#imagine them having gone to a frigid ice planet before this

[mostly-natm]

Warm.

[forsworned]

hiiii, can i request yoriichi hcs of him falling in love again but with a demon slayer this time, please? since he died of old age it makes me sad to think he spent all that time alone 😭💔

+author's note. if i'm being honest i don't really see yoriichi falling in love again, i imagine he's far too immersed in killing muzan and eradicating every demon off the planet so uhhhh there's that mfkwmfkwefwkfmwk, also im probably gonna make a part two cuz its pretty long so THIS ISNT AS ROMANTIC AS U MAY THINK SORRY I JUST CANT SEE IT HAPPENING SO QUICKLY THIS MAN NEEDS SOMEONE PATIENT DON'T B MAD AT ME ANON also its barely even hc's anymore bye jaodvjskv

+warning(s). mentionings of violence, nudity oh and it's super angsty oh yeahhh

yoriichi would definitely not be looking for anything even remotely romantic you know, uh since his first love and first child was slaughtered? poor guy can't imagine him ever getting over that

the first meeting most likely would occur while he was scouting the region he was assigned to

and it would be somewhere at a crossroads leading into the woods and he would immediately pick up on the shift in the atmosphere

he knew there was a demon around, but as always he kept his cool and didn't stop walking in the direction he was heading towards as if to lure them out

but the demon had other plans as he would pick on an oblivious woman who was enjoying her time in the natural hot springs

little did the demon know she was always prepared so as soon as the demon tried to prey on her, yoriichi rushed towards it but she already sliced it's neck off at an inhuman speed

if yoriichi hadn't had such a practiced eye he would've missed how you pulled out the hidden blade from the water and aim and swung flawlessly at the beast

"b-but how?!" the beast would be paralyzed slowly disintegrating as he watched you emerge out of the water completely naked

"because you're just a beast who's blinded by bloodlust, and i am a human who slays the beast to end this vicious cycle." she replied fixing her hair pin on the top her head that held her hair back as she stood over them. their eyes shaking as their dismembered body quaked even as they disappeared into the winter gust.

yoriichi's eyes were wide. not by the sight of her unveiled body, but at how clean her cut was. she must've been a finely tuned demon slayer.

"do you always wait on beasts as an oblivious damsel?" his voice smooth as ice cutting into the frigid air. he showed no signs of any shock that he may have had earlier.

yoriichi never got cold either as he had the sun running through his veins day and night.

he looked away from her bare form to the snow covered trees. their frosted breaths mingling with the air.

"it's a favorite past time of mine." she replied as she sunk back into the warm water. "you're free to join me."

yoriichi had no interest in joining her in the hot springs, but he did have an interest in being in the hot springs.

he actually had gone this way to get to there because he wanted to be able to relax and it had been his secret for a small time coming now, but alas it is no longer a secret since another mysterious woman has claimed it for her own. at least she was making use of herself with it.

"i only came here for the hot springs." he replied in an even tone as he peeled off his haori and kimono. she turned her head away as he unclothed himself as if she were any modest herself.

she only turned to face him again when she saw in her perpherial that his lower half was sunken into the steaming water.

his hair was unraveled laying against his broad back, shoulders and chest and he closed his eyes as he completely submerged himself. the only thing above the water was his head and his hair was floating above the surface.

she watched in awe as she's never seen a man of his stature before. demon slayers were usually so young and fragile and falling into preemptive deaths.

intrusive thoughts began to linger as she watched him but he paid her no mind.

not that he thought she was a woman of the night and demon slayer by day, but it had only been some years since his wife and unborn had been slaughtered by a demon so romance wasn't at the top of his list

still, though. even being bare with another woman in the same body of water made him feel somewhat guilty

he pushed down the feeling. "are you going to keep gawking at me?"

she felt taken back by his sudden brashness, though it wasn't brash to yoriichi. that's just how he spoke. blunt and straight forward.

her face feeling warmer as she struggled to speak. was it the hot spring getting to her? "that-that wasn't my intention."

he stayed silent for a moment letting the warmth of the water reaching his aching joints. "don't waste your time on me. i am simply a man of no worth, just a vessel put on this earth who's objective is to make up for mistake of not eradicating muzan."

her interest piqued at the name. "muzan you say?"

"yes, he is the father of demons."

"i'm aware. you've met him before?"

yoriichi remained silent. anger bubbling within him remembering the last meeting he had with that vile creature. he should've cut him down where he stood forever, but alas Kami had something different in mind.

"long ago. i almost landed a fatal blow, but it was not enough." yoriichi wanted nothing more than to submerge his head under the water, but he had his duty as a demon slayer.

"y-you're yoriichi tsugikuni?!" she stammered. she felt starstruck just now. it's not like they had posters of him to know who he was, but she could tell from the moment she felt his energy materialize that he was of a high caliber. dare she say even higher than her.

she didn't realize that he form swayed towards him in excitement and envy, until he inched back. "oh, forgive me."

she suddenly felt naked and crestfallen.

"no need to apologize." he murmured as he closed his eyes.

she felt almost mortified and revolted by her shameless behavior. she had heard the news about his wife and unborn being massacred some few years ago and now being in front of the man himself and letting him see her in all her naked glory.

"i should leave." she suddenly said trying her best to cover herself as she got out of the water and reached for her hakama and kimono.

"so, you're aware." definitely not even a question. he knew that she knew by her abrupt chagrin expression.

she froze in her tracks and let out a shaky breath as she fixed her kimono. "you may say that you are a man of no worth, but to me you are a man of honor. i feel, dare i say, ashamed of my actions towards a man of your caliber and hardships. i cannot in good conscious stay here with a widowed man in grief over his dead unborn child and wife."

maybe, he misjudged her.

"there's no need for that. it was a long time ago."

it infuriated her how emotionless he was being. "and so was muzan and yet the fire in your eyes burns with an intensity when you speak about him. i suggest you do your part in mourning your family a little longer."

yoriichi was a patient man. much more patient than the average man, the average human.

"i mourned the death of my wife and child for ten days. i never moved for any sustenance. do i think that's enough? no. nothing could ever measure the amount of mourning i could do for them. i have a duty to protect the helpless as do you, demon slayer."

she clamped her mouth shut. God, she was truly making a fool out of herself. "i--"

"there's nothing more you can say. what's done is done. life is ever moving."

everything stood motionless as the snow began to fall. yoriichi's prestigious figure and [name's] form stood there unmoving.

if he hadn't honed his skills beyond human limits, he wouldn't have heard the ever so slight change in the atmosphere which was her leaving. and another thing. it was a feeling of sorrow.

"she felt sorry for me... forgive me, uta." he whispered to himself. a tear emanated from the corner of his eye and slipped under his chin and into the water. he watched as it rippled and then it was gone.

just as uta was a ripple in his life and now she was no longer. shame, he only felt shame as he closed his eyes and then brought himself to face the sky.

he convinced himself that it was nothing.

MUAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA YOU DIDN'T EXPECT THAT ANON i feel almost bad that i didn't give u the love dovey mushy thing u wanted I JUST WANTED TO B REALISTIC ITLL GET BETTER ILL MAKE AN APOLOGY PART TWO OKAY PLS DONT B MAD AT ME KOVKDSCFMS

[tails89]

Aliit ori'shya tal'din

Family is more than blood

Fandom: The Mandalorian

Word count: 3700

No pairings

Summary: Din didn’t usually spare much through for annual holidays, Life Day included. There wasn’t much point when one spent most of their time travelling through the vast void of space where days were a monotonous streak of pitch black and starlight.

This year, there is a reason to celebrate.

Read it on AO3

***

It’s the insistent warning from the fuel gauge that forces Din to find somewhere to land. They’ve been traveling for a week, jumping from one quadrant to the next, never coming out of hyperspeed long enough to do much more than input the next set of coordinates and jump again.

Taking out Moff Gideon was supposed to solve their problems but they were yet to reap the rewards. Din can only hope that as word of the Moff’s demise continues to circulate, the hunters who still hold trackers will come to realise there is no longer any payout at the end. Until then, Din and the kid will need to keep moving—until they can be safe.

There’s also the matter of the Jedi.

He’d almost let the Jedi take Grogu after defeating Moff Gideon. The kid needs training. That much is certain, but Din isn’t ready to hand the little womp rat over to someone who may not have the kid’s best interests at heart. The Jedi, Luke, had given Din the coordinates to his school and an invitation to see it for himself. Din plans to take him up on that offer, but not yet.

The alarm whines again, the shrill sound set’s Din’s teeth on edge as he silences it. He misses that about Razor Crest. It had been old, but reliable and he’d known exactly how far he could stretch a full tank of fuel. There are too many things about this new ship that just don’t feel right. The galley is set up in a similar configuration as the old one, but the shelves are just a half step across, and Din has not yet learned to duck.

There’s a noise behind him in the cockpit—the soft patter of tiny feet and a high-pitched coo before a tug on his cloak draws Din’s attention down.

Grogu stares up at him with his large, expressive eyes.

“You want to help me find a place to refuel?”

He lifts the kid up to sit on his lap and drops them out of hyperspace. The kid watches with wide eyes as the long streaks of starlight condense into pinpricks of light.

“Alright.” Flicking up the map, Din presses a button on the console and their location blinks back at them. “This is us.”

The kid reaches for the hologram, one three-fingered hand stretching towards the flashing lights. The other clutches his newest toy—Din hasn’t worked it where it came from, but it’s definitely part of the ship.

Search the nearby planets, Din finds one that meets their requirements.

“Mirador,” he says out loud for the kid’s benefit. “It’s only a few hours away. Quiet, no known Imperial bases. What do you think?”

Grogu coos in agreement, at least, Din decides to take it is agreement. The kid understands more that it seems and is generally pretty good at getting his point across despite the language barrier. He plugs in the coordinates and stands, scooping the child out of his lap. If all goes smoothly and with out fuss, there’s enough time to feed his kid and catch up on a few hours sleep before Din needs to pilot the ship down the to the planet’s surface.

***

“Let’s see what we’ve got in here.”

Din set’s Grogu down on the bench and moves through the narrow space of the galley. They’re completely out of fresh food and Din makes a mental note to restock while they’re down on the planet, before looking at their dry rations. Before finding the child, Din had never been too fussed about eating. It was a necessity for survival, but he’d never taken any particular pleasure from the act. With another mouth to feed—a surprisingly picky mouth considering the things Din had seen swallowed whole—he’d had to expand his options.

Pulling one of the ration bars from the cupboard, Din tears open the packaging and starts breaking it down into smaller chunks, dividing the bar between two cups. Without anything to add to it, the soup will be rather bland, but it has all the nutrients and will be filling.

Carefully adding hot water, Din stirs until the chunks have dissolved, then adds cold water to the smaller cup to bring the temperature down.

“Sorry kiddo,” he says, pushing the cup towards Grogu. “It’s just for one meal. I’ll resupply when we land.”

The kid clutches at the cup, but makes no move to drink, his ears drooping in disappointment at the brown liquid.

“Come on,” Din reasons. “It’s not that bad.” He picks up his soup, lifting his helmet just high enough the raise the cup to his lips. “See?” He says, moving around the end of the bench. “Your turn.”

He passes the end of the shelving, just narrowly remembering to duck his head this time.

The kid giggles and finally drinks.

***

The new ship doesn’t have a sleeping compartment. The Razor Crest hadn’t had one either when Din had first come into possession of it— he’d repurposed a storage cupboard, fitting it out with a mattress and eventually turning it into something almost comfortable.

The new ship has an alcove. It’s not much more than a deep corner where two walls meet, but it’s out of the way, directly under the cockpit and half shielded by the ladder. It can’t be closed off the way the old compartment could, but until Din starts collecting bounties again, it’ll do.

Sitting on the warn mattress, Din starts pulling off his boots. He doesn’t remove all of his armour, just enough to sleep comfortably—the pauldrons, belt, and chest plate— and programs his vambrace to wake him just before they leave hyperspace.

The kid watches him throughout this little ritual, tucked away in his own little nest-bed, his large dark eyes blinking drowsily.

Finally ready to sleep, Din hesitates, his fingers flexing beside his head. After defeating Gideon and rescuing the child, Din had shown Grogu his face. After coming so close the losing the kid, he’d wanted to look at him with his own two eyes, to reassure himself that this was real.

