimney and let it be their problem?”

“No,” Jack said. “I have an idea. We’ll sneak into the university library and hide it in their archives. If they ever find it, they can claim it’s part of some collection they acquired and they don’t know where it came from – which, after all, will be the truth. That way, we don’t destroy it and it doesn’t fall into the wrong hands, and if the soldiers don’t find anything down where we live, they’ll probably drop it. Besides, if anyone tries to hurt you, I’ll kill them. Balfour is a wanted smuggler, he can’t just walk up to the soldiers and grass on us, and if MacGillivray wants to make any trouble, I’ll report him straight away as an occultist and dabbler in the dark arts. That should keep him quiet.”

“You searched his shop, you’d probably find plenty of stuff to that nature.” Sam shifted his position, as he was quite hungry and thinking almost longingly of Mrs. MacKay’s supper portion of ale, beans, and fish. But since he was the one who had gotten them into this scrape in the first place, he wasn’t going to say so. “You thought of ways of protecting me that don’t involve killing people? Just curious.”

Jack looked startled. “Why?”

“It’s not that I don’t appreciate it,” Sam said. “It’s just… well, it’s conspicuous, is all.”

“I’ll try to avoid it, but I’m not taking it off the table.” Jack looked up at the evening sky. “Should be full dark in another hour or so, we can sneak over to the university then. Probably best not to boggle too much around rooftops in the darkness, and this is a safe enough spot.”

“Yeah.” Sam paused, then moved to put his head in Jack’s lap, stretching his legs out with a sigh. He could just hear the faint sound of the coffeeshop’s commerce below, and it made him feel oddly isolated, on the far side of a mirror or the dark side of the moon. But he didn’t care, because at least they got to be up here together, and it was downright peaceful. The wind was blowing the stink of the tenements away from them, which also helped, and he couldn’t resist snuggling somewhat closer, as Jack absently stroked his hair. “Thanks. For helping me sort this out.”

“That’s what partners do, eh?” Jack looked down at him with a faint, crooked smile. “As I’ve already said, you’ve done more for me than I could ever bloody repay. They should give you the degree of doctor, if they even think about giving it to me. And I – I do. Like it. After all the time I’ve spent knocking things down, destroying them… putting them back together is nain sae bad.”

“Very Scottish of you.” Sam wriggled his head into a better position on Jack’s lap, and settled in to wait. They watched the sky grow dark together, practically romantic if you could forget the part about being on the run from the law (and a notorious smuggler) with an illicit book of dark magic and having to next break into Jack’s place of education to dispose of it in semi-safety. At least, Sam supposed, their life was never boring, one could say that for it.

Finally, once it was well dark and thus they could be assured of some cover, they got up, brushed the plaster chippings and brick dust off, and crept carefully around the side of the roof, to the narrow walk that spanned across to the next house. They were going to have to cross the Mile, since the university was on the other side of it, and while the houses leaned closely together at their narrowest point, there was still going to be some careful footwork involved. Jack scouted along the line, until he finally found an ideal spot. That was to say, there was enough room to take a running start, and the landing on the other side was more or less flat. The jump itself was not bad – Sam had certainly made longer ones before – but everything looked bad when you would fall thirty feet to the street below and break your neck if you missed. “What if we climbed down and… walked there like ordinary people?”

In answer, Jack pointed to the soldiers who were still patrolling the Mile with obnoxiously vigilant expressions. They were currently further down, but could come running quickly if they heard a disturbance, and since Jack and Sam were also out after evening curfew, they would be stopped and questioned on those grounds alone. Sam cursed under his breath. The Amazing Flying Book Thieves (well, not really thieves, but anyway) it would have to be. “You want me to go first?”

“No, I’ll go first,” Jack said. “Right then. Let’s get on with this.”

Sam watched very tensely as Jack backed up, made a few quick stretches, then broke into a sprint, pushing off hard from the lip of the roof, being silhouetted impressively in midair, and angling in to slide across the tiles on the far side. For a heart-stopping moment, Sam thought he was about to plunge over the edge, but he caught hold and arrested his momentum, then stood up, only slightly breathless. “See. Nothing to it.”

Sam shook his head, had a sudden urge to cross himself (though God was probably well shut of helping him with his constant misadventures) and backed up as far as he could. If this went wrong, he gave full permission to lie in his obituary that he had died doing something far more glamorous. Then, just managing not to close his eyes, he hurtled toward the edge.

It was all over in a few heartbeats – the wind, the air, the dark street below – and then he was falling out of the sky toward Jack, who braced himself and caught him, staggering a few steps back against a chimney. They remained clinging to each other for several moments, breathing hard, and Jack dipped his head and kissed Sam quickly. Then he said, “We should be able to make it to the university mostly straightforwardly from here. Come on.”

That sounded perfectly fine to Sam, and he trailed after Jack as they limbered across the crowded rooftops on the south side of the Mile, angling down toward the university. They had one exceedingly close call when a window banged open directly in front of them, nearly braining Jack, and another when the parcel almost tumbled out of his jacket, but they finally reached the general vicinity of campus. They had to climb down across the way and cross the street, and the gates had been locked for the night, which obliged Jack to pick his way through them. “Not exactly the best look for me, eh?” he muttered, as Sam kept a sharp eye out for any possible interference. “Breaking into my own school?”

After a few tense minutes of work, Jack got the lock open, and they crept through, into the small quadrangle laid out in imitation of Oxford and Cambridge colleges, and surrounded by handsome and imposing grey-stone buildings. The library was on the far side, and Jack said, “If we’re caught, I’ll just pretend I was working late and lost track of time. You can claim you came to find me. Can’t be the first time it’s happened.”

Sam nodded nervously, and they darted across the quad and up the steps of the library. This at least was unlocked, which he hoped was a good sign, and they eased the creaky doors open, moving into the dim, arched shadows of the reading room. It was all very gothic and intelligent, and despite the exigency of the situation, Sam couldn’t help looking around interestedly, as it was the first time he had ever been here. He was just about to ask Jack if they could have a proper tour at some later point when they heard footsteps from behind a shelf, and froze in their tracks, in expectation of some enraged night porter popping out to apprehend them on the spot. But instead, a familiar voice croaked, “That you, lads?”

“What the – ” Forgetting all need for caution, Sam stomped forward. “MacGillivray? Is that you? I swear I’m going to wring your bloody old chicken neck, you git.”

