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safrona-shadowsun · 6 years ago

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Sungrass Oasis

{Rp between @beamgully and myself. Thank you for reading if you do!}

The arid sun beaming through the purple Tanari sky began to dip westward, just barely considering its retirement. Gadgetzan was somewhat quiet. Many of its denizens were likely enjoying dinner. Amidst a cluster of adobe buildings there was one with a desert-blush sheet serving as a door. It complemented the sunbaked hue of the clay it rested against. Artful script flitted above the small foyer entrance:

Sungrass Oasis -Tea Lounge-

The void elf that stepped into Gadgetzan may have been more of an odd sight had the importer not been a known personage among several traders. What did draw a few eyes was the glowing scythe carried on her person, indicating that she was something more dangerous than a simple ‘delivery girl’. Yet, with a blink of an eye the ethereal blade of the Black Harvest was dismissed to a pocket of the Void, returning Safrona to her shades of nuanced professionalism. Stranger things had happened in the little desert city, perhaps.

Her eye was caught by the shift of the sheet that seemed to beckon her to an entrance she’d never stepped inside before, the written word of ‘tea lounge’ murmured soundlessly between her lips in consideration. Her step inside was preluded by her curious smile, tucking away the black shard between her fingertips. Tea sounded more cleansing against the trinket’s corruption than her usual glass of bourbon.

Though a hole-in-the-wall, it was contemporary chic and polished. The floor was tiled in sleek black. Voguish artwork brought the white walls to life. Framed in thick, black frames, the paintings were as soothing as they were stylish. They depicted modern abstract, turquoise beaches, and desert blossoms. A few were pieces that might have been pretentious in another setting, but somehow felt innocently trendy here. Two of them were offset by equidistant sandstone bowls resting in tasteful square impressions on the wall. Sweeping glass sculptures ribboned with solid colors - some glittering in the light - added bold character to the lounge. Most of them were feet tall and stood on the floor.

On each chair was a pale yellow cushion. Filled with sand, sea glass, and shells, a candle resting in a glass bowl embellished every table, along with a daisy in a white vase. A handful of firebloom petals were strewn about them. Each table was large enough for two guests, with a pair of long, slender menus. At the far back was a bar (of sorts), near another curtain which supposedly led to outdoor seating. It offered several stools should anyone choose to be in company with the Sin'dorei woman behind it. She scribbled something down with a quill, a gnomish-styled calculator beside her hand.

One look at her sleek, leggy physique and one might already imagine her at an amateur marathon. Yet she had a breezy posture as if vacationing somewhere nice. Her clothes paralleled the establishment: contemporary chic with painted, manicured nails. A sand dollar rested below her slim neck, joined by two silver starfish on a sterling chain.

Her tawny skin was mottled thick with freckles. Coffee brown hair, streaked subtly with caramel highlights, draped either side of her thin face like a square curtain - save the asymmetrical chunk knifing a few inches above her collarbone. Her nose was sloped, and her wide, pale lips coated in gloss. Smoky lavender makeup embellished the golden lights of her eyes.

They were upturned, and cheerfully lean in shape. For now there were only two separate couples occupying the lounge as guests, far too engrossed with each other to notice anything outside of themselves. It was the apparent owner who looked up from her work at the scarlet-haired courier, and spread a sunflower smile. She had a neighborly and wizened kind of charisma. Even her breathy, sand-like voice conveyed warmth: "Welcome! Please, take a seat anywhere you'd like."

The Courier took her study of what could have been considered a diamond in the rough of Gadgetzan as she walked, violet pupils glinting in low light approvingly of the little secret she'd stepped into. That arresting, otherworldly gaze eventually drifted to the desert flower that was the owner as she was greeted with warmth. She offered a practiced smile of her own, pulling away the burgundy hood that matched the long spirals of her gathered hair a little too well.

"I will. Quite the lovely place here," she spoke, her silk voice pleasant, if not a touch unsettling with its residual echo of the Void. "Almost Ramhaken in appeal. I'm surprised I've never found it before, actually." The scarlet importer took an elegant seat of a nearby barstool, a long leg flattered by the cut of her skirt as she'd cross one over the other. "Do you own this little gem in the sand?"

"Thank you!" the owner beamed. Her Muppet-esque friendliness was simple, but not patronizing. Pure, yet the opposite of naive. Her affable smile only broadened as the new guest drew back her hood and made herself comfortable. The tell-tale echo didn't appear to inspire any hesitation in the server whatsoever. She reached under the bar to procure a menu, then offered it.

"Oh, we're very new," she explained. "We opened weeks ago. I'm Colpeia, by the way! Let me know if there's anything that catches your eye." She nodded at her question. "Yes, I do! Though I couldn't have done it without the help of my tribe. A few continue to help as waiters, cooks, and business assistants."

The void elf inclined her head slightly with her gratitude as she took the offered menu, swiveling readily in her barseat to face Colpeia directly. "Ah, that explains much of why we've not met. Safrona. Safrona Shadowsun, importer of many of a needful thing. Maybe business will get us better acquainted, yes?"

Mystery was weaved beneath her try at simplistic professionalism, lending to the idea that she had not always been this simple importer she wore. She was too practiced, an enigmatic charm pooled there to her merlot smile. The emerald eyes of a bronze scarab trinket glinting in her gathered hair, set apart from the scarlet and shadow she wore. It seemed she favored this scarab theme, another design dangling prettily from the lace at her throat.

