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not-a-space-alien · 7 years ago

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Falling Hazard, Part 13: The Second Rebellion

Series masterpost

On AO3

Art by @petimetrek (link for better quality)

Holy water cannot help you now.

A thousand armies couldn’t keep me out.

I don’t want your money. I don’t want your crown.

See I’ve come to burn your kingdom down.

And no rivers and no lakes can put the fire out…

The atmosphere of Heaven seemed to be a little darker now. The gates were not shining quite as brightly. And the gatekeeper, leaning boredly against her post, was the first to smell the trouble that was about to unfold that day. She would have been a fool to miss it, since the portal opened up right in front of her and disgorged a smattering of angels who had all been reported missing.

“Hey, where have you all been?” said the gatekeeper, trying to sound annoyed instead of uneasy. The feeling of unease turned out to be justified when one of the warrior angels muscled her out of the way and began to pull the gates open.

“Hey! What are you doing? That’s my job!”

“Stand aside,” said the warrior.

The gatekeeper looked at the group with uncomprehending eyes. With a final clank, the gates sat open.

The gatekeeper moved into the center of the wide-open gates and stamped her foot. “Now listen, you better tell me what’s going on right now.”

“Get out of the way,” said a principality.

She stopped as she heard a sound that heralded another arrival from the portal. She turned.

There was something coming through to approach the gate, something puffing billows of black smoke. It held a healing staff in one arm, but the tip burned with a red and black light of death. Its aura rivaled that of any archangel or archdemon, but instead of one singular aura, it seemed to be made up of a thousand fragments of angels, as though sutured together from a patchwork of angry wishes and prayers. She had never seen anything like it before, and thought it must be from the deepest, darkest depths of Hell, except for the fact that it stepped out accompanied by an escort of angels.

“For your own sake,” said the angel beside her. “Get out of the way.”

Gabriel had called Kris into his office, and Kris had an idea why, but Kris did not want to get his hopes up and so remained humble as he took a seat across from the archangel’s desk.

“Do you know why I’ve called you in here, Kris?”

“I have a suspicion, sir,” said Kris, trying to hide a smile. “But I won’t say it before you.”

Gabriel dropped a mound of paperwork onto his desk, then tented his hands and peered at Kris. “With Michael gone, we need someone to fill the role of warrior archangel.”

“I thought Victoria was chosen for that.”

“Everything I’m about to tell you is classified, and you are forbidden from sharing it.”

“Of course, sir.”

“Victoria was chosen to fill Camael’s position. We may be demoting her back down to a power and promoting a clerical angel to take her place. We are certainly not going to reassign her to fill Michael’s position.” Gabriel scratched his chin. “Your loyalty to Heaven has proven in my mind that you would be a perfect replacement.”

“Pardon me,” said Kris, “but would it not be more conventional to promote one of Michael’s warriors to replace him? What did the other archangels say when you suggested one of your subordinates replacing him instead?”

“The other archangels don’t know yet,” said Gabriel. “But I’m positive I can strong-arm Uriel into agreeing to it. The others don’t matter. I’m going to take things into my own hands. Now that Michael’s gone, we can get things done with an archangel who actually does as he’s told.”

Kris was practically vibrating with excitement, but he did not say anything.

“We will carry out the promotion ceremony at sundown.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Some things are going to be changing around here,” said Gabriel. “We’re going to be doing things a little differently.”

“How so, sir?”

“I have here on my desk a list of names. It’s mixed angels and demons. As soon as you’re promoted, I want you to kill these individuals, starting at the top of the list.”

Kris took the list, flipping through pages. “Sir,” he said, trying not to sound dismayed. “This includes that demon under the other archangels’ protection. Surely this will cause problems.”

“That’s why nobody is going to find out you’re the one doing the killing,” said Gabriel. “The game has changed, and now we can play it however we want. I’m the Overseer of Divine Affairs on Earth, and it’s recently come to my attention that our agents on Earth are no longer functioning in the appropriate capacity. I have pinpointed a group of individuals whose elimination would purge our ranks of focal points for inappropriate behaviour.”

Kris scanned the list.

Crowley (infernal field agent, Great Britain)

Aziraphale (celestial field agent, Great Britain)

Oryss (infernal field agent, Libya)

Botis (infernal field agent, Egypt)

Adramelech (infernal field agent, India)

Lirach (infernal field agent, United States of America)

Abraxas (infernal field agent, Ireland)

Paula (celestial field agent, Ireland)

Angelo (clerical agent, third division)

Vincent (guardian angel, Canada)

“Hold on, Vincent?” said Kris, stopping partway down the list. “Sir, I don’t mean to question you, but how can he possibly be on this list? He’s a warrior, not a field agent, not to mention he’s been missing for a couple of weeks.”

Gabriel opened his desk drawer and tossed a photograph towards Kris. He peered at it to see Vincent with a small human girl on his shoulders and a woman on his arm. They were all laughing.

“Vincent’s place on this list is well-earned,” said Gabriel. “He has gotten inappropriately involved with his charges. Notice her stomach.”

Kris looked at the human woman, squinting at the photo in his fingers. “Is she…pregnant?”

“Yes.”

Kris looked up at him sharply.

“After he’s out of the way it should be easy enough to dispose of the unborn child. And as much as I hate to say it, the human daughter will have to be eliminated as well. Nothing of this kind has happened since the fiasco with the original nephilim, and we need to destroy all the evidence.”

“How old is the daughter?”

“Seven.”

Kris bit his lip. There was no way to refuse when he had just been rewarded so highly for his obedience.

“None of what I said leaves this room, understand?”

“Of course, sir.”

A sound began to flap into existence around them, the sound of sandals smacking on the polished floor as their wearer ran in a panic.

“Big changes are coming, Kris. Soon the….who is that?”

A messenger skittered to a stop inside the doorway, chest heaving and looking in absolute disarray. “Gabriel, sir, we need you outside. Now.”

Gabriel stood, alarmed. “What is it?”

“There’s something outside.”

“What?”

“Please come outside, quickly.”

“Kris, come on.”

The list and associated grandiose plans were left on the desk, forgotten. Gabriel and Kris hurried out, beckoning a group of Gabriel’s warriors that had been loitering in the lobby to follow.

Gabriel came out onto the steps to see that the street was empty, except for a lone figure planted in the middle of it, facing the building façade.

It was Vincent. And he was smiling wickedly.

Gabriel’s warriors appeared, streaming around him down the stairs to move between Gabriel and the street, weapons drawn.

They stood that way for a moment. Tension swamped the air for reasons he could not identify.

“So where have you been?” said Gabriel.

Instead of answering, Vincent raised something straight into the sky, a tool with a barrel on it, and pulled the trigger. With a huge pop, some projectile soared up into the sky, where it exploded into a shower of green smoke.

Gabriel’s eyes followed it up, then snapped back down to Vincent, who had done nothing else. “Was that supposed to scare me?”

A volley of principalities appeared in the street behind the warrior, jogging to stand beside him. Vincent shoved the gun back into belt. “I’m definitely not the scariest thing you’ll see today, sir.”

“Why are you in attack formation?” said Gabriel as another smattering of angels streamed in to line up with Vincent. “There are no enemies. Stand down.”

There was suddenly a booming hissing sound, like a pressurised machine venting steam, accompanied by a laugh that sounded like the crackling of something on fire. “Oh, there are enemies nearby, all right,” said Vincent coolly.

A burning, wraith-like creature with a healing staff in its hand appeared, feet melting the golden bricks beneath its feet as it came to a stop behind the group of opposing angels.

Gabriel’s eyes were wide. He could find no words.

“Here I am!” it said.

Gabriel had not heard that voice in person for a very, very long time, but the context of the staff was enough to job his memory. “Maltha?”

“The one and only!” said Maltha, raising her arms. “You told me to come at you with everything I had!”

“I meant through the war,” Gabriel fumed. “You can’t be here! What...”

A howl sounded nearby, some infernal creature the likes of which Gabriel had never heard. He turned to the messenger who had brought him outside. “Go find Uriel. Tell her we need the new warrior archangel now. Tell her my choice is Kris.”

The messenger stood frozen with fear. “Now!” Gabriel shouted. “Go! Go!”

The messenger spread their wings and took off.

Simultaneously, a dozen angels from the opposing side drew their bows and fired a dozen arrows, which all hit their marks. Four speared the messenger’s wings, five their legs, and three in the arms. The poor angel plummeted back to the ground before they could get clear of the site. No one volunteered to replace them.

Gabriel’s disbelieving gaze left the downed messenger and returned to the group of rebel angels. “S-so what? You’re going to kill me? Is that it?”

Maltha laughed. “No, I don’t think so. I have other places to be right now.” She motioned to her escort, who took to the air. “As for who will be killing you, I think I shall leave it to him.”

There was a booming growl. Maltha disappeared with a flurry of wings, revealing a hunched, bear-like figure behind her, muzzle crunched in a snarl, drooling saliva, eyes aflame with hunger.

“Jesus!” said Gabriel, jerking backwards. “Michael?”

Another unit of warriors had rushed onto the scene to move in between Gabriel and the interlopers. Gabriel did not want to admit how relieved he was to see them, because it bolstered his guard’s numbers so that his force was larger.

Mykas reared to stand on his hind legs, the tip of his sword trailing on the ground, waiting for the battle to start. Vincent threw himself into the air and yelled, “Do not lay your lives down to defend Gabriel, brothers and sisters. He deserves his fate.”

Thoughts of all the secret actions Gabriel had tried to bury suddenly came crashing back into him.

“For all his talk about rules and order, he has broken one of the foundations of Heaven’s cornerstones of kindness to humans,” said Vincent, sounding very angry.

“You have a little secret broken cornerstone yourself,” said Gabriel, who realised far, far too late that no amount of threats to the messenger would protect himself, because the next sentence out of Vincent’s mouth was:

“Gabriel destroyed the Lord’s Temple in Jerusalem.”

Stunned silence fell on the company of angels by Gabriel’s side.

“How many of you did not already know?” said Vincent. “Well, you know now.”

“Come on,” scoffed Gabriel. “I destroyed the Temple? Does that sound like something I’d do?”

Slowly, the warriors began to part from in front of Gabriel with mutters of disgust.

“Hey!” said Gabriel. “Resume your posts! Come back here!”

Mykas watched the blockade in the path to his adversary dwindle until the defending force was barely half its previous size.

“Y-you all!” said Gabriel. “You would betray Heaven?”

“You are not Heaven,” said Vincent. “You are corruption and disaster. You would sacrifice the Earth, Michael, and all of us if it meant getting your way. You have brought this upon yourself, and Creation will be bettered with your passing.”

Kris drew his sword and stood in front of Gabriel.

