#quintuple star system

[quiltofstars]

The region around Alnilam (ε Orionis, center) and Mintaka (δ Orionis, lower right) // Luis Marco Gutierrez

[magicbystarlight]

Star Crossed — Prologue

Hux x Reader, Ren x Reader

Summary: Years after leaving behind your life as a Jedi, an unexpected encounter forces you to confront the past you wanted to forget. Divider.

Warnings: 18+, canon-typical violence, sexually explicit scenes later, additional warnings as needed. Minors DNI.

Word Count: 1.1k

Lieutenant Atrox stalks through the halls, his face pulled taut with displeasure. It’s an expression you've grown familiar with in these last three months. You’re on his heels, nonetheless, with a datapad clutched tightly to your chest.

The Lieutenant and yourself had only arrived on board the Finalizer the night before from the Exheres System. He had spent the the time drunk while you spent it combing through three years worth of trade routes, ship manifests, store inventories, and planetary exports. It had been to quell the nagging feeling you’d gotten during a review of the last audit of an inconsequential clothing shop on an inconsequential planet, but it had paid off.

"Please, sir, if you would just listen I can—"

"I don’t have time for your theories. Ren will be here at any moment."

An unnecessary reminder. The headache that plagues you is evidence enough that the Sith had already boarded and subjected some poor soul to the Force. A day early of his expected arrival. Normally, you'd have found sanctuary far from any Force User. Twice before you'd been on the same vessel as Kylo Ren and twice before you'd shoved yourself into a dark corner far, far away. But this is important.

You hope.

"But I found it, sir. There's a bimonthly shipment of polyfibe that—“

“Polyfibe is the most common fabric in the galaxy.”

The hallway ends at two large doors. They open with a whoosh, revealing a room with a long table. It’s thankfully still empty. “It is, but it can’t be made on Sentrena which is where the shipments originate. Or any of the planets in that star system. They don’t have the proper resources or machinery.”

His steps came to a halt with a defeated sigh as the doors shut. “Could it be imported and shipped from there?”

“If they wanted the price quintupled.”

“Some people are stupid with their money.”

“Yes, but,” the datapad lit up as your fingers work deftly to bring up the list, “there’s no inventory of polyfibe or anything made of polyfibe in the shop.”

He takes the offered tablet, eyes roving over the list. His brows scrunch and he shoves it back into your hands. "When is the next shipment?”

“Today.”

“Send a squad to intercept.”

“Thank you, Lieutenant.”

His fingers grip your upper arm, pulling you back harshly as you try to turn. “You better be right about this or you’ll find yourself shoveling shit somewhere for wasting my time.”

A nod in understanding is all you muster before he releases his grip. Scurrying away, the door barely opens in time for you to squeeze through. Or at least, you thought you had before you collided with a solid surface.

With a glance up, you meet the icy gaze of General Armitage Hux. A scowl adorns his face as it has in every hologram you've ever seen of him. “Watch where you’re going.”

“Yes, sir. Sorry, sir.”

You can hear the sneer in his voice as you continue past him. "I'll never understand why we use civilians for secretaries."

—

"Chromafiber?"

The hologram of Sergeant Eviena is shaky, but her voice comes through clear. "Yes. It appears they were making suits of it."

You nod, pacing the small, sterile office. “For camouflage. Stealth suits.” Chromafiber is expensive and difficult to work with in unskilled hands. "The best money could buy. Who are they for?"

"They wouldn’t say, but" she reaches into her pocket and produces what appears to be a clothing patch with a familiar, flame-like insignia, "we found a batch of these hidden away."

It’s the worst case scenario. You expected smuggling of some sort, perhaps avoiding taxes or bringing in some other outlawed substance. But they’ve been providing a lethal advantage to the Resistance, possibly for years. “Detain them. Send me every file you find. On the ship, in the shop, on any droid. Everything."

Despite you having no authority to give such commands, Evenia nods. “Yes ma’am.”

The hologram dissolves and you’re left alone once more. You don’t linger to soak in the victory, retracing your steps across the ship to where the meeting had been taking place. It’s been nearly two hours since you left and you've heard nothing on comms about them being finished. By the closed doors and the sweating lower officers waiting just beside them, it’s safe to assume the meeting continued. The pain in your head is dull. A good sign. Perhaps Atrox will be in a decent mood for once.

You wait, leaning against a wall further down a hallway that leads the opposite way of the docks. Two dozen reports have already chimed on your datapad. They’re easy enough to run through the programs you’d created to find key phrases, locations, names, patterns, etc. There’s nothing the programs recognize in them, but names pop out to you as you skim. They’re all common names. Too common.

Fake names designed to be overlooked. You’ll have to consider adding a program to make sure something like this isn’t missed again. You pull information aside as you continue to scroll, letting it drop in a new document for later review. No matter how well they hid their connections, there was always a trace left behind.

A commotion has you looking up. The doors open and the sounds of someone in hysterics floods the corridor. A man backs out of the room, pleading. Only one person inflicts that sort of fear. You don’t have time to flee.

Pain erupts in your skull. Blinding, burning white pushes from every corner. Something cracks. You try to resist, to push back against the Force, but it’s too much, too close, too late. A locked door that had held for more than a decade splinters and explodes beneath the pressure. The pain disapperates, but it’s no relief. Every part of the world around you turns bright and vibrant, connected and overwhelming. A sense suppressed for so long snapped back like a rubberband.

There’s a hand on your face. Green eyes boring into yours. "I love you." Brown Eyes. "Stay with me." Yellow eyes. Blinding red.

Gasping, ragged breaths drag air back into your deprived lungs. Cold seeps through the gloves. Your hands are on the floor. Shattered datapad between them. Black boots behind it.

He sinks to his knees. “You’re alive.” The robotic overlay can’t hide his surprise. Fingers on your chin make you stare into the abyss of a mask. Kylo Ren. But beneath the mask you feel him. A twisted, darker version, but still him. Alive.

Ben Solo is alive.

[twotales]

According to my research a wip I wrote Chuck's favorite star system is a quintuple star system, with five circumbinary planets, and fourteen moons

Fact

[spacenutspod]

