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sserpente · 10 months ago

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A/N: I’ve been meaning to write this for so long. If you’re in the mood for some angst, you’re in the right place!

Words: 1743 Warnings: angst, poisoning

You didn’t know what hurt more. Was it the fact that the man—god—you had fallen for was on the brink of death, taking his last breaths? Or was it the very circumstance that no one but you cared?

Tony Stark had been very clear about it. He tolerated Loki only per Thor’s humble request. The God of Thunder himself was less than pleased that the Trickster was to serve his sentence on Earth of all places. It was Odin’s magic that restricted him, keeping him from causing even more mayhem after the chaos he unleashed in New York City.

They were even less delighted about him joining their self-proclaimed superhero group on missions even though Thor himself claimed that Loki’s wit and skills could prove useful.

You had nothing to say in the matter of course. If anything, you were declared crazy because you had expressed your affinity for the God of Mischief and that included Loki himself.

You couldn’t help it. The way he smirked, the way he talked, the way he sat in the corner buried in a book—one of the very few instances you ever saw him relaxed, not to mention the occurrence with the cat… oh, the cat. A stray—black and white, young, purring and dancing around Loki’s feet, desperate for his attention. And when he’d bent down to pet it and even conjured some food for it, it was the last piece of evidence you had needed to conclude that this man was not evil. Misguided, betrayed, hurt? Yes, all of those things and more. But not evil.

It was the latter. The very circumstance that no one but you cared hurt more.

Thor had left for Asgard already, seeking the advice of their healers. It was ridiculous, truly. In a life-threatening emergency like this, how could his banishment still hold any weight? He needed help.

Your enemy had been thorough, researching each and everyone’s greatest weakness. And Loki’s had proved the most fatal. Whatever the extra-terrestrial had coated their weapon in before it fired its arrow at the God of Mischief, it prevented him from healing, had him break out in a sweat and slowly lose a battle against the poison now spreading in his body.

“Loki? Can you hear me? Please stay with me. You got to stay awake, alright?” He was on the sofa, with his head placed in your lap. You stroked his forehead in an attempt to soothe him. Blue eyes found yours and you were unsure whether he wanted to tell you to stay with him or let him die in peace. You’d been singing to him too. Trying to keep him in the present, in the now.

By the time Thor finally burst back into the room, Loki’s breathing had become dangerously shallow.

“Did you tell them about the symptoms? What did they say? What’s wrong with him? How are we gonna heal him?” The questions gushed out of you like a waterfall before he’d even set his hammer down.

Thor, however, grew silent for a moment. “There… Loki was poisoned. The rat knew what he was doing. The arrow was likely infused with blood from a Memphis of Muspelheim mixed with a deadly dose of mistletoe essence.”

You put one and one together immediately. “So… you’re saying this poison was specifically made to kill a Frost Giant?”

Thor looked down. “Yes.”

“Well, did you bring the antidote then?”

“There… there is no antidote. Not on Asgard. And I fear… there is no time to search the realms. The Jötuns have spent millennia destroying every last drop of this poison. There is hardly any antidote left.”

Your heart sank. No… no! You were not going to let Loki die!

“There has to be a way. Somewhere we can…” Your lips parted. “There is somebody. Someone who has everything. You mentioned him before, you said you brought the Aether to him!”

“The Collector?”

“He has it. He must have it.”

“What, and you think he will give it to you without anything in return?” Tony said.

“I didn’t say that. I’m sure we can offer him something in return to make it worth his while.” You turned back to Thor. “Heimdall can take us there. Please, Thor. This might be our only chance.”

Perhaps you should have been surprised that the God of Thunder relented. There was no doubt he too wanted his brother to survive. The entire time you’d been preparing to leave, Thor was brooding and lost in thought. He wasn’t one for big words—but he cared and for the moment, that was good enough for you.

The Collector’s place was dimly lit, eerily quiet and… it smelled awful. You took a deep breath regardless and gave a nod to Thor to venture forth.

“An Asgardian. And… a human?” The Collector tilted his head when you stepped into view. “What an… honour. What brings you to my humble domain?”

“We need your help. We’re looking for something rare. Thor’s brother Loki is Jötun and he’s been shot with an arrow drenched in a rare poison.”

“Hmm… yes, I’m familiar.”

“There is no antidote. If… if anyone has any left, it must be you.”

“So it must be… I do indeed have this antidote you speak of.” Your face lit up but judging by the Collector’s body language—a smug and repulsive expression, truly—he was not going to give it up easily.

“Surely, your Asgardian friend has told you of how the Jötuns have ensured every last drop of this poison gets destroyed. There was a need for an antidote no longer. The bottle that I have in my collection is… an antique, almost.”

“Fine,” you spat. “What do you want in return?”

“You see… I’ve never had a human in my collection.”

Your eyes widened, lips parting to respond.

“No!” Thor roared.

“Then I am afraid we have reached a dead end.”

“She’s not an object to be collected, she’s a person!”

“Thor!” Gnashing your teeth, you turned to him and took a deep breath. “It’s fine. Just take the antidote to Loki, alright?”

“No. There has to be another way.”

“Take the damn antidote to him, Thor!”

“I cannot let you do this.”

“You can and you will. He’s your brother, Thor! And I’m…” I’m in love with him. Heavens, was that stupid? Loki didn’t even know. It was absurd, wasn’t it? To sacrifice your own life in this way to see the God of Mischief live another day?

Yes. It was. But it… it felt like the right thing to do. Loki deserved another shot. A chance to redeem himself, to show the world that he was more than he let on. And a chance to have the damn world apologise to him, too.

“Tell him… tell him to live his best life, okay? Tell him… tell him not to be too harsh on himself. To… to love himself.”

“To love himself?” Thor frowned.

“Shut up and listen. Loki hates himself, don’t you see that? He hates what he is, he hates what he’s become. He hates himself. And you all played a part in that.”

“Why would you do this… for him?”

Your lips parted. “Tell him… tell him I fell for him.” There. You’d said it. But it didn’t matter anymore whether he’d reject you, right? You’d be here, wherever here was and Loki would be back on Earth, recovering. You’d never have to face his reaction after your confession and yet, he could live with the knowledge that he was not, in fact, so terrible, that no one could love him beyond a family bond like the one he shared with Thor.

“I… fine. I will. Mark my words, I will come back for you,” he added quietly.

You nodded. Was there hope? Possibly. Possibly not. But you did not doubt for a second that your sacrifice was worth it.

You didn’t know how many days had gone by since Thor’s departure. One? Three? Ten? There was no sunlight in this place, no clocks. One of the Collector’s lackeys made sure to feed you regularly at least, other than that… you were on your own, caged in a pretty glass box until he figured out what to do with you. Unless of course… he was just going to keep you on display like this like the maniac he was.

If you didn’t know better, you would have asked him for a book. Surely he had some in his collection. It was boredom and solitude that would drive you mad sooner or later, that much you were sure of.

Every sound nearby became more interesting than the next. The cracking of the metal tiles, the flapping of wings of the caged bird opposite your own stupid box, the ruffling of clothing whenever you moved… a massive explosion forcing everything in its vicinity several feet into the air. Wait, what?

Your eyes widened and you stood. Were you under attack? Oh heavens, no, you didn’t want to be killed inside of a glass box! Would there be another explosion? What if the cage broke and you bled to death because of the shards piercing your body?

Chaos erupted, yet the Collector was nowhere to be seen. A scream escaped your lips when with a start, a figure appeared right before your cage, remnants of green shimmering light enveloping them whole. It took you a moment to realise that it was Loki.

“My… that is quite the predicament you have landed yourself in, pet.”

“I… w-what? Loki… you’re alive, you’re fine. What are you doing here?” Unable to process what was happening, you inched back when the God of Mischief broke the lock and opened the cage for you to climb out. Electricity rippled through you when he took your hand in his.

“Rescuing you, of course.” His sly smirk had you gasping for air as you leaned against him. Your knees and legs hurt from having to sit for so long.

“Thor told me what you did.”

“Did he also tell you…”

Loki nodded. Without another word, he leaned forward and stole a chaste kiss, leaving you breathless and wanting more.

“Come. The others are waiting on the ship. And then, my dear, I shall show you the proper Asgardian way of courting a woman.”

You smiled, relief flooding your entire body as he picked you up and carried you home.

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ask-sister-solaris · 8 months ago

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Hi 👋

Could you possibly do an Egon x reader where she’s possessed by gozer and how he would either or save her/ the aftermath???

-👻

God

I’m naming you Spoopy Ghost Anon :)

I’m pretty sure it’s the Keymaster and Gatekeeper that can possess, not Gozer themselves, so I took it upon myself to make y’all the Gate Keeper Zuul.

“You’ve messed with the wrong scientist”

Egon couldn’t believe his eyes when he reached your apartment. It was a total wreck, the one night he was able to get the slightest bit of time off, and this happened. He wasn’t one for date nights, not like Venkman. But something felt off. He went to the nearest payphone and dialed the Ghostbusters Headquarters number.

“Ghostbusters how can we help you?” Janine’s voice crackled through the phone piece. Egon took a breath and sighed “Look [Names] place has been wrecked and with all the trouble they were having, claiming there was a temple in her fridge and such, I can’t help but think my research was correct. And if it is, you need to send the other three.”

Janine was froze before she put the phone down and hit the red button. The other three slid down and rushed to the Ecto 1 (that Egon had graciously not taken, opting for a cab) and rushed down to your apartment complex. Once they arrived the place was indeed a mess. They loaded their proton packs on and went in, something definitely wasn’t right. Egon knocked on your apartment door and you opened it, looking very different.

“Are you the Keymaster?” Egon looked at you gone out, but knew that the only way in was to agree. The others were currently hidden waiting for his signal “Yes, I am the Keymaster” you let him in, and after what seemed hours of struggling he managed to get you asleep. He went to the others his appearance slightly messy.

“She will be fine for now, however we have to go back. There’s not much we can do.” They headed back and jog a few hours later the police brought in someone claiming to be the Key Master searching for the Gate Keeper. Of course Egon knew straight away, but the damn Health Inspector decided to shut the grid down, releasing thousands of spirits. Egon yelled at him before all four ghostbusters were dragged off to the cells and the Keymaster made his way to the apartments.

A few hours later:

The boys were allowed out and permitted to save the city from Gozer. Once they reached the apartment Egon was the first to actually rush up the stairs, he needed to make sure you were okay, but when they finally made their way to the roof you were stood on one pedestal the key master on the other.

You were both turned into ugly looking dogs and this infuriated Egon. He knew he had to save you. Once they’d confronted Gozer, tried to use their Proton packs (and failed), and Ray had conjured up a 100ft Stay Puft Marshmallow Man, everything seemed at a loss until Egon realized. It was risky but it would save New York and you. He explained it and they quickly agreed wanting this hell to end.

“You’ve messed with the wrong scientist Gozer” Egon growled under his breath as he and his fellow ghostbusters turned their proton packs to maximum.

They crossed the streams of the proton packs destroying the door as the monsters that came from it. The after math was messy and overstimulating for Egon but when he glanced at the stone dogs his heart sank, that was until you began picking your way out, a hand popping out. His heart rate quickened as he helped you get out of the dark stone shell and held you close kissing you.

A smile spread across your face as you kissed him back. You didn’t care he was covered in marshmallow fluff, he’d saved you! Once he pulled away (and Venkman and made multiple gagging noises) they made their way down to the waiting ambulance, staying by your side. That’s when he decided to tie the knot with you so he could always protect you.

“[Name?]” he tapped your shoulder as you were talking to a paramedic. You turned around and he was down on one knee. He’d been plannin on proposing since you’d hit the four year mark and he’d already bought the ring. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a beautiful golden band with a heart shaped ruby on it “Will you marry me?”

You squealed and nodded yes kissing him, what a day, you were possessed by a demon demigod, saved by the love of your life and now he proposed. It’s enough to tire a girl out

“I told them they’d messed with with wrong scientist”

#egon x reader #egon spengler x oc #egon spengler x reader #egon spengler #ghostbusters x oc #ghostbusters x reader #ghostbusters egon #ghostbusters

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simply-ivanka · 4 months ago

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A Minnesotan Sizes Up Tim Walz

During his tenure, student achievement has slipped, crime has surged, and state residents have fled.

By Scott W. Johnson - Wall Street Journal

St. Paul, Minn.

Tim Walz has such a bad record as Minnesota’s governor that I was astonished when he landed on Vice President Kamala Harris’s vice-presidential shortlist. As Minnesota’s Center of the American Experiment has documented, under Mr. Walz Minnesota has become a high-crime state. Student achievement has tumbled as spending on schools has skyrocketed. Per capita gross domestic product has fallen below the national average. Minnesotans have joined residents of New York, California and Illinois in fleeing their home state.

Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro—also on Ms. Harris’s shortlist—made sense to me. Pennsylvania is a key state. Mr. Shapiro seems to be a man of substance and would give liberal Jews a reason to vote for Ms. Harris without a guilty conscience. As a Jewish supporter of Israel, I worried that Mr. Shapiro would give the animus throbbing in the heart of the Democratic Party cover. Indeed, that animus drove a nasty intraparty campaign against him.

But Tim Walz? I’m a conservative Republican. I don’t completely understand Democrats’ ways. As an observer of Minnesota politics, however, I understand how Mr. Walz became governor. Having served six terms in Congress from a rural district, he challenged the endorsed DFL (Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party) candidate—a liberal metro-area state senator, Erin Murphy—in the 2018 DFL primary. Ms. Murphy was also challenged by another metro-area liberal, Lori Swanson, then state attorney general. With Ms. Murphy and Ms. Swanson dividing the liberal urban vote, Mr. Walz and his far-left running mate, former state Rep. Peggy Flanagan, won the primary with 41%.

On taking office in 2019, Gov. Walz was restrained by a one-seat Republican majority in the state Senate—until Covid hit in the spring of 2020. He declared a state of emergency on March 25, 2020, and ruled by decree for 15 months. He proclaimed the emergency on the basis of an allegedly sophisticated Minnesota Model projection of the virus’s course in the state. In fact, the projection reflected a weekend’s work by graduate students at the University of Minnesota School of Public Health. Relying on their research, Mr. Walz presented a scenario in which an estimated 74,000 Minnesotans would perish from the virus. The following week the Star Tribune reported that with the lockdown Mr. Walz ordered, 50,000 would die. Maybe it would have been preferable to address the virus through democratic means.

Having destroyed jobs and impeded life routines, including family get-togethers and church attendance, Mr. Walz finally let his one-man rule lapse on July 1, 2021. When the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center stopped counting in March 2023, the deaths of 14,870 Minnesotans were attributed to the virus. (In 2020 I successfully sued the administration for excluding me from Health Department press briefings on Covid.)

During the state of emergency, protests broke out in Minneapolis on Memorial Day 2020 following the death of George Floyd. That Thursday, rioters burned Minneapolis’s Third Precinct police station to the ground. Mr. Walz didn’t deploy the National Guard until the weekend. Riots, arson and looting throughout the Twin Cities caused about $500 million in damage.

Minnesota leads the nation in Covid fraud. Under the auspices of the Feeding Our Future nonprofit, its founder, Aimee Bock, allegedly recruited mostly young Somali men to seek reimbursement for millions of meals supposedly served to poor students and families. According to indictments handed up by a grand jury to U.S. Attorney Andrew Luger, Ms. Bock and others allegedly defrauded the state and federal government of $250 million. Ms. Bock has pleaded not guilty to the fraud charges.

Among the 70 defendants charged to date, 18 have pleaded guilty. In April the first of the cases to go to trial had seven defendants; five were convicted. The remaining cases have yet to be tried. In all, the Minnesota Department of Education oversaw the payout of $250 million to reimburse fictitious meals. The nature and scale of the fraud are staggering. Mr. Walz tried to blame state district court judge John Guthmann, who in April 2021 handled a case regarding the department’s processing of applications for reimbursements. According to Mr. Walz, Judge Guthmann ordered the state to continue payouts to the alleged perpetrators of the fraud even after the state Education Department discovered it.

In September 2022, Judge Guthmann authorized a news release titled “Correcting media reports and statements by Gov. Tim Walz concerning orders issued by the court.” The release concluded: “As the public court record and Judge Guthmann’s orders make plain, Judge Guthmann never issued an order requiring the MN Department of Education to resume food reimbursement payments to FOF. The Department of Education voluntarily resumed payments and informed the court that FOF resolved the ‘serious deficiencies’ that prompted it to suspend payments temporarily. All of the MN Department of Education food reimbursement payments to FOF were made voluntarily, without any court order.”

In November 2022 Mr. Walz was elected to a second term, and the DFL won majorities in both chambers of the Legislature. In the preceding two years the state had accumulated an $18 billion budget surplus. With the DFL in full control, Mr. Walz and the Legislature have spent the $18 billion surplus on infrastructure, education and other programs that will burden the state for years. They have also raised taxes.

Mr. Walz and his DFL colleagues have backed measures establishing Minnesota as a mecca for abortion and a “trans refuge.” The legislation prohibits enforcing out-of-state subpoenas, arrest warrants and extradition requests for people from other states who seek treatment that is legal in Minnesota. It also bars complying with court orders issued in other states to remove children from their parents’ custody for authorizing hormone treatment or surgery to alter sex characteristics.

Like so many Democrats who have kept up with the demands of the progressive agenda, Mr. Walz has “grown” in office. In his second term, he has been the most left-wing Minnesota governor since the socialist Floyd B. Olson (1931-36). I doubt that Mr. Walz could be elected to Congress in his old district, which is now represented by a Republican. The idea that he can appeal to voters who don’t already support Ms. Harris seems far-fetched.

Mr. Johnson is a retired Minneapolis attorney and contributor to the site Power Line.

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natsaffection · 2 years ago

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I hate you! | part I | N. Romanoff

Avenger!Natasha x Younger!Recruit!Reader

Summary: Arriving in a new Team is never easy. And when another person has a personal problem with you, it becomes even more difficult.

warnings: None!

Word count: 7,4k

A/N: Okayyy first part. Not much is happening here yet. The reader/you should first arrive normally. So sit back and enjoy it..Hehe

‎

Exactly one year ago, Nick had introduced you to this new team, about which you both had discussed before, and you still had not understood why the complete world should be put into the hands of these people. But...After all the events in New York and the attack of these things, you already had to admit that it was a good thing. It took time for the world itself to accept the "Avengers" as Nick called them. But after the successful fight and the re-conquest of the city, it was settled. They didn't see you (although you made a great effort to destroy those things) but that was fine with you.

Nick had also asked you to join the team, but you were able to turn him away, thank God. You are anything but a team player, and after some words and deeds, Nick finally understood.

But he came back with it again.

You were asked into his office one day and when you faced him you couldn't believe your ears for the second time, "I want you to join the Avengers as a full member." You took a deep breath, "..Like I said before. I'm not interested."

He looks at you and then sits down. He looks at you again and then he reached into a drawer and handed you a file. You took it and flip through it, "I'm sorry Y/n, but this is what the council decided."

You look through it and see that it is several writings about your last years here at SHIELD and..the years before. You look back up at him, "What's this?" You were a little pissed.

He sighed, "The council wants you to work directly to theirs. If you refuse, you will-"

"Let me guess-"

"No." He interrupted, knowing what you would say. "I gave them another suggestion. And that's this one." He pointed to the signature in the picture frame, for the Avenger Initiative. "Y/n, do you really want to become a pet again for people who would exploit it for that, or do you want to be able to make a difference and possibly have a future with it?"

You shake your head. That's exactly what you thought when he came to your cell two years ago and told you that you were free. However, "free" was not the world. You couldn't go out into the general population in the condition you were in when you met. Thus, Nick took you in and from that point, you had been working under Him.