A hoarse, ghostly chuckle answered him, just as the aged bookseller shuffled into sight. Sam considered asking how in the devil MacGillivray knew they would be coming to the library, but then decided as it could possibly involve the literal devil, he didn’t really want to know the answer to that question. “We’ve barely evaded the soldiers looking for you back at your shop, so. I hope you have a bloody explanation.”

“I have an explanation?” MacGillivray wheezed a laugh. “Ye were the one who volunteered so canny to do me errands, lad.”

“Which I might not have done if you’d told me that it was – that!”

“Ye opened it?” MacGillivray stared at him narrowly. “Didna I tell ye not to?”

“Aye, well, accidents happen, don’t they?” Sam folded his arms. “Seem to recall you said you wouldn’t get me hanged?”

“And I would ha’ kept that promise, as long as you didna ken what was in it.” MacGillivray seemed unruffled, or that could just be trying to pretend he didn’t notice Jack boring a hole through his head. “If ye were merely the innocent messenger, well, there’s rules about that sort of thing, are there no?”

“Listen, old man.” Jack moved up next to Sam. “I don’t care what loopholes you think you have worked out. You ever put Sam in danger like that again – he finds enough of it on his own, he doesn’t need help – then I’m breaking you into a thousand small pieces, consorting with King Solomon’s djinni or otherwise. The fuck were you even going to do with that thing, anyway? Put a curse on some rival lunatic?”

“If ye must ken, I had bigger plans for it.” MacGillivray raised a feathery eyebrow. “Was goin’ to hex George of Hanover, actually.”

“Oh, sweet Jesus,” Jack said. “That’s just fucking wonderful. Not only did you get Sam to smuggle you a book of demonology, you were then going to use it to commit high treason. Don’t you think that James Stuart, a man so Catholic he literally lives with the Pope in Rome, might have a thing or two to say about resorting to the forces of hell to win his throne?”

“What the king doesna ken won’t hurt him.” MacGillivray cackled. “Besides, it’s only the greatest spirits in that book that are what ye call evil. The rest, well, they’re neutral. Can be put to good or ill purposes, as the magician wishes.”

“Oh,” Sam said. “So you’re a magician now?”

“I’ve an interest in the mystic arts, aye.” MacGillivray shrugged, completely unruffled. “Surely ye guessed as much already?”

“Collecting a few alchemical oddities isn’t the same as full-on meddling with occult powers, you know.” Sam made a mental note never to tell his father about this, just in case. “Either it doesn’t work at all, or it does, and then you’re in a lot more hot bloody water than you bargained for. So frankly, it doesn’t sound like the – ”

MacGillivray chuckled, low and amused. “I appreciate your concern for me safety, lad, but I’m no amateur. Surely ye didna think that I decided on a lark to acquire such a dangerous book – dangerous to myself and to others? I dinna merely dabble, and it’s no merely a side hobby. So then. Hand it over, and I’ll have ye handsomely rewarded for your trouble.”

There was a brief, fraught pause. Then Jack said, “We don’t have it.”

MacGillivray’s rheumy eyes narrowed. “Ye what?”

Sam plucked nervously at Jack’s sleeve, as he was not sure that lying to a self-professed devotee of the cabbalistic arts was the best idea, and besides, they had come here with the intention of getting rid of the manuscript by hook or by crook. He didn’t think – he hoped not, at any rate – that Jack had decided that keeping it around was a great idea, and perhaps they should try out a few of the simpler incantations on nearby annoying persons (Sam had to admit, it would be nice if that worked). The tense moment remained as Jack and MacGillivray stared each other down. Then Jack said again, “Lost it. Sorry.”

MacGillivray’s eyes remained narrow. “That was very careless o’ ye.”

“Might be,” Jack said. “But frankly, if the alternative was having it used for that – we’ve both had plenty of damn trouble with the Jacobites already, we don’t need any more – and that was in any way related to us… well. I’m going to be a doctor, see. They make you take an oath to first, do no harm.”

“Aye, I’m familiar,” MacGillivray said impatiently. “But ye havena taken it yet, and besides, it would be my own actions, nae yours. So – ”

“Maybe,” Jack interrupted. “But if I gave it to you, knowing full well what it was and what you meant to use it for, that would be on my hands, wouldn’t it? I have enough on my conscience, I damn well don’t intend on adding that. Maybe the Rising happens. Maybe it doesn’t. But either way, it can be down to the efforts of men. Not – not this.”

MacGillivray regarded him for another tenuous moment. Then he said, “Ye didna actually lose it. Did ye.”

“No,” Jack said. “I didn’t. But you’re going to have to kill me to get hold of it, and even if you have some fell servant to do it for you, I’ll fight back.”

“Er.” Sam took a step. “Actually, please don’t kill him. Please.”

MacGillivray considered both of them. “Ye’ve been a good customer,” he said to Sam, after a pause. “And if ye still needed occupation, well, there’s certainly plenty I could teach ye. Knowledge beyond dreamin’, the weird and wild and magical and marvelous. Ye really want to throw it all away for this lad?”

“Yeah,” Sam said. “Frankly, I do. It’s not even that hard of a choice.”

MacGillivray sighed. “Far be it from me to stand in the way o’ true love, then. Maybe it’s nain sae bad that I leave Edinburgh for a bit. I’ll see to it that Balfour doesna give ye trouble. Either of ye change your mind, you ken where to find me. Good night, then? Good night.”

With that, as casually as if all of this had been an ordinary meeting in broad daylight, he strolled away down the reading room, as Jack and Sam watched him go with slightly stunned expressions. To say the least, that was not how they had seen any of that encounter going, and finally, Sam looked over at Jack. “Are we still leaving the blasted thing here, then?”

“I… no.” Jack shook his head, rubbing a hand over his face. “I can’t trust that whoever finds it will do the right thing. Suppose we have to destroy it after all. If it gets us possessed, well, all the bloody churches around here have to be good for something. It… it would be easy. To pass it off and make it someone else’s problem. But I don’t want to. Not anymore.”

“Well.” Sam looked at him tenderly, then reached out to take his hand. “Like hell am I letting you do that alone, either. Let’s go.”

It was very late by the time they had found a suitable spot to burn the book, and stared hard at the dancing flames, as if waiting to see if it would suddenly take form as an infernal creature and rush for their throats. The thick old parchment took a long time to be eaten through, cinders and sparks swirling in the dark air like pinpricks in a tin lantern, the wind making the embers flare and gutter. Jack poked the leaves of the manuscript in with a branch, as both of them felt a residual tinge of regret at destroying what was, despite its unfortunate purpose, a beautiful and fascinating old book. By the time it was finally mostly gone, and Jack kicked the ashes to disperse them, Sam was so tired that he was almost seeing double. “You – you think it’s safe to go back to our flat?”