All stars form in giant molecular clouds of hydrogen. But some stars are extraordinarily massive; the most massive one we know of is about 200 times more massive than the Sun. How do these stars gain so much mass? Part of the answer is that they form in multiple star systems. Astronomers have thought for a long time that massive stars are born in multiple stellar systems. They form as twins, triplets, quadruplets, or even larger sibling groups. Massive stars, defined as stars with more than eight stellar masses, are the progenitors of supernovae, neutron stars, and black holes. That’s why researchers are so keen on understanding their origins. Astrophysicists have a strong theoretical knowledge of how stars form, and they’ve constructed detailed simulations of stellar formation. Those simulations show how massive stars form in a hierarchical process. Giant clouds collapse to form dense cores. In those “parent cores,” smaller regions collapse into individual stars: some massive and some not so massive. Astronomers think that our Sun formed as one of the less massive stars in this hierarchical process. They’ve even tracked down the Sun’s siblings. Developing strong theories that describe Nature is a critical part of astronomy. But scientists have a healthy caution for something that remains theoretical. It takes observations to show how well theories match reality, and observations of multiple stars forming are difficult to obtain. “Finally, we were able to take a detailed look at the rich array of multiple star systems in a massive star formation region!”Henrik Beuther, researcher, Max Planck Institute for Astronomy Now, a group of researchers using the Atacama Large Millimetre/submillimetre Array (ALMA) have gathered observations of several groupings of massive stars forming together. Their results are in the research article “Observations of high-order multiplicity in a high-mass stellar protocluster,” published in Nature Astronomy. The lead author is Shanghuo Li from the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy (MPIA.) These results were years in the making. The ALMA observations took place between 2016 and 2019, and the data was so challenging that it also took several years to process. But the observations are filling in an important gap in our understanding of massive star formation. This is a Hubble image of the star cluster R136 at the heart of the Tarantula Nebula. It’s a starburst region that’s home to several extremely massive stars, including R136a1, which is almost 200 times more massive than the Sun. Image Credit: By NASA, ESA, F. Paresce (INAF-IASF, Bologna, Italy), R. O’Connell (University of Virginia, Charlottesville), and the Wide Field Camera 3 Science Oversight Committee “The dominant mechanism forming multiple stellar systems in the high-mass regime remained unknown because direct imaging of multiple protostellar systems at early phases of high-mass star formation is very challenging,” the authors write in their article. “So far, only a few high-mass protobinary systems, and no definitive higher-order multiples, have been detected.” But these ALMA results change that. The work centers on a massive star-forming region called G333.23–0.06. In it, the team of researchers found four binary proto-stars, one triple, one quadruple and one quintuple system. “Finally, we were able to take a detailed look at the rich array of multiple star systems in a massive star formation region!” said co-author Henrik Beuther from the MPIA. “Particularly exciting is that the observations go as far as to provide evidence for a specific scenario for high-mass star formation.” The observations support the idea that massive stars form in a hierarchical manner. This multi-pane image illustrates the research and the ALMA observations. a is an image of G333.23–0.06 from the Australian Telescope Compact Array showing very little detail. b is ALMA’s low-resolution image of the star-forming region. c, d, e, f, and g are high-resolution ALMA images showing dense cores fragmenting into multiple massive stars. Image Credit: Li et al. 2024. The images support the theory of hierarchical massive star formation, but they don’t answer every scientific question about how massive stars form. “Our observations seem to indicate that when the cloud collapses, the multiples form very early on,” said lead author Li. “But is that really the case? Analyses of additional star formation regions, some of them younger than G333.23–0.06, should give us the answer.” The researchers are already working on that analysis. They’ve observed a further 29 massive star formations with ALMA, and soon there’ll be 20 more of them to analyze. Those observations will further inform our understanding of massive, multiple-star formation. There are still many unanswered questions about how they form and evolve. One of the questions concerns fragmentation. There could be two types of fragmentation at work in the formation of these multiple massive stars. One is disk fragmentation, and the other is core fragmentation. Overall, core fragmentation explains most of the multiple massive stars. But disk fragmentation could play a role, especially in binary systems. More research is needed to resolve this. “Overall, these results demonstrate that the majority of detected multiple systems are formed from core fragmentation, although disk fragmentation may still occur on smaller scales than those we can resolve with the current spatial resolution,” the researchers explain. Even though there are questions about how this all plays out, this research has attached observations to theory, a critical step in understanding how massive stars form. “The discovery of these quintuple, quadruple, triple and binary protostellar systems is the best observational evidence to show the imprints of core fragmentation in building multiplicity in high-mass cluster-forming environments,” the researchers write in their article. There are more regions like G333 out there, and studying them will give us an even more detailed understanding of how these high-mass stars form and evolve. “Their properties will determine the initial conditions of multiple system formation, as well as the dynamical evolution in a cluster environment,” the authors conclude. The post Astronomers See Massive Stars Forming Together in Multiple Star Systems appeared first on Universe Today.

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

"Harshness Does Not Pay," Toronto Star. July 20, 1943. Page 6. ---- The discussions at the convention of the Police Constables Association of Canada call to mind the reports of the various penal commissions that were appointed in the past twenty years. The most recent was the Archambault commission in 1932. In its 418-page report it detailed how Canadian prisons subjected the inmates to the utmost severity mingled with cruelty, that practically no "sob sister sentimentality" was being shown them, and that the rate of repeaters in Canada was nevertheless the highest among civilized countries. At the time of the commission's investigations there were in the Dominion's institutions 181 prisoners who had been convicted 3,434 times, at a cost to the taxpayers of nearly $5,000,000.

Successive royal commissions on prison conditions in Canada have assembled collections of deplorable facts. Most of them were found unchanged by each commission. With continuous repetition, the commissions have recommended: reform of prison routine, occupational and vocational guidance for prisoners, the abolition of cruel severity, the reform of the parole system, the establishment of a "Canadian Alcatraz," that is, a special institution for habitual offenders, with suitable treatment; the segregation of youths from older prisoners and the segregation also of the criminal insane and drug addicts, with proper treatment for these unfortunates.

The commissions have also sharply criticized the antiquated buildings, the inadequate heating, diets for the prisoners, the lack of adequate workshops and employment system, the lack of trained personnel, the lack of physical exercise for prisoners and the "gruesome and humiliating restrictions" on the prisoners. They have called for more juvenile courts. for adequate court facilities and modernization of the laws, and for the appointment of qualified probation officers and the establishment of Borstal institutions for youthful offenders.

These recommendations have practically all been ignored. The only time that reforms were made, slight ones, was when prisoners have rioted. Riots are more expensive to the taxpayers than sensible and humane prisons.

The chief lesson to be learned from the pile of commission reports is that harsh treatment of lawbreakers does not pay. Canadian prison authorities have ignored recommendations to modernize our institutions. And the repeater rate in Canada was found by the most recent commission to be the highest of any country in the world, and the rate is going up. The commission found that the number of thrice-convicted offenders for indictable offences had quintupled in a decade. In the year 1936-7, 72 per cent. of the inmates in Dominion penitentiaries were repeaters. Seventy-seven per cent. of the prisoners went to prison before they were 23 years of age. Seventeen per cent. were drug addicts. The criminal insane in Canada had increased over 50 per cent, in 1937 over the year 1936, and there was no policy for their treatment.

All royal commissions have stressed the costliness of this antiquated prison system. The Archambault commission estimated that it cost taxpayers $744.60 a year - more than $2 a day - to keep an adult offender in prison. This is a large sum to spend for treatment that experts have shown to be largely inadequate.

[youarenotthewalrus]

Man, Firefly has no idea how large its setting is, huh? Like usually they refer to a "system" but this show intro has Mal calling it a galaxy. And like, it's probably just because someone dashed it off carelessly in a hurry, but still.

(Apparently the TTRPG clarifies that it all takes place in some kind of elaborate quintuple star system with like fifty terraformed planets and moons, which sounds a lot like the sort of thing an extended universe writer comes up with to rationalize the poorly-thought-out worldbuilding of the source material.)

[spacetimewraithwrites-archive]

First & Last Line(s) Tag

tagged by @ashen-crest, thank you!

from Thriving: Rebirth this time!

Beginning of Chapter One—

"Is there truly room for a god in the universe?"

Sussa's eyes found him across the bridge, silver scrutiny at the back of his gold head as he stared out into the stars passing the viewscreen. The reflections off the alabaster walls and floor suffocated him, ran a primal itch through his system and made him restless.

"You believe in a god, don't you?" she asked.

The memory of obhelian ceremonial robes became more and more distant as time went on. It had been over two centuries since Thrive's last formal invocation. In another life, he cherished like a child the rich fabrics, dyed a gradient of the setting sun fading into night, to evoke the feeling of the Sky, ironically to ground him further within his own faith. It amazed him that something so regular, so ingrained into his everyday life could dissolve into a myth.

"In a sense," he finally said into the clawing silence.

End of Chapter One—

The smell was...heartbreaking. He gathered the ———, attempting to ignore all of his senses igniting at one time. His eyes stung as he planted himself amongst the carnage and erected a shield around the entirety of the room. If he didn't calculate his timing correctly, he wouldn't be able to make it strong enough to bear the brunt of the impact.

He willed his eyes to stop prickling and mentally kept track of the minutes. Down...down...down...down....