"A future? I'm going back to following orders." You tossed him the stock again, "I said eventually. And these won't be the orders you were used to. You did a good job last year with the invasion. That would be wasted potential, Y/n!" You run it through your head, "You could be a hero. Accomplish something good with your skills. Something inside me says that the invasion of Loki, won't be the last enemy."

You have to admit you've done your research on the team..The world would celebrate you. You have wealth, an easy life and most importantly..living by your own orders..

"Who's in charge there?"

Fury had to stifle a smirk, "No head of state, that's for sure." This sounds too good to be true... "What's the catch? You really want me to realize that I can walk out of here and live my life without any risks? Come on."

You had a point. He walked around the table and looked right down at you, "I give you my word L/n. Did I break it last time?"

No he hadn't..

You looked to the side. "So? Are you taking my deal?"

And that was three months ago. Still, some arrangements had to be made for you to change organizations without difficulty. After all, you still had a certain reputation. But once everything was settled, it happened relatively quickly.

You were already sitting in the car with Nick, on the way to the tower. It was already several kilometers from SHIELD headquarters to the "Avenger" Tower and when you arrived, you were already getting ready for the confrontation..Which, however, did not come. "Don't be surprised, the team is out for the moment. So you have some time to find your way around."

How nice..I'm still waiting for the hook....

Furry showed you around briefly and as you were about to finish, a person spoke to you that the team had arrived again. Furry looked at you and headed off, "Well here goes."

You ran after him and couldn't say you weren't nervous. Why? You're just as good as they are, if not better. You head back down the Long Walk and when the door opened, there were several people facing you and one was on a stretcher.

"Team."

Everyone turned to the voice and had a puzzled look, "Fury?" Actually came in unison. "I'll keep it short. This is Y/n L/n." He steps aside and you emerged. You looked around, and saw smiling faces, until they saw you and had to stop smiling. They were probably expecting someone else. Steve, who I recognized immediately, probably voiced what was on everyone's mind, "Don't take this the wrong way, but..This is just a kid?"

You were prepared for it, "I'm 20, thanks. So no.." Your age didn't seem to matter to most because they kept looking at you like that. Furry still said, "Believe me, she really isn't," And he was sorry about that too, "And don't underestimate her. You got the message, and here she is." He turned to me, "You got this."

"W-Wait-" And he walked past you toward the exit, leaving you to your own now. Great.

Now you were standing there. In a wildly strange environment, with all too strange people.

"Well..Pleased to meet you. I'm Steve," He gave you his hand, and you took it in greeting. His handshake was strong, and Steve thought the same about yours. "The one lying here is Clint," He raised his hand and continued to drink his drink, "Thor, Bruce, Cho, Tony, and Natasha. Hey, now you got backup!" You could tell he was trying to move the mood up and grinned at the redheaded woman. She just looked at you with an iron gaze, though. Maybe she was happy to be the only one? I mean..Steve doesn't even look that bad, let alone that Thor..is that hair real?

"Anyway, how are you holding up?" She walked over to Clint, and thus you got your answer. "You know..If you don't mind, I'd like to continue preparing my room if that's okay?" You really just wanted to get out of this situation here. Steve just nodded and showed you the way to the door. When it closed behind you, you were relieved and could breathe normally again.

When you were back on the way, you looked around a lot more than you had earlier with Nick. Only now do you notice how many windows there actually are here. You could look over the entire city and from all angles..And when you somehow arrived in your room, your jaw dropped. It's only now that you realize how big it actually is, and they didn't skimp on the windows here either.... You're definitely going to rearrange your bed. Because you were just about to. You walk over and sit down on the bed and relatively quickly drop backwards with a groan. You thought the beds at SHIELD were already a marshmallow, but this? Anything that could be compared to a cloud. Maybe it wasn't a mistake to come here after all..

Yes, it was. Sure, you can't judge it yet, but who throws a fat house party at this hour? Is it every night? You were asked beforehand by an AI if you wanted to participate, but you thought it was just a tiny 7 man party and not a whole concert.

After several hours of blaring music, silence returned, and you decided to go downstairs to get a drink. You had found your way quite well and when you arrived in the huge kitchen you found..Maria?!

"What are you doing here?" Not that you're complaining, but seeing someone you know in a strange environment is a relief. "Y/n, hey, good to see you, want some?"

She grabbed a beer from the fridge, and you nicely denied her and made yourself a water from the tap. "I hope Tony's party didn't knock you out completely, he can't get enough sometimes..."

"It's alright. Was something new, soo," You suddenly heard loud laughter and saw Steve sitting on the couch with the others, having a good laugh about something. Maria caught this, "Come on, come on." She walked back and made a hand gesture for you to follow her, and since you didn't know what else to do, you followed her,"Hey, look who I found!" She sits back down, and you sit next to her, "Y/n! settled in yet?" Asked, if you remember correctly, Clint. "Yeah..thanks. I have to get used to the size of this place, but it'll be fine..." With this statement, you made some people laugh and smile. You lean back a bit so the conversation topic from earlier can continue, and it did quite quickly. While the men were busy lifting some hammer from the table, you took the chance to look around. Also, again a large room, however this is the room with the largest windows..Everywhere lay still things from the party earlier and-

Suddenly you hear a shrill sound and footsteps coming towards you. Everyone looked somewhere to find out where the sounds were coming from. However, the search was made easier when a robotic figure approached you, "You are all killers..." You could only gather from the machine, and the men next to you stood up. Tony was typing something on some kind of tablet, but had funny expression on his face. You also noticed that Maria took her gun and armed it.

"-But I have a mission!" The robot's voice brought you out again.

"What kind of mission?" Answered only Natasha, and suddenly two more of those things flew through the walls and towards you. Steve was quick and hit the table in front of both of you and him, however one of those things was faster and flew into it, causing you to fall. You quickly got back up, and Steve asked, "Are you okay?" You just nodded and looked over at the thing, which was now standing down as well. There were sounds everywhere like gunshots, breaking glass, furniture falling over, and more. This left you cold, however, you ran right at one of the things. You hit it several times, but it didn't do much, it just sped up its movements and was about to strike when you dodged, grabbed it and threw it over one of the many railings. It hit the ground and got up just as quickly.

You were about to jump off when Thor called to you to bring it back to the ground. You nodded to him, jumped over the now broken railing onto the robot, wrapped your thighs around the neck of the thing, and thus threw it to the ground. You roll cleanly away, only to see Thor smash it with his hammer.

"That was dramatic." said the remaining one who came up to us at the beginning.

"I'm sorry. I know you guys mean well. But you're not thinking logically."

Everyone was back together and looking at the thing, "You want to protect the world, but not have it change.... How are you going to save humanity if it's not allowed to..evolve?"

He walked up to one of the destroyed ones and lifted it up, "With these?! Puppets?" he crushed the head and tossed it back towards us, "There is only one way to peace. The eradication of the Avengers." That was his last word as Thor smashed him, and he fell against the wall.

"I was hanging by strings, but now I am free."

Everyone looked at each other and wiped away the blood you had. Meanwhile, Tony and Bruce ran off somewhere and the others followed them. You too, though, you stopped at the broken robot. The last thing he had said...that was true for you too.

But before you could think any further, you heard noises coming from the next room, and now you join up with the others. You entered and some put the broken parts of the things on a table, "He was everywhere, files, control systems..Probably he knows more about us than we do ourselves." Meanwhile, when Natasha said that, she looked at you. You look away because you didn't want to stare too.

"He's in files, on the internet, and when he's interested in something more exciting?"

Everyone looked anxiously into the corner. Are you afraid to find the pins for your website somewhere? What is-

"You're not too worried about that." Natasha's voice brought you out of your thoughts, "Because I don't even know what can be found about me myself." It was the truth, but this answer hit her a nerve, "You think that's funny?" She walked up to you, and you just kept looking at her, "No. But it's the truth." She looked alternately into your eyes, "Truth, huh? Then tell me how you know about that stunt earlier."

Her tone became more serious, and you didn't know what she meant. But if you questioned it now, she would surely be at your throat. "Hey Natasha-" Someone was about to intervene, but was interrupted by a louder trampling, and Thor came at Tony fully equipped and lifted him up by the neck. Perfect, now it's already two going nuts.

"Hey, hey, can we stop attack each other now? We have a much bigger problem right now!"

"You heard him..." Thor threw some more verbal stuff at Tony's head until the situation among us thinned out a bit, and we set to work finding this Ultron, as Tony named him. However, this has taken its hours and we have been sacking all night and so far have found nothing, absolutely nothing. About time Steve came back in and handed Thor a tablet again, "What's this?" Everyone stood up and walked over with, "A message."

You were about to look along when Maria moved into your field of vision, "Find anything yet?" You look from Thor and the others now to her, "No..I've searched everything and other than a few messages regarding bank robbery, nothing serious. Hey, what's over there?"

Maria didn't even look away from you, "A piece of information useful for this case and one before it." You don't know that Maria was starting to sweat and run out of ideas. She knows what's on the tablet and wants to prevent you from seeing. It would be too soon and especially too short notice. "Wouldn't it be good to see these then?" You had to laugh... "You know what, come with me!" She grabbed you and took you to the hallway, "Maria, what's wrong?" She closed the door and let out a soft sigh.

"Listen..I just don't want you to have to deal with unnecessary data, okay? I don't know if Nick told you, but the Council is looking over your fingers. If you get caught up in useless stuff that doesn't move you forward on the current case, you'll be somewhere else real quick..." Maria makes a mental note to punch herself for this stupid lie. The Council isn't looking at you, Nick has made that clear, but she needs to keep you out of this room at all costs. "I knew it. That would have been too easy." You swallowed the lie. "You didn't get that info, you understand?" You just nodded deceived and looked up as the door opened again and everyone walked out together. "Did you find anything?" Maria asked, and you didn't listen. Still annoyed that Fury had lied to you after all. "We have a clue. Y/n?"

You look up at Steve, "I'd like to pull you in on this, however we don't know your capabilities yet, and would keep you out of it for now." Great. And now you're being left behind, too. They just see you as a burden. Your barrel was already felt, and it's not getting any less. You look at Steve and leave Him with a cold shoulder as you walk back into the big break room. Maria looks back at Steve, "I'll handle it, go." Steve just nods and pulls away as well.

You look around and close your eyes. A good tip for someone who needs to control their anger issues. You take a deep breath and exhale. My time will come...

"Hey..." You look back at the door and see Maria leaning against it, and you desperately look for something to focus on to escape the conversation, "I know it's hard, but-"

"Hard? Oh, I don't know, but you're practically being offered a new life for the second time, and yet you're just being treated as a burden..." Your words hurt Maria somehow. She was with you from the beginning of your journey, "That's not true Y/n and you know it. You've only been here 24 hours..The team also has to first come to terms with giving up some of their work now. They appreciate that."

"Doesn't seem like it..." you mutter to yourself. "Your time will come, and in the meantime you'll just have to put up with me, unless you find me too boring..." Maria tried desperately to get her spirits up. "Come on, the team is doing the hard work, and we are trying to get more information regarding Ultron, how does that sound? You can only play into their hands."

You appreciate her attempt, but can see through her gamesmanship and only agree to give her a clear conscience. You are not stupid.

So you sat at the computer again for almost two hours, sorting stocks from before and contacting all sorts of people. You almost couldn't keep awake, so dull was the whole thing. And when Maria's phone rang, you thought there was more work to come. But when you saw her face, you knew something was wrong.

She got up and went to the nearest TV to turn it on. What you saw then you had never seen before. It was a person resembling Tony's suit fighting a giant green monster, "What is that?!" You got up and walked closer, "Okay, thanks," Maria hung up and looked at it too, "That's Banner..."

"Bruce?!!" You look at her with wide eyes. Before he was still small, and..not green... "That's the Hulk..And Tony is just trying to stop him from completely destroying the city..." He's doing a lousy job at it..He just flew into a fucking building with him!

"Some people won't like that..." Maria leaves the room, and you just keep looking at the screen with wide eyes..How can such a big figure come out of such a small person!!!

At some point, Maria came back and saw you still crouching in front of the TV, "How does it look?" You don't know how long you've been looking, but it's bad...Very bad... "Well...There are no deaths, but there are injuries, and the damage that has been done is too big at the moment to be more specific..." You hear Maria swear, and at that moment the radio in the control center beeps. You both head out and it's Tony on the line, "What's the story?"

"The media loves you guys. Nobody else does, though. There's no arrest warrant for Banner yet, but there's something in the air." So that's what Maria did the time.."The Stark disaster relief?"

"Is on the scene. How's the team?" Maria looked to you as she asked that and there was radio silence for a moment with Tony, "Everyone is..Today we plugged in...We'll put that away. "You can tell he's trying to sound reliable, but it must look bad. You haven't known your comrades long enough, but a lot of them put a lot of stock in you.... "Now go into stealth mode and stay away from here for now." W-what? "So..run and hide?"

"Until we find Ultron, I don't have a better suggestion." You both waited for a response, but nothing came. Maria hung up, sighing, "That's it? What am I supposed to do now? Sit around here and wait for the situation to defuse??" Maria stood up and packed her things, "Sort of. I'm sorry your first days are going like this, but that's the daily routine here."

She left the room again, but quickly came running back, "Y/n, a shrill alarm went off at Cho's research lab..." She went to a laptop and showed you the coordinates and then pointed to a large building, "I don't have anyone right now, so you're the one to look at it." Wait what? "Meaning?" She looks to you, "Get ready to go, I'll meet you in the hangar." You start to grin again for the longest time. Finally, a new task..You run up to your room, grab your gear and run all the way back down to the hangar. You see only one Jat that had its cargo door open and you go inside. Inside you meet Maria again, "Alright, the autopilot will fly you there, I'll try to send another unit with you meanwhile." You follow her instructions, "Got it?"

"Roger that." You see Maria nod and she walks back out. You sit down in the chair and only now realize that you are in a completely strange machine, and you don't even know where the button for the start is. Before you could call for Maria again, the door closes automatically, and it got ready for takeoff. You were pushed back a bit as the full speed arrived and you leaned back. The flight lasted just under 20 minutes, and when you arrived, everything was set still.

You had prepared in that time to get the site plan and knew where you needed to go. So you set off and traversed the corridors. You acted inconspicuously, but still something was wrong. Why isn't anyone looking at you? Everyone continues to do their work..Are they used to a complete stranger just walking this way?

You keep walking and as you were about to turn a corner, you immediately stepped back. You cautiously look again and see several of those things you destroyed last night. Only this time they looked complete..You look around and find a ventilation shaft to your right above you and jump in. You continue to follow the voices and eventually you become speechless.Just below you, you can see the woman who helped Clint the other night talking to a giant robot..He was just sitting there, and she connected large cables to him, "Cell cohesion takes a few hours. But we can already start the consciousness transfer. We're uploading your verbal matrix..."

Oh shit. Is that Ultron? He sure has gotten huge. You follow all the screens and you get it.

He's improving.

You don't even want to know what other thing is in that jar next to him...You were pulled out of your thoughts when the door to the lab opens and two more people come in. Something must have triggered one of them, because she suddenly cries out and then takes a step back. "H-how could you? You were going to destroy the Avengers, create a better world-"

"It will be better." You see Ultron tense up, "When all the humans are dead?"

When all the humans are dead? What the hell is in there? The two continue to discuss, and I notice in the corner of my eye that Cho blinks and suddenly disconnects Ultron from the vessel. Ultron caught on to this and shot her. I guess that also gave the go ahead for the others and, they pointed their guns at the staff. So you kicked the grate away, slid out and grabbed a tablet you found on the table and threw it right at the head of one of those things. He misses its shot and you go over to attack. You pull out your two pistols and shoot down the remaining six. You were just about to reposition yourself when you notice Ultron about to strike, and you narrowly dodge him. Meanwhile, you see four other robots bringing out this jar and you don't like it at all. You have to stop them. You roll forward under Ultron and go to attack those robots again, but before you could even get close Ultron was in front of you again and set to attack again, this time you bring your arms in front of your face to protect yourself and the impact of the blow caused you to slide, "Why are you still standing?" You have to admit that the blow hurt. and you shake out your arms and run towards him again. At least that's what he thought, because you slip under him again and make your way to the jar. You see the things with the jar go through a door and get ready for the attack, until you hear shouts for help from another room and a little later shots.

You look back to the door and again in the direction of the screams. You were about to run to the door until you stopped in your act.

Rule number two, no victims of our sides.

The phrase came back to you, and you cursed before heading for the path of the screams. When you arrived, there were robots again shooting at more employees. You got fed up and charged towards them. It wasn't long before all three of them were down, and you again head for the path to the jar, but this time not alone, "Y/n?" You look to the side and see Steve running in that direction as well, "He's uploading into a body, we need to-"

"I know, Cho told me everything, take this, put it in your ear and follow me."

You are puzzled because he is running in a completely different direction, but you decide to follow him. We arrived at a bridge, and he looked at one of the trucks coming towards us. You knew what to do, "Steve, I'm going to follow him...He can't stay in this vehicle the whole time, he wants to drop off somewhere." He looks at you in surprise, "What's your Plan?" You look back at the truck and take a running start, "Distract him as long as possible."

You take off running and jump right on top of the truck. You make your way to the doors until a beam blew the door open and threw you to the side. You swing back with the door and look inside when another beam came at you and this time the door fell off completely. You flew up unwillingly and just barely landed on the other door, which was now hanging by its last threads on the truck.

"Y/n you're no match for him, get out of there!" You thought you were losing it again, as suddenly a voice came from no where, but you quickly understood it was the radio in your ear, "No..He's mad and won't charge any further, let's keep it that way!" You climb up and were about to jump when Ultron kicked you off the door again. You fly backwards and land right on a car window. You look at the driver, and order him to speed up. He did just that, and you were able to jump back onto the truck. When you got to the top, Ultron was back as well, and you go into the attack. You are aware that you have nothing on him, but as long as he doesn't go back, everything is fine....

You managed to hold on trap for three minutes until he apparently had enough, and he now shot at you for the third time with his beam. You didn't have time to protect yourself, so he hit you, and you flew off the vehicle again onto another. You wanted to do it like the last time, but he got ahead of you and suddenly the ground under you moved and threw the vehicle with you into the air. You hold on to the roof above, the car flips over, and you let go at the right moment so you could land on the road and run, "HOLY SHIT!!!" You run for all you're worth, and you notice and hear how, behind you, other vehicles were rolling over and coming right at you. A car came flying quite well, and you jump on it and then again on the truck. You land completely exhausted in front of Ultron, "You won't get rid of me so easily, you should have realized that by now at the latest." He looks at you angrily and his hands glowed again until several shots hit him. You look back and see Clint sitting in the Jat.

However, the fire didn't last long, as the two other robots in the truck themselves were now flying at him. Clint pulled off again, and suddenly you hear another person in your ear, "L/n, keep him busy, I'm going in." It was Natasha's. You had to smile a little, "What do you think I've been doing here all this time?" But no answer came back. Before you get thrown off the truck several times again, you decide to take Ultron with you right away. You run up to him, cling to him, and throw you both off the moving vehicle. You fell on the ground and Ultron falls against several cars, getting a little damaged. You look back at the truck where Natasha is now inside and notice the others coming back from Clint, "Natasha they're coming back!" You were about to join her, but Ultron got in your way again and gave you a side kick. You buckled and were ready to live with the consequences, but suddenly Ultron is thrown away as well, but you didn't see anyone. I guess he got fed up and flew away. You get back up and try to find him, "I lost him! I think he's coming your way!"

You run a few blocks to catch up, but it was no use, "Y/n meet me at HQ..." Came Steve's voice from the radio. "What about Ultron?" You stop and look at the direction to the tower, "We'll discuss that later." You roll your eyes. You hate it when people don't give you the reports right away. So now you're running in the completely different direction again, and at some point you were able to catch up with Steve, who suddenly has the two with you that you had seen in the lab.