“Can’t hurt to have a look.” Jack looked as if he too was trying not to crack his jaw yawning. “And they can’t know which one is ours exactly. Come on.”

With one final check to make the ashes were cool (the last thing they needed was to accidentally start a fire and burn down Edinburgh), they started off on what Sam devoutly hoped would be the last leg of the night’s whirlwind adventure. The streets were mostly quiet, except for street cats fighting over scraps with hisses and yowls, and they, mirabile visu, managed to reach Teviot Place without being set upon by any number of potential foes. They opened the front door and crept upstairs, extremely careful not to step on the creakiest of the steps, and then at last, with vast relief, fell through the door and into their room. “Oh, shit,” Sam said. “You have anatomy again tomorrow morning, don’t you?”

Jack considered, then shrugged. “Aye, I do. But there’s liable to be only half the class there anyway, the rest will have gone home for Easter. Suppose it won’t kill me to skip once.”

“You sure?” Sam already felt that he had been the cause of enough potential dereliction in Jack’s education, and did not want to be responsible for any more. “Because it’s my fault we’re up this late, so if you wanted to go anyway – ”

Jack cut him off by grabbing hold of his arms and kissing him thoroughly, which left Sam briefly but enjoyably dazed. “Not that I didn’t appreciate that,” he said, slightly breathless, when they pulled apart, “but are you sure – ”

“Aye,” Jack said emphatically. “I could use a bit of a break myself. Now come on. I’m bloody exhausted, let’s get into bed.”

They undressed and crawled under the covers, and after a final hesitation, Sam reached out, linked his arms around Jack, and snuggled himself against Jack’s lean, solid torso, head under his chin. Jack reached out to wrap his arms around him in return, and they lay there in silence for several moments, nestled beneath the quilts. Then Sam said softly, “You weren’t… scared at all? About burning the book? Just in case?”

“I wasn’t going to give it to MacGillivray.” Jack shifted position, pulling Sam half on top of him. “And… well, honestly, there’s nothing else in the world that can really scare me, not any more. Not… after last year.”

Sam opened his mouth, then shut it. He felt abashed and unsure and very pleased all at once, not wanting to ask in case he was wrong, and it wasn’t actually watching him almost die that had been Jack’s worst fear, and nothing could compare. He was surprised, therefore, when Jack said, with the same sort of hesitance, “And you… you’re sure you didn’t want to learn what… whatever it was, he was offering to teach you?”

“I can’t deny I was curious.” Sam kept his head on Jack’s chest, hand tracing light circles. “But – what, pick him and his bonkers books over you? Not going to happen. Not even a possibility.”

He felt Jack shudder with a long sigh, and for another moment, neither of them spoke. Then Jack said, “There’s a job at the university they’ve been advertising in the Gazette for. It would involve some travel – it’s to track down books and artifacts and other things for the university’s collections. Mostly to Glasgow and St. Andrews, but maybe so far as Newcastle or York. They want an educated man, and one who doesn’t mind a bit of adventure or haggling or chasing down interesting things. Of course, it could just be that you’d get into trouble with every venture, but… that’s not for me to say, that you can’t have the chance. I know the professor who put in the notice, I could say a word to him on your behalf. Eh?”

“Really?” Sam raised himself on his elbow. “You think so?”

Jack smiled up at him, reaching up to play drowsily with a strand of his hair. “I think you’d be perfect. Just don’t get yourself killed either, hey?”

“I – that sounds great, actually. I’d love to. At least talk to him about it, that is. And I’d still help you, because of course I would. If you absolutely wanted to stay here – in this room, I mean – well then, we…” Sam hesitated. “We can make it work?”

“No,” Jack said, after a pause. “You’re right. We don’t need to live at the very minimum end of our means and resources, and we don’t need to stick you in a leaky, drafty garret on top of everything else you’ve done, leaving your family and home and coming here with – well, with me.” He attempted a nonchalant shrug. “So sometime over the Easter holidays, all right. We can take the stagecoach to London and get some money from the Bank, then come back here and rent a decent place. Sound good?”

It was Sam’s turn to answer by kissing him, which he did just as thoroughly, holding on tightly to say that he knew how utterly terrifying and difficult it had been for Jack to even consider that suggestion, much less make it. “I love you,” he blurted out, when they finally broke apart. “You know that, don’t you?”

Jack blinked, looking slightly pole-axed. For a moment, he remained frozen, uncertain, as if giving Sam space to amend it, change his mind, retract it altogether. But when he didn’t, when Sam kept looking down at him just as fiercely, holding just as tight, Jack smiled, in the way that lit up his entire face, and Sam’s entire world. “Aye,” he said. “And I love you too.”

[theresawelchy]

Autoregressive Models in Deep Learning — A Brief Survey

My current project involves working with deep autoregressive models: a class of remarkable neural networks that aren’t usually seen on a first pass through deep learning. These notes are a quick write-up of my reading and research: I assume basic familiarity with deep learning, and aim to highlight similarities between asdf, instead of commenting on individual architectures.

tldr: Deep autoregressive models are sequence models, yet feed-forward (i.e. not recurrent); generative models, yet supervised. They are a compelling alternative to RNNs for sequential data, and GANs for generation tasks.

Deep Autoregressive Models

To be explicit (at the expense of redundancy), this blog post is about deep autoregressive generative sequence models. That’s quite a mouthful of jargon (and two of those words are actually unnecessary), so let’s unpack that.

Deep

Well, these papers are using TensorFlow or PyTorch… so they must be “deep”

You would think this word is unnecessary, but it’s actually not! Autoregressive linear models like ARMA or ARCH have been used in statistics, econometrics and financial modelling for ages.

Autoregressive

Stanford has a good introduction to autoregressive models, but I think a good way to explain these models is to compare them to recurrent neural networks (RNNs), which are far more well-known.

Obligatory RNN diagram. Source: Chris Olah.

Like an RNN, an autoregressive model’s output at time depends on not just , but also ’s from previous time steps. However, unlike an RNN, the previous ’s are not provided via some hidden state: they are given as just another input to the model.

The following animation of Google DeepMind’s WaveNet illustrates this well: the th output is generated in a feed-forward fashion from several input values.1

WaveNet animation. Source: Google DeepMind.