He’d taken to sleeping without his helmet once they’d gone off on their own. Each time he removes it, it gets a little easier, but he’s still learning to reconcile his childhood lessons of the creed and the Re’solnare, and what he’s seen and learned in the last few weeks.

The helmet comes of with a soft hiss and Din sets in on the floor beside his boots. He lies back and closes his eyes, silently counting down in his head. Like clockwork, just as he reaches zero there is a shuffling as Grogu abandons his bed for Din’s.

He shouldn’t encourage it, but the separation had been hard on them both, so instead of sending him back to bed, Din lifts his arm so his kid can burrow in closer.

***

The vibration of his vambrace wakes Din a few hours later.

Careful not to wake the child, he sits up, tugging on his boots and reattaching his armour.

With his helmet tucked under one arm, he climbs the ladder to the cockpit, taking his seat in the pilot’s chair just as the bright streaks of starlight wink out as they leave hyperspace.

Up in the distance, the planet Mirador looms.

The beeping of fuel gauge is insistent now, Din shuts it off with the flick of a switch—he doesn’t need the reminder. The planet is in range and there’s just enough fuel to land—though it will be close.

He disengages the autopilot and locks in on the refueling station he’d scanned earlier. As he approaches the planet, his comms burst to life and he is assigned a bay to land in.

Grogu is awake when Din steps off the ladder. No doubt the loud clanking of the fuel line being attached woke him. He stares up from Din’s bed and voices his disapproval.

“Time to get up, we need to get moving.” Din scoops him up, ignoring the way the child goes limp in an effort to avoid being picked up. Grogu is a fairly easy-going child, despite everything that has happened to him, but he is a child and like some of the younger children back at the covert, prone to the occasional tantrum. Din can only hope this sour mood isn’t building to that.

“You know you can’t stay here,” Din says, carrying Grogu over to the weapons locker to grab his blaster. The kid whines, cranky and still half-asleep. “I know kiddo, but it’s not going to happen.”

He punches in the code to open the locker, ignoring the weapon that hangs beside the blaster—that was another problem Din wasn’t ready to deal with—and holsters the gun before resecuring the locker.

The next challenge is deciding how to carry Grogu.

Mirador’s distance from the nearby sun means that it is covered in snow and ice for the majority of its solar year. The days are short and frigid and Din’s usual method of carrying Grogu in his arms or in a satchel are not going to cut it in this weather.

He fashions a sling by cutting strips from a spare blanket and tying it around his waist. He has to take his cloak off to secure the sling, but once he’s done, he can pull the heavy material of his cloak around them both to stay warm.

When he’s ready, he hits the release for the ramp.

The kid burrows down further into the sling at the first blast of icy air that blows through the hold. Din wraps the cloak tighter around them and steps out into the snow. The heater in his suit helps to keep the frigid air at bay as they make their way towards the market town.

The child settles down after a few minutes, the slow rise and fall of his back against the cloak suggesting he’s asleep.

Good, Din thinks. He can’t imagine anything worse than shopping in the cold with a fussy child and in all honesty, the kid could use the extra sleep. They both could. Between the frequent resetting of their course and the constant vigilance since leaving Moff Gideon’s light cruiser, decent sleep has been few and far between.

The town, when they reach it, is brightly lit against the gloomy weather. The stalls are all outside, but they are each set up with large glowing heaters to keep people, and the wares, from freezing.

Din starts at one of the larger shopfronts, purchasing what he needs to restock the ship. They’re low on most things, the ship having been little more than a shell when it came into his possession, but in a town this small he’ll only be able to find the basic necessities. Fruit and vegetables are almost prohibitively expensive on a planet of Mirador’s type, but the meat seems reasonable.

Once he’s handed over an outrageous number of credits, Din gives instructions for delivery and moves on. He wanders from stall to stall with no real intention of purchasing anything else, just enjoying the opportunity to stretch his legs after a week on a cramped spaceship.

At some point, Din’s going to need to resume work. He’s got enough credits coming in from Dune and Karga to keep him and the kid fed, but he can’t live on their generosity forever. His conscience alone won’t let him. He needs to get back to what he knows, what he’s good at and earn money for the covert… once he finds them.

In the meantime, he’s happy enough to meander through the market. Many of the stalls are decorated and Din wonders if the planet has some local holiday approaching. He’s lost all sense of time in the last few weeks. It’s hard to measure the passage of days when speeding through the endless night of space.

As a Mandalorian he draws many stares as he walks, but the lump under his cloak goes unnoticed in the cold. He feels the child squirm against his chest just as his own stomach starts to rumble. He remembers passing a stall some time back selling hot food, so he doubles back to find it.

In the end, he follows his nose to the vendor roasting some sort of meat.

The Teltior woman looks up warily as he approaches, but Din is used to the stares his armour draws and just gestures for two of the skewers. Inside his cloak, Grogu shifts again, his clawed fingers skittering against the beskar.

“Don’t often see your kind on this planet, Mando,” she says conversationally as she turns the roasting meat on the grill. “Not here to cause trouble I hope.”

At the sound of another voice, Grogu coo’s something in response. Din tightens his hold on the edges of the cloak and shakes his head. “No trouble,” he says, raising his voice to cover the kid’s mumbling.

The Teltior’s eyes narrow slightly, but she doesn’t say anything else as she cooks. The scent of the roasting meat fills the air and kid makes a loud noise.

“Patience,” Din mutters under his breath, pressing one hand against the kid’s back in an effort to soothe him. He glances up, nervous, hoping the keep the child hidden but the noises from within his cloak become more insistent so Din lets the edges drop before his kid does something drastic, like use those Jedi powers of his.

The kid has his hands planted against the Mandalorian’s chest, twisting away to catch a glimpse of what’s going on behind him. With a silent sigh behind his mask, Din loosens the sling so that he can turn Grogu around and then refastens it.

The stallholder’s eyes go wide at the sight of the small green child, her eyes flicking from the kid up to Din’s helmet as she hands over the sticks of roasted meat and accepts the coins.

“Mine were like that,” she says, the suspicion gone from her tone, replaced with fond amusement. Her eyes are trained on the small green hand that’s come up, reaching for his lunch. “Like a nekarr cat the moment food was served. You’d think I never fed them.”

“Yeah, he uh- eats.” Din takes a half step back, ready to end the conversation and get back to the safety of their ship.

“He’s a cutie,” she continues blithely, leaning forward against the counter. “So, will this be your first Life Day with the little one?”

“Life Day?” His head jerks up, suddenly the decorations make sense. “Uh- yes?” He turns his attention down to the kid who is staring at the food, arms outstretched and grasping.  He hands over one of the skewers and the kid immediately chomps down, babbling happily to himself.

“Cherish this moment,” she says. “They don’t stay this size forever. Next thing you know they’re grown and leaving home.”

***

After escaping the marketplace, Din wanders around looking for a secluded place the eat. He finds a sheltered spot behind a snowy outcrop and sits on the gnarled and folded trunk of a stunted tree.

While they eat, his thought’s drift back to the conversation with the stallholder.

Din didn’t usually spare much through for annual holidays, Life Day included. There wasn’t much point when one spent most of their time travelling through the vast void of space where days were a monotonous streak of pitch black and starlight.

He remembers celebrating the holiday as a child. The memories of his parents are faint and fleeting, the good times overshadowed by the grief of losing them.

Much more vivid, and welcome, are the memories with his buir and the clan—his aliit. It was a time for everyone to come together for good food and good cheer. The children would be given gifts and the adults would tell stories.

Din wants that for his kid.

He sits up sharply, eliciting a squeak from Grogu.

No, not his kid, he corrects silently, wondering when he started referring to Grogu as his in his head. He can’t afford to let himself think like that. As right as the word might feel, Din’s main priority needs to be returning Grogu to his kind—the Jedi.

He glances down at the kid, gnawing on the on the skewer. He’s a mess, his face and smock stained with meat juices. Wiping the worst of it from Grogu’s face, Din decides there’s not much else that can be done for it. They’ll just have to wait until they get back to the ship and he can find the kid a change of clothes.

But first—there’s something he needs to do.

Grogu doesn’t complain to much about being rugged back up. The wind had picked up while they sat, and the cloak offers an extra layer of protection from the icy blast.

They detour through the market on their way back to the ship so Din can pick up a few more things.

***

The light is fading by the time they return to the ship. It’s been refuelled so Din hands over the credits then takes the kid inside out of the cold. All of his earlier purchases have been delivered too, sitting just inside the hold.

Din’s anxious to get moving again, uncomfortable with spending so much time in one spot, but he needs to change Grogu into something clean and put everything away first.

He starts with the kid, unwrapping him from the sling and setting him down on the bed. He takes in the mess with a soft sigh beneath the helmet and collects a clean robe from their meagre box of possessions. Between the two of them they don’t own a lot of clothing. Still—the new outfit will be clean and keep the kid warm until Din can get the heating going again.

“Okay,” he says, holding up the robe. “I’ll make this quick.”

He manages to strip the kid one handed, keeping him still with the other, but the kid wriggles, making a game of the task.

“You’re going to get cold,” Din warns him, struggling to pull the new robe over the long green ears. “Just sit still.” He manages to pull the outfit over Grogu’s head and slip his arms through the sleeves. “I don’t know why you make that so hard every time,” he sighs, exasperated but fond. “I know you understand me.” He digs out one of the toys from their blankets and hands it over to keep Grogu entertained while he moves everything from the hold to the galley. It also gives him the opportunity to hide the gift he’d bought.

Once he’s done, he takes Grogu up to the cockpit—the sealed room will heat faster than the rest of the ship once the life support is engaged. He buckles in the kid and starts flicking the switches the power the engines.

Night has well and truly fallen across the snowy planet as the propulsion engines kick in. The ship rises steadily into the air and Din pilots them up out of the atmosphere. As soon as they’re clear of the planet, Din makes the jump to hyperspace hoping to put some distance between themselves and their last location, then sets the ship to autopilot.

***

Din wakes to the not unfamiliar sensation of something poking his face. It’s how he’s woken most mornings when he is not wearing his helmet—the kid was better than any alarm clock.

It comes again- the gentle pinching of his cheek- and he grabs the kid before the little womp rat can do it a third time. The kid giggles at the manhandling, wiggling against the hand holding him at bay. It’s a favoured game, but one that tends to be played too early. Din himself is an early riser, but somehow his kid just seems to have a knack for knowing when he’s in the deepest cycle of sleep and chooses that moment to wake him.

Today though, he doesn’t mind.

Rising from the bed, Din searches his hiding spot for the little cloth wrapped bundle.

“This is for you,” he says, returning to sit, legs crossed in front of the bed and setting down the gift. “Happy Life Day kid.”

It isn’t much— a couple of small toys so the kid will stop stealing ship parts and a new tunic. Grogu takes his time picking up each toy and holding them up to show Din, chattering away in excitement.

Din wonders if he understands the significance of this day, if anyone else has celebrated with him in the last fifty years or if, as far as Grogu’s concerned, today is just another day.

For Din, Life Day has always been day for family.

Is that what they are?

Family. A clan of two.

After everything they have gone through together, everything Din has done for the sake of the child. Everything he would do—are they not family?

Din’s entire worldview has shifted in the scant few months since he’d taken on a bounty and found a child. He’d removed his helmet—an act he swore he would never do in the presence of another living thing. He’d broken his creed for Grogu, yet somehow, he couldn’t bring himself to regret it. Everything he’d done in his desperation to rescue Grogu had been worth it.

Grogu needs the Jedi, he needs to be trained… but as a child surely he needs more than that? Din wants him to have more than that.

“Grogu, hey.” He pulls the kids attention away from the toys he’s gleefully smashing together. “I-” he licks his lips against the sudden dryness in his mouth. It shouldn’t be this hard. He is a Mandalorian, the beroya for the tribe, master of the darksabre, the weapon of the Mandalor.

As though he can sense Din’s internal struggle, Grogu stands, reaching up for Din.

Taking one little green hand in his, Din steady’s his thoughts with a breath, and speaks the words that will make them family.

“Ni kyr'tayl gai sa'ad.”

[bellatrixobsessed1]

A Fairy’s Soul

This fic is more of a demo for a possible longer, full on role-swap AU. I probably won't continue it but will come back to this concept and some of the ideas in it.

Summary: Icy’s planet is destroyed by a coven of power-seeking witches. Dragon Fire witch Bloom, spares her life and tries to coax her into taking vengence.

