#regulation of foreign trade

[farmerstrend]

The Macadamia Shell Controversy in Kenya

The Macadamia Shell Association of Kenya has raised concerns about the potential importation of raw macadamia nuts from other countries. The association argues that this move could negatively impact local industries that rely on macadamia shells as a fuel source. According to the association, macadamia shells are a crucial byproduct of the macadamia processing industry in Kenya. These shells are…

[guanzhenwei]

[epic2source]

Investment Strategies

let’s delve into some detailed investment strategies with examples applicable to the Indian stock market: 1. Long-Term Investing: Strategy: Invest in fundamentally strong companies with a long-term horizon, aiming to benefit from compounding. Example: Invest in a well-established company like HDFC Bank (HDFCBANK) known for its stable growth, strong financials, and consistent dividend…

[praveenroshmi-blog]

Ti...

[jahirseo]

Navigating US Customs : Regulations and Compliances for First-Time US Importers and their Foreign Counterparts

This guide covers a wide range of topics, including the regulatory framework of US customs, import requirements, trade programs, and compliance issues. It also provides insights into the documentation requirements for customs clearance and the role of customs brokers in facilitating importation activities. Additionally, the guide offers tips for reducing the risk of customs compliance issues, such as intellectual property violations and anti-dumping measures. https://www.tradecouncil.org/

US Customs, USCBP, US Regulations and Compliances, US Import Regulations, International Trade Council, ITC USA, Go Global Awards, Foreign Direct Investment, Exporting to the USA

[darcylindbergh]

I've talked a lot about why you should vote AGAINST Trump. No fucking shit, right? But I want to vote FOR something, too.

Kamala Harris hasn't had time yet to put together her platform documents, though no doubt we'll see those in the coming days. But this is a good analysis of where she and Joe Biden stand - and Kamala is more progressive on every front.

Abortion rights: Joe would've restored Roe, but Kamala would expand it to prevent states from limiting access. The pre-clearance measure discussed here is a non-starter but I'd expect Kamala to be looking at how to frame the issue for another try.

Israel and Gaza: it's true that Kamala hasn't broken with Joe publicly about Gaza. However, the article goes on:

Harris hasn’t exactly broken with Biden over the issue. But she has expressed more public sympathy than Biden has over the tens of thousands of Palestinians who have died during Israel’s counterattack. In March, she was one of the earliest high-profile leaders in the administration to call for an immediate temporary cease-fire in March. She also delivered the sharpest rebuke against Israel’s handling of aid flows into Gaza and described the conflict as a “humanitarian catastrophe” for innocent civilians. And privately, she has told Biden and other top officials that the administration needed to take a stronger stance against Netanyahu and focus on a long-term peace to the decades-long conflict, people familiar with her remarks have previously told POLITICO.

Kamala has also declined to preside over the upcoming session of Congress that Netanyahu is speaking at, on invitation by Republicans. She wasn't scheduled to before this, but I think declining now is a clear indicator that her foreign policy will not include the broad support we saw from Joe.

Climte Change: Honestly, the Build Back Better bill was so fucking substantial and incredible I think Kamala would be hard-pressed to do much more. I think Kamala needs to have a solid response ready to the recent Supreme Court decision overturning Chevron, which is the biggest threat to the EPA and other agencies in our lifetimes. (Trump, by the way, would abolish the EPA and the vast majority of environmental protections.)

Student debt relief: She was more progressive earlier, and I expect we'll see many of Joe's relief packages continue expanding.

Similarly:

Free college: Kamala's in full support. I understand Joe's position that students from wealthy families should pay their own way, but I also know from experience that students from wealthy family not immune to financial abuse by controlling parents.

Trade: this is actually a great one to know, because Kamala's hesitance on these trade agreements are related to a) environmental concerns, and b) outsourcing American jobs. Republicans love to lose their shit over outsourcing American jobs. Here's more significance in the trade sphere:

This is going to be a HUGE talking point for your conservative-leaning relatives. Business leaders do not want Trump in office, because the agenda laid out in Project 2025 will make it harder for them to do business - it will make it harder for them to attract global talent, costlier to import and export, and stunt economic growth. Do you know that "undecided" voter who votes red for "fiscal responsibility?" This your talking point. Kamala's platform spends, but in such a way that it will stimulate economic growth and solidify the US as a business leader worldwide.

Artificial Intelligence: I'll let Kamala speak for herself.

“History has shown, in the absence of regulation and strong government oversight, some technology companies choose to prioritize profit over the wellbeing of their customers, the safety of our communities, and the stability of our democracies,” Harris said during her visit to the U.K. for November’s AI Safety Summit.  Last July, during the early days of the White House’s mobilization on AI policy, Harris led a meeting among civil rights, labor and consumer protection groups where she rejected the “false choice” between promoting innovation and protecting the public.

The article also talks about data privacy, where Kamala and Joe are very similar, and animal welfare. Historically, Kamala defended animal welfare protections in CA, but remember that as Attorney General, Kamala's job was to defend the law no matter what her personal feelings were. Biden made some strides here, but many will agree not enough - I think this is a place where Kamala has to tread very carefully because progressives are in favor of more stringent animal welfare protections, but agricultural and rural voters are already a demographic inclined to view progressive agendas negatively, feeling forgotten, misunderstood, and passed over in favor of large cities. It's definitely a weakness for the Dems so I wouldn't expect to hear much about animal welfare as a voting issue.

IN SUM

I'm very happy to vote FOR Kamala, not just against Trump. I think she stands to take stronger action on abortion, stronger action on Israel and Gaza, stronger action on college and student debt relief. I think she'll continue work inherited on environmental protections and infrastructure. I think she will do more to protect LGBTQ+ individuals and unions, as well as standing strong on disability reform and criminal justice reform (yes, I know she was a prosecutor, and I also know that she worked on several important CJ reforms during her time as AG - here's an article about her progressive record as DA).

Remember, there's no such thing as a protest vote. The only people who benefit by third-party voting or choosing not to vote are the far-right.

[ghostofreach117]

Guns in Teyvat

I’m back on the worldbuilding grind🙏only reason I stopped was bc I ran out of ideas lmao. Love drawing guns

MONDSTADT

You will never find anyone with a firearm in Mondstadt. They simply don’t have the resources, money, or -most importantly- need for such an expensive product that is essentially useless. It is considered extremely rude to use a firearm when hunting as the sound scares animals away from other hunters in the area and their use is seen as “cheating” by the general population. Since they have such little presence in Mondstadt, there is little to no regulation on anything pertaining to guns (you really have to try to break the law). If you want to obtain one you must import the parts from Fontaine or Snezhnaya and assemble it yourself, and it’s a pain to buy them. If you are willing to go through all that trouble then either someone wants to kill you or you are out to kill somebody else. Probably both.

FONTAINE

Fontaine has mastered the art of mass production. Guns are produced by the hundreds (very impressive for such a centralized nation!) for the Fontanian military. They have been meticulously engineered for the utmost safety of the user. Fontanian firearms are prized for their lack of recoil, lack of tendency to jam, and innovative safety mechanisms, such as loaded chamber indicators and their revolutionary rifle decocker invention. This comes at the cost of power. Most Fontanian rifles and flintlocks/pistols take very low caliber ammunition and do not have the stopping power of larger firearms. They are much more suited for ceremonial use or intimidation as opposed to actual combat. There are a select few exceptions though. For example, Clorinde has had her twin flintlocks especially made for her, and they are known to take ammo she has to commission from an armory in western Fontaine.

SNEZHNAYA

If you were to ask anyone with a knowledge on the subject, they would tell you that Snezhnayan firearms are often exceedingly dangerous. They are known to jam, catch fire, and even explode. Hastily produced by independent armories contracted by the Fatui, they are low in cost and quality. In exchange, these guns are extremely powerful. The Ночной Ветер, for instance, is able to take cartridges of up to .50 (you can’t even purchase ammunition of this caliber outside of Snezhnaya). The gun laws and regulations in Snezhnaya are surprisingly strict, however they are not enforced. Fatui officers are more likely to take the 5000 mora offered by whomever they have tried to charge with illegal possession than actually arrest a lawbreaker. This has allowed an underground firearms market to thrive, especially among those who oppose the Tsaritsa.

Note: Snezhnayan firearms do not possess a safety. Once the gun is loaded, it is ready to shoot. Please exercise caution.

Double note: full auto guns don’t exist yet in my AU (subject to change based on what I think is cool) . I drew childe with an ak47 because it’s so him lmao.

INAZUMA

Inazuma’s strict laws have long forbade any type of firearm from being used, sold, or traded in the country to keep the nation in its eternal state. They have often been seen as useless foreign inventions that make the user weak by forcing them to rely on guns. Guns are also seen by some to violate the strict honor code that many Inazumans live by. Not even gangs or delinquents will use them.

SUMERU

Sumeru has outlawed any weapons that the Mahamatras deem to pose a danger to the preservation of knowledge. Surprisingly, there is little to no pushback on this ban. Those who reside in the desert find that grains of sand clog the inner mechanisms of guns, rendering them useless and forest dwellers dislike firearms for many of the same reasons Mondstadters do. The Corps don’t have trouble with smuggling when it comes to Sumeru natives or tourists, but they keep a watchful eye over the Fatui diplomats, occasionally requiring a search, as their presence often heralds political maneuvering rather than genuine interest in Sumeru’s knowledge. Evidence of this can often be found in the remains of crime scenes, weapons tend to be left in the riverbanks of the forest, and though exceptionally uncommon, there have been reports of firearms bearing Fatui insignias being uncovered underneath muddy outcrops by riverbanks. Though this is all coincidence, of course. It must have been a rouge terroist from Fontaine.

Other notes

I mentioned this previously, but guns and ammo are SUPER EXPENSIVE. The average person would never be able to afford/maintain one.

Guns are extremely difficult to use with a vision. Unless you have your gun created for you by a specialty armory, you won’t be able to channel elemental energy through one.

On the other hand, Guns are very easy to counter if you have a vision or a delusion due to the fact that they require many small, intricate parts working together perfectly to fire. Whether through making the metal brittle with frost or softening it with flame, it’s very easy to neutralize a gun. Best to keep them out of active combat. Swords, bows, and catalysts are much more effective thanks to their simplicity. It’s a lot harder to stop a giant hunk of metal hurling towards you than freezing a gun.

Um. I did not mean for this post to be as much of a yap fest as it was. Lmk if I was confusing or if you have questions I love talking to people 🙏🙏

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The disenshittified internet starts with loyal "user agents"

I'm in TARTU, ESTONIA! Overcoming the Enshittocene (TOMORROW, May 8, 6PM, Prima Vista Literary Festival keynote, University of Tartu Library, Struwe 1). AI, copyright and creative workers' labor rights (May 10, 8AM: Science Fiction Research Association talk, Institute of Foreign Languages and Cultures building, Lossi 3, lobby). A talk for hackers on seizing the means of computation (May 10, 3PM, University of Tartu Delta Centre, Narva 18, room 1037).

There's one overwhelmingly common mistake that people make about enshittification: assuming that the contagion is the result of the Great Forces of History, or that it is the inevitable end-point of any kind of for-profit online world.

In other words, they class enshittification as an ideological phenomenon, rather than as a material phenomenon. Corporate leaders have always felt the impulse to enshittify their offerings, shifting value from end users, business customers and their own workers to their shareholders. The decades of largely enshittification-free online services were not the product of corporate leaders with better ideas or purer hearts. Those years were the result of constraints on the mediocre sociopaths who would trade our wellbeing and happiness for their own, constraints that forced them to act better than they do today, even if the were not any better:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/24/naming-names/#prabhakar-raghavan

Corporate leaders' moments of good leadership didn't come from morals, they came from fear. Fear that a competitor would take away a disgruntled customer or worker. Fear that a regulator would punish the company so severely that all gains from cheating would be wiped out. Fear that a rival technology – alternative clients, tracker blockers, third-party mods and plugins – would emerge that permanently severed the company's relationship with their customers. Fears that key workers in their impossible-to-replace workforce would leave for a job somewhere else rather than participate in the enshittification of the services they worked so hard to build:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/22/kargo-kult-kaptialism/#dont-buy-it

When those constraints melted away – thanks to decades of official tolerance for monopolies, which led to regulatory capture and victory over the tech workforce – the same mediocre sociopaths found themselves able to pursue their most enshittificatory impulses without fear.

The effects of this are all around us. In This Is Your Phone On Feminism, the great Maria Farrell describes how audiences at her lectures profess both love for their smartphones and mistrust for them. Farrell says, "We love our phones, but we do not trust them. And love without trust is the definition of an abusive relationship":

https://conversationalist.org/2019/09/13/feminism-explains-our-toxic-relationships-with-our-smartphones/

I (re)discovered this Farrell quote in a paper by Robin Berjon, who recently co-authored a magnificent paper with Farrell entitled "We Need to Rewild the Internet":

https://www.noemamag.com/we-need-to-rewild-the-internet/

The new Berjon paper is narrower in scope, but still packed with material examples of the way the internet goes wrong and how it can be put right. It's called "The Fiduciary Duties of User Agents":

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3827421

In "Fiduciary Duties," Berjon focuses on the technical term "user agent," which is how web browsers are described in formal standards documents. This notion of a "user agent" is a holdover from a more civilized age, when technologists tried to figure out how to build a new digital space where technology served users.

A web browser that's a "user agent" is a comforting thought. An agent's job is to serve you and your interests. When you tell it to fetch a web-page, your agent should figure out how to get that page, make sense of the code that's embedded in, and render the page in a way that represents its best guess of how you'd like the page seen.

For example, the user agent might judge that you'd like it to block ads. More than half of all web users have installed ad-blockers, constituting the largest consumer boycott in human history:

https://doc.searls.com/2023/11/11/how-is-the-worlds-biggest-boycott-doing/

Your user agent might judge that the colors on the page are outside your visual range. Maybe you're colorblind, in which case, the user agent could shift the gamut of the colors away from the colors chosen by the page's creator and into a set that suits you better:

https://dankaminsky.com/dankam/

Or maybe you (like me) have a low-vision disability that makes low-contrast type difficult to impossible to read, and maybe the page's creator is a thoughtless dolt who's chosen light grey-on-white type, or maybe they've fallen prey to the absurd urban legend that not-quite-black type is somehow more legible than actual black type:

https://uxplanet.org/basicdesign-never-use-pure-black-in-typography-36138a3327a6

The user agent is loyal to you. Even when you want something the page's creator didn't consider – even when you want something the page's creator violently objects to – your user agent acts on your behalf and delivers your desires, as best as it can.

Now – as Berjon points out – you might not know exactly what you want. Like, you know that you want the privacy guarantees of TLS (the difference between "http" and "https") but not really understand the internal cryptographic mysteries involved. Your user agent might detect evidence of shenanigans indicating that your session isn't secure, and choose not to show you the web-page you requested.

This is only superficially paradoxical. Yes, you asked your browser for a web-page. Yes, the browser defied your request and declined to show you that page. But you also asked your browser to protect you from security defects, and your browser made a judgment call and decided that security trumped delivery of the page. No paradox needed.

But of course, the person who designed your user agent/browser can't anticipate all the ways this contradiction might arise. Like, maybe you're trying to access your own website, and you know that the security problem the browser has detected is the result of your own forgetful failure to renew your site's cryptographic certificate. At that point, you can tell your browser, "Thanks for having my back, pal, but actually this time it's fine. Stand down and show me that webpage."

That's your user agent serving you, too.

User agents can be well-designed or they can be poorly made. The fact that a user agent is designed to act in accord with your desires doesn't mean that it always will. A software agent, like a human agent, is not infallible.

However – and this is the key – if a user agent thwarts your desire due to a fault, that is fundamentally different from a user agent that thwarts your desires because it is designed to serve the interests of someone else, even when that is detrimental to your own interests.

A "faithless" user agent is utterly different from a "clumsy" user agent, and faithless user agents have become the norm. Indeed, as crude early internet clients progressed in sophistication, they grew increasingly treacherous. Most non-browser tools are designed for treachery.