Put simply, an autoregressive model is merely a feed-forward model which predicts future values from past values.

I’ll explain this more later, but it’s worth saying now: autoregressive models offer a compelling bargain. You can have stable, parallel and easy-to-optimize training, faster inference computations, and completely do away with the fickleness of truncated backpropagation through time, if you are willing to accept a model that (by design) cannot have infinite memory. There is recent research to suggest that this is a worthwhile tradeoff.

Generative

Informally, a generative model is one that can generate new data after learning from the dataset.

More formally, a generative model models the joint distribution of the observation and the target . Contrast this to a discriminative model that models the conditional distribution .

GANs and VAEs are two families of popular generative models.

This is unnecessary word #1: any autoregressive model can be run sequentially to generate a new sequence! Start with your seed and predict . Then use to predict , and so on.

Sequence model

Fairly self explanatory: a model that deals with sequential data, whether it is mapping sequences to scalars (e.g. language models), or mapping sequences to sequences (e.g. machine translation models).

Although sequence models are designed for sequential data (duh), there has been success at applying them to non-sequential data. For example, PixelCNN (discussed below) can generate entire images, even though images are not sequential in nature: the model generates a pixel at a time, in sequence!2

Notice that an autoregressive model must be a sequence model, so it’s redundant to further describe these models as sequential (which makes this unnecessary word #2).

A good distinction is that “generative” and “sequential” describe what these models do, or what kind of data they deal with. “Autoregressive” describes how these models do what they do: i.e. they describe properties of the network or its architecture.

Some Architectures and Applications

Deep autoregressive models have seen a good degree of success: below is a list of some of examples. Each architecture merits exposition and discussion, but unfortunately there isn’t enough space here to devote to do any of them justice.

PixelCNN by Google DeepMind was probably the first deep autoregressive model, and the progenitor of most of the other models below. Ironically, the authors spend the bulk of the paper discussing a recurrent model, PixelRNN, and consider PixelCNN as a “workaround” to avoid excessive computation. However, PixelCNN is probably this paper’s most lasting contribution.

PixelCNN++ by OpenAI is, unsurprisingly, PixelCNN but with various improvements.

WaveNet by Google DeepMind is heavily inspired by PixelCNN, and models raw audio, not just encoded music. They had to pull a neat trick from telecommunications/signals processing in order to cope with the sheer size of audio (high-quality audio involves at least 16-bit precision samples, which means a 65,536-way-softmax per time step!)

Transformer, a.k.a. the “attention is all you need” model by Google Brain is now a mainstay of NLP, performing very well at many NLP tasks and being incorporated into subsequent models like BERT.

These models have also found applications: for example, Google DeepMind’s ByteNet can perform neural machine translation (in linear time!) and Google DeepMind’s Video Pixel Network can model video.3

Some Thoughts and Observations

Given previous values , these models do not output a value for , they output the predictive probability distribution for .

If the ’s are discrete, then you can do this by outputting an -way softmaxxed tensor, where is the number of discrete classes. This is what the original PixelCNN did, but gets problematic when is large (e.g. in the case of WaveNet, where ).

If the ’s are continuous, you can model the probability distribution itself as the sum of basis functions, and having the model output the parameters of these basis functions. This massively reduces the memory footprint of the model, and was an important contribution of PixelCNN++.

Theoretically you could have an autoregressive model that doesn’t model the conditional distribution… but most recent models do.

Autoregressive models are supervised.

With the success and hype of GANs and VAEs, it is easy to assume that all generative models are unsupervised: this is not true!

This means that that training is stable and highly parallelizable, that it is straightfoward to tune hyperparameters, and that inference is computationally inexpensive. We can also break out all the good stuff from ML-101: train-valid-test splits, cross validation, loss metrics, etc. These are all things that we lose when we resort to e.g. GANs.

Autoregressive models work on both continuous and discrete data.

Autoregressive sequential models have worked for audio (WaveNet), images (PixelCNN++) and text (Transformer): these models are very flexible in the kind of data that they can model.

Contrast this to GANs, which (as far as I’m aware) cannot model discrete data.

Autoregressive models are very amenable to conditioning.

There are many options for conditioning! You can condition on both discrete and continuous variables; you can condition at multiple time scales; you can even condition on latent embeddings or the outputs of other neural networks.

There is one ostensible problem with using autoregressive models as generative models: you can only condition on your data’s labels. I.e. unlike a GAN, you cannot condition on random noise and expect the model to shape the noise space into a semantically (stylistically) meaningful latent space.

Google DeepMind followed up their original PixelRNN paper with another paper that describes one way to overcome this problem. Briefly: to condition, they incorporate the latent vector into the PixelCNN’s activation functions; to produce/learn the latent vectors, they use a convolutional encoder; and to generate an image given a latent vector, they replace the traditional deconvolutional decoder with a conditional PixelCNN.

WaveNet goes even futher and employs “global” and “local” conditioning (both are achieved by incorporating the latent vectors into WaveNet’s activation functions). The authors devise a battery of conditioning schemes to capture speaker identity, linguistic features of input text, music genre, musical instrument, etc.

Generating output sequences of variable length is not straightforward.

Neither WaveNet nor PixelCNN needed to worry about a variable output length: both audio and images are comprised of a fixed number of outputs (i.e. audio is just samples, and images are just pixels).

Text, on the other hand, is different: sentences can be of variable length. One would think that this is a nail in a coffin, but thankfully text is discrete: the standard trick is to have a “stop token” that indicates that the sentence is finished (i.e. model a full stop as its own token).

As far as I am aware, there is no prior literature on having both problems: a variable-length output of continuous values.

Autoregressive models can model multiple timescales

In the case of music, there are important patterns to model at multiple time scales: individual musical notes drive correlations between audio samples at the millisecond scale, and music exhibits rhythmic patterns over the course of minutes. This is well illustrated by the following animation:

Audio exhibits patterns at multiple timescales. Source: Google DeepMind.

There are two main ways capture these many patterns at these many different time scales: either make the receptive field of your model extremely wide (e.g. through dilated convolutions), or condition your model on a subsampled version of your generated output, which is in turn produced by an unconditioned model.

Google DeepMind composes an unconditional PixelRNN with one or more conditional PixelRNNs to form a so-called “multi-scale” PixelRNN: the first PixelRNN generates a lower-resolution image that conditions the subsequent PixelRNNs.

WaveNet employs a technique and calls them “context stacks”.

How the hell can any of this stuff work?

