#same with attacking medical vehicles which is the like one thing being investigated

[smonk-wonk]

Israel has admitted to their war crimes, and the US is no less guilty. Entrapping Gazans and then bombing them nonstop. Occupying fucking hospitals and killing the people inside. Claiming that until Hamas surrenders, civilians of all ages will have to just deal with being slaughtered all day and night. That's collective punishment, which is a war crime, when they're killing civilians and wiping out entire communities until a specific group of people complies with their demands. They're poisoning and limiting and destroying water and food supplies (including the ocean so they can't even fish), turning homes and any other structures including fucking schools and hospitals where families take refuge into dust and rubble that become tombs for entire bloodlines. And every time it's "Hamas did it" as if they would gain anything. That would be counterproductive to them. Why the fuck would they bomb their own hospitals, homes, buildings, schools, places of worship, or entire families from their homeland? Israel was already doing this shit, the difference is that now the world is watching. That's some lobotomized mental gymnastics you're doing there

It's not even hard to find proof of what's happening. It's all over Tumblr, it's on Twitter, Instagram, Youtube- Marc Lamont Hill has interviewed a lot of important figures relevant to this matter and given great commentary on the issue (I'd start here, I promise it's worth your time). So if somehow you haven't seen the carnage and what's going on and children recounting horrors that no one let alone children should live through, educate yourself. Just scroll through something like @.eye.on.palestine on Instagram and Twitter, 5 or 10 minutes of your time. You can see Israeli soldiers in uniform doing this shit. People crying out to their dead loved ones, children rescued under rubble, children crying in pain, innocents disfigured by the attacks, mothers mourning, some crying out and covered in the blood of their children, premature infants in agony alone because they're dying while the few surviving ones are displaced, decaying bodies piled on the ground, sometimes in hospitals because they were surrounded and unallowed to leave, children losing friends, people breaking down trying not to cry while trying to comfort children- babies, sometimes not even their own because they've been orphaned. Children who are sole survivors of attacks are crying for their dead loved ones. Even pets terrified, injured, crying, and treading over rubble, desperately trying to find their owners and families, and vise versa.

Not one person is kneeling over their loved one's corpses saying Hamas did this, No one who's recording themselves trying to tell the world who's killing them and pleading to be heard is saying "Please tell Hamas to stop killing us" when if they were truly the culprit, there's no reason to protect Hamas or omit this information if they're the ones slaughtering their friends and family by the thousands. Listen to them, what they're saying happened to them and their families, who they saw/know is doing it, because they have no reason to lie or cover for anyone when they're standing over the ashes of the homes where they loved and lost their families. It's the kind of shit you can't fake, not with the best actors (esp children & fucking babies) and editing technology in the world. Why in the absolute hell would people who lost their entire families disrespect them like that, purposely hindering justice and concealing the truth?

I don't care if any Big Bad Scary group is hiding under any hospitals- which Israel admitted to building tunnels themselves and falsified their "proof" that Hamas was there, or schools (yknow the schools who ended the school year because the students were fucking murdered by Israel) or in ambulances- yet another war crime (all unproven or even debunked accusations). The largest hospital in the north of Gaza was attacked by the occupation forces- not by Hamas. Civilians aren't collateral damage, and their legacy shouldn't be some stupid fucking memes framing their killers as innocent and mocking them. That's nothing short of evil. No less evil than Jews drawn with beaks for noses

Israel is identifying and labeling any press members as terrorists and "Hamas' propaganda team" and targeting them too- also a war crime. Another war crime- using weapons that are banned in warfare. Also shutting down power and internet conveniently before the worst attacks occur, targeting any home or building with a solar panel. People have to write their names on their and their children's (sometimes living) bodies so they can be identified. You can only see so many images and footage of the aftermath of massacres, people with half their faces blown off, children asking why they can't see and what's happening because the attacks permanently blinded them, and soldiers brutalizing them like animals and piles and piles of dead bodies and people gunned down in the streets while onlookers panic and pray and children begging for a permanent ceasefire and screaming and crying with their bodies covered in burns and open wounds or pleading for their lives under the remains of their homes amongst their mangled loved ones taking their last breaths, a little boy in hysterics because he saw his friend's fucking head blown off, a girl sobbing because she saw her own friend decapitated as well, before you wonder how anyone could think Israel is on the right side of history and this is anything but a genocide. One that was ongoing long, long before October 7th and decades before Hamas existed. You have to be stupid, ignorant, evil, or all of the above to think these people deserve this, it's self defense, or this is a 'complicated matter where everyone's a little at fault'.

You truly think this is Israel defending itself? That not supporting the genocide of Gazans is anti semitic? You are aware that Israel, Judaism, and Jewish people are different things... right? There are many Jews that stand in solidarity with Palestine because they're seeing history repeat itself before their eyes. Yes some people who are already anti semitic are using this as ammunition to say they're right in their views but they're also wrong- because as both sides must be aware, Israel doesn't represent Jewish people, Israel represents Israel.

I see you using the "Israel warned them!" defense as well. It's kind of like me giving you a head start before I start firing a gun at you. But regardless, they have blocked Gazans from leaving as the "safe routes" are traps where people are also slaughtered. Doctors and surgeons and patients cannot just drop everything and leave the hospitals where notably there are no big scary Hamas soldiers in sight despite so much footage of these hospitals. Just the dead, the dying, and those who have tried tirelessly to keep their people alive or comfort them while they die. Please, please educate yourself. Not just "read the news". According to recent documented casualties, an estimated 15,000 Gazans have been murdered, around 6,000 being children. This is not counting those with unknown whereabouts, likely dead and dying painfully- possibly over a period of days under rubble, alone.

Imagine if this were your country, your family, your home, and while your people died all around you people called you a terrorist and said it was a complicated issue. You can't even contact your family and they don't know if you're alive. You don't know if they're alive. The sky is often either an eerie red or a haunting gray, and the air around is described to smell like a combination of rotting bodies and smoke. You're told that you are not allowed to celebrate occasions like birthdays just giving kids a couple of cupcakes to see them smile possibly for the last time. You're finally allowed to eat a little hummus if you can get your hands on it but it can only be plain, "extras" are banned. This is fucking self defense???

tldr; op go ki- fuck yourself because you're spreading the type of misinformation that allows this genocide to continue. Thousands are dead and the meme wouldn't even be funny if it were true

And if you're still in support of Israel shut the fuck up until you've clicked every single one of those links.

[maybe-your-left]

Broken Pieces - 12 Hours

:)

Happy Halloween Fellow-Terrible People

Here is the masterlist for Broken Pieces, which is part Two of the Unsalvageable Collection, please be sure to read Window Panes first. Here is the link to my Mega Masterlist, and my Random Ren Masterlist for more.

TW/CW: NSFW, degrading, not sexy talk degrading, explicit references to previous assault, flashbacks, triggering talk of child abuse (there is none, not once will there be in this fic), betrayal, infidelity, Dateline w Lester Holt, mentions of previous pregnancy, miscarriage mentioned from Window Panes, childbirth, breastfeeding, very apparent Stockholm syndrome still in place, therapy talk, Planned Parenthood, very talkative conscience, the narrator is losing her mind, Tom is Draco from Harry Potter, you’re welcome.

As I said before; this fic is intense and the tags are there because they are NEEDED. if you want to read it-thats on you boo.

A manhunt is underway for convicted murderer, Kylo Ren.

The news comes after the convict was moved to death row after dropping his appeals from his previous six years incarcerated. It’s been said that he has given up on a grand jury's ability to see the truth of his wrongful conviction.

Mr. Ren was scheduled to move from New York to an unnamed prison in the midwest to discourage followers who wanted him released. The prisoner was known to have many admirers after his public trial, and federal prison visitation records show some visited frequently.

All known admirers have been placed under investigation until further notice, the police have decided not to release the names of suspects in fear of tipping off the convict.

His transport van was last sighted in Colorado before a sudden hijacking that was so violent, it sent two armed guards and a driver to local emergency rooms. The victims were attacked by a group of 4 men who crashed into the vehicle on a backroad towards the Utah border. All assailants were dressed head to toe black and wore face masks. It is unknown who they are.

One guard was able to issue a statement to police saying that once Ren was uncuffed he attacked them. Showing off a sizable bite in the man's shoulder, dental records matching the escaped convict.

These five men are still at large, it's been 12 hours since they were last spotted running into the forest along the roadway. These men are assumed to be armed, and extremely violent. Please be safe and report any suspicious activities as the authorities continue the manhunt.

“Jesus,” Tom shook his head, an arm slung over your shoulder. Tugging you into his side before kissing your temple, “Can you fucking believe that? That there’s people out there that want to see that man free? It’s insane.”

You stayed still, unable to formulate a response. Tom hadn’t questioned where Luke was after you lied and told him he was staying at your friend Lily’s house with her son. Even though he was probably being wrapped up in a body bag as the clock ticked. Coiled with the venomous arms of his birth father, you couldn’t imagine the pain and torture he was already subjected to for just being born.

“I remember watching that trial when it happened,” Tom sighed, “I’ve never seen a woman so defeated, the awful things he did to her. I always wanted to write to her, she was pretty but it seemed like she wasn’t going out in public anytime soon.”

He caught your side eying him, quickly blubbering, “This was wayyy before I met you though, I wouldn’t dream of being with someone like that. With all her trauma, I wouldn’t be shocked if she was dead.”

“Hm,” you turned back to the TV, feeling his fingertips mindlessly running patterns along your shoulder. Thinking about how naive he was, not putting two and two together. His ‘son’ looked nothing like him, he knew you were from New York around the same time the trial happened, he knew about your night terrors, medications, therapy sessions, all of it.

But he didn’t seem to connect the dots that you were the ‘poor girl’ of his dreams.

Beside you, your phone began to ring, the screen lighting up with an unknown number as it buzzed. Tom frowned at it, “Who’s that?”

You launched at it before he could take it, cringing a bit when you saw it was a FaceTime. You weren’t ready, weren’t ready to see him, hear him, maybe get a glimpse of scars from your baby fighting back. But he was no match for him, the last time you saw Ren he was huge, towering over everyone else in his black and white jumpsuit from the jails. Scowling at every person who walked past him in the containment booth.

Practically screaming at the top of his lungs when he was found guilty, promising to rip your whore-ass apart, limb from limb until you were nothing but a spinal column to chew on.

“I’ll be right back,” you whispered, pacing out of the living room and up the stairs. Moving to the furthest corner of your house and shutting yourself away. If it was Ren, you didn’t want Tom to hear him. You just needed time, time to think through bargaining with Ren.

To get Luke back.

“Hello?”

The screen was black for a moment and suddenly lit up to the sight of your smiling baby.

“Hi, Mommy!”

His little cheeks lit up with happiness, bouncing in his seat on what looked like a black couch. A beefy arm was draped behind him, but you tried not to focus on it. Luke looked healthy, well-fed, and there were no signs of abuse.

“Luke,” you choked a little, wiping your eyes with the back of your wrist, “Are you okay? Mommy’s been so worried about you, where are you?”

His face scrunched with confusion, eyes flitting off-camera for a brief moment. Nodding to whatever was being fed to him from that black-hearted demon.

“Why are you crying? I’m okay, I had snacks and a nap and I got so many new toys.”

He scampered off-screen, leaving you staring at the muscled arm, yelling from afar, “I got a big stuffed animal! And a new blanket!”

The camera flipped, showing you a well-furnished living room. Almost identical to the one in Ren’s old home from New York. Giving you vivid flashbacks of bleeding out on the same hardwood and fluffed rug. Your attention was pulled back by the sounds of Luke running from whatever room he went in, dragging a gigantic stuffed animal in one arm and a big blanket in the other.

Grinning from ear to ear before standing in front of the flatscreen. Showing you everything he could, explaining to you that his new friend bought them for him special. That he was such a good boy for him, excited to show you everything when you came over.

You swallowed, fighting off an onslaught of tears. Because no, you weren’t coming over, you couldn’t. Not when you could see the owner of the cell phone in the reflection of the plasma. Legs spread wide, holding the camera up to block his face. But you could see enough, his alabaster skin, black t-shirt, jeans, dark hair framing the phone.

He was there, watching you.

Waiting to hear you give in for the most precious being in the universe, how could you say no?

“Our son is trying to show you things, love. Pay attention to him.”

You let out a small gasp, frightened of his voice, whimpering out a pitiful sorry before looking at Luke. He was just as upset, thinking you didn’t want to talk to him. You could see the tears pooling in his eyes, escalating quickly.

“I’m sorry, baby,” you choked, “I’m listening, that's such a pretty red blanket. Is it warm?”

Luke nodded his head silently, bottom lip trembling. When you cried, he cried, creating a vicious cycle that was a perfect recipe for a headache following a beating from Ren.

“Now you’ve gone and upset the boy.”

You watched the reflection shift to standing, flinching at the change of angle on your son, making him appear as nothing more than an insect. “Ren, please, I didn’t mean to make him upset, I’m just so happy about his new things…”

And that sent Luke into a crying fit, letting out a high-pitched scream and collapsing to the floor.

Ren tsked through the speaker, walking towards his pitiful boy, you gasped when his hand shot out. Looping under Luke’s shoulder and hoisting him in the air. Watching in the reflection as his little legs wrapped around his torso and wailed into him.

The camera flipped again, making you burst into tears.

Seeing him again, after years of trying to burn his image from your brain.

Years of psychotherapy, exposure methods, medications that cost you thousands, nothing could’ve prepared you for what you saw.

Predatory eyes, like a shark smelling blood in the water. Looking right through you, pink lips that you were abused by countless times, pressing into your son’s luscious dark hair. Cooing in his ear with the voice of your nightmares.

“It’s alright son, Daddy’s here now.”

Lukes face rotated, forcing you to watch him seek comfort in Ren’s neck. Nuzzling the skin like he did with you when he needed comfort.

“And there’s nothing Mommy can do about it.”

--------

You couldn’t sleep that night, rocking back and forth while Tom snored next to you.

How could he sleep right now?

Did he not realize how upset you were? Luke was gone, his supposed son was gone, on a school night. That was never allowed in the past, unthinkable actually. But Tom was oblivious, cuddling you as always, trying to get you to sleep with him before bed.

Usually, you’d indulge him before the events of the previous day occurred. Sometimes you needed the release too, and the night was a perfect time because you could close your eyes and imagine someone else.

With dark hair, falling on your face.

Spewing horrible names that made you unimaginably turned on, your therapists said that was normal for victims of abuse. To associate the cycle of punishment used during sexual encounters, as a way of coping with it like it was a reward.

Since men like Ren used sex as a ‘reward’.

Even though most of the time it was hell, having to sit back and watch him violate every inch of your mind, body, and soul.

You sighed, slipping Tom’s arms from around your waist. Stepping into your slippers and walking out your door. The halls were silent, wood creaking even louder than before, you’d have to get those fixed, but who were you kidding?

At any moment Ren could fly through the window like a bat to kidnap you again, there was no sense in wasting money on home improvements. When you’d need it to pay a ransom for Luke back, you found yourself standing in his room.

Clutching the edges of your sleep shirt, staring with watery eyes at the black and red sheets he had draped over his bed.

A few toys scattered around, color books, shoes, fuck.

You whipped out your phone, dialing the unknown number faster than you could blink. Chewing your lip nervously, it was 2 AM. There was no way he was awa-

“What is it?”

“Ren,” you stayed firm, “Give me back my son.”

“Hm, tempting, but no.”

You whined, sitting down on his bed so you could just smell the lingering memories of him in the house, “Please, you can’t keep him. The police will find you sooner or later.”

“I don’t think that's possible, love. He’s just where he needs to be, with me. Like he always should have been, instead of raised by that blonde-haired excuse of a man. How dare you (Y/N)? Allow our son, my miracle child, to be raised with a prick like that? Do you have no shame?”

“Tom is not a prick,” you scoffed, mind racing with every bargaining chip you had. “Ren, do you really want Luke to watch you get arrested when the police find you? He’s going to be traumatized-”

“More traumatized than watching his mother cheat on his father?”

“Excuse me?”

Ren huffed, it sounded like he was getting out of bed, “You heard me, for the past six years you’ve been nothing but an unfaithful slut. Having sex with that man, while you were pregnant with my child.”

“You cheated on me first?!”

“That doesn’t mean you can do it back! You’re mine! Always, and now you’ve tainted your body, I’ll have to clean you before I can have my taste. Disgusting woman.”

“Kylo,” you whispered, holding your head in your free hand as you took a deep breath. Allowing your tears to flow freely, “I need Luke, you can’t take him from me. Please don’t take him from me, I won’t survive.”

“Is that a promise?”

You began crying harder, knowing that he wasn’t letting up. He wanted you to suffer, and then he would turn it around and use it on poor Luke.

“Love,” he sighed, “He is fine. Sleeping soundly in his bed, waiting for you to join us.”

“I can’t-I can’t go with you Kylo,” you trembled at the thought. Imagining yourself willingly walking back into his outstretched arms. Even though your lizard brain was screaming for you to give in.

Let the big man take care of you once more, it was so hard being in control all the time. Always on the lookout, terrified that he would be around the corner.

But if you went with him, those fears would be a reality. And there was no question that he was even more bloodthirsty than before. You saw the news story, almost disassembling a human life as he did six years ago.

“I know you miss me.”

You swallowed, trying to make your voice sound strong even though it was breaking apart, “No-I don't.”

“I suggest you start telling the truth and come home willingly. Before I have to come find you myself.”

And he hung up.

———

‘My friend, I’m reaching out to you once more. I know you are scared. I am scared for you too. I can’t imagine how you feel every day. I hope you’ve read the letters I’ve sent, it pains me to think about you all alone.’

‘I pray you are safe.’

You swallowed back a sob, rocking on the cement floor in a ball of limbs. Arms tucked over your knees as you tried to breathe. In and out, teeth chattering as you counted down from ten.

The paper crumpled into a ball, dropping to the floor with no more than a small wisp of air. You clenched your eyes shut, breath catching as you heard shoes move closer to your bare feet. Toe to toe with their black leather, shining against the bitter red from your raw skin, bleeding from the repeated hours that you spent scraping the skin away just to be sure you were still alive.

“One of our neighbors received this in their mailbox by mistake,” his voice echoed against the bare walls.

You sniffled, he can’t see you cry. Please, just hold it together, yesterday you resolved to not let him see the weakness anymore. Pretending that you could be strong enough to be worthy of salvation, not damned to rot in the basement.

No food, no water, no love.

Only him.

“It’s a pity that someone would waste their prayers on someone like you.”

His shoes creaked as he crouched in front of you, you could feel the warmth of his breath. Heaving in sharp bursts against your knotted hair plastered to your scalp from blood. A beating you sustained days before, for smacking him when he tried to kiss your mouth. Earning a swift punch that knocked the wind out of your lungs, straight into the concrete wall you sat in front of now, at his mercy once more.

Would it ever end?

Would someone ever find you?

Clearly, someone wanted you back… why else would there be a letter for you?

A thick finger wormed its way into your cocoon of arms, crooking under your trembling chin. Forcing you to look up at your captor, nostrils flared like he smelled blood in the water. Eyes searching your face, fuck. Why did he have to be so beautiful? A tragedy really, that a man like him was so cruel.

A fallen angel, that's what he was.

Cloaked in darkness, surrounded by black drapings against his alabaster skin. Tiny smatterings of beauty marks, kisses from God some would say, all over him. But he would sooner grow horns from his temples and sprout wings, dragging you into the deep abyss of tar he must’ve climbed out of when he was purged from hell.

“Shaking like a shitting dog,” he quirked a brow, inspecting your face for a moment, “Maybe I’ll get you a collar and leash, parade you around like the bitch you are.”

“Please,” you whimpered, like the pitiful puppy he portrayed you as. Kicked so hard by its owner that it cowered in fear of setting them off once more, but with nowhere to run. Don’t bite the hand that feeds you, as the old saying goes.

“Please?” he echoed mockingly, “Is that all you can say? Hmm?”

You swallowed back a dry sob, trying to look as small as possible to try and lure him into giving you something. Anything, after a week of being down in this dungeon, “I didn’t…”

“You didn’t?” he raised both brows, clutching your cheeks in his firm grip, “You didn’t, what? Send a letter to someone? About your whereabouts while I wasn’t watching you?”

He shook your face, “What was that? You’re saying someone just magically found out where you were? And sent you a letter?”

“I’m sorry,” you choked.

You were, so very sorry.

It was a long shot at best, he had been sloppy the second morning you were locked down here. Not doing a thorough sweep of the room, you found a piece of paper in a garbage pile. An envelope in fact, with a stamp on it.

So, you scrawled what you could on the scraps, using your blood from your trembling fingers to signal for someone. A close friend, someone who checked on you daily, would look for you. Someone had to be looking for you, it had been too long for your parents to brush it off as a crazy weekend of fun.

“You know I don’t like it when you lie,” he whispered.

You spared another glance at him, wincing at the sharpness of his face. He was pissed, the veins in his neck bulging from the anger coursing through him. You could see another pulsing along his temple, fueling him into a blind rage of unrestricted violence.

He cradled your face in his hands, holding you carefully as you would crack. Shaking his head softly before placing a terrifyingly affectionate kiss on your forehead. You couldn’t hold in your sobs, fear wrecking through you, he was nice like this when he was going to punish you.

Really hurt you, until you thought you had died from it, but he ripped you back across the line every time. Making it so much worse, “Kylo-please.”

His hands slithered around your throat in an instant, slamming the back of your head into the wall behind you. Your skull cracking, even more, brain shaking around like you were in a carnival ride, thrown around and around. Scream deafening over him repeatedly hissing for you to be quiet, that it was hurting him to do this to you.