A smart speaker or voice assistant routes all your requests through its manufacturer's servers and uses this to build a nonconsensual surveillance dossier on you. Smart speakers and voice assistants even secretly record your speech and route it to the manufacturer's subcontractors, whether or not you're explicitly interacting with them:

https://www.sciencealert.com/creepy-new-amazon-patent-would-mean-alexa-records-everything-you-say-from-now-on

By design, apps and in-app browsers seek to thwart your preferences regarding surveillance and tracking. An app will even try to figure out if you're using a VPN to obscure your location from its maker, and snitch you out with its guess about your true location.

Mobile phones assign persistent tracking IDs to their owners and transmit them without permission (to its credit, Apple recently switch to an opt-in system for transmitting these IDs) (but to its detriment, Apple offers no opt-out from its own tracking, and actively lies about the very existence of this tracking):

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar

An Android device running Chrome and sitting inert, with no user interaction, transmits location data to Google every five minutes. This is the "resting heartbeat" of surveillance for an Android device. Ask that device to do any work for you and its pulse quickens, until it is emitting a nearly continuous stream of information about your activities to Google:

https://digitalcontentnext.org/blog/2018/08/21/google-data-collection-research/

These faithless user agents both reflect and enable enshittification. The locked-down nature of the hardware and operating systems for Android and Ios devices means that manufacturers – and their business partners – have an arsenal of legal weapons they can use to block anyone who gives you a tool to modify the device's behavior. These weapons are generically referred to as "IP rights" which are, broadly speaking, the right to control the conduct of a company's critics, customers and competitors:

https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/

A canny tech company can design their products so that any modification that puts the user's interests above its shareholders is illegal, a violation of its copyright, patent, trademark, trade secrets, contracts, terms of service, nondisclosure, noncompete, most favored nation, or anticircumvention rights. Wrap your product in the right mix of IP, and its faithless betrayals acquire the force of law.

This is – in Jay Freeman's memorable phrase – "felony contempt of business model." While more than half of all web users have installed an ad-blocker, thus overriding the manufacturer's defaults to make their browser a more loyal agent, no app users have modified their apps with ad-blockers.

The first step of making such a blocker, reverse-engineering the app, creates criminal liability under Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, with a maximum penalty of five years in prison and a $500,000 fine. An app is just a web-page skinned in sufficient IP to make it a felony to add an ad-blocker to it (no wonder every company wants to coerce you into using its app, rather than its website).

If you know that increasing the invasiveness of the ads on your web-page could trigger mass installations of ad-blockers by your users, it becomes irrational and self-defeating to ramp up your ads' invasiveness. The possibility of interoperability acts as a constraint on tech bosses' impulse to enshittify their products.

The shift to platforms dominated by treacherous user agents – apps, mobile ecosystems, walled gardens – weakens or removes that constraint. As your ability to discipline your agent so that it serves you wanes, the temptation to turn your user agent against you grows, and enshittification follows.

This has been tacitly understood by technologists since the web's earliest days and has been reaffirmed even as enshittification increased. Berjon quotes extensively from "The Internet Is For End-Users," AKA Internet Architecture Board RFC 8890:

Defining the user agent role in standards also creates a virtuous cycle; it allows multiple implementations, allowing end users to switch between them with relatively low costs (…). This creates an incentive for implementers to consider the users' needs carefully, which are often reflected into the defining standards. The resulting ecosystem has many remaining problems, but a distinguished user agent role provides an opportunity to improve it.

And the W3C's Technical Architecture Group echoes these sentiments in "Web Platform Design Principles," which articulates a "Priority of Constituencies" that is supposed to be central to the W3C's mission:

User needs come before the needs of web page authors, which come before the needs of user agent implementors, which come before the needs of specification writers, which come before theoretical purity.

https://w3ctag.github.io/design-principles/

But the W3C's commitment to faithful agents is contingent on its own members' commitment to these principles. In 2017, the W3C finalized "EME," a standard for blocking mods that interact with streaming videos. Nominally aimed at preventing copyright infringement, EME also prevents users from choosing to add accessibility add-ons that beyond the ones the streaming service permits. These services may support closed captioning and additional narration of visual elements, but they block tools that adapt video for color-blind users or prevent strobe effects that trigger seizures in users with photosensitive epilepsy.

The fight over EME was the most contentious struggle in the W3C's history, in which the organization's leadership had to decide whether to honor the "priority of constituencies" and make a standard that allowed users to override manufacturers, or whether to facilitate the creation of faithless agents specifically designed to thwart users' desires on behalf of manufacturers:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/09/open-letter-w3c-director-ceo-team-and-membership

This fight was settled in favor of a handful of extremely large and powerful companies, over the objections of a broad collection of smaller firms, nonprofits representing users, academics and other parties agitating for a web built on faithful agents. This coincided with the W3C's operating budget becoming entirely dependent on the very large sums its largest corporate members paid.

W3C membership is on a sliding scale, based on a member's size. Nominally, the W3C is a one-member, one-vote organization, but when a highly concentrated collection of very high-value members flex their muscles, W3C leadership seemingly perceived an existential risk to the organization, and opted to sacrifice the faithfulness of user agents in service to the anti-user priorities of its largest members.

For W3C's largest corporate members, the fight was absolutely worth it. The W3C's EME standard transformed the web, making it impossible to ship a fully featured web-browser without securing permission – and a paid license – from one of the cartel of companies that dominate the internet. In effect, Big Tech used the W3C to secure the right to decide who would compete with them in future, and how:

https://blog.samuelmaddock.com/posts/the-end-of-indie-web-browsers/

Enshittification arises when the everyday mediocre sociopaths who run tech companies are freed from the constraints that act against them. When the web – and its browsers – were a big, contented, diverse, competitive space, it was harder for tech companies to collude to capture standards bodies like the W3C to secure even more dominance. As the web turned into Tom Eastman's "five giant websites filled with screenshots of text from the other four," that kind of collusion became much easier:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/18/cursed-are-the-sausagemakers/#how-the-parties-get-to-yes

In arguing for faithful agents, Berjon associates himself with the group of scholars, regulators and activists who call for user agents to serve as "information fiduciaries." Mostly, information fiduciaries come up in the context of user privacy, with the idea that entities that hold a user's data would have the obligation to put the user's interests ahead of their own. Think of a lawyer's fiduciary duty in respect of their clients, to give advice that reflects the client's best interests, even when that conflicts with the lawyer's own self-interest. For example, a lawyer who believes that settling a case is the best course of action for a client is required to tell them so, even if keeping the case going would generate more billings for the lawyer and their firm.

For a user agent to be faithful, it must be your fiduciary. It must put your interests ahead of the interests of the entity that made it or operates it. Browsers, email clients, and other internet software that served as a fiduciary would do things like automatically blocking tracking (which most email clients don't do, especially webmail clients made by companies like Google, who also sell advertising and tracking).

Berjon contemplates a legally mandated fiduciary duty, citing Lindsey Barrett's "Confiding in Con Men":

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3354129

He describes a fiduciary duty as a remedy for the enforcement failures of EU's GDPR, a solidly written, and dismally enforced, privacy law. A legally backstopped duty for agents to be fiduciaries would also help us distinguish good and bad forms of "innovation" – innovation in ways of thwarting a user's will are always bad.

Now, the tech giants insist that they are already fiduciaries, and that when they thwart a user's request, that's more like blocking access to a page where the encryption has been compromised than like HAL9000's "I can't let you do that, Dave." For example, when Louis Barclay created "Unfollow Everything," he (and his enthusiastic users) found that automating the process of unfollowing every account on Facebook made their use of the service significantly better:

https://slate.com/technology/2021/10/facebook-unfollow-everything-cease-desist.html

When Facebook shut the service down with blood-curdling legal threats, they insisted that they were simply protecting users from themselves. Sure, this browser automation tool – which just automatically clicked links on Facebook's own settings pages – seemed to do what the users wanted. But what if the user interface changed? What if so many users added this feature to Facebook without Facebook's permission that they overwhelmed Facebook's (presumably tiny and fragile) servers and crashed the system?

These arguments have lately resurfaced with Ethan Zuckerman and Knight First Amendment Institute's lawsuit to clarify that "Unfollow Everything 2.0" is legal and doesn't violate any of those "felony contempt of business model" laws:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/02/kaiju-v-kaiju/

Sure, Zuckerman seems like a good guy, but what if he makes a mistake and his automation tool does something you don't want? You, the Facebook user, are also a nice guy, but let's face it, you're also a naive dolt and you can't be trusted to make decisions for yourself. Those decisions can only be made by Facebook, whom we can rely upon to exercise its authority wisely.

Other versions of this argument surfaced in the debate over the EU's decision to mandate interoperability for end-to-end encrypted (E2EE) messaging through the Digital Markets Act (DMA), which would let you switch from, say, Whatsapp to Signal and still send messages to your Whatsapp contacts.

There are some good arguments that this could go horribly awry. If it is rushed, or internally sabotaged by the EU's state security services who loathe the privacy that comes from encrypted messaging, it could expose billions of people to serious risks.

But that's not the only argument that DMA opponents made: they also argued that even if interoperable messaging worked perfectly and had no security breaches, it would still be bad for users, because this would make it impossible for tech giants like Meta, Google and Apple to spy on message traffic (if not its content) and identify likely coordinated harassment campaigns. This is literally the identical argument the NSA made in support of its "metadata" mass-surveillance program: "Reading your messages might violate your privacy, but watching your messages doesn't."

This is obvious nonsense, so its proponents need an equally obviously intellectually dishonest way to defend it. When called on the absurdity of "protecting" users by spying on them against their will, they simply shake their heads and say, "You just can't understand the burdens of running a service with hundreds of millions or billions of users, and if I even tried to explain these issues to you, I would divulge secrets that I'm legally and ethically bound to keep. And even if I could tell you, you wouldn't understand, because anyone who doesn't work for a Big Tech company is a naive dolt who can't be trusted to understand how the world works (much like our users)."

Not coincidentally, this is also literally the same argument the NSA makes in support of mass surveillance, and there's a very useful name for it: scalesplaining.

Now, it's totally true that every one of us is capable of lapses in judgment that put us, and the people connected to us, at risk (my own parents gave their genome to the pseudoscience genetic surveillance company 23andme, which means they have my genome, too). A true information fiduciary shouldn't automatically deliver everything the user asks for. When the agent perceives that the user is about to put themselves in harm's way, it should throw up a roadblock and explain the risks to the user.

But the system should also let the user override it.

This is a contentious statement in information security circles. Users can be "socially engineered" (tricked), and even the most sophisticated users are vulnerable to this:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/05/cyber-dunning-kruger/#swiss-cheese-security

The only way to be certain a user won't be tricked into taking a course of action is to forbid that course of action under any circumstances. If there is any means by which a user can flip the "are you very sure?" circuit-breaker back on, then the user can be tricked into using that means.

This is absolutely true. As you read these words, all over the world, vulnerable people are being tricked into speaking the very specific set of directives that cause a suspicious bank-teller to authorize a transfer or cash withdrawal that will result in their life's savings being stolen by a scammer:

https://www.thecut.com/article/amazon-scam-call-ftc-arrest-warrants.html

We keep making it harder for bank customers to make large transfers, but so long as it is possible to make such a transfer, the scammers have the means, motive and opportunity to discover how the process works, and they will go on to trick their victims into invoking that process.

Beyond a certain point, making it harder for bank depositors to harm themselves creates a world in which people who aren't being scammed find it nearly impossible to draw out a lot of cash for an emergency and where scam artists know exactly how to manage the trick. After all, non-scammers only rarely experience emergencies and thus have no opportunity to become practiced in navigating all the anti-fraud checks, while the fraudster gets to run through them several times per day, until they know them even better than the bank staff do.

This is broadly true of any system intended to control users at scale – beyond a certain point, additional security measures are trivially surmounted hurdles for dedicated bad actors and as nearly insurmountable hurdles for their victims:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/07/como-is-infosec/

At this point, we've had a couple of decades' worth of experience with technological "walled gardens" in which corporate executives get to override their users' decisions about how the system should work, even when that means reaching into the users' own computer and compelling it to thwart the user's desire. The record is inarguable: while companies often use those walls to lock bad guys out of the system, they also use the walls to lock their users in, so that they'll be easy pickings for the tech company that owns the system:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/05/battery-vampire/#drained

This is neatly predicted by enshittification's theory of constraints: when a company can override your choices, it will be irresistibly tempted to do so for its own benefit, and to your detriment.

What's more, the mere possibility that you can override the way the system works acts as a disciplining force on corporate executives, forcing them to reckon with your priorities even when these are counter to their shareholders' interests. If Facebook is genuinely worried that an "Unfollow Everything" script will break its servers, it can solve that by giving users an unfollow everything button of its own design. But so long as Facebook can sue anyone who makes an "Unfollow Everything" tool, they have no reason to give their users such a button, because it would give them more control over their Facebook experience, including the controls needed to use Facebook less.

It's been more than 20 years since Seth Schoen and I got a demo of Microsoft's first "trusted computing" system, with its "remote attestations," which would let remote servers demand and receive accurate information about what kind of computer you were using and what software was running on it.

This could be beneficial to the user – you could send a "remote attestation" to a third party you trusted and ask, "Hey, do you think my computer is infected with malicious software?" Since the trusted computing system produced its report on your computer using a sealed, separate processor that the user couldn't directly interact with, any malicious code you were infected with would not be able to forge this attestation.

But this remote attestation feature could also be used to allow Microsoft to block you from opening a Word document with Libreoffice, Apple Pages, or Google Docs, or it could be used to allow a website to refuse to send you pages if you were running an ad-blocker. In other words, it could transform your information fiduciary into a faithless agent.

Seth proposed an answer to this: "owner override," a hardware switch that would allow you to force your computer to lie on your behalf, when that was beneficial to you, for example, by insisting that you were using Microsoft Word to open a document when you were really using Apple Pages:

https://web.archive.org/web/20021004125515/http://vitanuova.loyalty.org/2002-07-05.html

Seth wasn't naive. He knew that such a system could be exploited by scammers and used to harm users. But Seth calculated – correctly! – that the risks of having a key to let yourself out of the walled garden were less than being stuck in a walled garden where some corporate executive got to decide whether and when you could leave.

Tech executives never stopped questing after a way to turn your user agent from a fiduciary into a traitor. Last year, Google toyed with the idea of adding remote attestation to web browsers, which would let services refuse to interact with you if they thought you were using an ad blocker:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/02/self-incrimination/#wei-bai-bai

The reasoning for this was incredible: by adding remote attestation to browsers, they'd be creating "feature parity" with apps – that is, they'd be making it as practical for your browser to betray you as it is for your apps to do so (note that this is the same justification that the W3C gave for creating EME, the treacherous user agent in your browser – "streaming services won't allow you to access movies with your browser unless your browser is as enshittifiable and authoritarian as an app").

Technologists who work for giant tech companies can come up with endless scalesplaining explanations for why their bosses, and not you, should decide how your computer works. They're wrong. Your computer should do what you tell it to do:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/08/your-computer-should-say-what-you-tell-it-say-1

These people can kid themselves that they're only taking away your power and handing it to their boss because they have your best interests at heart. As Upton Sinclair told us, it's impossible to get someone to understand something when their paycheck depends on them not understanding it.

The only way to get a tech boss to consistently treat you well is to ensure that if they stop, you can quit. Anything less is a one-way ticket to enshittification.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/07/treacherous-computing/#rewilding-the-internet

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

[mikerickson]

8/29/2024 - 9/6/2024

If I had a nickel for every time I took a vacation in a small European naval power that historically punched above its weight in global affairs I'd have two nickels, which... ah, you know the rest.

Just got back from a trip to the Netherlands and Belgium that was basically: Amsterdam -> Apeldoorn -> Utrecht -> Den Haag -> Brussels -> Ghent -> Amsterdam. I will now proceed to talk to myself about the highlights below the cut.

Still can't sleep on planes. I even took a sleeping pill and bought a fancy new neck pillow thing to help, but instead I was just exhausted and strangling myself. My dinner also didn't sit well with me, so every time I was about to fall asleep, my gag reflex would trigger and I felt like I was gonna throw up. Seven hours of this was not very relaxing.

Landed at ass o'clock in the morning local time and had 6 hours to kill before hotel check in. I've always read that spending time outdoors in natural sunlight helps regulate your circadian rhythm and can fight jet lag, so I took us to look at some windmills. This was kind of a blur and I'm not certain it made much of a difference because I did end up crashing and taking a nap in the afternoon anyway.

