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fishoutofcamelot · 5 years ago

Note

I saw your r recent contribution to the post about hard vs soft magic systems and I agree wholeheartedly. You also mentioned having a bunch of worldbuilding and stuff about the magic system, and I was wondering if you'd be willing to share some?

(For reference, this is the post in question)

Certainly! While the worldbuilding/magicbuilding hellscape i was describing in the notes is actually in regards to an original-content wip I've been working on, i also have a LOT of headcanons regarding the BBCM magic system too! (Do not ask about my wip's magic system, because i won't be able to shut up about it)

WARNING: long post ahead and mobile won't let me include a cutoff/read-more line. If you're not interested, get ready to scroll down like your life depends on it (and it does).

So! First things first. Here's what we know about the BBCM magic system:

Magic requires spells, most of the time. This seems like a no-brainer, but still an important distinction. There are a lot of magic systems that don't require vocalized spells - Avatar: the Last Airbender, Fullmetal Alchemist, and Ninjago, to name a few. Spells are rather common for wizard/witch/medieval fantasies, and are typically used to control and channel the intent of the magic. This suggests that the magic of BBCM is some kind of force or energy that needs spoken commands to control.

Spells are repurposed words from Old English, aka the language of the Old Religion. (Let's ignore the obvious anachronistic nightmare of the fact that Old English is exactly the same language they would've been speaking in this time period.)

The use of a spell causes someone's eyes to flare gold, plus that fancy wooshing sound effect that Arthur miraculously never hears. This suggests that magic somehow changes your physiology, although it could be also just be a side effect of channeling.

However, magic doesn't always require a spell. Though never fully explained, it appears to be something only innate magic users are capable of - Merlin, Morgana, Mordred. It is something less controllable than spellwork, typically governed by moments of strong emotion rather than logical intent.

The show consistently flip-flops between the idea that magic is something you're born with, and that Merlin is rare for being born with magic. It's never clarified just how someone acquires magic. Gaius asks Merlin where he studied, suggesting that it's something you can learn, while Balinor claims that you either have it or you don't. Though not confirmed fact, i suspect it's similar to how it works in the show Supernatural. There, some witches are natural-born, while others are taught (and some get their powers from spooky demon deals).

It has a life-for-a-life policy. Basically like the Law of Equivalent Exchange from Fullmetal Alchemist, a life cannot be created without another one being sacrificed first. This rule only canonically applies to creating life/the Cup of Life, and any other possible applications aren't addressed.

This rule apparently doesn't apply to animals, as Merlin brought a dog statue to life without killing anyone (that we know of), and Valiant's shield had three live snakes in it. However, it's possible that lives were taken as payment in the process of animation without Merlin's knowledge, but it never happens on screen so we don't know. So either a) animals don't have souls to exchange in the life-for-a-life policy, b) they do but it happens off-screen, or c) those animated animals aren't actually alive.

The Cup of Life infuriates me from a magicbuilding perspective. Ignoring the obvious question of how it came into the druids' possession, its existence isn't clearly defined. Does it require the fancy rain ritual that Nimueh gave it, or was she just extra? Why does drinking from it give you life, while bleeding into it makes you undead and also mindlessly obedient to the sorcerer who made you as such? Were there life-for-a-life consequences for creating an immortal army? Wtf happened on the Isle of the Blessed to allow Merlin to "master life and death", and what does that even mean? All valid questions that never get answered.

Spells sometimes need need a 'source'. Think the staff from "The Tears of Uther Pendragon" and Morgana from "The Fires of Idirsholas." It is unclear what makes these spells different/special.

There is a power hierarchy. Some spells are too powerful for some practitioners to cast, although the reason for this is unclear. Does it drain you of energy/life force? Do you exhaust/overwork your magic muscles? Do you get a little pop-up that says 404 Magic Not Found? Unclear.

Magic is something that can be trained and improved. For example, Morgana gradually became more powerful over time. Merlin naturally had a lot of power straight off the jump and just had to discipline it, but he's a ~special~ case so he doesn't count.

There are some subsets of magic that are definitively born traits. Morgana is a Seer, possessing this capability even before her magic manifested. Likewise, Merlin is a dragonlord, which he inherited from Balinor. Although Balinor did mention that it wasn't a sure thing he would have the ability until he faced a dragon, so there may be some variation in whether or not someone lucks out in the Magic Gene Pool. This may suggest that natural-born magic is hereditary, as both Morgana and her sister Morgause had it. Vivienne and Gorlois both probably didn't have it, otherwise you'd hear Uther bellyaching about it, which raises the question of where they got it? A grandparent, perhaps? Maybe they both carried a recessive magic gene or something...

Unless you're Merlin, magic can be taken away by the Gean Canagh. It's not explained how this is possible, though, as it's never explained how you acquire magic in the first place. But Merlin never lost his magic because he's "magic itself" which if you ask me is just a deus ex machina wrapped inside a headache wrapped inside a heaping load of chosen one bullcrap. But it's canonical lore, so we have to consider it.

Despite my previous complaints, i actually find the idea of Merlin being "magic itself" rather intriguing. Is he a creature of magic, like a dragon or a questing beast? Is his body made of magic, like how a statue might be made of clay? Does it run through his veins like blood? If this is the case, then why didn't he suffer more severe ramifications for losing his magic? Why didn't it kill him? How did it restrict his magic in the first place? Placebo effect? The fanon explanation is that he's "the living embodiment of magic" but that makes my bullcrap richter scale shoot off the charts because that makes NO sense whatsoever. "Son of the earth, sea, and sky?" What does that MEAN?

There is a vivid link between magic and the Old Religion, which has its own beliefs and rituals and deities. Primarily, the Triple Goddess. The Triple Goddess is actually an existing deity in Neopaganism and Wicca. This also suggests the existence of the Horned God, another entity from neopagan lore and her masculine consort/counterpart, but that is never confirmed.

WHO. OR. WHAT. IS. THE. FREAKING. DOCHRAID. She's described as a creature of magic, which suggests that humans/humanoids can be creatures of magic, fueling my theory that 'Emrys' isn't human.

Destiny exists. It is unclear who creates/writes destiny, who controls it, who or what is privy to knowing about it, and what that means for the concept of free will.

The crystal cave is a thing, i guess. It's the heart of magic, is haunted by Taliesin, and is filled with prophetic crystals. I actually skipped the episodes that involve this stuff because i disliked them, so i don't know much about the Crystal Cave. Apparently ghosts can manifest there tho???

The veil is a thing too. It is unclear how some spirits can retain their human figure and mentality, like Balinor and Uther, but others become dorocha. I imagine its also like Supernatural - being a ghost for long enough will drive you insane, and though it takes a while all spirits eventually turn into dorocha.

Creatures of magic exist. These are normal creatures who have magic imbued into them somehow.

Okay, i think that's everything we know. It seems like a lot, but keep in mind that all of those rules are VERY nebulous. But that at least gives us a jumping-off point!

So here's my working theory/headcanon.

Magic comes from a connection to the spiritual energies of the Triple Goddess. Kinda like a third eye, and for the sake of simplicity that's what we'll call it. The druids have adapted a way of life that revolves around faith and magic, likely in an attempt to cultivate and one day attain this Third Eye. Like Gaius, who trained with the High Priestesses, you can study and practice and discipline yourself into acquiring it.

Magic is a cosmic force owned by the Triple Goddess, accessible to anyone with the Third Eye link. Imagine the Triple Goddess as a milkshake and the so-called Third Eye as a straw. The studying and training that people dedicate their whole lives to is basically just looking for/building a straw.

However, some people are just naturally born with a straw in hand, but require practice and study to be able to properly use it. Or like Morgana, it takes a few years for them to even find it/activate it.

Spellcasting is essentially just sucking through the straw, and the vocalized spells gives that Magic Milkshake some purpose/intent/shape.

The bigger the spell, the more Magic Milkshake is required. Some people have bigger/wider straws than others, so magic comes easier for them. But with enough training and practice anyone can widen their straw/strengthen their straw-sucking muscles to cast with the big leagues.

The Gean Canagh devours your straw/Third Eye. Perhaps you have to rebuild a new spiritual connection from scratch, or perhaps it permanently severs any and all connection to the Triple Goddess. Like getting excommunicated from the Church, only worse.

The Crystal Cave was/is the Triple Goddess's home, but she's out of town on a business trip atm so she left the spirit of her most loyal follower, Taliesin, to look after the place. It's super powerful and has all those cool crystals because it's hella steeped in her magic juices.

While most magic users get a standard-issue straw, others get Fancy Premium Membership Straws. Normal joe shmoes like Gilli have plastic straws, while a Seer like Morgana has a metal one or something (can you tell this metaphor is starting to get out of hand?). Those Premium Straws are only hereditary in nature. So there's a Seer Straw, or a Dragonlord Straw, or a Disir Straw, but it's also not a sure thing you'll even inherit it at all. It's all luck of the straw draw.

Creatures of magic aren't just animals that possess straws, though. They've been made/produced using magic rituals and processes and spells. Like Nimueh's afanc, nathairs, wraiths, shades, etc. So probably like a thousand years ago, some especially powerful shmuck came by and invented dragons. Which leads me to an important question: WHO THE HELL THOUGHT THE DOCHRAID WAS A GOOD IDEA.

Im reluctant to say these creatures were invented by the Triple Goddess, though, for reasons I'll get to in a moment.

So this still leaves the whole Cup of Life, life-for-a-life policy thing to be explained. I do believe that the policy is universally applicable to the creation of souls, and i do believe that animals have souls too. But individuals get their souls exchanged for those of equal value. So every soul has a certain weight to it, and you need to exchange souls of equal weight to create one. So when Merlin brought the dog to life, some random dog somewhere dropped dead against his knowledge.

Creating undead armies involves killing them and then resurrecting them. That's what 'undead' means. Zombies. So yes, to raise an immortal zombie army, Morgause's spell probably caused a bunch of people around the world to mysteriously drop dead.

Which leaves two last things to explain: destiny and Merlin.

Destiny is, i think, a combined effort between human choice and supernatural predeterminism. That is, for the most part humans make their own choices, but there are occasions where the Triple Goddess has to step in and do some course correction. Uther starting the Purge was free will, but Arthur and Merlin's destiny was an act of divine damage control. The Triple Goddess sets destiny into motion and informs a chosen few about it.

Okay SO. That leaves Merlin. And this is the bit im kinda excited about.

The Triple Goddess is a reservoir of power, a cosmic force of spiritual energy intrinsicallu linked to the fabric of the universe. People can spiritually reach out and tune into/channel her supernatural frequencies. But as a milkshake cannot suck itself through a straw, the Triple Goddess likewise cannot cast a spell. She can influence destiny, but she can't physically cast any magic on her own. That's why she didn't create the creatures of magic.

So a few years ago, Uther hecked up big time. And people of magic, the Triple Goddess's followers and acolytes and straw connections, were dying in droves. I can imagine that all those Third Eye tethers snapping en masse was painful for her to go through. She relies on the tethers to remain connected to the real world, and if all the tethers snap then she will be cut off from Earth altogether. And Earth requires magic to continue existing/thriving, so that's kind of a no-no.

So, the Triple Goddess knew that the only way to save the world was through divine intervention. Thus began the destiny of the Once and Future King and Emrys. She knew humanity is bigoted so there was bound to eventually be a repeat of Uther, so she made OaFK resurrectable, so they could keep him on the bench in case anyone ever needs him again.

Where does Merlin/Emrys fall into things?

Well. The Triple Goddess knew that saving her people and the world would require an immense magical undertaking, something no ordinary magic user would be able to pull off. But she has the power, if only she could use it. But a human can. So the Triple Goddess decided to be reborn into the body of a dragonlord's son. Merlin. Emrys. Magic itself.

Of course, this whole Being Born As A Human Thing is tricky, and as anyone familiar with reincarnation knows, you don't usually recall your past lives. So she became Merlin, unaware that he was ever the Triple Goddess. (Although she did add a clause saying she'd be destined to remember her past life eventually, which got hecked up for reasons ill explain later)

That's why so many creatures of magic/magic users recognize Merlin by his presence, why thr druids carry such reverence for him. Whereas the sidhe and other individuals don't recognize him, because they are blinded by heresy. They may have a spiritual connection to the Triple Goddess, but do not use her magic as she intended, and she's too busy wearing jaunty scarves to excommunicate them herself.

Why get the Once and Future King involved when she could just save everyone herself? Well, the Triple Goddess prefers to let the humans keep their agency and save themselves, and would rather remain in the role of protector/helper. Its just her nature.

But if that's the case, then why did Arthur's destiny fail? It's simple: Kilgharrah.

Remember what i said about the Horned God, counterpart to the Triple Goddess? Yeah, that's Kilgharrah. Like the Triple Goddess, he's another power reservoir, but he's jealous because people worship her and not him. He is against everything she does and actively seeks the destruction of the Triple Goddess's magic/influence for Jealous Evil Reasons. To stop him, the Triple Goddess enlisted some of her followers to bind him into the body of a dragon (perhaps this is how dragons were created) so he would never be able to do that. Years later, the Purge happened and "Kilgharrah" got locked away, further cut off from his power.

When Merlin walked in, unaware that he used to be the Triple Goddess, Kilgharrah seized his chance at revenge and manipulated Merlin into setting him free. Then, once free, he decided to lay claim to the power vacuum left by the Triple Goddess's quasi-absence. He began controlling destiny in whatever limited capacities he could, using magic of his own to permanently bury Merlin's knowledge of his past life. Then he ensured that Arthur would die and the Triple Goddess's magic would never return. But since he doesn't have FULL control over destiny (his powers are still limited by his dragon form, after all), he couldn't rewrite the bit where Arthur gets benched in Avalon. He's probably conspiring with the sidhe to ensure Arthur stays trapped there forever, or else he would've come back a long time ago.

As for how the Gean Canagh took Merlin's magic...well, yes, it devoured his Third Eye straw, but those are created by a strong spiritual connection to the Triple Goddess. And since he's literally the big TG himself, all he had to do was find himself again (by returning to his old home, the Crystal Cave) to recreate a new one.

Over the last 1500 years, Kilgharrah/the Horned God has been steadily accruing followers and worshippers in the hopes that one will become strong enough to release TG's bonds on him. Then he can kill her once and for all and claim full dominion over the universe, with the sidhe to support him.

I imagine that's how Arthur's resurrection would happen - Arthur and the rest of the dead Round Table are in Avalon when they learn about the treachery and plot to kill Merlin/take over the world, and spend the next few hundred years fighting their way out of Avalon.

Okay, I think that just about covers it. God, that was long. Any questions?

#i should probably write a fic for this huh #bbc merlin #merlin bbc #merlin #bbcm #ask #magicbuilding #fish post

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poipoipoi-2016 · 5 years ago

Text

So you’ve decided you want to walk across the Grand Canyon

@dwelling-abode pinged me, and I ranted enough I’m just going to make this a post

3 parts:

The Hike itself and why it sucks

The warnings

The walkthrough

The gear you’re going to use to make it suck less and also not die

The fitness you need to be in to not die

I apologize to all the mobile people for whom this is a wall of text.

The hike:

Two variations:

1) Rim-to-Rim aka North Kaibab to Bright Angel. I did this. 1 day down, 2 days up.

2) South Kaibab to Bright Angel off the South Rim

First thing you should notice: There is no water on South Kaibab. There is no purified water source between Cottonwood and Bright Angel (Well, er, Phantom Ranch) which is the longest, hottest, most exposed portion of the trip. You are coming up Bright Angel.

The other thing you should notice: 1000 feet is 600 miles, this is the rough equivalent weather-wise of walking from Calgary to Phoenix to Minneapolis. On a good day, your downhill day has a 60 degree temperature differential.

This in turn enforces a very hard cutoff in terms of when it’s physically possible to do this, namely about 2 weeks in early October when the North Rim is open and it *might* not be 100+ degrees at the bottom. Key word might. I did it on the last possible day (No seriously, I flew my grandmother out to spend 4 days driving the car around), and it was 92.

If you’ve never done serious exertion, 55 is t-shirt weather, I mean this.

If you do it in June/July/August/early September, you will die. There is no safe way to do this (Read: Any) level of physical activity in the desert in those temps.

So let’s walkthrough the hike.

The first mile and a half down to Supai is a boring series of switchbacks down through a pine forest. Poor visibility because of the trees, boring yellow/grey rock, just do it. Weather-wise, it went from 30 to 60 in the space of about 2 hours, if you brought a jacket, it’s in the backpack by now.

Then you get to the tunnel. If your less... energetic... companions want to come down a little bit, this is the spot they gawk and turn around. There is a water supply, but it was covered in wasps, so don’t count on it running. Probably 60-90 minutes down, 2-3 hours back up.

The rock turns red, the pines get replaced by high desert scrub, it’s really the first open view of the next few miles of the hike and the light’s come around *just* far enough that it’s down into the canyon, but it’s still good light.

Broadly speaking, you’re switchbacking down the left wall to the bridge, over the bridge, then down the right wall until you hit the bottom of that far wall.

About halfway down, the red rock converts into the red-gray rock, and the trail becomes a dynamited cut into the sheer rock wall. If you’re afraid of heights... enjoy! Seriously, it’s freaky. There is a tree in this picture.

It’s another 15-20 degrees hotter (80... It was 30 4 hours and 3000 feet ago), and the sheer rock walls largely conceal the transition from the pictured scrub to actual desert.

At Roaring Springs, the red rock ends and you get this off-green shale in eroded piles. The trail flattens out, opens up, and goes another half mile down to the pumphouse. This was my first working water supply! It is 11:37AM. I have been walking for 4.5 hours, 6 miles, and I have another 8 hot, flat miles to go.

At this point, you merge with Bright Angel Creek. This is the worst part of the trip. ~5 miles of open terrain through the desert on a hot, hot day. Another mile up is Cottonwood, the last water supply until Phantom. Drain your water now, and refill completely. Drink, drink, drink.

About 2 miles up is the Ribbon Falls side trail. Unfortunately, the bridge was out and I really did not feel like going up to the ford, fording the creek and doubling back while carrying this much gear. This was a good choice, since I barely made it by dark. In October, I doubt it’s really running tbh.

So 5 miles rambling through the desert as the red side cliffs get higher and higher, you get lower and lower, and the day gets hotter and hotter.

And finally, at last, 11 miles of walking in, you hit the box canyon. Blessed shade. 3 miles of increasingly tired cornering later, there’s a side hike to Phantom Overlook, 1000 feet straight up, but I was running out of both light and leg strength, so I passed on this. If you’re coming down South Kaibab, you have 5-6 hours to kill, so go explore the box canyon. It’s seriously cool, and you’ll never be back here again.

Go to Phantom Ranch or Bright Angel Campground, check in, drop your bags, run run run down to the river for sunset at the black bridge. Stay there until dark, then use your headlamp to get back.

Variant: There’s a variant I’d love to do where I manage to get Cottonwood permits as well, and then do both Ribbon Falls and Phantom Overlook as Day 2 with some more time at Phantom Ranch. That’s about 7 down slow on the first day, a relaxing early sleep, ~11 (and ~4000 feet of elevation gain/loss nervous_monkey_puppet.jpg) on Day 2, then 2 easy 9-mile days on the climb with dead legs.

Note: I stayed in the cabins and got 2 hours of sleep. Preferably, you should just do Bright Angel Campground. Lows of 70 are perfectly fine for sleeping.

Day 2:

Wake up. Walk down to the river, cross... either of the bridges are fine really, black bridge is a slight detour, but ideally this is a short day, adding a mile won’t hurt. I must admit to being moderately curious about the south side trail from black to gray bridge.

Two miles running up and along a cliffside trail to the base of Polk Creek.

Looks like this, that’s a cell phone camera, enjoy.

You’re still pretty low, but also desert morning, shade, and the river being a giant heatsink. Then you start the climb out. 1500 feet up to Indian Garden, probably 80% of that climb is a 2-mile stretch of switchbacks. Lovely red and yellow rock.

The last mile or two before the campground are flat, exposed to the sun, and still low enough it’s hot hot hot. 80′s are expected.

And then you finally get to the campground (Trees, shade, toilets, first actual real water supply since Phantom!). At this point, either:

1) Congrats, you have a campground! Set up camp, rest, relax, maybe make a Plateau Point (2 miles, 1 hour each way, perfectly flat the whole way) run.

2) If you’re really fast and have 2 hours/4 miles of buffer in your legs (Iffy, 14 mile day up a 4400 foot cliff), also make a Plateau Point run. It’s not very pretty at 2:00 in the afternoon, so really don’t feel bad for skipping.

3) Stare in sheer horror at the 3000 foot cliff that has finally become visible in front of you, and cry inside.

You are a third of the way up.

I wasn’t feeling so good, so I went to bed early. The sun goes down at 6:00 by the way, and it’s so dark you’ll just conk out.

Day 3:

So I woke up at 4AM, made a sunrise Plateau Point run (DO THIS) with my tripod, and then headed back. Packed up the campground, started up about 9:00 or so?

This is ideal. You’re headed right up the middle of a crack in the rock, and if you do it this way, you’re making the climb in 60 degree weather in the shade pretty much until the top. If you took Option #2 or #3 yesterday, the sun comes around, and you’re doing the climb in 75 degree weather in the sun.

There’s not really much here. It is exactly a 5 mile, 3000 foot climb with 2 intermediate water supplies split every 1000 feet on 2/1.5/1.5 mile splits. 3 mile resthouse has a decent view. The most exciting thing past that is the red/yellow line in the rock, and if you do this early enough, the sun will be on that wall. This took me about 4.5 hours.

The hike until now has been a 2.5-day test of your ankles. Downhill, uneven ground, drop-offs, etc. This is a sheer test of your quad strength and cardio. Especially as you get closer to 8K feet. “Officially”, I burned 6200, 4300, 6200 calories across the 3 days.

The most encouraging thing is seeing the increasingly “tourist” nature of your hiking companions since the serious hikers have proper gear and the less serious ones... do not. So if you’re watching some little 4 year old kid in Converse, you’re probably not *that* far from the top.

At the top, stay as close to the Rim as possible. My ankle gave out the second I got to the top, and I had to hobble half a mile to my hotel. God help me if there was a shuttle ride or a longer walk.

Shower, relax, massage some feeling back into your feet, change clothing if you brought extra, THEN meet up with your family members. And then I was bored, so for sunset, I went around and grabbed this shot of the trail.

Gear that will keep you from death:

Satellite comms:

Garmin satellite comms ($350 for the Inreach Mini + more $$$$ for the actual plan) https://www.rei.com/product/140110/garmin-inreach-mini-2-way-satellite-communicator

I upgraded to the good plan that lets you send infinite random texts (~10 minute delay), and didn’t regret it. But you need a Panic button that works. There’s pretty good connectivity, you don’t need one of the $1000 beacons they use in slot canyons, and the cheaper competitors don’t.... actually work.

Invest in a Garmin. Set it up. TEST IT BEFORE YOU LEAVE. Make sure your relatives know how to contact you over the satellite comms, and that your texts will arrive from some random number.

Hiking gear:

Fitted Backpack with both good chest and hip straps and an internal support structure ($2-400)

I’ve been ecstatically happy with my 70L Osprey (Aether?), I also have a 24-inch torso.

They make different ones for men and women, because the men’s ones put the chest strap straight across the nipples. You actually care about that.

Carbon Fiber Hiking Poles tested and fitted ($300)

Get you down steps, get you across rivers, provide support on pushes up, get weight off the ankles.

Protip: 5cm too long on downhills, 5cm too short on uphills.

Good boots/shoes ($150-$300)

There’s an inherent tradeoff between ankle support and weight in the boots. Personally, for a through-hiker with serious gear, I’d go with mid-rise boots

If you were doing a true Rim-to-Rim, they all use trail runners even when they’re not running it.

Good Boot Socks

Merino Wool is a must, I really like Darn Tough thick boot socks.

Moisture-wicking underwear

Merino Wool is acceptable

Carbon Fiber is light, you actually care about every ounce.

Related: You’re about to spend 3 days in the same clothing, it will smell. Merino at least makes it smell better and handles the moisture acceptably.

Anti-heat gear:

A good sweat-wicking wide-brim hat with holes in the outer band (The name brand is Tilly for $80, I think mine was about $40?)

Good, tough, not too hot hiking pants ($60/pair?)

Ripping is bad, extra pockets are good.

I use these, note the water resistance and also two pockets, one per leg, with horizontal zippers so you can reach straight down and things can’t fall out of your pockets.

Some people use those convertible shorts, I’ve never liked the zippers myself.

Good moisture-wicking t-shirts, or even better polo shirts ($40)

Polo shirts let you pop your collar and cover your entire neck.

Moisture-wicking keeps you alive when it’s 95.

SPEND MONEY. It’s a $40 t-shirt, you just need one, SPEND THE MONEY.

Light jacket for cold mornings

Consumables:

At least one water bottle and 1 3L Osprey water bladder

Some form of backup water purification

High-carb, high-calorie-to-weight-or-volume, low-fiber food

6000 calories a day * Fiber in an energy bar...

Personal recc: Nutter Butters. Easy to find in any mid-sized grocery store, can go a week without going stale, etc, etc. Throw 2-3 family-sized packs into Ziploc, ration one a day.

Phantom Ranch has a store, you can buy some more food there.

They also have an all-you-can-eat breakfast, that’s worth investing in if you’re in the cabins.