He took several more deep, quick breaths, and at the end of the last one he quintupled his shield, just in time for the ship around him to collapse against the unknown planet. The last thing he remembered for a while was a metal beam snapping in half over his fortification, and the deafening roar of the collision right beside his ear.

tagging @zmlorenz, @drippingmoon, @drabbleitout, and YOU! if you want. :P

[lyraeon]

What's ADHD like?

Well, I woke up from a nap at 4 and was like, "Healing is done with work for the day, so I should walk the dog and then stream. Let's aim for 5pm."

So I grabbed some food real quick and sat down to watch a vid while I did. I've gotten good at using 10~15 minute PBS videos as timers for meals.

In the mean time Josh tells me he's going to the store, and I forget I was eating and wind up starting a second video to finish eating.

Got up, debated loading dishwasher, decided that since the things I need to cook dinner tonight are clean I wouldn't bother since the noise would be bad while I was streaming.

Went to find some of my compression socks cuz my ankles were hurting. Found 1.5 pairs, decided to do laundry, decided that as long as I was going into the room to get clothes I should plug my phone in. Plugging phone in revealed the new scrabble puzzle was up, so I played that for a few minutes, but then the dog whined so I got back up to go get the socks on and take her out.

by this point it was 4:48 and I was like "hmm that's not enough time to still go live at 5pm, and I don't know if I should cook before or after I stream. So I'll just tell my discord real quick that I'll be streaming some time tonight. Wednesday I don't usually so there's no specific time deadline here."

So I message them, then decide hey maybe I should hang out with Kolten instead cuz I haven't in a few days? so I leave him a message. And then I realize I haven't taken my meds for the afternoon so I get up and grab a drink and sit back down to take them. I see my discord is asking me about when I'm gonna stream something specific and so I respond to them.

It's about 5:20 when I remember my socks. I know they're a struggle to put on (freaking compression socks) so I decide to click on a random space video and leave it playing through the speakers while I put them on.

Except the video has really really crappy over the top stock videos and that explain very little, and the voiceover is paced weirdly compared to it, and I start suspecting the vid's either dubbed poorly or outright stolen with different audio added. So I thumbs down, close the window, and google it instead.

So i'm there looking up stuff about quintuple and sextuple star systems and then about brightest stars because man I love me some space?? and the whole "some things we think are stars are brighter than regualr stars cuz there's actually a lot of them" and wait holy crap there's stars that are sometimes visible during the day anyway cuz they're just that bright? and we've seen them since the 1600s and they were help for proving the sky wasn't turning around us?

and next thing I know I read the phrase "from a theoretical planet around this star, Sol would appear as a (magnitude I forgot) star in the constellation Columba and I look up to see if that's something visible only from there or - nope they're close enough that most the constellations look the same, but man I wonder what mapping has been done of what constellations look like from elsewhere?

And next thing I know it's 6:30, I only have one sock on, the dog has her head on my lap asking for attention, and I'm reading about the development of the Celestia software.

...at least I think this will settle the am I cooking before or after stream debate?

[clayhaus]

Mizar and Alcor. If you look very closely at the second star from the end of the Big Dipper you may just see the binaries Mizar and Alcor. For millennia it was considered a sign of good eyesight and clear dark skies to be able to resolve these two stars with one's naked eyes. In the mid-1800's astronomers determined that in fact Mizar itself is a binary system. In the late 1800's further research revealed that Mizar A is itself a double star system and in the early 1900s Mizar B was also determined to be a binary star. For a hundred years Mizar-Alcor was considered a quintuple-star system until in 2009 a very faint dwarf star was found orbiting Alcor, making what was two now six: a sextuplet star system! #clayhausphotography #astrophotography #stars #mizar (at Planet Earth) https://www.instagram.com/p/BxBTnOLnI-W/?igshid=15ezw09gbp202

[corellianangel]

For Luck

For @otterandterrier‘s Scoundress Saturdays prompt - “Lipstick”

A/N: Knowledge of the Empire’s canonical Blackwing project is not necessarily required.  However, do know that zombies are canon in both the old Expanded Universe, and the current canon.  And Han and Chewie have had to deal with them in both. Sadly I don’t own any of this. And there’s really no zombies here.  But I have been a participant in a zombie march. :)

Many big squishy hugs and much thanks to @organanation, who patiently betaed this a year and half before I finally got the darn thing out. 

Timeline: Star Wars rebellion era, pre-Empire Strikes Back - existing within both canons.

______________________

“Stop complaining and waving yer arms. Chewie, your fur keeps getting caught in the cuff seal.” Han Solo’s heavy drawl echoed down the vessel’s starboard hall, as a petite brown-haired woman clad in a white jumpsuit strode towards the source of the noise. There was a muffled howl, and Han answered.

“Yeah, yeah. I’ll get my fishbowl sealed up, just hang on.” A whoosh of expressed air and just the shuffling of bodies sounded through the confines of the corridor.

The Rebel Commander, Princess Leia Organa, rounded the vessel’s starboard access corridor, which had become a temporary staging area for Han and Chewbacca’s EVA outing. Around the pair, were strewn a myriad assortment of a half-dozen mismatched lockers and cases.

The princess paused at the bulkhead, watching the pair of smugglers-turned-Rebel mercenaries. Leia acknowledged the Corellian and Wookiee with a nod. Settling against the alloy-steel support, she ran her eyes up and down the chaos of equipment and boxes scattered everywhere.

Both beings were now fully sealed in their Immediac model-10 extravehicular activity spacesuits. Han’s back was turned to her, the broad expanse of the pilot’s shoulders encased in numerous layers: of suit, the padded straps of his flak vest, harness webbing, life-support and Force-knows what else. He was preoccupied with inspecting the integrity of the locking ring on the neck of his two-and-a-half meter tall Wookiee partner’s custom-sized spacesuit as Leia stepped up a few steps behind him. Chewbacca barked at Han, the noise muffled and bowled. Han shifted and pivoted slightly to catch the Princess’s eye on the edge of his helmet’s field of view. She could just barely glimpse a corner of the upturned corner of his mouth as he quirked a grin in greeting. Then he winked.

Leia blushed, as surge of heat travelled through her body in response to the Corellian’s flirtations. She hated him for doing that to her.

Every time.

She bit back something hostile, and gave him a forced neutral look, eyebrows raised. Han shrugged and returned to his work. Leia, relieved that Solo turned and their eye-contact broken, settled for staring at his back.

And rear.

Oh, wow.

That, then, became an exercise in distraction, too.

In that moment, Leia decided that an EVA suit, despite its overall bulk, had never looked quite so… good, until it had been stretched over the rangy form of the attractive Corellian pilot working in front of her. The rather sleek black military-grade unit was agreeably filled out in all the proper dimensions by Han’s lean athletic frame. A signal-red, decimeter-wide stripe ran down the outsides of the torso, enhancing the suit’s lines. Damnit Solo, only a ridiculous flyboy like you could make one of those bulky things look sexy. She bit the inside of her cheek, stifling an admiring smirk. She had to admonish herself mentally to be serious.

Eyes front, Princess.

“Hey there, Princess.” Han’s gruff baritone echoed her title, the greeting rendered tinny and indistinct by the EVA suit’s sealed confines. He tugged experimentally on the wrist seal’s locking ring of Chewie’s glove. Chewbacca watched her, amused, from inside his helmet with kind, patient blue eyes.

She placed the three spare blaster-pistol charges Han had requested on the lid of a nearby case. Curious, Leia cracked open the lid of a larger aluminum case next to her leg, peeking inside, and sucked in a harsh breath upon viewing the contents. A well-worn SX-21 Merr-Sonn pump-action scatter blaster lay atop an array of more anti-personnel munitions; cluster grenades, wide-area frag launchers, and most worrisome -  high volume incendiary throwers. Each item designed to dole out maximum destruction over a concentrated radius in enclosed areas - such as inside the halls of a ship.