Acknowledging that I am biased about this because I am 1) American and 2) literally a traffic engineer by trade, I simply cannot describe the Netherlands as anything other than "car-hostile". I felt actively unsafe driving around each city we visited because there are so many people on bicycles everywhere, who have right of way. Hell, even as a pedestrian I didn't feel safe because they come at you from every direction and you gotta keep your head on a swivel at all times. In The Hague I watched a woman get knocked into by a cyclist who just shouted over her shoulder "Let op voor fietsen!" ("Watch out for bikes!") and carried on.

Amsterdam ended up being more interesting than I was expecting and now I kinda wish I had dedicated one more day for it in the itinerary. Convenient and easy mass-transit system, some of the best bookstores I've ever been in, and beautiful canals everywhere you look.

Were I forced to describe the geography of the Netherlands, I would have to call it "suspiciously flat." I also got to continue my tradition of traveling to foreign countries, seeing literal hundreds of spinning wind turbines all over the place, and seething with jealousy.

Utrecht was a neat, smaller city with a central canal that I wish I had set aside more time for. Felt like a place where you'd actually want to live more than a touristy city.

The Mauritshuis in The Hague is where Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring is located, and you know that before you even get to that room because she's plastered on 99% of everything for sale in the gift shop right at the entrance.

When we drove over the Netherlands-Belgium border, it started getting overcast. These gray skies hung around for four days, and dissipated as soon as we traveled back north on the final day. All of my memories of this country will now have a gray/de-saturated filter on them.

I know Brussels has a reputation of being a run-down or dangerous city among Europeans, but it just felt like a regular American city to me (specifically like the architecture/street layout of Boston with the political importance of Washington DC). Like, I don't know what to tell you, sometimes cities have visible homeless people, unsightly graffiti, and ethnic minority neighborhoods? It's gonna be okay, I promise. Amsterdam felt like Weenie Hut Jr. by comparison.

Going through the European Parliament building was very cool and very well laid-out and informative. Definitely a personal highlight of the trip for me.

The Belgian War Museum kinda just felt like some rich guy's personal collection of artifacts the public shouldn't have had access to? Not a lot of labels explaining what you're looking at in any language.

Belgian chocolate is fine. Not bad, but I mean it's chocolate, that's hard to screw up, you know?

During my research before this trip I kept seeing a general consensus that Bruges is super touristy and sanitized and feels fake and that Ghent was better for a more "authentically" preserved medieval center. I'm glad I opted to go there instead because it exceeded my expectations. Awesome architecture everywhere you turn, way fewer crowds than I expected, and it still felt lived in by modern people rather than a giant open-air museum.

Literally did not see a single physical Euro at all on this trip. Both of these countries are entirely cashless societies, and everyone (both tourists and locals) used chip readers and contactless payment for damn near every interaction. If anything, I saw tons of "Card Only/No Cash" signs and none of the opposite.

[odinsblog]

In “The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America,” Carol Anderson argues that the Second Amendment is not about guns – it’s about anti-Blackness. She says it “was designed and has consistently been constructed to keep African-Americans powerless and vulnerable.”

Anderson cites legislative debates from the Founding Fathers and a range of historical records to make some bold points. She says some early lawmakers who supported the Second Amendment were more worried about armed Blacks than British redcoats. She says that even after the Civil War ended, many Southern states banned Black citizens from owning weapons.

And that famous line about a “well-regulated militia?” Well, that was inserted primarily to deal with potential slave revolts – not to repel a foreign army, she says.

“The crafting of the Constitution was of primary concern for folks like James Madison because the Articles of Confederation were not working. And when they went to the Constitutional Convention, the Southern delegates made it really clear that they weren’t going to sign off on any kind of Constitution to strengthen the United States of America unless they could get the clear extension on the Atlantic slave trade, the Three-Fifths Clause so they could get more representation than they were due in Congress, and the Fugitive Slave Clause. Those were the bribes. That was the sign-off for the South to sign off on the Constitution.

But then as Virginia is looking at this Constitution and sees the federal control of the militia, this is when Patrick Henry and George Mason really started leading the charge. And that charge was about either scuttling the Constitution or getting a Bill of Rights to curtail the power of the central government and protecting the militia. Protecting the militia means that they are protecting slavery.

One of the things that many previous historians have not linked up was the role of the militia in putting down slave revolts, in buttressing slave patrols and keeping enslaved Black people, and free Blacks, under the boot of White supremacy.

The emphasis on the Second Amendment has been crafted as a well-regulated militia in terms of (opposing) a tyrannical government or stopping a foreign invasion, and the individual right to bear arms. That’s the way it’s been cast in the legal debates. That’s driven our historical debates. We’ve got a weird bifurcation in the scholarship between the history of slavery and the history of the Second Amendment. What I’m doing is saying these things are all happening at the same time. Let’s see what’s really going on.”

(continue reading)

[forevergulag]

What're your thoughts on Deng? I'm genuinely curious I am confused about him thanks :)

Deng is often called revisionist for his focus on market reforms and the development of state capitalism, but all that is is an implementation of the science of marxism-leninism to the material conditions of the PRC.

state capitalism as opposed to its definition by left-coms and liberals, is simply a policy used develop the means of production and acquire capital in a poor and backwards country, like the ussr and prc pre-revolution. as said by lenin in Role and functions of the trade unions under the new economic policy:

"The proletarian state may, without changing its own nature, permit freedom to trade and the development of capitalism only within certain bounds, and only on the condition that the state regulates (supervises, controls, determines the forms and methods of, etc.) private trade and private capitalism. The success of such regulation will depend not only on the state authorities but also, and to a larger extent, on the degree of maturity of the proletariat and of the masses of the working people generally, on their cultural level, etc."

In the PRC, state capitalism follows a sort of "partnership." by making it beneficial to capitalists, their capital can willingly be used for the purpose of the proletarian state, while of course keeping them under the regulation of said proletarian state. this is the focus of most of the market reforms Deng implemented, except to utilize the capital of foreign imperialists in a similar way (which of course is dangerous as letting imperialists into a country is very risky). Deng was of course not perfect, but he did act in the interest of the Chinese proletariat, and was absolutely not revisionist.

[ophthalmotropy]

what's happening in argentina?

I don't fault you for the broad question because I'd ask too, but I need you to know that as a non-smoker I've never felt so strongly the need for a cigarette as I did just now thinking about answering this question. But I'll do my best.

In November of last year, the country elected Javier Milei as president. He would swear into office the next month. Javier Milei is a self-identified anarcho-capitalist and libertarian, although he states he is a minarchist in the short term (meaning he thinks the only functions the State should serve are those of law enforcement: no public education, social development, market regulations, etc etc). Some of his most controversial campaign statements included projects to legalise the free and unregulated sale of organs, and, along with his vice-president Victoria Villarruel (who in her youth organised visits to Jorge Rafael Videla in prison), apologia for the 1976 military dictatorship by revindicating the theory of the two demons (fair warning that from what I skimmed that article is biased in favour of the theory) and casting into doubt the estimated 30.000 victims of state terrorism (torture, disappearance followed by death) (also warning that that article uses the name the military junta gave this process) during its duration.

Since he took over six months ago, the population's purchasing power has dropped by 38%, plunging millions of people below the line of poverty. In stark contrast to this, Milei has been travelling around the world using public funds to visit his ultraright idols; most notably, Trump, who is not the political leader of any country at the moment (making his trip to see him a personal visit and not a diplomatic one, thus invalidating his arguments for using our money to go there).

On the subject of diplomacy, his government has been swinging quite a lot of bats at hornets' nests, accusing China and Brazil of communism and insulting the wife of the president of Spain. All of this is an international relations nightmare that will take endless apologies to undo.

Another interesting resolution deregulates the operations of foreign companies, SPVs, and offshore companies (article in Spanish), with the stated goal of attracting investments. Those types of companies have historically been used to conceal illicit activity, so resolutions in that vein pave the way to effectively turn Argentina into a fiscal paradise. This isn't the only problem they pose (offshore companies don't pay taxes, so there'd be a loss in the public sector, for example), but it is the most worrying to me because they also eliminated restrictions for Sociedades de Acciones Simplificadas (simplified stock companies), most of which have historically been used to commit crimes among which is the drug trade. Once you have narcos in your country, there's no taking it back--Argentina would be at real risk of ceasing to exist as we know it.

This administration is also slashing public spending, resulting in some universities suspending their activities temporarily. They also failed to deliver oncological medicine, depriving cancer patients of assistance the state is obligated to provide. As a result of this, several people have died already. In this climate of extreme poverty, soup kitchens have been shutting down en masse due to the withdrawal of state funding, and laws that protected tenants' rights and regulated rent prices have been severely modified to the detriment of the tenants.

The violent decrease in public spending also resulted in thousands of state workers being fired overnight. The attack is especially centred on state organisations that promote the arts or whose purpose is to fight discrimination. On this subject, 10% of the transgender and travesti workers who had their positions guaranteed by the law were fired illegally, and government members are outspoken about their opposition to this law--which isn't surprising. Diana Mondino, the current chancellor, has compared same-sex marriage to "the right to having lice" while she held a position in Congress. Ricardo Bussi, a current legislator, compared homosexuality to disability in October 2023. Coming to this year, Francisco Sánchez, the Secretary of Religion, said that the laws protecting the right to abortions, divorce, and same-sex marriage "seek to pervert our children and damage society". Milei is also on record describing abortion as "homicide aggravated by the bond".

Also recently, Milei's biographer, Nicolás Márquez, gave a one-hour interview in which he characterised homosexuality as a disease, claiming that when the State "promotes homosexuality" (as it allegedly did before Milei came to power), it is aiding a "self-destructive" conduct, supporting these claims with unfounded statistics about the correlation between STIs and homosexuality; he also denied the existence of homophobia and described lesbians and gays as being "against nature". For the sake of full disclosure, I will say he explicitly freed Milei and his government of responsibility for his declarations--but I think it's really important to point out the kind of people and rhetorics this government is giving a platform to; after all, nobody knew Nicolás Márquez before he started writing for Milei. In approximately the same time frame, and in response to a horrific hate crime that resulted in the death of three lesbians, Manuel Adorni, the presidential spokesman, said that he "doesn't like" to talk about a hate crime because men suffer violence too--and he said this in a press conference.

I'm probably forgetting something important--so much has happened in the past months--but I hope this is enough to give you an impression of the changes our society is undergoing. Please let me know if you have follow-up questions. <3

[balkanradfem]

"Growing flax to make linen was one of the oldest human activities in Europe, particularly in the Rhineland. Archeologists have found linen textiles among the settlements of Neolithic cultivators along the shores of Lake Neuchâtel in the Jura Mountains west of Bern, Switzerland. These were elaborate pieces: Stone Age clothmakers of the Swiss lakeshores sewed pierced fruit pits in a careful line into a fabric with woven stripes. The culture spread down the Rhine and into the lowland regions.

The Roman author Pliny observed in the first century AD that German women wove and wore linen sheets. By the ninth century flax had spread through Germany. By the sixteenth century, flax was produced in many parts of Europe, but the corridor from western Switzerland to the mouth of the Rhine contained the oldest region of large-scale commercial flax and linen production. In the late Middle Ages the linen of Germany was sold nearly everywhere in Europe, and Germany produced more linen than any other region in the world.

At this juncture, linen weavers became victims of an odd prejudice. “Better skinner than linen weaver,” ran one cryptic medieval German taunt. Another macabre popular saying had it that linen weavers were worse than those who “carried the ladders to the gallows.” The reason why linen weavers were slandered in this way, historians suspect, was that although linen weavers had professionalized and organized themselves into guilds, they had been unable to prevent homemade linen from getting onto the market. Guilds appeared across Europe between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries but many of the items they produced for exchange, like textiles and soap, were also produced at home right up through the nineteenth century. The intricate regulations of the guilds—determining who could join, how they would be trained, what goods they would produce, and how these could be exchanged—were mainly designed to distinguish guild work from this homely labor. That linen making continued to be carried out inside of households—a liability for guilds in general—lent a taint to the linen guild in particular.

In the seventeenth century, guilds came under pressure from a new, protocapitalist mode of production. Looking for cheaper cloth to sell on foreign markets, entrepreneurs cased the Central European countryside offering to pay cash to home producers for goods. Rural households became export manufacturing centers and a major source of competition with the guilds. These producers could undercut the prices of urban craftsmen because they could use the unregulated labor of their family members, and because their own agricultural production allowed them to sell their goods for less than their subsistence costs.

The uneasiness between guild and household production in the countryside erupted into open hostility. In the 1620s, linen guildsmen marched on villages, attacking competitors, and burning their looms. In February 1627 Zittau guild masters smashed looms and seized the yarn of home weavers in the villages of Oderwitz, Olbersdorf, and Herwigsdorf.

Guilds had long worked to keep homemade products from getting on the market. In their death throes, they hit upon a new and potent weapon: gender. Although women in medieval Europe wove at home for domestic consumption, many had also been guild artisans. Women were freely admitted as masters into

the earliest medieval guilds, and statutes from Silesia and the Oberlausitz show that women were master weavers. Thirteenth-century Paris had eighty mixed craft guilds of men and women and fifteen female-dominated guilds for such trades as gold thread, yarn, silk, and dress manufacturing. Up until the mid-seventeenth century, guilds had belittled home production because it was unregulated, nonprofessional, and competitive. In the mid-seventeenth century this work was identified as women’s work, and guildsmen unable to compete against cheaper household production tried to eject women from the market entirely. Single women were barred from independent participation in the guilds. Women were restricted to working as domestic servants, farmhands, spinners, knitters, embroiderers, hawkers, wet nurses. They lost ground even where the jobs had been traditionally their own, such as ale brewing and midwifery, by the end of the seventeenth century.

The wholesale ejection of women from the market during this period was achieved not only through guild statute, but through legal, literary, and cultural means. Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries women lost the legal right to conduct economic activity as femes soles. In France they were declared legal “imbeciles,” and lost the right to make contracts or represent themselves in court. In Italy, they began to appear in court less frequently to denounce abuses against them. In Germany, when middle-class women were widowed it became customary to appoint a tutor to manage their affairs. As the medieval historian Martha Howell writes, “Comedies and satires of this period…often portrayed market women and trades women as shrews, with characterizations that not only ridiculed or scolded them for taking on roles in market production but frequently even charged them with sexual aggression.” This was a period rich in literature about the correction of errant women: Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew (1590–94), John Ford’s ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore (1629–33), Joseph Swetnam’s “The Araignment of Lewde, Idle, Froward, and Unconstant Women” (1615). Meanwhile, Protestant reformers and Counter-Reformation Catholics established doctrinally that women were inherently inferior to men.

This period, called the European Age of Reason, successfully banished women from the market and transformed them into the sweet and passive beings that emerged in Victorian literature. Women accused of being scolds were paraded in the streets wearing a new device called a “branks,” an iron muzzle that depressed the tongue. Prostitutes were subjected to fake drowning, whipped, and caged. Women convicted of adultery were sentenced to capital punishment.

As a cultural project, this was not merely recreational sadism. Rather, it was an ideological achievement that would have lasting and massive economic consequences. Political philosopher Silvia Federici has argued this expulsion was an intervention so massive, it ought to be included as one of a triptych of violent seizures, along with the Enclosure Acts and imperialism, that allowed capitalism to launch itself.

Part of why women resisted enclosure so fiercely was because they had the most to lose. The end of subsistence meant that households needed to rely on money rather than the production of agricultural goods like cloth, and women had successfully been excluded from ways to earn. As labor historian Alice Kessler-Harris has argued, “In pre-industrial societies, nearly everybody worked, and almost nobody worked for wages.” During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, monetary relations began to dominate economic life in Europe. Barred from most wage work just as the wage became essential, women were shunted into a position of chronic poverty and financial dependence. This was the dominant socioeconomic reality when the first modern factory, a cotton-spinning mill, opened in 1771 in Derbyshire, England, an event destined to upend still further the pattern of daily life."

- Sofi Thanhauser, Worn: A People's History of Clothing

[praveenroshmi-blog]

Pa...

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Trevor Irvin, Southerland Report

* * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

October 24, 2024

Heather Cox Richardson

Oct 25, 2024

Trump’s threat to use the military on “the enemy within,” along with the recent statements of General John Kelly and other members of Trump’s administration who say he is a fascist, have fed growing concern that Trump’s reelection could spark a deadly conflict between MAGA Republicans and those they perceive as their enemies. But there has been far less attention paid to the civil war within the Republican Party.

