#one was actively hunting and saw it do a successful dive

[sealcore]

few things are better than getting to see one of your lesser-seen kintypes IRL, especially if its doing cool behaviours such as hunting

[rungssparemodelpieces]

Enrichment

Takes place in @tinydefector Merformers AU either as a side story or separate continuity! Thank you for the inspiration!

The scent of salty brine filled the air as it was just another quiet day at the marine centre. With few eyes to observe the Oceanides at the center, be it for research or recreationally, a pair of blue eyes decided to take up the mantel as Rung observed the few humans that were wandering around, finding their interactions quite assuming as he liked to compare how similar their behaviors were to Oceanides. He liked watching people and would sometimes try to mimic some of their mannerisms such as a hand wave or a grin though these have been met with mixed results or confusion from the caretakers feeding or observing him. He knew from experience furrowed brows weren’t a good sign but he was still trying to learn how to at least communicate back in a way they could understand.

With Rung being an older Mer, he would stay back more at the center, balancing the solace he got in his alcove with hunting and interacting with his pod. Though he didn’t seem like the most active member, he did show a habit of decorating his area with an odd array of trinkets, some assumed to be from previous hunts such as large and unknown bones or manmade items like used car parts or toys that were either lost or dumped into the ocean. The marine centre has tried to remove or replace the pollutants but Rung has been rather shown to have an attachment towards these items. To counteract this, you were instructed to work on finding other items for him to collect and display that were found in his natural environment.

It was enrichment, or so that’s what Dr. Quin called it and for an Oceanides so old, it was a good way to keep his skills sharp and to give him exercise while staying around the area. When Rung went out hunting with his pod, you would dive in and scatter these trinkets for him to find. You’ve even buried or hid a few to see if he could find them and problem solving how to get them out. Rung seems excited to find new treasures for his trove, chirping and showing you when he found one before going back for more.

This arrangement has been your personal project for months as others focused more on the lone baby and the next generation of Oceanides. So far you’ve found success with shells, bones, coral, and oddly shaped rocks but it seemed as of recent, he was struggling to find items that were near him or even in plain sight, feeling around until he eventually found the object in question. In light of this new problem, you’ve been taking the day to observe him, wondering what you could do to help his decline in his quality of life here.

It seemed the answer was closer than you speculated as while adjusting some rocks around Rung’s sleeping area, a small splash caught his attention as he saw a strange piece of plastic flutter down, swimming over cautiously as the object hit the sandy floor with a poof. Once the sand settled, he noticed the item was an odd contraption he noticed some humans wore on their faces, perhaps to assist with their vision or to distinguish one from another.

Carefully, Rung picked up the glasses and out of curiosity, placed them on his face. It took a few tries as the sides of the frame poked at his gills but eventually, he was able to place them comfortably on his face. Looking through the clear glass, it became very apparent to him that the theory this device helped with vision was correct as he looked around, seeming the lagoon around him in better detail.

The stones and shells that lined the sand became more defined and he was able to notice more of the colorful details the small fish that fluttered in and out displayed. With this realization, Rung started to happily swim around and look around the lagoon with a new, clearer perspective.

~~

Meanwhile, you were helping an intern at the marine centre pick up some papers as she bumped into you, barely able to see over their own papers. The fledgling intern, Donna, squinted hard as she tried to find all the notes that had scattered in the collision.

“Is something wrong?” You asked as she seemed to be panicked, scrambling to find something more important than her notes.

“I- I can’t find my glasses,” Donna muttered as she tried her best to find them, her searching more erratic before she turned towards the open water, fear clear on her face, “I think- I think they might have fallen in when I bumped into you.”

You gave her a pat on the shoulder in an attempt to reassure her there was nothing to worry about. “It’ll be fine, we can get them back, Shrimp’s easy going and won’t mind if we pop in to retrieve them.”

With that, you leaned over the railing briefly, trying to get a hint of where Shrimp was before noting the flash of orange and white darting the water below, deciding to call out to him to see if he would respond or if he was in distress.

“Shrimp!” With the call of his name, Rung poked his head out of the water, his blue eyes appearing much larger due to the glasses he was wearing. A small chuckle escaped your lips as you called him over, finding the image quite humorous.

“It seems Shrimp decided to try on your glasses,” you commented to Donna before leaning down closer to Rung’e eye level, a bittersweet smile on their face as you held out your hand. “I’m sorry I have to ask but I need those glasses back.”

Rung dipped his head mostly in the water at this request, not wanting to lose this tool that he was just starting to enjoy. A rumble of his gills caused the water to ripple out around him as he pouted in disapproval.

“Look, I’ll ask Quin if we can find you another pair but Donna needs those back so she can see,” you asked him, the Mer still not relenting as a burb of bubbles left his mouth as if sighing.

“I promise I’ll get you another pair, you have my word.” A few moments later, he conceded, handing the glasses back before retreating under the water before you could thank him, obviously sad about returning the glasses but seemingly understood that Donna needed them back.

Returning the glasses, Donna thanked you before scurrying away, your focus returning to the lagoon for a brief moment before returning back to the facility proper.

~~

“You’re requesting glasses, is that correct?” Dr. Quin attempted to clarify as she looked at your request for numerous pairs of waterproof glasses. The request was odd, to say the least, but she wanted to hear you out first before making her decision.

“Yes,” you stated before explaining yourself, “Earlier today, Donna’s glasses ended up near Shrimp in the lagoon and looking the video feed from that time, it seemed he not only enjoy playing with them but benefited from wearing them. He was swimming around excitedly and interacting like he could fully see his environment! I think giving him the option to choose and wear some would help him greatly… and I did promise him I would give him another pair to wear.”

You rubbed your arm nervously, knowing it was a long shot, but seeing at least one Mer so happy, especially with priorities being with the future generations of Oceanides, it made you feel like you could at least help one in the long run, a minor victory on the road ahead.

“Then we better find him a pair that works,” Dr. Quin stated as she signed her name for approval, a hum in her voice before being cut off by a hug and thank you from you, a pat on the back signaling you to lighten up on the embrace, “And besides, I don’t want you to break a promise.”

Excited, you thanked her once more before starting the process of finding glasses that might fit an Oceanides more comfortably.

~~

Rung poked at the sand that lined the floor of the lagoon, prodding under the dark blur he assumed was a rock or perhaps an clam before he heard you call him by the nickname you gave him, curious as it wasn’t feeding time yet. Perhaps it was another medical check, especially given his age.

Either way, he swam to the surface to find you kneeling down by the shore, a strange box in hand and an excited look on your face. “Hey, Shrimp, remember that promise I made about the glasses? Well, I kept it,” you mused before handing him a pair, “I hope these work for you.”

Upon realizing what you had, Rung excitedly took the glasses, putting them on and… frowning it seemed these frames made his vision worse, taking them off as the blurriness hurt his head.

“Oh, it seems those don’t work for you,” he mused, offering a different pair to him, “I have a few pairs until we find the right ones for you.” Through some trial and error, it seemed he found the perfect pair, big blue orbs staring at you as he swished his tail happily, the air being filled with a few melodic hums of excitement.

Though through your eyes, Shrimp was excited to see clearly again, Rung was ecstatic that the first thing he saw clearly again was your face. The way that your hair clung around your face, the light crisp from the sea water, the smile on your lips, slightly chapped from working outside and in the water, it was all so incredible to him. You were incredible to him and it made him feel something, something deep and primal that stirred inside him as he trilled in thanks before diving back down to the depths. He was searching for something, something that would interest you, something that would show he had interest in you, and maybe, just maybe, be able to communicate what you mean to him.

[qqueenofhades]

For the spooky prompts, "Violent Thunderstorms" for Fivan perhaps? 😳

Anonymous asked: Heyyy 2 Vampire for fivan (how to ask for the chapter 2 witout asking for chap 2)

Anonymous asked: Fivan and #2 🧛‍♂️🧛‍♂️

Very well, I see what the people want, and that is a sequel to this one-shot. I have thus combined these prompts for reasons.

Fedyor spends the next fortnight attempting – with notably indifferent success – not to think about Ivan Sakharov. The Conclave was less than pleased to hear that Fedyor came back empty-handed, having not even secured a promise for Ivan and the rest of the Black Hand to leave off their mischief-making, and in fact has empowered them in their belief that there is nothing the law can do to them. Considering the earful that Fedyor got on that accord, he saw nothing to be gained from mentioning that not only did Ivan blow him off completely, he did it after he had fed on him. It’s entirely possible that Ivan accessed sensitive thoughts, memories, or plans, any scrap of useful intelligence that Fedyor did not carefully hide away in his mind before that too-distracting bite. In short, he has comprehensively botched the entire situation, the Conclave is well within their rights to be very angry with him, and to demonstrate the extent of their displeasure, they have temporarily revoked Fedyor’s right to enter their territory and feed on their drones – willing humans kept for the purpose, who are hoping to be selected for the transformation in exchange for their service. That means if Fedyor wants to eat, he has to go out and hunt an animal, or bamboozle and beguile an unwitting passerby to let him chomp on their neck. Truly, being a vampire can be such a terrible drag.

Fedyor figures that if he keeps his head down, meekly accepts his punishment, and doesn’t make any trouble, the Conclave will get over their anger and reinstate him sooner rather than later. It’s not like he has many other options. If he wants to stay in Belgrade, he will remain in their good graces, and he has no desire to get mixed up with the Black Hand. The rumor is that they were founded by the Black Heretic himself, who has remained out of sight for many decades but is now said to be active again, and the Black Heretic is the scion of the Conclave’s greatest enemy, the vampire that all other vampires fear. Absolutely no good can come of throwing one’s lot in with that crowd, and Fedyor wonders if he is going to have to find a new home. If a stupid supernatural war blows up this city, he’s out.

Most of the fortnight passes without incident, but the flaw in the plan is the unfortunate fact that Fedyor is very hungry. He’s still a young enough vampire that he can’t go two weeks without feeding, and he really hates the messy business of corralling an unwitting human. Besides, the Conclave’s headquarters and chief place of business are on Knez Mihailova Ulica, the most fashionable downtown district right in the middle of Belgrade, and what with Fedyor’s current banishment from the premises, he can’t go there anyway. Hunting it has to be.

Fedyor waits until it is dark, a soft summer rain pattering on the steep-roofed eaves and glowing streetlamps, and then, having changed into clothing more suitable for getting a lot of bloodstains, he slips out. He moves silently in the shadows, past the well-dressed gentlemen and evening-gowned ladies out at the ball or the opera or the latest society supper-party, and escapes the precincts of Belgrade proper for the low green hills that surround it. This is on the Sava side of the river confluence, to the west, and once Fedyor is out of the city, the trees close in thickly. They are only broken by the occasional tiny village: small churches with square steeples and double-branched Orthodox crosses, red-tiled cottages crowded together along narrow dirt lanes, a lantern burning here and there to keep the monsters away. Fedyor can hear human voices, sense the shadows of people moving around behind the shutters, and it gives him a pang. No wonder he is clinging so closely to the prospect of timely reinstatement to the Conclave. Without them, he would truly be entirely alone.

The rain starts to come down harder as Fedyor climbs through the thick green underbrush, and by the time he reaches the top of the hill, it is slicing into his face with a vehemence that even a vampire finds intensely disagreeable. Squinting and swearing under his breath, Fedyor shields his eyes and takes a deep whiff, searching for the scent of a prey animal. He could always hop a fence and grab a cow, but cows can kick surprisingly hard, a poor farmer doesn’t need the hassle of his one beast of burden keeling over, and maybe it is just the city-boy aesthete in Fedyor, but crouching in a muddy farmyard, doing your damndest not to get murdered by a large and angry bovine while you valiantly attempt to suck its blood, is just fucking terrible. There’s nothing to recommend it. Now that he’s out of the fledgling bloodlust, Fedyor has no intention of ever going back.

Thunder booms overhead, making him jump, and a jagged spear of lightning sears the horizon from sky to ground. A tree not that far away lights up in blinding white, and a scorched scent of ozone drifts through the pounding rain. Fedyor flinches, as he has no desire to be set on fire, and decides that either he raids a farm or he heads back home and waits for better weather. But he can catch another scent just ahead, and he’s hungry enough to risk it. He breaks into a run, almost loses his footing, dodges around an enormous dripping tree, and spots a thin crescent of lights high on the bluff ahead. Wait, is that a house? Some Serbian royal bureaucrat’s elegant country retreat, or – something else? Fedyor doesn’t recall that he has seen it before, although he has not spent much time out here alone. That, or –

He has only a split second of warning, his supernatural senses screaming at him to get the fuck out of here right now, before he realizes two things at once: first, that the scent is very definitely hostile, and second, that something is dive-bombing directly toward him, on the strength of a ferocious leap that is remarkable even for a vampire. The next second, it – he – hits Fedyor like a ton of bricks, and they go crashing down the slope, kicking and thrashing and biting at each other in a flurry of blows too fast for a human eye to see. Another enormous clap of thunder rattles Fedyor’s fangs in his head, he slams down on his back hard enough to break his bones if he was human, and then, in the flash of the succeeding lightning bolt, his eyes confirm what his nose has already told him. Of all the stupid, stupid things, he appears to have unwittingly trespassed onto Black Hand territory and tried to hunt their game, and the angry supernatural soldier determined to beat the unholy tarnation out of him is therefore none other than the one and only –

“Stop!” Fedyor wheezes, although he has no idea why he expects it to make any difference. “It’s me! Fedyor Kaminsky! From Terazije!”

The rain stings his eyes hard enough to make him grimace, just as a third incandescent bolt of lightning rattles across the sky. From what Fedyor can see, which is not very much, Ivan looks almost as startled as he feels. They remain staring at each other, their faces barely an inch apart, Ivan’s fangs bared in a way that it is really not the time to find disturbingly attractive. Then Ivan springs off and barks, “What the fuck are you doing out here, Conclave whore?”

“Sorry.” Fedyor sits up. His dark hair is plastered to his head and getting in his eyes, there is mud all over his clothes, and even for an immortal who technically does not need to breathe, he is winded. Ivan, to nobody’s surprise, really packs a punch. “I was just… hungry.”

“You have your own arrangements.” Ivan eyes him suspiciously, arms folded, rainwater running down that magnificently disdainful Slavic nose as if from a statue in the public square. “If anyone besides me had caught you out here, you would be dead.”

Well, that is (not) encouraging. It does, however, point out the fact that Ivan has already had the chance to murder him and held back, and Fedyor is not about to speculate on why exactly that might be. It’s not a good idea, but he’s wet, hungry, has just had to unexpectedly fight like the dickens, and irritated at Ivan for being the one who got him into this mess in the first place. “The Conclave demanded that I return their visiting card,” he says shortly. “I’m not allowed to feed on their drones for some unspecified length of time – which is, I might add, entirely thanks to you.”

“What? Why is that my fault?”

“In case you’ve forgotten our last meeting,” Fedyor snaps, “it was at the Golden Cross, on the Lumière brothers’ film night. I relayed the Conclave’s warning to stop your illegal behavior and associations, and you completely ignored it. As a result – ”

“What, they cut off your feeding access?” Ivan interrupts. He looks utterly incredulous. “That’s charitable of them. A good way to build loyalty among your people. Besides, what the fuck did they expect? That you would walk up and ask me nicely, and that would solve it?”

He does, Fedyor has to loathingly admit, have a point. The best he can muster is, “The Conclave is accustomed to being obeyed.”

Ivan eyes him up, with an expression on his face as if that riposte is so pathetic, he isn’t going to dignify it with the effort of a reply. He is poised on edge, as if he doesn’t consider this matter to be entirely settled by the previous bout of violence, and Fedyor is equally tense. He very much does not want to scuffle with a Black Hand hardman who looks like that and fights like that, especially in the throes of encroaching frenzy, and the attendant loss of control. His fangs dig into his lower lip, seeking out the nearest blood – his own – and Fedyor clenches his fists. “Do you have an animal I can borrow?” he asks, as politely as he can. “I’ll – pay for it.”

Ivan surveys him up and down, dripping like an undead drowned rat and otherwise looking as miserable as Fedyor generally tries not to look (after all, presentation is everything). Then he jerks up an impatient fist. “Follow me.”

Fedyor is unsure what this might entail, but shamefully – whether it is due to his increasingly desperate hunger, or something else – he is not altogether opposed to it. He trails after Ivan, trying not to slip in the wet grass or fixate on Ivan’s scent; he will just get another smackdown for his trouble, like a horse flicking aside a fly, and he is not in the mood for it. After a climb of a few minutes, they reach the top of the hill and cross a deserted lawn to a manor house, scattered lights flickering in steep gables and pointed turrets. It is otherwise entirely dark, even to Fedyor’s vampire senses, as Ivan unlatches the heavy front door and drags it open with a screech. “In.”

Well aware that this is an even stupider idea than the polite request to knock it off – he is putting himself voluntarily in the power of a Black Hand operative, on enemy territory, where nobody knows where he is or what Ivan intends to do with him. If Fedyor’s drained corpse turns up floating in the Danube tomorrow, a warning to the Conclave never to interfere in their business again, he can’t say that he didn’t expect it. He hesitates at the threshold a moment longer, and then, given permission – it’s not essential, but it does help – steps inside.

The hall looks almost exactly as you would expect a secret vampire mansion to look: dusty suits of armor, glowering paintings, a sweeping grand staircase with a gothic balcony, and a chandelier which struggles to illuminate the cracked black-and-white chessboard flagstones. Still dripping, the thunder dulling to a muted rumble, Fedyor looks warily from side to side. There doesn’t seem to be anyone here except the two of them – or at least, he certainly hopes that there are no unwitting humans asleep upstairs. In the state that he’s in right now, he isn’t sure that he could control himself. Unless Ivan is trying to make some tiresome point about the inherent monstrosity of vampires, the sort that certain factions like to use in order to argue against the Conclave’s attempts to civilize them and make them follow human-like rules and laws. Fedyor hopes not, because that would be deeply irritating, but he’s so hungry that he’s about to bite his own wrist, and it would not be his finest hour.

However, Ivan does not lead them upstairs, but through a dim warren of corridors to a small, curtained study in the back of the house. Sullen embers glimmer in the hearth; vampires don’t need fires for heat, or to see by, but the human habit is hard to break, even if it’s one of the few things that can hurt them. Then Ivan shuts the door behind them and says crisply, “I’ll make you a deal. Give me useful information on the Conclave, and I will let you feed.”

“What?” Fedyor gapes at him. That was clearly a starvation-induced hallucination. “On – on you?”

“No,” Ivan snaps. “On the davenport, you idiot. Yes, obviously on me. Or I can throw you out and send you to try your luck in the nearest village. Yes or no?”

Fedyor continues to gape at him. Obviously he does not want to go and rip some screaming innocent villager out of their bed, like the very worst of the strigoi horror stories, but he is not in a hurry to jeopardize his ticket back to the Conclave’s good graces by informing on them to Ivan bloody Sakharov. (Indeed, literally.) Did Ivan make that offer because he knows that Fedyor wants it, and remembers how much of a reaction Fedyor had to Ivan feeding on him back at the Golden Cross? It was impossible to hide it entirely, blast him, and Ivan is too canny not to take advantage of an adversary’s weakness. He’s caught Fedyor dead to rights, trespassing on Black Hand territory, and as he himself said, Fedyor is lucky to escape with his skin. It’s Ivan’s right to exploit that fact, nothing more. If Fedyor refuses, what in the hell is he going to do?

“I don’t know,” he stalls. “I’m not sure that I can – ”

Ivan shrugs, then lifts his own wrist to his mouth and bites the back of it. Slow, rich, dark blood beads up, and he wafts it temptingly in Fedyor’s direction. “So, you don’t want this, then?”

Yes, Fedyor wants it. Fedyor, in fact, wants a few other things while he’s at it, and there is no way that Ivan, with hearing and senses and smell as acute as his own, doesn’t know it. He takes a step forward, but Ivan dances aside. “Information first,” he orders. “Then you may have your reward. Come now, Conclave whore. Why is it any different from last time?”

“Don’t call me that.” Fedyor is seeing red – which, at this point, could be due to just about anything. “I have a name, remember? Fedyor – Mikhailovich – Kaminsky.”

He stumbles a little over the patronymic, as it is an ongoing debate whether proper etiquette for Slavic vampires entails the use of the birth father’s name, or that of the vampire sire. Opinion generally comes down on the side of the latter, since it represents proper respect for one’s new immortal status and supernatural bloodline; you’re supposed to let go of your human family, since pining to go back complicates the already-difficult adjustment period and is impossible anyway. But since Fedyor isn’t entirely reconciled to it, and tries to hold onto his humanity, he tends to introduce himself as Fedyor Mikhailovich, not Fedyor Dmitrievich, and the flicker in Ivan’s eyes means that he has taken note of that struggle. Then he shrugs, crooking a taunting finger at him. “Fine then, Fedyor Mikhailovich. It is your choice.”

