#it just makes sense. if something is confounding you; scale it down and try again. that’s my wisdom for the day

[fingertipsmp3]

Thinking about how my granddad damn near went through the five stages of grief the first time he saw me knitting baby clothes, but now his gut reaction is to be like ‘so which of your friends is expecting’ lol

[alexandenigtscreations]

Chapters: 2/3 Fandom: The Penumbra Podcast Rating: Not Rated Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings Relationships: Peter Nureyev/Juno Steel Additional Tags: Poisoning, Poison, Heist gone wrong, Peter Nureyev has ADHD, Rita defiantly has ADHD, Nonbinary Juno Steel, crime against crime itself, No Beta, we die like the friends of Sasha Wire, Whump, Hurt/Comfort, The Penumbra Podcast, TPP, Junoverse | Juno Steel Universe Summary:

After Nureyev get's poisoned on a mission, he's determined to see it to it's completion. He and Juno make quite the team after all.

Chapter 2

Babe-" his brow knitted together as someone shook him gently. "Babe, time to wake up." The touch was so tender- and yet it set his head off hammering.  

Nureyev groaned, hiding his face in the nook of Juno’s neck. A few more minutes in bed wouldn’t hurt.

“Come on Ransom, we’re home.” There was a hand running through his hair he leaned into the touch.  Juno’s words caught up with his mind, we’re home. More importantly, they weren’t alone.

Nureyev’s eyes flew open and locked onto Jet, his expression unreadable. This was not their bedroom aboard the Carte Blanche, this was the hanger, the Ruby; and once again, he was making a scene in front of Jet. Confound it all.  

He unfurled best he could, breath catching with the unexpected wave of nausea. His hand pressed to his corset front so that he nearly fell back into Juno.  

“Babe?” Through the thick molasses of thought, Nureyev dragged his attention back to the Detective.  

“Hmm?” His voice came small and weak, even to his own ears. Still he was determined to project some semblance of normalcy. He forced leadend limbs to extricate himself from the Ruby, Juno right behind.  

“The Big Guy has something to say.” The Detective jerked his head towards Jet, his pearl earrings dancing in the light.  

“Indeed-” he turned to Nureyev, an extra crease forming in his brow “First, are you alright Ransom? You do not look well.” the Ruby whistled as if in agreement.

Nureyev hummed “Nothing a little rest won’t help-” he rubbed absently at his throat, sure that bruises had made themselves visible. “What- were you going to say?”

“Buddy set the family meeting to take place in one hour's time.” Jet explained. “As we could not hear you during the mission, there are details we require about Mx. Balsa and-”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah Big Guy, we know how the Family Meetings go by now.” Juno cut in hand on hip.

“I find it beneficial to go over procedures to ensure quality performance.”

“Okay, yeah. Guess that makes sense, but-”

There was an explosion that shook the entirety of the carte blanche, nearly toppling Nureyev. Half formed thoughts of security and debt collectors flashed through his mind.    

Were they there?  We're they coming for him?

Before they could so much as ask a question, Rita started to wail and Vespa cursed loudly from the direction of the kitchen. Jet excused himself and went to investigate leaving the pair alone with the Ruby.

“The hell was that?” Juno was tense, every muscle in his being straining towards the commotion.  His goddess was ever the curious one.  The scene was enough to make Nureyev smile.

“Oh go on Juno- she may require- your services.”

Juno’s head whipped back to face him, the pearl earrings flashing in the warm light. “But what about you?”

“Me? Why I’ll be fine- Detective.”

His eye was large, soft and unsure. He so wanted to check on his friend and yet, was plainly reluctant to leave Nureyev’s side

“But-”

“We can play doctor later. For now- go-”

That seemed to do the trick. He flushed prettily at that, “Well, if you’re sure-”

“Yes.”

“Okay.” he turned and Nureyev could hear him muttering under his breath “Damnit Rita- If this is another one of your snacks I swear-” before disappearing from sight.  

Fine, as it turned out, may have been an overstatement.

As soon as Juno left, he realized just how unwell he felt. He'd half a mind to call the Detective back, or call Vespa-  

Vespa-

His head throbbed at the thought of having to see her in such a state. No, a good lie down should surface.

Nureyev wasn't sure how he'd managed to make it back to his room. He felt heavier and heavier with each foot fall, each movement becoming more of a labor. Pain flared at his core, tripping him up. He fell hard into the wall smacking his temple hard enough to see stars.  

Get a grip on yourself, he chastised, frustration flashing bright and hot within. He hissed as his stomach lurched, acrid saliva rushing to pool in his mouth. Reflexively, he pressed a hand flat to his stomach, trying to breathe through it. Now he was just being foolish. All that he could do was will himself to not be sick.  

Then where would you be- he shook himself glancing up. Still the corridor stretched out long and treacherous. Unyielding in it it's length and tedium.  

There was nothing for it but to tredge on.

The closer he got to his room the greater the pain in his abdomen. He leaned on his door and put in the security code with shaking hands. Sweat trickling down his face, his back, plastering the finery to skin.  

A fresh stab of pain slammed into Nureyev just as the door swooshed open. He toppled in, the world blurring in a dizzying kaleidoscope of color. It was as though he was in a Martian teleporter again, careening through space and matter, no discernable surroundings, just the fall. He flailed. An eternity later his knees hit hard into the sea of debris masking the floor.  

What just happened? He was left to wonder, face pressed into a pile of clothes. Gasping, he attempted to pull himself upright but he couldn’t manage. It didn't make sense! Arms strong enough to scale a building should not feel so weak, so very hard to support- as though bone had been replaced with cast iron.  

Nureyev shifted, trying again to sit, maybe get to his bed, his comms- pain ripped through him. This time he couldn't hold back the strangled yell as he convulsed around his middle.  

Somewhere, in the back of his mind he realized he could die like this, and there would be nothing he could do.

He sent a silent apology to Juno.

"The Thief still isn't here-" growled Vespa.

"Yeah, I know." Said Juno. It wasn't like Nureyev to be late, especially to something scheduled by the Buddy Aurinko.  

"So what could be taking him so damn long Steel."

"Well I'd say it's the sabotage plan Vespa, I hear those are pretty lengthy."

"Oh very funny!"

"Look, I know about as much as you do okay?" Juno shot back, irritation getting the better of him. Okay, so the man didn't give them a name, why the hell did they have to continue to gang up on him? "Last thing he told me before Rita's microwave mishap-"

"It said microwavable on the tin Boss!"

"Yes but you have to take it out before you- god, Okay, look, not the point! Ransom said he wasn't feeling well and wanted a nap before the meeting."

"You are thinking he fell asleep like he did in the Ruby." Jet added thoughtfully while Rita wove elaborate braids into his hair and trimmed away the singed ends.

"Mista Ransom ain't feeling well? You should give him a kiss and make him feel better Mista Steel. Oh! Like in Jovian Princess! Lights Out, where the beautiful princess is awakened from her slumber of a thousand years by the other princess from a warring kingdom! And-"

"Rita dear, you bring up a fine point." Buddy interjected smoothly, "Pete's not here and the only one who can tell us why is Pete. And seeing as he made up a significant part of the heist-"

Juno knew where this was going and was already half out of his seat "I'll get him."

"Thank you darling." Buddy smiled.  

The door to Nureyev's room was, predictably, closed. Juno knocked "Babe? You in there?"

No reply.

Frowning he tried again "Babe?"

Nothing.

"I'm coming in."

The doors swooshed open to reveal the environmental hazard that was his boyfriend's room. The bed was empty, if you didn't count crumpled paper, and mounds of equipment and clothes. Hell, the man could use a few cleaning tips-

He spotted a molded plate of- something-

Or an encyclopedia...

He cast his eye about, trying to make sence of the "I-Spy" chaos of the room, before giving up to look elsewhere when he spotted a leg in the mess.

"Nureyev!" Juno couldn't help but call out fear spiking in his chest. The man was lying on his side, curled up around his middle, racked in tremors. Tangled in the mess around him enough to be camouflaged.  "Nureyev! Hey, hey hey babe-'' he dove to his side, carefully rolling him up into his arms. He whimpered faintly, protesting the movement. "I'm here, what's wrong?"

Tenderly, Juno smoothed back the hair sticking to his clammy brow. Hell, why was he so cold?

"Ju-no-" normally, Juno loved the way Nureyev said his name. As though it were a damned love language all its own.  But now it was a small broken thing as though he'd put all his strength into it. As though he were surprised Juno was there at all. He was looking at him with those eyes again, but the brightness was…. strange- glassy. It was taking him too long to focus. "Ju-no-" his chest stuttered "I- ugh-" he collapsed further in on himself, face contorting in pain. All this took seconds, but might as well have been an eternity.  

"Nureyev! Come on babe, don't do that!" Juno's mind spun wildly. He wasn’t dealing with some mask now, not Rex Glass, or Duke Rose, not even Peter Ransom. No, this was Peter Nureyev striped bare- and he was in serious pain. The man keened in a way that was so very wrong for him. The sound was barely above a whisper yet cut Juno to his core.  

“H-hurts-”

“I-I know babe, just- just give me a sec- Just-”

That's when he saw it, the odd discoloration of Nureyev's lips. He'd missed at first because of the faint pigment that clung to his features. His words of a few hours ago came floating back 'just a tad under the weather... something I drank…'

He had told him.  

Hours ago.  

He had told him hours ago and Juno had done nothing.  

Steel you goddamned idiot! He scrambled for his comms, murmuring assurance to his thief as he went, trying to ease him back open. He couldn't squash the rising panic now.

"Steel, what the hell-"

"We need help! Vespa- please!" Nureyev stilled again, his chest working overtime, producing short, shallow bursts of air. Arm wrapped over the corsets front.  

Goddamned it! His corset!

Juno swore loudly into the comms, tossing them down on speaker, "I went looking for him, and, Christ-" his hand slipped on a fastening, slicing deep into his palm. Why were these clasps so hard do undoo? "H-h-he's sick Vespa, really sick. Dammit I- I think he was poisoned-"

“Poisoned?” Even through the fear fogging his brain he could hear the scrape of chairs and pounding feet. “What do you mean by that Steel?”

“Poisoned! You know, when something gets into your body that isn’t supposed-” Nureyev’s hand closed around his wrist, shocking him out of the pointless rant. As if trying to stop Juno from undoing more of the fastenings. “It’s gotta come off babe-”

“Nn-no-” he choked out.

"You need to breathe Ransom-" he said, easily breaking his grip. That too was wrong but there wasn't time for that. Nureyev curled with each fastener undone, gasping and trembling. It was hard for Juno to not feel like the worst girlfriend in the Galaxy.  

"Course I know what poisoning is!" Vespa snapped "what I don't know is how the hell did he manage to get himself poisoned."

At some point Nureyev had turned into Juno, a hand tangling in his shirt, the other clamped around his stomach as tightly as he could manage. The movements were odd clumsy things that lacked his usual precision, his grace.

He was quite then, an eerie silence that spoke of years of hidden spaces and dangerous places. Normally he'd be trying to be as useful to Vespa as possible, filling her in on the necessary details. But not now.  

Juno hated that more than anything else.

"The mission. There was some sort of stupid test- a-a-and he told me not to drink it! Damnit it! He told me! I-I never even thought that he might of-"

“Cool it Steel.” Vespa cut in, not unkindly. “I’m getting the Med Bay setup. You gonna bring him to us, or should I send the gurney?”

Nureyev was long, lean and wiry. Not the easiest person to move around but Juno managed it before. Admittedly, those were more entertaining moments, but the presidents still stands.

“I’ll bring him.”

“Great. Move the thief, and I’ll be ready for you.” at any other time that may have sounded like a threat, but now it sounded like the most reassuring thing he’s ever heard.  

All he had to do was move Nureyev, he could do that.  

Juno glanced down at the man holding onto him like a lifeline, his face tucked into the popped collar of his coat. He hadn’t even taken it off. God-

Carefully, Juno shifted him, Nureyev hissed, pressing closer.  

What was he supposed to do with that? Juno took a deep steading breath of his own, running his fingers through Nureyev’s damp locks in what he hoped to be a comforting manor.  

“Okay babe, we’re going to have to move you” perhaps telling him would make it easier. He tried again, sweeping his arm behind his shoulders and lifting. Only for his foot to catch on the coat trane, he tripped shaking the nameless thief something fierce-

Nureyev cried out at the jostling- folding so that his gangly form nearly slipped through Juno's grasp. They just made it to the bed before his hold broke. The Thief spilled onto the unmade covers, holding his stomach, eyes squeezed shut. Breathing, just, breathing.  

Juno knew that look. And Dammit he was the one that put that look there. After he swore to himself that he’d never hurt him again.  

Nope, no, ugh-ah, no way in hell could he do this- He’d have to call for a stretcher after all.

“You comin some time this century, Steel?”

How long had they been there? “I- it’s hurting him.”

“Jesus Steel! Better pain than death!”

"But-" his brain caught up to his mouth, "yeah-" what the hell was wrong with him? He'd try again but first the coat had to go.

The Detective essed an arm over his shoulders before gathering the rest of the thief. Long limbs sitting strangely in the Lady's hold. There was a lot to manage, but manage, Juno did. It got easier after the hell scape of Nureyev's room.  

Nureyev's head lolled against Juno's neck, as though he couldn't support its weight.

"Hang on babe." Juno wheezed "just- for me, please-"

His lungs were tight and his legs burned, his burden heavier with each step, but it hardly mattered, they were nearly there now-

"Vespa!" He shouted, he'd forgotten the comms, "I got him!"

"Bout damn time! A Rengian sea slug could of moved faster!" She said, all the same indicating the operating table.

Juno had to raise up on tip toe to clear Nureyev onto the bedding. The man fell away with a piteous groan, fingers digging into the ruined shirt front.

"I know Babe, I know- We are having you looked at though."

That didn't seem to calm him down, if anything he became more distressed. Tried to raise himself up, move his legs, only to collapse back.

"Babe- babe come on-"” at a loss, Juno cupped Nureyev’s face in one hand, while the other was planted firmly on the man’s chest, mirroring the frantic dance of his own crappy lungs. “Ransom- babe, you’re- okay now”

“Jun-no- I don' feel- well-” it looked like it was hard for him to say, and not just because the words came out heavily accented and slurred.

“I know babe, Vespa is on it.”

"Vess-pa?" He glanced over, eyes widening at the acid green.

"Yeah Ransom, it's me."

Was it his imagination? Or did Nureyev seem to recoil? Shrinking in on himself as though trying to protect vitals.  

"Ransom, hey hey hey-" he tried to refocus him.  

"Hold 'im steady, I need a blood sample."

"Rr-right." He said, pressing Nureyev back into the covers. The man offered no resistance and Juno was left anxiously thumbing his cheek while the deed was done.

Vespa pushed him out of the way after that, cursing at her inspection of the thief and kept barking questions Juno's direction like:

"When did he get poisoned?” and “How much did he take?” and “What symptoms did the thief present?”

There were only a few questions Juno was equipped to answer. The mounting unknowns were only adding to his pile of worry. God, if Nureyev dies because he wasn’t paying attention- dies because he hadn't watched him more? Or at the very least got him checked out after puking his guts out in an ally.  

The man had been poisoned right in front of him and Juno hadn’t noticed.  

The man had been poisoned right in front of him and hadn’t thought to tell Juno-

Juno couldn't help but wonder why?  

Vespa cut away Nureyev's shirt, exposing the narrow muscled frame and the delicate criss cross of scars.  The ones he didn't bother remove.

Weren't they partners?  

She attached wireless monitors over his heart, his pulse points. Getting Juno to help clear away the rags.

Did he still not trust him?  

There was more swearing as their resident doc looked at the blood readings, already plugging something into the system. Christ, he was useless with computers, but even he knew that heartbeat was weak.

He couldn't help feel as though he were useless to Nureyev too-

Then he noticed it- Nureyev's chest had stopped moving.  

"Vespa!" He called out fear clawing at his insides. To her credit, she saw it right away.

"Goddamn it thief! I'm not done with you yet!" Rather than trying to get his lungs working again, she tore into her supplies with the care and ferocity of a sewer rabbit navigating it's tunnels. Everything remained impeccably organized, if a little man handled. The monitor started to sound urgently.

"There-" she said in triumph, holding out a large vial.

He couldn't understand what the big deal was-. Too preoccupied with the still form Infront of him.  "Vespa, he's not-"

"It's liquid oxygen moron," she said, filling a syringe "this way we have time to intubate."

"Intubate?" That was- serious- hell, Juno had it done before and the weeks of respiratory therapy were enough of a deterrent to avoid a third encounter-

Well, as much as someone in his line of work could-

The needle was worked into Nureyev's arm, and the contents released. The monitor began to calm down, but Vespa didn't slow.  

"You need to leave Steel." She growled. "Now."

He looked at her incredulous, how the hell did she think that he could leave at a time like this? He was about to say as much too when she elaborated

"You don't want to see this."

"But"

"I Said Out! I can't babysit you both!"

It might as well have been a knife to the gut. Juno took one glance more at Nureyev, frozen on the table, and walked out.

(Thank you for reading <3  Reblogs and likes are greatly appreciated)

[gallavictorious]

“Will you suck my dick whenever I want?” Sex, Power, and the Gallavich Modes of Communication.

Becaue of reasons I want to talk a bit about the rather infamous “suck my dick” scene of 4x08.

This is a complicated scene and I have complicated feelings about it, which is pretty much the above-mentioned 'reasons' for writing this exploratory meta: when in confoundment, hash it out by putting all your thoughts down on paper. Fair warning: this is long, and since it deals with dubious consent you might want to give it a miss if discussion of that sort of thing upsets you. Same goes if you believe that Ian really is just asking for unlimited access to blowjobs, or find extensive (over)analysis of fictional works silly.

The accusation sometimes levelled at Ian in regards to this scene is that he's being manipulative and practically forcing Mickey into performing sexual acts he would otherwise not perfom, taking advantage of Mickey's emotional vulnerability to secure sexual pleasure for himself. He certainly issues an ultimatum and this scene is uncomfortable to watch because of that, but at the same time it's always seemed pretty obvious to me that endless blowjobs isn't really Ian's objective here. If that's all he wanted, he could easily get that without having to resort to extortion: finding sexual partners has never been a problem for him. No, there are other things at work, and below I try to figure out what.

Let's kick of by a quote from Oscar Wilde: “Everything is about sex except sex. Sex is about power.”

Because yes, this is about power rather than sex – which is another way of saying that what Ian truly wants isn't for Mickey to give him a blowjob, but for Mickey to agree to do it in spite of his initial reluctance. Which still isn't a very flattering look for Ian, because neither demanding blowjobs nor demanding your partner's submission is particularly charming (outside of negotiated kink, of course). However, I think it's fair to say that the power Ian seeks here is not the power to (permanently) place himself above Mickey, but the power to once more level the playing field between them and regain some sense of the agency and control that Ian felt he lost during the whole mess leading up to Mickey's wedding.

From the very start, Ian's been wanting more from Mickey than Mickey's been willing or able to give (not because Mickey isn't as into Ian as Ian is into him, but because of all that other shit: you know well what I'm talking about). To a large extent, Ian's been reining himself in, wary of asking too much, lest he scare Mickey off. Whenever he's openly pushed for more – trying to kiss Mickey, putting his hand on the glass, insisting that Mickey do not murder his father – Mickey has brusquely rebuffed him. However, he's had quite a bit of success with less direct methods, as when he 'gets' Mickey to kiss him by explaining that one of the reasons he likes Ned is that Ned isn't afraid to. (And for the record, I don't think this was a conscious ploy by Ian: he was simply being honest with Mickey, in a way that also conveyed his disappointment in Mickey's continued unwillingness to kiss.)

Ian's been in love with Mickey for a long time. For a long time, he doesn't tell Mickey this, which  is partly due to the above-mentioned fear of scaring Mickey off, and partly due to Ian genuinely not being sure if Mickey likes him back. (“How do you know if a guy you've been hanging out with likes you?”) But following the very obviously jealous beatdown of Ned, the kiss in the van, and the invitation to a sleep-over, Ian is finally convinced that Mickey does indeed like him too – only 3x06 happens and Mickey is not only shutting him out again, he's getting married to someone else.

But knowing what he now knows – i.e. that Mickey is in love with him – Ian doen't back off or try (to the best of his feeble ability) to play it cool. He puts himself out there, he puts his emotions on display, and he repeatedly begs Mickey not to get married.

Mickey gets married all the same.

Now, Ian has a strong sense of integrity and does not enjoy having to depend on someone else. Ian is not very good at admitting when he's wrong. Ian is proud. Because of this and quite apart from the heartbreak of losing Mickey to marriage, I'd imagine that he's feeling less than great about being scorned after having been so open about his wishes. (Well. Scorned is a somewhat strong word: Mickey's obviously still down for him, but he's not willing to give Ian what he wants – a real relationship, as Ian defines it.) As far as Ian is concerned, the situation has created a tangible power gap between them, with Mickey having the upper hand. (It might be argued that the power gap's been there the entire time, with Ian wanting more than Mickey was willing to give, but up until that point Ian has not actively asked for things Mickey's made clear is out of bounds but has accepted Mickey's marking of boundaries with a shrug and an 'oh'.)

Mickey's broken “don't” as Ian announces his intention to enlist isn't enough to bridge that gap: it's an admission of feeling, of need, but does not indicate any intention on Mickey's part to further act on that feeling. It doesn't change anything: Ian still wants a commited relationship, Mickey still wants Ian around to fuck him even while he stays married to Svetlana.

And for all that we sympathize with Mickey – which we bloody well should, because he was the victim of a horrible crime and trapped in the shittiest of situations through no fault of his own – it isn't unreasonable of Ian to not want to be the secret 'mistress' of a closeted man. He's been there, done that, and quite understandably wants more from Mickey. He isn't wrong for trying to extricate himself from that situation, even as it's utterly understandable why Mickey isn't able to give him what he wants at the time.

Life's like that, kids. Sometimes there are no good choices, and sometimes no one's at fault even though everything's an absolute mess and people get hurt. (I mean, Terry's at fault. Terry is a huge fucking cunt.)

It bears saying that Ian isn't a saint and doesn't behave perfectly in this situation: he shows little understanding for Mickey's entirely justifiable fears, and rather than telling Mickey that he loves him, he insists that Mickey admits that he loves Ian, which I do find a bit presumptuous. Ian's small smile when Mickey comes close to breaking when Ian announces his plan to leave indicates that he finds some small measure of pleasure in knowing that he's hurt Mickey the way Mickey has hurt him: though I think it's not primarily pleasure in the hurt itself, but rather pleasure in what it signifies, i.e. that Mickey does care about him too. But that isn't enough; that isn't really news.

So he enlists and that goes the way it goes and then Mickey seeks him out at the club and brings him home, to the bed Mickey normally shares with his wife. This, I think, tells Ian something; it suggests something beyond Mickey just having feelings for him. It's just a suggestion, mind, so it doesn't actually resolve anything, but it's enough of a something that Ian's willing to have a conversation about possibly returning when Mickey comes to see him at the Gallagher house.

But Ian has a problem. If he simply goes back to be being with Mickey without anything changing he has effectively agreed to the sort of arrangement he joined the army to very pointedly escape. Quite apart from him not wanting that sort of relationship, it would signify a failure to proud guy Ian, and following his failure to even make it through basic, I think that's not something he's willing to allow. He still wants to be with Mickey, though. Knowing that Mickey is as unlikely to divorce his wife now as he was to call off the wedding, Ian can't ask for that; he can't ask again for the type or relationship he really wants – but he can't go back to what they had previously either. This puts him in a pretty  tough spot, and I think this is why he asks for Mickey to suck his dick. While not achieving exactly what he wants it still gives him enough of a something that he feels comfortable resuming his relationship with Mickey:

Firstly, it serves to even the score and redistribute the power between them. Yes, this is him asking Mickey to submit to him and for Mickey to acknowledge Ian's power over him, but it's a request made from what Ian perceives to be a position of weakness (because of the whole Ian putting himself out there and Mickey getting married in spite of that). By momentarily placing himself above Mickey, Ian seeks balance the scales, bringing them back to an even level. This is a one-time thing, over and done with once Mickey agrees. Evidence suggests this works very well, too: look at their interactions the next day, when they're back to their normal and easy back and forth. Even so, it's a pretty fucked up thing to ask for, but we need to remember that Ian has a fairly complicated relationship with sex, given all that he's been through, and probably doesn't take this kind of thing nearly as seriously as we might want him to.

Secondly, Ian wants Mickey to commit to an emotional honesty he has so far resisted. If they can't be an official couple, he still wants that much. They were getting somewhere before Terry fucked everything up, and Ian has zero interest in going back to a relationship where Mickey pretends that it's only about the banging and shies away from any notions of an emotional involvement.

Ian wants Mickey to let himself be vulnerable with Ian, and while performing a sexual act to signify a commitment not to let things be only about sex seems pretty damned contradictory at first glance, this specific type of sexual act – which is bitch-coded in the enviroment Mickey has grown up in and which he probably finds hard to admit that he likes (until he doesn't: “I suck his dick and I love it” – but this line really supports both the idea that Mickey doesn't in fact mind sucking Ian's dick and that it's something that isn't “appropriate” for him to like; else he wouldn't have thrown it in Terry's face like that) – signifies more that just the sexual act itself: Ian knows that Mickey likes sucking his dick, and he wants Mickey to own that (as Mickey owns being a bottom): he wants Mickey to lay off the bullshit and be honest about who is and what he wants, to Ian, if not to anyone else at this point. The last time Ian asked this of Mickey, Mickey kicked him in the face, so I don't think it's too hard to see why Ian would go about it in this way rather than asking for what he really wants outright.

What he seeks here is a promise of a long-time commitment, and that's why the “whenever I want” bit is significant, because it points ahead to the future, even if Ian has no intention of enforcing the actual sucking of dicks bit.

And I think it's very important that both Ian and Mickey are ver clear about the fact that Ian will not enforce this. I think they are: for all that they have trouble communicating at times, this is the sort of subtle signalling they are pretty good at. I guess it comes down a bit to character intepretation though: I just don't think Ian would seriously ask this of Mickey, and I don't think Mickey would agree to it either. They both see this for the one-time act of submission it is, with all that it signifies and symbolizes.

(Let's be clear: if Ian had actually continued to enforce this demand, leading them down a path of a 'blow me right now or I'm leaving' that would have been pretty damned horrible. The reason I don't think this happened, apart from finding it OOC, is the complete lack of evidence that things are weird between them going forward, and if Ian had been forcing Mickey, a rape victim, into performing sexual acts, things sure as hell would have been weird between them. After this, they're back on an even footing: they sure have conflicts, which culminates with Mickey coming out [and, yes – demanding that someone come out isn't great, especially when that someone is facing the kind of threats Mickey is, but at the same time it's perfectly reasonable for Ian not to want to stay in a secret relationship: again, it's a fucked-up situation with no good choices], but they're on level fighting ground. It's not the sort of conflict resolution I'd recommend, but it apparently worked for them, and given their generally messy dynamic, I'm not really surprised.)

In fairness, Ian isn't really being nice about this whole thing, and there's absolutely some glee and triump when Mickey actually agrees to do it. A sense of vindication, surely, after what happened between them just before Ian left. But do notice that while Ian kind of does rub it in – “suck my dick, whenever I want” with that pleased smile – he doesn't in fact make Mickey say it, even though Mickey's request – “don't make me say it, asswipe” – does make it clear that if Ian demands it, Mickey will. There is an element of payback to this whole exchange, there's no denying that, but Ian's not out to actually be cruel to Mickey: he wants them to be back on even and equal ground, and he wants Mickey to own his desires and emotions.

So yeah, it's still not great by any means, and it's still uncomfortable to watch, but if we take into account Ian's somewhat causal relationship to sex in general, as well as Mickey's unwillingness both to emotionally commit and to actually talk about things, I think it's fair to say that Ian is not trying to manipulate Mickey, but rather to stand his ground and express his wishes in a way that he believes Mickey can and will play along with. (I, incidentally, think that Ian might be wrong, and that it's possible that Mickey has missed him enough and worked with himself enough that if Ian had made instead asked “will we actually talk about our feelings” Mickey would have gone along with that too, to the best of his ability – but this is actually way easier for Mickey to roll with.) It is pretty messed up, but viewed through the lense of their shared history and less than straightforward modes of communication, it does make a whole lot of sense.

To me at least – as always, feel free to disagree or add your own perspectives. I view meta as an invitation to discuss, not as a finalized argument to end discussion, and there are certainly aspects I haven’t touched upon here. And if you have seen this discussed before, I'd be super grateful if you'd point in me in the right direction.

[kaesaaurelia]

let us go down, and there confound their language

For @whumptober2020 day 5: Where Do You Think You're Going? (specifically "rescue" and "failed escape")

Continues on from day four, wherein Aziraphale met up with a distraught coworker, waited for Crawly at the base of the Tower of Babel, and then it fell on him.

Aziraphale/f!Crawly, content warning for large-scale disaster/building collapse.  (Also, parts of fic probably aren’t super accessible to screen readers, as I have included a few pieces of “dialogue” here and there that are full of nonstandard characters.  They are brief, and not meant to be understood.)

Aziraphale scanned the rubble for surviving humans.  He knew they were there, he'd been the one to save them.  As he pulled rocks off of a woman who had miraculously been sheltered from the worst of the bricks, but was still unconscious, he thought about whatever Nisroc was so distressed about, and wondered whether Crawly was all right, and a terrible thought occurred to him.  Had Crawly known about this disaster?  Had she suggested the meeting place on purpose?

She was a demon.  And she had been very angry with Heaven -- and with him? -- last time he'd seen her.

The idea upset him more than it should have.  It wasn't as if they were friends -- they were an angel and a demon, for Heaven's sake.  But still... there was something... nice about running into somebody you'd known for so long, and she was very kind for a demon.  Her heart was in the right place.  He'd thought it was, anyway.