On the Hugh Hewitt Show this morning, Trump boasted that he had “taken the Republican Party and made [it] into an entirely different party…The Republican Party is a very big, powerful party. Before, it stood, it was an elitist party with real stiffs running it.”

Trump’s analysis of his effect on the party is right. In 2015, the party had been controlled for years by a small group of leaders who wanted to carve the U.S. government back to its size and activity of the years before the 1930s, slashing regulations on business and cutting the social safety net so they could cut taxes. But their numbers were small, so to stay in power, they relied on the votes of the racist and sexist reactionaries who didn’t like civil rights.

Once he took office in 2017, Trump put the base of the party in the driver’s seat. Using the same techniques that had boosted Hungarian prime minister Victor Orbán, he attacked immigrants, Black Americans, and people of color, and promised to overturn the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision protecting abortion rights. After his defense of the participants in the August 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, he began to turn his followers into a movement by encouraging them to engage in violence. 

In the following years, Trump’s hold on his voting base enabled him to take over the Republican Party, pushing the older Republican establishment aside. In March 2024 he took over the Republican National Committee itself, installing a loyalist and his own daughter-in-law Lara Trump at its head and adjusting its finances so that they primarily benefited him.

But while older leaders were happy to use Trump’s base to keep the party in power, the two factions were never in sync. Established Republican leaders’ goal was to preside over a largely unregulated market-driven economy. But MAGA Republicans want a weak government only with regard to foreign enemies—another place where they part company with established Republicans. Instead, they want a strong government to impose religious rules. Rather than leaving companies alone to react to markets, they want them to shape their businesses around MAGA ideology, denying LGBTQ+ rights, for example. 

In 2024, those tensions are stronger. Trump’s promise to build a tariff wall around the country contradicts the established Republicans’ reliance on free trade. His vow to deport 20 million immigrants threatens to devastate entire sectors of the economy. Both plans are widely panned by economists. Yesterday, twenty-three Nobel Prize-winning economists warned that Trump’s economic plans would “lead to higher prices, larger deficits, and greater inequality.” On Morning Joe today, economic analyst Steve Rattner noted that Trump’s plans would cut the gross domestic product in the U.S. by 8.9%, creating a severe recession or a depression. 

MAGA Republicans are fiercely loyal to Trump, but it is not clear how much they offer to those trying to get elected in more moderate districts. Extremist abortion bans have fired up significant opposition to Republican candidates, and that opposition does not appear to be weakening. "My wife…was miscarrying and bleeding out,” John Legend said today on the podcast of Broncos legend Shannon Sharpe. “Her life was in danger, and for the government to say, 'Oh, we need to evaluate this to make sure you're sufficiently dying before you can have an abortion'—that’s what they’re saying in...all these states where they have Trump abortion bans. Not your doctor, not you and your family. The government. No! Stay out of it!... We don’t need the government to be involved in it. And if the government’s involved, that means the police and the district attorney are involved in medical decisions. That's crazy!” 

“He is killing us!” Mika Brzezinski said this morning on Morning Joe. “He is putting us at risk. He is making us afraid to have babies. He is putting our reproductive health at risk and some women have died already because of this…. What’s happening with women right now is real, and it is playing out across America.”

MAGA extremists in the House of Representatives did the party as a whole no favors when they took control of the chamber in 2023 and made it virtually impossible for the Republicans to govern. Party members took weeks to agree on a House speaker and then threw him out, marking the first time in U.S. history that a party has thrown out its own speaker. With MAGA extremists unwilling to compromise on their demands, the Republicans were unable to pass almost any legislation at all, including appropriations bills and the long-overdue farm bill. 

Their determination not to yield an inch continues. A Trump-endorsed Republican candidate challenging a Democrat incumbent in New York could not name a single Democrat she would be willing to work with if she is elected. “These people are not fit to govern,” House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) posted today.

MAGA Republicans are already signaling their intent to expand their power in the House should Republicans retain control over it: Ohio representative Jim Jordan appears to be considering making a bid for House leadership, while others have their eye on committee chairs. Joe Perticone of The Bulwark explored today how “Trump’s Already Stuffing House GOP ‘Normies’ in a Locker” as they feel obliged to defend everything he does, even when his former White House chief of staff says he is a fascist. 

But the struggle between the Republican factions has not gone away in the past few years. Indeed, it appears to be escalating as evidence mounts that Trump will not be able to continue to lead the party. Earlier this month, 230 doctors publicly called on Trump to release his medical records, “Trump is falling concerningly short of any standard of fitness for office and displaying alarming characteristics of declining acuity," they wrote. Today, 233 mental health professionals organized by conservative lawyer George Conway’s Anti-Psycho PAC warned both that Trump “appears to be showing signs of cognitive decline that urgently cry out for a full neurological work-up,” and that his malignant narcissism makes him “grossly unfit for leadership.” 

But if Trump’s grip is slipping, who will take over the party? 

In a new biography of Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) by Michael Tackett of The Associated Press, obtained by CNN, McConnell condemned the MAGA movement and blamed Trump for making it hard for the Republican Party to compete. He called Trump “not very smart, irascible, nasty, just about every quality you would not want somebody to have.” He also went after Florida senator Rick Scott for his leadership of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, the party’s campaign arm.

Trump loyalist Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) promptly called McConnell’s comments “indefensible.” Scott said he was “shocked that [McConnell] would attack a fellow Republican senator and the Republican nominee for president just two weeks out from an election.”

Technology elites, including Elon Musk, who is pouring money into Trump’s campaign, and Peter Thiel, who backs Trump’s running mate J.D. Vance, also appear to be making a play to control the Republican Party, challenging both the established Republicans and the MAGAs.

And then there are the Republican voters, some of whom are abandoning the MAGA Republicans who are now openly embracing fascism. Today, Republican state senator Rob Cowles of Green Bay, Wisconsin, who has served for almost 42 years, announced he would vote for Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris. David Holt, the Republican mayor of Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, also indicated he would be casting his ballot for Harris.

In 1880, when the Democrats went off the extremist cliff, voters forced it to move to the center.

In 1879, after the bitterly contested 1876 election, voters gave Democrats control of Congress. So convinced were Democrats that the American people backed their determination to overthrow Reconstruction, they refused to fund the government unless Republican president Rutherford B. Hayes pulled the federal government out of the southern states. (They also tried to get a federal pension for Confederate president Jefferson Davis.)

“If this is not revolution,” Civil War veteran House minority leader James A. Garfield (R-OH) said, “which if persisted in will destroy the government, [then] I am wholly wrong in my conception of both the word and the thing.” 

Observers had expected the 1880 election to be a romp for the Democrats, who reiterated their demands in their party platform, but voters backed Garfield’s defense of the country and of Black rights and elected him to the White House. 

The unexpected loss prompted the Democrats to toss aside their former Confederate leaders and shift toward the northern cities. For president in 1884 they backed former New York governor Grover Cleveland, who had broadened Black appointments to office and desegregated the New York City police force, and who had worked closely with New York Assembly minority leader Theodore Roosevelt, a Republican, to reform the worst abuses of the industrial system. Cleveland won with the help of significant numbers of crossover Republican voters, dubbed “Mugwumps,” thereby securing the roots of the modern Democratic Party.

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[godihatethiswebsite]

Desert Oasis

✽ Johnny "Soap" Mactavish x f!reader (The Mummy AU)

Main Masterlist ✽ Ao3

✽ Part 9 - A meeting with ghosts

This is my longest one yet folks (don't ask, I have a problem). Was going to chop it up and make it into two, but then reasons...

Also it always bothered me that the only bits of Hamunaptra we ever got to see were the couple pillars up top and a handful of creepy caverns below. It's the fucking City of the Dead - resting place for royalty. Forgive me if I fix that oversight.

Some of this I had to look up. Some of this I'm just a nerd ^^;

The first four years of your life were spent in the fields of Buckinghamshire. 

It was an easy existence given your age, only knowing the worries of a toddler, ignorant to anything outside the little sphere your parents raised you in - until your father’s business partners convinced him to take up stakes in northern Africa. With the big archaeological boom in the early 1900’s, it made sense to cash in on the amount of trade flowing in and out of the country. 

If you thought back about it hard enough you could faintly recall the frayed edges of a memory where your father argued with your mother behind closed doors about the change, her not wanting to leave society behind and especially not wanting you to grow up away from all that in the ‘wild, bandit-infested gutters’ of lower Egypt (an awful sentiment she eventually got over after experiencing the bountiful culture firsthand).

You know from the following years that some sort of arrangement had been made that the family would travel back and forth to England often enough that would allow you a ‘proper education’ and keep your name in good standing for your eventual launch into the matching market as a teenager.

You’d been a bit too young at the time to truly understand the move, only knowing that one day everything went from mild and rainy to suddenly everything was far too sweltering and uncomfortable. Your mother plied you with all sorts of cold sweet treats at first until you inevitably adjusted to the foreign climate. But besides leaving your newly beloved cousin behind, it hadn’t really affected you in any sort of considerably extensive way. 

You longed for the meadows of your cousin’s backyard, but found beauty in the tropical fauna that now grew in your estate. There were new rules to abide by - different boundaries and regulations your parents put in place for your safety in unfamiliar territory - but once you’d learned that goats replaced pigs and that you began conversations with 'As-salaam ‘alykum' instead of 'Hello' it had been a smooth transition.

The biggest change came in the form of the towering architecture that was visible in the distance even in the middle of the city. Once you’d taken an interest as a youngling, your father allowed you to venture with him outside the walls of Cairo to see the massive monuments in person.

It was a normal occurrence to glance outside and gaze upon the remnants of Ancient Egypt. Locals hardly batted an eye at the things that dazzled the imaginations of foreign tourists - not unfeeling towards their history, merely conditioned to register it as background noise. All you had to do was travel minutes outside of Cairo proper to come face to face with the marvels that were the colossal pyramids of old. In some areas of the country you couldn’t even walk five feet without stumbling over some ancient piece of civilization or another. Sometimes they were integrated into the newly built infrastructure, others torn down and cataloged to make way for industrial progress.

This was different. These weren’t just any old dusty ruins. 

This was Hamunaptra.

Riding into the courtyard of the long forgotten city, you felt the air get pulled from your lungs as if some higher force desired this to be your final resting place.

Patting the camel’s neck in appreciation of its well fought efforts, your eyes bursting with wonderment couldn’t take the sights in fast enough to really process them. For as ancient and run down as it was, the majority of structures still standing were in impressive condition - the result of millennia hidden from the prying eyes of thieves and foreign kingdoms. The secrets of the New Kingdom were here - preserved intact - and ripe for exploration.

Replacing the pyramids of old, Hamunaptra was a sacred place where only the dead and those who kept them may enter. By all rights and customs, your head would be promptly removed from your shoulders for even daring to set foot on holy ground.

How many figures of vast importance were lying in rest less than ten meters under the topsoil? 

Ahmose I? Amenhotep I, Tuthmose II, Ramesses VII? Nefertiti?

Long have they remained hidden. Countless expeditions with thousands of pounds invested and archaeologists were still no closer to unlocking the secrets of their whereabouts than they were since we’d first learned their names.

You were yanked out of your inner musings by the clopping feet of a large animal that heralded another's arrival, adjusting in your saddle to peer over your shoulder towards the entrance and the figure that crossed over the threshold.

Johnny hadn’t even brought his mount to a full halt before he was suddenly vaulting off his camel, hardly wincing at what must’ve been a jarring impact for his knees as he quickly crossed the distance between and came up next to yours. 

Windswept hair and wardrobe; tanned skin flushed and glistening even under the newly born sun. Ocean blue orbs dazzling with mirth as he reached up with outstretched arms, fingers wiggling seductively beckoning you into his hold.

What was it that was stealing your breath again…?

Swinging a leg over the saddle, you allowed yourself to start sliding far enough down for him to securely grasp onto your waist with meaty well-worked hands, your own landing on his shoulders for a bit of balance. You wrongly assumed he’d place you back on your feet - a blind mistake, caught up in the logistics of getting down and missing the obvious moment his wide grin turned puckish. 

The two of you twirled as he kept you lifted high above his head, squealing in surprise before your own sounds of crowing delight mirrored Johnnys in both volume and excitement.

“Brilliant, lass! Pure brilliant! Left ‘em all in the dust, ye did! Thatta girl!” 

It was hard to tell if the ensuing lightheadedness was the outcome of all the spinning he had you locked into or if it was the result of something else entirely, lowering you down with powerful biceps as he planted an obnoxious kisser right on the side of your face. He was over the top with his fawning, playful in his affection in a way that felt oddly comfortable and left you in girlish giggles. “Gonna be hackin’ that outta their lungs fer weeks and spend even longer nursin’ their bruised egos. Christ, hen, ye should’ve seen yerself go.”

You pulled back from him just enough to give yourself some more breathing room, head tilted up as you responded to his praise with an insinuating remark. “Might’ve had something to do with the sudden bout of speed my camel caught on the back half. You wouldn’t happen to know anything about that, would you Johnny?”

“Eh, poor thing was jus’ as excited tae reach the city as ye were is all.” The way he shrugged his shoulders and cocked his head with a devil may care grin couldn’t disguise the way he spoke with all the innocence of a sweet toothed toddler in a cookie jar.

“Causin’ trouble over there, MacTavish?!” Came the teasing call of your cousin as Kyle rounded the corner of the ruins and brought his camel up to graze alongside where the others stood in the shadow of a crumbled wall, getting down with far less hurry than the two of you had. “Gonna give poor dolly there a conniption if you keep that up.”

“Och! Haud yer wheesht, Garrick! Or ah’ll gie ye a skelpit lug fer yer troubles!” 

That may not have been the King’s English, but you’re fairly confident you understood the sentiment just the same. 

It also hadn’t passed your notice that Johnny’s arm was still firmly snaked around your waist, holding you to him with an iron grip you had no care in the world to escape.

Part of you was almost disappointed when your cousin tugged you away from him, afraid for a moment that Johnny wouldn't relinquish his claim and feeling the possessive strength in his arm up until the last possible second when he finally turned you over to Kyle. 

Swept into your cousin’s arms this time and far more delicately than his predecessor, Kyle raised an eyebrow at his friend, head perched on top of yours. “Laying it on a bit thick there, dontcha think?”

Johnny shrugged, making eye contact at where you were glancing over your shoulder at him and offering you a little wink in return. “Jus’ givin’ our girl here some well earned praise s’all.”

That shouldn’t have pleased you as much as it did. His words sent a shiver of something sinful down your spine, distracting you from the hug your cousin had you currently encased in and forcing the blood in your face to travel southward.

You missed the look Kyle gave him in response, gone and replaced with one of concern as he held you at arm’s length and gave you a thorough once over in order to better ascertain your condition. “And you, dolly? Came out unharmed?”

They had witnessed Graves lashing out at you a few minutes ago, your outcry shocking them into action that toppled him off his horse and sent him rolling hard along the packed earth. Thankfully you hadn’t been the intended target. 

You weren’t sure they’d have let him walk away without a red stain in his gut if that had been the case.

“No, he didn’t get me. The only thing he wounded was his pride.”

As if summoned by your thoughts, the man in question slunk his way along the perimeter of the city, giving your posse a wide berth as the three of you simply watched Graves meander along past with a wobble to his gait. 

Still… he kept his head held high with all the arrogance of a man too stubborn to know when he had been humbled. Grasping the reins of his horse and leaning against the animal in a weak attempt to mask his minor limp, he avoided eye contact with your group except to briefly cast you all a scathing glower tinted with defiance. There was a bite to it aimed especially at your Scottish companion, something that held the promise of things to come that Johnny gladly returned until Graves finally averted his gaze and kept on trudging.

You kept tabs on him until he wandered too far out of view, a gentle hand on your back prompting you to start walking as the rest of the rival entourage slowly trailed into the courtyard.

As the sun climbed ever higher in the early morning sky, the atmosphere amongst the gathered crowd steadied. Now that coin was no longer on the table and the winnings had been begrudgingly handed out (though not without a few snarky comments that simmered under a powder keg of explosive personalities) it was all back to business and barking out orders. 