“What do you – ” Fedyor is having trouble seeing straight. “Want to know?”

“Anything that might be useful.” If he is worried about being shut in a small room with another vampire on the verge of total frenzy, Ivan doesn’t show it. Indeed, in this paramount confidence and command, Fedyor realizes that Ivan is much older than he initially thought. He took him for one of Catherine the Great’s courtiers, from the late eighteenth century or so, but the well-worn shadow of violence that sits on Ivan’s shoulders is of considerably longer use than that. It’s something else to puzzle out when Fedyor regains the use of his higher critical faculties, which is definitely not the case at the moment. “That is, if you can bring yourself to actually – ”

At that moment, he is cut off as Fedyor, deciding that two can play this game and he is tired of being jerked around by this arrogant bastard, lunges at him. Ivan jumps six feet straight up, hissing, and they end up somewhere in the vicinity of the ceiling, only to crash back down to the floor. Even vampires are not immune to the laws of gravity, and they roll around in a second deeply undignified flurry of kicking and biting, as Fedyor finally gets hold of Ivan’s wrists and tries to get his mouth as close as possible to that maddeningly enticing trickle. Then, for a crucial instant, he hesitates. He is very far gone, but there’s enough of his brain left to remember that feeding without permission is regarded quite dimly, and he is trying to prove that he is not a total savage. He gulps and gasps, fangs cutting into his lip, struggling and thrashing, not even able to properly articulate his request, as Ivan still looks – bafflingly – as if he is rather enjoying this. Then he smirks and says, “Very well, Fedyor Mikhailovich. Take it if you can.”

Now that is a challenge, and while it would be very enjoyable to throw it back in Ivan’s face in another fashion, Fedyor has only one concern at the moment. He presses his mouth to Ivan’s wrist, sinks his fangs, and sucks and licks like a man dying of thirst in the desert. Ivan utters a contented purring sound, his head falling back on the carpet, and certainly does not bother to keep struggling while Fedyor is otherwise occupied. Silence falls across the drawing room, except for the soft sounds of Fedyor feeding. He is half on top of Ivan, between his legs, and Ivan does not appear to be objecting in the least. Well. That was… unexpected.

When Fedyor has drunk enough to feel sane again, he pulls back with a jerk, remembers where he is, and fights the wash of embarrassment that floods through him. He wipes his mouth with the cuff of his shirt, then bends down and licks the bite wound closed, which is common vampire practice even if Ivan failed to do it with him. (After all, some supernaturals have manners.) Then they look at each other, and Fedyor doesn’t think it’s his imagination that Ivan’s breath is coming short, a flush visible in his pale cheeks, an enjoyment bearing a remarkable resemblance to Fedyor’s own. The silence persists a moment longer. Then Ivan groans, his legs sprawl further apart, and he orders, doing his utmost to sound gruff and commanding, “You will give me information on the Conclave now, yes?”

It is extremely tempting to tell him to take a long walk off a short pier, to pay him back for that underhanded trick at the Golden Cross, but that requires more command of his verbal processes than Fedyor currently possesses – or indeed, expects to possess in the near-to-medium future. He leans down instead, his nose brushing the hollow of Ivan’s cheek and his mouth ghosting against Ivan’s neck, his fangs tracing the line of the vein as if he might bite there too. Ivan’s hips buck, and his big hands settle heavily on the small of Fedyor’s back. “You know,” he murmurs, his voice a low, rough rasp in his throat. “You are wasted on those idiots.”

“Mmm.” Fedyor nips Ivan’s lower lip, with just a hint of fang. Then – although it’s the most difficult thing he has had to do in his life or his afterlife – he rolls off and gets to his feet, leaving the fearsome Black Hand anarchist vampire flat on his back on the drawing room floor. “It has,” he says, “been a lovely evening. But I will be taking my leave now. Good night.”

And with that, in the somewhat shameful epitome of quitting while he is ahead, but wanting to make absolutely sure that the point has been felt, Fedyor turns around and books it. He doesn’t dare to look back as he bursts out of the dark house, pelts across the lawn, and skids down the hill, in the thick and slippery knots of mud and moss. He doesn’t slow down until he spies the lights of Belgrade, and in a few minutes more, he’s thundering into his flat, clothes disheveled and hair a mess and mouth and head and heart still full of the taste and smell and feel of Ivan Sakharov. It’s intoxicating. It’s unbearable. But it can only be once. It will be only once.

The Conclave, Fedyor reminds himself. You’re doing this to get back to them, and you managed to get out of there without saying anything. They’ll appreciate it. They will. And it’s what you want. Keep your head down and don’t do anything else stupid, and it will work.

It’s what he wants.

It’s what he wants.

It’s what he –

Ah, fuck.

[lilydalexf]

Old School X is a project interviewing X-Files fanfic authors who were posting fic during the original run of the show. New interviews are posted every Tuesday.

Interview with Audrey Roget

Audrey Roget has 10 fics at Gossamer, with some different ones at AO3, fanfiction.net, and her website. You might know her from her very good fics or as part of Musea, a collective that all wrote fic and posted X-Files fic recs. I’ve recced some of my favorites of her stories here before, including Three Times Dana Scully Didn’t Go to San Diego for Christmas and The Shirt. Big thanks to Audrey for doing this interview.

Does it surprise you that people are still interested in reading your X-Files fanfics and others that were posted during the original run of the show (1993-2002)? A little, yes. Not so much by folks who were around in those days. I sometimes go hunting for beloved stories from the early years, both those I read and loved, and those I never got around to. I am always delighted to hear that later generations of fans have stumbled across my stuff, especially since I haven’t posted anything new in a number of years. It’s fantastic that both years-long fans and new ones are out there continuing to rec fic from all eras, and to maintain archives for fans yet-to-be born. What do you think of when you think about your X-Files fandom experience? What did you take away from it? What did you take away from your experience with X-Files fic or with the fandom in general? It may sound corny, but the main thing I think of, and the thing that has ultimately been most valuable and lasting, has been the friendships. The feeling of having found a tribe – not just of TXF fans, but of other people who could be as enthusiastically engaged as I was (if not more so) with fictional stories and characters – was mind-blowing. Since I was a kid, I had often mulled over the books/movies/TV I loved and speculated internally about what happened off the page or off-screen, or created new stories for characters in my head. But, except for an elementary school phase where I and my two BFFs regularly played Charlie’s Angels, I hadn’t engaged in that kind of gleeful immersion in a fictional world with others until TXF fandom. My involvement in fandom followed pretty quickly from getting hooked on the show, so for me, it’s all one big ball of experiences. Even as my interest in/involvement in fandom has waxed and waned over the years, I’ve been lucky to remain friends with wonderful people who I originally connected with as fellow fans.

Social media didn't really exist during the show's original run. How were you most involved with the X-Files online (atxc, message board, email mailing list, etc.)? What got you involved with X-Files fanfic?

My initial entrée to the fandom was through fanfiction. I didn’t get interested in the show until mid-season 5. Around the same time, I read an article in a zine called Might (co-founded by Dave Eggers) about this thing called fanfiction that people would write and publish online. At first I thought it was satire or a joke – the fic cited involved Wilma Flintstone and a polished sabre tooth, as I recall – but then realized this was an actual thing. So I figured that a show then at the peak of pop culture must have fanfiction, and I went looking. Early on, I scrolled atxc on a daily basis and downloaded stories. But I didn’t engage in discussions about the show on Usenet, since I only knew how to access it with my Earthlink email client, and I didn’t want to post using my real name.

Later, I set up a pseud address with Yahoo and subscribed to a couple of email fanfic/discussion lists, and stayed subscribed to those for years. There was also a period in there somewhere – of maybe only a year or so, when I think about it – when I’d often nerd out into the wee hours with other fans via IM chat groups. That was around the time the small writers’ collective Musea was founded, and we were active for several years after the show’s initial run. In the early aughts, I followed many authors to LiveJournal and eventually set up my own account and stayed involved in fandom that way, until it mostly dispersed as well. What was it that got you hooked on the X-Files as a show? In a word: Chemistry. I had casually watched a couple of episodes during the first four seasons, but I’m not a huge sci-fi/horror fan at heart, and the story lines didn’t immediately grab me. But I happened to tune into The Red and the Black in 1998, and BOOM. For the first time, the intense layers of emotion and attraction between Mulder and Scully really struck me – and then of course, upon further viewing, I realized it was unmissable, an essential element in the fabric of the show. As a wise woman once said, a switch had been flicked. Mulder and Scully’s magnetism was like nothing I’d ever seen, and though I eventually came to appreciate the storytelling, humor, production values, and other components that made the series so successful, watching those characters interact has always been what kept me coming back. Were you involved with any fandoms after the X-Files? If so, what was it like compared to X-Files? I was part of a list-serv discussion group for The West Wing for a while, which was a fun melding of character and plot analysis with political discussion. Later, I got into the House, MD fandom, again mostly as a fanfic reader/writer. I was finding that other fandoms, unlike TXF, were more dispersed, the networks of people structured more loosely, if at all. There were fanfic and discussion communities on LiveJournal, and fanfiction.net was the other main hub for posting and reading, but if there was anything centralized like Gossamer, Ephemeral, or the Haven, I never found it. Within all those fan communities, as in TXF, there were partisans for various characters and pairings, and flame wars erupted over plot developments that outraged this faction or that. One main difference was that those other shows had larger, ensemble casts and more varied subplots. So on one hand, there was more opportunity to explore back stories and multiple perspectives. In House MD in particular, there were several entrenched rival shipper camps, which were about equally grounded in canon, rather than TXF’s central ship. I was less into TWW fic, but my impression was that readers were less militant about their pairing preferences than TXF or House fans. Who are some of your favorite fictional characters? Why?

I was deeply fascinated by Greg House for several years. (And the love-hate chemistry between him and Lisa Cuddy was a strong draw for me.) House MD came early in a wave of TV shows centered on anti-heroes, and Hugh Laurie brought amazing complexity and thoughtfulness to the character.

Philip and Elizabeth Jennings (The Americans) are a lethal pair of antiheroes. The inherent moral conflict of a sympathetic narrative from their POVs, and the global political conflict they embody was TV catnip for me. The internal struggles at the hearts of those characters were so exquisitely written and performed, they completely fascinate me.

The West Wing felt so much like a show created specifically for me. I’m especially fond of story arcs and scenes that centered on CJ Cregg, Charlie Young, and Josh Lyman. Though I loved Martin Sheen’s human portrayal of Jed Bartlet, the fact that he was the President always made him a little untouchable in my mind. But CJ, Charlie, and Josh were basically hard-working functionaries who were ambitious and idealistic and funny and flawed, and they spoke to me. What is your relationship like now to X-Files fandom? Do you ever still watch The X-Files or think about Mulder and Scully? Do you ever still read X-Files fic? Fic in another fandom?

I do continue to think about Mulder and Scully and watch episodes somewhat often. I’ll sometimes run a favorite episode as background when I want something comforting on. I read TXF fic pretty regularly, which can inspire me to go back and watch a particular episode or story arc I haven’t thought about in years. Just recently, I started listening to The X-Files Diaries podcast (@XFDPodcast, @admiralty-xfd), and that’s a fun dive into the characters, and how other fans react to and interpret episodes.

Every once in a while, a TV show or movie – and more particularly, the characters – will grab my attention and make me curious about how fanfic writers have interpreted the original material. Random example, I saw Singin’ in the Rain for the first time in a theatre a couple of years ago, and the chemistry of the three leads sent me to AO3 as soon as I got home. I also loved the first season of Mercy Street and found some well-done stories in that fandom. I usually peruse the Yuletide gifts every year and have been amazed by the sheer variety, creativity and cheekiness of the output. There are a bunch of other shows I’ve followed faithfully, and sought out fanfic – Broadchurch, The Killing, Agents of SHIELD, Elementary, The Good Wife. Although I’ve found some well-written stuff in those fandoms, I’ve rarely gotten the same charge from them as reading TXF fic. Do you have any favorite X-Files fanfic stories or authors?

syntax6 (@syntax6) – Universal Invariants/Laws of Motion. I’d also shout out to syn’s Hunter fics, too – well worth reading even for those who have never seen or particularly loved the show itself.

JET – I re-read Small Lives Awake every year around Thanksgiving time. Other annual holiday re-reads: Revely’s The Dreaming Sea and Jordan’s Through the Fire (both set at Halloween).

Amal Nahurriyeh’s Casey universe – the rare post-col fic that felt hopeful, made extra intriguing by a kick-ass original character. [Lilydale note: the series starts with Machines of Freedom and has lots of additional fics and snippets.]

Prufrock’s Love – Finding Rokovoko was genuinely terrifying and tender.

melforbes (@melforbes) – Seaglass Blue is a recent favorite, lyrical and bittersweet.

These are just a few (apologies to those that didn’t come to mind immediately). Fortunately for readers, there’s an astonishing number of authors who have written in TXF fandom whom you can depend on for a good yarn, insightful character study, and/or ingenious “fixes” where 1013 went awry.

What is your favorite of your own fics, X-Files and/or otherwise?

Probably the two set in my own (former) backyard of Southern California: Enivrez-vous and Ravenous. I’d first read the Baudelaire poem that was the source of the former’s title back in university days, so I was tickled to be able to use a few lines as an epigraph. Do you think you'll ever write another X-Files story? Or dust off and post an oldie that for whatever reason never made it online? It’s not out of the realm possibility. I’d meant for “Three Times Dana Scully Didn’t Go to San Diego for Christmas” to be followed up with “And One Time She Did.” In fact, the idea for that never-finished story was what inspired “Three Times” in the first place. I have a couple of scenes sketched out and – unusually for me – even know exactly how to end it. Every year, November rolls around, and I think I should finish and post it…maybe in 2021?

Where do you get ideas for stories? Sometimes it’s from my environment. “Enivrez-vous” and “Ravenous” describe places that I’m fond of, that made me want to place Mulder and Scully there. “What Not to Wear” has that element too – I set it in Memphis as a tribute to a great trip there with a sister Musean. But WNTW was also inspired by a kink challenge in a years-ago LiveJournal thread, so sometimes ideas come from fandom discussions or even other fanfics. In the House MD fandom, a fic by another writer made me want to continue the story, and the author kindly allowed an authorized sequel. What's the story behind your pen name? I wanted my pseudonym to sound like it could be a real person’s name – or at least, maybe like a romance writer’s pen name – rather than an online handle. I also wanted to use a slightly obscure fictional character, to amuse anyone in the know. I had long had a bit of an obsession with Whit Stillman’s 1990s film trilogy, which started with Metropolitan; the 3rd installment, Last Days of Disco, came out the same year I started down the TXF rabbit hole: 1998. The central heroine of Metropolitan – who is mentioned in or makes a cameo in the other two – is Audrey Rouget, a lover of Austen and, eventually, a book editor. I altered the spelling of the last name as a nod to every writer’s companion, Roget’s Thesaurus. Do your friends and family know about your fic and, if so, what have been their reactions? I have a few close friends – from outside TXF fandom – who know that I’ve written fanfic. I don’t know if they know my pseud; if they do, or if they’ve ready any of the fic, they haven’t said so to me. They are fannish sorts themselves, but not really TXF fans. A smattering of other friends and family members know or could intuit that I’ve been a fangrl on some level for years. My boss, whom I’ve known for about 3 years, recently mentioned off-handedly that she was really obsessed with TXF “back in the day,” and I am DYING to know if she got involved in fandom, but don’t think I’ll ever work up the courage to ask.

Is there a place online (tumblr, twitter, AO3, etc.) where people can find you and/or your stories now? Most of the X-Files stuff continues to be generously and steadfastly archived by Forte at The Basement Office. The House MD stories and some TXF things are at fanfiction.net; same for AO3. If ever post anything new, it will probably go to TBO and AO3. I really ought to get it all together in one place, one of these days…

(Posted by Lilydale on April 6, 2021)

[phoebehalliwell]

Pls write mini essays about phoebe + next gen and paige + next gen!!

word i’d said i’d to this then i forgot i’m doing it now i’m gonna start of with both phoebe & paige + their kids and then i’ll burn through the list

okay so for starters phoebe i think phoebe’s family wins like the “most functional” award it’s not like a landslide win y’know it’s not like piper and paige’s families aren’t function but this family is comprised of an empath advice columnist, a cupid relationship therapist, and three cupid-witches. like, they’re all kinds experts of communication and self-awareness and understanding and relationships and bond blah blah blah they being said of course they have their issues but in general it’s relatively smooth sailing there is of course the flipside when friction usually generate from the kids starts to spiral out of control and phoebe & coop will be like let’s use our words help us to understand you and where you’re coming from do some breathe exercises and the girls would be like no!! can’t we just argue like a normal family!!! can’t you just get angry at something!! but those are um few and far between. and of course like phoebe really really wanted to be a mom we all saw we all didn’t enjoy it but that’s very much canon she really wanted three daughters she got that so i think phoebe was very much like Prepared for motherhood (like as prepared as one could be). like it wasn’t like she thought it was going to be smooth sailing but like she was ready to face any challenges that could be thrown at her she was ready to put all of her love and effort into this one thing and i think for her like Mama Era from pj’s birth in 07 to peyton starting preschool in 2013 i think she really like almost exclusively worked from home she was really hands-in she was in all the mommy groups and the pta and the whatnot but like. y’know that’s like 6 years. and phoebe really loves her job. so i think she’d really have a career renaissance once all of the kids were in school i think she’d slowly start to dive back into column work i think this is when she’d start to write her book after the success of that one i think she wrote another one i think she has a fiction series posted under a pseudonym that is more of a ya magical adventure series (which paige designs all the covers for) i also think she and coop have a podcast together maybe run through the bay mirror maybe independent the point is she’s really popular (i also think she’d be the wealthiest out of the three sisters bc she makes bank and so does coop as a therapist for those not in the states therapy is like really fuckin expensive as i recently learned y’all do not know. it’s a bitch. but yeah they got money. but that’s not the point here. the point is she’s really popular). book tours, doing stuff with the podcast, guest appearances on a variety of tv shows, i think phoebe’s not like. at home a lot. or at least she’s home the least out of piper her and paige. and it’s not like her kids really mind like she is just a beam away and she always makes it to important events (and unimportant ones!) like she takes photos before every school dance and she throws birthday parties and she really dos try to make it to all of the kids soccer games but like. she’s not always just like. home all the time. and i think she’d really love to have a lot of emotional heart-to-hearts with her kids but that doesn’t always happen. if pj needs an emotional heart-to-heart, she’s gonna talk to her dad. is parker needs an emotional heart-to-heart, she’s gonna talk to pj. is peyton needs and emotional heart-to-heart she’ll position herself on the couch late at night when she knows phoebe will be coming home and just sorta sit there like waiting for phoebe to show up and go oh honey what’s wrong bc uhh peyton will not like. go to someone to talk about their problems. she has to wait to be asked. that’s just the type of person she is. lucky for her, phoebe’s an empath so she can like tell when baby peyton’s in distress but lbr she usually doesn’t need it because like peyton perches in such an Obvious manner like hi mom come comfort me please : ( even tho she’ll never like say it out loud. i think phoebe’s also like proud of her girls and their practicing of the craft bc she remembers how she felt about magic hell how she still feels about magic and she’s always telling them like follow ur heart and love is ur greatest strength (and the power of three will set you free, of course) bc her girls are cupitches y’know it’s more true than ever but like. lowkey tho. it fucking terrifies her. magic like takes, man. a lot of people she knows have died. and she just like. she doesn’t want to tell her kids no bc it was grams controlling nature that made her rebel so much so like she wants them to be able to come to her when they have a magical problem and she knows that if she tries to stop them or tells them they’re out of their league they’ll probably just stop telling her things so she doesn’t she tried to be supportive but jesus fucking christ he gets so scared sometimes. she gets so scared.