He tried to put it out of his mind and concentrate on finding as many humans as he could to pull them out of the rubble and heal them.  He even revived a few of the dead ones -- the children, mainly, because Crawly's words just before the flood kept echoing in his mind.  As far as he knew, Crawly hadn't gone off and saved any of those children, she'd only been griping.  Aziraphale was the one doing something useful.

But an odd trend was starting to show itself, for every human he found who was conscious seemed to have got the exact sort of bump on the head that made them not speak properly, so he couldn't even explain what had happened.  They'd talk to him, in gibberish, and he'd try to be reassuring, but they didn't seem to understand at all.  It had been worrying on the first human he'd pulled from the rubble, but by the time he'd reached twelve, he was beginning to suspect demonic intervention.

(And what sort of business had Crawly had with that copper merchant, anyway?  She'd been awfully cagey about it.  Although, try as he might, Aziraphale couldn't think of anything particularly nefarious about the copper business, or how it might connect to a building collapsing.)

He was standing to the side taking a breather, for the hot sun and the dust had made it hard not to cough, when all his suspicions about demonic involvement in the disaster were confirmed, and three fellows -- three demons, specifically -- grabbed him by the shoulders and dragged him into an alley.  They all looked the same, so Aziraphale assumed they were that Legion one (that Legion many, rather) that Crawly always complained about.  One of them said something to Aziraphale, sounding very demanding, but he didn't understand any of the words.

"I'm sorry, didn't quite catch that," he said, apologetically.

They all looked at each other.  Then they started shouting gibberish at him, and Aziraphale realized they were just as confused as he was.

"Listen," he said, "you're not making a lot of sense.  Did you hit your heads?" he asked.  It was cruel of him, and he felt a bit bad about it, but he was going to find it very funny if they'd caused this awful disaster only to have it fall on their heads, literally.  Aziraphale didn't think there was a word for that, but there probably ought to be.

The demons gabbled at him.  They did seem to understand each other, which was unusual, and one of them shushed the others and began to speak very loudly and slowly to Aziraphale.  "tuH gʷʰen- káput?" the demon shouted at him.

"Oh, this is absurd," said Aziraphale.  "Can't you just heal yourselves?"

The shouty demon turned to his comrades.  "gʰabʰ sekʷ-dyēus gʷʰerm-per-pōds," he told them, and they nodded, like that made sense.  They made to grab him again, but Aziraphale reflexively spread his wings in self-defense -- and instantly was in agony.  He had forgotten how horribly broken they were, and it turned out that having his wings out made it much, much easier for them to chain him up, because he could claw and bite and kick all he wanted, but one of the demons had seized his left wing and whenever he yanked on it the pain was unbearable.

"steH₂!" one of the demons snarled at him once they'd got the manacles on, and Aziraphale got to his feet, miserably.

They seemed about to lead him away, when one of them said "h₂éngʷʰis!"

"h₂éngʷʰis?" the other two asked, confused, and then Crawly ran up to them, breathing hard.  Aziraphale hoped she would be able to sort this out, and that she hadn't, in fact, been part of this at all.

"ʔarbay!" she shouted at the three demons, and they paused what they were doing, and looked at each other.

"tuH gʷʰen- káput?" one of them asked him.

Crawly looked despairing at this.  "ḳudš?" she asked, apparently addressing Aziraphale.  She looked so hopeful.

"Ah.  I'm afraid I can't understand you either," he said.

Crawly sighed.  "ʔVšk!" she said vehemently, and Aziraphale didn't really have to know the word to know what sense she'd meant it in.  She began to argue with the other demons, gesturing frequently at Aziraphale, and he got the impression she was trying to talk them into giving Aziraphale to her.  But they didn't seem to understand her reasoning any more than Aziraphale did, and finally the three demons started walking away from her, dragging Aziraphale along with them, Crawly trailing behind, looking worried.  She kept trying to speak comfortingly to Aziraphale, but the only word he could make out consistently was "ḳudš," and he could not imagine what this was supposed to mean.

They came then to an open portal to Hell, which was never a comforting sight -- it looked like a simple doorway, but the stairs and the darkness beyond suggested they went down further than any basement in Babylon had any right to be.

The other demons insisted Crawly go through first, and after another incoherent argument, she did, looking apologetically to Aziraphale as she began the long descent.

"You little assholes ready to go?" said a voice full of brittle cheer, and Aziraphale turned with a shock to see that Nisroc was standing behind them, accompanied by another one of the Legions.  She still looked horrible -- she had clearly been crying more -- and Aziraphale felt terrible for her until he realized that she wasn't chained.

Under any other circumstances he would have been relieved at finally finding someone who he understood, but he was still trying to wrap his head around the fact that she was going along with them willingly.  "What are you doing?" he asked her.

"Oh boy, this is gonna be awkward," she said.  "But hey, good news!" she said, with an over-wide smile.  "I passed my test!"  Her smile dissolved, and she blinked back tears.  "You were super sweet to be concerned, and it was really nice of you to go around saving all those people -- seriously, thank you -- but uh, we're all pretty much fucked today, I guess.  I'm really sorry about whatever happens next.  But I did tell you to leave."  And with that, Nisroc walked into Hell, and didn't look back.

[next part]

[exactlythatsblog]

DigitalOcean Review 2021: Is it a good and secure hosting service? | TopReview

What is DigitalOcean?

DigitalOcean is an American cloud hosting company Launching its first server in 2011? focused on helping developers launch more apps faster and easier. The ultimate goal of DigitalOcean is to use a solid-state drive, or SSD, to create a user-friendly platform that will allow their wealth of clients to transfer projects to and from the cloud, ramping up production with speed and efficiency.

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DigitalOcean truly dominates in uptime, conveying a normal of >99.99% in the course of the most recent year of observing.

That implies that since April 2020 they just had 14 blackouts and 23 minutes of personal time. The solitary month where DigitalOcean didn’t convey an ideal 100% uptime was April 2020 (with an uptime of 99.96%).

DigitalOcean last 12-month uptime and speed statistics DigitalOcean average uptime | See stats The average uptime for the past 12-months:

March 2021: 100% February 2021: 100% January 2021: 100% December 2020: 100% November 2020: 100% October 2020: 100% September 2020: 100% August 2020: 100% July 2020: 100% June 2020: 100% May 2020: 100% April 2020: 99.96%

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Uptime is the main measurement to look for while choosing a web to have.

After all — every chime and whistle in the world will not record for a load of bologna if your site is spending extensive stretches disconnected.

Coming in as a nearby second is speed.

Slacking sites should be ‘down’, in every practical sense. Lazy destinations are practically unusable. Your traffic will not spare a moment to bob. In a real sense. A distinction of only a couple of seconds can cost you practically the entirety of your potential site traffic.

Fortunately, moderate speed isn’t something you must be stressed over when joining with DigitalOcean.

DigitalOcean Page Speed Apr. 2020 — Mar. 2021

DigitalOcean normal speed | See details

Their previous year’s normal page stacking time was 268 ms — the quickest we’ve seen!

A nearby second is A2 Hosting with a 285 ms stacking time.

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DigitalOcean isn’t only a one-stunt horse. Truth be told, their set-up of items offers huge loads of potential for designers.

What are the various choices offered by DigitalOcean?

Happy you inquired.

Beads

Drops is a versatile figuring stage that can be tweaked to meet the entirety of a business’ application needs. It likewise remembers add-for capacity, observing, and progressed security.

DigitalOcean drops:

You can pick between standard or upgraded drops and afterward modify them however much you might want. Drops let devs avoid tedious establishment and design to move directly along toward code sending.

Spaces:

Though Droplets is for application sending, Spaces is about straightforward item stockpiling.

We’re discussing a security framework that permits you to store and convey information to applications and end clients. Spaces work under a straightforward cycle, making solid stockpiling with an intuitive UI or API.

Spaces can be utilized to store reinforcement documents, weblogs, information investigation, and considerably more.

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Kubernetes

Kubernetes are intended for designers and administrators.

How would you be able to manage Kubernetes?

You can send your web applications for Kubernetes for simpler scaling, higher accessibility, and lower costs. You can likewise utilize these for API and backend administrations.

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Although we likewise have it under our cons, we believe it’s quite wonderful that you can really alter all that you pay for — your site stockpiling, CPU utilization, transmission capacity, data set, memory, and so on

It’s actually an extraordinary benefit in case you’re a high-level client and as of now acquainted with precisely what you need, what your objectives are, what you don’t require, etc.

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DigitalOcean performs reinforcements every day and you can generally reestablish any information as long as 7 days earlier. Even though DigitalOcean has prevalent uptime, it’s in every case preferred to be protected over grieved!

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Your information and traffic are constantly gotten. This is something that numerous different hosts don’t stress a lot or don’t give. DigitalOcean ensures that your information is secured from start to finish. It’s an incredible benefit to keep those badly-willed associations and infections out of your site framework.

Of course, DigitalOcean has added encryption to its volumes. If you need to add an extra layer of safety, as with the majority of their highlights, you’ll need to go through an instructional exercise, follow the means, and know some coding to succeed.

Cons of Using DigitalOcean Hosting

DigitalOcean began solid, in any case, there are additionally a few downsides that should be noted out.

We should have a more intensive look.

1. For Advanced Users

The characteristic of a really incredible item lies in its capacity, to sum up, its administrations in layman’s terms.

This is something tech organizations, specifically, struggle to fold their aggregate heads over.

All things considered, most tech locales and stages will in general be brimming with language. As in, “uncommon words or articulations that are utilized by a specific calling or bunch and are hard for others to comprehend”.

At the point when one glances at tech items like DigitalOcean, the compulsion to turn to language-based language turns out to be clear. You’re managing a ton of specialized data — a master in the field would be constrained to compose it as far as they might be concerned, and not how the normal individual can get it.

That is no biggie for the high-level, power clients. They’ll get it. It’ll all bode well.

Yet, for the amateurs? No way.

This is a territory wherein DigitalOcean bombs significantly. The site’s duplicate is loaded up with specialized terms and abbreviations with no clarification. They’re obviously showcasing their item to designers explicitly.

In this way, others will battle to sort out some way to move a webpage over, dispatch, keep up, or even develop their site.

In correlation, Dreamhost works really hard of improving the language of their site into terms that a normal individual sees exhaustively.

2. Needs Basic Features Other Consumer Hosts Provide

The most web as we’ve checked on will toss in the equivalent ‘additional items.’ For instance, reinforcements, perhaps a decent CDN, and surprisingly an SSL authentication.

In contrast to other people, because DigitalOcean obliges a further developed group, they don’t toss in a lot of essential highlights that numerous different hosts will give or deal with to you in the wake of joining.

Stuff like:

Free space name with facilitating

The capacity to try and buy a space name

Free site movements

This means they can assist you with a portion of these things. In any case, you shouldn’t expect a great deal of hand-holding administrations when you join.

This really carries us to our next point.

3. Restricted Customer Support

Most facilitating organizations offer some variety of all-day, every-day support.

It may not generally be excellent, yet in any event, it’s something.

Lamentably, DigitalOcean has not at all like that. On the off chance that your site goes down in the center of the evening (which could be appalling on the off chance that you’re managing in abroad business sectors), there’s nobody for you to converse with. You need to go to their site and open a help ticket utilizing their online structure.

DigitalOcean makes ticket form4. Confounded cPanel

As been referenced as of now, DigitalOcean is certainly not for novices. Fundamentally, a cPanel is the thing that you need to assemble your site these days (except if you’re on an acceptable footing with programming dialects).

For DigitalOcean, first and foremost, you’ll need to set up a Droplet of your decision (DigitalOcean workers). At that point you’ll have to introduce the cPanel following a careful guide including embeddings a few code orders (indeed, you need to know some coding), enrolling your record, introducing the execution document, and so on

On top of the wide range of various stuff, you’ll need to buy the privilege from an outsider to utilize the cPanel.

If you have no involvement in coding and how to be an engineer yourself, we recommend, you either recruit a designer (a decent one) or keep away from DigitalOcean and discover arrangements that suit your necessities and abilities more.

The convenience of cPanel is generally instinctive, however, then again — there’s an expectation to learn and adapt and it’s unquestionably not for amateurs.

5. Estimating is Complicated

When you get into the evaluating plans, you’ll head will go dazed with every one of the choices and potential outcomes which you can utilize and overhaul. There are various classifications for data transmission, space, workers (various paces), CPU, security choices, and so on

Essentially put — with DigitalOcean there are loads of approaches to make your month-to-month expense extremely expensive.

Most different suppliers offer 2–5 distinct plans which give you a decent outline of what you get. With DigitalOcean you can modify everything yourself.

It very well may be something worth being thankful for, however except if you’re a high-level client (as referenced over), it’s fairly convoluted and tedious.

DigitalOcean Pricing, Hosting Plans, and Quick Facts

DigitalOcean’s Standard Droplets plan begins at $5 each month. The costs ascend from that point, getting increasingly elevated until you’re paying $80 each month for all the more very good quality administrations:

DigitalOcean fundamental drop prices when you take a gander at the CPU Optimized Droplets, those are beginning at $40 and going as far as possible up to an incredible $720 each month:

DigitalOcean computer processor enhanced evaluating

Speedy Facts

The simplicity of Signup: Quite simple (you can join with email, Google Account, or GitHub)

Free area: Not free.

Cash Back: No. Valuing depends on the pay-more only as costs arise model.

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Secret Fees and Clauses: No significant ones.

Upsells: A couple of upsells.

Record Activation: Account actuation is speedy.

Control Panel and Dashboard: Custom control board (with cPanel choice)

Establishment of Apps and CMSs (WordPress, Joomla, and so forth): One-tick installer for WordPress and other applications/CMSs.

Do We Recommend DigitalOcean?

Indeed…

… insofar as you’re an engineer.

In case you’re simply a normal individual hoping to dispatch a web presence, there are undeniably more easy-to-understand items out there that will cost you undeniably less.

For somebody that feels comfortable around the tech world, there is by all accounts no quicker or more profoundly performing item than DigitalOcean.

There are not many downsides yet on the off chance that uptime and speed are the main variables for you, DigitalOcean is among the most ideal decisions available.

Best options for DigitalOcean:

Best alternatives for DigitalOcean:

Bluehost Very Good Uptime | Easy to Use for Beginners | 24/7 Customer Support Read Bluehost review

DreamHost Best Month-to-Month Plan | 97-Day Refund Period | Unlimited Bandwidth Read DreamHost review

Further reading: The 10 Best Web Hosting Services (In 2021)

If you have used Digital Ocean service, please don’t forget to let a review about your experience whit this service for other people who want to use it see you in another article.

#TRENDING:

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[7-wonders]

Blame It On My Youth

Summary: You’ve seen enough of Michael’s world to last you three lifetimes. Now, it’s time to show him some of your world.

Word Count: 4907

A/N: Did that sound a bit like the Little Mermaid? Yes. Do I care? No. Hope you guys enjoy, feedback is always appreciated and, if you feel so inclined, I would love if you reblogged, liked, and commented.

Read Mad Love (part one) HERE | Read Totally F***ed (part two) HERE | Read The Isle of Flightless Birds (part three) HERE | Read A Hard Day’s Night (part four) HERE | Read Pour One Out (part five) HERE | Read Where Angels Fear to Tread (part six) HERE | Read Naked & Afraid (part seven) HERE | Read Ironically Alive (part eight) HERE

Out of all of the fantasy books that you read as a child, none was more frustrating than Lewis Carroll’s classic Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland. It was a fine book, filled with whimsy and adventure, all things that a child can devour like candy, but one particular passage captured your attention and warranted your problem-solving abilities for an entire week after you first finished the book. The famous question of “why is a raven like a writing desk?,” posed by the Mad Hatter to young Alice at their tea party, drove you nearly as mad as a Hatter in trying to solve it. It’s not as if there was an answer; the protagonist, herself, declared that “I think you might do something better with the time than wasting it in asking riddles that have no answers,” but you were determined to be the first to solve this unsolvable riddle. Obviously, you didn’t solve the riddle, and the answer still eludes you to this day. You haven’t thought about that old riddle for quite some time, but your current predicament, and the amount of time spent thinking about it, gives you an odd sense of deja vu and reminds you of Lewis Carroll’s question with no answer.

It’s been two weeks since your trip to the Murder House, and your mind has spun with hundreds of questions that seem to have no answer. Michael, of course, hasn’t been any help at all. The man seems to be a walking paradox; when you don’t need him, he’s impossible to get rid of, and on the rare occasion that you do need him, he can’t be reached. You’ve been able to talk to him, your weekend visits to his mansion forcing you to make some conversation, but Michael has diverted every question you’ve shot at him. He doesn’t get mad that you’re constantly coming up with questions that, to you, have no answers, which only confuses you even more. Although you shouldn’t be pushing your luck after his show of mercy at his childhood home, you feel that you’re entitled to some answers.

Michael, the infuriating, confounding, caring husband that he is, has patiently reminded you time and time again that your finals are more important than any questions you may have. You hate it when he’s right, especially when he pulls out the contract and points out that it was you who made it a point to refuse dropping out of school. Your questions, he tells you, can be answered after you’ve finished the semester and gotten the grades you know you’re capable of. If you’re being honest, at this point you would take a year of being trapped in the Murder House over a week of finals (“Your dramatics truly never get old,” Michael commented dryly when you complained to him during a study break on Sunday). Finals week, you’ve decided, is certainly the work of Michael’s father.

Regardless of your opinions on the week of tests that largely decide your grades, the feelings of joy and relief that flood through you upon walking out of the classroom in which your last final of the semester was held. You have a high enough grade in the class to be able to keep your ‘A’ even if you flunk and, if you were brave, you would have just completely skipped the final. Worst-case scenarios, however, prevented you from doing so and made sure that you actually studied for this test. No matter how you did on the tests, you walk across campus feeling like you’re floating on air. No more school for an entire summer! The bliss that accompanies a last day of school does not, thankfully, fade with age.

Part of you wants to literally put the school in your rearview mirror and stay at least a mile away for three months straight, but you’re also a good person who promised to meet her friends for lunch and isn’t about to back out of a commitment. College dining halls, contrary to popular belief, are not nearly as clique-y as high school lunch rooms. Although there’s a few tables that everyone knows the athletes sit at, the rest of the tables are up for grabs. This can make things difficult when you’re one of the last to an already-packed dining hall and you have to awkwardly stand in the middle of the room while you search for your ‘group.’ Having friends like yours makes this move a lot easier, waving at you to get your attention once they notice that you’re looking around for them.

“You had finals today, right? How’d they go?” Kate and Brennan sit across from you, a bowl of cucumbers sitting between them. You grab at one when you take your own seat, deciding a water-based vegetable is better than nothing.

“They went okay, especially considering they were my last finals,” you reply, glancing around the table to catalogue who is and isn’t here. It’s the usual crew, but you take note of a new face. Shooting Kate a glance, she quickly picks up on your question.

“Oh yeah, you two haven’t met before! (Y/N), this is Mallory. She’s in my Russian Lit class, her other friends have already left for the summer so I invited her to come sit with us today.”

Mallory’s beautiful, her large doe-like eyes and golden leaf headband nestled in her brown locks giving her the appearance of some sort of angel. She’s wearing a black dress that’s cinched with a belt that matches the headband, her outfit looking like it costs as much as a couple of textbooks.

“Hi, I’m (Y/N),” you smile warmly, Mallory returning your smile and waving at you.

“It’s really nice to meet you, (Y/N),” she says.

“Why haven’t I seen you around campus before?” Although it’s a large and populated college, you’re sure that you would have remembered seeing someone as unique as Mallory.

“Oh, we must just run in different circles.” The buzzing of your phone draws your attention from the conversation, sending Mallory an apologetic look before checking the notification.

“How did your tests go?” You can’t help the smile when you see Michael’s message, thumbs flying across the keyboard to type a reply.

“I think they went really well, thanks!” 

Barely thirty seconds pass before Michael’s responded, and you stifle a laugh at the mental image of Michael sitting at his desk and just waiting for you to check your texts. 

“You should call me when you get a chance, maybe we can go out and celebrate?” After the Murder House escapade, you had become a lot more lenient with your “two phone calls a week” rule. Sometimes it’s actually you that calls him first, much to the shock and surprise of both of you. 

“Wow, our second date? Amazing, maybe we can even go steady after this lmao,” you can’t help the sarcasm, especially not when the opportunity is right there.

“-and--(Y/N),” Kate whines, drawing your attention back to the people in front of you.

“I was listening!” You unconvincingly insist.

“Really? What was I talking about, then?”

“Um...Brennan?”

“No, but nice try. I was talking about the end-of-year party at Colin and Noel’s.” Colin and Noel are two best friends who live together and, at least once a month, throw the type of parties that are the stuff of legends. The first, and only, time you went to one, Noel got so drunk that he body slammed himself onto the pong table, somebody tried to crowd surf, and multiple people ended up in the hospital with alcohol poisoning. 

That was on a regular Saturday in January.

“I don’t know, Kate, I’m still trying to recover from Thirsty Thursday at the Stadium House.”

“That was almost a month ago.”

“That’s the point,” you say jokingly. “But really though, I don’t like crazy parties, and I’d rather not deal with the cops.”

“They’ve scaled their parties back so much since the last time you came to one! No hospital visits related to events at their house, even!”

“Really?” You can’t help but be skeptical at her claim. 

“Really. Listen, you don’t even have to stay for long, but I’d really like to hang with you one last time before I go back home for the summer.” Kate smiles when you sigh, knowing she has you. A good chunk of your friends are all going off to the far corners of the country for the break, and this will probably be the last time that you’re all together for three months. 

“Alright, let me talk with, uhh--yeah, I should be able to swing by for a bit,” your friends don’t know about Michael yet, and you’d prefer to keep it that way.

“Yay!” Kate squeals, drumming her hands on the table in excitement. 

“I should get going.”

“I’ll see you tonight though, right?”

“...Right.”

“Are you going to the parking lot? I’ll walk with you if you are,” Mallory says, a twinge of guilt running through you at the realization that you practically forgot about the poor girl.

It’s impossible for you to say no, and you find yourself walking side by side with Mallory towards the parking lot. It’s a bit of an awkward silence, as it usually is when two people who don’t really know each other are left alone.

“Seriously though, how have we not met before? Are you a freshman?” You ask.

“No, but this is my first semester here. I transferred from a school in New Orleans.”

“Oh, I love New Orleans! I went there for a week last year, it was amazing.”

“Yeah, I, uh,” Mallory looks down towards her heeled shoes, nodding, “I miss it a lot.” Your heart aches at the sudden look of homesickness on your new friend’s(?) face, causing you to lay a comforting hand on her shoulder.

“Well, at least the school year’s over and you can go home now.”

“Actually, I think I’m sticking around for the summer. My aunt thinks it’s good for me to get out of New Orleans and out of my comfort zone. My best friend Coco’s letting me stay with her.” Mallory’s phone starts to ring, and she laughs when she looks at the caller ID. “Speak of the devil; it’s my aunt.”

“I’ll see you at the party tonight?” Mallory nods. 

“See you tonight, (Y/N).” Mallory watches you continue towards the parking lot, only answering her phone when you’ve rounded the corner. “Hey, Cordelia...Yeah, it’s her alright.”

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

Michael, as per usual, is in his office when you arrive at his home. Even though he has no logical way of knowing that you’ve arrived, the opening of his office door before your hand even makes contact with the knob gives you the sneaking suspicion that his Antichrist powers give him an advantage. You stroll in, Michael looking a little too nonchalant as he reads through some papers on his desk.

“Some serious Cooperative business?” You ask, falling into a chair on the other side of his desk. 

“You could say that,” he looks up at you, smiling. “How was your last day of the semester?”

“It was fine, finals were fine, it’s all fine, fine, fine.” You spin yourself in the chair, head falling back as you watch the blur of the ceiling above you.

“That’s a mood.” Stopping suddenly, you look at Michael in surprise before laughing loudly.

“Look at you, catching up on your slang!”

“Figured I’d try and actually learn what you were talking about.”

“Speaking of ‘moods,’ I might have something that would help to raise both of ours.” Michael raises an eyebrow, urging you to continue. “Some...friends of a friend are throwing a huge party tonight for the end of the year. Would you wanna go? I know you had talked about celebrating, but maybe we could celebrate this way?”

“You want me to go to a...college party? The same type of party that you drunk-called me from and where I had to get you from?”

Your face heats up at the reminder. “I’m not even going to be drinking at this party, I learned my lesson last time. Look, I know that you didn’t have the most normal upbringing, so maybe this could be your chance to experience some of the things you missed out on. You can’t tell me that you’re perfectly fine with going from a child to running your father’s army and planning the apocalypse practically overnight.”

Michael’s thinking about what you’ve said, which you’re not sure is good or bad yet. You know that you’ve made some good points, and he knows that you’ll go to the party even if he doesn’t. Maybe this is a question with no answer, like so many that you’ve encountered lately. Michael and parties don’t seem like they’d mix, and it’s impossible for you to read his mind like you can read his.

“Will I be out of place there?”

“Michael, there’s going to be so many people there that nobody will even look at you twice.” A lie; Michael’s far too beautiful for just one look.

“What time?” You aren’t even aware that you were holding your breath until he sighs and looks at you again.

“Really?” Michael nods. “Uh, probably nine or ten?”

“Is there not a set time for these parties?”

“Not really, just whenever people show up.” You stand up, smiling widely at Michael’s sudden apprehension and choosing to leave before he can change his mind. “I’ll leave you to your work!”

The good thing about being at the home of your Antichrist husband is that your wardrobe is limitless. A red satin top and a pair of black jeans (tightened with a Gucci belt, because how are you not going to take advantage of that?) is dressy, yet casual enough to be worn at a college party. When you trek down the stairs at a quarter to nine on a quest to scrounge around the kitchen for a quick meal, you’re not at all surprised to see Michael standing at one of the counters.

“You haven’t gotten dressed yet?” You ask, hopping up on the counter next to him and tearing apart a bread roll before popping a bite in your mouth.

“I figured I could just wear this to the party.” Michael’s expression sours when you laugh.

“I’m sorry, I promise I didn’t mean to laugh! It’s just--if you don’t want to attract a bunch of attention, then I wouldn’t suggest wearing a cloak, a suit, and a pair of red bottoms.” He looks down at his outfit, as if suddenly realizing how overdressed he is.

“But...I don’t know what else to wear?”

“C’mon, I’m sure we can find something in your closet for you to wear.” Michael hesitates when you grab his hand, obviously unsure of what to do next. “Kind of need you to lead the way, since I’m assuming your closet is in your bedroom that I’ve never been to before.”

“Right! Let’s go.”

The uncertainty that you feel at the threshold of Michael’s bedroom holds you back like a tether. It’s not as if anything unscrupulous is going to be happening, but the idea of invading the sanctity of your husband’s private bedroom is a little jarring. Peeking into the room, you’re reminded of a conversation you had with Michael during your first weekend here.

“Does every room look like this?” An unspoken question dangles in the air: does your room look like this? Michael grins widely, but it’s devoid of any of the emotions that a regular smile would accompany. It’s the smile of the devil. 

“Guess you’ll have to find out for yourself, won’t you?” He chuckles at the withering glare you give him, loping back towards the door and resting a hand on the silver handle. 

“So, every room does look the same,” you comment with a smirk, finally getting over your sudden fear and following Michael into his room.

“I had to have a little mystery surrounding me.” Michael smiles. “Are you going to help me or not?”

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

“Everybody here is in khaki shorts and printed shirts,” Michael hisses in your ear. Your hand grips Michael’s firm bicep, and you give it a teasing squeeze.

“Yeah, and you look a thousand times better than them. You always do.” Cars were already inconspicuously-but-not-really parked up and down the block, and you have to maneuver through at least fifty people just in the entryway and the living room. “College guys don’t really have a sense of style.”

“So I won’t lose you to one of these ‘boys,’ then?” Michael’s style, in your opinion, is timeless. You managed to work with his formal wardrobe, finding a white t-shirt and pairing it with an unbuttoned black shirt. The sleeves are rolled up to his elbows (although that part may be totally self-serving), and his black jeans are cuffed into a pair of boots. He still looks more formal than everyone else, but it’s way better than him showing up in a goddamned cloak.

“You never even had me in the first place,” you chuckle, shooting Michael a playful wink. “C’mon, let’s see if we can find any of my friends around here.”

There’s coolers set up in the kitchen to keep the different cans and bottles cool, as well as an array of liquor on the kitchen island. Michael looks like a fish out of water, standing around awkwardly while you start peeking into the coolers.

“I thought you said you weren’t drinking,” Michael comments.

“I’m not, I’m just trying to find some soda or water.”

“(Y/N)!” You turn around, smiling when you see Noel standing before you.

“Hey, bud.” Noel, one of two party throwers of legend, is a shorter guy who makes up for his lack of height with his absolute insane stockpile of never ending energy. His black hair is always carefully gelled and combed into place, and he dresses like a middle-aged rich dad who’s going boating for the weekend.

“Who’s your friend? If he’s a part of Sig Tau, he needs to get outta here before Colin sees him, because Colin still has a huge problem with--”

“No, don’t worry, he doesn’t go to our school.” Noel nods, drumming his hands on the table and picking up a bottle of tequila.

“In that case, can I get you two some shots?”

“I don’t know, Noel, I wasn’t really planning on drinking tonight.”

“C’mon, (Y/N), one shot’s not gonna get you fucked up. I’ve seen you drink before, you’re barely even gonna get buzzed.” He winks, already knowing that you’re going to say yes when you sigh.

“Two shots, then.”

Noel expertly pours two shots, sliding them your way with a friendly ���enjoy” before leaving to continue his hosting rounds.

“What’s Sig Tau? Is that some sort of a cult?” Michael asks once Noel’s gone.

“It’s a fraternity, so close.” You slide a shot to Michael and pick up your own, downing it with a grimace. Michael just stares apprehensively at the clear liquid in the shot glass. “Are you not going to drink that?”

“What is it? It looked like you were drinking gasoline.”