"I'd say let's see what I can help you with...but.. " she opened the menu as her eyes flowed down the lists inside. A breath of a chuckle unraveled beneath her next words. "Maybe I should just be the customer today for a change."

"Well it's an honor to meet you, Safrona," Colpeia dipped her head, with her own brand of flourished, Cheshire, yet plain charisma. "And sure! Actually, I know one way we may be able to help each other. My parents own a glass business called Beamgully Crystal. Maybe you've heard of it? It's been around for a long time. Their wares range from windows and vials to extravagant art. Much of what you see in this shop was crafted by their hands. They have me acting as their personal courier at times, so I would be very surprised if they wouldn't welcome a charming new courier like yourself."

A brief fondness flashed across Colpeia's features when she eyed the diplomatic woman's scarab motif. It reminded her of a friend. Her smile grew. "I think that's a great idea. We all need to treat ourselves sometime." The elegant script on the menu displayed prices that - while not dirt cheap - were reasonable.

"You as a courier, when you have this fine place to run?" Safrona lifted her eyes from the menu to connect her gaze to Colpeia's once more. "Well, we can't have that, lovely. All you need to do is give your parents my name, and I'll come do my job. I can handle fragile glass well enough too with the travel, and fees can also be settled on before I come for pick up. My specialty's actually connecting businesses and filling client bases, so maybe we'll see both the Oasis and your parent's glassware business growing, yes?"

Her eyes returned to the menu then and began to settle on a decision. "Mm...my inner wine importer is telling me you could use more alcohol for this menu, but let me slide away from that and take some of your Sweet Spice Tea. And...I'm tempted by Desert Dumplings, but I've...." she chuckled. "The meat choices are....different. What do you recommend to pair with the tea?"

Colpeia shrugged a shoulder. "It's something I've done for many years," she replied. Her dark brows lifted at the proposal. "What a generous offer! I'm certain they'll be very happy to speak with you about it. Perhaps they can meet you at a neutral location that's easy to get to?" She chuckled. "I have thought about it. I wanted to focus on tea, but some alcoholic options might be a good idea."

An unsurprised, but somewhat amused glint couldn't help but touch her eye as Safrona ruminated over her meat choice. It wouldn't be the first time she'd heard similar remarks about Tanari cuisine. "Well there's no arguing that," Colpeia agreed. "Desert meat is unique. The sweet and spicy flavors of the tea may go well with something that's subtle and light. So I would recommend the sandworm meat. Silithid is bold, and hyena is milder than lamb but more robust than beef."

"Dalaran is the easiest for me to arrive to as far as neutral cities go. And seeing as much of my business brings me there, I'm there often enough for the odd appointment. They can simply place a reservation at the Ledgermaine Lounge with the barkeep and I'll meet them there and take care of the tab."

Safrona nodded her acceptance on the suggestion, folding the menu to offer it up for the collecting. "Being a courier is...not a very satisfying lifepath to wander for the long run. Take it from me," the Void elf chuckled witheringly. "A good spring point for a while, but even I don't see myself playing delivery girl forever." Her violet gaze took its run down the dusky skinned Colpeia, tilting her head slightly as she did. "You look like you belong here in your little cafe. Not running around about out there making sure people receive their packages on time."

"That's great!" Colpeia smiled. "And so generous of you. I'll tell them. I think they'll be very happy to meet you." She gathered the menu, stowing it somewhere underneath the bar.

She listened patiently. Her gaze on Safrona was deep and open. When the worldly courier finished speaking, Colpeia gave another sincere smile. "Delivering packages for my parents has been something I've done for a long time, but only as an occasional side-job when their schedules were very tight," she reassured. "I'm actually a freelance mathematician. The cafe has become a side job for me, but one I hold dear in the short amount of time it's existed." Her pause was pensive, her golden eyes falling briefly to the floor.

"Our world still bleeds and everyone is tired." Colpeia looked back up at her. "I built this lounge to offer respite, even if for a little while. We all have a role in a time of war. Some believe theirs is to fight in it. Others to heal wounds and keep their friends alive. I think people forget that we need ways to find solace in these times the most, not the least. We all need to be reminded what we fight and are alive for. So I guess for that reason, I absolutely agree with you, Safrona. For now my place is here."

Colpeia's reasonings had the world-worn courier closing her eyes briefly with a small, warmed smile. When she spoke again, another piece of the professional that tried to take over had taken a back seat, letting someone more genuine and perhaps even a little bitter through. "It's true, isn't it? We're all a little predisposed to war like a bad habit. Consistently assigned our roles and thrown at one another for a battle cry in honor or glory of this or that. Told our lives won't be the same if we do not fight for the little piece of land we were born to. Some become weapons. By the time they come home...do they even know how to live anymore? Or is normalcy stripped from us and replaced by the cycle of conditioned violence? As much as I can tell you that war is profit, most of the time its empty gold put right into a cycle, breeding more machines."

The Courier shrugged as her eyes veered away with the same bitter smile. "I don't think war will ever change. People will always have something to fight over, and something will always be trying to deaden Azeroth, because other forces decide our only real, true mercy is the idea of death, or some degree of unified mindlessness. And honestly there are days I wake up and can't find a legitimate argument against that when we are faced with the same old rut, over and over..."