Imodium

Any needed meds. I have contacts so I needed a little bottle of Boston.

Camping Gear (Skippable if through-hiking or only staying at Phantom):

Lightest possible self-supporting full-frame tent ($300)

https://www.rei.com/product/110817/rei-co-op-quarter-dome-1-tent

The ground is rocky, you probably can’t pitch

There are scorpions and rats. If you want to try a tarp, I can’t stop you.

Sleeping bag + pad

Cold, but not that cold at night

Once again, rocky ground.

Your permit, in a plastic Ziploc bag.

Camera Gear:

Your cell phone is very good these days.

But fine, it’s a once in a lifetime trip.

Full-frame or APS-C body

High-MP landscape body if you can do it.

Lenses

24-105/4 for the day hikes. (NIkon is 24-120/4)

You want the reach more than you want a 24-70/2.8.

(Optional) 16-35/2.8 for nights/star shots/wide

Long lenses are heavy. 105 is good enough.

I brought a full-sized tripod, this was simultaneously super-cool and incredibly stupid.

Maybe a Platypod instead?

Don’t lose your remote trigger the day before like I did.

Peak Design Clip. Seriously, amazing little gadget.

Misc:

Wallet (Pull the loose change), keys, etc.

Paper printouts of your South Rim hotel reservations in a Ziploc bag.

I brought a change of clothing because Grandma was a couple days behind me, but an extra pair of underwear and socks is probably a good idea.

Extra batteries.

I blew out 2 camera batteries and an entire 26K mAh battery over 3 days with a camera, a phone, and satellite comms.

Fitness that will keep you from death:

Broadly Speaking:

Ankles/Calves/Feet are stability

Quads are power

Hips and back and chest hold the backpack up

Mine weighed 35 pounds, this is not nothing.

Cardio matters at the very end, gets outweighed by stability until then.

1MPH at 7K feet is 3MPH at sea level basically. And you can do 3 MPH now.

Arms kinda sorta show up and help a little bit on the hill climbs?

Pretty much your order of priority is top to bottom. Ankles giving out is a $10000 helicopter ride and months of rehab, legs giving out is a surprise lunchtime and an hour-long rest sitting on a rock somewhere.

Ankles:

BALANCE BALANCE BALANCE, also Lyle’s calf rotation starting about 6 months out, ending 4 just in case you injure something.

Legs:

Leg press and one-legged leg press. Also stairs. Loaded stairs if possible. Press it UP! Press, press, press. I got up to 700 pounds on an incline press.

Legs, but also Cardio:

Bring your backpack and wear your hiking boots to the gym, take a treadmill, and go slow and highly angled for a long time. Speed up as you get better. You use subtly different muscles when you have ankle protection on because the Achilles is no longer able to act as a spring. Train them hard now.

If you’ve got a good hill climb near you, be religious about that.

There are worse things than finding an ice cream shop 10 miles away, walking there with a fully loaded pack for hours and hours, getting the biggest ice cream they have, and Ubering home.

Hips/Back/etc:

Hip hinges with perfect back posture. Deadlifts wreck the back and risk injury, but rack pulls are perfect. Load up, load up, load up.

Other back exercises: Cable rows with perfect back posture, Pulldowns with perfect back posture.

Arms:

So you did cable rows, right? Yeah, that’ll get you some good enough arms.

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

Whatever you end up doing, pause it 2-3 months out. Avoid injury. Maintain your lifts, lose 10 pounds, and maybe up the cardio a tad.

And good luck and enjoy.

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kekekentyuh · 4 years ago

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The Quirks and Qualms of Online Class

The global pandemic terrorizing us as of the moment has taken so much of our lives when limited social contact was introduced. Preventing the virus from spreading further has reduced our lives to crumbs, robbing a lot of us of the chance to create a better life for ourselves in the outside world, forcing us to powerlessly retreat within the walls of our homes. And sadly, to say the very least, even the education system wasn’t safe from the Corona effect.

Remote learning seems to be the next logical step that most academic institutions can come up with because of the whole social distancing thing. For a while, it was a step so many dreaded to take because of how evident it was that it was just a disaster begging to take place — the countless government officials continuously campaigning to push through with the academic year weren’t of good help either — although it eventually arrived to a point where it was the only thing they could think of. Some have already opted to use this means of providing as early as April to finish off the previous school year, or summer semesters in some university constituents, all in little steps, but in general, we all know how it is: this type of learning is new to most of us, especially for those of us who are used to face to face learning, and we’re all learning to adjust to it while we’re still contained indoors.

The university I attend already had us undergo the whole process of online learning during our Midyear semester last June, where we took a couple of subjects that we were supposed to enroll in for the summer had the world not gone batshit crazy, opting only to open the possibility of attending that midyear semester for those who are required to do so in their respective course program curricula. We held synchronous online sessions via Zoom, where meetings were recorded for everyone's access, making for more accessible resources for note-taking, and used the online learning platform Canvas as pilot testers (both accounts provided by the university itself along with our emails) that we utilized for transfer of information, like learning materials and paperless, digital submissions, generally, and it all seemed to work, for a term that lasted a month maximum. But even before it began, I had a lot of qualms and reservations, particularly on how it’s all going to play out, and how it’s going to affect my performance and my academic standing, because up to that point, I’ve never taken any class or required academic sessions within virtual online learning platforms (not that I was happy while I was taking it, anyway; it’s a hellhole waiting to burst like a pimple). And that was just for a Midyear semester, which was four weeks at most; given how they’re planning to have this coming regularly-paced semester (shortened for the purpose of everyone’s convenience, although I’m pretty sure that’s going to do more harm than benefit, especially for students) purely on remote learning accords, we have no idea how we’re all going to take it on, not with major subjects and a lot of skill-based outputs being asked of us, which are probably much, much heavier than the countless submissions we had to do previously.

But you know what the boomers think: it’s all better than letting the school year just fly away, they didn’t have access to privileges like this so we’d better put up with it. Go now, plan later; and to that, I say one thing — you can’t stop a runaway train.

Even though one month of putting up with this mess is probably just a rough estimate of just how grueling an entire semester online is going to be, I would like to share a few of the things that I’ve noticed about remote learning that are not so great, and, to be completely unbiased, fine by my own judgment. I’m going to use the experiences me and my fellow Biology majors had whilst taking them to truly evaluate how effective it is for university students here in the Philippines, all with the company of you, my dear readers. This is, however, limited to the things we’ve experienced, and may vary for different situations, like from the point of view of a faculty member or a student of a different school, so please, take all of this with a grain of salt. We have no idea if things are going to play out exactly like they did previously, but it’s good to know a few things to prepare ourselves, right? Consider this as sort of a primer — from one lousy college student to another. If we’re going to deal with this bullshit, we’re going to look at it together.

For starters, remote learning is kind of energy efficient — and when I say that, I don’t mean chill. God, no; it’s anything but. The main thing I really like about learning from home is that it saves us a lot more time and physical energy than how much we usually need to attend face to face classes. It’s a very striking point, and I’m sure some may see it beneficial, especially those who still need to put up with the commute to go on campus. We don’t have to worry more about budgeting our time between classes and activities outside, like what time we’d have to wake up so we can have more time to get ready for our day ahead, or where to eat and what to wear to go out. We can wear home clothes while attending classes (not like your clothes even matter, anyway; at least not in UP) and don’t have to deal with the headaches and heartburns you get when you try commuting in the Metro, since we’re all just indoors. And let’s not forget, for someone who attends a university situated in the middle of a bustling city with people of all shapes and sizes that you can never trust, being confined to our homes means we are in a much safer environment, where we wouldn’t have to worry about being robbed every fifteen seconds or won’t have to look twice so every passing vehicle gets a lesser chance of ejecting us off the street. We’re all sitting within the walls of our homes, so we have lesser things to worry about logistically, so to speak. Besides, stepping outside is even more of a risk now than ever, and making available materials to access at home may reduce the probability of that risk getting the best of us, so at least that’s out of the way, like it’s supposed to be.

One thing that also struck me about remote learning is how it’s heavily dependent on how you pace your studies and work. Since your learning environment consists mostly of you and the digital materials, apart from the synchronous classes some professors require, a lot of the time, the way you’re going to deal with this is mainly on how you decide to work on it and how your pace with regards to taking everything on would be, and since there are scheduled deadlines and exams, and you can’t afford to lose any of your precious time monkeying around, albeit the hard way, you’ll definitely learn to manage your time on your own. It’s not completely individual, as there were still group tasks and outputs to be submitted as a unit, but since you’re all alone in your workspace, it’ll all depend on how well you manage to properly do these requirements. Time management is a key factor in college, or in any school level setting really, a skill better than any studying technique you will ever come across, since it helps a student tackle the countless loads of work being tossed their way without it stacking up to immediate doom, and remote learning prompts one to find the method that allows one to work with the flow the easiest — kind of like the perfect key to crank up an engine.

But the thing about remote learning is, for a whole student system not entirely prepared and properly equipped for it, the cons outweigh the pros — by about a mile.

To put it simply, limited contact is much more stressful in the parts of those who are actually involved in the setup, which are, primarily, the student and the teacher. Home environments, right up the first bullet, are not all conducive learning environments. This is entirely dependent on various factors, which may range from more personal ones, like unfavorable familial setups or various distractions at home, or more logistical ones, like the location of the home itself, all contributing to numbers and numbers of disruptive tendencies, none of which are under the child’s control, which may result to their lack of focus or increased anxiety. Home environments are not made for learning, unlike schools and universities where students are free to study without any distractions, and this may hold back the smooth process of their learning if continuous and entirely destructive — and there’s nothing the students nor the instructors can do about it but stress out. The number one most notorious culprit of them all, undeniably, would be the alarmingly appalling mediocrity of the Internet connection the majority has access to, which, on particularly bad days, may result to unfavorable situations almost unexpectedly, like constantly being cut off from the session and unclear instructions from professors, mostly, who have unfavorable access to the Internet themselves. The constant unannounced power cutoffs in some parts of the country (which is, personally, my biggest qualm and pet peeve that I have developed during quarantine) would come in at a close second, especially since a lot of these blackouts have no given range, much to the dismay of the consumers. On top of these are some unexpected inconveniences, like glitchy learning environments and faulty instructor-to-student communication, brought by lack of time synchronization, mostly, that may not seem like much, but can make this whole experience a whole lot shittier than it actually is.

And what’s even more stressful is the few solutions to these problems can all but do so much; mobile data as a substitute for WiFi connections can only give us so much with promos and the money it costs, but in the end, it’s still no match for the data requirements synchronous meeting platforms like Zoom or Google Meet require, so it’s best to just skip the class than waste your time and data trying to reconnect. Instructor-prepared course packs, which contain all materials needed for the subject, definitely designed to cater to students who lack the resources to make it to online classes, may work, but there’s still a lot of considerations that need to be made for their evaluations, which, preferably, need to match with the rest of the class they’re in. I know — no one wins here, except probably only the officials of our crappy Internet providers, happy that they still have a lot of people to leech out of.

The curriculum of the various degree programs students are enrolled in are at stake, because so much adjustments need to be done in order for them to be suitable for the online setting that they all, well, don’t feel like genuine learning methods anymore. Skill-based programs, like mine in Biology, for example, are particularly affected by these changes, since the materials and the opportunities for us to learn the skills we need for our degree are out there: at the labs, at the campus, out at the world. The pertinence of the development of methods to teach these practical courses with limited contact cannot be denied, but actually fulfilling those requirements physically and learning them with your own experience is something with much more impact, and that can’t be denied, too. The limits imposed on learning these necessarily skills will also limit the students to what they’re being given; if they’re given half the materials to make a bun of bread, they’ll only come up with half of that bun, because they’re given so limited resources. We don’t even know how lab classes will take place — how are we supposed to be sure we’re going to learn from them? Not only that, but the curriculum coming to play is at stake, too; take synchronous evaluation procedures, for instance. Does anyone want to take a quiz or an exam with relentlessly flopping Internet, with electrical power that plays Russian Roulette every single day of the year? Of course not, because you want to do as well as you possibly can in this exam. Do you want to wake up to a blaring, incomplete grade because the assignment file you’ve busted your ass for just didn’t make it through the portal, although you swore to your underwear drawer that you did? Of course not, and that’s why checking the submission box three times is almost nothing. So much of the learning process is being compromised and limited by a lot of factors outside of our control, it’s almost impossible to bounce back into the much-favored learning headspace we all desire to be in. We’re spending so much time worrying about not being able to learn because of so many things around us glitching that we lose, albeit gradually, our focus on actually learning.

These factors all narrow down to one big boulder about to trample one smacking detail within us: our mental health. It’s already bad enough that we’re dealing with the health crisis erupting everywhere around us, a health crisis that doesn’t seem to want to tone down anytime soon, and hearing and seeing so much of the tragedy it’s bringing to our country continuously, but we have to also constantly worry about whether or not we’re learning the right things or submitting the right things on time and still making sure we’re doing our best despite all of it. Imagine the constant anxiety and the rigid schedule of a regular semester multiplied thrice, all dumped online — with a few adjustments here and a few tweaks there, but almost inaccessible to some, and too much for many. You're not even sure, at any given point within the months-long span of supposed learning, if you're doing it to actually absorb the knowledge, or just fulfilling it because it's a requirement, and just hurriedly making sure everything is taken care of because you don't have any more energy to drag it on longer. That’s how mentally draining it is. And I get that I might be exaggerating (I have an underlying tendency to do so; forgive me, my bad) but who’s to say that it may not ring true for some? If you’re anything like me, who finds comfort in the company of peers, in the little things like building a routine and sticking to it, distracting yourself with new, uncharted things every day, and managing your stress outside the confinements of a house, then it’s probably taking a huge toll on you, too.

But all that’s nothing compared to those directly affected by the pandemic, like the family members of healthcare workers, those whose main modes of making a living were laid off due to contact protocols, and, most importantly, those who lost so many people dear to them because of a virus no one can contain. I can’t explain how much my heart cracks in my chest when I see a student looking to social media to ask for a means to fund his schooling, or when a person I rarely know is knocking to ask for a few pesos to get their ailing family members through. Remote learning, online classes, really, would work just fine — if you belong above that margin. If you have access to resources without going scathed, have nothing else to do but focus on what’s important for you, and leave the rest of the world outside your door. The exclusivity of remote learning is striking, and it’s extremely absurd how much people want to push through with it despite so many consequences for so many unwilling benefactors — six million children, to be exact — left behind. Children should never have to beg, lose themselves, or destroy themselves to be able to learn, because it’s their right to be given a chance to be the best they can by pursuing this education to the fullest extent. Apparently many people disagree.

Let me call remote learning for what it really is — a temporary aid, unsustainable way of dragging the students to uncharted waters. It’s a band-aid solution, meant to temporarily do what needs to be done while the future is still unknown. So many calls to stop the year from coming up have been put out there, as well as so much postponing and halting of the flow of inconcrete plans, promising to improve, but time and time again, to nothing; and amid so many calls for help, just within the education sector, there has been no reliable answer. Academic Freeze, which aims to halt the school year altogether, is not a plausible way of resolving this, as it is only student centered; although it may be beneficial for us, a lot of employees in the education system may lose their modes of income as well, which may lead to a shortcoming in their part. But given that, we also cannot turn our backs from the fact that so much of the student population, almost six million, will not be able to enroll, because education is a right that every child must be given, and if one child deserves to go on studying, they all deserve to. And postponing the opening of the academic year and delaying what is to come can only do so much.

Contain the pandemic — that’s the answer. If this administration, particularly the department concerned with this issue, truly cares about the rights of every Filipino to quality, equitable, culture-based and complete basic education, then they’ll take the necessary steps to put an end to this and protect not only those rights, but, to the administration itself, the welfare of their people.

Delaying the problem isn’t putting an end to it, because what’s only slowing down is going to gain momentum later on.

So many thoughts and so many words! What did you think about these experiences? And if your’re from the Philippines, what do you think about the Department of Education’s response to this rising concern? I’d love to hear your thoughts! Let me know by reaching me through the Inquiries page, or through my social media here I'd love to hear from anybody!

Like always, I wish everyone is doing well, being safe and secure, and in good health! I hope everyone is taking care of themselves by sanitizing and garnering a healthy lifestyle! It means a lot to me that you're here reading. Thanks for staying, and I’ll see you on the next one!

#online #classes #online classes #qualms #quirks #pros #cons #philippines #issue #education #children #university #hacking through life #hacking #through #life #off #the #beat #off the beat

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pug-bitch · 5 years ago

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That’s not why I’m staying (2)

Never have I ever punched someone

Book: The Royal Romance, Book 2

Pairing: Drake Walker x Amara Suarez

Rating: some foul language, some extremely suggestive. This is absolutely NOT appropriate for people under 18.

Word count: about 4,500 (sorry I am on mobile, so no cutoff :/)

Notes: This picks up pretty much where we left off, during the night at the bar in Ramsford, right after Liv joined. It starts with Maxwell’s POV.

*****

‘Hey guys,’ a familiar voice says behind them.

Maxwell turns around. ‘Rashad! You made it!’ He says as he wraps him in a tight hug.

Rashad chuckles. ‘Yeah, Liv said it was important. Hi guys,’ he waves at Hana and Michael.

‘Oh, where are my manners?’ Maxwell exclaims. ‘Rashad, I’m not sure you’ve met Michael Hansen-Suarez, Amara’s brother-in-law. Michael, this is Rashad Domvallier!’

The two men shake hands and exchange pleasantries until Drake, Amara and Liv arrive, multiple drinks in hand, which they distribute to everyone.

‘Cheers guys!’ Maxwell says excitedly, before taking a huge sip of his margarita. Amara’s right, he thinks. No way he’s driving them back. Oh well, it won’t be the first time his car sleeps downtown.

‘This is a big gulp,’ Michael says playfully, as if he’d been reading his mind. ‘You sure you’re still our DD?’

Maxwell nudges him with his elbow and whispers, ‘Shhh, don’t rat me out!’

Michael chuckles. Maxwell is so happy to see him relaxed, finally. Plus, the emerald green was a good call.

‘You having fun?’ He asks.

Michael nods. ‘It’s really nice here, yeah. I could get used to this.’

Maxwell smiles. ‘Good. You should get used to having fun. Maybe later this week we can organize a real Beaumont Bash, to show you how it’s done!’

‘Oh God,’ Michael exclaims, ‘will I have to wear a sash?’

Maxwell laughs. ‘Only if you want to.’

‘Anyone wanna play pool?’ Rashad asks.

Drake and Michael nod enthusiastically, while the girls playfully roll their eyes. ‘We just got here!’ Olivia yelps.

Maxwell shrugs. ‘Oh well. It super gendered I guess, but I could go for a game of pool right now.’

‘Alright boys, don’t start any trouble with your good looks,’ Amara teases, already sounding a little drunk.

*****

The three women sit in awkward silence for a couple minutes before Amara breaks the ice. ‘Ladies, if we don’t start talking right now I’m gonna go crazy. Liv, I said I’m sorry, I made you hug me, please let it be ok between us now.’

Olivia rolls her eyes. ‘We’re fine, Suarez, I told you.’

‘Then why is it so fucking awkward?’

‘She’s right, Olivia,’ Hana responds after gulping down about half of her drink. ‘If something’s bothering you, you should talk about it. Come on.’

Liv raises an eyebrow. ‘Wow, Lee. I like you assertive. Maybe you’re not such a weak bitch after all.’

‘Olivia!’ Amara scolds her. ‘Hana is just as strong a bitch as yourself, so shut it.’

Liv pauses and bursts out laughing. ‘Alright, you sexy bitches, you want me to tell you what’s bothering me?’ They both nod frantically. ‘I’m not nearly drunk enough for it,’ she concludes.

‘Ugh,’ Amara sighs. ‘Drink up, then!’ She looks around to check who’s within earshot before continuing. ‘In the meantime, can we please talk about how hot Rashad looks in a leather jacket? You go, girl.’

Olivia pauses and chugs the rest of her drink. She gets up and leaves silently. Amara and Hana look at each other, puzzled.

‘You think I offended her...again?’ Amara asks hesitantly.

Hana shrugs. ‘Please. It wasn’t offensive, on the contrary! It wasn’t the first time you guys comment on the hotness of each other’s partners,’ she remarks.

Amara nods and quietly sips her drink, her head hanging. Why couldn’t she ever shut up?

A minute later, Olivia comes back with a tray of drinks. Two double vodka rocks for her, and four margaritas for the girls. Amara gasps. ‘What did you do?? And, most importantly, how did you get the bartender to serve you so quickly?’

Olivia laughs and gestures at her body. ‘Are you really asking? I’m a fucking knockout, Suarez. You should know how it’s done, with those tits on you, I’m sure you’ve used your wiles before.’

Hana giggles and chants, ‘Liv is getting druuuunk!’

Olivia laughs. ‘Lee, you’re already drunker than me. Alright, here we go,’ she says before chugging one of the double vodkas.

Amara’s eyes are as big as saucers. ‘Is it that bad? What you have to tell us?’

Olivia puts her glass down and gestures at Amara to drink faster. ‘No, in the grand scheme of things, it’s not bad. But for me, it is.’ She pauses for a long time. ‘Rashad and I boned.’

Hana gasped. ‘OMG, congratulations!’ And she whispers in a conspiratory tone: ‘he’s so hot!’

Olivia, serious as ever, looks at Amara, ‘Does she know she’s supposed to be gay?’

Amara smiles. ‘She’s gay, not dead, it’s a whole thing. Please continue.’

Olivia grunts. ‘Alright. Well, Lee, you’re right, he’s very hot. Even more so naked. An ass like you’ve never seen, and a dick, holy shit.’ She looks away in the distance before shaking it off. ‘I digress, sorry. What I mean is, despite his perfection, and him doing everything I like, it was… well, it was good. Not great.’

Amara nods. ‘You mean he didn’t sweep you off your feet?’

‘Yeah, something like that,’ Liv says as she grabs her next drink.

Hana nods. ‘It’s normal for a first time, I think. Plus, you guys waited a little while, so there were expectations. You gotta give it time.’

Amara chimes in, ‘Exactly, and maybe it’s like Carrie and Berger on Sex and the City, maybe the first time wasn’t ideal, and you two need to work on it a little more.’

Liv looks her dead in the eye. ‘Are you comparing Rashad to whiny-ass Berger, Suarez? Also, his name is Berger. Have some respect.’

Amara smiles. ‘That’s not what I meant. I was just trying to find an example.’

Hana nods. ‘Sometimes, when you really like the person, the first time is awkward because you’re so anxious to get it right, that you get in your own head. And before you protest, I didn’t say you. I meant maybe Rashad was in his own head.’

Olivia stares at her glass silently. She sighs and pursues: ‘Maybe you’re right. Maybe I should just fuck him again. Pull a Suarez and bone him in this filthy bathroom.’

Amara grunts. ‘Come on, now you’re labeling me as the bathroom fucker? That’s not fair!’

*****

Michael walks towards the group of guys with a tray of drinks for everyone. Getting the second round was the least he could do, after they welcomed him so warmly. He didn’t really want to play pool, he’s just not good at it, and he doesn’t find it particularly fun. But he wanted to hang out with them, be one of the guys. He’s never been the most social person. He has friends, of course, albeit not many, but ever since he had Callie, he’s thrived as a father so much that he barely needs anything else.

Tonight, he finds himself missing his daughter, as always, but not in a sad way. In a way that makes him grateful to be a dad, all the while being happy to be here. With Amara, with new friends. With Amara’s new love, whom he’s grateful to get to know.

So, if he has to suffer through a few games of pool, so be it. With a couple more beers, he shall be drunk anyways.

‘Thanks, Mike,’ Drake says as he grabs a lager from the tray. ‘Next round is on Max. Right?’

Maxwell laughs as he aims for the balls. ‘Of course! My treat.’ He misses all of them, shrugs, and grabs a margarita from the tray. ‘Thank you, Michael. Rashad, your turn.’

Michael leans back against the wall and enjoys the atmosphere. He glances outside where the girls are enjoying their drinks. He notices a guy getting closer to them, then talk to them, while Amara is visibly trying to turn him down. Michael raises an eyebrow. He turns to Drake. ‘I’ll be right back.’

He exits the bar area to meet the girls on the patio. Something about this guy’s demeanor isn’t right. He stays at a distance as he listens to the interaction.

‘Come on, babe,’ the guy says to Amara. ‘Don’t tell me that you and your friends don’t want a drink from a guy like me.’ He opens his arms as if to display his body. ‘I’m no Prince, but I’m definitely capable of rocking your world. How about you, sweetheart?’ he asks Olivia.

Liv snorts noisily and responds, ‘My friend already told you we’re not interested, so fuck off, will you?’

The man laughs sarcastically and says, ‘Right, right, like you have such high standards.’

Olivia gets up menacingly and says, ‘Excuse me, asshole? What is that supposed to mean?’

Michael notices that both Amara and Hana get up also, their brows furrowed.

The guy spits out in an insulting tone, ‘I know you girls. You’re just a dyke and two whores, don’t pretend you’re anything more.’

Before anyone else can react, Michael’s blood boils and next thing he knows, he’s marching towards the man, putting his beer down, and connecting his fist to the guy’s face. He says, ‘What the fuck did you call my sister?’

The guy, taken aback, shakes his head. ‘What the hell--’ he says before he recovers and raises his fist to return the blow.

Amara leaps in front of Michael and places the guy in a strangle hold before anyone can react. The man yelps helplessly.