It was clear the Americans had well funded their endeavors. The amount of workers they’d secured to excavate the site was a bit much in your opinion, but considering the mostly empty saddlebags left hanging from their mounts you imagined they hadn’t felt like dallying around longer than necessary. No, these were the types to come in and seize as much as they could with as much haste as possible in a shoddy get rich quick scheme before telling their associates back home how to make out like bandits with their own weight in gold.

The only one who seemed to actually give a damn about where they were was the older gentleman in a well tailored suit whose image didn't quite seem to gel with the scraggly unkempt mess of salt n pepper hair - their scholar, Klaus Fisker. Danish by the accent; voice as gruff as gravel. You weren’t surprised to see the chain of cigarettes attached to his lips, dropping butts on the ground and lighting another as if he hadn’t had the last one in ages. 

He felt out of place even in his own skin, but you could at least appreciate his attention to detail as he spit out commands in abrasive Arabic from behind an impressive beard, unwilling to let the hired hands do things that could jeopardize the items they were tasked with handling. 

They might be trying to rob this place blind, but at least you were assured their plunder would all make it to the auction blocks in one piece.

They’d set to sprawling out on the north side of the courtyard whilst your group took up camp in the south - enough distance between you lot that the thirty or so of you could play nice for the duration of your visit.

Johnny had moseyed off a few minutes back after assisting your cousin with the task of setting up camp - a luxury you hadn’t previously been afforded in an effort to arrive at your destination before the others. You saw to the camels' needs during that time, making sure they were well fed for their labors and removing their saddles to give them a chance to more comfortably lounge in the shade. 

Once that was done, you took to unpacking the scant items the two of them had previously procured for you, your cousin perched nearby after you’d smacked his hands away from your things to do it yourself.

“Soooo… this is the fabled city, huh?” Kyle leaned against one of the tent posts with his arms crossed, taking stock of all the hired hands clattering about doing this and that. It was obvious the Americans were wasting no time roaming around the site in search of shiny things to pawn back home.

You paid them no mind as you tended to your belongings, already mentally cataloging major structures of importance to explore and document later.

“Well, it’s called a city when in fact it’s actually a large necropolis - a burial site for the pharaohs of the New Kingdom as well as all their worldly treasures. The only living people who were allowed entry were the high priests, their acolytes, and the soldiers tasked with guarding them. Even the slaves they brought in to dig grave sites and haul antiquities were promptly beheaded upon completion so as to be sure the exact location of Hamunaptra was kept an absolute secret. Walk about two hundred paces westward outside the city walls and I’m sure you’ll find an unmarked mass grave where all their remains were dumped.”

“Sounds charming,” came the dry response as he uncorked his waterskin and took a few needed gulps, splashing some on his face for a quick reprieve from the heat, the droplets rolling down his neck to disappear under his linen shirt.

“Well, be glad you’re coming here three thousand years in the future then instead of me digging up your own grave from the past.”

“You’d miss me being your cousin too much, dolly.”

“Perhaps then the Lord could’ve instead seen fit to bless me with one a bit less reprehensible.”

“Oi!”

You couldn’t help your little grin at your own quick wit and his indignation. Unfortunately for him he didn’t get a chance to fire one back, the small banter interrupted by the return of your other companion as he sauntered his way over to stand next to Kyle.

“‘Right.” Johnny clapped his hands together, motioning over his shoulder towards a group of six workers who were starting to haul some equipment further north. “Looks like they’ve started in on clearin’ out the rubble blockin’ that great pylon o’er there. Any idea where ye’ll be wantin’ tae start, lass?”

It caught you off guard to hear yourself being the one addressed, turning your head to find the both of them staring at you expectantly as the voice of leadership. At this point you were so accustomed to them being the ones taking control and calling all the shots that you completely forgot it was you and not them who was the technical expert in this part of the operation. 

They were the ones out of their depths.

It was a realization that was equal parts terrifying and incredibly satisfying after so many days feeling like a chicken strutting around without its head.

You put yourself back in the familiar headspace needed for something like this, standing up and brushing the dirt off your palms as you briefly cased the surrounding points of interest. “I wanna take a look around on the surface first before venturing into the catacombs below. Let’s focus on getting a brief overview of the layout that we can then narrow down for later. Most of these temples and buildings should be untouched and I want to get a glimpse of them first before our ‘friends’ start ransacking everything.”

“Yer the boss, hen.” 

It was said so matter of factly and without any sort of veiled ribbing in his words. This time you were the one in control. And damn if that didn’t make you feel ten feet tall.

It felt good to finally be back in your element after days spent floundering for something sturdy to grasp onto. While you’d been growing ever more comfortable in the situations foisted upon your trio simply through trial by fire, you were finally in a happy medium between the covers of your books and the world beyond. 

It was nice not having to share the space as you made your way deeper into the city with your two self proclaimed bodyguards, unencumbered by gleaning eyes only interested in how much profit they could obtain from pocketable treasures rather than the breadth of history ripe to be storied. You could walk the worn limestone at your leisure, piecing together clues from the golden age of architecture and art. 

The perceived idiocy of it wasn’t entirely lost on you. Here you were in the grandest monument to the wealthiest peoples of both upper and lower Egypt - a discovery that could grant you as much worldly renown and untold riches as was possessed by the very kings concealed below your feet… and all you wanted to do was step through time into a piece of ancient history for the chance to waltz with the ghosts who haunt these hallowed halls.

It wasn’t some giant leap to surmise whose temple stood tall next to the towering height of the statue of Horus, not much alike in its design to the one located miles away in Edfu. Of course that one was built in the Ptolemaic Empire between ten to twelve hundred years beyond this one. Nevertheless, the structure of buildings hadn’t changed much in the ensuing millennia and you’d done enough research on both periods to be able to navigate a temple without much fuss.

You’d needed the boys' assistance to scale up the side of a toppled pillar blocking the entrance, getting a much needed boost from Kyle at the bottom as Johnny hauled you up over the top with a firm grip and steadying hand on your waist. The buildup of drifted sands on the opposite side kept you from needing any further help from them, sliding down the small slope and hesitating at the bottom in front of the main entrance. 

Gods, this was a moment to take in. 

You were almost afraid to look inward; to take that next step into untouched territory that felt more sacred than the importance you had allotted it. The first to do so since it was lost to the shifting desert hidden within a mirage. Everything was so real now there was no mistaking the gravity drawing you in - the weight of all your decisions until now leading you to the steps you weren't sure you were brave enough to take.

But remembering the tales recently come to light of a secret courage you’d discovered you’d always possessed, you allowed curiosity to lead you forward through the doorway of the temple.

…or was that the steadfast hand ghosting over the small of your back? The heat of a corporeal body stood close behind, the soft whisper of ‘go on, m'eudail…’ breathed so delicately against your ear you’d barely heard it murmured?

Who was the last man to walk through this same threshold you found yourself now stepping over? Be he priest or slave? Medjai or king? Perhaps a close relative come to pay homage to Horus before they bid a final farewell before the forever stilled body of their dearest loved one glimpsed its last at the shimmering veil of starlight above.

Your hand was shaking as you brought it to your gaping mouth, enraptured eyes pulled in every direction as you gluttoned yourself on the near perfectly preserved views. The amazed utterances of ‘steamin’ jesus’ and ‘bloody hell’ of the men were mere wisps on the wind compared to the pounding of your heart in your ears.

In your opinion one of the worst misconceptions about the Romans and the Egyptians was that they avoided the usage of color like the plague. Just because time had eroded the polished white marble and beige sandstone did not mean they hadn’t once been just as full of life as the vibrant cultures who created them. It was unfortunate that the elements washed away their former grandeur and such an important part of society's understanding of their craftsmanship.

There was no mistaking as you entered through the courtyard and into the hypostyle hall, surrounded by rows and rows of wide stone columns of staggered heights that supported the sloped roof and allowed the hall to be lit by clerestory windows. Every inch is elaborately decorated with colorful displays of pharaohs and gods and ceremonies for worship and life and funeral arrangements. They were reminiscent of the ones famously carved at the Temple of Karnak, but upon seeing how detailed and dynamic these were up close you realized just how lacking you thought the former truly was.

You weaved between pillars raking your gaze up and down, some motifs familiar while others spoke of things you hadn’t learned in your books. Perhaps they were rituals held only within this necropolis, or maybe the other outside temples had them at one point, but were lost to erosion and vandalism…

All paths lead further into the inner sanctuary - the heart of the temple and what had at the time been considered the home of the gods.

The room was deep and narrow, a beautifully preserved statue of Horus with his sacred boat placed at the end of the hall. The walls were decorated with mythology, weaving the tales of his birth from Isis and Osiris. The murder of his father by his uncle Seth and the ensuing battle between the two gods. His triumph and aftermath of their bloody escapades. The healing of his left eye by Thoth. 

If you closed your eyes you could almost smell the incense left burning at the altar, threadbare tapestry fluttering with the draft held in place by instruments of worship. There would have been chanting as high priests read from sacred texts, prayers for the dead and celebrations for their deity. 

“You wanna tell us what the hell we’re lookin’ at here, dolly?” There wasn’t any mocking in Kyle’s tone, just pure inquisitiveness at the unique carvings on all sides of the chamber.

“I could spend a very long time educating you on the importance of where we are, but I don’t think you’d appreciate it enough to spare the proper breath.” Your eyes hadn’t strayed from the intricate bas reliefs on the wall for a moment as you addressed his remark, the awe of the sight prominent in the breathiness of your vibrato. “What I will tell you is that we are in a place of great importance and that you will never find a more perfect specimen of what life looked like three thousand years ago than you are right now.”

Johnny was oddly quiet as he observed your surroundings, scrutinizing them with an eye that suggested he was giving them far more attention than someone like your cousin afforded them. Curious for a soldier and treasure hunter to take such an interest in the ancient world considering it wasn’t anything of monetary value. 

Kyle was the one who eventually spoke up about moving onto the next site, lingering back in the doorway to the chambers as you stopped in front of the falcon at the end of the sanctuary. Clasping your hands in front of your chest, you bowed your head in reverent respect for the god of the sun and prayed to him for safe passage and good fortune, thanking him for letting you all enter into his domain and promising to do no damage or harm.

Once you’d finished with your silent parting, you were surprised to lift your head and see Johnny doing the same to the right of you, eyes still closed for a few moments longer than yours until he straightened up and glanced your way, a gentle hand on your shoulder turning you towards the exit where your cousin patiently awaited.

You could’ve sworn you felt someone’s eyes on your back, watching as you made your way from the chambers and back out into the heat of the city.

Horus was not the only one you visited. There were temples of worship to most of the major gods; Anubis, Osiris and his wife Isis, Amun-Ra, Hathor, Thoth. You’d even located Ptah amongst the structures despite him having no relation to anything regarding the Egyptian life cycle as the others did. As the god of construction and craftsmanship, perhaps he had been placed there to honor the vast array of noble architecture. Or maybe the occupants of whatever nearby temporary housing complex was erected somewhere outside the city walls created it first to honor their patron deity and bring them good fortune in their hard labors. 

Whatever the reason, you’d stopped inside and paid your respects just the same.

Empty boat pits lined up alongside the major temples. Whether for the gods themselves or the ones buried beneath you couldn't say. You hadn’t expected to find one still intact unless they were buried somewhere. There were surprisingly still traces of their remains at least, Johnny lowering you down gently into the depths as you gathered small fragmented pieces of wood so brittle most of them fell apart as soon as they met the warmth of your hands.

With each new place visited the more overtaken you were with each new find. There were long stretches where you were stuck silent in reverence and others you couldn’t stop going on and on with enthusiastic exuberance, pointing out important symbols and phrasing on the walls, the significance of an animal statue or the items left discarded by the last priests to visit centuries ago.

Truthfully you were glad to have been so lost in the moment that you were incapable of giving even half a care to the well meaning snickering of your cousin as he watched you halt every few paces to gawk at the glory of a bygone civilization laid out in front of you like an open banquet. But really who was he to judge when you’d seen him turn stupid at the sight of a tall glass of expensive amber brandy?

Your infatuation was far more dignified than his liquor cabinet full of rare imported inebriation juice.

But it was all in good fun, carrying on for the majority of the morning bleeding into mid afternoon until your tired legs humbly requested a small reprieve. The boys continued to entertain your chirpings long after returning to camp, smiling at you over their cooked portions of lunch, completely enamored by the way your eyes lit up to match your grin now that you were free to be unabashedly passionate to your heart's content.

The city itself was comparable to an iceberg; for how much there was on top to explore, the real meat of Hamunaptra was underground in the vast unexplored catacombs winding miles long and spanning the full breadth of the walled area above. 

It was by mere happenstance that you stumbled upon a way down into the area beneath - quite literally. You’d felt your foot slip with a rather ungraceful startled squawk of surprise, your stomach dropping as a piece of the stone path crumbled out from under you and tried to drag you down along with it. It was only due to the quick reaction of Kyle’s hand latching onto your bicep and dragging you backwards to hold securely against his chest that you hadn’t had an untimely discovery of just how far down that rabbit hole goes.

Once you’d calmed your racing heart from the unexpected fright, you’d been ushered back away from the opening as the two of them prodded the entrance for any more structural weaknesses that might cause it to further collapse. Besides a small chunk that had already looked iffy, they deemed it safe enough to stand near as Johnny got on his hands and knees to peer into the blackness.

“Jus’ a blank void. Cannae see shite down there.” He rolled back onto the balls of his feet, resting his forearms on his knees as he turned his gaze upwards again to where you and your cousin stood. “Dunnae think this is the place tae go down, Garrick. Might have tae try somewhere further south.”

The problem was that the actual entrance to the catacombs was currently occupied by the Americans. They’d hadn’t been unwelcoming so far, but none of you necessarily wanted to test that considering the real prizes were waiting down there. And even though you were fairly confident your boys could take on more than you thought they could, you didn’t want to press your luck or ruffle any feathers - especially when said birds were equipped with firearms.

But for all you knew, there was only one way in.

The two of them debated in the background as you took a gander around the area, trying to put together why that hole was even there in the first place. The structural integrity up until now had been solid, having walked a decent chunk of the grounds in the past few hours since you’d arrived. For there to be a sinkhole when it was so impor–

Something catching at the corner of your eye had you swiveling your head, a sparkle in the sands pulling your feet in its direction while your companions remained oblivious. Tucking your skirts under your legs as you kneeled, you wiped away the sand to reveal what looked like polished hammered metal, silver glinting in the sunlight as you brushed away more and more from its surface. 

You started to gather you had a pretty good idea what this thing was doing over here.

A large round disk - heavy too as you tugged at the newly revealed edge in an attempt to tip it upright with little success. Too stubborn to ask for help, it was only once you got back onto your feet that you were able to haul it up into a position it could be balanced on its own. 

You chortled quietly to yourself as you figured out exactly how it was you were going to accomplish your task, feeling good in your cleverness and turning to see your companions still at odds with each other on the direction you all should take next. The discussion appeared to be getting rather heated from what you could tell, the two of them standing toe to toe as arms gradually became more and more animated.

It entertained you just how unaware they were of anything outside their own minor argument, watching in growing amusement as they failed to notice you and your find that would ultimately put an end to their incessant babble if they only stopped to pay attention. 

But you were burning the daylight required for this and frankly you didn't have the patience to wait for them to finish.

“Oh booooys…” You called over with a sing songy lilt, watching as they came to the sudden realization you were no longer next to them and mildly panicking before their eyes fell upon you a few meters away, leaning the large mirrored object against your legs and knocking your foot against the winged falcon at the bottom. “Would you be ever so kind enough to cease your incessant yapping and come give me a hand with this?”

While Kyle got to work securing a hefty length of rope to a nearby obelisk, you’d located another one of those mirrors a few feet away, dragging it over to position it opposite the first and tilting it in a way that the sunlight would catch on the other as well. Thankfully you had made this discovery with a few hours of daylight left to spare. Otherwise your ancient party trick would’ve had to wait until tomorrow to be shown.

Once again Johnny had wandered off unannounced, leaving you and your cousin standing around waiting for minutes longer than you would've liked only to reappear holding a pack of smokes in one hand and a bundle of cloth in the other.

Hands perched on your hips, you found yourself mildly annoyed at his little disappearing act when he was supposed to be helping out here. These mirrors hadn’t exactly been light. “That’s the second time today you’ve trotted off to nowhere without prior warning.”