“It’s tequila, which is kind of the same thing.”

“If I die, I’m holding you responsible.” Michael throws his own shot back, coughing and hacking as you cheer. “Satan, that was terrible. Why do people drink that?”

“I dunno,” you shrug, grabbing two bottles of water from a cooler and tossing one to Michael, “quick little buzz, palate cleanser, there’s a million different reasons.”

Michael grabs your hand and pulls you out of the way when a girl, clearly already drunk, nearly bumps into you on her search for another drink. She mumbles an apology, choosing to take the whole bottle of Jack Daniels with her instead of pouring it into one of the hundreds of red Solo cups stacked on the counter. His blue eyes meet yours and you both chuckle, silently agreeing to move out of the cramped kitchen and somewhere with less people. While the living room’s not any better, you do manage to run into Kate and Mallory.

“You made it!” Kate exclaims, pulling you from Michael to hug you. Her eyes are wide while also managing to droop at the same time, and you can almost guarantee that she’s crossed. 

“I told you I would be here,” you say, giggling when Kate affectionately boops your nose. Mallory’s standing awkwardly to the side, eyes flickering between you and Michael. Kate also seems to pick up on her friend’s sudden change in demeanor, and smirks when she notices the man trailing behind you.

“And just who is this, (Y/N)?”

“Oh, this is my--uh, my friend Michael.” ‘Friend’ seems like a good term to settle on; you can’t explain your true relationship, Michael is not your boyfriend, and ‘acquaintance’ would be weird to say. Kate wiggles her eyebrows at you, sticking her hand out for Michael to take.

“Helloooo, (Y/N)’s friend Michael.”

“So, do you two have the same classes?” Mallory asks politely.

“No, Michael isn’t in college. He...well, he does--”

“I work for my father,” Michael interjects, smiling down at you. “I’m learning the ropes before I take over for him.” It’s technically not a lie, and you’re impressed until you remember that this must be one of his Antichrist powers. Mallory nods, but you can see a hint of something--doubt, or maybe suspicion?--in her eyes. Kate gasps before anymore words can be exchanged, grabbing yours and Mallory’s hands excitedly.

“I love this song! Dance with me, please!” You don’t really have a choice, the small woman amazingly strong when she wants to be. You look back at Michael apologetically, but he just smiles and gestures for you to go with. 

The familiar bass that underlays all hip-hop songs thumps loudly through you, acting as some sort of an electric charge. Where you had once been bored and ready to quietly slip out of the front door, you’re now controlled by the beat of the song. The congregation of partiers who have also decided to dance grows larger with each passing second, enveloping your trio in the middle. While the dancing isn’t so much dancing as it is bouncing in time with the rhythm, it’s carefree in a way that you didn’t know you needed until now. Mallory takes your hands, both of you laughing as she spins you in a circle.

Michael leans against the wall, head tilted as he watches the dancing college students. More specifically, he intently watches you dancing with your friends. He’s intrigued, the corner of his mouth tilting up in a smile as you move in a way he’s never seen you move before. While you’re more relaxed around him now, you’re still so reserved in your mannerisms. Here, Michael sees a glimpse of who you once were before he dragged you into his life. You smile widely, singing the lyrics at the top of your lungs along with everyone else in the group of dancers. Your hair flows freely around your face, and he finds himself enraptured by the movement.

Would things have been different between you two if Michael wasn’t the Antichrist? Maybe, in another life, or another universe, you both would have attended the same college. The image pops into his head like it’s burned there; Michael sitting next to you on the first day of some nameless class, becoming friends with you first. Slowly but surely, your bond would only deepen, and from friends would spring lovers. Michael shakes his head imperceptibly: a fantasy. He can’t dwell on these silly theoretical questions that have no answers. It’s a fruitless pursuit, and nothing good will come out of fixating on the ‘what if’s.’

Michael jumps in surprise when you’re suddenly in front of him, being too wrapped up in his thoughts to notice the song ending and you making your way back over to him. You laugh, obviously delighted at finally catching him off guard. 

“I let you startle me that time,” he jokingly argues.

“Uh-huh, if that’s what makes this crushing defeat easier for you. Anyways, do you wanna get out of here? Kate and Mallory are the only ones I really came here to see, and if we’re not going to drink there’s not really any reason to be here.”

“I’m ready to go home if you are.”

“Actually, I might have a little detour for us…” you trail off, smiling conspiratorially.

“Oh?” Michael’s not sure if he should be excited or nervous for idea of yours, something that you easily pick up on. 

“I promise you’ll enjoy it.”

Twenty minutes later, you’re sitting on opposite sides of a booth in a small diner that you frequent with friends during the school year. A basket of french fries sits in the middle of the table, two tall glasses that are already beading with condensation standing guard next to the food. Amidst the fluorescent lighting, scratchy country music, loud ceiling fans, and run-down booths, you’re struck by how out of place Michael seems here, in your world.

He had stuck out like a sore thumb at the party, his uncomfortable posture and expensive clothing practically screaming that he did not belong in that small house. Here, in a restaurant with patrons ranging from a young family to an elderly couple, a middle-aged businessman to a homeless woman, he looks like some far-away traveler who landed in the wrong town. He’s a Renaissance piece of artwork, something far too beautiful and celestial for the eyes of these mere humans who couldn’t begin to comprehend the masterpiece that is Michael Langdon.

“Just what are we doing here?” Michael asks after the waitress, an older busty woman with red hair straight from the box, sets your order down and leaves. 

“We’re enjoying a late-night snack,” you say simply, grabbing at a fry and savoring the first bite into the just-fried food.

“A late-night snack consisting of french fries and--are these milkshakes?” Michael picks up one of the glasses, investigating its contents. 

“Uh, yeah? Have you never had a milkshake before?”

“(Y/N), my grandmother hid me away and refused to let me out of the house. Of course I’ve never had a milkshake before.” Your face falls, proving that you’re still not good at hiding your emotions like Michael is. Pushing the other glass towards him, you lace your fingers together and place them under your chin. 

“I’m honored that I get to be a part of your first milkshake experience, then. There’s vanilla and chocolate; try them both, and then you can have whichever one you like best.”

Michael looks uneasily between the two glasses, as if trying to decipher if one is poisoned. “Which one do you prefer?”

“I like them both,” you shrug. 

Finally, he takes a cautious sip of the chocolate. You’re mildly disappointed when he doesn’t have any sort of reaction, silently cataloguing his opinions on the flavor before taking a less-cautious drink of the vanilla. Without any fanfare, he pushes the chocolate back towards your waiting hands.

“They’re both good, you’re right, but I like this one better.” You smile, sliding the glass towards you and sipping the shake that he’s rejected.

“Um, Michael…” you trail, not sure how to phrase what you’ve been thinking of for the past week.

“Yes?”

“Would--is the offer to move in with you still on the table?” Michael smirks widely, and you rush to explain yourself. “It’s just that my rent is going up next month and it’s not worth it at this point, and your place is closer to campus. Plus, my cat likes you better than she likes me.”

You’re not sure why you’re nervous, since he’s obviously going to say yes to your request. You living with him was one of the only things he desperately wanted during the contract negotiations. When you think about it, you just don’t want him to get the wrong idea. It seems as if you’ve finally reached a comfortable relationship with Michael, a place where you tolerate him and could even see him as one of your friends. But an actual romantic relationship is so far down the list of things that you and Michael are, and you don’t want him to think that you’re finally going to be the loving wife that Satan wanted you to be. For lack of better wording, there’s no way in hell that will happen.

“Only because I like your cat better than you, and I wouldn’t want her to go homeless.” Your mouth drops and you laugh, picking up a fry and throwing it at Michael who, of course, deftly catches it in his mouth.

“You jerk!”

“You said it first, not me!”

“Fine,” you sit back against the booth and cross your arms over your chest, trying to keep your best poker face on, “but you should know that we’re a package deal.”

“Hmm, I suppose I can cope with that.”

“Do we have a deal, then?” Yet again, you’re struck by the irony of making a deal with the Devil (well, the Devil’s son, but close enough). Michael picks up his glass and waits for you to do the same, clinking your milkshakes together in agreement. 

“We, my dear, have a deal.”

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

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[need-a-fugue]

We Grow Together (22)

Pairing: Bucky Barnes x Tessa Sullivan (OFC)

Chapter Summary: Tessa finds a new opportunity... and Bruce gets wasted.

Summary: Relationships can be tough, especially when one person is a recovering-from-being-brainwashed-and-tortured former assassin and the other is an overworked mutant scientist. But hey, every couple has their struggles. Right?

The restaurant was nice. Tessa had been there only once before, and that was for a business meeting with Tony, Helen Cho, and a couple of potential investors. They never ventured out of the bar, though – Tony’s philosophy, Everyone deserves to be taken to a five-star restaurant. But it takes a lot to make it past the bar with me.

Well she had managed to make it past the bar. And it was amazing. “I really was fine with Cantelina’s,” she says as the Maître D pulls out her chair.

Tony scoffs. “Please. It’s your birthday.”

Bruce leans over to whisper to her. “Sorry. If I’d known he’d hijack everything, I wouldn’t have told him.”

“I can hear you,” Tony responds in a whisper of his own as he leans forward.

Pepper turns in her seat and looks to Tessa, ignoring the two men at the table. “You prefer white, right? Chardonnay?”

“Oh, um, yes,” Tessa replies, watching as the woman proceeds to order a $500 bottle of wine without a second thought. “Pepper,” she gasps, but is met with a silencing hand.

“Please,” the blonde laughs out. “This is the least that we owe you.” A serious look suddenly takes over her face. “Unless you really don’t want this. We can go to Cantelina’s… or wherever you’d like.”

“No we can’t,” Tony interrupts. “She’s wanted to have dinner here forever.”

“Yeah, but I can’t ask you – ”

“Ask? No, you’re not asking us to take you out.”

“Yeah,” Bruce intones, facing Tony. “You actually weren’t invited at all.”

Tony slowly turns to his friend. “You agreed that this was a good idea,” he explains as though he’s speaking to a small child. “We discussed this, remember?”

“We discussed taking her to dinner sometime in the future to – ow!” he lets out as Tony’s shoe connects with his shin…hard. “I’m just saying, you didn’t have to take over her birthday.”

“I’m not taking over. I’m picking up the pieces the Tin Man left behind.”

“Tony,” Pepper warns.

“Look,” Tessa interrupts. “This is all really nice…” She pauses briefly and looks longingly around the dining room. “And you’re right, I do really want to eat here. And drink that crazy expensive chardonnay…”

“Good,” Tony utters from across the table.

“But, you really don’t need to pay for all this.”

He waves a hand in the air absently. “It’s a business expense. I do this for all of the people I’m trying to woo.”

“Only the important ones,” Pepper says with a smile.

“You do know that I already work for you, right?”

“Yeah, about that,” he says, stilling suddenly as the wine is brought out and served.

Tessa literally sits on the edge of her seat until the waiter leaves. “About what?” she asks. “You’re not firing me, are you?”

“Not entirely, no.”

“Not entirely?”

Tony leans back in his chair and motions to her glass of wine, urges her with his eyes to try some. She picks up the glass and sips the dry, buttery liquid, lets the warmth flow down her throat, all while maintaining anxious eye contact with her employer.

Pepper watches the odd dynamic, notes Tessa’s agitation – and Tony’s amusement – and shakes her head. “Would you just tell her, please?”

“I was building up to it, creating a mood,” he says as he straightens upright. “But fine, sure, I’ll just tell her.” He turns to face Tessa and says without any ceremony at all, “I want you to run the medical research division of Stark Industries.”

Tessa wrinkles her nose in confusion. “There is no medical research division of Stark Industries.”

“There is now,” Bruce supplies from her left. She glances over to find him trying to hide a coy smile behind his glass.

“I don’t understand.”

“Next week, we are officially in business with U-Gin, which means we’re going to devote more time, money, and resources to that side of the business.”

Pepper interrupts to supply the business perspective that Mr. Idea Man often lacks. “We’re going to be restructuring the entire Research and Development sector. Robotics, Biomechanical Engineering, Innovative Design Technologies, and Genetic Medical Research. We would like you to lead the new Genetic Medical Research division.”

Tessa cocks her head, a completely dumfounded look on her face.

Bruce lightly lays his fingers on her forearm to get her attention. “Of course, this means your role with the Avengers may change a bit,” he says. “You’ll no longer be able to practice.”

“She hates practicing,” Tony blurts out. “I’m not a practitioner,” he taunts, repeating her all too often uttered phrase.

“You did an amazing job setting up the medical response teams,” Pepper tells her. “Now you’ll just need to select who you want to lead the tier one team in your stead.”

“But, you’ll still, officially, be the Avengers’ lead physician,” Tony assures her. “There’s a level of trust there – medical records and secret old injuries and such. You just need to… delegate more. Like I’m doing now.”

“This will also mean a lot more time in the city,” Pepper continues, eager to explain just how this position might affect Tessa’s life. “We’re going to redesign and reopen the lab in the tower. You’ll still have your personal lab at the compound though – ”

“For pet projects,” Tony supplies.

“For whatever projects you personally choose to work on,” she corrects. “We want you to continue your research. We just want to give you the platform to do it on a much larger scale.”

“But… why?”

“Why?” Tony mocks. Then, turning to Pepper, “Did she just say why?” Pepper only smiles in response, tilting her head in that I’m trying to be patient with you way of hers. He lets out an exaggerated sigh before turning back to Tessa. “Because you’re going to cure diseases. You’re going to find a way to clone tissues for transplantation. You’re going to help the human race… evolve. And I want my company to get all of the credit.”

She stares at him for a long moment, working to gauge his level of sincerity. “I don’t think I know what to say,” she finally utters.

“You should know, there’ll also be a ton of boring meetings, press conferences… board meetings,” Tony adds with a dramatic eye roll. “The bureaucracy is just awful.”

“Board meetings?”

Pepper gives her a soft, patient smile. “The head of each new division will have a place on the board.”

“The board? Of Stark Industries?”

“Tell me you’re getting this, kid. I picked you because I thought you were some kind of genius. Not me kind of genius. But some kind.”

She nods emphatically. “I get it. I get it. I just… I don’t really have the experience… or any experience.”

Tony scoffs. “You have plenty. And besides, I like to mold my people.” He pauses to take a drink of the wine in front of him, and he makes a face the moment it hits his palate. “Ugh. No. Need scotch.” He motions for a waiter. “Also, you know Dr. Cho and you’ve been in on the U-Gin dealings from the beginning. It just makes sense that you’d be the one to set up the new lab.”

“The new lab in the city?”

He turns back to her after ordering a drink and momentarily gives her a confused look. “No. That won’t be big enough. We just bought a 500,000 square foot building in Seattle. That’s where the new lab will be. Did I mention this job will require travel?”

“Only in the beginning,” Pepper says. “We’ll need you in Seoul for a few weeks to work with Dr. Cho and her team on the plans. And then it’ll just be some back and forth between New York and Seattle while it’s all being built and staffed. Though, of course, you can go there and check in as needed. And you’ll have access to the company jet.”

“One of the company jets. Probably not the nicest one,” Tony says.

“Your office will be in the city. But you’ll be able to remote in from anywhere, including your office at the Avengers compound.”

“Okay,” Tessa says simply. “I can do that.”

“Of course you can,” Tony says, clapping his hands together. “You’re a big girl now. You can do anything!”

“Tony,” Pepper breathes out as she shuts her eyes and shakes her head in embarrassment.

“What? It’s true. She’s finally an adult. You didn’t think I’d give a job like this to a twenty-something, did you? Hell, the last time a kid headed a division, he almost ran the company into the ground.”

“Just so we’re clear here,” Bruce begins, leaning forward, “that kid was you, right?”

At some point during the three or so hours they spend at the restaurant, Pepper orders some other crazy expensive wine, and despite filling up on the most delicious filet mignon ever made, Tessa is fairly tanked by the time she gets back from the city. Oh, wait, that might’ve also been the bottle of scotch that she split with Tony and Bruce after Pep left. Well, whatever the reason, the room is spinning like a damn dreidel the moment she steps inside.

“I got it,” she tells Bruce as he helps lower her to the couch in her apartment. She closes her eyes and leans back into the cushions. “I got it.”

“Yep.” He grabs two bottles of water from her fridge and returns to collapse onto the sofa beside her. Tossing one of the bottles into her lap, he lets out a long growl of a sigh.

“Ha!” Tessa barks out without lifting her head. “You’re drunk.”

He takes a long gulp of his water and simply repeats, “Yep.”

They sit in silence for several long moments, waiting for the world to settle around them. When she finally opens her eyes again, things are at least a bit less spinny. She turns to face Bruce. “Why aren’t you doing it?” she asks him, words only slightly muddled.

He blinks hard to focus – what had he done with his glasses? – and gives her a confounded look. “Doing what?”

“Running this new… thing. I know you’re Tony’s first choice.”

He leans back and gazes up at the ceiling. “I don’t think…” He sighs long and loud. “After my failed experiant… experent… ex-peer-ment… It isn’t in me. Not like you.”

“I’m in you?” she asks with a snorty giggle.

“You were made for this,” he breathes out. Sitting upright, he looks her in the eye, though he has to cock his head a bit to the side to dispel the slight double vision. “Don’t be nervous.”

“Don’t be nervous?” she asks incredulously. “Billions of dollars,” she exclaims, throwing her hands into the air. “One of the biggest companies… a board member?”

“Tony wouldn’t ask if he wasn’t sure.”

“He’s testing me.” She rises from the couch with a rather significant sway and looks down at Bruce. “It’s all a test.”

“Waxing poetical,” he murmurs with a sweep of his hand. “Life’s a test. You pass, you die anyway.”

She stares down at him for a long moment, unsure what to say. Then, “I’m gonna rock the shit outta this job,” comes out through gritted teeth.

“Yes!” Bruce jumps up excitedly… maybe more animated than she’s ever seen him. She stumbles back a few steps and lets out a raucous laugh. “Yes,” he repeats, less emphatically as he wobbles where he stands. “And I’m going to…” He slowly lowers himself back onto the couch. “I’m going to rock this sofa.”

[baneofloslorien5384]

A (hopefully) Unique Robcina Headcanon

As some of you may be aware, I am very much a fan of the M!RobinxLucina pairing from Fire Emblem Awakening. Have been since I was reading spoilers in fanfics before I even played the game. Bad Bane, bad! Anyhow, I’ve seen Robcina fics in all shapes and sizes, but one factor that’s largely absent is this: how would things be affected if Lucina’s present day counterpart, the one who’s born just before your first brouhaha with Valm, knows and understands just who her counterpart from the future is? Well, here is my interpretation. Enjoy!

-          At times, living with her younger self could prove quite confounding when Lucina tries to say…well, anything, really. For instance, when regarding her then-infant younger self, she would start by saying “Isn’t she” and then fumble before beginning again by saying “I mean, me, adorable?”.

-          Robin, who’s never one to let such an opportunity for a good laugh go to waste, slyly replies “Yes, you really are cute, Lucina”. This prompts the older Lucina to blush adorably and run out of the room in embarrassment, all the while trying to convince herself that her younger self giggling is just a mildly sinister coincidence.

-          Robin, who’s much easier to slap with a “Guilty” verdict, then slips Little Lucina a cup of tasty fruit juice, saying “Here’s my end of the deal”.

-          Lucina is not the only one to end up confounded when talking about this subject. When Robin encourages Lucina to spend time with her younger self, he gets discombobulated in midsentence as he splutters out “You were…are…is…a cute kid?”.

-          Following the end of the Valmese War, when the Shepherds regrouped at Ylisse prior to heading to Plegia, Lucina was more-or-less gang pressed into spending time with her younger self. Eerily, Little Lucina did not seem at all nervous when confronted with a stranger and even seemed to get fussy if Lucina tried to leave the room while Little Lucina was still awake.

-          As Lucina has stated several times, her original plan is to leave Ylisse once Grima is vanquished. This goal becomes increasingly difficult to follow-through on as she falls in love with Robin and reconnects with her parents, but hints are dropped that she still intends to go through with it.

-          Though Robin would resign from the Shepherds in a heartbeat if he had to choose between that and Lucina, he rather dislikes having to make such a choice at all, especially since he can see how kinda-sorta having her family back has helped Lucina to open up and become happier.

-          Deciding that this dilemma calls for not the tipping of the scales, but for the scales to be tipped over and smashed into itty bitty pieces, Robin goes to Chrom, tells him of the situation, and suggests that the Exalt “do something ham-fisted”.

-          Chrom apparently obliges…and handily. For, within days, the story of the Warriors from the Future leaks out. With the public now aware of Big Lucina’s true origins, which are backed up by her Brand and the existence of a second Falchion, her plans to leave are rendered utterly pointless.

-          After Lucina shoots Robin and Chrom any array of blistering and yet strangely ineffective death glares, she resigns herself to her secret being out and ponders how her life will proceed from here. Ultimately, she takes the post of Captain of the Castle Guard (to be clear, Frederick is Chrom and the royal family’s personal bodyguard…slash-unofficial-butler, while Lucina handles the security of the castle) while Robin becomes Chrom’s chief advisor.

-          As Little Lucina grows from a baby to a toddler, she picks up on Big Lucina’s true identity with downright creepy speed, and promptly develops a unique blend of hero worship and self-aggrandizing.

-          Ascribing to the, technically correct, belief that the two of them are the same person, Little Lucina greets Big Lucina by saying “Hello, Me”. Big Lucina, who just can’t ignore that particular bait, replies “You are not me and I am not you. You are you, and I am me”.

-          Little Lucina, who still isn’t deterred after, literally, hearing this at least once a day, minimum, always answers “You were me, and I will be you”.

-          Considering how much Big Lucina does NOT want Little Lucina growing up like she did, combined with her tendency to take things too literally, Big Lucina finds this assertion annoying at best and outright alarming at worst.

-          For a time, Big Lucina was kept much too busy to agonize over her younger self’s unique quest for an identity, given that she now had to police the castle on top of being a good wife to Robin and a good mother to Morgan.

-          Of course, even that doesn’t go off without a hitch since, when Lucina is fitted with new armor to denote her rank, Robin’s belting out “HOLY CRAAAAAAP!!!!” is heard echoing through the castle, causing everyone who can fight to come running…only to discover Robin’s amazement that Lucina isn’t flat after all, but wore bindings over her chest to make her masculine disguise more convincing.

-          In a rare show of volatile temper, Lucina loses it and, in order to get back into her good graces, Robin must brave the direst of perils, venture into the darkest depths, and steel his nerves against abominations that defy explanation even as they turn the stomach and scar the soul…by which, I mean he has to go to the boutique and splurge on the clothing that Lucina prefers.

-          After getting over the sheer weirdness of there being two Princess Lucinas, one of which is supervising her own home security, the castle guard grows quite fond of their unlikely captain, even following her unspoken orders to treat her like their captain rather than their princess.

-          During one particularly memorable instance, Big Lucina was marching through the castle on an inspection of the guard and the castle’s defenses, straight and brisk, hand on hilt, shoulders squared, and back straight. Much to her surprise, she realizes that everyone was snickering at her when they thought she was out of earshot. Only after nearly an hour did Big Lucina realize that this was because Little Lucina was marching alongside her, mimicking her marching style flawlessly.

-          Robin treats Little Lucina much the same way as he, later, treats Little Morgan. That is, like a daughter or a favorite niece. When Big Lucina was elsewhere, and Chrom and Sumia were busy, Robin would read stories to Little Lucina, play Hide-and-Seek with her, and such.

-          At first, Robin is bewildered that Big Lucina seems so alarmed by these seemingly harmless moments…until he realizes that Big Lucina and Little Lucina have a very important commonality: both of them grew up having a crush on Robin.

-          This is illustrated by, for example, Robin taking a day off to have a family picnic with Big Lucina, only for Little Lucina to snatch his hand and ask him to play with her. This leads to a tug-a-war between the two Lucinas while Robin contemplates the existential weirdness of not only having the same woman on either arm but the impact that a nigh-literal duplicate of oneself can have upon one’s sense of uniqueness in the universe…okay, he instead contemplates how many terrible puns he can make about “having arguments with yourself” he can milk out of this situation. So, sue me!

-          Though Robin never, EVER passes up the chance to rile up Chrom after he becomes the world’s youngest grandpa, his ability to be mean is actually rather limited. Thus, he is constantly hard pressed to do anything other than melt submissively in the face of Little Lucina’s adorable smile and ten syllable version of the word “Please”.

-          The matter is not helped when Little Lucina decides that, since she and Big Lucina are technically the same person, that that makes Robin THEIR husband. Being the softy that he is, Robin does too little to disabuse her of the notion whereas Big Lucina, upon hearing Little Lucina ask that Robin address her as “my little bluebird” (Robin’s nickname to Big Lucina), straight up loses it.

-          Robin has to talk fast, and mightily strain his thinking muscles, in order to convince Big Lucina that he isn’t going to trade her in for a younger model somewhere down the line. And, though she eventually comes around, tensions between her and Little Lucina persist.

-          Morgan, being Morgan, merrily pours gas on this particular bonfire by greeting Little Lucina with “Hi, Mom!” And Little Lucina, not to be outdone, replies by saying “When I grow up, I’m going to have you!”

-          Robin then makes the truly grave mistake of dissecting that particular statement. If he were to abandon all sense of fidelity, morality, decency, common sense, self-preservation, and proper hero archetypes, and did, in fact, have a baby with Little Lucina, then would that child essentially be a third Morgan? For that matter, when Little Lucina does grow up and marry (hopefully) someone else and have children, then would those children be half-siblings to Morgan and…Morgan? And, just how would that look on a genealogy chart? Would Big Lucina and Little Lucina share an entry line they’re technically the same person? If so, how would the genealogist get across that these are two ladies from different points in time rather than one woman with two husbands? How could the genealogist illustrate that Big Lucina’s children and Little Lucina’s children are half-siblings, assuming that’s the case. And…and Robin decides he could really use a drink right about now.

-          Despite Morgan’s insistence on addressing Little Lucina as “Mom” whenever she thinks it’s funny, she typically treats her more like a little sister or a favorite niece and the two become fast friends. Later, Morgan begins instructing Little Lucina in the fine art of pranking.

-          As Little Lucina is still quite young, most of these pranks involve myriad ways to get out of taking her afternoon naps. These include, but are not limited to, arranging stuffed animals beneath the sheets to create the appearance that she’s under the covers, mixing up smoke bombs to distract the guards, setting up buckets of round nuts to trip people up, ropes and pulleys arranged to bury entire rooms in flower petals, and other brain aneurysm-inducing nonsense.

-          Big Lucina, who’s near to a tantrum over these shenanigans, adamantly and hotly insists that she was nothing like that as a child and takes Morgan to task for meddling with the “purity” of her younger self.

-          Morgan, characteristically, begins to gush about how maternal Big Lucina sounds when giving a scolding, which causes Big Lucina to relent a little…until Morgan tells her that Little Lucina is a “brilliant prodigy of pranking who comes up with brilliant pranks”, and that nearly all of Little Lucina’s shenanigans were ones she thought of herself. At this, Big Lucina loses it and lets out one of those she-could-break-glass screams, which has Chrom and half the castle guard breaking down her door before they realize it’s a false alarm.

-          A horrified castle functionary (i.e. useless bureaucrat) then sees the damage and, after a long moment of abject horror, says that that door was over six hundred years old. This triggers an amusing, and irreverent, discussion about just who the hell keeps track of those sorts of things.

-          Robin, being Robin, is about to throw his bit of gasoline on the bonfire by saying that Big Lucina puts a whole new spin on the phrase “you’re too hard on yourself”. When he notices that Big Lucina looks like she’ll dismember and eat him alive if he tries it, he instead asks if she’d like a trip to the Bathrealm.

-          Although Little Lucina’s prankishness tapers off enough that the castle is not poised to explode, her nursemaids and governesses, even years later, will insist that Morgan and Little Lucina’s pranks were the stuff of legends. And that they have the gastric ulcers to prove it.

-          Given that Robin has dodged many of Morgan’s pitfalls and snares, sometimes by tricking her into setting them off herself, it’s no surprise that Robin is sometimes called in to diffuse suspected traps set by Morgan and Little Lucina.

-          Since Morgan is well aware that Robin is her toughest quarry to prank, she, Little Lucina, and sometimes Lissa and Big Cynthia as well, will sometimes arrange massive arrays of double-bluffs. Or triple-bluffs, quadruple-bluffs, quintuple-bluffs, sextuple-bluffs (and, yes, that’s a real word), etc.

-          In these instances, lots and lots and lots of pitfalls, snares, etc. would be laid out in the hopes that Robin, in his efforts to avoid as many of them as he could, would get got simply by virtue of the law of averages. Remarkably, this strategy did not work…because other people, including the pranksters themselves, got caught in them before Robin even arrived. This explains the forest of people dangling by their ankles all pointing, in a very disgruntled manner, in Morgan’s general direction. It also explains the cardiac arrythmia Frederick has at such hazardous untidiness and the urge Chrom has to buy a wyvern when people start complaining to him about his granddaughter.

-          Curiously, Morgan hardly ever pranks Big Lucina, partly because Big Lucina is quick to learn the fine art of maternal scolding and partly because, due to Morgan’s memories of Big Lucina being so fractured and hazy, Morgan is worried about turning what memories she does have of her mother into bad ones. Little Lucina, by contrast, will prank Big Lucina at the drop of a hat, usually to get her older counterpart to loosen up and have fun. As with more than a few convoluted concepts, Big Lucina finds this quite baffling.

-          At some point, either consciously or otherwise, Big Lucina finds herself laughing at Little Lucina’s shenanigans, prompting the latter to, literally, jump for joy and give Big Lucina an impressive tackle hug. Knowing her original plan to leave Little Lucina to live her own life, and that staying with her is throwing that life out of whack, but also knowing she’d long since stopped wanted to leave her younger self, Lucina says aloud “Sometimes, I just don’t understand myself.”