At some point you blacked out, not remembering the events after the start. You hoped that your brain would never supply those memories to you, living through it once was enough. Waking in a straight jacket-looking contraption, on the floor of the basement.

Squinting at the single lightbulb hanging in the middle of the ceiling, you didn’t try to move your arms or legs. Too groggy for your nervous system to command it anyway, you were content to stare upwards, counting the cracks in the cement, he was a pacer.

That much you knew from the short time of your captivity, he probably ran a pathway through his carpet from how much he walked back and forth. Probably plotting another terrible thing to do to you, so you would break and be his little pet. Putty in his wretched hands, the same hands that felt so delicious when they caressed your cheeks.

Or slid into your hair when he bathed you that one time, you sighed at the memory. Instantly stiffening at the warmth it brought your chest, no. You were not falling for that, you’d seen enough murder documentaries. Stockholm syndrome was not your fate, you were getting out of here.

Going to finish school, and run away from that man.

But, what if you could change him?

Oh, yes.

Your heart liked that plan, very-very much. Thinking of taming the wild animal upstairs, making him your little attack dog, so you could feel protected. Like you did in the moments he held you, cooing in your sweat-laced scalp how good you were, a good little girl.

“Fuck,” you murmured, head falling back on the ground, you were fucked.

-------

Your heart was beating between your ears, almost like your body had rearranged its organs from the anxiety of your current situation.

Sitting at a red light, Luke’s school was just up the road, you could see it. The cute little sign in the front, other parents pulling in to pick up their kids, the crossing guard waving happily as people pulled in. Eager to reunite with their babies, you drummed your fingers on your steering wheel.

This wasn’t a good idea.

He would be here, he’s probably already been here.

All day, waiting for you to cave and try and sneak a peek at your baby. Knowing that you can’t leave him alone, you couldn’t just leave him to rot with Ren. You had to do something, even if it was just to cry from your car while you watched him walk to his car. You needed to see he was alive, true to Ren’s word.

Which meant little, but a small sliver of you believed that he would keep Luke safe.

You were signaled into the line of cars at the pick-up, dozens of little ones running around on the grass field in front of the school. Squealing and giggling with their friends, dressed in head to toe bright colors, mismatched socks, lunch boxes, fuck. You choked back a sob, where was he?

Frantically scanning the lawn, for just a trace of him.

But you saw nothing, not one child that looked like Luke. No little boys running around with dark hair all messed up from his day of playing, a red backpack hanging limply on skinny shoulders. He refused to let you tighten the straps, he was a big boy, okay? He would grow into it, he promised you.

A familiar set of shoulders came into your view, standing off in the distance, leaning against a tree. You swallowed, taking in his relaxed form as your rage boiled, head to toe burning. Ren was so casual like he wasn’t plastered on the news in all 50 states, with the FBI, CIA, and other government entities looking for him.

Arms crossed against his massive chest, a long-sleeve black shirt hugging him so tightly. Even from afar, you could see how much bigger he was, guess people have to do something in prison right? A pair of black ray-bans perched on his strong nose, a smirk playing at his lips, that son-of-a-bitch. You’d kill him, not a single question about it.

You stormed out of your car, the sound of your door slamming caused Ren’s head to turn to the right, zeroing in. Frozen in place as he surveyed you, you stayed absolutely still. Afraid that this was a dream, a nightmare, and at any moment he would transform into some kind of horrible creature and hunt you down.

But he didn’t move, just continued leaning in the shade.

You cocked your head to the side, what was he playing at?

He was making it too easy, all you had to do was scream and point and he would be arrested. Everyone was on high alert for a suspicious man on the loose, and there he was. Dressed in all black outside an elementary school, with no child in sight!

Wait, no child?

“Luke?” you whispered, whipping towards the drop-off zone. Eyes searching for your baby, you had gotten too distracted by that maniac that you’d forgotten your end game. To snatch Luke from his horrible father and run away, maybe to Alaska.

Everyone disappears in Alaska, there’s like more bears than people.

You walked towards the lawn, feeling Ren’s eyes on you the entire time. Determined to put it behind you, he wouldn’t dare try and attack you here, especially with the chance of Luke seeing him. His new friend, attacking his beloved mommy. Once you stepped on the sidewalk, your alarm bells began to siren once more.

All the other kids from Luke’s class were there, his friend Carson, and James, and Kenzie. All huddled around their teacher, shit yes. You approached his teacher, mouth open to accuse her of letting your son be kidnapped when someone snatched your wrist.

Yanking you back, you spun quickly, hand raised to backhand Ren for his audacity to come up to you-

“(Y/N)?”

Oh.

Lily, your friend, and fellow mom. Was holding your wrist in her feebly small grip, eyes wide with panic as she darted between your angry face and raised palm. With the threat of your attack looming between the two of you, she let go of you. Cradling her hands to her chest before speaking.

“I thought that was you,” her voice shook, “I didn’t mean to startle-I just-you haven’t been returning my calls…”

“Lily,” you let out a sigh of relief, briefly glancing at Ren’s way. Souring when you saw his face pulled in pure delight, “I’m sorry-I wasn’t expecting to see you.”

“At our kids’ school?”

She gestured around, all the parents shuffling along, while her own son. Carson, Luke's best friend, runs up to his frightened mom to snuggle into her hip. You watched her stroke his hair, your heart flaring with envy, where was your son? Why wasn’t he in your arms right now, “Sorry-I’ve been busy since I got back.”

She nodded, “Yeah, you were in New York, don’t you remember calling me? You were frantic, asking about Luke and everything and then you just stopped?”

You were about to respond, ready to break down into tears, admitting that you lied about Luke being picked up by a relative. Instead, he was kidnapped by his real father, who happens to be the world’s most wanted man right now.

“Miss (Y/N)?”

Both you and Lily turned, faced now with your kids’ teacher. Smiling at you with a tight-lipped expression, almost shocked to see you there. She cocked a brow at the scene between you and Lily, “I wasn’t expecting to see you here?”

You scrunch your forehead, “Why wouldn’t I be here? This is my sons’ school?”

She still looked confused, gesturing around, “Luke was withdrawn this morning by your boyfriend, Ben? He came in and let me know that the two of you were moving…”

Lily turned to you, “Boyfriend?”

Your mouth snapped shut, looking between the two. Shit-shit-shit-shit, this was not good, Ren took Luke out of school. Extending his parental rights, waltzing inside the building, a public building, without being stopped. Taking Luke right out of his safe place, Lily cleared her throat. Drawing your attention back to her, “You have a new boyfriend? What happened to Tom?”

“Nothing-I don’t,” you panicked, backing away from the two of them staring at you quizzically. This was not good, now they thought you were the dangerous one. Showing up here, getting all sweaty, shit. You really were sweaty, baking in the heat as the sun beat down on the sidewalk.

Lily stepped away from you, nodding softly, “I didn’t know things weren’t working out with Tom.” She looked at the ground, face colored with betrayal, “I guess we aren’t as close as I thought…”

“Wait,” you blurted out, eyes darting towards the movement to your right. Ren was walking from the trees, making a beeline for your car, “It’s nothing, we are still together. There’s no Ben.”

“Then who picked up Luke? He looked just like him, had to be someone you were close to.”

Your car door opened, the siren blaring in the busy parking lot. Everyone turned just in time to catch the door shutting, Ren nowhere to be seen. You held up your keys, shakily pressing the lock key.

Sweat beaded along your hairline, what you said next would be the difference between Ren being arrested, or you being arrested.

“I must’ve forgotten to close my door…” you walked away from the ladies. Staring at you suspiciously, you picked up the pace, waving a hand behind you, “There’s nothing to see here!”

You snatched the drivers’ door open, clambering inside as you held your breath. Chest tight with unshed tears and anger boiling inside, you whipped around to the backseat. Expecting to see Ren’s large frame, but no. There was nothing, not even your purse was moved.

“Fucking-fuck.”

————

You sped home, cringing when Tom’s car was in the driveway. Did Lily call him? Would she have told him about your behavior today? He thought Luke was with her…

The TV was on when you came inside, the sound of Tom eating a sandwich dulling the whistles for whatever sport he was watching.

You tried to shut the door as quietly as possible.

“Babe,” Tom yelled, “I got some chicken for dinner, Luke’s favorite. Since we missed him yesterday.”

Silence.

“It’s on the counter,” it sounded like he took a swig from some beer, burping in his arm. You rounded the corner slowly, leaving the safety of the entryway and into the mouth of your living room. Tom was seated on the couch, doing what you imagined, grinning at you with his shimmering teeth.

His face fell when you made eye contact, your bottom lip trembling. This was it, you had to tell him that Luke was gone. And he wasn’t the father, put your heart on your sleeve and tell him that you’ve spent the past six years lying to him.

“What’s wrong?”

You croaked, wiping your eyes with the backs of your hands, “N-n-nothing.”

Tom set his drink down, brow furrowed with concern. “Why are you crying?” he leaned to the side, looking behind, “Where’s Luke?”

“I-I,” you took a sharp breath, cradling your face in your hands, “T-tom.”

“Did something happen,” he moved off the couch, approaching you with cautious steps, “Is he okay? Why isn’t he-”

Thud.

Creak.

Footsteps were coming from upstairs.

You both flinched at the noise, looking at your ceiling for the culprit. The floor creaked as the weight shifted towards the hallway, right above you. Tom looked back at you, his face now a mixture of fear and suspicion, “What’s upstairs, (Y/N)?”

It’s him.

He’s here.

The steps grew louder, slowly descending your old wooden stairs. A hand was placed on the railing, callused skin scraping against the smooth varnish. You cringed at the sound of nails clawing their way down, how they used to feel on your skin. All those years ago, before digging into you.

“(Y/N).”

You gasped at the sound, eyes now snapped shut as you trembled in Tom’s arms. He was right there, you just knew it. Standing at the landing before the hallway, eyes boring into the back of your skull. You shuddered, mouth feeling like it was stuffed with cotton at the thought of being so close to him.

Earlier you were brave, now you were terrified.

“Ready to go home, my love?”

--------

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[shineonmalcolmbright]

Shine On, Bright: Chapter Three

Table of Contents

Present

The problem is the jittery (yet still subtle but not so subtle) excitement of Malcolm Bright. He’s walking beside Gil, sometimes hiding his shaking hands in pockets and other times he’s fidgeting out in the open in an attempt to explain what is happening right now. But Gil, Gil hears about every other word. He’s looking forward into the junkyard where Malcolm said he was shot at while visiting and that his father’s car was there.

Up ahead, Dani stands around, waiting for their arrival. The look of absolute disappointment is easy to spot or easy for Gil to spot. Without looking over at Malcolm and saying out loud, he does his best to snap, You should stop.

Malcolm literally stops both moving and talking at the same time. He almost trips as he looks over at Dani. What?

Something’s wrong.

With a brief survey, Malcolm knows. There’s something wrong by the way everybody is standing around. There is this attempt at carelessness while the weight of the world weighs down on each and every single present. Dani avoids eye contact while pretending to look over at Malcolm and Gil and their arrival.

“What’s going on here?” Gil interrupts a silence that’s so easy to miss.

Gil avoids thinking all the details Malcolm told him about a station wagon he rode in to get to the Overlook Hotel. Somehow after all those years, Gil remembers it well. The vehicle pulling up into the circle right outside the hotel. While he worked as a security guard at the Overlook, he paid little attention to arrivals but somebody failed to come into work as staff disappeared for the winter. It happened every winter.

Nobody’s saying it out loud but Malcolm can feel it sizzling in the air, all hot in his brain. Bodies. Murder. How’d he know? Whoever said that so loud into the wind, Malcolm didn’t even know their name. He did his best not to look over at them pretending their thoughts weren’t clear but they were all bold, red, painful. How did he know? How did he know here?

Good question.

But it’s not like Malcolm is going to offer them up an answer. Him being haunted by memories and ghosts, both just as dangerous. Maybe even both leading out here. He almost misses something Dani says to him. It’s so easy not to catch considering the noise, noise, noise. Not a good day to be able to read the unsuspecting minds of those on all sides.

When Dani doesn’t get an answer, she changes the subject. All she asked was if Malcolm was alright after being shot at. The no answer was clear, no. There’s a lot to be said too about the way Malcolm looks ready to hop all over the junkyard, about to leap on and off broken cars.

“A body of a young woman was found,” Dani starts to inform them.

Again, her words become lost. Malcolm shoots her a quick glance before nearly blacking out because of all the noise, noise, noise of surrounding loud sounds. How did he know? How did he know here? How did he know? How did he know here? Answer is: They don’t want to know.

Gil side eyes him. Chances are Malcolm’s being louder than usual. A lot louder than usual but he tries to focus and he tries to pry his way through all those thoughts, How did he know? How did he know here? Malcolm picks at a few loose threads in his coat pocket.

Reminder: Fix that later.

Another reminder: Fix memories later. Memories need to be fixed and investigated and sought out to better understand all the reasons to why his father’s car would be here in a junkyard where everybody else is also bouncing around thinking bodies, bodies, bodies. But strange. Dani made it sound as if there was only…one victim.

Rather than focus on Dani, Malcolm swings around to find Edrissa standing in one spot. If it weren’t murder that brought them all around, it would’ve looked as if she were lifting pizza from a brick oven with some giant spatula. She too is practically bouncing around. Some sort of energy consumes the area, popping around each and every single person increasing all the thoughts of each person standing around the junkyard.

Bodies, bodies, bodies. But nobody’s said a thing out loud about this. Just something brewing around them, boiling for too long.

Malcolm tilts his head to the side as he watches Edrisa side step towards another medical examiner, body on her giant pizza spatula. Her head bobbing as if she’s hearing some bop caught in her head. She’s not. Malcolm and Gil know this for a fact. Although in a sing-song way Edrisa is reminding herself again and again: Careful, be careful, you want to be careful

“Is that a pizza spatula?” It’s like Malcolm’s joining the land of the living, not a world of shadows shared between him and Gil then a few others.

Edrisa is dumping the remains of a woman found in a car into a bad to be carried back to the lab. She chuckles. “Oh this? No, it’s actually called a pizza peel, derived from the French word for shovel, which is weird since pizza’s Italian.”

Behind them, Dani manages to say in her head rather than out loud: Yeah, because that’s what’s weird. Malcolm gives her a look causing her to wonder if she said that out loud.

Holding up the pizza peel for everybody to see, Edrisa smiles. Her jitteriness is a welcome energy, one Malcolm feels he can fall in sync with rather than the tautness of everybody else in the junkyard. She chimes back into the conversation. “These puppies are a little known M.E. secret. Great for retrieving smashed soft tissue or a pepperoni that fell off in the oven.” By the look on everybody’s face, utter shock, Edrisa finishes the though. “Oh! Not-Not with the same one.”

Only Malcolm smiles, a breath of relief. He looks at a crushed car, not the station wagon. Those gunshots from the night before ricochet off the corners of his brain, locked in his memory. They’re loud enough above all the other noise, noise, noise that Gil grimaces a little behind him. Swinging his arms around a bit while keeping his hands in his pocket, Malcolm asks, “What do we know about the victim?”

Gil steps forward so Malcolm can see him from the corner of his eye. It takes a lot more strength to not roll his eyes than to actually roll them at the fact both Malcolm and Edrisa look ready to hop all around the junkyard with a victim at the site of the crime and the abandoned car of a serial killer. Then of course, the antsy tremors of gunshot memory ricochets. Before Edrisa gets a word in, Gil tells Malcolm, You should go home, take the day off.

Yeah, but of course, Malcolm isn’t going to listen. He’s the sort of person you say no to and his response is yes as he does whatever it is he shouldn’t do. The kid’s shaved enough years off Gil’s life.

“Oh, not much yet,” Edrisa answers. She’s shuffling around. “Based off of decomposition, I’m guessing she died a couple of weeks ago.” She glances off at the medical examiners with the remains.

Bodies, bodies, bodies.

Gil avoids eye contact with Malcolm. “Is it possible she wound up in the car by accident? Maybe she OD’d?”

Edrisa chuckles, she radiates anxiety. It’s pretty electric. Stacked up on top of all the other anxiety flooding the junkyard. Bodies, bodies, bodies. “No, I don’t think so.”

Malcolm tilts his head to the side, sometimes he’s more bird-like than he should be. But he’s looking at smudges along the window of the crushed car. “No, look at those prints, I think the killer locked her in and then turned on the compactor.” For a split second, she’s there. The girl in the car, clawing for life as she’s about to die. The car buckles around her and it’s obvious, she’s not going to make it, but maybe if she tries…

“Dani, see if the techs can pull a print,” Gil cuts in. He considers putting a hand on Malcolm’s shoulder. A reminder to just relax, but he doesn’t. Instead, it’s business. “And find JT.”

Dani glances at Gil. “He’s running down who might have shot at Bright.”

And as if on cue, JT arrives holding up some paper. “No one, apparently.”

WHAT? Malcolm snaps his attention to JT, he moves too fast. It causes JT to stagger a bit like he’ll be attacked. Doesn’t make sense! Ghosts don’t own junkyards, a fact Malcolm knows.

JT shrugs. “Property records list a guy named Paul Lazar as the junkyard owner but he doesn’t exist. There’s no record of him anywhere.”

But ghosts cannot own…

An iciness crawls through Malcolm. It starts in his head and inches its way through his veins. No record of him anywhere. Makes no sense. None of this makes sense. He pretends he’s paying attention to the moment and not looking over at his father’s station wagon.

Gil attempts to keep up the conversation, “So why would someone buy a junkyard under a fake name?”

To kill one woman? Hide The Surgeon’s station wagon? Still, Malcolm can’t focus in on any of them. Instead, little black spots form at the corners of his vision, blotting out Edrisa, Dani, JT, and even Gil.

Gil meant the question for everybody but his only response is Malcolm. Without looking at him, like they’re not talking at all, Gil replies, We have to consider the possibility that your dad’s car has nothing to do with this murder.

“Why?” Dani breaks the silence. “It doesn’t make sense.”

We have to consider the possibility that your dad’s car has nothing to do with this murder, he’s been chained to a wall for 20 years. That’s a good albi, Malcolm, this has to be a coincidence.

Any movement is too much movement. Malcolm feels too dizzy, he turns, moving at such an erratic pace. This he didn’t mean to say out loud, but he does. “He may not have killed her, but he’s connected somehow. He has to be! It can’t be a coincidence…” My memories brought me here, to a place with is car and a dead body! Only Gil hears the last bit of input, but selects to ignore it as best he can.

“What’s he talking about?” JT asks, just plain confusion is on everybody else’s face. It came out of nowhere, Malcolm’s comments. Then again, it’s not like they need a full explanation to know who’s being referenced. “What’s he talking about?

Bodies, bodies, bodies. Bodies, bodies, bodies. Bodies, bodies, bodies. Bodies, bodies, bodies.

A medical examiner walks over to them with a small wave. She looks at Edrisa, “Dr. Tanaka, we found more.”

Bodies.

Ice turns to steel, not good for blood flow. Malcolm realizes the world is all off-kilter. No. Wait. This is new. But the energy and the Bodies,bodies, bodies lingered with him from start to finish of standing in the junkyard but now it’s real, all too real. He tries to grab onto something except nothing is there. It’s not like the noise, noise, noise would help support him.

“More what?” Gil snaps.

The medical examiner looks at the ground. “Victims.”

Gunshots continue to ricochet but something else needles it’s away through Malcolm. He’s almost numb to it, a lot of feeling already gone. Before Malcolm realizes it’s too late, the ground is reaching up towards him. A soft voice haunts him. My Boy! Come on and take your medicine! The problem with memories is that they’re like ghosts. They’re always out there to haunt you. Malcolm is no stranger to being haunted by the dead and his memories, but a few know of this fact even as he hits the ground, passing out.

But there’s no silence even there.

[lexi-pup]

Writetober Day 20: Rescued (Steelbeak’s Hell)

Notes:

And now some comfort for that hurt and whump. 

Warnings: None

Day 20: Rescued

I was driving- well, I guess piloting- my flying SHUSH car over St. Canard in an area that I normally don’t go to. The night was dark and quiet. Part of why I liked doing nightshifts and watching over either Duckburg or St. Canard at night.

It’s been 3 years since I was ‘rescued.’ Though I wouldn’t call it that. If anything, I was lucky that Taurus Bulba didn’t kill me or take me with him as well.

Steelbeak and everything he put me through for those few years never left my mind. No amount of therapy could remove those memories or shove them to the back of my mind where they would be forgotten.

Still, I couldn’t help but wonder what happened to him. Was he still alive or did he get murdered? If so… where was his body at? Did Taurus Bulba destroy it?

We know he was never found if he’s still alive. Or if he is, he didn’t go back to FOWL and probably went off to restart his life somewhere.

Ever since I got the ‘okay’ from several different doctors so I could come back to SHUSH and be an agent again, I’ve wondered what I would do if I ever came across Steelbeak. My first instinct would be to shoot him.

…At least… I hope that’s what my first instinct would be. And not crawl to his side like nothing changed.

As my mind was once again taken over by Steelbeak, I couldn’t help but notice a small cave and a light shining out of it.

‘That’s weird.’ I thought to myself.

“This is Agent 13. Have you guys ever noticed a small cave with a light on over in my area?” I asked through my walkie talkie.

“Yeah but I never thought anything of it. Just a camper, yah know?” Another agent responded.

“Maybe. But something feels weird about it. I’m going to investigate it just to be sure.” I replied.

“It’s probably just a camper. But alright.” A different agent said.

“I’ll let you know when I get back what it is for sure.” I said and turned the walkie talkie off.

I lowered my car down and landed it on the ground a short distance away from the opening. Putting it into park, I took the keys out and put them in my pocket as I stepped out of it.