“Gods, Solo.” Leia whistled it out. “Are you looking to start another war?”

When there was no response, she looked up to see the boys fully absorbed in their final preparations. Sealed in their suits as they were, there was little chance they could have overheard her casual exclamation.

Chewbacca’s acute hearing seemed to have picked up Leia’s voice, however. He grinned, fangs glinting in the shadowed confines of the helmet. He punched a control on his glove and she saw the lights on the heads-up display inside of the Wookiee’s helmet reflect inside the bowl’s glass, detailing his furry face. Chewbacca barked amiably at Leia again and pulled on the buckle assembly of a thick harness he had strapped to his torso. Han’s attention went to the harness and tested the various straps and buckles by firmly tugging on them. He moved around to the Wookiee’s back and quintuple-checked the several monitors and gauges amidst the life-support array and various equipment packed on.

“All good there, buddy.” Han reached up and slapped the silver Millennium Falcon-shaped insignia patch on the side of Chewbacca’s shoulder, one of the few areas on his body not completely enclosed by harnesses and equipment. The Wookiee bent at the waist to pick up the beaten and worn end of the shoulder stock of a personal-sized heavy repeater cannon, attaching it to the cylindrical power supply on his back. He latched the housing of the weapon’s business end to a quick release clamp on the canister.

Satisfied with his preparations, Han stepped over to Leia, retrieving the spare blaster cells she had brought. He inserted them into the loops of his characteristic DL-44 pistol’s low-slung blaster rig, the leather belting refitted to accommodate the added volume of his spacesuit. He gave her a rakish look that put a small smile on her lips and lit a fire in her core.

“Thanks Princess.” Han’s voice was still distant and he said something else she couldn’t quite make out. Sensing her confusion, the Corellian rolled his eyes at himself, and made a sharp jutting motion with his chin, nudging the toggle inside the helmet.

“We’re pressured up and pretty much ready to go.” Han repeated, the sound emitting from a speaker in the control module near the center of his suit’s chest. He slung the strap of an Imperial-issue heavy blaster rifle over his shoulder, securing the strap with a hasp clip to a fixed D-ring on the webbing near his shoulder.

Leia shook her head at them. She reiterated what she had said a moment ago.

It would have been highly unusual for Han or Chewie to be unarmed. Han often carrying what would be considered a near-arsenal of weapons on a regular “safe” day - nearly all of it illegal in most civilized systems. The two smugglers had a lifetime of living on the fringes of society and legality. Never safe,always sleeping with one eye open. However, she noted that the Wookiee had abandoned his traditional bowcaster for the repeater cannon, something she didn’t even realize the two smugglers owned (owned being a purely euphemistic term with regard to the two widely-hunted Rebel criminals).

“Aah. No,” Han looked to Chewie, who was studiously ignoring the two humans. Han’s face was sheepish inside the helm. “We’re just not taking any chances, ya see,” he explained - rather lamely, Leia thought.

“—you wouldn’t tell command what this is about,” Leia reminded the two smugglers. “And yet, again, at the last minute you jump in and play hero.”

Han made a show of adjusting suit’s his wrist mirror, then threw his arms wide in frustration and pointed a black gloved finger at the Princess’s pert nose.

“Your skinny Festian buddy, Fulcrum–or whatever his name–got the info from me four years ago. That kriffin spook drugged me up and even got me to take him in front of Jab—“

Han shut up suddenly, and she could see his lips screw up in mid-rant.

Chewbacca turned his audio on and woofed at her and Han.

“What? In front of what?” Leia pressed, intrigued. “Who?”

Han shot a baleful eye at the Wookiee, who returned it unabashedly, glaring down at his captain, his dark lips curling up to reveal long fangs in challenge.

“He got you too, that night, buddy.” Han scowled, reminding his co-pilot of some past dereliction of duty.

Chewbacca snarled something in return. Leia could see Han stiffen in response, twisting his torso slowly and threateningly to stare up at the Wookiee that towered over the Corellian by two heads.

“Not another word about that,” Solo warned his partner. Chewbacca barked further and Han turned pink with embarrassment.

“He caught me at a weak moment.” The smuggler explained to his copilot.

Chewie’s next reply was mocking.

“Jenny was just being inhospitable that night, is all!” Han retorted angrily. Then his eyes flicked back to Leia and the Corellian went crimson. “Chewie…”

So, the Wookiee just laughed long and hard at his human friend. Leia rolled her eyes.

“If it helps your wounded ego,” Leia elucidated, then resumed in a wry tone, “or libido, “ she calculated, correctly, by the way Han nearly turned purple. “Captain Cassian Andor was one of our best spies. Actually, the best. Without him, “ Leia swallowed, pausing. Han’s gloved hand reached out to comfort her, recognizing her mood shift. Leia twisted to the right, side-stepping him, swiping at her cheek. “Without him, we would have never gotten the plans for the Death Star.”

Emotions such as regret, loss, anger and guilt swirled around Leia. So many “What ifs” lingered around the operation to uncover and destroy the Death Star. Entire cities were laid to waste before it turned its planet-killing laser onto her homeworld of Alderaan, killing billions. If, if, if…. Always with the ifs.

And now they were dealing with an Imperial superweapon that had been put aside around the same time. The rebel operative Andor had reported it then, as a low priority, though the entire sector associated with the project was declared “Absolutely Off Limits” in rare decree that spanned all levels of the Imperial Command structure.

Any ship that went in, did not come out. Period.

And somehow, by some act of Force-invoked coincidence, Han Solo and his co-pilot had gotten themselves entangled with whatever lurked there three years earlier, and were of only four people that emerged from the region in that time, pairing up to watch over each other and lose themselves in the wider galaxy. Four unlikely beings; a smuggler, a wookiee, an Imperial doctor, and an orphan boy - survivors who reportedly faced a ravening cannibalistic mass of recently deceased plague victims. A terrifying, all-consuming horror, apparently spawned by a bioweapon that exterminated all but one in a thousand humanoids.

The Rebel operative Andor was following various leads on Imperial superweapon projects, when he tracked down a rumor and discovered a traumatized and drunken Solo on Tatooine not long after.

Another, “If”, Leia counted on a finger. If the Rebel Intelligence service had put forward their files on this region of space to Command, before numerous scouting missions were dispatched to disappear amongst the floating wrecks, lives could have been saved. If they had first gone over the holos Andor had taken while interviewing Solo, they would have seen the fear in the battle-hardened Corellian smuggler’s eyes describing in drunken, disjointed speech, how would they have reacted?

“They were all… dead. Just piles of ‘em. Torn up. Then, then they woke up.”

“—Gray and flowing, following, looking for a way into you.”

“Just swarms of ‘em. Running, screaming….eating.”

“I could feel it coming in my lungs. The…The things it makes you think; all this red, hungry, gnawing.”

“I-, It almost got Chewie, he-, uh...uhm... the Doc intervened.”

“This, could take out entire sectors.”

Leia bit down the queasiness she felt recalling the hours viewing the holo-video, the blacked out lines of Imperial data files, and the Rebel scientists’ findings from Han and Chewie’s DNA tissue - samples Cassian Andor had stolen from the pair when he’d ambushed them in Mos Eisley. The conclusion sounded utterly insane, preposterous, a horror story for old-timers to tell younglings.

“Zombies…” Solo’s hissed warning, haunting Leia from Andor’s holos of him.

Simple adult logic told her it could not be true.

Leia ruminated about this mission. Just outside the adjacent hatch and airlock, floated the flickering derelict of an Alliance corvette starship. Han had cursed up and down in a dozen languages, grousing that this was too close already. Kept at a distant kilometer by a proximity lock from their vessel’s tractor beam, Han and Chewie adamantly refused linking the two vessels. Hence, was the necessity of an EVA outing for the two pilots to investigate the remains of the corvette.