-          Robin, being Robin, gets a kick out of this choice of words and, since seeing Big Lucina smile is one of his greatest, and hardest fought, pleasures in life, promptly adds Little Lucina to his arsenal of “secret weapons”.

-          Big Lucina, who we already know is quite capable of envying herself, gradually finds it becoming harder and harder to watch her younger self have the childhood she lost, from such things as Chrom reading Little Lucina a story to Sumia giving her a simple run down of how to bake. Big Lucina’s own recollections of these are few, distant, and tarnished since, even back then, Grima was known to be lurking on the horizon. Watching Little Lucina live the life Big Lucina wanted her to live thus, paradoxically, heals one old wound and creates a new one for Big Lucina.

-          Jealousy, in this case, works both ways, as Little Lucina clearly sees that Robin doesn’t look at her the way he looks at Big Lucina. And, this is further accentuated by Big Lucina being bigger, stronger, and prettier than Little Lucina.

-          Though Chrom is definitely not as bright as Robin, he’s no dolt. He can clearly sense that something is very wrong with his daughter…his two daughters…his two Lucinas…whatever. And, having about as much subtlety as Ike when someone is serving vegan cuisine, he decides upon a ham-fisted intervention (i.e. tricking them into going the same room, locking them in, and waiting until they make up before letting them back out).

-          After a rather lengthy period of trying to break the door down, yelling at each other, and then ignoring each other, the ice begins to crack. Eventually, recalling her chat with Severa at the Bathrealm, Big Lucina tells Little Lucina her reasons for not wanting her to grow up the same way Big Lucina did. ALL of them.

-          Hearing that Big Lucina’s being such a strong warrior came at the cost of her parents, her home, and most of her countrymen, Little Lucina is able to put much of Big Lucina’s reactions into context. The two also have a more civilized conversation about their reasons for envying each other.

-          Little Lucina, quite possibly recalling something she overheard between Big Lucina and Robin (or even acting on something Robin told her) tells her that she knows Big Lucina is just as welcome to spend time with her…their…whatever…parents as Little Lucina is. She even relays how proud Chrom is of how strong and brave Big Lucina is, and how much Sumia’s face lit up when Big Lucina was cooing over a Pegasus foal.

-          One thing that astonishes Little Lucina is that Big Lucina envies the former’s time with her tutors. Being a little kid, Little Lucina finds this utterly incomprehensible…until Big Lucina admits that her own education (reading, writing, maths, dancing, etiquette, etc.) was cut short by the rise of Grima. Indeed, Big Lucina can barely read and hasn’t written since before her parents’ deaths. This resonates with Little Lucina, since she loves reading, not-so-coincidentally because it’s one of her favorite pastimes with Chrom and Robin (she might leave out that second one).

-          Little Lucina, in turn, admits that even though she’s happy enough being a princess and all that entails, she wants to be strong enough to keep her people safe, especially her family, which is something Big Lucina can’t readily ignore.

-          Ultimately, the two reach an accord: Big Lucina will teach Little Lucina how to fight and Little Lucina will teach Big Lucina the same lessons Little Lucina herself is learning from her tutors.

-          After Chrom the Ham-Fisted lets them out, it quickly becomes apparent that the two have reconciled their differences. In one particular instance, Little Lucina, upon hearing that Big Lucina wanted to learn how to dance in time for her and Robin’s wedding anniversary, decides to teach Big Lucina the waltz. Given the height differences, however, some…out-of-the-box teaching techniques were called for.

-          By that same token, Big Lucina allowed Little Lucina to accompany her on her inspections in order to learn the layout of the castle, as well as the names and faces of the guards, since a would-be intruder just might be wearing the same armor as them.

-          Though Robin didn’t say anything, it wasn’t hard for him to guess that Big Lucina could barely read. He did, however, step in it when he discovered, the hard way, that Big Lucina’s handwriting hadn’t changed much from her childhood dabblings, right down to how she used the Brand of the Exalt to dot the i in her name. When he saw some of Big Lucina’s attempts to write out some “homework”, he assumed that the author was Little Lucina…which led to some awkwardness.

-          At both Robin and Little Lucina’s insistence, Big Lucina puts her penmanship lessons into practice by writing letters to Robin that he can read when he’s busy and/or away. She would tell him about her day, ask how he’s been, and, somewhat unconsciously, allow a clearer view into her thoughts and feelings than most are likely to get from her in-person.

-          BIg Lucina’s handwriting improves quickly and, although Robin sometimes misses the cuteness of his wife’s childlike handwriting, he does manage to talk her into continuing to dot the i in her name with the Brand.

-          As Big Lucina’s reading improves, she, Robin, and Morgan make a point of reading together late at night. When Little Morgan comes along, Big Lucina is seemingly chomping at the bit to read the baby a story before bed.

-          Robin, who discovered how exploitable time travel is for those fond of puns, would often use this to jerk around certain people, such as Both Lucinas’ governess and/or Chrom. For example, when asked where Lucina was, Robin would answer “She’s playing with herself”. This would prompt a mad dash to quash lewd and lascivious behavior unbecoming of a princess…only to discover that Big Lucina and Little Lucina are playing chess. This, in turn, led to a mad dash after Robin, who hadn’t counted on his pursuer(s) having ready access to hammers.

-          As a new family tradition to underscore that Big Lucina is considered as much a part of the Ylissean royal family as Little Lucina, Chrom and/or Robin (there’s an ongoing debate about which of them came up with the idea first) have the two Lucinas celebrate their birthdays on the same day, right down to sharing a big cake with ‘Happy Birthday LucinaS’ written on it in icing and with the two Lucinas trying – sometimes successfully, sometimes not – to cut their respective first slices in unison.

-          Although the gifts for each Lucina underscore how the two are similar and yet different, such as Big Lucina getting an eye-melting yukata while Little Lucina gets a similarly hideous hair ribbon, someone (usually Robin) sometimes gets them matching jewelry or other accessories.

-          The two Lucinas also get gifts for each other. In one particularly cute instance, Big Lucina got Little Lucina a rare first edition of the chronicles of the Hero King Marth’s exploits while Little Lucina got Big Lucina an exact duplicate of the butterfly mask she wore while traveling as Marth.

-          As the years go by, Big Lucina and Little Lucina begin to develop more divergent personalities. Big Lucina’s fashion sense is still atrocious whereas Little Lucina’s taste in clothing is much more normal…but she compensates by being fond of terribly gaudy accessories, such as hair ribbons with zebra patterns and jeweled hairpins which are bright enough to act as a substitute for flash grenades. Further, while Big Lucina can sometimes be tightly wound and over-serious, Little Lucina seems able to move from decorous to rambunctious in a heartbeat.

-          Although Big Lucina does not want to rule Ylisse, as she believes that to be Little Lucina’s right, she reluctantly consents to being named third in line for the throne, in the event that Chrom, Sumia, Little Lucina, and Little Cynthia all predecease her.

-          When Big Lucina becomes pregnant with Little Morgan, Little Lucina is delighted. Although by then she no longer considers Little Morgan her daughter simply by virtue of her and Big Lucina being “the same person”, she is nonetheless keen to help her older self.

-          Aside from reining in Sumia, who’s a little too excited at her and Big Lucina being pregnant together, Little Lucina is keen to make sure Big Lucina gets her bed rest, helps read to the unborn baby, and generally proving weirdly effective as a pregnancy coach.

-          In as much as health permits, Big Lucina continues her duties as Captain of the Castle Guard during her pregnancy…I mean, come on, can you picture Owain doing it? Or Cynthia? Or Noire? Or Brady? Or…well, suffice to say, none of the future children are management material.

-          Eventually, swollen ankles force Big Lucina to stop her regular patrols. That and some found her hard to take seriously when she was squeezing a baby bump under her armor. At that point, she not-so-voluntarily assumed the administrative duties of her post while the actual patrolling, inspections, and drills were divvied up between Big Morgan and Little Lucina.

-          At some point into the pregnancy, Little Lucina, and the Big Lucina, sense that Big Morgan, despite putting on airs, is somewhat leery at the prospect of her younger self’s birth. Deciding to play the Big Sister…I mean Mother…I mean…I don’t know what I mean, but Little Lucina tries to talk to Big Morgan, ultimately gleaning that Big Morgan is worried that she’ll be replaced by Little Morgan.

-          After pushing Big Morgan to talk to Big Lucina about her problems, Big Lucina gets some good practice in helping to reassure a child who is in distress. In fact, Big Lucina is uniquely qualified to deal with Big Morgan’s fear of being replaced by…well, herself. Chrom and Sumia promptly join in and, between the three of them, relay some of their interactions and how, when they sensed how out of place Big Lucina felt in this timeline, they MADE a place for her.

-          When Little Morgan is born, Big Morgan and Little Lucina are tripping over each other, and/or tripping each other, to get in the queue to hold her.

-          Even though Little Lucina knows she’s much too young to have much of a shot at being Little Morgan’s godsmother, she says she’ll so be in the running once Robin and Big Lucina have a few more kids. Proving that at least some of her impishness is here to stay, she times this assertion to coincide with Robin and Big Lucina taking a long pull of their drinks.

-          Aside from pranking others, Big Morgan tries to teach Little Lucina a variety of other bad habits, including Taguel torture, dressing like Big Lucina, circularly dramatic speech (i.e. “My Super Genius Plan of Genius Planning!”) and eating like a starving wolf…in terms of both quantity of food eaten and table manners.

-          Most of these “lessons” don’t take. Little Lucina likes rabbits too much to pull on Yarne’s ears (and certainly knows better than to pull Panne’s), prefers to melt people’s eyes with her accessories rather than her clothes, can talk dramatically but not circularly enough, and nyxs the eating bit because, though she’s not above messiness, Big Morgan’s brand is a bit much and she also learns, the hard way, that she shares neither Big Morgan’s immunity to stomachaches nor her imperviousness to sudden upticks in dress size.

-          Though Little Lucina will always have a soft spot in her heart for Robin, she does eventually get over her crush. She does, however, insist that, when she does find someone she loves, that Robin and Big Lucina will come to the wedding. Naturally, there are no objections.

-          Little Lucina does, eventually, fall in love with Raphael, the Prince of Warriors.

-          Who is Raphael, the Prince of Warriors, you ask? He is one of the sons of Priam and Say’ri. In fact, Robin, the two Lucinas, and several veterans of the Shepherds visited Chon’sin to celebrate his birth.

-          Some were startled when Big Lucina, upon seeing then-baby Raphael suddenly seemed quite overcome and then left the room, crying uncontrollably. Though it was well known that Big Lucina adored babies, not the smallest reason being how rare they were in her timeline, even those who knew her best thought her reaction a bit extreme.

-          Robin, being Robin, managed to track her down and get the truth out of her. Much to Robin’s amazement, Big Lucina reported that she’d actually met Priam in the future, as she and the other children were making their escape to the past. Though Priam proved a valiant warrior, and was instrumental in their escape, she distinctly remembered how melancholy he was, as he knew his time was ending and that there were none to inherit Ragnell or to carry on the legacy of the Radiant Hero. Seeing Priam, married and with children, acted as a particularly overwhelming sign that she truly had changed history for the better.

-          Robin, being Robin, took the opportunity to tease Big Lucina about how much of a sentimental softy she could be…which must’ve been especially galling since Big Lucina actually resorted to inviting the ever-present Tharja to join their little chat.

-          Though Little Lucina loves lording her Little Lord role over the other younger counterparts to the children from the future, perhaps developing a liking for telling people what to do like her father, Robin, and Big Lucina, people begin to notice that Raphael is much harder to boss around.

-          Aside from being born handsome, enough so that Little Lucina sometimes has a hard time keeping her words straight when talking to him, Raphael is an independent thinker who is not impressed by fancy titles, honorifics, or pretty words. Raphael, much like his father, respects strength and bravery, but he also respects wisdom and conviction, owing to his mother.

-          Though copious translation was needed, Miriel and Laurent posited the theory that, although Little Lucina was becoming her own person rather than considering herself to be nigh-predestined to become a second Big Lucina, she did retain the subconscious psychological belief that there would be a certain area of overlap, namely that Little Lucina would also be judged worthy of respect and deference by all who knew her. Robin had a much simpler explanation: Little Lucina had a crush on Raphael, and was galled at how he seemed to find her unimpressive.

-          Little Lucina, rather like Big Lucina, is not one to take such sleights lightly. Sensing that getting Raphael’s respect is best done with feats of strength, Little Lucina makes several attempts to prove that she can play with the big boys.

-          In doing so, Little Lucina learns, the hard way, that it’s hard for a young woman to develop Ike-esque biceps. Later, much like Big Lucina did in her still-wanting-for-a-proper-explanation fight with Chrom in Arena Ferox, Little Lucina learns that fighting strength-for-strength against someone who’s much, MUCH stronger than you tends to end badly.

-          Much like Big Lucina did, Little Lucina decides that, in order to overcome this aggravation, she needs to evolve. She studies many fighting styles, including several Chon’sinese styles, and devises her own fighting style which can be adapted to numerous opponents and tactical situations.

-          Little Lucina was eager to use these new talents to put Raphael in his place…but, much to her surprise, this did not go to plan. Rather than fight, Raphael insisted that they meditate, after which Raphael made some rather pointed comments on how Little Lucina’s chi, and priorities, were a bit out of whack. The dedication Little Lucina showed in her efforts was impressive, but it was done out of jealousy, pride, and a unique perception of entitlement, rather than the good she could do with what she’d created.

-          Flummoxed, Little Lucina reflects on her motives and, not-so-coincidentally, both the original and subsequent motives of Robin and Big Lucina. Granted, both of them found different reasons for fighting as time went on, but the consistent part of it all was that they were fighting to protect the people and land they both loved. Fame, recognition, respect, and such had never factored into it.

-          With this fresh perspective, and with her persistently wounded ego no longer acting as a distraction, Little Lucina challenged Raphael to three (non-lethal) duels, the stakes being that, if Little Lucina won at least once, Raphael would take her on a date. Raphael lost. Well, sort of. He later came to very much enjoy Little Lucina’s company.

-          Ultimately, Little Lucina and Raphael get married. As promised, Robin and Big Lucina attended the wedding.

-          Despite being a prince of Chon’sin and a distant relation of the Crimean royal family (IkexElincia; I am SO PISSED that it wasn’t even an option, let alone a thing!) Raphael simply does not do decorum, and he has a rather selective adherence to tradition.

-          In a rather jarring example, when it came time to carry Little Lucina off, rather than carrying her bridal style, he simply slipped one hand under her rear end and lifted her up, forcing her to stay balanced upon his palm.

-          In truth, Little Lucina’s combat training with Big Lucina made keeping her balance an easy, but fun, feat. She nonetheless made a good show of swaying in place, flailing her arms madly, and making all sorts of I’m-about-to-fall noises in order to cause the wedding guests to have infarctions. It worked too.

-          When Raphael was informed that he was supposed to carry his bride using both hands, he, demonstrating that he had the combined candor of Priam and Ike, asked “Why? She’s not as heavy as she looks.”

-          After this remark caused several more guests to have infarctions, Little Lucina gave a credible imitation of a scandalized gasp and whacked her groom on the head, which caused several more guests to have infarctions.

-          Halfway to the door, someone (probably Robin) remarked that Little Lucina was having too easy a time keeping her balance. Raphael responded by saying “Well, like I always say, let the women work too!” and then began to flex his wrist and walk in a weaving pattern, thus making things more fun (but hardly more difficult) for Little Lucina. Needless to say, the guests and their flimsy cardiovascular systems gave the castle’s healers quite a workout.

-          While Big Lucina was experiencing a truly unique case of being embarrassed at herself, Robin was taking the display in the spirit with which is was intended; namely by laughing his ass off. He then remarked that he fully expected to die laughing and Big Lucina, who still had some tone deafness when it came to idioms, took his words literally, scooped him up, and raced towards the nearest healers, trampling several important persons in her path.

-          Many years later, Raphael and Little Lucina’s son, Greil XXXVIII (VERY popular name amongst Ike’s progeny) was introduced to Robin and Big Lucina’s youngest daughter, Elena.

-          Just to be clear, Elena is not Little Morgan. Little Morgan’s name is…well, Morgan. Much like Big Lucina and Little Lucina are both named Lucina.

-          …and, somewhere in Ylisse Castle, the Royal Genealogist just has a heart attack. But I digress.

-          Greil XXXVIII, who is clearly going to inherit the family biceps when he grows up, keeps Elena entertained by performing feats of strength that would be tricky for boys twice his size. Needless to say, Elena comes away quite impressed.

-          Despite already sensing that Greil and Elena will stay “just friends”, Robin simply can’t resist and ponders aloud as to whether a relationship between the two could be considered incestuous, since Greil XXXVIII and Elena, technically, have the same mother.

-          The response to this wiseassery is the Ylissean royal family delivering a syncopated and very well practiced chorus of “Robin, shut up”.

 Likes are appreciated, reblogs are appreciated, and feedback via messaging and ask is loved. Thanks for reading, and catch you later.

[codylabs]

CodyLabs Guide To...

Specifically, I will be analyzing Time Travel in Gravity Falls. Yes it’s a kid’s show and I’m an adult man, but I hecking got myself INTO this, alright? This is IMPORTANT TO ME.

(This also serves as an appendix for my fanfiction, The Forest of Daggers. So if you’ve been linked here from that, good for you. You’re in the right place.)

Anyway.

So.

If you’re ready for some weird science, press the ‘Keep reading’ button and hang onto your butt.

Whenever I watch a time-travel movie, I want to know and understand what’s happening. That is, I want to understand the rules that the movie assigns to this fictional phenomenon. What power or technology allows it? Can you travel to the past? Can you meet yourself? Can you change the past (i.e., is the time travel stable or unstable)? How far can you change the past? Are you yourself affected by changes the past incurs? Does changing the past ‘replace’ the old reality, split the universe into two realities, or warp the reality that is? Do you have free will while in the past? What kind of paradoxes (if any) are likely to pop up, and what the heck does a paradox even do anyway?

Every movie, book, or piece of media seems to have different rules.

Back to the Future (perhaps the most well-known version) uses a freaky-looking car as a means to ‘time-drive’ to the past. It does allow changes to the past (that is, it is unstable). Changes to the past do affect the time traveler himself (when he accidentally prevents his parents from hooking up, he himself begins to disappear.) He does retain free will. And this movie clearly threatens an unstable time paradox: changing the past would kill the time traveler or else remove his means of ever changing the past in the first place, thus generating an inconsistent loop of causality that just doesn’t add up, no matter how hard you think about it.

In Groundhog Day (a classic comedy that uses the same exact rules as one of my all-time favorite movies, Edge of Tomorrow) the main character ‘time-resets’ back to the previous morning via his own mysterious innate power. However, his entire body isn’t transported back in time, but only his brain, skills, and memories. He replaces himself, and then has complete freedom to change the past however he can. Although he has complete free will, his memories and everything he brought with him remain unaffected by his changes, thereby never resulting in a messy paradox. The old reality from before the changes is assumed to disappear without a physical trace.

Terminator goes a whole different route. In Terminator, one cannot change the past at all (doesn’t stop the murderous Austrian robots from trying, but hey, to each his own.) In terminator, time travel is accomplished via a big, ominous time portal, which ‘time-teleports’ folks back without equipment or clothes. Once in the past, the time traveler’s actions inevitably result in the future happening the way it already did. A killer robot tries to kill the mother of the leader of the human resistance, and fails. A human resistance member goes back and makes him fail, along the way getting the mother pregnant with said leader of the human resistance… And to further complicate things, the time-traveling killer robot is reverse-engineered by human scientists, and accidentally used to create the robots that started the whole mess in the first place. This is a clear-as-mud example of a stable time paradox: wherein time travel occurs, and the reason it occurs is because it did. (Sure, if it didn’t occur then it wouldn’t occur, but instead it did so it would, which makes a better movie, so ha, so there.)

Yeah.

All that being said, what rules does Gravity Falls follow?

Well, let’s start with the basics.

Time travel is accomplished by using small, tape-measure-shaped devices to ‘time-teleport’ one or more passengers at once (along with their equipment and clothes, thanks a lot for making that distinction necessary, Terminator…) to any time in history. In order to be time-teleported, passengers must be either touching the device, or in direct physical contact with another passenger who is.

Since time machines have been stolen in the show from time to time, and the time-authorities have to physically chase down the time-criminals to retrieve them, we can assume that they are totally independent devices that run under their own power and control. It is never specified in the show how long it takes them to run out of fuel, or if they even require fuel at all.

Now, as for the actual rules of how time travel behaves, the particulars are never really laid out very precisely. But if you happen to be writing a hard sci-fi fanfic (the unfortunate and uncomfortable predicament in which I find myself), you need to interpret Alex Hirsch’s unspoken rules properly, and need to make your writing fit with his. (Note: In this analysis, I’m going to be ignoring the book “Dipper, Mabel, and the Curse of the Time Pirates’ Treasure”, firstly because I haven’t read it, secondly because it isn’t canon, and thirdly because its many alternate endings don’t fit with the natural stability of time that we see in the show.)

So let’s look at the evidence from the show’s 2 episodes where time-travel is prominently featured.

Diagram of Blendin’s Game:

Blendin’s Game is very clear-cut, so I’ll start there. In that episode, the time-travel behaves in a highly stable way. Changes they make to the past are already a part of history. (For example, when Dipper and Mabel go to fix Soos’ b-day, they accidentally leave a screwdriver in Young-Soos’ yard. Young-Soos found the screwdriver and returned it, resulting in him getting the job at the Mystery Shack, which is already how things were. Indeed, his job even indirectly resulted in Dipper and Mabel time traveling to fix his b-day.) The alternative (where he never gets his job) never happens. And, since the Time Paradox Avoidance Enforcement Officers either ignore this causality loop or fail to detect it, we can assume that such stable paradoxes aren’t considered much of an issue.

Diagram of a hypothetical Time-Wish use:

In order to significantly and neatly change history in an unstable way, an enormous power source such as a Precious Time Wish is required. (The key word ‘Precious’ here implies that significant unstable change is NOT normal. It is, in fact, worth Globnaring to access.)

Also, since Dipper and Mabel went 10 years into the past when they themselves were only 12, we can assume that they existed concurrently with their past toddler selves who were likely in the nursery in Piedmont. As would make sense.

As an aside, we also see Blendin freezing local time to talk with Soos and give him the Time Wish. So time machines must therefore have an optional feature to freeze time (except for the time travelers themselves and certain persons of their choosing.)

That’s all clear enough, eh?

Diagram of Time Traveler’s Pig:

However, ‘The Time Traveler’s Pig’ confounds things a bit. In that one, Dipper and Mabel loop through a day back to “high noon!” several times.

This marks the one and only time we ever directly saw an unstable version of time travel in the show. Dipper tries to loop back around to undo creaming Wendy in the eye, and ends up causing her to get creamed again. As Dipper stated in such impressively large words: “The forces of time naturally conspire to prevent any new outcomes.” So, even though we see multiple ever-so-slightly-different realities arise and fall over the course of the day, only one reality, one that is extremely close to the original, is all that remains after all is said and done.

This means, in a way, that Mabel and Waddles were DESTINED for each other. Unfortunately, this also means that Dipper will need to devote more to this relationship than just a baseball. Poor guy. Nothing worth having comes easy.

Anyway.

‘The Time Traveler’s Pig’ also features one extremely weird detail: when time traveling through the day, Dipper and Mabel never seem to encounter their past selves. (Plus their clothes and bodies never seem to carry changes back in time, nor get older or dirtier. Even Mabel was instantly restored to her former beauty after a month of standing out in the sun headbutting a chunk of solid plastic.) Therefore, it can be assumed that only their brains and memories (and the time machine itself) do any real time-travel. Their minds take the place of their original bodies at the start of the day.

However, the whole brains-only rule doesn’t fit with the rest of the show, or even the rest of the episode. When they start traveling beyond the day, they visit prehistoric times where they wouldn’t have been born yet, the distant future where they would have been long dead, and even appear briefly at previous points in the Summer, while past versions of themselves lurked nearby.

So that’s weird. Part of the episode (the part where they’re only traveling on the scale of hours/days) seems to follow one set of rules, and another part (where they’re traveling on the scale of weeks or more) seems to follow some different rules…

There doesn’t seem to be a clear answer here. Therefore, I will make something up to make it make sense. Namely, I will make up a ‘GroundHog Day switch’ (or GHD switch). When the switch is ON, the time machine will scan the target time for instances of the user’s body. If the time interval is very short (less than a week) and if the user’s past version is nearby, it will attempt to save fuel by locking onto a past version and transporting only the time traveler’s mind, soul, and self. If the time increment is more than a week, or if it cannot find a viable past self for replacement, or if the switch is OFF, then it will transport the whole body.

Over the course of TTP, Dipper and Mabel left the GHD switch ON, which allowed them to repeat the day without countless past versions getting underfoot. Whenever traveling beyond their local week, the Time machine defaulted to non-GHD travel. In Blendin’s Game, however, they probably left it off.

BUT THAT’S JUST A THEORY. A CODYLABS THEORY. THAYNKS FOR WACHIN.

Anyway.

In conclusion to all that nonsense above, here is my personal list of rules for time travel in Gravity Falls, that pretty much encompasses all we’ve seen.

These are the rules that I have been/will be writing from, and that I invite you to use as well.

Small, handheld time machines can be used to quickly and easily transport multiple people at once, along with equipment. The time machines can travel to most, if not all, points in history. Past, present, and future indiscriminately.

Time machines are capable of freezing local time, at least temporarily. Somehow, this freezing does not harm the freezer or the frozen. (Logically if time were frozen, everything would be perfectly cold, infinitely dark, and the air would be hard as rock, but that’s no fun so we ignore that.)

Time machines can be set to either replace the user’s past self in the target time, or not. If the past version targeted for replacement is more than a week distant, the replacement will not work. The function can be toggled on and off depending on need. (This is just a theory of mine, but I’ll roll with it because it makes enough sense. Plus a story I’m writing kind of depends on it. :P)

Time travel always defaults toward stability. From a practical standpoint, this means that any action undertaken in the past is most likely already a part of history. However, if significant effort is undertaken to deviate from set history, (especially replacing a past version of yourself), unstable change is somewhat possible. Which leads to my most important point:

The wrinkles of instability are usually ironed out by ‘the natural forces of time’. These natural forces take the form of poignant, improbable events: anything from a ball improbably striking an eyeball, to gusts of wind improbably blowing a ball off-course to strike an eyeball, to a girl improbably losing her delicate sanity in order to elicit pity from her brother and convince him to throw a ball in such a way that it could have the chance to strike an eyeball.

Stable time paradox loops form randomly and with some frequency, for no apparent reason besides general weirdness. Any closed, time-like curve, from Soos’ screwdriver loop to the dropped calculator loop, may form and become a ‘canonical’ part of established, stable history. These stable loops are not particularly significant, even if their causality is pretty weird.

Time travelers always maintain their own personal memories of observed events. This includes memories of any realities they have experienced, even those unstable realities which have since been altered or replaced. (This is important, because it allows for linear character arcs amid a nonlinear story.)

Oh yeah, and unstable change is possible and easy using the mighty power of the Time Wishes… And you get Time Wishes by fighting to the death for them. So have fun with that.

[queen-sands]

Save Me From Myself - Part 12

Pairing: Bucky Barnes/Winter Soldier x Reader

Summary:  Y/N was the leading medic on the team catering to the Winter Soldier under the watchful eye of Hydra against her patriotic will. After helping Captain America and the Falcon  to track down her ‘patient,’ Y/N took up a job at the Avengers Tower.

Recap: Y/N and Bucky had been getting closer until a mission called him away. Then a late night distress call about Bucky being hurt set things in motion to put distance between the two.

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Part 6

Part 7

Part 8

Part 9

Part 10

Part 11

A/N: I’m so sorry I took so long (2 years so long) to write the ending to this. I apologize profusely if my writing sucks. I’m a little rusty I’m afraid! :( Anyways...here’s the last part to Save Me From Myself. You’re always welcome to message me! <3

Y/N was avoiding him. She did come to see him when he was in Med Care but it seemed like she made it a point to only visit when he was either asleep or when she was accompanied by Steve or Natasha. More often than not, he pretended to be asleep just to be in her presence longer and he felt like a fool for it.

There were many things he still didn’t understand about himself and where he fit in this new world, but this was what ate at him the most. She was there, but she wasn’t. She spoke to him but all the inside jokes and stupid banter has been pushed aside to leave behind just polite pleasantries. She was close enough to touch and yet never has she been furthest from his reach. He did not understand at all.

Talking to Steve put things in perspective as it usually did.

“So she saw the surveillance footage of the last mission?” Bucky asked just to make sure he was hearing things right. Steve nodded curtly. “How did that even happen, Steve?”

“She walked in while I was reviewing. I think she came to update about your condition post-surgery.”

“How much?” Bucky breathed out. “How much did she see?”

“Enough.”

It was devastating for Steve to see the emotions warring against each other within his friend. The tension and horror was almost palpable. That mission had not been pretty, and Bucky...what he was capable of was not mild.

Enough. The word reverberated through Bucky’s mind. No wonder Y/N wanted nothing to do with him. She saw just how much of a monster he truly was – the killing machine. She finally knew that no matter how many shows they binged watched together or how many hours they spent idly chatting about life over coffee, there was a part of him that would never be erased. The greatest part of him. The worst part of him.

“Bucky...” Steve reached out to lay a hand on his shoulder but he flinched away.

“I should have known,” he whispered in resignation, eyes closed, almost as if the words were uttered to himself.

“Known what?”

He looked Steve in the eye and there was such a sense of defeat and even a slight hint of anger simmering in the blue. “I’m not meant for good things.”

“Bucky...”

“That it was just a moment in time and soon reality of who I am would set in. I should have known but I thought she was different.”

She is in love with you. Steve almost blurted it out but in the end he was glad he didn’t. It wasn’t his place to say it and even if it was, now was not the time.