Going into the cave, I couldn’t shake the weird and now bad feeling that I had so I ended up taking my gun from it’s holster on my hip. Holding it up in front of me, my finger was off the trigger but ready if needed.

I looked around the entrance of the cave and saw lanterns were where the light was coming from. Which makes sense if it was campers.

But there was mechanical and robotic stuff all over the place. It didn’t look like any campers were there since there wasn’t any sleeping bags or tents or anything. Just robotic stuff.

There was other junk here and there. I even noticed a radio and a TV. How either worked all the way out here, who knows. But I figured the owner had somehow fixed them to work with the antennae. I also saw some other things like a couch, a table with two chairs, a small side table that was by the couch, and a pet bed on the ground too.

I stopped and stared at the pet bed for a moment, a chill going up and down my spine. I began to take deep breaths to calm myself down. That was over and in the past… I didn’t have to worry about that anymore.

But now new questions was thought of. Where are the owners of this stuff and their pet? As far as I can tell, I’m the only one here and there wasn’t any other vehicles outside either.

Going into the back of the cave, I noticed there was some more areas that were lit up but one that wasn’t. I turned my shoulder light on and slowly stepped inside the pitch black room. Thanking god I had put that on my shoulder before I headed out for patrol.

I walked around the room and couldn’t find anything outside of more pet stuff like food bowls, food bag, and so on. That was until I walked closer to the furthest wall and the furthest corner.

I was half expecting a barking dog to go ballistic when my light shined on a big metal cage sitting all alone in the corner and in the dark.

But that wasn’t the case. Instead, I found a person laying curled up in the cage and with their back to me. I kneeled down, wondering if I was imaging things or experiencing some kind of déjà vu. But I know that wasn’t the case. This was very much real and this person needed help.

And I plan on doing that. Because even if I wasn’t an agent for SHUSH, I would still help people when I can.

I went to unlatch the cage only to find there was no latch. Looking at the bars closely, it seemed they were constantly being bent to make a opening before being put back into place.

Makes sense, this guy seemed pretty big despite being malnourished. Even then, he wouldn’t of been able to bend the bars but he probably could’ve stuck a finger or two through and unlatched the cage. Then escape on his own and fight whoever in the meantime.

I looked back to the man when I saw movement. But I could still hear snoring so I knew he was still sleeping. He was laying on a large dog bed and had a blanket over his legs.

Despite the blanket, I was still able to see he was only wearing boxers and something might’ve been around his neck but I couldn’t tell for sure if it’s what I knew it likely was or not. It was obvious that he was a rooster from his feet, head, and tail feathers alone.

My ears pinned down when it finally hit me who it was.

“Steelbeak!?” I couldn’t help but mutter out loud.

I looked his back over and could see a large scar of some kind of a design from his shoulders down to his tail feathers. No doubt that was Taurus Bulba branding him in his own way.

Now the bent bars made sense. Steelbeak couldn’t bend them but Taurus can. But… how come he never used his beak? Unless he did at some point until he was tortured into never doing that again.

A hand slipped under my shirt and I felt my own branding that Steelbeak gave me on both of my sides.

Another chill went down my spine but I managed to push those memories away for the time being. I can’t have a panic attack right now. Not when a certain someone was creeping around.

However, the cave was still quiet aside from his snoring and my heavy breathing. Taurus moved loudly due to being a cyborg. I remembered that perfectly. I would know when he was near.

‘Maybe he isn’t here? Which means I need to work fast.’ I thought to myself as I slowly and quietly holstered my gun.

My ears shot back up at that thought as I took a small laser out and began to quietly cut the front bars off and set them down to the side. There was some clings and clangs but it was mostly quiet, thankfully.

After doing that, I was surprised that he still wasn’t awake. A part of me would’ve thought he was dead if I wasn’t able to see him breathe and snore in his sleep.

I put the laser away and slowly crawled inside the cage and up to him.

“Steelbeak? Hey buddy, you gotta wake up.” I quietly said as I shook his arm as gently as possible.

Now that I was closer, I could see all of the bruises all over his body. His beak even seemed bent and damaged in some way. He was definitely malnourished. And I could see the shock collar around his neck clearly now.

It seemed different than the one I had so he must’ve replaced it. Under it was what looked to be a choke chain with a D-ring. There was also some extra chain behind it to make it easier to grab and pull. The spikes were going into his neck and I could see how bloody and bruised it was just from the chain alone.

“Steelbeak…” I trailed off.

Finally, he jerked awake. I quickly grabbed his beak and held it shut since I didn’t know what he would’ve done. It’s been three years. When I was at that point, I absolutely would’ve called for him about an intruder. And there was a good chance he would do the same now.

“Shh… it’s okay. It‘s okay, Steelbeak.” I quietly said as he began to struggle under me. “It’s me… your favorite SHUSH agent. Remember?”

This seemed to of calmed him down as he looked up to me. I watched as he lifted a hand to the light and moved it so it shined on me until he let it go and moved his hand back.

“I’m going to move my hands away from your beak, okay? You’re not going to call for Taurus Bulba, right?”

He gave me a sad look and I watched him tap at the collar.

“What…?” I asked as I released his beak.

Steelbeak didn’t make a sound as he tapped it again.

“You… you can’t talk, can you?” I asked and he nodded sadly.

That wasn’t just a shock collar… that was a bark collar. Great. Now I need to figure out how to get that off.

“I’m going to try and take it off.” I whispered, slowly reaching behind his neck and grabbed at it.

I played with it for a minute until I realized there wasn’t any kind of buckle on it. So it must’ve been like mine where he needed a remote to take it off after it locks on.

“Okay. New plan.” I say as I moved my hands away from him. “I’ll deal with that later. I’m really sorry. You’ll have to deal with them for a little while longer. I don’t feel uncomfortable taking the chain off without any kind of medical supplies. Come on. Let’s go home.”

I’m not quite sure why I’m even bothering to help him. I guess at this point Taurus Bulba is the bigger of the two evils. And considering how it seems like what he did to me, happened to him, I can’t help but have some sympathy towards the son of a bitch.

I began to crawl backwards, expecting him to follow. But he didn’t. Steelbeak was looking down at his hands and only sat up once I got off of him and backed away.

“Steelbeak?” I started, quietly. “Come on.”

Steelbeak looked up and shook his head. Oh god he wasn’t… There was just no way he was broken. Right?

“It’s okay. I’ll protect you. That’s what an agent of SHUSH does. They save and protect people.” I added.

He still didn’t move towards me so I moved back over to him. He was visibly shaking when I did though. And lowered himself so he wasn’t taller than me while sitting on our heels.

I sighed and gently grabbed the sides of his face with both hands. And rested my forehead against his.

“You know he’s a bad person. You know what he has done to you is illegal.”

Steelbeak inched closer to me, still shaking a little bit.

“I… I’ve missed you.” I lied. “Let’s go home. You don’t belong here with him. And you know that deep down, you aren’t a pet either.”

He pulled away and began tapping at the bottom of the cage. Then he pointed to me and tapped the bottom of the cage again before pointing to himself. It took me a minute but I finally caught on.

“Do… you want me to stay?” I asked if that was it and he nodded. “I can’t stay here and go round 2. Same abuse, different person.”

Steelbeak frowned and lowered his head. Whether it was because I wasn’t staying or because I reminded him of what he did to me, I’m not sure.  

“But I can’t leave you here either.” I added. “I promise I’ll protect you from Taurus Bulba. And I’m not angry at you anymore about what you did to me. If I was still angry, I wouldn’t be trying to help you now. What happened is in the past. Let’s move on. Whether it be as friends or enemies is up to you to decide later once we’re safe and away from here. You… you don‘t deserve to go through this. Not anymore. I think three years is long enough since that’s about as long as you had me.”

Steelbeak finally looked at me again with tears at the corners of his bruised eyes. I filled the small gap between us and slowly raised my hand towards him. He visibly flinched but otherwise didn’t move as I wiped the tear that had come out.

“See? I’m not angry. Let’s leave before he-” I stopped talking at a sound.

Then I heard loud footsteps. Fuck! Steelbeak must’ve heard them too because he gave me the most petrified look that I’ve ever seen him give me. I shushed him and turned the shoulder light off. I gently took him by the hand and slowly crawled out of the cage with him following. I backed up until I was against the opposite wall.

The memories of running and hiding from Taurus Bulba flooded my mind as we sat there. Almost in the same positions that we were in that night just the other way around.

I listened for the footsteps as I heard them come closer. Taurus walked by the room to the main area and entrance. I mentally prayed that he wouldn’t see my car or stay there all night.

My prayers seemed to of been answered since I heard him walk back this way and to whatever area he came from. Once the footsteps had quieted down completely and I felt he was a good distance away, I slowly moved.

I didn’t turn my light back on but used the wall to stand back up. Steelbeak was still holding my hand and I slowly got him up too. I felt him grab my shoulders, trying to steady himself as I held his waist.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t hold him up and keep an eye out for Taurus Bulba at the same time.

“Hey buddy, get back down. I’m going to need you to crawl beside me alright? I can’t protect you and hold you up at the same time.” I whispered as I slowly helped him back down.

I took my gun out and held it in my left hand as my right held the back of his shock collar so I could guide him out of the dark room. My left arm still on the wall and letting me know when I made it to the opening.

As quietly as possible, I led him out to the main area and straight to my car. There was no time to get him to the passenger seat so I opened the back door and sat him down there.

What I didn’t realize was that Taurus Bulba was watching us on his motion cameras. He knew the whole time I was there and simply wanted to see what I would do.

“There.” I shut the back door, keys already in my other hand.

I opened the driver’s door and quickly stuck the keys in the ignition. Right as I turned the car on and was about to shut my door, I felt something grab me by the neck and drag me back to the cave.

Before I could even come to terms with being choked, I was thrown down onto the hard ground.

I grunted as I looked up at the feet that was standing directly in front of me and I internally cursed as I rubbed my neck. Looking up, Taurus Bulba was standing in front of me with his arms crossed and looking extremely pissed off.

“Well, I didn’t expect you of all people to try and rescue that dumb mutt.” Taurus said in his normal tone.

I unintentionally flinched at that and Taurus caught it.

“Ah yes… he probably called you that, didn’t he? At least you got an actual name unlike him. I just call him whatever degrading name I can think of at the time. What did he call you again? Lucy? Layla?”

“L-Lucky.” My voice cracked as I got to my hands and knees.

“That was it!” Taurus kneeled down and grabbed my snout. “Because it was ironic for your situation, yes?”

“Hm hmm.” I nodded, my ears lowering on their own.

“Well, I don’t appreciate it when someone tries to steal my property. Now… you had a chance to get back to your old life a few years ago. Do you want that chance again?” Taurus asked, letting go of my snout.

“Obviously.” I rubbed my snout.

“You have two choices. Either leave alone or you don’t leave at all.” Taurus said before adding “You got 10 seconds to decide before I decide for you.”

As we were talking, Steelbeak was figuring out his own options while still in the back of my car. He didn’t want to stay here with him but he didn’t want anything to happen to me either.

He looked at the front area and the different buttons that was near the radio and cup holders. Surely there was… yes! Steelbeak smiled to himself when he saw a SOS button.

After pressing it, it began to silently blink. He hoped that meant that SHUSH would be notified and would get here ASAP.

Slowly, he got out of the car to come over to us. Taurus smiled when he crawled over on all fours and sat beside me.

“Good dog.” Taurus said, patting him on the head. “What do you think we should do with this stray?”

Steelbeak and I looked at each other for a minute as he thought about it.

Then he pointed to the collar before pointing it to me.

“Hmm… I was going to euthanize her but okay. I think you know not to make a sound by now, don’t you?” Taurus asked, taking the remote to his collar out and pressing a button.

The collar unlocked and Taurus grabbed it off of his neck. Revealing a very bloody and bruised ring around his neck and his feathers.

I jumped up and grabbed at the arm that was holding the collar.

“Steelbeak, get back to the car!” I quickly said as Taurus tried to throw me off of himself.

“Stay here, you damn dog!” Taurus ordered and Steelbeak listened to him.

Taurus finally managed to throw me a couple of feet away. I grunted again since this time I landed on my arm very hard. I rolled over onto my stomach, about ready to push myself up when I was suddenly pinned down.

I was surprised to find Steelbeak on top of me and grabbing my arms to hold them behind me. He also moved my ponytail so it was off to the side.

“Good dog.” Taurus chuckled as he came up to us.

Taurus tightened the collar up as much as he could before he forced it around my neck and locked it in place.

“I think the bad dog deserves a big shock for that alone. Clearly someone needs to be retrained.” Taurus laughed as he pressed a button.

My yelp of pain startled Steelbeak who jumped off of me as I began to whine and shake on the ground. Taurus put the remote away and enjoyed the first show of many.

It finally stopped and I was in the middle of telling him to fuck off when the collar shocked me again without him even pressing a button. Right. This is apparently a bark collar. I can’t make a sound with it on.

The pain went away again and I just laid there. Trying to think of a plan to save us both.

“Are you going to bark or whine again?” Taurus asked and I shook my head. No. Not right now. “Good. Let’s go.”

Taurus grabbed me by the collar and whistled at Steelbeak.

We were about to go into the cave when we heard helicopters above us and a bright light shined down right onto us.

Taurus let go of me and flew up to deal with them. In the meantime, some more flying cards flew down and parked with their headlights on us.

“SH-USH?” Steelbeak quietly said and trembled beside me.

I strangely felt better when he was finally able to speak. Even if it was in a voice that clearly needed some speech therapy after so long.

All I could do was nod as I slowly rubbed his back. Then I got his attention and wrote SOS on my hand. He nodded, confirming that he did press that button and that’s why they were here.

“Agent 13? And… Steelbeak?” A few agents came towards us.

I got in front of him and tapped at my neck. One got the message and came over to look at it. Now that there was a bright light shining on it, they were able to use some tools in their car to get it off without the remote. We confirmed it was just us three so the other agents went back to the sky to help defeat Taurus Bulba.

“There. It’s off now.” Agent 19 said, removing the collar.

“Thank god. I couldn’t make a sound with it on.” I replied, turning back around to face her.

“Bark collar?” She asked and I nodded. “God these are awful! Both on dogs and people!”

“How do you think he feels?” I asked, side stepping to show Steelbeak sitting on the ground and leaning against the car. “He had it on for roughly three years.”

“Yeah but… didn’t he have one on you too?” She questioned.

“Not quite. It wasn’t a bark collar.” I replied. “Since I’m sure you guys got things handled here, I’m going to take him to the hospital.”

“V-eeet?” Steelbeak moaned.

“No vet.” I shook my head. “Hospital.”

“Oh geez… that’s… I’m not sure how to feel about that…”

“Trust me, you’re not the only one feeling conflicted.” I replied to her.

“I’ll let the other agents know you took both of you to safety far away from here where he can’t hurt either of you anymore.” Agent 19 said.

“Thank you.” I nodded and helped him up again. “Come on, buddy. We’re going to my car.”

Once he was settled in the passenger seat and buckled. I jumped into the driver’s seat and quickly took to the sky. Once we were a good distance away from there, I pressed a button.

“Where would you like to go?” The car asked.

“St. Canard hospital.” I said.

“Okay. Auto piloting to St. Canard Hospital. Would you like me to get there quickly?” The car asked.

“Yes.” I confirmed. “Emergency.”

“Understood. Heading to St. Canard Hospital at emergency speed.” The car started to fly much faster and on it’s own.

“I love technology.” I smiled to myself. “The one downside is that the landing is still a bit off so you have to quickly turn it off and do it yourself.”

I heard an attempt to chuckle beside me and looked at Steelbeak, who was now frowning and touching his neck.

“Hey buddy, don’t do that and agitate it. The doctors will take care of everything. Did you find what I said funny?”

He trembled again and I slowly held one of his hands with mine.

“It’s okay. You can do that again and not be scared of getting hurt. Hearing you try to laugh actually made me feel a lot better.”

“So…rry.”

“For what? Having him put the collar on me?” I asked and he nodded in confirmation. “Don’t worry about it. That was actually really smart and you may have saved my life doing it.”

Steelbeak slowly moved and wrapped him arms around me, giving me a tight hug. Sighing, I hugged him back.

My original plan was to get him to the hospital, contact SHUSH about the situation, and hoped that would be it outside of having to deal with Taurus Bulba eventually. But now I’m not sure if I can leave him and not ever come back to visit with a good conscience.

Why was I cursed to be such a good person… even to my worst enemy…

[ladyshilya]

Roswell New Mexico: New Mother

Let’s see what is going on with Michael and Maria, Isobel deciding to poison herself to get rid of the baby, Maria seeing Rosa and everything else that is going to happen. 

The episode starts with the military finding some of the aliens.  Which does not turn out well when some of the aliens attack back. One of the aliens is shot and runs away only to be found by the original Max.  Max from the original series. I heard he was going to be on the show this season and I am a bit excited. 

Michael is doing what he can to help Max while he is in the pod. Alex asks Michael’s permission to keep investigating his mother because Alex hit strong firewall which means people really don’t want that info out. Alex later visits his father and tells him that he was right about the aliens. How he is no longer with Michael.  

Jenna, Max’s old partner found Maria’s mother walking down the street and brought her to hospital. Jenna talks to Michael about what happen to Max so Michael sends her to the lab where Liz is working. Liz explains to Jenna what she has been doing to get Max back.  They later take a moment to have some drinks and shoot at the side of a building.  Which causes to Liz to break down about everything. Max didn’t ask her about saving her sister he just did it. 

Earlier Liz had given Rosa some art supplies to help her. When Rosa starts to hear Max when she is awake it causes her to drink more.  Maria finds Rosa raiding liquor at the bar. Maria freaks out thinking she is turning into her mother. Rosa tells she’s not and about the aliens. When Michael comes to see Maria he finds Rosa and a very upset Maria who kicks him out.  Rosa gets a dream from Max who says he is getting stronger and can feel Isobel and she is in trouble. Rosa calls Liz about Isobel.

Isobel took a higher dose of the poison because the microdoses she had been taking have not been working. Isobel hallucinates Max talking to her.  Max telling her that she is going to get herself killed. He also tells her it won’t matter if she id doing everything to become stronger if it means she dies.  He wouldn’t want to come back to a world without her in it. Sheriff Valenti interrupts Isobel hallucinations to go over somethings found on Noah’s body. Isobel brings out a sex toy box to show the Sheriff. Apparently they were into some kinky stuff. This scared hallucination Max. Max told Isobel she would be a great mom but she can’t have Noah’s kid. Isobel feels like the only one here for her is herself. At this point Isobel has miscarried and Max urges Isobel to take the antidote but as she tries to grab it she falls and knocks her head on the table. 

Liz got to Isobel and was able to save her with antidote. Liz and Isobel had moment and Liz tells Isobel that Max was there for her and the one to help save her. 

When Liz goes to visit Maria at hospital, Maria is upset with Liz for keeping it from her.  Especially since she mourned for Rosa as well. Maria would visit her grave every month and even helped clean it. Maria put her necklace on her mother to protect her from all the bad things have been happening to her. Mimi doesn’t remember where she had been but she had boots on that were hers.  We all know Mimi likes to walk around barefoot. 

Alex pays Michael a visit because he found some information. It seems original Max’s name is Tripp.  The alien he found is probably Michael’s mother Nora. Nora was able to get the gun away from Tripp and get away from him. They found her a few hours later with the military vehicle she took.  Tripp puts down his weapons and tells Nora he will help her because she is injured. Tripp then grabs Nora from behind and calls the team in. A siren alien jumps and in helps before she was shot. Nora was able to get the other alien into the truck and get away.  Inside the truck were the pods that held the babies.  The question is if the other alien is Max and Isobel’s mom.  Michael shows Alex a news article with his mom in the picture where she won a pumpkin contest. How did she go from the crash to the pumpkin contest to being in captured. We see Nora and the other alien arrive on the doorstep of the man we saw in the pumpkin context picture. He offers to help them.

There was a lot going on in this episode. Maria’s mom is back but no one has any idea what happened to her.  Maria now knows about the aliens. She has every right to be pissed off especially after Noah controlled her. It seems whatever Michael did is helping Max get stronger. Hopefully this will stop Rosa from medicating with alcohol to keep Max away. 

Of course the cute moment between Michael and Maria when he made her breakfast. His relationships must always be mentioned. Alas Maria and Michael have hit a road block already with fact Michael has been keeping the fact he is an alien a secret.  I am sure we will be seeing more of Maria and Michael because this town has a way from bring people around each other. 

Isobel got her wish and lost the baby with that back alley coat hanger method she was trying. I really liked that line when Max said it because what she was doing was not all that different. At the same time she needed to do what was right for her and Roswell had no options for her.  I appreciate her seeing Max when she needed him. People rarely talk about how when someone is going through a tough time sometimes it helps them to talk to someone even if its in their mind.  

I wonder if the second alien was Max and Isobel’s mother or was she the mother of a different one.  It looked like there were 4 pods in the truck.  Anyone who has read the books and watched the original knows there was a 4th alien, Tess.  We still have not seen her but there was mention of a Tess in the first season. I am sure like everyone else I would love to know what happen to Michael’s mom during that time. I am sure she was captured because of the newspaper article.  How did everything happen and did the guy help take care of the pods after she was gone?  I am curious about them all having a different power and do the kids inherit the parents? 

I guess we have to keep watching to find out and next week looks like it will interesting looks like Rosa will be revealing herself to her dad. 