“Kris,” said Mykas. “Brother, you would still choose this even knowing you had a choice?”

Kris’s face contorted into anger. “Unlike you, I accept my role in our Heavenly Father’s Plan. Anyone who refuses to fulfill their intended purpose has no honour or respect from me. You are no brother of mine, beast. Even if it means I have to die here on these steps, I will—”

Mykas threw his sword and decapitated Kris.

Threw is not really the right word to describe what Mykas did. The sword moved so fast it was an invisible blur, seemingly propelled by force of anger alone. And decapitation is not really the right word to describe what happened to Kris. One moment he was standing there talking, and the next his head had disappeared completely in a red mist, the sword still shaking embedded in the marble stairs behind him.

Kris’s headless body toppled over and rolled down the stairs.

That was enough to start the battle. First blood had been drawn in Heaven. And the first attack on the Heavenly Kingdom in six-thousand years had begun.

Maltha’s feet had not touched the golden streets of Heaven for a very long time. She did not want to admit that she missed any of this. But when she had seen the infirmary with its insignia on the front that had been stripped from her millennia ago, a pang of some strong, unnamed emotion had seized her.

She had forced herself to walk past it without lingering, because it was the future she wanted to preserve, not the past.

Vincent jogged up to join the formation her escort made as it carried her away from the battle brewing in front of Gabriel. “It’s this way.”

A gaggle of frightened healers rushed to get out of their way as they went down one of the offshoots of the main street. That was about as much resistance as they met; they were moving quietly, and the sounds of battle in front of Gabriel’s courtyard were now raging so loudly they could still hear it even across such distance.

Heaven would be otherwise occupied for a few minutes. Which was all they needed.

“Almost there,” said Vincent. “This way.”

He led them around a corner and into an elegant courtyard with fountains and pools and pristine white limestone pillars. And standing in the very center of it was the archangel Victoria.

Puffing smoke, Maltha approached. “It’s nice to finally meet the new archangel. Well met, Victoria.”

Victoria drew her sword. “I don’t know what you’re doing here, but you need to leave. Now.”

“I’m done waiting around,” said Maltha. “If you think you can stop me, go ahead and try. But I see you haven’t even brought any support with you.”

“What are you lot doing?” Victoria shouted to the angels behind her. “Have you all lost your minds? Escorting a demon into Heaven?”

The angels drew back slightly behind Maltha, as though shame-faced.

“What’s wrong?” said Maltha. “Are you afraid of her?”

“Victoria is honourable,” said Vincent.

Maltha’s coal-red eyes roved from her angelic support back to Victoria, finally understanding the problem. Victoria was honourable. She had never been a target. But now she was standing in the way.

“I’ll take care of this,” she said, waving them back. “I wouldn’t see you pitted against your sister-in-arms.”

The six angels withdrew, looking unsure.

“Look, Maltha, I have a lot of respect for you,” said Victoria. “That’s the only reason I’m trying to talk to you first. If you were anyone else, I would have struck you down on sight. You understand that, right? You understand the gravity of this?”

Maltha clucked her tongue. “So serious. I’m just walking about, Victoria.”

“Get out!” Victoria shouted. “You desecrate the ground you walk on! Nothing good can come of you being so close to our Heavenly Father!”

“You were doing so well,” said Maltha, twirling her staff. “I thought perhaps we might have been able to settle this without violence.”

“Your very presence here is violence.”

“Victoria, surely you must know that the current leadership in Heaven cannot stand. You took Raphael’s side, so surely you must know they were willing to sacrifice Michael. And surely you must have heard about who actually destroyed the Temple.”

Victoria was stormily silent.

“You didn’t know.”

“Don’t pretend you care about the Temple.”

“It was Gabriel.”

“You’re lying!”

“She’s not lying,” interjected one of the angels.

Victoria glared at him, but did not lower her sword. “Heaven’s leadership isn’t the business of a demon.”

“It is my business when they meddle in my affairs to further their own agenda,” she snarled, stalking forwards, huffing glowing cinders out of her mouth. “They did everything in their power to hurt me in the deepest, most personal way, because they thought themselves safe in their holy fortress and wanted to watch me rampage from a distance. No more. I’m done. Now stand aside.”

“I’m afraid I can’t let you go any further.”

“Why are you so dead-set on sacrificing yourself for a meaningless cause, and for people who would not ever dream of doing the same for you?”

“Because this is all I have!” Victoria screamed, voice warbling. “This is who I am! If I don’t then what am I? What good am I? How could I look at myself in the mirror if I just let you?”

“What am I if I can’t fulfil my God-given purpose?” Maltha smiled sadly. “Doesn’t that sound familiar.”

“Don’t try that. I’m nothing like you.” Victoria wiped her cheek, then put her hand back on her sword. “This ends now.”

“I don’t want to fight you, Victoria.”

“Yeah, I wouldn’t want to fight me, either.”

“Please, Victoria. Just stand aside.”

“If you don’t want to fight, then don’t!” said Victoria, lunging forwards. “Then just die!”

Victoria launched herself and cleared the space between them in the blink of an eye, propelling herself on black wings spread wide. Her sword clashed mightily against Maltha’s staff with all of her momentum.

Maltha slid back with the force of the blow, arms trembling with the effort of holding back that sword. Any weapon less than that of an archdemon would have shattered under the attack.

Maltha’s foot barely cleared the water of one of the pools as she broke off, spreading her wings to stabilise herself. She flipped over the pool, trying her damnedest not to touch it, because of course she knew what would be in it.

Victoria lunged to chase her, splashing over the pool and thrusting her sword again.

They locked onto each other, becoming a blur of motion, weapons bashing against each other with a series of clangs like gongs ringing out in the open space.

“You can still run,” Victoria said between grunts, not breaking her concentration.

“So can you,” steamed Maltha.

Maltha slipped up. And Victoria’s sword punched right through her gut.

Maltha exploded into a fit of hisses and shrieks, sizzling out into human form and pulling backwards, hand over the wound. Stumbling, she fell to her knees.

The six warriors rushed to her side, drawing their weapons hesitantly, prepared in case Victoria tried to land the killing blow. Maltha gave a moan of pain, blood welling from between her armor where the sword had slid in.

Victoria stood back. “I told you to give up.”

Maltha squeezed her eyes shut.

“I’ll ask one more time, demon.” She pointed her sword at Maltha. “I’ll give you one more chance to escape with your life.”

Maltha pressed her hand into her wound.

“You’re skilled, Maltha. But you’re not a warrior. You’re…”

Victoria’s eyes blew wide as she realised what Maltha was doing with her hand on her wound.

“You cheating bitch!” said Victoria, flying into a rage, bringing her sword down on Maltha’s head.

The staff came up with one hand to meet her, shaking with the effort.

“If you think…” Maltha growled.

Still with one hand clutching the wound, she shoved Victoria back and got to her feet. Victoria tried to attack again, but Maltha blocked.

“…that I’ve come this far, just to be beaten by some upstart power…”

Victoria frantically tried to land hits, but Maltha kept her staff tight to her body, blocking with one hand and healing with the other, blue light feeding out from her hand back into her.

“Then you’ve got another thing coming, you whelp!”

“A dishonourable thing to do, to take advantage of someone giving you a chance—”

“All’s fair in war, love,” said Maltha.

The wound closed up. Maltha’s second hand flew back to her staff, and then she was on the offensive again, getting closer, working to push Victoria back.

And now Victoria slipped up. Maltha’s staff swung low and crunched against Victoria’s knees, and the archangel collapsed with an exclamation of pain. Maltha crushed Victoria’s hand, evoking another cry, and kicked her sword away.

The tip of Maltha’s staff came down into the center of Victoria’s back, slamming her into the ground and overcoming the archangel’s attempts to right herself.

Panting, the two of them just remained as they were for a moment.

“You wear the mantle of archangel well, Victoria. But I can see you’re not quite used to wielding it yet.”

Victoria let her head fall to the floor. “I suppose there are worse ways to die than this.”

The weight of Maltha’s staff disappeared. “Die? I’d never hear the end of it if you did.” She began to hobble away, moaning about her aches and pains. “Better get those legs looked at after I let Raphael out of Hell, hm?”

Victoria sprawled out, groaning.

Maltha’s escort formed up behind her, giving Victoria sympathetic glances in passing.

“Lord,” said Vincent, jogging to Maltha’s side. “Your performance was admirable.”

“Let’s just get out of here before someone comes along and fixes her up,” Maltha sighed. “I know this is going to bite me in the arse. Hurry up. Where are we going from here?”

Vincent pointed to a construction in the distance, something surrounded by a huge wall. “All the humans in Heaven are behind that wall. I know she is in there.”

Maltha stopped, putting her hands on her knees, winded. “Of course. All right. And how do you propose we gain entry?”

Vincent smirked. “Kris isn’t the only warrior who figured out how to use his aural weapon as a bomb.”

Olivia and Kyleth had been left to guard the gate. Guard it from what, no one was sure, but everyone in the party had agreed that it was a good idea to leave two angels at the gates.

If Olivia and Kyleth had not been distracted by arguing with Aziraphale, they might have noticed a certain someone, whom no one had counted on joining the war party, sneak up and fly over the gates. But this certain someone had done it very fast, and Olivia and Kyleth were both very angry at Aziraphale, so they didn’t.

“Look, I’m an angel the same as any of you!” Aziraphale shouted. “I have just as much right to be here as you!”

“Go back, you idiot,” said Olivia.

“Now you listen here!” said Aziraphale indignantly. “I’m Maltha’s friend!”

“Didn’t sound like earlier,” snorted Kyleth.

Aziraphale flushed red. “Never mind that! It’s very important that I talk to her. I might still be able to convince her this is a bad idea before she does anything to get herself and all these angels with her killed or worse.”

“And do what instead?” said Kyleth. “Have a nice chat over a cuppa instead? I’m sure that’d be lovely. Imagine Uriel and Maltha having tea together. Just wonderful.”

“Aziraphale, what is your problem?” Olivia said. “You know as well as any of us how—”

She was cut off by the sound of an explosion from somewhere deep in Heaven, so forceful that the ground shook beneath them. All three angels turned to find the source, and saw a towering billow of black smoke rising up.

Aziraphale took the opportunity to slip past them, spreading his wings and somersaulting over the gates, landing on the other side.

“Hey!” said Kyleth. “Aziraphale, you jerk!”

“Let him go,” said Olivia. “Not our fault if he gets himself killed.”

Aziraphale hurried away before they changed their minds, jogging along the main avenue, trying to decide on a course of action.

There were two immediately obvious destinations: The black smoke in the distance, indicative of something having been destroyed. And closer, a pall of green smoke hung in the air.

The green signal was closest, so he began to scramble towards it.

