#posting this before rendering sends me into a coma

[rimbaudthursday]

you are the one bright

light in kirkwall

[stormxpadme]

Fanfic Writer Asks:

5, 10, 17, 29

"I’m Bored and Anxious So I Slapped Together a List of Fan Fic Writer Asks"

5 - What’s a fic idea you’ve had that you will never write?

I'm notoriously not a huge fan of Mr. Sinister because it's just one of these things Marvel Comics has done to death, and guy's hopelessly overpowered. So aside from like 2 short oneshots, I never utilized him in my X-Men stories and my X-Men main verse.

But lately I've been thinking about a very meta kind of oneshot which arose from an Alternative Universe story for my X-Men verse that I did a while ago. A oneshot that included - and those scenes were very much part of my canon and not AU - some flashbacks of when movieverse!Scott was Essex' lab rat as a kid. That story also elaborated on how Essex has kept on meddling subtly, telepathically with Scott's life in the course of the years. In that official X-Men verse of mine, Essex has been put on ice deep under the ocean by Charles and Emma shortly before Scott came to Charles as a teenager and is mostly rendered powerless. But I like to think, very subtly, even at what is basically a coma, Essex still has a bit of influence on the real world. And of course he's never given up on the plan of creating his mutant super race and that perfect fabricated mutant child for his own uses. Since he did know somehow though, that his plan would never work as intended with Scott and Jean - cue Destiny coming in, in some way ... Bear with me, this whole thing is not finished beign plotted -, Essex decided to give Logan and Jean as his favorite parents a shot since those would be just an equally powerful combination of genes. Long story short - literally -, this would be basically the reason of why my whole version of the old X-Men movieverse happened in the end, with Essex' subtle manipulations making sure, Scott and Jean gave up on their relationship after Liberty Island because of several issues and because of Jean's attraction to Logan, not least by making sure, Scott had someone else he was attracted to and was basically out of the way of Jean's and Logan's spawn in the making. This oneshot would basically be nothing but a legitimation for writing my verse that I don't need because everything Marvel is multiverse and everything's possible and legit. So I don't really think I'm ever gonna write this, not least because I'm just not interested in doing anything longer with Essex. And I don't want to undermine what Scott and his wifey and Jean and Logan have in that verse by retconning it into something manipulated by an outsider. But the simple idea of Essex literally throwing in the face of Scott's partner for decades at this point, that she's nothing but a badly fabricated plot device? Ouch, here comes the pain. Maybe I'll do something like a vague nightmare about that thing at some point as part of a bigger story but really writing it out? Nah. I'm only that masochistic by proxy for my characters.

10 - Is there a fic that got a different response than you were expecting?

Honestly with how silent fandom has become in terms of feedback, it's mostly surprise these days that there's hardly any response at all (the person sending this ask being one of the few exceptions to regularly save my day). Because every now and then I do write popular themes and somewhat popular characters and think, well, this should get some response at least. Alas. I also was slightly taken aback by the reaction of a reader to one of the rare torture/non con scenes I wrote and published lately because it felt a bit like victim blaming. Which like. Just no.

17 - What’s something you’ve learned about while doing research for a fic?

After writing my fictional season of American Idol, I know more about the TV and casting show business (especially about how many celebs can't even get out of bed without their first line of coke in the morning) than I ever wanted to know.

29 - Share a bit from a fic you’ll never post OR from a scene that was cut from an already posted fic.

I'll cheat a bit here and take that fic I mentioned above because I'm never gonna post it on AO3; as of now, it's only in our German archive. The reason for that is that I got exactly one single active reader there, and that reader fell in love with a romance in my X-Men verse that got hardly any to zero response on AO3. And since that oneshot is an Alternative Universe version to my X-Men verse, spawning from the AU idea of that romance getting a happy instead of a horrible ending, meaning, something that I wrote only for said reader for her to be happy, it wouldn't make sense, translating it and putting it on AO3. I still very much like the parts I mentioned though that are canon for my regular verse too, because sometimes I really need a bit of Scott childhood drama in my life.

Just as a preface for understanding: Avery is an OC of mine, an old childhood friend-turned-enemy of Scott's with whom he's lived together on the streets as a teenager for a while. In this scene, Emma is taking Scott and Avery together into some shared memories in their heads because they're looking for a mental signature to follow, to go where Essex has been buried who is about to wake from his coma.

“What …? How …?” “I guess that's what we're here to find out.” Emma squeezed Avery's shoulder once more and then pointed back to the lab area, where a heavy double door opened after the clicking of several locks and the beeping of a code access entered. Even though neither of them really cared to see these particular memories … They had to find out. Otherwise, all this shit would soon be a reality all over the world. With his fists clenched hard, Avery looked at the white-skinned guy, even taller than Scott and himself, who entered the room with a cheerful whistle - some French classic - on his lips, pushing a trolley with various instruments in front of him, the sight of which promptly had Avery's stomach turn again. Instinctively, his fingertips wandered back to the fresh burn on his neck, that characteristic scar which he saw reflected in blood-red on that asshole's forehead right now. Indeed, a more than clear branding as the new property of this psycho. As if. Only in the bastard's wet dreams. By now, Avery didn't even have the strength to tell himself that he didn't care that the defenseless body on that stretcher had begun to tremble noticeably since Essex's memory image had entered the room, or that he was already choking with nausea again himself when that psycho made short work of the only piece of clothing on his victim's body with an impatient telekinetic touch. “Hm.” A discontented-sounding grumble came from the stranger, from a voice about as pleasant as nails on a slate, as he looked at a few numbers on a monitor belonging to the stretcher, obviously spitting out the various results of freshly measured vital signs. “Low potassium and blood pressure again. What did I tell you, Scott? With how tall you're growing recently, I can't have you being a picky eater. If you keep starving yourself, we can solve this very quickly with a feeding tube. I don't want to have to repeat myself. Or do you want me to have to track down Alex and lock him up here instead of you just because you're being so difficult? I don't want that because your mutation is much more promising, but if you don't finally learn how to behave, you'll leave me no choice. Understood?” As there was no response from his young victim, Essex tapped the tip of a scalpel demonstratively against a spot directly on the right hip bone, which was already adorned with a huge Band-aid, with a theatrical sigh. “Yes, sir.” The tonelessness in this choked reply had Avery inevitably take a step back against the wall, away from this alienating scene. No prisoner, no matter which age, who had been subjected to such treatment for only a few days would be talking like that.

[writingsoftheunderworld]

AU - yes! Time Travel - no? -p. 2

So @barkingbullfrog requested a future bamon daughter time travelling and no one knowing who she is and I said on that post that I might write more if people like it/I feel like it. So this is that! Chapter 1 here. Enjoy part 2!

Rose was home for the holidays, Easter in just a few days and college too loud to be able to study when she found it. The spell she’d been looking for since that summer 5 years ago when her cousin dared her to find the most powerful spell in her mom’s grimoires and attempt it. She’d had her plans foiled that week, but the idea remained firmly planted in her mind since. Especially since the spell was a dimension travelling one, which sounded just way too much fun not to try at some point just for fun. So when she saw her dad lead her mom to the dance floor, both distracted with their - eww - flirting, she snuck into her mom’s witch’s den - dad’s words not hers, but if it fits ya’know? 

The room was dark, it always was unless her mom was busy training her magic, and then it was just candlelight illuminating it. Rose looked around the corridor for a second, making sure no one had noticed her and come after. When no sound save for the small party downstairs was heard, she uttered a soft incendia, lighting all the hung candles inside. For a few minutes she was stuck in the sheer nostalgia of being in the room. She remembered with sudden clarity all the summer nights, widows open, fresh air coming through mixing with the cinnamon candles her mom prefered as the two of them played around with kiddie magic. She then recalled moving onto more powerful spells, like how to take on villains stronger than her just with a thought just a year ago, to playing hide and seek with her dad and hiding underneath the tablecloth and giggling so much he definitely knew exactly where she was - even if he hadn’t had the advantage of being vampire. It was this same room she’d locked herself in when at 11 her mom and dad sat her down and told her how they were going to adopt her, she’d been living with them for only 3 months at that point. 

Her mom’s old grimoire sat on a shelf that her dad and uncle could never agree on how it had had the top half torn off. She slowly walked over, still so very careful not to let any unnecessary noise be heard. She’d been used to magic, she’d gotten thrown out of 3 foster homes by age 9 due to magic she couldn't even begin to understand before she reached the Salvatore-Bennett’s, but hanging around vampires had taken some adjusting. Luckily her dad enjoyed being chased around the house by a curious 11 year old and then later a rumbustious teen in a variety of always entertaining games to the point she got very used to both making herself as quiet as possible as well as learning what to look for when his turn would come. So she got the grimoire and laid it on the table, flipping through the pages slowly, not wanting to risk missing the one she was looking for. A few others jumped to her as she did so, but she stored the info for later. She wanted to try that dimension spell right now. She reached something about pocket dimensions first - prison worlds and … did that say Hell? - but at least that’s how she knew she was close. The song had changed in the time she’d spent reminiscing, but she could hear her dad downstairs still, aggravating her aunt as per usual so it was all good. 

Bingo!

The words flowed from her lips and for a second she thought she did something wrong since she felt none of the usual surge that came with doing magic, but then something just… pulled at her and she lost consciousness. When she came to next she was in the driveway of her childhood home - if from 11 onward one could call it a childhood home, but it was the closest she ever got - and her head was pounding. She let herself feel the pain a minute or so before she got up and looked around. The sun was up, midday at least, maybe earlier, which was very odd considering it was nearing 11 at night just a few seconds ago. But she figured the spell had worked. Here she was, outside the Boarding House - which she could never understand why it continued to be called that since in all her years there not once was it used as such. 

She almost bounced on the heels of her feet, excited to see what this world had to offer - could she meet herself? Was it weird that she found that exciting? - so she immediately headed to the front door. But as she walked past the car parked in the driveway, her eyes found the newspaper wedged between the drives’ seat and the handbrake and her eyes widened at the date. 

“No.” she whispered in disbelief. “No, no, no nononono!” her heart started beating faster when the realisation dawned on her. She had traveled to a different dimension, but she’d never thought of the very real possibility that the dimension she’d be travelling to would be in the past. “Oh no, mom’s gonna kill me and dad’s gonna let her.” 

She looked around again, making sure no one was around to see her panic nor hear her, who knows what lurked in this dimension, god knows she didn’t think this through enough. She breathed a few seconds, in and out, in and out, then closed her eyes, fully intending on going back home. Except she hadn’t paid any mind to the return spell nor did she even remember the original spell she’d used. Great. Probably better she hadn’t remembered though, who knows where she would end up. At least here it looked vaguely like home. With a little bit of luck, she might even find her parents here, or someone who she could recognize from back home. Eventually her mom would go into her room and see the grimoire and spell and come get her, but who knew how long that’d be. Was time even moving at the same pace here? Sure she’d just gone a few minutes ago, there was no reason to think it wasn’t the same pace, but what if she’s been gone for days at home and mom had tried to bring her back and couldn’t, or what if it was slower at home and she’s just been gone for milliseconds and by the time her mom would find she was gone she’d be old and gray here, would she still be old and gray when she got back? Or would she revert to this age that she left as, and would she even want to go or want to return to a college student home for spring break? Or-

Breathe with me, Rosie-Posie. Just breathe with dad.

Listening to her dad’s voice in her head she did as he bade, closing her eyes almost letting her feel his hand on hers as he’d take her and put it over his chest so they’d sync their breaths when her panic would spiral. He used to joke she’d gotten the anxiety from her mom and uncle Stefan, despite not being related by blood to any of them. It used to make her feel like an impostor the first few times he’d done it, but afterward it just made her feel like belonging. Just like her mom telling her all about grandma Sheila that for some odd twist of fate she just happened to share a name with. Mom called it funny, dad called it fate. She called it sheer dumb luck. But it did make her feel like they really had been a family from the beginning. Hell she even had blue eyes. What were the chances? If she hadn’t remembered her birth dad’s dark skin on her lighter one as he kissed her goodnight the night he left or her birth mom’s watery blue eyes as she lay in the hospital when she was four she’d have agreed with Damon’s theory. 

She sighed, heavy, and put the newspaper back from where she’d gotten it and made her way to the house. It made no sense to get lost in the worry just yet. She’d barely arrived, there was plenty of time for panic later. She was more curious what she could walk into now. She remembered her mom telling her about this time and dad turning these moments into sleeping stories when she was younger. She got only more curious about their pasts the more she grew up until they’d eventually caved and told her everything she’d wanted. Slowly, in bite sized pieces that had frustrated her to no end in the beginning, but she was glad for now since it made remembering everything so much easier.

