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mycrofts-gunbrella · 3 years ago

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Favourite Experiment- Sherlock Holmes x Reader (Part 5)

Wordcount- 2.6k

"Come as a pair now, do you? John been sacked off?" Greg Lestrade spoke as you ducked under the police tape.

"Sherlock decided the prettier Watson looked better when the press snap pics for the papers; now tell me, do I capture the moonlight more on the left or right of my face?" You turned your head as you spoke, waltzing over to the front of the building.

"Highly inappropriate to be joking while a man lay dead, Y/N.." Sherlock tutted, shaking his head in feigned disappointment. "And the answer is your left- nicer eyebrow."

"Well consider my right eyebrow utterly offended, Mr Holmes.. A fine one to talk, too, considering your own."

"Utter rubbish, my eyebrows are perfectly symmetrical. And for shape and size they're identical."

"Precisely. Brows are meant to be sisters, not twins."

"Well-"

"When the two of you have finished your lover's tiff, a hand catching a killer would be lovely. Ta." Greg cut in, rolling his eyes hard enough his head lulled back, and headed into the pharmacy.

"Come along, Sherlock. We can pluck each other's eyebrows and paint our nails later, promise!" You gripped his sleeve and dragged.

"Insufferable."

"Oh you are a darling." Inside the little shop was nothing out of the ordinary (well, save the bloodied up shelves and corpse): no thrown shelves, no stolen items, no building damage.. "At least they were considerate." Lestrade frowned and looked back to the body of a man behind the counter. ".. Marginally consider- .. they didn't knick anything." Sherlock hummed in agreement, dramatically vaulting the till rather than just lifting the latch of the counter.

"Nothing except every bit of cash in the till.. Even took the pennies."

"And that means what, exactly? We ask around the area to see if somebody's been buying stuff with shrapnel? Check banks for people handing in a bag of coppers?" Lestrade's voice laced with sarcasm at Sherlock's meagre deductions. Gregory Lestrade didn't need the help of Sherlock Holmes to note that cash was stolen in the act of armed robbery, thank you very much.

"You do astound me, Graham, at how you rose to such a senior position- your way of catching criminals is appalling." Greg was about to speak up- whether it was to point out his sarcasm, the wrongness of his name, or to call Sherlock a dick, you didn't know- when Sherlock continued talking again. "So far, so bored. Why am I here? What haven't you told me?"

"Well if you'd given me a bloody chance to get a word in edgeways.." Lestrade rubbed his brow with his thumb and forefinger- record timing for a Holmesian Headache, you reckon. "Here we have Michael Chatterley, 64 years old, local chemist. Police were called to the scene after the sound of gunfire half an hour before the shop closed. CCTV was minimal." He nodded towards the laptop resting on a small table that housed multi-packs of mentos and Chupa Chups lollies- the English pharmacy staple. The footage was shown at the view of a camera from above the front door. Initially there was no sign of the suspect, the shop being entirely empty excluding Chatterley. With footage sped up, a minute or so in, a figure walks into the building, back to the camera. All that is seen is Chatterley smiling and beginning to talk to the figure before all goes black.

"This is the only footage? One camera?"

"It's a small shop, independent rather than chain. Been here since I was a kid and never had any trouble; if anything, I'm surprised there was a camera at all." Greg continued.

"But still, one camera? In London? And in the one spot where you can see nobody but the shopkeeper until somebody leaves? It's like people want to make life more difficult for themselves.. and for me." Sherlock moaned. "Still, this thirty seconds is enough to tell us two important things. Number one, the killer and Chatterley knew each other. Number two, there are two killers.. Don't look dumb, Lestrade. Surely you didn't think the CCTV magically stopped working out of the killer's luck."

"Could be a timer. Suspect knows the building well, sets a timer for the cameras to shut off at the right moment." Sherlock gave Greg a 'don't be a bloody idiot' glare that shut the DI up.

"And now for a reasonable explanation?" Holmes looked at you and you cracked your knuckles for emphasis as you went back to the body.

"The security system was weak and cheap, literally a tiny box outside of the building on the upper wall- I spotted it when we walked in, clearly been tampered with. Closed off area, no other important buildings around means no outside security footage either- leaving this place the perfect spot for a robbery. One person outside disarming the cameras while the other goes in and distracts the victim. Chatterley's reaction to the suspect was fond rather than polite- he knew them by name, so I'd wager a regular customer."

"Not a friend?"

"Not a friend. Watch his face in the footage, he smiles and talks to the person who walks in. It's a regular occurence, a practiced one by business owners to appear fond and friendly, but not attached. Had it been a friend, the victim would have a reaction akin to surprise, which clearly isn't evident.." You spoke, readying to answer Greg's next question before it left his lips. "Why 'surprise'? Indents of Chatterley's pockets show car keys- he's not local to the area and has to travel in. Too far away for the tube but he loves his shop and doesn't care about the journey to reach it. Houses in the local area, a bunch of flats, but why would Chatterley have friends in a location so far from his own and in an entirely different wealth divide? His shoes are a top brand, tan line on his wrist shows a watch was also stolen- clearly expensive. That's how else to know Chatterley is an outsider. Estates are small, an 'everybody knows everybody' area, so why would you risk killing a man that could be attached to the community? Answer is, you don't."

"And how does that help us?" Greg was scribbling notes onto a page.

"It doesn't. But it means you can cross Chatterley's poor wife and son off your list of bloody suspects since that's always a favourite of yours." He tried to give you an 'I knew that already' look but quickly gave up in favour of ripping out and screwing up a page a couple back from the one he was writing on.

"Of course I could have told you all of that already. Just ensuring that Y/N is a worthy apprentice." Sherlock mumbled, pulling out his little magnifying glass and scanning the hands of the corpse. "Black ink, clearly from today. I don't recall seeing him writing on the video." Sherlock stood hastily, scanning the floor, shelves and tables. "Paper, look for paper. There's got to be some somewhere." While Sherlock and Lestrade began to frantically search the area, you rolled your eyes and reached into the corpse's jacket pocket, producing a ripped receipt with numbers on the back.

"Sherlock, you're slacking." You called, waving the piece of paper in the air until it was snatched from your fingertips.

"Numbers? What numbers?" Greg asked, wandering over to you in hopes of a nicer response than Sherlock would give. "So, what? We've got a dead body of a man who lives nowhere near here, has no friends and wants to replace Carol Vorderman on Countdown?" He joked.

"Rachel Riley did that a while ago, actually." You quipped.

"Did she? I've not really bothered watching telly like that for a bit. Only the odd movie now and then with a, uh.. Mate of mine."

"Film noir, is it?" You winked, Greg's cheeks flushed a little.

"Yeah, actually.. How did you-?"

"Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, and he walked into yours?" You twisted the famous Casablanca line and grinned. Sherlock was clearly in the dark about his brother's romantic life (or he just didn't care.. or both) but you couldn't help tease Greg a little with a reference that would go over the younger Holmes' head. "I'm smarter than that one." You pointed at Sherlock who had no cares in the world other than his little slip of paper.

"Yeah and you're stuck with him, I reckon. At least I got the better one. John's got himself some freedom now, though it's buggered my support group. Might just have to extend it to you. We've not known each other long but any Holmesian associates need a shoulder." You raised a brow as he took your phone and put in his number. "Life in close contact with a Holmes, it can be a pain in the arse. A 'running away even though I'm an adult just because you've been overly inconsiderate' pain in the arse. You get my sofa, I get yours and the host buys the one with the sore arse a pint." You smirked and opened your mouth to speak but he cut you off. "If that's going to be a 'sore arse' joke you can bugger off because John did it already." You closed your mouth and instead offered a hand to shake. Greg took it.

"Louie, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship."

"Offer is retracted if you continue quoting Casablanca. I have enough of that in my life already."

"If the two of you are quite done, I've worked it out." The pair of you walked round to Sherlock and hovered over his shoulder to look at the page. "Dead ones are always so clever." His fingers traced a line beneath the numbers as he spoke. "It's a code, of sorts. One Chatterley wanted us to know but one that wouldn't be as obvious as writing names in case it was found while he was being robbed. Look at the numbers again." You did.

19-85-39/28-27-57-16/1

"Very cliche, given his occupation, but simple enough." Sherlock spoke before he began to reel them off by number. "19-Potassium, 85- Astatine, 39- Yttrium." You caught on.

"Oh, Sherlock, you clever bastard." You grabbed a pen off the side and began to mark the abbreviations of the periodic elements as they were written down, the first revealing K/At/Y. "Next gives us Nitrogen, Cobalt, Lanthanum and Sulfur so.. Ni/Co/La/S.. The last gives us Hydrogen for H." You looked at the paper again. "Married couple, in here often enough to pick up prescriptions that the victim remembered their names. Check the records for any variations of the names Katy and Nicolas, surname beginning with H. Oh I love it when they're clever."

With the case now back into the hands of NSY, Sherlock and yourself hailed a cab to get home.

"I have to admit that I'm a little impressed at how quickly you picked up the elements thing." You said, nudging your elbow into Sherlock's arm to grab his attention. "Of course, I'd have picked that up immediately had you not taken the paper from my hand." His drawn 'obvisly' in response paired with a smirk. You looked at the screen of your phone: 20:34. "Though the night is young and I feel we should have a little celebration."

"I don't care for drinking, nor the social situation in which it is done."

"Neither do I. Got any board games? Scrabble? Monopoly?"

"Cluedo."

"I'll kick your arse."

"Rubbish."

---

Shifting to sit cross-legged rather than kneeling on the carpet, you rested your fist under your chin as you worked out the next move. The sound of 221B's door opening cut your train of thought and you rolled your eyes.

"Y/N? Sherlo- what the hell are you still doing up?" John's voice sounded in the room and you put your hands over your ears to shield them from it.

"Hush, John. Thinking." Though your brother paid no attention to your words and sat on the floor between you and Sherlock.

"Oh for God sake, is this Cluedo? Sherlock, you know this has been banned. I binned it months ago."

"Mycroft bought it at our last chat."

"Of course he did, brilliant. How long have you been at this now then?"

"Mmm, that depends. What's the time?" You gave up your attempt of focusing to focus on entertaining your brother for 5 minutes.

"It's half two in the bloody morning. I finished work, went out to dinner with.. somebody.. who failed to tell me she had a peanut allergy and I've been up at the sodding hospital for the last three hours while she gets pumped full of adrenaline for anaphylaxis!"

"Is she okay?"

"Yeah she's fine now bu-" John was cut off at the sound of you and Sherlock laughing. "It's hardly funny, is it? Meet her because she's got an earache and end up nearly killing her!"

"That's karma for breaking code and dating a patient, dear brother." You managed between breaths.

"Seriously, she took one bite of her curry and she couldn't breathe. Her face went all puffy and she'd left her epipen at home and-" John started to laugh with you. "No, you're terrible influences. I shouldn't laugh, I'm a doctor for crying out loud!" You twisted your body to click your back and stretched.

"Fancy a tea to wash away your guilt?"

"No. I'm going to go to bed and have a good, hard think about the consequences of my actions." John grinned, readying to stand.

"Don't want to help with Cluedo then?"

"Normal Cluedo? Yes." He pushed through the pile of handwritten cards and held a few up to read. "Cluedo where you've added extra locations, weapons and people? No. Playing with the pair of you? Certainly not."

"But, John, the original game is ridiculous and unrealistic." Sherlock added.

"Sherlock, you've added Mycroft's umbrella as a weapon."

"It has a sword AND a gun in it!" Yours and Sherlock's voice shouted as though John was the one being ridiculous.

"Yep, definitely not playing. I've got the next week off so I'll see you in the morning.. Well, later in the morning." John rounded to press a kiss to the side of your head and left the room. You walked back into the front room, two steaming mugs in hand and sat down.

"Right, now where were we?"

"Are you sure you're not tired yet?" Sherlock asked, looking at the coffee in your hand as the clear substitute for tonight's rest.

"Nah, I've had a comfortable couple nights. I'm good to go til Thursday I reckon." You answered, peering back over your cards. You looked back at the lanky man when you felt his eyes burning into your skull. "Honestly, I'm okay. But look at you getting all caring and considerate! I'm honoured." You waved your hand as a means of bowing. "Or is this just your way of trying to get rid of me?"

"No." Sherlock's answer cut before you could finish your question and you smiled.

"Such a sweetheart to be enjoying my company. Consider me flattered."

"Don't be. You're simply.. tolerable.. enough to occupy my usual free time."

"That's a win in my book, Holmes." You winked at him and looked back at the board, just missing the light dust of pink that spread over his cheekbones.

TAGLIST- @ask-the-elf-stuff, @momos-peaches

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rocknrollarticles · 4 years ago

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The Artwoods Story

The Artwoods’ 100 Oxford Street is a UK compilation album released in 1983 that features a four-page booklet (pictured above) that tells the band’s story, written by guitarist Derek Griffiths.

Since there's a limit on the number of photos that can be added to one post, I'll be reblogging this a couple times until I have all the info up. To see this post with all the info added in reblogs, click here.

Thanks for reading, and I hope you enjoy Derek’s words as much as I do!

Transcript under the cut (main text + Record Mirror article from page three's rightmost side)

“ It's difficult to pinpoint exactly when the Artwoods came into being because everything just seemed to evolve naturally. The one date however that does stick in my mind is the 1st October 1964 which is the date I turned professional, thus depriving the accountancy profession of a valuable addition to its ranks! But seriously, one must go back to previous events in order to trace the history of the group.

I first met Jon Lord at a party in West Hampstead when he was a drama student at The Central School of Speech & Drama. He was introduced to me by Don Wilson whose claim to fame was his membership of the famous skiffle group Dickie Bishop & His Sidekicks. They had had a hit years previously with "No Other Baby But You", and Don now ran a band on a semi-pro basis called Red Bludd's Bluesicians in which I played guitar. Well, I say we were called this, but only when we were fortunate enough to cop an R&B gig. We used to play The Flamingo Allnighter and lots of U.S. air bases. The rest of the time we played weddings and tennis club dances as The Don Wilson Quartet! Jon Lord was brought in on piano and was a very valuable addition especially as he could get his hands around a little jazz and all the old standards. Jon used to ring me at work and interrupt my vouching of sales ledger invoices in order to discuss the coming weekends gigs. We would bubble with excitement at the approach of an R&B gig as we really hated all the weddings and barmitzvahs.

Around this time Don made a very important policy decision and we suddenly became the proud owners of a Lowrey Holiday organ for Jon to play. Shortly after this Don contrived to drive the band-wagon into the back of a lorry on the North Circular, doing himself considerable mischief in the process. This brought about the unfortunate end of Don's career with us, but not before he had masterminded an important merger of two local bands.

For some time we had been aware, and not a little envious, of The Art Wood Combo led by none other than Art Wood himself. His band underwent a split at that time and Red Bludd's Bluesicians, alias The Don Wilson Quartet, were neatly grafted on. We really felt we were moving into the big league by doing this as Art not only had more work than us but, wait for it, used to sing with Alexis Korner's Blues Incorporated with Charlie Watts on drums and Cyril Davies on harmonica! The next problem was a replacement for Don, and this was solved by stealing the bass player from another local group The Roadrunners, a good looking cove who went by the name of Malcolm Pool. The offer and acceptance of the gig were transacted in a pub car park somewhere in West Drayton staring into the murky waters of the Grand Union Canal clutching pints of local bitter (Fullers?). (Authors note: drugs had not been invented at this stage, as far as most groups were concerned, apart from the odd pill to keep one awake on an all nighter!)

The next personnel change took place some time in 1964 and this involved the retirement of drummer Reg Dunnage, who did not want to turn pro. Auditions were held in London and lots of drummers attended. However it was more or less a foregone conclusion that Keef Hartley would get the job. You see we'd already decided that what The Artwoods needed above all else was a Liverpool drummer! Unfortunately none came to the audition, but Keef hailed from Preston which was near enough for us. Keef had previously played with Rory Storm & The Hurricanes, replacing Ringo Starr in the process (heady stuff this), and Freddy Starr & The Midnighters. Both were such influential bands of their time that these credentials combined with Keef's quasi Liverpool accent (at least to our ears) provided him with a faultless pedigree.

So that was it, the line-up that would take us through to 1967 when Colin Martin eventually replaced Keef Hartley on drums.

For a while we worked as The Art Wood Combo but then decided it was hipper to drop the Combo and become The Artwoods.

The period when The Artwoods were operating was one of musical change when groups went from recording and performing other writers' material to writing their own. In fact the last year of the group's existence was 1967 which heralded the arrival of "Hendrix", "Flower-Power". "Festivals" and experimental use of mind expanding drugs! 1966/67 were particularly exciting years to be based in London and every night would be spent in one of the many clubs which had recently sprung up. The Ad Lib, The Scotch of St. James, The Cromwellian, Blaises and of course The Speakeasy to mention a few. Many of these we played in and the trick was to be well known enough not to have to pay the entrance fee on nights off. Any night you could be sure to meet your mates "down The Speak" and it became the unofficial market place for rock musicians.

It was also the days before huge amounts of equipment took over. Equipment meant road-crew and trucks and in turn financial hardship. This simple equation has been the downfall of many bands over the years. We used to travel in a 15 cwt van together with all the gear-no roadies, just us. It's amusing to recall but after recording the TV show "Ready, Steady, Go" (in Kingsway in those days?) one would be besieged by autograph hunters on the way to the van with the gear. Even really 'big groups of the day like The Zombies would hump their own equipment and apologetically place an amp on the ground in order to sign an autograph! Because it was financially viable to travel to small clubs in this way, we would often average 6 or 7 nights a week, every week, on the road. A bad month would probably mean less than twenty gigs. This meant we were living, sleeping and eating in close, and I mean close, proximity. You really found out who your friends were.

The subject of equipment is an interesting one as it really distinguishes the bands then from those of today. The average pub band of today would carry more equipment than we did. As I've already mentioned we were quick to realise that we could elevate ourselves musically by investing in a proper electric organ as opposed to a Vox Continental or Farfisa that many groups used. Consequently the group purchased a Lowrey Holiday and we thought this alone would provide us with the Booker T and Jimmy Smith sound.

What we failed to realize was that we also needed a Leslie cabinet with a special built-in rotor to get that "wobbly" sound. Our friend and mentor Graham Bond, the legendary organist/saxophonist, was quick to point out the error of our ways one night when we were gigging at Klooks Kleek in West Hampstead. We groaned inwardly when we discovered the extra cost and humping involved, but it had to be bought. We were fortunate very early on to score a deal with Selmers, who provided us with free amps and P.A., but we had to make the trek to Theobalds Road once a week to get it all serviced as they were not as reliable in those days. I used a Selmer Zodiac 50 watt amp and Malcolm had Goliath bass cabinets with a stereo amp.

The P.A. comprised two 4 x 12 cabinets and a 100 watt amp! When we toured Poland we played in vast auditoria and linked our system with the Vox system being used on tour by Billy J Kramer & The Dakotas. This meant we were pumping out no more than 300 watts which is laughable by today's standards. Although it would never have compared in quality, I can remember standing at the back of extremely large halls and being able to hear clearly all the words Billy J sang. One day in 1963 Alexis Korner sent me off foraging in and around Charing Cross Road for a new guitar, with instructions to mention his name whereupon I would receive a discount of 10%. Previously I played a Burns Trisonic (collectors will appreciate this model did not have "Wild Dog" treble) but fancied owning a Gibson ES335 as favoured by many blues players. Sure enough one was hanging invitingly in the window of Lew Davis's shop.

I ended up paying £135 and still use it regularly today although its value has multiplied five fold. Malcolm came with me that day and bought an Epiphone bass, the same colour and shape as my guitar. For years we looked like matching book-ends on either end of the group! Keef started off using a Rodgers drum kit, but somewhere along the line changed to, I think, Ludwig. There was no out-front mixing as is common today, just the P.A. amp on stage with the vocalist. Primitive I know, but everything revolved around bands being able to travel economically with their gear and perform at small clubs anywhere in Britain. The college circuit was much sought after and provided the icing on the cake while package tours were not necessarily well paid. We did our first with P. J. Proby and got £25 per night (for the lot of us) and we had to pay for our own accommodation!

I have already mentioned "Ready, Steady, Go" a show on which we appeared on more than one occasion. The original format called for groups to mime to their records but after a time it was decided that it would become "live" and that the show would be re-titled "Ready Steady Goes Live". We were proud to be picked for the first "live" show and learnt the news via a telephone call to our agent in London from a phone box high in the Pennines. We managed a drunken war-dance of celebration round the phone box believing that this meant we'd really cracked it. As I remember the first show we did featured Tom Jones (complete with lucky rabbits foot) miming to "It's Not Unusual", The Kinks, Donovan and Adam Faith's Roulettes playing live (without Adam). We were promoting our first single "Sweet Mary" and I would put the date at around late 1964.

Our first recording deal was with a subsidiary of Southern Music Publishing called Iver Productions and I reckon that would have been mid 1964. Southern had a four track studio in the basement of their offices in Denmark Street ("The Street") and getting the gear downstairs, especially the organ, was "murder". Our first producer was Terry Kennedy and we recorded several tracks with him. Without going too deeply into all the details of recording techniques of the period, one tended to compensate for the lack of tracking facilities available, by attempting to duplicate the live excitement. In many ways it was a frustrating experience particularly for ambitious guitar-players. I was a Steve Cropper freak and I knew as a musician that a lot of his sound on record resulted from him working his amplifier hard in the studio— thus the speaker would emit the sound he was used to on stage. In Britain however, engineers would say "You don't need to play loud man, we can turn you up on the desk". The result was a weedy, thin guitar sound. From way back I'd been experimenting with "feed back" on stage and I really had to dig my heels in about the guitar sound in the studio. Once when I turned my amp up to give it a bit of "wellie" on a solo the engineer bounded out of the control room screaming that the level would bust his microphones!

Sometime during the career of The Artwoods it was decided that we should graduate to a better studio. This was arranged by Mike Vernon who also became our producer. Our records had all been released through the Decca Record Co. and Mike was a staff producer with them. Mike w also an authority on "The Blues" and the relationship led to our only single chart record "I Take What I Want" a cover of a Sam & Dave U.S. R&B hit. Mike was also producing John Mayall at the time and it seemed only natural that Mike and The Artwoods should team up. From this point on we recorded at the Decca studio in Broadhurst Gardens, West Hampstead, but I can't honestly say it did any more for us than our previous efforts in the Southern Music basement, although we could now indulge ourselves in the comparative luxury of the eight track studio. Later on, towards the end of the groups life we were signed by Jack Baverstock at Philips Records who was looking for a group to cash in on the thirties-style gangster craze which had been triggered off by the film "Bonnie & Clyde". As a result we changed our name to "St. Valentines Day Massacre" and released a single of the old Bing Crosby hit "Brother Can You Spare A Dime?" It was an ill- fated venture, which I would prefer not to dwell on, virtually signalling the end of the band apart from a few heavy-hearted gigs with a changed line-up.