Michael’s head spins. It’s the first time he’s ever punched anyone. Suddenly, Drake is besides him. ‘Mike, buddy, are you ok?’

Michael shakes his head. ‘This asshole was insulting them, I--’

Drake turns to the guy, still held up by Amara. ‘What did you say to them?’

He struggles to breathe, and painfully says, ‘I was just--I was just trying to buy them a drink.’

Amara rolls her eyes and lets him go. He rubs his arm sheepishly. ‘He insulted the three of us because we refused to have a drink with him. Typical entitled dick.’

The guy mumbles, ‘Fuck you guys, I’m getting out of here. Bunch of assholes and whores.’

Drake places himself right in front of him, and he clearly towers over the guy. ‘What did you just say? Did you just call them whores? What’s your problem, man? You wanna get punched again?’

Olivia gets closer to Drake and pulls a dagger out of her jacket. ‘Or stabbed?’ she says. Michael gasps.

The guy runs off, still mumbling. Olivia puts the dagger away, as Michael is still reeling. He sits down. This is a lot to take in. His first sucker punch, a concealed weapon, and a whole bunch of dramatic confrontations. Not his typical Sunday at all.

The bartender comes out, closely followed by Rashad and Maxwell. ‘Sir,’ the bartender says to Michael, ‘you can’t stay here, we don’t tolerate violence in this establishment. As for you, Lady Nevrakis,’ he says to Olivia, ‘you can’t bring weapons here, please.’

Olivia rolls her eyes and takes a sip of her drink.

Maxwell grabs the bartender’s arm. ‘Loïc, please, they didn’t do this unprovoked. You know me, I wouldn’t bring troublemakers here.’

Loïc frowns and looks at Amara. ‘Oh, like this lady who likes to pull judo moves on people?’

Maxwell continues to barter: ‘This guy was bothering them, right Amara?’

Amara nods. ‘This douche called us whores, as well as derogatory homophobic terms. Do you welcome that in your establishment?’

Michael holds his breath as Loïc seems to take in the info. Finally, he rolls his eyes. ‘Fine. But Maxwell, next time, you’re all out. I mean it.’

As the bartender walks away, Michael takes a long, relieved breath. Amara sits by him. ‘Are you ok, Michael?’ she asks, looking at his hand.

He nods. ‘It doesn’t even hurt. I’m just in shock. Did I just punch a guy, or did I dream it?’

Drake laughs. ‘You definitely jammed your fist in his face, man. He deserved it, too.’

Hana squeezes Michael’s shoulder. ‘You’re our knight in shining armor,’ she jokes.

He turns to her, ‘I’m sorry for the name he called you. That was unacceptable.’

She shrugs. ‘It was. But you can’t change the fact that there are some terrible people on this Earth. All you can do, I guess, is…’ she pauses. ‘Punch them.’

Everyone laughs wholeheartedly. Michael takes a long sip of his beer and asks, ‘Can we talk about Olivia’s dagger, please?’

*****

‘Your Majesty?’

Constantine sighs, as if out of habit. He wishes he could get up, at least to seem like he’s doing alright, but his body is too weak. So, he calls out. ‘Come on in, Lady Madeleine.’

She walks in briskly, closing the door behind her. He specifically asked her to come by right after dinner, but it’s over an hour past, and he needs to get himself to bed. He tries to hide his annoyance and gestures for her to sit down.

‘Thank you,’ she says as she complies. ‘I won’t keep you long. I’m making progress.’

He nods. That’s all he wanted to hear. His country in good hands after he passes. That’s all he wanted. ‘Good, I’m glad,’ he says, hoping she will stop there and leave him alone. This could have been a phone call.

She nods. ‘Me too. He seems to have forgotten all about the incidents of the Ball, and I intend to help him forget some more.’

Constantine grimaces. He doesn’t need to know her methods, thank you very much. ‘Anything else?’ He asks impatiently.

Madeleine takes a breath. ‘Yes, potentially. He’s been talking to his brother a lot. He’s pensive after each of their talks. Last night, and then again this morning, and before dinner. I��ll keep an eye on it, but I thought you could ask your staff to do the same.’

Constantine nods. ‘Alright. It could just be that they’re speculating about who leaked the pictures, Lady Madeleine, nothing more. But you’re right. I will keep an eye out.’

‘Great,’ she says curtly as she gets up. ‘Enjoy your night.’

*****

Madeleine heads towards Liam’s suite. She finds herself hoping he won’t be as passive as last night. She shakes it off quickly. Who cares if he’s not enjoying himself? It’s not exactly a party for her either, but she will truly be happy when the crown is on her head.

He’ll learn to love her. If not passionately, like he would have the others like Olivia or the Mexican whore, at least he will love her respectfully, like a King loves his Queen. She doesn’t care if he fucks around. Perhaps she will, too.

But for now, she needs to keep Constantine happy. He wants the other women out of the picture, he doesn’t trust them. She gets it. She doesn’t trust them either.

She rattles her fingers on Liam’s door and waits for the weak signal to come in.

She plasters on a smile. ‘Good evening, love. I was heading to the gardens for a late night drink, do you want to join?’

Liam, already deep in a whiskey bottle, looks at his glass, chugs it, and gets up. ‘Sure,’ he says.

*****

‘Alright, alright! Rashad’s turn!’ Maxwell exclaims.

Rashad nods pensively. ‘Let’s see. Never have I ever… shaved my legs!’

Amara yelps, ‘That’s not fair! It’s clearly a twisted way to get us drunk!’

Rashad chuckles. ‘Yeah, you guys, and Maxwell,’ as he gestures towards Max taking a sip.

‘What?’ Maxwell asks. ‘I wanted to try it when I went through my bicycling phase!’

‘Ok, ok, my turn!’ Hana almost screams, leading Amara to think she’s had more than enough margaritas. ‘Never have I ever…’ she smirks at Michael’s direction. ‘...punched someone!’

Michael bursts out laughing as Drake pats his back. ‘Time to drink, buddy. I’ll accompany you, for obvious reasons,’ he says as he drinks.

‘Well played, Hana,’ Michael chuckles.

Hana mimes brushing off her own shoulders. ‘I try, I try. Amara, all you!’

Amara thinks for a second, trying to determine who she’s going to target. ‘Hmm, let’s see… Never have I ever had a child!’

Michael sighs. ‘Really, Amara? You know I’m a lightweight.’ He drinks reluctantly. ‘Ok now, my turn. Never have I ever…’ he smiles at Amara. ‘Thrown up in a parking garage.’

Amara gasps. ‘No fair! I told you this in confidence.’ She drinks. ‘Besides, it’s not my fault. I was sick.’

Michael fakes a cough. ‘Hungover sick.’

Amara rolls her eyes. ‘Fine, fine, since you’re determined to make me look disgusting.’

Maxwell puts his arm around her. ‘You could never be disgusting, Little Blossom, you’re the cutest! Even though, you know, you just had a guy almost choke in a badass move, I’m still allowed to call you cute.’

‘Alright, that’s my cue to go get another drink, you guys are too sappy for me,’ Liv says as she sighs deeply. ‘Rashad, help me carry the next round?’

Rashad follows suit, and Amara shares a knowing look with Hana. When the two are back inside, Hana asks, ‘Do you think they’ll be back?’

Amara chuckles. ‘I think if we’re expecting another round of drinks, we’re in for a big disappointment.’

*****

‘Feeling better?’ Rashad asks as Olivia is paying for the next round. He offered to pay but she looked at him with such a furious look that he put his hands up in a surrender pose.

Liv shrugs. ‘Yeah. Glad she’s back to her senses, and she apologized.’

Rashad smiles. ‘Good. Now can you tell me what else is bothering you?’

Olivia turns around briskly. ‘How do you know something’s bothering me?’

Rashad looks around for any wandering eyes and, when he realizes the coast is clear, puts a reassuring hand on Liv’s arm. ‘Because I’m starting to know your moods, Nevrakis. Now please tell me.’

She looks down at his hand. For one second, he wonders whether she’s about to tear him apart limb by limb for daring to touch her tenderly.

But she doesn’t. She looks into his eyes and says, ‘Did you really love last night?’

He gulps. He really did. It was amazing sex. But it was also somewhat awkward, and definitely not what he had been expecting from their extremely steamy makeout sessions. ‘You didn’t, right?’ He asks cautiously.

She whispers, ‘Don’t get me wrong, it was fucking good. But…’

He nods. ‘Yeah. I know. The anticipation was better.’

‘Right.’ She pauses. ‘Suarez thinks it’s just the curse of the first time.’

He nods. He should be mad that she already told her friend that he sucks in bed, but he figures, coming from Olivia, the fact that she talks about him at all is a compliment. ‘You think we should try again?’ He says, raising an eyebrow.

She nods. ‘Yeah. Let’s drop off those drinks and go fuck in the bathroom.’

He laughs heartily. ‘Um, as much as I’d love to, that’s a lot of pressure on a bathroom hookup. It might turn out to be even more awkward than the first time. Think hand dryers, weird smells, wet sink…’

‘Ew,’ she interrupts. ‘No need to get graphic, I get it.’

He gets closer to her and whispers in her ear. ‘I don’t want us to plan anything. Let’s just wait until we can’t help but fuck each other’s brains out.’

She gives him a mischievous smile and grabs a tray. ‘Well played, Domvallier. You got me wet already.’

*****

Liam zips up his pants, in silence. He looks around at the maze. Well, he thinks, there goes his maze fetish. She ruined it.

Madeleine gestures for him to help her zip up her dress. He complies. ‘That was...something,’ she whispers seductively. She looks at him over her shoulder. ‘Did you have fun?’ She purrs.

He plasters on his fake smile. ‘Of course I did, love. It was wonderful. Now let’s go back to the palace, you wore me out. I need to get some sleep.’

She seems satisfied enough with his answer. She locks arms with him and they walk on together.

Liam’s thoughts are racing, over his silence. How could he have thought she was genuine? How could he have believed her concern? All she ever wanted was to be Queen, he knows this, he’s always known this.

What he didn’t know is that she was willing to destroy others in order to get what she wants.

For now, he can’t break the engagement. But he will, right? He and Drake and Leo will find out who was in on the whole thing and Amara’s name will be cleared. Madeleine’s name will be the one with scandal associated to it. The woman who sabotaged everyone else for the throne. All they need is proof. Amara’s a detective, she can help figure it out.

His heart sinks. Amara.

She made it clear. She doesn’t have an interest in him. But maybe things will change, once she has a duchy and citizenship, and they can become friends first.

Right?

Something’s gotta give. He can’t be stuck in a loveless marriage.

*****

Madeleine runs her hand through her hair. She can’t arrive at the Palace all disheveled, although it would make for a nice statement. Sure, she’s not the first woman Liam fucked in the maze, but she’s the first fiancée he shags out there.

She didn’t hate the sex. He’s good at it. Still, this is a means to an end.

*****

‘Oh God, I shouldn’t have had that fifth beer,’ Michael slurs as Drake holds him up after the Uber ride.

Drake chuckles. ‘You’re good, I got you. Just put one foot in front of the other.’ He glances at Amara. ‘You ok, babe? Still standing?’

She gets out of the Uber and thanks the driver, a little wobbly on her feet. ‘I’m good,’ she laughs.

Hana stumbles out as well, giggly as ever. ‘Guys, I had the best night,’ she yells out.

Drake helps Michael up the steps, where Rashad, Liv and Maxwell are waiting for them.

‘Wooo you made it,’ Maxwell cheers. He holds out his arm for Michael to grab it. ‘Here, Michael,’ he says softly. ‘Let’s get you some water.’

Michael blushes. ‘Sorry everyone. I guess I’m still jetlagged.’

Olivia snorts. ‘Or maybe we wiped the floor with you at Never Have I Ever.’

Michael shakes his head. ‘I still think ‘Never have I ever been a lawyer’ was unfair.’

Maxwell opens the door delicately, so as not to wake Bertrand. He whispers, ‘Rashad, thank you so much for driving my car back. I owe you one. You can stay over if you want, Liv has a room here!’

Rashad nods. ‘Thank you Max, but I have an early meeting. I need some sleep.’ He looks into Liv’s eyes and captures her lips in a deep kiss.

Drake’s eyes widen. He looks at Amara, who’s pretending to fan herself. When Rashad’s mouth finally leaves Olivia’s, everyone else’s is still wide open.

‘Bye, Domvallier,’ Liv says in a low voice.

He winks at her and waves at everyone else. ‘Good night guys, it was fun.’ He takes out his phone and calls his driver.

Drake takes Amara’s hand and they go inside. ‘Wow,’ he says, ‘that was some PDA.’

Olivia snorts. ‘Ugh, of course you’d say that, Walker. Clearly, you have no idea what we’ve all been through with you. All your makeout sessions with Suarez, they aren’t PDA?’ She walks upstairs in the direction of her room and turns around midway, just to rolls her eyes at Drake one last time.’

He sighs. ‘Fine. I’ll shut up. I’m gonna turn in anyways. Babe?’

Amara squeezes his hand. ‘Yeah. I’m exhausted. Michael, you need me hun?’

Michael takes a deep breath, and uses the hand that isn’t holding Maxwell to hold the wall as well. ‘I’m fine, I just need water. Go to sleep.’

Maxwell shoos them with his hand. ‘You crazy bitches go to bed. I’m gonna water the kids,’ he says as he gestures to giggly Hana and wobbly Michael.

*****

‘Hana, hold still, OMG.’ Maxwell whispers, trying to help her out of her heels. ‘If we wake Bertrand he will kill me.’

Hana laughs softly. ‘Grandpa Tassel! I love his face so much.’

Maxwell can’t help but smile. ‘I do too, but if I see him burst out of his room, his lovely face furious at me, I swear to God, woman, I’m abandoning you to his wrath.’

Hana feigns shock. ‘Oh! You wouldn’t dare!’

Max blows her a kiss. ‘You have no idea what I’m capable of.’

Michael giggles, sipping on his glass of water. ‘Guys, I’m so drunk,’ he slurs.

Maxwell smiles softly. ‘It’s ok. Drink your water. I need to do the same, I’m fine but I’ve had a lot of margs.’

‘I swear Maxwell,’ he continues, ‘I never get this drunk. You have to believe me.’ He takes Maxwell’s hand. ‘It’s the jetlag, and that game.’

Maxwell looks at Michael’s hand, a pang in his heart. He puts his other hand on it, and carefully places it back on Michael’s lap, patting it gently. ‘It’s all ok, Michael. You can also blame the shirt.’

Michael makes a shocked face. ‘The shirt! It was infused with your party spirit, Maxwell. That’s it!’

Maxwell chuckles. ‘Yes, you got me.’ He finally manages to get Hana out of her shoes. ‘Hana, drink your water. I’m gonna go get you guys some of Drake’s leftovers. Be right back.’

‘Oh, I’ll come help,’ Michael whispers, getting back on his feet with difficulty. ‘Plus, I want to make sure you also bring some of those cookies we got at the farmers market.’

Michael stumbles a bit, and finds Maxwell’s arm. They walk to the kitchen together.

‘You ok?’ Maxwell asks, his heart racing.

Michael smiles faintly. ‘Yes. I’m embarrassed. I told you, I never get drunk. It’s embarrassing.’ He puts his hand on his face.

‘No!’ Maxwell protests. ‘Nothing embarrassing about having fun. You’re safe here, you can let go a little.’

Michael nods and, once in the kitchen, lets go of Max’s arm to hold on to the island. ‘You’re always so nice to me, Max. Thank you. You’re a good person.’ He pauses. ‘You don’t treat me like a pathetic widower.’

Maxwell grabs the pack of cookies and a tupperware of leftovers. ‘Michael, you’re so much more than a widower. And you’re not pathetic. You’re strong, smart, and loving. Look how far you’ve come just to reconcile with Amara.’

Michael sits at the island. Without a word, Maxwell brings him a cookie. Michael breaks it in half and offers him some. They both take a bite. Michael sighs. ‘I feel so much better,’ he says.

Maxwell smiles. ‘The power of the cookie, my friend.’

*****

Taglist:

@drakeandcamilleofvaltoria @andy-loves-corgis @jovialyouthmusic @mariahschoices @drakesensworld @thequeenofcronuts @notoriouscs , @drakewalkerisreal @nikkis1983 @simsvetements @alesana45 @iplaydrake @emceesynonymroll @lily1999love @drakewalkerwhipped @drakxwalker @drakewalkerrosenberg @drakeswalkers @drakelover78 @silviasutton1989 @dcbbw @texaskitten30 @furiousherringoperatortoad @hollygirl1269 @sirbeepsalot @ladyangel70 @thisperfectmemory @of-course-i-went-to-hartfeld @i-bloody-love-drake-walker @mrsmairstanley @addictedtodrakefanfic @msjpuddleduck

Thank you for your encouragements, everyone! Let me know if you want to be added to the taglist :)

#that's not why i'm going #drake walker x amara suarez #drake walker x mc #dramara #drake walker #trr fanfic #trr drake #drake x mc #drake walker trr #drake x amara #that's not why i'm staying #amara suarez

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sigritandtheelves · 6 years ago

Note

For the 5 headcanon AUs - Emily is there with Scully & Mulder (delivery room? home? whatever) when Scully gives birth to Miracle Baby #3.

This came out in one long brain-dump last night, but I thought I should read over it in the morning with a clear head before posting (it was, surprisingly, kind of fine?). I’ve really wanted to try and write Emily, which I have never done. Not to cross universes, but I think @o6666666‘s little Emily might grow up to be something like this big-kid Em, though I can’t promise this story is as good as hers. In this universe, baby 3 is born around 2006 (because … human anatomy and logic). CW for birth stuff (obvs.).

—

They have made this thing work, this family thing. They are even good at it, most of the time, but Scully is so tired these days. Emily, twelve and turning more beautiful by the day, helps them all by getting William ready in the mornings. She wears raspberry lip smackers and purple eyeshadow that Scully only smiles at as she packs their lunches. At the kitchen table, William rocks in his seat until Em lets him pour his own milk. “Careful,” she says, and the little boy nods.

Mulder slides behind his partner (his wife, his first best girl) while she’s chopping up carrot sticks to kiss her neck. He palms her round belly and whispers, “How about today?”

Scully reaches back with her socked foot to wrap it around his ankle. Her deft fingers still the knife, and she leans her head to his shoulder. “Sorry,” she says. “No action yet.”

He makes a disappointed grunt and moves to pour himself some coffee. When the lunches are bagged, he grabs his briefcase and calls out. “Offspring! To the dad-mobile!” And Scully laughs (still laughs after all these years) at his stupid stupid jokes.

In the evening, after dinner, Emily tiptoes into her parents’ bedroom to find her mother curled on her side and reading. Her eyes focus low, on the carpet, on her own feet, and Scully notices. “Hey,” she says. “What’s up?” She scoots back and pats the bed.

Emily sits. She fidgets, fingers in the blanket. Her blonde hair hangs down over her face. After a moment, she breathes deep, sucking in courage. “What if it’s a girl?” She asks.

Scully frowns, grasping to parse the subtext. “Then we’ll have two girls.” Matter of fact is best, she thinks. “You don’t want a sister?”

The wind outside rattles the window: an autumn storm blowing in. Emily shrugs one shoulder. “She’d be yours. And dad’s. Really yours.”

Scully’s eyes fall closed as Em’s meaning washes over her. She sits up, pulls the girl to her—all gangly arms and legs in a cutoff Foo Fighters t-shirt and Chucks. She is growing out of hugs like this, but not tonight. “Emily, you are really ours. You are completely and totally ours, mine and dad’s. The how doesn’t matter to that part of it.”

Against her shoulder, Emily sobs. “But you didn’t know me when I was born. It’s not the same.”

Scully rubs her back. “No,” she says. “It’s not. It’s different. It’s special.” Another choked sob like yeah right, and Scully can only squeeze her daughter tight. “Em, you brought us together. You made us a family.” Fingers over silky hair, knobby knees raised up onto the bedspread, resting against a rounded belly. “Without you,” she says, “dad would probably be out hunting werewolves, too afraid to even kiss me.”

Em pulls back to look at her, smiling now, but confused. “What do you mean?”

Scully shakes her head. “Without you, it might have taken us years, but you made me… made us… everything changed when we brought you home. Good change. Happy change.” She raises a palm to the girl’s cheek, red with tears. “You will always be our girl.”

When she tells Mulder that night in the calm dark of their bedroom, he is shocked quiet. Rain hammers their windows while they curl facing each other in the blue gloom. “Oh God,” he says. “Poor Em.”

Scully nods, her cold toes pressed into the hair of his calves. “I want her to be there when the baby comes,” she says. “I want her to be part of it.”

“Yeah,” Mulder says. He tugs her to wrap around him while he shifts to his back—her own warm body pillow, heavy belly propped on his waist. He touches it, feels the little bumps and shakes under his fingers. “Oh, Dana,” he sighs. “We’re about to be outnumbered, aren’t we?”

She laughs and kisses the warm cotton of his shirt under her cheek.

The dad-mobile is stalled the next morning by the onslaught of heavy contractions just before seven. “Mulder,” Scully says, and by the way she says it, he knows. They’re ready. They have time. He tells himself these things, but still he sits in low-level panic, waiting for Maggie to come so he can drop the kids at school.

“Mulder, I’ll be fine. You can take them.”

But he shakes his head and holds onto her hips like they are keeping him steady, grounding him here in this moment when they are still just four in the house. Scully sighs and raises her own hands to hook behind his neck. Her blue eyes shine up at him, and she gives him a resigned, affectionate smile. “You’re too good, you know that?”

He shakes his head and kisses her through another contraction, rubbing rubbing at her hips. When it passes, she says “thank you,” and rests her head on his chest. He notices Emily watching them, not with the mild disgust of the pre-teen as he expected, but with a fascinated curiosity. She blushes and turns away when she sees that he’s noticed.

When Maggie comes, he takes only William to school, leaving the three Scully women at home. “Be back soon,” he says. He sees that Emily is holding her mother’s hand and he knows they’ve made the right decision, letting her stay.

They are at the hospital by four p.m., Mulder and Scully and Emily, who checks on her mother regularly and gives her sips of vitamin water. It’s Emily who comes to find Mulder in the hall when things pick up. “Dad,” she says, because he’s had to make some quick phone calls. “Dad, her water broke. She needs you.” He hangs up quickly and follows his daughter in.

Scully won’t listen to the nurses, surprising no one, as she kneels on all-fours on the bed. Mulder rubs her back while she groans through the pain and the pushing. Emily watches them both in awe. She cries, as they do, when the tiny pinking body is lifted to her mother’s arms.

“Oh, you did it,” Mulder says, pushing hair back from Scully’s face. “Oh, baby, look,” because the little face is screaming itself known from a flannel blanket. He helps Scully turn, carefully, to rest on her back. They all peer down at the squirming child, who opens its eyes and shoots a fist out from the covering.

The nurses want to cut the cord, but she holds them back. “Delayed is better,” she says. “Em, come see.”

The girl does, leaning over this new tiny thing with such awe. “Is it a boy or a girl?”

Scully tugs away the blanket. “A girl,” she says and smiles at her other daughter. “Do you want to cut the cord?”

Em looks surprised, glances at Mulder. “Dad?”

“Nah, I got the last one.”

So she does it and feels so proud, feels like this is her little sister, feels the whole weight and duration and strength of her family. She tells Maggie and William everything when they come to see.

“Another girl?” William asks, trying not to seem disappointed. But he is fascinated by the tiny hands and feet.

When the baby sleeps and Dana sleeps and Maggie is readying to take the kids home, Mulder pulls Emily aside. He squeezes her shoulder, then hugs her. “You’re my first baby,” he says. “And I love you so much.”

She nods. She tries not to cry. “Thanks, daddy.”

#a thing i wrote #au #5 headcanons #emily lives #dad!mulder #family stuff #prompt fill #baby 3 #(in a reasonable timeframe)

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magnoliasinbloom · 6 years ago

Text

Lullaby

AO3 :: Previously

Chapter 5

I stared at my laptop screen. Waterstones was offering me a job. I had applied a few weeks earlier, thinking of saving some money for uni and now, when things were so twisted, they had come through. I really needed this opportunity; I chose to see it as something good for me, and I responded with an acceptance. I’d start on Monday along with school.

Frank hadn’t picked up his mobile when I’d called him the previous night, eager with news about the doctor’s appointment. Closing the laptop, I dialed his number again. It almost went to voicemail before I head his smooth polished voice.

“Hi, Claire.”

“Hey, Frank. I called you yesterday.” I felt as though I were nagging or complaining. I had promised myself never to be that kind of woman.

“How did the doctor’s go? Is everything alright?”

“Yeah, everything’s fine. I heard its heartbeat.”

“Is it a boy? A girl?”

“Frank, it’s much too early to tell. Maybe in a few weeks. Um, which reminds me—when can I see you? I haven’t talked to my parents yet, but—”

“Well, see, Claire, I haven’t told my parents either. You know, they’re considering selling their London apartment and just traveling for awhile,” he said. “It might come as a shock to them, I mean, I’ve not graduated and you’re so young.”

“My age didn’t seem to bother you before,” I said coldly. “What does that have to do with anything?”

“Nothing, forget I mentioned it. So, can we meet tomorrow?”

“Really? I guess. Oh, by the way, I got a job at the Waterstones on Argyle Street. Remember I told you I’d applied?”

“That’s great, Claire. Congratulations. I’ll text you when I know the time we can meet.”