The streets were quiet, as though everyone were holding their breath. Aziraphale didn’t like it one bit.

He rounded the corner to the courtyard before Gabriel’s headquarters. And stepped into a mess.

Bodies were strewn about in front of the building, the ground slick with blood. At the focal point of this scene was the archangel Gabriel. Or what was left of him. His body was lain out on—and all over—the stairs and main walkway. And standing over the remains was some enormous beast, one with the aural strength of an archdemon, but cloaked with the aura fragments produced by the angel dust spell.

It was fallen Michael. It had to be. Aziraphale had seen Michael do a lot of things as a Heavenly warrior, but he had never seen Michael look quite as scary as he did now. He was still tearing at the archangel as though they were in combat, growling savagely, blood soaking his muzzle and neck and flinging everywhere. It was not the fight of someone who knew what they were doing. It was the manifestation of millenia of pent-up anger.

A group of angels nearby were trying to tell him the fight was over and he could stop now. A second group was trying to tell him he had performed admirably, although it represented a deviation from his usual combat style.

Aziraphale watched for a few seconds before backing away. Hand on his chest, breathing hard, he staggered away and tried not to throw up.

So…green signal, nothing there for him to do, it looked like. What else could he try?

A second coloured signal went up in the sky nearby, this one yellow. And it was coming from behind him, nearer to the gate.

He began to backtrack.

Maltha ran.

She started running as soon as the wall fell, because she had waited for what seemed like forever for this moment, being as patient as humanly—or inhumanly, as the case were—possible, and now that it was so close, it seemed so much more unbearable than before.

Her escort yelled at her to slow down, that they knew where Beth was and should take the lead, and they needed to be orderly to get out as fast as possible, which was of paramount importance since they couldn’t see the signal flares from inside here.

Despite the chaos and Maltha’s excitement, they managed to find their destination eventually. Disembodied human souls with indistinct faces floated out of her way as she pushed through; they registered mild irritation at being disturbed and nothing more. The atmosphere was hazy and bright, bathed in a white, sourceless light, and the air was filled with a musical humming that reverberated, as though all the humans within were joined in perpetual song.

“Beth!” Maltha called, stumbling through this. “Elizabeth! Where are you?”

The path finally cleared, and there she was:

Beth was currently in the middle of a circle of sprites, small glowing human figures bobbing up and down around her, laughing lightly. She had a placid, euphoric look on her face, and did not seem to be aware of anything around her.

“Beth!” said Maltha.

Beth’s eyes snapped from the sprites to Maltha. Slowly, as though with great effort, Beth’s eyes widened with recognition. “Hey,” she said. “Hey! Oh, you’re finally here. Wonderful!”

She wobbly got to her feet, the fae-like creatures around her bouncing up and down and giggling. Beth, her expression one of intense happiness, took Maltha’s hand and pulled her closer. “Come here, I want you to meet someone.”

Beth held her hands out, and one of the small human souls drifted down into her arms. She held it like a toddler, taking it back over to Maltha. “This is my daughter.”

Tears began to well in Maltha’s eyes. “This…this is Penny?”

Beth nodded. The creature giggled, holding its amorphous limbs out, pulsing with light.

“She’s…she’s beautiful.”

“I know,” said Beth. “I’m so happy I got to see her again.”

“Beth,” said Maltha. “I came to take you back.”

“Back where?” said Beth.

“W-well,” said Maltha, suddenly acutely aware of how things might look to a human perspective, “back to Hell.”

Beth’s face fell, very slowly. “I can’t take her down there.”

“Well, no…”

“Can’t you just stay up here?” Beth took Maltha’s arm. “We could all just…stay up here together, and be a happy family.”

“Lord Maltha, please hurry,” said one of the warriors.

Maltha bit her lip. “Beth, I can’t.” Her voice almost cracked.

“Why not?”

“I’m a demon. I’m not welcome here.”

Beth’s face was blank, as though she were having trouble processing the statement. Then, finally, comprehension began to dawn on her face, like she had forgotten everything that existed outside of this room until now. “Oh. I guess I didn’t think of that.”

“Beth, would you rather stay here?” Maltha’s hand shook in Beth’s, and tears rolled down her cheeks. “It won’t upset me. I want you to be happy.”

“Maltha, please, hurry,” said one of the warriors. “Dina just came back and says she saw the yellow signal go up outside.”

“Noah,” said Beth quietly. “How is he?”

“He cries at night because he misses you,” said Maltha. “I can’t sing the lullabies the right way, apparently.”

Beth looked from Maltha to the soul in her arms.

“It’s up to you,” Maltha said tearfully.

“She’s happy here,” Beth finally said. “She doesn’t need me.”

Beth opened her arms, and the soul drifted upwards to rejoin the circle of other children.

“Goodbye, sweet pea,” said Beth. “I’m so glad I could see you one more time.”

Maltha had already lost track of which was Beth’s daughter. None of them seemed particularly bothered by her departure.

Beth took Maltha’s hand. “Okay. I’m ready. Let’s go.”

They hurried out of whatever that strange place was. The moment Beth’s feet hit the rubble of the explosion that had opened their entrance, she got an irritated expression on her face. “What…What the heck?” she said, rubbing her eyes.

“Are you all right?” said Maltha.

“Yeah, I just…” She looked back behind her. “That was fucking weird. What happened? Where have I been the past few weeks? Last I remember, Gabriel was there. That asshole. And then there was…light…”

“I’ll tell you all about it later,” said Maltha. “Right now, we need to get going.”

This last statement by Maltha was prompted by the appearance of the blue smoke signal in the sky, layered on top of the yellow one.

“What does that mean?” Beth said, peering at the signal.

“It means someone’s in trouble,” said Maltha, motioning her guard to follow her. “Come on.”

“Wait, hold on,” said Beth. “Crouch down for a second.”

Maltha did so. “Why?”

Beth clambered up onto Maltha’s back, wedging herself between her wings. “This is a rescue right? You’re supposed to carry me. Don’t you know anything? Oh, and once we get going, can you take me past Gabriel? I want to flip him off.”

Olivia was still fuming. She walked over to Heaven’s brass gates and started kicking them with her boot.

“Olivia, it’s fine,” said Kyleth.

“We shouldn’t have let him in,” said Olivia with another savage kick at the gates. “I ought to go find him and kick his fat, cherubic ass.”

“What is he going to do, realistically?”

“He’s going to get his ass kicked, that’s what he’s going to do.”

A few more kicks to the gate sated her need for violence. “That fucking guy. Who does he think he is, huh?”

“Just be glad it was him and not Crowley,” said Kyleth. “What a disaster that would be.”

A portal zoomed open in front of the gates, stretching far wider than traditional.

Olivia and Kyleth both leaned forward to peer into it.

A pair of headlights flicked on from inside it, and an engine growled.

Kyleth and Olivia barely had time to dive out of the way as a black car came barreling out, rocketing directly into the gates, smashing them open and chugging along for a few dozen metres before coughing and dying, skewed at an angle with tire marks under it.

“Oh my God,” said Kyleth, climbing over the wrecked gates. “Please tell me that’s not—”

A foot kicked the driver’s side door open, and Crowley rose up amidst steam rolling off the engine. “Damn,” he said. “I was really hoping that would get me a lot further.”

“Crowley, holy shit,” said Olivia, rushing over to him. “Are you using the powder version of the spell? You’re going to get yourself killed.”

Crowley clambered over the wreckage of his vehicle to get away from her. “Now don’t try and stop me, Olivia,” he said, while engaged in an awkward half-run away from her. “I’ve got to find Aziraphale.”

“Leave him to whatever he gets himself into—Crowley, dammit, would you listen to me! Kyleth, stay at the gate, I’ll handle this.”

They played an awkward game of chase. Olivia was faster, but she was afraid to touch him.

“Crowley, you stupid idiot!” said Olivia, trying to round about and step in front of him. “Maltha will kill us if anything happens to you.”

Crowley skittered to avoid her overtaking him. She finally managed to corner him against a fence of some sort.

“Now listen here,” she panted. “You’re important to a lot of people. This won’t do. You need to—”

She broke off, her eyes jerking up to a point in space somewhere above his head in the distance, an expression of utmost horror overcoming her features.

He spun around. Uriel was diving towards him, wings spread like a hawk.

“Fuck!” said Crowley, darting away, in no particular direction but away.

“I should have known you would have something to do with this!” Uriel’s voice rang out. “Didn’t I tell you what I would do if I caught you up here again?”

“No no no,” said Olivia. “Uriel never comes this close to the gate. She—she—she was supposed to be further in. She was supposed to be second.”

She watched as the second green signal went up into the sky behind Uriel, its explosion illuminating her wings faintly.

“Fucking—” said Olivia, yanking her flare gun out with a shaking hand. “Perfect. Perfect. Okay. Fucking—”

Olivia fired the flare gun at Uriel for good measure, but the archangel dodged it easily, and the signal climbed up into the sky at an angle and exploded low over the buildings.

Crowley, meanwhile, had made an impressive attempt to haul arse away, but Uriel was already in the air, and she gained on him far too fast to overcome.

Crowley turned to face her as she touched down, a hand outstretched to grab him, an expression of disgust and anger on her face. Olivia stood where she was, looking panicked but making no move to help.

Crowley was going to die, or something worse, right here, right now, unless he could keep Uriel off him. And for once, his fight or flight instincts landed on fight.

His healing staff materialised into his hands. And the split second before Uriel’s hand landed on him, he smacked it away with his staff, pushing out with his aura with all his might, trying his damnedest to copy Maltha.

And he heard a bone crack.

Uriel shrieked in surprise, withdrawing her arm and clutching it. “What did you do, you little scorpion?”

“I…I broke your arm,” said Crowley with triumph. “I did it!”

Reality came crashing back down on him as Uriel’s undamaged arm lashed out, too late for him to respond, and grabbed his throat, strangling him and lifting him up so that his feet dangled. She decked him with one of her wings and knocked his staff out of his hand.

“Somebody!” Olivia yelled. “Jesus fucking Christ. I can’t fight Uriel by myself. Somebody.”

“You think you can engage me in combat?” Uriel sneered as Crowley vainly kicked at her. “Me?”

Olivia, hands shaking, raised her flare gun again and fired a projectile that released blue smoke.

“I’ve had just about enough of this,” said Uriel, tightening her chokehold on Crowley. “You think you can get away with so blatantly abusing your power right in front of me?”

“Come on come on fucking come on,” said Olivia. “Somebody get your ass over here, come on.”

“Nobody respects the rules,” said Uriel, fire burning in her eyes. “So why should I? Hm? Maybe it’s Uriel’s turn to play God.”

Crowley’s thoughts suddenly rushed back to what Aziraphale had said. That they could be punished with something worse than falling that hadn’t been invented yet, and he had a very, very bad feeling that he was about to witness its invention.