Before that though, there were many great times to remember, and a fair number of gigs that were memorable in one way or another.

One of our favourite gigs was Eel Pie Island which we regularly played once a month; in fact we held the attendance record there for a while until the ageing blues artist Jesse Fuller took it from us. Eel Pie Island is literally an island in the middle of the River Thames at Twickenham and there's never been a gig like it since. It was an Edwardian ballroom originally I believe, that achieved notoriety in the 50's with the Trad Jazz boom. At that time, an overloaded chain ferry was used to convey the crowd across the river, but during the 60's a small bridge was in existence although it was only wide enough to take the promoter Art Chisnall's mini van. He had to make three separate trips across with the gear strapped to the roof and hanging out the back doors.

The audiences were exceptional for those times and I don't know where they all came from... very much like art students and very much more like the 70's than 60's. Long hair predominated and this was before 'hippies' had officially been invented! If you can imagine a ramshackle wooden ballroom, bursting at the seams, condensation pouring from the walls, the audience on each others shoulders leaping up and down, the sprung dance floor bending alarmingly in the middle, in the summer couples strolling outside and lounging on the river bank ... all this and not a disc jockey in sight! One other bonus was that it was a “free” house and therefore sold many different types of beer— we always favoured Newcastle Brown. Back on the 'mainland' afterwards it was always riotous packing the gear into the truck. I don't know how he managed it but one night Malcolm drove our truck over the support band's guitar which happened to be lying about, thus breaking the neck. I'll never forget the shocked look on that poor guitarist's face as Malcolm smoothly slipped the van into gear, apologised and drove off in that order!

No trip up north was complete without stopping at the famed Blue Boar on the M1 for a "grease-up" on the way home. I do not refer to truck lubrication but to a particular rock'n'roll delicacy known as “full-house”. This comprised double egg, sausage, chips, beans, tomatoes, fried slice, tea, and (if you were man enough) toast. It was considered a Herculean task to break successfully the 10 bob' (50p) barrier-all served on wobbly cardboard plates that doubled as items to sign autographs on for the self service waitresses.

Waitress: What band are you?

Me: You won't have heard of us.

Waitress: Oh go on, tell us.

Me: OK. The Artwoods.

Waitress: Never 'eard of you!

It was everybody’s dream to walk into the Blue Boar just as their hit of the moment was playing on the Juke Box.

One time we were chosen to represent the twentieth century at the centenary celebrations of the State of Monte Carlo— a most lavish affair which the aristocracy and dignatories of Europe attended. Princess Grace and Prince Ranier were the hosts and people like Gina Lollobrigida and the like were there. The ball was held in the famous Casino at Monte Carlo and we stayed in an opulent hotel called The Hermitage, I think. All I can remember is that we all had single rooms (a rare luxury) which were massive, and you could have pitched a tent under one of the bath towels, they were so big. After this we jetted off up to Paris where we played next door to the Moulin Rouge at a club called The Locomotive.

Whilst we were there we were taken out by our friend Mae Mercer, the American lady blues singer who we backed in England. She lived in Paris and took us out to Memphis Slim's club where we all set about drinking like it was going out of style. At the end there was an embarrassing scene concerning the bill with the result that Mae ended up in tears. Whilst we were bumbling about in an alcoholic stupor, an upright looking gentleman put his arm round Mae to comfort her and a wallet appeared magically from his inside pocket. Without further ado the bill was despatched and we later learned that our anonymous benefactor was none other than Peter O'Toole who was busy in the street outside filming 'Night Of The Generals' and was an old buddy of Mae's.

One Boxing Day we loaded up with turkey sandwiches and Xmas pudding and headed off for a gig down in Devon or Cornwall somewhere. We arrived to find the club closed and boarded up, and as usual we were broke. Naturally we were livid, checked into an hotel and located the promoter who lived with his mum. Next morning we drove round to where he lived and burst our way past his confused mum. We found him in his bedroom nervously cowering against some fruit machines which he collected. He had no money so we forced him to empty his damned machines with the result that we drove back to London with 50 quids' worth of 'tanners' (approx 22p for the younger reader!)

Whilst on the subject of disasters I suppose I am duty bound to mention Denmark. The first time we went there we caught the ferry to the continent, drove up through Germany, then caught another ferry to Denmark. There was no promoter to meet us when we arrived so all we could do was drive to Copenhagen and check in at the Grand Hotel. It cost us an arm and a leg but at least we got a good nights sleep after being awake for nearly two days travelling. The next day we made a few phone calls and finally tracked down the promoter. He said: "Didn't you get my telegram cancelling the tour?" We politely said no we hadn't and what did he intend doing with us? He checked us into another hotel (cheaper of course) and set about booking us at places that were similar to English coffee bars and youth clubs. We made enough to survive on and paved the way to more successful tours of that country. In fact by now we had Colin Martin on drums and were pursuing a much more adventurous musical policy and writing our own material. It was just right for Denmark who had taken Hendrix to their hearts to name but one, and we subsequently became quite big there in 1967.

The Artwoods achieved modest success-a minor hit single in "I Take What I Want", but we worked constantly, travelled abroad, had fantastic fun and made a living doing so. We had seven single releases, one album, and one EP, and we broadcast both on radio and TV many times. We did stage tours such as the P. J. Proby tour and covered most aspects of "show-biz" apart from actually making a movie. It was the era when bands still had to prove themselves as a live act before being offered a recording contract. now frequently happens of course that an act can become huge record sellers without so much as venturing to do a live gig.

So what happened to everyone? Well Art returned to his former occupation as a commercial artist and finds some time to fit in free-lance work between accompanying brother Ron Wood on raving excursions between Rolling Stones gigs. Malcolm moved into the same field as Art and they now work in the same building. Both of them gig occasionally on a semi-pro basis although Malcolm spent some time playing with Jon Hiseman's Colosseum and Don Partridge in the early 70's. Jon Lord became famous with Deep Purple and Whitesnake as did Keef Hartley with John Mayall and various bands of his own. Colin Martin is now a BBC Radio producer of repute. I played in various bands such as Lucas and The Mike Cotton Sound, Colin Blunstone's band, Dog Soldier (with Keef again), before I somehow drifted into studio and theatre work. Recently I formed an R'n'B band called the G.B. Blues Company, and it's great to be back on the road again. ”

Derek Griffiths.

Clipping from Record Mirror on June 5, 1965, by Norman Jopling.

“We aim to excite!” … say the Art Woods

Just for the record, the Art Woods aren't a part of Epping Forest. In fact they're a group of five interesting young men, named after the group's leader Art Wood. They also happen to be one of the most realistic groups on the scene.

For a start, they are the awkward position of having a large following, a club residency but no hit record. Secondly. they don't mind pandering to commercial tastes, even though they have been hailed as one of the most authentic R & B groups in the land.

NO PULL

“But authentic R&B just isn't pulling the crowds any more,” says Art. “The audiences want to be excited, not to be lectured on what is 'good' and what is 'bad'. Although there was a time when you could spend half an hour on one number with long solos by everybody, it didn't last long. And although there are some clubs like that still, most of them want something fresh and new.

“And we try to cater for them. We like authentic R&B, but we also like playing everything and anything else. So far, our two discs haven't meant a light. Of course we'd love a hit. But we're lucky enough to make a good living without one.”

DISCS

The Art Woods latest disc is "Oh My Love" and the one before that “Sweet Mary”. Of them Little Walter has said that he couldn't believe any white group could sing and play the blues like they do.

Line-up of the group is Art Wood, leader. vocalist and harmonica. Derek Griffiths, lead guitar, Jon Lord, organ and piano. Malcolm Pool— base guitar, and Keef Hartley on drums. The boys use a specially adapted Lowrie organ, and get a sound that's really different.

But even if the boys sometimes become depressed about no hits records, they should remember groups like Cliff Bennett, the Barron-Knights, the Rockin' Berries and the Yardbirds, and how long THEY waited before they had a hit!

N.J.

#the artwoods #the art woods #art wood #derek griffiths #malcolm pool #jon lord #keef hartley #colin martin #100 oxford street #the 100 club #articles #liner notes #newspaper clippings #record mirror #my posts

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treatian · 4 years ago

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The Chronicles of the Dark One: Breaking the Curse

Chapter 5: Old Somebodies

Tonight was the night.

He'd been waiting well over a week for an opportunity like this, ever since he'd confronted Regina at that Apple Tree of hers. He was starting to believe that the day might be months off or might never arrive, and he'd have to prepare for the future with educated guesses. But here they were.

He'd been busy in the last few days. After twenty-eight years, there was a lot to catch up on, and doing it in such a way that Regina might not notice anything different about him meant he had to be creative about how he acquainted himself with this new world. He wanted a way to be aware of who was around him, to let himself know who was in this town, who they were here, who they'd been at home, as well as any stray information that he happened to know about them. He wanted to be prepared and knowledgeable, and to do that, he had to unite his old self with his new self perfectly. As it turned out, his ledger was the key.

The books he kept, the same ones he used to keep track of rent, were as good as having the town census. With human eyes, it took a long time to go through name after name after name. Still, it was all worth it in the end, especially when he remembered that if Regina was capable of watching him in his house, all she'd see was Mr. Gold obsessing over his finances, something very "in character" for his alternate persona. Name by name, he went through his books. Often, he knew little about the individual, but there were more than a few that he was able to place.

Albert Spencer, a full-time lawyer, working crimes he didn't dare bore himself with-that was King George, James' and David's adoptive father.

Doctor Whale, a physician at Storybrooke Hospital-in fact, was Doctor Frankenstein, from the Land Without Color. Apparently, Regina had brought over a few individuals that were not in their land.

Tom Clark, owner of the Dark Star Pharmacy, the only pharmacy in town. Mr. Clark was teased by many for being rather short in stature, but on this side of the Curse, he knew that was neither bad luck nor ailment. In reality, he was Sneezy, one of the seven dwarves that always seemed attached to Snow White.

He studied his lists carefully, forming a checklist in his head of all those he wanted to know and needed to know and making sure they were accounted for. He found the other seven dwarves. Ashley Boyd, his "girl of ash," was currently very pregnant and working odd jobs, so she didn't have to live with her step-mother and sisters. It seemed Jefferson had kept his name of Jefferson and was secluded in a mansion of sorts close to the hospital and police station. Sheriff Graham was Regina's hunter, faithful to her only because he reckoned that she still held his heart captive somewhere safe. Kathryn Nolan was Abigail, King Midas' daughter, and David Nolan's supposed husband, not that anyone knew where David Nolan was at the moment. Sidney Glass was the Genie that Regina had used to murder her husband.

The name Sarah Fisher was the only one that made him stumble. Sarah Fisher, owner of the ice cream shop across the street. He'd given her a loan to get it, but…he remembered that. She wasn't like the others in Storybrooke that he had fuzzy false memories of. Her coming to him for a loan to start her shop, her opening day, Mr. Gold remembered those. They'd happened here in Storybrooke after they'd been here; years after, he was almost sure. But nothing in Storybrooke ever changed. For twenty-eight years, everyone had only ever had their single loop that they followed. No one ever struck out on their own or followed their dreams or got their happy endings, which meant…

Sarah Fisher hadn't always been in Storybrooke. She hadn't been brought here by the Curse. In actuality, Sarah Fisher was Princess Ingrid, the scared little Elemental from Arendelle he'd met so long ago. And this…this was very valuable information he now possessed. Until she made a nuisance of herself, it was information to keep close to his chest and play only when the time was right. Though, he was also fascinated to learn that Ingrid's niece, Anna, was among the missing.

There were a few others that joined Anna on this list of "missing people." Of course, "unknown" was perhaps a better word for it. Though he knew most people in Storybrooke, he had to admit he didn't know them all. There was an entire realm of people here; the Dark One hadn't dealt with all of them in his time, and thanks to Dove, neither had Mr. Gold. It was possible Anna was one of the faceless names he'd looked over and didn't know it. But he was disappointed and more than a bit nervous at who was on his list of unknowns.

For a while, David's name was at the top of that list, though he hadn't panicked when he realized it. His memories of when he'd awoken told him he was not a paying member of society, and shortly after he'd begun his search, he'd had Dove go to the hospital and locate a John Doe that matched David's description. A picture later, it was all confirmed. David was located even if he was the only one who knew it.

Also among the unknowns; Archie Hopper's unknown friend with dark hair who knew Baelfire, and Cora. Regina had claimed to have killed the woman when they were in the Enchanted Forest, so he supposed it was possible that was why she was missing, but he'd always doubted that she'd actually done the deed. So where was she now? More than likely, she was still in Wonderland. Dead or alive, that woman would be the last person Regina would want around here, and at the moment, he didn't care which it was so long as she wasn't anywhere near him. The Apprentice, Merlin, King Arthur, Guinevere, Lancelot, all of them were missing, and he couldn't recall seeing Princess Aurora or her Prince Phillip anywhere in town. But the most important person on his unknown list at the moment was the one that held something extraordinary of his inside her. Maleficent was missing.

He was certain, or at least almost certain, that she'd been carried over in the Curse. He knew that she'd still been in the Enchanted Forest when he'd been captured and taken to his cell. He'd been planning on her being here; that was why he'd had David leave his egg with his potion inside her! So where was she?

After days of consideration, he had a hunch, one theory that had come to him as he glanced across the street at the empty library, missing his Belle. He knew everything about this place, everything about his land and especially the library that Mr. Gold had considered knocking down more than a time or two. He'd seen the blueprints for it. He knew that in that library, there was an elevator; mostly, it was to be used for going up to the clocktower, but it could also go down. Down…Mr. Gold had no idea where "down" went to. The town legend had always said there was a dragon beneath the library. It was just a stupid story that children told to scare their classmates. Poppycock, Mr. Gold considered it. But suddenly, he remembered all those times he'd walked to his shop in the snow and cast that irritated glance over to the library. Why was it that the area around that library always seemed to get less snow?

It was worth an investigation. But how to pull it off? Regina was suspicious of him enough as it was, but she couldn't prove anything, and that was how he wanted to keep it. If the elevator was what he thought it was, then there might be magic on it. It might alert Regina to the fact that he used it, and he might be able to come up with some story or excuse, but at that point, he would be playing with fire.

He thought of a hundred different scenarios, dozens of different plans which might allow him to investigate, but all of them came back to one lesson the Seer had always taught him-it had to be the right time.

Well, it seemed the right time had finally arrived. He was keeping Dove happy and rich these days, paying him to watch Emma Swan, who was currently living in her yellow car on the street because no one was willing to invite the Mayor's wrath and let her stay with them. Last night, something had happened, something that nearly made him erupt in a fit of giggles when he found out. John Doe, David Nolan, Prince Charming…at Henry and Emma's behest apparently Mary Margaret had gone to read to him last night. The result?

John Doe was awake.

Dove didn't know the entire story. There had been some speculation in the hospital earlier in the night. Mary Margaret had insisted that he'd woken, but the medical staff had assured her that he hadn't. But sometime in the middle of the night, he'd wandered off in nothing but his hospital gown. Damn near the entire town had shut down today to go looking for the missing man, just as they had more than a decade ago, though no one else seemed to be able to remember that clearly. Naturally, much to what he was certain was Regina's disappointment; it was Emma and Mary Margaret who had found David in the woods.

Hopeful that a moment was coming, he'd stayed in his shop, hoping that the timing might be right. And then it arrived, a single text message from Dove. "Things are crazy here. The Mayor just showed up with a woman she claims is John Doe's wife. No one saw this coming. Everyone has questions."

That was good enough for him. Regina was busy. Good and busy, for the next several minutes at least. From the back of his shop, in a black bag that held all his magical potions, he grabbed a thick paste he'd been working on for just a time like this. Water, ground limestone, and salt. In their world, it was the essence of natural magic. He just hoped it would cancel or dull any protective spells that Regina might have on that elevator. With any luck, the commotion at the hospital would keep her busy enough not to notice. He grabbed a flashlight, a thick ring of keys that let him into nearly any home and establishment in Storybrooke, and he made sure his gun was tucked into his pocket. Then, quick as he could, he limped across the street to the library.

The door whined so loud at being opened, he wanted to cover his ears. But he pressed forward. Though the library did have electricity, he didn't turn the lights on and made sure not to aim his flashlight at any of the boarded-up windows. The last thing he needed was Regina getting a hint that something was wrong because some snoopy shop owner had seen something they shouldn't have. He smeared the paste he'd made over the frame of the elevator best he could and felt something tingle in the air. He hoped it was the Curse, desperate for more magic to keep itself going, taking the bait, and releasing any wards there might have been on the thing. Then he opened the doors to the elevator open.

The elevator car wasn't where it was supposed to be but rather stuck halfway down the shaft, further inviting those who wished to use it to simply leave. He wasn't fooled by it. He used the handle to inch the rattling metal cage up to where he was and then pretended not to gulp as he got into it, closed the doors, and opened a hidden panel that contained the emergency controls. Then he lowered himself down the shaft and into the mines below Storybrooke.

Ten minutes later, he was sitting in his car, huffing and puffing at what he'd seen and how he'd hurried to vacate the library before anyone knew he was there. He sent a text message to Dove and confirmed that Regina hadn't left yet and everyone was still there at the hospital. Relief spread through his body as he leaned his head back against the seat and tried to breathe.

He should have turned on the car and gone home, but he was suddenly aware that his hands were shaking and his feet felt unnaturally light. He tried to tell himself it was because he had hurried, that this body was far less capable than the body he'd had in the Enchanted Forest, but deep down, he knew it was something far more cowardly making him shake. It was what lay at the bottom of the Storybrooke Library.

At the bottom of the elevator, there had been an impossibly large cavern. It had been dark and damp, but cold. Fear kept him from taking a single step off the elevator platform as he circled his flashlight around the darkness. The light glinted and fractured over something shining and glass. It was an artifact he recognized, one that he was shocked to see found it's way over…Snow White's infamous glass coffin. He swallowed as he moved the beam of light again. Across a crack in the cavern floor, he was met with the sight of two glowing yellow eyes the size of large dinner serving platters. A low rumble had vibrated in his chest and across the walls of the black walls of the cave as those eyes had risen in height, and he'd quickly closed the elevator doors and pushed the metal cage to move faster back to the library.

A dragon was living under the library in Storybrooke.

He'd found Maleficent.

#Rumbelle #Rumple #Rumpelstiltskin #Dark One #Mr. Gold #Regina Mills #Evil Queen #Emma Swan #Mary Margaret #Snow White #David Nolan #Snowing #maleficent #ouat #ouat fanfiction #fanfiction

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shireness-says · 6 years ago

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CS JJ Day 22: The Queen’s Librarian

Summary: As the palace librarian under Queen Emma's rule, former Lieutenant Killian Jones gains a reputation for knowing not just what books his monarch wants, but those she needs. Perhaps when all is said and done, she'll need the man himself as well. ~ 11.6K. Rated M for smut-adjacent stuff and language. Also on AO3.

A/N: Here it is - my contribution to @csjanuaryjoy 2019! I had a lot of fun playing with this idea - librarian!Killian is a real weakness for me - so I hope you enjoy it too. Fun fact: Belle and Liam’s kids in this fic are named after children’s book characters, because that’s the kind of thing I think is funny.

Special thanks to @snidgetsafan for her beta services. Thanks for brainstorming the last half of this with me, babe!

Enjoy, and let me know what you think!

His nieces and nephew cry when they’re told Uncle Killy is going to work in the palace.

“But Uncle Killy, the Queen is mean!” his older niece, Sylvie, tries to tell him, like that explains everything. Killian understands where she’s coming from; Sylvie may not truly remember what life was like before young Queen Emma, but she’s heard tales of festivals and peace and a Queen and King who were regularly found mingling with their subjects. At only 2, 4 and a half, and 6, all the little ones know is that there’s a tension in their world now, a current of fear everyone is aware of even if they’re not yet acknowledging it. It doesn’t help that the new Queen is the reason their Papa is gone, off on his ship serving Misthaven in their war against King Arthur and Camelot.

Killian, however, is a quite a bit older than the kids, and can vividly remember the years in which Queen Emma’s parents ruled. Queen Snow and King David had been benevolent rulers, the kind of monarchs you felt cared deeply for each and every one of their subjects. The then-Princess Emma had never displayed the same optimistic exuberance her parents had - Killian always remembers her looking like she’d rather be anywhere else than waving in various public functions. Still, he had never gotten the impression she was unpleasant, but rather that she was impatient, anxious to be doing things instead of just acting as a pretty smiling face to be paraded about. Something about the crane of her neck, or the set of her shoulders. Killian could understand that, on a certain level, that desire to prove oneself. But now, with that opportunity placed firmly in Her Majesty’s hands, there’s no denying that the public persona she displays is of a stiff back and firm jaw, a woman focused on important matters with little time for frivolity.

Killian understands that too; there’s a war on, something her parents hadn’t had to deal with in many years. Sure, they’d maintained an army and navy, like any responsible country - Killian had served in the Royal Navy himself, alongside his brother, before a pirate attack and subsequent medical discharge had left him land-bound and minus his left hand. But they’d been a nation at peace for many years, ever since the ultimate defeat and banishment of the Evil Queen, respected and respectful in their dealings with their neighbors. Unfortunately, when the late Queen and King had died, their shared heart connecting them even in death, the proverbial wolves that had likely always been prowling at the door had pounced, taking advantage of the new Queen’s youth and inexperience as the ideal time to make their aggressive move. King Arthur of Camelot had always been power hungry, fancying himself far more important and deserving than he truly was, but it had still been a shock when mere weeks after Queen Emma had ascended to the throne of Misthaven, he had declared war over some supposed breach of trading agreements. More likely, that was a convenient front for his greedy desire to annex Misthaven’s lands as part of his own kingdom. And so, Misthaven had suddenly been thrown into a conflict it hadn’t anticipated and wasn’t fully ready for.

Killian’s brother had been called back to sea with the outbreak of conflict, leaving his little brother to look after his wife and their three children at the specialty bookshop Belle owned. Liam was a career military man, a Captain in the Royal Navy with his own ship and own command, but one who had scaled back considerably upon his marriage and fatherhood. During the peacetime, Liam had been able to ask for shorter assignments, trips where he could serve his monarchs while still being able to return to his family in a matter of a few short weeks - mostly diplomatic assignments, carrying envoys and messages between the nearby kingdoms. But Liam is gone on a semi-permanent basis now, called to defend his country from the sea, back every few months - if they’re lucky - for only a few days at a time for the past two and a half years.