Her unearthly gaze floated back over to the golden-eyed Colpeia with a withering chuckle. "But...that is perhaps more the Void talking than I. And its quieter here, in many aspects. Finding a place like yours, people like you...? It does remind me that some things are still worth putting in the fight for. Living for. Strange that, the little things, yes? Little mortal things like the delight of an oasis in the middle of the desert. A family trying to make the best of things, apart from the call of nations of war. It's important, keeping those little things running. The bakers must bake, the teachers must teach, the vintners must make their wine. The midwives must welcome new life, the pallbearers must put their dead to rest."

Safrona rested her heart-shaped face in the cradle of her fingers, her eyes still alight on her hostess. "I may be a little outside of the cycle of it all, but I find some strange satisfaction in helping keep that quality and culture of life for others in its order more than anything, as a courier. So yes, very much agreed. And I need more people like you in my life, lovely girl."

The air grew pleasantly cool as night fell outside the lounge. Colpeia briefly dipped behind the bar to obtain a clear kettle and cup. Placing them on the countertop, she released a folded pellet of herbs into the kettle's basin, then aimed her curved fingers. A stream of cold water materialized from her palm to trickle inside. It stopped when it was full. Since then, her gaze was present and sincere, never drifting from Safrona's thoughtful monologue. If anything, it deepened. Her manicured palm rested on the kettle's underside while she used subtle magic to heat it.

Safrona's last sentence softened Colpeia's eyes. A smile warm enough to rival the sun from hours ago beamed back at her. "Thank you. I feel lucky to have met you too, Safrona. I think you're doing something important. Couriers help keep the poetry of our world alive." The smile dimmed. "I wish I had reason to disagree with many of the other things you've said. People don't like to see themselves in their enemies. War is easier when you're blind."

A reflective glimpse landed on the back of a human Shafisian waiting a table. "My tribe has a saying for feeling stuck. 'The mind wants to heal.' A lot of people forget how to live normal lives after surviving hell. They don't heal until they decide they're ready. It's a hard journey that often takes a lifetime, if they ever accept it.”

"Death can seem like an easy answer, but I've seen secondhand that it doesn't give us peace. We can't control wars or the mindlessness behind other people's eyes. All we can do is create a mindfulness in ourselves. I think that helps when peace is hard to find." Colpeia's polished nails clinked as she removed her hand. Bubbles and steam now clung to the kettle walls, a vibrant flower blossoming in its pinkish water. Another server reappeared from behind a curtain. He balanced a platter of dumplings in his hand, which he served beside Safrona's now steaming hot tea. Colpeia exchanged nods with him.

The teaflower blooming its gift of bounty for her was it's own touch of magic Safrona had never gave her attention to before no matter how many teahouses she had visited and supplied before this one. Perhaps there was this small, simple meaning now in the generous courtesy of being served by Colpeia and her tribe that gave the moment its credence.

Safrona sat to let the steam and its delicate floral aroma caress her face from the teacup. Little cleansing rituals seemed to fall aside her, a deeper bottle of sin the default to reach for by habit in the knowing of what she was. "It's good," she murmured with a smile after that first sip. The little things. "I think...I simply want to go back to knowing nothing tonight, lovely girl. Other than the fact that I need to come here again, and more often, yes?"

Colpeia smiled. Watching Safrona enjoy her tea gave her a certain warm pleasure. She dipped her head in a sincere bow, her hand raised in a cheshire-esque gesture. "We will always be happy to see you, Safrona. I certainly will."

#warcraft #rp #couriers #safrona shadowsun #colpeia beamgully #ic #coop writing

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divagonzo · 6 years ago

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Consequences - Andromeda Tonks et al

A/N: this spur of the moment story was inspired by This post and This post, by @blitheringmcgonagall and @lytefoot . It’s the first AU on my part... a Snape Lives AU.

Yes, I am writing an AU with Snape living. I know it’s strange, coming from the Dragon.

Rated T for a few choice words and magical violence. Ace safe and it will go up tomorrow on FF.net and Ao3.

“Must you go so early?”

“I have a meeting at 7 with the Directors of MLS and the International Wizarding Confederation. But I will be back in time for tea.” He leaned over and gave her a kiss on the cheek before a peck on the lips. While he departed in a swirl of green flames and purple and gold robes, Andromeda Tonks went back to the modest kitchen of her cottage west of Yeovil, in Somerset. She put a kettle on and sat down to read the news from the morning Daily Prophet, wondering what salacious gossip that dung beetle Rita Skeeter would slander her family with today.

Tap Tap Tap

Andromeda put down the morning paper and went to the window in her kitchen. There stood a magnificent owl, larger than one of the barn owls the school used. The Great Grey Owl hooted softly, looking unlike anything she had seen before. “Who could be owling this early in the morning?”

She opened the window and the owl hopped in. She plucked up some rashers from the pan, cooking up magically, and she handed over one to the owl, who tore it apart immediately. Once down the hatch, the owl hooted again.

“So they need a reply back, do they?”

Hoot Hoot

Andromeda cracked the wax seal on the parchment, recognizing immediately the signet insignia from Hogwarts. Minerva wouldn’t send her an owl if there was anything remiss with her beloved Teddy. No, this must be something else. But the school owls –

“Oh my word!” she gasped reading the scrawl a second time to take it all in. “Well, I’ll be. He is like his Mum that way.” She read it a third time, chuckling at the indignation that dripped with every word written on the parchment, along with a smile breaking out at the fury scratched into the bottom of the parchment stipulating the aforementioned consequences for such behavior.