Uriel slammed him face-first into the ground, planting her foot into his back. “Now you’ll see what happens when Uriel uses her powers however she wants to, the way you do,” Uriel raged.

She brought her hand up, and Crowley gasped as his wings tore open from his back of their own accord.

“Uriel, don’t!” Olivia shouted, waving her arms and circling around in front of the archangel. “Here! Me! Attack me instead!”

“You’re next,” said Uriel, fanning her wings. “Stand back.”

Six-thousand-year-old fear kept Olivia from drawing her sword. “I hate you!” Olivia shouted. “You were always the worst out of the lot of them!”

Crowley felt invisible, steely hands grip the base of his wings, and he suddenly knew what might be worse than falling.

Losing your fucking wings.

“Oh God!” Crowley screamed as the hands began to tug. “Uriel, don’t! Don’t! Please!”

“You would dare call upon Our Heavenly Father for mercy?” Uriel said.

The pull became worse. “Wait! Don’t! Please! Please!” He felt a tendon snap and gasped in pain.

“Accept your fate,” Uriel said. “You pathetic creature.”

A figure with sandy wings appeared, moving so fast as to be a blur, ramming into Uriel with the full force of its body weight.

Crowley felt the pressure on his wings mercifully disappear, and rolled over to see that Aziraphale had tackled Uriel off of him, and the two were now righting themselves from the ground.

Aziraphale scrambled back to Crowley. “C-Crowley, what are you doing here?”

“Trying to stop you from getting yourself killed!”

Uriel pushed herself up with her wings.

“How’s that working out?” said Aziraphale.

“Honestly, not so great,” said Crowley.

“You would dare attack me!” hissed Uriel. “Traitor!”

“Then I guess I’m a traitor!” Aziraphale shouted. “I don’t care!”

Uriel began to lumber towards him. “Crowley, I was just about to say that you were right,” said Aziraphale. “But I’m starting to think this was a bad idea after all.”

“Aziraphale, I was about to say you might have been right too, but maybe we can talk about this later when we aren’t about to get the shit totally kicked out of—”

Aziraphale just barely managed to step out of Uriel’s grasp as she tried to grab him.

“You idiots!” shouted Olivia. “Run! What the fuck are you doing?”

Aziraphale drew his sword, Crowley retrieved his staff, and they backed up, linking hands.

“Aziraphale, I love you!” said Crowley.

“Likewise!” said Aziraphale, squeezing his hand.

“You morons! She’s going to murder us!” Olivia shouted.

“Then run,” said Aziraphale.

Screaming in frustration, Olivia ran in front of Aziraphale and Crowley and yelled in Uriel’s face, “This is exactly why I joined this mission! I can’t wait for you to die!”

The tap tap tap of something with clawed feet running at top speed suddenly sounded nearby.

Uriel looked at Olivia with steel cold eyes. “Me? Die? In your dreams.”

Mykas came barreling around the corner, a ball of blood and fury, and before Uriel could even turn to face him, his teeth had sunk into her face.

She staggered backwards, screaming as Mykas bit down, tearing the skin off her cheek, raking teeth marks down her neck. Mykas slipped off her, and she used her wings to push herself away, flapping frantically to get into the air.

Mykas’s accompaniment of rebel angels streamed around him, fanning out. Aziraphale could not help but notice that, far from losing numbers to casualties, it had actually grown in size.

“Traitors!” Uriel shrieked, clutching what was left of her face. “Vile creature! Get out now!”

Mykas exploded into a howl of delighted laughter, sticking his hand out and materialising his sword. “Hey, Uriel!”

Uriel had materialised a bow and leveled it at Mykas, several dozen arrows floating in a circle around her.

“Do you have any sympathy for me now?” Mykas shouted.

Uriel’s bow released, launching the volley of arrows.

The assembled angels materialised shields, taking cover. The second the volley was over, Mykas stood up from behind the angel who had shielded him.

He threw his sword.

Uriel almost moved out of the way in time.

It sliced clean through her leg, severing the limb to a painful cry drowned out by the boisterous shouts from those assembled below.

Trailing blood, Uriel zoomed off.

Almost directly into Maltha.

The archdemon appeared squarely in Uriel’s intended path. Beth was on her back, both hands thrown up in a rude gesture.

Realising upon what scene she had just barreled, Maltha took a swipe at Uriel, who zigzagged out of way and took off deeper into Heaven, escaping on already-laboured wingbeats.

Mykas went after her with keen concentration, like a bloodhound, tearing forward on all fours. Maltha’s group merged with Mykas’s, falling in behind him.

Aziraphale and Crowley had been standing there dumbfounded this whole time, weapons still at the ready. The support that had poured in left just as suddenly, on Mykas’s tail.

Aziraphale lowered his sword, pulse still hammering. “Are you all right, my dear?”

Crowley panted with his hands on his knees. “Ahh…dammit, I think something’s torn in my left wing. But I think that can be healed.” He shot back up. “I completely forgot to say the reason why I came up here! Kabata is here and he’s tagging along with Maltha’s plan!”

“What?” said Aziraphale with alarm.

“He stole the last jar of angel dust and I’m positive he’s here to do something awful.”

“Come on,” said Aziraphale. “We need to catch up and tell Maltha. Wait.”

Crowley had started to move forward, but stopped at the command from Aziraphale. “What?”

“The…the angel dust.”

Panic flared inside Crowley as he suddenly became conscious of the fact that his coating of angel dust had shifted under Uriel’s attack. He looked down at himself, patting all over his body frantically.

There was a patch of bare skin on his neck where Uriel had grabbed him. Most of it had been wiped from his arms too.

“I…I’m not burning,” said Crowley. He looked up to Aziraphale, eyes wide. “Why am I not burning?”

Aziraphale returned his gaze with equal alarm.

There was a ram moving among the inner circles of Heaven, stepping carefully, hugging buildings, moving with caution but also with speed. And when it reached its target, it shifted into something vaguely man-shaped, holding a sheathed sword.

Kabata looked at the massively ornate façade in front of him and pushed the doors open with one meaty claw.

The Metatron was already waiting for him at the far end of the room, right where the red carpet stopped at the door leading to the inner chamber, arms crossed. Kabata loped in, his hooves tapping on the floor in the silence.

“I see you knew exactly where I’d be coming,” said Kabata, stopping halfway into the room. The cavernous space was so massive, the ceiling soaring so high, that he still had to shout.

“We thought it would have been obvious what exactly your intentions were, considering the circumstances of your fall.” Metatron waved a hand and materialised a bow and arrow. “And this is your plan?”

Kabata pulled his sword out of its sheath. “Yes.”

“Maltha plots the downfall of the whole Heavenly Kingdom by coordinating an entire faction of angels, including one whose fall she had to facilitate herself. And your plan is to…Walk in behind her and stab God with a big knife?”

Kabata tossed his head, flicking his ears. “It’s a short-sword, actually.”

Metatron’s face was stormy. “What?”

“A short-sword. It’s not a knife.”

“We do not care if you had the audacity to walk in here with a pointed stick!” Metatron exploded. “You’ll die here!”

“It’s Him who’s going to die!” Kabata shouted, pointing with his sword to the throne room behind Metatron. “Now get out of the way!”

Metatron drew their bow back and launched an arrow, which Kabata dodged expertly, then charged. Metatron fired a volley of arrows at him, all with similar failure. Their bow morphed into a sword when Kabata reached them, and Metatron brought it up to deflect the blow that came next.

Holy metal clanged against the infernal weapon with a shower of sparks. Metatron scowled.

“You were never very good with a sword, my sibling,” said Kabata.

“Neither were you, brother,” Metatron sneered, pushing him off.

They came at each other full speed then, the awkward, graceless back-and-forth of two out-of-practice swordsmen who were very angry with each other and sincerely wished to see each other die.

“You do realise—” Kabata said in between the deafening clangs of their swords “—that we’re both dead the second Maltha walks in here.”

“You’re not with her?” Metatron replied, not breaking their concentration on the fight.

“She hates my guts.”

“It’s not hard to see why.”

One misstep from Metatron, and Kabata knocked them off balance, then seized the opportunity to smash into their chest with his horns, breaking ribs and sending them to the floor.

“I think she’ll be much less likely to kill me than you,” said Kabata, trotting over to the heavy door. “After I do this.”

He paused in front of the door, still awed by it. Then, he put one paw on the handle. “Time to die, parasite.”

He suddenly felt a weight on his back, and he tumbled to the ground, Metatron’s arms locking around his neck. And then they were fighting like schoolchildren, with fists and teeth and, in Kabata’s case, a wicked pair of horns that he could not get enough space to use.

“Metatron!” screamed a voice, moving rapidly towards them.

Metatron, who happened to be on top as that happened, looked up from Kabata. They saw Uriel running through the doorway. One of her legs was completely gone, and she spilled blood with each hobbling step, using her wings to stay upright. “Michael is coming!”

“No,” said Metatron. “No.”

Kabata cursed and began to thrash anew beneath Metatron. “Let me up. Let me up!”

Uriel collapsed to the floor, dragging herself back to give the door some clearance, then materialised her bow and arrow. Metatron left Kabata, kneeling beside her and morphing their sword back into a bow.

“You can’t beat him, you fools,” said Kabata. “You’re both dead.”

“Do you think you’re any less dead?” said Metatron.

Kabata grimaced. He looked at the door to the throne room, then back to Uriel and Metatron. Then, he cursed, withdrew his own bow, and knelt on the other side of Uriel, arrow pointing to the door.

The three knelt there with shaking hands on weapons trained on the entrance. A snarl echoed out from the doorway.

When Aziraphale and Crowley finally caught up, the war party had come to a halt.

“Why’s everyone just milling about?” said Crowley.

They pushed their way to the front, where Maltha and Beth were standing at the precipice of a doorway. The sounds of combat and Mykas’s enraged barking echoed from inside.

“What’s the matter?” said Aziraphale.

She looked at the two of them tiredly. “I would ask how you got up here, but I suppose I should have realised there was no point in trying to imprison you.”

“Hey!” said Beth, waving to them.

They both waved back.

“Mykas charged right in without us,” said Maltha. “But the angels do not want to follow him.”

Aziraphale peered up at the façade and suddenly realised why as recognition dawned on him: They were in front of the hall of God’s throne.

“They’re fighting in the antechamber to God’s throne room? Surely they’ll be killed!” said Aziraphale.

He looked back down at the accompaniment of angels, seeing the fear on their faces. This was it, the limit of their rebellion. They would gladly face Uriel and Gabriel without a second thought, but God Himself? No, apparently not.

“I’m going to go in,” Maltha said, raising her voice. “Unless anyone has any objections?”