For safety, they said.

For boarding a ship with just one lifeform aboard?

Han and Chewbacca were paranoid creatures of habit, but Leia had to admit she had never witnessed it this degree of extreme.

Upon an extensive and detailed sensor scan, – carefully monitored by Han and Chewie - they discovered that the three hundred beings recorded aboard the stricken Alliance craft beyond, had been reduced to the stubborn life-signature of one sole unknown humanoid, situated somewhere near the rear of the craft. Yet, the mass and density-signature scans showed the ship filled with clustered volumes of what could only be the remains of the crew and soldiers within.

Not only that... Han and Chewbacca had grudgingly acquiesced to Luke and Leia’s accompanying the mission, on the grounds - demands, Leia amended, - that the two smuggler’s preparations and procedures were not interfered with. Their word was law here. And that it was only the pair of them, out there.

Their orders too, hardly filled Leia with confidence, “If we come back, and we are not ourselves; sick, delirious, coughing, whatever... If there are no proper signal flares, or voice communications… If something is off, something is terribly, terribly wrong, - GO - cut the tethers and get the hell out of there. Do not, under ANY circumstances, attempt to rescue us.”

She had to promise, swearing upon the honor of the Royal House Organa, and repeatedly assure them that she and Luke would do as they requested if the circumstance arose.

And what was up with Luke? Leia fretted. Since arriving within system, Luke was a mess. Curled up in the cockpit; physically sickened by the Force’s signature in the area, the young rebel was in no condition to be enclosed in a spacesuit.

Luke said he’d recover shortly. He would just meditate through it. Saying, he’d be able to block it off in no time. He seemed to improve, until something had a softly thudded against the cockpit’s transparisteel glass outside, leaving a viscous red and grey smear. He’d yelped, distracting Han and Leia from their duties, rushing to fore to assist Luke. Han glared in horror at the smudge, clearly recognizing it. But the wide-eyed Jedi had waved them off, dismissing it, whispering something about space debris.

Han gave the kid a sympathetic look and resumed his preparations aft for the EVA, his mood grim for the next few hours.

Leia chose to avoid the surly Corellian for the afternoon, and spent a few timeparts sitting in the chair next to Luke, watching the shadows of dozens of derelict vessels beyond, as they drifted in front the glittering panorama of the brilliant field of stars beyond. They said little, communicating comfort through some unseen conduit.

Chewbacca’s lingering words from the intelligence briefing, roared at ear-splitting volume to the elite members of high council – shortly before Chewie and Han were temporarily locked up in the brig for (even louder) insubordination, and refusal to supply information on past experience with the area’s “Known unknowns,” as per General Cracken’s intelligence parlance – was translated and quoted, oh-so ominously and literally by the prim voice of Leia’s protocol droid C-3PO.

*Some things were not meant to be disturbed. *

The two-century-old Clone War veteran Wookiee’s grim warning looped over and over in the background of the Princess’s mind as she observed the present-Han secure the ship’s airlock’s safety tethers to their suits.

Pushing away from her lean against the bulkhead, Leia had to admit, she had a very bad feeling about this.

She watched Han gather up a satchel containing slicer kits, fusion cutters, clawed durasteel spreaders and truly archaic implements such as pry bars, and hammers. It was enough salvage and illegal ships’ hull-breaking tools to get the Wookiee and Corellian thrown in an Imperial penitentiary for at least a decade. Han passed a set to Chewbacca, who, after shouldering the bag, make a point of intently reviewing the energy level gauges on his weapon.

“See what you can bring back. “ Leia requested Han in sotto voce, she crossed her arms, not entirely sure what she actually expected. At the very least, she wanted them - needed him – back. Hopefully, they would locate what had to be that sole crew member on the life-scan, some logs, nav-data, or any evidence of why the months-overdue craft spun listlessly, here, near the feathered outskirts of Dathomir’s primary star’s Oort cloud.

“For you, your Worship; I would drag a star out of the sky.” Han bowed dramatically, paraphrasing an infamously corny Chandrilan poet for the Princess.

Grim atmosphere, or not; Han Solo could still extract a snigger from the implacable Princess Leia. Oooh, she hated him for that unique ability.

Han’s head popped up from the genuflection, his helmet’s heads-up displays illuminated the lower half of Solo’s ruggedly handsome features in a subtle shifting blue and green glow. And he winked…Again.

A warm surge spread across her cheeks, and Leia momentarily despised him for it…Again.

“Don’t do anything stupid, Nerfherder.” Leia cautioned, when she recovered her composure.

Han gave her his best comical Who, me?  expression, pointing two fingers at himself. But the humor didn’t seem to quite reach his eyes.

Impulsively Leia reached up, wrapping her slim fingers around Han’s EVA suit’s torso webbing. She hauled on it, dragging Han’s faceplate nearly level with her petite stature. She mused at his startled discomfit at her action. Craning her neck, she moved her face nose-to-glass with him. Han smirked ruefully at her, at the obvious literal and metaphorical barriers that seemed to always come up between them.

“Sweetheart, “ Han began, his voice gravelly, “I gotta tell y-“

Leia shook her head at him, the message obvious. We’ll figure us out later.

Leia clutched the sides of Solo’s helm, each studying the other,warring with the need to say what had to be said. To tip over into that beautiful abyss now, would shatter them both if something unfortunate happened here today.

Leia noticed the dull grey corona that had settled in the ordinarily glittering green and gold flecked irises of Solo’s deep-set hazel eyes. There was precious little of Han’s usual crazy bravado there now. And that, above all, frightened her.

She wanted to make him brave again, and by extension, herself.

Leia pursed and gently pressed her lips to the left edge of Han’s helmet’s glass, low down, near the neck seal, yet high enough for him to glimpse if he wished. When she withdrew, there remained the slightly smudged opaque print of her lipstick on the otherwise pristine exterior surface of the glass. Leia felt a blush rise to her cheeks, absently wondering how that had looked from inside. 

However, Han’s jaw dropped in pleasant surprise.

The Princess had extended a token of her favor to her champion.

Chewbacca woofed his approval as an aside, grinning toothily at the not-quite-a-couple.

Leia gave Han her most brilliant smile and he returned it, a crooked flash of gleaming white that made her breath catch, and heart pound. Han straightened, puffing his chest out, squaring broad shoulders in a determined set, the light finally reaching his eyes.

“For luck,” Leia added huskily.

“I know, “ Han murmured.

[justforbooks]

Tom Wolfe, Innovative Nonfiction Writer and Novelist, Dies at 88

Tom Wolfe, an innovative journalist and novelist whose technicolor, wildly punctuated prose brought to life the worlds of California surfers, car customizers, astronauts and Manhattans moneyed status-seekers in works like “The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby,” “The Right Stuff” and “Bonfire of the Vanities,” died on Monday in a Manhattan hospital. He was 88.

He had lived in New York since joining The New York Herald Tribune as a reporter in 1962.

In his use of novelistic techniques in his nonfiction, Mr. Wolfe, beginning in the 1960s, helped create the enormously influential hybrid known as the New Journalism.

But as an unabashed contrarian, he was almost as well known for his attire as his satire. He was instantly recognizable as he strolled down Madison Avenue — a tall, slender, blue-eyed, still boyish-looking man in his spotless three-piece vanilla bespoke suit, pinstriped silk shirt with a starched white high collar, bright handkerchief peeking from his breast pocket, watch on a fob, faux spats and white shoes. Once asked to describe his get-up, Mr. Wolfe replied brightly, “Neo-pretentious.”

It was a typically wry response from a writer who found delight in lacerating the pretentiousness of others. He had a pitiless eye and a penchant for spotting trends and then giving them names, some of which — like “Radical Chic” and “the Me Decade” — became American idioms.