[thecomicsnexus]

BATMAN #354-356, DETECTIVE COMICS #520-521 NOVEMBER 1982 - FEBRUARY 1983 BY GERRY CONWAY, DON NEWTON, ALFREDO ALCALA, IRV NOVICK, DICK GIORDANO, SAL TRAPANI AND ADRIENNE ROY

SYNOPSIS (FROM DC DATABASE)

In his home, Rupert Thorne, the most powerful man in Gotham City, cowers in fear as he has been constantly haunted by the spirit of Hugo Strange. When Thorne listens someone knocking on his door, he descends to open and finds himself face to face with Hugo Strange dressed in a Batsuit. Thorne closes his eyes and begs the phantom to leave him alone and when he opens his eyes, Strange is gone. Tired of being haunted, Thorne contacts the only man who can help him: Doctor Thirteen.

Meanwhile, Batman meets with James Gordon, Jason Bard and Vicki Vale, who inform him that the suicide of Morton Monroe, editor and boss of Vicki, might've been caused by Rupert Thorne, the same person behind the fraud of the past Mayoral Election. Vicki also tells Batman about the pictures she used to prove Batman and Bruce Wayne were one and the same and that they were stolen from her office. She has deduced that Thorne got his hands on them and he hired Deadshot to murder Bruce. With all this information, Batman leaves looking for one man.

Meanwhile, Thorne and Thirteen arrange a meeting, where Thorne tells the paranormal investigator about his dealings with Hugo Strange and how he murdered the man before the apparitions started to haunt him.

Moments later, Batman arrives at the Gotham Prison and interrogates Deadshot about his previous blood contract. Deadshot tells Batman that he was released by the warden of the prison and Batman decides to take Deadshot with him out of prison, much to everyone's shock and surprise. Once outside, Batman takes Deadshot for a ride in the Batmobile and asks him about the murder contract on Bruce Wayne, to which he reveals that he was paid by Rupert Thorne and his pawn Commissioner Pauling. With enough information, Batman activates a gas mechanism in the car, in order to drug Deadshot and keep him unconscious.

Finally, Dr. Thirteen goes to Greytowers, the last known place where Hugo Strange operated and investigates the building. When Thirteen goes to Strange's secret laboratory, he is confronted by the spectral apparition of Hugo Strange. Meanwhile, Batman has arrived at the Batcave with his prisoner and Alfred turns his attention to the events in the TV news, where Commissioner Pauling has declared Batman as public enemy number one for helping Deadshot out of prison. Despite the turn of events, Bruce laughs at the TV, knowing that everything is turning on his favor.

Batman has been declared a public menace and his special deputy status has been revoked by Mayor Hill and Commissioner Pauling. At Gotham City Hall, Pauling and Hill are concerned about the Batman's possible actions and they have the building surrounded by members of the Gotham City Police Department. Nevertheless, Batman manages to break into the building and into their office, where he warns them about the information that Deadshot has provided him about their corruption. When Batman leaves the building, Pauling activates an alarm that alerts the officers about his presence and the police start shooting at Batman. One of them hits the target, but when they go to seek the body of the Caped Crusader, they find nothing.

Meanwhile, Dr. Thirteen takes Rupert Thorne to Graytowers to show him the source of his haunting images. Inside the building, the two of them enter a secret laboratory, where the ghost of Hugo Strange appears and attacks Thorne. However, when Thirteen turns on the light, the ghost is gone and he has an explanation for the apparent spectral image. Thirteen finds a secret panel, which contains a holographic projector and he shows Thorne the holograpic image that has been used to haunt him. With the case solved, Thirteen only wants to distance himself from Thorne and the "Boss" of Gotham City comes to the wrong conclusion that the people responsible for this charade are his own pawns, Pauling and Hill.

Later, Alfred tries to deal with an annoying Deadshot, who is being held prisoner and blindfolded in the Batcave. When Batman arrives seriously injured from the shooting he just survived, Alfred hurries to give him medical attention. At that moment, Vicki Vale receives a phone call from a mysterious cat lady, who warns her to stay away from Bruce Wayne.

The next night, Rupert Thorne is planning his next move to eliminate the unexistent threat of his own henchmen, when suddenly, Batman appears at his door. Panicked at the sight of the Dark Knight, Thorne speaks out loud his deductions that Batman has already found about the fraud he organized in the elections and the murder contract on Bruce Wayne. Batman doesn't reply and in his outburst of madness, Thorne drops a bottle of alcohol near his fireplace, which causes the home to catch on fire. While Batman fights the fire, Rupert Thorne gets away.

Minutes later, Thorne shows up at City Hall, armed with a gun and ready to kill his unsuspecting thugs. Batman arrives just in time to witness Thorne's murder of Peter Pauling and the shooting of Rupert Thorne by one of Pauling's own men. Batman disarms the corrupt police officer and learns from the last man standing, Mayor Hill, that he will reinstate Batman's special deputy status, but he won't be able to prove that he was ever involved with Thorne.

Finally, Batman watches as Thorne is taken to a hospital and he uses his belt radio to contact the Batcave, before removing his cowl and reveal Dick Grayson under the mask. Bruce is still recovering and Dick had to step in to fill as Batman, giving Bruce the time he needs to recover. After a successful mission, Dick returns home, but there is another person looking the scene from a distance. The person is none other than Hugo Strange, who is alive and well and is responsible for the strange apparitions.

In the middle of the night, Selina Kyle awakes from a terrible nightmare in which she murders Victoria Vale. Selina realizes that the dreams started after she returned to Gotham City and learned that Vicki has started dating Bruce Wayne, which has made her extremely jealous.

After recovering from the shock, Selina calls Wayne Manor, hoping to talk with Bruce, but when Alfred answers her and tells her that Bruce is asleep, Selina assumes that Bruce is in fact spending the night with Vicki, which only makes matters worse. However, at that moment, Bruce is out as Batman, tracking down a street gang that has kidnapped an innocent woman and after a brief encounter, Batman saves the young lady.

A few hours later, Vicki Vale is awaken by Catwoman, who warns her to stay away from Bruce and she threatens to kill her if she doesn't comply. At first hour the next morning, Vicki arranges a breakfast date with Bruce and she informs her about last night's warning by Catwoman. Vicki tells Bruce that she wouldn't like to step between him and Selina Kyle, but Bruce tells her that Selina was responsible for their breakup and that now, she has to deal with their relationship. As Vicki and Bruce embrace in a loving kiss, Catwoman watches from afar and makes a vow to fight to the death for Bruce's affection.

After having seen Vicki Vale and Bruce Wayne together, Selina Kyle starts planning her revenge.

While Bruce and Vicki return home, their car is attacked by Catwoman's vehicle, and Bruce's car is forced off the road into the river. Regretting her actions, Catwoman dives to save Bruce, but the man refuses any help as he takes Vicki's unconscious body from the water. Knowing that she has made a terrible mistake, Catwoman flees without looking back.

Later, Vicki awakes at the Gotham General Hospital and Bruce is relieved to know that she is fine. When he tells the good news to Jason Bard and James Gordon, they also give him good news. Rupert Thorne has been convicted for the murder of Commissioner Pauling and early that morning, Gordon got a call from Mayor Hill, which can only mean one thing. After leaving the hospital, Gordon goes to Gotham City Hall, to Hill's office. There, Hill is concerned that the Gotham City Council are trying to recall another election and in order to prevent such a disaster, he gives James Gordon his old job as Police Commissioner.

At night, Batman goes to Selina's apartment and finds only a starving panther. After taking care of the animal, Batman realizes that the whole place has been deserted for a couple of days and he finds the only clue left behind. Moments later, Batman arrives at the "Catamont" warehouse, where Catwoman attacks him in a vicious way for all the pain he has caused her. With Batman at her mercy, Catwoman knows that she can easily kill him, but she realizes her mistake and instead, she helps her opponent. After such an agressive attack, Batman realizes that Selina needed to take all her anger and frustration out, much as he needed to do it when she first left Gotham, ending their relationship. An understanding Batman holds Catwoman in his arms as he apologizes for the unintended harm he caused her, and a grieving Selina knows that this is the end of her relationship with Bruce Wayne.

After months of careful planning, Hugo Strange is ready to set his plan in motion.

A certain night in Gotham City, Bruce Wayne and Vicki Vale are out on a date and their relationship seems to be going good, despite the recent threat of Catwoman. As Vicki is summoned at her work, Bruce returns home, but he reaches home without taking notice. Bruce finds the situation strange, but to make matters worse, once inside he is seemingly attacked by his trusted butler, but after he takes out the threat, Bruce realizes that he has imagined the whole event.

In the meantime, Alfred and Dick Grayson receive a visit by Vicki, who had just freed herself from work. Unfortunately, Bruce is currently not at Wayne Manor and Vicki assumes that he has gone out with another woman. After Vicki has left, Alfred and Dick realize that something has gone wrong and they try to contact Bruce, without success.

Meanwhile, Bruce Wayne is at the phony Wayne Manor, where once again, he is attacked by Dick Grayson, only to find out that the whole situation never happened. In truth, Hugo Strange has lured Bruce into his well designed trap, where he controls the rooms and situations that take place in the Manor. When Bruce is once again attacked by "Dick", he tosses the young man down the staircase and breaks his neck, revealing a robot inside. Bruce finally understands the situation and he starts descending towards the "Batcave".

Meanwhile, Robin is ready to go out looking for Batman and he uses the tracking device on Bruce's clothes to find the secret location of Hugo Strange. Inside the phony Batcave, Bruce confronts Strange, who has shaved his beard and is wearing a Batsuit, claiming to be the Batman. Strange explains how he faked his death at the hands of Thorne's men and after the truth is revealed, he gives Bruce a spare Batsuit so that they can settle the score once and for all. The two Bat-men fight each other and Strange's ruthlessness gives him the upper hand in the fight. At that moment, Robin appears in the Batcave and is confused at the sight of two Batmen. When Strange commands Robin to kill the "fake" Batman, Robin realizes the truth and turns against Strange, who is finally outnumbered and defeated. As a last resort, Strange activates a detonator that blows up the place, which he installed as part of his plan to eliminate any traces of Hugo Strange once he took over the role of Batman and the identity of Bruce Wayne. The fake Wayne Manor and Batcave are blown in a giant explosion, with Strange inside.

At the real Wayne Manor, Alfred answers the door and is almost killed by Bruce Wayne, when Batman and Robin arrive and save their friend from one of Strange's robots. The Dynamic Duo tell Alfred that they were long gone by the time Hugo Strange activated the detonator and they start telling their butler the whole story.

REVIEW

A very stretched out plot ends here, with the apparent death of Hugo Strange. But there are a lot of changes happening in the background.

Apparently, Selina Kyle wasn’t supposed to know Batman’s secret identity (it’s hard to keep track). Neither Conway nor Joe Orlando realized this at the moment. It would be later be retconned.

The Batman Animated Series owes a lot to these years of Batman publishing history (1980-1983), and it’s easy to see why it was so influential. These stories are easier to read than other “high quality” comics like Titans. It just doesn’t need that much complexity as the characters are already complex and yet we know them very well.

Dick Grayson wearing the Batman outfit is an interesting thing to see. Dick thinks something’s wrong with Batman (he outgrew Batman’s mission by now), he is loyal to his cause, but it’s not his quest anymore. Bruce, on the other side, is trapped in this never-ending crusade against crime. It will be interesting to see how things develop in the next issue when a very famous character will make his first appearance.

Newton and Alcala give these issues a very dark tone, worthy of a horror title.

Catwoman seems a bit desperate for Bruce in these issues, but she is pretty much desperate for her own sake. Bruce was her moral compass, and without him, she feels she will be lost again. It would be interesting to see this plot evolve as well.

I give these issues a score of 7

[hookaroo]

Vocivore, Ltd. (31 of 41?)

Also on FFN and AO3 (ListerofTardis)

Tagging @ouatwinterwhump, @killian-whump, @sancocnutclub, @killianjonesownsmyheart1, and @courtorderedcake <3

***THE MOST WONDERFUL COVER ART BY @cocohook38 HERE!!!!!******

***Chapter 12 animation and art that will absolutely astound you!!!!!!!!!BOLDED AGAIN IN CASE YOU WANT TO REFRESH YOUR MEMORY BEFORE READING THIS RELATED FLASHBACK...*************************

***LETHAL Chapter 19 art in all of its BLOODSTAINED GLORY!!!!************

**POOR STABBED KILLIAN falling into the sheriff station! Ch. 7 & 23 art!!**

****KILLIAN AND HIS MASTER IN THE GORGEOUS CATHEDRAL!!!!!!!!!!!!    CHAPTER 1 ART THAT KILLS ME EVERY TIME I SEE IT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!*********

*****AMAZING AND ALSO HEARTBREAKING COVER ART!!!!! MY POOR BOY, HELPLESS AND SCREAMING WHILE HE SLOWLY LOSES HIS GRIP ON REALITY… D: COCOHOOK38 IS TRYING TO KILL US ALL!!!!*************

***AAAAHHHH!!! THANK YOU MY WONDERFUL COCONUT FRIEND!!!!!!***

Two days ago...

The barn fire was getting too big too quickly. While it was true that the Master’s orders called for total destruction, there were multiple other buildings on the list, and this would alert the authorities far too soon.

Sure enough, before the slaves had a chance to regroup, a siren sounded in the distance, growing closer at an alarming speed. Killian ducked around the corner of the building farthest from the road while he considered his options.

Above all, Killian desperately wished he could allow himself to be captured, to give himself up to be tended with proper medical care and painkillers and a soft bed. He wanted more than anything for this nightmare to be over, to simply collapse in the arms of his beloved and admit defeat. But then they would not have one iota of gain to show for all of the suffering. They would lose their advantage and would have to come up with another way to defeat the monster, a possibility that seemed more hopeless with each passing day.

As it was, Killian did have the inklings of an idea buried deep, meticulously guarded from the Master’s probing thoughts. If he could somehow communicate the particulars to his Swan without the collar camera overhearing... But it all depended upon his Master not seeing him as a threat. Which meant continuing on with the charade and the misery.

It was the Chevelle: Detective Jones and his new partner, David. What Killian had been expecting and dreading at the same time. He would not be permitted to stand idly by while his fellow slaves were rounded up by his friends. He had a sword; his Master would oblige him to use it. And both of them were formidable opponents, especially in his weakened state.

ELIMINATE THEIR ESCAPE ROUTE, growled the Master's voice in his head, slightly quieter than normal but not by much. From the shaky, unreliable views at throat level, it would not be able to discern details yet, only that the new arrivals represented both a threat to its current slaves as well as potential victims to add to its horde.

While the two officers climbed out of the vehicle and raced to investigate the blazing barn, Killian staggered around the opposite corner, behind their backs and to the concealed side of the car. He could hear definite sounds of battle: stun guns and then pistol shots as his friends struggled against far too many opponents. With a grunt of exertion, Killian drove the point of his blade into the front left tire.

Before long, Jones and David decided to retreat. They were approaching the car. Killian made his way to the back left wheel well, grimacing. The confrontation was inevitable now.

Tasked with clearing their escape route, David was the first to spot him.

“Killian?”

He did not fire his gun, which Killian confirmed was his regular pistol and not the stun weapon. Damn it, there would be no easy way out of this one. Killian had no difficulty summoning his bleakest expression. Never mind seeing his friend for the first time in weeks; that friend would likely never trust him again. He would have to make a very realistic attempt to bring David down, possibly hurting him in the process. Was it any wonder, then, that he felt no joy at the reunion?

THAT ONE APPEARS TO HAVE A NOURISHING VOICE. CAPTURE HIM IF YOU CAN, TRIPOD, BUT DO NOT ALLOW YOURSELF TO BE TAKEN.

David was trying to talk him down, stepping carefully forward with his hands raised, his pistol loose in his grip and pointing toward the sky. As one in a trance, Killian stumbled his way to the third tire, speared it with his weapon, then paused to catch his breath. He could see the prince slowly reaching for the handcuffs at his belt. In the background, Jones was engaged in a desperate hand-to-hand struggle; like it or not, Killian's fellow slaves may take care of him on their own.

Killian allowed the point of his sword to rest on the ground, leaning back against the car in only slightly exaggerated exhaustion. He would not go to David; he needed David to bring the fight to him. It was all he had the energy for. Breathing heavily, Killian tried to block out his father-in-law's continued pleas, his reminders who waited for him at home, who was worried about him. None of it mattered if he was not successful in his quest.

Mere steps away, David had holstered his pistol and was reaching, almost too slowly to see, toward Killian's wrist.

“Come on, buddy. Let's get you taken care of, huh?”

Killian measured distances out of the corner of his eye. Waiting until the last possible second. Counting on the possibility that David would hold back and expect Killian to do the same. That Killian's true nature would result in the same feelings of restraint which guided David's actions.

With only centimeters to spare, Killian lashed out with the butt of his sword, driving it into David's solar plexus. The prince doubled over, winded, and Killian did not allow him time to recover. He followed the blow with a strike to the temple. Already twisted slightly as he fumbled for his pistol, David went limp and fell heavily to the ground, landing on his side. The thump of his body meeting dirt seemed to vibrate all the way up to the pit of Killian’s stomach where guilt normally lived.

KILL THIS ONE. BRING THE OTHER.

David seemed to be unconscious. He could not resist. Killian had run out of excuses. His Master was watching, and the nearest approaching siren was still much too far. Feigning breathlessness, Killian lurched the two steps that separated him from the helpless form of his father-in-law. Struggling to maintain his balance, he stepped over the obstacle, positioned himself behind David, and used a vicious kick to turn him onto his stomach. Then, as he straddled the body for maximum control, he allowed himself one quick glance in Jones' direction: now armed with a sword himself, the detective was finishing off his final opponent. If he could time this just right…

Killian magnified his tremors for the Master’s benefit as he held his blade poised above his target. Just as important as timing was the selection of a landing site. But he had to make it look as if his physical condition caused him to miss a fatal blow.

One good thing about David being unconscious: Killian didn't have to suppress the additional remorse that would have surely resulted from the pained reaction to his sword clattering off of David's shoulder blade.

Killian staggered as if surprised by the obstruction, and as he did so, he noticed that Jones had dropped his final attacker. With a dispassion born of his now-familiar mantra, Killian readied his weapon for a second strike.

Jones arrived just in time. Hope kidnapped, Hope tortured, Hope dead.

BRING THIS ONE TO ME!

The mental command had a noticeably greater insistence than usual, bordering on frantic hunger. It was the closest it had ever come to instilling the mindless compulsion that drove all other slaves.

Killian knew why his Master was so adamant. And could not allow it.

Jones engaged in their shared tactic of posturing, and even if he weren't playing the part of a broken-down, hopeless slave, Killian was too weary to answer back.

The pair had sparred before, a friendly contest here and there, a way to keep up their skills in a more peaceful world than the one in which they’d spent most of their lives. And Killian could tell right away that, just as he did during those contests of no import, Jones was playing it safe, holding back to prevent injury, and that was the last thing Killian wanted him to do. His Master would notice if the fight were not authentic, and if they both curbed their strikes, it would be revealed as a farce.

The slash to his sword arm was entirely accidental; Killian knew by the look on Jones’ face. But the burning wound was somehow enough to spur the fight into high gear, with resulting bloodshed on both sides. They traded blows. Killian could feel half-healed wounds beginning to open with the exertion. Jones, too, bled from more than one gash but seemed not to notice.

Killian could not catch his breath. The scene begin to take on a shadowy, murky quality and he moved solely by instinct. Tenuous footing caused a very real stumble, quick reflexes allowed Jones to catch his sword arm, and Killian should have allowed it to end then. But his left arm was free, and he moved without thinking, or perhaps his Master’s hunger for a twin Tripod overcame his usual immunity to its edicts. He swung his stump with all the strength he could muster, driving the wrist ring straight into the detective’s face.

Crystalline flames consumed Killian's wrist. Jagged tendrils climbed his forearm like steadily growing cracks in a pane of glass. He could do nothing but cradle the arm in breathless anguish as he waited for the defeating blow.

TAKE HIM, TRIPOD. TAKE HIM NOW!

His Master's command screamed through his mind and was just enough to mask his terrible pain. The nearing sirens would explain the urgency: not much longer before the opportunity was lost. Clutching the throbbing limb to his side, Killian responded to the order and struck out blindly with his blade.

The shock wave of steel against steel raced up his arm, jolting even the fiercely complaining wrist on the opposite side. Somehow taken by surprise, Jones lost his sword and stumbled back into the outstretched arm of a downed slave.

The Master's exultation as the detective hit the ground was short-lived. The crunch of gravel announced the arrival of backup, and though Jones was unarmed and struggling against the grip on his ankle, Killian would not have enough time to secure him and drag him away. The Master knew it too.

TOO LATE, it growled. DISPOSE OF HIM QUICKLY AND RETREAT.

Killian could not bring himself to look at the resignation on his friend's face as he readied his blade. In fact, the only reason he managed to watch at all was because he might miss and cause serious harm otherwise.

A car door slammed. His sword stabbed down into flesh.

GO, howled the Master.

"Killian!" came the frantic cry from behind.

It was her--Hope kidnapped--it was--Hope tortured--oh gods--Hope dead--Hope DEAD--Swan. His Swan. He only had to turn and she would be there. Right before him, in the flesh, not a bittersweet memory seen through a haze of pain--HOPE DEAD!!!

Killian was staggering away before he was even aware of it, desperate to preserve the illusion, to keep his resolve from crashing to the ground like all of his groaning comrades around him. If he saw her... if he met her eyes…

She was calling him, begging him to stop, and just hearing her voice again was enough to bring him to tears. He missed her so much; their separation rivaled the worst of the tortures, and maybe it wouldn't be so bad if he abandoned their plot--HopeDeadHopeDeadHopeDead--

He heard the pistol discharging at the same instant as a crippling pain burrowed its way into his back, knocking him forward, flat on his face in the grass. But dazzling lights exploded in his brain and zapped in scalding waves along every single nerve path in his body, and he did not even feel the jarring landing.