She’s such a pretty thing. A delicate thing. Bloom has come to find that this is common among ice fairies. There’s just something about them, something that makes them so precious. She runs her fingers through the fairy’s long white-blue locks. Brushes her thumb over those soft lips. Her breath is chilly as it slides over the back of Bloom’s hand. The fire witch shudders, she is supposed to be destroying this fairy, supposed to thaw at her until she is nothing at all.

And how easy it would be to burn her away before she can reawaken just as the coven had ordered her to do. And yet she can’t. She isn’t sure why, but she can’t. The woman gives a soft hum and stirs. Bloom goes tense, she can’t wake up yet. Not when she hasn’t figured out what to do with her!

Regardless, she blinks awake, immediately shielding her eyes against the sunlight she has awakened to. “Where am I?” She murmurs.

“Soon you won’t be anywhere at all.” Bloom assures her.

She sits up, her hair tumbles from its high ponytail and spills down her back over her slender, pale shoulders. Her lashes glitter with a fine diamond-like frost. Her skin shimmers with it. The princess of Dymond is beautiful. Bloom has been raised to despise beautiful. And she can’t resist, she reaches a hand out and touches the woman’s frigid cheek with the back of her hand. “You’re one of the Dragon Witches.” The woman comments plainly. Her voice is slick and smooth like the surface of an iced pond. It is much deeper than the fire witch had imagined it would be.

“I’m the dragon fire witch.”

The ice fairy nods. “What do you want with me?”

Bloom cups the woman’s chin and tilts her head up. “It’s simple. Sparks can’t be restored unless Dymond is sacrificed. All of it. Every last soul.” A wicked grin spreads across her face. “Look around you. You’re the last.”

“The last.” She repeats, her whisper like the rattle of pine needles caught in a winter breeze.

“The very last.” Bloom taps her pointer against the fairy’s cheek.

The woman swallows.

.oOo.

Icy’s body slackens, really what would be the point of resistance when there is nothing to stand her ground for. Her kingdom has fallen, her people have died, her friends, Sapphire… Those big blue eyes and that cheerful, innocent grin. And in those final moments those big blue filled with terror like Icy has never seen before on the girl. Her world had gone quite mercifully black as her sister was yanked screaming from her arms. The sound echos in her ears, it might echo in them forever unless…

She closes her eyes. She supposes that it won’t be so bad to let the fairy smolder her away and let her ashes rain down among everyone else’s.

“Go on then.”

“What?”

“Make your sacrifice.”

The heat rolls over her skin, she tastes ashes on her tongue. The air around her is so clogged with smoke that it could match the best of whiteouts. And yet no snow falls over Dymond, not anymore. Not again.

But the world around her grows no hotter. She wonders if the fire witch is playing games with her. It is no matter, she isn’t much of a player. She gives a harsh series of coughs as the smoke works its way to her lungs. Her eyes sting and water, clearing away the grime on her cheeks in twin trails. Ash and destruction dust her wings and paint her hair a shade of sooty grey. A smear or two of blood marrs her singed skirt and the hem of her shirt. Her entire body is sore, a soft shade of burnt red. If the fire witch doesn’t kill her off then the world around her will cook her slowly. “What are you waiting for, do it.”

She is growing quite dizzy with the heat. Decidedly, this is a favorable alternative. She offers no resistance and lets the night descend upon her on dark wings. The wings fold around her both feathery and velvety and she goes serenely into the darkness. She has a rather strange fondness for the dark...

.oOo.

Bloom watches the fairy slump to the ground, her face slick with sweat and blood and embers. They burn small marks upon her once immaculate complexion. And she hesitates. Why the hell is she hesitating? The coven, her ancestors, call for her to do just as the fairy had requested and yet, when she brings the flame to hover before the fairy’s limp body, she can’t bring it any closer.

She takes a deep breath, inhaling an exhilarating curtain of smoke and she lifts the fairy from the ground. Surely the coven will hex her into the next dimension or into oblivion for this, but she won’t kill the fairy. Neither will she let her die.

.oOo.

Icy doesn’t have a sense of where she is when she wakes. Though it is comfortable. She nuzzles her face against the pillow, its silk fabric is kind on her face at least for a moment. Until the stinging registers. And her body stings from head to toe.

She makes to shift positions but finds herself wincing and even the slightest movement. In the light of the room she can see that her skin is terribly red and blistering in spots. She could try for a healing spell but her magic is so weak. So weak that she can barely feel it at all. She wonders if the fire had burned it away entirely. She closes her eyes again as another wave of dizziness overtakes her. But the pain won’t let her retreat back into the kindness of night.

She feels the bed dip.

“You’re awake.” A voice remarks. “I thought that you’d went and died after all.”

Her brows furrow as it occurs to her that she shouldn’t be alive, much less awake. “Why didn’t you kill me?” She asks. Her voice is hoarse, throat scratchy and raw. It hurts rather terribly. And maybe that is the game; to make her suffer. To draw it out. Deplete her until she is entirely spent emotionally and physically and then if she is lucky she will get to join her people, her friends, her family.

“I tried, and I was going to.”

“But…”

The fire witch stares at her for the longest time. “There’s something about you.” She reaches out and her fingers graze over Icy’s upturned cheek. She flinches, the discomfort contorts her expression.

“I suggest that you retract your hand.”

“Or what?” Though she does pull her hand back.

“You should have killed me.” She mutters flatly.

“Why?”

“Because I am going to kill you. You and the rest of your coven.”

.oOo.

So the fairy has some bite. She can’t imagine that her rage will simmer for very long. It will give way to tears, as it always does with the soft fairy types.

She laughs. “You’re precious.” The fairy snarls. Bloom supposes that if any fairy could have the capability to do evil it would be the ice fairies. And my, my, this one would make a perfect witch. “I couldn’t kill someone like you. That would be such a waste.”

“Then what will you do with me?” The fairy looks almost bored.

There are plenty of things that come to mind. Among them; ripping her wings off and burning them before her eyes, taunting her for her lost kingdom, hexing her in unthinkable ways. But mostly, almost inexplicably, she wants to caress the fairy’s cheek and warm her frosty lips. “I want to help you.” She decides.

“How do you think that you’re going to help me.”

The witch’s lips curl back into a smirk. “Vengeance.” It will be a fun game, really; the fairy’s soul is as pristinely white as her snow. In one swoop she can corrupt it and take the rest of the coven down. She can take their power and the ice fairy’s for her own.

“What will that do?” The fairy asks. “It certainly won’t bring my kingdom back.”

“It can.” Bloom smiles. She reaches out and runs her fingers through the fairy’s long locks. She smells faintly of peppermint. She gives a soft shudder and Bloom withdraws her hand. “If I can syphon power from the coven, we will be strong enough to bring your realm back and then some.”

The fairy is quiet for a long time. “You think that I’m naïve.”

“Not at all.” Bloom insists. “I think that you’re too...passive. They killed your sister, don’t you think that you deserve to pay them back for it?”

The fairy seems to ponder it. “Perhaps I do.”

She trails her fingers along the fairy’s bicep and leans in closer so that her lips are level with the woman’s ear. “I think that you do. You deserve that and all of the power in the realms.”

The fairy lays back and stares off.

“Get some rest. I have a feeling that you’ll be more than ready to take what’s yours when the time comes.” And more than ready to have it yanked right back out of her. Until that time comes, it will be fun toying with her heart. “You might have lost your kingdom, but you don’t have to be alone.”

[kaablooie]

Before the Exclusion Zone

(Back to the beginning: Part 1)

Part 10 - A throw back

50 000 years before the first pyramids were built, there were the Madari. A highly advanced and technological race, they were amongst the first of the civilized species to master interstellar travel. Millennia passed as they traversed the stars exploring and searching for answers they didn’t know the questions to. Gathering together the other advanced civilizations they found, they organized and created the Galactic Consortium - a new, intergalactic organization governing and enabling a level of cooperation never before achieved. Technology and goods traded freely and everyone prospered. A true golden age of enlightenment and peace took hold of the known galaxy. 

Thousands of years later, the Madari exploration vessel, Star Rider, happened upon an exquisite planet on the edge of the galaxy absolutely bursting with life. Enough life that you could see it growing on the land and shimmering in the water, even from space. A huge planet, it was surprising to the crew of the Star Rider that it was even capable of any life at all. A truly surprising and remarkable find. Commander Ratrek didn’t want to waste any time learning all of this planet’s secrets.

“Atmospheric composition report,” he demanded from the bridge.

“One moment,” the surface analyst, Cordu, responded. “I’m getting some odd readings that have to be an instrument error. We’re re-calibrating and scanning again.”

“Sir, the gravity of this planet is 2.6. We’ll have to use the gravity modulators if we want to survive down there without being crushed or suffocating,” the analyst sitting next to Cordu offered.

“2.6! Zentic, have we ever encountered life before on a planet with that much gravity?” Ratrek inquired.

“Technically, yes, but never with anything larger than microscopic life on it. Initial scans indicate that there is a wide variety of massive fauna and huge animal lifeforms,” analyst Zentic replied. Next to him, Cordu finished reassessing his equipment and ran his scan of the atmosphere.

“This is impossible,” muttered Cordu. “Commander, my analysis is showing that this entire atmosphere has an abundance of Oxygen in it!”

“What?” Ratrek skittered up behind Cordu so he could look at the output himself. “That can’t be right. You’re sure your instruments aren’t getting interference from something? Look at the life on this planet! You’re telling me these creatures are not only alive but thriving in this oxygen rich atmosphere?”

“It would seem so, sir.” Cordu couldn’t quite believe it himself. Of all of the planets the Madari had cataloged over the long history of their race, he had never heard of one quite like this before. “Any expedition team will have to use full atmospheric hazard suits to go to the surface. Obviously.”

“Incredible. Let’s get down there then. Cordu, scan those creatures and we’ll see if the largest of them has any intelligence. We’ll start there.”

“Sir, the largest creatures on this planet seem to be aquatic in nature and can only be found in those vast oceans.. they... they are almost as large as our entire ship...,” Cordu trailed off.

“Fine fine, find me the largest terrestrial creature then. Zentic, you’re with me.” Ratrek pushed the com button on the wall. “Ordos and Rados, gear up, full atmo suits, grav modifers, and sed guns. Meet us at the shuttle.” 

As the four Madari stepped off the back of their gravity controlled shuttle, the soft whirl of their gravity mods could be heard kicking in. The readout in their suits was telling them it was cold. So cold, in fact, that the water in the air had somehow frozen on the ground, but not as ice as you’d expect. It was.. fluffy. Fluffy ice? How the lifeforms survived in such frigid temperatures was beyond Ratrek’s ability to imagine. It was just another wonderfully curious question to be answered by the planetary researchers back on his ship. Cordu had given them coordinates to put them just within sight of a group of what had to be the apex predator of this world. Using the enhanced visors in their helmets, they were able to zoom in on their targets. These things were HUGE. Hairy, four legged behemoths, maybe five legs if you included the one coming from its face but didn’t seem to be used for locomotion. They had long, curved protrusions from what had to be their mouths as white as the stuff on the ground. The diminutive Madari, the tallest of them at 2′ 3″, wouldn’t even reach the lowest joint on their legs. Everything around the intrepid foursome, dwarfed them. Even when they lifted off their front two legs to balance on the rear two, they were relatively minuscule. It was quite humbling. If it wasn’t for their superiour tech, it would have been terrifying. 

With their sed guns loaded with the most potent of their sedatives, they began their approach to the massive aliens - and was immediately interrupted from the tree above. A sleek, golden coloured vessel of terror had landed on Ordos and was ripping him to pieces. Five times his size and with curved fangs as long as his arm, it crunched through his suit before anyone could even yell an alarm. Ordos was gone and the remaining party were unloading on it. It took longer to take down than it should have, but there were no other casualties. Likely due to it’s size, the engineered viral sedatives used would have taken longer to work through such a sheer volume of mass.

After lamenting their loss and gathering a tissue sample of the unconscious cat, it was decided they would continue with the mission. They had no special death rites, having outgrown such cultural necessities eons ago. They did, however, take the time to strip Ordos of his tech. They couldn’t leave it for the locals to find and there wasn’t much of Ordos left to do anything with anyway. So not wanting Ordos’ sacrifice to be in vain, they started heading back in the direction of the herd and resumed their march. Within normal visual range of the beasts, they noticed they were following tracks larger than theirs, but considerably smaller than those of their quarry. The animal that created these also seem to only have two legs, or they were walking with only two at least. How strange. They seemed fresh and headed in the same direction as them, directly towards these towers of hair and flesh.