“You’d think that Headmistress McGonagall would have firecalled me last night after this. Maybe she was too busy keeping order in the school after what happened.

Andromeda went to the secretary, outside of the kitchen, and sat down to write a response to the extraordinary parchment of information before her.

“Dear Mrs. Tonks,

I am writing to you this afternoon to report that your grandson, Edward Lupin, hexed me in front of students in the NEWTS potions section. I am outraged at his behavior and demand that you see to additional consideration for his disrespectful behavior right this instant. How dare he – “

Tap Tap Tap

Andromeda looked up from the parchment and saw a second owl at her window, tapping on the glass. This one, she could only assume came from her recalcitrant grandson, one Teddy Lupin. She pointed her wand at the window and opened it, letting the school barn owl in. She sent him a second rasher, now cooling on the countertop, and took the roll of parchment from him as well. “Does my dear grandson need a reply or can it wait until I send it with this other courier?”

Hooooottttt

“Very good, then. Have another rasher and be on your way, then. Fly safely,” She said out of habit, borne of the years when every bit of correspondence that came to her window set a boulder rolling down her throat and landing with a painful thud in her stomach. She reflected back out of paranoid habit that any time she let Teddy out her sight, even for an hour would give her the worst panic attacks. Thank goodness that she learned to trust Harry, and then Ginny, along with Molly and Bill and Fleur and the rest of the Weasleys with the care of her only grandson.

It took years before she could handle being away more than an hour before a panic attack gripped her heart, making her think it would explode if she didn’t see him that instant, knowing he was safe.

She chuckled at the memory of her former self, one who had lost so much and so many near and dear to her. Now? She trusted her grandson’s Godfather implicitly, along with the Weasleys and those who loved and adored Teddy completely.

She went back to the secretary and sat down at her desk. A bold idea gripped her and she thought, ‘this does deserve my personal attention and not an owl sending a reply.’ He did hex a professor, even if it was for the noblest of reasons.

“Owl, what is your name?”

Hoot Hoooot Hoot

“Vikare, is it? Well, I am going by Floo to Hogwarts. I have an owl carrier. Would you like to travel back in a mere moment rather than fly back?”

Hoooooottttt

“Sorted, then.” Andromeda tucked the parchment in the pocket of her housecoat and set off to her bedroom, intending to dress sharp for her unannounced meeting with the particular professor in question.

“Hogwarts, Headmistress’ fireplace.”

The flames turned bright orange in the parlour fireplace before she pushed her head into the flames. “Headmistress McGonagall, Headmistress?” She knew that Minerva would be present in her quarters but since it was only 8 am on a Friday she gathered that she might actually be in her official office and not her quarters. Then again, she –

“Speaking,” a quiet voice came from the room off of the main one, connecting the spacious quarters for the headmaster/mistress to the office in question.

“Minerva? It’s Andromeda.”

“Andy?” Minerva pulled up a padded chair to the fireplace, intending to sit comfortably and not strain her knees or back at her age. She still had students to deal with in an hour but in front of a dear friend, she could show some vulnerability.

“I received an owl, well, two owls this morning, one from the Potions professor and one from my Grandson. Please tell me that it’s all a misunderstanding.”

Headmistress McGonagall smirked. “Oh I wish I could tell you it’s a misunderstanding but it’s actually the barebones truth. I presume you wish to come through, to talk with your grandson and the professor in question? Will I need to mediate the meeting?”

“It might seem prudent, my dear. Might I come through along with this magnificent specimen of an owl named Vikare? I don’t want the dear bird to tire out from such a long trek back with nothing to deliver.”

“Sure, send him through. I trust you have a Floo-proof cage for him. The last owl that went via cage and no shielding couldn’t fly again for months. Poor fellow kept getting turned around in the first gust of wind.”

Andromeda threw in the Floo Powder, turning the flames green. “My cage is protected, thanks to the nice people at Eeyops and the Weasleys’ Wizarding Wheezes.” She put the enchanted covering on the cage and heard it go completely silent underneath. The magic of the covering was a mild sleeping powder over anything in the cage, where they would sleep through the whole ordeal, only waking a few minutes after the cover was lifted. Whoever came up with that bit of brilliant magic was a genius.

She gently pushed the cage into the fireplace and nudged it into the slipstream, watching it disappear in an instant.

“Do you have the cage?”

“I do. Come through and I will send for your grandson and the professor in question.”

Andromeda stepped into the now empty fireplace and swirled away, remembering to keep her elbows tucked in and her purse in front of her face. At her age, she couldn’t tolerate all of the soot and dust Floo travel entailed now.

“Andy!” Minerva greeted her warmly, letting her brogue slip through some. “I wondered when I would be hearing from you over this situation. I’ve already sent for both of them so they should be here shortly.”

“I assume it happened yesterday?”

“It did, during class. From what I understand of the situation, something upset him earlier in the day, perhaps during his two-hour block of independent study that Pomona has her students engage in this term. Well, from speaking with the other students in the classroom, he came into the room in an epic fit of temper. So I am told, the professor didn’t notice something was very wrong in the classroom and proceeded to start the session, teaching how to brew Dreamless Sleeping potions.