Tossing the cigarettes to your cousin who gave a grateful nod, Johnny stopped a few feet away to watch you clean the dirt off the reflective surface. “Apologies, lass. Had tae take a leak.”

Ugh. Men.

You scrunched your nose up at the vulgar thought. “I did not need to know that, thank you very much.” 

Johnny shrugged, unbothered. “Ye asked.” 

The slight offense was forgotten as he held the bundle out to you, your ruffled expression dropping to one of doe eyed curiosity. 

“What’s this?” You asked even as you took it from his hands and started unravelling the cloth.

“Didnae jus’ empty mah bladder while ah was away. Took a stroll o’er tae see our American friends fer a wee chat. Bartered fer Garrick’s cigs and ah…” Johnny rubbed at the back of his neck, gesturing with his free hand at the parcel. “Ah dinnae ken how helpful it’ll be, but ah thought it couldnae hurt tae ‘ave ye be well prepped jus’ in case.”

By the time he finished speaking, you’d been staring at the items in your hands for a few seconds, dumbstruck at the professional quality of the archaeological tools you’d unwrapped. You’d had a set with you in your original belongings, but it had been old, worn down, and incomplete. Now they were mere toys for the fishies at the bottom of the Nile.

Blinking up at him, your tongue felt like it was stuck to the roof of your mouth, keeping you from speaking until you forced yourself to swallow. “Thank you… truly.”

He didn’t say anything in response, just a subtle nod and a quirk of his lips before he turned and strode over to Kyle to finish helping sort things out. You watched his back and shoulder muscles untense, a swagger in his step that gave you the impression of a man content with his own workings. You couldn’t help but bite your lip with a small smile, a giggle under your breath as you examined the gift again before rolling it back up and securing it with the provided buckle.

Kyle went ahead underground, rappelling down the rope and leaving you and Johnny on the surface to eventually follow behind once it was deemed safe enough. The shadows swallowed your cousin like a hungry maw, quickly out of sight from your spot peering down despite the light being bounced into the chasmic pit. It was a few moments before he reached the bottom, the sudden jostled thudding of his boots the only indication he’d landed roughly on the ground.

“It’s bloody dark down here!” You snorted at Kyle’s muffled proclamation, Johnny joining in with his own chuckle a heartbeat later.

“Ye’ll be alright, lad! We’ll come rescue ya from the boogeyman in a jiff!”

Your cousin muttered something too faint for you to hear from above, but you had a pretty good idea as to the contents of it.

Once he got the green light from Kyle, Johnny gave the rope a quick tug to confirm it was no longer attached and began reeling the length back up so that you could go next, Johnny following up at the rear.

“Ye certainly seem tae ‘ave found yer footin’.” Having recovered from the earlier lapse in his usual personality, he was back to sounding his normal self.

You felt good about the compliment, far more at ease than you had been given the past few days. It was nice to have your countenance acknowledged as something positive for a change. 

“That’s what happens when you take a fish out of a river and toss it up a tree. It starts gasping for air and questioning its worth until it returns to its home in the water.” Stepping away from the pillar you were leaning against, you met him halfway as he approached you with the length of rope. “Survivability and exploration are part of your repertoire. This is mine.”

Johnny stepped in front of you, taking up far more of your space than was proper or necessary for him to secure the slip knot around your hips. Fronts barely brushing up against each other, round buds hardening at the teased contact. Eyes kept locked in place by the enchantment only he seemed to wield over you. Deft hands worked to tie the rope, taking special care for your safety as he gave them a harsh tug to ensure they stayed put while the two of you shared the same breath. The unexpected movement sent you stumbling into his chest, face warming at the contact mirroring the spike of heat in his eyes.

“Good tae finally see ya, m'eudail...” Fervid pools of oceanic blue scorched your insides raw until you were sure white hot flames were licking up your throat and parching your mouth dry. The twinkle in his eyes telling you he knew exactly the effect he held over you.

You’d barely managed to eke out, “...thank you for seeing me.”

There was a sort of pleased rumble in his chest before he took a step back, smothering the pyre he’d lit in your bones and tilting you off access to the point of almost stumbling forward without his presence to keep you standing. He laughed at your reaction, motioning with his hand towards the gaping pit at your feet.

“Go on then, lass. Let’s see wha’ the desert’s been hidin’.”

It wasn’t the most graceful entrance you’d ever made in your life, but eventually once you’d lessened the death grip you held on the rope and allowed gravity to assist in your descent it hadn’t taken much to get you at the bottom. Kyle had been there to keep you from landing in a haphazard heap, unlatching you from the knots so that Johnny could have a turn. 

You’d halted him from moving as you peered into the shadows, hardly able to make out anything beyond vague shapes and blindly reaching out in the very dim light. Damn thing had to be nearb–

Hands met polished metal just as expected, brushing away the cobwebs and tilting the mirrored surface to catch on the beam filtered down from up top. You smiled over at your cousin, positioning it just - “And then there was…”

Suddenly the entire chamber was awash in stolen sunlight, illuminating the room without the need for candle or torch and leaving you with a smug satisfaction at the impressed look on his face. “...light.”

“Well I’ll be… MacTavish! Get your ass down here and have a look!”

Johnny wasted no time in jumping off the edge at the urging. It had startled you to see him drop so quickly, his prior experience in the act evident with the casual confidence he rappelled down the line. Practically puffed up like a peacock once he’d straightened and saw you gawking at him, tossing you a wink that had Kyle rolling his eyes and giving you a small shove onward as the three of you began to explore your new surroundings.

“Well this is certainly what we signed up for, wasn't it?”

“A whole surface full of colorful architecture and you’re most thrilled by an embalming room?” You shot over your shoulder at him from where you examined the small animal heads on a few nearby jars.

“Embalming?” Came the quizzical response from your cousin, retracting his hand from whatever container he’d been poking at on one of the nearby shelves.

It hadn’t taken much sleuthing on your part to deduct that conclusion. The tables arranged in rows throughout the chamber, large earthen pots along the walls smelling of faint rot, rolls of fragile linen stacked on shelves. The scent of palm wine and salt masked under all the muskiness.

“For the afterlife, dearest cousin.” There was a small smile on your face as you spoke to him with mild patronization. “This was the preparation room.” 

Pointing over at one of the stone tables closest towards him, you could almost make out the dark splotches of bloodstain hidden under the thick layer of dust.

“If you’d have died three thousand years ago and were wealthy enough to afford it, a chief embalmer wearing a mask of Anubis would have laid your corpse atop that table, gutted you like a pig, scooped out your insides, scrambled your brain with a hot poker, and then placed your internal organs inside one of these,” you held up an empty canopic jar you’d been inspecting that would’ve held a liver, “before smothering you in natron for forty days until you were a dried out husk of a man ready to be wrapped up in linen and packed away in a pretty colored box.”

“Mummies, Garrick.” Johnny gave him a hearty slap on the shoulder, softening the sting with a gentler one as he brushed past. “Good ol’ mummies.”

“It’s a wonder your mum ever let you study this shit in the first place...” Kyle remarked as he glanced down at the same spot you’d been looking, sidestepping the table as if there was fresh viscera still dampening the stone.

“I won’t tell her what was in those books if you don’t,” you added with a little dark humor before placing the container back where you’d found it, gaze raking over the rest of it as you moved through the room and out into the hallways beyond. 

Away from the clever structure of the mirrors there was at last a need for torchfire, your two companions holding one alight each as they took up the front and rear of your little group, sandwiching you between with Kyle taking up the lead. The air was stale down here, a constant itch at the back of your throat that travelled into your lungs with every breath. The corridors were sloped at the sides, thick cobwebs dangling like vines covering almost every inch of their surface. You made sure to keep your footsteps in the middle of the path, not wanting to accidentally back up into one and getting them all over your skin.

It impressed you how the pair of them communicated, speaking reminiscent how they might’ve clearing a battlefield rather than exploring ancient caverns. They parroted directions back and forth to each other, somehow keeping track of where you were long after you’d been able to keep up with the twisting path ahead. You passed by small antechambers filled with various supplies, assuming wherever you’d popped in was less a part of the tombs themselves and more the storage areas for the priests.

Eventually the walls started looking a little less run down and a little more smooth, empty metal brackets for holding wooden torches poking out of the stone. Whoever put this place together seemed to have taken a little more care in this section.

You found yourself pausing in front of another entryway, staring down a dark corridor with sconces lining either side. For all intents and purposes it wasn't anything remarkable; it didn’t stand out really from any of the others you’d passed by this point. It was just the first to look like someone had taken more care with the cut of the stone.

“Spy somethin’, lass?” 

You were vaguely aware of Kyle halting up ahead, backtracking as you reached out for Johnny’s torch that he willingly passed over.

“I just want to take a quick look down this one…” Your feet were already moving even as you spoke, lighting the sconces you passed with the weight of something in your chest tugging you forward. The walls were bare save for the oil lamps, but there was a subtle slope to the floor that led you downward and piqued something in the back of your mind.

About fifteen or so meters later, you found yourself standing inside an antechamber that was sparsely lined around the perimeter with only a few tables full of valuable artifacts. 

“More storage?” asked Johnny, skimming over the objects laid out on a table shaped like a…

…wait.

That wasn’t a table. It was a curved bed frame made up of the elongated bodies of two lionesses. 

Suddenly, everything clicked. 

You scrutinized the objects more closely, the cogs turning rapidly in your head as your eyes widened further with every new find. A painted wooden chest. A stool overflowing with sandals. Shabti dolls tossed haphazardly onto a thin lumpy mattress.

You bolted through the open doorway to your right, the other two shouting after you as you came to a halt inside the next room, torch clattering to the floor at the sight you took in. 

It wasn’t as grand as the pictures you’d seen of others like it elsewhere - certainly not possessing the same majesty or opulence as that of King Tut or Ramses IV. The room itself was small by comparison, not surprising considering the size of the annex you just exited and its meager furnishings. There hadn't been as much thought or care in the scenery depicted on the walls. But there was still a subtle elegance to its design that hinted at someone more important and incorporated all the way down to the large stone sarcophagus in the middle of the room.

“Fuckin’ hell!” Johnny might as well have not said anything for all the good it did reaching your ears, drowned out as white noise as all your attention was pinpoint fixated on the large box in the center.

You couldn't believe it. You could not believe it. Forget every moment that ever came before this because there was no way in hell it could ever live up to the overwhelming well of emotions bubbling up to the surface threatening to overflow from your tear ducts.

Was this how Howard Carter felt the first time he laid eyes on the burial chamber of Tutankhamun? Did he have to remind himself to manually breathe so as not to pass out? Did he yell and rejoice or just stand there in abject shock the way you did now? Was this figure nobility or just of high station? 

Whose golden death mask laid in wait inside the coffin housing it?

On newborn foal limbs you slowly approached the stone sarcophagus, ignoring the babble going on between the others and the questions being lobbed your way. Your vision was blurry enough from unshed tears that you were having a hard time making heads or tails of the hieroglyphics adorning the box, eyes frantic for the cartouche that would reveal everything.

You at last found the oval, tracing over every symbol until your brain supplied you with the accurate translation.

“Hatshepsut.”

This was Hatshepsut.

Wife of Thutmose II. Fifth Pharaoh of the Eighteenth Dynasty. Egypt's second queen regent.

Six inches in front of you.

Johnny stepped up beside you, making his own assessments from the various artwork sprawled across every corner of the room. “Gonna take a gander that’s someone important?”

That was a massive understatement. “Ruler of Egypt for twenty two years, one of the most prolific builders in all of history, responsible for the Temples at Karnak, Pakhet, and the masterpiece that is the Djeser-Djeseru. Peace and prosperity flourished under her rule and she was lauded for re-establishing vital trade routes previously lost to war and conflict.”

It was the first time since entering the chamber that you looked somewhere other than the coffin, meeting his gaze with the still wide eyed one of your own. “Yes, Johnny. She’s important.”

“But we already found her husband, yeah? So why wasn’t she buried with him in the Valley of the Kings?” Honestly you were going to have to give your cousin more credit for all the things he picked up on through the sheer osmosis of growing up in your vicinity.

“There were rumors that her stepson Thutmose III held resentment for her after the two of them became co-regent towards the end of his father’s reign. Politically he would have been afraid of being seen as the lesser candidate to succeed his father’s throne considering his young age. There’s documentation of how he tried to belittle Hatshepsut’s accomplishments throughout his life and many believe he was the one to deface and try to destroy most records of her from the history books.” 

The destruction of her statues, the erasure of her name from chiseled walls; there was a great deal of work that went into trying to keep her from being remembered. “He must've honored her enough as a ruler to bury her with dignity, but not enough to place her somewhere she would be found.”

Here amongst the other hidden kings of old.

“Makes you wonder who else is buried down here…” Kyle motioned over to another doorway on the eastern wall of the chamber, already inching towards it in curiosity. “Think we’ll find another one through here?”

“Unless there was a sudden fashion for corpses getting dipped in pure gold a few millennia back I doubt you’ll come upon one in the treasury room.” 

“No.” The way his eyes lit up was positively cartoonish, shaking his head with a cautious hurry to his steps almost as if he suspected you were pulling his leg, only to pause in the doorway not unlike you had when you’d first entered the burial chamber. The moan that left his lips was practically lewd as he supported his weight against the frame, taking in whatever he’d discovered out of view that had him practically buckling at the knees. “Christ, I'm about to be rich…”

Johnny rolled his eyes in exaggerated exasperation, the jovial smirk on his face betraying his fake ire at your cousin's inflated antics.

“Pump yer cock tae the trove some other time. Best be crackin’ on if we wanna keep makin’ progress before sundown.” Softer to you he added, “We’ll come back again, lass. There’s still plenty more explorin’ tae be had down ‘ere, aye?”

You knew you couldn’t linger here forever. And whether you’d return to this place or not she would have plenty of visitors soon enough. Now that you’d proven Hamunaptra’s existence there'd be historians and archaeologists flooding to the site in droves to get a glimpse of this lost piece of history and those inside it.

She wouldn't have to be alone anymore.

Resting your forehead against the cold stone lid of the sarcophagus, you imagined the person lying reposed within; the life she would have lived and the people who’d come to care for her even long past expiration. Closing your eyes, you allowed yourself to connect with the spirit on the other side, whispering words of gratitude and comfort to the soul at rest. “We didn’t forget. The world still knows your name, and we are all the more better for you having existed. May you forever find peace in the Field of Reeds, Pharaoh.”

It was only then that you allowed yourself to be led out of the room, casting one last glance over your shoulder to the figure sleeping peacefully in a tomb fit for a queen.

It was hard to shake off the emotions of witnessing the final resting place of such a great and powerful woman, constantly straying back to it as the three of you continued forward with your current venture. At this point you weren’t sure what discovery could possibly be better than rediscovering the body of a three thousand year old pharaoh, but far be it for you to call it a day when the other pair seemed so eager to continue.

Heads whipped upwards and the three of you froze, the sudden sound of dozens of chittering things scurrying overhead, torches raised to illuminate the ceiling in search of the source only to come up empty. You couldn't tell if that was a relief or if that only added to your paranoia.

“Must be movin’ inside the walls...” Johnny’s murmurings didn't do much to ease your nerves, not exactly a fan of creepy things with multiple tiny legs crawling around where you couldn't see. Hair stood on end and goosebumps ran the length of your spine, scooting just a tad bit closer to the Scotsman as you carried on with your journey.

The tunnels narrowed to an almost claustrophobic size, the lot of you having to duck your heads to avoid hitting them on the carved rock. Cobwebs dangled in front of your face, having to constantly bat them away to keep from accidentally inhaling them into your mouths. The passage went on and on without any sign of any other rooms, apparently having taken a wrong turn somewhere further back that led away from the royal wing and onto wherever the hell you’d ended up now.

“Maybe we should turn back?” You suggested at one point, only to be shot down by the others.

“Don’t worry, dolly.” Kyle placed a placating hand on your arm, a warm smile helping to ease the worries of your mind. “We’re not gonna get lost. Got the way out right up here.” He tapped on the side of his head for emphasis, apparently confident in his abilities to get you back to the embalming room safely.