“Commander, look,” Rados pointed towards the grazing creatures.  No, he pointed to just the side of them. Something much smaller was shifting in the snow. With a shrill cry, a small band of bi pedaled creatures maybe 2-3 times the height of the Madari emerged from the ground brandishing crud weapon and wearing what looked like the skin of their prey. Their antics frightened off the herd but they managed to isolate one of the beasts and were using an obviously coordinated maneuver to attack and tire the creature. Maybe these giants of this planet weren’t the apex predator of this world after all. 

Watching the battle from the shelter of a few sparse trees, the trio re-evaluated their situation. A number of the humans had sustained massive injuries and Ratrek assumed them to be dead. No being could recover from such injuries, even with the wildly powerful new regen medications the galaxy was in such a tizzy over lately. No, those Terrans were certainly dead. Until they weren’t. The beast, bloody and dying, gave off a thunderous and final trumpet. Ratrek could feel the vibrations of it’s fall through his feet. Then the victorious Terrans began going around to their fallen comrades and helping them up. They were clearly grievously injured with that odd red blood everywhere, stark against the white of the snow, but they were walking, albeit with assistance in many cases. While the humans didn’t look half as ferocious as the creature they took down, they were terrifying in their tenacity and made of sterner stuff than they appeared. 

“We should go back to the shuttle,” a visibly upset Zentic commented. And who wouldn’t be upset by the violence they had witnessed in such a short trip. A team member was dead, literally torn to pieces before their eyes, and the largest and most intimidating life-form any of them had ever head of had been essentially beaten into submission by other vicious creatures a fraction of its size. They were in an atmosphere that would kill them and was already likely degrading the integrity of their suits, not to mention if anything happened to their grav mods they would be flattened like a crew tech under a landing strut. 

Leaving, at least for now, was looking like an excellent idea. “Weapons up and watch those trees. Let’s head back.” Commander Ratrek reluctantly gave the order. He wanted to see more of this world, but was wise enough to know when a larger and better armed force was necessary. They would return after more extensive scans.

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

If you’ve liked what you’ve read, please consider joining me on my Patreon page where you can get early access to each chapter. https://www.patreon.com/roman_williams

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

Next: Part 11

Other parts:

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Part 6

Part 7

Part 8

Part 9

Part 10

Part 11

Part 12 (On Patreon) 

[pseudoknot]

A Dream of the Deep Sea

“When I was a little girl,” she began, “my parents would take me to the beach every weekend in the summer. Some days there would be a jellyfish swarm after a full moon, or a garbage barge would overturn, and we couldn’t go then, but most weekends we went. 

“My mother packed a cooler with cheese sandwiches, tangerines, iced tea and all that. My father carried our big beach umbrella with a pastel blue and pink pattern. I had my own little folding beach chair, the kind with snaps and straps to wear like a backpack.

“Our small two-bedroom apartment was, like, a 30-minute walk from the beach. The street we took, Oceanview Avenue, ironically did not have a view of the ocean until we rounded this obnoxious apartment building. Then you saw it in all its splendor. An unbroken vastness that stretched for hundreds of miles up and down the east coast. The sand wasn’t the luxurious white like from the southern islands, it was course, golden and very warm.

“Probably very similar to the sands from your home, the city in the Scythian desert. Did you know the deserts of Medina were once prehistoric seas? That was an exceptionally long time ago...

“Anyway, blue-green water stretched farther than my young mind could comprehend. Neither snack cart nor hawker with a yoke of cotton candy in plastic bags could distract me from the sparkling sea. I would help pick the space for us to settle. We came earlier in the morning, and so, set up in a quiet spot between the breakers. I pretended to be a dog to dig the hole for the beach umbrella.

“Even in the summer, the ocean temperature was cold, so I had a system of getting used to the chill. I stood in my one-piece bathing suit at the water’s edge and let the foamy, bubbly surf touch my toes.

“I let the waves bury my feet in the sand. I imagined sinking ever deeper. It was a comfortable feeling. I could stand there and stare at the glimmery distance forever.

“Once I got the green light to swim from my mother, I grabbed my goggles and splish-splashed in until I was up to my waist. From there, I dove under the first wave. Did you know that the ninth wave is usually the largest? It’s true, look it up.

“Sometimes, I would sit at the surf and make drippy sand castles or dig for sand dollars and sea shells. I had quite the collection at one point. But more importantly, the rhythmic motion of the cool water washing over me was … impactful.

“Hours later, back at home, when I lay in my bed, the churn of the sea continued to affect me. I felt the waves pass through me as I slept. My dreams were filled with visions of endless, peaceful oceans.

“At first, I only experienced the after-motion effect after swimming at the beach. Later, it continued as summer turned to fall and I returned to school. I felt the powerful current push and pull my body in the tub during bathtime.

“I can’t remember if I was afraid or concerned. It didn’t feel malevolent. When I mentioned it to my mother, she brushed it off as a part of my over-active imagination.

“On perfectly sunny days, I heard the dripping of water. Memories of the beach frothed up inside of me and gently condensed into droplets. I listened closely and heard the howl of the sea everywhere. My hands were in my pockets, but my fingertips felt the pitter-patter of rain.

“My dreams turned pale and incoherent. I believed my brain fluid had been replaced with pulsating sea water. Hydrocephalic symptoms manifested. I was a small stream connected to the rivers of the cosmos, and my head was caught in the eastward flow toward the ocean.

“One winter night, unable to resist the current any longer, I snuck out of my apartment and ran to the beach. Exhausted, I took off my coat, boots, and pajamas, and stood at the edge of the water. The night was exceptionally clear and the stars seemed so close that I tried to reach up and touch them.

“I laid down on the sand and let the icy waves rush over me. It took my breath away. It was so cold that I almost gave up, but my body was completely numb by then. I was buried deeper into the coarse sand. The light from the stars above rippled. The frigid water forced its way into my nose, mouth, throat, lungs, stomach, intestines…

“There on the beach, I fell into a deep sleep and dreamt of the Deep Sea.

“I was shown the next great age. The age of a boundless ocean that covered the entire world. I swam from pole to pole and circumnavigated the equator, never breaking the surface. Colossal underwater volcanoes oozed glowing red rivers of magma. I traced the molten rock to a great lavafall that spilled over the edge to darker depths. A long time passed before I felt brave enough to explore the Great Abyssal Trench.

“Ancient and powerful beings undulated in the darkness far below. I only ever caught glimpses of them. Ghostly creatures with humanoid faces and pale bodies like giant eels. They writhed in the deep. Tentacled beings suspended motionless in the gloom, carried by the current. I was moved by the profound tranquility felt in this cold world. This dark and gentle place.

“I dove down to the footprints of ancient cities, the last flooded artifacts of humanity. When I picked up a foundation stone it disintegrated in my hand. I never visited the cities again.

“I explored dense forests of sea vegetation and curled up to sleep inside the skulls of slain sea titans. I etched my gathered knowledge of the Deep Sea world onto the inside of these skulls. I discovered pieces of arcane writing inside caves that lead to the core of the planet.

“At first, I could not decipher the scrolls, but since they resisted corrosion, I knew they were written sometime during the Deep Sea age. I continued to gather knowledge and eventually was able to translate the first few paragraphs. The scrolls described an origin point, the pathway connecting this sea to other seas across the cosmos.

“Unfortunately, that’s when the dream ended. I awoke at sunrise on a beach I didn’t recognize. My family was gone. My previous life was gone. My body hadn’t aged and I remembered every detail of my long slumber. I received purpose and knowledge.

“And here you are, helping me achieve my purpose. The brine in your blood brought you here. You’re caught in the same cosmic current, unable to reach shore. I can’t help you, I have to complete my research and find the origin point.”

[moment-of-the-wolf]

My Eternity|| ch.2

Nine/Rose, Canon Divergent starting in 1x10. Strong T rating for non graphic sexual situations. One dance can change your whole life, the Doctor and Rose continue their adventures with their new companion, Jack Harkness, and discuss the difference between ‘going steady’ and ‘domestics’. 

Chapter 1

For now the TARDIS was on a planet called Jogroth, it’s rotation around its sun was about 20 earth years which meant that climate was pretty unique, with half it’s surface in the dark for ten Earth years and the other half in sun, switching it’s polar seasons drastically within a few days to compensate. The warm half of the planet was a vast jungle-like terrain while the dark side a frigid wasteland. Every ten years the planet would turn, the ice would melt and the jungles would freeze in an instant. 

The Doctor had brought them here to watch the migration of the planet’s populations as each traveled to the other side of the world before the temperature change got too extreme for them, it included two humanoid species from opposite sides that stopped to barter with one another. According to the Doctor, the two species would one day begin breeding with one another in these spots where the cold met the hot, families would be separated for years before the turning of the planet gave them just a few days to be together.

It was sad, Rose thought, but beautiful in a way. She couldn’t imagine what it was like to be away from the people she loved that long. Instinctively her hand had found the Doctor’s and she whispered that she wanted to visit home again. He made no comment, so Rose had assumed he hadn’t heard.

Later that night after expelling Jack from their bedroom for a private moment, the Doctor asked Rose if she really wanted to go back to Earth so soon. Rose explained how the two humanoid clans had made her think about her family and that recent developments needed to be made known to the people still waiting for her on Earth.

 There was no question what she meant by that. “We’re not telling her.” The Doctor said, folding his arms defiantly while Rose slid her pants on.

“She’s my mum, she should know.” Rose replied and seemed to start dressing faster as if to punish her Doctor for disagreeing with her, “What have you got against telling people that we’re together?”

“Yeah, Doc? She that scary?” Jack’s voice was coming from outside their room. While he was always ready to leap into the action on invitation, the Doctor had made it clear from the moment he came onboard the TARDIS that some places and times were meant for him and Rose alone. The Doctor had yet to find a way to keep him from eavesdropping, however.

“She slapped him once.” Rose explained, “First time I ever brought him home to her, ironically enough because she thought this was exactly what was happening.”

The Doctor rubbed his cheek as if even all these weeks later he could still feel the impact of her strike, “And she’ll either take my head clean off this time or start in on the Domestics and I don’t do Domestics.”

“Domestics?” Jack asked, Rose could almost see his eyebrow quirking.

The Doctor straightened in the bed, still naked, still sweating a bit from their previous love making, and god help her Rose thought he looked incredibly hot when he was on that special little borderline between annoyed and angry. Since that first quickie in the storeroom, Rose’s visits to the Doctor’s bedroom aboard the TARDIS had become so frequent and numerous that Jack had taken over Rose’s room while she shared the Doctor’s.

Jack sometimes joined them, but the Doctor kicked him out just as often.

 “Families.” He clarified, “Dinner, tea, Christmas. None of that. Not on my ship.”

Jack seemed to accept this answer with an ‘oh, I see’, but the blond human wasn’t about to drop her stance. Rose grabbed the Doctor’s jacket off the floor and put it on. It was way too big for her and the Doctor didn’t have a mirror so she could see if it was the cute kind of too big for her or absolutely unflattering kind of too big. “We need to tell her eventually. I mean, I don’t want Domestics either but, again, she is my mum.”

“Eventually.” The Doctor retorted stubbornly, “Not now. Not anytime soon.”

“Really, are you scared of my mum? I promise, her temper is really endearing when it’s not directed at you.” She said and folded her arms, mimicking the Doctor’s usual displeased stance.

The Doctor’s eyebrows furrowed, and Rose honestly couldn’t tell if she was crossing the line to make him angry or if he was getting aroused by the sight of her in his jacket. “Why do you insist on telling people things? Can’t we just have this to ourselves for a while?” There was a spark of something in his eye, a pain he hadn’t told her about, one she wasn’t going ask about.

“Ourselves meaning me too, right?” Jack called from beyond the door, good old Jack always breaking the tensions.

“Go away, Jack.” The Doctor replied, his voice raised just enough to know he was  really getting angry. And thankfully, Jack knew when the Doctor used that tone it meant this was one of the times the Doctor wanted just for himself and Rose.

She refused to relent, but she wouldn’t mind compromising. Rose crossed back over to the bed and kissed the Doctor, hard, long and hot. It was meant to distract him, let his temper cool a little bit before she spoke again. “I have to at least tell Mickey.”