He watched Bucky walk out. He hated seeing him that way. He hated that he felt he didn’t deserve good things in his life. Steve couldn’t help but feel angry at Doc. She knew who Bucky was. She’d known from the very beginning what he was and what Hydra made him out to be. If she couldn’t handle what he came with, she shouldn’t have let him get so close to her at all.

But in the end, it was between them and Steve couldn’t interfere.

Y/N was typing away on her laptop when she heard the door to her lab open. She looked up to find Bucky closing the door behind him.

“Hey!” She greeted him with a smile but her hesitance was obvious and the smile didn’t reach her eyes.

In that moment, all of his well thought out intentions gave away and his anger took over. “You’re avoiding me.”

It wasn’t a question but she answered none the same. “Yes.”

“You saw the footage.”

“Yes.”

He took a deep breath, as if bolstering himself up for the rest of the conversation. “So that’s it then, is it? You finally saw what I truly am and everything we had is just thrown out of the window, just like that? Is that how little it all meant to you or am I so despicable that even having a fucking decent conversation with me is so damn disgusting to you?”

He waited with bated breath, anger evident in every bit of him, his stance defensive. He prayed she’d deny it. He expected her to shut him out.

She walked towards him so fast he didn’t see it coming till her fist collided with his chest. It didn’t hurt but the shock of it made him cry out.

“How dare you?” She yelled.

Y/N never yelled. Y/N was never physically violent. But here she was screaming her head off at him and punching him with every word. Bucky was too confounded to respond or even understand why the hell she was angry.

“Is that how little you think of me?” she asked, continuing without waiting for Bucky to say anything. “That I am disgusted with you? That I am afraid of you?” She pushed him and walked away.

“What else was I supposed to think, Y/N?” Bucky asked, his voice devoid of all anger now. All he wanted was to understand, to go back to what they had. He did not want to fight with her. He did not want to be mad at her.

She turned around to face him once more. “I was afraid for you.” She took a few steps closer so that once again they were chest to chest with just mere inches between them.

Usually, such proximity unnerved Bucky. He was not still used to it. Yet, right now, he was so mesmerized by the emotions warring in her eyes to even think about putting distance between them. “What?” he asked, not fully comprehending what she meant.

“You walk into battle like you are immortal...like you’d never be hurt,” she whispered laying a gentle hand on his cheek. The few hours’ stubble prickled her but she didn’t care. He leaned into her touch subconsciously, craving her as he always seemed to. “But you’re human, Bucky. Stronger than most but still human,” she continued. “Do you know what it was like for me, to get that phone call in the middle of the night? To see you hurt? To know that there might be nothing I could do to save you?”

He didn’t answer. There was nothing he could say anyway.

“You mean so, so much to me,” she said, and her words set his heart racing with hope and anticipation. So much so that she could probably feel it, as close as they were to each other. “I don’t know if I could ever be okay with you being so reckless with yourself. I don’t know if I would survive a minute while you are away at some mission, not knowing when or if you’d come back,” she sobbed gently, looking down at her feet, unable to let him see so much vulnerability anymore.

Bucky gently cupped her face and made her look at him. It was imperative that he had her full attention for what he had to say. “I wish I could be someone else, too. Someone safe. Someone normal. Some nights, I can’t sleep. I stay up thinking of what could happen to you when I am not there. Mostly though, the thought that tortures me the most is what if something happens to you because of me? I wish I could stay away from you. That would be the right thing to do. The safe thing.”

“Then why don’t you?” she whispered.

Bucky smiled. Even in such a heartbreaking moment, she was not going to let him off easy. She wanted the words. Who was he to deny her? “I love you, Y/N.”

He waited with bated breath for her to return the words but they didn’t come. She leaned in and kissed him instead.

She tasted as sweet as he imagined she would be. Things started off innocently enough, but soon her hands were tangled in his hair, pulling, demanding, and his were grabbing her by the hips trying to be as close as they could physically be.

He walked her back to her desk and she found herself half sitting, and half wrapped around his hips. She wondered why she was not more awkward or cautious about it but whatever that was happening with him right now, felt like an ancient dance they were both aware of. When he unbuttoned her top, she turned her face, giving him access to her neck. When she reached for the bottom of his t-shirt, he raised his arms allowing her to lift it off him barely even breaking their kiss.

Skin to skin, they were all deft movements and sensations. When Bucky plunged into her in one stroke, she held on to his shoulders seeking something just beyond her reach. He wanted her to find it too. One hand held her head, cradled, while the other slipped between them to her center, coaxing her to fall apart in his arms.

There was no sweet slow lovemaking. It was fast, hard, and urgent – both of them seeking confirmation in the other. When she came around him, screaming his name, he let go and allowed himself to come hard within her.

Later, they held on to each other, coming down from the high, half-dressed and half not. She hid her face in the crook of his neck. “Just so you know,” she said, in between trying to catch her breath, “Sex is not the answer to everything.”

He chuckled. “Well no,” he agreed. “Sex is the question, and yes should always be the answer.”

Smiling, she pushed back on his chest to look up at him. “I’m serious though. We haven’t really worked out...”

“Y/N,” he interrupted her. “I have been on the wrong side of history for far too long. Whatever I can do to even the scale... I have to do this. This is who I am. I wish I could promise you ‘safe’ but I can’t. All I have is myself. I can promise to try and be careful, to be better at it but this is what my life is. I could be walking down the street and get hit by a bus for all I know.”

“Except you’d be running towards a freaking train head on every time you are away,” she pointed out.

“All I know, is that I love you. All I can promise you is that I’d try better at being more careful,” he told her solemnly. What was unsaid was that she could either have him as he was, or she could choose to ignore all that was between them out of fear.

She wanted to be mad at him, but was this not why she loved him in the first place? Hydra tried to break everything out of him and yet, his conviction and sense of duty remained, dormant for a while, but still there.

“Alright,” she whispered, agreeing. “For the record, I love you too, Sergeant Barnes,” she said dragging him down for a kiss.

Things weren’t perfect. Things weren’t all planned out. Yet, she was his and he was hers. They had been each other’s for longer than either of them even knew...and that was all they needed. His past was still his past. Her fear was still in her heart. Neither of them were naïve enough to think that love would conquer all, but they were brave enough to try. It was enough. It was all they had, and it was enough.

The End.

[qulaan]

    PAYING THE TITHE :  Alaqa & Bujeg Qulaan [RP Logs]

Alaqa Qulaan was hardly naive when it came to the business of crossing the Ruby Sea. It was a trip she had made a handful of times in the last ten years when necessity called for it. While the pirates of the Confederacy had initially confounded her with this 'Ruby Tithe' business, she had eventually caught on and learned exactly what she needed to do to secure safe passage across the waters. And so when she had left the Steppe, she had come prepared to seek out the same sailor she had dealt with in times past.

She dropped a heavy sack onto the dock at her feet, the heavy thud and sound of metal clanking against metal pulling the hyur's attention up to her. Recognizing her, he looked between the Xaela and the sack before grunting a question, "Lookin' for the usual?" As she nodded, he let out another huff. "Not for that sorry sack of goods." For a long moment, Alaqa stared in silence, perhaps waiting for a joke that never came. "What do you mean?" The man finally straightened from his work to give her an impatient look. "That shite isn't worth half what it was before the Empire was chased out, so it sure as hell isn't goin' to pay the Tithe."

Bujeg Qulaan had been standing guard duty, as he often did, ever looking out for people trying to sneak through the Sea without having paid the tithe. When the woman approached, he quickly noted the jingling sack she had in hand and didn't think much more of it, assuming it to contain gil as most people pay in. However when his compatriot denied her passage on the grounds of something not being worth as much as it used to be, it roused his curiosity, and so he turned to look over her.

Alaqa Qulaan's lips instantly turned to a deep frown of frustration at the answer, beginning to argue when the man once again cut her short. "Say what you will, but words are worth even less than than sack of metal, yeah? You either come up with something more to sweeten the deal or piss off." Her mouth snapped shut and her cheeks began to darken, ever so slightly, in indignant anger. But she knew there was little use in arguing, and even less coin in her pockets to make up the difference. But..

"This is all I have for now, but if you ferry me across the sea to Kugane, there are others of my tribe there waiting to cross. Others with coin. See me across now and I'll see that my debt is paid twice over when I return." She would just worry about where to get said coin later. "I swear it on my honor as a Qulaan."

Bujeg Qulaan stepped forward quickly, even as the hyur was beginning to frown and open his mouth again to deny her passage, holding out his hand between them, "Hold, hold." He gives the hyur an adamant look, which steams the hyur before ultimately he shrugs and turns back to his work, "Whatever you say, Bujeg. If you want to take responsibility for her, I wash my hands of this." Nodding, the Xaela peers down at Alaqa before gesturing towards the shore.

Alaqa Qulaan was prepared for a fight as soon as she sees the annoyed look on the hyur's face, but the wind is knocked from her sails the second that the other Xaela -- she had been so engrossed in her negotiating that she hadn't even noticed him -- steps between them. Compounded by confusion when the other not only stops the argument but speaks for her, she wasn't quite sure what to say or to think. She gave him a guarded look but nodded in turn, starting to head back to the shore -- but stopped and first took a couple back steps to snatch the heavy bag right back up over her shoulder. Now.. to the shore.

Bujeg Qulaan: "You. You said you were Qulaan. This cannot possibly be."

Alaqa Qulaan's normally calm mood, as still as the waters of Azim Khaat on a windless day, had still not returned after the confrontation. Once she stopped behind him and he spoke, she was instantly on the defensive. "I said I am Qulaan because I -am- Qulaan, and there are others waiting there--" She lifted a hand to gesture impatiently in the direction of Kugane. Or the direction she thought it was, at least. "--for me to return so that they may cross the sea to return home, no thanks to your criminal of a friend."

Bujeg Qulaan's face turns from a calm control to a snarl beneath the mask, which his hand then snaps up to to remove, staring back at her with his golden eyes, "And I say it is not possible, because -I- am Qulaan, and I saw my people get slaughtered by the Legion. I only survived my wounds because the Nem Khaal river swept my body out to this sea." He leans down to put his face close to hers, studying her. Squinting, trying to recognize her.

Alaqa Qulaan's slowly bubbling temper suddenly went dead at that, expression instantly turning from fire to ice as he snatched off the mask and claimed to be one of them. She tensed when he was suddenly in her face studying her, leaning back just a touch, but she studied him in return all the same. He seemed familiar, but almost all of her memories of the tribe were like looking at blurred old photographs now. It was hard to recall their faces, harder still to recall their names. But the other pirate had used his. Bujeg. Her brow furrowed then as she desperately tried to grab onto a decade-old memory. "There are others that survived," she admittedly quietly. "Not.. many. But there are."

Bujeg Qulaan leans back and crosses his arms, letting the wooden mask fall and clatter to the dock. "... I can't imagine... There was so much blood. My father's blood, the khan's blood.. -My- blood.."

Alaqa Qulaan flinches visibly at the mention of the khan, unable to help herself. Ten years and still the sight of her father dying on a hopeless battlefield was still far too raw of a memory, ever an open wound. "I remember.." she murmured, trying to pull her mind back from the past when it suddenly hit her. She perked then, a spark of recognition in her eyes. "Bujeg the Dzo-wrestler!" she exclaimed suddenly and abruptly. "Yes? My mind does not trick me?"

Bujeg Qulaan looks at Alaqa Qulaan in shock!

Bujeg Qulaan: "Yes... Yes, that's me... So long ago that was."

Bujeg Qulaan: "But you... you I can't...."

Alaqa Qulaan seems relieved at the confirmation and not the least offended at his own lack of recognition. "Alaqa," she answered him, the next part slightly more hesitant. "Daughter of Oyuun Khan."

Bujeg Qulaan his mouth was agape then, as he peered at her, eyes searching her face, "... Cha--" And then she said her name, and at his near misnaming, he grimaces… And her sister, no less.

Alaqa Qulaan flinches at that, however, though she at least tries her best to mask the discomfort with a downwards glance and a cough. "It is good that you are here," she answers, if not a bit stiffly. "That is, perhaps not.. -here-, specifically. But that you survived. I am glad."

Bujeg Qulaan nods, "I am... I am glad others survived. I thought myself alone in doing so." After a moment of pause and a hand coming up to scratch his chin scales, his eyes go wide and he drops to a knee. "If you live, then you must now be Alaqa Khatun.. Balanai be praised."

Bujeg Qulaan kneels before Alaqa Qulaan.

Alaqa Qulaan nodded along with the sentiment, knowing full well the feeling. There was likely not a single one among their tribe that didn't, in truth. But as he suddenly dropped to a knee, her eyes widened in mild surprise. "N-no, that is.." With the shift in topic, she was now acutely -- and awkwardly -- aware of the heavy sack slung over her shoulder. She cleared her throat. "Our khatun is Saraghul, though I do not know if you knew her. She was the daughter of our udgan, Subetei. I only advise her now."

Bujeg Qulaan tilts his head to the side as he rises. "Saraghul... Yes, I recall her... We were.. near the same age... As were you and I, I believe... I recall hoping that she ended up my hunting partner at one point.. though it did not come to be."

Alaqa Qulaan seems like, for a moment, she might say something but ultimately decides against it, her lips pressing shut as she nodded her head. "She has grown and learned much in the time since our tribe was scattered. I am confident that she will be a good leader to us."

Bujeg Qulaan gazes upon Alaqa Qulaan in deep reflection.

Bujeg Qulaan: "If you believe so... I would meet her. If I can."

Alaqa Qulaan nods and, finally, even a hint of a smile comes back to her lips. "Yes, you can. You can meet her and the others, few as they may be. As I told the hyur before, the tribe is looking to return to the steppe and many still lie on the other side of the Ruby Sea." She paused, glancing back across the shore towards the hyur, then back to Bujeg. "Though in truth.. I apparently haven't the means to pay the Tithe myself, much less for an entire tribe. This is.. an unexpected challenge."

Bujeg Qulaan: "Your bag seems heavier than most I see pay with... What lies inside if it is not heavy with gil?"

Alaqa Qulaan stumbles at the question, making a face as she opens her mouth to try to explain. But words failing her, she chose instead to simply shuffle the bag from her shoulder and hold it out from him to take. "I would.. appreciate that you speak naught of this to the others," she murmurs. "It is hard to explain." If he took the bag and opened it, it would perhaps make sense -- not only why she did not wish to speak of it, but why the value of the contents had dropped in the wake of Doma's liberation. Inside were numerous bits and baubles of Imperial make -- small firearms, a limited supply of munitions, small pieces of magitek. Things that once had value when they had to be taken from Imperial corpses, but now could be found comparatively easier since they had fled the land or been put to the sword and left their belongings behind.

Bujeg Qulaan squints into the bag, before his eyes go wide and he urges her to close it. "... I see. I will take it to Tansui. I will cover the rest of the Tithe in Gyuki hides and meat. But when next you cross, you will need the gil our people claim to have in the other side. Wait here."

Alaqa Qulaan bobs her head in a nod at the instructions and heaves a soft sigh of relief. The problem, of course, would be coming up with such a sum of coin for the crossing. But that was a problem she could worry about once she reached Kugane. For now, she was simply relieved to have the means to cross -- and warmed by the rediscovery of yet another survivor of the Massacre, besides.

ft. @jaliqai-and-company (Alaqa) and @fortress-and-flame (Bujeg).

[heavenwheel]

7 Conversations with Chris Penn: An Introduction to Machine Learning and AI

When I saw Chris Penn speak at our 2018 Next10x event, I knew I wanted to get together with him for a video session to discuss machine learning and AI. We did that recently, and the videos below are the result. Each video is accompanied by a transcript if you prefer to read.

We covered seven major topics in our discussions:

What Are Machine Learning and AI?

How Will Machine Learning and AI Change Our World?

Google and AI: RankBrain

Google and AI: Beyond RankBrain

The Rise of Smart Devices

Predictive Analysis and Content

Real Applications of Machine Learning and AI Today

As you can see, we covered a wide range of territory. Throughout these conversations, we’ll give you a solid introductory primer into machine learning and AI, as well as an understanding of how companies and individuals are applying them in the world of search. I hope you enjoy these conversations as much as I did.

Conversation #1: What are Machine Learning and AI?

Eric: Chris, my first question for you is, “Can you just tell the viewers a bit about machine learning and AI, first of all, and how they’re different?” and then, “Where are they today?”  

Chris: Gotcha. AI is a big broad umbrella term. It basically means getting computers to do things humans do with our intelligence naturally. So you can see me, and if you’re watching this, you can see what’s going on. You’re using vision. If you’re hearing the words I’m saying and it doesn’t sound just like noise, then you’re using natural language processing.

We learn these things instinctively and through our own training as we grow up. But, we’re trying to teach computers to do those things. Now under that umbrella, the foundation of today’s AI and machine learning is all statistics—it’s all math, right? So, if you didn’t like math, sorry.

The good news is software’s helping with a lot of that. Statistics and probability are really the heart of artificial intelligence. With those individual statistical techniques, we build them into what are called algorithms—repeatable processes. Everybody uses algorithms all day long. When you get dressed in the morning, you probably have a sequence of things that you do every day that is predictable. And so that’s the algorithm.

You get into the interesting territories when you give computers these algorithms and you give them data and you say, “Hey, you decide what algorithms to use to make the data reach a conclusion of some kind.” And that’s what we call machine learning where the computer now, instead of we write the software and the computer processes the data, now we provide the data and the computer writes its own software and then comes out with an outcome.

Now, if you were to take machine learning as a layer of a pancake,—a set of algorithms,— and you were to start stacking them on top of each other like Lego blocks, where the data moves from one block to the next, that’s what’s called deep learning. It’s called deep because it can be hundreds of layers deep. That gets computers much closer to either human level or beyond human level capabilities.

Deep learning is like a stack of machine learning Lego bricks, each brick passing information to the others.Click To Tweet

So, when we’re talking about AI, particularly in terms of marketing and search and things like that, we are talking about computers being able to think like humans, create outcomes that humans want, and optimize for those outcomes. A lot of what we’re going to be talking about today deals with how that impacts things like search.

Eric: Absolutely. One of my favorite examples is when Google’s DeepMind subsidiary cracked the code on the game of Go and taught it to beat the world champion. That was an intense machine-learning exercise right there.

Chris: Yes, absolutely.

END OF PART 1

Conversation #2: How Will Machine Learning and AI Change Our World?

Eric: For the next question, can you talk a little bit about how this is going to impact our world, in terms of the types of jobs and the kinds of things that will change in our environment, overall?

Chris: In the future, there will be two kinds of jobs. You will manage the machines or the machines will manage you. And that’s pretty much the future for everything. If there’s a process or a task that you do that is repetitive, a machine will do it. At some point, a machine will do it because it’s really not worth a human copying and pasting the same thing over and over again.

In the future there will be just two kinds of jobs: you will manage machines or machines will manage you.Click To Tweet

Think about, for example, in the world of search marketing. What are some of the things that we would do in search marketing? We do stuff like keyword scoring, keyword analysis, and text analysis. All that is stuff machines can do. You don’t need a human to do that anymore.

Another one of the things I think is relevant is if you ever Googled for an Instagram template or an SEO checklist, things like that, right? If you use a template to do your work today, a machine’s going to do it without you tomorrow because you just don’t need to be doing those things anymore. So that’s a big part of the future.

And the most important thing, I think, is that from a marketing and communications perspective, marketing becomes truly one-to-one. We can’t scale. You and I can’t individually talk to a million people every day. You and I are having this conversation here. We’re having a one-to-one conversation, but we can’t do this at scale. We don’t scale. There’s just not enough hours in the day.

 But an AI can actually do that and have a meaningful interaction with somebody on a one-to-one basis. Whether you’re searching for something or talking to a voice assistant, you can have these interactions one-to-one and the machines can remember who you are.

For one of my favorite examples, go to Google and look up Watson Conversational Ads. It’s an IBM product. Disclosure: I’m an IBM champion, so they send me clothes to wear.

You can talk to the ad. It’ll ask like, “What’s your favorite ingredient?” And I’ll type in “Sriracha” and they’ll come up with a recipe, on the fly, that’s just for you based on the time, the weather, your search history, and things like that. It’s your recipe, but it also warns you these are not kitchen tested—use common sense. But that’s one-to-one marketing and that’s how this is going to impact everything going forward.

END OF PART 2

Conversation #3: Google and AI: RankBrain

Chris: I want to get back to something that we were talking about in terms of search. At the Next10x conference, we were talking a bit about RankBrain and how Google is using AI. What have you seen the big search engines doing with AI and machine learning as it impacts marketers?

Eric: I’m glad you started with RankBrain because there’s a little bit of a myth out there and Google picked a really unfortunate name for it. But the original RankBrain algorithm is what I call a “sparse data algorithm,” and it was really about providing better answers for the kinds of search queries that users enter for which they don’t have data.

So the way that worked is it would actually look at historical search queries, especially on long-tail queries. It might be five, six, seven words long, or even longer queries. Nobody had ever done these queries before, but they could do what they call a similarity vector analysis where they look at the vector for the query entered by the user based on the words.

They might have a similar query where the vector, when they draw it, is really similar. So mathematically, they’re able to determine that these queries are extremely similar. This is building on what you said a moment ago, just doing the statistical analysis.

Looking at those two very similar queries, Google could then actually see how people responded to the other query. Do they not click on the first result? Do they ignore the e-commerce results? Do they click on the informational result? And based on that, they can tune how they give you the results for the query you actually entered. This is where RankBrain started years ago.

The interesting thing is, this got confounded a little bit more because Google made the statement that it was the number-three ranking factor in the Google algorithm. By the way, the first two, they said, were content and links.

Chris: Huge surprise.

Eric: Which is good. The world hasn’t been turned completely upside down yet. The reality is we have to remember, 70% of all search is in the long-tail. So if RankBrain operates primarily in the long-tail, it can actually have a very large impact but not change ranking for higher volume queries at all, which is basically what they tend to say about it.

70% of search takes place in the long tail, and that's where RankBrain comes in.Click To Tweet

Chris: But here’s the thing. The way we search is radically changing. So that inflates RankBrain’s importance. Today, when I talk to Google Assistant, I don’t say “best SEO firm.” I don’t speak in these short-clipped phrases. I’ll say, “Hey, Google, what’s the best SEO firm in Framingham, Massachusetts?” Right? It’s a very long-tail query. So does that mean that RankBrain is processing a lot more of the voice interface and the voice searches?

Eric: I think that’s likely the case. As you know, voice queries tend to be much more natural language and much longer, and as a result…Yes, it’s going to trigger RankBrain even more.

END OF PART 3

Conversation #4: Google and AI: Beyond RankBrain

Eric: I happen to think RankBrain is evolving.

Chris: Into what?

Eric: What we’re seeing now is this idea of comparative analysis and being able to look at query histories using machine learning and AI, and that is particularly interesting. It allows them to try out the idea of experimenting. Let me replay it briefly. RankBrain was looking at past historical query results and learning from them to tweak your results.

Chris: Based on a vector word analysis.

Eric: Now, let’s make a simple modification to that concept and actually run an algorithm where we test certain kinds of listings, see how they perform, and compare them to tests of other kinds of listings. I’m again looking at historical results, but rather than going in the databank and hoping that I have a related phrase that I’ve done something with, I’m going out of my way to dynamically test scenarios.

Chris: Well, yes, we know they do that. They do that with Markov chains in the Attribution 360 product. It’s built right in and they do hundreds of millions of comparisons of all your data based on your past data.

Eric: I think they’re being much more deliberative about that now in what they’re doing with search results.

Above is a screenshot of the search results for the phrase “digital cameras” from February of 2018. What you’re seeing is that there are two reviews results and two e-commerce results. By reviews results, I mean pages giving reviews of lots of different digital cameras.

Fast forward to May of 2018, and it’s changed dramatically. Now we have three e-commerce results, no review page results, and Wikipedia. I’ve seen this for many, many different kinds of SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages) in a way that I’ve never seen in Google before. It’s happening more dynamically. So it’s my conjecture—I have no confirmation, to be fair—but it really looks to me like they’re deliberately testing scenarios to better determine user intent.

It looks like Google is testing user intent assumptions and adjusting search results in response to the tests. Click To Tweet

Chris: How do you get around the issue of personalization in the results? When you’re advising clients, do you provide something like, “Here’s the generic, not logged-in result,” and then here’s 12 or 15 personas of standard business users or standard homeowners to show how the results will vary from person to person?

Eric: It’s actually hard to do specific SEO work around personalization. But really, it ultimately all gets back to user intent, and how well your content matches up with user intent. This is something that I think a lot of businesses are dramatically under-invested in because when someone comes to your web page, they’re looking for something. And it might not be just the top-level product on your web page, but all the ancillary needs that they have related to that.

Chris: Do I need a digital camera and…

Eric: Well, I was going to say an SD card, right? I almost said film. I was dating myself terribly there.

Chris: No, you could be retro.

Eric: Well, I could be retro. That would have been an embarrassment. Oh, wait a minute. I did say it. Yes, you have other needs, and you have other things that you’re looking for. So you have to design your content to meet that broader range of needs.  

And this, I actually think, is the thing that helps the personalization part of the algorithm work in your favor, because if you’re creating the content that they engage with initially, because you do a good job of putting out there that you’re addressing a broad range of needs, then you’re putting yourself in the situation where the personalization algorithms work in your favor.

END OF PART 4

Conversation #5: The Rise of Smart Devices

Chris: Now, let’s talk a bit about some of the smart devices like Google Home and Alexa and others in that world. How should we be optimizing for these devices, for these much longer tail searches?

Intent is a big part of it because obviously, if I don’t have to think about what I’m typing, I would say, “Hey, what’s the best SEO firm in Framingham, Massachusetts that accepts B2B clients?” That’s a very long search term, and there’s a lot more rich intent in there than “best SEO firm.” The intent is unclear.

So how do we optimize to take advantage of all these different types of intents that people are going to physically speak into their smart home devices, their watches, even people talking to their refrigerators now?

Eric: Absolutely—my car, right?

Chris: Exactly

Eric: And my watch; I’ve got them all, all those devices. I think one of the big things people have to realize is when you’re dealing with Alexa or the Google Assistant running on Google Home or something running on your smartphone, and you use a voice query and you get a voice response, you get one answer. You know this, right? This is the big thing.

Most of the time, the great majority at that time, when it’s a Google Assistant answer, they’re drawing that from what they serve as featured snippets in the regular search results. So the big thing to do is learn how to generate featured snippets.

But let’s back up and look at this from a Google perspective and how they’re thinking about it. It used to be that when they served regular search results, if the first answer in the search results wasn’t perfect but the user got what they wanted in position two or three, that was actually still a good result for the user. They don’t have that opportunity in the voice environment. They only get one answer. I happen to think that they’re investing in enormous amount of machine learning…

Chris: Duplex!

Eric: …technology. What’s your take on that?

Chris: I think you’re absolutely right. And I think one of the things that marketers, in particular, are neglecting is the data they already have. So we’ve been doing a couple of projects, mining people’s CRM data, like the stuff that people call in or email in: “Hey, I’ve got a problem with this product or service.” If you mine that data and you pull out the way people are talking to you about your stuff on your website, that is rich search content to fulfill intent, right?

Mining data from your CRM and email using machine learning can yield new search-friendly content opportunities.Click To Tweet

Because you know when somebody searches for SD card class 10, what they’re really asking about is, “How do I have a card that doesn’t cause frame rate issues when I’m recording a video or setting up a security camera?” or things like that. And so, if you mine your CRM data, and you’ve got a whole pile of emails that say, “Hey, I’ve got jittery video,” now you can go back and reinfuse your content that’s public or search volume indexed with that intent to say, “My video’s stuttering.” “Okay. You need a Class 10 card,” and things like that.

I don’t see companies doing that. People are sitting on these years or decades of CRM data and they just let it sit out there and just cost money as storage cost and let it be a security risk, as opposed to saying, “Let’s use this to inform search and marketing and communications.”

END OF PART 5

Conversation #6: Predictive Analytics and Content

Chris: The other thing I don’t see people doing, or hardly any of, is predictive analytics. This is a problem that marketing automation software has made worse. People assume that everybody who is qualified to buy is ready to buy all the time, right? You’re the CEO of a company, right? So clearly, you’re qualified. You’re the decision-maker. So we’re just going to assume that you’re ready to buy.

Well, no. I mean, if you are a CEO, you’ll have ebbs and flows and things throughout the year, particularly if you’re publicly traded. You have a quarterly calendar you have to go by. And so by using predictive data, especially based on search data, which is reliable─ and well, people ask Google things they would never ask another human being out loud─ you would get a much better sense of when somebody’s doing something good.

I think part of the intent and part of the search results that we’re talking about is that people don’t take into account time. When is somebody searching for an SEO firm? When is somebody searching for a marketing firm? When is somebody searching for a new car? I would be completely surprised if Google did not take into account time in its results.

Predictive analytics can go beyond what people want to when they want it. Effective marketing shows up just when people are ready to buy.Click To Tweet

Eric: Yes, I agree and I think people are dramatically under-invested in content. I mentioned this earlier.

Here’s a case study with a search visibility chart pulled from SearchMetrics for a company that we happen to believe has about 15 full-time, knowledgeable content generators putting up over 100 articles a month on their site addressing specific questions and aspects of topics that users have in their market space.

When you look at this, it’s crazy, the traffic lift. They launched in May of 2016 and they’ve actually already achieved a dramatic search visibility by understanding what you were just talking about and investing in answering the real user questions.

END OF PART 6

Conversation #7: Real Applications of Machine Learning and AI Today

Eric: Why don’t you talk to us a little bit about how you guys are using machine learning in your business today.

Chris: It’s really three things.

Predictive analytics: when is something likely to happen or what drives something?

Text mining: understanding what’s in the data you already have. There’s so much data you’re sitting on. Please do something with it. Don’t just put it in a digital filing cabinet to rot forever.