She walked towards the door the same way she had whenever she played hide and seek with her dad since she figured it was probably a good thing not to be noticed before she could figure out what the hell was going on. She listened once she reached the door and heard what sounded like Elena Gilbert, but she couldn’t bee too sure since a. She’d only met Elena like 3 times in her life and each one for a few minutes at a time, despite her mom still talking to her every week or so and b. Katherine was supposed to be around at this point in time, right? Was Hope’s dad here too yet? Or did she mix up the dates? Only, she reminded herself, Niklaus Mikaelson wasn’t Hope’s dad here, he wasn’t even semi nice if what Alaric’s library books on the great hybrid said was true. Oh boy, she so wasn’t ready for any of this bullshit. Her mom would write the best eulogy for her when she got home, something like “I loved my daughter more than my life, but damn if she didn’t deserve a Bonnie famous lecture and punishment” just after she killed her with her bare hands in a loving manner of course.

She took out her keys and put them in the lock, turned, but the door just opened without any fight and she almost had a heart attack on the spot because what kind of morons were her parents in this time/universe to not lock their doors? She’s still thinking about this when her dad - no, not dad, Damon, and isn’t that the weirdest thing - suddenly pounces at her and tries to strangle her. She reacts immediately, just as her dad - the one back home that loves and knows her - had taught her to do and sends a wave of aneurysms across the room, making sure to hit who’s surely Katherine extra hard via a very advanced spell her mom taught her recently that renders the 500 year old vampire in a mini coma for however long the caster wants. As Damon starts interrogating her, she can’t help putting on a bit of a show. They look so odd like this, weirdly young and very much in shock at her power that isn’t even that much of a big thing. She’s average as far as power goes back home, definitely not the witch goddess her mom is. But her mom isn’t her mom yet and she certainly isn’t yet that strong here… or rather, Bonnie isn’t yet as strong as her mom here. So she enjoys the game she finds herself playing with Damon and later Bonnie when she gets there. 

But she definitely has no clue what she’s gotten herself into yet as she tried to give an abridged version of the story her parents had told her over the course of at least 3 years. She sticks to the basics for them, Klaus is an Original, they’re a whole family that Klaus has the bad habit of fucking over - at least during this time - the Sun and Moon Curse is fake. And really, who the fuck thought that was a legit thing in the first place, seriously now? Klaus sired their whole vampire blood line so they can’t kill him, killing an Original kills their whole blood line, he plans on unleashing his werewolf side to belong, but he’s going to fail because his mom is mean as hell. She honestly isn’t sure what she doesn't say afterward, but the sheer silence brought on after her little tirade has her giddy. She could never get her mom and dad speechless like this, not without serious bodily harm or property damage, usually as a result of Lizzie Saltzman’s plans. She can’t wait to see how much chaos she can cause here by the end of the talk and looking at her mom with this dude that looks to be 14 that apparently is meant to be Jeremy Gilbert - only how can that be, Jeremy is a very strong vampire hunter that looks the part, not this string bean uncooked spaghetti looking child. 

And now she got when her dad meant when he said mom had had terrible taste in men before him - though Rose would argue looking at the Damon across from her that her mom’s taste didn’t so much as get better but simply change. She also couldn’t understand how these two who looked like they both wanted to be anywhere but near each other and yet oddly in sync couldn ever become the Bonnie and Damon that adopted her some odd years in the future/past/other universe. Huh… maybe she could have fun until her mom would come to kill her for being an idiot and dad would give her that look that made her want her mom to kill her. 

[ofillyria]

I have been toying around with A LOT of WIP ideas recently and I’m not really sure where I want to focus my energy or which ones I want to add to my WIP list or make intros for. So I figured I’d make a masterlist of all of my ideas that I have a rough plot and character list for so y’all can peruse! If there’s one that jumps our at you, a few you like, or any that you have questions on please please flood my inbox! There’s no better way to get me jazzed about a WIP than to send me asks! I’m putting them under the cut since there’s so many!

NIGHT TWELVE: Vi crashes into enemy territory and is taken in by the army. She's given an assignment: win the heart of the wealthiest woman on the planet to procure war funding. But she's already fallen in love with her superior officer.

DAVID’S PEAK: In the small, Oregon town of David’s Peak people are being mysteriously abducted, and blame is placed on possessed park ranger Diane Atwood. She has a choice: prove herself innocent by finding the real culprit, or say goodbye to the friendly voice in her head.

YOUNG DEMONS: After failing her first spell Cecily Young swore off magic. Her power is building, brewing. The repressed magic is manifesting as a hurricane set to destroy Louisiana in a month's time. She must find a way to expel the magic in time, without tearing herself apart in the process.

THE GODLING TRILOGY: Lea is the firstborn child of Morpheus, making her the most powerful godling in a millennium. Which means she’s the perfect scapegoat for Zeus to send to do his dirty work. Including murdering the ancient being known as Nyx, who’s determined to plunge the modern world into eternal night.

BERSERKERS: Gal pals turned fearsome warriors. When the clique dons their fur coats they gain the strength of the animals they wear. It’s time for revenge on selfish exs, bigoted teachers, and abusive parents,. That is, if the consequences don’t catch up to them first.

THE BLITZKRIEG BREAKER: When Teddy’s clock repair shop becomes both the epicenter of a magical war and the London blitz, he is tasked with keeping a strange device out of the wrong hands. In a world filled with demon dogs, falling bombs, and a mysterious shapeshifting witch it’s hard to know which threat to focus on.

HELL’S EMPTY: Sometimes, the dead get restless. There are a few who manage to slip through the cracks and back into the world of the living. On autopilot, the soul takes the first available body and become a zombie. Over time the body, incompatible with its new soul, will begin to decay. Desperate to live, but falling apart, these creatures seek new fresh bodies to enter, even it means killing to get them. Luckily, hell, like any good business, has a lost prevention specialist. And she’s ready to go hunting.

WASTELANDERS: In a post apocalyptic wasteland, a team of two girls band together to fight to survive. When crossing the desert from ration station to ration station they encounter a man on the side of the road, he claims that his car was stolen with his young daughter inside. The two girls venture to find the lost girl in a no holds barred rescue mission through deadly dive bars, life or death road races, and russian roulette tournaments.

TRAGEDY ANNE: Anne,  a bandit known for terrorizing the rich folks of Round Rock, caught wind of the local mine owner’s plan to blow out the dam. Even if it means washing out Round Rock in the process. Anne wants to save her hometown but no one will listen to a lying, cheating thief.

SOUL: SOLD: Six years ago Jac sold her soul to a demon so that she could say goodbye to her mother. But now her contract is up and she only has a week before she becomes a demon herself. The plan: find the family heirloom, use it to barter with the crossroads demon, and avoid damnation at all costs.

AMELIA BRIGHT PETSITTER TO THE ABSURDLY RICH: Amy loves her job: nice houses, free food, and cute puppies. But when she’s accused of stealing jewelry from a rich client everything falls apart and her reputation is destroyed. She has to prove her innocence. Hopefully, before the super hot CEO she’s dogsitting for returns from a business trip.

THE TEMPEST PROTOCOL: Mira’s mission is to study the defunct pleasure planet which orbits a black hole. But the mission is overturned when the owner of the planet returns and kidnaps Mira’s team. Mira has to rescue her crew before they are all swallowed by the looming void or murdered by the psychopathic resort owner.

THE ELECTRIC PIGHT - Winona is an archaeologist that studies the fallen society of the 21st century. When her brother returns home severely injured, she’s determined to use old world medicine to save his life even if she has to travel for days to find it. But the way to the city of old is guarded by militiamen, cannibals, and rabid dogs. Winona’s attempt to save her brother and prove her theories right might kill her first.

WELCOME TO THE NEIGHBORHOOD - Bee has been demon of the month over nineteen thousand times. She’s assigned a meager corruption mission and saddled with a newbie demon. Now, she’s determined to prove to Satan that she doesn’t need a partner. She has to find a way to kill her ‘husband’ without it looking suspicious. All while corrupting the perfect 1950s suburbia around her.

HELL FIRED - When one of the groundskeepers for the underworld goes on maternity leave her coworker has to find a suitable replacement. So they set up a reality show competition and the last person standing wins the role of right hand man to Hades’ right hand man. Which is sort of an honor.  

ARTEMIS AND APOLLO - Agent’s Artemis and Apollo have been working together for nearly twelve years. He’s the impulsive rogue and she’s the one who actually gets the job done. But now that she’s getting married he’s worried the agency will realize his incompetence. Instead of fighting it, he’s determined to make their final mission together the wildest ride possible.

FUN FUN AT THE BOARDWALK - Daniel works at the Santa Cruz boardwalk and knows for a fact it’s haunted. The giant stuffed animals have started to roam at night and recently, one tried to kill him. He has to round up a team to help him fight back but first, he has to make people believe him.

VIENNA - After being exposed to radiation from the sun an astronaut returns to earth to find that she is imbued with starlight. She’s recruited into an organization of mutants and tasked with rounding up others like her. But the more she uses her powers to render outside threats inert the more she risks burning out and turning herself into a black hole.

10 PERFECT DATES - Katherine Day’s website claims she can set up the most romantic date possible just for a small fee of $200. Rory, an investigative journalist, is determined to prove this offer a scam. So they buy 10 and ask Katherine to be the one to join them on these so-called ‘perfect’ dates. Rory thought this would be a disaster worth writing about, but the only problem is Katherine herself seems like the perfect person for Rory.

SOUL SEARCHING - A witch and her disembodied wife search for a body that can house the wife’s soul. The witch becomes a spiritual guide to people in comas, entering their minds and helping them through to the other side to open a space for the wife to have a body again.

CRITICALLY MISSED. After the death of David’s father he invites all of his childhood friends back to his childhood home for a reunion game of dungeons and dragons. When they start to fight they are interrupted as they are pulled into the game. The old friends are forced to fight off giant spiders, ogres, and long buried resentment. If they die in the game do they die in real life? And is an epic takedown worth risking your brother’s neck?

These ones don’t have titles yet so I’m just gonna give some comps so you get the vibe:

WES ANDERSON x THE HALF OF IT - Mindy’s life is going exactly how she wants. She has perfected her waffle recipe, a successful b&b, and no friends. But when her mom decides to get remarried Mindy is faced with the reality that the world goes on without her even when she constructs an eden for herself. So she enlists the help of a childhood friend to teach her how to deal with change.

STRANGER THINGS x PARANORMAN - Ryann drowned, and was resuscitated minutes after being declared dead. Now the kid sees ghosts: unmoving, unblinking figures staring at a singular location.  Ryann must discover why the spirits are back and what it is they want that’s in the Courthouse.

TOMB RAIDER x UNCHARTED - The Bloodright Chalice is the last unrecovered piece of known treasure, and Kel is determined to find it. With the help of a tagalong history nerd, she must fight off mercenaries, navigate perilous terrain, and withstand the draw of a magical artifact.

KICKASS x DAREDEVIL - Kimberly Price is trying to be the hero her powers deserve, but her moral ambiguity keeps leading her off track. Upon discovering an underground crime ring, Kim discovers her big break and that the mob boss, a mutant like her, can break any bone in her body with his mind.

INCEPTION x ARRIVAL - Dr. Parson has been having dreams recently of waking up next to a woman who he doesn’t know and she claims to be his wife. His new research partner on the particle accelerator is revealed to be the very same woman he’s been dreaming of since the beginning of the project.  He knows more about her than he should and it feels like an abuse of power, but he cannot help but fall in love, or rather stay in love. But how can he be honest when it would paint him as insane and ruin both his relationship with her and his plans for the project?

[fizzyxcustard]

Wrong Place, Wrong Time (6) - End of part 1

Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5

Masterlist here

Read the completed version on AO3 here

Summary: You find yourself in 1209AD after a science experiment has gone wrong, and you are now making a new life in a small village in France. However, Sir Raymond de Merville has his eye on you and will not take no for an answer. You both embark on a passionate love affair which leads to Raymond’s downfall.

Fandom: Pilgrimage (2017)

Pairings: Raymond de Merville x Fem!Reader

Warnings: Sexual references, violence, bad language, sexual language, smut

Comments/Notes: Re-post of original story which was posted on Tumblr last year in two 12-part stories. They will now be posted in two 6-part stories instead, just to condense the story down. Now has new name rather than it being a list of imagines for each chapter. If you wish to be added to a particular tag list, for a fandom, character or actor, message me or send an ask.