“Lord Maltha,” said one of the warriors. “When we made our bargain, we never expected you to step into the throne room without support, even with the angel dust.”

“No,” said Maltha. “I understand that. But this is why you asked me to come with you. Because you needed help. You needed someone to be strong when you couldn’t. You need someone to spit in God’s face.” She whirled around. “I’ve done this before. I’m practically an expert. We can’t leave Mykas fighting alone.”

The angels drew back with expressions of solemn respect.

“You don’t have to go alone,” said Beth. “I’ll go with you.”

Maltha planted a kiss on her head. “Beth, please. Just this once. Please listen to me when I ask you to stand back. Just this one time. For me.”

Beth stood on tiptoe to return the kiss. “All right. Anything for you.”

Maltha stood and faced the doorway, where a fresh scream rang out.

“Wait,” said Aziraphale. “I’ll go with you.”

Maltha smiled sadly. “Trying to make up for your comments earlier? Don’t you think that’s a bit overkill?”

“Bloody Hell,” said Crowley. “If he’s going then I guess I have to also.”

“Aziraphale, Crowley.” Maltha held out her hands. “My first friends. Will you face this with me?”

They took her hands.

“All right. Then let’s go.”

They stepped across the threshold and into the holiest antechamber in the Heavenly Kingdom.

The hall was already a mess. Uriel was the first thing their eyes fell to, because she was closest to the door, lying on the ground in a puddle of blood, either dead or dying. Beyond, closer to the carved door leading to the throne itself, the Metatron was struggling against Mykas, whose jaws were snapping precariously close to their face. Kabata, looking like his head had been bashed into the wall, hovered in the corner clutching his wounds, as though afraid to try and move.

And Death was there, leaning against the wall with his hands in his pockets, just watching.

Maltha let go of Aziraphale and Crowley and rushed forward, around Uriel, and menaced Kabata with her weapon. Kabata held out his hand, like it would keep her at bay, and backed up.

Aziraphale looked over to see that Crowley, of all the things in this chaotic scene, was staring at Uriel.

“Crowley,” he said, squeezing the demon’s hand.

Crowley let go of him and knelt beside Uriel, putting his hands on her wounds and letting healing power out through his hands. Grimacing, Aziraphale knelt beside him to help.

“She’s alive, but just barely,” said Crowley.

“You can let her die,” said Aziraphale gently.

Crowley did not respond. Aziraphale figured. He had never been able to talk Crowley out of showing anyone mercy.

Death let out a sigh and ambled down the red carpet, out of the hall.

Mykas was still in the process of beating the shite out of the Metatron. The archangel made an attempt to get out from under Mykas and dart away, but the archdemon’s mouth came up and closed around their arm, wrenching it out of its socket and hurling them into the wall like a rag doll. Metatron hit the floor hard, then tried to scrabble away, but Mykas was on them again in an instant, stomping on them and snarling.

Maltha looked up from Kabata, who had made no move to attack. “Look at this,” she said, her lip peeling back in a sneer. “His most loyal servant is fighting for their life a few feet away from Him, and still He does nothing.”

She stalked away from Kabata and moved towards the door of the throne room.

“M-Maltha, what are you doing?” said Aziraphale fearfully.

“She’s not going to…?” said Crowley.

“You’ve never lifted a finger to help any of us,” said Maltha. “All powerful? All knowing? So you must have seen this coming, and you chose to do nothing about it. You would rather let your three most loyal servants be slaughtered than do a single thing to help anyone.”

“Don’t,” shouted Aziraphale. “Maltha, don’t.”

“He has not seen fit to interfere before this point!” Maltha yelled. “Why should He start now?”

“It’s ineffable,” fumbled Aziraphale. “Ineffability. Ineffa—blast, Maltha!”

Mykas had seized Metatron’s neck in his jaws, and the Metatron, immobilised, watched Maltha’s advance towards the throne room with pained resignation, unable to even turn their head to look away.

“War and famine and death and rape and torture and murder and you just sit there,” Maltha raged. “It’s what you’ve always done. And when anyone dares to challenge you, you cast them out into darkness, and in the same breath claim to be merciful and loving. The one who has unwarranted arrogance is you.”

“Don’t,” said Crowley. “Oh, somebody, Maltha, don’t.”

Maltha’s hand was on the door handle. “Our Heavenly Father. Your prodigal daughter is here. Come out and face me.”

And she pulled the doors open.

AN: The lyrics at the beginning of this chapter are from “Seven Devils” by Florence and the Machinem

#good omens #my writing #my good omens fanfic #blood #gore

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racingtoaredlight · 7 years ago

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It happened to me: I saw all of the terrible ads and heard all of the unkind words and still went to see Alien: Covenant: the official RTARL movie review

Before I get to spoilery with my complaints I will say this for Alien: Covenant: it’s one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen in the theater.

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That was the nicest thing I could think to say. You probably don’t think that’s a compliment but then you probably haven’t seen this tremendous piece of shit waste of time, either. There is nothing about this movie that I particularly liked and I even liked parts of Prometheus. To take the original Alien and wash it out to the point you end up with this thing is a testament to the founding contributions of the late greats Dan O’Bannon and H.R. Giger. Even the xenomorphs manage to look terrible in Alien: Covenant.

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If you follow box office news at all you are aware that this movie has been a pretty big flop so far through two weekends. If you read movie reviews you might be aware that people hate the movie. If you watched the trailers and the TV spots, especially the reality TV-style confessionals, you are probably aware that you do not wish to see this movie. I was aware of this and I plunged in anyway. I love giant movie monsters and the original Alien is among the best of the bunch for sci-fi, horror, and creature design.

Look at that poster! It’s glorious and pays fitting tribute to H.R. Giger’s most famous creation. I kept thinking of Giger throughout watching the movie but it wasn’t nearly as glorious or fitting.

The movie opens with an interminable scene of Guy Pearce and Michael Fassbender reprising their roles as Peter Weyland and David, respectively, from Prometheus. Weyland does some weird power trip stuff to David including insulting his piano playing and making him get some tea. The robot (David) is offended. At least the room looks cool and you can see Fassbender totally acting his way into being a robot. It’s actually the best bit of acting in the whole movie.

The crew of the Covenant is introduced in a sort of episodic manner as the ship encounters a solar flare out in the dead of space that rips their solar sails. Walter, also a robot played by Michael Fassbender, goes around and wakes up the crew as the ship is faltering on it’s way to whatever system. There are embryos and passengers but we are only ever introduced to the crew. It’s still too many characters to feel any kinship, too, so they might as well have woken up the whole ship. Danny McBride stood out in the advertising as not necessarily belonging in this movie and he most certainly doesn’t but nobody really does. The movie just shouldn’t exist and it’s poorly conceived every step of the way. James Franco dies before he even gets out of his pod but it’s not really all that clear why the pod won’t open or why he just starts burning up in there instead of staying in his little coma. His wife, Daniels, played by Katherine Waterston, is sad in the way you might be if a plant you particularly liked stopped bearing fruit. I don’t blame any of the bad acting on the actors here because they’re all so terrible it’s probably something else holding them back. Well, Fassbender isn’t terrible but his dual robots aren’t interesting, either. Back to Waterston - you’ve seen the hair and it’s an abomination. I thought about it through the whole movie.

I think they want her to look like Ripley but they miss the mark and end up with more of a Mario Bros. vibe. It never stops being distracting. I digress.

So Daniels and her dead husband were planning to build a lakefront cabin when they got to the, uh, system, they’re supposed to be going to. Husband Franco (maybe he’s Daniels, too?) was the captain of the ship so it matters that he’s dead but second in command Billy Crudup is a man of faith who nobody respects. So he doesn’t think there’s time to have a one second remembrance of the dead captain. His wife (Carmen Ejogo and here I’m just going to stop linking actors because she’s the last one whose character I know for sure. I just watched this last night, by the way) talks him into letting the crew members drink Jack Daniels in secret before charred dead Franco gets ejected into space in the first scene that made me laugh out loud. It’s still very early in the plot and I don’t get this whole thing where the crew and the passengers are completely separated but all of the crew members are married to each other. Why would this crew get hired? They aren’t in charge of building the new society of pioneers (the idea of being pioneers tries to hammer itself home but it doesn’t really stick even when it’s in the dialog) they’re just transporting the couple of thousand people, so why would they be paired off like this? Danny McBride spends so much time talking about his wife that there’s no way she’s going to survive. And she doesn’t.

After the whole solar flare fiasco and the bunch of dead people, newly in command Crudup decides to veer off course for an unstudied planet that looks EVEN MORE HABITABLE THAN THE ORIGINAL DESTINATION! Nobody thinks it’s a good idea but Crudup gets his way.

The computer simulations showed a very habitable zone and the landing crew, lead by the acting captain (that seems like a bad idea to me), jumps off their little scout ship with no masks or biohazard gear of any sort. Neat. They’re just walking around on an unknown planet and ready to breath in whatever they have there.

Immediately one of them steps on a plant that releases spores that get in formation and fly into his ear. He gets sick right away and if you’ve ever seen an Alien movie you know what that basically means. But, wait, there’s another guy that also breathes in a bunch of spores! So we’ll get two chest bursting scenes right off the bat! Awesome, I’m already bored! I prayed to myself that it would just look cool because story-wise and acting-wise this shit was off the rails already. SPOILER! It never looks cool.

The first guy starts jerking around violently and collapses. Crudup’s wife tries to carry him back to the ship to chuck him in the medical room but he pukes all over her. I kind of assumed that meant she’d start spawning aliens, too, but they didn’t go that far. When she gets the ready to explode guy back into the medicine room, the medic that is Danny McBride’s wife (that’s her whole character, really) locks Crudup’s wife in there with ready to explode guy. Maybe I’ve got this mixed up. Maybe the guy starts exploding first.

Anyway, his back spits blood all over McBride’s wife so she goes and makes a call. She grabs a space gun to go back and kill the thing that popped out of the guy’s back, unlocks the door, and then slips in a bucket of blood. I’m not kidding. This was the second time I laughed out loud. Also, the baby alien? Looks like crap. Not like cheap FX but just a terrible design. It looks like a kid in a Pan’s Labyrinth costume. Eventually McBride’s wife fucks everything up so badly that the ship explodes. This movie is fucking hilarious.

The crew that was out exploring and carrying around the other sick guy gets there just in time to see the ship blow up and the other sick guy to explode with a baby alien. They all fight the baby alien. It’s hard for them to spot the alien even though they’re about 100 feet from a burning spaceship and the baby aliens are bright white, effectively glowing in the dark.