“Okay. Bye.”

~~~

Frank didn’t text.

He didn’t call or answer his mobile. I pondered this while I swallowed a huge prenatal vitamin, washing it down with orange juice. I was numb with exhaustion, inside and out. I’d started term and my new job at the bookstore, and doing all that while maintaining my pregnancy a secret was taking its toll on me.

I was not a morning person. Waking up at 6 to attend class and then work did not sit well with me or my changing body. I threw up a couple of times in the lavatory at school; I had cravings and nausea in equal measure. The doctor had worked out some dates, and pegged me at about 10 weeks along.

I sat down in the cafeteria with Louise and Mary and broke the news to them. They were sweet and supportive, as I had thought they would be, and excited at the prospect of a baby. I swore them to secrecy; both of them offered babysitting and help juggling classes in the future. As I processed their reactions, I felt a little lighter. Just having them know was enough; I knew I would have their support in whatever lay ahead. Jamie, of course, texted often, offering bits of encouragement. I had plans to tell my parents that week, but first, I needed to talk to Frank.

I trudged through the first school week back and work. Then, while I took a small break at Waterstones, I suddenly felt faint. Little black spots danced in front of my eyes until they clouded my vision completely. I felt my heart race and then the carpeted floor was rushing towards my face. Thankfully, before I hit the ground Fergus the cashier caught me under the arms. He was whispering in my ear, telling me to breathe slowly, but he sounded very far away. With his arm around me, he half-walked, half-dragged me to a chair. He wanted to call 999, but I wouldn’t let him. I just told him that I needed to eat after skipping breakfast.

I finished my shift—Fergus insisting I trade places with him, so I could at least sit—and then decided to go see Frank afterwards. I took the tube to the University of Glasgow and made my way to his small flat on campus. I dodged all sorts of people milling in the hallway and knocked on his door. There was no sound. I knocked more forcefully, almost pounding the door until Frank himself yanked it open.

“What?” He looked harried and angry, but then his expression changed when he saw it was me. “Oh. Claire.”

I pushed past him, going to sit on the bed. I gestured for Frank to shut the door, which he did, warily watching me under lowered brows. He paced the floor in front of me, the desk lamp throwing his lean shadow on the walls. Every step he took seemed to rob me of breath. I fiddled with the strap on my purse.

“You didn’t call, Frank. You don’t text. Sorry to barge in like this, but we need to make some decisions, now. I almost fainted at work today,” I said, and waved my hand when he stopped his pacing to look me over. “I’m fine, but it won’t be long before I start showing. I’m talking to my parents this Sunday.”

“Claire, I just don’t know.”

“What do you mean, you don’t know?” I gripped the blue duvet cover on the bed. “I thought you said you were happy about this, that we would work things out. What changed?” I tried to concentrate, tried to keep the frustration out of my voice.

“I was happy, Claire.” He ran his hands through his dark hair, clutching at his head.

“You were happy? So what, you lied to me?”

“No, I didn’t lie to you. It’s just—I’m not ready for this,” Frank rasped.

“What the bloody fuck, Frank? You think I am? I’m not even eighteen! This wasn’t exactly in my plans either. It’s not like I’m trying to trap you into anything. Is that what you’re thinking?” I pinched the bridge of my nose with my fingers. I didn’t understand how I couldn’t see this coming before.

“Actually, I don’t think you’re ready either. I wanted to talk to you about that.” Frank gestured wildly with his hands, clearly irritated. He still paced left and right across the room, his strides becoming longer with anger. The fact that he was angry infuriated me.

“You’re not saying anything that makes sense!” I pushed myself off the bed and blocked his path. I stood in front of him unimpressively; he towered a few inches above me.

“I’m saying you’re not ready for this, the responsibility of having a baby,” he sighed, exasperated.

“God, you think I don’t know that?!” I let my breath out in a hiss, as he took my shoulders gently and made me sit back down on the bed. Frank bent his knees, facing me now.

I glanced at my hands. I couldn’t meet his eyes as I blinked back tears, hating the idea of him thinking I was trying to blackmail him with unnecessary drama. I tilted my head back at last, staring at the ceiling. Around us, the desk, the lone bookshelf, the clothes strewn on the floor all stood silent witnesses to my despair.

“Listen,” Frank said softly, tucking a strand of hair behind my ear. “I know we talked about this, and I know you told me before, but I still think… look, let’s book an appointment through NHS. We still have time, the cutoff is twelve weeks.” I froze, my eyes searching his face in disbelief.

“Cutoff?” I repeated.

“It’s an outpatient procedure, really. A few hours.” He shrugged.

I stared at him, horrified, shaken out of my stupor. “No. I can’t.”

“Claire, please, be reasonable,” He pleaded.

“No!” I pushed him away, nearly causing him to overbalance. Tears kept falling down my cheeks, as Frank reached out and placed his hands on either side of my face. I shook him off, but he didn’t let go. I locked my hands around his wrists, and he finally let his hands slide away from my face. I stood and walked towards the door. He followed me and I stopped before I opened it.

I turned to look at Frank over my shoulder. I knew he could see the hurt on my face, but he kept his expression carefully blank. He was the first to drop his gaze to the floor, but neither of us yielded on this choice. I reached into my purse, and I pulled out the ultrasound image that I had tucked into the side pocket. I held it out to him.

Frank didn’t take it.

He stared down at it, and still I held it in midair, hand shaking only slightly. I swallowed hard. I withdrew the picture, putting it back into my purse. He didn’t say anything more, and neither did I. I turned away and left his dorm, walking fast down the street towards the tube station.

I was still crying.

#outlander #outlander fanfic #outlander au #jamie and claire #lullaby 5 #echoing the sentiment of a dear reader: frank's an ass

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postdoc-help-desk · 5 years ago

Text

Expert Note-Taking

Last post was about how to manage any references you gather during your research, so this time I’m going to focus on another important related factor: keeping track of important information obtained from references. Even though you can do this in multiple ways and preferences will determine what you go for, there is one factor you’ll definitely want to consider before choosing an option.

It all comes down to the question of how long your project will last and how many references you’ll need to collect in order to complete it. For me, these fall into three categories that boil down to the terms small, medium, and large.

◆ Consider small projects as those that are fairly short or not requiring many references. If the project only lasts a few weeks or you need under 10 references, you can probably get away with printing articles before highlighting relevant information and scribbling notes in the margins. If you prefer to keep things digital, these options are also available in most PDF reader applications.

◆ For medium-sized projects with up to 20 references or ones that last up to a semester’s worth of time, you may want to consider transferring that information to a notebook or onto note cards that you can flip through or putting it all into a single word processing document. At the very least, this will reduce each reference to its relevant information instead of having to skip past extraneous information. Since you should have a PDF copy of all your references saved for easy access, you will always have the option to return to the full piece for details you may have missed previously.

◆ And then there’s the large projects. For any projects that require more than 20 references, you will likely want to be able to search and sort information more easily, and this is where software options can be immensely beneficial. Similarly, any projects that last longer than one semester’s worth of time is likely best suited for digital notes so you don’t misplace work and have to do a close rereading of any references. As graduate students, this is where your main research project will definitely end up, though other projects may as well.

Of course, your cutoff point might be different than mine, so don’t feel like you have to stick to these values. If you have a better memory or fewer things to juggle, you may get away with stretching to longer time periods or larger quantities of references. If you’re liable to forget things easily or have a lot of responsibilities, make sure you account for this! You know your own limits better than I do, but do try to err on the cautious side. And by no means should you push yourself to keep everything in your head, because you will definitely forget information or mix up sources and details if you do!

So let me spend the rest of this post talking about what some of the best options are out there for digital academic note-taking. Just like you did in choosing a reference manager, spend a little time testing out your choice to make sure it’s a good fit for you and your style. If you thought the idea of transferring your references from one manager to another halfway through a project was daunting, consider how much worse it would be without the automatic export and import options they offer and you’ll have a sense for what transferring your notes to another platform halfway through a project would be like.

Digital note-taking options have two distinct advantages over paper and print options, which are intertwined. They are the copy and paste function and the search function. ◇ Whether you’re copying a specific quotation into your notes or grabbing a screenshot of a figure or table, this is invaluable next to having to hand-write or draw out anything. Even if you were to underline, highlight, or physically cut out the relevant part of a paper, each of these options are more time-consuming in the long run. Cutting up a physical copy to paste pieces into a notebook is completely absurd and does you no benefit when it comes time to use that information, and neither does underlining or highlighting because you’ll still have to go back to the whole reference. Finding highlighted or underlined phrases after the fact is hugely annoying, if for no other reason than having to flip through countless pages to find the right sentence. But any images you put into your digital notebook will be accessible to copy and paste out of it later on, just as any quotations will be. Searching for information will also take significantly less time and effort, because you won’t have to flip through physical notes to manually identify relevant phrases. Instead, all text in your digital notebook can be searched using the search function in the program if it has one, or CTRL+F if it doesn’t.

Now, I’m a little biased in note-taking options and I’m sure that will come across, so do keep that in mind. For me, there are really only three viable digital options at this time that are well-designed for academic note-taking.

A word processing document: ◇ It’s important to start by recognizing the tried-and-true, long-standing option of a massive document. This can of course be a browser-based document like a Google Doc that you can access anywhere with Internet or it could be application-based like a Microsoft Word document that is saved locally to a hard drive. But no matter how you design and format it, a giant document is the most basic of the digital choices and therefore has the fewest benefits. This means that as long as you include something to identify where any information comes from, it can work but it has distinct limits. However, the more references and information you add to the file, the harder it will become to pick out specifics or draw connections between several references. Consider for a moment the limitation of your monitor screen size. While it may sound silly, remember that if you copy several figures or take a lot of notes on one reference, the space taken up could easily take up more than what you are able to reasonably read on the screen. If you then want to find a key phrase or concept that appears in multiple references, there’s no way to find both that key information and the reference it comes from at the same time, even with a search function. Taking notes for small or medium projects may be feasible with a word processing document, but should definitely not be used with large projects.

Evernote or Microsoft OneNote: ◇ So what if you don’t want to use a word-processing document, or you have a large project to do? Both Evernote and OneNote are great options for you to keep all your notes together. They’re fairly similar, so in large part your decision will come down to personal preference. Evernote is distinctly business-like in its design with a relatively drab color scheme. In contrast, OneNote is a bit more colorful and creative in its design. This may not matter to you, but then again, it may be depressing or distracting for you if you choose the wrong application. The most significant difference between them, however, is the cost. Evernote has several levels to it, including the individual use options of basic and premium. Basic Evernote is free, but comes with the limitation of only being accessible on a computer rather than having the mobile access option that comes with a premium account. It also restricts your account in terms of the number of devices that can be linked to it, which may be problematic if you’re likely to work on multiple computers.For $8 a month, however, you’ll have Premium Evernote and be able to get rid of both of these issues while bumping up your abilities in some other areas, too. It’s also worth noting that a school email address can grant you a full year with a Premium account for free. OneNote, on the other hand, is completely free. No pay levels and no differences between account abilities, just full access. So, what can you do with these softwares? Since both of them are designed specifically to be note-taking software, there are some distinct benefits that mostly appear through organizational features. - While the terminology is different between them, both Evernote and OneNote let you organize your notes very well. Remember back in middle school when you had a different binder for each class, dividers within each binder for different sections of material, and many different pages within those dividers that contained your notes? That’s pretty much what you’ll have again through these applications, but with the added benefit of being digital. Each project can be the binder, while subsections within it will become folders, like the dividers, and all of your notes for each reference will go onto a different page. You can even create subfolders if needed. - Another key organizational feature here is one that I pointed out as a weakness with a word processing document, which is keeping more information on one screen. To continue the metaphor, unlike your middle school binders, you can see the name of each page in a folder without having to flip through them so you can identify and find information more easily. You’ll still have to click through the pages to see the notes, but if you use a search function to find a key word or phrase, you’ll much more easily identify which references have that information in them.

No matter what route you choose, regardless of the project size or duration, keeping track of which source any information comes from is easily the most important thing. By doing this, you will save significant amounts of time in not having to look back through multitudes of documents to find a specific statement or figure in one of them again.

#PhD #phd life #postdoc #postdoc life

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douchebagbrainwaves · 5 years ago

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RETURN OF THE ALTAIR BASIC OF WEB 2

Let's consider what it would take. Hackers are so used to computers that they have no intention of funding you, just to pick your brain for a competitor. Otherwise I just worked. C is pretty low-level, but it did at least have a chance of succeeding, you're doing well. YC for aggressive early user acquisition. No one would know what side to be on. As an angel, you have to do anything about it, they'll let you invest at a low enough valuation. Someone who goes to work for Google instead because he thought they had a few weeks' lead over their competitors. None of the ones we've funded have. At least, he was listed as an inventor on the patent Yahoo sued over—so perhaps there was something personal about it.

They're looking for ways to put large sums to work. It's money investors have given you in the hope that this constraint will prod them into action. But that doesn't mean it's wrong to sell. So the solution may be to think about ideas without involving yourself. VCs are money managers. This would be like, because that's how things have to be the most valuable things you could do all the company's errands as well as as apportioning the stock, you should either learn how or find a co-founder. This was a mistake, because Microsoft was a very anomalous startup. The only explanation is that they can't force anyone to do anything about it, it's probably the most efficient way to reach VCs, especially if you have kids. That is arguably one of the most powerful.

Probably for the same deals, but the custom among the big companies seems to be able to brag about the good terms they got. So if you want to optimize is your chance of a good outcome, not the idea. We were compelled by circumstances to grow slowly, and in retrospect it was exactly the right thing. So you want to be running out of money. Whether the number of startups started within them. I wouldn't be surprised if most programs started as throwaway programs. All you need is to be decisive. At the other extreme: a startup that avoided working on some problem because of patent trolls. The Mythical Man-Month. One of the most famous examples is Apple, whose board made a nearly fatal blunder in firing Steve Jobs.

I'm sure Larry and Sergey couldn't find stuff online, Hotmail because Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith couldn't exchange email at work. I've never heard anyone mention explicitly. Because most VCs are. I assume they could have vetoed such a deal. Startup funding is measured in time. The best case, both components of the vector contribute to your company's DNA: the unscalable things you have to learn. I'd say investors are the limiting reagent in startup formation. But things don't always go smoothly in startups. But what if you're investing by yourself? You might think a high valuation is that you get less dilution. Keep releasing new features; keep getting mentioned in the press. They're happy to invest small amounts—sometimes as little as $20,000—as long as you can.

The most powerful form of disagreement, and probably also the most common. I used to believe what I read in Time and Newsweek. But what a long fight it would be ignoring users. A combination of solipsism and laziness. The reason I suggested college graduates not start startups immediately was that I was disgusted by the idea of inhabiting a world ruled by intelligence. For hardware startups there's a variant of doing things that don't scale. When languages are designed for other people, it's always a specific group of other people: people not as smart as the language designer. Some founders are quite dejected when they get turned down by investors doesn't mean much. Should the city take stock in the startups is that they grow fast, and you are very happy because your $50,000 into at a valuation of $1 million. I used to close my eyes and hold my glove up more for protection than in the hope that the programmer he'll hire is Bill Gates—kind of backward, as the events of the Bubble, optimistic analysts used to justify high price to earnings ratio that was bogus. VCs think. Why don't more people do it?

The reason I suggested college graduates not start startups immediately was that I was disgusted by the idea of having a lot of time and money to do it is to predict it. For example, if someone develops a new process for smelting ore that gets a better yield, and you are very happy because your $50,000 into a company at a pre-money valuation of $2 million. All you need from a launch is some initial core of users. Revenues of $3000 a month, because the more startups you had in town, the less it would take me several weeks of research to be able to bear a good deal they'd want it all to themselves, but usually there's a bigger offer coming, or perhaps even an IPO. The culmination of my career as a writer of press releases was one celebrating his graduation, illustrated with a drawing I did of him during a meeting. An undergrad could build something better as a class project. Indeed, it evolved from actual warfare: most early traders switched on the fly. I think hiring people is the worst thing you can say with certainty about Jaynes is that he was one of many unforeseen advantages of the YC model and specifically of making YC big that B2B startups now have an instant market of hundreds of other startups ready at hand. It matters more to make something people want is so much harder. But when you use this trick for dividing a large group into smaller ones, something strange happens that I've never heard anyone mention explicitly. This is ridiculous, really.

But everyone knows that's important. So it was literally IPO or bust. The early adopters you need to fix something. A few years ago an Italian friend of mine said, Most VCs can't do anything that would sound bad to the kind of founders who have the balls to turn down most acquisition offers. What happens now if you realize you should be making this for consumers instead of businesses? I didn't realize till the last few years that writing for publication didn't have to mean it, because all it does is break ties: applicants are bucketed by ability, and legacy status is only used to decide between the applicants in the bucket that straddles the cutoff. You pay more, but there just aren't enough of them, initially has a certain amount of time left before the money runs out and they have a lot. Name-calling. We had some well known users.

If the company raises more money later, the new investor will take a chunk of the company. Although we didn't fund Meraki, the founders were Robert Morris's grad students, so we know their history. Blue staters think it's for sissies. That's the way to the closing, because the knowledge it tested was so specialized that passing required years of expensive training. How can the richest country in the world look like this? Perhaps we can split the difference and say that mobility gives hackers the luxury of being principled. By the time you had to? And in that department, there seems to be working in a group of employees go out to dinner together, talk over ideas, and then returned two months later and not one thing had changed. In the period just before the industrial revolution, some of the qualities of things you're meant to work in the end, though the experience probably took several years off my life. We know this continued to be true up till 2004, when the Facebook was founded—though in that case it probably won't take four years. Viaweb. The weak point of the top reporters is not laziness, but vanity.

Thanks to Aaron Swartz, Robert Morris, Jessica Livingston, and Harj Taggar for inviting me to speak.

#automatically generated text #Markov chains #Paul Graham #Python #Patrick Mooney #hand #releases #think #difference #college #lot #students #funding #money #laziness #IPO #intelligence #circumstances #investor

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tinycartridge · 6 years ago

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Approaching Infinity ⊟

[Guest writer Caroline Delbert brings us a fully unexpected article that manages to be both philosophical exploration and interview-based journalism, at the same time. I couldn’t be happier to share this piece! Find more from Caroline at her Twitter and Medium. -jc]

We live in a golden age of computing power. Our games are filled with giant procgen worlds and RNGs and thousands of ticking background variables. The math is surpassing human ability far faster than we can grasp, and we’ve, I think correctly, put it to work making the grass in Stardew Valley so fun to swoosh through with a sword. But the idea of infinity horrifies people more than almost anything else and remains as confusing and terrifying as ever. As our games get closer to endlessly detailed, I chose four designers who’ve worked on four of my favorite games of the last few years, all with totally different ways of using space, time, and more to give the feeling of an infinite playspace. I’ve also been spelunking the idea of infinity itself and why it makes us feel so uncomfortable and intrigued.

We Contain Multitudes

What is infinity? We aren’t born with an understanding of the idea of something that never ends. Psychology researcher Ruma Falk put together existing studies about infinity. “[C]hildren of ages 8-9 and on seem to understand that numbers do not end, but it takes quite a few more years to fully conceive, not only the infinity of numbers, but also the infinite difference between the set of numbers and any finite set.” You could spend your entire life counting out loud and get to 2 billion. But in calculus, which is all about approaching infinity, a billion is rounded down to zero. An average 2019 computer could count to a billion in about two seconds, depending on the code you wrote. That’s how tiny a billion still is. Falk calls the distance between our human billions and the idea of infinity an “abyssal gap.”

When I talked with Immortal Rogue developer Kyle Barrett about this project, he mentioned Jorge Luis Borges’s famous short story “The Library of Babel.” Borges imagined an infinite-seeming library of books filled with random combinations of letters and punctuation. He sets out 25 total characters and 410 pages. I averaged a few lines from David Foster Wallace’s primer on infinity, Everything and More, which had 57.5 characters per line. For just two lines of, say, 50 characters each, there are over six googol possible versions: that’s a 6 with 100 zeroes after it, for just two lines of a book of 410 pages. The largest math Excel let me do was for about four lines total, which became 3 with 300 zeroes after it.

Philosopher Daniel Dennett has spent decades writing about how humans think about problems and ideas. His 2013 book Intuition Pumps is filled with helpful analogies, including a spin on the Library of Babel. “Since it is estimated that there are only 10040 particles in the region of the universe we can observe, the Library of Babel is not remotely a physically possible object,” Dennett explained. But despite containing far more books than the possible volume of our entire region of space, that number of books is still a real number, not infinite! The takeaway from all this, and then I swear I’ll stop talking about math, is that nothing we can measure in real life is truly infinite. Infinity is a pure concept reserved for mathematicians and philosophers.

Playing with Time: Immortal Rogue

In Kyle Barrett’s 2019 mobile game Immortal Rogue, you begin in prehistory and fight your way through progressive eras in chunks of 100 years. But time is a flat circle, and eventually your progress is bombed back into preagricultural oblivion. The mechanics of Barrett’s game are fun and satisfying and I can’t recommend Immortal Rogue strongly enough, but the framework of endless time is what got my attention.

“It’s not really infinite,” Barrett explained. “It’s a matrix that loops every time you reach the end of it. There’s an x-axis that’s based on time, basically—it goes from agricultural to pre-industrial to the industrial era to the computational era and space age, so time based on human technological development, and if you get too far into the space era you’re gonna destroy the world and go back to the preagricultural era. Then there’s a y-axis that is based on authoritarian control in the world, so at the bottom you have anarchy, at the top you have fascism, and if you go too far into fascism you’ll get anarchy because people will rebel.”

I said I wouldn’t talk about math again, but Barrett brought it up this time. A matrix is just a grid. The Matrix is something else, but if you’ve ever done a “Sally has a blue hat and wasn’t born in March”-style logic puzzle, you’ve used a matrix. There’s also a proper math definition of a matrix and a whole field of operations we do to those matrices, collectively called abstract algebra.

Barrett’s matrix of time and authority determines the overall feel of the levels, but each one is procedurally generated after that. His day job is in mainstream game development, and he originally shopped the idea for Immortal Rogue as the system to power an AAA game. “You can imagine any AAA game with that kind of variety in environment would cost just too much money to make,” Barrett says. “It was a game concept that I had pitched to studios earlier as a sort of introduction piece—not necessarily to make the game, because I know that doesn’t happen, but as far as getting into the industry.”

The way Barrett combined his basic variables means Immortal Rogue does feel endless. My longest life so far is 800 years, and Barrett says a complete cycle in which you beat the game can take anywhere from 1,000 to 4,000 years. I’d love to tell you I believe I’ll beat the game at some point and see that full cycle. I’ll keep trying, at least.

Immortality and Endless Time

Would you want to live forever? This is one of the major philosophical questions that underpins western thought and especially the Christian form of the afterlife. Heaven and hell are each presented as an eternity, but again we run into Dr. Ruma Falk’s findings about how humans conceive of an infinite period of time. “One does not get closer to infinity by advancing the counting sequence because there is no way to approach infinity. Nowhere does the very big merge into the infinite.” If the lifetime of the planet Earth were condensed to one year, humans have lived for less than 30 minutes. We balk at the length of lives of record-setting elders who were born just a few years after the 19th century: imagine living that entire time and then living it again and again for literally forever. Our earthly understanding of time, and how our earthly brains process information, just isn’t compatible with thinking about living forever.