For a further few weeks, you and Raymond kept to your meeting place, the dairy barn. Each night you would make love, feeling the passion of your forbidden love rise. Raymond’s father had been pushing to dissolve your marriage, but he used this to his advantage, it becoming leverage to push his son into going on one last quest in their family name. “Raymond, you go on one last mission for me, and I will not see your marriage dissolved,” the old man had said, drawing a growl from Raymond.

“Whether I go or not, my marriage to her still stands,” Raymond hissed.

Then, finally, Raymond’s father had had enough of trying to make his son see sense. “If you do not go, I shall have her killed. If we go, then I shall spare her.”

Raymond knew that if his father made a threat then it was incredibly rare that he did not follow through on it. If he did not go to meet up with the travelling Irish monks on the road who were carrying a sacred relic, then you, his world, would be killed. And there was no way that Raymond could risk you, especially when you gave him news that evening.

“I think I’m pregnant,” you said softly, smiling.

Raymond swept you into a kiss, his hands brushing through your hair. “My love, I swear that after this last quest with my father then I shall remain by your side; we shall move from this god forsaken village, and I will bleed my father dry of everything. No one threatens you and my unborn child.”

“Make sure you come back to us,” you told Raymond, kissing the ring you had given him which was around his neck on a cord.

Raymond fell to his knees and lifted your dress, kissing your stomach. “I will return to you both, my love.”

The next morning would be when Raymond left, so you made sure you savoured each other in the barn that night. You made love way past the midnight hour, your cries falling onto empty air. Both of you fell asleep in the hay, wrapped together with your clothes over you for warmth.

*****

For the next few weeks that you were without Raymond, whilst he was travelling, you exchanged letters via pigeon. Every other morning and the same pigeon would come to the barn, dropping a small piece of parchment into your hand. Raymond would declare his love to you and your unborn child in each letter, swearing that his quest would uphold your honour and your vows as husband and wife.

Each letter you kept in a small wooden box which Etienne had given you as a wedding gift, a box which he had made himself, carved with roses coming into bloom.

But, suddenly, the letters from Raymond stopped.

*****

Your Raymond was dead. He had died staying true to his word and honouring you through betraying his father, trying to bring the bastard down and take away what he truly cared about. Upon hearing the news and you had fallen to your knees, weeping. Then you stormed out of the barn where you were working, kicking open the door and screaming into the open air.

Raymond’s body was brought back to the village, wrapped in a burial shroud. You kissed the fabric, your tears falling onto him. In a fold of the fabric, where you kissed, your lips touched something cold. You opened the cloth, and there across his chest, protruding from a hole in his leather gauntlet was an arrow. The sun shone down on the weapon, and on the very edge of the curled, modified shaft, you could see a small droplet of blood.

From the very day that your beloved Raymond was buried, you vowed to avenge his death. Firstly, you took his sword from his body along with the arrow, and watched in secret from behind a tree as his body was placed into the ground. His bastard of a father stood before his son’s body, his arms crossed.

He would be first.

Revenge was coursing through your body, filling your blood so it was red hot. Raymond’s death would not be in vain; you would make sure that every man who was responsible for your husband’s passing would feel pain, excruciating and raw.

The night of Raymond’s funeral and you gagged his father after sneaking into the back entrance of the house. The old man squirmed on the bed beneath you after being woken by your knees pressing into his chest. You held a dagger above the man’s body and drove it slowly downward into his chest, hearing him scream around the gag. Something dark overtook you and a sly smirk crept onto your lips as you watched the bastard die slowly, choking miserably on his own blood. But before he died you whispered in his ear, “Raymond’s child grows in my belly, and he will rise to take everything you own.”

You left the town, watching on in sadness as Etienne slept soundly, not knowing what fate would await you. In your bag you put rations of food, weapons, clothing and your box of letters from Raymond. His sword was snug in its scabbard at your waist and the arrow was placed in an inside pocket of your tunic. The few riding lessons you had had with Lucille and Henri would prove useful as you took one of the horses from the stables and left the village for good.

Word had spread in the village whilst you were there, remaining away from Raymond’s family, but still listening for news, that Raymond had been killed by a mute. This mute was tall, broad and had a cross tattooed on his back. That was enough information for you to begin searching.

You travelled far, inquiring where you could about the mute. Your sickness began, rendering you unable to travel during the first half of the day, but your resolve to see Raymond’s murderer dead was enough to keep you going. At night, lying beneath the stars or in abandoned houses, you would look upon your late husband’s letters, crying yourself to sleep.

Finally, you got a lead. He had last been seen approaching the coast, ready to get a boat to England to move back into Ireland. You stuck to the shadows, keeping your hood up out of your face. You ate at night just before sleeping and travelled by day.

In your pocket you fingered a small bottle which you had picked up from an apothecary. It was used during surgical interventions to paralyse parts of the body, but also used as a poison if it got into the wrong hands. An overdose could easily paralyse someone completely or slip them into a coma.

You found him. You saw him sitting alone at a tavern, his dark eyes watching everyone as they walked through the building. You kept your hood up and walked in, keeping to the edge of the room, your eyes smouldering in anger. You would make the fucker pay! All the people you had asked for information had served their purpose well, guiding you to him.

Being a woman may work to your advantage here, you thought. You looked across the room, through the masses of bodies, and approached him. You sat beside him, smiling and slid your hand down onto his thigh. Repulsion racked through you for touching another man who wasn’t your dearest Raymond, and more than that, this was the man who had murdered him.

An hour later and you found yourself in one of the upper rooms of the tavern, having brought a room for the night, and you were in the arms of the mute. He was kissing you, drawing all the disgust out of you, but you were doing this for Raymond. You stopped for a moment, quickly slipping the liquid from the bottle in your pocket into the ale, and then handed him the cup. “Come and drink,” you whispered. So far and he had not noticed your slight of hand.

He drank from the cup and moved forward to kiss you again, but suddenly stopped and collapsed to the bed. A grunt of frustration rose from him as he tried to move, his eyes wide in shock.

Laughing, you straddled him, and tied his arms to the bed posts, making sure that he could not move one inch. “You’re probably wondering who I am,” you told him, grinning at him. He stared at you, swallowing hard, his body completely paralysed. “This will answer your question.” From your inside pocket of the tunic you wore, you pulled out the arrow. You slid the metal down his cheek, onwards to his chest, his eyes widening even further. Slowly you ripped open his shirt, looking at the scars across him.

His body arched as you dug the metal into his thigh and twisted. Then you followed with the other thigh. Followed then by just above his chest, digging into his collarbones, each one in turn. “This is for my Raymond, you bastard!” you growled, forcing the arrow into his neck, in the exact same place that your husband had been bitten by this animal before you.

You slipped away that night, leaving behind the bloodied and mutilated body of the mute, satisfied that your beloved had finally been avenged.

**** FIN (Part 2 is on AO3 and can be posted here if people request) *****

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[markgallacher]

DISRUPTED

A week before my best friend M– died, I had a dream where I was travelling somewhere with unidentified friends. We were flying somewhere and the last call for the boarding gate was announced over the public announcement system. But we were not at an airport; we were in Glasgow Central Station. The boarding gate was behind some sort of large internal building structure that was accessed through a small walkway. My companions had reached the walkway. They briefly called to me before they moved on with their hand luggage. I knew where to go - just over there. Over there. But the floor was polished and it curved. I kept slipping and trying to stand up. An alarm began to sound, like the sound effect from the LOST TV series, its volume and frequency increasing. I repeatedly tried to get my footing and then despair hit me, as I knew I wasn’t going to make it. I WASN’T GOING TO MAKE IT! – and then I woke up.

A week later, M– was dead. He was 46 years old. It had taken cancer two years to kill him.

M–’s illness started with terrible pain in his arm that turned out to be lung cancer – a tumour creeping from the top of his lung into the plexus of nerves near his neck. The doctors eventually managed to kill that tumour, but not before the cancer had metastasised to his liver. The cancer was aggressive. Eventually M– had tumours other places and his liver was gone. Along the way, he suffered all the physical distress, mental anguish and humiliation a fatal disease and its treatment can bring to bear on one person. It says something about the man that in those two years, he married, visited Germany, France and Italy. He renovated a house in the country in Denmark, went to music festivals, applied for citizenship for him and his kids, and kept his family and friends from total despair. I don’t know if he kept despair at bay for himself. I sometimes imagined he was like a boxer on the ropes in the 11th. Heroic and slowly failing in that cruel light. I imagined he was agile enough so that the worst of it failed to land the knockout blow. But there were callous uppercuts that hurt. The bell was never going to sound. And though we tried to hide it, there were gasps and anguished moans from the darkened stands, our distance to the ring dictated by the bonds that bind, the circumstances of our lives or just by how much suffering at close quarters we could stand.

It says a lot about M– that he threw a small party for his close friends two months before he died - when he knew he would die in a matter of months. There were seven of us. It was an idyllic summer in Denmark. Record-breaking summer days. Sunsets and sunrises ablaze. Time slow and lazy like a slack river. M– made a speech beforehand; we were gathered around the kitchen worktop where he was preparing the meal. He told us the end was coming and there was nothing we could do about it. He wasn’t upset about his mortality. He was really upset about leaving his wife and children behind. But he had lived a fuller life than most. He’d seen the world. And he was lucky that it would be the liver that would go first. He’d fall into a coma and not wake up. Not the worst way to go. No pain. ‘Now,’ he said voice strong. ‘Let’s have a party.’ And that’s what we did. Just laughter, wine, seafood, good music and those strange floating smiles people make when they are immensely happy and their hearts are breaking at the same time.

Just weeks before he died, M– took his wife and kids to Italy. In the photographs, he looks like a healthy, happy father. He does not look like a man who is dying and who will die very soon. Planned as a last trip with his kids, he was forced to cut the holiday short because basically, his body was done. But not his mind. Not yet.

Still, pain, meds, exhaustion. When he came back, the sense that things would go fast.

M– left a 13-year-old daughter, an 11-year-old son, a widow who’d only met him four years ago, his parents, a sister, an ex-wife and mother to his children who’d known him for 25 years, near friends, far friends, work associates and all those people who couldn’t help but like him. Circles of loss of decreasing intensity, expanding out from his disrupted timeline.

Fate so cruel, you wanted to throw rocks at it.

I had told M– repeatedly we would grow old together. Our sons would drive us to some cosy café where we would drink expensive beers in late afternoon sunshine and take satisfaction from our ordinary lives, discuss all the books we had read, the movies we had seen together. Then at some point, one of our sons would come back and drive us home. When M– was first diagnosed with cancer, I told him that I had written a letter of complaint and mailed it. He asked me for the address. M– told me about some of the treatment choices he was having to make. ‘Hard-core decisions,’ he called them. He was still defiant then. Angry. ‘Fuck cancer.’ There was no question of his dying. Two years later at 2 am at that last party, I embraced my friend and asked him how much time did he want – take it from me. A week, a month, two years. It’s yours. ‘I’ll take as much as you can spare,’ he said and smiled wanly. One by one, we were all embracing M– .

But now when I look back to those moments, I think the giving was all the other way.

In the days after his death, it’s me asking M– for strength. FB pictures, text messages, Messenger threads, brief smartphone film clips. Nothing is banal. All of it is rendered precious, poignant. It has become prophetic. Digital ghosts haunting my grief-stricken now. Even his music playlists take on significance that takes the breath away. Why’d he have to pick that song Waiting’ Around To Die? The desperate search for one more recording I’ve never seen or heard. One more message. One more SMS. One more digital illusion. In those first days after his death, I desperately followed M–’s stats: It’s now been 24 hours since M– logged onto FB. It’s now been three days since he played a song on Spotify. Months since his last SMS. A world ago since his last post on Messenger. I was aware that I could be losing my mind. That I actually believed, I was going to find a Ted Talk from Beyond the Grave delivered by M–.

For days, I hunted down pictures of M–. In many of them, he looks over his shoulder at the camera, easy smile, glass of wine, preparing a meal or about to speak.

The strange compulsion that you could travel back in time. Send a warning.