Killian’s injury, that devastating loss of his hand, means he’s unable to serve his country in the traditional way like he might have if he had still been a full-bodied man. Perhaps that’s why he accepts when he’s offered the job as the new palace librarian after the position’s previous holder had retired; despite his inability to fight, Killian still wants to assist the cause, even if this is the only way. It’s not as if this will be a hardship, anyways; quite the contrary. He’d go so far as to call it an honor. He started his second career in bookselling just as a way to help out his sister-in-law and keep himself from going mad with boredom, but he’s found it suits him well. He’d always been a voracious learner, and working in the shop gives him an excuse to read anything that strikes his fancy on the pretense of needing to provide reviews to their customers. The exactitude of the work appeals to him as well, the strict system required to maintain an organized and functional bookseller’s playing well with the ship-shape mentality so fostered in the Navy. He’s even picked up some of the minor binding repairs, though Belle is still better at those; there are certain tasks you really do need two hands for.

Killian knows, in his heart of hearts, that they probably would have preferred Belle for the job; between her pair of hands and her lengthier experience, having grown up in that very shop and taken it over from her father, she’s the better choice. However, she also has her own business, three small children, and a husband away at sea, all things that keep her from being able to accept the job, even had she wanted to. Thus, Killian is the more practical choice, a bachelor more able to switch jobs at will. Belle can always hire more help, and besides, with the on-site housing the position provides, he’ll be able to send money back home to her and the children.

So he reassures his little gaggle that things will be fine, just fine, nothing to worry about, and packs his bags for this new opportunity.

As he approaches the gates, however, he thinks that the kids might have a point. There’s something about the towers and sturdy stonework that, while elegant from afar, seems so intimidating up close, more fortress than grand home. Killian tries to tell himself that he’s just being silly, but it kicks his nerves into high gear. Gods, what has he gotten himself into?

Courage, man, he scolds himself. There’s nothing to be afraid of.

It helps that there’s someone already waiting for him when he gets closer, an older gentleman with a serious face but smiling eyes. He holds his tall frame like a soldier, like someone always waiting for some threat to pop out from around the corner; Killian wonders which branch he’s served with, if he’s still serving or working at the palace in some other capacity.

“Lieutenant Jones?” the man asks, before Killian’s thoughts can run away any further. His voice matches his appearance, somehow; firm and sure, yet not particularly loud. It’s been a while since Killian was referred to by his rank, but there’s something almost comforting about the title. It’s able to snap him out of his nerves and back into the job at hand.

“Aye, sir, that’s me,” he replies smartly, barely resisting the urge to salute. It’d look silly anyways; he’s only got the one hand, and it’s filled with the little bag packed full of his clothes. It probably would have been more practical to wear his hook, at least for carrying his stuff, but he knows how the damn thing looks and had wanted to make a good first impression. The wooden hand is damn near useless, but it tends to set people more at ease.

“Captain Graham Humbert,” the other man introduces himself, wisely choosing to nod in Killian’s direction instead of the more common handshake. A perceptive man, too, Killian notes; though maybe it’s others who should feel embarrassed about trying to shake the hand of a one-handed man, he’s always the one who feels off-kilter as he’s forced to juggle around everything he’s carrying to appease other people. “I’m one of Her Majesty’s advisors, and have been tasked with getting you settled.”

“A pleasure,” Killian nods in return. It may be too early to make any real judgements, but so far, he likes Captain Humbert and his direct manner. He seems like a calm man who you always know where you stand with, and there’s a lot to be said for that.

“Now, if you’ll follow me?” Humbert gestures, opening the gate and sweeping an arm wide in invitation.

“I’ll show you to your room, and the library of course, as soon as possible,” the older man explains as they walk across the grounds, following the neat cobblestone path, “but there’s the formalities to take care of first. Namely, meeting the Queen. As for your room, it’s right next to the library itself where you’ll have a office as well —”

“Meet the Queen? Now?” Killian sputters out as his mind catches up with his companion’s words.

“Yes, meet the Queen,” Humbert repeats as if it’s obvious, raising his eyebrows. “Is that a problem?”

“No, no problem at all,” Killian rushes to cover. “I just… er…” There’s the strongest urge to scratch behind his ear, a nervous tic he’s never quite broken, but his hand’s not free for that particular maneuver. He can’t quite put into words why the idea of meeting his monarch makes him nervous, mostly because he can’t put his finger on it himself. Obviously, he’d known that he’d be interacting with officials in his new position, but this feels a little bit like tossing him to the wolves straight away to see what he’s made of. He shouldn’t be so nervous; it’s not the first time meeting his monarch, that occasion happening years and years ago in the ceremony when he was first promoted to Lieutenant, back when the late Queen Snow and King David were still alive and he’d had good reason to be nervous as a young and clueless lad.

Humbert is good enough to smile and clap him on the back reassuringly. Killian’s really warming up to that man. “It’s just a formality - nothing to worry about,” he reiterates. “She just likes to be kept up to date and meet the staff. Put a face to the new names, if you will. I promise, she’s not nearly as intimidating as you’d think.”

“Well that’s… good.” What else is he supposed to say?

Killian had expected to be led to the throne room for the introduction, much like he had all those years ago, but Captain Humbert leads them through a maze of hallways, deeper and deeper into the palace, before stopping to knock on one of the doors. It must be a private wing; the carpets and sconces are still elaborate and expensive, but he somehow feels like it’s seen by few.

“Come in,” a voice sounds, faintly. It’s a female voice, so Killian supposes it must belong to the Queen, but he didn’t expect Her Majesty to sound quite so… distracted. Maybe the voice is from some sort of secretary or assistant, instead? Regardless, Killian braces himself for the introduction to come, posture snapping to attention in a way he’d never quite forgotten even after his discharge from the Navy.

When Humbert opens the door, however, it’s not a harried assistant waiting for them, but the Queen herself, bent over a stack of papers at her desk and clearly paying more attention to the words on the page than anything else going on around her. Killian almost expects to see little spectacles perched on her nose to complete this picture of fierce concentration before remembering that the Queen is still just a young woman, a few years younger than himself, even. She likely has several more years yet before she’ll need reading glasses. The room itself is much less grand than he expected - filled with well-made and doubtless expensive furniture, he’s sure, but it doesn’t feel like some display piece on a grand scale. It feels used, lived in. You can’t fake that homey air or items set down absent-mindedly as new matters demanded attention.

She pops her head up quickly enough, eyes wide with surprise and anticipation, when the Captain clears his throat to get her attention. “I hope we’re not interrupting, Ma’am,” he cautions.

“No, of course not, it’s fine, Graham,” she excuses. “I needed to take a break from these reports anyways. Is this the new librarian?”

“Yes, Ma’am,” the other man replies, surreptitiously nudging Killian to prompt him to respond on his own - a necessary measure, considering Killian would have been more than happy just to let the Queen’s advisor lead this conversation.

“Killian Jones, Your Majesty,” he introduces himself, stepping forward to sketch a little bow as well as he can with his bag still in hand. “It’s an honor.”

“You were in the Navy, were you not?” she asks. Killian tries not to be too flattered that she knows that; if the stack of reports on her desk is any indication, she must be briefed about everything, no doubt including changes in her staff. Still, it’s nice that she remembered.

“Aye - I mean, yes, Ma’am,” he hastens to correct. ‘Aye’ feels just a little too informal for an audience with his sovereign. “I was a Lieutenant on the Jewel of the Realm before my injury.”

“That’s what I thought.” The Queen smiles, but it seems more a perfunctory gesture. Then again, with the weight of this war no doubt hanging over her head, her ability to find joy in things must be hindered. “If you need anything as you assume your duties, anything at all, please don’t hesitate to let either Captain Humbert or myself know. I’m sure you have quite the task on your hands - the previous holder of the position was… a little set in his ways.” Killian assumes she means old and eccentric. Gods willing, the task ahead of him will be a manageable challenge.

“Thank you, Your Majesty.” Queen Emma’s already turned her attention back to her paperwork, which Killian assumes is his cue to leave.

“Nothing to worry about,” Humbert smiles and says again once they’re back in the hallway and presumably moving towards the library and Killian’s chamber. “I’m afraid most of your interactions with Emma will be like that - she’s a bit too busy for much else these days,” he continues fondly.

The clear affection in the other man’s tone throws Killian off. There’s obviously some piece of Captain Humbert and the Queen’s relationship that he’s not quite grasping. “Pardon me, but you said you were one of Her Majesty’s advisors?” Killian cautiously asks.

“Yes, but I was her godfather first,” Humbert explains, correctly guessing where Killian’s question is leading. “Advisor sounds a bit better now though, considering she’s a grown woman in charge of a country.”

“Aye, I can see where that might be the case,” Killian chuckles.

They continue in silence only a few minutes longer down the corridors before stopping in front of a beautiful pair of glass-paned doors, the library just visible behind the decorative ironwork supporting each frame. Killian takes a moment just to marvel as his guide holds one of the doors open - it’s truly a wonder of a library that he’s faced with, and it’s about to all be his responsibility.

“Are you coming in?” Humbert asks, smiling at what must be an expression of childlike awe on Killian’s face. “I promise, you’ll get plenty of time to look your fill.”

“My sister-in-law would love this,” Killian explains as he finally crosses the threshold. “My nieces and nephew, too.”

“They’re welcome to visit. Perhaps once you’ve gotten a little more settled in?”

Killian grins at the thought. “They’d love that. I’d love that. Thank you.”

“Think nothing of it,” the older man says. “Truly, we want you to be as comfortable here as can reasonably be arranged. Just say the word. Now, you’ve got an office through that door —” he gestures towards the right-hand side of the room, where another ornate door is nestled between arching staircases to a second balcony-level of shelving — “and the librarian’s quarters through the other.” The door on the left-hand side mirrors its pair in placement, but doesn’t feature the same glass and ironwork as the main doors and office door do - likely to provide greater privacy. “There’s a lower level too, down a short staircase in the office, where the older and more fragile documents are stored away from the light. Would you like to go straight to the catalog, or would you prefer to deposit your bag first?”

“The bag first, if you don’t mind.” At Humbert’s acquiescent and friendly nod, Killian quickly crosses to the door leading to his rooms, briefly switching his bag to hang from his prosthetic to open the door. The room inside is reasonably sized, containing both a small sitting area and a bed with a dresser, all in warm woods and soft green fabrics that make the whole space feel comfortable. The two windows overlook a lovely view of the gardens, and if he’s not mistaken, the room is positioned to catch the light for as late as possible in the evenings, with a view of some beautiful sunsets to boot. It’s easy for Killian to imagine himself spending time in these rooms, doing his own private reading and spending his off hours.

It’s easy to tell Captain Humbert as such when the other man asks how he found his accomodations once he emerges back into the library.

“Excellent,” Humbert beams. “Now, as for the catalog,” he segues as they move instead towards the office, “I’m told it’s a very thorough compendium. However, Mr. Bradford’s organization system is… truthfully, a bit hard to follow. It made sense to him, but not to most others. I’d call it archaic, but I really don’t have enough knowledge of any other library system to make that judgement. If you will?” He gestures again through the doorway. The office proves to be neat and organized as Killian walks in; a sturdy wooden desk occupies the center of the room, with storage cabinets, presumably containing item records, lining the walls, leaving only a gap for a downwards twisting staircase. Killian assumes that’s for the fragile storage his guide had earlier described.

“The item records are organized alphabetically by title, we’ve discovered,” Humbert continues, “but the shelving itself is a bit of a mystery. As far as we can tell, they’re organized alphabetically by author, but in several different sections that we haven’t been able to really deduce the method of. Personally, I think Bradford was trying to ensure his own job security by making us dependent on his knowledge,” he jokes.

Taking a quick look at one of the cards in the nearest cabinet, Killian is relieved to see that not only is each one neatly written, but he can readily discern what this system is. Humbert had hit the nail right on the head in calling it “archaic” - the previous librarian had evidently been ordering sections by who had printed each volume, an organizational system previously preferred almost a century ago before printing had become easier and more widespread. Belle’s father had actually been one of the devoted hangers-on to that system, before she had taken over the shop and reorganized by subject matter.

“I am familiar with this system,” he assures Captain Humbert, “though I do agree, it’s rather… unwieldy. Is there perhaps someone I can borrow to help reorganize? I think that will be the first priority here.”

“Yes, of course, I’m sure a couple of page boys could be spared. I’ll take care of it first thing tomorrow,” Humbert assures him, his friendly face visibly relieved. The old system must have been giving them quite a lot of problems to elicit that reaction. “Is there anything else you need?”

“I think that’s all. It’s a lovely library you all have here - I’m excited to start exploring it.”

“Then if there’s nothing else, I’ll leave you to get settled in - here are the keys. The larger one there,” he indicates on the ring as he passes them over, “is for your office and the archive downstairs, and the smaller for your room. There should be desk keys in one of the drawers as well. As Her Majesty said, if you need anything, just let me know and I’ll see if we can’t do something about it.” With that, Captain Humbert inclines his head in a little bow and leaves Killian to his own devices.

He could get used to this, Killian ponders as he wanders back out into the main library space. There’s obviously a gorgeous collection here, one he suspects covers an enormous breadth and no doubt countless rare volumes he’s only heard rumor of until now. There’s quite a lot to be done as well, of course - the current organizational system truly is a counterintuitive mess, one he plans on revising first thing - but he’s never been opposed to hard work, and with the promised help, the whole thing should go quicker than he expects.

With that in mind, he turns back to the office to buckle down and begin sorting through the existing card catalog.

———

A week and a half later, Killian’s pleased to note that progress is being made. True to his word, Captain Humbert had sent a bright young page by the name of Henry to help with the reorganization effort. Killian initially just had the lad clearing off shelves onto carts, but he’d attacked the task with an unexpected enthusiasm and finished with the prescribed section much sooner than Killian had anticipated. From there, after a morning teaching Henry how to navigate the current organizational system, he’d set the boy to work weeding out and reshelving fiction works, the easiest portion of their reorganization. The lad is happy and eager to help - Killian is seriously considering seeing if he can be made a permanent librarian’s assistant or something, even after they’re through with this project - and it leaves Killian with plenty of time to work his way through the extensive card catalog, sorting entries into their new categories and noting the change on the card. It’s repetitive work, to be sure, but there’s something rewarding about watching the crates he’s borrowed as a temporary catch-all fill up as he sorts each to his satisfaction. He’ll make a second pass through each category later, but for the moment, he’s pleased with the progress.

The thing about the task at hand is that it’s wholly engrossing when he’s in the midst of it; ten more minutes becomes one more drawer becomes half the night if he’s not careful, Henry long since sent away for the evening and Killian left with only the company of a few candles and the sandwich the kitchens sent up for him. That’s how he sees the Queen again, as it turns out - creeping into the library at an ungodly hour of the night.

She visibly startles when she spots him in the glowing candlelight emanating from his office. For good reason, too; when Killian glances at the clock in the corner, it reads a quarter past one in the morning, well past time for him to call it quits and get some rest. Still, it seems wrong to not at least check and make sure that Her Majesty doesn’t need something before he retires, so after standing and stretching out his hunched back, Killian moves to do just that.

“Is there anything you need, Your Majesty?” he calls as he crosses the room. She doesn’t appear to, settling elegantly on one of the soft green couches and reaching for a book on the end table, but he’d hate to be rude and just cross the room without any acknowledgement. Spotting that she appears to be dressed in her nightclothes and a dressing gown, Killian stops himself from approaching too closely; bad form. Still, he waits patiently at a slight distance for her response, if any.

“I’m fine, Lieutenant,” she dismisses. “Just a bit of late-night reading to lull me back to sleep.”

Killian can’t help but smile; he understands that urge well, having succumbed himself many an evening. “I’m about to retire, myself,” he offers, “but if you need anything at all, just knock on the door. We’re halfway through assembling a fiction section along that wall, if stories strike your fancy tonight.”

“Thank you, Lieutenant.”

(He can’t help but notice that she doesn’t acknowledge his offer of assistance. Then again, that’s really none of his business.)

(Regardless, she doesn’t knock on his door that night, and he writes the incident off as an unexpected encounter with his Queen - and something he may have to get used to in the future, living under the same gilded roof.)

———

Item requests trickle in right from the beginning, but pick up over time. Though Killian expects to eventually be asked for specific government records, most of the requests are fairly trivial; one of the dwarves wants facts to back up his argument with a friend, the cook has a particular fondness for sickly-sweet romances.

The first official document request he gets is incredibly routine - the records of a particular land battle for the queen and her advisors to study. They’re easy enough to locate down in the archive, but on instinct, he grabs the official reports on four other battles and skirmishes that utilized a similar technique. They weren’t strictly requested, but it feels incomplete not to send the whole picture.

When Her Majesty shows up that night to peruse the library - not an uncommon occurrence, he’s learning - it’s with questions for him as well.

“Why did you send those extra reports today?” She asks, browsing the section he’s begun to devote to life sciences - botany, zoology, and anatomy. It isn’t phrased as an interrogation or a demand, just a question, but Killian still feels put on the spot.

“I didn’t mean to presume,” he replies, “but it seemed like the Council would benefit from the fullest picture available. That battle you requested may be most notable for a certain tactic, but I thought it might be prudent to send records of how that tactic could go wrong as well as its most famous success. Illustrate some of the factors that could affect a modern attempt, if you will.”

Queen Emma nods thoughtfully. The silence as he waits for her response is filled with a palpable anticipation. “Thank you,” she finally says. “You had the right instinct. We ultimately decided not to move in that direction after your very thorough offerings.”

“I’m pleased to hear it,” Killian replies quietly, modestly, but inside he feels a surge of relief, with no small amount of pride mixed in.

“If you can keep it up with that kind of instinct,” she replies, still looking at the shelves, “I think you’ll do very well here.”

———

Really, Killian should just stay out of it. Keep things professional, ignore the fact that the Queen spends half her nights in his library whiling away the hours during bouts of insomnia and just get his own sleep.

That’s not how it works, though. There’s a little niggling instinct that keeps him working until Her Majesty arrives each night, making sure she doesn’t need anything from him before turning into bed. And it’s that same gut instinct that tells him to leave out the adventure tale he runs across while shelving - a tale of pirates and dashing rescues and high-seas capers.

She seems so often to come in and read histories and dry manuals, he’s noticed. Not that there’s anything wrong with her choices; that’s some people’s preferred reading materials. Her Majesty doesn’t seem to take that same enjoyment, though, and he suspects she’s just reading as an extension of all the reports she absorbs over the course of the day. Regardless of her reasons, the frustrated expression on her face certainly suggests she’s not enjoying her reading. If there’s one thing he’s picked up from Belle, it’s that reading should be a happy pursuit, if not the outright passion she herself finds in it; Killian can’t help but want to bring that enjoyment back to the Queen’s face.

When she tiptoes back in the next night, Killian takes a deep breath to fortify himself before crossing to her customary spot on the couch with the slim red volume in hand. “Pardon the interruption, Your Majesty, but I thought you might enjoy this,” he tells her, thrusting the book in her direction, likely more rudely than he intended.

Carefully, she takes the book from him, a look of confusion gracing her lovely face. “Oh?”

“It’s an adventure tale,” he explains. “Pirates and princesses and daring escapes and True Love. It’s not a particularly serious book, but…” he trails off, suddenly feeling silly.

The Queen takes a careful look at the first page before nodding briskly. “Thank you for the recommendation, Lieutenant.”

Killian can’t tell what that tone means, but it’s not his place to press further. “Of course, Ma’am. As always, just knock if you need anything.” Maybe she thinks he’s being ridiculous, and maybe she won’t read it after all, but it’s gratifying to see Her Majesty paging through the novel with her feet tucked up underneath a couch cushion as he closes his door.

(It’s even more gratifying when a few days later, she asks where she can find other books by the same author. Maybe that gut instinct was right after all.)

———

He wasn’t watching, really, not on purpose. It’s not like he waits by the library windows, just hoping to catch a glimpse of Her Majesty in the gardens. Killian can’t help it, though, if he just happens to spot her as he crosses past the windows as he moves from shelf to shelf.

He can’t bring himself to regret it, though.

From where Killian stands, he can look down over the green lawns where the Queen is practicing archery, shooting arrows at flying targets tossed by an assistant with unerring, deadly accuracy. He didn’t know this was one of her many talents, but he supposes it makes sense; her mother, the late Queen Snow, was famously proficient with a bow. It stands to reason her daughter would inherit that talent.

Killian already knew from his interactions with Queen Emma that she’s a marvel of a woman - brilliant and strong, not to mention breathtakingly beautiful - but this demonstration of her fierce side is something else, something new that leaves him watching in awe. Watching her like this reminds Killian of the warrior queens of legend, women who led armies and charged headfirst into battle alongside their soldiers. With such a fragile line of succession in Misthaven, Killian knows Emma would never be allowed to do the same, but that picture is still in his head. He’s certain she’d make a glorious sight and be absolutely brilliant in that role.

Killian watches for a few minutes longer as Emma shoots down target after target before turning back to the library, this time with a specific quest in mind. If he remembers correctly, they’ve got a biography of Queen Elendrea around here somewhere - he’ll have to pull it and set it aside for the next time insomnia brings the Queen to his little corner of the world.

Sure enough, she’s down in the library the next night, 12:30am, right on time. When she sees the book, she smiles wryly, turning the leather-bound volume back and forth in her hands. Her Majesty isn’t much of a smiler, Killian’s noticed; she makes the motion just fine, but it rarely seems genuine, more just a reflex than anything else. He hopes that maybe, one day, he can coax a real one out of her - or at least that one of his books can.

“I suppose you saw that earlier then,” she comments. She doesn’t put the book down, though, he’s pleased to note, instead fiddling with the edges and running her thumb down the pages.

“Aye,” he replies, somewhat bashful. “I didn’t mean to, of course, I just looked out the windows —”

“It’s fine, Jones, no need for excuses.” That smile is almost real, even if it’s small - probably because he’s scratching at his ear like a dog, a nervous tic he’s never been able to shake. Damn thing.

“It was very impressive,” he offers in response. “Very… fierce. I wouldn’t want to be on the other end of that.”

“Just working off some frustration,” she shrugs. “My mother used to bring me out when I was upset. It’s not the same without her, but I still enjoy it.”

“I was wondering,” Killian smiles back. “Is that your weapon of choice, then?” The words are teasing, but he’s genuinely curious as well; King David had been a legendary swordsman, and Killian had grown up on the legend of how he slayed a dragon.

“Just the bow, I’m afraid. My father tried to teach me to sword fight, but it turns out I’m not very good.”

“Oh, I’m sure that’s not true,” Killian smiles. “From what I’ve seen, you’re a very capable woman. I’m sure you can do anything you set your mind to.”

“That’s very kind, but really, I’m not very good at it,” she assures him, looking amused that he’d even think otherwise. “There’s too much footwork, and I’ve never been very good at keeping track of my feet - especially not while having to focus on my arms at the same time. It took me an embarrassing amount of time to learn how to dance, and I’m still not very good,” she confides.