paige on the other hand had nowhere near the same experience with motherhood as phoebe bc well i think paige has the most complex relationship with motherhood set aside the fact that her kids are the only unplanned ones out of the entire next gen, she also like. she was a shit child. she was mean and violent and an alcoholic. she had committed so so many crimes before she was even 17. and she had a really good mom!! she had a mom who loved her and tried her hardest to support her and keep her from falling off the deep end who loved her unconditionally she had the best mom and she was still just a little shit! and i think that really fucks her up. like, looking back on it, she can’t imagine half the stuff she put her mom through. she was really cruel. and like!!! her mom was a good mom!! so paige doesn’t know she doesn’t know what she’s supposed to do. how she’s supposed to stop her kids from turning out like her. what can she do so she doesn’t have kids who end up exactly like how she was. henry isn’t like a load of help her bc henry Also never knew his parents and he jumped around from foster home to foster home and like never really felt like had a family until paige. and then like in his whole parole schtick he was definitely a hard ass he was definitely an Authority Figure bc hell that was the only way adults could get him to listen to them when he was a kid so he just kinda emulated that. however after meeting paige and really getting a feel for her whitelighter side and how she handled these situations i do think henry switched up his vibes he made the necessary changes. i also think like henry like no he wasn’t planning on having kids but i think he was really excited to become a father like he was gonna have a family like god he always wanted a family he was gonna teach his kids to play catch and he would host birthday parties stupid birthday parties with themes and balloons from safeway and friends there and goody bags the full kit and kaboodle like henry would fuckin go to bed each night dreaming about how he’s gonna do all these familial things he never got to do. bc he didn’t have a family. but paige did. she got all those things. and she was still fucked up!! so i think the conkclooshun paige landed on was that her mom tried to hard to like. like her mom saw her potential and always strived to push her to be that perfect version of paige that she saw her wonderful little angel when paige really wasn’t that paige wanted to be seen for what she was not some vision in her mom’s head and maybe that’s why she would like get drunk and steal a cop car bc she wanted her mom to see the girl standing right in from of her not an angel just paige. so paige was like. okay. i’m no gonna project onto my kids. they’re gonna be like “charmed ones” (there’s only two of them but w/e they’re really powerful witches) but i’m not gonna. i’m not gonna see them as that. i’m going to try to see them as they are and i’m going to be their Mom. i’m not gonna be some distant ethereal figure which is kinda how she felt a lot of the charges she brought to magic school viewed her bc she was this mythic charmed one and she was this she was that i think paige didn’t want to be her daughters’ whitelighter bc she didn’t want a “professional” relationship with them. there was no way she could advise her own kids the way she could advise her charges, she’s simply way too close to the situation. and she doesn’t want her kids to view her like that. she doesn’t want to be their whitelighter, she wants to be their mom. and um this really does work for the most part like she & her kids will like sit on the couch and just like yuck it up you know like the mitchell clan really is a tight knit they do all love spending time with her but. like her method of parenting really works with tamora. not so much with kat. kat’s a lot more witchy than tam is she’ll actively go out and seek out trouble she pursues the craft with a very similar hunger to what we saw in paige s5 and paige kinda hates it. like. god okay she gets it she gets it she really does. but kat’s a kid!! she’s just a kid and if she keeps looking for trouble she’s gonna get herself killed and i think whenever out god knows where doing god knows what paige just remembers that time she had to watch chris bleed out on the bed with nothing she could do. and how she- how if that happened to kat- she- she couldn’t go on anymore. that’s basically the fact of the matter. if she lost a child, she doesn’t know what she would do. give up. probably. and it’s again sorta like the inverse we see with phoebe’s free range demon hunting where paige gets so overprotective about it that kat just stopped telling her things. this gets doubled by the fact that you’re not my whitelighter, so why should you even care! and kat does view it as like a lack of faith from her mother (which is one of the reasons why kat and chris are so close) and she just wants to. she wants to prove herself. she wants her mom to see her for all that she could be, instead of just the place she’s in right now. and i do think as time passes paige learns to sort of let go of this control i think her and kat have the most difficult relationship but paige letting kat leave to take a gap year and explore the world was like a major step and kat acknowledges this to an extend she gets it was difficult for her mom but she really has no idea how much paige panicked how much it took every inch of her self control not to go out and drag kat back home because yes baby birds have to leave the nest eventually but these baby birds have a very high stab rate. um jumping over to her relationship with henry jr i think she does encourage his studying of the craft he is the most well read out of any of the next generation with wyatt taking a close second hell henry jr even knows like a bit of latin this kid is wicked smart And bonus round he’s aware he’s mortal. like yeah paige can kinda sense that it does ruffle his feather, but henry jr knows when to step away. again, henry’s really well-read. he’s brushed up on the family history. he knows the warren line is close friends with death. as a bit of a bonus round but also to give paige some peace of mind, she did give henry a basic charm that grants him the same high resistance that all witches are born with as well as cloaks him from magic bc like paige and henry sr both knew this mortal baby was gonna have a wicked high kidnap rate so they figured y’know best do all they can to Stop That from happening. the enchantment that henry jr has is a necklace it’s the same one paige wore throughout the show. bc i’d like to bring that back.

okay next gen time wyatt i think wyatt likes paige more than phoebe it’s not like a competition or anything it’s just gun to his head that’s who he’d chose bc paige really is like this witchlighter she walks the line between being charmed and being a whitelighter that wyatt can really take a lot of inspiration from he just doesn’t have that with phoebe phoebe’s a little bit more of like a love guru and wyatt’s got a weird relationship with love bc he keeps flinging himself headfirst into it and keeps getting bruiser bc of it what wyatt actually doesn’t know is almost all of the advice that has gotten him out of these troubling times has almost all been sourced from phoebe piper usually goes to her with advice when it comes to all that i mean i don’t think wyatt would like to know that post-breakup wyatt is just like kinda embarrassing he doesn’t want to know that’s being shared with the family of course he already knows he just doesn’t want confirmation

chris surprisingly closer with phoebe probably bc she’s an empath and again she has this whole free range witchcraft style that she has going if chris has a question he needs to ask somebody he’ll usually ask phoebe bc she’s the only one who won’t report back to leo bc again she’s an empath she gets it she knows what’s going on and she knows he just needs time and he and leo need some good honest communication paige also gets that but paige also watched chris die so yeah no she’s gonna snitch

melinda about and even tie melinda gets a lot of witchlightering advice from paige on finding harmony there but she’s also an empath she she spends a lot of time learning her craft from phoebe and how to focus that and apply that power to her witch/whitelighter abilities in ways paige can’t really teach her bc paige’s power is more physical that psychic/emotional. but it is like paige who gives her the groundwork on like. getting it. i think gun to her head if she had to choose she’d choose phoebe just because of those times they’d go out and do “field practice” where they go somewhere interesting and crowded and sense the wave of emotions and go out and try to pick out people from the crown it’s an art of drowning out the din and finding one you need to find a way of not getting lost in the sea of everyone else’s everchurning emotions which is nice bc it grants melinda a much wanted and needy control over empathy but it’s also nice bc it’s like. fun. phoebe always makes it fun they can always have a laugh.

tamora’s not like hella close with phoebe there’s really no reason for her to be however she is baby peyton’s favorite cousin (don’t tell the rest) simply because tamora’s both like studious and cautious and baby peyton’s tired of everyone running around trying to fight demons like what about normal life irl and stuff so i think tamora would definitely like tutor baby peyton this that and the other and so like phoebe really has like a sense of respect for tamora and tamora likes being over at phoebe’s y’know it’s not like peyton’s some snot nosed kid it’s fun she likes the vibes

kat has an appreciation for phoebe bc she definitely knows phoebe had a hand in helping her mom let go of her y’know that being said it’s not like she loves to spend time with phoebe phoebe’s both an empath and paige’s sister so like she knows that anything of note’s gonna be passed onto her mom (which isn’t like. entirely true. but it is kinda true). if kat’s gonna hang out with an empath she wants it to be one on her side so she’ll always pick melinda

henry jr okay so phoebe’s actually the opposite with henry it’s kinda like her and paige swapped places here bc paige trusts her son she knows he’s really well versed in magic blah blah blah and that he’s got y’know. common sense. he’s not gonna run into some situation half cocked and get himself killed he’s aware of his mortality. phoebe on the other hand did not raise henry so she doesn’t get him the way paige gets him; a large part of her free range ideology is the fact that her kids are basically little power loaded god their charmed and as an added boost they’re also half cupid they’ve been raised in the craft they’re insanely well trained so like. she knows that they’re capable. henry does not have their advantages. so i think phoebe really tries to hold him back isn’t quite the right word but like. it kind is. she doesn’t want him doing anything magical.

pj’s in the 07 baby squad even though she’d at the younger end of the scale so she was a grade behind mellie kat and tam but that little barbershop quartet’s p tight knit i don’t think she has like insane exposure to paige as i think cupids and whitelighter work very differently like at the most basic magical level and therefore paige’s halfling experience really doesn’t do that much to help her i think she likes paige alright but like. it’s nothing compared to like wyatt relationship with paige

parker always like runs towards danger she’s got an insane amount of energy and like a fire within her i think she’s always trying to push boundaries and break the rules eg with her cupid ring becoming an athame i don’t think she straight up asked paige bc like parker definitely views all adults as narcs but with this of that ilk parker bounces questions off paige which paige just always answers like really honestly like if parker asks a question that’s like really complex and strange paige won’t give her a roundabout answer she’ll just tell her what’s up and for that parker respects paige

peyton i think sees paige the most through tam i think she likes paige i think she’s definitely privy of the whole paige/kat situation bc like who is the family isn’t but i think she really kinda takes paige’s side her peyton thinks the real worlds insanely dangerous she doesn’t like looking for trouble and her heart lowkey goes out to paige bc she knows the whole thing with kat is a matter of love it’s just something that’s hard to work with

[theculturedmarxist]

By Gary Brecher.Republished from the Radio War Nerd subscriber newsletter. Subscribe to Radio War Nerd co-hosted with Mark Ames for podcasts, newsletters and more!. Posted with THE EXILED.

There’s a gigantic, well-organized, extremely violent fascist group with tens of thousands of active members in Germany right now.

And nobody notices.

You’d think all the fascist-hunters would have sniffed it out by now, but it goes right by them as if these guys were invisible.

Which is odd, because this group is not trying to hide, or pretending to be harmless. They’re not shy about it, and it’s not just talk. They have quite a record. They’ve been rampaging for decades, and if anything they’re stronger now than they used to be. They’re closely linked to CIA and Nazi groups; they’re very busy beating, burning, and murdering minorities of all kinds, and boast quite openly about hating literally everyone who’s not a member of their own ethnic group and sect, even suggesting that members go on “hunting expeditions” against minorities which they’d already almost wiped out back in the 20th century.

This group recently held massive, open rallies in the cities of Germany, and it’s only in the last few years that the government has even attempted to ban the public symbols and salutes of this massive fascist group.

There’s something grotesquely comic about this. We have a swarm of fascist-spotters who’ve spent the last few decades waiting for fascism to emerge in Germany when it was marching around, shouting at the top of its lungs, beating minorities, celebrating genocide, and supporting ethnic cleansing right in front of their damn faces.

I’m talking about the Gray Wolves. And I defy anyone to find a more successful, out-front, no-kidding, massive, effective, ruthless fascist organization anywhere in the world. They’re adapting quickly, and even have their own fierce Wiki defenders.

Here are a few highlights from their long, successful career:

In 1978, Gray Wolves started pogroms against Alevi Kurds in Maras (also known as Kahramanmaras) in South-Central Anatolia.

Location is important here. Maras is due north of Aleppo across the Syrian border, NW of Kobane, and above all just up the road from Gazantiep. Gazantiep is a key city for right-wing Turkish nationalists, a city dominated not just by people who are ethnically Turkish but who identify as rightwing Turks of the most intensely nationalist kind. This kind of population lives in a state of siege, glories in that feeling, and is almost always willing to lash out against the sea of minorities they imagine surrounding them. That’s why Gazantiep keeps making the news as a nice convenient safe house for IS and their Turkish allies, some of whom killed 57 Kurds at a wedding in 2016.

It’s important to emphasize that people who are ethnically Turkish are not a bloc. Some of the bravest people on earth, languishing in the Turkish state’s prisons or buried in unmarked graves, are proudly Turkish by ancestry.

And then there are the young men who join the Gray Wolves. Those men are murderous fascists, and it’s cowardice to pretend not to see that.

Violence by these men against minorities has never stopped, but it hit its peak — more like the highest peak in a mountain-range of a graph — in 1978, before the Anglosphere had any handle on sectarian violence in the Middle East.

The target of the Gray Wolves in Maras was a double minority: Alevi Kurds. Alevi Muslims are often considered heretics by Salafists and other Sunni fundamentalists. They were massacred with impunity in Ottoman pogroms. Erdogan’s AK Party, which very much wants to revive Ottoman practice and Ottoman borders, openly considers the Alevi heretics fair game for the Gray Wolves’s death squads.

Those who were killed in 1978 were not only Alevi, but Kurds — and the Turkish state, which embraced Wilsonian ethnic nationality with a vengeance, a terrible vengeance, hates Kurds simply for being Kurds. So the Kurdish Alevi of Maras were a natural target twice-over.

The campaign against them built up for weeks, as pogroms usually do, with the unpredictable pace partly a result of working with unstable, violent mobs but also part of a strategy to terrorize the victims, who never know when things will go from bad (very bad) to even-worse.

The details of the massacre are very typical, sickening but not unusual:

Witnesses to the massacre.

Seyho Demir: “The Maras Police Chief at the time was Abdülkadir Aksu, Minister of the Interior in the last AKP government. The massacre was organised by MIT (the Turkish secret service), the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) and the Islamists together… As soon as I heard about the massacre, I went to Maras. In the morning I went to Maras State Hospital. There I met a nurse I knew…When she saw me, she was surprised: ‘Seyho, where have you come from? They are killing everyone here. They have taken at least ten lightly-wounded people from the hospital downstairs and killed them.’ This was done under the control of the head physician of the Maras State Hospital. Everyone knows that such a big massacre cannot be carried out without state involvement. In the Yörükselim neighbourhood they cut a pregnant woman open with a bayonet. They took out the eight-month foetus, shouting “Allah Allah” and hung it from an electricity pole with a hook. The pictures of that savagery were published in the newspapers that day. The lawyer Halil Güllüoglu followed the Maras massacre case. The files he had were never made public. He was killed for pursuing the case anyway. Let them make those files public, then the role of the state will become clear.”

Meryem Polat: “They started in the morning, burning all the houses, and continued into the afternoon. A child was burned in a boiler. They sacked everything. We were in the water in the cellar, above us were wooden boards. The boards were burning and falling on top of us. My house was reduced to ashes. We were eight people in the cellar; they did not see us and left.”(EZÖ/TK/AG)

All accounts agree that the massacre not only happened with state collusion but state encouragement. No one was punished. Many were, in fact, promoted, and hold high positions in Erdogan’s government today.

That’s the pattern here: the Gray Wolves as the street-fighting wing of the state. The parallel is closer to Indonesian Islamists in 1965 than the SA in 1930s Germany, but so many people have trouble taking any fascism clearly unless it can be soldered to 1930s Germany that I may as well make the analogy for, as they say in the academic biz, heuristic purposes.

The Gray Wolves ideology is very widespread and acceptable in many (not all) communities in Turkey. This leads to a lot of more or less lone-wolf killings (as it were), as when a soldier who was a member of the Gray Wolves killed a fellow soldier for being an Armenian a few years ago.

Older readers might remember the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II back in 1979.

The assassin was one Mehmet Ali Agca, a longtime member of the Gray Wolves.

He had a track record of killing leftists and other enemies on behalf of the “Idealists” (seriously, that’s what the Wolves call themselves):

“The weapon used in the Feb. 1, 1979, murder of a Turkish newspaper editor, Abdi Ipekci, for which Mr. Agca was convicted, was supplied by a member of the Idealist Clubs, according to the Turkish authorities. Other members helped Mr. Agca escape from prison. Still others prepared a false passport for him. And on the day of the killing, he went to the National Action Party offices.”

Note the familiar pattern: Ali Agca kills a leftist editor who’s annoying the Turkish state, gets caught, and manages to escape with a lot of help from Turkish intelligence.

They hardly bothered to hide their collusion in the escape. The Turkish state was killing a lot of leftists, a lot of intellectuals, a lot of minorities — the usual suspects for classic fascists like Ali Agca.

But as you older readers might recall, nobody in the media talked about Ali Agca as a Turkish fascist. He was, for Cold-War purposes, smeared as a Bulgarian agent.

The “Bulgarian connection” never made much sense, but it served the US/UK/Israel/Saudi intelligence agencies’ PR purposes. Remember, Turkey is NATO — very, very NATO.

NATO might survive the loss of many other small European states, but it could not survive losing Turkey. So the US/UK state will always side with the Turkish state and help them cover up fascist atrocities, blaming them on the Soviets until those useful patsies took their final dive.

Blaming Bulgaria rather than the obvious suspects, the Gray Wolves to which this thug Ali Agca had been murderously loyal all his life, was especially bizarre since there was an obvious sectarian motive: the Gray Wolves hate Christians, as they hate all other minorities, ethnic or religious, and make a point of staging provocations at all occasions when the remnants of what was once a huge Christian minority dare to show themselves in public.

Orthodox Christians are the Wolves’ preferred prey. They prefer not to do anything too bloody to high-profile Western targets like a pope, but when you squirt sectarian hate into weak minds and itchy trigger fingers for generations, some of the lads are going to pick the wrong victim.

Perhaps that’s what happened when Ali Agca went from NATO-approved murderer of leftists and Kurds, to shooting the Pope. We’ll never know, because it was quickly twisted into the ridiculous “Bulgaria did it” farce by the guys who enjoy a few cocktails with their opposite numbers from Ankara at all those NATO conferences.

And we’ll never know how much daily violence this massive fascist gang inflicts. Occasionally the Turkish state gets irritated enough to send a suicide bomber or two to kill Kurdish peace demonstrators, as it did in Ankara in 2015, killing 86 demonstrators and maiming a hundred more. But that state, our NATO ally, supports a whole madhouse of Arab and Turkmen jihadis as well as its own stable of disposable Gray Wolves assassins, so it may never be clear whether it was the Wolves, precisely, who pressed the detonators.

But it’s a statistical certainty that somewhere along the long line from greenlighting an attack like this and sending red-hot ball bearings splattering into the bodies of teenagers with peace banners, many of the men involved were members in good standing of the good ol’ Wolves.

Violence by the Gray Wolves is a constant in Turkey, usually unreported — especially now that Erdogan’s party has imprisoned thousands of journalists and intellectuals, and terrorized the rest into quietism or collusion. We may never know how many Kurds are murdered daily in the southeast of Anatolia, because no one who matters, in the Turkish state or its many powerful allies in the West (e.g. the Michael Flynn story) want you to know about it. It’s rare for those stories to make the news at all, but God knows you can’t forget them once you’ve read them.

In fact the Gray Wolves are going mainstream, and winning a lot of votes.

Fascism is mainstream in Turkey, getting more mainstream all the time — and has been since the violent dissolution of the Ottoman Empire. The Gray Wolves have quite a pedigree, a classic fascist genealogy.

Fascism is often strongest in the ruins of a defeated empire, and that was the situation in the former Ottoman Empire in the 1920s. The Empire had once ruled from Central Europe to Iraq, flowing and ebbing over the centuries (with a peak in the 16th century). At its peak, it was a fearsome conquering force.

There’s a great novel by the Albanian writer Ismail Kadare detailing the unstoppable waves of special forces that the Empire could unleash on strongpoints that held out against conquest.

The Ottomans took a long time to fall from that 16th c. peak. They were still around, partly because Britain and France always supported them against the bogeyman of the late Victorian Era, the Russian Threat.

Propped up by the two big powers of Europe, the Empire managed to survive a coup in 1908 by young officers who would go on to a career in defeat and genocide, because they guessed wrong on which side would win the oncoming Great War.

The Young Turks, as these officers were called, sided with the up-and-coming, efficient military of the neighboring empire: Germany. They guessed wrong, but not before they managed to exterminate the harmless Armenians who had recently been patronized as Turkey’s “model minority�� for their docility. And this genocide went so well, so quietly, that Hitler, contemplating the genocide of the European Jews, allegedly demanded of any squeamish nay-sayers “Who remembers the Armenians?”

You get a lot of horrible echoes like that in this story. At any rate, no one cared to remember or notice the extermination of the Armenians, but the winners at Versailles were typically vengeful against the former Ottoman Empire — not by any means for wiping out the Armenians, but for being German allies, and losing.

Britain and France, now joined by the US, were as vengeful toward the former Empire as they had been lenient during its bloody final years. Ottoman rule over non-Turkish territory was erased. For a few years there was some doubt whether even Anatolia would remain a Turkish state.

Then, as most of you know, came Mustafa Kemal, soon to become Kemal Ataturk, a hero of Gallipoli (a Turkish/Ottoman victory that stood out proudly in the great defeat).

Ataturk was a typical elite young officer of the early 20th c. Those were very dangerous people, those young officers. Often impressive individuals, but completely ruthless and immensely fond of violence. That goes for all of them, right across the Continent — Hell, right across the world.

Ataturk formed a nucleus of former officers from the Great War. (Again, the international echoes are clear enough; suffice to say that these guys were the most dangerous, formidable demographic in a few generations, perhaps since the emergence of the Napoleonic elite.) They fought well, and then they went about making Turkey a monoethnic state, without mercy.

For a while, that state was professedly secular, but since it had already killed or driven out most religious minorities, the monoethnic state became, under the AK party, avowedly mono-sectarian as well.