For many people, God or another higher power is the only way that infinity can make sense. In turn, a much longer afterlife helps to also make sense of how tiny and fleeting our earthly lives can feel. In the potentially infinite scale of time, our lives are the meager billions. They round down to zero, and it definitely feels that way sometimes. Falk cites 17th century mathematician Blaise Pascal, himself a late-in-life convert to Christianity and the trope namer of Pascal’s Wager. During Pascal’s lifetime, infinity was still a scandalous idea and a wedge issue for mathematicians and theologians. “When I consider the short duration of my life, swallowed up in an eternity before and after, the little space I fill engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces whereof I know nothing, and which know nothing of me, I am terrified,” Pascal wrote. “The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me.”

In her memoir Living with a Wild God, journalist Barbara Ehrenreich describes grappling with the same problems as an isolated teenager in the 1950s. “I didn’t think much about the future when I was a child—who does?” she writes. “But to the extent that I did imagine a future, it held an ever-widening range for my explorations—more hills and valleys, shorelines and dunes. […] The idea that there might be a limit to my explorations, a natural cutoff in the form of death, was slow to dawn on me.”

Randomizing Infinity: Alphabear & Alphabear 2

Game designer Pat Kemp worked on both 2015’s Alphabear and 2018’s Alphabear 2 at Spry Fox. Both have the same core word game, a fresh take on the classic Bookworm where you have to spell words from rapidly deteriorating letter tiles. Unlike in Scrabble and its knockoffs, rare letters don’t have higher point values. And into the mix you throw dozens of different collectible bears, each with a total score multiplier and a specific boost like a bonus for 5-letter words or preventing all Xs and Zs. Both games are free to play with in-app purchases. In Alphabear 2, Spry Fox took the mechanic of the first game and added a linear story, multiple difficulty levels, and a host of other features. Playing the game feels like getting an upgrade at the rental-car place and realizing you have heated side mirrors. I didn’t ask for them, but I love them and now I need them. But why did the second Alphabear get so much bigger?

“I hope this answer isn’t disappointing to you, but the first Alphabear, although it’s a lovely game we’re very proud of and was critically well received and we got lots of features and good reviews, wasn’t much of a financial success for us,” Kemp told me. So Spry Fox went into development of Alphabear 2 with goals to convert more users into purchasers and more purchasers into multiple-purchasers. “The decision-making around making it into a world, and a linear campaign, and building out all the different features […] was creating this rich, interwoven progression system that players can feel invested in and value. Basically how you monetize a free-to-play game is, people play your game for weeks and months and come to really value things in the game.”

In the first Alphabear, each chapter had a set of collectible bears that quickly eclipsed the power of the previous chapter’s bears. “And you would almost never go back and use bears from earlier chapters, just because of the way it was set up,” Kemp says. “So you had this weird ‘disposable’ feel to bears. It was cool when you unlocked them, but the game was telling you, ‘You’re done with that bear, here’s some new bears.’” Now, the bears accumulate over time as one big group, and you can continue to level them up as high as you want, but your progress is paced by how quickly you regenerate in-game energy in the form of honey.

After a certain chapter in the Normal campaign, players can begin again on Hard mode, and then after a later chapter, they can begin Master mode. I don’t know the full length of the basic campaign, but I’m probably 100 levels in and somewhere in chapter 9 on Normal mode. The scope of the whole thing including all three difficulties is staggering, and the game had been out for just seven months when I talked with Kemp. “Have people finished the amount of content you’ve made so far?” I asked. “We know of at least one person who’s completed the master-level campaign,” he said. When I said I was surprised, Kemp said, “Every game developer I know has this experience where they’re surprised by some small portion of their fanbase that is just so into it that it defies all expectations.”

In this case, the fastest player ended up lapping the development team. “It was so far off that we had planned to build whatever happened when you did that later on,” Kemp said. “They sent us a picture of their screen of the campaign board, and all it was was just a black screen, because it was trying to load the next campaign board, which doesn’t exist. We were like, ‘Oh my god, we didn’t even put anything in there, and it looks kinda like you’re in purgatory or something.’” Spry Fox plans to replace the Sopranos non-ending.

Purgatory or Something

Earlier this year, I talked with my friend Tristan about his existential dread. He’s pretty fresh out of college and still figuring it all out. “I was going to write about games,” he said, “and as I entered my last year or so, I was going to write about movies. I don’t know if I’m still going to do that, so that’s a large part of the dread. Not knowing what I was actually doing.” Humans can’t conceive of infinity using numbers, but we can use our pessimistic imaginations. Our set of plausible options is no match for what we dream or panic about.

Christian existentialist Søren Kierkegaard wrote about dread and fear of the unknown in his 1844 book The Concept of Anxiety, where the Danish word angest could be translated as “anxiety” or “dread”. Using the story of Adam and Eve, Kierkegaard posits that anxiety dates back to a fraction of a second after original sin. “The terror here is simply anxiety,” Kierkegaard writes, “since Adam has not understood what was said.” In other words, like a pet in trouble, Adam didn’t know what was being told to him, but he understood it was bad from the tone of voice.

“Anxiety can be compared with dizziness,” Kierkegaard goes on. “He whose eye happens to look into the yawning abyss becomes dizzy. But what is the reason? It is just as much his own eye as the abyss, for suppose he had not looked down.” Those who think about Dr. Ruma Falk’s “abyssal gap” between the finite and infinity may be dizzy forever with the uncertainty of what they’re pondering. “A persistent pursuit of the infinite may bring the individual to a blind alley, both emotionally and intellectually,” Falk writes. His analogy isn’t an accident. A blind alley is like another famous philosophical idea, Schrodinger’s cat: without shining a light, we can never know if the alley is empty or full, terrible or fine. And we can never shine that light.

Infinite Reality: Telling Lies & Her Story

At 2018’s E3 conference, Sam Barlow appeared on a panel about the future of narrative. “People will write to me and say, ‘I haven’t played a game in twenty years, and I played Her Story,’” Barlow said. “Or ‘My daughter installed it on my iPhone for me.’” It makes sense: Her Story’s core mechanic is as simple as a YouTube search, and the game is set in 1994, with a Windows 3.1 aesthetic to match. The game also fits with Barlow’s career arc. His 1999 XYZZY-winning interactive fiction Aisle gives players just one chance to type any command before reaching one of the game’s dozens of endings, placing players in a finite setting that even feels claustrophobic, but setting before them seemingly limitless possibilities. He was a natural fit to lead two Silent Hill games after that, and he views Her Story as the surprisingly successful “one chance” he had to make a successful indie game.

“This is something I’ve pitched so many times to publishers, with the rationale that in every other medium, crime fiction, police procedurals, murder mysteries, detective stories—if you have a TV channel and a film company, you’re gonna have a few stories in that world because it consistently works,” Barlow told me. “Games publishers were never into the idea. They felt like the things that sold in video games were power fantasies and superhero stories.” Barlow chose to home in on the interrogation room both as a convenient single setting and the place where his interest in crime stories was naturally drawn. “I wasn’t trying to do the police chases and locations and all those elements which would be expensive, but also, I was zooming in on the dialogue and the interactions and the human side of it,” he said, citing the groundbreaking ‘90s show Homicide: Life on the Street and its Emmy-winning bottle episode “Three Men and Adena.”

“I did a ton of research, reading the interrogation manuals for detectives, academic studies and pieces about the psychology of the interview room, a ton of crime books, movies with notable interrogation scenes and police interviews. This was slightly ahead of the true crime wave that we’ve had since, so I was discovering there’s so much footage online of real-life interviews and interrogations that has been released or leaked,” Barlow told me. “One day, as these things do, I woke up and went for a walk, and my subconscious—which is far cleverer than I am—put all the pieces and all the research I’d been doing together. [T]he detective’s sat at a computer, and there’s always the twist where they stay up all night sat at the computer and then they find that one little bit of information or the one piece of evidence that will break the case.”

Her Story is made of hundreds of discrete video clips, divided into main character Hannah Smith’s answers to an unseen detective’s questions. For his upcoming game Telling Lies, Barlow brought the setting forward into the Skype era and is introducing new mechanical twists to match. “To some extent Her Story was about giving you the writer’s perspective into a story, and here it’s giving you some of that editing room insight, where you spend so much time with the footage, choosing whether to cut out on this frame or that frame,” Barlow said. Instead of separate clips, Telling Lies gives you long, uncut videos that show both sides of a Skype call that you can scrub through—meaning drag the progress bar searching for highlights. “Not only are you coming at these stories in a nonlinear way, but also within a given scene you might end up watching it backwards.”

The text side of searching has also evolved. Because the videos aren’t separated into clips, searching for a specific word drops you into a video at that exact place. “Those conversations are split into two parts, so you can only see one side of a conversation at a time. You have the full seven minutes in front of you and you get dropped in to the point where someone says the word [or] phrase you've searched for,” Barlow said. “So early on, if you search for the word ‘love,’ you get dropped into a moment when Kerry [Bishé’s] character says, ‘Love you!’ and hangs up.”

Including Her Story and now Telling Lies in a group of very big-feeling games runs into a funny obstacle, because they’re both made of a very finite number of minutes of video. Her Story even has Steam achievements linked with what percentage of the total clips you’ve discovered and watched. “Something like 20% of people 100%-ed it. For most games you’re lucky if 20% of people finish the game. It had a display that showed you all the clips you hadn’t seen—that was an incentive and somewhat maddening if you could see there were clips you hadn’t seen. My approach with Telling Lies was to make it so big and huge and messy and colorful that it would feel less like something you could 100%, because I really wanted people to lose themselves in just the joy of exploring these characters’ lives.”

Just Out of Reach

Even with the incentive to find all the clips, in Her Story I found myself revisiting clips I’d already seen as I tried to find new keywords or listen for clues, and I maxed out just past the 75% achievement. The rest eluded me. With Telling Lies, this one kind of mystery will be removed, and that’s a blow against infinitude. In the perfect world of pure mathematics, having one more item just out of reach is one of the fundamental ways we can make proofs of infinite ideas. This structured approach also helps us turn the overwhelming idea of infinity into, at least right now, the one step in front of us. It’s infinity in the form of a child asking a parent for just five more minutes of sleep, then asking for five more, for eternity.

In Daniel Dennett’s book Intuition Pumps he uses this idea as an illustration for why infinity just can’t exist in real life. If every animal evolved from another animal, then there are infinity animals stretching back into infinity long ago, always with one preceding. We know that’s just not true. On the other hand, a study of how children process infinity showed that knowing the names of some large numbers made children think those were the largest numbers. Learning named ideas pushed out the very idea of having unnamed ideas, which makes sense given how large and robust our language brains are. Being strong, clear communicators has shaped our brains and the societies we form as humans. If we all became existentially troubled abstraction peddlers, I don’t think that would necessarily be a step forward.

To consider infinity with a finite mind is a paradox, and as Dr. Ruma Falk explains, “Mathematicians and philosophers are often no less addicted to resolving these paradoxes than some adolescents are to experiencing the limits of existence.” Like the Library of Babel, an infinite world is made mostly of incoherent and random nonsense, compared with a human mind that can only remember its own history in cohesive story form. My friend Martin has a rich life and a beautiful family, and he told me, “My personal greatest fear is probably losing my mind. The idea of being unable to make sense of the world is horrifying.” In fact, studies show that we’re more able to tune out conversations we can overhear both sides of than those where we can hear just one side—this is how deep our need for clear narratives runs, and it’s why we’re not made for an infinite world.

Infinite Liminal: Sunless Sea & Cultist Simulator

In February of 2019, Alexis Kennedy addressed something that had grown beyond his reach, and his post was the catalyst for what eventually became this essay. On the Weather Factory blog, where the developer typically shares updates to 2018’s Cultist Simulator, Kennedy described an alternate reality game (ARG) called Enigma that he’s built into his work—not just Cultist Simulator but 2015’s Sunless Sea and even 2009’s Fallen London. In the Enigma post, he sums up the appeal this mystery seems to have to fans: “If you’re working through things and looking for meaning in your life, then all the hidden meanings in this project may look like they add up to something more important than they actually do.”

I love Kennedy’s work—if we’re friends, you’ve probably heard me talk about it—and while I’ve never mistaken him for a guru, his games have affected and stayed with me more than anything else I’ve ever played. He’s gifted with language, stuffing his work with plausible and evocative neologisms or uncommon historical terms. But his more powerful gift lies in what he chooses to reveal and how long you must wait for it. I’ve thought often of something my friend Diana said nearly twenty years ago, about traveling with other people and seeing their luggage: “They wonder what I’m taking, but I wonder what they’re leaving behind.” I constantly wonder what Alexis Kennedy is leaving behind.

“Gamers tend to be—to borrow a phrase of Mike Laidlaw's—more like dogs than cats in the way they consume content. If the core loop is even moderately compelling, they'll gorge on content and rush through it,” Kennedy told me via email. “As soon as players are doing that, they'll skim text, and if they're going to skim text, text had better not be your A feature. I constantly skim quest text in games, and I'm a narrative junkie. So pacing is a way of saying: hold on, appreciate this, take your time with it.” In both Fallen London and Sunless Sea, one variable shuffles what day it is, so you receive different flavor text or events even when you’re repeating actions or storylines. “I don't think I ever quite recovered from the initial terror, back in 2009, of seeing players consume Fallen London content literally ten times as fast as I expected,” Kennedy says.

Like Sam Barlow, Kennedy reached for inspiration outside of what’s traditionally in the purview of a video game. I asked how he chooses end goals in games with such wide-open mechanics—Cultist Simulator is even more open than Sunless Sea in some ways. “I come at those stopping points from two directions. One is 'what sort of emotions and experiences are we aiming for?' The other is 'what sort of activities would a character in a novel, not just in a game, do in this setting?' So in Sunless Sea, we want people to be thinking about loneliness and survival and discovery, and we also want people to be aiming for the kind of things they'd aim for in Moby-Dick or Voyage of the Dawn Treader or HMS Surprise.” The only ending I’ve reached in Sunless Sea is the most basic one, where you amass some money and retire. In Cultist Simulator, I’ve managed to live a normal working life and then retire, which is considered a minor victory. And still, the game wonders what I’m taking, while I wonder what it’s leaving behind.

Pure Abstraction

“The study of infinity stretches human abstract thinking to some of its loftiest possibilities,” Dr. Ruma Falk writes. “By definition, it calls for modes of reasoning that transcend concrete representation.” What I’ve found most interesting as I researched this piece and talked with these gifted game designers is how thoughtfully they’d constructed gameplay loops that continue to feel fresh and challenging. The games themselves couldn’t be more different in terms of genre or lack thereof, revenue models, or mechanics, but all feel large and immersive inside to an extent that I instinctively ignored whatever seams I might end up seeing.

I asked each designer to share a game that felt infinite to them as players. Sam Barlow answered the question before I even asked it, though. He described wanting Telling Lies to feel like a huge place to explore. “My only go-to reference, which is somewhat ambitious, is the way I felt when I was playing Zelda: Breath of the Wild and the way that Nintendo made me feel, where I could just go off and explore in any direction and I could let my curiosity guide me and I would always enjoy myself. I would always find something interesting.” He called this kind of freedom a form of magic. “To some extent, Her Story was me trying to get some of the magic and—again, this wasn’t a conscious thing—some of the magic of the old text parser games.”

Pat Kemp also chose Breath of the Wild. “The world feels huge and dense in a kind of unusual way even amongst all the other open-world AAA experiences that are out there. There’s this big mountain and you climb up it, and on the way up you encounter two or three little unique-feeling things, and you make your way down and encounter a bunch of other little things, and they’re all handmade little surprises. It feels like the world is just brimming with delightful little nuggets of story or interesting challenges or encounters. It’s really a remarkable achievement and it’s also one of those things where, as a game developer, I can recognize what a monumental task it must have been to create that world,” Kemp said. “Every inch of it feels handcrafted by someone who cares about that itch, which is just incredibly daunting. It must have been so expensive to do.”

Alexis Kennedy chose Elite: Dangerous, and I enjoyed how his answer mirrored how I feel about his games, where some amount of suggestion makes it easy and fun to project the rest with your imagination. “I put a hundred-plus hours into Elite: Dangerous because I so enjoyed the sense of jumping through galactic-size simulated space. I knew perfectly well that the procgen systems were largely identical in all meaningful ways, I knew the space between star systems isn't simulated and you're just jumping between skyboxed instances, but I've spent 47 years learning how space works IRL and I still carry over those assumptions if the sense of resource cost lets me. I need to feel like I'm working to cross the space and have something that will run out or need balancing.”

Kyle Barrett pointed out that, infamously now, No Man’s Sky sold itself as an infinite game. “The game definitely feels infinite. It also has the effect of what infinity would feel like, which is empty after a while. It teaches people that lesson,” Barrett says. It brought back to mind something he told me before about deciding how much to procedurally generate within Immortal Rogue: “If it’s pure random, I think it normally fails. That’s something designers find pretty quick. So it’s like, what’s the right amount of random and what’s the skeleton that can make the random meaningful?” He mentioned Dwarf Fortress as a game with infinite-feeling possibilities, and Minecraft as something that marries the two. “It feels infinite in scope and the amount of possibility feels infinite, which is why it’s probably one of the best games ever,” he said.

“Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom,” Kierkegaard wrote. “Freedom now looks down into its own possibility and then grabs hold of finiteness to support itself.” The games we love might feel infinite, but we only hang around in them long enough to realize this because of the hard work of building structures and feedback loops that make games fun to play. We study infinite math from the security of offices with comfortable temperatures and lighting. As Alexis Kennedy put it, “So it is a design choice, but there's a reason I made that one design choice rather than a million others.”

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#caroline delbert #original #infinity #sunless sea #her story #telling lies #cultist simulator #sam barlow #alexis kennedy #immortal rogue

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faveficarchive · 5 years ago

Text

Ways to Be Wicked

Part 2 of Vivian Darkbloom’s White Trash series

By Vivian Darkbloom

Pairing: Xena/Gabrielle

Rating: Mature

Synopsis: Callie finds the Lord, Zina’s past comes back to harass her, and Gabrielle is there for love and support (and burgers).

I never claimed to be your savior. I said I had a dirty mouth. —Garbage, "Dumb"

The trailer formerly known as Zina's sat contentedly on its concrete foundations, sporting a new paint job on its exterior—a blazing red to dazzle and blind the hapless occupants of the trailer park, to let them know that the reticent firefighter who once lived there—and who had quite successfully entertained a string of blondes, one after another, stray housewives on "vacation," waitresses, recent fire victims, high school cheerleaders, the manager of the local Uni-Mart, and finally the factory girl-cum-poet who stole her heart—was no longer the mistress of said dwelling.

Its lone tenant sat inside the fire-red mobile home twirling locks of her white-blonde hair and watched, for the twelfth time in twenty minutes, a little Chihuahua mouth the words "Yo quiero Taco Bell." She gritted her teeth and her flat tummy rumbled. Once again the baseball bat of commercialism had smashed against the addled brow of another complicit, blissfully unaware TV viewer. With a growl she jumped up, snatched the keys to her Camaro off the table, and went off into the night.

An hour later she sat stuffed with the bounty of Taco Bell, and her mind, always chattering, chattering, chattering…well, finally the synapses gave out and she fell asleep.

And she dreamed. A voice, disembodied, spoke to her. Callie, it whispered fervently. Listen. She tossed her head about, hoping to shake the annoying voice. "No, stop," she moaned in her sleep.

Callie! Don't resist me, my child! Who was that? It sounded like…

Callie, you must change your life. Zina has shown you forgiveness, you can show her the same…you must release the rage in your soul, you must purify yourself again.

It was…Charlton Heston! Wasn't he the old guy who played Moses in that movie? And he was speaking to her—the foggy image grew clearer—through the Taco Bell Chihuahua.

You must give yourself over to the Lord, Callie. Let Jesus Christ into your heart.

"No!" she cried aloud again. Silence. She was grateful, and started to drift into a deeper level of unconsciousness…then…

Why not? the voice demanded petulantly.

"I'm not worthy, I'm not worthy!" she wailed.

Ah, but you are, my child. You are worth saving. That's why I'm here. You have the fire within you, Callie.

"I do, I do!"

You must accept Jesus as your own personal savior. And you must go forth into the world and spread my word, for I am the light and the way to salvation. Do you know what to do now?

"I do, I do!"

Callie woke up. Aside from the massive, almost crippling pain in her stomach, she felt great. She rose from her bed, ran to the door and flung it open. A breeze blew back her hair, and the moon glowed.

"Lord, I hear you!" she screamed into the night. "I shall do as you say! From this moment I am born again!!!"

The crickets cackled their approval. The stars twinkled benignly. And a lone male voice, from two trailers away, shouted, "Shut up, you crazy bitch!"

***

Gabrielle laid on the couch and read aloud from the book she held: " 'I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness…' " She paused and closed her eyes. "Oh, wow…you were so right about this…the more I read it, the clearer and clearer it becomes…" she said to her companion, as she clutched the thin paperback of Howl to her chest.

Cyrene, sitting on the floor, leaned over and handed the joint to Gabrielle, their second one of the day. "See, honey, I told you…you just needed to relax and let your mind open up…" she waved her hands around, and her jewelry chink-ed in affirmation.

"Yeah…" Gabrielle sucked on the joint with a hiss. "When they assigned this to us in class, I just thought it was a bunch of bullshit written by some crazy hippie…uh, no offense, Cyrene."

"None taken, honey." She took the cigarette back from Gabrielle. "Cause you know something?" She took a hit.

"Hmmm?"

"It is a bunch of bullshit written by some crazy hippie!"

They dissolved into giggles, which turned into hysterical laughter once Gabrielle looked at the back cover photo of Allen Ginsburg again.

"Did you know—he was gay?" Cyrene informed Gabrielle, pointing at the photo.

"Really? Wow!" Gabrielle was still at the stage of her young life when one is continually astonished to learn that others in the wide world share one's inclinations.

"The 60s were a great time, Gabrielle." Here she goes again, Gabrielle thought. "Like, you could be gay and no one would care. No labels, man. You could experiment with sex and no one would care…I mean, I am not ashamed to say I had an encounter with another woman." She placed her hand over her heart to signify her sincerity.

"You did, Cyrene?" Gabrielle was impressed.

"Yeah. It was after I broke up with the drummer of Strawberry Alarm Clock. Man, that was a bad scene. Anyway, I kinda didn't want to deal with guys for a while, so I got involved with a chick. It was a beautiful, healing experience."

Gabrielle had ingested enough talk show fodder over the course of many years to know that "beautiful healing experiences" were usually pretty boring ones you could do without. Nonetheless she nodded solemnly at Cyrene. Then she heard a faint rumble. At first she thought it was her stomach. Man, I just ate two burritos half an hour ago….Then the sound grew louder, and more distinct. It was Zina's Harley. She sat bolt upright. "Shit! Zina's home!"

"Damn!" Cyrene crushed the lit end of the joint against the floor using her beer can. Then, in a panicky fit, she used the copy of Howl to brush the roach and all the ashes under the couch.

"Get the Lysol!" Gabrielle cried as she ran to the window. She and Cyrene had been sitting upstairs in her "study." She hoped that if she opened the window it would fumigate the room before Zina's hypersensitive nostrils could detect any aroma.

She flung open the window and looked down. She yelped again. The one flaw in her plan was that the room overlooked the front of the farm house; in fact, it was directly under where Zina usually parked her bike. The noise of the opened window caused her firefighter girlfriend to look up at her in surprise.

"Hi honey!" Gabrielle shouted, at a loss.

"Hey," Zina called up with a smile. She climbed off the Harley. "Anything wrong?"

"No! Nothing! Not at all."

"Why'd ya open the window?" It was cold out.

"I just wanted to say hi to you, baby!"

"You coulda done that inside." Zina was strangely logical at the oddest times.

"I know but, baby, I just love you so much I couldn't wait!" Gabrielle heard Cyrene behind her, her jewelry making the middle-aged woman sound like the percussion section of a Hare Krishna contingent as she waved around the hissing can of Lysol.

"Uh huh," Zina grunted skeptically. Carrying her fire helmet, she headed for the front door. Probably smoking reefer with Mom again, she thought, casting a look at Cyrene's powder-blue Volkswagen bug. As she entered the house she saw Gabrielle coming down the stairs with Cyrene. The little blonde ran right at her and jumped into her arms, smothering her lips with a kiss. The fire helmet dropped to the floor with a clang.

"Man, the honeymoon is never over with you two!" Cyrene said. It had been almost eight months since they had moved in together, six since they had been living at the farmhouse at Effie's behest; Effie, her new paramour, Hank, and her band, the Amazons, were all in Memphis, recording a new rockabilly album.

"How was your day, stud? Want some chicken pot pie?" Gabrielle cooed.

"Yes, please. Let me help you…" Zina carried Gabrielle into the kitchen. Cyrene shook her head. "Crazy kids," she muttered, then dashed upstairs to retrieve the roach she left under the couch.