Blah blah blah blah blah. Michael Fassbender with long hair and a Luke’s desert outfit from Return of the Jedi shows up to rescue the crew and bring them back to his lair. It’s very clearly David from Prometheus but there are some questions to answer. Why does a robot have long hair? Does robot hair grow like human hair? What happened to the Noomi Rapace character he was flying around with at the end of Prometheus? Noomi Rapace is so awesome in non-English movies but not super great in most of her English movies, why?

It’s David from Prometheus! I’m stunned! Shocked! What a surprising reveal! Oh, who could have guessed? He takes the scout crew back to where he lives. Lots of dead architects are there. It seems kind of bad. Danny McBride has the main ship hovering close to the planet in a dangerous way. He wants to make it a little more dangerous. His crew members object for several seconds. Then they fly closer like he wanted.

It turns out in relatively short order that David killed Noomi Rapace and he loves the xenomorphs. He tries to corral one by breathing into its mouth after it kills another crew member. Then Billy Crudup shoots the xenomorph. Oh, yeah, at some point one of the crew members got alien acid blood on his face. It gets treated but he’s just asleep for the rest of the movie until he dies. David takes Crudup into his cave of alien eggs and tricks him into hosting a baby alien. The xenomorph that pops out of him is the more classic black skinned model.

David and Walter, the two Fassbender bots, have fundamental differences about their roles. David is an older model and he was given tools to create things like music while Walter can’t create things because of his programming. David teaches Walter to play the recorder. David killed Noomi Rapace and he wants humanity to end! Walter disagrees. They fight.

Danny McBride swoops in and picks up not-Ripley and whoever else is still alive. Walter jumps on board but he’s very obviously actually David. Nobody on the ship notices even though they know David is evil. The ship doesn’t even detect it even though the robots are linked to the ship operating system.

The ship alerts Not-Ripley and Kenny Powers that there is an intruder on the ship. They both know it’s the xenomorph. David helps them track the xenomorph in earnest even though he’s rooting for the alien. There is a very loud alarm blaring throughout the ship but the two awake and alive crew members that aren’t Kenny Powers or Not-Ripley are having sex in the shower. The xenomorph pushes its tail in between the lovers in a way that I’m sure was much more graphic in the script. Then it kills them both.

Kenny Powers and Not-Riply kill the xenomorph after getting off such memorable one-liners as “let’s kill this fucking thing!” Then it’s dead and they are getting into their cryo-chambers to continue the journey on its merry way towards the original destination. Not-Ripley realizes it’s David after she’s already in her cryo-chamber and its too late.

David files a report about more dead crew members after he kills Not-Ripley and Kenny Powers. Somehow this information no longer exists when the crew from Nostromo in the original Alien shows up. It reminds me of the shitty ways George Lucas tried to connect his prequels to the original Star Wars movies. How do you do so much fan service and get it all so wrong? Anyway, David puts on the Wagner piece that Guy Pearce made fun of him for/with in the opening scene and then plants some xenomorph embryos in with the human embryos and we’re done.

SCALE OF 1 TO 5 STARS, WITH MORE STARS MEANING A BETTER MOVIE: Holy shit did this movie fucking suck and I’m a little disappointed in myself that I sat through the whole thing.

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#alien #alien covenant #it happened to me #RTARL goes to the movies #movie review #danny mcbride #horrible piece of shit #michael fassbender #james franco has one speaking scene and it's a video that his wife watches when she's sad that he died #ridley scott is now george lucas #box office failure

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unwiltingblossom · 8 years ago

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Queen’s Favor (Mysme Jumin/MC AU 4/?)

Being a maid would be much easier if the cat would just let her do her job.

AU - Instead of joining the RFA via random text, MC is hired on as one of the maids assigned to Jumin Han’s penthouse. Nothing else about the setting has changed, the messenger and the RFA still exist, only the MC’s position has been altered.

Chapter 4

“GYAA--!”

She couldn’t tell if slamming into the ground knocked the wind out of him and ended the shout early, or if the crash of two bodies hitting the ground drowned out the end of it, but at least it stopped.

He flailed on the ground underneath her, one hand reaching out toward where the white cat peered out from the safety of the bedroom. For all his flailing, though, he didn’t move anywhere. He seemed much too scrawny to overcome her full body weight, though, so it wasn’t a surprise.

“Elly~! Save me~!” The way he drew out the words, there was no way any cat would come to him. Indeed, the cat immediately disappeared and he dropped his head to the ground in disappointment.

...It was hard to tell if he’d seriously expected it to work, or if he was simply being dramatic. But it was probably the latter? Surely.

Well, it would be if he were a reasonable person, but as far as she knew he was a strange weirdo who found a way to break into a rich man’s house just to attack his cat. (He did know the cat’s name, though...)

While it wasn’t something loudly broadcasted, as a personal maid it was important to be adept at self defense. When working alone, anything might happen. Random intruders included. So, while he hadn’t managed to squirm his way out of her knee pinning him down yet, she didn’t leave it at that.

She wrested his outstretched arm behind his back and then pulled the other one to join it.

“H-hey! Ow! Ow, ow, ow!” “If you stop struggling it won’t hurt.” Well, it might be uncomfortable. She wasn’t exactly making an attempt for it to be a comfortable hold, but his flailing about and jerking his shoulders around would have caused him the most pain. For as much as it would have hurt.

...But she couldn’t just keep him stuck there until someone came looking for her. She’d get tired, and more importantly she had an actual job to do which wasn’t pinning an intruder to the ground with her hands for hours.

Briefly, she glanced about her surroundings for something to secure his hands together with, before her gaze fell on one of the bracelets around his arms. It looked flexible and long. She shifted slightly to pin his arms with her leg and uncoiled the yellow elastic from his arm.

It looked flimsy, but it felt tougher than that, like some kind of metallic paracord. Which served her purposes just fine.

“Wah--wait you’ll break it!” Noisy. This guy was so noisy, and she couldn’t help noticing just how much, when the penthouse was always so calm and quiet when she cleaned it. Even when there were others in the place, it never got all that loud. He just kept whining and complaining as she used the bracelet to tie his hands together, but once it was secured, his struggling showed no real effect on the knots.

Good. She hadn’t been completely confident in those. It wasn’t like the life of a maid was so harrowing that she regularly had to tie people up. Or ever.

Never.

She’d never done it before. Because people didn’t generally try to actually break in and mess around with a place when a maid was right there.

“Don’t try to get up or I’ll tackle you to the ground again and tie up your legs this time.” If she could find rope. Maybe his shoelaces would work? Well, actually she just wanted her threat to work long enough for security to arrive and deal with him instead.

“Not necessary! Not necessary!” He looked over his shoulder at her - or at least he made a good attempt at trying to turn his head like an owl. “I won’t invoke any more violent ire, but I told you! I’m Jumin Han’s friend! This isn’t necessary!”

She didn’t know much about the man who owned the penthouse other than that he seemed very strict and very quiet, but ‘friend’ seemed very unlikely. If only because no cat owner would stand for that kind of manhandling. Let alone one so protective of his cat.

“You were trying to kill his cat.”

“I WOULD NEVER!”

He said that, but she couldn’t imagine any other coherent reason for treating a cat so bizarrely and roughly.

She brushed her hands off as she stood, and walked over to call the security desk. To his credit, as weird as he was, he really didn’t try to move. He whined and complained, but he didn’t immediately start wriggling toward the room with the cat in it or something. She’d really have had to tie him up more than that if he had.

The security officer she spoke to over the phone was...surprisingly calm about the matter. Whoever he was, he must have been somewhat familiar to the house and the workers there, as the guard merely seemed exasperated with the red haired man when the guard appeared.

Rather than pull the man out of the room, the bespectacled youth ended up planted on a chair, watched by one of the bodyguards while original security man spoke to someone on the phone. Contextually, it would have to be the cat’s owner.

She observed the process for a little while, but once it was evident they waited for the man to return, she turned her attention back to her work. They wouldn’t need her help keeping him subdued and it still wasn’t her job to keep unwelcome intruders in line. She had dust bunnies to deal with and a few more challenging wars to wage in the rooms that managed to get mangled every day. Usually by the cat.

And she didn’t want to be associated with the situation at all if Elizabeth looked distressed when he came back. It wasn’t her fault, she wouldn’t get lectured for it. No way.

It was only about a half hour before the front door opened to admit the man of the house. She happened to be standing in a hallway near to the living room when he did, and was close enough to watch his expression turn from pensive thoughtfulness to something that...might have been amusement.

They weren’t actually friends, were they?

“Didn’t I tell you not to come here anymore?” His tone was casual as he walked toward the sitting boy.

“A hero won’t stand idly by while the princess is trapped in a gloomy tower!” She couldn’t actually see the intruder’s face from where she lingered, eavesdropping, but he sounded almost sincere in his bizarre delusion.

“...Heroes are usually arrested?”

An offended huff responded to his comment. “I couldn’t have expected the evil overlord to have actually hired ninja maids to guard the castle. This dramatic set back only means I’ll return to triumphantly rescue her next chapter!”

“No. You won’t.” She couldn’t see either of them now, and she didn’t want to get close enough for them to see her. Especially since the captive man referenced her. “Ninja maid?”

The security guard responded. “The one who called us was one of the maids.”

It was brief and, from where she stood, quiet...but his laughter sounded surprisingly nice. For being so cold and blank most of the time, the amusement that echoed in his short laugh felt warm.

...She had to finish her work, not eavesdrop on a conversation between two people who clearly knew each other better than she knew either of them, but she still couldn’t help a bit of a smile when she ducked into the nearest bathroom to work.

He really did have a nice laugh.

Initially, it hadn’t really hurt. The excitement of the moment and how busy she’d been the rest of the day playing catch-up to all the time the weird cat assaulter wasted, but once she got home she realized her whole body ached.

Crashing into the ground with a bony human underneath her probably left her with more bruises than it did to him. Maybe she should have been a bit more rough with him. Especially since it sounded a bit like she’d just been dragged into some kind of weird inside joke between two...maybe...not friends?

They hadn’t really sounded like friends, but nothing about their conversation seemed serious enough to actually call them enemies, either.

She flopped down into her bed and suppressed a wince at the way her soreness seemed to reverberate with the vibrations in the mattress.

Wouldn’t be nice if she got a bonus for protecting the cat?

She probably should just be happy he didn’t check the CCTV records and see the part where she technically let him do it first. Even though it wasn’t like she had the authority to tell people who could or couldn’t go into a penthouse suite that wasn’t even hers. She was literally the hired help. Unless people did something illegal or dangerous in front of her, she basically didn’t exist.

She might have liked not existing right then.

It would mean she’d be less sore, probably.

“...Guh.”

If he showed up again tomorrow and tried to mess up her day again, when she’d just gotten used to how easy and relaxed the job was, she couldn’t promise herself she wouldn’t just break his glasses and kick him bodily out the door.