The three of them were in a hurry for some reason and immediately rushed into Tony's lab, "I'm only going to say this once." You saw Tony and Bruce also connecting cables to the vessel. What did you before?

"How about no time?"

"Turn it off!" Steve took a step forward. "Nope." But Tony kept pushing his buttons. "You don't know what you're doing!" You notice Bruce tense up and move closer to you as well, "But you do? Is your mind guiding you?" He points his finger at the female Steve has brought with him. Steer mind? You can do that?!

"I know you're angry." Oooohh, maybe it was related to the incident four hours ago..Bruce, Tony, and Steve are discussing and suddenly the one next to me was standing on the other side of the room, cables in hand, HOW THE HELL?!!!

And from then on, the complete chaos began. Steve started attacking Tony, he of course defended himself. Bruce was holding the mind woman, and you were just standing there. You are too new here to pick any side. And if that wasn't enough, Thor joined in, swinging his hammer in the air and throwing it right back at the vessel. All was quiet until the vessel inflated and burst completely. Out of the thing now came another thing. It looked like a human only in red and a few places were covered in silver. Everyone took cover and the thing in red looked around. It looked at Thor and flew straight at him. But her swerved and threw it further, where he then paused in front of a window. He stayed there for a few, until he came back around, "Sorry..That was..weird. Thank you." He nodded to Thor.

After that, the guys almost started bumping into each other again until Thor enlightened us. It's still a blur to you, but the others seem to have figured it out.

"He's waiting for you." the red one started again, "Where?" and clint stepped forward, "In Sokovia..Natasha he has there too."

"Totally impossible for all of us to get through there. If only one tin soldier remains, we've lost. It's going to be an ugly thing and blood will flow."

I guess that will be the endgame. Man versus machine.

"Ultron knows we are coming. We expect heavy fire. We know what to expect. But the people of Sokovia...do not. So our priority is to get their out of there. We find out what Ultron built, we find Romanoff, and we evacuate the area." Steve looks at us as we all get the Quinjet (as you figured out) launch ready.

"The fight is just between us."

You immediately understood why Steve is in charge here. He just knows how to use his words and get the team motivated. When you were on your way, you had divided into groups. Steve assigned you with Bruce because Hulk should stay in as long as possible and Bruce would be on his own. You didn't mind, after all, you had to give it your all earlier. Clint gave us the more exact coordinates of Natasha's position and we headed out. It was a kind of castle that was abandoned. You had only split up, but no one had found her. There was only one way left open, and that's where she had to be. Bruce went out and you behind him. You were already thinking ahead and looking for things that might be of use to you to get Natasha out, and you found something. So did Bruce. You came to it when Natasha asked how to get out of here, "That's my sign, Hi. I hope you're okay?" She just nodded, "Well then, I found this beautiful thing here!" It was enormous in your hands and heavy to boot. You pressed the detonator and the gun charged, then fired, and you thought the entire door would be blown apart, but only the lock fell off. You look down at the gun in disappointment and drop it.

Natasha came out, "So what's the plan?" Bruce just stood up for some reason, "I'm going to get you to safety." You stood next to him and looked at him.

I'm not even there..it's okay.

"The job isn't over yet?" Natasha asked and you agree. That was definitely not the plan. You were about to say something until he interrupted, "We can help with the evacuation, but I-I'm not allowed to fight when people are around, and you've already done enough. Our fight is over."

He came closer to her and looked in her eyes. You were just speechless. Was he flirting with her right now? In a situation like this?

"I hate to interrupt your...whatever this is, but we have to go..." You intervened, as slowly but surely the town was getting restless. The two listened to you, and you set off on your way back. However, now suddenly the ground began to shake and bricks fell from the walls. "We have to get out of here..." Okay, you're starting to dislike Bruce, isn't that what you mentioned 5 minutes ago!

"Aren't you turning green?" Natasha held him tight, "I have a beautiful reason to be cool."

Now it's over. You don't know if it was your instinct or the nauseating feeling, but you got in between them until more happens and throw him down wherever it goes there. You turn to Natasha, "I know this looks wrong, but-"

"No. This was the right thing to do. We need the other one."

That was definitely your plan…

It wasn't long before the screaming got louder, and now Hulk was standing in front of us, now looking at both of you. You both held onto him and he jumped off. It was the longest 15 seconds of your lives because you really thought you wouldn't make it, but then when Hulk got to the top he threw us both off his back, and we rolled on the ground and also got up at the same time and stood there identical. You thought that was very funny, hello, it wasn't even planned that way, but Natasha just looked at you in shock and quickly straightened up, "We have to go."

She gave Hulk another nod and ran ahead to the city. You didn't think much of it and went after her. You both could see from afar what the city looked like, and it was a total disaster.

Also, later you noticed that you were in the air...What was Ultron up to?

It didn't take you long to get to the others and try to rescue a group of civilians from the battle of the machines. You beat the hell out of them, only more and more machines came out of nowhere. "Y/N!" You were just surrounded until Steve threw you his shield, and you took it thankfully. It was fantastic. The shield was not only good at protecting, it was also good at attacking.

Your side was clear, and you threw the shield to Natasha. She took it as well and hit the thing in front of her several times, pushing it away a bit and reflexively throwing it back to you as you ran to it. You caught it and used it to knock the head off the machine.

"We make a good team, don't you think?" That you say that...

However, she just looked at you again and straightened her posture, "Didn't expect anything else now, and now move on."

You just look after her. Did you do something wrong at some point? Why is she being like this to you? You arrived together at Steve's who was already talking to Tony, and it looked very bad for you and the population, "Steve these people have nowhere to go." Natasha confirmed Steve's fear. "Blow up-"

"Not if everyone is safe..." You also had something to say, "Everyone up here or everyone down there? That's out of proportion..." So that's it? Wow..you've been able to enjoy your new freedom for almost three days..you look ahead and see only the blue skies and the clouds,

"We can die worse..And the view isn't so bad.." You thought your end was sealed four years ago, and that's definitely no comparison to this.

"Glad you like the view, Y/n, it's about to get even better." You look puzzled as you suddenly hear Nick's voice and all of a sudden a cloud got bigger and Nick's ship came out of nowhere.

"Fury, you really have balls..." You could tell hope was coming back. On top of that, several small ships were docking, planned for the civilians. "Let's load you up then!"

The next few minutes were spent getting everyone one on the ships. However, Ultron had other plans. Thor called for help, and Tony commanded you all to support him, and a little later you all found yourselves together again at the heart of it all. Ultron's entire army against the nine of you. Ultron's machines began the attack and you gave everything you had. You didn't know what it was, but the feeling was incredible. Thousands of machines against two handfuls of you, and you did well. Not a single machine came close to the core. Every once in a while you had to smile, because just such a situation happened in your training. You didn't realize it, but Natasha had a hard time keeping her eyes on the machines and on you at the same time. How did you know this fighting art? And how can you perform it so well? She was- no is better than you, at least that's what she thinks, but her notions are kicked to sand when she saw your stamina and felt hers. You had destroyed by far more machines than she, and she is already physically almost at the end.

Eventually it got to the point where Thor, Tony, and Vision could go at Ultron himself and defeat him. They stopped and Ultron wanted to say something. But Hulk had other plans and catapulted him into nothingness.

"We have to leave, even I feel the air is getting thin. Go to the ferries. I'll look for stragglers and catch up."

"I'll come with you." Everyone looked at you, "I can still go on, take me with you." Steve looked at you and definitely sees that you are telling the truth. He nodded and the two of you set off. The others drove back as Steve had instructed.

You and Steve crossed half the city again and found no one else. You are already on the ferry, when Steve looked around again. But suddenly the island fell and Steve jumped up in time. You both look down in shock and see the rock hurtling towards the earth at a rapid pace and falling into thousands of small pieces a short time later.

You all wait until the small ship brought you to the big one, and then go to the bridge to tell Fury everything. You stopped in your tracks, however, as you saw Natasha talking to Bruce-or rather Hulk-through the radio, "Flip the bird, okay?" She tried to stay calm, and you see Hulk walking towards the screen, "We can't track you in stealth mode.." You'd think she was talking to a kid. Kind of cute.

"So help me out here, will you? You're supposed to-" And suddenly the screen went black. Hulk apparently disconnected..Natasha seemed hurt and probably wasn't expecting it. You're bad with feelings and words, but it doesn't seem to hurt to try, does it?

"We'll find him, I'm sure..To me, Bruce came up in the last-" She stood up and came straight to you,

"You know absolutely nothing about him or about us! You think you can suck up to Fury and thus hope for a bright future, don't you? Wrong thinking L/n. Let me guess, you had no interest in joining the team until Fury talked you into it and convinced you by acting like you were the best in your field. Do you really think you're just going to walk in here and take it all without caring how it affects everyone else?"

What is wrong with her? What did you ever do to get on this side of Her? Is it your age? Is it your nature? You were so surprised and shocked at the same time that you didn't even know what to say. There you are, open-minded for once, and the rug is pulled right out from under you.

She walked past you, and you just look over and Fury came at you.

"Wow, that hit something..." You look at him, and he looks at you, "I hope you don't believe her. Romanoff is a little..complicated at first, but nothing you can't handle." That's right..both.

A night passed, and you were so grateful to finally get some rest. But the next day, it was back to business. You, Wanda, Rhodey, Vision, and Sam were now the new hitchhikers, and you were glad not to be the only one anymore. You were in a hanger until Steve and Natasha came in. You were told that they were going to help you work as a team and when you saw Natasha you knew it was going to be fun.

TAGLIST: @marvelwomen-simp @natsxwife @blacklightsposts

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fatehbaz · 1 year ago

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all the time, gotta walk away, for a moment, take a break, infuriated, when reading about European implementation of forced labour, particularly and especially thinking about nineteenth and early twentieth centuries plantations, whether it's sugarcane or rubber or tea or banana, whether it's British plantations in Assam or Malaya; Belgian plantations in Congo; French plantations in West Africa; Dutch plantations in Java; de facto United States-controlled plantations in Haiti or Guatemala or Cuba or Colombia. and the story is always: "and then the government tried to find a way to reimpose slavery under a different name. and then the government destroyed vast regions of forest for monoculture plantations. and then the government forced thousands to become homeless and then criminalized poverty to force people into plantation work or prison labor." like the plantation industries are central (entangled with every commodity and every infrastructure project) and their directors are influencing each other despite spatial distance between London and the Caribbean and the Philippines.

and so the same few dozen administrators and companies and institutions keep making appearances everywhere, like they have outsized influence in history. like they are important nodes in a network. and they all cite each other, and write letters to each other, and send plant collection gifts to each other, and attend each other's lectures, and inspire other companies and colonial powers to adapt their policies/techniques.

but. important that we ought not characterize some systems and forces (surveillance apparatuses, industrial might, capitalism itself) as willful or always conscious. this is a critical addendum. a lot of those forces are self-perpetuating, or at least not, like, a sentient monster. we ought to avoid imagining a hypothetical boardroom full of be-suited businessmen smoking cigars and plotting schemes. this runs the risk of misunderstanding the forces that kill us, runs the risk of attributing qualities to those forces that they don't actually possess. but sometimes, in some cases, there really are, like, a few particular assholes with a disproportionate amount of influence making problems for everyone else.

not to over-simplify, but sometimes it's like the same prominent people, and a few key well-placed connections and enablers in research institutions or infrastructure companies. they're prison wardens and lietuenant governors and medical doctors and engineers and military commanders and botanists and bankers, and they all co-ordinate these multi-faceted plans to dispossess the locals, build the roads, occupy the local government, co-erce the labour, tend the plants, ship the products.

so you'll be reading the story of like a decade in British Singapore and you're like "oh, i bet that one ambitious British surgeon who is into 'economics' and is obsessed with tigers and has the big nutmeg garden in his backyard is gonna show up again" and sure enough he does. but also sometimes you're reading about another situation halfway across the planet and then they surprise you (because so many of them are wealthy and influential and friends with each other) and it'll be like "oh you're reading about a British officer displacing local people to construct a new building in Nigeria? surprise cameo! he just got a letter from the dude at the university back in London or the agriculturalist in Jamaica or the urban planner from Bombay, they all went to school together and they're also all investors in the same rubber plantation in Malaya". so you'll see repeated references to the same names like "the British governor of Bengal" or "[a financial institution or bank from Paris or New York City]" or "[a specific colonial doctor/laboratory that does unethical experiments or eugenics stuff]" or "lead tropical agriculture adviser to [major corporation]" or "the United Fruit Company" and it's like "not you again"

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eyeodyssey · 1 year ago

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The Post-Futurist Fossils of LITCHI HIKARI CLUB In a somewhat recent research tangent, while considering the possible “genealogy” of the Tokyo Grand Guignol’s themes and aesthetics, I made an interesting personal discovery regarding Litchi Hikari Club. Specifically some distinct thematic parallels that the play shares with the Italian futurist movement, less in relation to the art of the movement itself, but rather the ideologies of the movement’s controversial founder, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, and his relation to the Italian fascist party. This is all of course in the context of understanding Litchi as a transgressive/dystopian horror story. This is less of an absolute statement than it is a sort of open train of thought, so take things with a fair grain of salt. This is more or less just my own personal analysis of all the materials I could gather of the original play. Beyond inspecting the play as a possible allegory for futurism, there's also just a lot of general analysis of the play in relation to Ameya's overall body of work, both with the Tokyo Grand Guignol and also as a performance artist. I rarely put a 'keep reading' tag on these things since I'm an openly shameless product of the early days of blogging, but this one's a doozy (both in the information but also just the gargantuan length). Hopefully others will find it just as interesting. The full essay is below...

The futurist movement itself was nothing short of an oddity. In their time, the futurists were pioneers of avant-garde modernist aesthetics, with their works ranging from deconstructive paintings to reality-bending sculptures and even early pathways to noise music with the creation of the non-conventional Intonarumori instruments of Luigi Russolo. Russolo’s own futurist-adjacent manifesto, The Art of Noises, would go on to influence such artists as John Cage, Pierre Henry, Einstürzende Neubauten and the openly left-wing industrial collective Test Department. When visiting the MOMA in New York City as a child, I was fascinated by Boccioni’s Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, a sculpture that appeared to be a spacetime malformation of the human figure encapsulated in a continual state of forward motion while in total stillness. Despite this, the futurists were also a social movement of warmongering misogynists, with their own founding manifesto by Marinetti describing the bloodshed and cruelty of war as being “… the only cure for the world”. Their manifesto would also feature quotes such as “We want to demolish museums and libraries, fight morality, feminism and all opportunist and utilitarian cowardice”. They would originally pin anarchism as being their ideological ground in the manifesto, but shortly thereafter Marinetti would pick up an interest in fascism along with the politics of Benito Mussolini, going on to be a coauthor for the Italian fascist manifesto alongside the futurist manifesto. In consideration of how throughout most of World War II, modernist and post-modern works were considered “degenerate” forms of art in contrast with traditionalism, a whole avant-garde movement founded from fascist ideals is paradoxical. But for a period of time, that parallel wasn’t only in existence, but backed by Mussolini himself with there being a brief effort by Marinetti to make futurism the official aesthetic of fascist Italy. One of the draws of futurism for Marinetti was an underlying sense of violence and extremity. According to Marinetti, his initial inspiration for the movement was the sensations he felt in the aftermath of a car accident where he drove into a ditch after nearly running over a band of tricyclists. He conceived his works to be acts of social disruption, intending to put people in states of unrest to cause riots and similar bouts of violence. “Art, in fact, can be nothing but violence, cruelty, and injustice”. He sought to destroy history to pave the way for a rapid acceleration to futuristic technological revelation.

“As shown in Edogawa Rampo’s Boy Detectives Club, young men like to hide from a world of girls and adulthood to form their own secret societies.” - June Vol. 27 In Litchi Hikari Club, a group of middle school-aged boys are faced with a crisis on the brink of puberty. At the twilight of their childhoods, they form a secret society known as the Hikari Club (or Light Club), a collective that’s devoted to the active preservation of their shared youth and virginity. The boys naively mimic an authoritarian organization and its hierarchy as they seek a means to preserve their boyhood, which they see as being idyllic in contrast to adulthood, a dreary state of existence that they call old and tired in the Usamaru Furuya manga version of the story. Similarly, in the Litchi Hikari Club-inspired short manga Moon Age 15: Damnation, the boys go on to liken their hideout with the paradisiacal garden of Eden. In said story, Zera would directly name the poem Paradise Lost in reference to the discovery of their hideout by adults (arriving in the form of ground surveyors) and the wide-eyed daughter of a land broker, with their contact to the virgin industrialized land being an ideological tainting of the sacred lair. In their mission, they seek refuge in technological inhumanity by having their penises replaced with mechanized iron penises, symbolic devices of power and violence that can only procreate with other items of technology. Working in absolute secrecy, they collectively manufacture a robot known as Lychee. The purpose of Lychee, previously only known to Zera, isn’t revealed to the other club members until its completion. It’s when they unveil their “cute” robot in a scene that parallels the 1920 German expressionist film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari that Zera tells the other members of Lychee’s purpose as a machine that would kidnap women for them. The robot's efforts are assisted by the girl capturing device, a strange rice cooker-shaped mask that’s laced with a sleeping drug. When questioned about the fuel source for the robot, Zera explains how it will run off the clean fuel of lychee fruits rather than an unsavory yet plentiful substance like electricity or gasoline as a means to further match the robot’s perceived beauty.

While the club share a general disdain for adulthood, they hold a special hatred to girls and women. Going off the dogmatic repulsion to sexuality that Kyusaku Shimada shows as the teacher in the Tokyo Grand Guignol’s prior play, Mercuro (1984), it could be assumed that the Hikari Club hold a similar dogmatic viewpoint about the vices of sex. In this context, it’s likely that they would’ve perceived women as being parasitic by nature as spreaders of the “old” and “tired” adult human condition through pubescent fixation and procreation. Sexual thoughts are inherent to aging for most people, given the process of discovering and exploring your identity throughout puberty. It’s that exact pubescent experience the club seek to eradicate. Further insight is given to the Hikari Club’s dystopian psyche through their open allusions to nazi ideology. While Zera travels out to gather lychees from a tree he planted, the club get a special visit from a depraved elderly showman known as the Marquis De Maruo, performed by none other than Suehiro Maruo himself in the 1985 Christmas performance. Despite the club’s disposition to adults, they hold an exception for the Marquis for his old-timey showmanship and open pandering to the children’s whims. He always comes with autopsy films to show the young boys, and as they watch the gory videos he hands out candies that he describes as being a personal favorite of the late Adolf Hitler. He was said to also be the one to convince the boys to name their robot after the lychee fruit. It isn’t until Zera returns that the Marquis is removed from the hideout on Zera’s orders. Just before his exiling, he foretells to Zera the prophecy of the black star as both a promise and a warning to the aspiring dictator. It should be noted that there is a fascist occult symbol known as the black sun.