RNNs are theoretically more expressive and powerful than autoregressive models. However, recent work suggests that such infinite-horizon memory is seldom achieved in practice.

To quote John Miller at the Berkeley AI Research lab:

Recurrent models trained in practice are effectively feed-forward. This could happen either because truncated backpropagation through time cannot learn patterns significantly longer than steps, or, more provocatively, because models trainable by gradient descent cannot have long-term memory.

DataTau published first on DataTau

[thelmasirby32]

Six tools for effective influencer-driven content marketing

30-second summary:

Why influencer marketing should be an essential part of any digital marketing strategy.

How to find approachable influencers, device the best way to associate them with your brand.

Research each influencer and each opportunity to maximize your chances to get noticed.

Plus, there’s a key to keep those initial relationships going for even more benefits, in the long run.

Internet Marketing Ninjas’ Community Manager gives you a concise overview of six great tools that can add value to your influencer-driven content marketing efforts.

In the most basic sense, influencer marketing is about building connections with niche experts and mentors who have enough authority to influence other people’s buying decisions.

Influencer marketing is one of the most efficient ways to build brand awareness and trust as well as increase sales and leads.

The simplest example of an influencer marketing is a brand sponsoring a video product review on YouTube or a visual endorsement on Instagram done by a user with a solid following.

While the above is a good way to convert a lot of people into actual sales in ecommerce, influencer marketing can be effective in blog marketing, too.

In fact, when applied to blogs, influencer marketing is much more diverse and long-term than it is in e-commerce. It’s about engaging niche experts in creating and/or promoting content for your site which in turn builds your traffic and authority.

When an influencer takes a part in your blog life—contributing, commenting, or providing a quote—they are more likely to help you promote that content thus bringing your blog in front of their following and building your brand.

Let’s see how it works…

Who are influencers?

That is a tougher question than it seems.

There have been many attempts to measure online influence, none of which is satisfying enough.

Neither the number of followers nor the various metrics (for example, Klout score) can fully reflect influence.

In fact, a person can have just around 1K followers on Twitter and still be able to influence most of those followers with their tweets. Or one can have 10 Facebook fans, yet a huge following on Pinterest.

And it becomes more complicated when you start looking at different niches. Some industries are more “Twitter-friendly.” Most (local) news outlets have huge Twitter following, for example, while health and beauty bloggers have more success on YouTube, Instagram, and Pinterest.

All in all, no tool can provide you with a ready-to-go list of niche influencers. Identifying true influencers (who are also willing to interact with you) is a long process involving much searching, browsing, and reading.

So, how to create an effective influencer-driven content marketing strategy?

1. Identify searchable content topics: Ubersuggest

Keyword research should be your very first step when planning any content marketing project, including an influencer-driven one.

Keyword research may be quite overwhelming, so here’s the easiest – yet one of the most comprehensive tools to try: Ubersuggest

The tool can be run for free and it returns pretty awesome data, including a so-called “SEO difficulty” of each keyword, which is the number that reflects organic competition. The number allows content marketers to choose search queries that will be easier to rank for:

Source: Ubersuggest (July 2020)

Why Ubersuggest?

From experience, it is the easiest tool to figure out, even if you are very new to keyword research. It is also very usable for free. If you choose to upgrade, it costs $29 per month for an individual managing one-two-three websites.

2. Search for content-producing influencers: Buzzsumo

On BuzzSumo, you’ll find bloggers writing about your topic.

What I like about it is that you can play around filters to limit results to long-form articles, videos, listicles, and more. This offers powerful tools to better research your niche content and authors:

Source: BuzzSumo (July 2020)

Apart from content research, Buzzsumo offers more sections including Youtube influencers, Twitter influencers, and more.

Search individual social media platforms

Of course, by only using BuzzSumo you miss out on important platforms like YouTube, Instagram, Tumblr, and the others.

So make sure you go directly to those platforms (especially those that are more popular in your niche) and play with their native search feature to expand your list.

Use Google to search for interviews and podcasts

Active influencers are usually invited to talk about their expertise. Searching something like [your topic interview] or [your topic opinion] will let you find more influencers.

Why Buzzsumo?

I am simply unaware of a tool that would offer the aforementioned influencer research features. Buzzsumo offers a seven-day trial and it will cost $99 per month for a team of five users.

More tools to find influencers:

Fanpage Karma: Provide the competitor’s Facebook page and the tool shows its most influential and most engaged fans

FollowerWonk (Twitter bio search tool): Use it to find members of prominent blogging and news outlet teams

It is also a good idea to find which influencers your competitors are working with. Here’s a quick guide on how to do that.

3. Research each social media account on your initial list

The number of followers doesn’t matter as much as the number of actual interactions.

Twitonomy is a good free way to quickly run an interaction analysis of any Twitter account.

Source: Twitonomy (July 2020)

Why Twitonomy?

Twitonomy offers a pretty solid report completely for free. Should I say more?

The same goes for Facebook presence: Ignore the number of friends or fans and scroll down the page to see if people engage with the updates and how many updates go unnoticed.

4. Create a list of who you plan to reach out to: Google Spreadsheets

Be very selective. Your decisive criteria to whether include an influencer or not to the list should be whether they seem to interact back with followers.

Don’t spend your time trying to hear back from someone who never replies to comments, thanks for shares, likes someone else’s updates, etc.

Now you don’t want to create a list of 1,000 influencers. Depending on your industry and time availability, anything between 20 and 50 is a good start.

What you want to have in that list

Influencer’s primary account and name

More social media profiles (make sure you follow them everywhere)

Whatever other contact info you have ever used or are aware of

Whether you had any previous contact or engagement and when

Any notes you choose to make

The list will grow and change over time but don’t get overwhelmed with too many rows and columns at the start. I love using spreadsheets to maintain a list of contacts.

Why Google Spreadsheets?

Google Spreadsheets are absolutely free and offer a great set of features. They are also incredibly fast which is very important for collaboration.

Spreadsheets can be shared across teams, so they are great for collaboration. You can also integrate Google Drive into your WordPress dashboard to make it easier to find and access.

5. Come up with interesting questions: Text Optimizer

To help you come up with interesting questions for your expert roundups, Text Optimizer offers a handy tool for collecting and analyzing popular questions for any niche. Use the tool to come up with influencer-driven content ideas:

Source: Text Optimizer (July 2020)

Why Text Optimizer?