Present (Friday, continued)...

The guards in the surveillance room were considerably more alert than the one at the armory. Perhaps due to their proximity to their Master--they were, after all, in the same building--or the fact that it had reason to visit more frequently. Whatever the explanation, they’d leapt to their feet the instant Killian had pushed the door open.

They weren’t armed and probably could not fathom ill-intent from a fellow slave. Still, the moment they saw his sword, they must have known he was up to no good. Two charged him recklessly, no thought for their own safety, while the third managed to lift her wooden chair to use as a shield-slash-weapon.

With the sword hilt, Killian quickly felled the first two assailants, every single movement tearing at the screws in his neck. He growled and stumbled over their unconscious forms just as a set of chair legs swiped at his midsection. A fragmented pair of wooden rods clattered to the floor as Killian brought his blade down hard. The remaining slave staggered and snarled, but she did not back off. Lurching forward, she swiped the still-vibrating chair in the other direction, forcing Killian to dodge the splintered edges coming for his face. One of the intact legs caught him in the abdomen, driving the breath from his lungs and doubling him over.

Blindly, through darkening vision, mind-numbing pain, and the desperate panic of not being able to breathe, Killian lashed out with his sword. There was a thunk as the blade contacted wood, and he only barely managed to hold on through the shock wave. The chair flew upward, the seat back slammed into the woman’s forehead, and she crumpled backwards in a heap, the damaged chair on top.

Killian clutched at his belly and finally managed a small breath. Eyes watering, heart racing, he limped to the row of monitors even as stars twinkled in his peripheral vision. He had no time for recovery, no time to secure the temporarily stunned guards. His Master would have sensed the threat. It could be here at any time. And there was no clinging to the charade of obedience anymore.

“Swan,” he wheezed, praying she’d had enough time for preparation. He squinted at the first screen. “Entrance to the hospital Emergency Department.” He sucked a deeper breath, held it, grimacing. Screen two. “Holding cells in the sheriff station…. City Hall auditorium…” The fourth and fifth cameras were in locations he could not identify, possibly outside of Storybrooke. Gritting his teeth, Killian hobbled to that side of the desk, noting that the first two feeds had already been replaced by other images. Emma was ready! They may have a chance after all.

Killian had little clue how to switch the feeds of the last two cameras, but he began clicking randomly in the program regardless. He had to find one which Emma could control. The image changed. A slave collar, overseeing the destruction of property. Then someone’s bedroom from their webcam. A random front porch. Killian battled rising urgency. There was no time. There had to be… there!

“The cemetery,” he barked, already moving to the final screen. “Turn them on, love! My Master could be--”

The inside door swung open with a crash. And into the room, wearing an expression of pure malice, scuttled the imposing shape of the scream-eating monster.

His Master. They were too late.

[scifigeneration]

To protect us from the risks of advanced artificial intelligence, we need to act now

by Paul Salmon, Peter Hancock, and Tony Carden

What would Artificial General Intelligence make of the human world? Shutterstock/Nathapol Kongseang

Artificial intelligence can play chess, drive a car and diagnose medical issues. Examples include Google DeepMind’s AlphaGo, Tesla’s self-driving vehicles, and IBM’s Watson.

This type of artificial intelligence is referred to as Artificial Narrow Intelligence (ANI) – non-human systems that can perform a specific task. We encounter this type on a daily basis, and its use is growing rapidly.

But while many impressive capabilities have been demonstrated, we’re also beginning to see problems. The worst case involved a self-driving test car that hit a pedestrian in March. The pedestrian died and the incident is still under investigation.

The next generation of AI

With the next generation of AI the stakes will almost certainly be much higher.

Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) will have advanced computational powers and human level intelligence. AGI systems will be able to learn, solve problems, adapt and self-improve. They will even do tasks beyond those they were designed for.

Importantly, their rate of improvement could be exponential as they become far more advanced than their human creators. The introduction of AGI could quickly bring about Artificial Super Intelligence (ASI).

While fully functioning AGI systems do not yet exist, it has been estimated that they will be with us anywhere between 2029 and the end of the century.

What appears almost certain is that they will arrive eventually. When they do, there is a great and natural concern that we won’t be able to control them.

The risks associated with AGI

There is no doubt that AGI systems could transform humanity. Some of the more powerful applications include curing disease, solving complex global challenges such as climate change and food security, and initiating a worldwide technology boom.

But a failure to implement appropriate controls could lead to catastrophic consequences.

Despite what we see in Hollywood movies, existential threats are not likely to involve killer robots. The problem will not be one of malevolence, but rather one of intelligence, writes MIT professor Max Tegmark in his 2017 book Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence.

It is here that the science of human-machine systems – known as Human Factors and Ergonomics – will come to the fore. Risks will emerge from the fact that super-intelligent systems will identify more efficient ways of doing things, concoct their own strategies for achieving goals, and even develop goals of their own.

Imagine these examples:

an AGI system tasked with preventing HIV decides to eradicate the problem by killing everybody who carries the disease, or one tasked with curing cancer decides to kill everybody who has any genetic predisposition for it

an autonomous AGI military drone decides the only way to guarantee an enemy target is destroyed is to wipe out an entire community

an environmentally protective AGI decides the only way to slow or reverse climate change is to remove technologies and humans that induce it.

These scenarios raise the spectre of disparate AGI systems battling each other, none of which take human concerns as their central mandate.

Various dystopian futures have been advanced, including those in which humans eventually become obsolete, with the subsequent extinction of the human race.

Others have forwarded less extreme but still significant disruption, including malicious use of AGI for terrorist and cyber-attacks, the removal of the need for human work, and mass surveillance, to name only a few.

So there is a need for human-centred investigations into the safest ways to design and manage AGI to minimise risks and maximise benefits.

How to control AGI

Controlling AGI is not as straightforward as simply applying the same kinds of controls that tend to keep humans in check.

Many controls on human behaviour rely on our consciousness, our emotions, and the application of our moral values. AGIs won’t need any of these attributes to cause us harm. Current forms of control are not enough.

Arguably, there are three sets of controls that require development and testing immediately:

the controls required to ensure AGI system designers and developers create safe AGI systems

the controls that need to be built into the AGIs themselves, such as “common sense”, morals, operating procedures, decision-rules, and so on

the controls that need to be added to the broader systems in which AGI will operate, such as regulation, codes of practice, standard operating procedures, monitoring systems, and infrastructure.

Human Factors and Ergonomics offers methods that can be used to identify, design and test such controls well before AGI systems arrive.

For example, it’s possible to model the controls that exist in a particular system, to model the likely behaviour of AGI systems within this control structure, and identify safety risks.

This will allow us to identify where new controls are required, design them, and then remodel to see if the risks are removed as a result.

In addition, our models of cognition and decision making can be used to ensure AGIs behave appropriately and have humanistic values.

Act now, not later

This kind of research is in progress, but there is not nearly enough of it and not enough disciplines are involved.

Even the high-profile tech entrepreneur Elon Musk has warned of the “existential crisis” humanity faces from advanced AI and has spoken about the need to regulate AI before it’s too late.

The next decade or so represents a critical period. There is an opportunity to create safe and efficient AGI systems that can have far reaching benefits to society and humanity.

At the same time, a business-as-usual approach in which we play catch-up with rapid technological advances could contribute to the extinction of the human race. The ball is in our court, but it won’t be for much longer.

About The Authors:

Paul Salmon is a Professor of Human Factors at the University of the Sunshine Coast; Peter Hancock is Professor of Psychology, Civil and Environmental Engineering, and Industrial Engineering and Management Systems at the University of Central Florida, and Tony Carden is a Researcher at the University of the Sunshine Coast.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.

[spectrumscribe]

brothers = den mothers

a rottmnt ficlet, set directly after Repo Mantis. word count 3,510; rating Gen. pure & sweet family fluff, banter, and caretaking. :”)

AO3 link

“Three of hearts?”

“Go fish.”

“Aw, come on. It’s been go fish the past five times.”

“’cause I don’t got your cards, genius. That’s how the game works.”

“I have ten cards in my hands, I’ve asked you about half of their matches- no way you don’t have any.”

“Nope.”

Leo narrows his eyes. Raph avoids them.

“You’re cheating,” Leo exclaims, and lunges forwards to look at Raph’s cards. His brother just catches him with one hand and holds him down, lifting the four cards out of his reach. “Raaaph.”

“Just ‘cause you’re bad at cards don’t mean I’m cheating.”

“Lemme see and then I’ll believe you.”

“No.”

“Then you so are cheating-”

A distant sound of something exploding echoes through the walls, and they both go still. Nothing else explodes after a few beats, and Raph and Leo exchange looks.

“Wanna bet that was a Donnie related explosion?” Leo says.

“I would put good money on that bet,” Raph replies. He lets go of Leo and stands up; dropping his cards on top of the other scattered ones.

Leo glances at the cards as he stands too, and splutters. “Hey- you were cheating!”

“Please, Leo, we got priorities right now.”

Leo scowls at the back of his brother’s shell, but grumbles and follows along. They both grab their weapons as they head to investigate- mildly wary of the chance it’s not a Donnie related explosion (for once), and someone’s somehow found their home and busted in.

“What was that?” Splinter calls as they pass the living room.

“Probably Donnie,” Raph replies offhandedly, “maybe a human militia here to kill us all.”

“Well tell them to keep the explosions down; I can hardly hear my gameshow.”

“Will do, pop,” Leo promises with a wave, and keeps pace with Raph as they leave the lair at a jog. “So what do we do if it’s not Don and Mike?”

“Raph’ll kick their asses back to where they came from, that’s what. You can help, too.”

“Oh, I get to help?” Leo says sarcastically. Their conversation comes to a halt as they do; both of them staring at the collapsed portion of a tunnel wall. What looks like the rear end of an unusual vehicle is stuck through it, covered in dust and stray brick.

Leo sticks the tip of his sword in the stone under his feet, leaning on its handle. “Huh,” he says mildly. “Yeah, no, that’s not supposed to be there.”

“Ey! Wall breakers!” Raph bellows at the vehicle. “Who the hell are you, and what the hell do you want?”

“We really don’t have anything decent to steal, if that’s what you’re here for,” Leo adds, cupping his mouth to get his voice to carry. “Well. Donnie’s lab has some okay stuff. You can have that.”

A disgruntled green and purple head pokes around the corner of the broken wall. “Excuse you,” Donnie says irritably, “we do not offer my lab’s contents to hypothetical robbers, Leo.”

“Hey, guys!” Mikey cheers, popping out next to Donnie. He beams at them, covered in dust and band-aids. “We’re home!”

Raph makes a delighted cry and Leo does much the same. Both their weapons are sheathed as they hurry over and give their siblings welcome home hugs. Ten days apart is a lot longer than they’ve ever done before, and it feels better all-around to be back together.

“Man, I missed you guys,” Raph says, squishing all three of his brothers in a hug. “It’s been totally boring, and I was runnin’ out of ways to cheat cards with Leo.”

Leo gasps and thrashes in the hug, pissed enough that he’s hissing. “I knew it! You’ve been cheating this whole time!”

“Awww, we missed you guys, too,” Mikey says, looking pleased as peach despite being squished against an exasperated Donnie and irate Leo. The goofily happy smiles he and Raph are both wearing prove their relation.

“I’ll concede to having missed you two, too,” Donnie admits, craning an arm to hug Raph back. “Even if you’re all crushing me right now. Raph, if you would.”

Raph lets them down, but not before one more firm hug. “Sorry, just- I’m glad you guys got back safe. You kinda ghosted us bunch of the time. But, you got all your limbs still, and,” he says, glancing at the mostly obscured vehicle his siblings brought home, “came back with some serious booty! This is the surprise you talked about?”

“Sure is,” Mikey chirps, grabbing Leo- the closest brother- and dragging him towards the wrecked wall, “and you’re not gonna believe how cool it is!”

They do not believe how cool it is. The two brothers who’d stayed home also cannot believe they somehow didn’t recognize what the surprise was, even semi-buried under rubble.

Raph and Leo quickly become intensely jealous they missed out on the adventure that led their brothers to not only hang out with puppies all week, but also resulted in them coming into possession of the Jupiter Jim moon buggy.

“I mean, we kind of stole it,” Donnie admits as they’re all fawning over the buggy, “but that was only after Repo tried to back out of the deal. Also we’ll fix the wall later, and considering I’ve only ever driven in controlled environments and not during a high-speed chase in rush hour traffic, this is a decent parking job.”

“He forgot which was the break,” Mikey explains from up on the buggy; draped over the lip of the cockpit, head on his arms.

“I only forgot for a moment.”

“A moment too long, according to the wall,” Leo says with a grin, jerking his thumb at the wrecked structure. Mikey laughs, but it turns into a yawn halfway through.

“And it seriously has all the weapons from Return to the moon 3?” Raph asks, touching some of the oil slick that’d splattered the buggy mid-fight.

“It does,” Mikey confirms, nearly in a mumble, though his smile remains bright. “I bug-zapped a guy an’ everything with ‘em. It was awesome.”

He yawns again after that, long enough his eyes water a little. Mikey settles more comfortably on his arms, eyes hooded as the others keeps talking.

“They’re not too shabby for a movie prop, buuuut…” Donnie rubs his hands together, a wicked gleam in his eyes. “I have full intention to overhaul them all and increase not just their efficiency, but the diversity of attack options and double the firepower output. Maybe triple it. Depends how many compatible parts I can get my hands on in the next twenty-four hours.”

Leo walks around the top of the buggy, nodding in approval. “Awesome, awesome- please tell me you’ll re-do the upholstery inside, too? Old pleather sticks when you sit on it too long.”

“Uh, a-duh?”

“Sweet. Classic fuzzy dice gonna be included?”

“I have some!” Raph offers excitedly.

“Are they the ones that went missing from my room a few months ago?” Donnie questions dryly.

“Maybe.”

Donnie rolls his eyes. “That- figures.” His words are interrupted by a wide yawn, and he gives his slightly bloodshot eyes a rub. “We can start with them as a base for the colors scheme of the interior. Mikey, I’m guessing you’ll want to handle that?” No answer. “…Mikey?”

They all glance over to their youngest sibling.

Mikey’s eyes are shut and his mouth slightly open; soft breaths coming from him as he sleeps.

“Wow,” Leo says, coming over to crouch by Mikey. He gently pokes his brother’s cheek, testing for any chance of wakefulness, and gets nothing. “You know, you’d think he’d be bouncing at the walls right now. This is the coolest thing we’ve ever stolen. Besides my sword, obviously.”

“Eh, give him a break,” Donnie says, stretching his arms above his head and yawning again. “He’s been- been working with about five or less hours of sleep per day. Puppy paradises don’t build themselves, after all. Let ‘im sleep.”

His battle shell extends its spider legs, and Donnie goes scuttling up the sides of the buggy to start poking at machinery. Raph watches him for a moment, and then follows him up. Not for the same reasons, though.

“Alright, c’mere, Mike,” Raph says quietly, scooping up his brother. Mikey starts a little, eyes opening briefly, but then he sees Raph’s familiar red bandana and settles again. He’s asleep a second time around before Raph’s even dropped back onto the ground; tucked in close and held in one arm.

Leo is watching Donnie start pulling apart the engine, taking note of the slight jitter to his brother’s movements and the amount of dust and unbandaged cuts on his limbs. If Mikey has been running on five or less hours of sleep per day, then without a doubt Donnie has been running on even less. And, given how Mikey has medical care to his small injuries and Donnie doesn’t- Leo’s technical twin has only paid any attention the needs of their brother, rather than the both of them equally.

Leo and Raph share a look; Raph having been eyeing their genius sibling with a concerned expression, and holding Mikey a little closer to himself unconsciously.

Raph gestures at Leo, then at Donnie pointedly. Leo nods, moving into position as his big brother does.

“Hey, Donnie,” Leo says, crouching right in front of his twin.

Donnie looks up, goggles down over his eyes and a distracted frown on his face. “What?” he says shortly.

Leo shoves Donnie backwards. His brother tumbles off the buggy with a strangled shriek.

Raph catches Donnie with ease. Their sleep deprived sibling is startled enough he actually stays still for a whole minute; which is enough time for Raph to bundle him up, and start carrying both his little brothers back towards the lair.

Leo hops down, grinning smugly and skipping over to aim that grin at his brother. Donnie scowls, flipping his goggles up to get the full look across.

“I sense that was plotted,” Donnie says.

“Closer to spur of the moment ambush,” Leo corrects. “You know how Raph works.”

“It’s called getting shit done now, not later.”

“Like I should be doing, with the moon buggy-”

“Uh, no?” Leo cuts in. He clicks his tongue. “What you an’ Mikey are gonna be doing is sleeping, obviously. We’ll go patch the wall and haul in the buggy later.”

“I can keep working,” Donnie protests, twisting to get out of Raph’s grip. “I’ve got to assess the engine, and then the undercarriage, and-”

“Quit wigglin’,” Raph snaps mildly. “You’re gonna wake Mike.”

“’m ‘wake already,” Mikey mumbles faintly, but his eyes don’t even open fully. Leo and Raph both stare at Donnie until the guilt of disturbing their youngest brother’s sleep sets in, and Donnie stops protesting. He allows Raph to carry them along without further interruption, and with the last of the fight going out of him, Donnie sags under the weight of his exhaustion.

Raph is more than happy to carry that weight, right back into the safety of their home.

…He’s a little less happy to carry Leo’s, though, as their red striped sibling hops up on Raph’s shell and demands to be carried, too.

“You can’t play favorites with your little brothers, bro,” Leo chides as Raph growls. He sets his chin on Raph’s head, looping his arms around his brother’s neck and making himself comfortable as he hangs there.

“Watch me,” Raph grumbles, but makes no move to dislodge Leo from where he is. Leo smiles to himself all the way back into the lair, hardly even mad anymore that Raph had been cheating all week at cards.

Inside again, they’re met by their dad. Splinter is waiting in the main atrium, hands in his robe’s sleeves and a mild expression on his face.

“So I’m guessing you weren’t worried about the militia of killer humans?” Leo asks dryly.

“There would have been many more explosions if that was what happened,” Splinter sniffs, whiskers twitching. “You, my boys, are many things. But stealth fighters you are not.”

“Thanks, pop,” Donnie says sarcastically, as Mikey quietly, sleepily laughs.

“Purple, Orange. You’re home.”

“Hi, pop,” Mikey says, smiling at their nicknames.

Splinter takes one arm out from his sleeves and extends a claw, crooking it in request that Raph bend down and let him see the exhausted turtles in his arms. His nose twitches as he sniffs, eyes squinted and careful as he examines his sons. Other than being dusty and a little banged up, Donnie and Mikey are perfectly healthy.

“Hm,” Splinter mutters, still casting a dubious eye over the both of them. Then, he nods, expression calmly accepting. “You two have been gone quite a while. Welcome back.”

“Happy to be back,” Donnie replies easily, not minding the scrutiny of his father. It’s comforting, being back in an environment that’s completely and truly safe. Splinter, satisfied with the brief checkup, pats Mikey’s cheek and goes to wander back into the living room.

“Seeya later, pop,” Mikey says, waving. “Love ya.”

“Yes, yes, I love you, too- and remember to fix whatever you blew up!” Splinter scolds over his shoulder, tail flicking irritably as he disappears through the doorway.

“I think he really missed you guys,” Raph says, resuming his trek to their rooms. “He asked like, four whole times if we’d heard from you.”

“Aw, I missed him, too…” Mikey says softly, words trailing off into a yawn. His eyes are heavy as their journey continues, and when he halfway wakes again, Donnie has been dropped off along with Leo and Raph is setting him down on his bed.

“Gear off,” Raph reminds, fingers going for the buckles of Mikey’s weapons holster. Mikey brushes them away, fumbling with them himself.

“I got it, I can do it myself…” The holster comes undone and Raph sets it on the chair by Mikey’s easel and paints. Mikey yawns, but feels awake enough he can manage the remaining steps to get to bed. “Go wrestle Don into bed, Raph,” he says, starting to shove his kneepads off. “I can brush my teeth n’ stuff on my own.”

“You sure?” Raph questions, hovering a little.

Mikey makes shooing motions. Raph goes, but silently promises to swing through again just to check in one last time. A few rooms over, voices are mingling in Donnie’s bedroom; the sources the two turtles flopped over each other on the bed and procrastinating one of them getting to sleep.

Raph knocks on the doorway, drawing their attention. “Ey, Leo. You’re supposed to be helping him into bed, not schooling him on Jupiter Jim lore.”

“Can you blame me?” Leo says haughtily, sprawled across Donnie’s stomach to keep him from wandering back to the buggy. “He mixed up Return to the moon 8 and Return to the moon 10. I couldn’t let that stand!”

“I am more than half asleep right now, Leon. Gimme a break.”

“You might as well have mixed up Lou Jitsu and Bruce Willis, you heathen.”

Raph rolls his eyes at both of them. “Donnie, either you get up and brush your teeth or I’m just kickin’ Leo out right now and turning off the light.”

“Gingivitis is a very serious condition to treat. I’m going right now.” Donnie doesn’t move for a moment, then reaches over and flicks Leo’s skull. “That means you get off of me, Leo.”

“Ow, god, you coulda just said you wanted me to get up.”

“It was strongly implied between the lines.”

They heckle each other a little more, but Leo does eventually roll off Donnie’s stomach. Raph steadies their second eldest sibling as Donnie stands, wobbling a little as low blood pressure puts sparks in his vision. Food will be the next step, after he and Mikey get at least a few hours of sleep.