His talent as a writer and caricaturist was evident from the start in his verbal pyrotechnics and perfect mimicry of speech patterns, his meticulous reporting, and his creative use of pop language and explosive punctuation.

“As a titlist of flamboyance he is without peer in the Western world,” Joseph Epstein wrote in the The New Republic. “His prose style is normally shotgun baroque, sometimes edging over into machine-gun rococo, as in his article on Las Vegas which begins by repeating the word ‘hernia’ 57 times.”

William F. Buckley Jr., writing in National Review, put it more simply: “He is probably the most skillful writer in America — I mean by that he can do more things with words than anyone else.”

From 1965 to 1981 Mr. Wolfe produced nine nonfiction books. “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test,” an account of his reportorial travels in California with Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters as they spread the gospel of LSD, remains a classic chronicle of the counterculture, “still the best account — fictional or non, in print or on film — of the genesis of the ’60s hipster subculture,” the media critic Jack Shafer wrote in the Columbia Journalism Review on the book’s 40th anniversary.

Even more impressive, to many critics, was “The Right Stuff,” his exhaustively reported narrative about the first American astronauts and the Mercury space program. The book, adapted into a film in 1983 with a cast that included Sam Shepard, Dennis Quaid and Ed Harris, made the test pilot Chuck Yeager a cultural hero and added yet another phrase to the English language.

At the same time, Mr. Wolfe continued to turn out a stream of essays and magazine pieces for New York, Harper’s and Esquire. His theory of literature, which he preached in print and in person and to anyone who would listen was that journalism and nonfiction had “wiped out the novel as American literature’s main event.”

After “The Right Stuff,” published in 1979, he confronted what he called “the question that rebuked every writer who had made a point of experimenting with nonfiction over the preceding 10 or 15 years: Are you merely ducking the big challenge — The Novel?”

‘The Bonfire of the Vanities’

The answer came with “The Bonfire of the Vanities.” Published initially as a serial in Rolling Stone magazine and in book form in 1987 after extensive revisions, it offered a sweeping, bitingly satirical picture of money, power, greed and vanity in New York during the shameless excesses of the 1980s.

The action jumps back and forth from Park Avenue to Wall Street to the terrifying holding pens in Bronx Criminal Court, after the Yale-educated bond trader Sherman McCoy (a self-proclaimed “Master of the Universe”) becomes lost in the Bronx at night in his Mercedes with his foxy young mistress. After running over a black man and nearly igniting a race riot, he enters the nightmare world of the criminal justice system.

Although a runaway best seller, “Bonfire” divided critics into two camps: those who praised its author as a worthy heir of his fictional idols Balzac, Zola, Dickens and Dreiser, and those who dismissed the book as clever journalism, a charge that would dog him throughout his fictional career.

Mr. Wolfe responded with a manifesto in Harper’s, “Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast,” in which he lambasted American fiction for failing to perform the time-honored sociological duty of reporting on the facts of contemporary life, in all their complexity and variety.

His second novel, “A Man in Full” (1998), also a whopping commercial success, was another sprawling social panorama. Set in Atlanta, it charted the rise and fall of Charlie Croker, a 60-year-old former Georgia Tech football star turned millionaire real estate developer.

Mr. Wolfe’s fictional ambitions and commercial success earned him enemies — big ones.

“Extraordinarily good writing forces one to contemplate the uncomfortable possibility that Tom Wolfe might yet be seen as our best writer,” Norman Mailer wrote in The New York Review of Books. “How grateful one can feel then for his failures and his final inability to be great — his absence of truly large compass. There may even be an endemic inability to look into the depth of his characters with more than a consummate journalist’s eye.”

“Tom may be the hardest-working show-off the literary world has ever owned,” Mr. Mailer continued. “But now he will no longer belong to us. (If indeed he ever did!) He lives in the King Kong Kingdom of the Mega-bestsellers — he is already a Media Immortal. He has married his large talent to real money and very few can do that or allow themselves to do that.”

Mr. Mailer’s sentiments were echoed by John Updike and John Irving.

Two years later, Mr. Wolfe took revenge. In an essay titled “My Three Stooges,” included in his 2001 collection, “Hooking Up,” he wrote that his eminent critics had clearly been “shaken” by “A Man in Full” because it was an “intensely realistic novel, based upon reporting, that plunges wholeheartedly into the social reality of America today, right now,” and it signaled the new direction in late-20th- and early-21st-century literature and would soon make many prestigious artists, “such as our three old novelists, appear effete and irrelevant.”

And, added Mr. Wolfe, “It must gall them a bit that everyone — even them — is talking about me, and nobody is talking about them.”

Cocky words from a man best known for his gentle manner and unfailing courtesy in person. For many years he lived a relatively private life in his 12-room apartment on the Upper East Side with his wife, Sheila Wolfe, a graphic designer and former art director of Harper’s magazine, whom he married when he was 48 years old, and their two children, Alexandra and Thomas. All survive him.

Every morning he dressed in one of his signature outfits — a silk jacket, say, and double-breasted white vest, shirt, tie, pleated pants, red-and-white-socks and white shoes — and sat down at his typewriter. Every day he set himself a quota of 10 pages, triple-spaced. If he finished in three hours, he was done for the day. “If it takes me 12 hours, that’s too bad, I’ve got to do it,” he told George Plimpton in a 1991 Paris Review interview.

For many summers the Wolfes rented a house in Southampton, N.Y., where Mr. Wolfe continued to observe his daily writing routine as well as the fitness regimen from which he rarely faltered. In 1996 he suffered a heart attack at his gym and underwent quintuple bypass surgery. A period of severe depression followed, which Charlie Croker relived, in fictional form, in “A Man in Full.”

As for his remarkable attire, he called it “a harmless form of aggression.”

“I found early in the game that for me there’s no use trying to blend in,” he told The Paris Review. “I might as well be the village information-gatherer, the man from Mars who simply wants to know. Fortunately the world is full of people with information-compulsion who want to tell you their stories. They want to tell you things that you don’t know.”

The eccentricities of his adult life were a far cry from the normalcy of his childhood, which by all accounts was a happy one.

Daily inspiration. Discover more photos at http://justforbooks.tumblr.com

[twotales]

🌩️ Share something funny/cracky from your WIP.

The third WIP

Thanks for the ask! <3

Okay, this wip isn't very funny, so this is my funniest moment. It takes a little to get there but I feel the lead-up is necessary for it to be funny in general. Anyways-

Chuck shot straight up in bed, hands gripping his datapad tight. "No. Way." His fingers hovered over the screen as his eyes flashed over it.  "Completely ridiculous." But- He tilted his head. Ridiculous didn't mean impossible, and if Chuck knew one thing by now, it was that impossible was more possible than you'd think. He jumped out of bed, whipped his pants up his legs, and tapped his communicator.  "Dr. McKay, Dr. Zelenka, this is Sergeant Campbell." "Yes, Sergeant?" Zelenka said grogily. "It's the middle of the night." McKay groaned. Chuck ignored his tone. "I think I figured something out. Meet me in the gate room." "On my way," Zelenka said. "Coming," McKay grumbled. Chuck had just gotten the data up on the screen when Zelenka walked up, blinking sleep from his eyes and trying to fix the hair flattened against one side of his head. McKay followed him in with a cup of coffee and a scowl. "This better be good Chuck because I swear to-" The two of them stopped suddenly and stared at him strangely. Chuck dismissed the looks and pointed at the screen. "I recognize it." McKay was the first to snap out of his stupor. "That's highly improbable." Chuck nodded, "I know, but each star system is unique, you know that, and this happens to be one of my favorite star systems." He pulled up past readings. "It's too coincidental. "Five circumbinary planets." He ran his finger over the screen, "Fourteen moons." He leaned toward them. "Quintuple star system." Chuck's heart beat wildly as their faces became interested. "The distances and orbits are all identical." He breathed. Radek smiled as Rodney barked out a laugh. "Good work Sergeant." Chuck grinned.  "Now," Rodney's lips twitched, "go put a shirt on."  He glanced down at his bare chest and flushed red. "Y-yes, of course."