The current chant of the Wolves many, many supporters is “My heart is Turkish and my soul is Muslim!” You must be both: ethnically Turkish and orthodox, Sunni Muslim as well. No mercy for anyone who fails either test, which means that a lot of Kurds, a lot of Alevis, a lot of secular Leftists, end up dead or in prison.

The evolution of the Gray Wolves is a classic fascist Genesis story, and the behavior of its hundreds of thousands (perhaps millions) of supporters is classic fascist violence. Why don’t more people notice that?

I hate to speculate, because the range of possible answers all boils down to cowardice, conformity, and the odd Euro-centrism one finds in the strangest places. They don’t get noticed because they’re not European, maybe? Fascism of the 1930s was European, and that’s the only kind amateurs notice? Odd, because Turkey is European enough to be the cornerstone of NATO.

This would not be the first time that the interests of what you could call the NATO Deep State aligned all too perfectly with the more gullible pockets of the Left. In fact, it’s very closely related to the phenomenon of not noticing, or trying very hard not to notice, the sectarian ultra-violence of the Syrian “rebels.” But this time, since Turkey is a NATO ally, it’s the violence of the state and its fascist proxies that is ignored. I struggle to come up with any other reason that the Gray Wolves get so little attention.

All I know is that we have a massive, ultra-violent, highly effective, classically fascist movement killing minorities every single day, and there’s an odd silence about it.

I would love to ask one of the innumerable online fascist hunters why they hunt stray curs and slink silently past the cold stare of the Gray Wolves. Perhaps it’s not so much any of the excuses I suggested above; perhaps some hunters just prefer smaller, easy prey to the real thing.

Gary Brecher is the nom de guerre-nerd of John Dolan. Buy his book The War Nerd Iliad. Hear him read his comic memoir Pleasant Hell in audiobook format.

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[mimosaeyes]

Jon still gets nightmares.

Set in a post-canon ‘verse where they save the world, build a life together, and adopt a cat. It’s a series now! This fic (2.7k) works standalone, but is best read after the others, especially I Was Found (13.2k of softness). Everything below the cut will spoil you for the end of that fic.

Beta-ed by @emberidzae. Thank you for telling me it’s probably fine.

There is a special kind of quiet that occupies a room near two in the morning. The refrigerator hums, the water pipes whine, sirens go off in the distance — this is London, after all. But beneath that lies stillness, elusive like the space between breaths.

Jon sits on the sofa, rocking ever so slightly and waiting for... he doesn’t even know what. For peace to slip into his lungs. Be carried along in his blood, spread throughout his brain. Every time he blinks, he thinks he sees horrific afterimages on the backs of his eyelids. Tonight, his dreams have been full of bodies: burning, running, festering, falling, twisting, crying, choking. Closing in on all sides of him, until his sight was completely obscured.

Out of that apparent void, a single, all-encompassing eye mired in spiderwebs had opened, and looked directly at him. Under its scrutiny, it was as if he and Martin had never fixed the world he’d broken. Never torn themselves out of the Mother of Puppets’ plots, or away from the Ceaseless Watcher.

He exhales slowly, burying his face in his hands. Surely he should be used to nightmares by now. He’s had a long history with them, between statement givers and his own encounters with entities and avatars. The dreams were always vivid and hallucinatory, clinging to him as he struggled toward consciousness and woke gasping, often clutching the arms of the office chair he’d dozed off in. Later, after he ended the world, he’d stopped sleeping entirely. Slumber no longer carried the promise of rest.

No one remembers clearly what happened to them in the domains during the apocalypse. That collective, polyphonic torment now lives on only in Jon’s mind. He may not be affiliated with the Beholding anymore, but some part of him will always be the Archive.

The frustrating thing is that over the last year and a bit, the nightmares have been happening less and less frequently. He’d actually thought they were going away, but all week now, Jon’s been waking up screaming or sobbing, tangled in the sheets, his pyjamas soaked through with cold sweat. Martin hasn’t gotten through a night undisturbed, either. They’re both exhausted; that’s probably why he managed to slip out of bed without alerting him initially.

Just then, a slight sound makes him look to his left. What he sees is so incongruous to his mood that he begins huffing in silent laughter.

Boo, the smaller of their two cats, is using one front paw to bat at his ear, on which a large dust bunny appears to be stuck. It’s a slightly lighter grey than his fur, else Jon may not have even seen it. 

Jon knows the exact moment Boo notices him looking, because he stiffens for a second. He’s been with them for a little over a month now, and while their efforts to make him feel at ease in their home have paid off somewhat, he remains jumpy.

Jon holds perfectly still. After a few seconds, Boo returns to his scratching, but to no avail. The dust bunny somehow ends up entangled in his whiskers, stretching between them and the tip of his ear. Boo shakes his head once, twice. Then he sneezes — and arches his back, his fur standing on end. 

He had actually startled himself with his own sneeze. Jon can’t help cracking a smile, endeared and grateful for the distraction, inadvertent though it may be. 

Clearing his throat quietly, he asks, “Would you like some help with that?”

Boo ignores him, which is ideal. It takes a certain amount of trust on this cat’s part to be considered beneath notice — meaning, not a threat. When Jon gets off the sofa and tries to approach, though, Boo freezes and watches him warily. So he sits down on the floor instead, thinking.

After a while, he begins softly singing the alphabet.

Immediately, Boo’s look changes from alert to curious. Whenever Jon has had the opportunity to do so, he’s been reading aloud to get Boo used to hearing his voice. Assembly instructions for a new shelf, dubious job listings he finds online, the weekly shopping list. At first, this strategy had been very successful. Boo learned to stop diving for cover every time Jon or Martin called for each other from another room. Then came the day Jon paused midway through washing up after dinner, to find Boo sitting not two metres away from his feet. It had been a crowning moment of triumph until Martin said, “You hum songs when you do the dishes, did you know? I think he likes it.”

Jon had somehow not been aware of this habit. He was instantly embarrassed.

Not that he’s stopped since it was pointed out to him. He’s actually been experimenting. Boo may have a certain fondness for ‘90s power ballads.

Which he is hardly going to attempt at this time of night. Instead, Jon cycles through the rainbow song and that one about the teapot, making no move as Boo cautiously approaches, blue eyes huge and unblinking. When he’s within an arm’s length, Jon stops singing and offers his hand for Boo to sniff at.

Purring now, Boo lets himself be pet. Jon seizes his chance and gently pulls off the dust bunny. “Now where did you even get this?” he wonders aloud. They’re generally diligent about household chores, especially keeping the place clean. Martin has allergies, and Jon likes the routine.

Boo nudges up into his fingers and leaves a smudge of fine dust on them.

A sneaking suspicion enters Jon’s mind. He narrows his eyes at the cat. “You’ve been in the study all day,” he says. “I saw you go in. And the desk has that jammed drawer, doesn’t it?” 

They’ve been meaning to fix that. The drawer is stuck just wide open enough for dust to collect on the inside. And apparently, for a skinny, timid cat to make his hiding place.

“Well, that’s one mystery solved,” Jon muses, continuing to pet Boo despite the dirt. “Filthy boy,” he says affectionately. “Scruffy. Crumpet will refuse to cuddle with you.”

Mrow, Boo protests in his low, bullfrog-like way. He’s much less vocal than his calico counterpart, so Jon doesn’t get to hear this often.

“I suppose you’re right. She’ll probably just try to clean all this off you. She dotes on you, doesn’t she?”

He falls silent for a while, until Boo indicates with a flick of his tail that he’s had enough. Jon lets him wander some distance off and begin grooming.

In the lull of activity, the memory of his nightmare comes back with a vengeance, screaming in his brain and making him suck a breath in through his teeth. He had known their names as they struggled in their personal hells at the end of the world, had drunk his fill of their suffering and felt sated in that most inhuman side of himself. 

It’s since been ripped away, of course, taking with it the voyeuristic detachment that had, in a perverse way, protected him from the distress his nightmares now cause him. Yet it scares Jon that that had ever been a part of him. Ever found suitable soil and taken root.

He’s fine, though. Or so he keeps telling himself. These aren’t the worst dreams, after all. No, those are the ones where he loses Martin. In the Panopticon. In the house on Hill Top Road. To the call of the Lonely. To the slip of a knife in the Hunt. There were so many ways one or both of them could have not survived. Not gotten to have everything they now have together.

Jon swallows and massages his temples. “Boo,” he says, “you’re afraid of everything. Any tips?”

Boo looks at him for a long moment, then yawns.

“I see,” Jon starts to say, just as a strangled cry comes from the street below. One of London’s many foxes, probably. Jon has learned to tune out this sort of thing, but the sound sends Boo scrambling for shelter.

And he runs to Jon.

“Oh, it’s okay,” Jon murmurs. “Just a fox. It’s over now. It’s okay.” After hesitating a moment, he picks Boo up and deposits him on his lap, then encircles the cat loosely with his arms. He doesn’t squish him — it’s Crumpet who likes to be bundled up and snuggled. He just sort of surrounds Boo, letting him mash his face into the crook of Jon’s elbow.

It takes a long time for Boo’s fur to settle back down. Jon starts stroking him after a minute, keeping his movements soothingly slow. “You’re safe here,” he tells him. 

Then he sighs and repeats quietly, to himself, “You’re safe. You’re here. It’s over.”

Boo leaps off his lap, rumbles at him, then darts back into the study. Jon watches him go, shaking his head. A problem for tomorrow.

He sighs, then pauses and deliberately takes a deep breath. He holds it for a count of five before releasing the air. He imagines tension bleeding away as he does.

Martin had taught him this technique back in the safehouse in Scotland — far from the first time Jon had had nightmares, but certainly the first time anyone had been there to comfort him when he woke up. Progressive muscle relaxation, Martin said it was called. He’d used it himself during his stay in the Archives, whenever those thirteen days he spent trapped in his flat by Jane Prentiss came back to haunt him. 

“Breathe in, tense? Okay, now hold,” he murmured, sitting up in bed next to Jon, his silhouette familiar and comforting against the yellow glow cast by the bedside light. It had been on by the time Jon surfaced into consciousness, still panting and crying.

“One one-thousand, two one-thousand, three, four, five,” Martin counted for him. “Release, breathe out.” His hands ran over Jon’s shoulders, warm and soothing. “Better?”

Jon nodded. “A bit,” he said, his voice a little hoarse. He must have yelled in his sleep before Martin managed to rouse him. “Listen, you... you don’t have to do this. I can go sleep on the couch.”

Martin went silent for a moment. “The other day, when I dreamt I was back in the Lonely. Did it cross your mind to kick me out, even for a second?”

“No,” Jon said at once, shocked. “Of course not.”

“Then that’s settled,” Martin said firmly. “You’re not okay, and I can help. That’s all there is to it. On to your arms next, ready? Breathe in, tense...”

Alone in their living room, but following Martin’s instructions from before, Jon works his way through various muscle groups until he gets to his hands, at which point he clenches his fists and presses his knuckles down against the floor on either side of his thighs. That probably isn’t recommended. He hasn’t done it hard enough to hurt, though, and he needs the sensation, he thinks, to ground himself in reality. To remind himself that he’s here in their tiny apartment, and if he goes to peer out the window, the sky will not look back at him. 

He’s here and it’s long past midnight, but if he texts Daisy, she will grouse good-naturedly, then call him to ramble about how the new podcast she’s started listening to is pretty good, but could never measure up to The Archers. If he goes back to the bedroom and tells his husband he needs him, Martin will rub his eyes and get up to make Jon some tea. He’ll put in milk and sugar, which always seems too indulgent for Jon to do himself, and they’ll cuddle up with a book, or in front of the telly with the volume turned way down.

The people he loves, who love him in return, are within reach. Even when they’re not there next to him. Jon knows this in a way that has nothing to do with the Beholding. It’s just hard to remember sometimes.

He exhales one final time, and that’s when Martin appears in the doorway to their bedroom.

“Hey,” he says quietly, looking soft and rumpled in his pyjamas. His voice is rough with sleep, low with concern. “I woke up and you weren’t there. Is this a bad night?”

Another one, you mean? Jon wants to say bitterly. He bites it back; it’s only the sleep deprivation talking. “I just needed a moment to clear my head,” he says, clambering to his feet. “Let’s go back to bed.”

He honestly feels a lot better, and he thinks he’s done a decent job of sounding normal. He must still look like a mess, though, because Martin frowns and stops him from squeezing past. “Wait. Do you want to talk about it?”

Jon’s already shaking his head. “No. It was just... more of the same.” The first few times, Martin had stayed up with him while Jon stammered out the things he’d seen in his dreams. He listened and tried to reassure him, and it had helped to an extent. But the more Jon spoke, the harder Martin’s lips pressed together in that way that meant he was horrified and trying to hide it. Jon had grown all too familiar with that expression during their walk through the domains.

He clears his throat. “Really, Martin. Everything’s fine.”

“Then why’d you come out here by yourself? Why didn’t you wake me?”

“Well, I thought one of us should get some sleep,” Jon says drily, only he’s tired, so it comes out rather snappy.

Martin cants his head at him, his brows pinching together. Jon can practically hear the gears whirring in his mind. He shifts uncomfortably.

“I know it’s been a bad week,” Martin says at last, softly, “but please don’t shut me out.”

As soon as he says it, Jon knows that that’s what he’d been trying to do tonight. Keep his nightmares and guilt to himself, protect Martin from the horrors he knows about anyway. At least, that was his excuse. It’s not that Jon didn’t want his help; he did. It had simply felt too selfish to ask for it.

Jon watches him for a long moment. He thinks about fear, and love, and self-isolation. He thinks about Martin waking up in the safehouse smelling like sea spray; about telling him to Breathe, just breathe. You’re not alone. Not anymore. He thinks about a little grey scaredy-cat who feels safe with Jon, of all people.

“I won’t,” he says. “I promise.”

Martin gives him a small smile. “Okay. How can I help?”

Jon bites his lip. “Would you... would you just hold me, please?”

“Oh, Jon.” Weary though he is, Martin’s look is full of sympathy. “Of course.”

Jon follows him back to bed. As he lifts his side of the covers, Martin says, “Ah, careful. I think Crumpet’s settled in the warm spot you left.”

He peers in the darkness. Indeed she has. “Your Royal Highness,” he greets her, bowing slightly. That’s the appropriate form of address for a princess. It doesn’t roll off the tongue very easily, but Martin groans and rolls his eyes whenever Jon says it, so he keeps doing the bit.

He can never bear to move either of their cats if they look comfy, so he gets into bed gingerly and ends up pressed close to Martin, who loops an arm over him. They’re face to face, with mere inches separating them.

“Hi,” Jon says, somewhere between shy and pleased.

“Hi,” Martin says back at him, his smile colouring the word. Jon thinks they could be seventy years old and still greet each other like that, bashful and sweet as teenagers with a crush.

Jon tucks his face against Martin’s shoulder, humming in contentment at the warmth and solidity of him. After a while, he mumbles, “By the way. Boo needs a bath.”

Martin laughs. “That’ll be an adventure. Why?”

His voice is light, but betrays how tired he is. Jon shifts and presses a kiss to his cheek. “Tell you in the morning. Go to sleep.”

“Are you sure you’re alright?”

“Yes,” Jon says slowly. “I think I will be.”

[my TMA fic on AO3]

[anothersillyfanblog]

The Caveway To Hell

Day 13: Door. I did- so with something like this, you either have to take it 100% serious or go crack fic. By “something like this” I mean a Sanders Sides/Devil May Cry crossover, I did a DMC crossover, you don’t need to understand it, I don’t understand it. ------------------

Remus had been dead for two-and-a-half-years. Until, unfortunately for museum curator Janus William, he wasn’t.

“Where is it?...” something may or not have whispered from the dark.

It was late into William’s shift, and the slight patter of footsteps he kept fooling himself weren’t his own wasn’t helping the night pass any quicker. He’d done this enough times, he thought, backing against one of the glass cases, there was no reason to be nervous. Then? Then the glass smashed behind him.

A figure, somehow stood in the container, holding a recently-procured-mace and clad in an emerald-green leather jacket. Janus tried to look past the large shards of glass stuck in his face and see who this was, maybe get a better description for the police, but he didn’t get the chance. This man, antique mace in hand, ran towards the museum curator- and swung.

-Four weeks later-

Posters up for ‘the man in green’. Lots of people wear green. Roman’s heart still jumped five feet, it’s not as if ‘lots of people’ steal antique maces. Hell, the young devil hadn’t even known his brother’s mace was in a museum! If he had, HE’D have been the one committing theft. Might’ve been a different antique mace? Might not have been “Harmsway”? Maybe?

Any information contact the police.

….

Or the museum, okay so that worked.

-

“He looked like you-” Roman rolled his eyes “Are you blind? He probably had a shitty moustache and dyed thingy up here!” “Blind?!” scoffed the man sat in front of him “well yes, I just had half of my fucking face smashed in with a mace, and I couldn’t really see him properly at the time so.” “Oh, well!” Roman laughed “No need to get antsy, just sayin’. Anyway, he should look a bit like me, if he’s who I think, he’s my twin brother.” He became a lot more sombre now “except he can’t be- or really shouldn’t.” “What do you mean?” Janus asked. “My brother, Remus, died nearly three years ago now. I saw him fall from Mikaw Mountain- and that mace, Harmsway, too. I ran to the bottom of the mountain, but... Do you know how many creatures are around there? How many demons? I mean, I’m me and I struggled to make it out of there… I really- I just-” Roman took a deep breath “Look, Janus, if he’s alive then I have to see it with my own eyes. Coz It could be any random guy (who looks like me) in green leather breaking into a museum to steal my brother’s mace back!” Janus nodded “Sure could…” he smiled “so how are you going to find him?” “Oh now that!” Roman began “might take a while.”

-

It was like one of those optical illusions, at least when Logan had questioned what they were doing there: the cave looked like a door to hell (when you squinted slightly), and the door to hell looked like a cave (you didn’t have to squint for that).

Either way, as long as they were getting closer to the goal, that was what mattered. And if this goal involved trusting a devil- or half-devil, either one- then whatever.

“Can you see it?” the man in front of him wielding the mace asked. “See what?” Logan replied. Remus tutted “That’s your humanity, you, can’t see what’s standing right! In! Front! Of! You!” he hit the snowy cliffside on each pause, to the protests of Logan (who astonishingly didn’t want to cause an avalanche), and the rocks split- revealing a dark passageway. “See?” Remus began to cackle. “You think you can handle the devil world? Get ready for a funky old time, my friend!”

-

So how were Janus and Roman going to find them? Ultimately, through one very anxious ex-lab-partner. This being of Logan’s, of course.

Virgil Dagon had woken to find the lab eerily quiet. Usually he could at least hear the breathing of his work partner, but not at this moment. Right then, he went to put his food in the fridge, then- like clockwork- walked over to check on the micro-samples.

It was then he found the note.

--To Virgil: I did not feel quite right leaving without writing something, though my, shall we say, new partner encouraged against it. I have found an extraordinary opportunity, the likes of which this world cannot provide me, and so I am leaving it. There are studies to be sought elsewhere and I will seek them for I can. I wish you all the best; Logan. –

His heart leapt. Well, actually it summersaulted, but he wasn’t getting caught up on the details. Well, he was. Logan was not the kind of guy to just leave, or to ‘just do’ anything, and it really wasn’t an over-reaction to find this suspicious. Unless it was? No, Logan was the kind of guy who would skip out on meeting with friends to study, but not the kind to actively abandon those friends. Especially not…

‘This world???’

So began these new sleepless nights- sifting through his friend’s emails, notes, even the lab’s security footage (indoor and out). By the end, he had more than a few ideas.

-

A cave. Or, so Janus was told, the doorway to hell (if you squint). And it was two guys, from the same lab, in fairly close succession, both quitting their jobs to get plane tickets to Mikaw Mountain that tipped off one of Roman’s many informants.

“He’ll have a head start” Roman stared at the split in the cliff face momentarily “and quite a big one, so!” he grinned, then sprinted into the darkness, leaving Janus calling behind. It’s not like a half-blind man could keep up in a cave full of demons- he’d just have to die or run, either of which didn’t sound like a Roman problem.

In fact, without that curator guy, he was having a grand old time. It had been a while since Roman had done any serious hunting, any REAL fighting, and it was good to be back at it! Hacking at the sorts of bloody creatures he hadn’t fought since he’d last seen his brother…

Just simple, caped, skeleton-like things, many of them were- nothing too difficult- and nothing that him and his blade (Starcrossed) didn’t handle well enough. He was just propelling himself off of the cavern wall, slicing through the necks of several creatures as he leapt across, when he heard the scream. From up ahead.

So not the curator (probably).

And either way, he had already gotten started. Better finish.