The Doctor rolled his eyes, “What makes you think I want to tell-”

She silenced him with another distracting kiss, “I have to tell him, Doctor.” She insisted, “I know what he thinks about this, he thinks this is like some kind of vacation for me and that when I’m ready to come back to reality that I’ll come back to him too.”

The Doctor cupped her face in his large hand, “This is hardly a vacation.” He said.

“And I’m not going back.” She replied, kissing the Doctor’s thumb, “This is my reality now, and I can’t string him along on some hope that I will. I know he’s not your favorite person, but he’s a good man, and very good friend, he deserves to be happy and he can’t if he’s waiting for me.”

He stayed silent for a long time before finally agreeing, “Fine. tell your ex-boyfriend you’ve got two new ones.”

“Okay, so I am part of that ‘ourselves’ you mentioned. Good to know!” Jack’s muffled voice called.

“I said go away Jack.” The Doctor snapped.

“Okay, I’m going, I’m going!” Jack laughed

There was silence for a few seconds, “He’s still waiting behind the door isn’t he?” Rose asked.

“Most likely.” The Doctor answered, “Ruddy pervert can’t even leave a party he’s not invited too.” If Jack was still there he did himself a big service by not snickering or making a lewd comment back through the door.

“So I can tell Mickey that you and I are going steady, then?” Rose asked and stroked his face, the Doctor nodded and she kissed him one last time before hopping off the bed. Almost a shame she’d already gotten dressed, Rose shrugged off the leather jacket so the Doctor could do the same, “I can’t promise that Mickey won’t tell mum though.” 

“Oh....Fantastic....” The Doctor groaned and Rose giggled as she left his room, door open and found Jack had indeed not gone away and was equally amused at the Doctor’s displeasure at the mere thought of Jackie Tyler knowing he was sleeping with her daughter.

[at-least-ill-die-a-lionturtle]

All of the questions. 💖

** Links are in bold **

1: when you have cereal, do you have more milk than cereal or more cereal than milk? It depends on the cereal. Raisin Bran gets 50/50 milk-to-cereal ratio, while something like Fruity Pebbles gets a 30/70 milk-to-cereal ratio

2: do you like the feeling of cold air on your cheeks on a wintery day? I CHERISH IT WITH ALL OF MY HEART AND SOUL

3: what random objects do you use to bookmark your books? Whatever happens to be the closest, flat object

4: how do you take your coffee/tea? I like my coffee as such: 50% coffee, 30% half&half, 20% sugar. Im going to assume this means hot tea, which Ive only had green. But I like my green tea with three sugars.

5: are you self-conscious of your smile? Very. I have bad gaps on all my front teeth

6: do you keep plants? No, but I really want to :3

7: do you name your plants? I will give them lovely names. Like Hamish, and Ludacris

8: what artistic medium do you use to express your feelings? Music

9: do you like singing/humming to yourself? I DO, I do it all the time

10: do you sleep on your back, side, or stomach? Mostly side and stomach. I roll around a lot

11: what’s an inner joke you have with your friends? Hey Karen, have you sent those faxes?

12: what’s your favorite planet? Mars

13: what’s something that made you smile today? A few things. My girlfriend, Rob Schneider, Achievement Hunter

14: if you were to live with your best friend in an old flat in a big city, what would it look like? Like this, I’d imagine15: go google a weird space fact and tell us what it is! On Venus a day is longer than a year. The length of time it takes to complete one whole orbit around the Sun is 224.7 Earth days. However it takes 243 Earth days to rotate on its axis just once.

16: what’s your favorite pasta dish? Uhm… Lasagna? I need more time to think about this lol

17: what color do you really want to dye your hair? Ive dyed it blue before, it started off kinda dark and ended like a bubblegum blue. Next time I wanna dye it like this but darker

18: tell us about something dumb/funny you did that has since gone down in history between you and your friends and is always brought up. The time during marching band when we did our invitationals. Me and a buddy were in charge of the water station, and the valve on one of the jug-thingies wasnt working right. I told my buddy, “Hey, it wont work right unless you flick it first.” And the band director of the band walking buy, he was like 70 years old, kinda sounded like Old Man Jenkins from Spongebob. He said, in a tone that he knew EXACTLY what kinda joke he was making, “It works when I flick it!” And we were literally rofl

19: do you keep a journal? what do you write/draw/ in it? I keep a dream log, but I havnt updated it in years. Its not very often that I remember enough of my dreams to actually write them down. But I’ll go ahead and make posts with the two that Ive kept, here and here

20: what’s your favorite eye color? Greens and blues

21: talk about your favorite bag, the one that’s been to hell and back with you and that you love to pieces. Ive got this Halo 3 messenger bag thats like a Desert Storm color. One end of the strap has come off, a lot of the ends are frayed, and one of the zippers no longer works.

22: are you a morning person? Ive always been a morning person, and I also used to be a night owl. But now I struggle to stay up past 10pm

23: what’s your favorite thing to do on lazy days where you have 0 obligations? Watch Youtube and play video games

24: is there someone out there you would trust with every single one of your secrets? Yeah (:

25: what’s the weirdest place you’ve ever broken into? My own home lmao

26: what are the shoes you’ve had for forever and wear with every single outfit? My stupid fucking work boots lol Only pair of shoes I own

27: what’s your favorite bubblegum flavor? Trident Layers Strawberry Citrus

28: sunrise or sunset? Primarily sunrise, but also sunset

29: what’s something really cute that one of your friends does and is totally endearing? When @pizzaboxx​ attacks the patriarchy

30: think of it: have you ever been truly scared? Yes, quite a few times actually. I almost tumbled down a mountain in a Jeep Wrangler when I was 7

31: what is your opinion of socks? do you like wearing weird socks? do you sleep with socks? do you confine yourself to white sock hell? really, just talk about socks. I think okay about socks. I like wearing weird socks, I have a pair of Captain America ones with little wings. I do sleep with socks. I mostly do yeah lol Im pretty much always wearing socks unless swimming or showering is involved

32: tell us a story of something that happened to you after 3AM when you were with friends. Partook in some hooliganism at a Walmart, which included, but was not limited to, prank calling 9-11.

33: what’s your fave pastry? Bear claw and/or apple fritter

34: tell us about the stuffed animal you kept as a kid. what is it called? what does it look like? do you still keep it? Ive had an Orca named Oscar since I was like 10

35: do you like stationary and pretty pens and so on? do you use them often? Nah, not really

36: which band’s sound would fit your mood right now? Faunts

37: do you like keeping your room messy or clean? It kinda goes back and forth

38: tell us about your pet peeves! God damn, thats a list for another day lol

39: what color do you wear the most? Black and other dark colors. But Ive picked up a small array of light colored clothes over the last few years

40: think of a piece of jewelry you own: what’s it’s story? does it have any meaning to you? I own an Amulet of Stendarr. It increases your Block skill by 10%. Stendarr is the Tamriellic god of Justice and Mercy. He is the patron of cleric-type folks, as his devout followers, the Vigilant of Stendarr, travel the lands rooting out demons and undead such as vampires.

41: what’s the last book you remember really, really loving? Hm… I dont really know. My memory is shite and I havnt read a book in full in SO long

42: do you have a favorite coffee shop? describe it! Not really, never have really been to an actual coffee shop. FUCKIN LOVE WAWA THO

43: who was the last person you gazed at the stars with? Alex 

44: when was the last time you remember feeling completely serene and at peace with everything? I dont know if Ive ever truly felt like that. But Ive been close a few times.

45: do you trust your instincts a lot? Not a lot, but on occasion.

46: tell us the worst pun you can think of. I’m always on time with my jokes. I guess you could say I’m pretty pun-ctual.

47: what food do you think should be banned from the universe? Fucking anything with cabbage. Oh, and candy corn. Fight me.

48: what was your biggest fear as a kid? is it the same today? I used to be really afraid of the dark, but not really anymore.

49: do you like buying CDs and records? what was the last one you bought? I LOVE cds! And I’ll start getting records when I get a record player. The last cds I bought was a Weezer collection. It had Blue, Pinkerton, Green, Make Believe, and Red.

50: what’s an odd thing you collect? Nothing that I can think of, really.

51: think of a person. what song do you associate with them? MY buddy Sam; You Spin Me Round (Like a Record)

52: what are your favorite memes of the year so far? None really. But Im sure something good will come around.

53: have you ever watched the rocky horror picture show? heathers? beetlejuice? pulp fiction? what do you think of them? No, no, yes, and yes. I really like Beetlejuice, and I LOVE Pulp Fiction.

54: who’s the last person you saw with a true look of sadness on their face? poop

55: what’s the most dramatic thing you’ve ever done to prove a point? Im not really sure

56: what are some things you find endearing in people? The passion for something they love

57: go listen to bohemian rhapsody. how did it make you feel? did you dramatically reenact the lyrics? I ALWAYS dramatically re-enact the lyrics. HOW CAN YOU NOT?!

58: who’s the wine mom and who’s the vodka aunt in your group of friends? why? Dont know about wine mom, but my friend Caitlyn is DEF the vodka aunt lmao

59: what’s your favorite myth? The American Dream

60: do you like poetry? what are some of your faves? I do, but I dont go out of my way to read it

61: what’s the stupidest gift you’ve ever given? the stupidest one you’ve ever received? I honestly cant think of anything right now, for either situation

62: do you drink juice in the morning? which kind? I drink juice literally whenever possible, preferably apple juice.

63: are you fussy about your books and music? do you keep them meticulously organized or kinda leave them be? Leave them to be

64: what color is the sky where you are right now? Midnight blue

65: is there anyone you haven’t seen in a long time who you’d love to hang out with? YES. My group of friends from back home, and my baby sister

66: what would your ideal flower crown look like? Made of blue Morning Glory’s and pink Hibiscus

67: how do gloomy days where the sky is dark and the world is misty make you feel? SO GOOD. I always feel in a better mood.68: what’s winter like where you live? One week of frigid temps and occasionally Fall like temps but mostly in mid to high 70′s69: what are your favorite board games? Battleship, Scrabble, hmmm. Thats all I can think of at the moment70: have you ever used a ouija board? Never71: what’s your favorite kind of tea? Sweet iced tea. Im also trying out some Scottish Heather tea right now and its quite delightful72: are you a person who needs to note everything down or else you’ll forget it? YES. I am so forgetful lmao73: what are some of your worst habits? Forgetfulness is the root of most, if not all, of my bad habits. So Imma go with that.74: describe a good friend of yours without using their name or gendered pronouns. Loud, but also quiet at times. Very laid back, but adventurous. Trust-worthy and reliable. Never afraid of a good dick joke.75: tell us about your pets! OKAY! First dogs, then cats. Otis is a momma’s boy and loves socks. Charlie is energetic but loves being lazy on the bed AND BORFS LOUD AT SQUIRRELS and will steal your food without a second thought. Sheep is blind and likes the bathroom. Izzy is hella stressed and barks at EVERYTHING. Bojack is a grandpa with literal Alzheimers and sleeps A LOT. Lady chews on EVERYTHING and often throws up stuff like string and leaves and loves to be held. Gizmo likes to jump up against your leg and rip apart your flesh with his little raptor claws. Dobby gets hurt and cold easy but plays SUPER rough and is a MAJOR GROANER when sleepy and stuff.  NOW CATS. Oscar is smol and cuddly and gets cold, but he PEES EVERYWHERE. NOTHING IS SACRED. Bones is also smol and very shy, doesnt like the other cats and REALLY LOVES Charlie. Frizzo is sweet most times but growls at everything and is an ASSHOLE to Bones and Carter. Carter stays away and hidden, she doesnt like the other animals. Will boop you when she wants attention. Lucy is our angry son, he is a super asshole to all the cats except Bones because thats his girlfriend, and is especially mean to Frizzo and Carter. He has an old man face when he’s tired.76: is there anything you should be doing right now but aren’t? Going to bed lol Super tired, but I need to finish my tea.77: pink or yellow lemonade? Yellow78: are you in the minion hateclub or fanclub? I dont hate them, but I dont like them either79: what’s one of the cutest things someone has ever done for you? Alex has done plenty of cute things for me, because everything she does is cute :380: what color are your bedroom walls? did you choose that color? if so, why? Fucking fake wood panels. We did not :P81: describe one of your friend’s eyes using the most abstract imagery you can think of. I dont know too much about any of my friends eyes???82: are/were you good in school? NOPE lol83: what’s some of your favorite album art? Really like the album artwork of Deep Blue by Parkway Drive84: are you planning on getting tattoos? which ones? I AM! I have a few specific ones planned, but also a bunch of inspiration here!85: do you read comics? what are your faves? I do not, but I really want to! I want to get into Spider-Man, The Flash, Ms. and Captain Marvel, Guardians of the Galaxy, and anything Teen Titans related.86: do you like concept albums? which ones? I think this is a concept album?87: what are some movies you think everyone should watch at least once in their lives? Good Will Hunting, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Her88: are there any artistic movements you particularly enjoy? Expressionism and Impressionism89: are you close to your parents? LOL NOPE90: talk about your one of you favorite cities. FUCKING LOVE SAVANNAH. Its the perfect blend of historic and modern. Right on the beach/river. Lots of cool things going on. Also downtown is BEAUTIFUL.91: where do you plan on traveling this year? No idea lol92: are you a person who drowns their pasta in cheese or a person who barely sprinkles a pinch? DROWN IT.93: what’s the hairstyle you wear the most? Varied lengths, and its really hard to tame my hair. Even with gel and shit. So I just let it do its own thing mostly.94: who was the last person you know to have a birthday? An old friend from Runescape95: what are your plans for this weekend? Not a got damn thing!96: do you install your computer updates really quickly or do you procrastinate on them a lot? I used to procrastinate them a lot, but Ive gotten better at it97: myer briggs type, zodiac sign, and hogwarts house? It changes almost every time I take it, but I think its ISFP? Taurus. Gryffindor but I relate to Hufflepuff as well98: when’s the last time you went hiking? did you enjoy it? Like over a year ago, I went with my buddy Sam and it was a pretty good time.99: list some songs that resonate to your soul whenever you hear them. Jesus Doesnt Mosh - The Ambulance Review, Engine 45 - The Ghost Inside, Broken Mirrors - Mercy Screams, Rise Against, like just in general; [This Is More; We’re What Separates the Heart from the Heartless; Amber; Some Kind of Hope; Sufferer/La Poderosa; Diamond; Ring Loud (Last Hope); D(I AM)OND; Built Upon the Sand; The Suspend] songs in brackets are by Stick to Your Guns. Im total trash, sorry not sorry.100: if you were presented with two buttons, one that allows you to go 5 years into the past, the other 5 years into the future, which one would you press? why? Easy, I would definitely go back five years into the past. It would be awesome to have my current knowledge so I could better prepare myself for my life today.