You could map M–’s decline by the frequency of my visits. Once every couple of weeks. Once a week. Once every three days. M–’s last week went fast. His life force seemed like a country-sized shelf of ice that threatening to cleave for two years, cleaves from the main body. His last hours a drift of coma and delirium, watched over by his wife and nurse. I visited him on what turned out to be his last Monday. He said how tired he was. I visited him on the last Wednesday, he could still hold a conversation but he was like a man behind a waterfall. I wasn’t always sure if I was only seeing the shape of him. His mind submerged, sank, and came back again, paler than before. Like the fading light in the gathering darkness of a coming storm. When I drove back home, my heart broke. I wept for M– and his wife and children. And I wept for myself because I was losing my best friend.

On the last Friday, I asked my wife to drive out with me, afraid I would not be able to drive back. M– refused to see us, his wife tearful at the door, with some boxes of old children’s toys and clothes we were to take to the charity shop. She couldn’t stand at the door for long. M– could not be left alone. Not now. We heard him call her name.

He died about midnight that Sunday.

I miss my friend.

- September 2018

[eccacia]

Favorite Snowbarry Fics

So I have a bit of free time before things get busy again, and being Snowbarry Trash™ I thought, What better way to spend it than rereading my favorite SB fics????? At first I compiled all the links in one place as a reference for myself, but what the heck, it won’t hurt to put these fics out there again and send the writers some love.

Before anything, a caveat: this is by no means a comprehensive list of all the best SB fics. There are a lot of other great fics out there. Also “favorite” here probably more accurately means “fics I reach for when I’m having a bad day,” lol. So to these writers here, THANK YOU. Your fics really get me going again. (And to other fanfic writers out there, keep writing! You’ll never know when a fic will make someone’s day a little better, as these did for me.)

The fics are below the cut, arranged alphabetically. I put in the summary and a brief gushing of what I liked about them. Happy reading, everyone! Don’t forget to give the ones you like some love!

& If It Never Ends then When Do We Start, by @ttinycourageous​

Far too soon, a common occurrence for them, their time together is up. Looking up at him Caitlin wonders how long they’ll be able to keep this going; Barry gone on a mission, she back to the lab ignoring Jay’s advances, both of them under the scrutiny of the agency they work for. How long before her heart gets broken?

“Can you keep a secret?” Barry asks.

[00Q au in which Barry's the spy, and Caitlin one of the scientists providing the gadgets. The two grow closer over the course of several months, mostly due to Barry's insistent inquiring after her real name.]

Spy AU? Secret Identities?? Forbidden Relationship?????? Uh, count me in. What really gets to me about this, though, is that unlike other spy AUs, the language isn’t punchy and action-packed; instead the story’s told with restraint, and the language pulses with quiet longing. Tension and suspense aren’t so much in the external circumstances as in the internal conflict, so the moment that they finally come together is the climax in both external and internal tension. It’s just brilliant. Also I live for coded affectionate exchanges, that whole saying one thing but meaning something else, and it was so well done in this fic.

at first sight, by @tinytendril

College Pride & Prejudice AU. Literature student Barry swears he hates everything about the privileged side of Central City, including one leggy, doe-eyed, bon-mot tossing, label-worshiping vortex of girly vapidness Caitlin Snow. Until, as these things go, he doesn’t, not even by a small measure, and not at all.

I’ve read this so many times I’ve lost count. But really, wow. Barry as Lizzy and Caitlin as Darcy just makes so much sense, and the rest of the cast were slotted so naturally into their P&P counterparts that I couldn’t imagine it any other way. The dialogue’s also very witty. I love how Caitlin calls Barry out for his pretentiousness. (The pretentiousness is so well-done, by the way. I mean, just look at the summary. It’s a mini-adventure into the dictionary.) I always get this sense of vindictive joy when Barry realizes that Caitlin can match him line for line. Ha, you show him, girl. Serves him right for underestimating you. Anywaaay, I could go on, but in short, I love this fic to bits.

Blind Date, by @chasingblue57​​

Iris just knows that Barry & her TA are perfect for each other, she just needs to get them in the same room [college au].

Iris as a matchmaker, Barry and Caitlin being set up on an awkward blind date, them talking about awkwardness during said blind date... It’s the most adorable thing, I tell you. Even if the same can be said of nearly all of Blue’s fics, this one’s close to my heart.

cold and paperskin, by @briarsrosie​

You're Killer Frost. Caitlin Snow is dead. You deserve to die, too. / Trigger warning.

This technically isn’t SB or even romance. It’s Snowbarisco friendship, and I’m glad it is. It’s also a great rendering of Caitlin’s disjointed, fractured consciousness following her rampage as Killer Frost, and the obsessive repetition of that “you-deserve-to-die” reveals the destructive quality of her guilt. But what really got me was the friendship. I mean, friendship’s usually light and fluffy, but their friendship here is tenacious and stubborn and hopeful, and it’s what saves Caitlin in the end. It’s so precious.

Could End in Burning Flames or Paradise, by NeoNails

Or 5 Times Caitlin Had Sex with Barry & the 1 Time It Meant Something. "She didn't know what series of events culminated in Barry's mood that night, but she did know it began with him pulling the bottle out of her hand and taking a long swig for himself."

This one needs little explanation. I don’t know about you, but one of the first things I did as a new SB fan was to look for good smut, and this one was the first one I came across. It definitely did not disappoint. It was written way back, but it remains my favorite smutty fic.

here is my heart (your love is everything i need), by @roastytoastyprincesss

AU: In a world where soulmates exist, when your first touch with them shall brand you for life, Barry Allen gets marked. By who he's not quite certain, but he's determined to find out. Caitlin Snow however, she knows... she's just not ready to deal with it's repercussions. Snowbarry.

The angst almost killed me in this one. It’s a masterful prolonging of a misunderstanding, with every opportunity to right it consistently thwarted; and when the truth is finally revealed, it’s in the worst circumstances possible. It’s what makes their reunion so cathartic, and their hot make-out scene towards the end so satisfying.

(i know that) we’re cool, by Lint​

She hasn't smiled much because there hasn't been anything worth smiling about. But all of a sudden some string bean of a police scientist wakes up from a lightning induced coma, and her facial muscles magically remember how?

Probably the first SB fluff I’ve read. Whenever I reread it my facial muscles still ache from smiling. Also, I’m pretty wordy as a writer, so it amazes me to see how much happens and how much is conveyed through short sentences and succinct dialogue.

If summer is for lovers then consider me in love, by gustin puckerman

When Barry finds out about the kiss.―Barry/Caitlin. Post 1x19 "Who is Harrison Wells". Oneshot.

This has the most adorable SB conversation ever. Barry and Caitlin tiptoe around the elephant in the room in the most endearing, awkward way, but what really gets to me is that behind the innocence of their words, their verbal dancing around each other feels like a strip tease, a slow revelation of the truth one line of dialogue at a time. It ends in the purest way possible, though: not with a kiss, because that would have been a decisive gesture, one that doesn’t quite fit with the atmosphere of the story, but with tentative hand-holding and a walk home. What’s not to love?

Knowing the Flows of Time, by @christinafalls

There is no greater pain than knowing. Barry travels back in time to save his mum, that single event is the catalyst that allows him to have a life with Caitlin he never expected he'd want. But could he truly fight destiny when he knows they were never meant to be?

I was an emotional wreck after reading this fic. I was in tears by the end. Everything hurt. I was in a daze for the rest of the day. This story, I remember thinking to myself then, is one that knows how to end. The storytelling was beautiful, with not one scene out of order. I still reread this from time to time just to marvel at how seamlessly everything unfolds.

Lifeguards’ Summer, by @destianac

This was going to be the longest summer of her life. First, she had to work instead of travelling with her best friend. Second, she was paired with that tall brown-haired guy and his cocky grin. Snowbarry AU one-shot. Summer Lovin' 16 - Day 2 - Lifeguards AU

My favorite SB summer read. Destiana pulls off a Barry with boyish charm, cocky and goofy at the same time. The dialogue is light and funny, and there’s a ton of fluff. Not just any fluff, too — it’s sexy fluff. Destiana practically invented that genre for SB. I read this on bad days to cheer up, and it always does the trick.

Swimming Lessons, by chasingblue57

The gang heads to the beach so Barry can teach Caitlin to swim, things get a bit handsy.

This is one of my favorite tropes of all time, and Blue just nails it. The moment when he first sees her in the bikini. The tickling. The not-so-accidental, lingering touches over bare skin. The “Don’t Worry, I Won’t Let You Drown” speech. The innocent flirting contrasted with the fact that they’re both half-naked and, well, wet. I grin like a fool every time I read this, especially when I reach the last line, because it recasts everything in a different light. Read it if you haven’t yet and you’ll see what I mean. It’s just delightful.

somebody sweet to talk to, by tinytendril

Isolated and jaded, executive assistant Caitlin finds an unexpected companion with a stranger, or her IT specialist, Barry. Except, they’ve only got a single phone line to connect them.

AUs are usually more difficult to ease into, but in this case I’m in awe of how I already have a feel of the setting and the characters from just the first paragraph. I also love how Caitlin and Barry’s relationship progresses through dialogue, how they initially get in touch because of professional necessity, and how that professional necessity soon (d)evolves into a sly ruse for another kind of necessity altogether. I’m a sucker for those things, and this one was beautifully done.

text me a heart attack, by @shyesplease​

Caitlin texts Barry because she needs a little bit of saving, but Barry might be the one having a heart attack.

One of the best things about reading drunk!Caitlin is watching how she (and the author) comes up with ways to reduce Barry into a flustered, tongue-tied mess, and in this fic it’s done so deliciously: drunk!Caitlin sends Barry a hot pic of herself that he receives during a nice, wholesome family dinner... and, well, you can read on to enjoy the hilarity that ensues. I also love the devious twist at the end, during the post-drunk!Caitlin conversation in the morning. Barry’s teasing her mercilessly, as expected, and Caitlin endures it... until she turns the entire conversation on its head with a single line, and then saunters away leaving Barry simultaneously confused and turned on in her wake. Poor Barry. Good thing there’s a sexting sequel...

Untitled, by @snow-bellarke-barry​ 

Barry sneaks into Caitlin’s house at night & asks for her help.

My favorite Caitlin-nurses-Barry-back-to-health fic. I just keep going back to the scene where Barry, after two days of being knocked out by an injury, finally wakes up to see Caitlin dozing off, and then he correctly surmises that she hardly slept for the entirety of those two days while keeping watch over him. It just seemed so Caitlin to worry to the point of forgetting to care for herself, but at the same time not exactly revealing or broadcasting the extent of her worry (except probably in the form of a warning, or in this case in eliciting a promise from Barry). And the scene at the end when they kiss after the culmination of all the anxiety was definitely a wonderful bonus.

wanna be around, girl, by tinytendril

1960s Snowbarry AU - Marrying into wealth isn’t Caitlin Snow’s idea. It takes an annulment and a pool boy with a smart mouth to break out of her perfectly colourless suburban lifestyle.

Oh my God, I live for this fic. I have a soft spot for heroines who go through their lives having everything externally but feeling a diffuse, unnameable restlessness inside, and then meeting someone who finally, really sees her behind all the glamor. I’d like to think it goes beyond just romance, this seeing; it’s like being acknowledged and respected and accepted as an individual... Or is that what romance is? Lol anyway, I love how the choice of setting further emphasizes the importance of appearances. It makes Caitlin’s developing relationship with Barry all the more deviant, and it becomes an important stepping-stone to her questioning of societal expectations and finally breaking free of them; it enables her to not only choose whom she wants to be with but also what she wants to do with her interests and talents. Other than that, I also love the progression of their relationship: how rigid their interactions first seem, marked by the obligatory proprieties; how they slowly shed those proprieties; and then how, during the climax, they just throw all caution to the wind. A really wonderful, engrossing read. I always feel so content after reading this.

Well, that’s it for now. I might add more in the future when I’ve read more fics or if I’ll suddenly remember one that I’ve missed. If you liked anything, don’t forget to let the writers know, or reblog with your comfort fics if you like :)

[aion-rsa]

Star Trek: Discovery Season 3 Episode 2 Review: Far From Home

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J

This Star Trek: Discovery review contains spoilers.

Star Trek: Discovery Season 3, Episode 2

Star Trek: Discovery season three continues to take its time in the second episode, which acts as a satisfying parallel to the season premiere. Last week, we followed Michael in her first day in this strange, new frontier. This week, we’re doing the same with the rest of the Discovery crew. Like Michael, their introduction to this new time begins with a traumatic, dizzying fall from space. Unlike Michael, they have one another to lean on, not to mention an entire starship to keep them safe. With sloppy writing, this kind of retread of the “stranger in a strange land” plot could have been redundant and boring, but Discovery nails it for the second week in a row, giving us further insight into how the values and the experiences of these 23rd century characters fit and don’t in this new world.