“Well, your grandson cheeked the professor in front of everyone. Now you know the professor in question will not tolerate any insubordination in his classroom, not from anyone.”

“I seem to recall, vaguely. But please, go on.”

“The professor gave immediate detention for it. Your grandson yelled back. The class devolved into chaos and anarchy. Anyway, it got up to a week’s detention before Teddy yelled out what was bothering him so much.”

“And that was?”

The ancient oaken door opened with a loud squeak and there at the door was Teddy Lupin, wearing his robes, hat, and Turquoise blue hair that changed immediately once he saw his grandmother sitting in the headmistress’ office. His hair and eyes shifted to mouse brown and he shrunk down on himself slightly.

“Come in, Mr. Lupin. I was just explaining to your grandmother what happened yesterday.”

“I wish you’d have contacted Uncle Harry,” he muttered.

“I didn’t contact her, Mr. Lupin. I presume the professor sent his own correspondence.”

“I did, Headmistress,” a guttural voice articulated. In the doorway stood Professor Snape, looking worse for wear in his 54 years. “I figured that Mrs. Tonks should know exactly what happened, if not exactly why it happened.”

The professor stumped up each step of the stairs leading to the official office, using a large walking stick with a handle on the end for support. Professor Severus Snape stood there, regarding his disobedient student and the two older witches before him.

His face was scarred horribly on one side, and a large chunk of skin was missing from his face and jaw. Somehow he had survived his wounds inflicted by a magical snake and lived to tell the tale.

“And that would be, Professor Snape?” Andromeda’s voice took on the haughty quality of her Pureblood heritage, looking down upon someone who wasn’t her equal. “Please, do tell me what happened.”

He stumped over and looked at the proffered chair and shook it off. “Your grandson hexed me and this is how I look. Madame Abbot said that the curse will wear off in a month. I have to admit that it was a ruthless bit of brilliance on the part of Mr. Lupin, who seems to have a penchant for taking after his father.”

“You leave him out of this, you bastard.”

“Edward, enough.” Andromeda looked over at her shoulder at her grandson who had the smarts to keep quiet when his grandmother used his formal name. She turned back to the professor and fought down a grin of her own.

Professor Snape stood at the corner of the desk, complete with a long bushy tail, recessed pointed ears that lay flat against his sallow skin and scalp, and was covered in dark grey fur, minus the scar on his face. With his recessed brown eyes and elongated hands, he appeared like he accidentally took Polyjuice potion that had been contaminated with wolf fur.

“Your grandson hexed me, in the middle of class, in front of all of the NEWTs students. It was an uncalled for attack, without provocation – “

“Liar! You know what you did, you sorry – “

“Teddy,” Andromeda’s voice dropped to barely above a whisper, “One more word from you unasked and I will have to silence you myself. I know you would despise not getting a chance to speak up for yourself.”

“Yes, Grandmother.”

“Good lad,” She turned back to the others and saw Minerva with a ghost of a grin on her face, gone immediately. “You were saying, Professor Snape? You said that it was without provocation? My grandson wouldn’t act impulsively, not without excellent reasons, unless you are questioning my childrearing skills.”

The two others had a staring contest and Professor Snape blinked first. He didn’t reply to her unasked question.

“I didn’t think so. Now, it’s obvious that my grandson cursed you with what appears is a non-permanent version of Lupus mutatio lupinotuum pectinem. I assume that is the one you used, correct Teddy?” He nodded solemnly. “But it appears you missed one flick of the wand since the professor here looks incredibly like himself.”

“Probably,” he muttered.

“Did you intend to use that particular spell on him when you cursed him?”

He lifted his chin and his hair went candy floss pink, along with his eyes. “I did. I don’t deny I did it.”

“Why did you, Mr. Lupin?” Professor Snape tried to speak softly but it ended in a slight yip.

“Isn’t it obvious, Professor?” Teddy sneered. “I read what you did, you sod. You outed him. You, of all people. It ’s ‘cause of you that he couldn’t work, ‘cause of you that he was homeless and knotless. Its cause of you that he – “

“Enough,” Professor Snape barked. “Yes, I did out your Father. Would you like to know everything?”

Teddy’s hair turned jet black and prompted green eyes. “I already do know everything,” his answer came out like a slight hiss. “My Godfather told me everything, along with Barrister Granger.”

“Ah, so they told you the child’s version, it seems, in dealing with a dangerous fugitive – “

“Severus, I would be wise to not speak so harshly about my favorite cousin, one that it turns out the ministry made a mockery of justice in condemning him without a trial, subjecting him to the horrors of Azkaban without a trial, much less the fact that you tried to have him along with my son-in-law receive a Dementor’s Kiss out of furious fit of pique. See, I also spoke with Director Potter in regards to everything involving my son-in-law after he and his wife perished that night, one that somehow you survived miraculously, while still grievously injured.” She huffed, slightly. “Teddy, since I think you used the one in question; it’s designed to last until the next full moon, correct?”

“Yes, Grandmother. I wanted the – “

“Mr. Lupin, you’re in enough trouble as it is already.”

He cleared his throat. “I wanted the Professor to know what it felt like as my Father, to know how he was shunned when he was outed, being the monster that mothers tell their children to behave. You intentionally did it, because you were upset to not be awarded something important and so ruined his life financially, using the Toad’s help in the Ministry.”