-

“Is it done?” Remus whinged, almost childlike, whilst attempting to balance Harmsway on his finger. Logan didn’t look at him, remaining focused on the device in his hands “Almost…” he tapped the screen “there.” Remus snatched it off him, grinning, before instantly frowning again and giving it back. “What does, so, what does it mean, then?” “It’s a map to the door.” “But the cave is the door-” Remus started, before a figure behind interrupted. “Not quite,” Janus pointed a cane at Remus “bitch.”

The two swivelled round immediately, with Logan looking at his new partner with confusion and that partner proceeding to break out into hysterics.

“You? You?” he cackled “I can hardly remember who the FUCK you’re supposed to BE, let alone why you would know shit about the doorway to hell!” “Really?” Janus stepped closer “you, uh- robbed my museum and did this to me with a fucking mace you psychopath.” He gestured to the still-bandaged half of his visage, smiling with absolute hatred. Logan coughed “I’m not sure you have a diagnosis of psychopathy-”   “I DON’T GIVE A SHIT, HE SMASHED HALF MY FUCKING FACE IN.” he glared directly at Logan now, shouting, a tear pricking his eye. Remus tutted “Well, if you keep screaming at my friend, then I can do the other half- if you like?” he stepped forward, this time successfully balancing Harmsway on his finger. Janus turned slowly and lifted his cane- the end turning into spike after pressed a seemingly invisible button. “Or we could match- ‘if you like?’” he taunted.

Janus made very precise, delicate moves, attempting to finely swipe or jab at Remus’ figure. The latter was extremely different. He leapt dramatically out of the way of every move, then would charge back with astonishing speed- mace overhead.

They kept on like this for a while, evading and attacking, leaping and swiping, until Remus stayed still. He just stood there as his opponent dived in. And then, of course, he grabbed the cane- flinging Janus round and into the cave wall, who then let out a sharp cry.

Remus drove into him, winding him further with Harmsway, then quickly snatched his cane-arm and held it above his head. “If you want MY mace in your pussy-ass museum,” he snarled “then you can take it where it belongs.” “Thank you for the invitation but I think I’d rather, ooh, go to hell?” Roman stood, beaming, to their right.

“Hi again, Remus.” --------------------------------------------- Yeah so I haven’t finished this and, due to college, probably won’t for all of October. Also I don’t think anyone will like it so uh yeah no one will want me to continue. I had TOO much fun though!!!

[bluntache]

yo , there are a SHIt TON of people here . let’s write together .

comment a verse , i’ll write something . this blog is official semi active !

xx. ‹ canon. ›

canon dean winchester. seasons 01-15. any canon divergences have their own verses below ie. endverse, etc.

xx. ‹ canon div. ›

anytime we write canon but we change something .

xx. ‹ end. verse. ›

canon dean winchester. end!universe setting. this is dean’s verse for anything related to the apocalypse, both in canon (end!verse) and alternate universes such as american horror story apocalypse or just apocalyptic au’s.

this dean fed into his dark desires after sam said yes to lucifer. using sam’s betrayal as an excuse to get his hands dirty without worrying about retribution or guilt. without any real ties to family or friends, dean allows himself to go very far into the dark hole of desire and destruction. using his brother as his excuse for his actions – we had to do it - or lucifer will win , mentality. he is abusive and toxic towards castiel as well as others .

xx. ‹ ordinary. ›

alt. universe dean winchester. this verse does not have supernatural components. dean is a baseball player, taking 18 hours at university, living in studio apartment he fixed it up and is renting to own atm, working part time at a diner as a cook, also working saturdays at a local autobody shop as a intern.

is a baseball player, taking 18 hours at university, living in studio apartment that was pretty trashy but he fixed it up and is renting to own atm, works part time at a diner as the cook, also works saturdays at a local autobody shop as a intern.

mary winchester was accidentally burned alive when a loose wire sparked upstairs in the baby room causing it to fill with smoke. incredibly baby sam had crawled from the room and woke up dean next door who started screaming when he saw the flames. his father screamed for him to carry sam outside and ran into the burning room for their mother. john was thought to have suffered from smoke poisoning due to believing he had seen a demon in the smoke and flames. after a month or so john gained custody of his kids again. sadly he was never the same and went on ‘hunts’ often. leaving the children unattended for weeks sometimes. when dean was 17 his father was busted when a hotel clerk called authorities after seeing dean break into a vending machine and notices the father had not returned. dean was not charged as the police believed neglect was apparent and john never came back. his body would lady be found near his car, police believed he tried to commit suicide since the smell of sulfur was in the area and the cars gas tank had been drained (as if left on until the engine died).

dean was given the impala and the news. sam had already been in foster care at this point and was integrating well. he was at a good school with a good family and while they invited dean over often dean knew he had to make sure his life turned around. sam encourages him to go to college and dean decided to after sams foster dad said he would help him talk to the college about financing.

dean made friends quick and while most didn’t connect dean to the death in the papers some did and offered a helping hand. he was able to find a studio apartment through a local ad and was offered it dirt cheap if he would do the renovations. dean accepted even though he knew the place was a dump and would take a lot of tlc.

the baseball coach spotted dean quickly and asked if he’d ever played sports. dean mentioned his training with his dad and easily knocked one out when practicing with the team. he was offered a walk on spot and a minimal scholarship of covering 12 hours of college credit per semester.

he picked up a job as fast as he could at a local dive joint that was desperate for a cook. they threw him in with no experience but the customers weren’t picky and he could cook most of the basic slop people wanted. he worked hard and the waitresses appreciated his take no shit demeanor if an unruly customer came in.

dean tries to reconnect with bobby but it takes. along while to find him again through the phone book. when he does eventually bobby offers him a place with him but dean declines wanting to stay close to sam. bobby’s known for coming to visit and watch the games. most people assume that’s deans dad and he’s happy to let them think it.

he’s going for his basics right now but has several paths he’s considering. photography, wielding, autobody or business. he keeps very little around him. he’s a minimalist and always feels like he’ll have to leave at any minute. afraid of commitment. desperate for a connection. very confident but got that southern gentleman charm. he keeps an old photo of his parents in his wallet and one of sam in the impala.

xx. ‹ pre. canon. ›

pre-canon dean winchester. this takes place prior to the pilot and generally is either teen or young adult dean prior to meet up with sam at college to find their father.

xxi. ‹ demon!dean. ›

canon dean winchester. deanmon era. anytime dean is a demon, or knight of hell. in this verse, he is typically devoid of emotions that drive him normally : such as guilt, etc. he still holds somewhat of a moral compass, killing those who don’t follow the rules or hurt children / rape women, etc. follows canon supernatural but most threads turn divergent fairly quickly.

xxi. ‹ dean smith. ›

alternate universe dean winchester. dean smith. a verse for dean in which he is dean smith, adopted successful child of ellen & bobby smith, loving brother to jo. he loves golfing and fancy suits. eats salad everyday & is a ceo of his fathers fortune 500 company which specializes in cars with new age technology , similar to tesla .

xxi. ‹ moc!dean. ›

canon dean winchester. mark of cain era. anytime dean has the mark of cain , he is drawn to violence and blood shed. he’s drawn to dark, terrible things such as killing, violence, hardcore sex, and other taboo things. he feeds off the energy and has trouble controlling himself . if castiel or sam is not around he’s likely to kill without pause.

xxi. ‹ purgatory ›

canon dean winchester. purgatory setting. anytime dean is in the realm of purgatory. can be canon divergent but typically written with benny or castiel.

xxi. ‹ michael!dean. ›

canon dean winchester. michael!dean era. anytime dean’s body is taken over by michael, or in which michael is sharing dean’s vessel with or without permission. covers both canon timeline and canon divergence regarding michael.

xi. ‹ coach. ›

alternate universe dean winchester. dean works at a high school or university (plot dependent). in high school threads, he is a head football coach and gym teacher. he sometimes teaches history or health depending on what the school needs that year. in university he is the asst coach, defensive coordinator, and sometimes teaches freshman fitness courses .

xi. ‹ hitman. ›

dean left his fathers house at 18 and went straight into the military. with his moms untimely death his father slowly lost his mind, beginning to believe in conspiracy theories, supernatural beings, and was becoming extremely paranoid as well as beginning to buy guns. dean knew he needed to get out if he wanted to gain custody of sammy somehow and he saw the army as his out. when testing on the exams the army found he had a certain aptitude for …. certain jobs… he started out as a contract hitman and cover up guy. after a while he retired from the military and went private with his time and money. he’s got one assistant and no other contacts. as far as the world knows, he’s still with the army. as far as the army knows, he’s off the grid. sammy is placed in foster care within one year of dean joining the army. dean is granted leave temporarily and sam is given to bobby singer while dean works , sending large sums in various forms during the times he is gone.

xi. ‹ witch. ›

alternate universe. dean winchester is a witch who is able to communicate with biologically living things that use photosynthesis . his brother sam , a pyrokenetic , tragically started a house fire that took the lives of his entire family minus dean who was found cocooned entirely by crisp , burnt foilage and limbs . the tree outside his window had inexplicably created a barrier between him and the fire. taken in by bobby singer , who’s deceased wife had (he found out later) been blessed with divine sight , he tried to learn and hone his skills . he eventually opens his own holistic apothecary where he offers mixtures based on the ailments of his customers . he known to be called upon by those who know his true nature for cures and consults.

xi. ‹ bounty hunter. ›

ffxv. crossover universe. dean winchester is a hunter without family. found among the remnants of what was assumed to be a freak house fire or arson, he was taken in and raised by hunters . after leaving their safety net and moving into a small cabin built by the lake not far from cindy’s shop, he stays there fending off wild monsters and animals. living as best he can in isolation.

sw. crossover universe. dean winchester is a bounty hunter. his mother was a bounty hunter as well but died while attempting a job. his father, worked for the first order / rebellion (you pick) but was caught in an explosion not long after , leaving sammy behind to join the first order / rebellion as a researcher and design specialist. dean refused to be entrapped by a label and left searching for meaning and his place in everything.

loz/botw. crossover universe. dean winchester is a hylian hunter on a mission. he’s heard rumors of a great hero and wants to learn the ways of the champion. his brother sam, inspired by the princess, travels with him and they document all they can find. together they hope to unlock the mystery to their mother’s disappearance. there father blames a dark spirit and talks about it constantly, convincing those in the villages he is mad. their mother traded her soul with the dark statue in hateno in order to pay a debt owed by her family. john, and his boys do not know of the statue and believe her to be dead or that she has abandoned them.

teen wolf. crossover universe. dean winchester is a hunters son and comes to beacon hills in order to aid chris argent in his hunting of werewolves. along the way he befriends allison argent and becomes intertwined with the complex story of the pack. he will not know of the pack in the high school unless you tell him . his loyalty will always be to allison over anyone else .

xi. ‹ dark!dean. ›

canon divergent. dean’s been fucked up since he can remember. if it’s nasty, he wants it. if it’s wrong, it feels right. he’s tired of babysitting and he’s tired of taking orders. veering off on his own more often than not, he’s got a secret. he likes blood on his hands, black blood, red blood, he’s not picky. he just wants the raw freshness of a kill on his hands. his weapon of choice is whatever is available but his knife is always on him. warm blood helps wash away the bad memories. and sometimes, it helps him forget the fire.

in this verse , the fire happens and all events still occur. however, dean is not the same as canon dean . instead he took the smarting abuse of his father one last time, citing to himself that the constant verbal and emotional abuse was enough to justify the bullet to the back of his head. he left him there. dressed it up real nice, like a present, even faked the scent of sulfur. ‘demons’ were real, so his dad said. dean figures his demons must be pretty real too, but now they’re dead, buried 6 ft under.

he gets off on dominance / power / and killing . he is not concerned with sammy staying alive unless it helps him in some way. after his father dies he gets a lot worse . sam (most times) turns into a conscious of sorts that he uses to guide his actions (wwsd? -what would sammy do) . he only does this if he needs to keep a low cover. when castiel comes along , dean finds him a pain in the ass but grows to enjoy him. over time he wants more and more to own the angel and to influence him to become more like him. deadly.

xi. ‹ anything but business‚ sheresists. ›

private verse with @sheresists .

[starcitizenprivateer]

Phantom Bounty: Part One

Writer’s Note: Phantom Bounty: Part One was published originally in Jump Point 3.1.

Two hundred and sixty-five days. That’s how long they’d been hunting the Phantom. It seemed like they’d entered a thousand of these tiny, dark, hole-in-the-wall taverns, seeking leads from shifty informants, always just too far behind. Mila leaned against the metal prefab wall and tried to breathe through her mouth, but the scent of stale alcohol and vomit flooded her nostrils anyway.

Rhys stood at the bar, towering above the other patrons, his broad back all she could see as he haggled with the owner for information, likely bribing away the last of their meager credits. Her stomach churned just watching him. They had to be close this time. Because if they didn’t land that massive bounty soon, they wouldn’t be able to afford so much as a mug of this dive’s swill.

Mila ran a hand through her straight brown hair, and a toothless patron leered at her from his stool at the bar. She crossed her arms and shot him a challenging glare, which unnerved him enough that he looked away and took another swig of his drink.

A younger man with a ripped synth liavold-skin jacket and questionable hygiene inched his way up to the bar and stood off to the side, pulling on the silver hoop in his ear. Typical.

There was usually at least one lowlife in a place like this — wearing synth-skin of nearly extinct creatures. They thought it made them look badass, like they didn’t fear the law, like they were above it. Mila’s nails bit into her palms, and she forced herself to unclench her fists. He probably didn’t even know it was a fake. Real liavold skin never came in that shade of grey.

The lowlife stepped closer to Rhys, clearly trying to eavesdrop, and Mila pushed away from the wall to go run him off. But Rhys finished haggling before she made it to the bar, and he gestured at her toward the exit. Relieved, she followed him outside.

The yellow-white sun had finished its descent while she and Rhys had been inside the tavern, and one by one the century-old light globes running the length of Tevistal’s streets flickered on. A loud murmur echoed down the alleyway, voices in the night, evidence of the crowd that had been gathering a few streets over in the square to celebrate the new year.

Damn Traveler’s Day. Sure, the huge crowd afforded her and Rhys an easy way to blend in, but that went both ways. If they could stay low profile, then the Phantom could do the same, slipping away like always.

Rhys grabbed Mila’s arm as the tavern doors swung closed behind them, and she gazed up at him: at the sharp angles of his face, his tousled brown hair, at the rough beard he’d allowed to grow in as they’d chased the Phantom from system to system, barely sleeping.

Rhys’s green eyes were bright, glinting in the light of the globes as he leaned down close. Mila warmed at the look in them. If she was being honest, their recent sleepless nights had less to do with the Phantom and more to do with . . . other things. They had been sharing a bunk for almost a month now.

“Good news,” Rhys said. “Maybe.” A familiar smirk appeared on his face.

She cleared her throat. “Oh yeah? What did he say?”

“That we might actually catch our Phantom this time.”

Mila’s pulse quickened, and her hand involuntarily dropped to the laser pistol holstered beneath her jacket. “She’s here? Still in Tevistal?”

Rhys’s smirk faded, and he took Mila by the arm and led her down the alleyway toward the main street. “I want to believe it,” he said, keeping his voice low. “I paid the fixer his fee and . . .”

“And what?”

“He gave me an address to a hostel. RoomTab’s still clicking. Said he saw the Phantom yesterday.”

Yesterday. “Why do I hear a ‘but’ coming?”

Rhys halted as they exited the alley. “But I’m not sure we can trust him. It was all . . . too easy.”

Pressure grew in Mila’s chest, and she blew out a breath, surveying the crowd at the end of the globe-lit street. Rhys had solid instincts — one of the many reasons Mila had charmed the successful bounty hunter into forming a partnership with her. With his hunches and her tech skills, they made a great team.

“Well, what do you want to do?” she asked, a note of the desperation she felt seeping into her tone. “I think we should check it out. We need this.”

“I know.”

She met his eyes. “We don’t have a choice.”

“There’s always a choice.”

“We’re too close. I say we check this out.”

Rhys worked his jaw and finally nodded. He pushed up the sleeve of his jacket, revealing the mobiGlas strapped to his forearm, and swiped his finger along the flexible clear screen to bring up a street map of Tevistal. After a moment, he concluded, “The address isn’t far from here. Travel advisory says it’s a high crime area.”

Mila snorted and swept her arm around. “And this isn’t?”

Fetid pools of water had gathered in potholes from the last rains, and the low prefab buildings here were dirty and dented, nothing like the tall, sparkling skyscrapers that had grown up further from the docks as the city matured. If Tevistal had an armpit, this was it.

Rhys laid a heavy hand on her shoulder. “Doesn’t matter. Because you’re heading back to the ship. I’ll scout this out to see if it’s legit.”

“Like hell I am. No way.” Mila flared her nostrils and shrugged off his hand. “It’s dangerous. You need back-up.”

The Phantom had single-handedly attacked seven Phan Pharmaceutical research facilities in the past year and had managed to evade every agent of the law since. The UEE wanted the saboteur — dead or alive — on charges of terrorism, murder and armed robbery. Dangerous was an understatement.

“Let me scout it out,” Rhys repeated, his voice rough.

“We go together,” Mila responded through gritted teeth.

Rhys let out a low growl, but when it was clear Mila wouldn’t back down, he shook his head and started walking.

Mila released a breath and caught up to him. Rhys never would have suggested going alone before. He’d grown more cautious, more protective since they’d taken things to the next level. Controlling, even. It needed to stop, but right now wasn’t the time to address it.

The mobi directed them away from the crowds and deeper into the dockside slums. One cramped alleyway led to another, and the scent of burning garbage wafted over them as they passed homeless transients tending fires in front of scrap-metal lean-tos.

Hovers flew overhead, their lights illuminating the dark night as they ferried those who could afford it between the docks and the gleaming towers in the more affluent sections of the city. The soothing hum of their engines reminded Mila of another life, where she’d have been the one headed for better lodgings. But that old existence on Terra was long gone. And this — the chase, the hunt, taking down criminals with Rhys by her side — this was her life now. No regrets.

When Rhys’s mobi beeped to tell them they’d reached their destination, he deactivated it and drew his Arclight. “Down that alley. Building Two. Apartment Nine.”

Mila readied her own pistol and followed him into the dark alley. The prefab self-service “hostels” that filled this area were owned by investors who probably never set foot here. If you wanted to do something shady, this was the place for it.

Adrenaline flooded Mila’s body, making her pulse thrum faster. A cracked globe flickered above the low buildings, barely illuminating the letters engraved in the walls. She activated her pistol’s nightlight, but it didn’t help much.

A slow drip echoed from somewhere, and the only other sound was the pad of their boots on the pavement. Mila pointed her light at the nearest building and found the number etched in the side.

“One,” she said quietly.

A low rustle emanated from where she’d cast her light, and she and Rhys tensed. Metal hit metal, and Mila swung her weapon toward it. A skap tore out of the darkness and skittered across their path. Another dark shape, a blur of claws and fur, raced after the rat-like creature. As the predator and prey disappeared into the gloom, the skap let out a brief, interrupted shriek.

Mila released her breath with a shaky laugh. Maybe it was an omen. Maybe this would be the night she and Rhys finally caught their prey.

“Building Two,” Rhys said, shining his light on the building where the animals had headed.

Mila barely breathed as Rhys pushed open the outer metal door. It swung in on rusty hinges, creaking in the silence.

Dim globes lit up the space automatically, revealing a narrow corridor that was strewn with litter and stank of piss.

Mila darted a glance at Rhys. His eyes were narrowed, and that hint was enough for Mila to know he was worried.

“It’s too quiet,” Rhys murmured.

“Maybe it’s pickpocket-the-pilgrims night,” Mila responded, but her sarcasm didn’t ease the tension. Rhys was right. These prefab buildings had paper-thin walls, yet the place was dead silent. Not a good sign.

They walked a few more paces, and Rhys pointed his weapon at a door on the right. “Nine. Watch my back. I go in first.”

As he turned the knob, every muscle in Mila’s body went tight. The door swung open, unlocked, and the bright lights inside flooded the dimly lit hallway.

Rhys stepped through the door, and Mila’s jumpsuit suddenly felt too tight. Sweat dripped down her back as she scanned the other doors and kept an eye on the one they’d come in.

Rhys returned, finished with his sweep of the small space. His face was a blank mask. “Empty. RoomTab’s been hacked.”

Heat coursed through Mila. She let out a grunt and shoved past him and into the room. So close. Her throat thickened, and she fought the urge to punch a hole through one of the thin walls.

The room contained a low mattress and a metal folding table and chair. A partition separated the sink and toilet from the rest of the room, but other than that, the room had been stripped bare.

Mila whirled around to face the hacked payment scanner. Wires had been ripped out and reconnected in a knot, forcing the RoomTab system to keep the water running and the lights on without payment.

“Search the room,” Mila said, her voice hard. “You find so much as a hair, you save it.”

Rhys gave her a pained look. “You know we won’t.”