***

Callie careened down Chakram Creek Road in her Camaro. She sang loudly with the radio: "I fell down, down, down into a burning ring of fire…down, down, down and the flames, they ran higher…and it BURNED BURNED BURNED, this burning ring of fire…" She was on her way to see the one person she was certain could help her in her mission to serve the Lord and save Zina. She had to save Zina, she realized, for the woman, corrupt as hellfire as she was, started her on her Journey to Jesus by giving her a home to live in.

She pulled into the parking lot of the Morpheus Mini-Mall, a desolate little stretch of under-utilized stores and buildings. There was a liquor store, a video store with a yellowed poster of "Ernest Goes to Jail" in the window, a frozen yogurt shop, a fabric store, and, near the end of the complex, a plain white sign on a door, which read "Ares Ministries, Inc."

Callie, of course, expected him to be alone, and he was. Artie, Zina's former friend, ex-sometimes-boyfriend, and maybe sorta either her first cousin or half-brother (Cyrene wasn't talking), sat at a desk in his fake-wood-paneled office reading "Guns and Ammo." He wore a scratchy looking light gray suit he bought at K-Mart for $29.95, and his green and brown knit tie was loosened at his throat. When Callie entered he looked up at her in utter shock, and, disbelieving, ran his hand through his long dark hair and then stroked his goatee. "Callie," he murmured.

"Artie." They stared at each other.

"I can't say I'm surprised to see you here. I always knew you'd find your way to me and the Lord."

Callie blinked. "Really?" She wanted to believe, oh so much…

He nodded solemnly. "My prayers have been answered, Callie. You are here, and I know why. "

"You do?" Callie said impatiently.

"Yes!" he stated firmly. He tried not to look too closely at the cutoff shorts she wore…even in February. He hoped she wasn't here to borrow money again, but he had a feeling, this morning, as he prayed…that God would send her to him. "You are ready to serve with me at the head of Christ's Army, Callie."

"I am, Artie! I truly am! I had a vision last night. The Lord spoke to me, and—"

"—and what did he sound like?" Artie narrowed his eyes and his voice lowered a register.

"Like…oh, that old dude, what's-his-face....You know, Ben-Hur." Wisely she omitted the part about how He looked.

Artie nodded with approval. He knew then her vision was real. "Go on."

"And God said I must spread the word! And I knew, Artie, I knew you were the only soul to help me. And…God said I must save Zina."

"Zina?" His interest piqued at the mention of his ex-lover's/cousin's/half-sister's name. He cursed himself at the hold this devil still had over him. Zina was his cross to bear, she was a test from the Lord, and sweet baby Jesus she looked divine when she was working out. (Sorry, Lord.) He stroked his goatee again. He knew the incredible guilt Zina felt about Callie, about the house in Cirra. Technically, he had been involved in that whole mess, but Callie didn't need to know that—it would only confuse her and detract from her mission. Besides, he'd paid his debt to his Savior. If Callie could use that guilt against her, she could bring Zina into the fold, and they would lead the Lord's Army of Love together! He could do it, with Zina at his side…the cable show would be revitalized, he'd get another book deal, he might even be asked to be a guest host on the 700 Club.…

He stood up and walked to Callie. Grasping her thin shoulders, he said, "Sister, it shall be done. I shall send you on your first mission. I shall send you to save that poor backslidden soul."

"Praise God, Artie!"

"But first…we go shopping."

***

Callie pulled at the tight collar of her white frilly blouse. She wasn't used to wearing something so close to her neck. But, she thought with a sigh, her body was no longer just something to flaunt, to use mindlessly—no, her body was sacred as a church, and it needed to be covered and protected as such. She adjusted the skirt of the light pink suit that Artie had selected for her at Sears. Drawing a deep breath and clutching the new Bible that he had given her as well, she opened the door of the parked Camaro and walked warily toward the farmhouse, the den of iniquity. How much sin has gone on in this place? she thought righteously, remembering its former occupants. Of course, Zina lived here now with that little tart…Callie's nostrils flared at the mere thought of the slut. She stopped. Then she took a deep, cleansing breath. "In with love, out with anger…" she muttered to herself. Steadying herself once again, she walked toward the farmhouse. I am a pillar of strength, I am filled and blessed with love, I shall be strong in the face of evil…she drew another deep breath and rang the doorbell. The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall…

Zina opened the door. She wore nothing but a sleeveless white under-shirt which clung to her broad shoulders, muscled torso, and perfect breasts; black lycra shorts clung even more ferociously to her firm, luscious thighs. She cradled a barbell in one hand; a sheen of sweat covered her exposed skin, making her entire body glow and glisten. She shook her damp black hair and fixed her luminous blue eyes on Callie.

…want. She maketh me to lie down in black satin sheets, and…stop stop stop!!!

All thoughts of God had flown from Callie's head, except a brief fleeting thanks to the Almighty for making such a magnificent creature.

"Callie?" Zina said, utterly confused at the presence of her arch enemy. "Uh, is somethin' wrong with the trailer?"

"…zugzug…" She tried to speak but could not. But what were these noises? Hey, I'm speaking in tongues! Cool!

Zina looked her over, taking in the suit. "You got a job interview or something?"

Lord, I am fading fast. Help me! Send me a sign!

Zina shifted a little nervously; in doing so, she gripped her barbell tighter, causing a perfect bicep to flex. Her eyebrow twitched.

It was all too much.

"Oh Zina!" Callie cried. She flung her arms around the firefighter's neck and planted a wet kiss on her lips. Her wildly flailing tongue sought to break the barrier of Zina's warm mouth, but alas, her lips were in as good a shape as the rest of her (thanks to Gabrielle), and withstood the onslaught. She placed the tip of the barbell on Callie's chin in an effort to pry away the born-again beast. Callie didn't know how it happened, but before she knew it she was kissing a barbell. She withdrew, sputtering.

"What the hell's gotten into you?" Zina growled.

"Oh Zina," Callie moaned at the memory of those perfect lips on her own, "I have been sent here to save you, my child." She thrust the Bible into the firefighter's face.

Zina was so shocked at the turn of events that her barbell slipped from her sweaty grasp and fell onto Callie's foot, shod in a pair of pumps from Payless.

"Oh Zina!" This time it was a howl of agony.

***

Gabrielle burst through the door of the farmhouse, expertly carrying a pizza, a six-pack, two bags of Doritos, a two-liter bottle of 7-UP, and a pint of Ben & Jerry's Chunky Monkey...with most of said items balanced on top of the pizza. "Honey, I'm home!!" she bellowed. She heard the radio from upstairs, and figured Zina was in her weight room, working out. Her assumption grew even stronger when she tripped over the barbell near the door and sent the precariously balanced food sailing merrily off the top of the pizza as she fell to the floor. She landed on her stomach, the weight of her backpack pinning her down (why did I have to take Fat Novel 101 this semester?). However, she managed to keep the pizza upright. Turning, she glared at the offending object and shouted, "Goddammit Zina, I told you not to leave your weights lying around down here!" Last week she had stubbed her toe on a hand weight that had been on the kitchen floor, for Christ's sake.

The guilty party sauntered down the steps. "Hiya, baby. Sorry 'bout that." Zina proceeded to pick up the scattered groceries. "How was school?"

"Uh…good." Zina noticed that Gabrielle hadn't moved; she laid there on the carpet, staring into space.

"Didja hurt yourself?" she asked, padding over to Gabrielle.

"Zina?" The tone was icy. It was that tone Gabrielle used when she was either really pissed or PMSing big time.

The firefighter gulped. "Uh, yeah, baby, what is it?"

"Why is there lipstick on your barbell?"

***

"Arise from your numb existence, readers. Awash yourself in Christ's beautiful and healing waters, awake in forgetfulness of the sins of the past. For the chariots of war are upon us, Satan's deceptive dreamworkers will rob you of your cradle of hope. Together, we shall embark on a quest for our destiny, to repay a debt and to sacrifice our wrongdoings for the greater good."

—Rev. Callie de Ash, from her book I Didn't Find God, But He Sure Did Find Me, p. 25

Callie awoke from her painkiller-induced slumber. Her dreams had been pleasant enough—she dreamt she owned a Porsche and had won the Indy 500, and then she drove through a huge daisy-filled meadow crushing every single daisy and ran over Gabrielle and a bunch of silly bunny rabbits too and grabbed Zina and threw her in the car and…

…then she was fully awake and staring into Artie's faintly disapproving and totally condescending face. The minister sat at the foot of her hospital bed. "You poor child," he sighed. He moved his chair closer to her, and took her hand. "The demon proved too much for you, didn't she?"

Defeated, Callie nodded sadly. Zina's barbell had broken innumerable bones in her foot and then, while she limped to the car (refusing any assistance from Satan's Handmaiden) her heel got tangled in some weeds and she fell, spraining her ankle.

"Callie," Artie clucked, "this is just as much my fault. I never should've sent you to her. She's a powerful one, Zina is. I have no doubt she will be dragged kicking and screaming into salvation. I know you wanted to be the one to bring her to God, but perhaps…" He stroked his chin. "…perhaps I need to try. At any rate I must confront her, after what she did to you." Callie had told him that the sadistic firefighter had jumped up and down on her foot with her shit-stomping boots, and had even trod upon her pristine Bible!

"I reckon you're right, Artie. I was too weak—too tempted by her. Don't believe anything she says, though!"

"Don't worry, child. I am prepared to battle the devil."

***

Cyrene turned off her sputtering Volkswagen. She grabbed the grocery bag, which contained organic yogurt and tofu burgers (she had been much horrified by the spectacle of Zina devouring a Spamburger last week and began anew her campaign to make her daughter a vegetarian). She got out of the car and headed to the house. With some confusion she noticed that the Harley was there but the Escort was not—she was supposed to be "studying" this evening with Gabrielle—in fact, she had brought her best bong, knowing that they would be tackling Modernism and that Gabrielle would need all the help she could get.

She entered the farmhouse and found Zina sulking in front of the TV, watching NASCAR.

"Hey honey," Cyrene called.

Her daughter grunted.

Trouble in paradise, Cyrene thought. "Where's Gabrielle?" she asked gently.

"At Lila's."

"Oh. Will she be back soon?"

"Nope."

"Aw come on, honey, spill it. Did you two have a fight?"

"Yeah."

Cyrene sighed. It was going to be a long night. "I'll be back in a few minutes." She definitely needed to have a few tokes before dealing with this. Patting her macramé purse, she retreated to the bathroom.

***

"I told you your unnatural relationship would fall apart," Lila said. She held a squalling baby—her daughter, named Tiffani Amber.

Gabrielle sat at her kitchen table, arms crossed. "Shaddup," she snarled at her sister.

Lila blew a stand of hair out of her face; shaking her head sadly, she took the baby into the bedroom for her nap.

Purdy, who had moved in with Lila after Gabrielle moved out, stood awkwardly in the kitchen. He had just got home from work to find his former girlfriend sulking in the kitchen with Lila, his current one, who was berating her sister at every turn. He actually felt sorry for Gabrielle—and he even liked Zina once he got to know her. Every time he saw her they had pretty cool conversations about motorcycles. He pulled two cans of Bud out of the fridge and handed one to Gabrielle. "C'mon, Gab, it'll make you feel better."

"Thanks," she said, taking the can from him. She popped it open and took a big gulp. "Purdy, you don't think I'm…weird or unnatural, do you?" Her green eyes begged for understanding, while her upper lip was covered in beer foam.

Was she weird? He had been surprised by it all, but not too—he remembered that when they were dating he made the mistake of looking through her diary and had read a rather detailed and explicit sexual fantasy involving Kate Jackson. He had found it very…interesting, in a stimulating kinda way. No wonder she always rushed home from school to watch Charlie's Angels. "What? Naw, hell no, Gab. It's your life. Not for me to judge. 'Sides," he added shyly, "Zina's pretty cute."

Gabrielle smiled gratefully. "Thanks."

"Wanna go down to the Saddle and get wasted?"

"Sure!"

***

"Trust me, honey, I had two years' worth of EST seminars."

Zina shifted nervously in her chair. Her mother's attempts to help in these significant arenas of her life left much to be desired. She recalled when, at the age of 12, she began menstruating; she had the typical feelings of confusion and ambivalence about it that most teenage girls encountered. Cyrene chose to mark the occasion with what she called a "feminist ritual": When Zina came home from school one day, sanitary napkin chafing, she found their house dark and eerie, lit only with candles, and "White Rabbit" echoing ominously from the stereo. Cyrene, wearing a purple-red muumuu, blathered something about how Zina will drink her own menstrual blood "because Germaine Greer said it's the true test of a woman." Zina didn't know who the fuck Germaine Greer was, but it was all weird enough to make her think her mother was involved in some cult and so she ran screaming from the house, spending the next month living with Artie and his family, until she made her mother swear that (1) she was not in a cult, and (2) she would cut down on the hallucinogens for a while.

So here she was, sitting at the dining room table with Cyrene, who said that her "under-emoting" child needed to get in touch with her feelings and she would be happy to help her do so. She said it would improve her "communication skills" with Gabrielle…whatever that meant…and that she would learn to "take responsibility" for her actions…even though IT WASN'T HER FAULT that Callie went insane and kissed her, it wasn't her fault that Gabrielle didn't understand this and had hit her…unconsciously she touched her cheek. Never had she been so frightened—not even in a crumbling, burning building—than when Gabrielle had pulled out of her knapsack the thickest paperback book Zina had ever seen, stalked over to her, and swung the mighty Modernist tome—Zina barely had the chance to read the name Ulysses—against the side of her head.

Cyrene sat across from her with a paper and pencil. "Now, I want you to tell me all the things you love about Gabrielle. Be as specific as you like."

The firefighter dropped her dark head against her strong forearms, which were propped on the table. Just like she used to do in high school.

What I do love about Gabrielle? Well, she's got a nice smile…her hair is pretty…she smells good…she makes a great chicken pot pie…yum!…I love her abs, the way they ripple when she's about to come…oh, and the meatloaf is pretty awesome…her skin is so soft…and she's a great kisser…and…and…I love how smart she is, how she figures things out so quickly…I love it that she's so kind…so gentle…like how she cried when she heard about baby seals getting clubbed…I love it when I hear her sticking up for herself and screaming "Fuck you!" at that dumbass sister of hers…I even love it when she recites stupid poetry to me that I don't get at all…

"Sure you don't want a little...?" Cyrene mimicked puffing on a joint. "It might help."

"No," Zina snapped. She sighed in frustration. "Aw, fuck, Mom, I love everything about her," she growled reluctantly. She hated getting all mushy.

Cyrene smiled and scribbled something down on the pad..

***

It was almost 3 in the morning. Zina had slept fitfully since midnight, when her mother had left. However, she was in a decidedly deeper state of consciousness when a noise brutally ripped her from a pleasant dream about becoming the first female quarterback for the Broncos:

"SMOKE ON THE WATER! A FIRE IN THE SKY!"

The entire house pulsated to the sound of Deep Purple. She sat upright, eyes bulging. She groped under the bed for her baseball bat, although it was doubtful the intruders were really thieves. Nonetheless, she thought evilly as she hefted the bat, I'm gonna fuckin' kill whoever is down there.

As she bolted out of the bedroom and approached the top of the stairs, she heard a figure treading lightly toward the top, oblivious to her presence. She snapped on the hall light.

Ed looked up at her, John Deere hat backwards and a little askew on his head. More than slightly trashed, he swayed on the steps. "Z!" he cried in greeting. "Hope we didn't wake you."

The long reach of Zina snared his flannel shirt and hauled him up the remaining few steps, until her snarling face was within an inch of his. "What the fuck are you doing here?" she said in her lowest voice.

"Hey, chill out! We brought Gabby home."

"We?"

She released him and he staggered against the steps, almost falling down until she grabbed him again. He giggled. "Me and Purdy. They're downstairs." He regained his balance and she released him tentatively. "But man…I gotta tell ya…I, uh, got into a little trouble with the truck, Z…"

She leaned on the baseball bat as if it were a walking stick and sighed in resignation. "Don't tell me you wrecked it again."

"Well, not exactly…I hit something."

"A deer?"

He shook his head.

"What? Someone's dog? Cat?"

Again, his head responded no.

She was losing patience. "What then, Ed?"

"A cow," he mumbled apologetically.

She grabbed him by the shirt again. "A cow? Is Gabrielle all right?"

He nodded in the affirmative.

"How the hell did you hit a cow?"

"I tried a shortcut," he moaned. "Look Z, I really gotta piss."

She released him again. "Go, then," she growled, giving him a shove toward the bathroom. She stomped downstairs.

She saw Gabrielle's red-gold hair splayed across the arm of the couch. "Gabrielle?" she called gently as she approached.

The young woman was curled up fetally, clutching an empty mason jar which reeked of beer. She was snoring. Zina took the afghan from the back of the couch and tucked it around her sleeping form.

Purdy was standing in front of the stereo playing air guitar when he spotted Zina. "Hey old buddy!" he shouted, stumbling over to her. He was even drunker than Ed. He flung an arm around her. "We brought your woman home!" he said proudly. With a burp.

"That's great, Purdy. Thanks," Zina replied sincerely, while flinching from the smell of the burp.

Suddenly he started to cry and hugged her. "I love you, man!"

"I love you too," she replied, whatever thread of patience she possessed threatening to snap. "Now get the hell out of here."

***

Alas, she had not gotten Ed and Purdy to leave for another hour; she felt obligated to help Ed wipe cow blood and gore off the front of his Ford pickup (apparently his "shortcut" was through Farmer Draco's pasture). There was a huge dent across the front of it, but she checked out everything under the hood and it seemed to be running fine. When Ed was sober enough to drive, she sent the boys on their way.

Gabrielle was still passed out on the couch when she dragged herself off to bed at 4:30. She had considered carrying the girl up to bed, but didn't want to disturb her sleep. And, frankly, she was pretty tired and had to get up for work in less than 3 hours.

Zina hadn't slept for more than 2 hours when she felt something heavy lying across her body. A sickly sweet breeze, smelling like cough medicine (like Jagermeister, she thought later), trickled across her face. Then she felt something warm and wet against her cheek, like a dog licking her.

She opened her eyes. In the fuzzy light of predawn, she made out Gabrielle's grinning face above her. "Pumpkin pie!" Gabrielle burbled happily.

Zina did not know if this was an endearment or a craving.

"Gabrielle?" she mumbled sleepily.

"Baby, I'm really sorry about yesterday…I got so jealous. I didn't want to come home at all, but Ed and Purdy got me too drunk so I couldn't protest much. Then I read what you wrote on the fridge."

"Huh?"

"You know!" Playfully she slapped Zina on the arm. Then Zina remembered: Her mother had posted the results of their "therapeutic session"—the message that "Zina loves everything about Gabrielle"—on the refrigerator with a Coke magnet.

"It's true," Zina said. It was, and didn't matter who wrote it, she figured.

"Ooooh, I love you, stud muffin!"

***

If you want to woo her

You will surely delight her

With a sweet tasting kiss

From a big ol' firefighter!

--"A Fire in the House of Love," performed by Effie and the Amazons. Music by Effie Phantes, lyrics by Gabrielle Hockenberry

The hangover was so atrocious that to even listen to anything on the radio was horrible. Especially Celine Dion. The lung-devouring wails of the woman were like a hang nail being torn across her consciousness. Maybe I kinda understand now why Zina doesn't like her, Gabrielle thought, switching off the radio with one hand and clutching her head with another.

She was sitting in the kitchen, wincing at the bitter taste of the instant coffee, when the doorbell rang. Still cradling her head, she wandered to the door, wearing her Olympus County Community College t-shirt and the baggy plaid boxer shorts she wore around the house.

A handsome man stood at the door, dressed in a dark suit and tie. His long dark hair touched his shoulders and he had a goatee. He was very striking, she thought, and vaguely familiar. Her mind raced and in her excitement the hangover lessened.

"Oh my GOD," she squealed, taking him by surprise, "you're the lead singer from Metallica, aren't you??"

His dark eyes grew wide with horror. "What?" he said.

"You are! Wow, this is SO cool! Are you lost or something? Hey, my girlfriend LOVES Metallica!! Would you autograph something?" Before he could respond she ran into the living room and retrieved one of her notebooks and a pen. "Okay, could you just write something like, 'Zina, you are an awesome chick' and sign it?"

He rolled his eyes. "I am not the lead singer of Metallica!" he growled. "I'm Artie Guerre. An old friend of Zina's..."

Gabrielle's excitement dissipated and was replaced by mistrust. So this was the infamous Artie. "You're Xena's cousin," she stated flatly, green eyes glinting suspiciously, "or is it half-brother?" she added accusingly.

"Nobody's even proven that," he said, shaking a finger into her face. "Where is Zina? I want to talk to her."

"She's at work, duh. D'ya see her cycle anywhere?" Gabrielle waved her arm around.

"Look, young lady, don't you take that tone with me. I am minister," Artie said proudly.

Gabrielle cackled in disbelief.

"You may laugh all you like, Satan's strumpet, but I know the nature of your relationship with our dear Zina is less than pure."

"Pure?" she snorted. "You're a fine one to talk about pure, Artie. You set fire to a house and slept with someone who might be your sister. So don't you lecture me. I love Zina."

"Love her enough to see her go to jail again, missy? 'Cause that's what's gonna happen unless I get to speak with her!" Artie demanded.

"What the hell are you talkin' about?"

"Zina assaulted one of my disciples. Callie."

"Bullshit! The crazy slut assaulted Zina!"

Artie raised one of his black brows. "Really?" asked smoothly. "Well, who do you think a court of law would believe—a follower of God or some dyke with a record?"

***

All Zina knew was that one minute she was looking at a rerun of the Simpsons, and the next she was staring at Gabrielle's midriff. Her little companion, in an effort to get attention, had planted herself in front of the TV. This meant either one of three things:

Gabrielle was horny. (Unlikely, thought the firefighter, scanning the scowl on the young poet's face.)

Gabrielle wanted to have a Sensitive Chat. (Again, that scowl. Nope, she usually gets all puppy-eyed, so that's not it.)

Gabrielle was pissed about something. (Yeah, I think this is the one. Did I leave another weight on a floor somewhere? Tracked mud on the carpet? Did she finally notice the ring of soot I left on the lip of the milk carton the other day?)

Zina was a brave woman, and resigned to her fate. "Okay, what did I do now?" she sighed.

"How come," Gabrielle began slowly, her hands on hips, "everyone you sleep with either dies or goes crazy?"

"Huh?"

"Come on, tell me."

"It's not true…I mean, I slept with Hank, and he's alive and pretty normal, don't you think?"

"Well, he's the exception to the rule, I guess. Although who knows, maybe listening to Effie and the Amazons 24/7 might just push him over the edge."

"...and there was Ed, he's kinda normal..."

Gabrielle blinked in shock. "Ed? You slept with Ed?"

"It was only once, Gabrielle. I just did it to make Hank jealous." She grinned with sheepish pride. "Worked, too."

Gabrielle moaned and shook her head. "I met Artie today, Zina."

"Artie? Where?"

"He came out here looking for you. What a fuckin' nutjob he is."

"No shit, Sherlock. What did he want?"

"He's very pissed about Callie. Went on about how you assaulted her, said he was going to get her to press charges against you…"

Zina threw up her hands (after placing her can of Rolling Rock on the end table) in disbelief. "Fine, let 'em press charges! I didn't do anything wrong!"

"He said he and Callie are willing to let bygones be bygones if you come on his cable access show. He wants you to repent on TV, accept Christ into your heart, and ask for some pledges."

The firefighter's blue eyes grew icy. Which both chilled and thrilled Gabrielle. "I always knew it would come down to this," she muttered.

***

Gabrielle grabbed the ringing phone. "Den of iniquity!" she cried in greeting.

"Jesus H. Christ, you sure are learning big words in school," Effie’s voice responded.

"Effie!!" The squeal reverberated around the house, causing Zina to wince and grind her teeth, and a village of termites to vacate the premises. "How the hell are you! I MISS YOU!!!"

"I’m great, Gab honey. Our new album is coming out next week, with your song on it, of course! Hank loved it."

"Cool. How’re Pony and Sally?"

"Well, they had a rough time of it recently…"

"Uh oh. What happened?"

"Well, uh, promise not to tell anyone…"

"Okay. What?"

"Well, Sally had an affair with Wynonna Judd…"

"No!"

"Yeah! It was wild. But they worked it all out."

"How?" Gabrielle asked, mystified. Pony was not the most reasonable creature on God’s green earth.

"Well, then Pony slept with Wynonna and they decided to call it even."

"Can I tell Zina?"

"Oh sure, what the hell. Can’t quite see Tall, Dark, and Sullen running around telling people."

Gabrielle saw Zina in the kitchen, pulling on her leather jacket. "Eff, I gotta go. I hafta go help Tall, Dark, and Sullen with something…"

"And knowing you two, it’s something in the bedroom. Okay, Gab, I’ll talk to you later."

She hung the phone and ran into the kitchen. "Okay, I’m ready. Let’s go."

Zina gave her a blank stare. "Gabrielle, I don’t want you to come. It might get ugly." She was on her way to meet Artie at Roy Roger’s, in the hopes that they could reach an amicable solution to the Callie problem.

"Oh no, bitch. You’re not leaving me behind. We’re a team, remember? You may need me. And I promised you I’d always support you no matter what." She paused and gazed into her beloved’s deep blue eyes. "I may have been stoned when I said it, but I still meant it."

Zina broke into one of her lovely lop-sided grins. "Okay, baby."

"Besides, I really want a Triggerburger."

***

Artie sat at a table at Roy’s. His tray was littered with the ruins of his dinner. Arms folded, he glared up at Zina and Gabrielle, who were walking toward him. Zina was sucking on a shake, Gabrielle held a tray piled with three burgers and an order of fries.

They sat down across from him.

"You’re late," he growled.

Zina shrugged. Her ravenous small companion ripped the paper wrapper off a burger and started to devour it.

"Dear Lord, what a savage," Artie said condescendingly, looking at Gabrielle’s puffed out cheeks.

"Look Artie, knock off the bullshit. Gabrielle told me what you want. I’m not gonna do it. I’m sorry about Callie’s foot, but it was an accident."

"Hold your tongue, sinner!" Artie raised his hand. "I’ve had just enough of your lies and deception, Zina. You injured a member of my flock. A woman who has turned out to be more valuable to me than I ever could have imagined. I have placed my trust so thoroughly in Callie that I have given over to her the leadership of my ex-gay ministry, Homo Helpers."

***

Callie reached out and gently grasped the shoulders of the young man. "We’ll start out slowly, okay? No nudity at first. I just want you to get an appreciation of the female form."

The young man, terrified, nodded quickly. One minute he had been sitting in the office space of the Gay & Lesbian Student Union at the Olympus County Community College Student Center, then the next thing he knew this crazy chick in a pink suit, with a big cast on her foot, comes in, hits him over the head with a big black Bible, and he passed out. Then he woke up in this strange office with the crazy chick who started babbling to him about being saved, changing his ways, and so on….and he was tied to a chair, the ropes cutting into his thin little torso, clad only in an old Absolutely Fabulous t-shirt. Boy, if I get rope burns on this, Patrick is going to get really suspicious, he fretted.

The crazy blonde, who said her name was Callie, sat on the desk in front of him. She had a stack of photos by her side. "Now don’t be scared…what’s your name again, kid?"

"Chad," he whispered.

"Chad! See, no wonder you’re gay, with a name like that. Okay, Chad, take a deep breath…"

He did.

She held up a photo of Gillian Anderson, wearing a black bra. "Take it all in, Chad. Doin’ anything for ya?"

He stared at the photo.

"Talk to me, Chad. What do you like about her?"

"Uh…that’s a fabulous bra she’s wearing."

"Like to see more, huh?"

"Yeah, like I’d love to see her all in black lingerie. I’m sure it’d be a really kicky outfit. My friend Kevin is majoring in fashion design…"

"No!! Dammit, kid, stop being a fairy and focus on her body! Her face! Whaddya see?"

"They did a good makeup job on her. Her lipstick is perfect. It’s a good shade for her."