“And when he inevitably screws it all up then ye have me who actually remembers.” The cough you spluttered wasn’t enough to hide the chuckle from Johnny’s words, laughing in earnest as your cousin walked up to him and tried to wrestle him into an easy headlock. It warmed your heart to see them so spirited and boyish with one another, a gentle reminder that there were still kind souls within that hadn’t been completely hardened by a life of brutality.

It took a few more turns until you finally arrived at an area big enough for you all to stand in at your full height. It was a bit surprising when you realized the carved bottom half of a human was completely obstructing the way forward, a thick stone platform embedded in the floor from where the statue must’ve fallen through from the world above.

Kyle recognized it the same time you did, bringing his torch up to inspect the dark coloration of the stone that matched the upper portion in the courtyard. “Huh. The legs of Anubis. Well it looks like we’ve found where the rest of the statue went.”

“Was wondering why the Bembridge scholars said it was a full body sculpture...” You were fully aware of the contents supposedly held inside the base, recalling the conversation you’d had with Johnny on the boat a few days back when he’d wrongfully accused you of only being out here for the money. 

“Well, here you go, mister treasure hunter.” The hem of your skirt flared out as you turned on your heels to face Johnny, one hand on your hip with the other pointing behind and a grin on your tilted head. “You wanted something for your troubles? Here’s your chance - the Book of Amun-Ra. Should be a secret compartment somewhere in there if you want to take a whack at it.”

He flashed his canines at you, a sweaty arm brushing up against yours as he walked up to the base and started reaching for the bag slung over his shoulder. “Dunnae mind if ah do.”

The droning of garbled voices from somewhere nearby gave you all pause, already on edge from the mysterious bug encounter earlier and the overall eerie quality of the catacombs. The atmosphere in the group shifted as Kyle motioned for you to press up against the statue. Handing over his torch the same time Johnny set his on the ground, both reached into their respective holsters and withdrew their firearms, hammers pulled back and pistols at the ready.

The droning grew louder and louder, breaths steadying in anticipation of whatevers approach. Johnny giving Kyle a quick nod of unspoken agreement as the two darted out from behind the statue–

Ten loaded pistols aimed right at each other's faces from both sides as the two groups found themselves engaged in a standoff. The hired workers squirmed antsily behind the American’s, you holding out your own torch as if it would do anything against a loaded gun.

Roze was the first to cut the tension, a wobbly frustration to her voice. “Sweet Jesus, you tryin’ to turn us into mummies too, gents?”

Guns lowered slowly to their owner's sides as everyone breathed a sigh of relief, all of you apparently on the same wavelength that this place was starting to mess with your heads.

“Maybe don’t make a habit of sneakin’ up on people and you won't get shot,” Kyle snarked back with a quiet huff.

A greasy pit dropped in the middle of your stomach upon noticing Graves amongst their team, mood turning sour as he opened his mouth with that stupid patronizing tone of his. “Well maybe if you boys learned to keep your noses out of where they don't belong you too might find yourselves living a little longer.”

“Hey,” came the confused voice of Hutch from the back, stepping forward from the group as he gestured towards the bundle of tools wrapped in your arms, “hey, that’s my toolkit!”

Johnny didn’t let him any closer than that, raising his pistols again which immediately prompted the other trigger happy morons to do the same. “Think yer mistaken there, lad. That there’s hers.”

Hutch was smart enough to retreat back to his spot, taking one look at your Scottish friend and rethinking his life choices. “Must be... my mistake...”

“Enough of this!” shouted one of the others, Oz motioning with his head to move out of their way. “This here’s our territory. Go run along and look somewhere else.”

“Claimed it first, mate.” The toothy smile on your cousin’s face was a mask for the slithering creature under his skin preparing to strike, given away only by the deadness in his eyes. “Might want to reconsider your next move if you don’t want to join these poor sods here in the afterlife.”

Graves was more than happy to take the bait, a mocking sneer hidden behind an amused chuckle. “Would ya look at that. Pretty boy Garrick here thinks he still has the guts to go toe to toe even after high tailing it away from that fight in Turkey.”

“Ye shut yer mouth, Graves!” Johnny barked straight venom, raising his voice as the muscle in Kyle’s jaw jumped, grip only tightening on his loaded firearm. 

“Woah there!” Graves continued to antagonize from behind spiked teeth. “Down, boy! Someone outta put a leash around your neck and remind you of your place.”

The tension in the room was growing exponentially at a rate you weren’t sure could be interrupted anymore, mind scrambling for anything to diffuse the situation before someone pulled a trigger that couldn’t be undone. Twenty five of them against three– two of you. Those weren’t odds you were willing to chance.

It was by sheer luck you heard the shifting of sand under your feet, daring a glance down at the floor to watch a pebble disappear through a crack and revealing a chamber below. If the statue of Anubis was wedged deep into the floor… then maybe…

The next thing you did was possibly the stupidest move of your entire life.

You walked out in front of ten loaded guns.

“Gentlemen, gentlemen. Please.” One by one you began lowering the barrels, the shaking in your hand the only thing giving away the nerves underneath so eloquently masked by the English charm of your disarming smile, the perfect picture of ladylike decency in a room full of missing manners.

Ignoring the heated looks your companions sent your way in favor of focusing on the unruly Americans, even Roze seemed to fluster from such a rapid change in atmosphere. “There’s no need for such excitement. You’re all men of intellect here. Surely you wouldn’t let yourselves be overcome by a bit of schoolyard slander.” 

They all glanced between each other in conflicted confusion, not sure what was happening but unable to summon the emotional intelligence to deal with the situation. The secret to breaking a man - fluffing their egos while simultaneously giving them a dressing down. 

“Now,” you continued, satisfied when their postures relaxed and their weapons were no longer facing each other, “since we all learned how to share when we were younger, I don’t see anything wrong with letting you fine folk get to work on this statue here.” You finally met the stern gazes of your companions, secretly pleading with your eyes for them to go along with what it was you were saying. “There are other places to dig…”

A few tense moments passed before Johnny lowered his pistols and offered you his hand, sending one more scathing look at the others before leading you from the room with Kyle at the rear.

“Happy digging! And best of luck!” You shouted with a good natured wave to the other group, flashing them one more smile before being tugged out of view around the next corner. It wasn't until you were far enough out of earshot that he relented his tight grip.

Your back met the wall behind you, startling a gasp from your lips as Johnny suddenly crowded you against it with a simmering expression and a finger in your face. “Donnae ever do that again, lass! Do ye have any idea what would’ve happened if one of those triggers slipped?!”

His anger had never been directed your way before, just as intense as every other emotion he’d always expressed. Johnny didn’t know how to do things by halves and that was evident in the way he processed feelings as well. It tore at your chest, the rage in his eyes burning holes in your heart that left you aching and blind to see it for what it really was. 

The cool confidence you’d pretended to exude earlier fell away under his harsh judgment, the girl underneath who’d been terrified for her friend's safety and only wanted to help revealed underneath. You tried to shrink back from his gaze as far as the space would allow - which in reality was practically nothing. The stinging behind your eyes, the flood of emotions rising to the surface from the earlier threat of confrontation combined with this unanticipated lambasting left you shaking.

You tried to explain. “T-There’s a chamber underneath that room. If we can find a way down then we can try to bust our way up from the bottom. W-We can steal the treasure right out from under their noses.”

“I dunnae care what yer reasonin’! That was naive and foolhardy and ye know damn well better than tae put yerself in harm’s way like that! Ye could’ve been shot! You could’ve–!” He cut himself off with an infuriated growl, hands slamming into the wall beside your head as his own bowed forward. For a moment you thought Johnny would continue with his admonishing tirade, huffing out a breath like an enraged bull as fingers dug into the stone.

You held as still as you could, unable to turn away from the penetrative orbs searching through your soul. Something must’ve shone in your watery eyes that brought him out of the ‘what ifs’ and back into the here and now, stare softening into weariness as he leaned the last bit forward to rest his head on top of yours with lidded eyes.

You didn’t know what to make of it as you stood trapped between him and the wall, listening to his soothing baritone as he began murmuring something soft in his native tongue. You weren’t sure if he was speaking to himself or to you, but it had the effect either way of settling most of your nerves like you would a frightened animal. Gentle lips pressed a kiss to the top of your head, pulling back to look you in the eyes with a grounding weight before quietly uttering, “C'mon, lass. Let’s go find ye that room.”

Where Johnny was a flintlock, Kyle was a smoldering ember.

He said nothing as Johnny led you all through twisting catacombs, following some unknown path he’d mapped out in his head that he assured should lead you all to the level below. The silence from your cousin was deafening, hurting just as much as Johnny’s earlier explosion but cutting far deeper. The fact that he hadn’t spoken up when you were being manhandled only confirmed to you how pissed he must be.

Keeping your voice low despite the close quarters ensuring the conversation wouldn't be private anyways, you finally summoned enough courage to address the man following behind you.

“Are you just going to keep being mad at me?”

“I’m not mad.”

The breath you exhaled was loud as you halted your movement, forcing Kyle to come to a quick stop so as not to run into your back. “You could at least have the decency not to lie to me.”

“Not lying. We need to keep moving…” It wasn’t ‘dolly’ he said at the end there. It was your real name.

That’s how you knew you fucked up.

Turning on your heel, you instantly hated the unphased expression he wore, wishing he would just snap at you the way Johnny did so that you could get it over with already. But no. That wasn’t Kyle’s style. He let his anger fester under his skin and rot away at his internal organs until you could see the decay in his eyes.

You were gonna have to push him. 

Thankfully your other companion had sensed the impending conflict and kept moving farther down the hall to grant the two of you a bit of space. “Over two decades of hanging around each other and you think I don’t know just how much you want to throttle me for what I did back there?”

“You’re a grown woman who can make her own decisions.”

“And as we’ve already established it was a stupid one and I deserve to get a scolding.”

“Johnny did just fine with his version.”

“You’re not Johnny.”

“The accent give that away?” 

Damn it, this was getting you nowhere.  “What gave it away was that he has enough emotional intelligence to get his rage out instead of letting it systematically destroy him.”

A vein twitched in Kyle's forehead, the only tell you’d hit a nerve. Perfect.

“If I had a problem I’d say something about it.”

“If that was the case then you wouldn’t have spent all these years burying your problems at the bottom of a bottle!”

That hadn’t at all been the sentence you'd meant to say, immediately regretting the spewed out words as soon as they left your lips. Kyle's eyes narrowed down to slits, his jaw clenching and muscles bulging in his arms where hands formed into tight fists. God, this was not the time nor place for this conversation.

“How I choose to spend my time is none of your business!”

Hurt mixed with outrage as you took a step toward him and shouted right back in his face, rare tempers flying on both sides. “It is when I have to sit and watch my cousin waste away every night in a bar because he refuses to open up to the only family he has left!”

His scoff was mean, but the red bleeding into his dark brown eyes wasn't from anger. “You think I'm gonna subject the person I love most to every terrible thing I've ever done? The horrors I've had to witness? You think I'm gonna willingly tell you just how much of a fucking monster your cousin has become?!”

“Yes, you asshole! Because I fucking forgive you!”

There was stillness in the corridor. Chests heaved with shallow breaths; words hung suspended between you. Droplets fell to the parched earth beneath your feet as you shed tears enough for the both of you.

Too long had you watched your cousin suffer under the weight of his own choices. 

No more…

“Just because I didn't have to fight in it doesn’t mean I went untouched by the war! None of us did!” Arms spread wide as you bore your own grieving soul in hopes he’d finally let you see his. 

“We were the ones keeping things afloat while the men in our lives left to serve king and country. We were the ones bent over the toilet violently shaking and throwing up every time the postman came, never knowing if the next letter we received was going to begin with the words ‘we deeply regret to inform you’. We were the ones who had to deal with the aftermath of our soldiers returning home from distant fields - changed, violent, distant men. I saw the boys I danced with take their own lives because they couldn’t stand the nightmares that plagued them even years later and hundreds of miles away from the trenches!” 

You would never know what it looked like to see a man with his intestines pouring out of his gut or a decapitated body from where a canon blew it clean off. You would never have to look a man in his eyes as you became responsible for the way the light slowly left them. But that did not mean you didn't know suffering in your own valid way.

“So I don’t care what you had to do over there to come back home to me. I don’t care that there’s blood on your hands that will never wash away. Tell me you strangled a man with those bare hands. Tell me you relished in committing heinous acts of torture. Tell me you stayed in the military far past your original enlistment date just because you realized you found something you were both good at and fucking enjoyed. I don’t fucking care! It was war, Kyle! And whatever it was you had to do was done in order to stop the other monsters - the real ones who didn’t feel remorse for the countless lives they've destroyed - from reaching our shores and doing far worse to people like me than you did to them. You think you don’t deserve to be here for what you’ve done? You think you’re beyond forgiveness? Well guess what? I forgive you! Be a monster for all I care! Just fucking let me in!”

It was the first time your cousin cried since the death of your parents, standing there like a marble statue as it poured over his face like rivers. You could tell he grappled with the vulnerability of your words - the permission being granted to share his pain and trauma with an understanding soul.

You reached out for Kyle the same time he did, crashing together in an embrace that left you even more raw and torn open than before. His iron grip on the back of your head and banded around your waist kept you locked against him, hair dampening with tears matching the ones you were leaving on his shirt, face buried in his chest with your arms clamped around his broad torso.

You’d tried to have this talk with him in the years prior, but each attempt ended in failure either with him shutting you out from the start or you were just too scared to dredge up feelings in the first place. You promised yourself never again would you stand by while the people most important to you suffered - whether by their own actions or any outside force, including you.

“Supposed to be brave for you, dolly…” The strained voice came muffled against your scalp.

“And I was a stupid little girl who didn’t want to see her two favorite people in the whole world end up with bullet holes in their heads. We’ve both made mistakes. No more pushing me away because of them, got it?”

“Yes, ma’am.” He squeezed you extra tight, pressing a firm kiss to the side of your head before finally relinquishing his grip to smooth away the tear tracks from your cheeks. You returned the favor in kind, your fingers lacing with his as the two of you turned to glimpse the last of your trio waiting patiently at the opposite end of the hallway.

Johnny hadn’t said anything the entire time the two of you were duking it out. He merely stood watch as a silent sentinel, his added presence a not uncomfortable witness to the long overdue confession. His gaze lifted from the floor at your approach, heavy with understanding and weighted with something glistening of his own. It wasn’t until you got close enough that it was replaced by a familiar sparkle that spoke well before his mouth did, pushing off from the wall he’d been leaning against and coming to stand directly in your way.

“So… ah’m one of yer favorites now, eh?”

The loud groan of annoyance from Kyle was echoed by the exasperated sigh from you. The playful shove you gave him had you grateful for his constant ability to so easily lighten a heavy mood, feeling like everything would eventually - in time - be alright again.

“Shut up, Johnny.”

Something you hadn’t anticipated in your ‘brilliant plan’ was the fact that the ceiling above would be so damn high, the tools the boys brought with just barely out of reach even for their six foot something statures. The idea was briefly put on hold as they went off to search any nearby rooms for something that could support their weight, returning a short while later dragging a couple decorative jackal statues on small platforms. 

You didn’t want to know whose tomb they’d raided for those, hoping you weren’t offending the dead too terribly badly.

“The statue of Anubis should only be a few feet above us now. So long as we’ve landed in the right area we should come up right between his legs.”

Dirt rained down on the group, the loud clunk of mining tools a steady beat chipping away at the sand and stone above. It was a real effort to keep your eyes on the ceiling so as not to be constantly admiring the flexing of a certain Scotsman’s beefy biceps and corded hairy forearms every time he swung his heavy hammer.

Johnny paused in his endeavors for a quick breather, glancing in your direction and accidentally catching you in one of your rare moments of weakness. Tossing you a quick wink with a knowing smirk, he rolled out the stiffness in his joints from craning his neck before resuming the task at hand. 

Meanwhile you had to act like you weren’t ready to spontaneously combust from the mortification of having been found practically drooling.

“Ye sure we’re gonna find this secret compartment this way?” Johnny coughed as a dusting of sand accidentally fell into his mouth.

To be honest: you weren’t. But at the very least it gave you a chance rather than letting the others be the only ones having a go at snatching it.

“Don’t worry, MacTavish,” chimed in your cousin, grunting with the exertion of swinging his pickaxe. “We’ll get to it before those beastly Americans do and then we’ll have even more riches to rub in Grave’s ugly mug.”