“A month, you say? Surely there is a counter-curse.”

Andromeda smiled. It was wicked. “Oh, there is one. It’s a Black family secret. But the pain is too much to bear for most mere mortals. It forces you to change back into human form within an hour. Most perish from the agony of the pain of a lycanthropic change unless they are already contaminated with a werewolf bite.”

“He hexed me, Mrs. Tonks.”

She glanced back at Teddy, smiling warmly. “What a tragedy,” She turned back to the Professor standing aside the desk, “just like your birth.” Andromeda turned to Headmistress McGonagall. “Since my Grandson did attack a professor, even with provocation, he still must be punished. I won’t abide him getting away with things like his mother did repeatedly.”

“He should be expelled and do time in Azkaban.”

“No, I don’t think so, Professor Snape. You seem to have done enough damage to my family to last three lifetimes. No, I think that Teddy should have to do detentions with you every night until the curse wears off.” Andromeda turned back to her Grandson, who was standing tall, looking much like his father, but with candy floss hair and turquoise eyes. “Yes, a month’s detention should suffice. “It’s only fitting since you seemed to have escaped most of the consequences for your choices, Severus. However, my Grandson is nothing like you.”

“I will have him for a month, on top of being a bloody wolf?”

“Severus, I concur with the decision. A month’s worth of detentions with you should suffice as punishment, especially in light of the fact that you stood aside while students were tortured when you were Headmaster that year.”

“We’ll discuss that later, Headmistress.” He stomped off with his walking stick, escaping the other witches penetrating gazes.

“Mr. Lupin, you have class shortly. I suggest that you not be tardy.” Professor McGonagall gave Teddy a look. He went over to hug his grandmother and a peck on the cheek before dashing out of the office and down the stairs towards his next lessons.

#Dragon's Fic #hpfic #Teddy Lupin #Andromeda Tonks #Minerva McGonagall #Severus Snape #Rated T #some little bit of innuendo #and those who know me know who I have an appreciated post-war ship for Andromeda #The robes should give it away #Will post on Ao3 and FF tomorrow #it's late tonight here #Queue Up for the Dragon

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the-royal-courier · 7 years ago

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Azeroth Works: Writing is Fullfilling Work

By Sky Stoneseat

(Editor’s OOC Note: This interview was conducted on a real life author who just so happens to find interest in our little roleplaying community. She does not play World of Warcraft but we wanted to share this in the hopes of inspiring all of you out there who write on tumblr or in game. Please take the IC as a little tongue in cheek.)

While we here at the Royal Courier strive to be the best source of news in Azorth, today we offer up something a bit different. We bring you something that is from another realm in the hopes that you may find it interesting.

We know that many of you write in your spare time, so I sat down with an author from "Earth" who was kind enough to share some tips that she uses. J.M. Frey is an author, fanthropologist and professional smartypants on AMI Radio’s Live From Studio 5. She’s appeared in podcasts, documentaries, and on television to discuss all things geeky through the lens of academia. She also has an addiction to scarves, Doctor Who, and tea, which may or may not all be related. Her life’s ambitions are to have stepped foot on every continent (only 3 left!)Her debut novel TRIPTYCH was nominated for two Lambda Literary Awards, won the San Francisco Book Festival award for SF/F, was nominated for a 2011 CBC Bookie, was named one of The Advocate’s Best Overlooked Books of 2011, and garnered both a starred review and a place among the Best Books of 2011 from Publishers Weekly.

Lucky for us dear readers that she found time to sit down and chat.

Any tips for getting into the mood for writing?

For me, writing is a full time job, so to get in the mood to write I get up, get dressed, have tea, and basically prepare to sit down at the computer as if it is a real dayjob. That gets me into the headspace required, that “this is work, so work” mode.

But in terms of environment, I like it as uncluttered as possible. Nice lighting, daylight, and only the notes for the project that’s currently on the docket pinned to the board beside me. I really prefer silence, too. I absolutely cannot write in public spaces, and if there’s any noise at all, it’s got to be white noise – either from outside of my window or an online digital generator.

The only raging, noisey mess should be inside my head. When creating a character what are some ways to build an interesting back story's that feel fresh?

There’s a idiom that creatives use about avoiding the low-hanging fruit. The thought is that the first idea within grabbing range might be the most appealing, but it’s also probably going to be the most obvious and the most over-used.

However, sometimes your first instinct is the right one. I always grab the low-hanging fruit, but then – to stretch the metaphor – figure out the best way to turn it into fruit salad. Clichés are clichés because they work, but that should always and only be a starting point.

I like to come at my stories from the perspective of the person who is least often allowed their own voice in common narrative. For example, my series The Accidental Turn is a standard sword-and-sorcery epic fantasy. But instead of making the muscle-bound hero or the scrappy sidekick the narrator, I chose the hero’s overlooked, overshadowed little brother.

The low-hanging-fruit approach to this brother character says that he ought to be craven, cowardly, perhaps even sneaky or secretly the villain. So I thought, yes, okay, let’s give him those traits. Because that’s what’s expected. But let’s figure out a different reason for them. Why does he behave like that? What made him like this? How much is nature, how much is nurture?