There’s something deeply unnatural about seeing a starship on the ground. Usually built in space and equipped with shuttlecrafts for away missions, a starship could conceivably live out its whole life without ever touching the surface of a planet. Because of this, if a starship is on the ground, something has probably gone terribly wrong, for example: the starship has jumped 930 years into the future and come out in the middle of an asteroid field with many of its systems straight-up not responding. Or something like that.

Like Michael in the premiere, Discovery’s first experience in this new time is crash landing onto a planet. A planet that the crew quickly realizes is not their intended destination of Terralysium (aka Burnham’s mom’s home base). Where are they? Doesn’t matter! Discovery can’t fly and can’t communicate, and Saru makes it clear to his crew that fixing these problems needs to be the priority, even if there is a shiny new future out there to explore. (Shiny new futures are like cat nip for these Federation types.) The crew goes about fixing the plasma manifold rupture, which means finding and fixing all of the EPS conduits that went boom.

But, really, where are they? OK, fine. The planet doesn’t really have a name; the few people who live in the man-made pockets of breathable atmosphere simply call their home “The Colony,” and that no-name status tells you pretty much everything you need to know about this place. It’s a backwater that no one cares about, especially, presumably, now that its mining colonies have been sabotaged. If this were a western, a genre the episode mades several explicit references to, then this would the mostly-abandoned frontier town way down on its luck.

The Colony may be a dusty frontier town, but it’s still 930 years ahead of the Discovery when it comes to tech, which is good news for the battered ship. While the crew works diligently to make the repairs necessary to get Discovery flying again before the planet’s parasitic ice crushes the hull and everyone in it (did I not mention there is parasitic, hull-crushing ice?), Saru and Tilly travel to one of the settlements in search of a repair for a broken transtator. As with any good western, they find a saloon filled with trigger-happy locals (well, two trigger happy locals). But even future folk can’t resist the one-two punch of Sar and Tilly’s earnest likability. They agree to help.

It helps that one of the miners, Kal, believes in the Federation. Like Mr. Sahil in last week’s episode, Kal is a true believer, someone who hopes for the Federation long after there is evidence to inspire or support that hope. Unlike Mr. Sahil, Kal has bigger problems than keeping his teeth clean and. his bird alarm clock set. The Colony is under the thumb of local bully Zareh, a violent courier who uses his position to exploit the remote community. When Zareh shows up on the saloon scene, the situation quickly takes a violent turn. Kal is killed, and Zareh plans to send Tilly out into the parasitic winter to retrieve the dilithium Saru has promised in exchange for their safe release.

But Saru and Tilly aren’t in the same situation as Michael: they have backup, even when they don’t ask for it. Emperor Georgiou, highly critical of Saru’s plans to simply ask the locals nicely for their help, has followed Tilly and Saru. She saunters in and turns the situation on its head, quickly taking Zareh and his henchmen out. The backup definitely saves Tilly’s life and probably saves Saru’s too, and presents an uncomfortable truth: Saru might not like Georgiou’s methods, but it’s hard to deny that she is a useful ally in this lawless future. Still, Saru won’t let Georgiou kill Zareh, after he has been safely apprehended, giving the choice of justice to the remaining miner instead. Georgiou goes along with it when Saru pulls rank, but it’s not clear how long that will work. Right now, Georgiou is of value to the crew and willing to, more or less, follow the rules of Discovery, but it’s not hard to imagine that there will come a day when this is not the case anymore. When that day comes, Saru will have some hard choices to make.

While Saru, Tilly, and Georgiou secure a messy victory on the planet, the crew of Discovery manages to secure a last-minute victory repairing the ship’s systems, with a huge assist from a very injured Stamets. (Yeah, his medically-induced coma has been cut short.) We often speak about Star Trek, at least in its initial incarnations, as a utopian show and, for me, I understand that utopia as directly related to workplace. Star Trek: The Next Generation especially is a show about the best office ever, one where everyone is excited to be there, is good at their jobs, and will show up for their colleagues’ poetry readings. It’s a depiction of a workplace that is so healthy and functional that the near non-existence of everyone’s domestic lives is depicted as not a problem. Past Season 1, the Discovery has had more of this happy workplace vibe—that being said, this ship has a serious problem with employees working while sick and/or wounded (a very American work culture flaw). In this episode, we see both Detmer and Stamets work through their serious injuries. While it works out for now, especially in Stamets’ instance, it’s a dangerous game and one that, at least in my workplace utopia, is sad to see. While this is a lesson I need to internalize myself, addressing any and all medical concerns and listening to your doctor’s advice (as is demonstrated in this episode by Reno) is necessary for a healthy and efficient workplace. (But, seriously, someone needs to check on Detmer.)

The episode ends with a hell of a plot twist that, while many viewers may have seen coming, still packs a punch. A mysterious ship shows up to help haul Discovery out of the ice. It’s Burnham, and she has finally found Discovery… after a year of searching. Frankly, she looks great, and is probably overjoyed that she didn’t have to wait longer for Discovery to appear in this time. (In last week’s episode, she and Mr. Sahil agreed that it could be days or it could be centuries.) We’ll have to wait until next week to see what Michael has been up to, but, now that the Discovery crew has been properly reunited, this future feels one step closer to restoring the Federation.

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Additional thoughts.

It’s a very broad title, but it makes me laugh that this episode has the same name as the last Spider-Man movie.

Is there anything scarier than having your helm yell “Brace!” because there is nothing else they can do?

Having the bridge crew cheer Detmer after that crash landing was a nice touch. I love this group.

The sickbay needs to step up its game. Dr. Pollard, right now I’m looking specifically at you. (But, again, Detmer, you got to speak up about those symptoms, friend!)

“Um, you have some Leland on your shoes.”

Stamets’ “Worse than me?” upon being awoken from his coma so that someone else can have his bed is a real metric of the situation. I am still unclear what the capacity of this medbay is. How many beds does it have? It always seem to have a skeleton crew of doctors.

“OK, what the f-?!” Tilly snaps at Georgiou in a highly relatable way.

Different incarnations of Trek have had different policies and patterns when it came to how often the captain would go on away missions. Thoughts on Saru, the captain, leaving the ship during this crucial moment?

“We are introducing ourselves to the future. You, Ensign Tilly, make a wonderful first impression.” I love that Saru (and this show) recognizes this quality as the skill that it is.

Beautiful Iceland!

We get some great Saru as captain moments in this episode. He is kind and clear-eyed, communicative and firm, smart and calm under pressure, and he also kicks some ass when it is called for.

“What an unbelievably shitty decision.” Georgiou’s thoughts on Nhan’s choice to ditch the Enterprise in favor of Discovery. I mean… I kind of get where she is coming from on this.

“Bureaucracy is where fun goes to die.” Emperor Georgiou, not a fan of Section 31 or, most likely, Starfleet.

“We’re odd and strange.” “Not to each other.”

Do you think we will see Zareh again? I kind of hope not.

Gene is credited as “Ensign Hazmat,” which is a nice touch. I hope we see him again.

Like the season premiere, this episode was also directed by Olatunde Osunsanmi, and it was beautiful.

While I am excited to see Michael and the Discovery crew reunited, it would have been interesting to spend a good chunk of the season alternating episodes between these two groups, a la Farscape Season 3, and only having them reunite well into the season. But I am cool with this too.

What did you think of “Far From Home”? Let us know in the comments below.

The post Star Trek: Discovery Season 3 Episode 2 Review: Far From Home appeared first on Den of Geek.

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[mahariel-theirin]

Dead Titan = Blight ?

Has anyone written a meta about the connection between titans and the blight? Can someone send links if so?

I was researching for a fic but I just kept clicking on links and found:

Veilfire Runes in the Deep Roads

In the light of the veilfire, the runes seem to shift, coiling and uncoiling like snakes. A thunderous voice shatters the stillness, shouting:

"Hail Mythal, adjudicator and savior! She has struck down the pillars of the earth and rendered their demesne unto the People! Praise her name forever!"

For a moment, the scent of blood fills the air, and there is a vivid image of green vines growing and enveloping a sphere of fire. The vision grows dark. An aeon seems to pass. Then the runes crackle, as if filled with an angry energy. A new vision appears: elves collapsing caverns, sealing the Deep Roads with stone and magic. Terror, heart-pounding, ice-cold, as the last of the spells is cast. A voice whispers:

"What the Evanuris in their greed could unleash would end us all. Let this place be forgotten. Let no one wake its anger. The People must rise before their false gods destroy them all."

What if, due to the Evanuris’ mining for lyrium and the foci (probably the heart), the titans died or were sent into some kind of coma, causing their blood -- lyrium -- to turn red (decay, be tainted, calcify)? Then: 

lyrium in the fade, since connected to lyrium in Thedas, is also tainted = golden city (whatever that is) turns to black?

primeval thaig made before first blight, but covered with red lyrium = thaig is a dead titan’s body

some dwarves serving the dead titans get infected, spread blight

There’s also a bit about evanuris or ancient elves making bodies from earth (x), plus: "In this place we prepare to hunt the pillars of the earth. Their workers scurry, witless, soulless. This death will be a mercy. We will make the earth blossom with their passing." For one moment there is a vivid image of two overlapping spheres; unknown flowers bloom inside their centers. Then it fades.

Which makes me think: Titans ruled/shaped a solid world, while the Evanuris lived in a changeable world like the fade. Evanuris decided to get solid bodies for themselves (becoming elves, According to Dalish understanding, Elgar'nan and Mythal, the Father and the Mother, did not create the world. They were born of the world. The world was always there...), invaded the Titan’s world. Meaning, titan sphere + evanuris sphere = Thedas Arlathan time.

I accidentally read so much in so little time, but I want to fix all the info in my head, So if anyone has links about this topics, please send them my way. I might get this ideas sorted out later on and post about it.

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I could hear things, and Icould feel terrible pain: when anaesthesia fails

The long read: Anaesthesia remains a mysterious and inexact science and thousands of patients still wake up on the operating table every year

When Rachel Benmayor was admitted to hospital, eight and a half months pregnant, in 1990, her blood pressure had been alarmingly high and her doctor had told her to stay in bed and get as much rest as possible before the baby came. But her blood pressure kept rising this condition, known as pre-eclampsia, is not uncommon but can lead to sometimes-fatal complications and the doctors decided to induce the birth. When her cervix failed to dilate properly after 17 hours of labour, they decided instead to deliver the child by caesarean section under general anaesthetic. Rachel remembers being wheeled into the operating theatre. She remembers the mask, the gas. But then, as the surgeon made the first incision, she woke up.

I remember going on to the operating table, she told me. I remember an injection in my arm, and I remember the gas going over, and Glenn, my partner, and Sue, my midwife, standing beside me. And then I blacked out. And then the first thing I can remember is being conscious, basically, of pain. And being conscious of a sound that was loud and then echoed away. A rhythmical sound, almost like a ticking, or a tapping. And pain. I remember feeling a most incredible pressure on my belly, as though a truck was driving back and forth, back and forth across it.

A few months after the operation, someone explained to Rachel that when you open up the abdominal cavity, the air rushing on to the unprotected internal organs gives rise to a feeling of great pressure. But in that moment, lying there in surgery, she still had no idea what was happening. She thought she had been in a car accident. All I knew was that I could hear things and that I could feel the most terrible pain. I didnt know where I was. I didnt know I was having an operation. I was just conscious of the pain.

Every day, specialist doctors known as anaesthetists (or, in the US, anesthesiologists) put hundreds of thousands of people into chemical comas to enable other doctors to enter and alter our insides. Then they bring us back again. But quite how this daily extinction happens and un-happens remains uncertain. Researchers know that a general anaesthetic acts on the central nervous system reacting with the slick membranes of the nerve cells in the brain to suspend responses such as sight, touch and awareness. But they still cant agree on just what it is that happens in those areas of the brain, or which of the things that happen matter the most, or why they sometimes happen differently with different anaesthetics, or even on the manner a sunset? an eclipse? in which the human brain segues from conscious to not.

Nor, as it turns out, can anaesthetists accurately measure what it is they do.

For as long as doctors have been sending people under, they have been trying to fathom exactly how deep they have sent them. In the early days, this meant relying on signals from the body; later, on calculations based on the concentration in the blood of the various gases used. Recent years have seen the development of brain monitors that translate the brains electrical activity into a numeric scale a de facto consciousness meter. For all that, doctors still have no way of knowing for sure how deeply an individual patient is anaesthetised or even if that person is unconscious at all.