"You’re doing this deliberately to drive me crazy, you little brat. Look at her! She’s gorgeous! Look at those knockers! They’re lovely! They’re perfect!" Callie peeked at the photo herself. And became mesmerized. "They’re…oh Lord, they’re divine," she moaned. Defeated once again, she buried her face in her hands.

"Uh…Callie, is it?" Chad ventured gently.

"Yeah, what?"

"Sweetie, I don’t think this is working. Look, it’s Gay Night at Dahak’s Temple. Why don’t we go have a nice drinkie together…"

She looked up.

"Margaritas are half-price," he added hopefully.

***

"Baby, are you okay?" Zina asked anxiously, peering down at Gabrielle. At the mention of the Homo Helpers the little poet had laughed so hard that she spat half-eaten burger all over Artie’s best suit (from Sears) and fell off the seat in a fit of hysterics. Zina’s reaction, given her personality, was more subdued; she had merely blown out some milkshake from her nose.

"Homo Helpers," Gabrielle giggled helplessly.

"What’s so darn funny?" Artie demanded as Gabrielle climbed back into the booth.

"I think you should think ‘bout changing that name, Artie," Zina guffawed. "Have you been getting a lot of calls from people wanting to know where the nearest gay bar is?"

Artie glared at her suspiciously. "How did you know?"

"Just a wild guess."

"It was the best I could do under the circumstances! Nonetheless, Zina, I have Callie all prepared to press charges against you. She can hardly get around at all. It was a very serious injury."

At that moment they saw, from their window booth at Roy’s, Callie’s red Camaro pull up to the stoplight. The crazed blonde took the opportunity to stand up in the car and dance to the throbbing beat of the Pet Shop Boys which emanated from the car stereo. A young man, seated beside her, did the same. The light changed. A pickup behind them blared its horn. Callie flipped him the bird. After another minute of frantic dancing, she finally put the vehicle in drive and they were gone.

The trio sat in stunned silence.

"Who was that dude with Callie?" Zina asked no-one in particular.

"Oh, it looked like Chad. He’s president of the gay student union at OCCC," Gabrielle said. She merrily returned to the task of eating.

"Hell’s bells," muttered Artie. "The Lord is making my work very difficult indeed." He thrust a finger into Zina’s face. "I blame you for this, Zina. Obviously the injury has affected her judgment."

Zina flicked a French fry at him.

"Watch the suit!" he cried. "it’s bad enough your little tart spewed half-eaten cow all over it."

"Fuck off, Artie," Zina drawled in a bored manner.

"You haven’t heard the last of me yet!" He rose from his seat and stalked off. He half-turned to give Zina one last glare and tripped over a poorly placed mop and bucket. He snarled and staggered off.

"Man, he’s just like Snidely Whiplash," Gabrielle complained.

The firefighter laughed. "So which one of us is Dudley Do-Right?"

"You, of course, stud muffin." Gabrielle paused. "Although you’re smarter than Dudley Do-Right…and not quite as goody-two-shoes. You’re more a classic anti-hero."

"A…what?" Zina scrunched up her angular face. "I dunno if I like the sound of that."

"It’s a good thing, baby. Trust me. I learned it in school."

"School? You’re learning about cartoons in school?"

"No," replied Gabrielle haughtily, "I am merely learning how to apply my analytic skills in other fields of interest and art forms."

"Shit…if I knew college was all about cartoons and smoking dope, I woulda gone."

"You don’t need to go to college, baby. You already have many skills."

The firefighter lounged back in her seat. "I have many skills," she murmured to herself, although her beaming companion heard her as well. "I kinda like the sound of that."

THE END

#xena #xena warrior princess #xena/gabrielle #xena/gabrielle fanfiction #author: vivian darkbloom #femslash #fanfiction

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sushiexcrement · 6 years ago

Text

An Interesting Wonder about H3H3, George Miller, and the Origin of Vape Nation.

So this is gonna be a long story, but I wanna talk about it. It involves the Baited Podcast, Anything4Views, Joji, and of course, H3H3 Productions, and the creation of Vapenation. It’s a long story, so there’ll be a cutoff. Disclaimer btw, I’m not trying to stir shit up amongst fandoms, I just find it a very interesting topic of discussion.

If you’ve never watched the Baited Podcast, I’ll explain it simply. It is a podcast where Keemstar, ColossalisCrazy (eggs on toast guy), and Chad get together, and talk about what’s going on in the Youtube community. Because Keemstar and Colossal have vastly different personalities, they will argue, and Chad will be the median/moderator of the debate. This Baited episode in particular, was centered around the time that Ethan was under criticism for releasing a mobile game after a break in videos and claiming to be depressed (he was depressed, but the timing was terrible on Ethan’s part). During the podcast (deleted originally because the art got it demonetized and age restricted), Chad says the following, “Ethan, stop stealing your jokes.” Keemstar then follows up with, “Oh, you mean the Vapenation meme.” They go on to discuss that they don’t want to talk about who it is, but that it was indeed stolen from someone they all know.

Later that day, I’m watching Colossal’s Twitch stream, and Keemstar joins the chat. During that stream, they’re talking about how the podcast was good, but a donator asks to know who stole the VapeNation meme from, and in the chat it is revealed by Keemstar that it was George. (This link shows the livestream but not the chat, I’m sorry).

At first, I was very very skeptical about the idea, because at the time there wasn’t a lot known about George and Chad’s relationship. It felt very friend-by-proxy with Max at best, that is, until Chad started talking a bit more about his relationship with George on Cold Ones. George showed Chad how to boost himself, even at a time where Chad wasn’t really sure if he wanted to be a Youtuber, and gifted him the name Anything4Views. Now that I can see that they did have a decent enough bond, I don’t doubt that they probably talked about video ideas casually or talked about other Youtubers who they were friends with.

But this brings us back to Ethan and Hila and their relationship with George. They have a pretty good relationship it appears. He promoted them when they were still small creators. Hila made him a Pink Guy doll. They tried to go to his show at Rolling Loud. Overall, they’re pretty supportive. However, if the claim that Chad had made is true, it makes me wonder how George really felt about it.

It’s not uncommon for Youtubers to swing around video ideas with each other. Max and George talked about the concept for vomit cake on twitter casually though privately, George pointing out how Max at the time got a good amount of views/recognition from vomiting. It should be noted, because George was careful in what he uploaded to his very niche audience. Filthy Frank was a very character oriented channel, and while memes are memes and unpredictable, I can’t see how Vape Nation would’ve worked with any of the filthy frank characters. Ethan portrays himself as silly but overall kind with a bit of an aloof edge, while Filthy Frank/Fake Frank was always pushing the limits of edginess.

This probably isn’t important now since George has retired Filthy Frank, but it does raise the questions about what happens when ideas are shared. On a platform like Youtube, where creators scrape the barrel for something original, is taking an idea like that stealing? How many other immensely popular videos are out there that were inspired by friends of these creators? And do they see that as stealing or as utilizing an idea that doesn’t have purpose for the platform?

#h3h3productions #h3h3 #ethan klein #hila klien #vapenation #george joji miller #george miller #joji #chad #anything4views #chad roberts #cancer crew #filthy frank #Filthy Frank Show #colossal is crazy #keemstar #baited podcast #youtube discussion

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iotaarcane · 6 years ago

Text

XnationalZ

BUSY BLOW TORCHING DABS

Door doesn’t open it glides on rails like the entrance impales tracks leave scabs

They pick at them like a flurry of energy inertly imperil and in peril while sterile the enemy isn’t at his post busy blow torching dabs

Laughing gas to a mass of brain cells that might as well been in cell or for sale to sell for the fact of not being usable like loud theater patrons at musical

Stomping footsteps upsets the stairwell, Hercule as security

picks you up and while airborne you get the farewell.

A good bye of sorts a great try physically the body with a little help contorts but spiritually its dormant in hibernation protected in a fort. The outside winds set him to the maximum miles per hour bumping over the welts. Swelling is mainstream never go underground. A golf club waving at lightning

A day filled with bad decisions. A perfect life a nocturnal health freak who is slowing dying because of the hours he choose to sleep. North of the sauna lives out of water a piranha gills with chankla…. Flip flop the hip hop to this mantra…. They got Bin Laden but the tomatoes slices cut au gratin and their insides just by general principal all rotten every good deed all but forgotten.

They attempted because it looked great on camera to have caughten Sadam but the madam of the ministry secretly had many a body double dangling feet from noose corpse of course wasn’t who they thought they had bad DNA tests fail when not given. You’ll just straight believe without any thought or thinking in a closed space trying to identify who is stinking. This planet in that galaxy is sinking below where it once orbited and your whole existence is defined of what you afforded how toxins are absorbed y’all point the finger iota morbid.

As blood dripping on everything like a loop of hemoglobin training goblins to run tasks on apps. Hairless ape with only a little fur missing - hand and the wrist slice is still fresh magenta pink placenta veiny underwent chef prep, impractical to prevent a story to end like this begin as it went, we muster the emotion to climb street curb like step, tentacle suction cup girlfriend tales like cotton swab on bunny ear manifesto. One piece bikini transacting - posts no bill. Open register the creditor turned into a collector, an editorial of breadwinner meanwhile back in the western hemisphere sky is too clear - cuts retina sundries colander fluid filter an array of enemies attacked the command post. The mid morning foray angrily adjusted. You could totally notice the moment the ward went kaleidoscope twist 33 degree. As the crow fly viewpoint saw the west wing extend and to what seems like an elbow bend but they aint drinking consuming much of nothing except orders from the chief who dictates the whereabouts and you gotta be down cannot have doubts they don’t come in shouts - illest hand signals in the game it’s an artistic beauty to see the tic for tac counterattack he who gets the most vagina must be the Mack. Diesel easel drawer no undies they were left in dresser drawer and if it don’t work out oh no the lawyer is not pro bono yet the retainer fixed the teeth apprehended the beef no more issues.

Him whose piss poor planning continues will be facing the sultry seductress Miss Hughes 4 feet 6 shoes opposite of the elephant of Hindus infamous for the pop ins on miscues So real was breakfast cereal mammal sauce from cashews. Nipple hula hoop sports car aficionado drop top in the coupe where they kept the chickens. Jumpy trampoline mouth fortune reader foreseen vulgar obscene potty lips unclean that contingency of the attorney of where wonder land on a poca dot which marks the spot. Accuracy solar hot, lift off broke apart space shuttle heat pads over hot not matter if they were chosen or not. Nudity not as bad as could be frontal, wide opening little exit funnel so many come backs you can’t shoot down every rebuttal. We double as secret agents where birds are fowl and flagrant evil as the vortex in control of this spaceship. I got it plannded see use that ladder granted to climb into the zoo – carefully pinpoint were from the top we landed snag a handful thus huck right between their eyes candid close to the nose as possible rancid so they go crazy - ape shit

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++NOTHING and LIKE it

You’ll get nothing and like it. No matter how much you despite it.

Like you wanted that new whip but you were too good for the bus so you bike it.

Like it ever mattered – your best bud did the same inebriated on the way home dump truck made him splattered we identified the body basically because only thing left the t-shirt he wore that night tattered. I want a hamburger – with a vegan patty in the current state of Armageddon it doesn’t look good brethren Xnational that’s why I rock the same hairdo as a Tibetan. No a cheese burger yall overreacting on this meat is murder so is a relentless ethic of work especially when exhausted and it hurt. We’ve been threatened by a heavy weapon. I was reading about Reagan and outline seems Pagan that’s as good for you as dippin Copenhagen spittin telling the surgeon do not beckon the question I love when my gummies are redden. Cancer of the embouchure is more than a Horoscope sign I concur. I want a hot dog. Smothered in mustard covered in meat trimmings ground up chemicals as the fixings. Bought my rhymes with a great bargain from Groupon. Even added a discount photoshopped counterfeit coupon. Creating to the beat the loops on. I don’t know is a Bentley a Rolls Royce because in the back seat the window lowered and I was offered grey poupon do you happen to have another choice. Already had condiments on my weenie. Get off my computer don’t you dare peep my documents. My sentiments exactly the conference in regards to arguments approximates Many inter-nationalities at least 3 continents. Ancestor occupants with these words I’m a biochemist marketing guerrillas in the midst of this mist. We the tapestry of ornaments via the internets correspondents it’s like I’m studied on my own no paperwork to show my doctorate of rocking it. I want a milkshake mixed extra thick so it actually improves my life. Massacre in the streets. Soul gets fasten to the beats. Emotion in a drum pattern. Puts the spirit at ease changes lives makes memories. We reminisce lacking candor look back in retrospect kinesis situational intensity convince myths as the centripetal force drifts making you cause conflicts with the dame you caressed whose early departure has you dismissed flailing arms is a fit temper tantrum get nothing and like it anthem in this for the marathon and beyond whereupon such a large portion of our population is related to Genghis Khan. What was going on? Mating a savage motivation bondage of ancestral astral projections. In a succession of going with aggression. Talking too much now I’m a witness to this confession. I didn’t want to know that nor should you want to share it - in your heart bear with it. I need to check up on what era that was. I want potato chips crisper than a whisper in a dark room embracing solitude twiddling a whisker brisker than podcast radio transistor, he was very bad only did one movie but he was a fister, turned that lifestyle around and became a wonderful listener, except after he kissed her, she fiddled his zipper, polished half handle of liquor, hand cuffs cutoff circulation like a prisoner, as she moved towards his waistline she announced OK noodle, his phone screen lit up he couldn’t get up - his unit wouldn’t get up, Here is the kicker, she addressed yours is so much pinker, than red shade of a swisher, Oh yes it is sir right when she was about to go to town cell phone screen with the rear camera face down accessed a video Oh yes Mister Fisher. Vid featuring a debutante with oily wrist smash grab a sphincter. Homegirl peeped it out the corner of her eye. Jeez Louise Guy, you think she liked it, those are screams of terror why did you video tape and mic it? Payback is real He said no no stop she said you will get nothing and like it.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Bloop Didn't Match Bleep

Flat line monitor they filed with the manufacturer to get truth because bloop didn’t match bleep

Was she dead or deep asleep it takes a large leap of courage to surpass milestones when laid out flat on back thick as a board bright as feather totally do laps passing my stone counting per mile our style lashes out flashes of the bang - boom go sky. They hope when it’s over something changes dramatically like a star fall macho man bar brawl telekinetic script to anyone one whom you bonded importance of existence is something you cannot deny.

Fly by the seat of pants, advance like cash flow, difficult to rap slow, I wanna run it like you need it get roller pinned and kneaded, Hebrew jui-jitsu submission look at what his knee did. Star of David on his playlist we turning off tech on Satur no matter bribery or how you flatter your condolences belated along with ski masks raided should of seen them coming the porch was shaded driveway isolated doctrine confirmed over something we traded urine peptide beaker foggy but perplex this – His best amigo did too much acid like amino so when he was at cathouse heard a whore moan he could only cognate behavior to influence mood balanced hormone as the counterpoint feline payment never transacted fee to wait in line. What skill or excellences are you pursuing how can you portray without any cueing. Hit your marks. Spit in pitch black fire mouth out sparks.

It’s your energy that relay tend to take opposition and sway. Assists their dishin’ drug addicts spinning to get spun on a mission in addition to addiction they act like they don’t lie this is no audition you’re grown why you want permission to ruin your life You see in LA a Bruin cub a forty niner in Long Beach data gets scrubbed unit information placed out of reach. Look what the cat drug in, breeze blew in you could have been somebody a shoo in. Migrated to Peru in a mobile pyramid amongst doubters, its like the shouters are first with inside out lower lip pouters claim to be ballers all they are is browsers knickerbockers shirtless with trousers waving a give me a freebie voucher so I roll with moon howlers now does this overwhelm like towers stimulates give us powers of the third kind and our encounters.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Gun Laws

- No fun wit dem laws especially when encountering rough edges grainy surface with gun laws

- The cause is mass hysteria because amendments put both sides into a predicament

- Wing of the Eagle into action Xnational Activist after a sour apple up spring the people Active Fist raised above the forehead concurrently nobody wants more dead.

- Not even the gunman but what about that run in my states Capitol Sacramento

- Odd… Cell phone is not a weapon 20 trigger pulls the Police can act like a beast, On tempo protest Florida mad man rampaged blood everywhere escorted in handcuffs away facial expression wonder struck departed campus quad

- Dem our rights in dat bill but that bill was proclaimed before our land fell ill Overdose of fluoride oxygen intoxicants horrible supplements processed food and diabetes from too much sugar in condiments

- Now to fix your country don’t be chicken like poultry spend love to arrange a redeeming elixir

- This is precise calculation when you are overcrowded too many people in population the hypertension trying to keep up with what you commercially demonstrating sort of like an exchange of demon trading evil for evil soul grasp tool sickle--- Concise to arbitration overcrowded too many people in population the hypertension trying to keep up with what you commercially demonstrating sort of like is regal viper fang retention seek help contemplating like gleaming shovel off moonshine fickle.

- Everything even your status is the status materialism is the apparatus zero the sum on the abacus but yet the ability to function not be bullied or tempted to destroy yourself or others can be uncontrollable

- Mental health doesn’t have a look so why they judge based on the cover texture ink print of book

- No civilian needs an automatic machine gun. Home protection can be accomplished with 20 gauge is plenty.

- There are more guns in the US than people. So agree with March for our lives. I disagree with anything I’m not feeling and if we all could be a Democracy and meet in the middle we all should be fine with the compromise.

- First person liver body organ problem corking, ostrich keeping dome piece dipped into land chunks hoping not to get things out of proportion

- News was sidetracked Porn Star had protection less sex with President along with a dry cleaner hanger abortion clinic minute men attacking those who look immigrated

- It’s a circle of blood you been initiated. We do not exist in a dystopia but these large organizations can paint whatever portrait they want to fit into an agenda

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++You Can Be Anything

You are where you at in fact you could go where you want to be and you can be anything

So easy to feel like nothing complain and become doubtful with a mouthful of evil they walk in a horrible path of negativity and self-destruction same time place continuum hurting others while they just trying to get through the same as you do. What is this reasoning? Who created the outline? Why if I don’t play ball can’t I get a pass down on the baseline? Appeasing you either got to be a mover and shaker or to the sideline your thrown and labeled a space waster. Money identifies so much. Status class how your friends and family eat continuous and fast. Totally empty posthumous till those on top of the power structure find those beneath humorous. Better teeth greater smile success is subjective. I took the elective to be me why don’t you be you. Underneath all the bogus ideas and understandings I breathe near the 14th of the month only to inhale and not exhale for another 30. If you do business justified you can really be wealthy if you lied play dirty. Landing around the 5th I derail in a matter of moments look sick and pale living again for less than allowed. Now the natural lines in my face is scowled. I want to be an xnational not into whats in or rational I’ve never admired reality TV or what is force fed to me. The world is very fluid with whats not allowed how you make your bread and weather you get a box or become dust when dead. They never said it would be like this but they never stated it wouldn’t or couldn’t I’m tired of the chosen getting a vote I never balloted giving me basically 2 options on major decisions unanimously untalented more than perfected for the future while living slithering past the masses until something so major happens to a loved one a ugly ungloved one frozen in the headline archived content someplace indefinite it is about time. Dig through scorched Earth. Charred ground far fewer giblets in the stew to see self in mirror the spoon is wooden and sipping left a splinter too difficult to survive this nuclear winter.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++To Get Bye

Chatted with an annoying carcass inverted in Caracas on an apparatus and we agreed about this

You’re all I need to get buy

- The voice don’t know but like a bass line I record in mono Remember before I kissed a girl I got mononucleosis and this in general gave me a neurosis if I haven’t kissed how the heck did I get mono

- Punctuality arriving pronto seconds click nimble with the fingertips pulling a combo characterized in metabolic state ketosis

- Fasting near or around roses favorite floral Lotus. To get by stay fly no aeronautics my aerobics consists of verbal trampoline pounce the guardrail carine upon the jet strip Don’t Trip.

- Landing gear engaged to get by clearance from the air traffic controller, just this style is me high roller tip toeing soldier avoiding ebola maintain employment meeting or exceeding quota.

- To get buy you need straight cash homie loads and loaves of bread cheddar or whatever Hamilton greenbacks, paper guap of franklin will do

- To get by Your Blessing will be thee necessity sky beautiful. Open heart to keep it plain and simple more than the crease unfolding the ripple

- To get by clean water fresh air healthy food the ability to create mobility infinitely friends family meditation agility stretching.

- Concept of these scriptures stacks all the to the back of literature willingness be the finesse all this and that’s success

- To get by why try easier to complain make it artificial cause others through the tidal waves stress and strain

- Sitting on your knees sneaker heels tap the back of your button ups Long Barrel at temple. Imagine the thoughts before you’re executed. That process of it’s over. Can you fanaggle? Use communication for survival last chance come at them sideways like a tooth that snaggle

- This snag will either end your current existence begin into a newish dimension an entrance how did these doors swing open? Never let them see you moping. Laugh in the face danger many elements to this for coping.

- Change is a guarantee and you can’t get much of anything so constant. Who can adapt the fastest? Chip up as soon as society is cashless. Global position the system while mapless. I’m going to flow more rap less.

- Concubine colorful sword edge dull, The Ktown market I copped it at in the China shop bull. Tea party porcelain porcupine alarm module.

- iota needs some soda caramel color cola so the bubbles can fix my upset tummy stay scummy my friend is a sin and not funny Lowest on totem pole that explains the mischievous grin

- Never find work attitude be the jerk stay going bizerk at the store with the clerk make it impossible for them to accomplish the mish undertone a smirk relentless and abscessed until they fail find out it all evolved from silly little games your repercussions wrong answer given to test

- Well rounded knew how art felt, Chemicals were spilt and the fumes of the 2nd story would melt. Heartfelt never dealt a hand like that patience is all precious up til you are the doctors patients and he truly evil terrorize a boll weevil wore wild long tail lab coat crazy colors of crayon except no cotton all rayon and he would lay on the guilt deprive of medication till the truly ugly wanted to be killed subconsciously the whispers You’re all I need to get by…..

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greyias · 7 years ago

Text

A little (hopefully temporary) PSA on Tumblr Tags

(Note: On the off-chance this picks up steam, I’m making this post on 06/14/18, and the information in it is not 100% verified and could very well change at any moment knowing the way this site operates). This odd behavior also seems like it might be confined to the mobile app at the moment.

I do not know if this is new, isolated to just me and a handful of folks, or sitewide, but a few of my friends were talking across various posts about some of the strange things that have been happening on Tumblr lately, including the notification drought.

I have no hard facts, but I suspect that they changed something on the back end a few weeks back, and it’s had a cascade effect across the site as a whole. For me specifically, I noticed that my posts seemed to be getting a much wider reach than I had intended them to, despite me deliberately tagging them in the way that should have kept my posts out of general search tags.

I assumed this was related to the odd “feature” (see: grand annoyance) that had been rolled out on the mobile app sometime in May that completely ignores all of your set preferences and inserts random posts into your dashboard scroll that I presume Tumblr thinks you would like based on some hidden (and broken) algorithm. However, when I dug in further to try and trace why I was getting so much traffic, I could not figure out how this would get such a wide reach on these rather random posts.

Until I noticed on Sunday on a tag I do follow a post I hadn’t meant to include in the general fandom tag, despite tagging it in a way where it should have just been contained to my followers.

TL;DR -- It’s possible Tumblr has changed the way tracked tags works, expanding it beyond the traditional and mostly understood “first five tags” to the first twenty-one, so any of the first twenty-one tags you use on any original post at this moment in time will show up in the main/searched tags.

So if you are like me, both quite shy and like to put random commentary in the tags (that includes: ship names, character names, fandom names, etc) and you don’t want your posts to show up in the tracked tags/searched tags, you will either need to:

Not include any of that at the moment in time

Include 21 trash tags before including any tags for your own personal blog organization or tag muttering

This is a problem for people who want to have a conversation with just their followers/mutuals but don’t want to engage with a larger group of people, like to organize their blog in ways that make sense, but again, would like to not have to necessarily interact with the whole of Tumblr to do so.

I do not know if this is change is intentional on Tumblr’s part, an accident in coding, or if somehow I alone have broken the blue hellsite once again, but I can confirm that, at least for me, this has been happening since June 1st.

Also, apologies to everyone on the #theron shan tag this morning, as I tried to find out what the new magical cutoff number was, and you guys are kind of used to me doing something odd every now and then, so I figured I’d be forgiven.

Please feel free to try and verify/replicate to see if this is actually true across the board, or if somehow I alone can shout out into the blue void and force everyone in the searched tags to listen.

#grey breaks the tumbles #maybe #tumblr psa #Happy Theron Thursday? Oops?#hoping this gets fixed along with notifications #would like to resume my traditional mutter and organization #without necessarily shouting to tumblr at large #i've already said 'RIP my notifications' on the off-chance this blows up #but i figured it would be good to let everyone know #you know #in case some people don't want to cause accidental fandom wank because tumblr changed thins all of the sudden #and for aearyn #long post

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sometimesstorieshappen · 6 years ago

Text

Over/Under

Barian had been mopping the floor for approximately 12 minutes when he was interrupted. Not that he didn't welcome the interruption, for usually cleaning was a job he assigned to someone else, but nevertheless he found himself mildly annoyed as a man materialised in front of him with a muffled crack. He stepped back to avoid getting water on his immaculately white suit.