“I can put that away,” Leo offers, tapping Donnie’s battle shell. Donnie mumbles something of a thank you and a yes please at the same time, unlatching the protective shield from himself and handing it off. He stretches, groaning as his shoulders ache.

“Glad I wore one with solar power options,” Donnie tells Raph, once Leo has headed back to the lab to tuck the battle shell into its charging station. He rolls his shoulders again, grimacing as the extended use of the false shell comes back to bite him. “Though, ugh, I wish it’d been a lighter model, too. I think I’ve got bruising, and not just from dropping wood planks on my foot three fuckin’ times.”

“Klutz,” Raph teases, but then adds, “You want some painkillers?”

“Please. God please.”

When they make it to the bathroom, Mikey is there slowly brushing his teeth; mask and gear all left in his room, leaving him bare and visibly dusty everywhere the equipment hadn’t been. Donnie is equally dirty, but neither of them have the energy or willpower to clean themselves properly at the moment. Baths, like food, will come later.

Mikey mumbles a greeting around his toothpaste and brush, and then makes an annoyed grunt as all three of them crowd around the sink and cabinet. Donnie going for his toothbrush and Raph reaching overhead to rummage in the mirror cabinet for necessary drugs. There’s some squishing and shoving involved, but everyone gets what they need done with minimal grousing or paste spat on each other.

“Hey, Raph?” Mikey asks, stopping in the doorway as he’s leaving.

“Yeah?” his brother answers, still leaning against the wall. He’s holding a waiting cup of water and two Tylenols for Donnie, and also making certain their genius doesn’t try anything ‘smart’ and sneak off to look at the buggy. Donnie knows this is why he keeps being watched by his brothers, and is tolerantly accepting the den mother attitudes.

“Come rub my shell afore I sleep?”

Raph smiles warmly. “Sure. Go get in bed an’ I’ll be there in a minute.”

Mikey rubs his eye, nodding. He disappears as Donnie spits in the sink; the second eldest sibling wiping his mouth and holding out a hand for the painkillers.

Raph drops Donnie off in his room again, just as Leo comes strolling back from his trip to the lab. Raph  leaves them both to their own conversation as Donnie flops onto the bed; Donnie rambling a little about some kinks in his battle shell he’d found through its overtime during the week, and Leo listening from his comfortable sprawl at the foot of the bed. Raph will shoo Leo out of the room again when he comes back through one last time, so Donnie puts a pause on the science for a while and actually sleeps.

Mikey is set up in bed when Raph gets there; his side table lamp the only illumination and a battered but loved comic in his hands, reading it absently while he waits. When he sees Raph, he puts the comic aside and rolls onto his front.

Raph sits on the edge of the mattress, hearing it squeak under his weight as he moves the covers off his brother to expose the patterned shell. Placing his large palm against its cool surface, Raph starts a firm but soothing rub of the scutes. It only takes a few passes for his littlest brother to start a gentle purr; Mikey wholly happy to have the indulgence of a shell rub before bed, especially after a long week of hard work.

“Aight, g’night, Mike,” Raph says after a bit, finishing the rub with a few pats to Mikey’s back.

“G’night,” Mikey says, mostly asleep and face buried in his pillow. Raph reaches over and turns off the lamp, and shuts the door quietly behind himself as he leaves.

Leo is still hanging out in Donnie’s room when Raph comes by, but their brother’s tech and gear are in a pile by the bed and Donnie’s eyes are shut. Leo is just choosing to remain on top of his brother’s feet a while longer, eyes hooded as he himself wonders about a catnap.

He also sincerely missed his brothers, like Raph did, like their brothers missed them. It’s not the time for grilling them on details of the puppy RV and moon buggy shenanigans, but they can spend a few quiet moments with their siblings before they drop into slumber. It sets the undertone of being off kilter, with their pairs having been apart so long, back to rights again.

Still, Leo leaves Donnie’s bed as Raph whispers for him to, and the family genius is left in his dark room to get much needed rest.

“Feel like another game of cards?” Raph asks as they hop back down to the bottom level.

“Not in your god damn dreams, you swindling asshole,” Leo hisses without heat.

Their father’s gameshow plays an ambient soundtrack to the lair as they search for something new to amuse themselves with. Other than their good natured banter and padding feet on the stone floors, there’s no other noise to disturb the turtles sleeping in their beds.

Commission info & Kofi link.

[mythicallore]

The Zanfretta Abductions

Here we have a strange case out of Italy of what may very well be the first recorded encounter with what people commonly refer to as “reptilian” aliens. (If not the first, then the most widely known at the time)

It all started one night in 1978 at the village of Torriglia. Pier Zanfretta was simply making the rounds on his security route when he made to the currently empty home of one of his clients. All of a sudden the lights and engine of his car died. As he was looking around he noticed lights coming from the house and assumed that the home was being burgled. So Zanfretta, with gun and flashlight in hand, decided to sneak around to try and surprise the criminals. However, it was him that would be surprised that night and the shock would change his life forever.

Something touched him on the shoulder and he spun around to meet “An enormous green, ugly and frightful creature, with undulating skin..as though he were very fat or dressed in a loose gray tunic…” Was his original description of the creatures. He would go on to describe them as having large yellow triangles for eyes and points on either side of their faces. He sprinted away and as he made it back to his car, a massive UFO rose up from behind the house. It began to glow and blasted him with a wave of heat before it disappeared completely.

Zanfretta radioed his dispatcher for help. He was rambling and in shock when the found him, saying of his attackers “No, they aren’t men, they aren’t men…my God are they ugly.” He brandished his gun at his comrades, he seemed to not know them and they were forced to knock him to the ground. They were shocked to find how warm his clothes were since it was so cold and icy out.

The Italian Military police were sent out to the area that night after Zanfretta was rescued. The found huge prints possibly created by the UFO’s landing gear that was 9 feet in diameter and horseshoe-shaped. A staggering 52 citizens reported seeing the large UFO around the area of the home at the same time Zanfretta claimed to have seen it.

During the course of the investigation, Zanfretta’s credibility was further increased by a number of people who came forward in defense of his character. A member of the press found it hard to believe a family man, with a stable career and obvious hate for his newfound fame, would willingly make up a story that could cost him so much. However public opinion was against him, he would go on to say to a reporter named Di Stefano “People call me on the phone at all hours to play jokes on me. I don’t know what it was that I saw, but I saw it. I am not a liar…if I could have, I wouldn’t have reported my experiences, now that I see the consequences.” Those words echo modern-day sentiments from many abductees. They often lament talking about what happened to them because of the backlash they received from not only strangers but their own family at times.

So in an attempt to shed some light on what happened, On December 23rd Zanfretta agreed to be hypnotized. Dr. Mauro Moretti, a member of the Italian Association for Medical Hypnosis put him under. Under hypnosis, Zanfretta revealed that the aliens had also abducted him and had taken him to a strange hot room filled with light. There they communicated with him through a glowing device. He found that the strange mouthpieces they wore allowed them to breathe while on earth and that they were from a planet called “Teetonia” somewhere in the “Third galaxy”. The interrogation lasted some time and the creatures revealed that they wanted to speak more and would soon arrive in greater numbers.

Three days after his session with Dr. Moretti, Zanfretta claimed to have been abducted again. This time he said that his car was overtaken and controlled remotely. He was driven through a tunnel before a bright white light flooded the car. His dispatch claimed that he called in at the time in a very controlled voice saying “The car has stopped. I saw a bright light. Now I am getting out.” Hours later he was found by two other guards out in a field by his car in a heavy rain. Zanfretta was weeping, crying out “They say I must leave with them. What about my children? I don’t want to…I don’t want to.” The military police were called and found to their confusion that Zanfretta’s clothes were completely dry despite the rain and that the roof of his car was “as hot as an oven.” Shocking them as well was the 20-inch boot prints that surrounded the car.

A full report was filed on January 3, 1979, and labeled “Report on the Sighting of Unidentified Flying Objects by Fortunato Zanfretta.” The military police later went on to say that the reliability of these events actually occurring was “good”. After this Zanfretta began to receive even more attention and scrutiny. He was examined by neurologist Dr. Giorgio Gianniotti who found that “…The man is in a state of shock, but he is perfectly sane.” This, however, did little to stop the harassment so he once again agreed to undergo hypnosis but this time he allowed it to be televised.

In this session, Zanfretta claimed that the device they used to speak with him was a glowing helmet and it caused him a great deal of pain. They took his gun and fired it, some would speculate in an effort to see if human weaponry could hurt them. They expressed an interest in taking him with them to which he responded with “I know that you need me, but I don’t want to. I like to be alone. I have two children. I feel good this way…and after all, you are not human beings. You are horrible.” Hundreds watched but the scrutiny only increased further. Eventually, things died down, until he was abducted yet again.

Zanfretta and his motorcycle were found on the summit of Mount Fasce. None of the locals had seen him drive up the only road that led to the top. This time Zanretta insisted that he be given sodium penathol, the “truth serum”. Under it, he claimed that he had been picked up by a green light. The doctor who administered the drug confirmed to the press “No human being can knowingly lie while he is under treatment, so I think it’s very probable Zanfretta had these encounters.” (It was not known at the time just how malleable a person’s perception becomes while under sodium penathol, even allowing for the implantation of false memories. One of the reasons it is no longer used as a truth serum.”)

His forth abduction was not an encounter he would have alone. After he disappeared in December of 1979, four members of his security company were sent to find him. They found instead a strange glowing “cloud” which shot out two beams of light at their cars, killing the engines. One of them shot at the UFO, which then went dark and faded out of sight. The encounter proved too much for another, who later ended his own life with a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

Now for some crazy stuff.

As if it weren’t off the wall enough. Zanfretta says that while filling up his car with gas after the last encounter a strange man came up to him. The mansupposedly was bald with an egg-shaped head and wearing a checkered suit with a chest-plate made of steel. The man’s voice compelled him to follow and he was shown a ship filled with strange beings in jars. Some “frog-shaped” others more birdlike or even similar to a “caveman”. The being tried to give him a sphere that would humanity to know who they were and how they lived. He was instructed to give the gift to Dr. J. Allen Hynek in America, who as a premier UFO researcher at the time. Zanfretta did not do this however and instead claimed to have buried the object somewhere.

His last hypnosis session with Dr. Moretti was the oddest session of all. He made strange sounds, spoke in an unknown language and said things like “Question with negative answer, tixel…you can’t work out anything in a case like this. To believe or not to believe doesn’t mean anything: each thing in its own time.”

That was the last encounter Zanfretta would have with the beings but his description of the man in the checkered suit echoes a being encountered by others. In November of 1966, in West Virginia, A Woodrow Derenberger had an encounter with a strange vehicle pouring flames from both ends and shaped like a lamp. A smiling man stepped out and spoke to him without moving his lips. Claimed his name was “Indrid Cold.” He was baled with an egg like head and wanted to know more about UFO sightings in the area. The same manwas spotted by two boys behind a fence, where he was dubbed the Grinning Man and was seen in Point Pleasant around the same time as the Mothman sightings.

“Honey, did you order a subscription to the Watchtower?”

I have a theory that this Grinning Man may, in fact, be a Man in Black. Reports of them indicate that they seem shockingly similar. Bald, fancy suits, asking and talking about UFO encounters. Always giving off an otherworldly feel and disappearing as quickly as the arrived.

[imagine-lcorp]

Mustang Ride (Part IV)

A/N: Hello again, my dearest!! I hope you’re still enjoying this beautiful holiday season and that everyone is having fun. Here’s a late xmas present for you, part IV of this series, beacuse I know i left you wondering about the story. But not just that!!! Until next wednesday I will be posting new content each day so we can finish this year and start the new one with great vibes. So stay tuned and stay beautiful <3<3<3 love you guuuys!!!

Lena Luthor x Shapeshifter Reader//Word Count: 1,931

Series: Part I - Part II - Part III - Part IV - Part V

The first thing that caught your attention was the long line of blood splatter that dripped to the floor on one side of the van. Then you saw the agents, struggling in a fight with something that wasn't human or animal anymore. Looking at that thing made your hair stand on end and your heart pound. Suddenly, you felt as if you were nine years old again, watching a horror movie that would leave you with nightmares.

Supergirl was first to react, jumping inside and trying to separate the agents from the beast's claws. You had to shake yourself back into action when one agent escaped his hold. He came stumbling towards you, holding his right side, and you caught him before he could fall to the ground. You saw his bloody hands trying to cover the wound, a deep claw scratch the size of his forearm, and walked him quickly to the sidewalk. By the size of the wound, you guessed it was polar bear guy in that van.

The other agent came out of the vehicle a moment later, safe and unharmed, and you called for her to help her partner. You could hear Kara inside the van with that animal and, if the growls and metal snapping were any indication, she was having a hard time taking him down.

"Go, she may need your help." Said the agent that now you recognized as Vasquez. "I got him." She assured you and then both of you turned your heads at the sound of tires skidding.

Another DEO van was coming to your aid, they were going to be fine. You nodded at her and returned to the van. Supergirl was pushing polar guy against the right side of the car, holding him by the arms while he was gripping her with his clawed hands and trying to bit her face. It was a relief she had bulletproof skin or she could have ended like shredded paper.

He drifted his attention on you once you jumped inside. His bloodshot eyes were looking at you with frenzy and a fury you could only expect from a rabid animal. You swallowed hard before taking a step further and, once you did, things happened too fast for you. He broke away from Kara's hold, sprinting in all fours to jump on you.

His claws sank into your shoulders and his hot breath was on your face after landing on the ground. A broken cry came out of your mouth as polar guy placed himself on top of you. You didn't move. You couldn't. You felt like that could be the difference between keeping your face and using a Guy Fawkes mask for life. But even with no sudden move, you saw him open his mouth, revealing sharp teeth about to tear your face apart.

Your face remained intact, after all, thanks to Kara. In one second, she launched herself at polar guy and took him for a flight. She made a few barrel rolls with him hanging from her hands before heading straight to the back of the van and tossing him inside. He fell unconscious in an instant and only then you stopped holding your breath. DEO agents came to attend your wounds immediately after that but you made then go with the other agent. They could patch you up later. With everyone safe and secured once again, you went straight to the DEO.

The injured agent was taken to the medical bay while you helped Kara and J'onn put the three men in containment cells. You couldn't help the discomfort at seeing polar guy being pulled down from the van, he hadn’t changed his appearance. You guessed he couldn't. White hair had grown over different parts of his face, mixing with his brown hair. He appeared to have a crooked jaw from the extra teeth that tried to come through and, where his nails were supposed to be, he had sharp long black claws.

You put your hand on one of your shoulders, where he had buried those claws, feeling the marks he had left you. They weren't that deep but they had surely hurt. The other two didn't present the same changes as their friend but walked inside their cells with a few protests. There no signs of anything out of the ordinary as if they were just common criminals.

"Hey, (Y/N), are you alright?" Kara put a hand on your arm, stopping you outside the cell blocks. She had seen the way you had reacted, or rather paralyzed, when you saw polar guy. She had been taken by surprise too but she could tell something was bothering you.

"Yeah, I'm fine." You tried to shrug it off. "I just wanna know what the deal with those guys is."

"We all do but you should go and have that checked." She pointed at the shoulder you had been rubbing when they brought polar guy in. "You just got back and we wouldn't want to send you home again."

"Okay." Your shoulders slumped, knowing you couldn't really argue with her. "But call me if you find anything, please."

"As soon as we have anything new." She promised, pulling her sunny smile at you, and you watched her walk in the direction of the operation room.

You should have gone to the medical bay after she left, but you didn't. Your wounds weren't that bad and you were sure they would be healed before lunch. Right now, you only wanted a few moments to yourself, at least until Kara came back with some updates about the investigation. There was something about all this you couldn't exactly pinpoint yet and it made you feel uneasy. So you walked on the opposite direction, towards the training hall.

A training sequence started and you walked to the center of the room. You tried to recall exactly what had happened today. Turning into a frog helped you dodge lasers while you thought about the bank robbery. It was obvious the three men had relied on their powers to get away with that. When you had a couple of spherical robots within reach, you smashed them with some of your gorilla strength. Then, there was the fight with those men. The fact that they hadn't transformed into something else during the whole brawl made you have second thoughts about their abilities.

Finally, polar guy attack, the halfway transformation and that look on his eyes. It was fear what you had felt and that sudden realization made you want to tear apart everything. Your mind had drifted away, to the day you first discovered your powers and had thought yourself a monster. To the day you first used them to save a life and believed you could grow up to be like those mythical heroes. To the days in Roulette's ring, when you couldn't think about anything else but survive.

All of the cardboard people ended up ripped and slashed by the claws and teeth of the wolf you had turned into. After chewing and spitting the last of them, you let out a harsh breath. The training sequence was over but you stood there, growling as you looked into space.

"(Y/N)?" You were pulled out of your thoughts at the mention of your name.

You turned your face to look at Lena at the bottom of the stairs of the training room, watching you with a concerned look. You shook your head, trying to clear the thoughts in your mind and transformed back to human.

"Sorry." You looked between her and the rests of the cardboard people. "I was...training."

"I can see that." She examined the pieces of cardboard scattered around the floor and her brows knitted in a worried frown. "Kara told me what happened. Are you alright?"

You had wanted to give her the same answer you had gave to Kara, shrug it off like it was nothing. But it was something and the little demonstration during the training sequence had made it obvious.

"No." You finally admitted with a heavy sigh and went to sit at the bottom of the stairs.

"What's on your mind?" Lena took a seat near you, watching your features chance as the thoughts on your mind did.

"Do you know what I was afraid of when I was a child?" She saw a frown appear on your face but you didn't look at her.

"The dentist?" She half joked trying to ease the upcoming conversation.

"Yeah", you scoffed with a faint smile, "but also werewolves." Lena waited for you to continue. Whatever you were thinking it sure wasn't a good memory. "I was nine when I watched this old movie, you know, about a man cursed to turn into a werewolf every full moon. It was all black and white and a bit ridiculous but... it still managed to give me nightmares. This boy in my class would make fun of me because of that, but one day", you rubbed the back of your neck, "he crossed the line."

It had been during the last day of school before winter break. After the last class, you couldn't wait to get home and along with everyone, teachers and kids, you stormed out of the building. You said goodbye to your friends and you were walking home when Jeffrey and his friends grabbed you by the arms. You had tried to scream but everyone else had already left and fight back was no use being three against one.

They dragged you to the small forest behind the school, where they let you fall to the ground but didn't let you stand up. Jeffrey was laughing, telling you they were going to let you there, at the mercy of the big bad werewolf that lived in the forest. He was going to eat you alive or turn you into a werewolf too, in which case Jeffrey would sent hunters after you, or so he said.

You were nine, in the woods with a band of bullies, thinking about the prospect of becoming a monster, or being killed by one. The werewolf popped up crystal clear in your mind with his fangs and claws, his blood stained fur, and his black eyes seeking you through the trees. The scream that came out of your lungs was enough to make them retract from their intentions, or at least you thought it had been that way. They had run away, leaving you to howl at the trees alone.

"That's how you first discovered your powers?" Lena felt her heart sank with that revelation and you simply nodded.

"I had transformed into a wolf without knowing how." You took a deep breath. "And even after getting used to my powers I... I feared I would lose control of them."

"Like a werewolf." She completed your thoughts.

"Yeah..." You trailed off and Lena knew, with just that, what was exactly happening on your mind.

"(Y/N), what happened to that man won't necessarily happen to you." She said while taking your hand and only then you turned to look at her.

"I know. It's just that seeing him...he made it a real possibility." Your tone was almost desperate. "I need to know what happened to him, Lena, or I'm going to lose my mind."

"We'll find out." She said with confidence and kissed your temple. To be afraid of turning into someone you were not but that could be, was something Lena knew how it felt. So, no matter what, she was going to be there for you.

[severepersonacrime]

Sheila Bellush had made headlines for three years. Not for any of her accomplishments or being entertaining – the most she was known for was giving birth to quadruplets, being dubbed the “quad mom” in her community in San Antonio, Texas. What she made the headlines for was her untimely and gruesome death – she was found with her throat slit and two of the then 2 year old quadruplets were playing in her blood. Her body was discovered by her eldest daughter from a previous marriage, Stevie, as she came home from school. The question was, why?

Before moving to San Antonio, Sheila originally lived in Kansas until she met a young, charming man by the name of Allen Blackthorne. The both of them believed that they had found what they were looking for in each other, and Allen had actually convinced Sheila to marry him by their third date. The couple were married in 1982.

Originally, the marriage and the relationship were perfect. They had two daughters, Stevie and Daryl. Allen was a self made business man, selling medical equipment, and he encouraged his in-laws to invest in the business. Smitten with such a hard-working and dedicated son in law, Sheila's parents invested everything they had into the company. However, business was failing; Allen was spending more on himself than he was putting into the company and Sheila's parents lost everything, which was devastating to them. Tensions rose and Allen forced Sheila to choose between him and her parents. She ended up choosing Allen and cut off contact with them.

During this period, the marriage became strained and Allen started to show his true colours. He would become abusive, physically and emotionally, towards Sheila, putting her down, slapping her, to which he has never denied but made out it was only a one time thing. He was also a masochist, someone who felt pleasure from feeling pain, and would hire prostitutes to carry these sexual acts out while making Sheila watch. Sheila also alleged that Allen was also abusing their daughters, even originally filing a sexual assault claim against him on Stevie, but the charges were eventually dropped. By 1987, Sheila was filing for divorce. But Allen didn't like this – he was a control freak and hated when things didn't go his way.

Allen had his mind set on gaining sole custody of the girls. The court had originally ruled that both would receive part time custody, but Allen tried multiple times for 100%. Eventually, it was decided Sheila would gain sole custody, which angered Allen further. However, every request he made towards the court was denied. In the mean-time, Sheila had met another man, Jamie Bellush. He was the picture-perfect husband, an ex marine and a respectable person. They were married in 1993, and Sheila gave birth to quadruplets in 1995.