I’d love to dance with you, all the same, he wants to say. That’s crazy talk, though; he can’t say that to the Queen. Where did such a crazy thought even come from? He veers towards safer territory instead. “I haven’t picked up a sword, myself, since my injury,” he says, waving his stump as if in illustration, “but if you’d ever like to spar, I’d welcome the opportunity. Without a second hand, we might be evenly matched,” he jokes.

“What, in here?”

Killian shrugs, almost exaggerating the motion in an effort to seem casual. “Why not? There’s plenty of space in here, enough not to have to worry about injuring the books as long as we stay towards the center. And who knows, it might tire you out enough to sleep.” The Queen adopts a thoughtful expression at that point, but Killian is wise enough not to press it further. Bad form. “Just a thought.”

They retreat to their separate corners, as is customary, but Queen Emma does so with a pensive look on her face - and with the biography in her hand, Killian is pleased to note.

(He’s even more pleased when she returns the next night with a pair of blunted practice swords. As it turns out, she’s just as mediocre with a sword as promised, but he’s very out of practice himself. It’s worth it, anyways, to watch her work up a sweat bouncing across his stone floors.)

———

The moment Queen Emma walks through the doors one evening, maybe three months after their late-night sessions in the library began, Killian can tell something is wrong. Though glimpses of happiness on her face are nigh-on unheard of, that’s usually replaced instead by determination, the undeniable sense that though exhausted and often frustrated, she’s got a spine of the strongest steel underneath that pristine skin. Tonight, though, she just seems listless, a bit lost, picking up a stray book from the table but making no move to page through it. Not that he can blame her - it’s a very dry volume about agriculture techniques that he’d set aside for one of the advisor’s reference earlier. Still - he can’t help but be concerned.

“Pardon my presumption, Your Majesty,” he broaches cautiously, “but are you alright?”

“I don’t even know,” she mutters, seemingly to herself as she stares off into the middle distance. As she realizes her words were audible, she quickly snaps back to attention, shaking her head as if to dispel the thoughts. “I’m sorry. It’s nothing.”

“Are you sure? I’d be happy to listen if you need an ear,” he offers in return. Personally, Killian thinks the Queen needs that; she seems to spend so much time performing for others, without taking any for herself. He won’t wheedle or force her to say anything - lord knows he doesn’t have that standing, even if he’s eager to help her in any way she’ll allow.

He doesn’t need to wheedle though, it turns out, as Queen Emma sighs heavily and turns to face him. “I just wonder what I’m doing some days is all. My parents prepared me as best they could, but there’s no way to really know what to expect until you’re sitting on that throne. Especially with a war. Men are dying every day on the borders, and the citizens are terrified, and maybe I try my best, but how good is that? Most days, I feel like I’m making this up as I go along,” she confides with a dark chuckle. “My parents… they were supposed to be here for so much longer. I crave their advice every day, while at the same time, I feel so bitter about the fact that they left me here without their counsel. I know they couldn’t help it, of course, but… they shared a heart. They made that decision, and they did it out of the truest love, but most days, as the one left behind, it feels like they chose each other over their only daughter. And it’s stupid, and irrational, but it hurts, especially when I still need them so badly. My mother was pregnant with me, you know, back when she gave half her heart to my father. And I’m so grateful every day that I got to grow up knowing him, and loving him, and being loved by him, but she didn’t know it would work. She didn’t know that the fairies could bring him back to life with half her heart after Regina crushed his. She could have died, attempting that, and me along with her, but she made that decision. And I’m grateful for it, but on days like today when I feel so lost and unsure what to do, it feels like they’d rather be together and dead than alive - without the other, but with me. Their daughter. Who needs them, so badly. Because I don’t know what to do.” By the time she finishes her speech, one he suspects has been bottled up for far too long, there’s tears trickling down her cheeks.

Maybe it’s overstepping, but Killian carefully reaches out a hand to brush the tears away. She needs that right now more than any propriety, he thinks. “You’re doing the best you can,” he assures her gently. “And maybe that doesn’t always feel like enough, but it’s the most anyone can ask of you. You are the fiercest, most brilliant woman I’ve had the honor of meeting, and I can’t tell you how much I admire what you’ve managed to do. It’s no small feat, leading a country through a war,” he reminds her gently with a smile.

“You really think so?” She asks in a small voice, looking up at him with those big, sad, scared eyes.

“I do. One hundred percent.” An idea strikes him suddenly. “I’ll be right back,” he assures the Queen as he moves to grab the volume he has in mind, one Henry had stumbled across earlier and spent half the afternoon entranced by. Returning to the couch, he carefully places the brown leather tome in Her Majesty’s lap.

She chuckles a little. “A book of fairytales?”

“A book of fairytales,” he echoes. “My sister always says that fairytales teach us to have hope, even in the darkest of times, and I think you could use a little of that right now. I have full faith you’ll find a way to bring us through this.”

“Thank you,” she smiles through the residual tears - the first real smile she’s directed just at him.

“Of course, Your Majesty.”

“You know, after all this tonight,” she laughs, “I think you could just call me Emma. I’d like it if you did.”

“As you wish, Your - Emma. As you wish, Emma.”

———

“I’ll be leaving for a few days,” she tells him one night, almost offhandedly, sitting on her favorite couch as Killian adjusts some of the shelving spacing. “Do you have any recommendations for me to take with?”

Killian’s heart lurches a little bit at that, but he tries to school himself and his traitor heart back into neutrality. The announcement shouldn’t mean anything to him; she’s his Queen, after all, and he’s got no right to harbor any fonder feelings than loyalty, maybe comradeship after all these nights amongst the stacks.

“Well, I suppose the materials I’d send with you to prepare would depend on what you hoped to achieve from this journey,” he replies carefully, making a point to keep his gaze focused on the shelves, lest his gaze give anything away. No doubt, if she looked closely, she could spot his very heart shining out through his eyes, and he’d prefer not to be that obvious, thank you very much.

“I can’t really tell you that,” she replies apologetically. “That doesn’t matter anyways, though. I meant something to read for myself. You know, one of your famous recommendations.”

Killian falls silent at her words, crossing over to peruse the fiction section. Something for her to take with her… the obvious choice would be an adventure story, something to while potential hours in a carriage and make whatever this journey is seem akin to whatever quest for glory she’s reading about. However, Killian’s mind keeps being drawn instead towards the poetry section. It’s riskier, for certain, but his instincts have served him well thus far, so he continues to go with his gut in selecting a collection of love poems. It’s a little too close to how he feels inside, but when has that ever stopped him?

Quickly, he finds a small box to put the volume in before moving to hand it off to the Queen. “Promise you won’t peek, not until you’re on your way,” he warns, smiling teasingly at her and holding the parcel just out of reach.

Queen Emma rolls her eyes, but she smiles too as she reaches for box. “I promise.”

(It’s a moment that could make or break his fledgling affections in her hands, but that’s a risk he’s chosen to take. After all, his intuition when it comes to books has served him well thus far.)

She’s gone for almost a week, and Killian feels like he spends half that time just watching his doors to see if she’s about to walk back through. Gods above, he’s pathetic, pining after a woman so wildly out of his reach. That awareness still doesn’t keep his heart from leaping with excitement when Emma walks back into his library, flopping dramatically - or maybe just exhaustedly - into a chair.

“It’s good to see you back,” he smiles. “Did your trip go well?”

The Queen - Emma raises a hand above the chair back to wiggle it in a so-so motion. “It was… eventful,” she finally settles on.

“Is that so?” He doesn’t want to push too hard, knowing she couldn’t tell him even her destination before her departure, but he’s curious, and a willing ear if she wants it.

“Yeah.” She pauses, leaving a stretched silence in her wake before she breaks it again. “What I’m about to say… it’s just between us, alright? Not that you’re a gossip or something, but really, this doesn’t leave here.”

“Of course.”

“I went to the border to meet with one of Camelot’s generals,” she confides. “Lancelot. Good man. There’s apparently a lot of anger and unrest in their country about this war as Arthur keeps conscripting men and diverting more resources than can be spared to the army. He wanted to speak with me about whether we’d back a new government if it came to power. That’s what’s been keeping me up a lot of nights lately - the messages we receive from him.”

“Understandable.”

“He wanted us to meet to talk about a potential successor. Some noblewoman, he said. He maybe forgot to mention that the noblewoman was Queen Guinevere.”

Killian snorts - with that tone of voice, he can’t help it.

“I know, right?” Emma smiles back. “That was a bit of a shock. Apparently, not only has her and Arthur’s marriage been rather on the rocks for a while, but she privately suspects that he’s gone mad and thinks a change in leadership is in order. She’d make a good Queen, I think - she seems genuinely concerned about their subjects.”

“So what did he want to talk to you about then?”

“Support, mostly. If they manage to replace Arthur will we support the new government in return for a mutual peace treaty, blah blah blah. I agreed, of course.”

“Sounds like a successful journey then,” Killian smiles.

“Tentatively, yes,” Emma agrees. Killian is about to turn back to his sorting when she broaches the silence again. “Thank you for the book recommendation. It was lovely.”

Ah yes. That. Killian’s been torn between anxiety about wanting to know what she thought and never wanting to hear about the love poems again, and now is the moment of truth. “I’ve always found those verses to be particularly moving,” he replies carefully.

“I agree. Completely.”

There’s probably more to unpack from that statement, but for the moment Killian lacks the courage to do so. Instead, he flashes a shy smile before turning back to his own distractions.

That’s more than enough to tide him over for tonight.

———

A visit from Belle and the children was probably overdue.

It’s not that he hasn’t seen them at all - he’s been home, of course, for dinners and Liam’s shore leaves and Max’s seventh birthday, but despite being assured from the very first moment by Graham that they’d be more than welcome to come see him, Killian’s just never arranged for it.

Belle’s been pestering him to see his library, though, and he does miss seeing the children, so he finally sets things up for them to come for a visit. It’s worth it just for the massive hug he gets from his little bookworms, but seeing the awe on his sister-in-law’s face is an enjoyable bonus.

“This is amazing, Killian,” she tells him, spinning around in a slow circle. The true testament to her awe is how she barely pays attention to how her three rascals dash off to explore. Not that there’s much they can really get into - the archives are locked up tight, and Killian keeps a tight ship he’s more than willing to adjust if anything is left out after little hands pull them off the shelves. Still, Belle’s always been concerned about maintaining a very precise shelving system, so her lack of concern about possible impending disarray is a real testament to her distraction.

“This is yours, Uncle Killy?” Sylvie yells from across the room, the excitement obvious on her face. Her mother’s daughter, that one.

“I’m taking care of it, little love,” he explains. “The library is the Queen’s, but I get to use it. And that means that all you ruffians get to use it too,” he smiles, bending down to bop Harriet gently on the nose - the only one who hadn’t gone running off immediately.

As if on cue, the doors to the library open, the one squeaking slightly on its hinges. “Jones, I’m looking for —” Emma begins before drawing up short. “Oh. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to interrupt.”

“Not at all, Your Majesty,” he smiles. He does remember her permission to call her by her given name, but it seems more appropriate to stick to formality with his family present. They’re actively trying to instill good manners and good form into the little ones, anyways. “Just taking a moment to show off the library to my brother’s wife and children.”

The aforementioned wife and children are clearly startled by the interruption, their expressions ranging from mild fear from the young ones to awed surprise from their mother. Quickly, Killian stoops to pick up Harriet from where she’s trying to hide behind his legs, gesturing to Belle to herd the other two closer for an introduction.

“Ma’am, may I introduce my sister, Belle —” she drops into a slight curtsey, likely straight out of some half-remembered etiquette book — “and her children, Max, Sylvie, and Harriet. And this, of course,” he gestures back at Emma, “is Her Majesty, the Queen.”

“It’s lovely to meet you,” Emma tells them. He can tell that she’s making a concerted effort to exude warmth, her smile one of the rare, genuinely happy ones he’s so rarely seen. She even makes a point to engage his nieces and nephew. “Thank you for letting your uncle come work for me. He’s very good at his job.”

Max and Sylvie still look wary, but little Harriet nods sagely in his arms, like that’s all she needs to hear to like the Queen. Who knows; she’s not yet three, maybe that’s true.

It doesn’t take much to sway the other two, though, especially when Emma leads their mother to her favorite couch to talk about Belle’s recommendations for stories of suspense. At some point, Harriet even ends up standing on the cushion next to the Queen with Emma’s arm bracing her upright as her little fingers play with the few golden tendrils escaping from Emma’s updo.

“See? Not so scary,” Killian murmurs into Sylvie’s ear where she’s curled against his side, paging through some zoology book with beautiful illustrations of fish.

“Of course she’s not scary, Uncle Killy,” Sylvie replies, her brow furrowed in stubborn insistence. “Don’t be silly.”

How easy it is for children to forget and change their minds.

———

“I’ll bet you never imagined this, the first time we met,” Emma pants after a round of sword fighting. She remains slightly terrible at the art, but had actually managed to put her sword to his throat tonight, so maybe there’s hope yet. “Can you believe that was only a few months ago?”

“I really can’t,” he assures her, and it’s true - their dynamic feels so natural that it feels like he and Emma must have been spending their nights together in the library for an eternity. “Granted, that wasn’t the first time we met,” he adds as an afterthought.

Emma frowns at that. “It wasn’t?”

“No. You remember how I was a Lieutenant in the Navy, of course?” he asks. Emma nods in return, though her brow is still furrowed in confusion. “And you remember how such a promotion usually warrants a ceremony here? Especially when one’s brother is made a Captain at the same time?”

“I suppose we would have met then, wouldn’t we?” Emma realizes. “I’m sorry that I didn’t remember.”

“It’s quite alright, love, you’ve doubtless had to do a good many of those ceremonies.”

“It sounds like you remember me, though,” she comments.

Killian bashfully reaches for his ear, only to realize that with the hook, that’d be a terrible idea likely ending in injury. “Aye, well, I was a 23 year old lad, still wet behind the ears, and quite smitten.”

“Oh really?” Emma laughs back, clearly amused by the idea.

“Oh, aye. Absolutely smitten. You were all lightness and smiles and grace, and I was lost. Liam gave me a good bit of grief about it, actually.”

Something about that makes Emma go quiet again. When she finally speaks, it damn near breaks Killian’s heart to hear. “I’m sorry I’m not that girl anymore,” she tells him.

“I’m not that man, either. It’s been eight years; we both grew and changed. I don’t think the younger Emma and I would get on well, not with the man I’ve become,” he replies. He should stop there, but dangerous words bubble on the back of his tongue, and he can’t help but let them spill out. Oh well; instinct has served him well thus far where Emma’s concerned, anyways. “Just because you’re not that innocent, lighthearted girl anymore doesn’t make you any less enchanting. You’ve become so much more in the ensuing years - a strong, capable woman who’s all the more beautiful for it. Any man who doesn’t prefer the woman you’ve become over the girl you were is a fool.”

“And are you a fool, Lieutenant Jones?” Emma asks, stepping into his space to rest her delicate hands on his chest.

Killian swallows, working up his courage again; this feels like a major moment. “Not in that regard.”

She smiles, one hand gently stroking over his heart. “Enchanting, huh?”

Killian finds himself moving once more on instinct - his stump to rest lightly on her hip, and his hand to tilt her chin up to meet his eyes. “Utterly enchanting,” he whispers, before finally leaning down the last little distance required to capture her lips in a gentle kiss. Maybe it’s improper to be kissing his Queen, but in truth, Emma’s stopped being his Queen long ago to become just Emma, his love.

He’d be more than happy just to spend an eternity on those gentle brushes of their lips, but when Emma starts brushing at the seam of his lips with her tongue, seeking to deepen the exchange… well, he’d be a fool to deny her. And as he said before, Killian Jones is no fool.

The kiss is everything he could want, everything he’s dreamed of in weeks and months of pining. Emma’s hair is indescribably soft between his fingers where his hand has made its way into the strands, as is her hand where it grips at his neck. Her fingers playing with the ends of his hair are enough to make him shudder, ultimately breaking their back and forth of tongues and lips and teeth. That’s probably ultimately a good thing; he’s been told that breathing is important, though it’s never seemed more overrated than in this moment.

As Emma steps away, his stomach plummets - did she not enjoy that the way he did? Did he overstep? - but she just smiles, bending to pick up her discarded sword and twirling it around in an elaborate arc.

“What do you say, Lieutenant?” She smirks. “Up for another sparring session?”

(If that wink at the end is any indication, Killian doesn’t think she means swordplay - at least, not in the traditional sense.)

Laughing - laughing! Emma laughing! - she makes a dash for his private quarters, Killian eagerly giving chase and making sure to shut and bolt the door behind them. Even if no one usually comes to the library this time of night, he’s not taking any chances. Killian turns back around just in time to see Emma drop the sword and toss herself onto the bed in a fit of giggles, bouncing a little as she attempts to arrange herself. He’s only too happy to join her, tackling her back onto the pillows before bracing himself above her.

It’s been a while since he’s done this, the years since he lost his hand and spent living with his brother’s family not exactly conducive to an active sex life, but he remembers well enough to manage. It helps that Emma’s got her loose nightdress and underdrawers for him to deal with, having left her dressing gown outside. He draws the garments off her body in between hungry kisses and Emma seems only too happy to help him do the same, working on the laces of his pants as he tosses his hook Gods-only-know-where and whips his shirt over his head. Her fingers seem to trace over his erection more than they strictly need to as she loosens the laces, the devious little minx. Then again, once her self-assigned task is done, she does reach inside to grip and stroke him with one hand while the other works his pants down his thighs, so complaints seem a little ridiculous.

He has to pull away briefly to finish removing his pants, but that’s probably a blessing in disguise; not much longer and he would have lost all reason and control. As it is, when he returns, now able to lie flesh to flesh, he can return the favor.

Certain things, as it turns out, are still buried in his memory, like that thing with his tongue that always drove the ladies crazy back in the Navy. It has much the same effect on Emma, especially when paired with fingers plunging, stroking inside her as his tongue and lips go to work on her sensitive nub. In contrast, he thought he remembered exactly the way it felt when a woman clenched in climax around his fingers, that surge of masculine pride to match the cresting of her ardor, but with Emma it seems sweeter, better earned.

(That may just be the taste of her release on his lips, however. He’s more than satisfied, either way.)

The sex itself is, not to understate the matter, glorious. There’s always some adjustment with a new partner, learning a rhythm both can follow, but with Emma he falls into sync quickly in a perfect balance of her hips arching upwards and his driving forward on long, delicious thrusts. It’s probably a miracle he’s able to bring her to completion again along with him, the time it’s been since his last encounter bringing him close in an embarrassing amount of time, but he’s able to brace himself on his left arm and reach down to rub just above where they’re joined while mouthing at one of her breasts and somehow, some way, it’s just enough to get her there, the tight clasp of her flesh quickly pulling him after her.

It’s easy to pull her into his arms afterwards, tucking her lithe body against his side and letting their legs tangle together. Maybe there will be a second round later, but for the moment, sleep is calling. Anything else can wait.

“Those are some impressive sword skills you’ve got there, Lieutenant,” Emma mumbles, voice somewhat muffled by the way she buries her face in his still-naked chest. “I insist that we continue our dueling later.”

Killian chuckles tiredly, letting a content little smile appear on his face. “As you wish, milady.”

———

It’s hard to pull himself out of slumber’s grasp, but years in the Navy mean that Killian is dragged back to awareness by the distant sounds of shouting. There’s an urge to just ignore it, to not open his eyes, to let himself slip back into sleep; the events of the night prior were so wonderful he’s frankly afraid they were all a dream, and he’s not anxious to wake up and discover that for certain. Emma stirs a little in his arms, though, and it’s suddenly easier to open his eyes when faced with that proof. He’s eager to see what she looks like in the disarray of the morning anyways.

Beautiful, as it turns out - exquisitely rumpled, with her hair tumbling every which way on the pillow and a peaceful little smile on her face. Killian would be happy just to watch her all morning, but the shouting sounds again, and he’s on instant alert. Not a dream, then.

“Emma,” he hisses, shaking her by the shoulder. “Darling, wake up.”

“Don’ wanna,” she mumbles, trying to turn her face into the pillow.

“Emma, something’s wrong,” he insists. “You’ve got to get up.”

Just at that moment an almighty clatter sounds in the hallways, snapping her to awareness. “What the hell was that?”

“I don’t know. Let me find out.” Quickly, Killian grabs his trousers off the floor, quickly sliding into the legs and tying the laces in a sloppy knot. His first instinct is to walk out into the library, but instinct tells him to check first. Sure enough, as he peeps through the little peephole in his door, they’re not alone. Killian’s blood suddenly runs cold; standing in his library is a strange man holding a sword and wearing a cloak emblazoned with the emblem of Camelot.

“We’ve been infiltrated,” he calls back to Emma as quietly as he can. It’s unnecessary; she’s wiggled into his shirt and crept right up beside him. Killian would take more time to marvel at the sight of her lovely long legs poking out the bottom of his shirt if it wasn’t for the circumstances. As it is, she’s already pushing him aside to take her own peek, just as the man outside cackles with glee.

“I know you’re in here, Your Majesty!” he calls. Emma’s face blanches at the taunt, abruptly swinging away from the little peephole.

“Do you know him?” Killian asks urgently.

“It’s King Arthur,” she hisses back, “though Gods only know what the hell he’s doing here.”

“I know you’ve been speaking with my wife, corrupting my wife,” the intruder continues, conveniently answering Emma’s question. “I know you’ve been trying to steal my country out from under me, you and that traitor Lancelot. I know!” The more the enemy king speaks, the more manic his voice becomes. Killian is suddenly reminded of Emma’s summary of her meeting - that Queen Guinevere feared the King had gone mad. It certainly seems like that’s the case, if the ranting man in the other room is any indication.

“How does he know you’re here?” Killian whispers in question. Arthur shouldn’t have that information.

“My robe,” Emma explains. “It was a gift Guinevere gave me at the meeting, one of a collection of peace offerings. It’s made from very distinctive Camelot silk.”

That would explain it. The how is somewhat irrelevant though, as they’re forced to deal with Arthur’s presence regardless. Killian does his best to tune out the raving as he attempts to come up with a plan. No one knows Emma is here; realistically, no one is coming to save them. As it is, they’re two against one. He’s got his old officer’s sword in his wardrobe, and if worst comes to worst Emma’s blunted sword can be used as a distraction, maybe convince Arthur they’re better armed than they actually are. Play this right, and they might just survive.

“We’re going to have to take him,” Killian tells Emma, as seriously as he can manage.

“Why can’t we just stay here?” Emma hisses back.