He’d proven to be pretty weak today, so she could probably succeed in violently ejecting him if she tried. And she’d spread information about him through the rest of the maids and other coworkers in the building. See if he ever got a decent maid for himself then.

...She couldn’t help but worry a little bit that the fiasco spooked the cat away from her just by being involved in it.

Somewhat surprisingly, it did not. Even though Elizabeth stayed in the bedroom hidden under the bed the rest of the day of the commotion, the very next morning she behaved as if nothing happened at all, trotting up to greet her as soon as she arrived, and then lazily playing with toys wherever she felt like.

Almost more importantly, the red haired man did not reappear.

Maybe he took the threat Jumin Han made about police seriously.

Fur seemed to be everywhere. Moreso than usual. Which meant the cat must have been shedding excessively. Was it the time of the year, or despite the cat’s apparent nonchalance, was it still stressed from the previous day’s incident?

During her lunch, after eating she sat down on the soft rug in the living room. Rather than approach and attempt to pounce or draw her into some sort of play, the white cat simply laid down next to her leg and dropped her fluffy white head on a knee.

...Maybe the cat really was a bit worn out still?

“I don’t think he’s coming back any time soon.” She reached down and ran her fingers lightly through the unnaturally soft fur. “You should be okay now.”

The cat lazily swatted at a dust mote that floated near its face.

Where did all the dust in the suite even come from?

She flopped back on the rug herself, hands and arms splayed out on either side of her, and admired the ceiling. It should have been regular stucco, but from where she lay...it looked like someone might have actually put purposeful patterns in it instead. Who would waste the time or the money on something so trivial?

It did kind of look nice, though, if that’s what it was.

White fur moved from her leg to curl up between her arm and chest, purring lightly. “Don’t you step on my face next just because I’m relaxing. I defended you yesterday, you know.”

The cat gave no sign it heard her.

Before she could continue her lecture, the front door opened to admit the one who owned the penthouse suite. Considerably early. She couldn’t help but wonder if he only did that while she was lying on the floor looking like a child who’d just played herself out running all over the penthouse and back with the cat.

It seemed like it so far.

“You’re here.”

The cat lifted her head and then wandered leisurely to where he stood. It seemed like it would be disrespectful to hold a conversation while staring out at the upside down world beyond his large windows...so she, too, sat up to speak to him. “I’m afraid I’m only halfway done.”

“That’s to be expected, given the time.” He made a small gesture with one hand, a minuscule dismissive wave. As if the concern was much too small to be bothered with anything grander than that. “It’s why I returned home early.”

...hold on.

Why did he do what?

#mystic messenger #mysme #jumin han #mysme mc #jumin x mc #ooc #fic

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thechasefiles · 5 years ago

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The Chase Files Daily Newscap 20/11/2019

Good Morning #realdreamchasers. Here is your daily news cap for Wednesday, November 20th, 2019. There is a lot to read and digest so take your time. Remember you can read full articles via Barbados Government Information Service (BGIS), Barbados Today (BT), or by purchasing a Midweek Nation Newspaper (MWN).

MOTTLEY: FIX THE POWER PROBLEM – Prime Minister Mia Amor Mottley has lit a fire under the Barbados Light & Power Co. Ltd (BL&P), telling the Canadian-owned company that it must do all in its power over the next few weeks to rectify the problems at its Spring Garden plant which has led to islandwide outages for the past two days. She also told the company, owned by Emera Corporation, its plans to change its problem-plagued equipment in the next 12 to 18 months was “completely untenable”, advising that it must explore all options to rectify the problem in a shorter period. Mottley met with the top brass of the electric company, including chairman Rick Janega and managing director Roger Blackman, at Government Headquarters for almost two hours late yesterday evening, minutes after she arrived from an overseas assignment. (MWN)

LIGHT & POWER ‘TO RENT GENERATORS, WORK AROUND THE CLOCK’ – By 8:30 tonight, power to all of the nation had been fully restored. But after two straight days of blackouts triggered schools to close, businesses to shut up shop and left consumers fuming, Prime Minister Mia Mottley this evening publicly declared that “it must never happen again”. She said: “While that is absolutely good news this Government will not accept anything less than absolute resilience and redundancy in the provision of power to the people of this nation. “We have worked too hard as a Government over the course of the last 18 months to stabilize this nation from its greatest threat, which was in fact the value of our dollar and which would have decimated every household and every Barbadian business.” Mottley made the statement moments after meeting with Barbados Light and Power (BL&P) executives and senior civil servants at Government Headquarters for just over an hour and a half. She said Government would ensure that the people of Barbados were provided with quality service, even as the electric company said it would take as much as a year and a half to replace aging generators. She revealed that as a short-term fix, Light and Power employees are working around the clock, while generators would be rented by the BL&P to back-up its supplies. She said: “I think we have shared our perspective as a Government with the BL&P and they have agreed in principle that we will work together to make sure that whatever is done, including 24-hour days, including multiple teams, that we will look and revisit every assumption that has been made that would otherwise see new generation capacity not coming onboard for another 12-18 months. This we believe is not tenable. “We are going to manage this over the course of the next few days, but we have enough information before us to know that the question will be whether they can procure generating capacity immediately tomorrow, or whether they will have to rent in the interim for a few weeks and have generating capacity brought on the island while they procure the permanent one that will give the country at least the comfort of another minimum of 30 megwatts of power.” Mottley said it was simply “not acceptable” that the last time the BL&P purchased new generators was 14 years ago. The Prime Minister said while the issue of compensation would be on the minds of most Barbadians, that issue would be addressed at a later date. She said the BL&P was scheduled to hold a board meeting tomorrow where that issue would be discussed. Mottley said she would be in a better position to speak on any possible forms of compensation following that meeting. In issuing a heartfelt apology to the its customers, BL&P’s managing director Roger Blackman explained that a series of “extraordinary” events had led to the power outages. He disclosed that those outages originated due to a failed switch at one of BL&P’s sub stations at the Spring Garden plant on Monday and again this morning. Blackman also pointed to contaminated fuel as one of the reasons for the malfunction of equipment. And while he revealed that electricity had been completely restored across the island, he hinted that customers were still not out of the woods yet. Blackman explained: “At this point in time we have sufficient capacity to satisfy the demand but it is a delicate situation because a significant portion of our units run on heavy fuel oil and those units have been shutting down from time to time due to fuel equipment failures, so we have been working to ensure that when one fails we have it back up as quickly as possible and before the next one is down. “We have the teams in place and we will be looking to bring in additional expertise as well to help us address the situation and manage while we work on quick and short-term fixes in relation to expediting additional capacity on the network.” James Browne, the general manager of the Barbados National Oil Company Limited (BNOCL), the government fuel supplier to the BL&P, said this was the first time any significant incident had occurred. He said the BL&P was concerned that new streams of phenol and aldehydes were contaminating the fuels, triggering the turbine shutdowns. Browne maintained that while tests were being done on the remaining 4,000 cubic metres of fuel left, he said BNOCL had also been in contact with its suppliers to ensure there would be no recurrence of dirty fuel. (BT)

FAILED DLP POWER PROJECTS ‘TO BLAME FOR AGING DYNAMOS’ – The controversial Cahill waste-to-energy project’s fiasco left Barbados Light and Power stuck with outdated generators, triggering a rash of blackouts, the electric company’s managing director revealed tonight. The Canadian company’s plans to convert waste to energy was one of two major energy projects BL&P had been banking on to meet much of the island’s electricity needs, BL&P’s Roger Blackman said. He explained that while most of the BL&P’s generators were past their due retirement, this was only because the company did not see a need to purchase new equipment after the then Democratic Labour Party (DLP) administration had assured that two projects would be coming on stream. When questioned by Prime Minister Mia Mottley in a meeting, Blackman revealed: “In terms of the decision around replacement versus reinvestment or life extension, there are a number of factors; one of which a few years ago was a decision to develop a waste-to-energy plant at Vaucluse to produce something in the order of 40 megawatts and a biomass plant at Andrews. That waste-to-energy plant was the Cahill plant. “So plans were in place and the Government at the time had identified that location and that capacity, as well as the 20 megawatts biomass plant. “That generating capacity would have allowed us to retire some of the existing generating capacity that is in place. “So in light of those decisions which had been made at the time, it was prudent for us to reinvest in what we had.” Blackman said the fact that Barbados had also signalled its intention to move towards renewable energy at that time also played a significant role in the BL&P’s decision to repair some of its aging generators rather than buy new ones. He said those kinds of investments usually proved to be long term. Blackman said: “The country was on a path of renewable energy and decarbonization and generating investments tend to be 25-year to 30-year investments. “You have to consider those very carefully in an environment where within ten years you’re going to be carbon-free. “So given that those big renewable projects were earmarked, given that the country was clearly on a path of decarbonization and going to zero carbon, the decision was taken at the time to reinvest and extend the life of the fossil fuel plant that is already there.” Chairman of BL&P and chief operating officer of Emera Caribbean, BL&P’s parent company, Rick Janega acknowledged that he was concerned with the current state of the BL&P. But he promised that everything was being done to provide a reliable service to its customers. Janega said: “Let me start by reiterating our dissatisfaction with the state that we are in right now, but Roger [Blackman] and the team at the BL&P are a dedicated and committed workforce that have been working tirelessly to keep this event from occurring. “We have been dealing with some extraordinary issues at the plant related to fuel oil issues that we believe are at the root of it. “They have unfortunately harmed us that it has caused interruptions with other issues on the system that we have been able to manage through in the past without a significant effect on the system.” He continued: “Our objective is to make the supply of electricity a seamless interaction for customers and we have given our commitment to Barbados that we will continue to work with every level of resource available and that we can find to expedite the additional generation. “We will not stop until we have things restored to the state customers expect.” (BT)

‘TOO BUSY’ A TIME FOR UTILITY CUTS – Painful. A disaster. Chaotic. These are the words some business leaders used to describe two consecutive days of electricity and water outages. While not able to quantify the financial losses, Barbados Private Sector Association chairman Edward Clarke reported “severe impact” for some businesses. Former Barbados Chamber of Commerce & Industry president Eddy Abed said his business was hurt by the “absolute mess” caused by the loss of electricity. And Edwin Thirlwell, whose company BICO Limited operates the island’s largest cold storage facility, urged the business community to invest in standby generators. (MWN)