The newlywed couple, however, could not have a quiet life. Allen was stalking Sheila, harassing her, even trying to ruin her wedding day by handing her papers with his request to gain sole custody of her children, claiming she was abusive. With this in mind, the couple moved to Sarasota, Florida so Allen could no longer reach them. How wrong they were indeed.

The first thing that Allen did was that he hired a private investigator to track Sheila's new location. Once he was given her address, he created a plan, in which he wanted her beaten up and seriously injured, injured enough for her to be rendered unable to care for the children, in which custody would be granted towards him. For this, however, he would need to hire someone else. Allen ended up turning to Daniel Rocha, a petty criminal who attended the same golf club, who spoke to a friend of his called Samuel Gonzalez, who sought out the help of his cousin, Jose Del Toro. Allen alleged to these men that Sheila was abusing the children, leaving the men compelled to be apart of this elaborate scheme. Jose Del Toro eventually agreed to carry the assault out for $14,000.

On November 7th 1997, Del Toro travelled to the location given by the private investigator in a car registered in his grandmother's name. He stopped at a store to purchase a camouflage suit and at a gas station in order to gain directions to his destination. His car was spotted by a neighbour who was able to memorise and record the license plate of the car. Joey walked into the house and saw Sheila with the quadruplets as he broke in – immediately he felt guilty, seeing how much she loved her children, and was about to not go through with the crime. However, he had already broken in and had already made a promise. In a hurry, he shot Sheila in the face with a .45 caliber gun and slit her throat before leaving her lifeless body in the house, in full view of her toddlers.

Her 13 year old daughter Stevie was the one who found Sheila dead in their family home. Stevie had had a good day at school that day; she had asked a boy she liked to the Sadie Hawkins dance at her school, to which he had said yes – that good mood was about to be shattered. Distressed, she called 911, and an investigation immediately went underway.

Police were able to trace the crime back to Joey Del Toro when the neighbour came forward with the license plate of the car he was driving – using records, they discovered Joey's relationship to the owner of the vehicle and that he had fled to Mexico after the murder. He was discovered and brought back to the United States, where he was made to testify against everyone else involved in the brutal murder. They were all arrested and tried in the following years.

Jose Del Toro pleaded guilty to first degree murder and armed burglary charges, and was sentenced to two life sentences, the maximum penalty. Samuel Gonzalez was sentenced to 19 years in prison after a plea deal in which he pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit murder. Daniel Rocha was convicted of first degree murder in 1999 and was sentenced to life imprisonment. Allen Blackthorne was convicted of federal interstate charges of conspiracy to commit murder and domestic violence, in which he was sentenced to two life sentences without possibility of parole.

In 2001, Allen Blackthorne was attacked and nearly killed by a prison gang. After this incident, he was separated from other prisoners until he was relocated to another facility in Florida. On November 18th 2014, Allen Blackthorne died of causes unknown to the general public – he was 59 years old.

While for the most part justice was served in this case and Allen Blackthorne never experienced an ounce of freedom after his atrocities, the scars that he left on the family Sheila had left behind will always remain. 6 children had to grow up without a mother, their parents unable to speak to their daughter again, a husband never able to hug and kiss his wife again. While he claimed that everything he did was for the best interests of his daughters, all his actions did was hurt them further, which is what makes this case stand out a huge deal from many other domestic disputes.

[newstfionline]

Friday, February 12, 2021

House managers wrap up case against Trump (Washington Post) House managers on Thursday wrapped up their case against former president Donald Trump, imploring the Senate to convict him while warning that he could stoke violence again. Trump’s legal team is poised to respond on Friday, arguing that he should be acquitted. They are expected to use only one of two allotted days. A verdict could come as early as the weekend. The developments came on the third day of an impeachment trial in which Democrats have charged Trump with “incitement of insurrection” for his role in the Jan. 6 violent takeover of the Capitol.

California Is Making Liberals Squirm (NYT) California is a remarkable place. It also has the highest poverty rate in the nation, when you factor in housing costs, and vies for the top spot in income inequality, too. The median price for a home in California is more than $700,000. As Bloomberg reported in 2019, the state has four of the nation’s five most expensive housing markets and a quarter of the nation’s homeless residents. In much of San Francisco, you can’t walk 20 feet without seeing a multicolored sign declaring that Black lives matter, kindness is everything and no human being is illegal. Those signs sit in yards zoned for single families, in communities that organize against efforts to add the new homes that would bring those values closer to reality. Poorer families—disproportionately nonwhite and immigrant—are pushed into long commutes, overcrowded housing and homelessness. Those inequalities have turned deadly during the pandemic. There is a danger—not just in California, but everywhere—that politics becomes an aesthetic rather than a program. It’s a danger on the right, where Donald Trump modeled a presidency that cared more about retweets than bills. But it’s also a danger on the left, where the symbols of progressivism are often preferred to the sacrifices and risks those ideals demand.

6 killed in 130-vehicle pileup on icy Texas interstate (AP) A massive crash involving more than 130 vehicles on an icy Texas interstate left six people dead and dozens injured Thursday amid a winter storm that dropped freezing rain, sleet and snow on parts of the U.S. At the scene of the crash on Interstate 35 near downtown Fort Worth, a tangle of semitrailers, cars and trucks had smashed into each other and had turned every which way, with some vehicles on top of others. The ice storm came as a polar vortex — swirling air that normally sits over the Earth’s poles — has moved near the U.S.-Canada border, resulting in colder weather farther south than usual, said Steve Goss, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service’s Storm Prediction Center in Norman, Oklahoma.

History of abuse for Mexican police unit in migrant massacre (AP) When state police in northern Mexico allegedly shot 19 people, including at least 14 Guatemalan migrants, to death in late January near the border with Texas, it was a tragedy that critics say authorities had been warned could come. In 2019, prosecutors charged that the same Tamaulipas state police unit, then operating under a different name, pulled eight people from their homes in the border city of Nuevo Laredo, posed them in clothing and vehicles to make them look like criminals, and shot them to death. Now, a dozen officers of the 150-member Special Operations Group, known by its Spanish initials as GOPES, have been ordered held for trial on charges they shot to death at least 14 Guatemalan migrants and two Mexicans on a rural road in the border township of Camargo. The bodies were then set afire and burned so badly that three other corpses are still awaiting identification. Authorities had ample warning of the problems in the unit, which was created last year from the remains of the special forces group accused of the 2019 killings and other atrocities. A federal legislator even filed a non-binding resolution in Mexico’s Congress in early January to protest beatings and robberies by the unit. “If back then they had done something, if any attention had been paid, perhaps today we would not be mourning the deaths of 19 people,” said Marco Antonio Mariño, vice president of the Tamaulipas Federation of Business Chambers.

Brazilian ballerina born without arms soars with her attitude (Reuters) When Vitória Bueno’s mother first dropped her off at ballet class, she worried about her five-year-old fitting in. Born without arms, Bueno’s dream of being a dancer seemed painfully unrealistic—especially in a small town in rural Brazil. But Bueno, now 16, focused on her assemblés, pirouettes and other technical challenges. She took up jazz and tap as well. Now a regular at the ballet academy in her hometown in the state of Minas Gerais, Bueno’s talent has made her a social media star and an inspiration to many. Watching her glide across the wooden stage, synchronized with her colleagues in a dazzle of green and white, it is easy to forget she dances without arms. More than just realizing a dream, the strength and flexibility gained through dance have proven crucial to Bueno, who does everything from brushing her teeth to picking items off the supermarket shelf with her feet. “There are things she can do with her feet that I can’t do with my hands,” said her stepfather, Jose Carlos Perreira. With over 150,000 Instagram followers, Bueno is glad to be a role model for others too. “We are more than our disabilities, so we have to chase our dreams,” she said, flashing a broad smile.

German children suffer from psychological issues in pandemic (AP) A new survey of children in Germany suggests that the stress and depravations of the coronavirus pandemic are taking a toll on their mental health, especially among those from underprivileged families, researchers said Wednesday. The study by the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf found about one in three German children are suffering from pandemic-related anxiety, depression or are exhibiting psychosomatic symptoms like headaches or stomach aches. Children and teenagers from poorer families and those with migrant roots are disproportionally affected, according to the study. “Children who were doing well before the pandemic and feel sheltered and comfortable within their families will get through this pandemic well,” said Ulrike Ravens-Sieberer, the head of the study and research director of the children’s psychiatric clinic at the university hospital.

Koo d’etat (Foreign Policy) Indian lawmakers are threatening to abandon Twitter in favor of Indian lookalike app Koo amid a dispute with the Silicon Valley company. The Indian government has ordered the removal of hundreds of Twitter accounts and posts in recent days over claims that users are spreading misinformation about ongoing farmer protests. On Wednesday, Twitter announced it would not comply with some takedown orders as it deemed them in contravention of Indian law. India’s IT ministry posted its displeasure with Twitter on rival app Koo, as a number of Indian leaders, including Trade Minister Piyush Goyal encouraged a Twitter exodus. The Koo app has seen a ten-fold increase in downloads as a result of the spat—a total of 3 million in the past two days.

They were accused of plotting to overthrow the Modi government. The evidence was planted, a new report says. (Washington Post) Key evidence against a group of Indian activists accused of plotting to overthrow the government was planted on a laptop seized by police, a new forensics report concludes, deepening doubts about a case viewed as a test of the rule of law under Prime Minister Narendra Modi. An attacker used malware to infiltrate a laptop belonging to one of the activists, Rona Wilson, before his arrest and deposited at least 10 incriminating letters on the computer, according to a report from Arsenal Consulting, a Massachusetts-based digital forensics firm that examined an electronic copy of the laptop at the request of Wilson’s lawyers. Many of the activists have been jailed for more than two years without trial under a stringent anti-terrorism law. Human rights groups and legal experts consider the case an attempt to suppress dissent in India, where government critics have faced intimidation, harassment and arrest during Modi’s tenure. Sudeep Pasbola, a lawyer representing Wilson, said the Arsenal report proved his client’s innocence and “destabilizes” the prosecution case against the activists. On Wednesday, Wilson’s lawyers included the report in a petition filed in the High Court of Bombay urging judges to dismiss the case against their client.

China to pull BBC News off the air, state broadcast regulator says (Washington Post) China’s broadcasting regulator has moved to pull BBC News off the air in the country over a “serious content violation,” the Chinese state news agency Xinhua reported Thursday. China’s National Radio and Television Administration (NRTA) said in an announcement on its website that the broadcaster, which is partly funded by the British state but editorially independent, had “undermined China’s national interests and ethnic solidarity.” The announcement, which arrived with the Lunar New Year holiday in China, followed recent disputes between Chinese officials and BBC News. It also came just a week after Britain’s media regulator pulled the Chinese state-run television channel CGTN off British airwaves because of alleged errors in an application to transfer its license to another company. In December, BBC News produced a report that alleged the forced labor of ethnic minority Uighurs in China’s cotton industry in Xinjiang. Chinese state media bristled at the work, calling it “fake news” and accusing the BBC of political bias.

Racialized surveillance (Foreign Policy) Following numerous reports of Chinese firms, including Huawei, singling out Uighurs in facial recognition, a Los Angeles Times/IPVM investigation found that Dahua, the world’s second-largest security camera manufacturer, provides Chinese police with “real-time warning for Uighurs” and informs them of “Uighurs with hidden terrorist inclinations.” In many parts of China, being Uighur is now effectively criminalized, with the few remaining Uighur residents of cities outside Xinjiang reporting routine harassment by police. The arrival of Uighurs, even mothers with children, in a new city or town prompts the arrival of the police and actions ranging from warnings to stay in their hotel or apartment to deportation back to Xinjiang. Dahua is rolling out its race-based systems to other countries, which may have their own least favored minorities to target.

Biden Announces Myanmar Sanctions (Foreign Policy) U.S. President Joe Biden has announced U.S. sanctions against Myanmar’s military junta, ten days after the military seized absolute power and arrested members of the country’s democratically-elected leadership. Biden is to freeze $1 billion in Myanmar’s state assets held in U.S. banks, with further sanctions expected to follow against a “first round of targets” this week. But Myanmar’s generals have endured sanctions before—including recent ones over the ethnic cleansing of its Rohingya minority—and so whatever the international community can muster is unlikely to dislodge them.

Digital siege: Internet cuts become favored tool of regimes (AP) When army generals in Myanmar staged a coup last week, they briefly cut internet access in an apparent attempt to stymie protests. In Uganda, residents couldn’t use Facebook, Twitter and other social media for weeks after a recent election. And in Ethiopia’s northern Tigray region, the internet has been down for months amid a wider conflict. Around the world, shutting down the internet has become an increasingly popular tactic of repressive and authoritarian regimes and some illiberal democracies. Digital rights groups say governments use them to stifle dissent, silence opposition voices or cover up human rights abuses. Regimes often cut online access in response to protests or civil unrest, particularly around elections, as they try to keep their grip on power by restricting the flow of information, researchers say. Last year there were 93 major internet shutdowns in 21 countries, according to a report by Top10VPN, a U.K.-based digital privacy and security research group. The list doesn’t include places like China and North Korea, where the government tightly controls or restricts the internet.

Japan Olympics chief who said women talk too much will resign over remarks, reports say (Washington Post) The head of the Tokyo Olympics organizing committee is set to resign, Japanese media reported on Thursday, after an uproar over sexist remarks he had made about women at a meeting last week. Mori, an 83-year-old former prime minister with a record of insensitive and sexist pronouncements, had tried to justify the lack of women at a senior level in the Japanese Olympic Committee by saying women talk too much at meetings and make them run on too long. The following day he apologized but showed no apparent remorse and said he had no intention of resigning. The comments provoked an unprecedented reaction in Japan, with more than 146,000 people signing an online petition calling on him to step down. Nearly 500 Olympic volunteers withdrew, and one poll found less than 7 percent of respondents thought Mori was qualified to continue in his role. The World Economic Forum ranks Japan 121st out of 153 countries in terms of gender parity, with the largest gender gap among advanced economies.

20 UN peacekeepers injured in an attack in central Mali (AP) An attack on a United Nations base in central Mali has injured at least 20 peacekeepers, the U.N. mission spokesman said Wednesday. The temporary U.N. base in Kerena, near Douentza, was the target of direct and indirect fire early Wednesday morning, Olivier Salgado said in a statement on Twitter. No group has claimed responsibility for the attack, but Islamic extremists linked to al-Qaida and the Islamic State group stage regular attacks on U.N. peacekeepers and soldiers.

Salesforce declares the 9-to-5 workday dead, will let some employees work remotely from now on (The Verge) Cloud computing company Salesforce is joining other Silicon Valley tech giants in announcing a substantial shift in how it allows its employees to work. In a blog post published Tuesday, the company says the “9-to-5 workday is dead” and that it will allow employees to choose one of three categories that dictate how often, if ever, they return to the office once it’s safe to do so. The company joins other tech firms like Facebook and Microsoft that have announced permanent work-from-home policies in response to the coronavirus pandemic. “As we enter a new year, we must continue to go forward with agility, creativity and a beginner’s mind—and that includes how we cultivate our culture. An immersive workspace is no longer limited to a desk in our Towers; the 9-to-5 workday is dead; and the employee experience is about more than ping-pong tables and snacks,” writes Brent Hyder, Salesforce’s chief people officer. “In our always-on, always-connected world, it no longer makes sense to expect employees to work an eight-hour shift and do their jobs successfully,” Hyder adds. “Whether you have a global team to manage across time zones, a project-based role that is busier or slower depending on the season, or simply have to balance personal and professional obligations throughout the day, workers need flexibility to be successful.”

At first cat lawyer was embarrassed. Then he realized we all could use a laugh. (Washington Post) As far as courtroom disclosures go, this one was unique: “I’m not a cat,” a Texas attorney claimed as his Zoom square displayed a fluffy white feline. At a routine civil forfeiture case hearing in Texas’ 394th Judicial District Court, Presidio County attorney Rod Ponton accidentally signed on with the cat filter, making the flummoxed attorney look like an adorable kitten. The 34-second clip of Ponton’s brief appearance as a cat immediately amused many and is becoming a viral hit. The prevalence of video chat platforms for court appearances has led to other unusual moments: A defendant in Sacramento appeared from a barber’s chair, a Florida burglary suspect tried to flirt his way out of trouble with a judge, and a lawyer in Peru was caught on camera naked after he stripped to have sex. But Tuesday’s video was the cat’s pajamas to many. Even Ponton, once he recovered from cat face and mortification, found humor in his proverbial 15 minutes of fame. “At first I was worried about it,” Ponton, 69, told The Washington Post on Tuesday, “but then I realized as it was going viral if the country could take a moment to laugh at my cat moment at my expense, I’ll take it. We’ve had a stressful year.”

[delacruzlynn]

What Is Cat Spray Like All Time Best Cool Ideas

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[sociologyquotes]

Post-Katrina, White Vigilantes Shot African-Americans With Impunity

from the article Post-Katrina, White Vigilantes Shot African-Americans With Impunity by A.C. Thompson

“The way Donnell Herrington tells it, there was no warning. One second he was trudging through the heat. The next he was lying prostrate on the pavement, his life spilling out of a hole in his throat, his body racked with pain, his vision blurred and distorted.

It was Sept. 1, 2005, some three days after Hurricane Katrina crashed into New Orleans, and somebody had just blasted Herrington, who is African-American, with a shotgun. "I just hit the ground. I didn't even know what happened," recalls Herrington, a burly 32-year-old with a soft drawl.

The sudden eruption of gunfire horrified Herrington's companions -- his cousin Marcel Alexander, then 17, and friend Chris Collins, then 18, who are also black. "I looked at Donnell and he had this big old hole in his neck," Alexander recalls. "I tried to help him up, and they started shooting again." Herrington says he was staggering to his feet when a second shotgun blast struck him from behind; the spray of lead pellets also caught Collins and Alexander. The buckshot peppered Alexander's back, arm and buttocks.

Herrington shouted at the other men to run and turned to face his attackers: three armed white males. Herrington says he hadn't even seen the men or their weapons before the shooting began. As Alexander and Collins fled, Herrington ran in the opposite direction, his hand pressed to the bleeding wound on his throat. Behind him, Herrington says, the gunmen yelled, "Get him! Get that nigger!"

The attack occurred in Algiers Point. The Point, as locals call it, is a neighborhood within a neighborhood, a small cluster of ornate, immaculately maintained 150-year-old houses within the larger Algiers district. A nationally recognized historic area, Algiers Point is largely white, while the rest of Algiers is predominantly black. It's a "white enclave" whose residents have "a kind of siege mentality," says Tulane University historian Lance Hill, noting that some white New Orleanians "think of themselves as an oppressed minority."

A wide street lined with towering trees, Opelousas Avenue marks the dividing line between Algiers Point and greater Algiers, and the difference in wealth between the two areas is immediately noticeable. "On one side of Opelousas it's 'hood, on the other side it's suburbs," says one local. "The two sides are totally opposite, like muddy and clean."

Algiers Point has always been somewhat isolated: it's perched on the west bank of the Mississippi River, linked to the core of the city only by a ferry line and twin gray steel bridges. When the hurricane descended on Louisiana, Algiers Point got off relatively easy. While wide swaths of New Orleans were deluged, the levees ringing Algiers Point withstood the Mississippi's surging currents, preventing flooding; most homes and businesses in the area survived intact. As word spread that the area was dry, desperate people began heading toward the west bank, some walking over bridges, others traveling by boat. The National Guard soon designated the Algiers Point ferry landing an official evacuation site. Rescuers from the Coast Guard and other agencies brought flood victims to the ferry terminal, where soldiers loaded them onto buses headed for Texas.

Facing an influx of refugees, the residents of Algiers Point could have pulled together food, water and medical supplies for the flood victims. Instead, a group of white residents, convinced that crime would arrive with the human exodus, sought to seal off the area, blocking the roads in and out of the neighborhood by dragging lumber and downed trees into the streets. They stockpiled handguns, assault rifles, shotguns and at least one Uzi and began patrolling the streets in pickup trucks and SUVs. The newly formed militia, a loose band of about 15 to 30 residents, most of them men, all of them white, was looking for thieves, outlaws or, as one member put it, anyone who simply "didn't belong."

The existence of this little army isn't a secret -- in 2005 a few newspaper reporters wrote up the group's activities in glowing terms in articles that showed up on an array of pro-gun blogs; one Cox News story called it "the ultimate neighborhood watch." Herrington, for his part, recounted his ordeal in Spike Lee's documentary When the Levees Broke. But until now no one has ever seriously scrutinized what happened in Algiers Point during those days, and nobody has asked the obvious questions. Were the gunmen, as they claim, just trying to fend off looters? Or does Herrington's experience point to a different, far uglier truth?

Over the course of an 18-month investigation, I tracked down figures on all sides of the gunfire, speaking with the shooters of Algiers Point, gunshot survivors and those who witnessed the bloodshed. I interviewed police officers, forensic pathologists, firefighters, historians, medical doctors and private citizens, and studied more than 800 autopsies and piles of state death records. What emerged was a disturbing picture of New Orleans in the days after the storm, when the city fractured along racial fault lines as its government collapsed.

Herrington and Alexander's experience fits into a broader pattern of violence in which, evidence indicates, at least 11 people were shot. In each case the targets were African-American men, while the shooters, it appears, were all white.

The new information should reframe our understanding of the catastrophe. Immediately after the storm, the media portrayed African-Americans as looters and thugs -- Mayor Ray Nagin, for example, told Oprah Winfrey that "hundreds of gang members" were marauding through the Superdome. Now it's clear that some of the most serious crimes committed during that time were the work of gun-toting white males.