“We can have the advantage right now - two against one. Eventually others are going to show up to help Arthur, or he’ll figure out how to swing around and through the bedroom window, and we don’t want either of those things to happen. It’s better for us to fight now, while we’ve still got the best chance to take him out.” As he talks, Killian searches for his hook, finally spotting it underneath his chair.

“What do you want me to do?” Emma asks as he clicks the instrument into his brace. Every weapon could prove a crucial advantage.

“Stay behind me, try to get to some other weapon. I think there’s some historic rapier down in the archive, if you can make it,” he instructs, tossing Emma the blunted sword and moving to retrieve his own weapon. He’s the better swordsman, but it’s better for her to have that than nothing at all. “Ready?”

Just then, Arthur pounds on the door. “Come out and face me, bitch!”

Emma nods in determination. “Ready.”

Killian counts down under his breath, before nodding at Emma to open the door. She shoves it back with force, managing to catch Arthur in the face; the idiot had still been standing right there. He reels back with a sudden gush of blood from his presumably broken nose. That’s good for them; he’s already at a disadvantage.

“You’ll pay for that,” he snarls, lunging forward towards Emma, but Killian blocks the way, raising his sword and forcing the other man to either engage or get slashed.

From there, it’s a furious battle. Killian knows he’s in a fight for both their lives, this spar more important than even any battle he was part of in the Navy, and pours every ounce of his energy into the duel. His arms ache and he’s drenched in sweat, but there’s no quitting, no resting, because Emma’s life is in his hand - his Queen, his love - and failure is not an option.

Killian’s got Arthur firmly on the defensive, but he’s tiring quickly, and the other man could certainly turn that into his advantage. He’s lost track of Emma, which scares him to pieces, but he’s got the madman in front of him on tenterhooks and he knows Arthur hasn’t been able to reach her. That’ll have to be enough.

It’s almost not, though, because Killian makes a stupid mistake, glances his hip off of one of the tables scattered around the room. He’s distracted only for a moment, trying to make sure he doesn’t trip over the table leg, but Arthur takes that advantage, pressing forward with a crazed look in his eyes. Suddenly his strikes are coming faster and faster and Killian feels the panic rise as he suddenly knows the tides have turned, and not in his favor -

And then, by some miracle, Arthur crumples. Casting darting eyes around him, Killian spots Emma, still poised with a heavy book held aloft where she struck their enemy into unconsciousness.

“Are you alright?” she asks urgently.

“Aye, love,” Killian wheezes back, “just a bit winded. Well done.”

“Thanks,” she replies, tossing the tome aside and making Killian wince. Luckily, when he catches a glimpse of the title, it’s an out-of-date atlas; that probably needs to be removed from the collection anyways. “Now, I don’t suppose you have any rope around?” Killian shakes his head, still too out of breath to speak more than strictly necessary. “That’s fine,” Emma replies. “I’ll just use the belt from that damn robe.”

Gods, he loves her. Killian silently blesses whatever actions of instinct have brought them here, because he’s never encountered any woman more fascinating and magnificent.

A couple of guardsmen, fresh off subduing Arthur’s soldiers, passes by soon enough and is happy to carry the disgraced King down to the dungeons. Thankfully, Emma finds a way to close her robe even without the belt; as keen as Killian is on her excellent arse, he’s not quite as fond of the idea of everyone else catching a glimpse. Graham still seems to know what’s going on anyways as he comes by to check on his goddaughter, rolling his eyes when he spots Killian’s stump arm draped around Emma’s waist, but that’s probably the best outcome they could hope for.

“I don’t suppose you’d like to stay here the rest of the night,” Killian murmurs in her ear as the mass of worried advisors and guardsmen and seemingly everyone else in the damn palace who needed to check on her begins to disperse. It’s obvious that she’s loved by everyone around her, but for the moment, Killian’s more interested in indulging the fledgling affection between just the two of them.

Luckily, Emma smiles back up at him through heavy-lidded, exhausted eyes. “You’ve got yourself a deal, Lieutenant.”

He’s the luckiest bastard alive.

———

Lancelot is more than happy to take Arthur off their hands, meeting the carriage at the Misthaven-Camelot border after freeing Queen Guinevere - soon to be Queen Regnant Guinevere - from the dungeon of Avalon Castle, where the deposed king will himself await trial. Liam and Graham are even happier to be relieved him, however, after being treated to several days of the king’s raving, the speech impediment caused by his broken nose doing nothing to rein him in.

(It probably doesn’t help either that Arthur keeps shouting about sees fugging da buhworm! Killian had tried to convince his brother that he didn’t need to be the one to volunteer to see this through, but Liam had some idea in his head that after Arthur endangered his younger brother, it’s his personal duty to see this through. So really, it’s his own fault that he’s forced to hear about Killian’s love life from a madman.)

(Killian does find himself wishing they had gagged the crazy bastard when Liam goes off on his own rant about bad form and defiling the Queen. Especially since if anyone’s doing the defiling, it’s Emma herself, at least if the nail marks down his back and the lovebite barely covered by his shirt are any indication.)

Killian’s tenure as the palace librarian ends up being a relatively short one, but he’s fine with that. He accomplished a lot while he was in the position, and he’s sure the next occupant will bring their own remarkable skills.

His own excellent instincts tell him he’d be an idiot to turn down the promotion anyways. Prince Consort really does have a nice ring to it.

#cs ff #cs january joy #csjj #captain swan #my writing #The Queen's Librarian #librarian!Killian #queen!Emma #lieutenant swan #is that a thing?#it is now

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ncfan-1 · 7 years ago

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ncfan listens to The Magnus Archives: S1 EP034 (’Anatomy Class’), EP035 (’Old Passages’), & EP036 (’Taken Ill’)

A bizarre kind of comedy episode (at least it is to me), and lots of juicy, juicy plot.

No spoilers past Season 1, please!

EP 034: ‘Anatomy Class’

- There is something bizarrely hilarious about the story this episode. Yeah, the seven ‘students’ killed at least one person and drove a professor to suicide, but there’s just something so ridiculous about beings who are pretending to be human but are so bad at it that they have to take an anatomy class, and can’t hide it well enough to keep their professor from noticing. And they used placeholder names, and presumably had to exert a considerable amount of supernatural influence (presumably the same influence that keeps more people from noticing that they’re really bad at pretending to be human) to keep people from noticing how off that is. It has all the makings of a weird, gory comedy.

- Here is, I believe, our third statement so far given directly by the statement-maker. This time, it’s a college professor who seems more than a little rattled by everything that happened to him.

- And now we have our first indication that people from outside the Institute know there’s an infestation problem.

- So Dr. Elliott walks into his class to find it populated entirely by pod people. He takes this as well as you might expect.

- The fact that these people are so uncanny and that there seems to be a lot of supernatural “interference” radiating off of them (the fact that Dr. Elliott can’t remember what any of them looked like, and the fact that he didn’t notice anything odd about their names) makes me think a little of Not-Graham. At the same time, though, their ability to manipulate their own bones puts me in mind of Jared Hopworth. I wonder if a bone turner could create a new person from pilfered bones and black magic.

- The detail about Dr. Elliott suddenly being able to hear them breathing is… something. Although he doesn’t seem to want to think about it, the fact that he could only hear them breathing after a certain point implies that they weren’t breathing before.

- They’re very brazen, these seven, altering their bones right in front of the professor, when they must know he can hear them, and probably guess what’s happening. It implies that they are very secure in their ability to escape any and all consequences, which means it’s just as well that Dr. Elliott never confronted any of them about what he had been seeing and hearing.

- I’m sorry. I know the thing with the hearts is supposed to be horrific, but it’s funny. When I listen to this scene, I find myself close to snickering by the end.

- What really makes it funny is that the ‘students’ were polite enough to clean up the lab after they coated it in blood.

- And the tooth-apple is so bizarre I start giggling to myself when I think about it. Jonathan’s reluctant “Did you… eat it?” just makes it even better. Why would they do that? How would they do that?

- I know there’s no reason to believe the other professor didn’t commit suicide, but the first time I listened to this episode, I’d assumed he was so bad at teaching to the ‘students’’ satisfaction that they had killed him, and left that note because they thought that even his corpse would be worthless for educational purposes.

EP 035: ‘Old Passages’

- This is another favorite, not least because we have another appearance of Gerard Keay, and because I think this is the first episode where we’re really presented with a vague outline of the other forces at work in the world besides humanity.

- So I looked them up (being an American, I don’t know these things off the top of my head), and apparently Pall Mall is a swanky shopping district/home to prestigious clubs. The Reform Club is one of those, a private club that was men-only until 1881; if Wikipedia is to be believed, it was the first of London’s gentlemen clubs to open its doors to female members. It’s a popular haunt of political progressives.

- Robert Smirke was a real-life architect. As best as I can tell (I didn’t dig too deep; I don’t have that kind of time), his association with the occult is native to The Magnus Archives.

- And here comes Gerard, a skinny teenager in 2002 with a band t-shirt and a portable CD player. I had one of those. I’ve noticed that people heavily associated with the supernatural shrug a lot.

- The implication here seems to be that Mary Keay sent her kid down to some incredibly dangerous tunnel network to pick up a Leitner book for her. Lady, why don’t you do that yourself instead of sending your kid to risk his neck? What the hell.

- I think this is also my first semi-direct glimpse of Jurgen Leitner, and he sounds about as sketchy as I had thought he’d be. “Some things are too powerful to be owned.” And yet you’re meddling with them anyways.

- “Can you smell it?” Can Gerard sense the supernatural, or something?

- I wonder what the scream was about.

- There are fourteen passages out from the star, including the one Harold, Rachel, Alf, and Gerard went in through. And several of those fourteen are extremely reminiscent of entities/phenomena that’s been experienced in other statements in Season 1.

1. The one they walk in through out of the basement gives Alf and Harold a sense of claustrophobia, similar to ‘Lost John’s Cave.’

2. One is so dark that the flashlights could only penetrate a couple of feet before the light failed—‘A Father’s Love’ and ‘Growing Dark.’

3. One, if you look into it, makes you feel like you’re falling into it—the sense of vertigo induced in some readers by Ex Altiorā in ‘Page Turner.’

4. One makes you feel like you’re burning—‘Burned Out’ (and ‘Confession’), and the later ‘Burnt Offering.’

5. Pages covered in cobwebs—‘Arachnophobia’, ‘Burned Out’ (Tangentially).

6. The one Gerard runs down to get the book has walls covered in what is almost certainly blood—‘The Man Upstairs’ and ‘Killing Floor.’

7. One has at the end of the corridor a stranger Harold was certain meant him harm—the Not-Them, perhaps, seen in ‘Across the Street’, and later in the finale.

So… Fourteen passages, fourteen parent entities? Or was that just Smirke’s assumption?

- Jurgen Leitner has definitely been messing with things he shouldn’t have been.

- The inscription on the date stone, “Balance and fear,” makes the audio distort.

- I wonder if there’s any significance to Robert Smirke having built this in 1835.

- The book Gerard grabs seems to drop small animal bones behind it; this is almost certainly the book the ghost of Mary Keay (if that was even Mary Keay at all) showed Dominic Swain in ‘Page Turner.’

- I’d say the owners of the Reform Club know at least part of what’s up with that star and those passages, for them to insist that the builders rebuild the wall and not pry into it any further. So what’s up with them?

- “And I can’t help but wonder whether that was where they were found, or just where they were stored.” Which suggests that Jurgen Leitner’s books are far more vital to the plot than even past episodes would suggest.

- Tim’s interest in architecture, and Robert Smirke in particular makes me wonder if said interest will come up again.

- Smirke wanted to design churches? Uh, Jonathan, I wouldn’t be so certain he wasn’t designing churches, or at least chapels, considering the one we saw in ‘Growing Dark.’

- I think this is the first time we see worms loose in the Institute building.

- The last bit of the episode is devoted to Martin running into two deliverymen who it’s safe to say are from Breekon & Hope, delivering something to the Archives. Which is fairly ominous, to be honest.

EP 036: ‘Taken Ill’

- This one has a great atmosphere to it.

- As Jonathan pointed out, the way Nicole talks about her fears, and about insects and decay, and her use of the phrase “bleed into” is very similar to Jane Prentiss’s narration in ‘Hive.’ I get the impression that perhaps whatever was behind the deterioration of the nursing home in this episode is connected to the Flesh Hive, or is perhaps part of the same parent entity. After being touched by the pus oozing from that corpse, maybe Nicole got a flash of that visceral feeling, too.

- This one is kind of hard, because both of my grandfathers live in nursing homes. My maternal grandfather has dementia and can’t be cared for at home. It would be perhaps more accurate to say that my paternal grandfather is in assisted living; he’s close to ninety and has gotten to be very frail, and after he had a stroke, he decided he needed to be somewhere he could get immediate medical attention if something went wrong again. I don’t like the idea of someone exploitative taking over their homes.

- “I don’t know why I wrote ‘disease’ just then.” I think I do.

- It’s interesting that Alenka was still trying to call Nicole after the nursing home was decommissioned and John Amherst came in and started enforcing the “new order.” It sounds like he tried to enforce that new order unilaterally, without the consent of at least some of the staff who remained after it was decommissioned.

- The detail about the heat is important to the episode, I think. In my experience, the summer heat is oppressive, and especially so because summer here is so humid. It’s thick and close and cloying; the air is too damp for your sweat to evaporate and cool you off, so it just sticks to you while you get hotter and hotter and hotter. I’ve heard it’s very humid in the UK as well, so I imagine summer feels much the same there as it does here.

- I’m guessing John Amherst is one of those people who’s only human in appearance. I can’t see any normal, conscious human not reacting as a fly crawls over their eye.

- It sounds like Amherst was trying to turn the entire building into one big pus-oozing wound.

- The fact that the pus could make Nicole’s skin burn even through a (presumably latex) glove gives the lie to Amherst’s claim that what killed Miller wasn’t contagious. If you didn’t automatically assume he was lying, that is.

- Nicole’s uncle seemed to grasp at least part of what had happened to Bertrand Miller. Why the calls he made didn’t result in the nursing home being cracked down on, I can’t imagine—I can only assume the reasons fell under some category of “Not my problem.” At least he tried, anyways.

- I can just imagine the uneasy pall over everything as Nicole drove back to Ivy Meadows that last time. I can just see the sky turning red as the afternoon grew older and the shadows growing—no breeze, nothing to break the rolling walls of heat. Just still air, so close it’s hard to breathe.

- The detail about the plants turning white reminds me of the plants in front of the farmhouse in The Colour Out of Space.

- Alenka banging on the window, it becoming clear her last phone call was a last-ditch cry for help, is a horrible moment, even before the flies enter the picture. Because we just see her. What about the residents still trapped in the building with her?

- It’s clear that the man who tackles Nicole is Trevor Herbert. This is the first time since ‘Vampire Hunter’ that we’ve seen someone out and about with the explicit purpose of hunting down and destroying supernatural threats (Well, asides from Gerard Keay, but there’s a caveat there in that I can’t tell if he proactively hunts them, or if this shit just sort of happens to him). They’re thematically linked, and the physical descriptions match up. This, despite the fact that Trevor Herbert is supposed to be dead. Don’t know who the woman with him is supposed to be; I hope we’ll see her again.

- The fact that John Amherst doesn’t seem to even officially exist further suggests that whatever he is, he’s not human.

- “Workplace accident.” Yeah, sure. I hope, at least, that getting rid of the hand means that the infection can’t spread any further.

- And Jonathan finds out about the deliveries. The smaller of the two packages is a lighter with a spider web design on it, and the larger is… worrying. The table from ‘Across the Street.’ Oh, that’s not good.

#ncfan listens to The Magnus Archives

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dietplan5 · 3 years ago

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Choose fresh fruits instead of drinking juices of fruit. Certain juices are more packed with sugar that they are more as soda pops. Fresh fruit is the preferred choice as it is a great source of minerals, fiber and vitamins that aid in the treatment of some chronic illnesses such as cardiovascular problems.

Make sure you select dairy products with consideration. Although dairy products are rich in calcium, potassium as well as vitamin D and protein You should select low-fat or fat-free options. Consume low-fat or skim milk as this will reduce calories, but not the nutrients. If lactose is not a food you can digest you can consider soy milk or lactose-free milk.

Make sure not to add meat and other proteins into your diet! The muscles require protein to develop and meat is among the most important sources to ensure optimal growth. You should aim to consume at least 10 ounces of protein per day.

This could include anyone who has gone through the same thing you are experiencing, or perhaps someone who is going through the same thing you're going through now. It is important that you show support and encourage.

Consume healthy, nutritious meals that are smaller in size and are more nutritious throughout the day. Consuming small portions of food often throughout the day will improve digestion and help to keep your weight in check. Being in control of your weight can help prevent illnesses like hypertension and diabetes. Regular eating helps prevent becoming hungry, and it ensures that you'll overindulge in unhealthy foods.

Make an effort to eliminate unhealthy snacks like sodas and biscuits.

You'll need to cut out certain items from your diet to improve nutrition. Sugars could harm your nutrition goals. Additionally, food items that are described as "white such as rice and bread, don't have the same amount of nutrients as their brown counterparts. Thirdly, you should avoid trans and saturated fats. Instead, stay with healthy fats.

Avoid eating sugary kid cereals for breakfast. They are full of sugar as well as other chemicals, they may even contain trans fats.

drinking enough water throughout the day is an the best way to stay in good health. It is recommended to drink at minimum eight glasses of fluids each throughout the day.

Substitute dairy products with healthier alternatives. Evaporated milk that is fat-free can be used to replace cream in many cream. You can also substitute the ricotta cheese instead of cream cheese. It is possible to substitute these ingredients while still being able to take pleasure in delicious foods that contain dairy.

However, in recent times seafood has been replaced by diets of meat and poultry. Seafood is an excellent choice because it doesn't have as much saturated fat and sodium as meats like red. There's also lots of Omega-3 through this method. Include different types in fish to your daily meals regularly.

One method to enhance your diet by eating healthier by setting meals that you take your meals every day.

It's nearly impossible to maintain your health without proper nutrition. If you know what your body requires in order to devise a plan that allows your body to achieve its full potential. Keep in mind the tips given to you and you'll become better off within a matter of minutes.

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another-lost-one · 7 years ago

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Hannibal Rewatch

108, Fromage

Will

This is the first time Will is experiencing outright hallucinations in the series (but for the first time ever? I couldn’t say for sure), it differs from his usual night terrors, which is why he cannot differentiate between them and what is really happening at first. All three times, it’s the same auditory hallucination, a sound which speaks to his emphatic mind the most - an animal, in distress and possibly wounded. It is interesting that in all three instances, he hears the sounds in a moment of confident work; fixing a boat motor, tying his fishing lures, interviewing a potential murder suspect.

The hallucinations establish Will as the unreliable narrator that he is in this episode; when we see the happenings from his point of view, we have to assume that not everything we see/hear is real. The capturing of this establishment is done quite subtly and very skilled: the first time, Will hears a sound and goes to investigate, and the viewers are as curious as he is as to what the source of the sound was. Not finding anything, we are equally disappointed and puzzled as Will. Nothing in this makes us doubt what is happening; Will lives in the middle of nowhere and such a noise seems quite likely.

The second time Will hears a noise in his chimney; again, it is possible that his assumption of a racoon caught in there is correct, even though destroying his wall above the mantelpiece is a little radical of a solution but still, it is believable, However, what made me double back is that his dogs were completely calm - one would expect them to catch the sound before Will did, and make a ruckus about it, especially with them being so many. When Will does not find anything, it confirms the doubt in the viewer’s mind, there was no sound at all. Alana acts as a confirmation here, she also knows that there was nothing in Will’s chimney, and upon seeing the havoc he caused in his living room, mirrors the concern we feel for him.

The third time, Will must be aware that he might be possible hallucinating, but goes after the sound anyway. Ultimately, him leaving the Chordophone might have saved his life, but his distress is clearly shown to the viewers now; trembling, breathing heavily, taking his meds.

Will taking his medication occurs one more time in the episode, when he is left alone with the dead displayed trombonist. He defiantly swallows is pills in front of Jack Crawford, to prove a point; it’s not easy but he can handle this. When the team leaves, Will is in control. He said the looking is not getting easier, but he manages to get a much clearer picture of the murderer than with for example the Angel Maker or the Mushroom Farmer. Is it because this murderer had a less complex mind to figure out? I disagree and put forward this theory: it is indeed getting easier for Will to look, hence the quicker made profile of this killer, but it is getting harder for Will to come back. In the morgue, while examining the victim’s corpse, Will relapsed into the mind of his killer (“Had to open you up to get a decent sound out of you.”), creeping out not only his colleagues, but also himself.

Furthermore, this theory is supported by Will’s confession in Hannibal’s office later. To Hannibal’s question what he sees behind closed eyes, Will answers “Myself,” but actually refers to him seeing Garret Jacob Hobbs, so does that mean that Will is feeling himself slipping into the darkness? To Will, Hobbs first started to appear as an image, but this time he is actively participating in Will’s mind, while he is recreating the crime scene. Will sees Hobbs in the audience, watching him do ‘his thing’ and Hobbs approves of… what? That Will has it figured out? The way in which Hobbs is imagined seems more mocking than genuinely impressed, which makes me think Hobbs is there representing Will’s fear of becoming one of them. He is already seeing things, looking is easier, understanding has always been easy, but coming back to himself is getting harder every time, and all of this scares Will so much because becoming one of them is the one thing he has been trying to avoid his whole life.

Hannibal

Last week, we gained an insight in the less-gentlemanly and more homicidal tendencies of the good doctor, and this insight continues in this episode, even though more subtle.

Hannibal is a curious person. He likes to prod and poke certain scenarios into existence, just for the sake of seeing what will happen, which makes him a dangerous psychiatrist to have, as Franklyn unfortunately (for him) got to experience. Their scenes together provide for a comical element in the show, with Hannibal being so obviously done with Franklyn that we can even feel sorry for the doctor while laughing at the faces he makes (subtly, of course). But Hannibal’s patient unknowingly takes up a messenger-type role in this episode, with Tobias Budge using him to provide Hannibal with hints about his person. But one thing struck me as especially fascinating; Franklyn mentions that Tobias had been making ‘weird comments’ lately, which he found so creepy he looked up articles about psychopaths on Google and asked Hannibal for his opinion. If we assume that Tobias knows exactly how much his friend tells his psychiatrist, this has been a deliberate choice of his. That, in turn, must mean that in the short time Hannibal had the chance to talk to Franklyn and Tobias at the Hunger Relief Concert, Tobias recognized him for what he was, which is incredibly and unbelievably perceptive.

When they finally meet, both aware of the other in Tobias’ shop, they keep up the charade in which ‘composition’ becomes a lovely euphemism for homicide, their politeness toward each other almost sickeningly oversaturated. But being the curious cat he is, Hannibal wants to see Tobias, get to know him, which is why they eat dinner together at Hannibal’s home. They both, as it turns out, yearn for a companion (in whichever way the word can be taken, one who understand them completely), but rejects Tobias’ offer for friendship when he realizes how unworthy of it he really is. In other words, Hannibal hates his guts (pun intended).