[gamehayapkmod]

MY 777 SLOTS - Best Casino Game & Slot Machines

MY 777 SLOTS - Best Casino Game & Slot Machines

Game MY 777 SLOTS - Best Casino Game & Slot Machines là dòng game Casino

Giới thiệu MY 777 SLOTS - Best Casino Game & Slot Machines

Play MY 777 SLOTS for FREE - the HOTTEST Slots game in the Google Play Store! Experience Vegas Slots like never before with free spins and blazing jackpots! New players get 750,000 FREE BONUS COINS as a welcome gift. What are you waiting for? Come join the hottest Slots community now! Install MY 777 SLOTS to get the following: • Free Hourly and Daily bonuses! • Dynamic VIP system that rewards up to 500% Hourly & Daily Bonuses. • High Stakes Tournaments: Spin against other players in real time for huge payouts! • Instant support from one of the best service teams in the industry. • Entertaining mini games to win free Coins! • Get Social: Add your friends to earn Coins and exchange gifts with each other! All the Slot Machines you love: • Blaze the casino with Quickfire Jackpot! • Win a quintuple jackpot with 5x Megawin! • Spin the Wheel of Wealth for fortune of Coins! • Hit the Star to win big! • New Slot machines added frequently! Why wait? Heat up Vegas with winnings never before seen! ---- MY 777 SLOTS is intended for an adult audience for entertainment purposes only. Success at social casino gambling does not reward real money prizes, nor does it guarantee success at real money gambling. • We have welcomed a new name for our game! From now on we will continue under the name "My 777 Slots" • Game optimization and bug fixes

Download APK

Tải APK ([app_filesize]) #gamehayapk #gameandroid #gameapk #gameupdate

[spacenutspod]

For humans, the chance of giving birth to multiples is less than 2%. The situation is different with stars, especially with particularly heavy stars. Astronomers observe stars that are many times heavier than the sun in more than 80% of cases in double or multiple systems. The key question is whether they were also born as multiples, or whether stars are born alone and approach each other over time.

[whifferdills]

Hey so what about a Twelvedole scenario where one reason why Nardole is so fed up with Twelve going in the vault all the time is that Nardole is left with picking up the pieces when Twelve reemerges hearts-broken, troubled and worn out by Koschei?

Twelvedole, background Twelve/???, h/c and flangst, ~1.5k words

[also on the AO3]

It’s one of those nights where the sky’s weirdly clear. Despite light pollution and regular pollution and the omnipresent cloud cover, there’s still stars out. Or satellites, close enough. The out-there, the away-from-here, visible from campus grounds.

The Doctor’s sitting on a bench, neck craned up at the sky, all the satellites and suns and all the space in between. On the bench in full view from their office windows; this is the first step. Nardole in the office by the windows watching the Doctor on the bench watching the sky. The Doctor knows Nardole is watching - this isn’t where they go when they want to hide - and the satellites do too, probably, considering the unsubtle monitoring UNIT’s been doing. Nardole worries at a pen he’d grabbed from the jar of pens and screwdrivers on the Doctor’s desk. Click-top clicked in and out and in and out.

The Doctor leans forward, hands on their face in a familiar gesture. Step two. They stand up and wander across the grass, past the ‘Keep Off The Grass’ sign. Step three. Clicking in and out and in and out and in and out. The Doctor doesn’t look up, to the window where Nardole is watching, and Nardole does not make any move to stop them, does not even entertain the thought.

(He’d tried, once; the attempt had ended poorly.)

Around the corner of the building, to where the door to the vault is. Nardole steps away from the window, closes the curtains, sits down on the couch. Hands clenched into fists, listening to himself tick. One second, two seconds, three seconds, step four. There’s dust on the lamps and papers in disarray and, somehow, a stray sock under the desk; he whirrs up and busies himself putting things back into place, a paper towel folded halfwise then lengthwise carefully wiped over every recently-neglected surface. Bookcase back into alphabetical order.

Brecht after Asimov and before Butler. The faces of spines aligned, a smooth, flat front.

“Won’t be able to find a damn thing, now,” the Doctor says, from the doorway where they inevitably reappear, nights like these.

Nardole slowly, carefully, finishes reshelving a fantasy quarterly from 2072, then stills. “You know no one else understands your ‘organizational system’. Bill comes by, she’s not expecting things to be in order of when you met the author.”

The Doctor huffs out a laugh, in a way that implies that nothing is actually funny, just that they couldn’t come up with a better reaction. “Good night, Nardole.”

“Sleep tight,” Nardole responds automatically, staring at the bookshelf.

Parts one through four of the young adult trilogy that’ll take the world by storm next year, Z in a parallel-universe edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, a manual for a lawn mower, poetry from the early days of Earth’s colonizing of space. Or later days, one of those.

The sun is shining, bizarrely, and the grounds are filled with bright young things, all too loud and too carefree or too focused on the wrong things. Nardole pushes through them, the boy with a guitar and the girl drinking wine out of a thermos and the study group cross-legged around a stack of practice tests. Motors at max speed still equates to a quite slow average velocity: an eternity, then, under the hot sun before he makes the dark, damp cool of the basement. And the vault door, still in place, still locked. Double-locked, triple-locked.

Nardole goes to bang on the door, and then stops. And then starts again, and then stops. And then places his hand flat against it, and then withdraws, and then finally makes a fist and pounds on it. The sound landing flatly, unimpressively. His hand hurts anyway.

“It’s cruel, what you’re doing,” he says. “I s'pose you know that, and that’s probably the fun, isn’t it.”

Chopsticks, played haltingly.

The Doctor on the bench with their neck craned up at the sky. Nardole at the window swallowing his heart back down his throat. Everything in the office is spotless. Books in linear chronological order, Bill’s latest essay centered on the desk. Something about momentum, about movement. The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner: The Lorentz Transformation and Time Dilation.

Nardole on the couch with his hands in fists and the clock ticking, and the other clock ticking at just slightly, annoyingly, the wrong speed. Lagging just a touch behind. The door opens softly, and closes equally softly, and since he’s staring at the carpet his barometer of the situation here is just how the Doctor sighs, and the quiet scritch of whatever movement they’re making, cloth against cloth.

Step five, the Doctor leaves and Nardole heads off to bed. Except the Doctor’s not moving, this time. The clock is ticking and the clock is ticking and Nardole’s digging his nails into his palms. Could do with a manicure, been a while.

“Alright?” he asks, flicking his eyes up at the Doctor and then back down at the audiovisual device in his lap paused in the middle of a video about kittens.

The Doctor laughs, not-laughs, that noise they make when nothing is actually funny. “No,” they say.

Nardole turns his telephone off and tucks it into his waistcoat pocket. Movements careful, telegraphed. And he looks up.

“I’m not fine,” the Doctor says, smiling. All wide wild eyes, red-rimmed and exhausted. “Par for the course, really. Nothing to worry about.”

There are a hundred things he could say here but all of them feel wrong, or too risky, so he just pats the couch cushion next to him and says, “C'mon, I found this video of a bird doing a funny dance, you need to watch it. Looks just like you when you think you’re being impressive.”

The vault door is quintuple-locked. Physical, digital, quantum, your mother’s maiden name and what you had for tea yesterday, thumbprint and retinal scan and a pass/fail on whether you mean well. The air cold and damp and still, puddles on the floor and something dripping rhythmically somewhere.

Nardole presses his hand flat to the door and scrunches his eyes closed and just thinks. Maybe if you could find it in yourself to stop encouraging this. Maybe if you could, for once, be kind.