The tool doesn’t rely on any API: Their data completely relies on the semantic analysis of the tool. This ensures two things:

The data is not skewed by any single source

The data is only available to the current users of the tool

It is one of those tools that hasn’t been overused yet, so you can rest assured your competitors may not yet have it. The tool offers a seven-day free trial, and will cost $60 a month after that.

Question research is a great tool to build influencer-driven content but there are more ideas to consider:

Brainstorm ideas that relate to your product lifecycle

Use surveys to generate more ideas from your audience

6. Retarget your influencer-driven content visitors: Finteza

Finally, if someone visits your influencer-driven content you can safely assume that they were there for the sake of the influencer(s), so you can engage them better by serving custom CTAs once they are back to the site.

Finteza allows you to set up on-site remarketing campaigns: You can set up your roundup visits as an event and serve those visitors custom CTAs inviting them to buy a matching product or optin using a related content upgrade:

Source: Finteza (July 2020)

Why Finteza?

I am not aware of any independent web analytics platform that would offer a remarketing functionality on such an affordable budget. The tool offers a 30-day free trial and will cost $4 per 100,000 impressions a month.

You can use Facebook remarketing options to reach your visitors outside of your site. This is especially powerful for lead generation purposes (when you use influencer-driven content to generate webinar signups or whitepaper downloads). Here’s an easy way to install Facebook pixel on your site for you to start collecting the data.

Conclusion

When influencer marketing drives your blog promotion, you can achieve both: a much more in-depth content and more shares and traffic.

It’s a long process but it’s well worth the effort in the long run.

Ann Smarty is the blogger and community manager at Internet Marketing Ninjas. She can be found on Twitter @seosmarty.

The post Six tools for effective influencer-driven content marketing appeared first on Search Engine Watch.

from Digital Marketing News https://www.searchenginewatch.com/2020/08/07/six-tools-for-effective-influencer-driven-content-marketing/

[martechadvisor-blog]

How MTA is Helping Marketers Succeed: since 2014

It was a warm sunny day…

Well, that’s how some stories begin.

This is how ours did.

Sometime in 2013… At a company retreat, Ankush Gupta, then the VP of marketing at DemandShore had an idea that involved documenting the fast growing martech space.

  Almost 7,000 companies are now part of the Martech landscape today. As entrepreneurs, when it came to serving a trillion-dollar-a-year industry that leads to disruptions in so many ways, the first question that popped to mind was, ‘Why Not’?

The Founders of Revenu8, the parent company backed the idea.  Abhijit Gangoli says, “3 years ago, our lead generation business had been growing rapidly and every month brought with it new challenges and opportunities. As part of the space, we’d been following the Martech industry quite closely; Here is why we felt the investment was a good one:

After decades of technology investments going into business operation standardization (ERP and related solutions) that impacted a company’s bottom line performance, the next wave of technology adoption among enterprises was going to be around increasing the top line- i.e; Sales & Marketing automation.

Internet and Digital had finally come of age, and it was evident that with SAAS & Cloud based solutions- the customer acquisition cycle was going to increasingly move to digital. (As we speak it is estimated that more than 70% of the buyer journey today for B2B technology is already digital)

Marketing technology as a domain had exploded from 500 products in 2012 to more than 2000 products in 2014. Today it stands at more than 7000 known products!!

The traditional marketer was neither equipped nor disposed towards using technology to run marketing programs. With the increasing number of tools available in the market then, there was immense pressure on the marketer to understand, identify and leverage the right set of marketing technology tools to deliver results. And the more we looked around, the more we realized that there were almost no media properties focused on the marketing decision maker as yet. Whereas there were more than a 1000 similar properties for IT decision makers!

We were one of the earliest starters as a platform to help marketers understand marketing technology, choose the right set of tools for her/his marketing environment, develop new skillsets to be able to leverage these technologies, AND find new talent to build a robust team to build & manage the martech landscape! But we also provided a valuable service to Martech vendors- by providing a platform for them to reach relevant audiences, engage with them, and expand their martech horizons. Today, even as we expand, our guiding force is still ‘Helping marketers succeed’."

MarTech Advisor as of October 2014:

By understanding the various ways in which technology can support different marketing functions, MarTech Advisor has always endeavored to add crucial value to both the vendor side of the table and marketing practitioners in the B2B segment by sharing interesting insights, key industry changes and trends, unbiased news and expert opinions.

    How has MarTech Advisor ‘helped marketers’ since 2014?

Christine Crandell, Chief Customer Strategist & President at New Business Strategies chimes, "What I find the most valuable about MarTech Advisor is how current the breadth of information is. The thought leadership is excellent - not too high level and not too detailed, just right.  MarTech Advisor does a good job of curating content on top issues and is my go to source when I want to dive deep into a trend, best practice or new topic.”

David Raab, widely recognized expert in marketing technology and analytics adds, “It has become a reliable source for industry news, analysis and opinion.  That’s very important in an industry that changes as quickly as martech. It has been a pleasure to work with MarTech Advisor as they grow their expertise and expand their services.”

  Over the past few years the union of technology & marketing has created software products and platforms that are redefining the way in which modern marketers go about their jobs.

Brian Ferrario, VP of Marketing at San Mateo based Drawbridge, a company in the programmatic advertising industry adds, “I think the very fact that it's positioned as a “platform” says a lot – it says MTA is thinking about going way beyond crafting a simple news site or a product review site. The most interesting thing about the platform is that there isn’t just one thing to focus on. To me it’s a smorgasbord – a one-stop shop for exploring strategy, insights, tactical tips & tricks, thought leadership, networking, trends, stats, products, news, and tons of other things. It keeps me fresh and up-to-date on what in the world of martech is happening that might impact me, help me, enlighten me, or even entertain me. As a marketing exec my biggest fear is going off the back on staying current, or what I would call becoming lazy from “breathing your own exhaust” on what you think best practices are.”

“It’s definitely added tons of value to both our corporate brand and what I would call my personal brand along the way.  It’s a great place to both extract value and add value by having a voice in the conversation through contributed pieces and commentary. I’m looking forward to being apart of a “platform” that continues to grow, morph, and add new functionality – currently loving the video interviews that let us go beyond simply reading answers to seeing and hearing from people in the industry.”

Lauren Tascan of Fluid Speak, a PR agency who has been associated with MTA since the beginning contributes, “MarTech Advisor plays an important role in helping marketers navigate the complex martech ecosystem. The up to the minute news, research, and thought-provoking articles provide practical advice and helpful analysis, making complex topics seem simple and accessible for marketing audiences.”