Attribution analysis: the same technology Google uses, the same algorithms like Markov chains and Monte Carlo simulations, you can do on your laptop, though you won’t do it at a Google scale. But you can do it enough to do really good attribution analysis and get a very clean picture of what’s working. What’s really surprising is, in particular, search traffic and referral traffic are so under-weighted in most people’s attribution models because they just go with “last touch,” that if you do a full path analysis, I guarantee you’ll find you are under investing in search.

No matter what company you’re with, you’re under investing in searches with the way devices are going and with how social has changed to be all pay-to-play. Whatever your search budget is, just double it, because that’s where this stuff is going as the only way you can be found and not be spending large quantities of ad dollars.

Now, at your Next10x Conference, you mentioned that you would actually take Python courses and such. So what are you guys using in the AI realm?

Eric: Well, to be honest, at the beginning, it was just me trying to get my head around it. Being a geek, I have to go down into the detail before I can come back up and get my own sense of the bigger picture. So, I basically was just learning machine learning. I took the course from Andrew Ng, who’s Chief Scientist at Baidu. And then Geoffrey Hinton, who is directly involved in Google and machine learning out of the University of Toronto.

Where we’ve gone from there with it though is we’re really focusing a lot of energy on understanding how Google is using AI and machine learning. That’s really a big area for us because that actually puts us in a better situation to help our clients with it. And we have also done some dabbling in tools to improve content quality.

In particular, we have something that’s focused on processing user-generated content and automating that to, at this point, just reduce the need for human moderation by 80-90%. It’s a little hard to get to 100% with that.

Chris: Oh, yes, that’s true.

Eric: But if you can cut it down dramatically, then that’s actually a very high-value thing to do.

Chris:   I’ll say. One other course that you should take a look at is Google’s crash course in machine learning, completely for free. It uses TensorFlow, as well as their hardware and their software. So if you wanted to literally get it from the horse’s mouth, it’s a completely free course. I’d encourage anyone to try it out.

END OF PART 7

If you’ve made your way down to this portion of the post, you have a definite interest in Machine Learning and AI. Watch this space for more content along these lines!

Christopher S. Penn is co-founder of Brain Trust Insights, a data analytics company focused on helping you make more money with your data, a co-founder of PodCamp with Chris Brogan, and co-host of the Marketing Over Coffee marketing podcast with John Wall. Learn more about him at his personal site: www.christopherspenn.com

Eric Enge is the founder of renowned, award-winning digital Stone Temple Consulting, and was its CEO until it was acquired by Perficient Digital, where Eric now serves as General Manager. He is the lead co-author of the bestselling The Art of SEO (now in its third edition from O’Reilly Media), and a sought-after keynote speaker, as well as a regular columnist for Search Engine Land. Eric’s groundbreaking studies have become industry standards, regularly cited in major publications.

from Digital https://www.stonetemple.com/7-conversations-with-chris-penn-an-introduction-to-machine-learning-and-ai/ via http://www.rssmix.com/

[donnafmae]

7 Conversations with Chris Penn: An Introduction to Machine Learning and AI

When I saw Chris Penn speak at our 2018 Next10x event, I knew I wanted to get together with him for a video session to discuss machine learning and AI. We did that recently, and the videos below are the result. Each video is accompanied by a transcript if you prefer to read.

We covered seven major topics in our discussions:

What Are Machine Learning and AI?

How Will Machine Learning and AI Change Our World?

Google and AI: RankBrain

Google and AI: Beyond RankBrain

The Rise of Smart Devices

Predictive Analysis and Content

Real Applications of Machine Learning and AI Today

As you can see, we covered a wide range of territory. Throughout these conversations, we’ll give you a solid introductory primer into machine learning and AI, as well as an understanding of how companies and individuals are applying them in the world of search. I hope you enjoy these conversations as much as I did.

Conversation #1: What are Machine Learning and AI?

Eric: Chris, my first question for you is, “Can you just tell the viewers a bit about machine learning and AI, first of all, and how they’re different?” and then, “Where are they today?”  

Chris: Gotcha. AI is a big broad umbrella term. It basically means getting computers to do things humans do with our intelligence naturally. So you can see me, and if you’re watching this, you can see what’s going on. You’re using vision. If you’re hearing the words I’m saying and it doesn’t sound just like noise, then you’re using natural language processing.

We learn these things instinctively and through our own training as we grow up. But, we’re trying to teach computers to do those things. Now under that umbrella, the foundation of today’s AI and machine learning is all statistics—it’s all math, right? So, if you didn’t like math, sorry.

The good news is software’s helping with a lot of that. Statistics and probability are really the heart of artificial intelligence. With those individual statistical techniques, we build them into what are called algorithms—repeatable processes. Everybody uses algorithms all day long. When you get dressed in the morning, you probably have a sequence of things that you do every day that is predictable. And so that’s the algorithm.

You get into the interesting territories when you give computers these algorithms and you give them data and you say, “Hey, you decide what algorithms to use to make the data reach a conclusion of some kind.” And that’s what we call machine learning where the computer now, instead of we write the software and the computer processes the data, now we provide the data and the computer writes its own software and then comes out with an outcome.

Now, if you were to take machine learning as a layer of a pancake,—a set of algorithms,— and you were to start stacking them on top of each other like Lego blocks, where the data moves from one block to the next, that’s what’s called deep learning. It’s called deep because it can be hundreds of layers deep. That gets computers much closer to either human level or beyond human level capabilities.

Deep learning is like a stack of machine learning Lego bricks, each brick passing information to the others.Click To Tweet

So, when we’re talking about AI, particularly in terms of marketing and search and things like that, we are talking about computers being able to think like humans, create outcomes that humans want, and optimize for those outcomes. A lot of what we’re going to be talking about today deals with how that impacts things like search.

Eric: Absolutely. One of my favorite examples is when Google’s DeepMind subsidiary cracked the code on the game of Go and taught it to beat the world champion. That was an intense machine-learning exercise right there.

Chris: Yes, absolutely.

END OF PART 1

Conversation #2: How Will Machine Learning and AI Change Our World?

Eric: For the next question, can you talk a little bit about how this is going to impact our world, in terms of the types of jobs and the kinds of things that will change in our environment, overall?

Chris: In the future, there will be two kinds of jobs. You will manage the machines or the machines will manage you. And that’s pretty much the future for everything. If there’s a process or a task that you do that is repetitive, a machine will do it. At some point, a machine will do it because it’s really not worth a human copying and pasting the same thing over and over again.

In the future there will be just two kinds of jobs: you will manage machines or machines will manage you.Click To Tweet

Think about, for example, in the world of search marketing. What are some of the things that we would do in search marketing? We do stuff like keyword scoring, keyword analysis, and text analysis. All that is stuff machines can do. You don’t need a human to do that anymore.

Another one of the things I think is relevant is if you ever Googled for an Instagram template or an SEO checklist, things like that, right? If you use a template to do your work today, a machine’s going to do it without you tomorrow because you just don’t need to be doing those things anymore. So that’s a big part of the future.

And the most important thing, I think, is that from a marketing and communications perspective, marketing becomes truly one-to-one. We can’t scale. You and I can’t individually talk to a million people every day. You and I are having this conversation here. We’re having a one-to-one conversation, but we can’t do this at scale. We don’t scale. There’s just not enough hours in the day.

 But an AI can actually do that and have a meaningful interaction with somebody on a one-to-one basis. Whether you’re searching for something or talking to a voice assistant, you can have these interactions one-to-one and the machines can remember who you are.

For one of my favorite examples, go to Google and look up Watson Conversational Ads. It’s an IBM product. Disclosure: I’m an IBM champion, so they send me clothes to wear.

You can talk to the ad. It’ll ask like, “What’s your favorite ingredient?” And I’ll type in “Sriracha” and they’ll come up with a recipe, on the fly, that’s just for you based on the time, the weather, your search history, and things like that. It’s your recipe, but it also warns you these are not kitchen tested—use common sense. But that’s one-to-one marketing and that’s how this is going to impact everything going forward.

END OF PART 2

Conversation #3: Google and AI: RankBrain

Chris: I want to get back to something that we were talking about in terms of search. At the Next10x conference, we were talking a bit about RankBrain and how Google is using AI. What have you seen the big search engines doing with AI and machine learning as it impacts marketers?

Eric: I’m glad you started with RankBrain because there’s a little bit of a myth out there and Google picked a really unfortunate name for it. But the original RankBrain algorithm is what I call a “sparse data algorithm,” and it was really about providing better answers for the kinds of search queries that users enter for which they don’t have data.

So the way that worked is it would actually look at historical search queries, especially on long-tail queries. It might be five, six, seven words long, or even longer queries. Nobody had ever done these queries before, but they could do what they call a similarity vector analysis where they look at the vector for the query entered by the user based on the words.

They might have a similar query where the vector, when they draw it, is really similar. So mathematically, they’re able to determine that these queries are extremely similar. This is building on what you said a moment ago, just doing the statistical analysis.

Looking at those two very similar queries, Google could then actually see how people responded to the other query. Do they not click on the first result? Do they ignore the e-commerce results? Do they click on the informational result? And based on that, they can tune how they give you the results for the query you actually entered. This is where RankBrain started years ago.

The interesting thing is, this got confounded a little bit more because Google made the statement that it was the number-three ranking factor in the Google algorithm. By the way, the first two, they said, were content and links.

Chris: Huge surprise.

Eric: Which is good. The world hasn’t been turned completely upside down yet. The reality is we have to remember, 70% of all search is in the long-tail. So if RankBrain operates primarily in the long-tail, it can actually have a very large impact but not change ranking for higher volume queries at all, which is basically what they tend to say about it.

70% of search takes place in the long tail, and that's where RankBrain comes in.Click To Tweet

Chris: But here’s the thing. The way we search is radically changing. So that inflates RankBrain’s importance. Today, when I talk to Google Assistant, I don’t say “best SEO firm.” I don’t speak in these short-clipped phrases. I’ll say, “Hey, Google, what’s the best SEO firm in Framingham, Massachusetts?” Right? It’s a very long-tail query. So does that mean that RankBrain is processing a lot more of the voice interface and the voice searches?

Eric: I think that’s likely the case. As you know, voice queries tend to be much more natural language and much longer, and as a result…Yes, it’s going to trigger RankBrain even more.

END OF PART 3

Conversation #4: Google and AI: Beyond RankBrain

Eric: I happen to think RankBrain is evolving.

Chris: Into what?

Eric: What we’re seeing now is this idea of comparative analysis and being able to look at query histories using machine learning and AI, and that is particularly interesting. It allows them to try out the idea of experimenting. Let me replay it briefly. RankBrain was looking at past historical query results and learning from them to tweak your results.

Chris: Based on a vector word analysis.

Eric: Now, let’s make a simple modification to that concept and actually run an algorithm where we test certain kinds of listings, see how they perform, and compare them to tests of other kinds of listings. I’m again looking at historical results, but rather than going in the databank and hoping that I have a related phrase that I’ve done something with, I’m going out of my way to dynamically test scenarios.

Chris: Well, yes, we know they do that. They do that with Markov chains in the Attribution 360 product. It’s built right in and they do hundreds of millions of comparisons of all your data based on your past data.

Eric: I think they’re being much more deliberative about that now in what they’re doing with search results.

Above is a screenshot of the search results for the phrase “digital cameras” from February of 2018. What you’re seeing is that there are two reviews results and two e-commerce results. By reviews results, I mean pages giving reviews of lots of different digital cameras.

Fast forward to May of 2018, and it’s changed dramatically. Now we have three e-commerce results, no review page results, and Wikipedia. I’ve seen this for many, many different kinds of SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages) in a way that I’ve never seen in Google before. It’s happening more dynamically. So it’s my conjecture—I have no confirmation, to be fair—but it really looks to me like they’re deliberately testing scenarios to better determine user intent.

It looks like Google is testing user intent assumptions and adjusting search results in response to the tests. Click To Tweet

Chris: How do you get around the issue of personalization in the results? When you’re advising clients, do you provide something like, “Here’s the generic, not logged-in result,” and then here’s 12 or 15 personas of standard business users or standard homeowners to show how the results will vary from person to person?

Eric: It’s actually hard to do specific SEO work around personalization. But really, it ultimately all gets back to user intent, and how well your content matches up with user intent. This is something that I think a lot of businesses are dramatically under-invested in because when someone comes to your web page, they’re looking for something. And it might not be just the top-level product on your web page, but all the ancillary needs that they have related to that.

Chris: Do I need a digital camera and…

Eric: Well, I was going to say an SD card, right? I almost said film. I was dating myself terribly there.

Chris: No, you could be retro.

Eric: Well, I could be retro. That would have been an embarrassment. Oh, wait a minute. I did say it. Yes, you have other needs, and you have other things that you’re looking for. So you have to design your content to meet that broader range of needs.  

And this, I actually think, is the thing that helps the personalization part of the algorithm work in your favor, because if you’re creating the content that they engage with initially, because you do a good job of putting out there that you’re addressing a broad range of needs, then you’re putting yourself in the situation where the personalization algorithms work in your favor.

END OF PART 4

Conversation #5: The Rise of Smart Devices

Chris: Now, let’s talk a bit about some of the smart devices like Google Home and Alexa and others in that world. How should we be optimizing for these devices, for these much longer tail searches?

Intent is a big part of it because obviously, if I don’t have to think about what I’m typing, I would say, “Hey, what’s the best SEO firm in Framingham, Massachusetts that accepts B2B clients?” That’s a very long search term, and there’s a lot more rich intent in there than “best SEO firm.” The intent is unclear.

So how do we optimize to take advantage of all these different types of intents that people are going to physically speak into their smart home devices, their watches, even people talking to their refrigerators now?

Eric: Absolutely—my car, right?

Chris: Exactly

Eric: And my watch; I’ve got them all, all those devices. I think one of the big things people have to realize is when you’re dealing with Alexa or the Google Assistant running on Google Home or something running on your smartphone, and you use a voice query and you get a voice response, you get one answer. You know this, right? This is the big thing.

Most of the time, the great majority at that time, when it’s a Google Assistant answer, they’re drawing that from what they serve as featured snippets in the regular search results. So the big thing to do is learn how to generate featured snippets.

But let’s back up and look at this from a Google perspective and how they’re thinking about it. It used to be that when they served regular search results, if the first answer in the search results wasn’t perfect but the user got what they wanted in position two or three, that was actually still a good result for the user. They don’t have that opportunity in the voice environment. They only get one answer. I happen to think that they’re investing in enormous amount of machine learning…

Chris: Duplex!

Eric: …technology. What’s your take on that?

Chris: I think you’re absolutely right. And I think one of the things that marketers, in particular, are neglecting is the data they already have. So we’ve been doing a couple of projects, mining people’s CRM data, like the stuff that people call in or email in: “Hey, I’ve got a problem with this product or service.” If you mine that data and you pull out the way people are talking to you about your stuff on your website, that is rich search content to fulfill intent, right?

Mining data from your CRM and email using machine learning can yield new search-friendly content opportunities.Click To Tweet

Because you know when somebody searches for SD card class 10, what they’re really asking about is, “How do I have a card that doesn’t cause frame rate issues when I’m recording a video or setting up a security camera?” or things like that. And so, if you mine your CRM data, and you’ve got a whole pile of emails that say, “Hey, I’ve got jittery video,” now you can go back and reinfuse your content that’s public or search volume indexed with that intent to say, “My video’s stuttering.” “Okay. You need a Class 10 card,” and things like that.

I don’t see companies doing that. People are sitting on these years or decades of CRM data and they just let it sit out there and just cost money as storage cost and let it be a security risk, as opposed to saying, “Let’s use this to inform search and marketing and communications.”

END OF PART 5

Conversation #6: Predictive Analytics and Content

Chris: The other thing I don’t see people doing, or hardly any of, is predictive analytics. This is a problem that marketing automation software has made worse. People assume that everybody who is qualified to buy is ready to buy all the time, right? You’re the CEO of a company, right? So clearly, you’re qualified. You’re the decision-maker. So we’re just going to assume that you’re ready to buy.

Well, no. I mean, if you are a CEO, you’ll have ebbs and flows and things throughout the year, particularly if you’re publicly traded. You have a quarterly calendar you have to go by. And so by using predictive data, especially based on search data, which is reliable─ and well, people ask Google things they would never ask another human being out loud─ you would get a much better sense of when somebody’s doing something good.

I think part of the intent and part of the search results that we’re talking about is that people don’t take into account time. When is somebody searching for an SEO firm? When is somebody searching for a marketing firm? When is somebody searching for a new car? I would be completely surprised if Google did not take into account time in its results.

Predictive analytics can go beyond what people want to when they want it. Effective marketing shows up just when people are ready to buy.Click To Tweet

Eric: Yes, I agree and I think people are dramatically under-invested in content. I mentioned this earlier.

Here’s a case study with a search visibility chart pulled from SearchMetrics for a company that we happen to believe has about 15 full-time, knowledgeable content generators putting up over 100 articles a month on their site addressing specific questions and aspects of topics that users have in their market space.

When you look at this, it’s crazy, the traffic lift. They launched in May of 2016 and they’ve actually already achieved a dramatic search visibility by understanding what you were just talking about and investing in answering the real user questions.

END OF PART 6

Conversation #7: Real Applications of Machine Learning and AI Today

Eric: Why don’t you talk to us a little bit about how you guys are using machine learning in your business today.

Chris: It’s really three things.

Predictive analytics: when is something likely to happen or what drives something?

Text mining: understanding what’s in the data you already have. There’s so much data you’re sitting on. Please do something with it. Don’t just put it in a digital filing cabinet to rot forever.

Attribution analysis: the same technology Google uses, the same algorithms like Markov chains and Monte Carlo simulations, you can do on your laptop, though you won’t do it at a Google scale. But you can do it enough to do really good attribution analysis and get a very clean picture of what’s working. What’s really surprising is, in particular, search traffic and referral traffic are so under-weighted in most people’s attribution models because they just go with “last touch,” that if you do a full path analysis, I guarantee you’ll find you are under investing in search.

No matter what company you’re with, you’re under investing in searches with the way devices are going and with how social has changed to be all pay-to-play. Whatever your search budget is, just double it, because that’s where this stuff is going as the only way you can be found and not be spending large quantities of ad dollars.

Now, at your Next10x Conference, you mentioned that you would actually take Python courses and such. So what are you guys using in the AI realm?

Eric: Well, to be honest, at the beginning, it was just me trying to get my head around it. Being a geek, I have to go down into the detail before I can come back up and get my own sense of the bigger picture. So, I basically was just learning machine learning. I took the course from Andrew Ng, who’s Chief Scientist at Baidu. And then Geoffrey Hinton, who is directly involved in Google and machine learning out of the University of Toronto.

Where we’ve gone from there with it though is we’re really focusing a lot of energy on understanding how Google is using AI and machine learning. That’s really a big area for us because that actually puts us in a better situation to help our clients with it. And we have also done some dabbling in tools to improve content quality.

In particular, we have something that’s focused on processing user-generated content and automating that to, at this point, just reduce the need for human moderation by 80-90%. It’s a little hard to get to 100% with that.

Chris: Oh, yes, that’s true.

Eric: But if you can cut it down dramatically, then that’s actually a very high-value thing to do.

Chris:   I’ll say. One other course that you should take a look at is Google’s crash course in machine learning, completely for free. It uses TensorFlow, as well as their hardware and their software. So if you wanted to literally get it from the horse’s mouth, it’s a completely free course. I’d encourage anyone to try it out.

END OF PART 7

If you’ve made your way down to this portion of the post, you have a definite interest in Machine Learning and AI. Watch this space for more content along these lines!

Christopher S. Penn is co-founder of Brain Trust Insights, a data analytics company focused on helping you make more money with your data, a co-founder of PodCamp with Chris Brogan, and co-host of the Marketing Over Coffee marketing podcast with John Wall. Learn more about him at his personal site: www.christopherspenn.com

Eric Enge is the founder of renowned, award-winning digital Stone Temple Consulting, and was its CEO until it was acquired by Perficient Digital, where Eric now serves as General Manager. He is the lead co-author of the bestselling The Art of SEO (now in its third edition from O’Reilly Media), and a sought-after keynote speaker, as well as a regular columnist for Search Engine Land. Eric’s groundbreaking studies have become industry standards, regularly cited in major publications.

from Marketing https://www.stonetemple.com/7-conversations-with-chris-penn-an-introduction-to-machine-learning-and-ai/ via http://www.rssmix.com/

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1.

DURING MY JUNIOR YEAR of high school, I took piano lessons from a woman named Frances Thompson, who lived in a well-kept but fading ranch house on Grand Avenue, alone with her dying father. My lessons took place at night. I don’t remember why that was — possibly I’d asked for a late hour, to keep from cutting into my all-important regimen of time-wasting after school — but I remember the slight feeling of eeriness it created, the oddness of being in a place long familiar in the daytime but subtly transformed in the dark. Mrs. Thompson sat beside the bench, in her spindle-backed chair, wearing the big hexagonal glasses with their slender, drooping chain, and I sat on the bench, trying to coax my fingers into decoding the music I had once again failed to practice, and the brass lamp shone under its green shade on the upright, and in the windows stood a darkness that seemed to cut us off from the rest of creation, as if the studio were a kind of spaceship in which we were traveling.

That fall we worked on Bach — the French Suites, because they would teach me to play gracefully, she said. Playing gracefully wasn’t my strong suit. What I liked was to improvise, preferably at ear-bursting volume, in a mode inspired by the exquisite but agonizing passions of the tragic lovers in Merchant-Ivory movies I’d seen, and also in Merchant-Ivory movies I hadn’t seen, Merchant-Ivory movies that existed only in my imagination, where trembling hands were forever pouring glasses of brandy from cut-crystal decanters in front of hotel windows looking out across Constantinople, while the curtains blew in, filmily. I thought of this mode as “romantic.” I was good at dreaming up melodies Helena Bonham Carter might freeze to death in Australia to, somewhat less good at scales. Certainly Mrs. Thompson deserved better. She herself had studied with famous musicians, had lived in Chicago, had known something of the world beyond our barren patch of north-central Oklahoma. Probably every dried-up oil town in the United States has one music teacher whose pedagogical lineage traces back to Liszt; she was ours. She was elderly now, but there were moments when she talked about music with an expression at once so hard and so far away that even I understood she was looking into a realm I had never conceived of, much less visited.

She had standards, in other words. She wasn’t someone you could impress with little virtuosic tricks. Yet with me she was patient. She frowned but never criticized. She’d raise a hand to stop my sight-reading, give me small lectures on fingerings and voicings. We slide the thumb under the palm to keep the slurred passage even. We bring out the dissonances — see? — to register a harmonic shift. In Mozart we play allegretto lightly, lightly; and there were her hands on the keyboard, knobbed and spotted as if they’d spent a century or so under the sea, playing allegretto with a lightness that seemed simple, seemed like nothing at all, except that I couldn’t mimic it.

I wasn’t too thrilled about the French Suites. Not because I had anything against Bach. In fact it had been while playing Bach that I realized I loved classical music, one day when our seventh-grade orchestra was rehearsing the Little Fugue in G minor and I suddenly felt (I think the trombones had just come in) as though my brain were a cloud of fine golden particles through which sunlight was streaming. It was just that the pieces were so measured. To play them well took poise I hadn’t begun to develop. You had to be able to sustain multiple ideas, multiple processes, and develop them simultaneously, in all their complexity. Which meant you had to be able to get above yourself, to listen not just in the emotional thrall of the moment but with a kind of cosmic detachment. That was what Mrs. Thompson meant by grace; she meant you had to be the astronomer, and not, or not only, the supernova. I was 17. My ideal of pianism was that when you finished playing, your hair should be sticking up, because of passion. I had no frame of reference for Bach’s superb contemplativeness. Mrs. Thompson might as well have asked me to learn a different instrument. In a way, that is what she was doing.

“I figured it out,” I announced. “It just has to sound logical. Everything builds toward this weird major chord at the end.”

“Well,” she said. “Yes, but also no. Remember that an allemande is a dance. This is a suite of dances. So we’re thinking, but the thinking is dancing — dan-cing, dan-cing, dan-cing. Dancing, not banging, please.”

It was confounding to think she had a living father. Students never saw him. We entered the studio through a separate door, around back, and were never invited beyond, into the mysterious interior, where he was understood to dwell. Mrs. Thompson herself rarely mentioned him. Yet in a way his very implicitness intensified the weirdness of his being there. Coming into the studio already felt like stepping out of time. You had the little bust of Brahms, the rounds of lace. The antique metronome, like something that might have fallen back to Earth after Sputnik launched. Mrs. Thompson and I were from the same small town, but I knew it only in its current form, with its miles of strip malls on 14th Street and its three Sonic drive-ins and the constant quiet stress over how many jobs the refinery would shed next year. When she was a girl, the oil mansions were still being built. Where did her experience open onto mine? I had heard stories about our great tycoon, the scion of an ancient English family from the village of Ashton-under-Lyne, near Manchester; he had built a vast oil empire in the early 20th century, when Oklahoma was practically the Wild West. Mrs. Thompson remembered him from life. To me, she was ancient.

So the idea that, invisibly near, there was someone so much older; and that he was on the threshold between life and death, frozen there, somehow, for the old man had lain dying for years … It struck a note not at all like a Mozart allegretto. Now, from a distance of time, I think of what the duty of caring for him must have meant for Mrs. Thompson — the challenge of it, at her age, the expense, the waiting, possibly the grief. How it must have reordered her life. None of that occurred to me then. Or it did, but as something not wholly real, like the weather in another city. What was real was the feeling of being in a ghost story. I thought of the word “macabre,” which made me think of Poe, and the word “eldritch,” which I knew from Lovecraft (“the eldritch scurrying of those fiend-born rats”), and also from Dungeons & Dragons.

Once, only, I saw him. Mrs. Thompson collected sheet music. She’d been stockpiling it for decades. It overfilled her filing cabinets; stacks of it slouched on chairs and in the spaces under end tables. She needed this private library, she said, because she liked to consult alternate fingerings. In fact the impulse went deeper. I never had a music teacher who was more distrustful of memory. I, who memorized pieces faster than I could learn to play them, who couldn’t properly practice a measure until I knew it by heart, found this baffling. But to her way of thinking, it was dangerous to spend too much time away from the objective record of the printed page. Things slip. It was better to have a lot of music, even too much music, even an absurd amount of music, than too little. Too little and you risked becoming like Sviatoslav Richter, the great Russian pianist, who discovered near the end of his career that he’d spent 40 years playing a single wrong note in Bach’s Italian Concerto. He’d memorized the piece in his youth, but one tiny error had crept in, an f-sharp instead of an f-natural in the 47th measure of the second movement, the andante. And then, because his memory was prodigious, he’d replicated the mistake for decades, including on at least two recordings, without ever going back to check the score.

Mrs. Thompson wanted to look, that night, at a different edition of the French Suites, specifically the allemande that opens the second, in C minor. There was some question about what finger to use for the pivotal note in a run. I’d been playing it with my ring finger, as my yellow Schirmer’s Classics Library edition recommended, but she thought the pinkie might make more sense. We couldn’t find the book she wanted in the studio, and Mrs. Thompson didn’t quite feel like getting up from her chair, so she sent me into the house to continue the search.

I’d never been beyond the studio before. I walked down a dark hallway, toward what I supposed was the dining room, where the file cabinet she’d told me about was kept. The air was warm and had a stale-apricot, old-potpourri smell. Every so often thin lights would stretch along the wall and I’d hear the long sigh of a car sliding past on Grand; otherwise it was ticking-clock quiet.

Here was the file cabinet. I found the book, turned around to go back, and stopped, because the old man was in the room with me.

He was lying in a hospital bed. He’d been there all along; I hadn’t seen him because his bed was angled to face into the room, and so was partly hidden from the doorway. Now he was facing me. This was his sickroom, evidently. A metal stand with some sort of dangling clear sack stood beside the bed and was connected to it — to him — by tubes. The bed was raised so that he could partly sit up. A white sheet covered him to the chest. Over the foot of the bed someone had folded a patchwork quilt. His face was so thin it was as if it had been whittled down from a different person’s face.

I wondered if he was dead. I wasn’t sure how to tell. The summer before, I had gone with my father to the funeral of a distant relation, a huge man who lay in an open casket in a pair of dark blue farmer’s overalls, and I remembered how fragile he had looked, how strangely chastised, with his big hands folded over his work shirt, nose pointing up toward the lights. Maybe you can tell when someone is dead, I thought, because of the peculiar way in which they look alive.

After a hesitation, I said hello and gave him an awkward little wave. I heard him rustle in bed. He lifted his thin arm above his face, the elbow bent as if he were warding off a bright light. Then he straightened his elbow and I realized what he was doing. He was waving back at me. Arm raised above his head, he gave me a slow, exaggerated salute, as if he were hailing shore from a ship that was about to depart.

  2.

A few months ago, in a friend’s back garden in Los Angeles, I found myself paging through a book about the English Catholic poet Francis Thompson, who lived from 1859 to 1907. Thompson isn’t much talked about these days, but he wrote some of the most beloved religious poetry of the late Victorian era, work that for decades featured on Catholic-school reading lists, that was anthologized and memorized and admired by critics. (G. K. Chesterton called him “the greatest poetic energy since Browning.”) He also — this was the thesis of the book I was reading — might have been Jack the Ripper.

I know how that sounds, and you’re right to be skeptical. The case against Thompson is purely circumstantial. There’s no hard evidence. And at first glance Thompson is one of the least likely suspects imaginable. In photos, he looks like a fragile mystic. He stares out of a gaunt face with large, haunted eyes. He’s serious and celestial. At 47 he wasted away from tuberculosis. Before that he spent years semi-sequestered in monasteries, writing verses about God’s love. One of his poems, “The Kingdom of God,” contains the first use of the expression “a many-splendoured thing.” A person of strange intensities, clearly; an unsettling, even otherworldly person, but not someone you’d peg as a murderer.