PORT NOT AFFECTED BY POWER OUTAGES – Despite comments made in a news report, the Bridgetown Port was not affected by the power outages which plagued Barbados for the past two days. Rather, the seaport was “open without interruption” and for extended hours, clearing almost 100 containers on Tuesday alone. “As a critical installation, we function on backup power when needed, and on that basis, our generators have worked without any issues. The Port remained open until 7 p.m. today delivering cargo, and as previously advised two weeks ago, will continue to open until 7 p.m. on Tuesdays and Thursdays to clear the backlog. The Port delivered 94 containers today while operating on its generator power,” a media release said. The cruise facility also operated on backup generator and officials are seeking to augment production with the recently installed solar panels. Earlier today in an address to the nation, Prime Minister Mia Mottley said both the air and main sea port, Queen Elizabeth Hospital and HMP Dodds were operating on generator power and were not impacted by the islandwide blackouts. (MWN)

FRANKLIN: BLAME GOVT’S LIGHT & POWER SALE – An outspoken legislator has blamed Government for selling its shares in Emera, the Canadian-based parent of the Barbados Light & Power Company Limited (BL&P), saying Barbadians are now paying the price with a rash of power cuts. As the outages severely disrupt life and productivity across the island, Opposition Senator Caswell Franklyn said the Mia Mottley administration made a big mistake when it sold its shares in the BL&P. He told Barbados TODAY this afternoon: “Emera is about itself and profit, it doesn’t care about the people of Barbados. “They refused to invest in upgrading the [local] company and now they blaming aging equipment for contributing to the power outages. “They also went and bought the cheapest fuel they could find on the market…even the contaminated one and blaming that too.” Senator Franklin, General Secretary of the Unity Trade Union contended that the Government should never have put that portion of its interest in the local power firm in the hands of the Canadian energy conglomerate. He said: “In the same way [Government] bought out Mrs Ram’s [Asha Mirchandani] Liquidation Centre, the Government now needs to rethink its Emera interest. “It needs to look at ways to repatriate Emera and put back the BL&P in the hands of the people of Barbados.” Yesterday, the electric company’s managing director, Roger Blackman, told journalists the problem with the outages was mainly due to contamination in the imported oil. Blackman also said this was compounded by aging generator equipment, half of which is past its “retirement age.” In 2014, Light & Power Holdings Ltd was renamed Emera (Caribbean) Incorporated (EC) with Emera Inc. of Canada owning 80 per cent of the shares. Four years earlier, Light & Power Holdings (LPH) had explained that the purchase by Emera was not of shares in LPH, but of the company CI Power which owns LPH share which until then had been owned by US-based Leucadia National Corporation, now known as the Jefferies Financial Corporation. Based in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Emera Inc. is a public company trading on the Toronto Stock Exchange which boasts of revenues of more than $6.5 billion and assets of $32 billion in 2018. Emera primarly invests in regulated electricity generation and electricity and gas transmission and distribution. Its strategic focus is on transformation from high carbon to low carbon energy sources, the company said on its website It has investments throughout North America and in Grand Bahama, St Lucia, Dominica and Barbados. (BT)

CAVE HILL STUDENTS PROTEST CAMPUS CONDITIONS – Regional students living on the halls of residence at the Cave Hill Campus of the University of the West Indies staged a protest this morning after back-to-back major power outages left them without water and spoilt food. The students gathered about 8:30 a.m. at the front of the Administration building where the principal’s office is located, chanting for water and a generator and questioning the absence of university officials. They said they were not informed about the issues and a promised generator was not available even though they are paying for one. “Admin didn’t help with the issue either as they gave us three bottles of blue water for 18 people. The water tanks are not working since last semester even though they were told that the issue would be fixed. “There were three packs of Crix, a few ramen, three corned beef and a few cans of sausages for roughly 180 students in Frank Worrell Hall. This is not enough food for all of us,” said one student. The Frank Worrell and Sherlock Hall residents claimed that lack of communication on the hall was routine, and often issues occurred with no statement from the leaders of the institution. Meanwhile Director of the Office of Student Services Dale Lynch said that the immediate needs of the students were met, including foodstuff. “It was an islandwide inconvenience and because of the communal space, it would be challenging. It wasn’t something that anyone would be prepared for,” Lynch said. (MWN)

BLANK BANKS: OTHER LENDERS – Avoid borrowing money from financial institutions as much as possible and for as long as possible, budding entrepreneurs have been advised by an official of a youth business support organisation. Gregory Fergusson, the Business Development Officer of the Barbados Youth Business Trust (BYBT) recommended future entrepreneurs carefully consider their needs and their abilities before thinking about going to banks and government agencies for funding. Fergusson was addressing the business support organization’s Business Over Breakfast seminar at the Accra Beach Hotel, as part of Global Entrepreneurship Week 2019 under the theme Building our Solutions Strong. He advised that when going for a loan it was important for entrepreneurs to ensure they had a good character, a capacity to repay, some capital, their business was in good condition and that they had some form of collateral. He recommended that start-ups first look to family and friends for financial help if they must before going to the more established financial institutions that he said was more likely to turn them down. “Family and friends are very important to you initially,” said Fergusson, though warning that such a financing stream would dry up after a while. “After ten years you can’t keep going back and asking family and friends to help you with your business. You could but you would get a lot more noes,” he said. But he warned against going to banks for financial help in the early stages of operation, saying he was aware that “banks do not like start-ups because it is very high risk”. He said: “So if you are a start-up and you are going to the bank you may very often get rejected, not because your business plan is not nice, it is because you are high risk… so you might need to go to someone else until you get there. “You can start small as much as you and do as much as you can. “My caveat with loans is that you avoid it as much as you can for as long as you can in start-up as well as certain stages of your business.” Fergusson told the young business people that they had to consider things like monthly repayments, which he said could “cause a problem because you may not make regular revenue every month”. While stating that he was not against start-ups taking out a loan, the accountant urged potential entrepreneurs to also look at other financing options such as angel investors, corporate investors, entering contests, having product pre-sales, going after venture capital and crowd funding. Digital Marketing Strategist with Yello Barbados Sachin Ellcock encouraged the participants to engage in several activities to quickly grow their operations. He recommended more use of video marketing and live streaming, use of social media, continuous training, addressing customer complaints quickly and offering personalized experiences. Encouraging entrepreneurs to pay close attention to industry trends before making major decisions, Ellcock also advised them to use artificial intelligence where possible and listen to their employees. He advised: “You may be the business head, you may be the person calling the shots, but you rely heavily on your staff. “And very much their opinion will matter in the long run if not, in the short-term. “I urge you to take off the blinders and look further beyond your [own opinion] if you want to stay into business longer than tomorrow. “You need to form friendships and bonds and listen.” (BT)

DIABETES SUFFERERS IN 43% OF QEH BEDS – Forty-three per cent of the beds at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital (QEH) are occupied by people suffering with diabetes or diabetes-related diseases. This was disclosed recently by chief executive officer of the Barbados Diabetes Foundation, Cally Boyea. In addition, he said 20 per cent of the adult population of Barbados was living with diabetes, with about 47 per cent of them 60 years and over. Boyea was speaking just before the official start of the Rotary Club of Barbados’ annual meeting at Hilton Barbados, during which Rotarians presented the Barbados Diabetes Foundation and the Diabetes Association of Barbados with $ 7 500 each to help with their diabetes awareness and educational programmes. (BT)

BARBADOS BEAT CAYMAN TO GAIN CONCACAF PROMOTION – Barbados have been promoted to league B of the CONCACAF Nations League. On a night where parts of the island were still in darkness, the Wildey Turf was lit up as the Tridents delivered a 3-0 victory over Cayman Islands in a must-win game. Hallam Hope opened the scoring for the hosts in the 32nd minute. Armando Lashley netted in the 86th and Hope grabbed his second a minute from time. Barbados advanced to the next stage of the competition at the summit of Group A, League C with 12 points. (MWN)

POLICE OFFICERS WERE ALSO AT THE TRENTS, ST JAMES SCHOOL. - Second and third form students returning to Frederick Smith Secondary School on Tuesday were greeted at the gates by security guards who searched them in a lengthy process. Additional guards were stationed under a tent next to the guard hut at the front of the school, searching students’ bags and scanning their bodies with hand held metal detectors. On Monday, Minister of Education Santia Bradshaw announced that when second to fourth form students return to school for counselling following the November 8 stabbing of 16-year-old student Temario Holder by another, they would be greeted by beefed-up security. As a result of the closure of primary and secondary schools across the island due to power outages, not all the students who were to report to school were present. Several parents who observed the proceedings at the gate told Barbados TODAY that while they were happy to see the school had taken the needed step to increase to stop students from taking weapons on the premises, they believed the process should be more efficient. The parents warned that if the process was not reviewed immediately, there could be long lines at the gate when all the students return to the institution on Thursday morning when classes have been scheduled to resume. A father, who only gave his name as Worrell, said he watched the process and realised that it moved slowly. He said: “It is a little slow and there are not all the children here this morning. When all the children come in I feel that will be a problem. “But they got to work to fine tune it and get it moving a little better. It is a lot of children that going here and that line is going to be backed up. “They have to find a way to move faster.” Pheona Beckles agreed with Worrell that the process should be evaluated. Beckles said she dropped her nephew at the school gate, drove to Holetown to conduct business, and when she returned minutes later he was still in line waiting to be checked. Beckles told Barbados TODAY: “To go through all of these bags, it may be worth it, but the time is too long. “They have to take out their things and put them in the tray to be checked. “There are a lot of children at this school. And when one bus load come in, and another bus load come in they would be moving slow and school would begin and children missing a lot of time from class.” Beckles suggested that parents who take their children to school should play a role in checking their school bags before they get out the vehicle. David Alleyne, whose daughter is in the fourth form year group said he was happy to see the search taking place, considering that he heard at a meeting that “parents seeing children with weapons and not saying anything”. “I am quite pleased,” Alleyne said. Erskine Alleyne said he was fully on board with the new security measures which he hoped would keep his daughter, her schoolmates, and teachers safe and gave him and other parents an ease of mind. Alleyne said: “When I got here things were not busy at the gate, but anything that is going to keep the kids safe and help the school, is a good thing.” The Ministry of Education has informed parents and guardians that professional counselling services for all second to fourth form students would continue on Wednesday November 20 since sessions would have been disrupted on Tuesday. Students should report to the school for 9 a.m. The education ministry has also issued a reminder that school resumes for all students on Thursday. “All members of staff, teaching and non-teaching should also report for duty,” a release from the Government Information Service (GIS) stated. The ministry said that professional counsellors would continue to be onsite for all staff and students after school reopens (MWN)

MCCOLLIN TOLD TO CLEAN UP HIS ACT – Burglar Corey Omar Jerome McCollin has been given a final chance to turn his life around. “This is your last opportunity to sort yourself out Mr McCollin. Your [pre-sentencing] report does not speak highly of you . . . and you have walked this path before,” Justice Randall Worrell told the 33-year-old convict, of no fixed place of abode, as he sentenced him to seven years in prison. (BT)

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