Then and Now

Ankush Gupta, one of the key founding members who served as the first Editor-in-Chief sums up, “MarTech Advisor was born with the aim of providing gainful knowledge, opportunities & insights to the modern marketer. I was inspired by the work that Scott Brinker and David Raab were doing in really pushing an understanding of how diverse the martech landscape had become and I saw an opportunity to take an editorial position and bridge the gap between all of this innovation taking place on one hand and marketers who were either stuggling to make sense of all the changes their roles were undergoing as a result of all of this tech influx or either not being aware enough of the choices that existed before them like no other time in history!

Post our launch in October 2014, what took us all by surprise was the quick acceptance of MTA and its subsequent explosive growth. I think our timing was spot on and the quality of our content really resonated with marketers. That gave us confidence to add a marketing software review platform where marketers could read reviews left behind by their peers and a job board to serve the latest openings in marketing technology.

Today I feel that we have a responsibility more than ever to keep a strong focus on the quality of content and to continuously evolve our platform to seamlessly offer marketers the opportunity to learn & grow without having to worry about the credibility of the brand or content offering. I think MarTech Advisor is going to remain relevant for a long time to come and I am proud to be associated with the creation of this platform and its continuing journey.”

Happy Birthday MTA!

Abhijit Gangoli, concludes, “In these three years, the team has strived to gain ground in this evolving field. MTA today is recognized as one of the leading media brands addressing the martech space. The road ahead is going to be defined by the quality of content we deliver, the new age formats that we adopt to make the content more engaging, and the value we are able to innovate and co-create with our stakeholders. We need to strive to make MTA the first choice for every marketer when it comes to Martech. Everything we do from a Technology , Editorial, Solutioning and Operations perspective should deliver value to our audiences and our clients and we hope that they do.”

He signs of saying, “Thank you to all our team members, subscribers, readers and clients for all your support and hard work. I’m sure we’ll have a lot more to talk about together on our 4th anniversary a year from now!”

MarTech Advisor Key Features

MTA acts as a platform for a 1.1 million subscriber base of marketing and sales professionals to put forth their views, exchange best practices, share opinions through a Guest Author Publishing Program. Key executives write bylined content pieces on martech, marketing and sales related topics, which are amplified through our multiple social channels for wider outreach to the entire marketing universe.

MTA's hosts an invite-only MarTech Maven featured panel, where marketing leaders and opinion-makers from the martech industry share key insights on leading martech categories.

MTA hosts a MarTech Advisor Video Interview series, now revamped, which features conversations on martech issues with the marketing leadership of various companies. 

Martech users share their feedback and testimonials on MTA's Reviews platform, so prospects intending to invest in this segment could benefit extensively with their inputs. 

MTA's Research team works closely with martech companies to generate original content for whitepapers, research reports, analyzing survey data, SMB buyer's guides for various martech categories.

MTA regularly has Media partnerships with major martech brands and leading events like Salesforce (Connections and Dreamforce), Terminus, MarTech Conference US and Europe, Oracle MME 2016, Demandbase Marketing Innovation Summit 2016, 2017, Allbound CO:LLABORATE 2016. 

MTA actively hosts custom and on-demand webinars on various martech categories.

This article was first appeared on MarTech Advisor

[susalh-blog]

Sure, Let’s Talk Health (Pt. 1)

I know that my children don’t understand my health situation.  I know they expect me to feel all better - and wonder why I don’t. The concept of having a chronic disorder/disease is intellectually understandable to them, but I still get questions and comments revolving around “are you better yet?”.  So let’s see if I can color in this paint-by-number topic to the point of providing clarity of subject matter.

I don’t remember a time when I was healthy - actually that’s not true; I remember being a healthish young adult.... but that’s much later and not quite true. I was a healthy baby, it would seem.  I recall neither the reality nor family stories.  Aside from accidentally swallowing a tinker toy when I was about 3, I don’t recall a medical thing happening to me.  

That changed when we moved to St. Louis, when I was around 4.  When I was 5, I had a horrid case of the measles.  I lay in bed in a dark room, for days. My fever crossed 105 degrees, 4 days in a row, and my parents thought that was the end of me.  I was too sick to transport to the hospital, so my pediatrician made a house call, hooking me up to IV’s in my thighs.  (This, by the way, was the start of a terrible needle phobia. You don’t get IV’s, with people holding you down while you thrashed having fever dreams, and not have a resultant phobia.)  I did survive but with my budding permanent teeth “fried” - I would have brownish teeth for the rest of my life. Yes, that is a thing - look it up.

As I said, I did survive, but was far too weak to go to kindergarten, so I was babysat by a lady up the block, while my mother worked on the 1960 National Census.  A couple days into this arrangement, the lady met us at the door highly agitated.  “Don’t come in!  My kids have the mumps!  Get Susan away from here!”

Mama took me home and called the pediatrician who, alarmed, brought us immediately into the office to begin a course of an experimental mumps vaccine.  I can remember the terror of getting this shot after my measles experience!  I shrieked and had to be held down - not once, but 3 times over the course of as many weeks.  Talk about nightmares.

Since I now needed to be carefully watched (for side effects of the shots as well as my weak constitution), Mama bundled me into the back of our Ford Falcon and drove me around while she went house to house conducting her census surveys.  I had a nest in the back seat: Blankets, pillows, books, paper, scissors, crayons and tape.  I was given milk and snacks at almost every stop to build up my strength and weight.  

After that, I have memories of constant sickness, but which I figured was normal childhood.  Beginning around 3rd grade, I was sick (missing school) basically a week of every month.  I had fierce sinus infections and miserable tonsillitis.  I never had my tonsils out because my pediatrician (who had saved my life, so could do no harm in my parents’ eyes) was “nouvelle” and felt that tonsils had to stay in.  I remember the feeling of a tonsil episode starting: A quivering feeling in the back of my throat - as though my throat were dry. So I would swallow and swallow and within an hour or so, the quiver had turned into t localized stab of pain.  Fever would shoot up, and I was down for the count. 