Suehiro Maruo as the Marquis De Maruo. On the right side is a caricature of Maruo as drawn by a contributor to June magazine, excerpted from an editorial cartoon in June Vol. 27 covering Litchi's 1985 Christmas performance. In addition, the Marquis’ role alongside Jaibo’s appearances in the play (which I’ll get to later) show distinct parallels with the presence of the hobo in the Tokyo Grand Guignol’s first play, Mercuro. In Mercuro’s case, the hobo (performed by Norimizu Ameya, who would go on to also act as Jaibo) visits the classroom in secrecy to lecture the students his depraved ideologies. Whilst the hobo in Mercuro was a figure of perversion that existed in contrast to the teacher’s paranoid conservatism, in Litchi both Jaibo and the Marquis are enablers of the club’s fascistic leanings, with the Marquis being a promoter whereas Jaibo is a direct representation of the underlining perversions of fascist violence. Though completely omitted from the Furuya manga, the element of the autopsy films shines a unique light on Zera’s death at the end of the story. In both the play and the manga, Zera is gutted alive by Lychee when the robot undergoes a meltdown after being forced to drown Kanon (Marin in the original play) in a coffin lined with roses. In the manga, Zera appears deeply unsettled when realizing his intestines resemble the internals of an adult. It’s unknown if this aspect is present in the theater version, as the full script remains unreleased to this day. It would fit however knowing not just the club’s repulsion to adulthood, but also how they retreat to technological modification to eradicate the human aspects they associate with adulthood. What is described of Zera’s death in the theater version has its own disquieting qualities as, from what’s mentioned, when confronted with his own mortality he appears to regress to a state of childlike delirium, a demeanor that’s drastically different from his usual calm and orderly presentation. Upon seeing his intestines, one of the responses he is able to muster is “I’m in trouble”. He says this as he questions whether or not he can fit his organs back inside the cavity before eventually telling himself that he’s just tired, that he “need(s) to sleep for a while”.

While never directly stated, it’s heavily implied that the club’s ideologies and technological fetishism ultimately root back to Jaibo, an ambiguously European transfer student who secretly manipulates the club’s actions from behind the scenes. Referred to by Hiroyuki Tsunekawa (Zera’s actor) as the “true dark emperor” of the Hikari Club, he was said to haunt the stage from the sides, closely inspecting the Hikari Club’s activities while keeping a distance. The iron phallus was first introduced by Jaibo through a monologue where he reveals how he fixed one to his own person, carefully describing its inner mechanisms and functionality before demonstrating its inhuman reproductive qualities by using the phallus to have sex with a TV. A television that he affectionately refers to as Psychic TV Chan, in reference to the post-industrial band fronted by Genesis P’Orridge. In the same scene, he promises the other members that they would all eventually get their own iron penises just like his own. In a subsequent scene, he reveals the iron phallus’ use as a weapon when, arriving to the club’s base with a chained-up female schoolteacher who accidentally discovered the sanctuary, he uses the device to brutally kill the teacher through a mocking simulation of sexual intercourse. Just before raping her, he likens her to a landrace, bred for the sole purpose of reproducing and being processed into meat for consumption. He menacingly tells her that he will make her as “cut and dry” as her role in society before carrying out her execution. While there was some confusion on whether or not the iron phallus was a machine or solely a chastity device, it was found in bits of dialogue that the iron phallus at least shares the qualities of a pump with a described set of rubber hinges. The teacher’s death gruesomely reflects the death of Kei Fujiwara’s character in the later film Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1989), with the iron phallus mangling her insides as blood splatters across the stage. While the club treats adult sexuality as a plague, they manage to find through the iron phallus a way to convert their own states of chastity into a form of violence, stripping all humanity away from the penis and rendering it to a weapon of absolute power through desolate mechanized cruelty.

JAIBO: “Length, 250 mm, with a weight of 2.4 kilograms. Arm diameter, 30mm. Cylindrical thrust, 170mm… With pins, plates and rods of die-cast alloy. And hinges of rubber… the rest is pure iron. It is the iron phallus.” - June Vol. 27 In the same interview, Tsunekawa would go on to recall how the members of the Hikari Club were effectively Jaibo’s guinea pigs. In both the play and the manga, an after-school night of the long knives ensues with the slow collapse of the Hikari Club as Jaibo influences the exiling of certain club members, with Zera left ignorant to the social engineering as a mere extension of Jaibo’s elaborate puppeteering. Left embittered by a chess match where he lost to Zera, Tamiya is easily tricked by Jaibo into burning the lychee field as a way to get vengeance. Upon being caught, Tamiya is castrated of his iron phallus, resulting in his exiling from the club as a traitor while also being mockingly likened to a woman in the process. In another scene, it’s recalled that Jaibo and Zera exchange a conversation about the Hikari Club’s loyalty to Zera as they observe the outside world through their periscopes. By all contemporary recollections, Jaibo was the club’s puppet master. He would’ve been the likely source of the club’s ideologies, the underlining hatred to women and fixation on technological violence, replacing mankind with a race of humanoid weapons. Zera would be a shell without his influence. The presence of futurism could arguably even be rounded down to Lychee’s presence in the story. Beyond his theoretic work, Marinetti was also a playwright. He would be most well known for his futurist drama La donna è mobile, a story riddled with similarly perverse renditions of sexual violence. The play notably featured the presence of humanoid automatons a full decade before the term “robot” would be coined by Czechoslovakian author Karel Čapek in the play R.U.R., with the French version of Marinetti’s script referring to the machines as “puppets” for their visual similarity to humans.

All of this plays out over a soundscape that’s dominated by unnatural electronic frequencies and synthesized percussion. The sound design was arguably one of the most important aspects of Ameya’s plays, with Ameya at one point describing the Tokyo Grand Guignol productions as being an ensemble of his favorite sounds. The setting further compliments the atmosphere, made to resemble the internal of a junkyard or factory warehouse where heaps of technical jump decorate the stage around the monochrome cabinet that would eventually birth Lychee. Some of the featured artists in the play’s first act include Test Department, The Residents, 23 Skidoo and Deutsch Amerikanische Freundschaft. The play’s opening, which depicts the capturing and subsequent torture of a student named Toba through a so-called “baptism of light”, is underscored by the S.P.K. song Culturcide, a grim primordial industrial dirge that paints the image of a dystopia where the genocide of ethnic cultures is likened to the infection of human cells by parasitic pathogens. Instead of being hung with a noose, Toba is suspended by a meathook, left as a decoration amidst the heaps of mechanized excrement. He would eventually be joined by the lifeless bodies of various women the Hikari Club abduct as they’re steadily gathered in a small box at the back of the stage. “Membrane torn apart, scavenging with the nomads. Requiem for the vestiges. Dissected, reproduced. The nucleus is infected with hybrid’s seed. Needles soak up, the weak must destroy. Cells cry out, cells scream out. Culturcide! Culturcide! Culturcide! Culturcide!” - Culturcide (from S.P.K.'s Dekompositiones EP)

“We are now entering an era which history will come to call ANOTHER DARK AGE. But, in kontrast to the original Dark Age, defined by a lack of information, we suffer from an excess of information, which has been reduced to the repetition of media-generated signs. Through this specialization, it is no longer possible for an individual to attain a total view of society. Edukation is struktured to the performance of a limited number of funktions rather than for kreativity.” “Kommunications systems are designed for the passive entertainment of the konsumer rather than the aktive stimulation of the user’s imagination. Through the spread of the western media, all kultures come to stimulate one another. By the end of the millennium, this biological infektion will have penetrated the heart of the most isolated traditions - a total CULTURCIDE.” “Yet in every era, a small number of visionaries rise above the general malaise. Those who will succeed, will resist the pressure to become kommercialized “images”, demanding identifikation and imitation. They will uphold their principles in the face of impossible odds. By remaining anonymous, they will be free to develop their imagination with maximum diversity. For this is the TWILIGHT OF THE IDOLS, - the end of the proliferation of the ikons and the advent of a new symbolism.” - From the back cover of S.P.K.’s Dekompositiones EP (released under the moniker SepPuKu) Over the course of the play, the story undergoes a drastic tonal shift as the focus moves from the Hikari Club’s hierarchical order and internal conflicts to the relationship between Lychee and Marin. Marin (performed by synthpop musician Miharu Koshi) was the first girl the Hikari Club successfully kidnap through Lychee after implementing the phrase “I am a human” in Lychee’s coding so it can understand the concept of human beauty. This small implementation causes a full unraveling in Lychee’s personality as it quickly forms a close bond with Marin, convinced that it is also a human like Marin. The soundscape changes alongside the overarching atmosphere, going from cold industrial drones and percussive electronica to ambient tracks. Some of the major scenes play out over moving piano-focused pieces and music box tunes from Haruomi Hosono’s soundtrack for Night on the Galactic Railroad. Originally created a weapon like the iron phalluses and the girl capturing device, Lychee is eventually defined in how he transcends from being a weapon to a conscious being with feelings. In this context, the play can be read as a juxtaposition of human emotion against inhuman futurist brutality.

This split was likely the product of the radically different creative ideologies of Norimizu Ameya (the Tokyo Grand Guignol’s founder and lead director) and pseudonymous author K. Tagane (the playwright for the group from Mercuro to Litchi). Ameya had come into the group with radical intentions, holding Artaudesque aspirations to transgress the literary limits of modern theater to achieve something deeply subconscious. Meanwhile, Tagane was a romantic who was known for their poetic and lyrical screenplays. Ameya purportedly sought out Tagane’s screenplays specifically to find a literary base he would “destroy” in his direction, deconstructing the poeticisms in his own unique style. He describes it briefly in an interview regarding the stage directions of Mercuro, stating how he took elaborate descriptions of a lingering moon and ultimately deconstructed them to the moon solely being an illusion set by a screen projector, mapping out the exact dimensions of the projection to being a 3-meter photograph of the moon rather than a “fantastic moon”. It’s believed by some that the Tokyo Grand Guignol’s formation and ultimately short run were the product of a miraculous balance between Ameya and Tagane’s ideologies. It’s possible that Litchi could’ve been a last straw between the two artists. After Litchi, Tagane left the group, with Ameya having to write the troupe’s final screenplay on his own. LYCHEE: “Marin is always sleeping… all she does is sleep. She doesn’t eat anything. Why does Marin sleep all day?” MARIN: “When you’re asleep, all the sadness of the world passes over you.”

"The second half of Litchi was predominantly driven by the sounds of Ryuichi Sakamoto and Haruomi Hosono. During a scene that featured a piece from the Galactic Railroad soundtrack, Miharu Koshi sang to Kyusaku Shimada while dancing like a clockwork doll to the sounds of a twisting music box. The scene lasted for a while and was very romantic, the interactions between Lychee and Marin were all very sweet and cute. The second act of Litchi was all a product of Tagane’s making. By the time of the following play, Walpurgis, I was told by a staff member that Ameya had written the screenplay by himself because Tagane had left.” “… While the first half was filled with repeated mantras and the unfolding aesthetics of an aspiring militia, the second half was immersed in the world of shoujo manga. It did appear that through the intermission, much of the junk and rubble around the podium was sorted out.” “… The Tokyo Grand Guignol’s plays were always defined by a strong nocturnal atmosphere. But in Litchi’s second half, it wasn’t a dark night, but a brightly lit one under the moonlight and plentiful stars in the sky shining through an invisible skylight. Marin doesn’t forgive Lychee immediately for his actions, responding to him harshly in a way that would confuse him and make him sulk. It came across as a somewhat bitter reimagining of a French comedy like Louis Malle’s Zazie dans le Métro or Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Amélie, it was different that way in how it wasn’t only Maruo’s inferno.” - From a Twitter thread by user Shoru Toji regarding the 1986 rerun of Litchi Hikari Club Some questionable qualities do exist in the relationship between Lychee and Marin. What should be a peaceful retreat from the dystopian corruption still has a sinister undertone in the disparities between Lychee’s cold masculine features in contrast with Marin’s childlike girly innocence. It doesn’t help that Zazie dans le Métro (one of the mentioned films in the recollection) was directed by Louis Malle, who while known for such films as My Dinner With Andre and Black Moon was also responsible for the infamously discomforting Pretty Baby. Then again, Litchi was the product of a confrontational transgressive subculture, so the sinister undertones could be intentional. Keep in mind the contents of Suehiro Maruo’s prolific adaption of Shōjo Tsubaki and how it unflinchingly depicts abuse and manipulation through the eyes of a confused child. It could be possible that Lychee himself was intended to be childlike in its mannerisms. Throughout the existing descriptions, Lychee was shown as speaking in fragmented sentences while struggling to understand basic concepts. Zera was mentioned to also use certain phrases like “cute” when referring to the robot when it was unveiled. And it’s through Marin that Lychee learns morality like a child. The robot’s masculinity could be passed off as the cast all being adults. Hiroyuki Tsunekawa for instance shows distinctly sculpted features from certain angles when performing Zera.

In his aspirations to become a human, Lychee eventually “dies” like a human. With the burning of Zera’s lychee tree, the robot is left with a finite limit on its remaining energy before it totally loses consciousness. After his rampage, Lychee attempts to reunite with Marin, but he runs out of fuel. Before what should be a moment of resolution, things are cut short as the stage goes black, eventually illuminated to show an unpowered Lychee cradling Marin’s corpse in his arms. Zera reemerges to observe the remnants of Lychee and Marin. He speaks of how Lychee will crumble into nothingness alongside Marin for foolishly giving into human emotion, further implying the club’s views on humanity. After this, recollections of the play’s final lines differentiate somewhat. It was said that in the original Christmas performance, Zera calls out to Jaibo, posing the corpses of Lychee and Marin as being his seasonal gifts to Jaibo. Whereas in most popular recollections, it’s described that after his monologue, Zera shouts “Wohlan! Beginnen!” (German for “Now! Begin!”) before prompting the decorations across the stage to collapse, revealing a set of stepladders from behind that the remaining previously deceased club members stand, all drenched in blood with spotlights illuminating their faces from below. ZERA: “And with that, our tale of a foolish romance between woman and machine reaches its conclusion. It ends before me as I stand here, watching. Lychee, the machine, will rust away into dust. And Marin, a young girl, will rot away leaving behind only her bones, which too will crumble…”

Multiple readings can be deciphered from this conclusion. The most established theory is in relation to the Hikari Club’s aspirations for eternal youth, with the members technically achieving their goal through the stagnation of death. They will remain eternal children since they died as children, unable to ever grow into adulthood. In the context of futurism and mechanized fascism however, it could be read as a bitter observation of a lasting dictatorship. With how the Hikari Club members had rendered themselves less human than their own robot, they survive death to continue their work, seeking to one day eradicate humanity in favor of a race of sentient childlike weapons. “To admire an old picture is to pour our sensibility into a funeral urn instead of casting it forward with violent spurts of creation and action. Do you want to waste the best part of your strength in a useless admiration of the past, from which you will emerge exhausted, diminished, trampled on?” “… For the dying, for invalids and for prisoners it may be all right. It is, perhaps, some sort of balm for their wounds, the admirable past, at a moment when the future is denied them. But we will have none of it, we, the young, strong and living Futurists! Let the good incendiaries with charred fingers come! Here they are! Heap up the fire to the shelves of the libraries! Divert the canals to flood the cellars of the museums! Let the glorious canvases swim ashore! Take the picks and hammers! Undermine the foundation of venerable towns! The oldest among us are not yet thirty years old: we have therefore at least ten years to accomplish our task. When we are forty let younger and stronger men than we throw us in the waste paper basket like useless manuscripts! They will come against us from afar, leaping on the light cadence of their first poems, clutching the air with their predatory fingers and sniffing at the gates of the academies the good scent of our decaying spirits, already promised to the catacombs of the libraries.” - from the 1909 Futurist Manifesto by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti

I forgot what exactly first caused the parallel to cross my mind. I do recall it being reignited when having a closer look over the poster and flyer for Litchi’s Christmas performance in December 1985. The flyer in particular is really a wonderful thing to look at. Predominantly featuring an art spread by Suehiro Maruo, a suited man with Kyusaku Shimada’s likeness is shown caressing a girl in front of a modernist cityscape with spotlights shining up to a night sky. Other suited men in goggles fly in the air with Da Vinci-reminiscent flying apparatuses between the beams of the metropolis’ spotlights. A student in full gakuran uniform flings himself into the scene from the far left side of the image with a dagger in hand, and a larger hand comes from the viewer’s perspective holding a partially peeled lychee fruit. While not based on any direct scene from the play, it perfectly instills the play’s atmosphere with an air of antiquated modernity, like the numerous illustrations of the early 1900s that show aspirational visions of what a futuristic cityscape might resemble. The bizarre neo-Victorian fashions of the future and its post-modernist formalities. The term futurism came to mind somewhat naively from this train of thought. It was a movement I recalled hearing about, but my memory of it was hazy. It wasn’t until I went in for a basic refresher that I felt the figurative lightbulb go off in my head. That was when the pieces started to come together, but then also strain apart from each other into tangents. Granted, many of these parallels could be read as coincidental. Many of them can even be passed off the play being a work of proto-cyberpunk, knowing how Tetsuo: The Iron Man would subsequently explore similar themes of cybernetics and human sexuality. It should still be noted however that in contrast with many of the Japanese cyberpunk films, Litchi was explicit in its connotations between technological inhumanity and fascism, with the machinery itself being the iconography of a dictatorship rather than a product of it. In addition, with Tetsuo the film has strong gay overtones, with the technology being an extension of the sexual tensions between the salaryman and the metal fetishist. For a period of time, efforts were made to make futurism the official aesthetic of fascist Italy, and modern fascism as we know it is in the same family tree of Italian philosophy as futurism. The Hikari Club are explicit in drawing from German aesthetics rather than Italian however, speaking in intermittent German and predominantly using German technology. The spotlight that they used when torturing Toba in the first act, for example, was a Hustadt Leuchten branded spotlight. And if that isn’t a German name I don’t know what is. It was also said that Jaibo’s outfit in the play was modeled after German school uniforms. Though then again, the Tokyo Grand Guignol’s works were a bit of a cultural slurry. Jaibo’s name for example is Spanish (derived from Luis Buñuel’s Los Olvidados), while the character is implied to be German.

Similar to the cited origins of futurism, Ameya stated in a 2019 tweet regarding the June 9th, 1985 abridged Mercuro performance on Tokumitsu Kazuo’s TV Forum that in the following August of that year, an airplane accident occurred that led to the conception of Litchi’s screenplay. The exact nature of the accident was never specified, but the affiliates he was communicating with all appeared to be familiar with it and expressed concern when it was brought up. This was however one of an assortment of influences that were cited behind Litchi’s production, with the two more established theories regarding the then-contemporary mystique around lychee fruit in Chinese cuisine along with the play being a loose adaption of Kazuo Umezu’s My Name is Shingo. For what it’s worth, the themes of Litchi, along with the Tokyo Grand Guignol’s other works, were closely tied with certain concepts that Ameya personally cultivated throughout his career. A frequent recurring topic Ameya would bring up in relation to his works was the nature of the human body in relation to foreign matter, need it be biological or unnatural. With Mercuro the students taught by Shimada are made into so-called Mercuroids by having their blood supplies replaced with mercurochrome, a substance that is referred to as the “antithesis of blood” by Shimada while in character. In an interview for the book About Artaud?, Ameya cites an interest in Osamu Tezuka’s manga in how certain stories of Tezuka’s paralleled Ameya’s observations of the body. He directly names Dororo and Black Jack, observing how both Hyakkimaru and Black Jack reconstructed their bodies from pieces of other people, going on to bluntly describe Pinoko as a “mass of organs covered in plastic skin”.