"Please. We have a front desk for a reason you know." Barian said as he waved the smell of sulphur away. He had often wondered why he wasn't used to it by now, as despite smelling it almost on a daily basis it still forced him to crinkle his nose.

"Uhhhh...."

"Desk. At the front. Big queue, you can't miss it." At the man's continued confusion Barian sighed and dropped his mop. "Alright then, I'll help you this time. But only this time." He practically dragged the man to his feet and set off towards the door.

"Who...who are you?" The man asked with a quivering voice. He was dressed in clothes that looked tattered and torn, as though he had been mauled by a bear, and next to Barian's gelled hair and white suit he looked even worse.

"I am Barian, general manager and secretary to Lucifer himself. And you are?"

"Leo. I don't – I don't have any titles."

Barian shrugged. "Doesn't matter too much down here." As they exited the room Leo was given a sight of what looked like the entrance to a bank, albeit a very, VERY large one. A line of desks stretched into the distance, far beyond the limit of Leo's eyesight, and in front of each one was a queue of between 100 and 250 people. Behind the desks was one long wall, punctuated by doors every so often, and it was from one of these doors that the pair had come out of. Barian looked at the queues and groaned.

"I forgot, there's a war going on at the moment. Tell you what, since I'd rather sort you out quickly I'll take you to the boss myself. If anyone asks then you waited in the queue. Got it?"

Leo had enough sense to nod. "But who is your boss?"

Barian stared. "You kidding me? I even told you his name already! Come on, you seriously never heard of – ah forget it. Come on." Barian pulled out a set of keys that jangled loudly, putting one in the door they had come out of. After some jiggling and muttered curses, the lock turned and the door opened. Except it was not the same room. Inside was what looked like a large ballroom, occupied by nothing but a desk with a computer on it. A man sat at the desk, studiously typing away, and there was another empty chair for visitors to sit on. Barian dragged Leo to the chair and sat him on it.

"Did you finish up in 37B Barian?" The man asked.

"Not yet, got interrupted. Queue jumper. I'll leave him with you." Barian turned on his heel and left, the sound of his jangling keys following him. The man typed for a few seconds longer before pushing the computer to the side and addressing Leo.

"Now then, my name is Lucifer. I hear you appear to have skipped the queues out there."

"I don't know how I got here, I just –"

"Alright alright, first things first. Let me find you on the system." Lucifer typed for a few seconds, and Leo took the opportunity to look at him. He was dressed simply, a plain black shirt and jeans, hair cut very short. No rings, necklaces, jewellery of any kind. Suddenly something clicked for Leo: Barian had mentioned the queues were due to war, and the boss was called Lucifer...

"Am I in hell?" Leo blurted out. Lucifer looked up at him.

"I should think that's a bit obvious. It's not exactly easy to arrive here accidentally. Though..." He frowned. "I can't find you on here. Now it could be a computer error but Belerus assures me that is not possible. So option two is that you are not meant to be here." Leo squirmed in his seat as warmth flushed through him.

"Am I... am I dead?"

"Well now that's an interesting question. The fact that you are here suggests yes, but if you're not on the system then you are not officially terminated." Leo felt warmth flush through him again, stronger this time, and little beads of sweat formed on his upper lip. "I believe the best thing to do is to give it some time, allow your representation to –"

With a crack and a smell of sulphur, Leo disappeared again. Lucifer frowned, and after a moment's contemplation pulled a mobile out of his back pocket and pressed a speed dial.

"Belerus? It's me. I need you to run something through the simulations for me. Yes, that one. Yes, I just want to check it. Okay. No, I'm not your chef, there's a snack machine in the corridor. You asked for the damn thing. Okay. Okay bye." Lucifer pocketed the phone, sighed, and returned to his computer.

Leo opened his eyes. Or rather, he opened one of them – the other had something in it. His right arm was held in a cage of twisted metal, the bicep pierced by what looked like part of a door. One of his legs was dangling in front of him, the joint twisted beyond normal angles. He was held in place by something that he recognised as a seat belt, the ends disappearing into the broken branches and car parts around him. There was a person crouched over him, beaming. Leo couldn't quite tell what was happy about this situation, but then he did not have the context. The defibrillators should have been a giveaway.

For 2 minutes and 13 seconds, Leo Brazikin had been clinically dead.

"Look, do you realise the implications of what you're asking me to do?" The doctor put his pen down, giving Leo his full attention. "You're not even off crutches, let alone healthy enough to undergo this sort of thing."

"2 months ago I died, Dr Massan. I died, and I saw where I was going. Now I want to go back, and this is the only way I know how." Leo shifted in the chair. It was an uncomfortable plastic one, and with his leg still in plaster it was proving impossible to find a good position. He sighed. "Look at me. They say the leg will never heal fully, the break was too severe. I'll have problems for the rest of my life."

"The fact that you even have a life is enough reason to reconsider. You have no idea how lucky you were to live. The fact they didn't amputate that leg is even more astonishing."

"It might as well have been amputated." Leo said with a frown. "I've looked everywhere, you're the only person who could undertake this. You've been researching clinical death for nearly 20 years."

"Yes, preventing it. Not causing it." Massan dragged a hand down his face. "This is clinical death, not clinical sleep, or clinical rest. Death. The risks in doing this are immense."

"With respect Doctor, it is not your place to decide what I can or cannot do with my life."

"With respect," Massan retorted, his voice dripping with sarcasm, "I'm not just worried about you. Let's say something goes wrong. I'm left standing over a dead body that I personally killed. Manslaughter, 5 years minimum. And there's no way out, it's only your word that can save me, and it's not like I can drag that out of you when you're a slab of cold meat on the table. This is just as risky for you as it is for me!"

"Doctor, please. I... I don't have anywhere else to go." Leo looked down for a moment, gathering himself. Massan let the silence hang in the air for several seconds before breaking it.

"If we're going to attempt this we need rules."

Leo looked up in joy. "Oh thank you so –"

"Shush. Rules. Listen. First rule is that you write a will extenuating me should you die. Unfortunately that's pretty much going to be a signed suicide note, so you cannot show or discuss this with anyone."

"I'm single and my parents are long gone. Who would I talk to?"

"Alright. Second rule is length. No longer than 30 seconds."

Leo frowned. "Why?"

"The longer you're out the greater the risk of brain injury. 3 minutes is the cutoff point for full recovery, After that it's virtually guaranteed you'll wake up with some brain damage. The only way to extend that is through induced hypothermia and I don't want to risk any further complications. You've already been through a 2 minute death, doing another one is asking for trouble." Massan stood up, pushing his chair back and walking to the window.

"Anything else?"

"Last rule." Massan turned to face Leo. "You do everything I say. If I say jump you say how high. Most of the potential damage from this will be while you're conscious, and if I can't do the proper procedures then the chances of brain damage are very high. So Listen. To. Me." Massan smacked his hand on the windowsill to emphasise each word. "I'll need to prepare a room out of the way, plus get hold of some equipment. I'll message you the address and date.

Leo stood up. "Thank you Doctor. You have no idea what this means to me."

Massan sighed and turned back to the window. "No, I don't. I never do. I just do what I think is right. Don't prove me wrong. Now get out before I change my mind."

"Uhh. Hi God. It's me." Leo looked up. The stained glass window above him was supposed to depict some kind of religious scene, but he couldn't really tell what exactly. He didn't exactly live in the most opulent area, and so he reasoned that it was likely done a little cheaply. "So it's been a while huh? A few years I think. Okay a lot of years. I'm not good at this." Leo looked around. He was sitting on one of the front pews of the church, bathed in orange and yellow light from the window. Or he would have been if the weather wasn't cloudy.

"I don't know if I should kneel, or like, bow. Or do something besides sitting. Not sure if it even matters. You're probably ignoring me anyway. I would." Leo sighed. "So I'm here because, well, I guess you could call it an old habit. My mother used to bring me here, take me to confession. I would sit in a booth and tell some guy that I took a chocolate from the sweet cupboard at night, and he would tell me to say some prayer I don't remember, then everything would be fine. You were supposed to admit your sins or something. And that's what I'm here for. I want to get something off my chest." He paused for a second. "Am I crazy?" He waited for an answer. For a godly sign, a beam of light coming from the heavens. But there was nothing. "I died, then I lived, now I'm about to die again. Except this time I'm dragging someone else into it. If I die, he takes the blame. I feel...guilty. You know? Like he has to deal with me because I can't. I don't know if that counts as a sin or not, but it's worth admitting I think." For a moment the sun found a gap through the clouds, shining through the main window onto Leo. Had it been slightly earlier it could have looked like a godly sign, however now it just looked like the sun shining through a slightly crappy stained glass window. Leo looked at his phone again, at the single message from Dr Massan. He sighed and stood up as the light faded.

"Keep an eye out for me God. I know I've been a dick in the past but just this one time. I'll say however many prayers you want. I'll even go to church. I really will. Do this for me and I'll do something for you. I promise. For whatever that's worth." Leo stood up and made to leave, but he stopped for just a second. He gave as much time as he dared for an answer to materialise. But nothing came, and he carried on out of the church muttering to himself. "I'm asking a goddamn window if I'm crazy. Way to go Leo, good job. Gold star."

"Ah there you are. Come on, quickly." Massan led Leo down, down, into the basement of the building. After a few too many stairs for Leo's liking they arrived at the designated room. It was large but undecorated, with a cracked concrete floor and ventilation pipes snaking through the roof like worms; the sort of room you held kidnapped people in, Leo thought with a morbid smirk. In the middle was a hospital bed, with several other pieces of equipment surrounding it. Most were complicated looking medical machines that Leo did not recognise, all hooked up to an extension lead going to the corner of the room. One looked rather worryingly like a refrigerator.

"Oh ignore that." Massan noticed Leo staring at it. "It's an ice machine. We'll only need that if things go wrong. Lie down please."

Leo laid down on the bed, fully clothed, as Massan began attaching electrodes to various parts of his body.

"So you're not going to be in the same position as last time. Last time was full cardiac and respiratory cessation, due to shock and having a big hole in your lung." Massan finished attaching electrodes and turned to a machine behind him. Leo could hear the beep, beep, beep of his heart ticking away. The sound of his continued existence, spelled out in monotone notes. "I'm going to induce ventricular fibrillation using a large AC shock. I would tell you how big this shock will be, but to be honest I don't want to frighten you. Take off your shirt and spread this on your chest." Massan gave Leo what looked like a tub of hair gel.

"What's this for?"

"It's so you don't have defibrillator shaped scars on your chest. At this voltage these things will burn your skin without protection, and I don't have the equipment to deal with an infection here. Plus if you show up at a hospital with defibrillator burns they'll start asking questions, which is the last thing I need." Massan pulled out two paddles, rubbing them together as they charged. They made a faint high pitched whine as they did, and Leo eyed them nervously.

"Is this going to hurt?"

"I'm afraid so. I can't get hold of any decent painkillers without going through procedures and they would never approve this. Unless you want to start downing paracetamol now I suggest you don't think about it. It's a very short shock." Massan placed the paddles on Leo's chest, pulling out a stopwatch as he did so. "3, 2, 1, clear."

Leo looked up. The roof was far above him, which meant he was lying down. But he wasn't lying in the bed. Instead he was in a big room. Someone was looking down at him. Someone familiar.

"You again. Most perplexing." Lucifer shook his head. "Alright I'll bite. What do you want?"

"I want to understand." Leo said as he stood up, his legs shaky. His chest ached, a deep throbbing pain that reverberated through his body. "What is this place? How does it work? What happens?"

"I don't deal with the technical side of things down here. But I know someone who does." Lucifer walked towards the door, pulling out his keys as he did. After a quick fiddle with the lock the door opened to what looked like a laboratory, full of giant glass tubes and computer banks. A small man in a lab coat and sunglasses was busy at one of the machines.

"What now? I'm busy." The main said. His voice was nasally and thin, tinged with annoyance.

"Leo, this is Belerus. He's our chief of technology down here, and if anyone can tell you about how we work, it's him. Now don't bother me again unless it's important." Lucifer practically shoved Leo through the door and slammed it behind him. Belerus finished at his machine and turned around, grinning.

"I heard about you. Barian couldn't keep a secret if his lips were glued together. Although being asked to run some very specific simulations was a hint."

"What exactly is this place?"

"Really? That's the question you want to open with? I should think that was pretty obvious." He spread his arms. "Welcome to Hell. Purgatory. Shak'delar. The Cycle. Whatever you want to call it. Every culture has some inkling of what happens after death, and though the words change the intent is the same. This is where you go when you die."

"I thought there was a heaven as well as hell?" Leo frowned.

"Depends who you ask. As far as I know there's only one place after death, and that's here. Thing is what you're seeing is technically a communal mental representation of what you think this place looks like. Your subconscious is deciding everything for you." Belerus walked over to Leo, and as he did Leo realised just how small he was. The man was barely 4 feet tall, his lab coat tails dragging on the floor. His smile was greasy, a little too forced. "So right now your body is a subconscious mental projection of your self. Effectively you're walking around in your subconscious body. This place can therefore be treated as both heaven and hell in a sense. It's your subconscious that decides which one you see. You judge yourself guilty or innocent. It's quite beautiful actually."

Leo felt warmth flush through him and realised Massan was trying to bring him back. "What about you? Do you actually work here? What do you do?"

"Oh a bit of this, and a bit of that." Belerus pushed his sunglasses further up his nose. "That's not important though. I anticipate we're running out of time."

"What – how do you know?"

"You're not the first." Belerus said simply. "I'll explain later but I need more time to confirm. I need you to die for longer really. I don't have enough time to run any simulations on you. Come and see me again when you can stay for longer." Leo felt the warmth again, stronger, and he closed his eyes.

"Come on, stay with me. ShitShitShit!" Massan threw the set of paddles to the side and pulled out another pair, these ones hooked up to a car battery. He glanced at the clock. 51. 52. 53. "Come on you bastard, get back here! Come on!" He let the charge go, Leo's slight frame jumping as the electricity contracted his muscles. And then with a gasping breath he opened his eyes.

"I – urgh – ack" Leo tried to speak but found he couldn't.

"Quiet. Lie still." Massan began lumping ice onto the bed, covering Leo in it. Once done he pulled out a syringe, and after a quick inspection, promptly injected Leo in the neck with it.

"Urgh"

"What's your name?" At Leo's blank expression Massan sighed. "I need to know if there's any damage. Your speech will recover once blood circulates, cognitive function should be immediate. Name. Now."

"Leurgh"

"Close enough. How many fingers am I holding up?"

"Fouurgh"

"Good." Massan sighed and collapsed into a nearby chair, wiping sweat off his forehead. "This is crazy. You're crazy. What the hell am I doing here performing the medical equivalent of mad science in the basement? That's it. No more. I'm done." The basement was quiet save for heavy breathing and the beeping of Leo's heart, still struggling onwards.

"No way. Not after last time."

"He told me I needed to die for longer."

"He could tell you to jump on one leg and sing songs for all I care!" Massan threw his hands up. "Who told you this anyway?"

"Belerus. He runs the technical side of things in the afterlife."

Massan tilted his head. "You know, at first I thought you were making this stuff up. But nobody is this exact with lies. You talk to me about the same things over and over, and you're almost convincing. But I just can't. I'm sorry, but last time was far too close. You were dead for 50 seconds, somehow you didn't suffer any major brain damage but god knows how."

Leo quietly wondered about that. His memory had been worse since he woke up, and he pondered if he really did avoid brain damage. Or if he would even notice it if it occurred. "Massan please. I'm begging you."

"You did that already, and It worked the first time. But no more." Massan sighed. "You have to understand how abhorrent this is to me. I took an oath, Leo. A code I've lived by for nearly 30 years. On top of that what you're asking me to do is something that I have been actively researching to prevent for 20 years. This is something I have dedicated my life against, and you're asking me to cause it. God knows why I even agreed to this in the first place, but it goes against everything I've lived and worked for. Please understand." He leaned back in his chair. "I don't have anything against you personally. I honestly hope you find someone else to help you in this, I really do. But it cannot be me anymore."

"I see." Leo slumped in his chair. Massan looked at him for a moment.

"Look I'll tell you what. You want purpose in this life? Let me give you something. I've got to clear all that stuff out of the basement later today, why don't you come help me with that? It'll take your mind off things."

Leo shrugged, but beneath the nonchalant exterior the gears of his mind were turning. "Guess I don't have anything else to do. What time?"

"7:30 exactly. There's a gap in the schedule that we have to hit. We'll have a 30 minute window, otherwise we'll be explaining why we're carrying hospital equipment to the next janitor. So be punctual." Massan turned to his computer, and Leo stood up to leave.

"Oh and Leo? Life is great. Trust me, I work at keeping it." Massan chuckled to himself.

"Yes. Yes it is." With that Leo left the room, crutches clicking as he walked.

Leo looked at his watch as he entered the basement. The equipment was all still there, the defirbillators, the hospital bed, unmade and covered in ice. It was odd to think that this was his deathbed, both metaphorically and literally. He brushed the ice off the bed, clicking on the machines as he did so. He wasn't sure what for but they felt necessary somehow. He couldn't find the electrodes however so instead of a steady repetitive beep the machine simply registered a flat monotone line. It was unsettling, as though he had already died. Another glance at his watch. 7:28. After a moment's searching he found the defibrillators, the cold metal heavy in his hands. A quick search found the switch to turn them on, hooked up to the extension lead, and Leo lay in the bed. He couldn't find the gel, so he simply left his shirt on. As the defibrillators charged with a faint whine he looked up at the roof, the fluorescent tube lighting illuminating the weathered ceiling, the silvery grey of ventilation pipes like jewellery on a scarred body. The earrings and tongue piercings of the building, Leo thought with a smirk. Funny what the mind jumps to when it's about to die. 7:29. Leo placed the defibrillators on his chest, and took a deep breath. Then another. Then another. He muttered "Clear." to nobody in particular. Then he pressed the button.

"How long was it between the sessions?"

"A day and a half, more or less." Leo thought back. "Why?"

"I need the data for the simulation. Come." Belerus beckoned Leo over to a large machine, typing some numbers on a small calculator he was holding. There was a screen at the bottom of the machine, and the scientist gave it a few meaningful taps. It began to show a complex mathematical formula, something Belerus evidently understood as he gave a few excited claps.

"And that is...."

"So time doesn't run parallel down here. At the point of death your mind speeds up, it works overtime to find a way to save you. As far as we can tell that overclocking of your brain carries over to down here, hence time runs faster down here than it does up there." Belerus waved his hands distractedly. "Well I say time runs faster, in fact that's a lie. You're just thinking faster. Time isn't a fixed linear progression, it's in a state of flux that varies depending on our perception of the world around us. You think that the passage of time influences your perception of the world, whereas it's the other way around. Your perception speeds up or slows down time."

"I don't get it." Leo was struggling to keep up, and Belerus sighed.

"Basically time runs faster here. The question was how much faster, and now I know." He gestured at the screen. "Taking your mental calculation speed as a base value time is exactly 12.67 seconds per second down here. For every second you spend up there, 12.67 seconds passes down here. Well I say exactly, it's pretty hard to calculate mindspeed but –"

"Wait, how long have we been here for?"

"About 20 minutes."

Leo's heart dropped. "Massan should be here by now. He should be trying to get me up. Where is he?"

"Massan?"

"Someone on the other side. A doctor. He's been getting me here. I.... I tricked him in order to come here this time." Leo looked up at the ceiling in hope.

"Sorry I'm late, I had to dodge a few questions. Some of my old colleagues work here and –" Massan stopped. He saw the bed. Leo asleep on it. The defibrillators half charged, dangling from the side. His formidable mind put the pieces of evidence together, sent the compiled report to his brain, and after digesting for a second it came to a conclusion.

"You didn't. No way. No bloody way." He ran over to the bed, but he knew in his heart that Leo wasn't just asleep. "You stupid, selfish, son of a-" He picked up the defibrillators left on the bed but they were still charging, useless to him. The backup pair were hooked up, and he pulled them out. The ECG was still registering no heartbeat, the electrodes dangling uselessly, and the tone mocked him as he pulled up the paddles. Without even hesitating he fired them. Compression. Wait. Discharge. Compression. Wait. Discharge. Compression. It wasn't working.

"Come on you bastard, come on. I'm not going to jail for you. Not like this. No way." He charged the paddles again.

"What are you waiting for?" Belerus had a notepad out and a pen poised and ready.

"It feels warm when he shocks me, like a hot flush. He should have arrived a minute ago. I should feel something, anything. But I don't." He noticed Belerus was scribbling furiously. "Will you stop that? This is serious!"

Belerus' phone rang, and he held up a finger at Leo as he pulled it out. After a moment's nodding, and a few affirmatives, he ended the call and turned to him.

"That was the boss, he rang to say you're officially turned up on the system." He held his hands apart. "Congratulations. You've officially died."

Massan leant back. The last charge had only produced meagre sparks: he was out of juice. The extension lead was no longer connected. He was out of options. He looked at Leo lying peacefully on the bed, the result of his endeavours. For the first time in 22 years, Massan sat on the floor and, in between muffled curses, began to quietly cry.

"What do you mean I'm dead?"

"I'm not sure how you can misinterpret that sentence." Belerus tilted his head. "Besides, what is one world to another? You can be perfectly happy down here. I could even take you on as my assistant."

"I can't." Leo was panicking now. "I have to get back." He grabbed Belerus by the shoulders, practically shaking the man. "You have to help me, there must be a way. There has to be."

"Well, there is a way." Belerus frowned. "Come with me. Quietly." He led Leo through a small door, closing it behind him. In the room was what looked like a table, upright, with manacles on the corners. Various equipment surrounded it, some appearing to be medical in nature, others...less so, Leo thought with a dull flash of fear.

"What is this place?"

"Nothing you need concern yourself about. Hop in." He gestured to the table. Leo stood against it and Belerus closed the manacles around his wrists and ankles.

"What happens when you kill something that's already dead?" Belerus muttered under his breath.

"What was that?"

"Oh nothing. I must thank you really. I've wanted to try something like this for a while, and simulations are only so good. After a certain point more substantial evidence is required." Belerus turned away, and when he turned back he was holding what looked like a very large needle attached to a cable. "Don't worry about this, it'll hurt for only a moment. It looks scary but it's not that bad, I assure you. I have no other way of delivering the charge to your heart sadly."

"What?"

"I'm going to kill you." Belerus said with a grin. "I don't know if this will work or not, but we shall see. Are you ready?" Leo nodded. "Alright then. On the count of three. One. Two." Belerus plunged the needle into his chest and Leo's world flashed white.

Massan jumped. The last vestiges of electricity leaving Leo's body had caused it to jump. For just a second he thought it had made a noise. He looked at Leo intently for a few seconds, but the body was as still as a...well, as a corpse, Massan thought with a mirthless smile. He turned away again.

"Wait what was that? I need longer! That was no time at all!"

"I can't." Belerus threw the needle down, the cable clattering on the floor. "What did you see?"

"I saw... there. The real word. But only for a second." Leo looked down at his chest, at the hole the needle had produced. It reminded him of a particularly nasty insect sting, not something that he would associate with a hole going towards his heart.

"The time difference. You saw it for about a 12th of a second if my calculations are accurate."

"I need longer."

"I told you I can't." Belerus frowned. "The body that you see here is a coalescence of your subconscious. I ran a large charge through it for about 2 minutes already, any longer and it'll start to dissipate."

"What do you mean dissipate?"

"It just... goes." Belerus waved his hands in the air, then grimaced. "Look I'm a scientist, I don't like admitting that I don't know something. Down here there are things that I know or things that I will know, nothing else. The coalescence just vanishes if you run too much charge through it, I think it just destabilises the brain, cauterises it somehow."

"How can you know? You've never done this before."

"I told you before. There were others." Belerus said darkly, scratching the back of his head. "I'm not a good person. But I tell the truth. And before you ask no, we can't go again. Your subconscious needs time to settle. Maybe a week or two." He walked over and unbuckled Leo from the table as he talked.

"A week!? I – woah." Upon trying to stand Leo found it difficult to even stay upright.

"You're just had a massive charge run through you for nearly 2 continuous minutes. Your subconscious will struggle to stay together for a while, so take it easy."

"I'm coming back. As soon as I can, I'm coming back. If I have to get a message up there a half second at a time then I will."

Belerus shrugged. "It's your call. Just do me a favour and get some rest in between."

"No guarantees."

Detective Inspector Marinetto looked around. This late nobody was in the station, which was perfect for his needs. In the room in front of him was the victim of case 1437. Cause of death apparently defibrillation, suspect apprehended and convicted of manslaughter. Though the times varied slightly, every 4 days the body would jerk and make a noise. His superior had ordered him to get rid of the body, but he was a detective at heart, and he couldn't leave a problem unsolved. So he had pulled some strings to get it and place it under surveillance. He had pieced together the recordings of each noise, and something was starting to become clear. After nearly 12 incidents he had the makings of what looked like a word.

"I'm." He muttered to himself. The body was saying something, and it began with I'm. I'm what? Alive? Here? Marinetto shivered. Eventually he would figure it out. He always did in the end. It was just a matter of time. He clicked his pen, shut his notebook, and without another sound left the station, leaving the body to wail its message into the waiting lens of the camera and the open arms of the dark night.

#but hear me out #what happens if you get reincarnated

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