Still, when Will interrupts his dinner and Tobias leaves, Hannibal looks forward to seeing what Tobias does next, especially in concern to the investigation he actively sends on Tobias’ path. He is curious if Tobias will be able to get rid of them, and looks forward to killing him in case he does.

What baffles me, however, is his reaction to Will in this episode. Last week clearly established his way of thinking and choosing his victims; he eats the rude. But let’s take a look at Will here; he barges into Hannibal’s home without invitation and at a late hour, even let’s himself in without waiting for Hannibal’s invitation, discards his jacket carelessly in the hallway, and continues to invade Hannibal’s space ahead of the doctor. And all that with “I kissed Alana Bloom” as both greeting and explanation. What does Hannibal do? He stands there, unhelpful and stiff, and only manages a “Well, come in” against the onstorm of Will Graham in his space. He doesn’t even chasticize Will for his behavior, but grants him an ear to rant to, followed by consideration and advice. Even in their sessions, Will is not confined to the typical patient - therapist position in their respective chairs; Hannibal let’s him invade his space, and Will is in turn comfortable enough to drive an hour in the snow to the doctor’s house only to tell him about his failed attempt at romance. Hannibal then goes on and talks to Bedelia about his opportunity for friendship, making it clear that despite their different world views and moralities, Will is a more compatible companion that Tobias could ever be.

Still, at the end of their conversation, Hannibal practically sends Will into the arms of a murderer, with little to no hesitation.

Then however, when Tobias barges into his session with Franklyn and confesses killing two men who came to investigate him, there is a flicker of emotion on Hannibal’s face - is it the thought that Will might have been among the two, is he disappointed, or is it something else?

I think the answer to that might be his face when Will walks into his office, after Hannibal killed Tobias Budge; for a fracture of a moment, there is a smile, almost too quick to notice, as if he is positively surprised that Will is alive (and can we talk about the glossy eyes when he looks at Will and says “I was worried you were dead” please?). Not to mention their dialogue afterwards, which is just too precious for us as viewers, because Will feels so responsible for Hannibal, since it was Will who ‘dragged him into his world’ when we know that it is quite the other way around.

(fun fact: in the original script, Will takes a gauze and dabs some blood off Hannibal’s forehead as they speak, and i think that’s very important. in case you doubt it, source)

(fun fact no.2: all the scripts can be found online, complete and for free if anyone wants to be a big nerd like me and do comparisons)

#nbc hannibal #hannibal rewatch #long post #meta #hannibal meta #analysis #character development #episode analysis #im just a big nerd for hannibal #i love this show #hannibal lecter #will graham #meta data

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royallypsychotic · 4 years ago

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High Replica Bags Silicon Soap Replica Designer Bags Mold

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talabib · 4 years ago

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How To Become An Intelligent Investor

Have you ever thought about investing in the stock market? Many of us have given it serious consideration. Yet, most of us have been hesitant to take action due to the financial crises, burst bubbles and economic crashes we’ve witnessed.

However, there is a way to invest in the market that doesn’t leave you at risk of losing everything: intelligent investing. First outlined by Benjamin Graham in 1949, intelligent investing takes a longer-term, more risk-averse approach to the stock market. And it works.

In the decades since The Intelligent Investor was published, many have used Graham’s approach and made fortunes, among them, perhaps the most famous is Warren Buffett.

This post, based on Graham’s original advice, shows how you can become an intelligent investor yourself.

Intelligent investors don’t rush in; they take time to rationally examine a company’s long-term value.

There is a lot of money to be made through investing. But also a lot to lose. Finance history is full of stories of investors like Warren Buffett, who, by investing in the right companies, earned vast amounts of money in return. There are just as many — if not more — stories of misfortune, in which people place the wrong bets and end up losing it all.

So, we have to ask ourselves: is investment really worth the risk? The answer is yes, it can be, so long as you follow the strategy of intelligent investing.

Intelligent investors use thorough analyses in order to secure safe and steady returns. This is very different from speculating, in which investors focus on short-term gains made possible by market fluctuations. Speculations are thus very risky, simply because nobody can predict the future.

For example, a speculator might hear a rumor that Apple will soon release a new hit product, and would then be motivated to buy lots of Apple stocks. If she’s lucky, then this knowledge will pay off and she’ll make money. If she’s unlucky and the rumor proves wrong, then she stands to lose a lot.

In contrast, intelligent investors focus on pricing. These investors buy stock only when its price is below its intrinsic value, i.e., its value as it relates to a company’s propensity for growth.

As an intelligent investor, you’ll buy a stock only if you believe there is a probable margin between what you pay and what you will earn as the company grows. Think of this margin of safety the same way you would if you were out shopping. An expensive dress, for example, is only worth it if you end up keeping it for a while. If the quality is insufficient, then you might as well buy a cheaper one that lasts for the same amount of time.

The life of an intelligent investor isn’t very exciting, but that’s not the point. The point is the profit.

Intelligent investing is broken down into three principles.

There are three principles that apply to all intelligent investors: First, intelligent investors analyze the long-term development and business principles of the companies in which they’re considering investing before buying any stock.

A stock’s long-term value is not arbitrary. Rather, it depends directly on how well the company behind it performs. So, be sure to examine the company’s financial structure, the quality of its management and whether it pays steady dividends, i.e., the distribution of profits to investors.

Don’t fall into the trap of only looking at short-term earnings. Look instead at the big picture by examining the company’s financial history.

These steps will give you a better idea of how well a company performs independent of its value on the market. For instance, a company that isn’t currently popular (and therefore has low share price) but shows promising records, i.e., has earned consistent profits, is likely undervalued, and would thus make a prudent investment.

Second, intelligent investors protect themselves against serious losses by diversifying their investments. Never put all your money on one stock, no matter how promising it appears!

Just imagine the horror you would feel if the promising company that you poured all your investments into shows up in the news for a tax fraud scandal. Your investment will lose its value immediately, and all that time and money will be lost forever. By diversifying, you ensure that you won’t lose everything at once.

Finally, intelligent investors understand that they won’t pull in extraordinary profits, but safe and steady revenues.

The target for the intelligent investor is to meet her personal needs, not to outperform the professional stockbrokers on Wall Street. We can’t do better than those who trade for a living, and we shouldn’t be aiming for fast money anyway; chasing dollar signs only makes us greedy and careless.

Intelligent investors understand the importance of stock-market history.

The first thing you should do before you invest isn’t to look at a stock’s history. That’s important, sure, but what’s more important is looking at the history of the stock market itself.

Looking back through history reveals that the stock market has always been defined by regular ups and downs. Often, these fluctuations can’t be foreseen. The unpredictability of the market means that investors need to be prepared – financially and psychologically.

Economic crises, like the Wall Street crash in 1929, are a fact of life, and happen from time to time. Thus you need to ensure that you can take a big hit and survive. This means that you should have a diverse stock portfolio, so your investments don’t all get hit at once.

What’s more, you should be mentally and psychologically prepared for crisis. Don’t sell everything at the first sign of danger. Remember instead that, even after the most devastating crashes, the market will always recover.

And while you can’t predict every crisis, looking at the history of the market will give you a better idea of its stability.

Once you’ve determined that the market is stable, focus on the history of the company in which you’d like to invest.

Look, for example, at the correlation between stock price and the company’s earnings and dividends over the past ten years. Then consider the inflation rate, i.e., the rise in prices generally, in order to see how much you’d really earn, all things considered.

For example, you calculate a 7-percent return on investment within one year, but if inflation is at a 4-percent rate, then you’ll earn a return of only three percent. Think carefully about whether it’s worth the effort for only a three-percent return!

When it comes to shrewd trading, a knowledge of history is a fine weapon, so be sure to keep it sharp.

Don’t trust the crowd or the market.

To understand the whims of the market, it’s sometimes easier to imagine the entire stock market as being a person, let’s call him Mr. Market. As far as people go, Mr. Market is unpredictable, very moody and not very clever.

Mr. Market is easily influenced, and this causes him to have major mood swings. You can see this in practice in the way the market always swings back and forth between unsustainable optimism to unjustified pessimism.

When a new iPhone is released, for instance, people lose themselves in their excitement. Mr. Market is no different, and we see this reflected in the stock market when something exciting is about to happen: prices go up and people are more willing to overpay.

As result, when the market is too optimistic about future growth, stocks become too expensive. On the other hand, sometimes the market is too pessimistic, warning you to sell in unwarranted circumstances.

The intelligent investor needs to be a realist and stop herself from following the crowd. She should likewise ignore the mood swings of Mr. Market.

Moreover, when Mr. Market is happy, he makes you see future profits that aren’t really there.

Just because a stock generates profit in a given moment doesn’t necessarily mean that it will remain profitable forever. Quite the contrary: stocks that have been performing well are more likely to lose value in the near future because demand often inflates the price to the breaking point.

Even knowing this, it’s exceedingly easy to become enticed by short-term gains; we have evolved to easily recognize patterns, especially those that promise good things to come. In fact, people are so good at recognizing patterns that, when psychologists show them random sequences and even tell them that there is no pattern, they will still try to search for one.

Likewise, when we see profits rising and rising, we trick ourselves into seeing a pattern that we believe will continue.

By this point, you should understand the basic principles of intelligent investing. The following will offer you practical investment tips based on your unique investment style.

The defensive investor’s portfolio should be well balanced, safe and very easy to manage.

When you start on the path of investing, it’s important that you pick a strategy that best matches you as an individual. You’ll need to decide whether you’re a defensive investor or an enterprising investor. Right now, we’ll focus on the defensive investor:

The defensive investor hates risks. Thus, safety is her main focus. This safety can only be achieved if she diversifies her investments.

First, you should invest in both high-grade bonds, things like AAA government debt securities, as well as common stocks, by which your share of the company translates to voting power for major business decisions. Ideally, you should make around a 50-50 split between the two; or, for the extremely risk-averse investor, splits of 75 percent for bonds and 25 percent for stocks are acceptable.

Stocks and bonds have different degrees of safety and profitability: bonds are more secure but produce less profit, while stocks are less secure but can lead to greater rewards. This kind of diversification accounts for both tendencies.

Second, your common stock portfolio should be likewise diversified. Invest in big, well-known companies with long histories of success, and try investing in at least 10 different companies to reduce the risk.

This diversification might sound to you like more work than we initially promised, but don’t worry. To make things simpler, you’ll make use of the simplicity of choice:

When deciding on common stocks, it’s best not to reinvent the wheel. Look at the portfolios of well-established investment funds and simply align your portfolio with theirs. This doesn’t mean you should follow the bandwagon and buy the stocks that are fashionable. Rather, look for investment funds with a long history of success, and copy them.

Finally, always make sure to employ the services of an expert. They know the game better than you, and can guide you to making the best investment decisions. If you follow these simple principles, then your prudence will be rewarded sooner or later with good results.

Investing is easy when you follow the formula.

Once you’ve chosen the companies you want to invest in, then it’s time to congratulate yourself. Most of your work is now complete! Now all you have to do is determine how much money you want to regularly invest and check your stocks from time to time.

During this time, you will use a process called formula investing, in which you act strictly according to a predefined formula that determines how much money you will invest and how often. This approach is also called dollar-cost averaging, whereby you invest in a common stock every month or quarter and always with the same amount of money.

Once you’ve found a stock that you’ve determined to be safe and sound, you’ll want to set your investments on autopilot. Start by committing yourself to a certain amount of money, e.g., $50, which you will invest every few months. Then buy as many stocks as possible for your $50.

The advantage here is that you now have to exert no further effort. You won’t ever invest too much, and you certainly won’t gamble.

The disadvantage, however, lies in the emotional demands of formula investing. Even if the price for your target stock is a real bargain and you want to buy more, you’ve already limited yourself to spending only your limit.

Nevertheless, defensive investors should check from time to time to ensure that their investment portfolios are still running well.

A good rule for this is to readjust your portfolio’s division of common stocks and bonds every six months. Ask yourself: are my stocks still profitable? Is the ratio about the same as when I had initially invested (e.g., 50-50)?

Finally, you should seek out a professional once a year to consult about adjusting your funds.

You now know all you need to start your career as a defensive investor. The following will lay out the strategies you need to become a successful enterprising investor.

Enterprising investors start similarly to defensive investors.

To become a successful enterprising investor, you’ll want to employ many of the same strategies as defensive investors. Just like a defensive investor, you will divide your funds between bonds and common stocks.

Whereas the defensive investor will most often opt for a 50-50 split between stocks and bonds, the enterprising investor will invest more in common stocks, as they are more profitable (yet riskier). And just like the defensive investor, enterprising investors should also consult a financial planner.

However, the enterprising investor sees her financial planner not as a teacher, but rather as a partner in managing her money. That is, she is not led by her financial planner; they make decisions together.

In addition to using bonds and common stocks as the base for their portfolios, enterprising investors will also experiment with other kinds of stocks that have higher risk and higher reward.

For instance, you might have read about an up-and-coming start-up, and you suspect that it might be the next Google. In other words: it represents an amazing opportunity. As an enterprising investor, you have an opportunity to take a risk on this company, but only with a limited amount of money.

No matter how exciting or promising an investment opportunity seems, enterprising investors should limit these stocks to a maximum of 10 percent of her overall portfolio.

Remember: intelligent investors are not without fault, and sometimes Mr. Market is too wild for any rational person to predict. So, we have to place limits to protect our money in case of economic downturn or poor investment.

And like defensive investors, enterprising investors don’t forget that continual research and monitoring of their portfolios is essential to maintain an incoming profit flow.

The enterprising investor doesn’t follow the market’s ups and downs.

If you own stocks and their price falls, do you sell them immediately or keep them? If another stock is rising, is it a good idea to get in on the action before it’s too late?

This approach, known as trading in the market, is typical of investors, because they fear that going against the flow will result in financial losses. An intelligent investor, however, knows better!

Trusting Mr. Market is dangerous. If a stock’s prices are climbing fast, then chances are that it’s either already more expensive than its inherent value or it will make a risky investment.

Do you remember the US housing bubble only a few years back? Everyone kept investing in housing, and as prices continued to climb, nobody realized that prices were already totally unrepresentative of their intrinsic value. Once this became too obvious to ignore, however, the entire market crashed.

To avoid this exact scenario, enterprising investors buy in low markets and sell in high markets.

Check your portfolio regularly and examine the companies you invest in. Ask yourself questions like: Is the management still doing a good job? How is the financial situation?

As soon as you realize that one of the companies in your portfolio is overrated and its stock prices are growing without any relation to its true value, then it’s better to sell before it crashes.

On the other hand, you’ll want to buy in low markets.That’s exactly what Yahoo! Inc. did in 2002 when it bought Inktomi Corp. for only $1.65 per share. It was a sensational bargain. Mr. Market had become depressed after Inktomi’s shares fell from the seriously overrated $231.625 per share, at a time when the company wasn’t profitable.

The enterprising investor has the chance to find real bargains.

By this point, the idea of becoming an enterprising investor should sound like a fun challenge. But is it really worth it to go through all this trouble of constantly checking your portfolio? As a matter of fact, it is, since that’s where the best bargains lie — but only if you start smart.

The best way to start your life as an enterprising investor is to virtually track and pick stocks. Invest virtually for one year in order to hone your ability to pick out a bargain and track your stocks’ progress.

Today, there are many websites that allow you to make virtual investments. All you have to do is register in order to see if you can really achieve better-than-average results. This one-year practice period serves a number of purposes: not only does it help you learn the ins and outs of investment, but it will also free you from your fantastic expectations.

Once you’ve had your year’s virtual experience, then you’re ready for bargain hunting. The best place to find a bargain is in undervalued companies’ stocks.

The market normally undervalues the stocks of companies which are either temporarily unpopular or are suffering economic losses.

To illustrate this, imagine that Enterprise B is the second-strongest competitor in the refrigerator market. The company is large, and has shown sound — but not spectacular — profits over the past seven years. However, due to a production error, the company hasn’t been as profitable over the past two months, causing its share price to plummet as skittish investors get scared.

Once that production error is resolved, the company will be right back where it was, and an intelligent investor would see these falling prices as an opportunity to get a great bargain.

But finding bargains is hard. That’s why it’s so important to get your year’s worth of practice in first. If you can make it in the virtual world, then you can make it in real life!

Whether you want to play it defensively or go the route of the entrepreneur, when it comes to stocks, you always want to walk the path of the intelligent investor. All you have to do is follow the guidelines laid out here, and you too can turn your investments into modest — but steady — profits.

#How To Become An Intelligent Investor

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grahamperryondisputeresolution · 4 years ago

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CHINA AND COVID AND WORLD HELP

https://grahamperryonchina.com/?p=1892 CHINA AND COVID AND WORLD HELP - First, the facts 70+ Countries + Territories have either approved Chinese vaccines or done deals to receive doses from China. 37 nations have received vaccines from China free of charge 100+ nations have received face masks, deployment of doctors from China. 115m doses of vaccine have been exported by China. 230m+ doses of vaccine have been produced by China. Eight per hundred Chinese citizens have been inoculated but no backlash against the government’s export drive 800,000 Chinese vaccine doses received by Nepal – previously received from India 103,558 new infections reported on 5 April by India Let’s remember the sequence of events. News emerged from China of the outbreak of Covid-19 in Wuhan. Whilst questions remain about the flow of information from Wuhan to Beijing and the extent to which China might have been culpable for a period of delay, it is the case that by 29 January 2020 China had communicated information to the world sufficient to put all nations on notice that Covid-19 might spread. The warning having been given, two things happened; first, China went into action and took a number of decisive steps to defeat the virus and to limit its spread in China. The action was effective and immediate – at the time Western nations were predicting significant deaths in China – at least hundreds of thousands if not millions. In the event, nothing like this happened and China’s figures of the number of deaths in the range of 10,000 have not been disputed. China put the health of its people first and took the steps. People were instructed – not asked – to remain indoors. The streets emptied; the shops closed; the schools were shut. Emergency hospitals were built and the country went into crisis mode. Politically, the Party was in control. It required that its people conform to the orders issued by the local government. Train stations were quiet. Aeroplanes did not fly. People did not congregate in parks or take trips or use motorways. China was closed. The priority was fighting the pandemic, limiting travel, stepping up testing, restoring order in the medical centres. And the battle was won. The numbers of people reporting Covid-19 symptoms fell; the number of deaths fell. Well-being was restored. If the Party had been questioned at the start of the epidemic, its actions from 29 January were very effective and life began to return to normality. A measure of China’s success became apparent in January 2021 when China became the only major country to achieve economic growth (2.3%) during 2020. If China’s bounce-back was immediate and effective, the same cannot be said of the US and the UK. Both countries were on notice at the end of January 2020 of the seriousness of Covid-19. They received all relevant information from China but they did not act. Johnson did not act until 13 March 2020 – almost 6 weeks of key weeks had been lost. The leadership was out of touch. Boris Johnson was still in success mode following his victories in the Brexit Referendum and the December 2019 General Election. He was ‘Jack The Lad’ refusing to take matters seriously. He missed five COBRA Meetings. He welcomed delegations to 10 Downing Street. He shook hands with guests and refused to wear masks. Apart from the 2021 vaccination response which has gone well, his political leadership has had an important part to play in the present level of 126,000 deaths. Trump’s failings were even greater and today the number of deaths is at 500,000 and rising. The US and the UK with a combined population of 360m have logged 630,000 deaths. Chins with a population of 1.4bn have logged 10,000 deaths. Do figures matter? The answer is Yes. Each life matters and the actions of governments come under scrutiny when figures are adverse and the figures for deaths due to Covid-19 tell a big story. China acted. The US/UK did not act and there were serious consequences. Now, this is not a matter just of health and health systems. This is also a matter of democracy. What is the purpose of democracy? – to provide a structure of government that promotes the health, well-being and economic prosperity of its people. Democracy is not just about One Man One Vote and relatives of the 630,000 + dead people in the US and the UK will look at China’s success in handling Covid-19 and begin to ask searching questions. What is the point of voting for a President or a Prime Minister when they fail so significantly to look after the health of their people? There is another dimension to Covid-19 that is reflected in the numbers set out at the start of this article. China is doing much to help the world by supplying vaccines, doctors, and equipment. 70+ countries have either approved Chinese vaccines or done deals to receive doses from China at just the time countries in the West are fighting with each other to secure vaccine doses for their own people. For the US/UK, there is no question of helping less fortunate countries with less developed health systems and more vulnerable populations. “Number One Comes First. – my electorate, my voters – they are my priority – let the others look after themselves.” The contrast is considerable and again raises the question about the selfishness of the West as against the selflessness of the East. By its decisive action in February 2020, China turned back the tide of advancing deaths and limited its loss of life to 10,000 people. By its indecisive action in February 2020, the US/UK have, so far because the number is still rising, allowed 630,000 unnecessary deaths to occur. China is in a position where it refuses to look after “Number One” at the expense of the rest of the world. As events develop and history draws its conclusions from events, much will be made of the credibility of the rival systems of government. The West relies on one man vote. China relies on the leading role of the Party. No question the Chinese system is more authoritarian and the West’s system is more democratic. But what is the point of government if one system restricts deaths to 10,000 and the other system permits 630,000+ deaths and more? And the final question – which peoples are happier with their lot – the Chinese or the people of the US/UK? GRAHAM PERRY APRIL 2021 - #china #UK #usa - https://grahamperryonchina.com/?p=1892

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lushrainforest · 4 years ago

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An Ideal Information For Heavy Tow Truck Service

A towing company must certainly present you with speedy services needed in towing and also with extra help required like emergency services when you have a flat tire, battery run out, car lock out etc. These services provided are good but the most important consideration during towing is safety. Safety for your car and you and your family. Towing is the process of pulling or drawing behind a chain, or some other form of coupling that is the most obviously performed by road vehicles.You can learn more at Heavy Tow Truck Service Graham

Every person has required a tow truck at some point or another. Whether it was a flat tire and a lost spare or a fender splurge, tow trucks have helped us all out of a jamb by safely transporting our vehicle to a repair shop. But many people don't realize that towing companies offer more than just a raise when your car is disabled. From roadside support to flat-bed towing, your local towing provider offers a several helpful services. By keeping an eye out for these towing problems, you should be able to avoid damage to your vehicle.

In addition to tow truck services, most towing companies provide complete roadside assistance. When towing your vehicle it is compulsory to use safety chains to make sure that your vehicle ruins coupled to the towing truck. It ensures the protection of the vehicle and is also keeps you permissible. When you're using safety chains make sure to check that the chains are crossed underneath the tongue of the trailer, this makes sure that even if the trailer were to get disconnected from the glitch it will not be separated from the tow truck. Several offer 24-hour help, so in the middle of the night-when roadside assistance is most important-they'll be there to lend a hand.