A section from June Vol. 27 highlighting some of the more established performers from Litchi's 1985 Christmas performance. The actors from left to right are Norimizu Ameya as Jaibo, Naomi Hagio as the female school teacher (best known in cult circles for her role as Kazuyo in the 1986 horror film Entrails of a Virgin), Suehiro Maruo out of costume and Miharu Koshi as Marin. During his temporary retirement from theater, Ameya would take up performance art, with some of his performances revolving around acts with his own blood. While my memories of these works are a bit hazy, I remember one action he performed that involved a blood transfusion, with the focus being on the experience of having another person’s blood coursing through your veins. While I didn't have much luck relocating this piece (probably from it not being covered in English), I did find on the Japan Foundation’s page for performing arts an interview where Ameya discusses being in a band with Shimada where Ameya had blood drawn from his body while he played drums. He would also describe an art exhibition where he displayed samples of the blood of a person infected with HIV. “After 1990 he left the field of theatre and began to engage himself with visual arts - still proceeding to work on his major topic - the human body - taking up themes like blood transfusion, artificial fertilization, infectious diseases, selective breeding, chemical food, and sex discrimination, creating works as a member of the collaboration unit Technocrat.” - Performing Arts Network Japan (The Japan Foundation) There are still an assortment of open questions I’m left with in regards to the contents of the original Litchi play. One of the most glaring ones is Niko’s eye. In consideration of Ameya’s interest in the body, the detail would fit perfectly with his ideologies. A club member who, to show his absolute loyalty to the Hikari Club, has his own eyeball procedurally gouged out to be made a part of the Lychee robot. Despite this perfect alignment, none of the contemporary recollections mention this element. While Niko does have an eyepatch in certain production photos, it never seems to come up as a plot point. He isn’t the only one to bear an eyepatch either, with Jacob also being shown with an eyepatch in flyers. More questions range from Jaibo’s motives in causing the dissolution of the Hikari Club to the true nature of Zera’s affiliation to Jaibo. While Tsunekawa has stood his ground in the relationship between Zera and Jaibo being totally sexless, in the cited volume of June the editor playfully refers to Jaibo as being Zera’s “best friend” in quotes.

A side-by-side comparison of the cast listings on the back of the flyers for the December 1985 performance of Litchi Hikari Club alongside its 1986 rerun. The 1985 run's lineup is at the top while the 1986 run is at the bottom. Much speculation is naturally involved when looking into the original Litchi Hikari Club since it is in essence a cultural phantom. There’s a reason I used the term genealogy in relation to my research of the Tokyo Grand Guignol’s works. It is an artistic enigma as while its presence lingers in subculture, the original works are now practically unattainable due to the inherent nature of theater. As Ameya himself would acknowledge in another interview, theater is an immediate medium that can only be perceived in its truest form for a very short span of time before eventually disintegrating. So with the Tokyo Grand Guignol’s plays, you are left to scour through the scattered remnants and contemporary recollections alongside the figurative creative descendants of the plays. You analyze the statements of both the original participants and the people they openly dismiss, as even those people were original audience members before reinterpreting the plays to their own unique visions. Despite the apparent differences, I still feel that Furuya’s manga gives a unique perspective to the story when viewed under dissection. That is if you want to see it in strict relation to the play. Outside that, I feel it firmly stands on its own merits. I like the manga no matter what Tsunekawa says, that’s what I’m trying to say. Ameya approved it anyway. It took me a full day to write all this out, and like the first time I went down this train of thought, I’m pooped. During that first excursion, after excitedly spiraling through these potential connections, I noticed in passing mention something about Marinetti’s cooking. You see, later in his life Marinetti aimed to apply futurism not just to art and theater, but cuisine also. As an Italian, Marinetti openly despised pasta, seeing it as being an edible slog that weighs down the spirits of the Italian people. Just further evidence that I would never get along with the man, no matter my liking of the Boccioni sculpture I saw at MOMA all those years ago. Well, outside of him being a fascist and all obviously. I like pasta. Either way, he was on a mission to conceive all-new all-Italian cuisines that would match the vision he had of a new fascist Italy. Nothing could prepare me though for when I saw an image of what would best be described as a towering cock and ball torture meat totem. It is exactly as it sounds, a big phallic tower of cooked meat with a set of gigantic dough-covered balls of chicken flesh on the front and back where you have to stick needles through the thing to hold it together. Words cannot express just how big it is. The thing was damn well near falling apart from how unnatural its shape was, and you’re expected to eat it while it has honey pouring from the tip of the tower. I genuinely winced watching its assembly, I instinctively crossed my legs somewhat when it was pierced by wooden sticks and then cut into sections to reveal the plant-stuffed interiors. As a person with no interest whatsoever in cooking shows, I was on the edge of my seat watching a PBS-funded webisode of someone preparing futurist dishes. Seek it out for yourself, it’s an excessively batshit culinary freakshow. That is more than enough talk about penises for the rest of the week. I’m going to spend the next few days looking at artistic yet selectively vaginal flowers to balance things out, equal opportunity symbology.

#litchi hikari club #lychee light club #norimizu ameya #suehiro maruo #tokyo grand guignol

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guilty-pleasures21 · 7 months ago

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Maybe this will just be my trash one.

2. Um, getting closer?

Part 1 - the divorce

Part 2 - the sister

Warnings: Brief mentions of cheating and rape.

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She was sat at the kitchen island, typing away on the new laptop Miguel had gotten her when he wrapped his arms around her waist from behind.

“Querida,” he began softly, bending over to rest his head on her shoulder. “¿Qué tal, cariño? (What's up, sweetheart?)”

She startled at his sudden appearance, then curled into herself as the woodsy, spicy scent of him took over all her thoughts. “Oh! Uh … I’m just … I’m researching protocols.”

Mierda, she was cute when she was flustered. He raised his head to nip her earlobe and chuckled when she flinched in response. Then he began trailing his lips down the side of her neck. “Mmm, querida.”

A shiver ran down her spine at the feeling of his low voice rumbling against her neck. The only complaint she could think to have was the way he kept touching her: tender, appreciative, driving her mad with every brush and stroke. “Did you … want something, Miguel?”

“Just you.” He grinned and cuddled her against him, delighting in the way she squirmed in his arms as she tried to control her body’s natural response to him.

“Miguel …” she whined, hunching over to try to minimise contact with him. Miguel sighed and moved his hands to her waist as he straightened. He gave her a final squeeze, then sank into the seat beside her.

“Have you had lunch yet?” he asked. X nodded as she swivelled around to face him.

“Yup! Have you?” He hadn’t been in the house when she’d woken up and the only answer she’d received from Penni had been ‘business’. She hadn’t wanted to know more about what ‘business’ entailed, so she’d left the matter alone and decided to try out the swimming pool instead.

He reached out to twirl a strand of her damp hair around his finger, then he leaned forward to tuck it behind her ear. “Yeah. What did you have, preciosa?”

He leaned back in his seat and rested his elbow on the table, spreading his legs wide as he propped his head up on his fist. She did her best not to let her eyes trail down his broad chest or linger on his muscled thighs. But holy shit, he was hot! “Uh, Paula made some carbonara for me. What did you have for lunch?”

“Lasagne.” He’d told his housekeeper to make his cute little scientist anything she asked for. He was only sorry that he hadn’t been able to join her. But he’d had to take care of his associates now that that scumbag Francesco wasn’t going to be interfering with their activities any longer. “Have you started packing?”

“It’s not like I have much to pack, Miguel,” she pointed out, her tone more familiar now that they’d spent a little more time together. He’d told her last night that they’d be leaving for America soon - his home base where he’d be able to give her all the resources she needed for her research. She’d been nervous at first - unsure about how his feelings towards her might change once he was back in the big city. But then he’d brushed his fingers along her waist and asked her if there was anyone she wanted to see before they left. She hadn’t made many friends, what with the way her entire reputation had been destroyed and her husband had kept her sequestered in the countryside. But her sister had moved to the UK last year for university …

Miguel grinned at the slight exasperation on her features, then leaned forward to place a hand on her thigh.

“No te preocupes, querida (Don't worry, darling),” he reassured her cheekily. “I’ll get you all the Burberry trench coats and Bvlgari necklaces your closet can fit once we get to New York.”

She pulled her gaze away from his, turning her head to the side and trying hard to not think about the way his large fingers wrapped around her thigh. Miguel felt his chest warm at the sight of the smile she was attempting to hide from him. But there was one other matter he still needed to settle. “Querida. We should probably settle your divorce before you leave.”

Oh right. That. X tapped her fingers on the countertop, trying to figure out where to start. “How … Do I need to go to court or …”

“I’ll get Matt to handle it,” Miguel interjected quickly, brushing her thigh with his thumb. “You just need to sign the papers once they’re done.” He leaned back in his seat, finally releasing his hold on her, and X felt some of the tension leave her body.

“Yup!” she chirped enthusiastically. “You got it!” Miguel smiled at her and she felt her stomach flip at the sight. She squashed the feeling down quickly and returned her attention to her laptop, still afraid to believe that her life could have changed for the better, for once.

Gwen glanced at her partner standing on the other side of the metal door. They’d followed the address of the man who’d rented the cars on Miguel’s behalf - he’d used a fake name, of course, but an address was much more difficult to fake. So that was how they’d ended up here: outside of a seemingly abandoned warehouse in a sketchy, isolated part of town they likely had no business being in. Miles nodded, one hand on his holster, then burst into the warehouse.

“Freeze! Police!” He held his gun out in front of him as he looked around, expecting some sort of drug packaging setup. But there was nothing. Well, nothing except for the single plastic chair in the middle of the cavernous hall. Miles twisted his head around to glance back at his partner in question. Gwen signalled for him to continue and Miles turned back to the chair to walk cautiously over to it.

She kept her eyes trained on their surroundings, guarding her partner’s back as he picked up whatever was on the chair. Her curiosity grew as he took a moment to study it. Then he swore and stomped his foot on the ground in frustration. “Shit!”

Gwen lowered her gun and went over to him, wanting to find out the reason behind Miles’s irritation. “What? What did you find?”

He sighed and turned around, holding out the objects he’d found: a gleaming golden ring and a lazily scrawled out note. Gwen raised an eyebrow as she took the piece of paper from him. ‘Tell Mr Lombardi his wife sends her regards.’

“Shit!” Gwen exclaimed, crumpling the note in her hand. “Argh! What are we gonna do now?!”

Miles rubbed his hand over his face, at a loss himself as to what their move should be. Then his phone rang with a call from Pav.

“Please tell me you have good news,” Miles begged him after picking up the call.

“I have good news!” Pav confirmed. “I’ve been going through the list of private airstrips around the area and I think I found his plane.”

Miles put the phone on speaker so Gwen could hear as well. “Great! Where is it?”

“Uh, on the way to London.”

“What?!” Miles exchanged a wide-eyed look with Gwen.

“Yes. Our guess is that they’re going to visit X’s sister,” Pav explained, the sound of his keyboard echoing over the phone. “We’ve booked you and Gwen a flight there and it leaves in … two hours. You need to get to X’s sister before they do.”

“Two hours?!” Gwen repeated incredulously.

“Yup. Better get going if you want to catch that plane,” Pav warned them. Then he hung up. Gwen looked up at Miles, horrified, then the two of them rushed back to their car to make their way over to the airport.

He threw the stack of papers down on Francesco’s desk before taking a seat across from him, his posture lazy and unbothered. “Your signature, if you will, Mr Lombardi.”

Francesco begrudgingly picked up the papers and flipped through them, seething at what he found inside. “What are these?”

“Divorce papers,” Miguel replied as if it should have been obvious. “From your wife.”

Francesco stood up, pushing his seat back in anger. “What have you done with her?! Where is she?! Bring her back!”

Miguel slung an arm over the back of his chair, unbothered by Francesco’s threatening tone. He’d already sent X off to London to meet with her sister before they left for America. Aside from throwing those pesky DEA agents off his tail, it also gave him some time to settle her divorce for her. But mierda, it felt strange, going back to his empty house after having come home to her everyday for the past two weeks.

“She’s safe,” Miguel assured Francesco, giving him an unimpressed scoff. “Safer with me than she ever was with you.”

Francesco leaned forward over the table, making sure to enunciate his words so the other man would understand him. “She is my wife! Bring her back to me!”

Ben stepped forward, ready to intervene as he sensed the rage threatening to overflow from Francesco. But Miguel raised a hand to stop him. He rested his elbows on the table instead, pressing his fingertips together as he considered Francesco. “You didn’t seem to care about that when you were getting your cock sucked by your assistant two nights ago.”

Francesco’s face turned red with anger at the declaration, but he controlled himself at the revelation that Miguel had him under surveillance.

He leaned back in his seat, his lips curling with the hint of a smirk at Francesco’s submission. Then he gestured to the papers on the desk, waiting.

“Listen here, you cocky bast*rd.” Francesco wagged a finger at him in warning. “I’m not the one who kidnapped her and then f*cking r*ped her in her own house! Who the f*ck are you to tell me to divorce my f*cking wife?!” Miguel felt his insides heat up at Francesco’s vile accusation and he found himself having to take a deep breath before he responded.

“‘R*pe’ is non-consensual, Mr Lombardi,” he explained, maintaining a cool tone. “And I don’t remember you wife having any objections when I was f*cking her on your kitchen island.” His lips twitched in anticipation of the outburst he knew was going to follow. He wasn’t disappointed.

“You motherf*cker!” Francesco screamed at him, searching for something he could throw at the larger man. “Son of a b*tch!” Miguel’s shoulders shook with an amused snicker.

“I don’t remember her having any children either,” Miguel joked. He tilted his head to the side then, as if he was thinking about it. “But … I could fix that. If that’s what she wants, of course.”

Francesco hurled a slew of curses and swears at Miguel, adding his fist onto the end of his words. But Miguel caught his hand before it could make contact. He twisted Francesco’s arm as he stood up, causing him to screech with pain. Then he let him go, allowing him to caress his wounded arm - he’d break it after he got him to sign the divorce papers.

“I’m not the one who told your wife to get a divorce, Mr Lombardi,” Miguel spat out through gritted teeth. “She decided that all on her own. Maybe if you took two f*cking seconds to talk to her, you’d realise how intelligent she is!”

Francesco ground his teeth together and lowered his gaze, humiliated. But not humiliated enough, apparently. “I’ll only sign them if you’ll let me see her - if you can prove to me that she’s safe.”

Miguel sighed and pulled his phone out of his pocket to dial her number.

“Querida,” he greeted her once her sweet little face popped up on his screen. Dios, he missed her. But he’d only known her for two weeks, how could he miss her when he’d only known her for two weeks? He swallowed down the pain that throbbed in his chest at the sight of her. “Your husband wants me to prove that you’re safe.”

He slid his gaze over to Francesco, his expression disgusted. Then he angled his phone towards him.

“Mia cara?” Francesco asked, his features softening as his gaze landed on her. “Where are you? What has he done with you?”

“I’m fine,” X replied, her voice flat. She sighed, suddenly exhausted as all the hurt and grief finally washed over her all at once. “What do you want, Francesco?”

“I want you, mia cara. Please. Come back to me?” He pursed his lips, his expression vulnerable as he pleaded with her. Miguel looked away so he wouldn’t scoff at the pitiful expression on his face.

She lowered her head, wanting to hide the tears starting to form on the edges of his eyes. It wasn’t that she missed him, definitely not. It was just that she’d suddenly been reminded of all the time she’d spent on him - all the months she’d given up to him - just for it to have meant absolutely nothing to either of them. “Just … leave me alone, Francesco. Just sign the damn papers and leave me alone.”

Miguel’s heart squeezed at the way her voice cracked. He’d break much more than just Francesco’s arm once he’d gotten what he came for. He turned the phone back to himself, wanting to shield his sweet arañita from the man who’d caused her so much pain. “You’ve seen her. Now sign them.”

The muscles in Francesco’s jaw feathered as he tried to figure a way out of his situation. But why was he so fussed about his wife wanting to divorce him? What did he care if she’d decided she wanted to leave him forever? He grabbed a pen from his stand, ready to sign the papers. But he hesitated when he saw the empty line on the page. He lifted his gaze to Miguel’s. “I want my papers back.”

Miguel raised an eyebrow, amused: how the hell did this pathetic excuse of a man think he was in any position to negotiate? Lawyers. He held a hand out and Matt stepped forward to hand him the bank accounts Francesco was requesting for. The man practically leaped across his desk to grab them from Miguel, eagerly flipping through the stack to make sure everything was there. He picked up his pen again and scrawled his signature at the bottom of the divorce papers before pushing them back to Miguel. Miguel huffed at his desperation and stood up, giving Matt a nod before he walked out the door. Matt pulled out another stack of papers from his bag and set them on the desk in front of Francesco. “Here is our other set of copies. We’ll be seeing you around, Mr Lombardi.”

He flashed Francesco a knowing smile, then left him alone in his office, wife-less and credit-less.

Tags: @heubstr @zayai @amberbalcom14

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drnikolatesla · 2 years ago

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A Century Ahead Of Our Time

After his unfortunate laboratory fire in 1895, which destroyed nearly all his work and research, Nikola Tesla was immediately back in a new laboratory experimenting with his wireless theories. As early as 1896, Tesla was already sending signals from his laboratory in New York City to West Point, located roughly 30 miles north of his lab. He continued these experiments and many others until he realized he needed more space than what the crowded city could offer.

In 1899, he developed a laboratory station in Colorado Springs, Colorado in hopes of developing a transmitter of great power, to perfect means for individualizing and isolating the energy transmitted, and also to ascertain the laws of propagation of currents through the earth and the atmosphere. Tesla ultimately believed that it is practicable to disturb the electrostatic condition of the earth and by developing large enough machinery he could grip the earth with electricity, use it as a conductor, and transmit signals and power through it.

While in Colorado, Nikola Tesla was informed numerous times by his secretary about the many other competitors in the wireless art. There was George H. Clark, who was sending messages up to 3 miles. There was also Professor Marble in Connecticut, Dr. Riccia in France, and Professor D'Azar in Rome. Guglielmo Marconi was the biggest competitor who was sending messages up to 20 miles in America at the America's Cup boat races. Although Tesla's secretary was worried that Tesla might be wasting time in Colorado while others were getting the jump on him, Tesla confidently replied:

"Do not worry about me. I am about a century ahead of the other fellows."

In January of 1900, Tesla would leave Colorado fully convinced that he accomplished all he set out to do. He would then set out to engineer and build his machines on a large scale, but ended up lacking the investments and funds to finish his work in its entirety. Some say he failed because his idea didn't work, but that's not true at all because his Colorado experiments proved that they did. He simply underestimated the cost of his system. Unfortunately, his failings to fulfill his dreams and finish his work would leave him with the public persona as being the mad scientist who had unrealistic ideas for the future. Although we are advancing with great strides in technological achievements, we are still a century behind the future Nikola Tesla hoped and dreamed for.

#nikola tesla #science #history #quotes #wireless #electricity #power #technology #ahead of his time #ahead of our time

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specialagentlokitty · 1 year ago

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Carol Danvers x reader - say love

A/N: I’ve never wrote for Carol before it’s probably bad but I just wanted to write for her 😂

Standing on the Statue of Liberty, you looked at the light of New York from across the water, a small smile on your face.

“Been a while since you smiled.”

Tilting your head back, you went back to staring at the city.

“Didn’t think you’d be able to get up here Fury.”

“I have my ways you know this (Y/N).”

You hummed a little bit, slowly nodding your head.

“We need you.”

“I told you after everything that’s happened I’m not coming back.”

“Stop being childish.”

You turned around, stuffing your hands into your pockets as you glared at him a little.

“I get it, you two go history. We all got history but that don’t mean you can ignore me when I call for you.”

“You’re not my boss fury, I helped you as a one time thing, that’s it.”

He sighed, leaning back against the stone as he looked at you.

“We’re playing this game? You don’t wanna play this game with me.”

“Just leave me alone.”

“No way, you don’t get a free pass out this shit anymore. I don’t give a crap whether you two get alone, Earth is in danger and you’re going to get your shit together and help Danvers.”

You turned around, crouched down, resting your arms on your legs.

“Either you do this by choice or I make you.”

“You’re an asshole.”

“I know, now let’s go.”

Getting up, you walked over and placed a hand on his shoulder, teleporting you from the statue to his office and let go of him.

“Thank you.”

“I would’ve left you up there.”

“No you wouldn’t, now shut up and take the damn file.”