[nancygduarteus]

The Zombie Diseases of Climate Change

From the air, the coast of Greenland appears vast and tranquil. Hundreds of fjords, their surfaces a mirror of blue sky and cloud bottoms, divide the territory. In the gaps between them, the terrain folds over itself, hill over hill, descending into obsidian lakes. The turf is covered in the waxy pastels of alpine dwarf willows and the dull white of age-bleached lichen.

Though an immense ice sheet sits in its interior, Greenland’s ice-free coast encompasses almost 159,000 square miles and and houses 57,000 people. In other words, it is larger than Germany with a population half the size of Topeka, Peoria, or New Haven. It is possible to stand on a hill outside the coastal town of Ilulissat and hear only the grass quaking, the harbor ice dully grinding against itself.

I visited Greenland because, lately, the land here has gone soft, and disquieting things threaten to wake in it.

Let me orient you. At the top of the world, there is water. Television anchors sometimes speak of the Arctic Ocean as the “polar ice cap,” but that is a contingency of temperature and a quirk of today’s climate. Consider it instead a landlocked ocean, a northern Mediterranean Sea. Surrounding it sit great landmasses—Europe, Asia, North America—and a surfeit of islands. Among the largest are Svalbard, which is due north of Norway and so dense with polar bears that everyone who strays beyond its sole settlement must carry a rifle; Novaya Zemlya, the site of the largest atomic test ever conducted; and Greenland.

In all of these places, rich, marshy soils run from the edge of the interior ice right up to the ocean cliffs. Once, this dirt gave rise to lush ferns and open grasslands; now, after 35,000 years of frigid cold, we call them permafrost.

Despite their name, they are not permanently, or entirely, frozen. Every winter, a sheet of ice blossoms over the Arctic sea, and the soils seize shut with frost. Then, during the long summer days, the ice breaks up and the permafrost partially thaws.

Lately, as summers have lengthened and winters have warmed, this seasonal transformation has lost its symmetry. What biologists call the permafrost’s “active layer”—the part of the dirt where microbes and other forms of life can live—now reaches farther underground, and further north, than it has for tens of thousands of years.

The newly active permafrost is packed with old stuff: dead plants, dead animals, mosses buried and reburied by dust and snow. This matter, long protected from decomposition by the cold, is finally rotting, and releasing gases into the atmosphere that could quicken the rate of global warming.

This matter is also full of pathogens: bacteria and viruses long immobilized by the frost. Many of these pathogens may be able to survive a gentle thaw—and if they do, researchers warn, they could reinfect humanity.

Climate change, in other words, could awaken Earth’s forgotten pathogens. It is one of the most bizarre symptoms of global warming. And it has already begun to happen.

The Russian botanist Dmitri Ivanovsky was just 28 when, at a scientific meeting in St. Petersburg, he presented evidence of an unexplainable phenomenon: He had found a disease with no germ.

When he exposed tobacco leaves to a certain clear liquid, he could watch the leaves mottle, but he could not find the bacteria under his microscope that could explain the change. In the decades before his work—it was 1892—Louis Pasteur and other scientists had demonstrated that microscopic life could cause disease. But here was a disease with no microbe at fault. Ivanovsky said that the disease must be inherent to the gloop he had put on the leaves. He termed it a virus, from the Latin word for slime.

Narciso Espiritu

One hundred and twenty-five years later, we still use Ivanovsky’s term, but we know viruses are far stranger than he ever imagined. An individual virion, the unit of viral existence, makes many copies of itself over its life cycle, but it never does something that can be described as living. It never breathes or mates. It punctures a cell’s wall, hijacks its protein factories, and forces it to make more of itself. A single virion can make tens of thousands of copies of itself near instantly. Viruses are living nonlife, a desirous but mindless substance.

At the frontier of viral life are Jean-Michel Claverie and Chantal Abergel, two professors of microbiology at Aix-Marseilles University who happen to be married to each other. Since the turn of the century, they have established themselves as two of the world’s most famous microbe hunters. In 2002, while researching Legionnaires’ disease in their lab in Marseilles, they discovered the largest virus ever: Mimivirus, a virion so large that it could be seen under a microscope.

They have identified four more monster viruses since, all several times larger than any virion known to science before 2000. Their menagerie oozes about in a far-flung set of landscapes: one monster virus was found in a shallow lake in Australia, another lurked in a bucket of seawater hauled off the Chilean coast. A third was discovered in a woman’s contact lens.

All of these mammoth viruses infect amoebae, not people. They do not pose an infective risk to us. But they are strange substances. They rival bacteria in size; they can be seen under a microscope. They are quite durable. And some of them produce more proteins than most amoebae.

Claverie and Abergel weren’t thinking of monster viruses when they began poking around in the permafrost. In 2013, Claverie read about a Russian team that had found a seed lodged deep in the permafrost. The fruit, buried some 125 feet below the surface, had spent thousands of years at about 20 degrees Fahrenheit, never thawing out in the wax and wane of seasons. But once warmed and placed in a pot, it sprouted waxy arms and delicate white flowers.

Claverie contacted the Russian team, explained his work with microbes, and asked for a bit of permafrost to test. The team agreed, and they mailed Claverie and Abergel a sample of the same deep-frozen core of permafrost that had contained the seed. The pair pulled a small sample onto a high-resolution microscope, brought it to room temperature, introduced an amoeba as bait, and waited.

And then, as they watched, a virus appeared in their viewfinder: Pithovirus sibericum, a massive ovular virion that had survived 30,000 years frozen in the ice core. It was also the largest virion ever discovered.

“We tried to isolate amoeba viruses without knowing they were going to be giant viruses—and a totally different type of virus than we already know appeared,” Claverie said. “It turns out the viruses we are getting [in the permafrost] are extremely abnormal, extremely fancy.”

Claverie and Abergel’s viruses aren’t a threat to humanity—yet. But human pathogens have also survived freezing and thawing in the permafrost. Last summer, an outbreak of anthrax in Siberia infected dozens of people and killed one child. The vector of disease is thought to be the thawing and decaying carcass of a reindeer killed in 1941.

And a team of Canadian scientists recently found a strain of bacteria, Paenibacillus, in a cave in New Mexico that had been closed off for more than 4 million years. Though harmless to humans, the ancient bacteria was resistant to most clinical antibiotics, including most of the newest and most aggressive. The discovery suggested that bacteria can survive the most exotic and remote environments.

Researchers are continuing to test the limits of pathogens. Reportedly, a Soviet microbiology lab revived bacteria from the permafrost in the 1980s, but its paper went little noticed. Claverie is traveling to Siberia this year to core even deeper into the soil, to prove that viruses can survive being thawed out after a million years.

“We’re trying to go deeper and deeper in our sampling, to demonstrate that it is possible that viruses could survive—amoeba viruses. We are not going to try to revive human viruses, of course, we are not crazy,” he said.

He already frets about what climate change will unlock in the permafrost, especially when humans help it along.

Take Greenland, for instance. Right now, the island is a territory of Denmark, the country that colonized it three centuries ago. Greenland is slowly severing itself from Europe—in 2009, its government took over every government function from Denmark except defense and foreign policy. Denmark still pays out a block grant to Greenland every year equal to roughly two-thirds of its government budget, but independence will likely mean giving that up. To fill that eventual budget hole, Greenland has explored opening six new mines across the country. Greenland abounds in minerals—the island’s south contains the largest reserve of untapped rare-earth elements on the planet—but the Arctic’s dangerous seas and extreme temperatures have ensured they’ve never been mined. Climate change will solve both those problems, so to speak.

In a paper this year in the European Journal of Internal Medicine, Claverie worried about the pathogenic consequences of opening the Arctic Ocean, specifically around Siberia and the Russian Arctic, to commercial traffic.

Narciso Espiritu

“We know, and the Russians know, there are a lot of resources there. Very precious metals, rare-earths, petrol, there is gas and gold,” he told me. Greenland is not separate from these pressures.

Getting at the minerals and petroleum deposits throughout the Arctic, he says, will require moving a lot of permafrost—an amount properly measured in millions of tons. “At once, you are going to excavate 16 million tons of permafrost that has not been moved or perturbed in a million years of time,” he said.

He imagines towering heaps of rotting permafrost stacked up next to mining cabins, their contents open to the sun and air and summer rain. “We are really reaching places where, if there are microbes infectious to humans or human ancestors, we are going to get them,” he says.

If one of these contagions does get loose in Greenland, Luit Penninga will be one of the first men to deal with it. He is the lead surgeon at Ilulissat Hospital in Greenland. His office looks out across Disko Bay, a gray sea 200 miles north of the Arctic Circle disturbed by azure-edged icebergs and the occasional breaching tail of a humpback whale.

His entire life is dictated by the scarcity of Arctic medicine. The night before I met Penninga, he boarded a red helicopter and rode it across the bay to meet a woman suffering a pregnancy out of the womb. She lives in the village of Uummannaq, population 1,200, which has no doctors of its own. He helped her board the helicopter, attended to her through the flight, and—when the helicopter landed at Ilulissat Hospital—operated on her. It was successful. Early the next morning he invited me to visit the hospital. When I meet him, he is gentle and calm.

Ilulissat Hospital (Malik Niemann / Courtesy of Ilulissat Hospital)

Health care in Greenland is socialized—all hospitals are state-owned and all medical care and prescription drugs are free—and the vast country is split into regions. Since Penninga leads health care in Ilulissat, he oversees human health across the entire northwest half of the world’s largest island—from Ilulissat, the country’s third-largest city, to Qaanaaq, a small town of 650 that overlooks the Arctic Ocean. Seventeen thousand people live in the region, mostly in small villages accessible only from boat or helicopter, spread out over an area larger than France.

Penninga must sometimes take the three-hour flight between Qaanaaq and Ilulissat, a distance of more than 700 miles (1173 km). It costs $1400. From Qaanaaq, it’s another hour-long helicopter ride to reach some of the smallest villages, where people hunt seal and walrus as their ancestors have for generations. These transportation costs add up: In any year, between 10 and 15 percent of Greenland’s national health budget is spent on transportation costs alone.