“I’ll check the scanner.” Mila clenched her jaw as she rolled up her sleeve to activate her mobiGlas and access the payment scanner.

She brought up the program she’d written to hack basic systems. Technically it was illegal to use a program like this, but she’d written it so she could bring criminals to justice, hadn’t she? She’d never use one of her programs to break the law.

“This was rigged less than twenty-four hours ago. We just missed her.” Mila disconnected her mobi and slammed a hand into the room’s thin metal wall. The whole thing shuddered in response. “We need to —”

“Mila.” Rhys’s sharp voice was a warning, and she turned to face him. The heat drained from her as she saw what he held in his hands. He’d turned the folding table over and part of it rested on his thighs. A small bundle was taped to the underside of it. It let out a low beep. Then another.

Explosives.

Mila’s pulse skyrocketed, roaring in her ears. She kept her eyes glued to Rhys, to the thinly masked fear on his face, and reluctantly backed out the door. It had happened too fast. They should have listened to Rhys’s gut on this.

She paused for a moment outside the unit’s door, indecisive, then turned and took off running down the corridor.

Reaching the outer door, she threw it open and glanced back to find Rhys hurtling toward her. They stumbled into the alleyway together as a deafening blast rocked the flimsy structure, and the shock wave knocked them both to their knees. Heat rushed over them and stole Mila’s breath away.

Mila stared down at the pavement, ears ringing as the shock faded.

Rhys recovered first, panting, and pulled a shaking Mila to her feet. He held her close and searched her face. “Are you all right?”

It took Mila a second to find her voice. “Yeah. You?”

“Fine.” Rhys glanced back toward the building. “Do you think anyone else was in there?”

“You know it was empty. We gotta get out of here. If we get stopped here, we’ll be wrapped up for a day or more in questioning.”

Rhys nodded, looking as dazed as she felt, and they jogged down the alleyway and back out to the street. The explosion had summoned a small group of the transients, and they openly gaped at Mila and Rhys as they ran by.

Red crowded the edges of Mila’s vision, and her anger mingled with an old, dark pain. They needed to bring the Phantom to justice. Had to. It was a need that overwhelmed logic, a need she couldn’t deny, and Mila probably would have chased the Phantom even if the bounty had been far lower.

It was all because of Casey, even if Mila tried to pretend it wasn’t. Casey Phan, kidnapped and murdered when they were sixteen. The inept police force had just let the killer get away. Watching that crime go unpunished was the reason Mila decided to work for justice. The reason she abandoned her family to become a bounty hunter.

Casey’s father owned Phan Pharmaceuticals, and seeing the Phantom blow up the facilities, kill Phan Pharm workers, steal research . . . it had rekindled all of Mila’s old memories. She’d take out the Phantom the way she’d never been able to take out the screwed up person who had stolen Casey away.

When Mila and Rhys were almost to the crowded square, she halted and wiped the sweat from her face, still breathing hard. She was dangerously close to losing it, and she wasn’t about to have a breakdown in front of all the revelers between them and their ship.

Rhys stopped when she did. “What is it?”

“That was a set-up,” Mila said, her voice breaking. “That fixer knew he was sending us to die. Everyone must have known it. Someone warned the rest of the tenants to get out.”

She swung her body around, seeking something, anything, to take her anger out on. She slammed the toe of her boot into a piece of scrap metal and sent it flying. A sharp pain coursed through her foot, but she gritted her teeth against it and tried to ignore the burning sensation in her eyes.

She let out a little guttural scream and turned back to Rhys, her hands clenched into tight fists. “We need to beat the kak out of that fixer until he gives us the truth.”

Rhys grabbed Mila by the shoulders and leaned down so his eyes were level with hers. “Calm. Down.”

“No!” Mila pushed him away with both hands, but he held her tight and didn’t let go. She blinked against the continued burning sensation in her eyes. “We need this bounty.”

Rhys shook his head. “If that fixer knowingly sent us to a trap, I’m not about to advertise we survived it. This is his turf. We’re at a disadvantage here. You should know that.”

“We were just so close,” Mila replied, her voice shaking.

Rhys loosened his tight hold on her. “I’m calling it, Mi. This isn’t worth getting blown up over. There are plenty of other bounties to go after.”

But none like this one. Hot anger lit a fire in Mila’s chest, and she shoved Rhys away. “Coward.”

Surprise flashed across his face, and he stiffened. “Don’t be an idiot. This isn’t about bravery, it’s about survival. You wanted to hunt this one, so I agreed. For you. It was always a long shot. We’ll survive off less until something else comes along. We’re done.”

“No,” Mila shoved Rhys again, and he stumbled back a step. “We’re finding the Phantom. And if you won’t help, I’ll keep searching by myself.”

“What is it about this case that you’re not telling me? You’ve never been this stubborn about any of the others. It’s like you’re not thinking clearly.”

Mila swallowed the lump in her throat and pushed past him so he couldn’t see the look on her face. She’d have to tell Rhys about her past someday . . . when she was ready. And today wasn’t that day.

“Mila.” Rhys was by her side again. “Tell me what’s going on.”

She took a deep breath as she turned toward him, struggling to get her roiling emotions under control. He really thought he was making the right choice. But he was wrong.

“The trail was cold before,” she said, trying to keep her voice even. “Whispers of the Phantom passing through, week-old transactions. Twenty-four hours, Rhys. Twenty-four! The Phantom was in that room a day ago. We can’t stop now. We need food. Devana needs maintenance and upgrades. And maybe . . . maybe after we finish this, we can take a break, right? Go to some pleasure planet, maybe Cassel . . . together.”

Her cheeks flushed at how her own words sounded, but Rhys’s eyes grew dark, and he cupped her chin in his callused hand and tilted her head up until their eyes met.

“One more time. We’ll try to find one more lead,” Rhys conceded, his voice rough. “But if we don’t . . . we can’t afford to keep ignoring other work for this bounty. So if the next lead doesn’t work out, promise me you’ll give it up.”

Mila pushed his hand away. “I’m sorry. But no. I can’t promise you that.”

The low hum of an approaching hover caught their attention, and they both looked up. Flashing lights. Local police.

“Let’s get lost in the crowd,” Rhys said. “But this conversation isn’t over.”

Mila pushed down her irritation and followed him. She’d convince him. Because they were not quitters.

They kept up a brisk pace until they were well into the main square, where the mass of people had gathered outside the Journeymen Hall. It was an interesting spectacle — a mix of normal-looking civilians and people dressed for the occasion. Some of these Travelers liked to mimic old Earth customs, more-so than those on Terra.

A cluster near Mila and Rhys wore silken cloaks and fantastic masks adorned with feathers. Another dozen had forgone the costumes, but their walking sticks were intricately carved and inlaid with gems and smooth stones. Another pair wore gold robes with masks carved to resemble predatory animals.

Rhys pushed through the crowd, carving a path to the far edge of the square where vendors had set up booths filled with all the goods and trinkets a crowd of pilgrims could want on Traveler’s Day.

The scent of roasting meat made her mouth water and her stomach growl, reminding her she hadn’t eaten since this morning’s breakfast on Devana. Rhys seemed to be of the same mind, because he led her to where the nearest food vendor had set up a grill.

“What kind of meat?” Rhys scoffed.

The middle-aged woman winked and waved the skewer at Rhys. “Special. Is a secret.”

“Ah, right. Might that be some special skap meat from dockside?”

The woman’s face soured. “Insults! I no sell skap.”

Mila wandered over to the next table, zoning out Rhys’s haggling. He was so tight-fisted with their creds. How could he not see how important catching the Phantom was to their bottom line?

The table Mila found herself at was strewn with trinkets. Incense burners, Christian crosses, Wiccan pentagrams, Buddhist statues, and a wide range of other eclectic-looking jewelry.

A bronze-toned pendant on a long chain caught Mila’s eye. She picked it up without thinking and turned it over in her palm. It resembled the shape of an infinity symbol, and small pearlescent stones in all different shapes and sizes dangled from the end of it.

“That piece is almost as beautiful as you.”

Mila started and felt her cheeks redden as she met the vendor’s gaze. The colorfully dressed woman looked to be in her early thirties and had pale skin and ice blue eyes like Mila’s, but that’s where their similarities ended. The woman’s space-black hair was styled in dozens of tiny braids, and she wore a nose ring that glinted beneath the sparkling lights hanging from the metal awning above.

“Um . . . thanks,” Mila said. “It is a nice piece.”

“Better than nice, girl. It’s the ideal gift to celebrate the new sun. That is, if you want to have good luck. That pendant’s been blessed by Cassa.”

Mila glanced back down at the pendant, at the way the twinkling lights overhead made the colors on each stone warp and change, like tiny rainbows. She wasn’t superstitious or religious, but the pendant reminded her of a ring she’d owned as a child. She wanted to try it on, hold the stones closer to the light and see them change, but she resisted.

“What kind of stones are these?” Mila asked.

“Those stones were collected from the null point between two binary stars. Only travelers with great luck and persistence can thread the needle to reach that point.”

A low laugh sounded from behind Mila, and she whirled to find Rhys standing there, two skewers of meat in hand. “Stones collected from between paired stars, eh?”

The woman’s serious expression didn’t change. “That’s exactly what they are.”

Rhys shook his head. “Maybe you should get off this rock some time. Because nothing hangs between binary stars; one or the other pulls everything in.”

The woman leaned across the table, and a slow smile spread on her blood-red lips. “The journey can teach us much, my friend. But build a life on false beliefs, and you’ll soon find your ship has drifted into a minefield.”

“You done here, Mi?” Rhys’s question came out like a command, and he looked like he was trying hard not to respond to the woman. He didn’t have a lot of patience for religious types, Journeywomen or otherwise.

The merchant ignored Rhys and looked at Mila expectantly. “The colors in that piece really do suit you.”

“It’s gorgeous. But maybe some other time.”

Mila sighed and reluctantly dropped the necklace into the woman’s waiting palm. Mila grabbed a meat skewer from Rhys without meeting his eyes and strode toward the center of the square. Why did he always have to be such a buzzkill?

She stopped at the edge of the crowd, watching an unfamiliar ritual unfold at the center of the square, and gnawed at the stringy meat. Skap meat or not, it was a thousand times better than the bland nutrition bars on their ship.

She finished it, tossed the stick, and started searching the crowd for Rhys. Time to convince him to continue their search for the Phantom.

She found him only a few yards away, watching her intently, and despite her earlier annoyance, a smile budded on her lips. He knew when to give her space, and he knew when she really needed him not to. His solid presence in her life had been the best part of these past months.

A flash of grey in her peripheral vision drew her gaze, and it landed on a man wearing a silver hoop earring and a fake liavold skin jacket. It was the lowlife from the tavern.

Mila’s pulse quickened, and she pushed past the people surrounding her to get closer. The lowlife was staring at Rhys, but when he noticed Mila heading for him, his eyes widened and he scrambled away, disappearing into the crowd.

Mila shouted and sprinted after him, shoving people out of her way, ignoring the obscenities they yelled in her wake. She was vaguely aware of Rhys falling into step behind her. That dock scum knew something, she was sure of it. He might even be a spy for the fixer. She couldn’t let him escape.

The cries of anger erupting in front of her let her know she was on the right path, and as she exited the main press of the crowd, she caught sight of a grey jacket disappearing around the corner.

She ran faster, a stitch growing in her side as she caught up. When the man faltered ahead of her, trying to decide which way to turn at the end of an alleyway, she launched herself forward, knocking him into the wall. They both hit hard and slid toward the grimy pavement.

Rhys was there an instant later, hauling Mila out of the way and pinning the man’s arms behind his back so he couldn’t pull a weapon. The man’s bloodshot eyes were wild, darting between Mila and the alley’s exit.

Rhys raised a brow. “Care to explain?”

Mila sniffed and wiped the dust off her pants. “What? Didn’t you notice him back at the tavern? This snake was eavesdropping on you. I bet he works with the fixer. And he was definitely watching you back there.”

“Is that so?” Rhys pulled his pistol and shoved the man against the building to frisk him. He pulled out a slide blade concealed at the man’s waist, then retrieved a small black case from his jacket. He tossed Mila the case, and she opened it, her heart still beating a staccato rhythm against her ribcage.

Inside lay a syringe and a vial filled with black, viscous liquid.

“Show us your arm,” Mila demanded.

The man was shaking as he pushed his sleeve up, revealing a web of veins stained black from his habit.

Rhys whistled. “Got ourselves a WiDoWer, eh?” He adjusted his Arclight so it lined up with the man’s face. “Now why were you following us?”

The man’s Adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed, and he held his hands palm out as a drop of sweat slid down his forehead and into his eye. “I followed you ’cause I got info. I’ll trade for it.”

“What kind?” Rhys asked, his eyes hard. “The last info we got wasn’t worth much.”

“Harris — he set you up. But I know the truth.”

“No trades.” Mila closed on the addict, still holding his drugs in her grasp, and wrapped her other hand around his throat, squeezing. “If you knew about the trap, you should have told us before. We could have died.”

“Mila.” Rhys’s low warning did nothing to calm the rage buzzing in Mila’s head.

“No trades,” Mila repeated, squeezing tighter. The lowlife gasped for air.

“Mila.” This time Rhys’s voice broke through, and Mila dropped her hand from the man’s throat, then forced herself to step back.

Rhys narrowed his eyes at her, then turned back to the addict. “What do you want for the info?”

“Creds,” the man said, wheezing. “Ninety creds.”

“For drugs.” Mila opened the case and held the vial high so the addict could see it. “How ’bout this? You tell us everything you know, or I feed your precious sludge to the pavement.”

“No. No no no.” The man was sweating more freely now, and the desperation in his voice made Mila nauseous with sudden self-loathing. But she wouldn’t back down. She was done with haggling. With the trades. Done with all the lies and dead leads.

She placed the vial on the ground and positioned her boot over it. “You get one second to decide.”

“I’ll tell you. I’ll tell you! Don’t. It’s my last one. The Phantom was here. She was callin’ herself Elaine. Harris hooked her up with new tags. I got a shot of ’em on my mobi.”

“Show us,” Rhys demanded.

The man revealed the mobi beneath his sleeve and brought up the data. Mila swiped her arm across his screen and her mobi captured the tag numbers. Then she placed her boot back over the vial of WiDoW. The lowlife seemed to turn green in the dim light of the globes overhead.

“Where was Elaine headed next?” Rhys asked.

“Septa — she had a meeting on the platform. She’s got a way into Xi’an space. Someone powerful is helpin’ that girl. Musta paid off Harris big, ’cause I ain’t never seen him help set up a bounty hunter like he did to you two.”

Mila’s mind raced, considering the implications of what this snitch was saying. If the Phantom truly had a way into Xi’an space, they’d never find her again. She’d reach Rihlah, and the Xi’an wouldn’t do kak to help them catch a terrorist. They’d just pretend to, acting diplomatic while the Phantom got to live out her life, with the Advocacy and the rest of the UEE stuck waiting for her to voluntarily cross into Human-controlled space again.

“He could be lying,” Mila said. “Describe this Elaine.”

“Uh — red hair. I think it was a wig. I followed her back to that hostel and saw her leave with black hair. Dark skin. Late twenties. Kept her face all covered up. Never got a good vid.” The addict tapped his mobi again and brought up an image of a woman, covered up as he’d described.

All Mila and Rhys had ever seen were blurry images of this woman, no better than what this man was showing them. But what else did they have to go on?

She exchanged glances with Rhys, and Rhys gave her a slow nod.

Mila picked up the vial and shoved it back in the case. She wanted to destroy the drugs, force this scum into withdrawal, but the withdrawal could kill him. And Mila was no murderer and never would be.

She dropped the case back into the man’s hands and flicked his jacket with her finger. He flinched at the touch.

“If you need creds, you should start by demanding a refund from whoever sold you this knock-off.”

His brows went up in surprise, and he glanced down at his jacket, then back to Rhys, who still held his weapon. “Can I get my blade back?”

“Get out of here,” Rhys barked.

The man flinched again, then pocketed his drugs and took off running.

“What the hell was that?” Rhys’s face was red, his voice so low Mila knew he was pissed. “That’s not our agreement. I do the haggling. I handle the contacts. Not you. That’s our deal.”

Mila put her hands on her hips. “Well, it worked, didn’t it? We need to get back to our ship and get to Septa before our phantom disappears for good.” She turned heel and walked off without waiting for a reply.

Rhys didn’t speak a word as they made their way back to the docks, and his anger hung in the heavy silence between them, ruining what should have been a celebration and leaving her to her own thoughts. When they finally reached the well-lit entryway that led up to their Freelancer, Mila turned to Rhys.

His expression was blank again, showing nothing of what he might be feeling. Sometimes he was so damn hard to read. She pressed a hand to his chest, and his eyes softened slightly at her touch.

“I’m sorry. For how I acted back there. You’re right. I broke our agreement. I promise I’ll try to keep it together from now on —”

“Don’t. You got what we needed. But if this lead doesn’t pan out?”

“Fine. If it doesn’t pan . . . then we’re done searching.”

It didn’t matter. Because if the Phantom really was headed for Xi’an space, and they missed her one more time, it was as good as over anyway.

A look of relief passed over Rhys’s face. “Good. Then we agree. We’ll follow this lead, but if we lose her, we move onto something else.”

He hesitated, then reached into his pocket and drew out a small velvet bag. Mila’s lips parted as he pulled out a length of chain, the Cassa pendant hanging from it, its gorgeous pearlescent stones shimmering in the light of the dockside globes.

Rhys fastened the good luck pendant around Mila’s neck.

“But our credits . . .” Mila warmed at his light touch. “We didn’t have enough to waste on this.”

He shrugged. “Could be that Journeywoman was right about this thing after all. All we needed was a little luck. And it seems we got it.”

His voice came out husky, and Mila stood on tiptoes to kiss him. He responded with intensity, pulling her close, pressing her body to his. She wrapped her arms around his neck and lost herself in him.

When he pulled away, his eyes were dark. “Flight plan first. But while we’re waiting for clearance . . . ”

Mila gave him a small smile. “Meet me in the bunk?”

He smirked and pulled her close for another kiss. “And after that . . . we catch our phantom.”

TO BE CONTINUED…

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[thesewomenarebadass]

Amelia Earhart

Amelia Mary Earhart was born on the 24th of July 1897. She was the first female pilot to fly solo across the Atlantic. She was also active in the creation of the Ninety-Nines, an organisation for female pilots.

Amelia was the daughter of Samuel Stanton Earhart and his wife, Amelia (‘Amy’). She was born in Atchison, Kansas, in the home of her grandfather, who was an important member of their town. She had a younger sister named Grace, and they were nicknamed ‘Meeley’ and ‘Pidge’. Their mother didn’t believe in raising her daughters to be “nice little girls”, so they had a slightly unconventional upbringing. However, their grandmother disliked that they didn’t wear trousers.

As children, the girls spent a lot of time playing together. They climbed trees, hunted rats, collected animals and explored their neighbourhood. With the help of her uncle, Earhart made a ramp and attached it to the roof of their shed. Her first go of the ramp left her tattered and bruised, but it exhillerated her, and she exclaimed “Oh, Pidge, it’s just like flying!”

Her father’s job as a claims officer for the Rock Island Railroad meant that the family had to move to Des Moines, Iowa, where she saw her first aircraft the following year at the state fair. Samuel tried to get his daughters interested in flying, but Amelia took one look at the unsteady “flivver” was enough to put her off the idea.

When their parents moved into a smaller home in Des Moines, the girls moved in with their grandparents. During this time they were educated by a governess and their mother. Amelia greatly enjoyed reading and often spent time in the family library, and when the family reunited in 1909 the sisters were sent to public school.

Even though the family’s situation greatly improved, it quickly became evident that Samuel was an alcoholic, and he was forced to retire from his job five years later. He never got his job back despite rehabilitating himself. Amelia’s grandmother also died around this time, leaving a considerable estate that placed Mrs Earhart’s share of the inheritance in a trust, as she feared Samuel drinking the money away. The Otis family home was auctioned off, along with everything in it. Amelia was heartbroken and later described it as the end of her childhood.

In 1915, her father found a job at the Great Northern Railway in St. Paul, Minnesota, and it was there that Amelia started Central High School as a junior. He then applied for a transfer to Springfield, Missouri, but the claims officer re-evaluated his retirement and took his job away. Amy took her children to Chicago, where they lived with friends. Amelia looked through nearby high schools to find the one with the finest science programme. She eventually decided to attend Hyde Park High School, but she was unhappy the entire year. Amelia graduated in 1916. She continued to aim for a future career; she kept a scrapbook of newspaper clippings about successful women in largely male-orientated careers, including film direction and production and mechanical engineering. She began junior college at Orgontz School in Rydal, Pennsylvania, but did not finish her course.