You rolled your eyes, grabbing the file and you opened it, giving it a quick read over before tossing it back on to his desk.

“Seems like she can handle that.”

“Maybe most of it, except Danvers can’t touch the device, even with her powers it would destroy her.”

“Okay?”

Fury sighed.

“As a demigod you have that ability to touch it, I need you to get in there, grab the device, bring it back here and secure it for us.”

You sighed a bit.

“Fine. Okay.”

“Great, she’s already there, just get in and get out.”

You waved your hand dismissively at him as you teleported away, heading to the location.

You could tell that Carol was here, the guards were unconscious, and you made your way inside.

It wasn’t hard to find which way she was going, so you just made your way there, standing in the entrance of the room.

You watched as Carol reached out.

“If you value your hand and you life I wouldn’t.”

Carol spun around, fist raised but when she saw you she slowly lowered it.

You walked over, reaching out you picked up the circle object.

Tossing it in your hand, you examined it a little bit.

“What is it?”

“Don’t know.”

“Who did it belong to? What race?”

“Don’t know.”

Carol sighed a little, looking at you.

“Are we ever going to talk about this?”

“No.”

She slowly nodded her head and you turned your attention back to the device in your hand.

You held it up against the light, and you lowered it again, then you put it in your pocket looking around the room for anything else.

“We need to go.” Carol whispered.

“If the device is here then there has to be some sort of research, a hard drive or something and I need that as well.”

“Right, okay.”

Carol began to search around as well, anything she thought was related she would bring over to you to have a look at.

Most of it you threw aside, a few things you kept, stuffing them somewhere into your jacket.

“Take a look at this.”

You walked over to the superhero, taking a seat in the chair as you watched her type something into the keyboard.

“It’s not a weapon.” She said.

“It can still be just as dangerous, by the looks of this it’s something to bring back life.”

“How?”

You glanced at her before looking at the computer quickly erasing all the data.

“By taking the life of somebody else, it takes that life force, and for the right people it will use that energy to bring someone else to life, or add to their lifespan. These guy’s probably wanted to study it and try replicate it for their use.”

“Would that work?”

“No. Only a god can create something like this.”

You stood up, and turned around, only to be thrown back against the wall which knocked the air out of your lungs.

You fell to the floor, slowly taking a breath.

“Fuck…”

You slowly pushed yourself up and you looked around with hazy eyes, trying to find out where the shot came from.

You found Carol fighting the attackers.

You teleported away, dropping your jacket in Fury’s office.

“Don’t touch!”

With that you teleported back and grabbed Carol by the back of her suit and you threw her behind you, tensing your back as you felt someone hit you with something metal.

Spinning back around, you grabbed it as they tried to hit you once more.

Taking it from his hand, you tossed it aside and punched him through the wall.

Flames licked at your fists as you spun around, punching someone else to the ground.

Backing up, you put your back against Carol, and you both stood there back to back, fists raised.

“We can’t fight our way out of this…” she whispered.

“Give me you hand…”

“What?”

“Give me your damn hand Carol..”

You reached out behind you, and you felt Carol grab your hand.

“Don’t move…” you whispered.

You raised your foot, slamming it back on to the ground to send everybody around the pair of you flying out, then you were gone.

Letting go of Carols hand you vanished again, and you rolled your shoulders a bit, placing your hand on the wall.

“Sorry boys, it’s been real fun.”

Flames burst out of your hand, engulfing the wall in flames, and you swung your hand to the side, catching all the walls in flames.

You teleported out again, back into the office and you picked up your jacket.

“I’ve got their research don’t worry I’ll deal with it all.”

“As always it’s been a pleasure.” Fury said.

You said nothing, and you teleported from the room back to your home.

It wasn’t fancy, but it worked for you.

You had a hidden room for where you stored the device in a case and sealed it along with its researched and you left the room again.

Throwing yourself on your couch, you picked up a baseball and you threw it towards the door.

“Breaking and entering is illegal.”

“We need to talk.”

Carol walked over, setting the hall back on the table and she stood in front of you.

“We’ve got nothing to talk about.”

“Right, so you’re not ignoring me and everybody who talks to me?”

You shrugged a little and she sighed.

Walking over, Carol knelt in front of you, resting one of her arms in the couch and brought the other up to gently touch the side of your face.

“Please don’t angry with me..”

You reached around her, grabbing the tv remote to turn it on and she took it from you, setting it back on the table.

“Come on, please? I’m really sorry.”

You carried on ignoring her and she leant forward, resting her forehead in yours.

“(Y/N) you know I didn’t mean too.”

“You stood me up Carol, our two year anniversary and you stood me up.”

“I’m sorry, okay? I really am sorry.. my ship broke down and I had to fix it, then I had to come back here..”

“You could’ve called…”

“I did, you blocked me.”

You huffed a bit and she smiled.

“Come on.”

You moved your head back and head butted her slightly.

Carol laughed slightly.

“Okay maybe I deserved that.”

She got up, and she laid on you, putting her head on your shoulder, her hand coming down to hold one of yours.

“I’m not leaving though.”

Wrapping your arm around her, you closed your eyes, holding her tightly.

“I love you.” She grinned.

“I hate you.”

“Uh huh, keep telling yourself that.”

Grinning a little, you pressed a kiss to her head and she smiled brightly, closing her eyes as well

#marvel #marvel x reader #marvel x you #marvel x y/n #marvel imagine #captain marvel #captain marvel x reader #captain marvel x you #captain marvel imagine #Carol Danvers #Carol Danvers x reader #carol danvers x you #Carol Danvers imagine

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blysse-and-blunder · 3 months ago

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in lieu of a labor day long weekend

11pm, sunday, september 1, 2024

couldn't remember if i've done 'in lieu of a long weekend' before, so i specified. raise your hand if you're spending the day off doing more work than ever, because you're a grad student and/or poor planner!

reading

francis spufford's cahokia jazz (2024) absolutely entranced me this week. i couldn't put it down, stayed up all night (literally) to get through the big confrontation and then stayed up to make sure i knew how things shook out afterwards. i have found two book reviews which seem to agree that there's a lot to 'work through' here, pull-quote below, but this was not my experience-- i was thoroughly hooked by the (to me) subtle and eloquent clues about how this timeline was different from our own, and fascinated by the city politics, religion, infrastructure-- if anything, the focus on public transit struck me more than the exposition! shoutout to the streetcars!--but most importantly, maybe, spufford knew how to write his protagonist's relationship to music, and incorporate joe's jazz into his pov in a beautiful way, a real way. i'm fucking mourning the what-could-have-been of cahokia, of indigenous america, of. god. that vision of a different form of modernity-- not less complicated, not less industrialized, with all its own moral ambiguities and darkness...but nevertheless a living society.

from the new york times' review, ivy pochoda:

Reader, let me ask you a question. How much work are you willing to do to dive into a new novel? Do you want to step into a speculative world frustratingly close to our own? Do you want to spend time in an imaginary city constructed with the world-building minutiae of a high fantasy novel? Do you want to engage with new forms of government and religious sects? Are you cool if there’s foreign language peppered throughout? How about the Klan? A Red scare? A nascent F.B.I.? A love story? Do you also want jazz? And do you want all of this to be part of a detective novel?

fucking of course YES I DO.

also finished just today, the personal librarian (2021) by Marie Benedict, Victoria Christopher Murray, narrated by Robin Miles. i had known there was a belle da costa greene award offered by the maa for medievalists of color, but it took me until reading this novel to actually learn anything about belle herself, and i am thrilled it exists. i'm so, so glad she existed. figuring out how to work her into my medieval book syllabus as we speak. a very different book than the one above, though they both must have taken a huge amount of research and informed imagination and inference-- belle destroyed her correspondence, apart from her business letters apparently-- but the academic in me was hoping there would be. two or three more skosh more precision and detail in the discussion of manuscript / incunabula research. there was a lot of 'the beauty of art' and 'the value of the written word' but it felt a little cursory. still, i know i'm an outlier. the discussions of her relationships to her parents, her identity, her passing, were all executed with so much care.

watching

the build up of intensity / count-down to the opening of the restaurant in the bear s2 was getting to me in the count down to the new semester, so i turned to something a little different. what if this is the year i actually get into psych. so far, signs point to this being a good decision. just finished the spelling bee episode (s1e02 i think? i didn't realize that the pilot was two parts, i thought those were two separate eps but whatever) and it was absurd, but. i'm just so glad to be watching tv made in an era where...you have to watch the screen to get everything that's happening! and there are contrived/ridiculous premises in the same episode as some layers are built up in the main characters' relationships and actual, like, continuity! it's a serial detective show that is at bottom incredibly silly but i'm here to over think and get invested in it. love to see dulé hill in a lead role. what the hell was i doing in 2006, when not watching this.

listening

i'm exploring a bit lately, new music, new (to me) artists-- I think i'm enjoying pop girlies at the moment, song of the summer etc., and charlie xcx's brat and caroline polachek have both been on my repeat list, but i don't have a ton to report yet. honestly this week it's been a lot of listening to the podcast a more civilized age: a star wars podcast (thanks @knifepadme for the rec!!) break down over andor. it is so incredibly cute to hear how excited they get over the first three episodes, and continue to get over the whole first arc. TELEVISION! it makes me feel like i'm rewatching the show with friends, their insights and the parallels and interpretations they keep pulling out are enriching it a lot, but also their star wars nerdery is picking up on things i wouldn't have thought to get excited about, and predictions that never occurred to me, and it's. delightful.

playing

finished chants of sennaar! total play time was about 20 hours, and that's with getting all the glyphs and all but two of the accomplishments (a little sore about that since I'm pretty sure i was in proximity for at least one of them that ended up not counting, but, whatever). i did consult a guide for the final series of puzzles, not the last language but the stuff that came after, i guess because i wanted to be completionist about it--but there were also some obstacles that weren't logic or anything, but more about learning the game's patterns (the first thing i looked up was staring right in front of me, i just wasn't paying attention to the right shit). there was a moment when the genre of the game shifted, i think i've mentioned before maybe, and it happens again towards the end-- but this time it didn't hit in quite the same way? perhaps because it wasn't as big a shock. more of a 'oh well, i guess this might as well be happening' reaction. i'd done a few of the puzzles out of order, i think, earlier than they'd anticipated / as i was progressing up the tower rather than all at the end, except for one at the very bottom that i had to go back and find (thank you to the people online who write guides and do playthroughs).

i really loved the visuals and design of this game-- the colors, the angles, the wild perspectives in some of the scenes. i liked that, once i'd gotten the hang of something, i could typically repeat that manner of thinking and succeed the next time as well-- a game about learning. learning to learn!

making

sewed part of one of the new patches onto the jacket. just barely worked out a stitch i could handle, only to have my housemate lend me a little rubber finger...thingy, and make everything so much easier. why did i decide to sew through denim and multiple layers of stitching? because i don't trust the iron-able backing, and also love to make life harder for myself i guess.

working on

it's been syllabus lockdown hours over here, and considering that the first class is thursday, it will continue to be until the absolute last fucking minute. i want too much and also shy away from making literally any decision. you'd think that this level of avoidance might make it easier to productively procrastinate by working on other things, but that's a funny joke.

#ilcb #in lieu of a commonplace book #weekly roundup

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mariacallous · 1 year ago

Text

In the first half century of his career, Robert Jay Lifton published five books based on long-term studies of seemingly vastly different topics. For his first book, “Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism,” Lifton interviewed former inmates of Chinese reëducation camps. Trained as both a psychiatrist and a psychoanalyst, Lifton used the interviews to understand the psychological—rather than the political or ideological—structure of totalitarianism. His next topic was Hiroshima; his 1968 book “Death in Life,” based on extended associative interviews with survivors of the atomic bomb, earned Lifton the National Book Award. He then turned to the psychology of Vietnam War veterans and, soon after, Nazis. In both of the resulting books—“Home from the War” and “The Nazi Doctors”—Lifton strove to understand the capacity of ordinary people to commit atrocities. In his final interview-based book, “Destroying the World to Save It: Aum Shinrikyo, Apocalyptic Violence, and the New Global Terrorism,” which was published in 1999, Lifton examined the psychology and ideology of a cult.

Lifton is fascinated by the range and plasticity of the human mind, its ability to contort to the demands of totalitarian control, to find justification for the unimaginable—the Holocaust, war crimes, the atomic bomb—and yet recover, and reconjure hope. In a century when humanity discovered its capacity for mass destruction, Lifton studied the psychology of both the victims and the perpetrators of horror. “We are all survivors of Hiroshima, and, in our imaginations, of future nuclear holocaust,” he wrote at the end of “Death in Life.” How do we live with such knowledge? When does it lead to more atrocities and when does it result in what Lifton called, in a later book, “species-wide agreement”?

Lifton’s big books, though based on rigorous research, were written for popular audiences. He writes, essentially, by lecturing into a Dictaphone, giving even his most ambitious works a distinctive spoken quality. In between his five large studies, Lifton published academic books, papers and essays, and two books of cartoons, “Birds” and “PsychoBirds.” (Every cartoon features two bird heads with dialogue bubbles, such as, “ ‘All of a sudden I had this wonderful feeling: I am me!’ ” “You were wrong.”) Lifton’s impact on the study and treatment of trauma is unparalleled. In a 2020 tribute to Lifton in the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, his former colleague Charles Strozier wrote that a chapter in “Death in Life” on the psychology of survivors “has never been surpassed, only repeated many times and frequently diluted in its power. All those working with survivors of trauma, personal or sociohistorical, must immerse themselves in his work.”

Lifton was also a prolific political activist. He opposed the war in Vietnam and spent years working in the anti-nuclear movement. In the past twenty-five years, Lifton wrote a memoir—“Witness to an Extreme Century”—and several books that synthesize his ideas. His most recent book, “Surviving Our Catastrophes,” combines reminiscences with the argument that survivors—whether of wars, nuclear explosions, the ongoing climate emergency, COVID, or other catastrophic events—can lead others on a path to reinvention. If human life is unsustainable as we have become accustomed to living it, it is likely up to survivors—people who have stared into the abyss of catastrophe—to imagine and enact new ways of living.

Lifton grew up in Brooklyn and spent most of his adult life between New York City and Massachusetts. He and his wife, Betty Jean Kirschner, an author of children’s books and an advocate for open adoption, had a house in Wellfleet, on Cape Cod, that hosted annual meetings of the Wellfleet Group, which brought together psychoanalysts and other intellectuals to exchange ideas. Kirschner died in 2010. A couple of years later, at a dinner party, Lifton met the political theorist Nancy Rosenblum, who became a Wellfleet Group participant and his partner. In March, 2020, Lifton and Rosenblum left his apartment on the Upper West Side for her house in Truro, Massachusetts, near the very tip of Cape Cod, where Lifton, who is ninety-seven, continues to work every day. In September, days after “Surviving Our Catastrophes” was published, I visited him there. The transcript of our conversations has been edited for length and clarity.

I would like to go through some terms that seem key to your work. I thought I’d start with “totalism.”

O.K. Totalism is an all-or-none commitment to an ideology. It involves an impulse toward action. And it’s a closed state, because a totalist sees the world through his or her ideology. A totalist seeks to own reality.

And when you say “totalist,” do you mean a leader or aspiring leader, or anyone else committed to the ideology?

Can be either. It can be a guru of a cult, or a cult-like arrangement. The Trumpist movement, for instance, is cult-like in many ways. And it is overt in its efforts to own reality, overt in its solipsism.

How is it cult-like?

He forms a certain kind of relationship with followers. Especially his base, as they call it, his most fervent followers, who, in a way, experience high states at his rallies and in relation to what he says or does.

Your definition of totalism seems very similar to Hannah Arendt’s definition of totalitarian ideology. Is the difference that it’s applicable not just to states but also to smaller groups?

It’s like a psychological version of totalitarianism, yes, applicable to various groups. As we see now, there’s a kind of hunger for totalism. It stems mainly from dislocation. There’s something in us as human beings which seeks fixity and definiteness and absoluteness. We’re vulnerable to totalism. But it’s most pronounced during times of stress and dislocation. Certainly Trump and his allies are calling for a totalism. Trump himself doesn’t have the capacity to sustain an actual continuous ideology. But by simply declaring his falsehoods to be true and embracing that version of totalism, he can mesmerize his followers and they can depend upon him for every truth in the world.

You have another great term: “thought-terminating cliché.”

Thought-terminating cliché is being stuck in the language of totalism. So that any idea that one has that is separate from totalism is wrong and has to be terminated.

What would be an example from Trumpism?

The Big Lie. Trump’s promulgation of the Big Lie has surprised everyone with the extent to which it can be accepted and believed if constantly reiterated.

Did it surprise you?

It did. Like others, I was fooled in the sense of expecting him to be so absurd that, for instance, that he wouldn’t be nominated for the Presidency in the first place.

Next on my list is “atrocity-producing situation.”

That’s very important to me. When I looked at the Vietnam War, especially antiwar veterans, I felt they had been placed in an atrocity-producing situation. What I meant by that was a combination of military policies and individual psychology. There was a kind of angry grief. Really all of the My Lai massacre could be seen as a combination of military policy and angry grief. The men had just lost their beloved older sergeant, George Cox, who had been a kind of father figure. He had stepped on a booby trap. The company commander had a ceremony. He said, “There are no innocent civilians in this area.” He gave them carte blanche to kill everyone. The eulogy for Sergeant Cox combined with military policy to unleash the slaughter of My Lai, in which almost five hundred people were killed in one morning.

You’ve written that people who commit atrocities in an atrocity-producing situation would never do it under different circumstances.

People go into an atrocity-producing situation no more violent, or no more moral or immoral, than you or me. Ordinary people commit atrocities.

That brings us to “malignant normality.”

It describes a situation that is harmful and destructive but becomes routinized, becomes the norm, becomes accepted behavior. I came to that by looking at malignant nuclear normality. After the Second World War, the assumption was that we might have to use the weapon again. At Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, a group of faculty members wrote a book called “Living with Nuclear Weapons.” There was a book by Joseph Nye called “Nuclear Ethics.” His “nuclear ethics” included using the weapon. Later there was Star Wars, the anti-missile missiles which really encouraged first-strike use. These were examples of malignant nuclear normality. Other examples were the scenarios by people like [the physicists] Edward Teller and Herman Kahn in which we could use the weapons and recover readily from nuclear war. We could win nuclear wars.

And now, according to the Doomsday Clock, we’re closer to possible nuclear disaster than ever before. Yet there doesn’t seem to be the same sense of pervasive dread that there was in the seventies and eighties.

I think in our minds apocalyptic events merge. I see parallels between nuclear and climate threats. Charles Strozier and I did a study of nuclear fear. People spoke of nuclear fear and climate fear in the same sentence. It’s as if the mind has a certain area for apocalyptic events. I speak of “climate swerve,” of growing awareness of climate danger. And nuclear awareness was diminishing. But that doesn’t mean that nuclear fear was gone. It was still there in the Zeitgeist and it’s still very much with us, the combination of nuclear and climate change, and now COVID, of course.

How about “psychic numbing”?

Psychic numbing is a diminished capacity or inclination to feel. One point about psychic numbing, which could otherwise resemble other defense mechanisms, like de-realization or repression: it only is concerned with feeling and nonfeeling. Of course, psychic numbing can also be protective. People in Hiroshima had to numb themselves. People in Auschwitz had to numb themselves quite severely in order to get through that experience. People would say, “I was a different person in Auschwitz.” They would say, “I simply stopped feeling.” Much of life involves keeping the balance between numbing and feeling, given the catastrophes that confront us.

A related concept that you use, which comes from Martin Buber, is “imagining the real.”