Penninga treats snowmobile and dogsled accidents, appendicitis and chlamydia and pneumonia. Many of the worst ailments are bacterial: A particularly aggressive form of ear infection, which seems endemic to Greenland, can leave holes in kids’ eardrums that last for years, permanently inhibiting their performance in school. The island also seems to have its own form of sepsis, which doctors learn to fear after a couple years of working there. “Some people can have a very short course of disease—they develop sepsis, very shortly come in, and die,” he said.

When I asked him about the zombie pathogens, he laughed and nodded. “They say that, yes,” he told me. Penninga has enough problems.

Some of the microbes lurking in the permafrost may be familiar: adversaries that humanity already knows and believes it has defeated. The World Health Organization brags that it has eradicated smallpox, for instance—other than the stores in the United States and Russia—but Claverie warns that it could well have survived in the tundra.

Even more worrisome are the microbes we don’t know. “No one really understands why Neanderthals went extinct,” Claverie said. Sometimes, he catches himself when talking about these possible permafrost-locked diseases—they may have threatened humans or human relatives in the past, he’ll say. Then, he’ll change tense, emphasizing that they could do so again.

Two weeks after I left Greenland, a patch of permafrost not far from Penninga’s office burst into flame. The press marveled around the world: a wildfire on the tundra. It raged for weeks as authorities tried to figure out how to keep it from causing anyone harm. The problem itself, the logistics involved in addressing it, required a response no one had anticipated or practiced for. Eventually, rain put it out.

Such emergencies—those that overwhelm our understanding of “known knowns”—are among the most unsettling portents of climate change. Whether the emergencies of the coming century arrive in the form of fires, or floods, or plagues that rise invisibly from the ground, they’re likely to become more and more extreme and less and less familiar—a fantastical parade of crises we will be shocked to find ourselves battling. Even in its quietest places, the world will become newly hostile.

from Health News And Updates https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/11/the-zombie-diseases-of-climate-change/544274/?utm_source=feed

[ionecoffman]

The Zombie Diseases of Climate Change

From the air, the coast of Greenland appears vast and tranquil. Hundreds of fjords, their surfaces a mirror of blue sky and cloud bottoms, divide the territory. In the gaps between them, the terrain folds over itself, hill over hill, descending into obsidian lakes. The turf is covered in the waxy pastels of alpine dwarf willows and the dull white of age-bleached lichen.

Though an immense ice sheet sits in its interior, Greenland’s ice-free coast encompasses almost 159,000 square miles and and houses 57,000 people. In other words, it is larger than Germany with a population half the size of Topeka, Peoria, or New Haven. It is possible to stand on a hill outside the coastal town of Ilulissat and hear only the grass quaking, the harbor ice dully grinding against itself.

I visited Greenland because, lately, the land here has gone soft, and disquieting things threaten to wake in it.

Let me orient you. At the top of the world, there is water. Television anchors sometimes speak of the Arctic Ocean as the “polar ice cap,” but that is a contingency of temperature and a quirk of today’s climate. Consider it instead a landlocked ocean, a northern Mediterranean Sea. Surrounding it sit great landmasses—Europe, Asia, North America—and a surfeit of islands. Among the largest are Svalbard, which is due north of Norway and so dense with polar bears that everyone who strays beyond its sole settlement must carry a rifle; Novaya Zemlya, the site of the largest atomic test ever conducted; and Greenland.

In all of these places, rich, marshy soils run from the edge of the interior ice right up to the ocean cliffs. Once, this dirt gave rise to lush ferns and open grasslands; now, after 35,000 years of frigid cold, we call them permafrost.

Despite their name, they are not permanently, or entirely, frozen. Every winter, a sheet of ice blossoms over the Arctic sea, and the soils seize shut with frost. Then, during the long summer days, the ice breaks up and the permafrost partially thaws.

Lately, as summers have lengthened and winters have warmed, this seasonal transformation has lost its symmetry. What biologists call the permafrost’s “active layer”—the part of the dirt where microbes and other forms of life can live—now reaches farther underground, and further north, than it has for tens of thousands of years.

The newly active permafrost is packed with old stuff: dead plants, dead animals, mosses buried and reburied by dust and snow. This matter, long protected from decomposition by the cold, is finally rotting, and releasing gases into the atmosphere that could quicken the rate of global warming.

This matter is also full of pathogens: bacteria and viruses long immobilized by the frost. Many of these pathogens may be able to survive a gentle thaw—and if they do, researchers warn, they could reinfect humanity.

Climate change, in other words, could awaken Earth’s forgotten pathogens. It is one of the most bizarre symptoms of global warming. And it has already begun to happen.

The Russian botanist Dmitri Ivanovsky was just 28 when, at a scientific meeting in St. Petersburg, he presented evidence of an unexplainable phenomenon: He had found a disease with no germ.

When he exposed tobacco leaves to a certain clear liquid, he could watch the leaves mottle, but he could not find the bacteria under his microscope that could explain the change. In the decades before his work—it was 1892—Louis Pasteur and other scientists had demonstrated that microscopic life could cause disease. But here was a disease with no microbe at fault. Ivanovsky said that the disease must be inherent to the gloop he had put on the leaves. He termed it a virus, from the Latin word for slime.

Narciso Espiritu

One hundred and twenty-five years later, we still use Ivanovsky’s term, but we know viruses are far stranger than he ever imagined. An individual virion, the unit of viral existence, makes many copies of itself over its life cycle, but it never does something that can be described as living. It never breathes or mates. It punctures a cell’s wall, hijacks its protein factories, and forces it to make more of itself. A single virion can make tens of thousands of copies of itself near instantly. Viruses are living nonlife, a desirous but mindless substance.

At the frontier of viral life are Jean-Michel Claverie and Chantal Abergel, two professors of microbiology at Aix-Marseilles University who happen to be married to each other. Since the turn of the century, they have established themselves as two of the world’s most famous microbe hunters. In 2002, while researching Legionnaires’ disease in their lab in Marseilles, they discovered the largest virus ever: Mimivirus, a virion so large that it could be seen under a microscope.

They have identified four more monster viruses since, all several times larger than any virion known to science before 2000. Their menagerie oozes about in a far-flung set of landscapes: one monster virus was found in a shallow lake in Australia, another lurked in a bucket of seawater hauled off the Chilean coast. A third was discovered in a woman’s contact lens.

All of these mammoth viruses infect amoebae, not people. They do not pose an infective risk to us. But they are strange substances. They rival bacteria in size; they can be seen under a microscope. They are quite durable. And some of them produce more proteins than most amoebae.

Claverie and Abergel weren’t thinking of monster viruses when they began poking around in the permafrost. In 2013, Claverie read about a Russian team that had found a seed lodged deep in the permafrost. The fruit, buried some 125 feet below the surface, had spent thousands of years at about 20 degrees Fahrenheit, never thawing out in the wax and wane of seasons. But once warmed and placed in a pot, it sprouted waxy arms and delicate white flowers.

Claverie contacted the Russian team, explained his work with microbes, and asked for a bit of permafrost to test. The team agreed, and they mailed Claverie and Abergel a sample of the same deep-frozen core of permafrost that had contained the seed. The pair pulled a small sample onto a high-resolution microscope, brought it to room temperature, introduced an amoeba as bait, and waited.

And then, as they watched, a virus appeared in their viewfinder: Pithovirus sibericum, a massive ovular virion that had survived 30,000 years frozen in the ice core. It was also the largest virion ever discovered.

“We tried to isolate amoeba viruses without knowing they were going to be giant viruses—and a totally different type of virus than we already know appeared,” Claverie said. “It turns out the viruses we are getting [in the permafrost] are extremely abnormal, extremely fancy.”

Claverie and Abergel’s viruses aren’t a threat to humanity—yet. But human pathogens have also survived freezing and thawing in the permafrost. Last summer, an outbreak of anthrax in Siberia infected dozens of people and killed one child. The vector of disease is thought to be the thawing and decaying carcass of a reindeer killed in 1941.

And a team of Canadian scientists recently found a strain of bacteria, Paenibacillus, in a cave in New Mexico that had been closed off for more than 4 million years. Though harmless to humans, the ancient bacteria was resistant to most clinical antibiotics, including most of the newest and most aggressive. The discovery suggested that bacteria can survive the most exotic and remote environments.

Researchers are continuing to test the limits of pathogens. Reportedly, a Soviet microbiology lab revived bacteria from the permafrost in the 1980s, but its paper went little noticed. Claverie is traveling to Siberia this year to core even deeper into the soil, to prove that viruses can survive being thawed out after a million years.

“We’re trying to go deeper and deeper in our sampling, to demonstrate that it is possible that viruses could survive—amoeba viruses. We are not going to try to revive human viruses, of course, we are not crazy,” he said.

He already frets about what climate change will unlock in the permafrost, especially when humans help it along.

Take Greenland, for instance. Right now, the island is a territory of Denmark, the country that colonized it three centuries ago. Greenland is slowly severing itself from Europe—in 2009, its government took over every government function from Denmark except defense and foreign policy. Denmark still pays out a block grant to Greenland every year equal to roughly two-thirds of its government budget, but independence will likely mean giving that up. To fill that eventual budget hole, Greenland has explored opening six new mines across the country. Greenland abounds in minerals—the island’s south contains the largest reserve of untapped rare-earth elements on the planet—but the Arctic’s dangerous seas and extreme temperatures have ensured they’ve never been mined. Climate change will solve both those problems, so to speak.

In a paper this year in the European Journal of Internal Medicine, Claverie worried about the pathogenic consequences of opening the Arctic Ocean, specifically around Siberia and the Russian Arctic, to commercial traffic.

Narciso Espiritu

“We know, and the Russians know, there are a lot of resources there. Very precious metals, rare-earths, petrol, there is gas and gold,” he told me. Greenland is not separate from these pressures.

Getting at the minerals and petroleum deposits throughout the Arctic, he says, will require moving a lot of permafrost—an amount properly measured in millions of tons. “At once, you are going to excavate 16 million tons of permafrost that has not been moved or perturbed in a million years of time,” he said.

He imagines towering heaps of rotting permafrost stacked up next to mining cabins, their contents open to the sun and air and summer rain. “We are really reaching places where, if there are microbes infectious to humans or human ancestors, we are going to get them,” he says.

If one of these contagions does get loose in Greenland, Luit Penninga will be one of the first men to deal with it. He is the lead surgeon at Ilulissat Hospital in Greenland. His office looks out across Disko Bay, a gray sea 200 miles north of the Arctic Circle disturbed by azure-edged icebergs and the occasional breaching tail of a humpback whale.

His entire life is dictated by the scarcity of Arctic medicine. The night before I met Penninga, he boarded a red helicopter and rode it across the bay to meet a woman suffering a pregnancy out of the womb. She lives in the village of Uummannaq, population 1,200, which has no doctors of its own. He helped her board the helicopter, attended to her through the flight, and—when the helicopter landed at Ilulissat Hospital—operated on her. It was successful. Early the next morning he invited me to visit the hospital. When I meet him, he is gentle and calm.

Ilulissat Hospital (Malik Niemann / Courtesy of Ilulissat Hospital)

Health care in Greenland is socialized—all hospitals are state-owned and all medical care and prescription drugs are free—and the vast country is split into regions. Since Penninga leads health care in Ilulissat, he oversees human health across the entire northwest half of the world’s largest island—from Ilulissat, the country’s third-largest city, to Qaanaaq, a small town of 650 that overlooks the Arctic Ocean. Seventeen thousand people live in the region, mostly in small villages accessible only from boat or helicopter, spread out over an area larger than France.

Penninga must sometimes take the three-hour flight between Qaanaaq and Ilulissat, a distance of more than 700 miles (1173 km). It costs $1400. From Qaanaaq, it’s another hour-long helicopter ride to reach some of the smallest villages, where people hunt seal and walrus as their ancestors have for generations. These transportation costs add up: In any year, between 10 and 15 percent of Greenland’s national health budget is spent on transportation costs alone.

Penninga treats snowmobile and dogsled accidents, appendicitis and chlamydia and pneumonia. Many of the worst ailments are bacterial: A particularly aggressive form of ear infection, which seems endemic to Greenland, can leave holes in kids’ eardrums that last for years, permanently inhibiting their performance in school. The island also seems to have its own form of sepsis, which doctors learn to fear after a couple years of working there. “Some people can have a very short course of disease—they develop sepsis, very shortly come in, and die,” he said.