I also remember sickening sinus headaches, which often started at school and left me leaning against the bus windows coming home, letting the cool glass sooth my pain somewhat.  I would sometimes have to sick down on the walk home from the bus stop because I felt so so sick.  At home I went up to bed, using a Vicks inhaler and VapoRub on my face as a remedy.  The Vicks burned mightily, but I stood it, believing that it was literally burning the pain out of me.  As its pain ebbed, I usually fell asleep, and often work with the headache gone, but feeling rather groggy and stunned.  It was a miracle when SinuTabs were invented.  They would keep the pain down to a dull roar, and I could continue through my day.  As an adult, I realized that I LIVED with sinus infections - heavy yellow snot, unable to breathe, low grade fever and all - and never thought anything of it (except the feeling of aggravation that ‘here comes another one’).  It was not until I was an adult, and got my own adult doctor in Charlottesville, that I learned this was an infection, which needed to be dealt with, and which, miraculously! could be tamed with antibiotics!  

What were my parents thinking?  I don’t know.  These two monsters of my childhood, tonsillitis and sinusitis, were ignored. I was told to get dressed and get to school unless I had a fever (which I did a lot of the time as my report cards attest!) and told to get more sleep.  When I was sick, I was put to bed and basically ignored.  I had my own personal bed table for when I was sick.  I read a lot of books and made villages of cardboard on my bed.  As an adolescent, I was allowed to watch TV.  My mama would bring me lunch, usually soup and jello, but left me alone the rest of the time.  I don’t know. Maybe they were more attentive than I remember, but I have no memory of that at all, which really makes me sad.  I’m actually crying while writing this, because I feel so bad for that lonely little sick kid.  

One distinct memory - and I am sorry at both the pathos and the pity this will engender.  I remember one time when I had a stomach flu.  I was expected to get up and go throw up in the connecting bathroom (no trash can for me!). But I had such a high fever, and I was so ill, that all I could manage was to roll to the side of the bed and throw up on the floor and then, basically, pass out, until I needed to vomit the next time.  I can remember calling for my parents, but no one came.  That was in St. Louis in our big house, so maybe they didn’t hear me.  But no one came and I threw up several times.  I don’t recall having that mess cleaned up or what happened next.  

I also remember having fever dreams, where everything swelled to enormous size and I had to find my way out of a world of “balloon creatures”.  I can remember the joy of breaking out in a deep sweat and knowing my fever was breaking.  I can remember the odd, glassy, glowy feeling of stepping back into the real world where everything seemed fresh and shiny!

When our family moved to Washington, D.C., and I was in 5th grade (age 11), I missed my last month of school in St. Louis because I was violently ill with what I thought was tonsillitis, but was something more sinister -scarlet fever, perhaps?  We had to move from our house while I was ill, and my father went on to D.C., while my mother and I stayed in a nearby hotel.  I remember that the linens in that hotel felt awful, and the sofa bed I slept in was uncomfortable.  I recovered enough to go visit school on the last day.  My mother drove me there, and my classmates surprised me with a going away party!  They had little gifts for me, and we had a cake.  They couldn’t come near me for fear that I would pick up another germ. I remember waving to them, 10 feet away or so.  I loved my teachers, Mrs. Wall, for doing that for me.

In Washington, my “worst case ever seen” of measles, was joined by a “worse case ever seen” of chicken pox.  I had them between my toes, in my eyes, everywhere!  My niece and nephew, roughly 4 and 5 years old, also had them.  It was the March after my mother had died, and Dad and Anne had to work, so I babysat all three of us as we lived through the pox, then each developed secondary infections.  I can remember painting pink calamine on ourselves for both fun and relief, and begging my father for a gun like toy and setting up a shooting range in my room for fun.  Weird.  Horrid and weird. Where were the adults?!?

I also got a case of German measles, which seemed like lightweight stuff after the other two.  I never got the mumps: That experimental vaccine worked, it seemed.

In the year after my mother died, I missed school rather a lot with stomach aches.  Frankly, I don’t think that was actually illness; I think that was psychosomatic illness due to depression.  Whatever, I was home and binged on TV, days at a time.  I don’t remember much else about that period.

As I got older, I managed my headaches better and the tonsils seemed to settle down.  In college, I got a horrible earache, which the clinic told me was nothing, but which burst once I got home for Christmas.  Our hometown doctor was furious that they hadn’t dealt with it more actively.  That’s why my right ear has diminished hearing.  

Through my young adult years, I was plagued with hard strong, irregular periods.  At 22, I was told that I might as well get a hysterectomy, since I would never have children.  A second opinion confirmed the first.  Thankfully, I ignored them both. When Peter and I got married, we went to an OB/GYN to get me checked out.  He told us that I looked fine “in there” and go ahead and try for kids - if nothing happened in a couple of years we could talk again.  Little did we all know that I was actually already pregnant.  With twins.  

My pregnancies were dreadful.  I couldn’t keep any food down with the twins, and lost 35 pounds in the first trimester.  I was down to roughly 100 lbs.  When I began throwing up water, I was hospitalized to get things under control.  There, I literally almost died, when I had a severe allergic reaction to compazine, given to me for nausea.  The nurse would not believe me that I couldn’t swallow and was having trouble breathing.  She said I was just over reacting because it was my first pregnancy, but I was having an anaphylactic reaction. Peter wandered in and saw me in dire straits and ran out to the nurses station where they told him to calm down.  He ran downstairs, across the street to the doctor’s office and got him to come in a rush.  Dr. Vogel showed up at a dead run, called for Benedryl, which he administered, then sat with me while I recovered until I slept. He held my hand and kept apologizing.  Apparently he then went straight out and got the nurse fired.  We almost lost me and my beautiful boys that day.

It was also the first in a long, long sequence of allergic reactions to drugs.  Thankfully, we had a friend who was a pharmacologist who helped us negotiate this crooked path.   He gave us a list of warnings, starting with the compazine, which he says I should never have been given since I was allergic to aspiriin.

I regained the weight I had lost, handled a difficult pregnancy (which included PUP - or an allergic reaction to the babies’ placenta), and gave birth to gorgeous Paul and Daniel.  Four years later I gave birth (after a pregnancy that was slightly less hard) to beautiful Mary.  If you look at photos of this era, I was a stick - in fact, a friend said that pregnant, I looked like a cocktail olive on a toothpick.  

Once these years passed, I was slammed with weight gain.  I’ve never really figured this out.  I went from a super skinny mother, who took and taught aerobics, hiked up hills, carried around my kids in backpacks, and cared for a large house, to an overweight Woman of Pain. In graduate school, I ran with a group on Columbia’s indoor track, managing several miles at a time while we talked about our readings.  

But suddenly I could barely get through a day with out several doses of Tylenol for the pain.  I gained an enormous amount of weight, while eating ‘normally’.  By the time we moved to Portland, I was a fat, painful mess, and wondered what on earth had gone wrong.

This takes energy - more later.