Instead of being craven because he’s “just a bad person”, the little brother is quiet and withdrawn because his older brother used to bully him. Instead of being sneaky because he’s plotting, it’s because he’s actually secretly a spy for the king, on the side of good. This led to all sorts of neat things to explore in his backstory – who chose him to be a spy? Why? Who trained him? How? What purpose is there to have a spy planted in the home of the hero?

When you try to find different motivations for common traits, then you start to get into really interesting territory for backstory and character creation. And their reactions are going to be totally different, too – the way these characters address problems or react to violence will be fascinating, because the motivations and backgrounds you’ve created for them is new and interesting.

Any thoughts on a character who a bit go big or go home vs a slow burn sort?

For me, characters fit the kind of story I am telling and the kind of narrative and growth arc they need to have.

Kintyre Turn, the hero of my fantasy series, is defiantly a Go Big guy. He starts out with being gifted a magic sword at the age of eighteen, and the complete inability to ever lose. He’s got a big ego, big muscles, bit personality. And he’s great, he fits what I needed from him perfectly; but I also found with him that there was nowhere left to go. He was too big. There was no upward growth available. I found an arc for him by letting him shrink inside his own skin again. He puts away the sword, and the mantle of the hero, and starts to attend to his own mental health, in repairing and nurturing the relationships around him, and swapping places with his little brother to become the caretaker of their family estate, in allowing himself to stop running from commitment and finding domestic peace and a loving partner. Pulling Kintyre away from the Big and Bold gave him growth.

His brother Forsyth was the opposite. He started small – physically skinny, shorter than Kintyre, swaddling himself in too many house robes and the mantel of the prim, fastidious Lord of the Manor. He even stooped and stutters. He’s the King’s secret Spymaster, but even then he works from behind a desk and lets others do the legwork. He is a Slow Burn character. He grows by increments as he becomes surer of himself and his worth. He stands straight. He learns not to be ashamed of his stutter. He goes out into the world and wields a sword and becomes a hero.

But, going back to what I said about backstory above, his background and motivations mean that he is a Ravenclaw hero rather than a Gryffindor. He would rather talk his way out of things, or think through loopholes, or outwit his opponents than beat them down with a blade.

Both Go Big and Slow Burn types of characters are useful. It’s just a matter of knowing (or learning as you go) which kind is better for the sort of story you’re telling and where you need it to go. And always remember that there’s always an avenue of growth available somewhere; you just need to find it.

Dialogue can be tricky to get right, how do you create conversation that both moves the plot but is not an info dump? My first rule is to completely avoid “As you know…” or “As I said before…” or “I just remembered that…” in dialogue. If the characters already know, then the audience should already know. And if the audience knows already, there’s no need to repeat it. If they don’t know it already, then you’re telling the story in the wrong order, or writing the wrong moments.

Focus your scenes on the moment when the character learns the information, rather than on the scenes where they report the information.

If you can’t do that, then try to keep as much of a natural flow in the dialogue as possible. Listen to people in coffee shops or pay attention at your own family dinners. Note the natural ebbs and flows, where people interrupt for clarification or pause to gather their thoughts. Watch what they do with their hands, their bodies. Watch how they fidget, or pace, or tap their sugar packets on the table top. Describing the body language will help break up large paragraphs, especially if you can use that body language to convey the character’s emotions or reactions to the news. To show instead of tell.

When I’m not sure if the dialogue is working, I strip it down into a script – dialogue only – and ask a friend to read the scene out loud with me. If it sounds unnatural or repetitive, it trips and jams in my ear. Reading your dialogue out loud, either alone or with a friend you trust to be brutally honest with you, is a great way to catch unnatural errors.

There’s also the trick of giving the characters something to do. They don’t have to be sitting in an office, or in a car, or at the kitchen table. They could be hiking, or chasing a suspect, or fighting off a barbarian horde, or slaying a dragon, or skulking through an abandoned spaceship. There’s nothing saying that the info dump has to come at a moment of stillness and quiet.

And remember that the moment of revelation should be the climax of the scene. Each scene should have its own mini-plot-mountain-rising-action-course. Instigating, rising action, climax, and then either cut to a new scene or a brief denouement. Something should happen in every scene – some information discovered or revealed, a character changes or grows, there’s a scene of action, or the plot leaps forward, etc.

Scenes that do more than one of those things are even better. Info-dump scenes don’t feel so boring if they’re happening in the middle of a sex scene, or a fighting scene, or a scene in a laboratory, or a travelling scene.

Is the look of your characters set before you start writing or do they change as you get to know them? Sometimes my character walk into my head fully formed –Forsyth strolled in one day, prim as you please, a skinny ginger amalgamation of Eddie Redmayne, Mark Gatiss, and David Thewliss. But some characters I deliberately sit down to design to compliment the world and what I need from them. For example, if Forsyth was the skinny ginger kid, then Kintyre had to be big, buff, tanned, and straight from the cover of a Harlequinn novel.

From there they sometimes change as the need arises – like, knowing a certain physical trait would be useful to solve a problem, so I go back and retroactively put it in.

But I try to be deliberate about my choices too. In the final book of The Accidental Turn series, our heroes step off the pages and into “the real world”. So I made a point of making every other character around them non-white. Fantasy tradition, which is what the series is commenting on, dictates that the heroes are always white and the PoC-representative characters are always monsters or half-something-or-other. I wanted the “real world” to reflect the world I actually live in. And choosing a variety of ethnicities for each character meant that I had an idea of how they would look and – stereotypically, based on their social standing, religion, personal culture, and country of origin – how they might dress.