The pair took out their aggressions for the next few minutes, pausing only briefly here and there, driven by the need to reach the golden book before the team up top. The item in question hadn’t been the reason you’d started this expedition - that honor still belonged to the discoveries you’d made thus far - but you couldn’t deny there was a certain allure to it now, whether because of the knowledge it might contain or some sense of competition evoked in you by the two men banging away at the ceiling. 

A loud rumbling drew your eyes upward, the boys halting their movements with quizzical brows as they glanced between each other and the spot they’d been carving away at, hesitant to take another swing. The noise went on for a few moments longer, sounding far bigger than it had any reason to before disappearing a few seconds later.

Even still, everyone remained on edge. “The whole thing isn’t gonna collapse down on top of us… right?”

“Nah. Ah’m sure it’s jus’–”

Johnny didn’t get to finish that sentence before the sound came back with a thundering vengeance, clamorous enough to make you flinch back and reverse your steps in the opposite direction of the now growing crack opening up in the ceiling.

Kyle’s eyes were the size of dinner plates, violently smacking his friend’s arm as dirt rained down on top of them and something started to violently burst through. “Back up, back up!”

They dove off their platforms just in the nick of time, barely avoiding a deadly catastrophe while you stood stunned pressed against the far wall of the chamber as an enormous stone box broke through with a resounding CRACK and crashed to the floor in a heap, taking up almost the full width of the room.

“Steamin’ Jesus…” Johnny groaned out from the dirt, bringing himself to his feet and assisting Kyle in doing the same from where the two of them had rolled out of the way to keep from being pancaked.

Once the dust kicked up had settled, you slowly approached the box, recognizing it for what it was and glancing up at the sizeable hole from where it’d fallen through. “A sarcophagus… buried at the feet of Anubis…”

“The hell they do something like that for?” Kyle was still gawking at the exposed stone on the ceiling, partially to check if anything else was about to topple down with it.

You could only imagine the reasoning behind doing something like this. After all, the ancient Egyptians weren’t exactly known for this kind of unorthodox burial. 

“I honestly don’t know. I can only assume that this person was either someone of great importance, or alternatively…” and you were really banking on it being the former, “they did something entirely unforgivable.”

The whole thing was covered in a thick layer of dust and sand, settled after millennia of being buried and obscuring any and all writings. Using your hands only seemed to smear it, forcing you to pull out your new archaeological equipment as you began brushing away the film coating every inch of its surface, searching for any kind of markings that could be used as an identifier for the figure inside. 

But there was nothing written along the sides as one might see on the tombs of pharaohs and high priests. Why give a man the honor of resting at the feet of a god for all eternity only to tell us nothing about him?

Whistling for your attention, Johnny pointed to a small section he cleared away at the top of the box with his hands, visible indents still obscured by tiny grains of sand. You moved your brush over the area, sweeping away the dirt gathered in the cracks keeping you from reading any of the rather roughly carved hieroglyphics. You’d expected to find a cartouche at the very least, but this… this was not that.

“He… that shall not be named.”

But… but that didn’t make any sense. If they weren’t going to tell us who he was then why even bother giving him a title in the first place? Who was this man to be hated so much that the high priests reduced his very existence down to unspeakability?

Something wasn’t right here.

Your arm bumped against a raised texture just below the symbols, glinting metal embedded in the sarcophagus that once cleaned out revealed an eight pointed star with a scarab at the center.

Kyle ran his fingers over the serrated edges, glancing over at Johnny as the two of them tried to work the problem. “Feels sturdy; built into the container, not just slapped on top. Some sort of locking mechanism?”

“Could be. The hell kinda key looks like that, though?”

An enraged voice shouts from the recesses of your mind, flashes of glinting metal threatening your neck and impatient eyes belonging to a man you encountered not three days past: "THE KEY!"

That's when it hit you. The robed men, the attack on the boat, the key, the eight sided container burning a hole in your mind.

The box.

You scrambled for the bag you carried with you, digging around in one of the exterior pouches before emerging with the little metal box that started this whole adventure in the first place.

“Thought that’s empty.” Kyle looked at it with a tilted head and a raised brow, wondering if you’ve by chance gone off your rocker in your current frenzied state.

“It is,” you confirmed, flipping the item around in search of that tiny pressure plate, “but that’s not the point, dear cousin. The point is… Aha!”

The box sprung open with a click, the top unfurling into a recognizable shape as your two companions eyes flashed in understanding.

“...that I have a better memory than you.” You gave him a cheeky grin overflowing with smugness as you tipped the box upside down, placing it against the symbol where it slotted in perfectly into the eight pointed star. 

Johnny squeezed you against his side in a one armed hug, an enthusiastic kiss to your temple that had you giggling. “Lookit our clever lass, aye Garrick.”

Kyle didn’t get a chance to respond. 

Agonized screaming filled the air, blood curdling and twisted and gripping into your very core. It was a primal sound of torture, cutting into your soul and filling you with abyssal dread that left you feeling white as a ghost. 

The boys made haste in rushing out the open doorway, you trailing along behind them as Kyle held an arm out to block you from potential danger. You weren’t prepared for the sight of a man you didn’t recognize flailing about and crashing down the corridor, nails clawing into his bald scalp leaving rivulets of blood soaking his skin. 

His brutal screams of everlasting torture rang out like a cathedral bell as he ran headlong past you, unseeing or uncaring as he flailed violently, repeatedly bashing his head against the wall and leaving a red gory mess in his wake. 

Johnny almost moved to stop him until the stranger suddenly collapsed in a heap on the floor, back cracking and arching off the ground in an almost inhuman way as his fingernails dug deep scratches into the earth. Eyes bugging out of his head, mouth open in a garbled choked off scream, limbs twitching and spasming until - eventually - they moved no more.

You were getting far too used to seeing corpses…

No one fought Johnny when he made the executive decision of being done for the day, the sweet taste of discovery turned to rot in your mouth at the unexpected turn the evening had taken. 

You'd seen men struck down right in front of you that night on the ferry, blood staining the carpet of your stay rooms and the polished wood of the upper deck. But they had been bad men doing horrible things and deserved not one ounce of pity for their fates. This however had been on the other end of the spectrum. That man hadn’t suffered for any crimes he’d committed - he'd merely suffered. And that to you was more disturbing than watching the man who tried to cause you harm take a bullet between the eyes.

Your trio emerged from the darkness of the catacombs up into star speckled nightfall. Kyle stayed behind to fill the other team in on the details of what just transpired with one of their workers while Johnny escorted you back to the opposite side of the courtyard. 

He sat you down on the laid out rugs in front of the blackened firewood, striking the kindling with a match as the dry pieces of timber quickly set ablaze. Digging into one of the nearby bags, Johnny carefully draped a blanket over your shoulders before quietly taking a spot at your side.

“Thank you...” The voice that came out from your lips was smaller than you might’ve liked, very telling of your current delicate psychological condition. Even with the added heat it wasn’t enough to take the chill off your bones.

It took you a few breaths to bring up the question you didn’t really want to know the answer to. “What do you suppose killed him?”

The arm that had been around you earlier for your cleverness returned now for your comfort. “Dunnae ken, lass. Must’ve been somethin’ with his head the way he was holdin’ it screamin’ like that. Seizure maybe?”

It was at that point that Kyle rounded the other side of the tents, an unlit cigarette already wedged between his teeth as he struck a match and raised it to the tip, tossing it somewhere in the sand before joining the two of you on the rugs.

“Got confirmation that the man was indeed one of theirs. Going back to retrieve the body now. Poor buggers just can’t seem to catch a break.” Kyle muttered with a tired groan as he sunk into the blankets next to you, leaning back on his elbow and exhaling a billow of smoke skyward.

Seemed like there was an awful lot of that going around since this whole trip started. “More bad news?”

“Only if you were one of the blokes that went and got himself melted today.”

Johnny scoffed, tossing another piece of kindling on the flames. “Yer bum’s oot the windae.”

“Swear to god, mate. It’s true. You can go ask them yourself.” He motioned over to the north where the other party had taken up camp. “Lost three of their workers opening up that compartment we almost had our own hands in. Soon as the lid was popped, poof!”

You flinched away from his animated arm gestures miming an explosion, the mental image that brought to mind combined with the screams of the deceased man from earlier making you shrink inward on yourself and pull the woven blanket tighter around you as if the thin barrier would protect you from the outside world.

“Hydrochloride then,” your Scottish companion muttered, a soothing hand beginning to rub large circles on your back at your obviously perturbed expression. It helped even if only a little bit.

Your cousin made a small hum in agreement at Johnny's conclusion before taking another drag. It was painfully obvious you were out of the loop concerning that information, wondering what it was they apparently knew regarding the matter that you didn’t.

“I’m afraid I’m not familiar with that term…” You trailed off, looking between the two of them for some sort of explanation.

Kyle piped up with the answer. “Salt acid, dolly. Pressurized salt acid. Would’ve dissolved the flesh right off their bones. Bit old fashioned, but we’ve seen it used before.”

Part of you wasn’t surprised - either at their familiarity with the substance or the fact that the statue of Anubis had apparently been booby trapped. It made sense that the guardians of the city would’ve had a host of implemented deterrents they used to ward off plunderers. The fact that you hadn’t considered that as a possibility earlier weighed heavy on your heart with guilt.

Christ, if either of them had been the ones to pry open the compartment instead…

Your depressing ruminations were interrupted by the horses whinnying in the background, the boys turning their heads towards the sound with focused eyes as if sensing something that you weren’t. 

You almost made fun of them for being so antsy. After all, it was only a bunch of animals talking amongst themselves. Just as you were about to open your mouth with a quick remark, you heard the disturbance again - only to realize the shuffling of hooves was coming from the opposite direction of where the other team's horses were currently grazing along the hillside. 

So then who…?

Movement pulled your gaze back to your companions, furrowing your own brows as the boys began grabbing for their nearby rifles in a hurry. “Wha–?”

“Stay here, lass.” Came the harshly barked order, wasting no more breath on you as they turned in tandem and sprinted off in the direction of the commotion, expecting you to remain obedient.

You weren’t an idiot. You knew if they were headed into something guns blazing then you stood no chance against whatever it was they might face. You trusted your boys enough to stay right where you were, scooting backwards on your butt to further conceal yourself in the shadows of one of the tents. Curling your legs up to your chest, you could only sit and wait for whatever outcome might befall.

The first echoing gunshots rang out in the courtyard, multiplying quickly as gunsmoke drifted upwards into view from your position. Distant screams and grunts and foreign battle cries told you everything you needed to know about the situation your friends now found themselves in; flashbacks to the only other fight you’d ever witnessed as your imagination supplied you with pictures of damp crimson earth and bullet ridden corpses. You’d have covered your ears to muffle the cacophonous sounds if you weren’t trying to remain on alert in case the fighting veered any closer.

The camels grew restless and frightened by the loud echoing bangs, yanking on their ropes in blind panic as their distressed bleats joined the horses whinnying. You tried in vain to calm the spooked animals without moving towards them, but they were all but deaf to the gentle hushes and calming words sent their way. It wasn’t until the one tugged hard enough with a reverberating snap to free itself from its confines that you bolted upright from your hiding spot with a sharp curse, following along after the panicked beast as it started to run in the wrong direction of safety.

It was easily outrunning you, charging away at speeds your tiny human legs could not compete with until you were forced to abandon your mission of bringing it back. Its path led you right towards the fighting, something you realized far too late until you had to dodge out of the way of a horse galloping past, nearly tripping over yourself to turn back in the direction you just came from. It was your turn to panic as you were finally met with the sight of your aggressors - men in familiar black robes directly blocked your intended path back to the far end of the courtyard, frantically searching for another way through when a gunshot rang out in your vicinity, startling a high pitched shout from your lips as you cowered away in terror.

It gripped you with the force of a thick iron chain, wrapping around your torso and snaking its way up around your delicate neck. Your airflow was constricted, the metal slipping inside between shocked parted lips to paralyze your windpipe and slither down to form a dense weight deep in your gut. 

It was pure pandemonium as lit torches were tossed onto thin linen canopies, men who’d been hiding within running out shrieking in pain as fire licked across their blistering skin. Those closest to the exit tried to flee in alarm only to be halted by reinforcements trampling through the gates and turning them away. Those who could defend themselves were doing so, casualties on both sides as the Americans fought back against the foreign adversaries, cheering as each shot knocked an enemy clean off its saddle. But there were too few of you in comparison to the number of intruders spilling down into the city.

All around you, faces of the men you’d encountered throughout the day contorted in agony as they were cut down like rotted trees, blood coating the blades of their enemies and bubbling up from the gruesome gaping wounds in their chests. You heard their cries to mothers and wives they would never see again; their prayers to gods that would not arrive to save them. It broke your heart to turn away from outstretched hands, looking to you as if you were their savior when in reality you’d never felt more useless in your entire life.

It took someone nearly bowling you over for your brain to finally drag itself out of freeze mode, the deep rooted need for survival powering your legs to seek cover elsewhere. 

In all the chaos you could not find either of your boys, hoping they were not amongst the bodies you rushed past as you swerved between tents towards a crumbled obelisk, hefting yourself over the side to crouch down hopefully out of view. Your hands trembled and your head felt dizzy, breaths shallow and ragged as you fought back nausea from the taste of copper soaking the air. 

Clenching your eyes shut, you begged whatever higher power might be listening to please… please not let this be the end for you. Please let Kyle and Johnny make it out of this alive and unscathed. Please don’t take away your chance at living now that you just discovered what it felt like to live.

A deep gravelly call to halt came from somewhere to your left, first in Arabic and then again in English as the clattering of swords stilled and the shouting quieted. Risking a glance, you raised up onto your knees to peek over the stone structure for whatever seemed to bring the fighting to a temporary pause.

It wasn’t hard to pinpoint what had captured everyone’s attention.

Dark clothing intermixed with light, everyone turning to face the same area awash with burning firelight highlighting two figures amongst the chaos.

And there in the middle of it all stood a man in black faced in a tense standoff opposite the familiar form of Johnny, a lit stick of dynamite the only thing keeping him and his forces at bay.

The stranger didn’t cower from the sight in front of him, keen eyes taking in the situation with careful calculations that told you he was weighing all outcomes - well aware of the destruction in Johnny’s hands and the promise in his gaze that dared them to call his bluff.

The man in black straightened to an imposing height, a deceptively bored stance with a calm aggression sparking in his gaze. He didn’t flinch away from the harsh glare of your friend, meeting it head on with one of confident arrogance. It was hard to tell his full expression, a black cloth covering the bottom half of his face that he had yet to lower. His sword swung limply at his side - dripping dark blood onto the sand below - but the muscles in his arms tensed as if they were prepared to strike at any moment.

You weren’t sure you’d ever met a more dangerous man.

“We’ve spilt enough blood tonight.” The rough bass in his voice rumbled through your bones even at a distance, the surprisingly silky timbre cutting through the undertone of lethality. “This is the only warnin’ I’ll give you so best listen carefully.”

He took a step forward as if unbothered by the sparkling wick counting down in front of him, eyes narrowing down to slits above the black fabric of his mask. 

“Leave.” The singular word sent an ominous chill down your spine. “Leave this place, or else we'll be sendin’ you to meet your heathen god.”

You didn’t doubt it, not for one minute. It briefly flashed across your mind that this might just be some elaborate trick to lower your guards, but you somehow trusted the man to keep his word. You were only grateful the killing had ended for the time being, glad to be given the opportunity to leave with your heads still intact. 

One of his men came up beside him, holding out the reins of his horse for him to take, head dipped in a reverent bow.

“Shabah.” Ghost.

The stranger's gaze swept over his surroundings as he made to turn away, halting his movement as he picked you out amongst the sea of faces. Dark brown eyes pierced yours as he came to a sudden stop, something brewing within that once again pulled at the back of your mind the same as it did that night on the ferry. There was something staring you right in the face and you were too blind or traumatized to see it.

He held you captive a moment longer, a hidden message within those orbs that he granted you no time to decipher. Breaking eye contact to mount his steed, he turned his harsh glare back to the others present, yelling out again in English for everyone to hear. “You have one day!”

Calling out to his men, they all took to their steeds and scattered with the wind back the way they came, funneling out through the city gates to disappear out into the darkness of the night. They may have gone, but their chilling warning remained.

You hoped that would be the last you ever saw of him.

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