During Christmas break 1917, Amelia visited Grace in Toronto. WWI had been going on for 3 years, and Earhart saw the injured soldiers coming home. She trained as a nurse’s aide with the Red Cross and began work in the Voluntary Aid Detachment at Spadina Military Hospital.

When the Spanish flu pandemic reached Toronto, Earhart engaged in arduous nursing duties that included night shifts at the hospital. She was eventually admitted herself, as she began to suffer from pneumonia and maxillary sinusitis. She was discharged about two months after the illness started. As she was in hospital before the tie of antibiotics, she had several small but painful operations to wash out the affected maxillary sinus, but they were unsuccessful and subsequently she suffered from strong headaches. Her recuperation took almost a year, which she passed at her sister’s house learning to play the banjo, reading poetry and studying mechanics. Chronic sinusitis hugely affected her flying and other activities later in her life, sometimes she had to wear a bandage on her cheek to cover a small drainage tube.

Around this time she attended the Canadian National Exhibition in Toronto, in which one of the mail events was a spectacular air show. A WWI flying ace who was participating saw Earhart and the friend she had come with standing away from the crowd, so he dived at them, hoping to give them a fright. Amelia stood firm, and later said, “I did not understand it at the time, but I believe that little red airplane said something to me as it swished by.”

In 1919, Earhart enrolled in Columbia University, in a medical studies course, but she quit a year later to be with her parents, who had reunited in California. In December 1920, Amelia and her father visited an airfield where Frank Hawks gave her a ride that would forever change her life. Within minutes of the flight she knew that it was what she wanted to do, and she decided that she had to learn. She took an assortment of jobs and managed to save up $1000 for her lessons. She had her first lesson on the 3rd of January 1921, at Kinner Airfield. Her teacher was Anita Snook, a pioneer female pilot. To get to the airfield, she had to take a bus to the end of the line, and then walk four miles.

Earhart’s commitment to flying meant having to endure the challenging work and basic living conditions that came with the training. She updated her look to fit in with the other pilots - she cropped her hair and bought a leather jacket (which she slept in for a few days to make it look used). Eventually she bought a yellow Kinner Airster biplane, which she nicknamed “the Canary”, and flew it to 14,000 feet, which was a record for female aviators. In 1923, Amelia became the 16th woman in the US to receive a pilot’s license.

In the 20s, Amelia’s inheritance from her grandmother steadily lessened until it was completely gone. This caused her to sell the “Canary” and the second plane she had bought, and purchase a yellow Kissel “Speedster” two passenger automobile. Her sinus infection also came back, and she was readmitted to hospital for another unsuccessful operation.

Her parents got divorced in 1924, so Amy and Amelia took a transcontinental trip from California, eventually ending up in Boston. Earhart underwent another operation, but this one was more successful. When she recovered she went back to Columbia University for a few months, but had to leave because they could no longer afford her tuition. She began working as a teacher shortly after this, then a social worker in a settlement house.

During this time she remained interested in flying, even becoming a member of the American Aeronautical Society, and eventually becoming the vice president. She also became a sales representative for Kinnear Aircrafts and wrote for local papers to promote flying. She became increasingly famous in her local area, so she began her plans for an all-female flying organisation.

Earhart’s first transatlantic flight was sponsored by Amy Guest, as the trip was determined to be too dangerous for her to make herself. She took off from Trepassey Harbour, Newfoundland on the 17th of June 1928, and 20 hours and 40 minutes later she landed in Pwll near Burry Port, South Wales. Amelia had no experience with the equipment used for the flight, which meant she could not pilot it herself, but it did spark her interest in making the trip solo.

When Earhart and the crew arrived in the USA they were greeted with a parade along the Canyon of Heroes, followed by a reception with President Coolidge. Shortly after this she set off on her first ever long distance solo flight, across North America and back, and was the first ever woman to do so.

Earhart became known as the “Queen of the Air”. After her return to the United States, she went on a two-year-long lecture tour. She began to undertake mass market endorsements to promote her flying career. The money she made with some of her endorsements was saved for a forthcoming expedition to the South Pole.

The marketing campaign was successful in catching the public’s attention and put Amelia in the spotlight. Rather than simply endorsing the products, Earhart actively became involved in the promotions, especially in women’s fashion. Promoting products helped Amelia pay for her flying, she even accepted a position as Cosmopolitan’s associate editor , which she used as an opportunity to promote greater public acceptance of flying and to campaign for more women to enter the field. 

In 1929, Amelia was one of the first pilots to promote commercial air travel through the development of the Transcontinental Air Transport, and she invested in starting the first shuttle service between New York and Washington D.C. She was also a Vice President of several airlines, including what was then called National Airways. During the first Santa Monica-to-Cleveland Women’s Air Derby that year, Amelia made her air racing debut, coming third in the ‘heavy planes’ category.

Earhart became an official of the National Aeronautical Association in 1930, and advocated for the separation of women’s records. The following year she set a world record for altitude, at 18,415 feet. She also became the president of the  Ninety-Nines around this time. The organisation was created to provide support and advance the cause of female pilots, and Amelia herself was a spirited advocate for women in aviation. When the Bendix Trophy Race banned women from entering in 1934 she publicly refused to fly Mary Pickford to open the race. 

Amelia spent a considerable amount of time with publisher George P. Putnam around 1928, and once he was divorced in 1929 he proposed to her - he asked six times before she said yes - and after some hesitation on her part, the couple were married in 1931. However, Earhart was adamant that this would not be a traditional marriage in which the woman was inferior to her husband, and wrote him a letter on the day of the wedding telling him just that. Her ideas on marriage were unconventional at the time, as she believed in the equal sharing of responsibilities and kept her own surname, refusing to be called “Mrs Putnam”. The pair had to forgo their honeymoon because Amelia was taking part in a cross-country tour promoting autogyros. They also never had any children of their own, but George had two boys from his previous marriage, whom Amelia is said to have been quite fond of.

She set out on her first solo transatlantic flight on the 20th of May 1932 from Harbour Grace, Newfoundland, and intended to fly to Paris. After 14 nearly fifteen hours and enduring icy conditions, strong winds and mechanical problems, she landed in Culmore, near Derry in Northern Ireland. For her trip she received the Distinguished Flying Cross, the Gold Medal of the National Geographic Society and the Cross of Knight of the Legion Honor. She went on to make many pioneering solo flights and broke many flying records.

As she became increasingly famous, Earhart developed friendships with people like Eleanor Roosevelt. The two shared many interests, most notably women’s rights, and the two kept in contact throughout their lives.

A fire broke out in Amelia and George’s house in 1934 that destroyed much of their belongings, so the couple decided to move to California. They bought a small house in Toluca Lake and remodelled it to suit them. A year later Earhart and her friend Paul Mantz set up the Earhart-Mantz Flying School at the Burbank Airport, but it was short-lived. 

Amelia began to plan her round-the-world flight in 1936. Her trip was financed by Purdue University, where she had begun working, and a Lockheed Electra 10E was built to her requirements for the trip. Fred Noonan and Harry Manning were selected to be the navigator for the flight, and the plan was that Noonan would navigate from Hawaii to Howland Island, which was a difficult section of the journey, then Manning would navigate to Australia where she would carry on by herself. Due to mechanical difficulties, the first attempt to make the journey was unsuccessful, and the plane had to be shipped home from Hawaii.

The second attempt was a success, with Earhart and Noonan departing from Miami on the first of June 1937 (the direction change was to do with seasonal weather) and, after several stops in various countries, they arrived in Lae, New Guinea on the 29th. They only had 7,000 more miles to go. On the second of July they took of and intended to land on Howland Island. Their last recorded position was 800 miles into the journey, at the Nukumanu Islands. 

There have been many theories as to what caused Earhart and Noonan’s failure to navigate their way to the island, but to this day nobody knows exactly what it was. Search efforts started approximately an hour after the pair failed to show up, but they were never found. There have also been many theories on how they disappeared, but again, nobody knows exactly what happened to them.

[johnboothus]

Meet HDHC the New Hopping Technique Coming to a Hazy IPA Near You

The craft beer industry has never seen more of a need to keep consumers actively engaged. Business was already on shaky ground before the pandemic hit. Hard seltzer has proven a mighty competitor. Now, throughout 2020, government restrictions and health concerns have kept normally busy taprooms quiet. Still, people are drinking beer at home, and there are two different reliable routes brewers can take to keep customers loyal: serving up tried-and-true favorites, and wowing the crowd with new innovations.

To quench American beer drinkers’ seemingly boundless thirst for bigger, bolder IPAs, those innovations often fall under the umbrella of hop products and techniques. Most recently, one in particular is pulling ahead: HDHC.

Those familiar with Brooklyn’s Other Half Brewing won’t be surprised that the brewery, known for its eagerly anticipated hop bombs, is behind the method, which stands for “high density hop charge.” It’s the result of Other Half’s ongoing experimentation with a hop product called Incognito. The brewery released its first HDHC beers in the summer of 2019, unveiling updated versions of fan favorites like More Citra Than All Citra using Citra Incognito, Citra Cryo, and Citra pellet hops.

This is the first HDHC beer Scott Peluso, behind the popular @lorenzothebeercat Instagram account that regularly features Other Half, saw on the market. “This beer became an instant OH fan favorite,” Peluso says of Other Half’s HDHC More Citra Than All Citra in an email. “In my opinion, it was the perfect way to introduce the hopping process.”

Credit: imgur

Hop supplier John I. Haas, Inc. unveiled Incognito (stylized “INCOGNITO”) in the spring of 2019. It’s a flowable hop-flavoring liquid that reduces the amount of beer lost when brewers use pellets, while cranking up hop flavor. Other Half co-founder Sam Richardson says that the brewery’s team is always looking for fresh ways to pack in more hop flavor without any over-hopped pitfalls (notably, hop burn or grassy off-flavors). Realizing Incognito’s potential for maximum hop impact without the risks of using only fresh hops or pellets, they created a combination of INCOGNITO with T90s, the most standard hop pellet used in beer production, and Cryo hop pellets, known for cutting down on beer waste and avoiding potential hop astringency. Together, the three products are clean, bright, and powerful — and have a flavor impact that is equivalent to 15 pounds of hops per barrel.

“The idea of HDHC is to combine these all together to create the biggest hop profile we could but still have drinkable, enjoyable, balanced beer,” Richardson says.

Other Half may not be the only brewery to create some combination of Incognito and pellets, but it is the first to nail it down and name it. The reason, according to Richardson, is so customers can understand where the difference they’re tasting is coming from. This is Other Half’s modus operandi, to label cans with hop information to extend a little knowledge to its fanbase, who typically fall somewhere on the beer geek scale.

“We try to always give people more information about the beer,” Richardson says. “They know what to expect, and they’re excited about getting what’s bigger and bolder.”

It’s also a powerful marketing tool: Like DDH, HDHC is a symbol that, when used on labels, beer drinkers can instantly recognize — and if not truly understand it, yet, can at least understand it means big, bold hops flavors await in the can.

The method is starting to gather steam. Peluso says Other Half fans have come to love and seek out HDHC beers — so enthusiastically that the brewery responded with “HDHC Week,” releasing a slew of its greatest hits with HDHC this past June. It’s growing through collaboration and inspiration, too: Fans of Trillium Brewing Company in Massachusetts met HDHC through Other Half’s Freaky Friday series, in which Other Half and other breweries swap recipes. Other Half brewed Trillium staple Fort Point Pale Ale with HDHC, and Trillium brewed Other Half’s All Citra Everything with HDHC.

“HDHC is an astutely cool way for Other Half to better communicate to customers what a lot of brewers have been tinkering with over the last few years with advanced hop products like Cryo, CO2 extracts, T45s, and now the new Haas products Incognito and Lupomax,” says Trillium co-founder JC Tetreault. “Folks have become familiar with DDH and HDHC is the next logical extension of that for our friends at Other Half.”

Credit: John I. Haas, Inc.

Will HDHC Catch On?

In September, Brooklyn’s Non Sequitur Beer Project debuted All!, an IPA brewed with the combo of Incognito, Cryo, and T90s.

“Other Half branded [this method] and that drew a lot of excitement,” Non Sequitur founder Gage Siegel says. “It’s worth highlighting as a unique thing to utilize these three different hop products.” Siegel adds that he liked Other Half’s HDHC beers even more than their non-HDHC beers. He now considers Incognito to be the purest expression of hops — as a brewer, “that’s a pretty good reason to try it,” he says.

What remains to be seen as more breweries apply this brand of hop products to achieve their own maximum-hop flavor, minimum-burn effect is whether we’ll actually see the term HDHC grow in ubiquity, like DDH. While Richardson says HDHC isn’t proprietary, Siegel named Non Sequitur’s application All! and nodded to Other Half as inspiration. The method may become more common; the HDHC term might not.

Either way, the power of HDHC may simply lie in being able to communicate to consumers that this can contains huge hop flavor, whether it’s labeled specifically HDHC, “Incognito, T90, and Cryo,” or whatever a brewery comes up with and makes transparent to fans.

Kate Bernot, reporter at Good Beer Hunting and contributing editor at Craft Beer & Brewing, sees breweries’ transparency with these experimentations as a way to entice consumers even if they aren’t versed on brewing science. She cites Hop Valley, part of Molson Coors, and its Stash series, made with Cryo hops, as a mainstream example of a brewery touting a new hopping process to engage customers who may not know what the process means except more hop flavor.

“It can’t hurt because people who are geeky and interested will dive into it, and the average consumer will just see new and fancy hop techniques,” Bernot says. “That’s where breweries see value in this innovation: Consumers will equate that with, ‘They’re doing interesting things with hops.’”

Credit: Non Sequitur Beer Project / Instagram.com

Of course, that’s not to say HDHC will kick DDH to the curb. More brewers are continuing to advance and develop their dry-hopping techniques, too. One of the ways is via dip-hopping.

While HDHC blends hop products for maximum impact, dip-hopping introduces a hop addition that can serve as its own stage of dry-hopping, happening between the whirlpool-hopping and the dry-hopping, in order to create different flavors and aromas than dry-hopping alone. Or, dip-hopping can be a stand-alone method for lighter pale ales. The technique was developed by Kirin in Japan in 2013.

“Dip-hopping is allowing the hops to steep in 150 to 170 degrees Fahrenheit wort for a few hours before chilling and pitching yeast,” says Joe Wells, head brewer at Fair State Brewing Cooperative in Minneapolis. “The hop matter is left in the beer for the fermentation, giving it a lot of contact time and the potential for some biotransformation.”

According to Wells, this keeps piney, resinous myrcene flavors low, while ramping up fruit notes. “By showcasing the underlying linalool and geraniol from these hops, and using smart processing to prevent the introduction of their myrcene, we can make very bright, citrusy, and tropical beers from otherwise piney and dank hops,” Wells says.

Fair State first tried dip-hopping during a collaboration with 3 Floyds Brewing of Munster, Ind. Wells says 3 Floyds head brewer Todd Haug had the idea to use it for the collab, Partying Past Burning Bridges. The can label dons “Dip Hopped IPA.”

Fair State has since employed dip-hopping for another collaboration with Fargo, N.D.-based Drekker Brewing Company called Toon Dip. In its Untappd listing, the beer is described as a dip-hopped and double-dry-hopped double IPA with Mosaic, Citra, and El Dorado: “It’s like getting dipped into a vat of citrusy goodness then having a piano of dankness dropped on you from 10 stories above.”

Despite its ultra-trendy-sounding description, Fair State’s dip-hopped offerings have been a success, Wells says, because they cater to a nostalgia for heartier, maltier-bodied brews that stand out in today’s hazy IPA culture. Craft Beer Time editor Ben Brausen, who reviewed Toon Dip in March, agrees. “It had wonderful floral and citrus aromas, without the green hop aroma or floor cleaner notes that can be found in many dry-hopped beers,” he says.

Wells believes sharing hopping methods with consumers can go beyond engagement to education, explaining that educating beer fans is a priority at Fair State. “A smart consumer will return to the highest-quality beer that interests them and I like to think that will often be us,” he says. Wells adds that the number of people inquiring about dip-hopping after trying these beers proves Fair State achieved that curiosity-piquing goal.

“Innovation” can be a gamble during an unimaginable crisis that makes just staying in business a herculean task. But right now, even as the pandemic’s many stresses have sent drinkers back to their tried, true, and trustworthy favorites (or askew to hard seltzer), craft brewers’ penchant for continuous experimentation hasn’t abated. Neither has the furious pursuit of flavor for a certain segment of beer drinkers. Thirsty for the latest trends, fan bases for brewers like Other Half, Fair State, and 3 Floyds expect innovation. And if dry-hopping and doubled-up DDH hazy IPAs have taught us anything, it’s that in craft brewing, innovation is contagious.

The article Meet HDHC, the New Hopping Technique Coming to a Hazy IPA Near You appeared first on VinePair.

Via https://vinepair.com/articles/hdhc-ipa-hop-trend/

source https://vinology1.weebly.com/blog/meet-hdhc-the-new-hopping-technique-coming-to-a-hazy-ipa-near-you

[daleisgreat]

Last Action Hero

Today’s entry will result in one of the quickest turnaround times of an older movie in my backlog box yet. A couple weeks ago I noticed Uproxx posted an article on how 1993’s Last Action Hero (trailer) was way ahead of its time (click or press here for the Uproxx piece). Once I noticed this story I tracked down a BluRay copy of it off Amazon and promptly watched it within 24 hours of its delivery. I did not read the Uproxx entry yet, but I will after I finish proofing this entry to prevent it from altering my current thoughts I am about to deliver and will post a little addendum at the end of this look back at Last Action Hero for some extra insight on how my take compares with Uproxx’s. I cannot remember how many times I watched Last Action Hero as a kid, but my gut tells me it may be near the double digits. Our family had the HBO and Starz movie channels as part of our cable package back then, and the way those channels primarily were programmed back then was a specific amount of newer and older movies were highlighted each month, and they would play each movie once every day or two to the best of my recollection. I remember being stoked for Last Action Hero. The turnaround time on movies from the theater back then in the early 90s was it would take about five to six months after the cinema release for a film to hit Pay-Per-View and home video. Several months later, or roughly a year after release it would hit the premium cable movie channels like HBO, Starz and Cinemax in their original form. Another year or two after that it would be available for local and basic cable channels, but usually in an edited and censored/FCC friendly format. Our family could only afford trips to the theater and video rentals so many times a year, so if we missed a movie in either of those formats and it wound up on HBO/Starz it was kind of a guilty pleasure in my childhood boredom days to pick an anticipated movie like Last Action Hero and watch it as many times as possible the first month it was available.

I have not seen it since then however when I was 11 and have not thought much about it since LAH is not as highly regarded as other Arnold Schwarzenegger classics even though it hit at the tail end of Arnold’s prime (which I consider to be from 1984’s original Terminator through 1994’s True Lies). When it hit theaters in 1993 I remember a ton of hype for it getting ubiquitous advertising and the requisite hot-summer-movie-licensed videogame and pinball table. The pinball table is part of the many licensed tables included in Pinball Arcade on PS4 which I also played a few rounds of before diving into the movie. In 1993 Arnold was the big name action star fresh off his Terminator 2 success. He also dabbled in the occasional comedy like Kindergarten Cop and Jingle All the Way. LAH marked Arnold’s first action comedy however. Schwarzenegger portrays big name action movie star ‘Jack Slater.’ Danny (Austin O’Brien) is Slater’s #1 fan on top of being a middle school film guru where he routinely cuts class to catch flicks at the local cinema where he is best friends with the old-timer projectionist there, Nick (Robert Prosky). Daniel is promised by Nick an after-hours exclusive showing of the wildly anticipated Jack Slater IV. To celebrate the special showing, Nick gives Danny a special ‘magical’ movie ticket that Nick states he got from legendary magician Houdini himself as a kid, but was too afraid to use it. Through cinema magic, the ticket activates and Danny is warped into the movie world of Jack Slater IV as his new reality when he winds up magically transported into the backseat of Slater’s ride in the middle of a cliché action movie car chase.

Danny is thrilled being immersed in an action movie world filled with the clichés and tropes of the genre that he gleefully points out and references past film lore to help Jack track down his latest bad guy. Slater has none of it and takes in Danny in for questioning. Slater’s over-the-top-gruffy captain, Dekker (Frank McRae) is impressed with Danny’s knowledge and makes him Slater’s new partner. Slater begrudgingly works together with Danny to track down Slater’s current most wanted baddie, Benedict (Charles Dance). The film unravels from there in a world jam-packed with the aforementioned clichés that Danny constantly breaks the fourth wall by showing off his action movie fandom by pointing out how all the women in this universe are hyper-sexualized, indulging Slater’s gratuitous one-liners, how Slater instantly pops up from battles unscathed and how the bad guy stereotypically monologues too long to give Slater a chance to make the heroic comeback. 11 year-old-Dale was the perfect target age for LAH when I first saw it in 1994. I experienced the filmed vicariously through Danny and I was right there with Danny for how wicked it would be to magically transport alongside your movie hero in his latest summer blockbuster and helping him bust bad guys and be in the middle of an extravagant chase scenes overstuffed with special effects. I think a big part of me held off forever re-watching this again because I dismissed LAH as a satire film over the years that I loved as a kid, but thought I thought I would outgrow over the years. After my recent re-watch however, I emerged surprised how wrong I was. Seeing it with a grown-up’s set of eyes significantly helped with a new understanding of filmmaking references and other off-color jokes that went right over my childhood head. I also got a whole new appreciation of the scene where Danny takes Slater to a video store in his universe to show him how awesome he is in Terminator 2 only to instead see in that world Sylvester Stallone landed the role.