Anaesthetists have at their disposal a regularly changing array of mind-altering drugs some inhalable, some injectable, some short-acting, some long, some narcotic, some hallucinogenic which act in different and often uncertain ways on different parts of the brain. Some such as ether, nitrous oxide (better known as laughing gas) and, more recently, ketamine moonlight as party drugs. (If you have an inclination to travel, take the ether you go beyond the furthest star, wrote the American philosopher-poet Henry David Thoreau after inhaling the drug for the fitting of his false teeth.) Different anaesthetists mix up different combinations. Each has a favourite recipe. There is no standard dose.

Todays anaesthetic cocktails have three main elements: hypnotics designed to render you unconscious and keep you that way; analgesics to control pain; and, in many cases, a muscle relaxant (neuromuscular blockade) that prevents you from moving on the operating table. Hypnotics such as ether, nitrous oxide and their modern pharmaceutical equivalents are powerful drugs and not very discriminating. In blotting out consciousness, they can suppress not only the senses, but also the cardiovascular system: heart rate, blood pressure the bodys engine. When you take your old dog on its last journey, your vet will use an overdose of hypnotics to put him down. Every time you have a general anaesthetic, you take a trip towards death and back. The more hypnotics your doctor puts in, the longer you take to recover, and the more likely it is that something will go wrong. The less your doctor puts in, the more likely that you will wake. It is a balancing act, and anaesthetists are very good at it. But it doesnt alter the fact that for as long as anaesthetists have been putting them to sleep, patients have been waking during surgery.

As Rachels caesarean proceeded, she became aware of voices, though not of what was being said. She realised that she was not breathing, and started trying to inhale. I was just trying desperately to breathe, to breathe in. I realised that if I didnt breathe soon, I was going to die, she told me.

She didnt know there was a machine breathing for her. In the end I realised that I couldnt breathe, and that I should just let happen what was going to happen, so I stopped fighting it. By now, however, she was in panic. I couldnt cope with the pain. It seemed to be going on and on and on, and I didnt know what it was. Then she started hearing the voices again. And this time she could understand them. I could hear them talking about things about people, what they did on the weekend, and then I could hear them saying, Oh look, here she is, here the baby is, and things like that, and I realised then that I was conscious during the operation. I tried to start letting them know at that point. I tried moving, and I realised that I was totally and completely paralysed.

The chances of this happening to you or me are remote and, with advances in monitoring equipment, considerably more remote than 25 years ago. Figures vary (sometimes wildly, depending in part on how they are gathered) but big American and European studies using structured post-operative interviews have shown that one to two patients in 1,000 report waking under anaesthesia. More, it seems, in China. More again in Spain. Twenty to forty thousand people are estimated to remember waking each year in the US alone. Of these, only a small proportion are likely to feel pain, let alone the sort of agonies described above. But the impact can be devastating.

For Rachel, sleepless and terrified in her hospital room, it was the beginning of years of nightmares, panic attacks and psychiatric therapy. Soon after she gave birth, her blood pressure soared. I was in a hell of a state, she told me.

For weeks after she returned home, she would have panic attacks during which she felt she couldnt breathe. Although she says the hospital acknowledged the mistake and the superintendent apologised to her, beyond that she does not recall getting any help from the institution no explanation or counselling or offer of compensation. It did not occur to her to ask.

Things can go wrong. Equipment can fail a faulty monitor, a leaking tube. Certain operations caesareans, heart and trauma surgery require relatively light anaesthetics, and there the risk is increased as much as tenfold. One study in the 1980s found that close to half of those interviewed after trauma surgery remembered parts of the operation, although these days, with better drugs and monitoring, the figure for high-risk surgery is generally estimated at closer to one in 100. Certain types of anaesthetics (those delivered into your bloodstream, rather than those you inhale) raise the risk if used alone. Certain types of people, too, are more likely to wake during surgery: women, fat people, redheads; drug abusers, particularly if they dont mention their history. Children wake far more often than adults, but dont seem to be as concerned about it (or perhaps are less likely to discuss it). Some people may simply have a genetic predisposition to awareness. Human error plays a part.

But even without all this, anaesthesia remains an inexact science. An amount that will put one robust young man out cold will leave another still chatting to surgeons. More than a decade ago, I found this quote in an introductory anaesthesia paper on a University of Sydney website: There is no way that we can be sure that a given patient is asleep, particularly once they are paralysed and cannot move.

Last time I searched, the paper had been adjusted slightly to acknowledge recent advances in brain monitoring, but the message remained the same: just because a person appears to be unconscious, it does not mean they are.

In a way, continued the original version of the paper, the art of anaesthesia is a sophisticated form of guesswork. It really is art more than science We try to give the right doses of the right drugs and hope the patient is unconscious.

The death rate from general anaesthesia has dropped in the past 30 years, from about one in 20,000 to one or two in 200,000; and the incidence of awareness from one or two cases per 100 to one or two per 1,000. Obviously we give anaesthetics and weve got very good control over it, a senior anaesthetist told me, but in real philosophical and physiological terms, we dont know how anaesthesia works.

It is perhaps the most brilliant and baffling gift of modern medicine: the disappearing act that enables doctors and dentists to carry out surgery and other procedures that would otherwise be impossibly, often fatally, painful.

The term anaesthesia was appropriated from the Greek by New England physician and poet Oliver Wendell Holmes in 1846, to describe the effect of the drug ether following its first successful public demonstration in surgery. Anaesthetise: to render insensible. These days there are other sorts of anaesthetics that can numb a tooth or a torso, simply (or unsimply) by switching off the nerves in the relevant part of the body. But the most widespread and intriguing application of this skill is what is now known as general anaesthesia.

The first public demonstration of the use of inhaled ether as a surgical anaesthetic in 1846 by an American dentist, William Thomas Green Morton. Photograph: Design Pics Inc/Rex/Shutterstock

In general anaesthesia, it is not the nerve endings that are switched off, but your brain or, at least, parts of it. These, it seems, include the connections that somehow enable the operation of our sense of self, or (loosely) consciousness, as well as the parts of the brain responsible for processing messages from the nerves telling us we are in pain: the neurological equivalent of shooting the messenger. Which is, of course, a good thing.

I am one of the hundreds of millions of humans alive today who have undergone a general anaesthetic. It is an experience now so common as to be mundane. Anaesthesia has become a remarkably safe endeavour: less an event than a short and unremarkable hiatus. The fact that this hiatus has been possible for fewer than two of the 2,000 or so centuries of human history; the fact that only since then have we been able to routinely undergo such violent bodily assaults and survive; the fact that anaesthetics themselves are potent and sometimes unpredictable drugs all this seems to have been largely forgotten. Anaesthesia has freed surgeons to saw like carpenters through the bony fortress of the ribs. It has made it possible for a doctor to hold in her hand a steadily beating heart. It is a powerful gift. But what exactly is it?

Part of the difficulty in talking about anaesthesia is that any discussion veers almost immediately on to the mystery of consciousness. And despite a renewed focus in recent decades, scientists cannot yet even agree on the terms of that debate, let alone settle it.

Is consciousness one state or many? Can it be wholly explained in terms of specific brain regions and processes, or is it something more? Is it even a mystery? Or just an unsolved puzzle? And in either case, can any single explanation account for a spectrum of experience that includes both sentience (what it feels like to experience sound, sensation, colour) and self-awareness (what it feels like to be me the subjective certainty of my own existence)? Anaesthetists point out that you dont have to know how an engine works to drive a car. But stray off the bitumen, and it is surprising how quickly pharmacology and neurology give way to philosophy: if a scalpel cuts into an unconscious body, can it still cause pain? And then ethics: if, under anaesthesia, you feel pain but forget it almost in the moment, does it matter?

Greg Deacon, a former head of the Australian Society of Anaesthetists, told me about a patient who was waiting to have open heart surgery. Deacon had been preparing to anaesthetise him, he said, when the man went into cardiac arrest. The team managed to restart the recalcitrant heart, then raced the patient into surgery, where they operated immediately. It was only once the operation had begun, the mans heart now beating steadily, that they could safely administer an anaesthetic. It all went well, said Deacon, and the man made an excellent recovery. Some days later, the patient told doctors he remembered the early parts of the procedure before he was given the drugs.

That is a sort of incidence of awareness which was thoroughly understandable and acceptable, Deacon told me: he had not even known if the mans brain was still working, let alone whether he would survive an anaesthetic. We were trying to keep him alive.

This is not denial. This is the tightrope that anaesthetists walk every day. They just tend not to talk about it.

In 2004, and against a backdrop of growing public and media concern, Americas Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations finally issued an alert to more than 15,000 of the nations hospitals and healthcare providers. The commission, which evaluates healthcare providers, acknowledged that the experience of awareness in anaesthesia was under-recognised and under-treated, and called on all healthcare providers to start educating staff about the problem.

The American Society of Anesthesiologists subsequently acknowledged, in a 2006 practice advisory, that accidental intraoperative awareness, while rare, might be followed by significant psychological sequelae and affected patients may remain severely disabled for extended periods of time.

Before that acknowledgment was published, however, then ASA president Roger Litwiller made a small but telling observation. Despite his organisations concern about anaesthetic awareness, he did not want the issue to be blown out of proportion: I would also like to say that there is a potential for this subject of awareness to be sensationalised. We are concerned that patients become unduly frightened during what is already a very emotional time for them.

This is the anaesthetists dilemma. Under stress which affects just about everybody facing a general anaesthetic we lose our ability and often desire to process complex information. More than half of all patients worry about pain, paralysis and distress. High anxiety or resistance to the idea of anaesthesia may even contribute to anaesthetics failing, or at least increase the chances that we will remember parts of the operation. The more anxious we are, the more anaesthetic it may take to put us to sleep.

This creates a quandary for doctors: how much to tell? When we are anxious, our bodies increase production of adrenaline-type substances called catecholamines. These can react badly with some anaesthetic agents. So what does an anaesthetist tell a patient who, because of the type of operation, or their state of health, is at higher than average risk?

I mean, were trying to make people not worry about it, said one Australian anaesthetist I spoke with, but in the process I think we blur it so much that people hardly ever think about it, and thats probably not right either Should I be telling you that youve got a high risk of death? Is that going to frighten you to death?

Today the profession makes much of the emergence of a new generation of anaesthetists who are more attuned to the experiences of their patients. But the reality is that anaesthetists remain for the large part the invisible men and women of surgery. Many patients still dont meet them until just before or sometimes after the operation, and many, muffled in a fug of drugs, might not even remember these meetings. Nor do anaesthetists generally leave anything to show for their work: no scars or prognoses. When they do leave evidence, it is invariably unwelcome nausea, a raw throat, sometimes a tooth chipped as the breathing tube is inserted, sometimes a memory of the surgery. It is unsurprising, then, that by the time an anaesthetist makes it into the popular media, he or she is generally accompanied by a lawyer.

For the doctors who each day make possible the miraculous vanishing act at the heart of modern surgery, this invisibility can be galling. It is not surgeons who have enabled the proliferation of surgical operations numbering in the hundreds 170-odd years ago and the hundreds of millions today. It is anaesthetists. In hospital emergency rooms in Australia and other countries, it is not surgeons who decide which patient is most in need of and mostly likely to survive emergency surgery: anaesthetists increasingly oversee the pragmatic hierarchy of triage. And if you have an operation, although it is your surgeon who manages the moist, intricate mechanics of the matter, it is your anaesthetist who keeps you alive.

One of the first articles I came across when I started researching this subject was a 1998 paper by British psychologist Michael Wang entitled Inadequate Anaesthesia as a Cause of Psychopathology. Wang pointed out that pain even unexpectedly severe pain did not necessarily lead to trauma. Post-traumatic stress seldom followed childbirth, for example. What could be devastating, he said, was the totally unexpected experience of complete paralysis.

Even today, most patients undergoing major surgery have no idea that part of the anaesthetic mix will be a modern pharmaceutical version of curare, a poison derived from a South American plant, which causes paralysis. Few will be aware, either, that during surgery their eyes will be taped shut, that they may be tied down, and that they will have a plastic tube manoeuvred into their reluctant airway, past the soft palate and the vocal cords, overriding the gag reflex, and into the windpipe.