Yet that very celestial quality, the sense, which Thompson strongly conveyed, that he could see into the world beyond our own, concealed a darkness — perhaps better to say it was a darkness, transmuted in his poems only through a keen effort of spirit. There’s a line Chesterton singles out in his essay on Thompson. Thompson is talking about the gulf between our world and what’s beyond it, and he says this gulf — he calls it a “crevasse” — is spanned by “Pontifical Death.” In two words, Thompson imagines death both as a bridge (a pont is a bridge, a pontifex is a bridge-builder) and as a high priest supervising the crossing over it. Which is a beautiful notion, until you look at it from a certain angle, at which point it becomes completely terrifying.

I didn’t know much about Thompson’s life, and I had to admit, as I slowly turned the pages, that some strange synchronicities emerged when you laid his biography over the timeline of the Ripper murders. Nothing definitive; just uncanny parallels, in a Dark Side of the Moon-played-over­-The Wizard of Oz sort of way. Not that I believed everything in the book, exactly. The author, an Australian schoolteacher named Richard Patterson, was an amateur sleuth who was pretty clearly excited by the thought of solving one of history’s greatest mysteries, and he was willing to indulge in a lot of irresponsible speculation to make his case. On the question of Thompson’s fire-starting and doll-mutilation, for example. Patterson had some evidence to suggest that during childhood, Thompson demonstrated a pattern of lighting fires and cutting open dolls, behavior that could be taken as an early indicator of psychopathic tendencies. However, most of this evidence was ambiguous — Thompson made a joke, say, about how cutting open a doll as a child had taught him never to look for a beautiful woman’s brains. Which is ugly and misogynistic, but not necessarily serial-killer talk. But instead of treating it as suggestive but ultimately uncertain, Patterson charged ahead with the intensity of a prosecuting attorney, brushing aside all doubt.

Before long I was reading the book on two levels. On the first level, I responded only to the facts about Thompson’s life. This had the effect of awakening in me an intense pity toward the poet, who suffered terribly in his time. On the second level, I responded to the alternate reality conjured up by Patterson, in which Thompson was in fact Jack the Ripper. This had the effect of completely freaking me out. Often this split consciousness meant that a single piece of information registered with me in two directly opposed ways. That was the case, for instance, with the issue of Thompson’s education. He grew up near Manchester, in the village of Ashton-under-Lyne, where he was known as a frail, taciturn, bookish boy, unpopular with other children. In his youth he trained to enter the priesthood. Then one day he returned home with a letter from the seminary college informing his father that it was God’s will that he should look for a different career. He entered a medical college and studied to be a surgeon, but he failed his exams repeatedly, again disappointing his family.

And here’s what I mean about my two levels of reading. On the first level, the level of fact, I found this story sad. It was clear that Thompson had been under extreme pressure to pursue a career for which he was temperamentally unsuited, and I could easily imagine the anxiety, the lying to his father, the rising panic as he realized he was again bound to come up short, would again be revealed as inadequate. (In fact he seems to have had a nervous breakdown at around the time he left medical school.) On the second level, though, the story helped build the case that Thompson was a murderer. Dr. Phillips, the police surgeon who attended three of the Ripper’s murder scenes and four of the subsequent autopsies, thought the killer must have had medical training, due to the precision with which the victims’ organs were removed. Thompson, who could be placed in the vicinity of the murders at the time of the murders, had had such training. He had spent hours in the college basement cutting up corpses. He had in fact, according to Patterson, begged his father for more money so he could afford more bodies to dissect. He was known to carry a surgical scalpel on his person. He said he used it to shave.

This weird doubling of response continued, in fact compounded, as I read, so that before I was halfway through the book I almost seemed to be reading two stories, two parallel but unconnected narratives, at the same time. The outward action was the same in each, but the meanings were different. You can guess, then, how disorienting it was to read about Thompson’s time in Whitechapel at the time of the five Ripper murders, in the late summer and fall of 1888.

Whitechapel, in London’s East End, was then one of the city’s poorest districts. Thompson was in his late 20s. He’d had little success as a poet. In medical school he’d gotten addicted to opium, and he was now living as a homeless vagrant in Whitechapel’s warren of narrow streets. He slept in shelters within walking distance of where the murders took place. Many nights he spent walking up and down Mile End Road, often in the grip of delirium. Some time before, he had fallen in love with a young prostitute, whom he credited with saving his life. She left him shortly before the Ripper began murdering prostitutes.

Thompson wrote poems on dirty scraps of paper and kept them in his pockets. Those that survive show a mind not exactly planted on firm rock. The hallucinatory violence and barely controlled mania of some of his drafts from this period are startling:

And its paunch was rent Like a brasten drum; And the blubbered fat From its belly doth come With a sickening ooze — Hell made it so! Two witch-babies, ho! ho! ho!

Even in the Christian masterworks, you find disturbing overtones. “The Hound of Heaven,” Thompson’s most celebrated poem, depicts a wayward sinner’s flight from, and eventual surrender to, God’s love. Read in a certain light, its monomaniacal focus on God’s relentless pursuit of the speaker might even seem to frame the relationship between deity and human as that between a murderer and his prey:

I fled Him, down the nights and down the days, I fled Him, down the arches of the years; I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways Of my own mind; and in the midst of tears […]

From those strong Feet that followed, followed after.

It was a sunny afternoon in Los Angeles. Clusters of red and purple flowers swayed in the breeze as I turned the pages of Patterson’s book, drinking endless cans of the lime-flavored seltzer that Holly brought out from her kitchen. Without quite knowing why, I’d been listening for days to Bach’s Italian Concerto, repeating again and again the slow second movement, with the dirge of its left-hand part and the clear, cold aria of the right hand. I’d become mildly obsessed with Sviatoslav Richter’s recordings, as many people do with Sviatoslav Richter’s recordings, finding in them an intensity of focus that sets them apart from other musicians’. You feel, when Richter is playing, as if this music will be heard once, and then dissolve forever. In the garden, I played through my headphones a file I’d dug up online. It was a recording from the 1950s that preserved the mistake Richter had made when he memorized the piece — that one wrong note, almost unnoticeable, a 20th of a second where he’d shown a rare fallibility.

He’d have hated me for it. Richter was a perfectionist, not inclined to self-forgiveness, and he believed that the purpose of his playing was to serve the composer’s intention absolutely. That self-annihilating quality, never quite at ease with the obvious immensity of his talent, is part of what makes his playing so riveting. When Richter realized what he’d done, he didn’t find it “humanizing”; he was devastated. The very littleness of the imperfection galled. It was nothing, but at the same time it was everything, and it was irreversible. He issued an apology in the liner notes of a CD he released on the Italian label Stradivarius in 1991 — an astonishing thing for a pianist of his stature to do, to flagellate himself publicly over a slip Bach himself might not have worried about. From then on he played the piece as it was written.

To me, though, there was something irresistible in that false note sustained over decades, the f-sharp played instead of f-natural, the tiny broken stitch between Bach’s unchanging reality and the fluid world of an artist’s mind in performance. “Perfect” recordings of the Italian Concerto existed by the dozens, I reasoned; only this one offered that strange, fleeting glimpse into Richter’s mental experience. Where else could you hear a literal act of forgetting? It was magical.

That afternoon, as I sat reading and listening in Holly’s backyard, the music and the images from the Thompson story seemed to blend together, so that in my mind’s theater, Richter’s playing became a soundtrack for the perverse costume drama of Patterson’s book. I saw Thompson as a boy, swinging from a golden chain the thurible he used (so Patterson said) to start a fire in the seminary. I saw him slicing into the pale abdomen of a corpse at the medical college. I saw his eyes go out of focus as the first dose of laudanum kicked in. I saw him praying till his hands shook. In London, where he fled after his mother died and he could no longer hide his failure at school, he read De Quincey and the encyclopedia. He took opium to sleep. Poverty ground him hard: soon he was sleeping on sidewalks. At the British Museum Library he was turned away for being unclean. Cold, dark London: fog and gas lamps, horses’ breath, shadows on stone. Verses beating in his head. He submitted a crushed and barely legible manuscript to a Catholic magazine, Merry England, edited by Wilfrid and Alice Meynell, but he had no return address; he asked the editors to send his rejection to the post office. They accepted his poems, came to Whitechapel to find him, tried to get him off the streets. He refused to go. On the night of August 30, 1888, a warehouse fire went up in the West India docks along the Thames. Massive buildings burned. Flames visible for miles. The horizon a red glow. In Whitechapel the atmosphere was festive. Such a spectacle! Look what a jolly new bonnet I’ve got, Mary Ann Nichols sang when she was kicked out of her lodging house. She didn’t have fourpence for the bed. Alright, but there were plenty of men around after the fire — she’d earn it on the street.

She went by Polly. She was 43 years old. She’d been married and had five children, but that had all fallen apart. She was an alcoholic, herself intermittently homeless; she’d lived in and out of workhouses. A few months earlier she’d found a job as a servant in Wandsworth, but she hated the work and fled to Spitalfields with a bundle of stolen clothing. It was after one o’clock when she left the boarding house. Thompson was somewhere in the area. It’s not known precisely where, though he surely would have seen the fire. At 32, Polly Nichols’s roommate, Ellen Holland, ran into her at the corner of Whitechapel Road and Osborne Street. Polly laughed that she’d earned the money she needed three times over but kept drinking it away. (And there it was, in the recording — the misplaced note, the false f.) That was the last time a witness saw her alive, though strangely, when her body was discovered an hour later, at 3:40 a.m., in the doorway of a stable, the carters who found her were unsure whether she was dead. I felt something move in her chest, one of them said. What happened during the previous hour no one knows, except that her throat was cut.

The threshold between life and death was a place Thompson visited again and again in his poems. “We unwinking see / Through the smoked glass of Death,” he wrote in one, and in another:

O world invisible, we view thee, O world intangible, we touch thee, O world unknowable, we know thee, Inapprehensible, we clutch thee!

It’s when I think about this threshold that I’m most strongly reminded of a passage written about Thompson many years later. By then he’d long since been rescued from poverty. Wilfrid and Alice Meynell eventually succeeded in getting him out of Whitechapel. They sent him to a priory in Sussex to recover from his laudanum dependency. (It was at this time, Patterson notes, that the Ripper murders ceased.) Soon, with the Meynells’ help, he began to win fame as a poet. The editors’ son, Everard Meynell, wrote a book about him. It’s somewhere between a biography and a memoir. The passage I’m thinking of is one where Meynell describes the poet’s love of music, which expressed itself particularly in an adoration of the piano. Standing at the piano, Meynell says, “he would gaze at the performer, his body waving to and fro in tremulous pleasure.” As a young man, he had shirked his studies at the medical college to attend musical performances. He would tell his father that a professor had kept him back to offer him extra instruction when in fact he had gone to the home of a pianist to hear music. When he was supposed to be studying anatomy, he listened to piano music. He could not play himself, but he knew a sequence of chords, and “he struck them,” Meynell says, “with such earnestness that I, as a child, was impressed by his performance.” He held down the keys as the notes, briefly suspended, decayed, crossing as they did so the uncertain bridge between what exists and what is gone forever.

¤

Brian Phillips is the author of the essay collection Impossible Owls, forthcoming in 2018 from Farrar, Straus & Giroux. He lives in Los Angeles.

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The Death and Life of Atlantic City

SEPTEMBER 5, 2017 ISSUE

Zeno’s paradox down the shore.

By Nick Paumgarten

If not for zany schemes, Atlantic City would be a sand dune. Revel was supposed to be the most opulent casino the place had ever seen.

Mike Hauke opened a pizza and sub shop in Atlantic City in 2009, but only after he had failed in nine tries to rent the space to somebody else. He had bought the building three years earlier on the advice of his father, an accountant who considered distressed real estate a smart long-term bet. This piece of real estate seemed to test the proposition. It was a bedraggled three-story clapboard house that years of neighborhood demolition and neglect had stranded at the edge of several mostly vacant blocks, which together formed an urban badlands reaching all the way to the dunes. This was the South Inlet, a once thriving part of town and now more or less a desolate slum at the northeastern end of Absecon Island, the landmass that is home to Atlantic City and three other municipalities. People from “offshore,” as locals like to call the mainland, tend to think of the island’s Inlet end as north, because it’s upcoast, but locals call it east. Atlantic City has a Bermuda Triangle effect; it can confound a compass.

Three blocks west of Hauke’s place, an immense slab of steel and glass was rising over the badlands: a hotel and casino to be called Revel, destined to be bigger and more opulent than anything Atlantic City had ever seen—two towers, reaching almost fifty stories, nearly four thousand rooms, and parking for more than seven thousand cars. Morgan Stanley, the investment bank, had bought the land in 2006, for seventy million dollars, and sunk about $1.2 billion into the project. (Revel, as some have noted, is “lever” spelled backward.) By the end, the cost of building Revel reached more than $2.4 billion, making it the most expensive private construction project in the history of New Jersey.

Hauke went after the crumbs. Unable to find a commercial tenant for his house’s ground floor (the apartments upstairs were designated Section 8, for low-income tenants), he started selling rudimentary takeout to Revel’s construction crews. Their rush-hour bulk orders overwhelmed his staff, but off hours the place was dead: a trickle of casino workers and, in Hauke’s words, “shitbags, crackheads, hustlers, and pimps.”

Hauke, a recent graduate of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, had spent a couple of years in Hoboken and Manhattan working in marketing, but he had no restaurant experience. One of his first customers was a neighborhood junkie known as V8 Man (“All the white kids are junkies,” Hauke said. “The Inlet does it to everybody”), who, on opening night, picked a fight at the counter with a male prostitute and another customer; Hauke smashed a pizza paddle on the counter and used the sharp end to scare him off. More than once, a guy came in trying to unload stolen merchandise as the victimized storekeeper came running up the street in pursuit. One morning, a neighborhood kid rode by on a bicycle and threw a crude pipe bomb through the window; Hauke chased him in his car and, after cornering him briefly in an abandoned house, hounded him on foot across a vacant tract called Pauline’s Prairie, named after Pauline Hill, a city planner in the sixties who’d had this stretch of the neighborhood bulldozed for urban renewal, which never came. The kid, looking over his shoulder, ran into the side of a parked box truck. The police appeared and put him in cuffs. His grievance was that cops had been patronizing Hauke’s shop and that sheriffs had evicted his cousins, Hauke’s Section 8 tenants, from one of the apartments upstairs. The tenants, according to Hauke, had been running a welfare scam. They’d also been throwing dirty diapers on his customers and fishing for pigeons from the roof.

Hauke hoped that, in spite of such annoyances, Revel would either provide him with an income stream or else buy him out. A few neighborhood property owners said that it would never happen. They’d been holding on for years themselves, in the hope of selling to a big casino, and in the interim they’d been gutted by rising property taxes and ongoing decay. The problem was that the area was zoned for big casino-hotels. You couldn’t build a house, and the few houses left in the neighborhood—most had been demolished or had burned down, accidentally or not—were old and badly battered by the salt air. One of them, down near the beach, across the street from a run-down low-income housing complex called the Waterside, belonged to a teacher Hauke had got to know named Tony Zarych, who’d moved to Atlantic City as a teen-ager forty years earlier, when his family was buying up property around town. He’d worked as a baccarat dealer at the Sands, until it closed (it was demolished in 2007), and now taught English as a second language at an elementary school. He liked to hunt wild turkey offshore and sometimes had carcasses hanging outside. His property taxes had risen sharply, as the city contended with a steep drop in tax revenues from the casinos. “Get out while you can,” Zarych told Hauke.

Sure enough, in 2009, amid the financial meltdown, Revel, only half built, ran out of money. In April, 2010, Morgan Stanley quit the project, booking a loss of almost a billion dollars. Construction stopped. Hauke’s business withered. “There were no more tourists or construction workers,” he recalled. “Mostly just cops. And crackheads wanting free shit.” But something about the city, and about the Inlet’s seaside squalor, made him want to stay on. Maybe it was the fact that his great-grandmother had attended shul in the Inlet. Or that he’d simply got sand in his shoes, as the locals say about those who take to the place.

After grinding along for another year, Hauke shut down the shop, spiffed it up, and rechristened it Tony Boloney’s. He bought a food truck, which he named the Mustache Mobile, and developed a line of pizzas and novelty subs that he marketed as “indigenous Atlantic City grub,” as though he’d revived an obscure provincial cuisine. Soon, Tony Boloney’s began winning foodie awards and luring in not just gamblers, night-clubbers, food-truck connoisseurs, politicians, and cops but also a procession of casino magnates and real-estate speculators who were visiting the neighborhood, often on the sly, to size up the distressed property next door.

At the beginning of 2011, Governor Chris Christie pledged tax incentives to Revel worth more than a quarter of a billion dollars. (The incentives were tied to certain revenue targets, which, in the end, Revel failed to meet.) Christie had evidently decided that Revel’s success was essential to the survival of Atlantic City, and therefore his gubernatorial track record. His pledge helped Revel secure new financing from an array of hedge funds, including Chatham Asset Management and Canyon Capital, which manage hundreds of millions of dollars in New Jersey state pension funds.

Construction resumed, and Christie came to town. After a photo op at a famous sub shop called the White House and a visit to the Revel site, he dropped in at Tony Boloney’s and urged Hauke to keep the place going. “Listen, you gotta stick around,” Christie told him. The Revel executives were emphatic as well: “It’ll look bad if you close. Please don’t go anywhere.” The head of Chatham Asset Management hired Hauke to cater his annual Halloween party, up in Essex County.

“I understand you’ve spent the summer on someone’s ass. Can you tell us what that was like?”

Revel opened in the spring of 2012, with Beyoncé performing a series of concerts in its auditorium. (She also took over the Presidential Suite, relegating Michelle Obama and her daughters to another suite.) The plan had been scaled back—just fourteen hundred rooms, and one tower instead of two. The tower’s midsection had a half-dozen stories not yet built out; you could see clear through it. Still, it was an impressive building, with sleek, airy marbled atriums and lobbies that had little in common with the smoky, windowless, carpeted caverns of the older mega-casinos down the boardwalk. Unlike all the rest, it directed one’s attention to the ocean and had ample outdoor space, a two-acre terrace with firepits and cabanas. Even from the outside, Revel had an ethereal appeal. The reflective glass took on the sky’s hue and became almost invisible at dusk, a stealth casino guarding the edge of town.

If only. During construction, a tower crane collapsed. Lightning struck a worker’s cement bucket and killed him. Three top Revel executives died in a plane crash. A guest plunged from one of several escalators that climbed vertiginously through the heart of the lobby. A couple were found dead of an apparent drug overdose in a suite. The N.F.L. player Ray Rice punched out his fiancée in an elevator, and the surveillance video went viral.

The casino wasn’t making nearly as much money as the developers had anticipated. Some observers blamed the layout—the hotel-room elevators didn’t access the casino floor, and a long, tortuous trip from the entrance to the check-in desk didn’t take you through it, either—or the fact that Revel prohibited smoking, or that its slot machines didn’t seem to pay out, or that it was stingy with the comps. Even though occupancy was decent and the night clubs and restaurants were busy, the tables and slots weren’t taking in enough to offset the cost of operating the place—the burden of debt service, high property taxes, bad leases with the tenants, and an expensive arrangement for power and light. Within a year of opening, Revel filed for bankruptcy. It restructured and emerged from Chapter 11 a few months later, but the economics still didn’t make sense, and so, in the spring of 2014, it went bankrupt once again. Finally, last September, unable to find a buyer, it closed.

From the time Morgan Stanley began searching in vain for equity partners, Revel had been in play, and all along Tony Boloney’s had served as an informal commissary for would-be investors and buyers. Among those whom Hauke and his staff said they’d seen were Steve Wynn, who had sold the Golden Nugget in 1987 and vowed never to come back; various hedge-funders from New York; and a group of Chinese men—the Export-Import Bank of China was at one point in talks to buy a piece—who took over Hauke’s tables and held meetings for hours, without ordering anything.

A mysterious character in tattered clothing and a handlebar mustache had been showing up a few times a year, engaging the staff in conversation about space travel and Elon Musk. He claimed to represent someone who was going to buy Revel. Hauke and his team were skeptical, but one day last summer, just before the casino closed, the man rolled up in a baby-blue Bentley convertible. Maybe he was for real. “My guy’s going to offer ninety million,” he said. His guy, he went on, was from Florida and intended to erect a “Tower of Geniuses” on the Revel site, a high-rise think tank, which would draw on nasa and the federal government’s aviation-research facility at Atlantic City Airport, just offshore.

If not for zany schemes, Atlantic City would still be a sand dune. Within weeks, news broke that a little-known Florida developer named Glenn Straub, the owner of Palm Beach Polo Golf and Country Club, had offered ninety million dollars to buy Revel. Straub wanted to put up the aborted second tower and fill it with academics and scientists charged with solving the world’s problems: your Tower of Geniuses. Few in town took this seriously, but, as far as the bankruptcy was concerned, he’d established a baseline. Everything has a clearing price. The bad news was that Straub’s offer was less than four cents on the dollar—a chilling signal of how far Atlantic City had fallen and may yet fall. The good news was that the building—and you might even say the town—was worth anything at all.

Most cities exist as a consequence of commercial or strategic utility. Atlantic City is more of a proposition and a ploy. The town fathers of Cape May, the first American seaside resort, weren’t interested in a railway, or perhaps the class of people who’d ride in on one—the well-to-do arrived from Philadelphia by boat—so a group of investors built, in 1854, what became known as a “railroad to nowhere,” to a spot a little way up the coast that was more or less the shortest possible distance from Philadelphia to the sea. Over the decades, and with the industrial-era advent of leisure time and disposable income, this forsaken wedge of salt marsh and sand became “the world’s playground”—a crucible of conspicuous consumption and a stage for the aspirations and masquerades of visitors and entrepreneurs. In some respects, Atlantic City was where America learned how to turn idle entertainment into big business. For a while, it was home to some of the world’s grandest hotels (the Marlborough-Blenheim was the largest reinforced-concrete building in the world, and was later imploded in the music video for Bruce Springsteen’s “Atlantic City”), as well as some of its more ardent iniquities and diversions. The night clubs were as often as not fronts for backroom gambling halls, intermittently tolerated by the authorities.

The city, like so many, has its racial demons. At the turn of the twentieth century, Atlantic City had one of the highest African-American populations of any city north of the Mason-Dixon Line, owing to the abundance of jobs in the hotels. The archetypal amusement was that of white working-class visitors kicking back in the boardwalk’s famous wicker rolling chairs while black people did the pushing—a “public performance of racial dominance,” notes the historian Bryant Simon, in “Boardwalk of Dreams.” Though the Northside, traditionally a black neighborhood, had been a thriving district, the decline in tourism to the city, after the Second World War, hit it hard. With the rise of affordable air travel, people started going to Florida and the Caribbean instead. The city desegregated. Disneyland opened.

Legalized gambling was supposed to rescue the city from its obsolescence as a resort and convention town, a condition that came to national attention during the 1964 Democratic Convention there and grew more conspicuous as the decade wore on. A dozen years later, the state passed the Casino Control Act, which was, at least ostensibly, an attempt to reverse the decline. But, perhaps predictably, a lot of the money that flowed in flowed right back out—to the casino operators and their financing schemes (“I made a lot of money in Atlantic City,” Donald Trump said at the recent Republican debate. “And I’m very proud of it”) and to their subsequent efforts to lobby for the approval of casino gambling in other states. New Jersey, which taxes the casinos to fund a seniors’ prescription-drug program, among other things, always got its piece.

Neglect of the city has been attributed to a bloated municipal payroll—a budget nearly double what it was ten years ago—and the years of corruption and mismanagement in city government. Some blame the suffocating effect of the casinos, which are boxed off from the city and are designed to keep patrons inside losing money rather than outside spending it. Others point to the thorny old problem of race or the dreary question of the structure of municipal government statewide.

“He’s very self-loathing, but not enough.”

The dividing line between south and north, and between white and black, used to be Atlantic Avenue, the main commercial street, which runs parallel to the sea. It was where South Jersey shopped for wedding dresses and jewelry; now it’s a gantlet of shabby storefronts and fast-food joints, running toward and away from the New Jersey Transit bus terminal. In the streets that run from the boardwalk, dilapidation and squalor are not hard to find. Wood’s Loan Office, a pawnshop established in 1927, is owned and operated by Martin Wood, a seventy-nine-year-old Atlantic City native. Wood, who is white (his grandfather, a metallurgist, came to town from Lithuania at the end of the nineteenth century and used to scavenge for junk on the beach with a horse-drawn wagon), has noticed an uptick in the number of shopping bags from the outlet mall, a few blocks away. In his opinion, the sixties were worse. “It’s not that bad here. Yet.” Twenty years ago, the Casino Reinvestment Development Authority moved the pawnshop a few blocks, in an effort to remedy the city’s oft-lamented lack of a supermarket. “But they opened a discount liquor store next door to the new supermarket,” Wood said. “That was not a good move. They wound up with winos hanging around. People were scared to go to the supermarket. So it closed up.”

“Atlantic City turned its back on the boardwalk,” Paul Steelman, a prominent casino architect who grew up nearby, said. “It’s the most prominent pedestrian walkway in the world. It’s got everything going for it except the buildings that are on it.” His solution: “Cut holes in the casinos and let out all those people, all that capital.”

In order to prevent monopolies, the Casino Control Act stipulated that no one could own more than three casinos. In the eighties, Donald Trump became the first to hit that limit. Eventually, the provision was scrapped, and by 2014 Caesars owned four. Carl Icahn now effectively controls a quarter of the market with just two casinos, the Tropicana and the Taj Mahal.

Does Atlantic City need more gambling, or less? There are proponents on both sides. Some favor alternative entertainments (concerts, water parks, polo, legalized marijuana) or the panacean potential of higher education (Stockton University, a state college headquartered offshore, has long wanted an Atlantic City campus). A few push for smaller boutique casinos, and others swear by the existing big-box regimen, just done better. In Las Vegas the ratio of revenue is two-thirds non-gaming to one-third gaming. In Atlantic City the situation is reversed. Since 2006, gaming revenue has dropped by half, from a peak of $5.2 billion to $2.7 billion. As that stream dries up, logic suggests tapping others. And yet the casinos remain lucrative. Divided among eight casinos—that’s how many are left—$2.7 billion isn’t bad. This may be the locals’ most commonly stated reassurance. The city has a higher concentration of casinos than anywhere outside Nevada. It gets twenty-five million visitors a year.

I asked Steve Perskie, who wrote the Casino Control Act as a state legislator representing Atlantic City, if casinos, in the final accounting, had been good for the town. “Compared to what?” he replied. “Imagine Atlantic City without them.”

When word gets out that a city is on the skids, people seem eager to imagine post-apocalyptic desolation, a rusting ruin at Ozymandian remove from the glory days. But American cities don’t seem to die that way. They keep sopping up tax dollars and risk capital, thwarting big ideas and emergency relief, chewing up opportunists and champions.

Two weeks after the shuttering of Revel, Trump Plaza closed—the fourth casino to do so in 2014. The first was the Atlantic Club, né the Golden Nugget, built in 1980 by Steve Wynn, with financing by Michael Milken and one of the earliest iterations of the junk bond, and then owned (and rechristened), in succession, by Bally’s, Hilton, and Resorts International. Two competitors, Tropicana (owned by Icahn) and Caesars (controlled by the private-equity firms Apollo Management and TPG Capital), bought out the bankrupt Atlantic Club, closed it, and divvied up the scraps. Next came the Showboat. It was profitable, but its owner, Caesars, hobbled by debt, needed to consolidate. (The amputation failed: in January, Caesars declared bankruptcy; another of its holdings, the Bally’s casino, has been rumored to be the next to go.) Meanwhile, Trump Entertainment Resorts declared bankruptcy (its fourth), and Icahn, who’d bought up Trump’s debt, played a game of chicken with the casino workers’ union and the state. (Donald Trump himself no longer runs the company or the casinos, and he has sued to have his name removed.) In December, the Trump Taj Mahal was about to close; Icahn, having squeezed the state and the union for concessions on taxes and benefits, found twenty million dollars to keep it open, and since then it has limped along, a zombie casbah.

It’s not all the big shots’ fault. There’s just been less money to go around. Atlantic City has lost its monopoly on legalized gambling on the East Coast. First came the casinos on Indian reservations in Connecticut, in the nineties, and then, in recent years, the advance of gaming across state lines, in Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, and upstate New York. (Some industry experts will tell you that Manhattan is destined to have tables, too.) Now there’s talk of casinos in North Jersey, which, along with video-slot parlors at the racetracks (“racinos”), would cannibalize the action in Atlantic City.

Neighboring states approved legalized gambling in the hope that it would do for their economies and state treasuries what it once did for New Jersey’s. Perhaps they should hope instead that it does not. The casino closures in Atlantic City have contributed to the loss of nearly ten thousand jobs, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and who knows how many associated income streams, reputable or not. The city has fewer than forty thousand permanent residents; the majority of Atlantic City’s workers live offshore, in the townships of Atlantic County, which, in the first quarter of this year, led the nation in foreclosures. Property taxes in the city have doubled since 2008 and were up twenty-nine per cent in 2014, to make up for the drop in tax revenue from the casinos and in the taxable value of the property. The city is around four hundred million dollars in debt. Earlier this year, its credit rating was downgraded to junk-bond status.

After convening a few summits on the predicament in Atlantic City, which resulted in a dire report, Governor Christie, in January, appointed two emergency managers, Kevin Lavin and Kevyn Orr, to oversee the city’s finances, wresting control from the mayor and the city council. The fact that Orr had previously served as Detroit’s emergency manager, steering Detroit into and out of bankruptcy, led observers to predict that he’d been hired to do the same for Atlantic City. Perhaps mercifully, the mayor, Don Guardian, was relieved of some of the hardest decisions, about who and how many to fire and what services to deprive the citizens of. “A good manager welcomes a good auditor,” he told me. The mess was now Christie’s. Presiding over the first bankruptcy for a New Jersey municipality since the Great Depression would not help his Presidential ambitions, and, perhaps more important, it would raise the already high costs of borrowing across a state whose finances are very grim. Christie staked a lot on his rescue of Atlantic City, and so far the bet’s not looking so good.