It’s attributed to Martin Buber, but as far as I can tell, nobody knows exactly where he used it. It really means the difficulty in taking in what is actual. Imagining the real becomes necessary for imagining our catastrophes and confronting them and for that turn by which the helpless victim becomes the active survivor who promotes renewal and resilience.

How does that relate to another one of your concepts, nuclearism?

Nuclearism is the embrace of nuclear weapons to solve various human problems and the commitment to their use. I speak of a strange early expression of nuclearism between Oppenheimer and Niels Bohr, who was a great mentor of Oppenheimer. Bohr came to Los Alamos. And they would have abstract conversations. They had this idea that nuclear weapons could be both a source of destruction and havoc and a source of good because their use would prevent any wars in the future. And that view has never left us. Oppenheimer never quite renounced it, though, at other times, he said he had blood on his hands—in his famous meeting with Truman.

Have you seen the movie “Oppenheimer”?

Yes. I thought it was a well-made film by a gifted filmmaker. But it missed this issue of nuclearism. It missed the Bohr-Oppenheimer interaction. And worst of all, it said nothing about what happened in Hiroshima. It had just a fleeting image of his thinking about Hiroshima. My view is that his success in making the weapon was the source of his personal catastrophe. He was deeply ambivalent about his legacy. I’m very sensitive to that because that was how I got to my preoccupation with Oppenheimer: through having studied Hiroshima, having lived there for six months, and then asking myself, What happened on the other side of the bomb—the people who made it, the people who used it? They underwent a kind of numbing. It’s also true that Oppenheimer, in relationship to the larger hydrogen bombs, became the most vociferous critic of nuclearism. That’s part of his story. The moral of Oppenheimer’s story is that we need abolition. That’s the only human solution.

By abolition, you mean destruction of all existing weapons?

Yes, and not building any new ones.

Have you been following the war in Ukraine? Do you see Putin as engaging in nuclearism?

I do. He has a constant threat of using nuclear weapons. Some feel that his very threat is all that he can do. But we can’t always be certain. I think he is aware of the danger of nuclear weapons to the human race. He has shown that awareness, and it has been expressed at times by his spokesman. But we can’t ever fully know. His emotions are so otherwise extreme.

There’s a messianic ideology in Russia. And the line used on Russian television is, “If we blow up the world, at least we will go straight to Heaven. And they will just croak.”

There’s always been that idea with nuclearism. One somehow feels that one’s own group will survive and others will die. It’s an illusion, of course, but it’s one of the many that we call forth in relation to nuclear danger.

Are you in touch with any of your former Russian counterparts in the anti-nuclear movement?

I’ve never entirely left the anti-nuclear movements. I’ve been particularly active in Physicians for Social Responsibility. We had meetings—or bombings, as we used to call it—in different cities in the country, describing what would happen if a nuclear war occurred. We had a very simple message: we’re physicians and we’d like to be able to patch you up after this war, but it won’t really be possible because all medical facilities will be destroyed, and probably you’ll be dead, and we’ll be dead. We did the same internationally with the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, which won the Nobel Peace Prize. There’s a part of the movement that’s not appreciated sufficiently. [Yevgeny] Chazov, who was the main Soviet representative, was a friend of Gorbachev’s, and he was feeding Gorbachev this view of common security. And Gorbachev quickly took on the view of nuclear weapons that we had. There used to be a toast: either an American or a Soviet would get up and say, “I toast you and your leaders and your people. And your survival, because if you survive, we survive. And if you die, we die.”

Let’s talk about proteanism.

Proteanism is, of course, named after the notorious shape-shifter Proteus. It suggests a self that is in motion, that is multiple rather than made up of fixed ideas, and changeable and can be transformed. There is an ongoing struggle between proteanism and fixity. Proteanism is no guarantee of achievement or of ridding ourselves of danger. But proteanism has more possibility of taking us toward a species mentality. A species mentality means that we are concerned with the fate of the human species. Whenever we take action for opposing climate change, or COVID, or even the threat to our democratic procedure, we’re expressing ourselves on behalf of the human species. And that species-self and species commitment is crucial to our emergence from these dilemmas.

Next term: “witnessing professional.”

I went to Hiroshima because I was already anti-nuclear. When I got there, I discovered that, seventeen years after the bomb was dropped, there had been no over-all, inclusive study of what happened to that city and to groups of people in it. I wanted to conduct a scientific study, having a protocol and asking everyone similar questions—although I altered my method by encouraging them to associate. But I also realized that I wanted to bear witness to what happened to that city. I wanted to tell the world. I wanted to give a retelling, from my standpoint, as a psychological professional, of what happened to that city. That was how I came to see myself as a witnessing professional. It was to be a form of active witness. There were people in Hiroshima who embodied the struggle to bear witness. One of them was a historian who was at the edge of the city who said, “I looked down and saw that Hiroshima had disappeared.” That image of the city disappearing took hold in my head and became central to my life afterward. And the image that kept reverberating in my mind was, one plane, one bomb, one city. I was making clear—at least to myself at first and then, perhaps, to others,—that bearing witness and taking action was something that we needed from professionals and others.

I have two terms left on my list. One is “survivor.”

There is a distinction I make between the helpless victim and the survivor as agent of change. At the end of my Hiroshima book, I had a very long section describing the survivor. Survivors of large catastrophes are quite special. Because they have doubts about the continuation of the human race. Survivors of painful family loss or the loss of people close to them share the need to give meaning to that survival. People can claim to be survivors if they’re not; survivors themselves may sometimes take out their frustration on people immediately around them. There are all kinds of problems about survivors. Still, survivors have a certain knowledge through what they have experienced that no one else has. Survivors have surprised me by saying such things as “Auschwitz was terrible, but I’m glad that I could have such an experience.” I was amazed to hear such things. Of course, they didn’t really mean that they enjoyed it. But they were trying to say that they realized they had some value and some importance through what they had been through. And that’s what I came to think of as survivor power or survivor wisdom.

Do you have views on contemporary American usage of the words “survivor” and “victim”?

We still struggle with those two terms. The Trumpists come to see themselves as victims rather than survivors. They are victims of what they call “the steal.” In seeing themselves as victims, they take on a kind of righteousness. They can even develop a false survivor mission, of sustaining the Big Lie.

The last term I have on my list is “continuity of life.”

When I finished my first study, I wanted a theory for what I had done, so to speak. [The psychoanalyst] Erik Erikson spoke of identity. I could speak of Chinese Communism as turning the identity of the Chinese filial son into the filial Communist. But when it came to Hiroshima, Erikson didn’t have much to say in his work about the issue of death. I realized I had to come to a different idea set, and it was death and the continuity of life. In Hiroshima, I really was confronted with large-scale death—but also the question of the continuity of life, as victims could transform themselves into survivors.

Like some of your other ideas, this makes me think of Arendt’s writing. Something that was important to her was the idea that every birth is a new beginning, a new political possibility. And, relatedly, what stands between us and the triumph of totalitarianism is “the supreme capacity of man” to invent something new.

I think she’s saying there that it’s the human mind that does all this. The human mind is so many-sided and so surprising. And at times contradictory. It can be open to the wildest claims that it itself can create. That has been a staggering recognition. The human self can take us anywhere and everywhere.

Let me ask you one more Arendt question. Is there a parallel between your concept of “malignant normality” and her “banality of evil”?

There is. When Arendt speaks of the “banality of evil,” I agree—in the sense that evil can be a response to an atrocity-producing situation, it can be performed by ordinary people. But I would modify it a little bit and say that after one has been involved in committing evil, one changes. The person is no longer so banal. Nor is the evil, of course.

Your late wife, B.J., was a member of the Wellfleet Group. Your new partner, Nancy Rosenblum, makes appearances in your new book. Can I ask you to talk about combining your romantic, domestic, and intellectual relationships?

In the case of B.J., she was a kind of co-host with me to the meetings for all those fifty years and she had lots of intellectual ideas of her own, as a reformer in adoption and an authority on the psychology of adoption. And in the case of Nancy Rosenblum, as you know, she’s a very accomplished political theorist. She came to speak at Wellfleet. She gave a very humorous talk called “Activist Envy.” She had always been a very progressive theorist and has taken stands but never considered herself an activist, whereas just about everybody at the Wellfleet meeting combined scholarship and activism.

People have been talking more about love in later life. It’s very real, and it’s a different form of love, because, you know, one is quite formed at that stage of life. And perhaps has a better knowledge of who one is. And what a relationship is and what it can be. But there’s still something called love that has an intensity and a special quality that is beyond the everyday, and it actually has been crucial to me and my work in the last decade or so. And actually, I’ve been helpful to Nancy, too, because we have similar interests, although we come to them from different intellectual perspectives. We talk a lot about things. That’s been a really special part of my life for the last decade. On the other hand, she’s also quite aware of my age and situation. The threat of death—or at least the loss of capacity to function well—hovers over me. You asked me whether I have a fear of death. I’m sure I do. I’m not a religious figure who has transcended all this. For me, part of the longevity is a will to live and a desire to live. To continue working and continue what is a happy situation for me.

You’re about twenty years older than Nancy, right?

Twenty-one years older.

So you are at different stages in your lives.

Very much. It means that she does a lot of things, with me and for me, that enable me to function. It has to do with a lot of details and personal help. I sometimes get concerned about that because it becomes very demanding for her. She’s now working on a book on ungoverning. She needs time and space for that work.

What is your work routine? Are you still seeing patients?

I don’t. Very early on, I found that even having one patient, one has to be interested in that patient and available for that patient. It somehow interrupted my sense of being an intense researcher. So I stopped seeing patients quite a long time ago. I get up in the morning and have breakfast. Not necessarily all that early. I do a lot of good sleeping. Check my e-mails after breakfast. And then pretty much go to work at my desk at nine-thirty or ten. And stay there for a couple of hours or more. Have a late lunch. Nap, at some point. A little bit before lunch and then late in the day as well. I can close my eyes for five minutes and feel restored. I learned that trick from my father, from whom I learned many things. I’m likely to go back to my desk after lunch and to work with an assistant. My method is sort of laborious, but it works for me. I dictate the first few drafts. And then look at it on the computer and correct it, and finally turn it into written work.

I can’t drink anymore, unfortunately. I never drank much, but I used to love a Scotch before dinner or sometimes a vodka tonic. Now I drink mostly water or Pellegrino. We will have that kind of drink at maybe six o’clock and maybe listen to some news. These days, we get tired of the news. But a big part of my routine is to find an alternate universe. And that’s sports. I’m a lover of baseball. I’m still an avid fan of the Los Angeles Dodgers, even though they moved from Brooklyn to Los Angeles in 1957. You’d think that my protean self would let them go. Norman Mailer, who also is from Brooklyn, said, “They moved away. I say, ‘Fuck them.’ ” But there’s a deep sense of loyalty in me. I also like to watch football, which is interesting, because I disapprove of much football. It’s so harmful to its participants. So, it’s a clear-cut, conscious contradiction. It’s also a very interesting game, which has almost a military-like arrangement and shows very special skills and sudden intensity.

Is religion important to you?

I don’t have any formal religion. And I really dislike most religious groups. When I tried to arrange a bar mitzvah for my son, all my progressive friends, rabbis or not, somehow insisted you had to join a temple and participate. I didn’t. I couldn’t do any of those things. He never was bar mitzvah. But in any case, I see religion as a great force in human experience. Like many people, I make a distinction between a certain amount of spirituality and formal religion. One rabbi friend once said to me, “You’re more religious than I am.” That had to do with intense commitments to others. I have a certain respect for what religion can do. We once had a distinguished religious figure come to our study to organize a conference on why religion can be so contradictory. It can serve humankind and their spirit and freedom and it can suppress their freedom. Every religion has both of those possibilities. So, when there is an atheist movement, I don’t join it because it seems to be as intensely anti-religious as the religious people are committed to religion. I’ve been friendly with [the theologian] Harvey Cox, who was brought up as a fundamentalist and always tried to be a progressive fundamentalist, which is a hard thing to do. He would promise me every year that the evangelicals are becoming more progressive, but they never have.

Can you tell me about the Wellfleet Group? How did it function?

The Wellfleet Group has been very central to my life. It lasted for fifty years. It began as an arena for disseminating Erik Erikson’s ideas. When the building of my Wellfleet home was completed, in the mid-sixties, it included a little shack. We put two very large oak tables at the center of it. Erik and I had talked about having meetings, and that was immediately a place to do it. So the next year, in ’66, we began the meetings. I was always the organizer, but Erik always had a kind of veto power. You didn’t want anybody who criticized him in any case. And then it became increasingly an expression of my interests. I presented my Hiroshima work there and my work with veterans and all kinds of studies. Over time, the meetings became more activist. For instance, in 1968, right after the terrible uprising [at the Democratic National Convention] that was so suppressed, Richard Goodwin came and described what happened.

Under my control, the meeting increasingly took up issues of war and peace. And nuclear weapons. I never believed that people with active antipathies should get together until they recognize what they have in common. I don’t think that’s necessarily productive or indicative. I think one does better to surround oneself with people of a general similarity in world view who sustain one another in their originality. The Wellfleet meetings became a mixture of the academic and non-academic in the usual sense of that word. But also a sort of soirée, where all kinds of interesting minds could exchange thoughts. We would meet once a year, at first for a week or so and then for a few days, and they were very intense. And then there was a Wellfleet meeting underground, where, when everybody left the meeting, whatever it was—nine or ten at night—they would drink at local motels, where they stayed, and have further thoughts, though I wasn’t privy to that.

How many people participated?

This shack could hold as many as forty people. We ended them after the fiftieth year. We were all getting older, especially me. But then, even after the meetings ended, we had luncheons in New York, which we called Wellfleet in New York, or luncheons in Wellfleet, which we called Wellfleet in Wellfleet. You asked whether I miss them. I do, in a way. But it’s one of what I call renunciations, not because I want to get rid of them but because a moment in life comes when you must get rid of them, just as I had to stop playing tennis eventually. I played tennis from my twenties through my sixties. Certainly, the memories of them are very important to me. I remember moments from different meetings, but also just the meetings themselves, because, perhaps, the communal idea was as important as any.

Do you find it easy to adjust to your physical environment? This was Nancy’s place?

Yes, this is Nancy’s place. Much more equipped for the Cape winters and just a more solid house. For us to do all the things, including medical things she helps me with, this house was much more suitable. Even the walk between the main house and my study [in Wellfleet] required effort. So we’ve been living here now for about four years. And we’ve enjoyed it. Of course, the view helps. I wake up every morning and look out to kind of take stock. What’s happening? Is it sunny or cloudy? What boats are visible? And then we go on with the day.

In the new book, you praise President Biden and Vice-President Harris for their early efforts to commemorate people who had died of COVID. Do you feel that is an example of the sort of sustained narrative that you say is necessary?

It’s hard to create the collective mourning that COVID requires. Certainly, the Biden Administration, right at its beginning, made a worthwhile attempt to do that, when they lit those lights around the pool near the Lincoln Memorial, four hundred of them, for the four hundred thousand Americans who had died. And then there was another ceremony. And they encouraged people to put candles in their windows or ring bells, to make it participatory. But it’s hard to sustain that. There are proposals for a memorial for COVID. It’s hard to do and yet worth trying.

You observe that the 1918 pandemic is virtually gone from memory.

That’s an amazing thing. Fifty million people. The biggest pandemic anywhere ever. And almost no public commemoration of it. When COVID came along, there wasn’t a model which could have perhaps served as some way of understanding. They used similar forms of masks and distancing. But there was no public remembrance of it.

Some scholars have suggested that it’s because there are no heroes and no villains, no military-style imagery to rely on to create a commemoration.

Well, that’s true. It’s also in a way true of climate. And yet there are survivors of it. And they have been speaking out. They form groups. Groups called Long COVID SOS or Widows of COVID-19 or COVID Survivors for Change. They have names that suggest that they are committed to telling the society about it and improving the society’s treatment of it.

Your book “The Climate Swerve,” published in 2017, seemed very hopeful. You wrote about the beginning of a species-wide agreement. Has this hope been tempered?

I don’t think I’m any less hopeful than I was when I wrote “The Climate Swerve.” In my new book [“Surviving Our Catastrophes”], the hope is still there, but the focus is much more on survivor wisdom and survivor power. In either case, I was never completely optimistic—but hopeful that there are these possibilities.

There’s something else I’d like to mention that’s happened in my old age. I’ve had a long interaction with psychoanalysis. Erik Erikson taught me how to be ambivalent about psychoanalysis. It was a bigger problem for him, in a way, because he came from it completely and yet turned against its fixity when it was overly traditionalized. In my case, I knew it was important, but I also knew it could be harmful because it was so traditionalized. I feared that my eccentric way of life might be seen as neurotic. But now, in my older age, the analysts want me. A couple of them approached me a few years ago to give the keynote talk at a meeting on my work. I was surprised but very happy to do it. They were extremely warm as though they were itching to, in need of, bringing psychoanalysis into society, and recognizing more of the issues that I was concerned with, having to do with totalism and fixity. Since then, they’ve invited me to publish in their journal. It’s satisfying, because psychoanalysis has been so important for my formation.

What was it about your life style that you thought your analyst would be critical of?

I feared that they would see that somebody who went out into the world and interviewed Chinese students and intellectuals or Western European teachers and diplomats and scholars was a little bit eccentric, or even neurotic.

The fact that you were interviewing people instead of doing pure academic research?

Yes, that’s right. A more “normal” life might have been to open up an office on the Upper West Side to see psychoanalytical, psychotherapeutic patients. And to work regularly with the psychoanalytic movement. I found myself seeking a different kind of life.

Tell me about the moment when you decided to seek a different kind of life.

In 1954, my wife and I had been living in Hong Kong for just three months, and I’d been interviewing Chinese students and intellectuals, and Western scholars and diplomats, and China-watchers and Westerners who had been in China and imprisoned. I was fascinated by thought reform because it was a coercive effort at change based on self-criticism and confession. I wanted to stay there, but at that time, I had done nothing. I hadn’t had my psychiatric residency and I hadn’t entered psychoanalytic training. Also, my money was running out. My wife, B.J., was O.K. either way. I walked through the streets thinking about it and wondering, and I came back after a long walk through Hong Kong and said, “Look, we just can’t stay. I don’t see any way we can.” But the next day, I was asking her to help type up an application for a local research grant that would enable me to stay. It was a crucial decision because it was the beginning of my identity as a psychiatrist in the world.

You have been professionally active for seventy-five years. This allows you to do something almost no one else on the planet can do: connect and compare events such as the Second World War, the Korean War, the nuclear race, the climate crisis, and the COVID pandemic. It’s a particularly remarkable feat during this ahistorical moment.

Absolutely. But in a certain sense, there’s no such thing as an ahistorical time. Americans can seem ahistorical, but history is always in us. It helps create us. That’s what the psychohistorical approach is all about. For me to have that long flow of history, yes, I felt, gave me a perspective.

You called the twentieth century “an extreme century.” What are your thoughts on the twenty-first?

The twentieth century brought us Auschwitz and Hiroshima. The twenty-first, I guess, brought us Trump. And a whole newly intensified right wing. Some call it populism. But it’s right-wing fanaticism and violence. We still have the catastrophic threats. And they are now sustained threats. There have been some writers who speak of all that we achieved over the course of the twentieth century and the first decades of the twenty-first century. And that’s true. There are achievements in the way of having overcome slavery and torture—for the most part, by no means entirely, but seeing it as bad. Having created institutions that serve individuals. But our so-called better angels are in many ways defeated by right-wing fanaticism.

If you could still go out and conduct interviews, what would you want to study?

I might want to study people who are combating fanaticism and their role in institutions. And I might also want to study people who are attracted to potential violence—not with the hope of winning them over but of further grasping their views. That was the kind of perspective from which I studied Nazi doctors. I’ve interviewed people both of a kind I was deeply sympathetic to and of a kind I was deeply antagonistic toward.