An anaesthetist checking a patients pupil to gauge the effect of an anaesthetic. Photograph: Cornell Capa/The Life Picture Collection/Getty Images

For the patient paralysed upon the table, said Wang, [t]he realisation of consciousness of which theatre staff are evidently oblivious, along with increasingly frenetic yet futile attempts to signal with various body parts, leads rapidly to the conclusion that something has gone seriously wrong. The patient might believe that the surgeon has accidentally severed the spinal cord, or that some unusual drug reaction has occurred, rendering her totally paralysed, not just during the surgery, but for the rest of her life.

As soon as anaesthetists explain to patients how the process works, it all starts to seem a lot less mysterious. And talk, it turns out, is not only cheap but effective: a preoperative visit from an anaesthetist has been shown to be better than a tranquilliser at keeping patients calm. I know from my own experience I had surgery on my spine how reassuring such a conversation can be. For me, it was not just the information; it was the fact of the human contact, of being treated as an equal, of being included, rather than feeling like an appendage to a process to which I was, after all, central.

Hank Bennett, an American psychologist, remembers a young girl whose mother brought her to see him some time after the girl had her adenoids removed. The surgeon referred the mother to Bennett after she had returned to him in a state of anxiety about her child. The surgery had been straightforward, but the mother felt that something was very wrong with her previously happy daughter: the child had withdrawn from her family and friends, and had stopped working at school. She could no longer fall asleep without her mother sitting with her, and was afraid of the dark.

Bennett spoke with the girl. He told her there must be a reason she had changed her behaviour, and asked if it might have something to do with the operation.

Bennett recalled: And she said, Yes. They saidthat they were going to put me to sleep, but the next thing I knew, I couldnt breathe. Now, she was only momentarily like that she does not remember the breathing tube going in but when I asked why she was doing these things differently at school and at home, she said: Well, I have to concentrate and I cant be bothered by anything. Ive got to make sure that I can breathe.

Bennett referred the girl to a child psychologist, and within weeks she was back to herself. Today she would be approaching middle age. But lets say that was just luck, Bennett says now. What if nothing had been picked up about that? Would she have been permanently changed? I think that you would say, yes, she probably would have been.

So if you were my anaesthetist and I your patient, there are some other things Id hope you would do in the operating theatre. Things that many already do. Be kind. Talk to me. Just a bit of information and reassurance. Use my name. Patients who remember waking are often greatly relieved at having been told what was happening to them, and reassured that this was OK and that they would now drift back to sleep.

The Fifth National Audit Project on accidental awareness during general anaesthesia states: The patients interpretation of what is happening at the time of the awareness seems central to its later impact; explanation and reassurance during suspected accidental awareness during general anaesthesia or at the time of report seems beneficial. Hospital staff could put a sign on the wall of the operating theatre: The patient can hear. Because one of the strange things about anaesthetic drugs is that they can exert their effect in each direction not just upon the patient, but upon the doctors and theatre staff performing the procedure.

After the teenage son of a good friend was badly burned in an accident some years ago, he had to endure weeks of intense pain, culminating each week in the agonising ritual of nurses changing the dressings on his chest and arms. They did this by giving him a dose of a sedative drug designed to distract him from the pain and prevent him remembering it. My friend would attempt to comfort her son as he yelled and as the nurses got on with their difficult task. What she observed was that while the drugs did give her son some distance from his pain, and certainly his memories of it, they also gave the nurses some distance from her son. It was an understandable, perhaps necessary, distance; but inherent in that tiny retreat (the lack of eye contact, the too-bright voices) was a loosening of the tiny filaments that connect us one to another, and through which we know we are connected.

It is a process inevitably magnified in the operating theatre, where the patient is silent and still, to all intents absent, and where their descent into unconsciousness is routinely accompanied by the sounds of the music being cranked up (one prominent Australian surgeon is said to favour heavy metal), and conversation. It need not take a scientific study to tell us that this deepening of respect and focus is good not only for patients, but for doctors, too. In the end, it might not even much matter what you say. During an operation, a soothing voice may be more important than what the voice says, writes psychologist John Kihlstrom, who still encourages anaesthetists to talk to their anaesthetised patients (about what is going on, giving reassurance, things like that) but acknowledges that he doesnt expect them to understand any of it not verbally at least.

Japanese anaesthetist Jiro Kurata calls this care of the soul. In an unusual and rather lovely paper delivered at the Ninth International Symposium on Memory and Awareness in Anaesthesia in 2015, he wondered if there might be part of our existence that cannot ever be shut down, which we cannot even conceive by ourselves a subconscious self that might be resistant to even high doses of anaesthetics. He called this the hard problem of anaesthesia awareness. I have no idea what his colleagues made of it. But his conclusion seems unassailable.

Any solution? Science? Yes and no. Monitoring? Yes and no. Respect? Yes. We must not only be aware of the inherent limitation of science and technology but, most importantly, also of the inherent dignity of each personal self.

Anaesthesia: The Gift of Oblivion and the Mystery of Consciousness by Kate Cole-Adams (Text Publishing Company, 12.99) is published on 22 February. To order a copy for 9.99, go to guardianbookshop.com

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Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/feb/09/i-could-hear-things-and-i-could-feel-terrible-pain-when-anaesthesia-fails

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I could hear things, and Icould feel terrible pain: when anaesthesia fails

The long read: Anaesthesia remains a mysterious and inexact science and thousands of patients still wake up on the operating table every year

When Rachel Benmayor was admitted to hospital, eight and a half months pregnant, in 1990, her blood pressure had been alarmingly high and her doctor had told her to stay in bed and get as much rest as possible before the baby came. But her blood pressure kept rising this condition, known as pre-eclampsia, is not uncommon but can lead to sometimes-fatal complications and the doctors decided to induce the birth. When her cervix failed to dilate properly after 17 hours of labour, they decided instead to deliver the child by caesarean section under general anaesthetic. Rachel remembers being wheeled into the operating theatre. She remembers the mask, the gas. But then, as the surgeon made the first incision, she woke up.

I remember going on to the operating table, she told me. I remember an injection in my arm, and I remember the gas going over, and Glenn, my partner, and Sue, my midwife, standing beside me. And then I blacked out. And then the first thing I can remember is being conscious, basically, of pain. And being conscious of a sound that was loud and then echoed away. A rhythmical sound, almost like a ticking, or a tapping. And pain. I remember feeling a most incredible pressure on my belly, as though a truck was driving back and forth, back and forth across it.

A few months after the operation, someone explained to Rachel that when you open up the abdominal cavity, the air rushing on to the unprotected internal organs gives rise to a feeling of great pressure. But in that moment, lying there in surgery, she still had no idea what was happening. She thought she had been in a car accident. All I knew was that I could hear things and that I could feel the most terrible pain. I didnt know where I was. I didnt know I was having an operation. I was just conscious of the pain.

Every day, specialist doctors known as anaesthetists (or, in the US, anesthesiologists) put hundreds of thousands of people into chemical comas to enable other doctors to enter and alter our insides. Then they bring us back again. But quite how this daily extinction happens and un-happens remains uncertain. Researchers know that a general anaesthetic acts on the central nervous system reacting with the slick membranes of the nerve cells in the brain to suspend responses such as sight, touch and awareness. But they still cant agree on just what it is that happens in those areas of the brain, or which of the things that happen matter the most, or why they sometimes happen differently with different anaesthetics, or even on the manner a sunset? an eclipse? in which the human brain segues from conscious to not.

Nor, as it turns out, can anaesthetists accurately measure what it is they do.

For as long as doctors have been sending people under, they have been trying to fathom exactly how deep they have sent them. In the early days, this meant relying on signals from the body; later, on calculations based on the concentration in the blood of the various gases used. Recent years have seen the development of brain monitors that translate the brains electrical activity into a numeric scale a de facto consciousness meter. For all that, doctors still have no way of knowing for sure how deeply an individual patient is anaesthetised or even if that person is unconscious at all.

Anaesthetists have at their disposal a regularly changing array of mind-altering drugs some inhalable, some injectable, some short-acting, some long, some narcotic, some hallucinogenic which act in different and often uncertain ways on different parts of the brain. Some such as ether, nitrous oxide (better known as laughing gas) and, more recently, ketamine moonlight as party drugs. (If you have an inclination to travel, take the ether you go beyond the furthest star, wrote the American philosopher-poet Henry David Thoreau after inhaling the drug for the fitting of his false teeth.) Different anaesthetists mix up different combinations. Each has a favourite recipe. There is no standard dose.

Todays anaesthetic cocktails have three main elements: hypnotics designed to render you unconscious and keep you that way; analgesics to control pain; and, in many cases, a muscle relaxant (neuromuscular blockade) that prevents you from moving on the operating table. Hypnotics such as ether, nitrous oxide and their modern pharmaceutical equivalents are powerful drugs and not very discriminating. In blotting out consciousness, they can suppress not only the senses, but also the cardiovascular system: heart rate, blood pressure the bodys engine. When you take your old dog on its last journey, your vet will use an overdose of hypnotics to put him down. Every time you have a general anaesthetic, you take a trip towards death and back. The more hypnotics your doctor puts in, the longer you take to recover, and the more likely it is that something will go wrong. The less your doctor puts in, the more likely that you will wake. It is a balancing act, and anaesthetists are very good at it. But it doesnt alter the fact that for as long as anaesthetists have been putting them to sleep, patients have been waking during surgery.

As Rachels caesarean proceeded, she became aware of voices, though not of what was being said. She realised that she was not breathing, and started trying to inhale. I was just trying desperately to breathe, to breathe in. I realised that if I didnt breathe soon, I was going to die, she told me.

She didnt know there was a machine breathing for her. In the end I realised that I couldnt breathe, and that I should just let happen what was going to happen, so I stopped fighting it. By now, however, she was in panic. I couldnt cope with the pain. It seemed to be going on and on and on, and I didnt know what it was. Then she started hearing the voices again. And this time she could understand them. I could hear them talking about things about people, what they did on the weekend, and then I could hear them saying, Oh look, here she is, here the baby is, and things like that, and I realised then that I was conscious during the operation. I tried to start letting them know at that point. I tried moving, and I realised that I was totally and completely paralysed.

The chances of this happening to you or me are remote and, with advances in monitoring equipment, considerably more remote than 25 years ago. Figures vary (sometimes wildly, depending in part on how they are gathered) but big American and European studies using structured post-operative interviews have shown that one to two patients in 1,000 report waking under anaesthesia. More, it seems, in China. More again in Spain. Twenty to forty thousand people are estimated to remember waking each year in the US alone. Of these, only a small proportion are likely to feel pain, let alone the sort of agonies described above. But the impact can be devastating.

For Rachel, sleepless and terrified in her hospital room, it was the beginning of years of nightmares, panic attacks and psychiatric therapy. Soon after she gave birth, her blood pressure soared. I was in a hell of a state, she told me.

For weeks after she returned home, she would have panic attacks during which she felt she couldnt breathe. Although she says the hospital acknowledged the mistake and the superintendent apologised to her, beyond that she does not recall getting any help from the institution no explanation or counselling or offer of compensation. It did not occur to her to ask.

Things can go wrong. Equipment can fail a faulty monitor, a leaking tube. Certain operations caesareans, heart and trauma surgery require relatively light anaesthetics, and there the risk is increased as much as tenfold. One study in the 1980s found that close to half of those interviewed after trauma surgery remembered parts of the operation, although these days, with better drugs and monitoring, the figure for high-risk surgery is generally estimated at closer to one in 100. Certain types of anaesthetics (those delivered into your bloodstream, rather than those you inhale) raise the risk if used alone. Certain types of people, too, are more likely to wake during surgery: women, fat people, redheads; drug abusers, particularly if they dont mention their history. Children wake far more often than adults, but dont seem to be as concerned about it (or perhaps are less likely to discuss it). Some people may simply have a genetic predisposition to awareness. Human error plays a part.

But even without all this, anaesthesia remains an inexact science. An amount that will put one robust young man out cold will leave another still chatting to surgeons. More than a decade ago, I found this quote in an introductory anaesthesia paper on a University of Sydney website: There is no way that we can be sure that a given patient is asleep, particularly once they are paralysed and cannot move.

Last time I searched, the paper had been adjusted slightly to acknowledge recent advances in brain monitoring, but the message remained the same: just because a person appears to be unconscious, it does not mean they are.

In a way, continued the original version of the paper, the art of anaesthesia is a sophisticated form of guesswork. It really is art more than science We try to give the right doses of the right drugs and hope the patient is unconscious.

The death rate from general anaesthesia has dropped in the past 30 years, from about one in 20,000 to one or two in 200,000; and the incidence of awareness from one or two cases per 100 to one or two per 1,000. Obviously we give anaesthetics and weve got very good control over it, a senior anaesthetist told me, but in real philosophical and physiological terms, we dont know how anaesthesia works.