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unsettlingshortstories · 4 years ago

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The Jaunt

Stephen King (1981)

Chapter 1

"This is the last call for Jaunt-701," the pleasant female voice echoed through the Blue Concourse of New York's Port Authority Terminal. The PAT had not changed much in the last three hundred years or so - it was still gungy and a little frightening. The automated female voice was probably the most plesant thing about it. "This is Jaunt Service to Whitehead City, Mars," the voice continued. "All ticketed passengers should now be in the Blue Concourse sleep lounge. Make sure your validation papers are in order. Thank you."The upstairs lounge was not at all grungy. It was wall-to-wall carpeted in oyster gray. The walls were an eggshell white and hung with plesant nonrepresentational prints. A steady, soothing progression of colors met and swirled on the ceiling. There were one hundred couches in the large room, neatly spaced in rows of ten. Five Jaunt attendants circulate, speaking in low, cherry voices and offering glasses of milk. At one side of the room was the entranceway, flanked by armed guards and another Jaunt attendant who was checking the validation papers of a latecomer, a harried-looking businessman with the New York World Times folded under one arm. Directly opposite, the floor dropped away in a trough about five feet wide and perhaps ten feet long; it passed through a doorless opening and looked a bit like a child's slide. The Oates family lay side by side on four Jaunt couches near the far end of the room. Mark Oates and his wife, Marilys, flanked the two children. "Daddy, will you tell me about the Jaunt now?" Ricky asked. "You promised." "Yeah, Dad, you promised," Patricia added, and giggled shilly for no good reason. A Businessman with a build like a bull glanced over at them and went back to the fodder of papers he was examining as he lay on his back, his spit-shined shoes neatly together.

From everywhere came the low murmur of conversation and the rustle of passengers settling down on the Jaunt couches. Mark glanced over at Marilys Oates and winked. She winked back, but she was almost as nervous as Patty sounded. Why not? Mark thought. First Jaunt for all three of them. He and Marilys had discussed the advantages and drawbacks of moving the whole family for the last six months - since he'd gotten notification from Texaco Water that he was being transferred to Whitehead City. Finally they had decided that all of them would go for the two years Mark would be stationed on Mars. He wondered now, looking at Marilys's pale face, if she was regretting the decision. He glanced at his watch and saw it was still almost half an hour to Jaunt-time. That was enough time to tell the story ... and he supposed it would take the kids' minds off their nervousness. Who knew, maybe it would even cool Marilys out a little. "All right," he said. Ricky and Pat were watching him seriously, his son twelve, his daughter nine. He told himself again that Ricky would be deep in the swamp of puberty and his daughter would likely be developing breast by the time they got back to earth, and again found it difficult to believe. The kids would be going to the tiny Whitehead Combined School with the hundred-odd engineering and oil-company brats that were there; his son might well be going on a geology field trip to Phobos not so many months distant. It was difficult to believe ... but true. Who knows ? he thought wryly. maybe it'll do something about my Jaunt-jumps, too. "So far as we know," he began, "the Jaunt was invented about three hundred and twenty years ago, around the year 1987, by a fellow named Victor Carune. He did it as part of a private research project that was funded by some government money ... and eventually the government took it over, of course. In the end it came down to either the government or the oil companies. The reason we don't know the exact date is because Carune was something of an eccentric - " "You mean he was crazy, Dad?" Ricky asked. "Eccentric means a little bit crazy, dear," Marilys said, and smiled across the children at Mark. She looked a little less nervous now, he thought. "Oh." "Anyway, he'd been experimenting with the process for quite some time before he informed the government of what he had," Mark went on, "and he only told them because he was running out of money and they weren't going to re-fund him." "Your money cheerfully refunded," Pat said, and giggled shrilly again.

"That's right, honey," Mark said, and ruffled her hair gently. At the far end of the room he saw a door slide noiselessly open and two more attendants came out, dressed in the bright red jumpers of the Jaunt Service, pushing a rolling table. On it was a stainless-steel nozzle attached to a rubber hose; beneath the table's skirts, tastefully hidden, Mark knew there were two bottles of gas; in the net bag hooked to the side were one hundred disposable masks. Mark went on talking, not wanting his people to see the representative of Lethe until they had to. And, if he was given enough time to tell the whole story, they would welcome the gas-passers with open arms.

Considering the alternative.

"Of course, you know that the Jaunt is teleportation, no more or less," he said. "Sometimes in college chemistry and physics they call it the Carune Process, but it's really teleportation, and it was Carune himself - if you can believe the stories - who named it ‘the Jaunt.' He was a science-fiction reader, and there's a story by a man named Alfred Bester, The Stars My Destination it's called, and this fellow Bester made up the word ‘jaunt' for teleportation in it. Except in his book, you could Jaunt just by thinking about it, and we can't really do that." The attendants were fixing a mask to the steel nozzle and handing it to an elderly woman at the far end of the room. She took it, inhaled once, and fell quiet and limp on her couch. Her shirt had pulled up a little, revealing one slack thigh road-mapped with varicose veins. An attendant considerately readjusted for her while the other pulled off the used mask and affixed a fresh one. It was a process that made Mark think of the plastic glasses in motel rooms.

He wished to God that Patty would cool out a little bit; he had seen children who had to be held down, and sometimes they screamed as the rubber mask covered their faces. It was not an abnormal reaction in a child, he supposed, but it was nasty to watch and he didn't want to see it happen to Patty. About Rick he felt more confident.

"I guess you could say the Jaunt came along at the last possible moment," he resumed. He spoke toward Ricky, but reached across and took his daughter's hand. Her palm was cool and sweating lightly. "The world was running out of oil, and most of what was left belonged to the middle-eastern desert peoples, who were committed to using it as a political weapon. They had formed an oil cartel they called OPEC - " "What's a cartel, Daddy?" Patty asked.

"Well, a monopoly," Mark said.

"Like a club, honey," Marilys said. "And you could only be in that club if you had lots of oil."

"Oh."

"I don't have time to sketch the whole mess in for you," Mark said. "You'll study some of it in school, but it was a mess - let's let it go at that. If you owned a car, you could only drive it two days a week, and gasoline cost fifteen oldbucks a gallon - " "Gosh," Ricky said, "it only costs four cents or so a gallon now, doesn't it, Dad?"

Mark smiled. "That's why we are going where we're going, Rick. There's enough oil on Mars to last almost eight thousand years, and enough on Venus to last another twenty thousand ... but oil isn't even important, anymore. Now what we need most of all is - " "Water!" Patty cried, and the Businessman looked up from his papers and smiled at her for a moment.

"That's right," Mark said. "Because in the years between 1960 and 2030, we poisoned most of ours. The first water lift from the Martian ice-caps was called - " "Operation Straw." That was Ricky.

"Yes, 2045 or thereabouts. But long before that, the Jaunt was being used to find sources of clean water here on earth. And now water is our major Martian export ... the oil's strictly a sideline. But it was important then."

The kids nodded.

"The point is, those things were always there, but we were only able to get it because of the Jaunt. When Carune invented his process, the world was slipping into a dark age. The winter before, over ten thousand people had frozen to death in the United States alone because there wasn't enough energy to heat them."

"Oh, yuck," Patty said matter-of-factly.

Mark glanced to his right and saw the attendants talking to a timid-looking man, persuading him.

At last he took the mask seemed to fall dead on his couch seconds later. First-timer, Mark thought. You can always tell.

"For Carune, it started with a pencil ... some keys ... a wrist watch ... the some mice. The mice showed him there was a problem ..."

Victor Carune came back to his laboratory in a stumbling fever of excitement. He thought he knew how Morse had felt, and Alexander Graham Bell, and Edison . . . but this was bigger than all of them, and twice he had almost wrecked the truck on the way back from the pet shop in New Paltz, where he had spend his last twenty dollars on nine white mice. What he had left in the world was ninety-three cents in his right front pocket and the eighteen dollars in his savings account . . . but this did not occur to him. And if it had, it certainly would not have bothered him. The lab was in a renovated barn at the end of a mile-long dirt road off Route 26. It was making the turn onto this road where he had just missed cracking up his Brat pickup truck for the second time. The gas tank was almost empty and there would be no more for ten days to two weeks, but this did not concern him, either. His mind was in a delirious whirl. What had happened was not totally unexpected, no.

One of the reasons the government had funded him even to the paltry tune of twenty thousand a year was because the unrealized possibility had always been there in the field of particle transmission. But to have it happen like this . . . suddenly . . . with no warning . . . and powered by less electricity than was needed to run a color TV . . . God! Christ!

He brought the Brat to a screech-halt in the dirt of the door yard, grabbed the box on the dirty seat beside him by its grab-handles (on the box were dogs and cats and hamsters and goldfish and the legend I CAME FROM STACKPOLE'S HOUSE OF PETS) and ran for the big double doors. From inside the box came the scurry and whisk of his test subjects. He tried to push one of the big doors open along its track, and when it wouldn't budge, he remembered that he had locked it. Carune uttered a loud "Shit!" and fumbled for his keys. The government commanded that the lab be locked at all times - it was one of the strings they put on their money - but Carune kept forgetting. He brought his keys out and for a moment simply stared at them, mesmerized, running the ball of his thumb over the notches in the Brat's ignition key. He thought again: God! Christ! Then he scrabbled through the keys on the ring for the Yale key that unlocked the barn door.

As the first telephone had been used inadvertently - Bell crying into it, "Watson, come here!" when he spilled some acid on his papers and himself - so the first act of teleportation had occurred by accident. Victor Carune had teleported the first two fingers of his left hand across the fifty-yard width of the barn.

Carune had set up two portals at opposite sides of the barn. On his end was a simple ion gun, available from any electronics supply warehouse for under five hundred dollars. On the other end, standing just beyond the far portal - both of them rectangular and the size of a paperback book - was a cloud chamber. Between them was what appeared to be an opaque shower curtain, except that shower curtains are not made of lead. The idea was to shoot the ions through Portal One and then walk around and watch them streaming across the cloud chamber standing just beyond Portal Two, with the lead shield between to prove they really were being transmitted. Except that, for the last two years, the process had only worked twice, and Carune didn't have the slightest idea why. As he was setting the ion gun in place, his fingers had slipped through the portal - ordinarily no problem, but this morning his hip had also brushed the toggle switch on the control panel at the left of the portal. He was not aware of what had happened - the machinery gave off only the lowest audible hum - until he felt a tingling sensation in his fingers.

Chapter 2

"It was not like an electric shock," Carune wrote in his one and only article on the subject before the government shut him up. The article was published, of all places, in Popular Mechanics. He had sold it to them for seven hundred and fifty dollars in a last-ditch effort to keep the Jaunt a matter of private enterprise. "There was none of that unpleasant tingle that one gets if one grasps a frayed lamp cord, for instance. It was more like the sensation one gets if one puts one's hand on the casing of some small machine that is working very hard. The vibration is so fast and light that it is, literally, a tingling sensation. "Then I looked down at the portal and saw that my index finger was gone on a diagonal slant through the middle knuckle, and my second finger was gone slightly above that.

In addition, the nail portion of my third finger had disappeared." Carune had jerked his hand back instinctively, crying out. He so much expected to see blood, he wrote later, that he actually hallucinated blood for a moment or two. His elbow struck the ion gun and knocked it off the table.

He stood there with his fingers in his mouth, verifying that they were still there, and whole. The thought that he had been working too hard crossed his mind. And then the other thought crossed his mind: the thought that the last set of modifications might have . . . might have done something.

He did not push his fingers back in; in fact, Carune only Jaunted once more in his entire life.

At first, he did nothing. He took a long, aimless walk around the barn, running his hands through his hair, wondering if he should call Carson in New Jersey or perhaps Buffington in Charlotte. Carson wouldn't accept a collect phone call, the cheap ass-kissing bastard, but Buffington probably would. Then an idea struck and he ran across to Portal Two, thinking that if his fingers had actually crossed the barn, there might be some sign of it.

There was not, of course. Portal Two stood atop three stacked Pomona orange crates, looking like nothing so much as one of those toy guillotines missing the blade. On one side of its stainless-steel frame was a plug-in jack, from which a cord ran back to the transmission terminal, which was little more than a particle transformer hooked into a computer feed-line.

Which reminded him -

Carune glanced at his watch and saw it was quarter past eleven. His deal with the government consisted of short money, plus computer time, which was infinitely valuable. His computer tie-in lasted until three o'clock this afternoon, and then it was good-bye until Monday. He had to get moving, had to do something - "I glanced at the pile of crates again," Carune writes in his Popular Mechanics article, "and then I looked at the pads of my fingers. And sure enough, the proof was there. It would not, I thought then convince anyone but myself; but in the beginning, of course, it is only one's self that one has to convince."

"What was it, Dad?" Ricky asked.

"Yeah!" Patty added. "What?"

Mark grinned a little. They were all hooked now, even Marilys. They had nearly forgotten where they were. From the corner of his eye he could see the Jaunt attendants whisper-wheeling their cart slowly among the Jaunters, putting them to sleep. It was never as rapid a process in the civilian sector as it was in the military, he had discovered; civilians got nervous and wanted to talk it over. The nozzle and the rubber mask were too reminiscent of hospital operating rooms, where the surgeon with his knives lurked somewhere behind the anaesthetist with her selection of gases in stainless-steel canisters. Sometimes there was panic, hysteria; and always there were a few who simply lost their nerve. Mark had observed two of these as he spoke to the children: two men who had simply arisen from their couches, walked across to the entryway with no fanfare at all, unpinned the validation papers that had been affixed to their lapels, turned them in, and exited without looking back. Jaunt attendants were under strict instructions not to argue with those who left; there were always standbys, sometimes as many as forty or fifty of them, hoping against hope. As those who simply couldn't take it left, standbys were let in with their own validations pinned to their shirts. "Carune found two splinters in his index finger," he told the children. "He took them out and put them aside. One was lost, but you can see the other one in the Smithsonian Annex in Washington. It's in a hermetically sealed glass case near the moon rocks the first space travellers brought back from the moon - " "Our moon, Dad, or one of Mars's?" Ricky asked.

"Ours," Mark said, smiling a little. "Only one manned rocket flight has ever landed on Mars, Ricky, and that was a French expedition somewhere about 2030. Anyway, that's why there happens to be a plain old splinter from an orange crate in the Smithsonian Institution. Because it's the first object that we have that was actually teleported - Jaunted - across space."

"What happened then?" Patty asked. "Well, according to the story, Carune ran . . ."

Carune ran back to Portal One and stood there for a moment, heart thudding, out of breath. Got to calm down, he told himself. Got to think about this. You can't maximize your time if you go off half-cocked. Deliberately disregarding the forefront of his mind, which was screaming at him to hurry up and do something, he dug his nail-clippers out of his pocket and used the point of the file to dig the splinters out of his index finger.

He dropped them onto the white inner sleeve of a Hershey bar he had eaten while tinkering with the transformer and trying to widen its afferent capability (he had apparently succeeded in that beyond his wildest dreams). One rolled off the wrapper and was lost; the other ended up in the Smithsonian Institution, locked in a glass case that was cordoned off with thick velvet ropes and watched vigilantly and eternally by a computer-monitored closed-circuit TV camera.

The splinter extraction finished, Carune felt a little calmer. A pencil. That was as good as anything. He took one from beside the clipboard on the shelf above him and ran it gently into Portal One. It disappeared smoothly, inch by inch, like something in an optical illusion or in a very good magician's trick. The pencil had said EBERHARD FABER NO. 2 on one of its sides, black letters stamped on yellow-painted wood. When he had pushed the pencil in until all but EBERH had disappeared, Carune walked around to the other side of Portal One.

He looked in. He saw the pencil in cut-off view, as if a knife had chopped smoothly through it. Carune felt with his fingers where the rest of the pencil should have been, and of course there was nothing. He ran across the barn to Portal Two, and there was the missing part of the pencil, lying on the top crate. Heart thumping so hard that it seemed to shake his entire chest, Carune grasped the sharpened point of his pencil and pulled it the rest of the way through.

He held it up; he looked at it. Suddenly he took it and wrote IT WORKS! on a piece of barn-board. He wrote it so hard that the lead snapped on the last letter. Carune began to laugh shrilly in the empty barn; to laugh so hard that he startled the sleeping swallows into flight among the high rafters.

"Works!" he shouted, and ran back to Portal One. He was waving his arms, the broken pencil knotted up in one fist. "Works! Works! Do you hear me, Carson, you prick? It works AND I DID IT!"

"Mark, watch what you say to the children," Marilys reproached him.

Mark shrugged. "It's what he's supposed to have said."

"Well, can't you do a little selective editing?"

"Dad?" Patty asked. "Is that pencil in the museum, too?" "Does a bear shit in the woods?" Mark said, and then clapped one hand over his mouth. Both children giggled wildly - but that shrill note was gone from Patty's voice, Mark was glad to hear - and after a moment of trying to look serious, Marilys began to giggle too.

The keys went through next; Carune simply tossed them through the portal. He was beginning to think on track again now, and it seemed to him that the first thing that needed finding out was if the process produced things on the other end exactly as they had been, or if they were in any way changed by the trip.

He saw the keys go through and disappear; at exactly the same moment he heard them jingle on the crate across the barn. He ran across - really only trotting now - and on the way he paused to shove the lead shower curtain back on its track. He didn't need either it or the ion gun now. Just as well, since the ion gun was smashed beyond repair. He grabbed the keys, went to the lock the government had forced him to put on the door, and tried the Yale key. It worked perfectly. He tried the house key. It also worked. So did the keys which opened his file cabinets and the one which started the Brat pickup.

Chapter 3

Carune pocketed the keys and took off his watch. It was a Seiko quartz LC with a built-in calculator below the digital face twenty-four tiny buttons that would allow him to do everything from addition to subtraction to square roots. A delicate piece of machinery - and just as important, a chronometer. Carune put it down in front of Portal One and pushed it through with a pencil.

He ran across and grabbed it up. When he put it through, the watch had said 11:31:07. It now said 11:31:49. Very good. Right on the money, only he should have had an assistant over there to peg the fact that there had been no time gain once and forever. Well, no matter. Soon enough the government would have him wading hip deep in assistants. He tried the calculator.

Two and two still made four, eight divided by four was still two; the square root of eleven was still 3.3166247 . . . and so on. That was when he decided it was mouse-time. "What happened with the mice, Dad?" Ricky asked.

Mark hesitated briefly. There would have to be some caution here, if he didn't want to scare his children (not to mention his wife) into hysteria minutes away from their first Jaunt. The major thing was to leave them with the knowledge that everything was all right now, that the problem had been licked.

"As I said, there was a slight problem . . ."

Yes. Horror, lunacy, and death. How's that for a slight problem, kids? Carune set the box which read I CAME FROM STACKPOLE'S HOUSE OF PETS down on the shelf and glanced at his watch. Damned if he hadn't put the thing on upside down. He turned it around and saw that it was a quarter of two. He had only an hour and a quarter of computer time left. How the time flies when you're having fun, he thought, and giggled wildly. He opened the box, reached in, and pulled out a squeaking white mouse by the tail. He put it down in front of Portal One and said, "Go on, mouse." The mouse promptly ran down the side of the orange crate on which the portal stood and scattered across the floor. Cursing, Carune chased it, and managed to actually get one hand on it before it squirmed through a crack between two boards and was gone.

"SHIT!" Carune screamed, and ran back to the box of mice. He was just in time to knock two potential escapees back into the box. He got a second mouse, holding this one around the body (he was by trade a physicist, and the ways of white mice were foreign to him), and slammed the lid of the box back down.

This one he gave the old heave-ho. It clutched at Carune's palm, but to no avail; it went head over ratty little paws through Portal One. Carune heard it immediately land on the crates across the barn. This time he sprinted, remembering how easily the first mouse had eluded him. He need not have worried. The white mouse merely crouched on the crate, its eyes dull, its sides aspirating weakly. Carune slowed down and approached it carefully; he was not a man used to fooling with mice, but you didn't have to be a forty-year veteran to see something was terribly wrong here. ("The mouse didn't feel so good after it went through," Mark Oates told his children with a wide smile that was only noticeably false to his wife.) Carune touched the mouse. It was like touching something inert - packed straw or sawdust, perhaps - except for the aspirating sides. The mouse did not look around at Carune; it stared straight ahead. He had thrown in a squirming, very frisky and alive little animal; here was something that seemed to be a living waxwork likeness of a mouse. Then Carune snapped his fingers in front of the mouse's small pink eyes.

It blinked . . . and fell dead on its side.

"So Carune decided to try another mouse," Mark said.

"What happened to the first mouse?" Ricky asked.

Mark produced that wide smile again. "It was retired with full honors," he said.

Carune found a paper bag and put the mouse into it. He would take it to Mosconi, the vet, that evening.

Mosconi could dissect it and tell him if its inner works had been rearranged. The government would disapprove his bringing a private citizen into a project which would be classified triple top secret as soon as they knew about it. Tough titty, as the kitty was reputed to have said to the babes who complained about the warmth of the milk. Carune was determined that the Great White Father in Washington would know about this as late in the game as possible. For all the scant help the Great White Father had given him, he could wait. Tough titty. Then he remembered that Mosconi lived way the hell and gone on the other side of New Paltz, and that there wasn't enough gas in the Brat to get even halfway across town . . . let alone back.

But it was 2:03 - he had less than an hour of computer time left. He would worry about the goddamn dissection later.

Carune constructed a makeshift chute leading to the entrance of Portal One (really the first Jaunt-Slide, Mark told the children, and Patty found the idea of a Jaunt-Slide for mice deliciously funny) and dropped a fresh white mouse into it. He blocked the end with a large book, and after a few moments of aimless pattering and sniffling, the mouse went through the portal and disappeared.

Carune ran back across the barn. The mouse was DOA. There was no blood, no bodily swellings to indicate that a radical change in pressure had ruptured something inside. Carune supposed that oxygen starvation might - He shook his head impatiently. It took the white mouse only nanoseconds to go through; his own watch had confirmed that time remained a constant in the process, or damn close to it.

The second white mouse joined the first in the paper sack. Carune got a third out (a fourth, if you counted the fortunate mouse that had escaped through the crack), wondering for the first time which would end first - his computer time or his supply of mice.

He held this one firmly around the body and forced its haunches through the portal. Across the room he saw the haunches reappear . . . just the haunches. The disembodied little feet were digging frantically at the rough wood of the crate.

Carune pulled the mouse back. No catatonia here; it bit the webbing between his thumb and forefinger hard enough to bring blood. Carune dropped the mouse hurriedly back into the I CAME FROM STACKPOLE'S HOUSE OF PETS box and used the small bottle of hydrogen peroxide in his lab first-aid kit to disinfect the bite.