When I asked him about the zombie pathogens, he laughed and nodded. “They say that, yes,” he told me. Penninga has enough problems.

Some of the microbes lurking in the permafrost may be familiar: adversaries that humanity already knows and believes it has defeated. The World Health Organization brags that it has eradicated smallpox, for instance—other than the stores in the United States and Russia—but Claverie warns that it could well have survived in the tundra.

Even more worrisome are the microbes we don’t know. “No one really understands why Neanderthals went extinct,” Claverie said. Sometimes, he catches himself when talking about these possible permafrost-locked diseases—they may have threatened humans or human relatives in the past, he’ll say. Then, he’ll change tense, emphasizing that they could do so again.

Two weeks after I left Greenland, a patch of permafrost not far from Penninga’s office burst into flame. The press marveled around the world: a wildfire on the tundra. It raged for weeks as authorities tried to figure out how to keep it from causing anyone harm. The problem itself, the logistics involved in addressing it, required a response no one had anticipated or practiced for. Eventually, rain put it out.

Such emergencies—those that overwhelm our understanding of “known knowns”—are among the most unsettling portents of climate change. Whether the emergencies of the coming century arrive in the form of fires, or floods, or plagues that rise invisibly from the ground, they’re likely to become more and more extreme and less and less familiar—a fantastical parade of crises we will be shocked to find ourselves battling. Even in its quietest places, the world will become newly hostile.

Article source here:The Atlantic

[dtkrippene]

Sean Parker via Unsplash.com

Imagine that’s me huddled in the rocks beneath an infinite sky with a story I’ve written cupped in my palms.  Do I release it like a dove to the big wide world, or not.  There’s no easy answer for a pantser writer like me.

It all starts well, but somewhere in the process I always get lost by straying from the story arc in search of a new trail. As a friend cautioned, I’m susceptible to the antics of the antihero, Captain Tangent, defined by Yogi Berra’s famous quip, “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.”

I am the master of the side journey and story scenes that entice me toward a glimmer of light on a dark trail with promises of enhancing the story arc, only to lead to a dead end. I write with a story mindset easily seduced by a maze of infinite paths, unable to see the pitfalls around the next corner. You need to be more disciplined, make notes, follow a plan,” literary superheroes tell me.  I do make notes. I just – tend not to use them much. Why is that, Captain Tangent? My story telling imagination is a twisted spaghetti junction of chaos.  It’s where all the fun is, where the best story elements lie, waiting for me to grab on while riding a hundred-mile-per-hour carnival ride.

It’s hard to describe what I go through in words. How ironic is that? I like visuals you can sense, and I’ll turn to the amazing photography of talented artists from Unsplash.com to help me.

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Like most writers, I get a story spark from an ocean of ideas, and nurture it to the seedling of a first chapter.  It sprouts robust and green in the dung ball I planted it.

  Kristopher Roller via Unsplash.com

Sushobhan Badhai via Unsplash.com

I have a sense for how I want the story to conclude. It’s that subtle glimmer on a distant mountain in the dead of winter, of which I must return the story back to the shores of where the spark arose and result in the sunset of a good ending.

Asoggetti via Unsplash.com

Patrick Fore via Unsplash.com

A little studying to research best conditions for the seedling to grow, followed by rifling through the card catalog of genres to repot it in – science fiction (soft or hard), dystopian, alternate universe, contemporary or fantasy.  Who decides where it fits? So many choices, just write the damned thing.

Sanwal Deen via Unsplash.com

Alex Block via Unsplash.com

  What must sprout first in the story’s first chapters?  Characters of course. Some writers claim to have a clear visual of the protagonist, some prefer to obscure individual traits and leave it to the reader to decide. Me?  Physical traits tend to change as I write, and often remain a featureless manikin until it’s decided how to dress it.

Samuel Zeller via Unsplash.com

Voice.  I’ve learned the hard way how important it is for setting the tone. Important characters with a voice thinner than a sheet of paper will result in boring drivel.

Meghan Duthu via Unsplash.com

Will my characters navigate the journey within the noise of many?

Mike Wilson via Unsplash.com

Annie Sprat via Unsplash.com

Or walk alone?

Luis Del Rio Camancho via Unsplash.com

Do one last setting check, like a director framing a movie.

Rawpixel.com via Unsplash.com

  Okay. I’ve got a handle on the beginning and the end. My plotter superheroes staple notes to my forehead. Hey McFly, take the straight and narrow road. Use the bridges. And for God’s sake, don’t go off again on those hairpin roads to nowhere.” They want me to turn off the GPS in my head knowing all too well it rarely works in remote terrain.

Adrian via Unsplash.com

Leonard Von Bibra via Unsplash.com

Think I’m ready now. The trail is clearly marked, and though it’s a little foggy and the path covered in leaves, I’m ready to take the first step.

Derrick Cooper via Unsplash.com

Clem Onojeghuo via Unsplash.com

Chapter one.  It was a dark and stormy night … read to the sounds of a phonograph needle scraping across a vinyl record.  Yeah, I know, don’t start with the weather. Just checking to see if my ADD medication has kicked in yet. Oh, and no waking up from a dream either.

Jeremy Bishop via Unsplash.com

How about this for a start.

‘Historical archives painted a somber scene of the few humans still surviving before extraterrestrials showed up like benevolent gods to save us from ourselves. Not like humankind had a choice. Do as our alien saviors suggested, or they would leave with all their advanced technology and return the planet to the state they found it in, and oh-by-the-way, will the last human standing, please turn off the lights.’

  Enter the protagonist, the human who will guide us in the tale, resolving from the mist of my imagination.

Tiko Giogadze via Unsplash.com

‘Though I cemented my reputation as class gadfly with poly-metal-ceramic fiber, twenty-four hours from now, I will still join others in my age group, newly minted adult females in our so-called Utopian Matriarchy. We don’t fail these things.  But gee whiz, Behr, think you could have spared Aunt Victoria major embarrassment? To dump fuel on a burning shuttlecraft, Aunt Vic is going to kill me when she learns I accidentally dropped off the balcony, a dress she selected for the Presentation Day Ball.’ 

  Four chapters written, the path looks clear ahead. I need a reality check. Did each chapter hook ’em, and did I leave ’em hanging at chapter end?

Alan Bishop via Unsplash.com

Almos Bechtold via Unsplash.com

  Ten chapters now completed, and it’s time to check the basics before continuing.

Showing versus telling – Roger Ground Control, we have a green light on all sensory detectors.

Vincent Van Zalinge via Unsplash.com

Vero Photoart via Unsplash.com

Fabrizio Verrecchia via Unsplash.com

Shubhankar Sharma via Unsplash.com

Seth Macey via Unsplash.com

  Finally, the faces have resolved in my head.

Capturing the Human Heart via Unsplash.com

Swaraj Tiwari via Unsplash.com

Alexandru Zdrobau via Unsplash.com

Shawn Hill via Unsplash.com

  How’s that romance tension coming along?

Mikael Kristenson via Unsplash.com

Reread last few scenes, check action sequences, and see if there’s any road bumps in the dialogue and narrative. Looking good.

Henry Hustava via Unsplash.com

Ming Jun Tan via Unsplash.com

Jason Rosewell via Unsplash.com

  Time for a little mirth, give the reader a breather. Send in the clown.

Diana Feil via Unsplash.com

  Doing great.  I love where the story is going. Oh look, need to make a plot decision to go right or left.

Jens Lelie via Unsplash.com

Pantser check light just came on. Ah – we’re fine. I ignore the warning. Go left.

Wait a minute, where’d these guys come from? They’re blocking the path. Can’t see where I’m headed.

Yuki Eyre via Unsplash.com

  Let’s turn around, see if we missed a road sign.

Adrian via Unsplash.com

Okaaaaayyyyyy – this doesn’t feel like the right direction, but maybe it ends up on the highway.

Simon Matzinger via Unsplash.com

  Oh, shit.  Now what?

Leio Mclaren via Unsplash.com

  Hmmmm, I don’t remember this bridge, but hey, looks like a well traveled road. Onward.

Ahmad Kadhim via Unsplash.com

  Sure getting dark in here.  Maybe I should just go back and rewrite the last few scenes.

Ooh, look, pretty light.  Must be the oasis of better story telling.  Let’s check it out.

Wilson Ye via Unsplash.com

  Uh oh. I can’t believe I went down this tangent.  One thing for sure – ain’t going down that hole.

Riccardo Pelati via Unsplash.com

Pantser light just winked off. It must be the battery, or it just gave up on me.

How do I write my way out of this?

 Let’s try it this way. Little dark down there, but the cross-bridge looks intact. What could go wrong?

Antonio Ron via Unsplash.com

  WTF. Where the hell am I?  I should have listened to my friends. What part of ‘don’t go down tangents’ did I not understand?

I’m three-quarters through my word count budget, and I can’t see the horizon.

Dan Grinwis via Unsplash.com

  Wait.  Headlights up ahead. Yeah, always room for a new character. Hey buddy, you know how to get back on the story highway?  You can’t get there from here, he says, but if you go back a few miles, look for a weather-beaten sign with “Pantser Exit – Turn Right”, keep going until you see an old billboard with “Carnival of Unfinished Stories — Fun for the Whole Family”. Turn left until you come to it ends in a T. Go right, you can’t miss it.

  Son of a bitch. I turned right at the T like he told me. Was that bastard just messing with me? Now what? Flashlight of ideas is about to go out, and the story is colder than glacial ice.

Jonatan Pie via Unsplash.com

  I give up. It was such a great story idea. Why do I always do this?  Write 20K words, trash fifteen.  Rinse, repeat. I can’t do this anymore. I plant my ass in the cave, and stare at nothing. I feel like my characters when they reach the end of their rope – drifting in endless woods of tangent side stories, my feet unable to find the way. Every time I reach out in the darkness, my hands find nothing.

Kate Williams via Unsplash.com

Cherry Laithang via Unsplash.com

Bryan Minear via Unsplash.com

  I sleep on it. Maybe something will pop up in the morning. Daylight arrives, and I get my first good look at the world I’ve created, piled in the cave of discarded tangents of the past. I call one of my writer friends. What’s up dude? He shakes his head when he enters the cave. Whoa, you need to clean this mess up.

  I try a little levity to dull the sting. I tell him if I ever get out of this, I need to hang a sign above my desk. “Hi. I’ve lost my mind. I’ve gone to look for it. However, should it get back before I do, please ask it to wait.”

  Like a good critique partner, he beckons me toward the cave entrance. I crawl out of the frigid waters of stories gone lost, wet and depressed.

  Staring at a story that lost its wings, he reviews a checklist of parts that might get it air worthy.

The strangest thing happens. A shimmer of kaleidoscopic light appears over the wreckage. I say thanks for pulling my ass out of tangent hell, wave goodbye, and follow the inkling of an idea.

Well, I’ll be damned. My feet touch the asphalt of a well-written road several chapters back.

John Towner via Unsplash.com

  The road widens beneath a canopy of trees in their autumn cloak when I approach the story’s ending. Why didn’t I see this before. Writing a story is a lot like the seasons. They change depending on the elements, but the tree roots of a plot line remain firmly affixed to the ground in which it sprouted.

Trevor Cole via Unsplash.com

  OMG, is that who I think it is? My characters silhouetted by the setting sun, embracing in the end, just as I envisioned when I first started.

  I dash toward them, heedless of undulating, ivy of tangent side stories reaching to ensnare me on the last page of the manuscript.

  I’ve found it. The end.

  The last page written, the little sprout that could, has become a full-grown story.

Johannes Plenio via Unsplash.com

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Thus completes my picture book, The Perils of Captain Tangent, a Pantser’s Writing Journey in Pictures.  May you never be cursed with an addiction to a malaise known as “Going-off-on-a-tangent.”

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  All photographs attributed to the individual artist have shared their amazing work free on the website, Unsplash.com.  If you need that perfect photo graphic for a blog or article, they give you the right to use it without restrictions. It isn’t required, but a little thank you to the artists when it pops up, goes a long way.  And don’t forget to sign up to their email list, so you stay current with the newest submissions.

  The Perils of Captain Tangent, a Pantser’s Writing Journey in Pictures Imagine that's me huddled in the rocks beneath an infinite sky with a story I've written cupped in my palms.