So far, their crimes have gone unpunished. No one was ever arrested for shooting Herrington, Alexander and Collins -- in fact, there was never an investigation. I found this story repeated over and over during my days in New Orleans. As a reporter who has spent more than a decade covering crime, I was startled to meet so many people with so much detailed information about potentially serious offenses, none of whom had ever been interviewed by police detectives.

Hill, who runs Tulane's Southern Institute for Education and Research and closely follows the city's racial dynamics, isn't surprised the Algiers Point gunmen have eluded arrest. Because of the widespread notion that blacks engaged in looting and thuggery as the disaster unfolded, Hill believes, many white New Orleanians approved of the vigilante activity that occurred in places like Algiers Point. "By and large, I think the white mentality is that these people are exempt -- that even if they committed these crimes, they're really exempt from any kind of legal repercussion," Hill tells me. "It's sad to say, but I think that if any of these cases went to trial, and none of them have, I can't see a white person being convicted of any kind of crime against an African-American during that period."

You can trace the origins of the Algiers Point militia to the misfortune of Vinnie Pervel. A 52-year-old building contractor and real estate entrepreneur with a graying buzz cut and mustache, Pervel says he lost his Ford van in a carjacking the day after Katrina made landfall, when an African-American man attacked him with a hammer. "The kid whacked me," recalls Pervel, who is white. "Hit me on the side of the head." Vowing to prevent further robberies, Pervel and his neighbors began amassing an arsenal. "For a day and a half we were running around getting guns," he says. "We got about 40."

Things quickly got ugly. Pervel remembers aiming a shotgun at a random African-American man walking by his home -- even though he knew the man had no connection to the theft of his vehicle. "I don't want you passing by my house!" Pervel says he shouted out.

Pervel tells me he feared goons would kill his mother, who is in her 70s. "We thought we would be dead," he says. "We thought we were doomed." And so Pervel and his comrades set about fortifying the area. One resident gave me video footage of the leafy barricades the men constructed to keep away outsiders. Others told me they created a low-tech alarm system, tying aluminum cans and glass bottles together and stringing them across the roads at ankle height. The bottles and cans would rattle noisily if somebody bumped into them, alerting the militia.

Pervel and his armed neighbors point to the very real chaos that was engulfing the city and claim they had no other choice than to act as they did. They paint themselves as righteous defenders of property, a paramilitary formation protecting their neighborhood from opportunistic thieves. "I'm not a racist," Pervel insists. "I'm a classist. I want to live around people who want the same things as me."

Nathan Roper, another vigilante, says he was unhappy that outsiders were disturbing his corner of New Orleans and that he was annoyed by the National Guard's decision to use the Algiers Point ferry landing as an evacuation zone. "I'm telling you, it was 40, 50 people at a time getting off these boats," says Roper, who is in his 50s and works for ServiceMaster, a house cleaning company. The storm victims were "hoodlums from the Lower Ninth Ward and that part of the city," he says. "I'm not a prejudiced individual, but you just know the outlaws who are up to no good. You can see it in their eyes."

The militia, according to Roper, was armed with "handguns, rifles [and] shotguns"; he personally carried "a .38 in my waistband" and a "little Uzi." "There was a few people who got shot around here," Roper, a slim man with a weathered face, tells me. "I know of at least three people who got shot. I know one was dead 'cause he was on the side of the road."

During the summer of 2005 Herrington was working as an armored car driver for the Brink's company and living in a rented duplex about a mile from Algiers Point. Katrina thrashed the place, blowing out windows, pitching a hefty pine tree limb through the roof and dumping rain on Herrington's possessions. On the day of the shooting, Herrington, Alexander and Collins were all trying to escape the stricken city, and set out together on foot for the Algiers Point ferry terminal in the hopes of getting on an evacuation bus.

Those hopes were dashed by a barrage of shotgun pellets. After two shots erupted, Collins and Alexander took off running and ducked into a shed behind a house to hide from the gunmen, Alexander tells me. The armed men, he says, discovered them in the shed and jammed pistols in their faces, yelling, "We got you niggers! We got you niggers!" He continues, "They said they was gonna tie us up, put us in the back of the truck and burn us. They was gonna make us suffer...I thought I was gonna die. I thought I was gonna leave earth."

Apparently thinking they'd caught some looters, the gunmen interrogated and verbally threatened Collins and Alexander for 10 to 15 minutes, Alexander says, before one of the armed men issued an ultimatum: if Alexander and Collins left Algiers Point and told their friends not to set foot in the area, they'd be allowed to live.

Meanwhile, Herrington was staring at death. "I was bleeding pretty bad from my neck area," he recalls. When two white men drove by in a black pickup truck, he begged them for help. "I said, 'Help me, help me -- I'm shot,'" Herrington recalls. The response, he tells me, was immediate and hostile. One of the men told Herrington, "Get away from this truck, nigger. We're not gonna help you. We're liable to kill you ourselves." My God, thought Herrington, what's going on out here?

He managed to stumble back to a neighbor's house, collapsing on the front porch. The neighbors, an African-American couple, wrapped him in a sheet and sped him to the nearest hospital, the West Jefferson Medical Center, where, medical records (PDF) show, he was X-rayed at 3:30 pm. According to the records, a doctor who reviewed the X-rays found "metallic buck-shot" scattered throughout his chest, arms, back and abdomen, as well as "at least seven [pellets] in the right neck." Within minutes, Herrington was wheeled into an operating room for emergency surgery.

"It was a close-range buckshot wound from a shotgun," says Charles Thomas, one of the doctors who operated on Herrington. "If he hadn't gotten to the hospital, he wouldn't have lived. He had a hole in his internal jugular vein, and we were able to find it and fix it."

After three days in the hospital, which lacked running water, air conditioning and functional toilets, Herrington was shuttled to a medical facility in Baton Rouge. When he returned to New Orleans months later, he paid a visit to the Fourth District police station, whose officers patrol the west bank, and learned there was no police report documenting the attack. Herrington, who now has a wide scar stretching the length of his neck, says the officers he spoke with failed to take a report or check out his story, a fact that still bothers him. "If the shoe was on the other foot, if a black guy was willing to go out shooting white guys, the police would be up there real quick," he says. "I feel these guys should definitely be held accountable. These guys had absolutely no right to do what they did."

Herrington, Alexander and Collins are the only victims, so far, to tell their stories. But they certainly weren't the only ones attacked in or around Algiers Point. In interviews, vigilantes and residents -- citing the exact locations and types of weapons used -- detail a string of violent incidents in which at least eight other people were shot, bringing the total number of shooting victims to at least 11, some of whom may have died.

Other evidence bolsters this tally. Thomas, the surgeon who treated Herrington, staffed one of the few functioning trauma centers in the area, located just outside the New Orleans city line, not far from Algiers Point, for a full month after the hurricane hit. "We saw a bunch of gunshot wounds," he tells me. "There were a lot of gunshot wounds that went unreported during that time." Though Thomas couldn't get into the specifics of the shooting incidents because of medical privacy laws, he says, "We saw a couple of other shotgun wounds, some handgun shootings and somebody who was shot with a high-velocity missile [an assault-rifle round]." The surgeon remembers handling "five or six nonfatal gunshot wounds" as well as three lethal gunshot cases.

In addition, state death records show that at least four people died in and around Algiers Point, a suspicious number, given that most Katrina fatalities were the result of drowning, and that that community never flooded. Neighborhood residents, black and white, remember seeing corpses lying out in the open that appeared to have been shot.

While the militia patrolled the streets of Algiers Point, the New Orleans Police Department, which had done little to brace for the storm, was crippled. "There was no leadership, no equipment, no nothing," recalls one high-ranking police official. "We did no more to prepare for a hurricane than we would have for a thunderstorm." Without functioning radios or dispatch systems, officers had no way of knowing what was happening a block away, let alone on the other side of the city. NOPD higher-ups had no way to give direction to unit commanders and other subordinates. As the chain of command disintegrated, the force dissolved into a collection of isolated, quasi-autonomous bands.

Around Algiers Point people say they rarely saw cops during the week after Katrina tore through Louisiana, and in this law enforcement vacuum the militia's unique brand of justice flourished. Most disturbing, one of the vigilantes, Roper, claims on videotape recorded just weeks after the storm that the shootings took place with the knowledge and consent of the police. "The police said, 'If they're breaking in your property, do what you gotta do and leave them [the bodies] on the side of the road,'" he says.

As we drive through Algiers Point in a battered white van, Roper tells me he witnessed a fatal shooting. Roper says he was talking on his cellphone to his son in Lafayette one evening when he spied an African-American man trying to get into Daigle's Grocery, a corner market on the eastern edge of the neighborhood, which was shuttered because of the hurricane. Another militia member shot the man from a few feet away, killing him. "He was done," Roper recalls.

During our conversations, Roper never acknowledges firing his weapon, but in 2005 a Danish documentary crew videotaped him talking about his activities. In this footage Roper says, when pressed, that he did indeed shoot somebody.

Fellow militia member Wayne Janak, 60, a carpenter and contractor, is more forthcoming with me. "Three people got shot in just one day!" he tells me, laughing. We're sitting in his home, a boxy beige-and-pink structure on a corner about five blocks from Daigle's Grocery. "Three of them got hit right here in this intersection with a riot gun," he says, motioning toward the streets outside his home. Janak tells me he assumed the shooting victims, who were African-American, were looters because they were carrying sneakers and baseball caps with them. He guessed that the property had been stolen from a nearby shopping mall. According to Janak, a neighbor "unloaded a riot gun" -- a shotgun -- "on them. We chased them down."

Janak, who was carrying a pistol, says he grabbed one of the suspected looters and considered killing him, but decided to be merciful. "I rolled him over in the grass and saw that he'd been hit in the back with the riot gun," he tells me. "I thought that was good enough. I said, 'Go back to your neighborhood so people will know Algiers Point is not a place you go for a vacation. We're not doing tours right now.'"

He's equally blunt in Welcome to New Orleans, an hourlong documentary produced by the Danish video team, who captured Janak, beer in hand, gloating about hunting humans. Surrounded by a crowd of sunburned white Algiers Point locals at a barbeque held not long after the hurricane, he smiles and tells the camera, "It was great! It was like pheasant season in South Dakota. If it moved, you shot it." A native of Chicago, Janak also boasts of becoming a true Southerner, saying, "I am no longer a Yankee. I earned my wings." A white woman standing next to him adds, "He understands the N-word now." In this neighborhood, she continues, "we take care of our own."

Janak, who says he'd been armed with two .38s and a shotgun, brags about keeping the bloody shirt worn by a shooting victim as a trophy. When "looters" showed up in the neighborhood, "they left full of buckshot," he brags, adding, "You know what? Algiers Point is not a pussy community."

Within that community the gunmen enjoyed wide support. In an outtake from the documentary, a group of white Algiers Point residents gathers to celebrate the arrival of military troops sent to police the area. Addressing the crowd, one local praises the vigilantes for holding the neighborhood together until the Army Humvees trundled into town, noting that some of the militia figures are present at the party. "You all know who you are," the man says. "And I'm proud of every one of you all." Cheering and applause erupts from the assembled locals.

Some of the gunmen prowling Algiers Point were out to wage a race war, says one woman whose uncle and two cousins joined the cause. A former New Orleanian, this source spoke to me anonymously because she fears her relatives could be prosecuted for their crimes. "My uncle was very excited that it was a free-for-all -- white against black -- that he could participate in," says the woman. "For him, the opportunity to hunt black people was a joy."

"They didn't want any of the 'ghetto niggers' coming over" from the east side of the river, she says, adding that her relatives viewed African-Americans who wandered into Algiers Point as "fair game." One of her cousins, a young man in his 20s, sent an e-mail to her and several other family members describing his adventures with the militia. He had attached a photo in which he posed next to an African-American man who'd been fatally shot. The tone of the e-mail, she says, was "gleeful" -- her cousin was happy that "they were shooting niggers."

An Algiers Point homeowner who wasn't involved in the shootings describes another attack. "All I can tell you is what I saw," says the white resident, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of reprisals. He witnessed a barrage of gunfire -- from a shotgun, an AK-47 and a handgun -- directed by militiamen at two African-American men standing on Pelican Street, not too far from Janak's place. The gunfire hit one of them. "I saw blood squirting out of his back," he says. "I'm an EMT. My instinct should've been to rush to him. But I didn't. And if I had, those guys" -- the militia-men -- "might have opened up on me, too."

The witness shows me a home video he recorded shortly after the storm. On the tape, three white Algiers Point men discuss the incident. One says it might be a bad idea to talk candidly about the crime. Another dismisses the notion, claiming, "No jury would convict."

According to Pervel, one of the shootings occurred just a few feet from his house. "Three young black men were walking down this street and they started moving the barricade," he tells me. The men, he says, wanted to continue walking along the street, but Pervel's neighbor, who was armed, commanded them to keep the barricade in place and leave. A standoff ensued until the neighbor shot one of the men, who then, according to Pervel, "ran a block and died" at the intersection of Alix and Vallette Streets.

Even Pervel is surprised the shootings have generated so little scrutiny. "Aside from you, no one's come around asking questions about this," he says. "I'm surprised. If that was my son, I'd want to know who shot him."

By Pervel's count, four people died violently in Algiers Point in the aftermath of the storm, including a bloody corpse left on Opelousas Avenue. That nameless body came up again and again in interviews, a grisly recurring motif. Who was he? How did he die? Nobody knew -- or nobody would tell me.

After hearing all these gruesome stories, I wonder if any of the militia figures I've interviewed were involved in the shooting of Herrington and company. In particular, Pervel's and Janak's anecdotes intrigue me, since both men discussed shooting incidents that sounded a lot like the crime that nearly killed Herrington and wounded Alexander and Collins. Both Pervel and Janak recounted incidents in which vigilantes confronted three black men.

Hoping to solve the mystery, I show Herrington and Alexander video of Pervel, Janak and Roper, all of whom are in their 50s or 60s. No match. The shooters, Herrington and Alexander tell me, were younger men, in their 30s or 40s, sporting prominent tattoos. I have never been able to track them down.

New Orleans, of course, is awash in tales of the horrible things that transpired in the wake of the hurricane -- and many of these wild stories have turned out to be fictions. In researching the Algiers Point attacks, I relied on the accounts of people who witnessed shooting incidents or were directly involved, either as gunmen or shooting victims.

Seeking to corroborate their stories, I sought out documentary evidence, including police files and autopsy reports. The NOPD, I was told, kept very few records during that period. Orleans Parish coroner Frank Minyard was a different story. The coroner, a flamboyant trumpet-playing doctor who has held the office for more than 30 years, had file cabinets bulging with the autopsies of hundreds of Katrina victims - he just wouldn't let me see them, in defiance of Louisiana public records laws.

After wrangling with the coroner for more than six months, I decided to sue -- with a lawyer hired by the Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute -- to get access to the autopsies. (We weren't the first to take the coroner to court. CNN and the New Orleans Times-Picayune had successfully sued Minyard, seeking particular Katrina-related autopsies.) This past May, Orleans Parish district court judge Kern Reese ruled in our favor, ordering Minyard to allow me to review every autopsy done in the year after the storm. But I soon learned that reconstructing history from the coroner's mess of files was next to impossible, because the paper trail is incomplete. "We carried the records around in our cars, in the trunks of our cars, for four months and, I mean, that, that was the coroner's office," Minyard said in a sworn deposition obtained during the course of our suit. "I'm sure some of the records got lost or misplaced." Even the autopsy files we got were missing key facts, like where the bodies were found, who recovered them, when they were recovered and so forth.

Many of the manila file folders the coroner eventually turned over were empty, and Minyard said he'd simply chosen not to autopsy some 25 to 50 corpses. The coroner also told us he didn't know exactly how many people were shot to death in the days immediately after the storm -- "I can't even tell you how many gunshot victims we had" -- but figured the number would not "be more than 10."

Under oath Minyard proceeded to say something stunning. The NOPD, he testified, was only investigating three gunshot cases, all of them high-profile -- the Danziger Bridge incident, in which police killed two civilians, and the shooting of Danny Brumfield, who was slain by a cop in front of the Convention Center. Minyard's statement buttressed information I'd gotten from NOPD sources who said the force has done little to prosecute people for assaults or murders committed in the wake of the storm.

I contacted the police department repeatedly over many months, providing the NOPD with specific questions about each incident discussed in this story. The department, through spokesman Robert Young, declined to comment on whether officers had investigated any of these crimes and would not discuss any other issues raised by this article.

Sifting through more than 800 autopsy reports and reams of state health department data, I quickly identified five New Orleanians who had died under suspicious circumstances: one, severely burned, was found in a charred abandoned auto (see "Body of Evidence"); three were shot; and another died of "blunt force trauma to the head." However, it's impossible to tell from the shoddy records whether any of these people died in or around Algiers Point, or even if their bodies were found there.

No one has been arrested in connection with these suspicious deaths. When it comes to the lack of action on the cases, one well-placed NOPD source told me there was plenty of blame to go around. "We had a totally dysfunctional DA's office," he said. "The court system wasn't much better. Everything was in disarray. A lot of stuff didn't get prosecuted. There were a lot of things that were getting squashed. The UCR [uniform crime reports] don't show anything."

In response to detailed queries made over a period of months, New Orleans District Attorney spokesman Dalton Savwoir declined to say whether prosecutors looked into any of the attacks I uncovered. The office has been through a string of leadership changes since Katrina -- Leon Cannizaro is the current DA -- and is struggling to deal with crimes that happened yesterday, let alone three years ago, Savwoir told me.

James Traylor, a forensic pathologist with the Louisiana State University Health Center, worked alongside Minyard at the morgue and suspects that homicide victims fell through the cracks. "I know I did cases that were homicides," Traylor says. "They were not suicides." NOPD detectives, the doctor continues, never spoke to him about two cases he labeled homicides, leading him to believe police conducted no investigation into those deaths. "There should be a multi-agency task force -- police, sheriffs, coroners -- that can put their heads together and figure out what happened to people," Traylor says.

One of the suspicious cases I discovered was that of Willie Lawrence, a 47-year-old African-American male who suffered a "gunshot wound" that caused a "cranio-facial injury" and deposited two chunks of metal in his brain, according to the autopsy report. Minyard never determined whether Lawrence was murdered or committed suicide, choosing to leave the death unclassified. However, the dead man's brother, Herbert Lawrence, who lives in Compton, Calif., believes his sibling was murdered. Herbert tells me he got a phone call from one of Willie's neighbors shortly after he died. The caller said Willie, whose body, according to state records, was found on the east bank of the Mississippi, was killed by a civilian gunman. "The police didn't do anything," Herbert says, pointing out that NOPD officers didn't create a written report or interview any relatives.

Malik Rahim is one of a handful of African-Americans who live in Algiers Point, and as far as he's concerned, "We are tolerated. We are not accepted." In the days after the storm struck, Rahim says, the vigilantes "would pass by and call us all kind of names, say how they were gonna burn down my house." They thought "all blacks was looting."

As he walked the near-deserted streets in that period, Rahim, 61, a former Black Panther with a mane of dreadlocks, came across several dead bodies of African-American men. Inspecting the bodies, he discovered what he took to be evidence of gunfire. "One guy had about his entire head shot off," says Rahim, who was spurred by the storm to launch Common Ground Relief, a grassroots aid organization. "It's pretty hard to think a person drowned when half their head's been blown off," he says. He thinks some of the gunmen saw Katrina as a "golden opportunity to rid the community of African-Americans."

Sitting at his kitchen table, while a noisy AC unit does its best to neutralize the stifling Louisiana heat, Rahim describes the dead and lists the locations where he found the bodies. He also shows me video footage taken days after the storm. On the tape, Rahim points to the grossly distended corpse of an African-American man lying on the ground.

Rahim introduces me to his neighbor, Reggie Bell, 39, the African-American man Pervel confronted at gunpoint as he walked by Pervel's house. At the time, Bell, a cook, lived just a few blocks down the street from Pervel. In Bell's recollection, Pervel, standing with another gun-toting man, demanded to know what Bell was doing in Algiers Point. "I live here," Bell replied. "I can show you mail."

That answer didn't appease the gunmen, he says. According to Bell, Pervel told him, "Well, we don't want you around here. You loot, we shoot."

Roughly 24 hours later, as Bell sat on his front porch grilling food, another batch of armed white men accosted him, intending to drive him from his home at gunpoint, he says. "Whatcha still doing around here?" they asked, according to Bell. "We don't want you around here. You gotta go."

Bell tells me he was gripped by fear, panicked that he was about to experience ethnic cleansing, Louisiana-style. The armed men eventually left, but Bell remained nervous over the coming days. "I believe it was skin color," he says, that prompted the militia to try to force him out. "That was some really wrong stuff." Bell's then-girlfriend, who was present during the second incident, confirms his story. (In a later interview, Pervel admits he confronted Bell with a shotgun but portrays the incident as a minor misunderstanding, saying he's since apologized to Bell.)

On my final visit to Algiers Point, I stand on Patterson Street, my notebook out, interviewing a pair of residents in the dimming evening light. An older white man, on his way home from a bar, strides up and asks what I'm doing. I reply with a vague explanation, saying I'm working on an article about the "untold stories of Hurricane Katrina."

Without a pause, he says, "Oh. You mean the shootings. Yeah, there were a bunch of shootings."

When I share with Donnell Herrington what the militia men and Algiers Point locals have told me over the course of my investigation, he grows silent. His eyes focus on a point far away. After a moment, he says quietly, "That's pretty disturbing to hear that -- I'm not going to lie to you -- to hear that these guys are cocky. They feel like they got away with it."