He put a Band-Aid over it, then rummaged around until he found a pair of heavy work-gloves. He could feel the time running out, running out, running out. It was 2:11 now.

He got another mouse out and pushed it through backward - all the way. He hurried across to Portal Two. This mouse lived for almost two minutes; it even walked a little, after a fashion. It staggered across the Pomona orange crate, fell on its side, struggled weakly to its feet, and then only squatted there. Carune snapped his fingers near its head and it lurched perhaps four steps further before falling on its side again. The aspiration of its sides slowed ... slowed ... stopped. It was dead. Carune felt a chill.

He went back, got another mouse, and pushed it halfway through headfirst. He saw it reappear at the other end, just the head . . . then the neck and chest. Cautiously, Carune relaxed his grip on the mouse's body, ready to grab if it got frisky. It didn't. The mouse only stood there, half of it on one side of the barn, half on the other.

Carune jogged back to Portal Two.

The mouse was alive, but its pink eyes were glazed and dull. Its whiskers didn't move. Going around to the back of the portal, Carune saw an amazing sight; as he had seen the pencil in cutaway, so now he saw the mouse. He saw the vertebrae of its tiny spine ending abruptly in round white circles; he saw its blood moving through the vessels; he saw the tissue moving gently with the tide of life around its minuscule gullet. If nothing else, he thought (and wrote later in his Popular Mechanics article), it would make a wonderful diagnostic tool. Then he noticed that the tidal movement of the tissues had ceased. The mouse had died.

Chapter 4

Carune pulled the mouse out by the snout, not liking the feel of it, and dropped it into the paper sack with its companions. Enough with the white mice, he decided. The mice die. They die if you put them through all the way, and they die if you put them through halfway headfirst. Put them through halfway butt-first, they stay frisky.

What the hell is in there?

Sensory input, he thought almost randomly.

When they go through they see something - hear something - touch something - God, maybe even smell something - that literally kills them. What? He had no idea - but he meant to find out. Carune still had almost forty minutes before COMLINK pulled the data base out from under him. He unscrewed the thermometer from the wall beside his kitchen door, trotted back to the barn with it, and put it through the portals. The thermometer went in at 83 degrees F; it came out at 83 degrees F. He rummaged through the spare room where he kept a few toys to amuse his grandchildren with; among them he found a packet of balloons. He blew one of them up, tied it off, and batted it through the portal. It came out intact and unharmed - a start down the road toward answering his question about a sudden change in pressure somehow caused by what he was already thinking of as the Jaunting process.

With five minutes to go before the witching hour, he ran into his house, snatched up his goldfish bowl (inside, Percy and Patrick swished their tails and darted about in agitation) and ran back with it. He shoved the goldfish bowl through Portal One.

He hurried across to Portal Two, where his goldfish bowl sat on the crate. Patrick was floating belly-up; Percy swam slowly around near the bottom of the bowl, as if dazed. A moment later he also floated belly-up. Carune was reaching for the goldfish bowl when Percy gave a weak flick of his tail and resumed his lackadaisical swimming. Slowly, he seemed to throw off whatever the effect had been, and by the time Carune got back from Mosconi's Veterinary Clinic that night at nine o'clock, Percy seemed as perky as ever.

Patrick was dead.

Carune fed Percy a double ration of fish food and gave Patrick a hero's burial in the garden.

After the computer had cut him out for the day, Carune decided to hitch a ride over to Mosconi's. Accordingly, he was standing on the shoulder of Route 26 at a quarter of four that afternoon, dressed in jeans and a loud plaid sport coat, his thumb out, a paper bag in his other hand. Finally, a kid driving a Chevette not much bigger than a sardine can pulled over, and Carune got in. "What you got in the bag, my man?" "Bunch of dead mice," Carune said. Eventually another car stopped. When the farmer behind the wheel asked about the bag, Carune told him it was a couple of sandwiches.

Mosconi dissected one of the mice on the spot, and agreed to dissect the others later and call Carune on the telephone with the results. The initial result was not very encouraging; so far as Mosconi could tell, the mouse he had opened up was perfectly healthy except for the fact that it was dead.

Depressing.

"Victor Carune was eccentric, but he was no fool, "Mark said. The Jaunt attendants were getting close now, and he supposed he would have to hurry up . . . or he would be finishing this in the Wake-Up Room in Whitehead City. "Hitching a ride back Home that night - and he had to walk most of the way, so the story goes - he realized that he had maybe solved a third of the energy crisis at one single stroke. All the goods that had to go by train and truck and boat and plane before that day could be Jaunted. You could write a letter to your friend in London or Rome or Senegal, and he could have it the very next day - without an ounce of oil needing to be burned. We take it for granted, but it was a big thing to Carune, believe me. And to everyone else, as well."

"But what happened to the mice, Daddy?" Rick asked. "That's what Carune kept asking himself," Mark said, "because he also realized that if people could use the Jaunt, that would solve almost all of the energy crisis. And that we might be able to conquer space. In his Popular Mechanics article he said that even the stars could finally be ours. And the metaphor he used was crossing a shallow stream without getting your shoes wet. You'd just get a big rock, and throw it in the stream, then get another rock, stand on the first rock, and throw that into the stream, go back and get a third rock, go back to the second rock, throw the third rock into the stream, and keep up like that until you'd made a path of stepping-stones all the way across the stream . . . or in this case, the solar system, or maybe even the galaxy." "I don't get that at all," Patty said.

"That's because you got turkey-turds for brains," Ricky said smugly.

"I do not! Daddy, Ricky said - "

"Children, don't," Marilys said gently.

"Carune pretty much foresaw what has happened," Mark said. "Drone rocket ships programmed to land, first on the moon, then on Mars, then on Venus and the outer moons of Jupiter . . . drones really only programmed to do one thing after they landed - " "Set up a Jaunt station for astronauts," Ricky said. Mark nodded. "And now there are scientific outposts all over the solar system, and maybe someday, long after we're gone, there will even be another planet for us. There are Jaunt-ships on their way to four different star systems with solar systems of their own . . . but it'll be a long, long time before they get there."

"I want to know what happened to the mice," Patty said impatiently. "Well, eventually the government got into it," Mark said. "Carune kept them out as long as he could, but finally they got wind of it and landed on him with both feet. Carune was nominal head of the Jaunt project until he died ten years later, but he was never really in charge of it again." "Jeez, the poor guy!" Rick said.

"But he got to be a hero," Patricia said. "He's in all the history books, just like President Lincoln and President Hart."

I'm sure that's a great comfort to him . . . wherever he is, Mark thought, and then went on, carefully glossing over the rough parts. The government, which had been pushed to the wall by the escalating energy crisis, did indeed come in with both feet. They wanted the Jaunt on a paying basis as soon as possible - like yesterday. Faced with economic chaos and the increasingly probable picture of anarchy and mass starvation in the 1990's, only last-ditch pleading made them put off announcement of the Jaunt before an exhaustive spectrographic analysis of Jaunted articles could be completed. When the analyses were complete - and showed no changes in the makeup of Jaunted artifacts - the existence of the Jaunt was announced with international hoopla. Showing intelligence for once (necessity is, after all, the mother of invention), the U.S. government put Young and Rubicam in charge of the pr.

That was where the myth-making around Victor Carune, an elderly, rather peculiar man who showered perhaps twice a week and changed his clothes only when he thought of it, began. Young and Rubicam and the agencies which followed them turned Carune into a combination of Thomas Edison, Eli Whitney, Pecos Bill, and Flash Gordon. The blackly funny part of all this (and Mark Oates did not pass this on to his family) was that Victor Carune might even then have been dead or insane; art imitates life, they say, and Carune would have been familiar with the Robert Heinlein novel about the doubles who stand in for figures in the public eye. Victor Carune was a problem; a nagging problem that wouldn't go away. He was a loudmouthed foot-dragger, a holdover from the Ecological Sixties - a time when there was still enough energy floating around to allow foot-dragging as a luxury. These, on the other hand, were the Nasty Eighties, with coal clouds befouling the sky and a long section of the California coastline expected to be uninhabitable for perhaps sixty years due to a nuclear "excursion."

Victor Carune remained a problem until about 1991 and then he became a rubber stamp, smiling, quiet, grandfatherly; a figure seen waving from podiums in newsfilms. In 1993, three years before he officially died, he rode in the pace-car at the Tournament of Roses Parade.

Puzzling. And a little ominous

The results of the announcement of the Jaunt - of working teleportation - on October 19th, 1988, was a hammerstroke of worldwide excitement and economic upheaval. On the world money markets, the battered old American dollar suddenly skyrocketed through the roof. People who had bought gold at eight hundred and six dollars an ounce suddenly found that a pound of gold would bring something less than twelve hundred dollars. In the year between the announcement of the Jaunt and the first working Jaunt-Stations in New York and L.A., the stock market climbed a little over a thousand points. The price of oil dropped only seventy cents a barrel, but by 1994, with Jaunt-Stations crisscrossing the U.S. at the pressure-points of seventy major cities, OPEC had ceased to exist, and the price of oil began to tumble. By 1998, with Stations in most free-world cities and goods routinely Jaunted between Tokyo and Paris, Paris and London, London and New York, New York and Berlin, oil had dropped to fourteen dollars a barrel. By 2006, when people at last began to use the Jaunt on a regular basis, the stock market had levelled off five thousand points above its 1987 levels, oil was selling for six dollars a barrel, and the oil companies had begun to change their names. Texaco became Texaco Oil/Water, and Mobil had become Mobil Hydro-2-Ox.

By 2045, water-prospecting became the big game and oil had become what it had been in 1906: a toy.

Chapter 5

"What about the mice, Daddy?" Patty asked impatiently. "What happened to the mice?"

Mark decided it might be okay now, and he drew the attention of his children to the Jaunt attendants, who were passing gas out only three aisles from them. Rick only nodded, but Patty looked troubled as a lady with a fashionably shaved-and-painted head took a whiff from the rubber mask and fell unconscious.

"Can't Jaunt when you're awake, can you, Dad?" Ricky said. Mark nodded and smiled reassuringly at Patricia. "Carune understood even before the government got into it," he said.

"How did the government get into it, Mark?" Marilys asked. Mark smiled. "Computer time," he said. "The data base. That was the only thing that Carune couldn't beg, borrow, or steal. The computer handled the actual particulate transmission - billions of pieces of information. It's still the computer, you know, that makes sure you don't come through with your head somewhere in the middle of your stomach." Marilys shuddered. "Don't be frightened," he said. "There's never been a screw-up like that, Mare. Never."

"There's always a first time," she muttered.

Mark looked at Ricky. "How did he know?" he asked his son. "How did Carune know you had to be asleep, Rick?"

"When he put the mice in backwards," Rick said slowly, "they were all right. At least as long as he didn't put them all in. They were only - well, messed up - when he put them in headfirst. Right?" "Right," Mark said. The Jaunt attendants were moving in now, wheeling their silent cart of oblivion. He wasn't going to have time to finish after all; perhaps it was just as well. "It didn't take many experiments to clarify what was happening, of course. The Jaunt killed the entire trucking Business, kids, but at least it took the pressure off the experimenters - " Yes. Foot-dragging had become a luxury again, and the tests had gone on for better than twenty years, although Carune's first tests with drugged mice had convinced him that unconscious animals were not subject to what was known forever after as the Organic Effect or, more simply, the Jaunt Effect.

He and Mosconi had drugged several mice, put them through Portal One, retrieved them at the other side, and had waited anxiously for their test subjects to reawaken . . . or to die. They had reawakened, and after a brief recovery period they had taken up their mouse-lives - eating, fucking, playing, and shitting - with no ill effects whatsoever. Those mice became the first of several generations which were studied with great interest. They showed no long-term ill effects; they did not die sooner, their pups were not born with two heads or green fur and neither did these pups show any other long-term effects.

"When did they start with people, Dad?" Rick asked, although he had certainly read this in school. "Tell that part!"

"I wanna know what happened to the mice!'' Patty said again. Although the Jaunt attendants had now reached the head of their aisle (they themselves were near the foot), Mark Oates paused a moment to reflect. His daughter, who knew less, had nevertheless listened to her heart and asked the right question. Therefore, it was his son's question he chose to answer.

The first human Jaunters had not been astronauts or test pilots; they were convict volunteers who had not even been screened with any particular interest in their psychological stability. In fact, it was the view of the scientists now in charge (Carune was not one of them; he had become what is commonly called a titular head) that the freakier they were, the better; if a mental spaz could go through and come out all right-or at least, no worse than he or she had been going in-then the process was probably safe for the executives, politicians, and fashion models of the world.

Half a dozen of these volunteers were brought to Province, Vermont (a site which had since become every bit as famous as Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, had once been), gassed, and fed through the portals exactly two hand-miles apart, one by one.

Mark told his children this, because of course all six of the volunteers came back just fine and feeling perky, thank you. He did not tell them about the purported seventh volunteer. This figure, who might have been real, or myth, or (most probably) a combination of the two, even had a name: Rudy Foggia. Foggia was supposed to have been a convicted murderer, sentenced to death in the state of Florida for the murders of four old people at a Sarasota bridge party. According to the apocrypha, the combined forces of the Central Intelligence Agency and the Effa Bee Eye had come to Foggia with a unique, one-time, take-it-or-leave-it, absolutely-not-to-be-repeated offer. Take the Jaunt wide awake. Come through okay and we put your pardon, signed by Governor Thurgood, in your hand. Out you walk, free to follow the One True Cross or to off a few more old folks playing bridge in their yellow pants and white shoes. Come through dead or insane, tough titty. As the kitty was purported to have said. What do you say?

Foggia, who understood that Florida was one state that really meant Business about the death penalty and whose lawyer had told him that he was in all probability the next to ride Old Sparky, said okay. Enough scientists to fill a jury box (with four or five left over as alternates) were present on the Great Day in the summer of 2007, but if the Foggia story was true-and Mark Oates believed it probably was-he doubted if it had been any of the scientists who talked. More likely it had been one of the guards who had flown with Foggia from Raiford to Montpelier and then escorted him from Montpelier to Province in an armored truck.

"If I come through this alive," Foggia is reported to have said, "I want a chicken dinner before I blow this joint." He then stepped through Portal One and reappeared at Portal Two immediately.

He came through alive, but Rudy Foggia was in no condition to eat his chicken dinner. In the space it took to Jaunt across the two miles (pegged at 0.000000000067 of a second by computer), Foggia's hair had turned snow white. His face had not changed in any physical way-it was not lined or jowly or wasted-but it gave the impression of great, almost incredible age. Foggia shuffled out of the portal, his eyes bulging blankly, his mouth twitching, his hands splayed out in front of him. Presently he began to drool. The scientists who had gathered around drew away from him and no, Mark really doubted if any of them had talked; they knew about the rats, after all, and the guinea pigs, and the hamsters; any animal, in fact, with more brains than your average flatworm. They must have felt a bit like those German scientists who tried to impregnate Jewish women with the sperm of German shepherds.

"What happened?" one of the scientists shouted (is reputed to have shouted). It was the only question Foggia had a chance to answer. "It's eternity in there," he said, and dropped dead of what was diagnosed as a massive heart attack. The scientists foregathered there were left with his corpse (which was neatly taken care of by the CIA and the Effa Bee Eye) and that strange and awful dying declaration: It's eternity in there.

"Daddy, I want to know what happened to the mice," Patty repeated. The only reason she had a chance to ask again was because the man in the expensive suit and the Eterna-Shine shoes had developed into something of a problem for the Jaunt attendants. He didn't really want to take the gas, and was disguising it with a lot of bluff, bully-boy talk. The attendants were doing their job as well as they could-smiling, cajoling, persuading-but it had slowed them down.

Mark sighed. He had opened the subject-only as a way of distracting his children from the pre-Jaunt festivities, it was true, but he had opened it-and now he supposed he would have to close it as truthfully as he could without alarming them or upsetting them. He would not tell them, for instance, about C. K. Summer's book, The politics of the Jaunt, which contained one section called "The Jaunt Under the Rose," a compendium of the more believable rumors about the Jaunt. The story of Rudy Foggia, he of the bridge club murders and the uneaten chicken dinner, was in there. There were also case histories of some other thirty (or more . . . or less . . . or who knows) volunteers, scapegoats, or madmen who had Jaunted wide awake over the last three hundred years. Most of them arrived at the other end dead. The rest were hopelessly insane. In some cases, the act of reemerging had actually seemed to shock them to death. Summer's section of Jaunt rumors and apocrypha contained other unsettling intelligence as well: the Jaunt had apparently been used several times as a murder weapon. In the most famous (and only documented) case, which had occurred a mere thirty years ago, a Jaunt researcher named Lester Michaelson had tied up his wife with their daughter's plexiplast Dreamropes and pushed her, screaming, through the Jaunt portal at Silver City, Nevada. But before doing it, Michaelson had pushed the Nil button on his Jaunt board, erasing each and every one of the hundreds of thousands of possible portals through which Mrs. Michaelson might have emerged - anywhere from neighboring Reno to the experimental Jaunt-Station on Io, one of the Jovian moons. So there was Mrs. Michaelson, Jaunting forever somewhere out there in the ozone. Michaelson's lawyer, after Michaelson had been held sane and able to stand trial for what he had done (within the narrow limits of the law, perhaps he was sane, but in any practical sense, Lester Michaelson was just as mad as a hatter), had ciphered a novel defense: his client could not be tried for murder because no one could prove conclusively that Mrs. Michaelson was dead. This had raised the terrible specter of the woman, discorporeal but somehow still sentient, screaming in limbo . . . forever.

Michaelson was convicted and executed. In addition, Summers suggested, the Jaunt had been used by various tinpot dictators to get rid of political dissidents and political adversaries; some thought that the Mafia had their own illegal Jaunt-Stations, tied into the central Jaunt computer through their CIA connections. It was suggested that the Mafia used the Jaunt's Nil capability to get rid of bodies which, unlike that of the unfortunate Mrs. Michaelson, were already dead. Seen in that light, the Jaunt became the ultimate Jimmy Hoffa machine, ever so much better than the local gravel pit or quarry. All of this had led to Summer's conclusions and theories about the Jaunt; and that, of course, led back to Patty's persistent question about the mice. "Well," Mark said slowly, as his wife signaled with her eyes for him to be careful, "even now no one really knows, Patty. But all the experiments with animals-including the mice-seemed to lead to the conclusion that while the Jaunt is almost instantaneous physically, it takes a long, long time mentally." "I don't get it," Patty said glumly. "I knew I wouldn't. "But Ricky was looking at his father thoughtfully. "They went on thinking," he said. "The test animals. And so would we, if we didn't get knocked out." "Yes," Mark said. "That's what we believe now." Something was dawning in Ricky's eyes. Fright? Excitement? "It isn't just teleportation, is it, Dad? It's some kind of time-warp." It's eternity in there, Mark thought. "In a way," he said. "But that's a comic-book phrase-it sounds good but doesn't really mean anything, Rick. It seems to revolve around the idea of consciousness, and the fact that consciousness doesn't particulate-it remains whole and constant. It also retains some screwy sense of time. But we don't know how pure consciousness would measure time, or even if that concept has any meaning to pure mind. We can't even conceive what pure mind might be." Mark fell silent, troubled by his son's eyes, which were suddenly so sharp and curious. He understands but he doesn't understand, Mark thought. Your mind can be your best friend; it can keep you amused even when there's nothing to read, nothing to do. But it can turn on you when it's left with no input for too long. It can turn on you, which means that it turns on itself, savages itself, perhaps consumes itself in an unthinkable act of auto-cannibalism. How long in there, in terms of years? 0.000000000067 seconds for the body to Jaunt, but how long for the unparticulated consciousness? A hundred years? A thousand? A million? A billion? How long alone with your thoughts in an endless field of white? And then, when a billion eternities have passed, the crashing return of light and form and body. Who wouldn't go insane? "Ricky-"he began, but the Jaunt attendants had arrived with their cart. "Are you ready?" one asked. Mark nodded. "Daddy, I'm scared," Patty said in a thin voice. "Will it hurt?" "No, honey, of course it won't hurt," Mark said, and his voice was calm enough, but his heart was beating a little fast-it always did, although this would be something like his twenty-fifth Jaunt. "I'll go first and you'll see how easy it is. "The Jaunt attendant looked at him questioningly. Mark nodded and made a smile. The mask descended. Mark took it in his own hands and breathed deep of the dark.

The first thing he became aware of was the hard black Martian sky as seen through the top of the dome which surrounded Whitehead City. It was night here, and the stars sprawled with a fiery brilliance undreamed of on earth. The second thing he became aware of was some sort of disturbance in the recovery room-mutters, then shouts, then a shrill scream. Oh dear God, that's Marilys! he thought, and struggled up from his Jaunt couch, fighting the waves of dizziness. There was another scream, and he saw Jaunt attendants running toward their couches, their bright red jumpers flying around their knees. Marilys staggered toward him, pointing. She screamed again and then collapsed on the floor, sending an unoccupied Jaunt couch rolling slowly down the aisle with one weakly clutching hand. But Mark had already followed the direction of her pointing finger. He had seen. It hadn't been fright in Ricky's eyes; it had been excitement. He should have known, because he knew Ricky-Ricky, who had fallen out of the highest crotch of the tree in their backyard in Schenectady when he was only seven, who had broken his arm (and was lucky that had been all he'd broken); Ricky who dared to go faster and further on his Slideboard than any other kid in the neighborhood; Ricky who was first to take any dare. Ricky and fear were not well acquainted. Until now. Beside Ricky, his sister still mercifully slept. The thing that had been his son bounced and writhed on its Jaunt couch, a twelve-year-old boy with a snow-white fall of hair and eyes which were incredibly ancient, the corneas gone a sickly yellow. Here was a creature older than time masquerading as a boy; and yet it bounced and writhed with a kind of horrid, obscene glee, and at its choked, lunatic cackles the Jaunt attendants drew back in terror. Some of them fled, although they had been trained to cope with just such an unthinkable eventuality. The old-young legs twitched and quivered. Claw hands beat and twisted and danced on the air; abruptly they descended and the thing that had been his son began to claw at its face. "Longer than you think, Dad!" it cackled. "Longer than you think! Held my breath when they gave me the gas! Wanted to see! I saw! I saw! Longer than you think!" Cackling and screeching, the thing on the Jaunt couch suddenly clawed its own eyes out. Blood gouted. The recovery room was an aviary of screaming voices now. "Longer than you think, Dad! I saw! I saw! Long Jaunt! Longer than you think-"It said other things before the Jaunt attendants were finally able to bear it away, rolling its couch swiftly away as it screamed and clawed at the eyes that had seen the unseeable forever and ever; it said other things, and then it began to scream, but Mark Oates didn't hear it because by then he was screaming himself.

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