There’s no answer.

It’s been drizzling all day and all night, grey-overcast, a blank isolated nothing of a rotation around a sun no one in this city can see. Sunset is just an abrupt dimming, the darkness drawing close and heavy. This morning’s lecture was about the various deaths of Russian cosmonauts, and it was downhill from there.

One pen going clicky-clicky-click and two windows with a view of the bench and three books he’s not sure should be classified under editor or topic and four steps from the window to the desk, four from the desk to the back-room door, four from the door to the sofa. Step five.

Six AM, the door roughly opened and left ajar. “Morning,” Nardole says.

The Doctor leans on the doorframe, smiling crookedly at the nothing at all that is funny here.

“You’re a mess, you know that?”

“How is this news?” The Doctor slumps slightly, catches themselves, wincing.

If a given action leads to a certain outcome, every time. If a choice is wrong and you keep making that choice. If all of this goes to the same place and that place isn’t where you should be. If all of this leads here. What’s that say, then, about you?

The Doctor looks like they’re about to fall over. They look like something hurts. If Nardole didn’t know better, he’d think they look like they’re about to start crying.

The clock and the clock ticking, ticking. He stands up. Clunks across the carpet, motors whirring. Hovers a hand above the Doctor’s shoulder, and then thinks better of it, and then changes his mind. The Doctor closes their eyes at the touch, swaying. Nardole screws up his courage and goes in for the hug. Risky maneuver, this, like petting a feral cat.

“Is this okay?” he asks, arms wrapped firmly around the Doctor. No answer. “I’ll take that as a yes, then.”

He shuffles them towards the sofa and sets the both of them down awkwardly, trying not to squish the Doctor, who now seems impossibly small and fragile. This skinny shivering arsehole flinching at specific points of contact, like some things in particular hurt for reasons Nardole doesn’t need to know. They wind up in a half-comfortable tangle, the Doctor’s head on his chest and bony elbow digging into his gut, hair in his mouth whenever he opens it to say something and then think better of it.

They sit there for a while.

“Have you considered learning from your mistakes and not doing this so much,” Nardole says, delicately spitting out a stray curl of the Doctor’s hair.

“All the time,” the Doctor says. They shift, turn in, arm out of attack-elbow mode and sent sprawling across him. “I know, okay? I know.”

“First step to recovery is admitting you have a problem,” Nardole says, patting the Doctor on the back.

“Fuck off.”

“Shut up.” He breathes in and breathes out, and listens to the Doctor breathing in and out, and how they’re both tapping a foot against the floor, and how the clocks are ticking.

The sky’s lightening, dark grey to a slightly less dark grey. Sunrise, presumably, though who knows these days. Could be an alien invasion or something. The Doctor’s hand curls into Nardole’s side, pulling at the cloth. They breath in, and out, just slightly out of sync. Step six.

[harrycicatello-blog]

The pressure got the Strikers a run out

He lost his salary arbitration case against the Blue Jays in February of 2015 after seeking $5.75 million. Instead, Donaldson was awarded Toronto's offer of $4.3 million for the 2015 season nfl jerseys. He is just the second Blue Jays player to earn MVP honours after George Bell in 1987.

Cheap Jerseys from china Of course, a great sound system is a must. If you do not have a fireplace but would like one or need some heating for the garage there are alternatives. Gas fireplaces are nice but need installation as do wood burning stoves. Com today I was too little puppy bowl please. Explain to play itself an adding that. Now this by the way Michael all the time there's going to be a huge about the legal fornication show.  Cheap Jerseys from china

Cheap Jerseys china These types of protists are also equipped with the plant like ability to perform photosynthesis. Most of these life forms often lack a typical mitochondria. Those which have mitochondria have it in the form of discoidal, laminar or tubular cristae. Everyone pitched in to carry extra ammo cans for the.30 calibre. Bazookas were critical if fairly useless against enemy armour and extra rockets for them had to be carried. Small but deadly 60mm mortars were the rifle company commander's hip pocket artillery and he wanted plenty of ammo for those tubes, even if his riflemen had to help carry it..  Cheap Jerseys china

wholesale jerseys Goodbye George Jones. Urban: I blessed enough to make it there, I look forward to you giving me the grand tour. Rest in peace George Jones!!!!! Daniels: in peace George Jones There will never be another one like you and we miss you a bunch buddy. One touch, one touch, one touch. Insofar as any club has a distinct visual identity, this is Dortmund fans should not only recognise us by our black and yellow jerseys, coach Jrgen Klopp said when he took the Dortmund job in 2008. If we play in red, everyone in the stadium should think https://www.cheapjerseys168.com, that can only be BVB.  wholesale jerseys

wholesale nfl jerseys But this guy has qualities you just don't in your typical shooting guard. At 6 8, he can grab a rebound and take it the length of the floor. He can make it hell for smaller guards to find passing lanes, and can be a match up nightmare defensively. As of Monday, there had been a bid for more than $55,000 for one of the championship rings and more than $20,000 for the high school uniforms, according to Doug Drotman of Goldin Auctions, which is conducting the auction that runs through July 19. Half of the proceeds from the high school jerseys, the All Star game ring and the All Star medallion and ribbon will benefit the BULLY Project, an anti bullying campaign that seeks to foster a culture of empathy. (Bill) Schroeder, founder and managing director of the sports museum and library originally known as the Helms Athletic Foundation, died Wednesday morning after a lengthy illness.  wholesale nfl jerseys

Cheap Jerseys from china Novice 2, Pony: C Waddell, Carnesso Emerald Jewel 1, D Simpson Mabey, Gundagai Tabberabbera 2, I Roberts, Willow Spring Chelsea 3. Pony 123. Cm up to 128 cm: E Chamberlain, Eastdale Beatrice 1, Bishop Family/K Bishop, Twilight Song 2, C Waddell, Carnesso Emerald Jewel 3.  Cheap Jerseys from china

wholesale nfl jerseys from china Seventy million Americans lived in the nation's urbanized areas in 1950; these regions covered some 13,000 square miles (33,700 square kilometers). By 1990 the urban suburban population had more than doubled, yet the area occupied by that population almost quintupled to more than 60,000 square miles (155,000 square kilometers). Phoenix, Arizona, one of the Sunbelt's fastest growing communities, has been spreading outward at the rate of an acre an hour.  

Cheap Jerseys china By hiring a commercial landscaping service for your NJ business, you help raise the value of that space, as well as the areas surrounding it. Increasing your market value causes a "trickle down" effect: other companies will implement commercial maintenance as well, thus making the entire area more profitable. Since people are instinctively drawn to attractive areas, this move can increase revenue for your company.  Cheap Jerseys china

wholesale jerseys from china The power of flightThe earliest known bird Archaeopteryx comes from the Late Jurassic period in Germany. By the Early Cretaceous period, birds had radiated and diversified. Fossils have been found in Spain and China https://www.cheapjerseysaleusa.com. Avoid talking about the case to other coworkers. Even with your accusers, maintain a professional attitude. All these will help you if an investigation happens..  

nfl jerseys Bush's successfully throwing out the first pitch during the 2001 World Series. Fans of the New Orleans Saints have a tortured but passionate history with their usually awful hometown team. This was true even in the week after the hurricane hit, as heard on the all Katrina conglomeration of New Orleans radio stations..  nfl jerseys

nfl jerseys Mr. Gomes is partnering with Morris Bailey, the New York property mogul, to purchase the troubled New Jersey based casino for about $35 million. They aim to buy the gaming property from a consortium of lenders headed by Wells Fargo Bank. Glenn Maxwell came in and the tentative shot making continued wholesale jerseys from china. The pressure got the Strikers a run out. Buchanan pulled and turned for a second, only to be sent back by Maxwell and fall well short of his crease nfl jerseys.