It is perhaps the most brilliant and baffling gift of modern medicine: the disappearing act that enables doctors and dentists to carry out surgery and other procedures that would otherwise be impossibly, often fatally, painful.

The term anaesthesia was appropriated from the Greek by New England physician and poet Oliver Wendell Holmes in 1846, to describe the effect of the drug ether following its first successful public demonstration in surgery. Anaesthetise: to render insensible. These days there are other sorts of anaesthetics that can numb a tooth or a torso, simply (or unsimply) by switching off the nerves in the relevant part of the body. But the most widespread and intriguing application of this skill is what is now known as general anaesthesia.

The first public demonstration of the use of inhaled ether as a surgical anaesthetic in 1846 by an American dentist, William Thomas Green Morton. Photograph: Design Pics Inc/Rex/Shutterstock

In general anaesthesia, it is not the nerve endings that are switched off, but your brain or, at least, parts of it. These, it seems, include the connections that somehow enable the operation of our sense of self, or (loosely) consciousness, as well as the parts of the brain responsible for processing messages from the nerves telling us we are in pain: the neurological equivalent of shooting the messenger. Which is, of course, a good thing.

I am one of the hundreds of millions of humans alive today who have undergone a general anaesthetic. It is an experience now so common as to be mundane. Anaesthesia has become a remarkably safe endeavour: less an event than a short and unremarkable hiatus. The fact that this hiatus has been possible for fewer than two of the 2,000 or so centuries of human history; the fact that only since then have we been able to routinely undergo such violent bodily assaults and survive; the fact that anaesthetics themselves are potent and sometimes unpredictable drugs all this seems to have been largely forgotten. Anaesthesia has freed surgeons to saw like carpenters through the bony fortress of the ribs. It has made it possible for a doctor to hold in her hand a steadily beating heart. It is a powerful gift. But what exactly is it?

Part of the difficulty in talking about anaesthesia is that any discussion veers almost immediately on to the mystery of consciousness. And despite a renewed focus in recent decades, scientists cannot yet even agree on the terms of that debate, let alone settle it.

Is consciousness one state or many? Can it be wholly explained in terms of specific brain regions and processes, or is it something more? Is it even a mystery? Or just an unsolved puzzle? And in either case, can any single explanation account for a spectrum of experience that includes both sentience (what it feels like to experience sound, sensation, colour) and self-awareness (what it feels like to be me the subjective certainty of my own existence)? Anaesthetists point out that you dont have to know how an engine works to drive a car. But stray off the bitumen, and it is surprising how quickly pharmacology and neurology give way to philosophy: if a scalpel cuts into an unconscious body, can it still cause pain? And then ethics: if, under anaesthesia, you feel pain but forget it almost in the moment, does it matter?

Greg Deacon, a former head of the Australian Society of Anaesthetists, told me about a patient who was waiting to have open heart surgery. Deacon had been preparing to anaesthetise him, he said, when the man went into cardiac arrest. The team managed to restart the recalcitrant heart, then raced the patient into surgery, where they operated immediately. It was only once the operation had begun, the mans heart now beating steadily, that they could safely administer an anaesthetic. It all went well, said Deacon, and the man made an excellent recovery. Some days later, the patient told doctors he remembered the early parts of the procedure before he was given the drugs.

That is a sort of incidence of awareness which was thoroughly understandable and acceptable, Deacon told me: he had not even known if the mans brain was still working, let alone whether he would survive an anaesthetic. We were trying to keep him alive.

This is not denial. This is the tightrope that anaesthetists walk every day. They just tend not to talk about it.

In 2004, and against a backdrop of growing public and media concern, Americas Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations finally issued an alert to more than 15,000 of the nations hospitals and healthcare providers. The commission, which evaluates healthcare providers, acknowledged that the experience of awareness in anaesthesia was under-recognised and under-treated, and called on all healthcare providers to start educating staff about the problem.

The American Society of Anesthesiologists subsequently acknowledged, in a 2006 practice advisory, that accidental intraoperative awareness, while rare, might be followed by significant psychological sequelae and affected patients may remain severely disabled for extended periods of time.

Before that acknowledgment was published, however, then ASA president Roger Litwiller made a small but telling observation. Despite his organisations concern about anaesthetic awareness, he did not want the issue to be blown out of proportion: I would also like to say that there is a potential for this subject of awareness to be sensationalised. We are concerned that patients become unduly frightened during what is already a very emotional time for them.

This is the anaesthetists dilemma. Under stress which affects just about everybody facing a general anaesthetic we lose our ability and often desire to process complex information. More than half of all patients worry about pain, paralysis and distress. High anxiety or resistance to the idea of anaesthesia may even contribute to anaesthetics failing, or at least increase the chances that we will remember parts of the operation. The more anxious we are, the more anaesthetic it may take to put us to sleep.

This creates a quandary for doctors: how much to tell? When we are anxious, our bodies increase production of adrenaline-type substances called catecholamines. These can react badly with some anaesthetic agents. So what does an anaesthetist tell a patient who, because of the type of operation, or their state of health, is at higher than average risk?

I mean, were trying to make people not worry about it, said one Australian anaesthetist I spoke with, but in the process I think we blur it so much that people hardly ever think about it, and thats probably not right either Should I be telling you that youve got a high risk of death? Is that going to frighten you to death?

Today the profession makes much of the emergence of a new generation of anaesthetists who are more attuned to the experiences of their patients. But the reality is that anaesthetists remain for the large part the invisible men and women of surgery. Many patients still dont meet them until just before or sometimes after the operation, and many, muffled in a fug of drugs, might not even remember these meetings. Nor do anaesthetists generally leave anything to show for their work: no scars or prognoses. When they do leave evidence, it is invariably unwelcome nausea, a raw throat, sometimes a tooth chipped as the breathing tube is inserted, sometimes a memory of the surgery. It is unsurprising, then, that by the time an anaesthetist makes it into the popular media, he or she is generally accompanied by a lawyer.

For the doctors who each day make possible the miraculous vanishing act at the heart of modern surgery, this invisibility can be galling. It is not surgeons who have enabled the proliferation of surgical operations numbering in the hundreds 170-odd years ago and the hundreds of millions today. It is anaesthetists. In hospital emergency rooms in Australia and other countries, it is not surgeons who decide which patient is most in need of and mostly likely to survive emergency surgery: anaesthetists increasingly oversee the pragmatic hierarchy of triage. And if you have an operation, although it is your surgeon who manages the moist, intricate mechanics of the matter, it is your anaesthetist who keeps you alive.

One of the first articles I came across when I started researching this subject was a 1998 paper by British psychologist Michael Wang entitled Inadequate Anaesthesia as a Cause of Psychopathology. Wang pointed out that pain even unexpectedly severe pain did not necessarily lead to trauma. Post-traumatic stress seldom followed childbirth, for example. What could be devastating, he said, was the totally unexpected experience of complete paralysis.

Even today, most patients undergoing major surgery have no idea that part of the anaesthetic mix will be a modern pharmaceutical version of curare, a poison derived from a South American plant, which causes paralysis. Few will be aware, either, that during surgery their eyes will be taped shut, that they may be tied down, and that they will have a plastic tube manoeuvred into their reluctant airway, past the soft palate and the vocal cords, overriding the gag reflex, and into the windpipe.

An anaesthetist checking a patients pupil to gauge the effect of an anaesthetic. Photograph: Cornell Capa/The Life Picture Collection/Getty Images

For the patient paralysed upon the table, said Wang, [t]he realisation of consciousness of which theatre staff are evidently oblivious, along with increasingly frenetic yet futile attempts to signal with various body parts, leads rapidly to the conclusion that something has gone seriously wrong. The patient might believe that the surgeon has accidentally severed the spinal cord, or that some unusual drug reaction has occurred, rendering her totally paralysed, not just during the surgery, but for the rest of her life.

As soon as anaesthetists explain to patients how the process works, it all starts to seem a lot less mysterious. And talk, it turns out, is not only cheap but effective: a preoperative visit from an anaesthetist has been shown to be better than a tranquilliser at keeping patients calm. I know from my own experience I had surgery on my spine how reassuring such a conversation can be. For me, it was not just the information; it was the fact of the human contact, of being treated as an equal, of being included, rather than feeling like an appendage to a process to which I was, after all, central.

Hank Bennett, an American psychologist, remembers a young girl whose mother brought her to see him some time after the girl had her adenoids removed. The surgeon referred the mother to Bennett after she had returned to him in a state of anxiety about her child. The surgery had been straightforward, but the mother felt that something was very wrong with her previously happy daughter: the child had withdrawn from her family and friends, and had stopped working at school. She could no longer fall asleep without her mother sitting with her, and was afraid of the dark.

Bennett spoke with the girl. He told her there must be a reason she had changed her behaviour, and asked if it might have something to do with the operation.

Bennett recalled: And she said, Yes. They saidthat they were going to put me to sleep, but the next thing I knew, I couldnt breathe. Now, she was only momentarily like that she does not remember the breathing tube going in but when I asked why she was doing these things differently at school and at home, she said: Well, I have to concentrate and I cant be bothered by anything. Ive got to make sure that I can breathe.

Bennett referred the girl to a child psychologist, and within weeks she was back to herself. Today she would be approaching middle age. But lets say that was just luck, Bennett says now. What if nothing had been picked up about that? Would she have been permanently changed? I think that you would say, yes, she probably would have been.

So if you were my anaesthetist and I your patient, there are some other things Id hope you would do in the operating theatre. Things that many already do. Be kind. Talk to me. Just a bit of information and reassurance. Use my name. Patients who remember waking are often greatly relieved at having been told what was happening to them, and reassured that this was OK and that they would now drift back to sleep.

The Fifth National Audit Project on accidental awareness during general anaesthesia states: The patients interpretation of what is happening at the time of the awareness seems central to its later impact; explanation and reassurance during suspected accidental awareness during general anaesthesia or at the time of report seems beneficial. Hospital staff could put a sign on the wall of the operating theatre: The patient can hear. Because one of the strange things about anaesthetic drugs is that they can exert their effect in each direction not just upon the patient, but upon the doctors and theatre staff performing the procedure.

After the teenage son of a good friend was badly burned in an accident some years ago, he had to endure weeks of intense pain, culminating each week in the agonising ritual of nurses changing the dressings on his chest and arms. They did this by giving him a dose of a sedative drug designed to distract him from the pain and prevent him remembering it. My friend would attempt to comfort her son as he yelled and as the nurses got on with their difficult task. What she observed was that while the drugs did give her son some distance from his pain, and certainly his memories of it, they also gave the nurses some distance from her son. It was an understandable, perhaps necessary, distance; but inherent in that tiny retreat (the lack of eye contact, the too-bright voices) was a loosening of the tiny filaments that connect us one to another, and through which we know we are connected.

It is a process inevitably magnified in the operating theatre, where the patient is silent and still, to all intents absent, and where their descent into unconsciousness is routinely accompanied by the sounds of the music being cranked up (one prominent Australian surgeon is said to favour heavy metal), and conversation. It need not take a scientific study to tell us that this deepening of respect and focus is good not only for patients, but for doctors, too. In the end, it might not even much matter what you say. During an operation, a soothing voice may be more important than what the voice says, writes psychologist John Kihlstrom, who still encourages anaesthetists to talk to their anaesthetised patients (about what is going on, giving reassurance, things like that) but acknowledges that he doesnt expect them to understand any of it not verbally at least.

Japanese anaesthetist Jiro Kurata calls this care of the soul. In an unusual and rather lovely paper delivered at the Ninth International Symposium on Memory and Awareness in Anaesthesia in 2015, he wondered if there might be part of our existence that cannot ever be shut down, which we cannot even conceive by ourselves a subconscious self that might be resistant to even high doses of anaesthetics. He called this the hard problem of anaesthesia awareness. I have no idea what his colleagues made of it. But his conclusion seems unassailable.

Any solution? Science? Yes and no. Monitoring? Yes and no. Respect? Yes. We must not only be aware of the inherent limitation of science and technology but, most importantly, also of the inherent dignity of each personal self.

Anaesthesia: The Gift of Oblivion and the Mystery of Consciousness by Kate Cole-Adams (Text Publishing Company, 12.99) is published on 22 February. To order a copy for 9.99, go to guardianbookshop.com

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Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/feb/09/i-could-hear-things-and-i-could-feel-terrible-pain-when-anaesthesia-fails

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