In May, the city submitted a plan to lay off two hundred city workers, about a fifth of the municipal workforce. Orr returned to private practice, having been paid seventy thousand dollars for three months of part-time work. (He’d billed the state nine hundred and fifty dollars an hour.)

Abandonment, and the spectre of bankruptcy, intensified the bleakness of the winter in Atlantic City. At one end of the boardwalk, Revel loomed dark. At night, the blare of piped-in pop warped in the wind, and floodlight spilled out over the dunes, which, post-Sandy, were just a layer of sand atop an armature of giant sandbags. The obituarists who came to gawk didn’t have to bother going so far. On the façade of the first casino that one saw after pulling off the expressway there was the ghost lettering of the immense sign that once spelled out “Trump Plaza” and, beneath it, a billboard that read “The Center of It All.” (The small print read “Gambling Problem? Call 1-800-gambler”—advice, maybe, for the city itself.) Visitors regularly stopped to photograph this, to add to their portfolio of what some locals, resenting the attention, considered ruin porn.

The greatest ruin was to the lives of the thousands who’d lost their jobs. One morning, I met Dawn Inglin, who had gone to work as a cocktail waitress at the Plaza when it first opened, in 1984. She’d come to town three years before, when a friend got her a role in a dinner-theatre company down shore, in Ocean City, and then she found herself auditioning at Harrah’s, which, in those days, used cocktail waitresses as dancers in its TV commercials. “The choreography was difficult,” she recalled.

When she applied for a job at the Plaza, she auditioned for Donald Trump at Trump Tower, in Manhattan. She remembers a weigh-in, and an interview in a bathing suit, and she and the others were required to wear two-and-a-half-inch heels. (When I met her, she had her hair up and was wearing a smart lavender suit.) “I very much enjoyed working for Donald Trump,” Inglin said. “When he was there, it was tip-top. You’d’ve thought he was the Messiah.”

Inglin’s generation of casino workers, whose professional primes track the birth and decline of the industry in Atlantic City, speak wistfully of the abundance and camaraderie of the halcyon days. “Back in the eighties and nineties, the money flowed. It was glamorous,” Inglin said. “Then the attention and the business was diverted from the Plaza to the Taj. Things started closing. Restaurants, room service. For four or five years, there were constant rumors that this or that person was going to buy us. I don’t have enough fingers and toes to count the number of people who were going to save us. The last few years were so stressful. You watched people lose their jobs. They were taking away severance, the machines disappearing, equipment rolling past you.”

After thirty years, she was fourth in seniority among cocktail waitresses at the Plaza and was making $8.99 an hour, plus benefits. It ended last September. “When we found out we were closing, we were standing at the bar—the last bar in the casino. We saw it on the six-o’clock news. We were frantic.”

Despite coming up empty in a search for another job, Inglin felt that she was going to be all right. Since the Plaza closed, she has been attending classes at the community college in pursuit of a degree in human services—a growth field in these parts. “We have an addiction problem here,” she said.

I met a bus driver named Kip Brown, who worked the Port Authority route, up and back each morning, for Academy Bus Lines. He had been at Academy for fifteen years and was No. 3 in seniority, out of seventy drivers in the region. As ridership has fallen, Academy has been cutting back on its schedule. The number of visitors arriving by bus is an eighth of what it was a quarter century ago. In the spring, Brown, just forty-seven, retired.

Now he was looking for work as a livery driver. Brown also used to work in the casinos, at the Showboat, bussing tables, and at Trump’s Castle, stripping and waxing floors. “When Donald and Ivana came to the casino, the bosses would order all the black people off the floor,” he said. “It was the eighties, I was a teen-ager, but I remember it: they put us all in the back.”

He lives in the Northside, on Martin Luther King, Jr., Boulevard, in a house that, like many in town, was inundated during Hurricane Sandy. “Sandy: that was the beginning of the fall of Atlantic City,” he said. Because of the rise in property taxes, the value of the house is well below the value of the mortgage, so he is stuck with it. “If I could get out of my house, I would. I don’t want to live in Atlantic City, to be honest with you.” Recently, one of the employees at his cousin’s corner store had been killed in an armed robbery.

Atlantic City has had three great bosses, political or otherwise. In the decades prior to the First World War, Louis Kuehnle, a transplanted New Yorker and powerful Republican known to all as the Commodore, turned the resort into a bustling metropolis and the state party into a patron and beneficiary of the evolving local aptitude for vice. Enoch (Nucky) Johnson, his successor and the basis for the Steve Buscemi character in “Boardwalk Empire,” continued this work and presided over Atlantic City’s glory years, during Prohibition, which, largely thanks to his efforts, never really pertained. The third was Hap Farley, a Republican legislator and master puller of wires, whose political swan song was his support, behind the scenes, for the second (and successful) attempt, in 1976, to pass the state bill to legalize gambling in Atlantic City.

Since then, there have been party bosses, governors, and mayors with varying degrees of power and venality, but no kingfish of the stature of the Commodore, Nucky, or Hap. “I’ll give you Atlantic City,” the mayor of Camden said, to F.B.I. agents disguised as Arabs during the Abscam sting. “Without me, you do nothing.” But by then such an offer was beyond the reach of any one man. In city politics, the Democrats held sway. (The electorate is now thirty per cent Hispanic and forty per cent black; Democrats outnumber Republicans nine to one.) The only Republican elected to* City Hall in the casino era was James Usry, the city’s first black mayor, who got caught up in a corruption investigation that cost him the 1990 election—until 2013, when, to the great surprise of the city’s political establishment, Don Guardian, a gay white Republican, beat Lorenzo (Rennie) Langford, an African-American, by fewer than four hundred votes.

Langford, out of the public eye since then, has been writing a memoir and working as a substitute teacher. He lives in the same modest split-level that he’s been in for twenty-eight years (“In two years it’ll be paid for”), on a street in the Northside that has been renamed L. T. Langford Lane. We talked in his “man lair,” a furnished subfloor with jazz paraphernalia and a wall of fame: his wife, Nynell, with him and Jay Z and Beyoncé; Stevie Wonder; Janet Jackson; Michael Vick; and Lionel Richie. He had on a Champion sweatshirt, jeans, and Nikes. His grandfather had come to town in the twenties, bought some trucks, and won trash-removal contracts at the big hotels. Langford’s father dropped out of high school and worked in a factory. Langford went to college, then dealer school at the Casino Career Institute, on the Black Horse Pike, one of the old Atlantic City arteries, and started at Caesars when it opened, in 1979. He spent fourteen years in the industry—as a floor supervisor at the Playboy and a pit boss at the Atlantis and the Taj Mahal. In 1992, he ran for city council.

People dish a lot of dirt about Rennie—how he’d put his extended family on the payroll; how he had sued the city and, after becoming mayor, got a settlement of more than four hundred thousand dollars (a judge later ordered him to repay it); how his wife’s goddaughter, the pop singer Ashanti, got paid twenty thousand dollars for spending a day at the Atlantic City high school—but it’s hard, when you’re in his home, hearing his side, not to admire his cheek, in the hurly-burly of Chris Christie’s New Jersey, or not to credit his assessment that in the end what has befallen Atlantic City could not have been prevented by any mere satrap.

“You can’t take a solo after every serve.”

“For the last four years, everything was my fault,” he said. “No matter how many times I talked about neighboring jurisdictions or the national economy, it was ‘Langford, it’s your fault.’ ” As for the Revel project, he says that from the start he’d considered it “extremely risky” in a saturated market, and that it got such extravagant support from Christie and the state because it was a way to steer the support of the construction unions to the Governor and his party. Langford said, “What Christie thought would be his shining achievement will be the albatross around his neck.”

His successor, Guardian, is sixty-two and from North Jersey. He is a former Boy Scouts of America executive. (“I couldn’t have gotten out at a better time,” he told me; he left just before the Scouts’ policy regarding homosexuality became a national controversy.) Guardian made his name, locally, as the head of the city’s Special Improvement District. He was a keen advocate and errand man for the tourist precincts, the guy out on the boardwalk on his bicycle at dawn, picking up the plastic cups. He was not a part of any machine, but he worked tirelessly to round up votes, and Langford, having survived a bruising, expensive primary and confident of the black vote, apparently got complacent. Guardian also picked up the support of the state’s Republican establishment and of the unions, in light of his promises to put “cranes in the sky.”

Guardian has been frank about the city’s predicament yet optimistic about its prospects. He has a jolly goofball air and a tireless enthusiasm for particulars. He wears bow ties and has trouble pronouncing his “r”s and “l”s. His partner of twenty-one years, Louis Fatato, whom he married last summer, runs a spa at the Borgata. Guardian is routinely unpunctual and speaks off the cuff with enough dash that Chris Filiciello, his chief of staff, usually sticks close to keep watch. At City Hall, a dreary D.M.V.-like cube of concrete and glass, they share an office on the seventh floor, with sweeping views toward Revel and the South Inlet. When I visited, Filiciello looked on coolly from his desk, dipping into a tub of animal crackers, while Guardian enumerated some of the intractable financial problems the city faces. “If I can take eighty million out of the budget, that’s sustainable, but that’s not feasible right now, not if we want to provide public safety and public works. I can get forty out.”

In public, he projects a no-bullshit boosterism reminiscent of Ed Koch. He was the keynote speaker at this year’s annual luncheon of the Metropolitan Business and Citizens Association, a kind of super-charged chamber of commerce. The luncheon was at Caesars Palace, on the day, as it happens, that Caesars, the parent company, declared bankruptcy. The Palladium Ballroom was filled with glad-handers, as the casino’s employees—employed for now—poker-facedly delivered pats of butter molded into the profile of Augustus.

“You think you had a bad day?” Guardian began. “I woke up this morning, Caesars filed bankruptcy, all three elevators are broken in City Hall, and there’s a major water leak at public works.” He went on, “Hey, at least we’re not Detroit!”

“Last year, I promised you a root canal,” Guardian told the crowd. “I just forgot the Novocain.” But the good news was that “the root canal is over and the healing is about to begin.” Or, as he said at the end, “2015’s got to be better than 2014. 2014 sucked!”

The hosts of the luncheon, and the founders of the M.B.C.A., were the local philanthropists Gary Hill and John Schultz. Schultz, an Atlantic City native and three-term city councilman, and Hill, from Reading, Pennsylvania, made their money operating night clubs (Studio Six, Club Tru) in a forlorn stretch of town where the Sands used to be. Eventually, the casinos figured out the night-club business, so Schultz and Hill got out, and started giving their money away. Twenty years ago, they bought an old building near the clubs, next door to a porn shop, and converted the top three floors into a triplex they called Casa Del Cielo, where they live together and preside as ambassadors, of a kind, over various gaudy but charitable entertainments. In a way, they are avatars of the town’s long-dormant gay scene, which has reawakened in recent years.

The night of the luncheon, they had me up for a drink. Past a suite of paintings by Ringo Starr and a library shelved with scrapbooks chronicling Hill and Schultz’s twenty-seven years together, a loggia led to a heated pool, which they once filled with wine corks. Here and there were garish furnishings salvaged from the casinos: headboards from Trump Plaza, smokestacks and banquettes from the Showboat, chandeliers from the Sands. Last summer, they hosted Mayor Guardian’s wedding; Schultz officiated. The event was catered by Hauke and Tony Boloney’s.

It was hard to find a building or enterprise in the city limits that was not in some way touched by crisis and folly. But none was more conspicuous, and of greater likely consequence to the city in the long run, than Revel. Last September, with Glenn Straub’s ninety-million-dollar offer as the stalking horse, the bankruptcy court held an auction to sell it. The winner, at a hundred and ten million dollars, was Brookfield Property Partners, based in Toronto. Brookfield owned the Atlantis in Nassau and the Hard Rock in Las Vegas, and so saw some synergy here, but it couldn’t make a deal with the owners of Revel’s adjacent power plant, which had been built solely for Revel and was charging Revel three million dollars a month for utilities. (The power plant was a separate, independently owned entity, called ACR Energy Partners—an arrangement that has proved poisonous.) In November, Brookfield decided to forfeit its deposit, of eleven million dollars, and walk away. The only bid left, apparently, was the one predicated on a Tower of Geniuses.

Straub began unfurling his plans. He said he’d spend three hundred million dollars building the second tower and another half billion to buy up derelict property around town. He’d refurbish Bader Field, the defunct downtown airport, and establish an equestrian center for two thousand horses, polo fields, high-speed ferries to Manhattan, a life-extension university, and the world’s biggest indoor water park.

Whenever I called Straub, he answered his own phone and seemed not to have assistants or gatekeepers, or any kind of filter at all. The first time he picked up, at his club, he told me, through bites of an apple, that he had just finished playing a polo match, that he lived and worked on a yacht, that he was debt-free, and that he had two brilliant adult daughters with whom he had failed to spend enough time. Once, he answered his phone as he was getting fingerprinted by the Casino Control Commission, for his gambling-license application. Another time, he announced that he was at a urinal. With bankruptcy-court procedures in mind, I asked, “So what comes next?” and he replied, “I wash my hands.”

Straub invited me to meet him at Revel one day in February, on one of his trips to town. He tended to fly up on Spirit Airways, to save money. When I arrived, he was still busy trying to buy Bader Field. (The city, the Mayor had told me, wanted far more for it than Straub was willing to pay.) Straub also talked of buying the racetrack, Trump Plaza, the Showboat, and several large tracts of undeveloped land in various parts of the city. At times, he talked as though he’d bought some of these things already.

“Have ye seen a whale that matches this swatch?”

In the all but abandoned Revel corporate offices, overlooking a slatey winter sea, two of the remaining Revel employees were waiting for Straub to arrive. They didn’t work for him yet, but, given that he was the putative buyer, they allowed him to use the space and they were inclined to be deferential.

“It’s kind of hard to believe Glenn Straub might be our white knight, but here we are,” one said.

“Just a tip,” the other said. “He likes to be called Mr. Straub.”

Straub arrived alone, wearing a zip-up hoodie under a blazer. He had a Florida tan and hair that was brushed back and reddish-brown. He’s trim, at sixty-eight, and he had the bent gait of an aging country-club athlete. In a kitchenette, he made a sandwich for himself and sat down in a conference room with a view down the boardwalk: in the foreground, the empty lot that would one day, he hoped, be home to his water park, and then, stretching south, the casino cordillera—Showboat, Taj, Resorts, Bally’s, Caesars, Trump, Trop.

“It’ll be done the right way,” Straub said. “I’ll actually wash the windows here. It’ll cost a couple of dollars. There must be ten million windows in this frigging place. That’s the first thing we’ll do. Get the laser light shows and wash the windows and hire four thousand employees. That way, I’ll get the politicians. ‘Oh, Straub, I know him. I want to do business with one of his marinas,’ or whatever. . . . Get their attention. ‘Guys, I got a high-speed ferry. . . . Midtown Manhattan, what do you got there for a pier?’ Politicians can get you into that place that you can’t get into.”

Straub’s way of talking in a stream-of-consciousness rush, in the manner of an Appalachian Don King, often made his big plans seem scattershot and his tactical explanations disjointed, at least to someone not adept in vulture finance. “He has a learning disability,” his daughter Kim, a branding consultant in New York, told me. “When he was a kid, when it was time to read aloud in class, he’d count the people who were supposed to read before him and then, just before his turn, go to the rest room. He’s a bit of a savant.”

Straub comes from Wheeling, West Virginia, where his father had a business providing transportation to the Texas Eastern pipeline and later owned auto-leasing franchises and taxi fleets. “So you worked, and if you didn’t work Dad got the belt out and beat your butt,” Straub said. “Anyway, he died, just when I got my driver’s license.” After high school, Straub and a brother helped run the businesses. In time, they owned a network of sand and gravel quarries and concrete and asphalt plants; highway- and airport-construction contracts made them rich. (In recent years, those long-moribund quarries, in the upper Ohio River Valley, have been found to sit atop vast reserves of oil and gas, extractable by horizontal drill, making Straub even richer.)

Straub retired at forty, moving his family (his wife, from whom he divorced in 2007, and two daughters) to Florida. “I lasted six months,” he said. He started investing in distressed and bankrupt properties. It was a good time to have cash on hand. In the wake of the savings-and-loan crisis, at a Resolution Trust Corporation auction, he bought a twenty-two-hundred-acre golf and polo club in Wellington, for $27.1 million. It was called Palm Beach Polo. “All of a sudden, people were giving me a half a million dollars for an acre,” he said. “I sold two or three hundred million dollars’ worth, and we still have another thousand acres down there.” A big driver was the equestrian center: “Never once thought it would turn out to be a gold mine, but it did turn out to be a gold mine, because then the Bloombergs of the world and their daughters, and all the movie stars’ daughters, they would go down there, and they would have the big Olympic stars do the show jumping, and there was this thing called polo. I didn’t know what a polo game looked like. They put you on a horse. And I thought, This isn’t that hard. I was good in sports, amateur sports. I can hit things. I can pick a fly out of the air.”

Straub has been called “the dictator of Palm Beach polo.” His reign has been contentious. In numerous lawsuits, he has been accused of neglecting his residents, as well as the grounds, and charging undue fees. In 2010, he was tried, and ultimately acquitted, on criminal charges of polluting protected wetlands. He was once convicted of contempt, after interfering with a federal marshal who’d come to seize a yacht at a marina Straub owned. He tried to appeal the verdict all the way to the Supreme Court, without success. Through the years, he has been proudly litigious. “If you check me out, I’m pretty good at protecting our rights in the court system,” Straub told me.

In the conference room, he told me about his idea for an ocean liner. “An old ocean liner, like the QE2. I’m gonna buy it,” he said. He squeezed mayonnaise from a packet. “Bring this ocean liner in, and I don’t know if you’ve been around Ripley’s down in Orlando, the whole building shaking and everything else. I’m gonna teach my kids, or my kids’ kids, what World War II was all about, and the Holocaust, and Zeros coming in from Japan, and so when you go inside this thing, this ship, it’s gonna make you feel like you’re being bombed, like Pearl Harbor when the damned Zeros came in, took out our whole fleet in the Pacific. The ship’s suites where the crew used to be will be for my construction workers, because if we’re gonna spend this kind of money up here I need to get cheap housing for them, so instead of shipping them back to Philadelphia and bringing them here every day I’ll let them store themselves in the bottom of the ship. It’ll be like the back lots at M-G-M.”

Throughout the winter, Straub made regular trips to Atlantic City and to the federal bankruptcy court in Camden, where he pressed his attempt to have his bid approved. Amid innumerable motions, hearings, and rulings, attorneys representing bank lenders, unsecured creditors, jilted tenants, other prospective buyers, the power company, and the gutted estate argued for and against his offer, sometimes changing sides as the circumstances evolved. Other bidders waded in and wandered off. The power company remained a sticking point. The lawyers racked up their fees and did their pressers on the courthouse steps.

One cold morning in February, Straub arrived at the courthouse in a gray suit, with a trenchcoat slung over his shoulders. He said he’d left his cell phone in a bathroom at the airport, and someone had retrieved it and was sending it back. He looked at the pairs of lawyers filing in through the door. “A few more guys and we’ll get a soccer game going here,” he said. “I wish I was getting paid a thousand bucks an hour.” Straub’s lawyer, Stuart Moskovitz, of Freehold, not normally a bankruptcy attorney, called them the “bankruptcy cabal.” It was essentially the deadline on Straub’s bid, now at ninety-five million dollars, but he had failed to close, owing to some unresolved questions about his obligation to old leaseholders and to the power plant.

“We need to know what we’re buying,” Moskovitz said.

Revel’s lawyer told the judge, “We’re ready to move on to another buyer.”

“Can I get back to you when there’s someone to overhear me?”

Problem was there didn’t seem to be one. With this in mind, Straub and Moskovitz had been threatening to put in a much lower bid if their offer fell through. At one point, Straub stood and handed his lawyer a piece of paper. Moskovitz read aloud, “Sometimes the judge has to protect the debtor from himself.”

In the back of the courtroom, a lanky man in a yellow sweater, his graying hair perfectly in place and his eyes darting around, fidgeted with his fingers as though he were handling invisible chopsticks. His name was Vincent Crandon. He was a low-profile Jersey dealmaker from Mahwah, and he had been circling various properties in Atlantic City for years, to no avail. He’d failed in attempts to buy Trump Plaza and the Atlantic Club. Early on, he’d been after a bricks-and-mortar property to go with an Internet-gaming company. But his quest had morphed into something else, and so now he just lurked, waiting for the court, or perhaps the entropy of Atlantic City, to scuttle Straub’s bid. Quietly casting himself as the new white knight, he’d submitted an offer, but so far it had gone unacknowledged.

“Straub is done,” Crandon told me later. “We’ve put in a better offer. We’re sitting back, taking our time.” He added, “Straub thinks he’s the only guy in town.”

The town, and the sellers, seemed to think so, too. After the ninety-five-million-dollar offer fell apart, Straub put in a lower bid, for eighty-two million, and lawyers for Revel and the lenders, increasingly desperate, supported it in court. At the beginning of April, the presiding judge, Gloria Burns, who said she would not let the case delay her impending retirement, abruptly ruled in favor of Straub. The questions of the tenants and power plant remained unresolved. For a few days, anyway, the town experienced something like hope.

Atlantic City, formerly a breeding ground for big ideas, was now a tar pit—trapping financial mastodons and big-eyed dreamers, whether or not their intentions were pure, as the capricious gods of commerce looked on. Revel kept luring in new ones. In April, the day after Straub took ownership of Revel, he called Crandon and—according to Crandon, anyway; Straub denies it—offered to flip the property to him for a hundred million dollars. A couple of days later, Crandon drove down to Atlantic City. With Revel blacked out (owing to the inevitable dispute between Straub and ACR, the power company), the only people allowed inside were security officers from the Casino Control Commission. They stood in darkness guarding acres of idled slot machines, which Straub wasn’t technically authorized to own, since he had no gaming license. So, according to Crandon, the two men who would decide Revel’s fate met in one of its parking garages. Crandon had along one of his partners, Don Marrandino, an Atlantic City native known as Rockin’ Don, for his music-industry connections. He had been the president of Hard Rock in Las Vegas and of Caesars East Coast operations. Straub was accompanied by Tara Lordi, his adviser and “toxic-asset manager,” a horsewoman and former banker. Crandon says Straub told them he wanted much more than a hundred million for Revel, but at least he now had a possible out, and Crandon had an in. (Straub says the meeting never happened.)

Crandon had been eying Revel for a year. Crandon, who is fifty-three, grew up in Delaware, but his parents were from New Jersey, and as a kid he worked at a service station his grandfather owned on the Black Horse Pike. His surname used to be Ceccola; Crandon is an adaptation of Cranendonk. His father-in-law is Theodor Cranendonk, a wealthy Dutch oil trader who was once imprisoned in Italy on charges of delivering thirty bazookas to the Mafia. (“It was all made up,” Crandon says. According to Crandon, Dutch commandoes sprung Cranendonk from a prison hospital and brought him back to the Netherlands.) One of Crandon’s investment vehicles is called MidOil, but Cranendonk was not involved in the Revel bid. “He doesn’t do gambling,” Crandon said.

Crandon said his group—“We’re Jersey guys”—planned to spend hundreds of millions reconfiguring the space. The new name would be Rebel. Crandon said they were planning a forty-night Bon Jovi residency. Rockin’ Don had the pull.

The money wasn’t from Jersey guys. Crandon says he spent a marathon weekend in town and in New York wooing representatives from a Chinese real-estate firm that had been buying up properties around the United States. Crandon’s group and the Chinese were betting that Macau, the Asian gambling mecca, was tapped out, amid a Chinese government crackdown on corruption and gambling, and that travellers from mainland China would soon be including South Jersey on their U.S. itineraries. The Atlantic City airport would be the hub for jumbo-jet charters from Asia. The margins are better if you can lure a plane from Hong Kong than a bus from Port Authority. Atlantic City, born in proximity to the population and early industrial wealth of Philadelphia, would now reach halfway around the world for money and the guests from whom to separate it.

Crandon believed that Straub was planning to demolish Revel. A consultant had told him you could net a hundred million dollars if you sold it off as spare parts. There was a precedent: In 2004, Straub bought Miami Arena for twenty-eight million dollars, half what the city had paid to build it. He promised to turn it into a venue for horse shows, conventions, and minor-league sports, to help revive downtown Miami. “Tearing it down serves nobody’s purpose,” Straub said at the time. Four years later, he tore it down.

Events on the ground in Atlantic City seemed to be pushing Straub in that direction. As soon as he bought Revel, he found himself, not unexpectedly, in a war with ACR, the power plant, and thus, in short order, with the city. The maneuverings often seemed frivolous and petty, except that a city was at stake. Straub refused to pay ACR the three million a month for power, and ACR refused to provide it for free. And so Revel remained dark: no light, heat, air, or water, no sprinklers or alarms. The city’s fire marshal deemed the building unsafe, and the city rescinded Straub’s certificate of occupancy and began fining him five thousand dollars a day. Observers wondered about catastrophic fire and debilitating mold.

Straub dug in. He told reporters, as he unsuccessfully challenged the plant’s owners in court, “We’ll erase them off the map.” He brought in a fleet of diesel generators and parked them outside the casino. But he had no permits, and ACR owned much of the connecting infrastructure. Back to court they went. Straub, the loser again, sent the generators away. He told me, referring to city and state officials, “If they won’t work with me, I’ll just go back to Miami.” Publicly, he made the threat explicit: “I’ll tear the building down.”

To circumvent ACR, Straub had set about trying to buy the empty casino next door, the Showboat, and tap into its power plant instead. The Showboat’s owner, at the moment, was Stockton University, the state college, which, a few months earlier, had bought it to establish a long-desired Atlantic City campus. The university had paid just ten dollars a square foot. “You can’t even buy tile at Home Depot for ten dollars a square foot!” Herman Saatkamp, Stockton’s president, told me.

“Seltzer . . . seltzer!”

But the campus plan had suddenly fallen apart, when Trump Entertainment, owners of the Taj Mahal, next door, unexpectedly opted to enforce an old covenant mandating that the Showboat be a casino-hotel, and nothing else. Icahn, who controls Trump, didn’t want a college campus next door. “Who is this guy?” Bob McDevitt, the president of Local 54, the casino workers’ union, said of Icahn, with whom he has been feuding for a year. “How does he get to decide everything? He’s disembowelling the city.”

Icahn blames the unions. “I saved the Tropicana, which was bankrupt, and made it into one of the only vibrant and surviving casinos in Atlantic City,” he told me. “I have also saved the Taj Mahal and have saved six thousand jobs. Bob McDevitt has caused three casinos to close and the loss of thousands of jobs. Ask yourself: Who is the villain of this story?” Capital or labor? Germany or Greece? Depends on whom you talk to. In July, Taj workers, having lost many of their benefits, voted to authorize a strike.

At any rate, now Stockton was stuck with a vacated casino on its balance sheet and monthly maintenance costs of four hundred thousand dollars. That’ll buy you a lot of tile. And so Saatkamp, the university’s president, who is also a leading scholar of George Santayana (“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”), rushed into a provisional agreement to flip the Showboat to Straub. At the end of April, Saatkamp, out of his depth in these sharky waters, resigned as Stockton’s president, his tenure scuttled by the Showboat and Revel mess. Santayana: “Skepticism is the chastity of the intellect, and it is shameful to surrender it too soon.”

Throughout the spring, Crandon pressed for a deal while Straub held out for more. Straub told me, “Everyone says, ‘Oh, you’re so fucking smart, Mr. Straub.’ And I’m saying, ‘I’m not smart. I can just outlast everybody.’ ” Tara Lordi e-mailed Crandon one afternoon in early April:

Can you kindly by the place so I can get back to the warm weather I’m freezing my ass off here.

In early May, according to Crandon, the two men met aboard Straub’s yacht, the Triumphant Lady, which he’d brought north to Atlantic City and docked at the Golden Nugget. Crandon says they actually shook on a deal, for a hundred and thirty-two million dollars. (Straub denies this meeting took place and in general was dismissive when I asked him about Crandon, referring to him as “Kramden.”)

But they continued to haggle over terms and timing as Crandon worked out his arrangement with the Chinese. There were stories of Straub stiffing a local law firm, and of his filling a truck with Revel fixtures and tools, bound for Florida. (He denies wrongdoing in both cases.) His deal to buy the Showboat foundered, and a court gave Stockton the go-ahead to seek another buyer. As weeks passed, Crandon made promises that he’d soon hold the keys to Revel, and then the deal would recede again: Zeno’s paradox down the shore.

At the end of June, Crandon texted me to say that his deal with Straub was off. “Greed and evil have destroyed A.C.” He explained, “What happened is we got circumvented.” Straub, apparently, had cut him out of the loop and gone directly to the Chinese. He had come to see the potential of junkets from overseas. Crandon sent photos of Tara Lordi in Shanghai with a Chinese man, whom he still, vestigially, called “my partner”: “2 days after that photo, Chinese canceled our deal.” Crandon vowed revenge: “We will keep it in litigation for years. No one will get Revel.”

If Straub was really planning to sell to the Chinese, he wasn’t saying. Lordi says she went to Shanghai to play polo. Straub said he was looking for groups to help manage the hotel and the casino. All the while, Revel remained closed. Still no light shows or clean windows, to say nothing of the four thousand new jobs the city so desperately needed. Revel’s remaining employees were let go. There was no one left, really, except for the security guards overlooking the slots, in the sweltering heat of an un-air-conditioned glass box in high summer.

“No word on Revel, Showboat, or any of these things,” Mike Hauke said, down at Tony Boloney’s. “It’s frustrating.” Weekends were busy, weekdays were soft. It was hard to make decisions or plans. “Sometimes, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, you drive around town and see four or five cars.” The talk at the shop was mostly about water parks, or the recent news about the mysterious disappearance of three million dollars, which the Langford administration had given to a Bronx businessman in 2013, for a community-loan program that seems to have never made a loan. ♦