Speaking of guest stars, the cameos are through the roof in LAH. There are some blink and you miss it surprise cameos, and then there are exponentially more in the final act where Danny takes Slater back into the ‘real’ world in time for the red carpet movie premiere of Jack Slater IV. The premiere sees the likes of Little Richard, MC Hammer, Jean Claude Van Damme and a few other recognizable celebrities of that era. Back in 1994 I was probably only lucky enough to recognize Van Damme from his role as Guile in the underappreciated Street Fighter, but reliving it again with a new set of eyes made that scene pop in a whole new way. Needless to say, Last Action Hero was a surprise delight to experience in 2020. If I had any nitpicks it is that it was not as brisk a watch as I recalled as it clocks in a little over two hours and I came out of it feeling they could have trimmed at least a good 10 minutes or so off. For as big a deal LAH was when it hit in 1993 it was a bit of a buzzkill to see the no-frills BluRay have a complete lack of extras. I would have loved all-star action movie director John McTiernan (Predator, the good Die Hard films) do a commentary track with Arnold and a few other bonus extras, but it regrettably was not meant to be. At least I have this Uproxx take I can now peruse that will have to suffice for a bonus of some degree…..

Alrighty, I just finished the Uproxx 27 years later take on LAH and we share a lot of similarities. Uproxx’s Mike Ryan thesis is that LAH was too meta and ahead of its time in 1993, but perfect for a 2020 viewing experience. I could not agree with him more, and he grinds out the little references and meta-details more eloquently than I can here, so I highly urge you all to give his editorial a perusal. One key takeaway from Ryan’s article on why Last Action Hero came and went back then was because it made the big time mistake of releasing one week after Jurassic Park. No wonder it is not brought up with other classic Arnold films over the years. I am right there with Ryan on how LAH is an absolute marvel of a film, and if it has slipped by you all these years later then now is the perfect time to watch it in these pandemic times with zero movies hitting theaters nowadays. 1993’s Last Action Hero is the ideal 2020 summer blockbuster! BONUS EXTRAS TO COMPENSATE FOR BLURAY’S ABSENCE OF ANY Click or press here to check out this awesomely through ‘Did You Know’ style breakdown of facts and backstage filming secrects from Mental Floss Here is an incredibly thorough two part oral history of LAH complete with interview excerpts from the cast and crew And I will leave you with Cinemassacre’s ‘Rental Review’ roundtable of Last Action Hero….

Other Random Backlog Movie Blogs 3 12 Angry Men (1957) 12 Rounds 3: Lockdown 21 Jump Street The Accountant Angry Video Game Nerd: The Movie Atari: Game Over The Avengers: Age of Ultron The Avengers: Infinity War Batman: The Dark Knight Rises Batman: The Killing Joke Batman: Mask of the Phantasm Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice Bounty Hunters Cabin in the Woods Captain America: Civil War Captain America: The First Avenger Captain America: The Winter Soldier Christmas Eve Clash of the Titans (1981) Clint Eastwood 11-pack Special The Condemned 2 Countdown Creed I & II Deck the Halls Detroit Rock City Die Hard Dredd The Eliminators The Equalizer Dirty Work Faster Fast and Furious I-VIII Field of Dreams Fight Club The Fighter For Love of the Game Good Will Hunting Gravity Grunt: The Wrestling Movie Guardians of the Galaxy Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 2 Hell Comes to Frogtown Hercules: Reborn Hitman I Like to Hurt People Indiana Jones 1-4 Ink The Interrogation Interstellar Jay and Silent Bob Reboot Jobs Joy Ride 1-3 Major League Man of Steel Man on the Moon Man vs Snake Marine 3-6 Merry Friggin Christmas Metallica: Some Kind of Monster Mortal Kombat Mortal Kombat Legends: Scorpions Revenge National Treasure National Treasure: Book of Secrets Not for Resale Pulp Fiction The Replacements Reservoir Dogs Rocky I-VIII Running Films Part 1 Running Films Part 2 San Andreas ScoobyDoo Wrestlemania Mystery The Secret Life of Walter Mitty Shoot em Up Slacker Skyscraper Small Town Santa Steve Jobs Source Code Star Trek I-XIII Sully Take Me Home Tonight TMNT The Tooth Fairy 1 & 2 UHF Veronica Mars Vision Quest The War Wild Wonder Woman The Wrestler (2008) X-Men: Apocalypse X-Men: Days of Future Past

[poorguysheadisdoingwhatnow]

Newsies College AU pt 2

Spot: exercise science major (future personal trainer). doesn’t drink coffee, drinks energy drinks instead. we’re talking like every brand ever made (but red bull is his favorite). one time he mixed red bull, monster, and redline together to see what would happen. Race did not approve. “you’re going to die.” “nah, i’ve done this before, just with different brands.” “What!?” Spot doesn’t die, but he does see some weird shit for a few hours and his heart rate is much faster than it should be. will never admit it, but he loves to cuddle at night...Race does too, so this works out pretty great for both of them. can be seen walking around campus in a “sun’s out, guns out” tank (Race gave it to him, he wears it all the time), wearing sunglasses and drinking some kind of sugary beverage (again, usually an energy drink, but he also really likes sweet tea and coca-cola). def drinks at the togetherings. he and Race switch off being dd for each other so they’re always able to get home safely.

Elmer: majors in paranormal science (yes it is in fact a real major). top-notch conspiracy theorist (but one of the only people left who will tolerate his rants is Albert). goes on many a monster hunt (sometimes for class, sometimes for fun), and Albert is always there with him.  This boy is def a coffee drinker. he takes it with as much sugar as they’ll give him, and can drink maybe 3 or 4 cups in an hour if he’s super tired, excited, or nervous...so he drinks a lot of coffee. super smart, pretty into technology (he uses it for his monster hunts a lot). could def be an engineering or it major if he didn’t love paranormal activity so much. wears practical clothing (jeans, sturdy boots, etc.). “why are you wearing hiking boots we’re going to math.” “you never know when you’re gonna need to survive in the wilderness.” “math is inside??” you know he’s a doomsday prepper (but his efforts are hindered by the fact that he lives in a small apartment on a college campus). a big drinker at the togetherings, but only at the togetherings. claims he needs his wits about him at all times, but he feels safe at the togetherings, so he’ll only let his guard down there.

Albert: psychology major. one of the only ones that puts up with Elmer’s paranormal ramblings (Crutchie will always listen, and sometimes Specs or David, but Elmer knows that Albert will always be truly interested). not nearly into the paranormal as Elmer, but he’s always ready to dive into the unknown. think Buzzfeed: Unsolved- if Elmer, is Ryan, Albert is Shane. he’s more of a “see it to believe it” guy, but one time he and Elmer went ghost hunting and they both still swear to this day they saw an apparition in an abandoned mansion near campus...that was the only time he wasn’t chill as a cucumber during a ghost hunt. more into cryptids than Elmer (he believes in them more easily bc there’s physical evidence). likes his coffee fancy (lots of lattes and iced macchiatos). not a lot of sleep bc he’s constantly out w Elmer, so there’s often an extra shot (or three) in those fancy coffees. casual drinker (most of the time), but he is not afraid to go big (hard liquor and fireball is the key to success)

Crutchie: double major in animal biology and chemistry (he wants to be a vet and wanted as much knowledge as possible before vet school). gets a fair amount of sleep, more than most of the group, keeps himself on a schedule to make sure he balances his time well between studying and sleeping (which is all he ever seems to do). forgets to eat sometimes in between all his studying and sleeping, but one of his friends (usually Davey or Specs, sometimes Jack) will always bring him something and make him take a much-needed break. only drinks coffee when he’s really really stressed, prefers hot chocolate bc it tastes better. he prefers softer clothing, usually 100% cotton, bc it’s more comfortable and minimizes chafing when he’s using his crutch. speaking of the crutch, it helps him walk and kick ass. Crutchie’s got hella strong arms from using it. someone tried to mug him once,, Crutchie took the guy down w his crutch w almost no effort. of course everyone on campus found out...no one’s tried to mug or mess w Crutchie since. casual drinker, never has more than a beer or two at the togetherings.

Specs: poly sci major. loves to debate (he’s always right, so that’s def a plus). the other mom of the group besides Davey (loathe to admit it, of course, but everyone knows it’s true). doesn’t drink a lot of coffee bc he gets a little jittery when he does and he doesn’t like the feeling. sleeps pretty regularly, except when he’s pulling all-nighters (political science is harder than people think, especially when one is trying to become president of the us eventually). super chill, the chillest of the group. almost nothing bothers him, so he’s always the voice of reason when the others get in arguments. only gets mad when other people mess with his friends (def wanted to fight the guy that tried to mug Crutchie, but Crutchie assured hijm the guy was not in fighting condition and wouldn’t be bothering anyone for a while). chill drinker, only gets drunk when he’s had a super bad week.

[albinostorm]

Read a short excerpt from Learning Earth's Deathly History.

"June, 1700 hours Eastern Seaboard Time: The nose of the U.S. Navy’s Virginia-class, nuclear-powered, fast-attack submarine USS Texas (SSN 775) opens a dark void in the Arabian Sea. She is covertly traveling at twenty-eight knots, near 12° latitude and 64° longitude, at a depth of 850 feet. Inside the hunter killer’s advanced command and control room is an array of computers and other sophisticated electronics with navigation, sonar, weapons and diagnostic information displayed on over forty monitors. The complicated equipment is installed to maximize space. Multicolored lights from the ever-changing imagery on the dozens of displays can be seen dancing on the walls and ceiling of the ultramodern hub. Near the center of the operations center, standing bent over the edge of a table, is the lethal submarine’s Captain. He is actively studying nautical charts and satellite imageries showing on high-definition flat screens mounted flush in the table’s top. Standing next to him is his executive officer (XO), who is keeping watch over the crew of specialized technicians and officers seated working at their stations. All the underwater sailors are dressed in wrinkle-free tan or dark-blue U.S. Navy uniforms. There are naval pins and patches on their shirts including the Submarine Warfare Insignia breast pins that are either gold (officer) or silver (enlisted) dolphins.

Though commissioned into service in 2006, the USS Texas remains a state-of-the-art combat submarine of the U.S. Navy. She displaces 7,800 long tons, and her 337-foot long hull, which is constructed of HY-100 high-pressure structural steel, is the strongest ever built. She carries twelve Tomahawk cruise missiles, Mk-48 torpedoes, and was recently loaded with a few of the cutting-edge supercavitating Barracuda torpedoes. The sea warrior has earned the respect of anyone who has ever sailed on her. Her slogan, “Don’t Mess with Texas,” was adopted from the proud state after which she was named—and the slogan couldn’t be truer! When not running lone wolf on top-secret missions, or sailing under standard operational patrol, the Texas is at times an unseen escort protecting aircraft carriers and other U.S. naval ships traveling to and from their theaters of operation.

The Texas’s Commanding Officer, Captain William Norton, is fifty-six years old. He’s an experienced veteran of war, who graduated with top honors from the United States Naval Academy and Naval War College. Captain Norton is a polished man with a rigid stature. He stands board straight using all five-feet and seven-inches of his aging form. His short, graying hair is parted on one side, and thin-rim glasses correct his sea-blue eyes. Fleshy cheeks, thick eyebrows, and a wrinkled forehead complete his commanding appearance. Though he may be over-the-hill, it’s obvious that he takes exceptional care of himself, since he is quite fit. The intrepid naval commander, who is wholly admired and respected by his crew, is an avid reader of history, especially historical naval warfare. Full of grit, Captain Norton is a tenacious leader with unparalleled knowledge of his submarine, and he has spent the last twenty-seven years of his naval career onboard nuclear-powered submarines.

Over the course of his silent service, Captain Norton has led countless missions stalking and shadowing numerous Russian and Chinese submarines as well as other adversarial fighting ships. While on those cat-and-mouse hunts he and his highly skilled crew of submariners were perpetually ready, if so ordered, to sink-and-destroy an enemy vessel on a moment’s notice. Furthermore, he has led several covert operations spying on the sea trials of new Russian and Chinese ships of war to learn their strengths and weaknesses. Captain Norton has even presided over missions to salvage technology and military secrets from ocean floors deposited there by rival missile tests, or from naval ships sunk by calamity. In years past, he was the Captain of an Ohio-class submarine armed with Trident II ballistic missiles tipped with thermonuclear warheads. Then, he and his stealthy submariners secretly patrolled the coastlines of rival nations. Captain Norton and his regimented men sat under the cloak of the sea, ready to launch a nuclear first strike if ever so ordered.

Captain Norton wanted command of the Texas ever since he first saw her keel being laid in 2002 at a Virginia shipyard. Of note, the Captain was personally instrumental in working on silencing the Virginia-class submarine’s acoustical signatures. He did so when he worked with engineers at the Navy’s Acoustic Research Department (ARD), located on Lake Pend Oreille in Northern Idaho. They used 1/8th scale remote controlled models of Virginia-class submarines for doing their research. That aside, three years ago the Captain’s dream was realized when he replaced the Texas’s aging commander, whose long life at sea ended with his retirement. Captain Norton’s love for the Texas may be partly due to the fact that he was born and raised on his family farm in the Lone Star State where his ancestral roots stretch back several generations.

Currently, the fearsome sea hunter and her formidable crew are deployed on a top-secret mission. Having just finished scrutinizing sonar screens as well as satellite imagery, all in the course of looking for any nearby threats, Captain Norton gives the order, “Reel in the communication buoy; we’ll reconnect to FORCEnet when we surface.” (FORCEnet is a Naval Network Warfare Command networking communication link that allows decision-makers and others to be aware of current missions, so they can share information in real time that might prove vital to the success of an active operation.)

“Take us to periscope depth. Ten knots low ’n slow,” further orders the Captain.

“Aye, Captain. Reel in the buoy. Take us to periscope depth. Ten knots low ’n slow,” responds the XO as he relays the Captain’s commands to the communications and diving officers.

“Aye, docking the buoy,” answers the communications officer.

“Aye, periscope depth, zero degrees rear rudder, ten degrees up all planes, ten knots low ’n slow,” answers the diving officer while passing the command to the pilot.

“Aye, periscope depth, zero degrees rear rudder, ten degrees up all planes, ten knots low ’n slow,” answers the pilot while moving the single joystick that maneuvers the massive submarine. A whistle sounds, followed by a short ringing noise as yellow lights begin flashing at two of the control room’s stations. The Texas answers the helm without delay and begins ascending. Any standing submariners lean toward her nose as she planes upward. The diving officer calls out their depth every 100 feet, 50 feet, and lastly 10 feet as the fast-attack submarine rises silently from the depths of the Arabian Sea until trimming out at periscope depth.

“Raise the masts,” orders Captain Norton.

“Aye, Captain. Raise the masts,” repeats the XO as he passes the orders to the photonics technician on deck.

“Aye, raising the masts,” promptly answers the young sailor. The moment he types on the touch screen in front of him, a pair of masts, topped with special instruments, begin rising stealthily from the top of the submarine’s sail. (A submarine sail is also called a fairwater. In earlier generation subs, the sail was called the conning tower because that’s where the con was located.)

The telescoping poles’ heads quickly puncture through the wavy sea surface and immediately begin relaying information to computers in the control room. Monitors come to life with high-resolution infrared and video imagery with rangefinder data. The imagery covers a 360° view of the surface from the submarine’s position. Other screens in the command center display information round-the-clock. They are littered with colored dots fed to them by the sub’s sonar as well as government satellites when they can connect to them. (The sub’s sonar features are so sensitive that a sonar officer or technician can hear a ship sailing 1000 miles away, and even hear shrimp eating.) The colors of the dots differentiate countries. Moving a cursor over one of the dots makes the ship or aircraft’s point of origin, destination, friend or foe status, and cargo immediately appear on screen. The crew can also send and receive information using ELF or VLF low radio frequencies when at depth. The submariners endlessly watch sea and sky, so they are always aware of what surrounds them.

Captain Norton studies the live thermal and video images for a moment before giving the con to his XO. He orders him to maintain speed at periscope depth, for exactly twenty minutes, before diving to 800 feet and proceeding full speed ahead to their mission destination. The Captain exits the command and control room just as the steel orca surreptitiously enters the Gulf of Oman.

Inside the wardroom of the USS Texas are eight men from SEAL Team Fourteen, “Fury and Company.” This is no ordinary group of the elite fighters. The members of this special SEAL Team were handpicked by the U.S. Naval Special Warfare Development Group (NSWDG) to be on this tier-one black-ops unit. They are a special missions and counter-terrorism SEAL Team. Only two such secret squads exist. The seas were heavy when the sailors transferred onto the USS Texas with their tactical gear when she surfaced temporarily in the Indian Ocean, less than twenty-four hours ago. The men boarded by rappelling from a HH-60 Sea Hawk helicopter that flew them from the deck of the USS Gerald R. Ford (CVN-78) aircraft carrier deployed in the Atlantic Ocean. They had landed on the aircraft carrier after flying from Joint Expeditionary Base—Little Creek, located in Virginia Beach, Virginia.

The SEALs have just finished listening to Lieutenant (Lt.) Brock Barnette, the Officer in Charge (OIC), give instructional orders he received from U.S. Naval Forces Central Command. All eight warfighters are seated body tight on three sides of a table with bench seats. There is a large sealed envelope bearing the official seal of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) placed conspicuously on the center of the table. A notepad and pencil are placed in front of each man. All the men are dressed in black shorts and t-shirts with the SEAL Trident insignia embroidered on them in gold. Attentive, their eyes are fixed on a large flat screen that is attached to a wall. A video camera mounted above the screen is pointed toward them. Captain Norton has just entered the room.

“Captain on deck,” announces Lt. Barnette as he starts to stand with his men to acknowledge the Commander.

“At ease, sailors. Stay seated. We have a very short window of opportunity, so let gets this show on the road,” orders Captain Norton, who is now standing beside the table facing the camera.

The imagery showing on the screen is split into two views. On the left side is the Director of National Intelligence, Brian Erikson. He and CIA agents are seated around a large conference table at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. On the right side is Secretary of Defense, General Douglas Wheeler. He is sitting behind an ornate cherry desk in his office at the Pentagon. The live video feeds appear via a secure satellite link to FORCEnet.

“Everyone, I’ll be brief. You have nineteen minutes to conclude this meeting before my sub is diving and we lose the satellite link. So I suggest you use this time wisely,” informs Captain Norton.

“Captain Norton, I understand completely. Okay men, no time to waste! Welcome Lieutenants Barnette and Storm, Senior Chief Petty Officer Knight, Chief Petty Officer Hernandez, and Petty Officers Mancinelli, Van Dyke, Brooks, and Goldberg to this most important briefing. On behalf of America, we give our utmost gratitude for your bold service to this great country as we ask you once more to go into harm’s way. Lieutenant Storm, I’m glad to see you’re back on active duty,” remarks Secretary of Defense General Douglas Wheeler

“Thanks, General,” reply all the men.

“Men, this mission is extremely critical for two reasons. First, we need to know why a wealthy jihadist arms dealer, who is an al-Qaeda sympathizer and devoted ISIS supporter, is meeting with a Chinese nuclear physicist, Iranian rocket engineer, and a Russian nuclear submarine expert on his yacht. Secondly, we know from information-sharing amongst the CIA, British Secret Intelligence Services, and other allied security agencies that a well-financed secret society has formed with global roots. We are referring to this new synergetic group of evil as the DOOMS-TEAM, which stands for the ‘Dark Order Of Maligned Seeking To Eradicate AMerica.’ We believe the members of this malevolent alliance are from China, Russia, North Korea, the Middle East, and other parts of our world. It’s very likely that the DOOMS-TEAM has their people embedded in England as well as other allied countries. Their demented collaborators are no doubt hidden here in America, too.

“DOOMS-TEAM is hell-bent on destroying the Western way of life, for ideological or perverse religious reasons. They seek to obtain and use weapons of mass destruction to destroy America, or, at minimum, to create great devastation, panic, and economic collapse. It’s believed that all the men meeting on this yacht are DOOMS-TEAM members. We desperately need solid intelligence, such as video, photographs, written documentation..."

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