Is there anything I haven’t asked you about?

I would say something on this idea of hope and possibility. My temperament is in the direction of hopefulness. Sometimes, when Nancy and I have discussions, she’s more pessimistic and I more hopeful with the same material at hand. I have a temperament toward hopefulness. But for me to sustain that hopefulness, I require evidence. And I seek that evidence in my work.

#I think there's a lot of really interesting and thought-provoking moments in this interview

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captainsophiestark · 1 year ago

Text

Office Most-Eligible

Daniel Sousa x Reader

Masterlist - Join My Taglist!

Written for Fictober 2023!

Fandom: Marvel

Day 20 Prompt: "This better be good."

Summary: When Jack ropes Daniel into eavesdropping on the telephone ladies' breakroom, they both might hear a lot more than they'd bargained for.

Word Count: 2,387

Category: Fluff, Humor

Putting work into an AI program without permission is illegal. You do not have my permission. Do not do it.

Daniel's POV

I sighed as I shuffled the papers in my hands, mentally running through the million things I had to do today. Peggy, Jack, and I had managed to stop Leviathan from leveling New York City and destroying Howard Stark, but that didn't mean the last six months since then had been any more relaxed. If anything, it had gotten busier than ever before.

There had even been talk of opening another branch of the agency in LA, which was a whole other insane possibility fluttering around in my mind. It was enough to distract me to the point that I didn't notice Thompson, half-hidden by the entryway to the agency, until I ran into him.

"Thompson? What the hell are you-?"

"Sh!"

He raised his finger to his lips and glared at me. I glared back.

"Why are you-"

"Sousa! Shut up and listen," he hissed, jerking his head towards a grate in the wall. I frowned and made a demanding "what?" gesture, but he just nodded towards the grate again. I sighed, so long-suffering it wasn't even funny, but shuffled closer.

"This better be good," I grumbled. Jack just waved his hand at me.

Through the grate, I could hear voices talking and giggling loudly. It sounded like all the ladies who sat outside the entrance to the agency, guarding the door and keeping up the front that this was a phone company, talking together like they were in the break room. I paused, curious enough to entertain Thompson's nonsense for another ten seconds.

"-saying is, there's a definite ranking of all the guys in this office. And yours ain't it."

The girls dissolved into another fit of giggles, and I scowled. I grabbed Thompson's arm and yanked him away from the grate, out of earshot.

"What the hell is wrong with you?" I demanded, keeping my voice low just in case. "You're eavesdropping on coworkers in their breakroom? Instead of working? You're the Chief!"

"I don't know if you caught it, Sousa, but they're talking about us. Specifically which one of us they'd most want to date. I'd call that research and intelligence work for future opportunities."

Jack gave me a smirk as he drifted back towards the vent. I scowled and followed to drag him away and make him do his damned job, but froze when I heard the ladies welcoming our newest addition to the agency, the second female agent in SSR history. She'd been here a little over five months, had become instant best friends with Peggy Carter, and had me head over heels within a week of knowing her.

And apparently she'd just walked into the breakroom.

Jack gave me a knowing smirk and raised an eyebrow, and I glared right back. But I couldn't quite manage to drag myself away either, no matter how much my brain told me I should.

****************

Y/N's POV

"You came at the perfect time!"

I pulled a snack out of the fridge and looked suspiciously at Mary, one of the switch operators who worked outside the SSR. In the short time I'd been here, I'd gotten to know her and Rose pretty well, since they mostly alternated shifts for our main door guard. Rose and I had quickly bonded over our mutual feminism and desire for independence; Mary and I had bonded through being troublemakers, and I had a feeling I was about to see some more of that.

"Why?" I asked, drifting halfway to the door now that I had secured my snack. Mary smiled.

"We were just talking about the boys in the office. We have a few different opinions about who would make the best boyfriends and husbands, and since you know them all so well... I mean, I can't think of anyone else with a better reason to chime in."

I scoffed. "Nice try Mary, but no way am I engaging in this conversation. See you all later!"

The rest of the women in the room booed playfully, but I didn't turn around as I reached the door. Mary, however, knew me well enough to figure out how to stop me in my tracks.

"Well, I guess that means Jack Thompson is the definitive winner!"

I narrowed my eyes and stared at the door in front of me, hand on the half-turned doorknob. I'd come so close to avoiding this nonsense, and it still wasn't too late for me to take the exit. I scowled and scrunched my nose, then turned around to squint at all my coworkers looking back at me.

"Be completely honest, I'll be able to tell if you're lying," I started, still only half-turned away from the door. "How many of you would put Jack Thompson at the top of your 'SSR's Most Eligible Bachelor' list?"

A few hands shot into the air, followed by a few more tentative hands that must've heard the disgust in my tone. All in all, about half the room had their hands up for him. I sighed, long and heavy.

"And the other runners up were...?"

A few people called out names of other men in the office, most of whom were barely better (or definitely worse) than Jack. I looked up at the ceiling and shook my head.

"You all have terrible taste in men."

Half the room, Mary included, started laughing, and the other half looked offended. I shook my head and turned to leave again, but Mary stopped me again before I could go.

"Who would you choose then, if not Thompson? You can't criticize our taste without giving us some insight into your process."

Her grin stretched across her entire face as she stared at me, waiting for me to take the bait. Her hand had been the first in the air for Thompson, but I could tell she genuinely wanted to debate me more than she wanted to defend him.

I sighed.

"Fine. But I'm going to make this quick and then I'm gonna go do my job, because I have a ton of stuff to do today," I said, finally stepping away from the door to stand in the middle of the room. Everyone stared at me, leaning forward in their seats a little, Mary most of all. "...I can't believe I'm about to engage in this."

Mary scoffed and I rolled my eyes, but then took a deep breath and dove in. What the hell, right?

"Okay, first of all, let me clarify: I can understand, from a surface level, why you might pick Thompson. He's handsome, and if you didn't spend much time with him, I can see why you'd think he might make a good partner. Honestly, in the five months I've known him, I've even seen a few glimmers of hope that there might be a heart of gold underneath all that arrogance, posturing, and chauvinism. However. In terms of best guy in the office to have as a partner? He does not even come close to touching Daniel Sousa."

A few people raised their eyebrows, half leaning forward and half leaning back and crossing their arms. I ignored them all (especially Mary, who beamed at me), and continued.

"Listen. Sousa is... kind of ridiculously attractive. He's handsome, with the warmest brown eyes you've ever seen in your entire life... and he's super strong. I've seen him one-handed lift a bunch of different things the other agents struggled with using their whole bodies. He looks incredible in a sweater vest, to say nothing of suits and non-sweater vest clothes."

I saw considering nods around the room as people took in my words. I paused and took a deep breath, then continued.

"More than all of that, though... Daniel is kind. He's strong in his morals and his character, not just physically. He's got a great sense of humor, and his jokes don't rest on being a mean, close-minded jackass. And, above anything else, he respects me. He respects Peggy. He treats us as equals. I don't know about you guys, but... that means everything to me. And finding a man who's kind, smart, strong, handsome, and will treat me as an equal partner? Come on. Daniel's got it all."

I hadn't been paying a lot of attention to the expressions of everyone else around the room while I was talking, but now I focused back in to see the majority looking thoughtful. I cleared my throat, suddenly feeling incredibly self-conscious, and started backing towards the door.

"Uh, anyway... long way of saying I'd put Daniel at the top of my list."

Mary grinned at me as I continued heading for the door, then pushed out of her chair and called out to the whole room.

"Hear that? Sousa's off limits, these two are going to be dating in the next month if we have anything to say about it."

"MARY!"

****************

Daniel's POV

Jack and I stood in the hallway, stunned into silence as we stared into space. My brain had been telling me to stop listening a while ago, but I'd been shocked enough that my body had refused to listen. Now, my heart was telling me I was on the verge of a cardiac arrest.

"You go get him, girl!" Mary's voice continued through the vents. Then, with determination and glee dripping from her words, "I'm staying after Thompson. I'm gonna fix him."

I heard some light-hearted laughter, and then a door shutting. In a few seconds, the girl who'd just poured her heart out to me without realizing it would be coming into the office, a few feet from Jack and I's stupid hiding place.

"You look like you're about to puke," said Jack, a beaming grin on his face. I scowled.

"Why don't you? You just got called a couple pretty bad things."

"What? Like 'attractive'? All I was hearing were positives." He grinned at me, then sobered slightly before slapping me on the shoulder and taking a few steps away. "Don't psych yourself out on this one though, Sousa. She's a catch, and she's clearly in love with you. If you don't take a shot, I might have to."

I scoffed and shook my head. I knew Jack didn't really mean that; it was his own, terrible way of trying to be supportive.

I sighed and tried to brace myself as I walked over to the entrance to the SSR. Thompson was wrong about many, many, many things, but he was right about this: I needed to take my shot.

****************

Y/N's POV

"Holy- Daniel!" I nearly dropped the snack I'd taken a detour to retrieve as I cleared the SSR doors and came face to face with Daniel, especially since I'd just poured my heart out about him to a bunch of our coworkers. "You scared the hell out of me!"

"Uh... sorry," he said, shifting his weight around a little and running a hand through his hair. He looked almost as comfortable as I felt.

"Is, uh, is everything okay?"

"Yeah. Well, sort of. I just..." He cleared his throat, then jerked his eyes away from the floor and the wall to meet mine. "I need to tell you something, and then I need to ask you something."

"...Okay?"

"First, I... I heard what you said in the breakroom. About me. And about Jack, which was fun too, but... It feels important that you know I heard the stuff you said about me."

My heart stopped in my chest, and I blinked a few times as black spots danced at the very edges of my vision. I was going to kill Mary.

"Uh..."

"Before you say anything, I'm sorry," he said, holding up a hand. "I didn't mean to eavesdrop, I just... I let Thompson suck me into something I should've known better about. I'm sorry."

"It's fine, Daniel," I said, a little breathless as my legs finally started working to move me past him. I could not deal with this a second longer. "Don't worry about it, I'll... I have to go-"

"Wait!" he cried. He put one hand on my arm to stop me, then quickly dropped it when I turned back to look at him. I watched him take a deep breath, my heart hammering a thousand times even though it only took a few seconds, then he continued. "Look, I know I might've lost a few points in your book for the eavesdropping, which is fair, but... I'd be lying if I said I wasn't head over heels for you too. Have been since the first few days you got to the agency. You're smart and strong and funny and... God, listen to me."

He looked down and shook his head, and I noticed a slight blush rising up his neck and cheeks. Slowly, my heart dropped back to a normal rhythm, and I started to smile.

"Okay, what I'm trying to say is... I feel the same way about you that you do about me," he said, finally looking up at me again. "And if you'd still be interested... I'd love to take you out to dinner sometime."

I beamed at him, unable to stop the smile completely overtaking my face. I looked down, and when I looked up again, Daniel's stare was still on me, a smile hopefully flickering in and out of place.

"Daniel, I'd love that," I finally said.

"You would?"

"Yeah. I really, really like you, eavesdropping and all."

He huffed a laugh, the shaky smile turning into full-on beaming.

"Great! How's tomorrow night sound?"

"Sounds perfect."

"Good. I'll pick you up at eight." He started to back away, so both of us could get to the mountain of work we had to tackle at some point today, then stopped. "If that works for you, that is?"

I smiled. "That absolutely works for me."

"Alright, great! I'll see you then. And, uh, around the office, I guess."

"I'll see you around the office."

We shared another set of dorky, ridiculous smiles as we backed away from each other, going to do our separate tasks for at least part of the day. Thank God Thompson wasn't around to see either of us.

At some point, he and the rest of our coworkers would probably catch on to the two of us dating, unless the first date somehow went so horribly there wasn't a second. But I'd meant every word I'd said to the rest of our coworkers about Daniel. And if a little eavesdropping had led to him asking me out, I couldn't bring myself to be too upset about any of it.

****************

Everything Taglist: @rosecentury

Marvel Taglist: @valkyriepirate @luv-ghostie @songbirdcannabe

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pikolswonderland · 3 months ago

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Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Urban Conspiracy...EXPLAINED!

HELLO EVERYONE!! I've been putting this off for a while now, but I think it's finally time I make an explanation post for my original TMNT iteration, Urban Conspiracy! However, before we begin, there is some stuff I need to clarify first.

This is NOT a full explanation of the WHOLE iteration, such as complete descriptions of characters and the ENTIRE storyline (those will be saved for future posts). This is just an introduction to the main premise, characters, world building, and lore. Secondly, some aspects of this iteration may potentially change as time goes on (for anyone who read my ComputerBug fic set in this iteration, there are already some significant differences between when I uploaded that fic and now). Finally, this iteration will discuss and portray some potentially triggering themes and content, including in this post. Please keep this in mind and proceed with caution. Also, this post is going to be a bit long, so watch out for that as well!

Now, with that all out of the way, let’s begin!

15 years ago, a mysterious tragedy occurred in New York City, known as the TCRI Disaster. The TCRI (Technological Cosmic Research Institute), was a government organization stationed in New York, dedicated to researching anomalous scientific phenomena and materials.

One night, however, a huge disaster occurred causing a large portion of the facility to be completely destroyed and exploded, completely out the blue. As a result, many of the scientists, visitors, and animals used for experiments were killed or went missing. To this day, nobody knows what really happened that night. Who or what caused the disaster, and what happened to the people and animals whose bodies were never found?

One thing was for certain though, something shifted within the general populous. Even long prior to the disaster occurring, there was already a famous urban legend that plagued the streets of New York. It was believed that there existed a mysterious substance known as the ooze, a bright green glowing sludge said to have the ability to turn normal humans and animals into mutant monsters. Yet still, despite the numerous reported sightings of these so-called mutants roaming the city, no concrete evidence existed that proved that the mutants and the ooze actually existed. However, things started to change after the TCRI Disaster. The reported sighting of mutants skyrocketed, and more and more people started to speculate the possibility of what was once a simple urban legend...could actually be true...and whether or not the TCRI Disaster and these mutant sighting were somehow linked.

But whether or not you actually believed it or thought it was all bullshit, what nobody realized was that the legends...were all true. A certain bunch of turtles could attest to that.

Leo, Ralph, Donnie and Mikey were all originally just normal baby turtles, born in the TCRI laboratory to be used for experiments. In reality, the ooze...or by its more proper title as mutagen, did, in fact, actually exist. The mutagen had the ability to mutate any organism within the kingdom of Animalia into hybrid of it and the last organism (also within the kingdom of Animalia) it had made physical contact with.

In the case of the four brothers, it was the humans that cared for them within the laboratory, turning them essentially into humanoid turtle people. Though in the case of their adoptive father, Splinter, his situation was a little different. Once a famous action movie star by the name of Hamato Yoshi, he just so happened to be visiting the TCRI facility when the disaster occurred and having come in contact with one of the lab rats within the facility, his fate was sealed. He was now stuck as a humanoid rat with a bunch of turtle children to raise, who just so happened to be mutated in the same disaster as he was.

Yet despite them technically not being entirely human, at least in their bodies, they were human within their brains and hearts. They had human lifespans, they thought like humans, they talked like humans, they were essentially...humans. However, the outside world was too dangerous for them, if anyone ever found out about the existence of mutants, who knows what terrible things could happen! They had to stay safe, to stay hidden. They made their home in an abandoned subway tunnel, right underneath an old 24/7 internet cafe, only occasionally leaving for quick trips on the surface. Additionally, Splinter decided to teach and train his sons in the art of ninjitsu, so they could fight and defend for themselves, just in case.

However, on the brother's 15th birthday, 15 years since the TCRI Disaster, 15 years since they were mutated, 15 years since they became this weird little family, Splinter decided to do something. He believed the turtles were strong, old, and responsible enough to go to the surface, all by themselves, without the supervision of their dear father. The four teenage boys were excited and overjoyed, finally being able to have their first real taste of freedom that night! There was only one rule, don't let any humans know about you...

...unfortunately, that rule just so happened to be broken in the exact same night. At least this teenage human girl by the name of April O'Neil is more than happy to keep quiet about the existence of mutants, especially since these four mutant turtles just saved her life as well. The only reason their secret even got out was thanks to them being suddenly attacked out-of-the-blue by a bunch of members of the Foot!

The Foot was said to be a mysterious organized crime syndicate from Japan but stationed in New York. Little was known about them and their goals, all that was known was that they were extremely dangerous and not to be trifled with. However, many people also believed the Foot were having an increasing interest in the rumors about the mutants. People have slowly been going missing without a trace over the past 15 years, and with that being just around the same time the Foot had shown up, and when the TCRI Disaster happened, there was indefinitely something strange going on. Something bad was happening, and it's going to be up to these mutant turtles and their new friend (and some future friends as well) to get to the bottom of it. From mutants, to gangsters, vigilantes, robots, crazy scientists, an underground society, and interdimensional aliens, things are certainly going to be interesting.

However, one thing is for certain, good old New York City is about to get a whole lot weirder!

Special thanks to @catonamatchbox, @glitter-alienz, and @acidichcl for inspiring me to make my own TMNT iteration and for accidentally really getting me into this franchise at all! I'll be making some more explanation posts in the future as well. Also, I encourage you to send me asks for this iteration based on this and this Ask Game as well, I tend to have an easier time explaining things by being asked questions! My ask box is always open! Until then, I'll see you all soon!

Ɀረ ዐ𐌄ዪᏵ፱𐌐ቹ𐌐ል, Ᏽ፱𐌐ረ ክ𐌄ዪ የ𐌁ጊᕓል𐌕 𐌔፪𐌄 𐋅ቻ ክ𐌙ሃ. Ᏽ፱𐌐 𐌓፱𐌍፪𐌅 Ꮦ፱ᕓየ𐌵 𐌄ዪᕓፕ𐌀ቻ ፪𐌉ዪ𐌄 𐌁ⶴ𐌄 𐌵፪Ɀዪ ፓᕓሃ𐌙 𐌀፪Ᏽ Ꝋዪ ዪᏵዪ𐌄ል𐌍ሃ, 𐌀፪ ጊ𐌍ፏᏵዪ𐌄 Ꮦ፱𐌍ፏ, Ꮦዪ ፓᕓሃ𐌙 𐌔ህ𐌀ዓ ር𐌍ቹ𐌍ዓᕓቻ𐌐. ህ𐌔 ᕓፏ ፓᕓሃ𐌙 𐌀፪Ᏽ Ꝋዪ ነ𐌁ቹ ⶴ𐌅, ፏ𐌵ዪ𐌀 ᕓፏ ፓᕓሃ𐌙 Ꝋዪ ነ𐌁ቹ ፪𐋅ቹ የ𐌵ህ𐌙ዓ𐌄ዪ𐌀. ነ𐌁ቹ ፏ𐌵ዪ ፕ𐌙፪𐌄ረ ፪𐌔 𐌁ⶴ𐌄 𐌙ህ𐌉ዪ𐌅 𐌍ል𐌒 Ᏽ፱𐌐 𐌕ሃ𐌁ፓᕓል𐌕 𐌕ቹ𐌐ዪ𐌀 ᏖህᏵ፱ᕓል ፪𐋅ቹ ዐ𐌙፪𐌁ዓ, 𐌔፪𐌄 ᕓፏ ጊ𐌍ሸ𐌐ቻ ⶴ𐌅 Ꮦ፱𐌁 Ꮦዪ ክ𐌄ዪ.

#tmnt #teenage mutant ninja turtles #tmnt iteration #original tmnt iteration #TMNT: Urban Conspiracy #tmnt leonardo #tmnt raphael #tmnt donatello #tmnt michelangelo #tmnt splinter #april o'neil #my writing #pik's writing #pik's fanfiction #im going to explode #haha encrypted message go brrrrrr

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