But even then, I had a great time flouting those stereotypes. One of my favorite new characters is a first-generation Indian girl living in Toronto named Ahbni, who is totally into both respecting her parent’s home culture and a rainbow unicorn pastel-punk.

Once the character has been nebulously envisioned in my head, I write down the basics so I don’t forget them – eye color, hair color, height, weight, identifying features like freckles or piercings or tattoos – but then I don’t worry too much about it. If something important to their appearance comes up in the text (like Forsyth’s fear that his little tummy paunch means that he’s getting fat) then I describe it. But after I’ve described the character on the page for the first time, I don’t really bother doing it again.

I know that no matter what I say, the audience will envision them how they like, and I don’t mind that. Though I do make a point of trying to give a really clear, and quick, and immediate description of the character when we first meet them, something that really stands out to the reader.

And I try to avoid describing my narrator characters except in the comments of others. Nobody stands in front of a mirror and describes themselves or evaluates their own bodies for sexiness in real life. Please, can we chuck that narrative trope straight out the window?

There’s no need to tell the reader outright exactly what the narrator looks like, unless it is an extremely important narrative reason. Reveal it through showing, not telling. Reveal it in the character’s choices, what other characters say about them, how they react to situations. Find a way to be active about it, not passive.

Your readership is clever – let them put the clues together themselves. Trust them.

You can find out more about J.M and her work at http://jmfrey.net/books/ or follow her @scifrey here on Tumblr.

Editor Note: Do you have an interesting job? Is your work something out of the ordinary? Do you simply take great pride in what you do? Columnist Sky Stoneseat wants to interview you!

Reach out today and be a part of this exciting new column. We want to highlight you and your line of work!

(OOC Note: We are looking for individuals who want to share the ins and outs of their RP job. These interviews will be conducted solely over tumblr. You’ll be sent a set of questions and asked to reply in private to Sky. Once she has your responses, you may get a few follow up question over Tumblr chat. The responses will be used to write up short and sweet profiles of interesting jobs around Azeroth. Contact @skystoneseat today to schedule your profile!)

#WRA RP #rp #wra people #Skys

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musingsofmaniacs · 6 years ago

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We Two Dervishes: Istanbul Diaries

If you do not wish to read the whole article but are interested in a typical itinerary and tips, skip to the last section. Important tips are highlighted in Bold also.

Courtesy: Mehmet Gören (Pintrest)

Pins and Needles

To think that this trip almost never happened.

ProTip: Take the visa rules very seriously. The spirit doesn’t matter, the letter absolutely does. Also, never overestimate Consulates and Visa centres, if they say it will take 10 days, take it to mean that it will take 11 days at least and prepare accordingly.

4 days until the trip, no visa in hand, sleepless nights, continuously refreshing the VFS website for any change in the status of arrival of Visa from Mumbai to Ahmedabad, estimating time it takes for courier services to deliver a package from Mumbai to Ahmedabad and constantly flitting between self reassurance and sick-in-the-stomach worry that visa won’t arrive on time. If only we had been a day early, the situation where a small delay could fully derail the trip I have wanted to take for a long time would not have precipitated, and all the preparation, from ordering The Museum of Innocence, to vividly imagining/dreaming of being there would sink in front of our eyes. To say nothing of the monetary loss, because we had booked non-refundable flights.

The visa arrived two and a half hours before our departure to Mumbai. The VFS staff weren’t sure when the damn thing would come, so we just decided to camp out in front of the visa centre and wait for the Blue Dart mini-truck. Fortunately they were expecting a delivery in the evening, and they were kind enough to give our visas to us after their working hours (Visa Centres and Consulates are strict about their working hours. Fervently so). I am not sure when the last time I had a tsunami of relief wash over was. The package soon arrived and we heard the guard talking amongst themselves about arrival of Japanese, American, and to our good fortune, Turkish. We ran to Forex centre close by, requesting them on phone to stay open for a little while (thankfully, they wanted our business) and managed to buy a modest sum of 230 Euros, because that’s all the Euros they had.

Sigh of Relief

Battlefield

I would like to argue that the first country out of my own that I have stepped on is Turkey and that layovers don’t count, because boy Kuwait City was disappointing. The only fascinating thing that one can see in the darkness before dawn break are the fires in the oil fields. Kuwait City, especially the area around the airport looks like an empty abandoned desert, and it should because it is far from the actual Kuwait City. If you look at the map of Kuwait, you will be struck by the featurelessness of the country, apart from the dense network of roads around a small tip that is Kuwait City. The airliner from Mumbai had nice food (as airplane foods go), and a courteous and diverse staff: You had an Indian, an Arabian, a Caucasian, an African, and an Asian. The Cinema and TV selection were average, but the movies were heavily censored. Even words like ‘Hell’ were muted, and absolutely no scenes of intimacy, even those that would be demure by Bollywood standards!

The airport has 2 terminals. The old one receives flights from Mumbai, and the new modern terminal services to Istanbul. The ground staff, or the lack of them is particularly pain in the ass. It was 6a.m and passengers were to be transferred to new terminal, and the staff was scrambling to get the security officer and the bus driver to service the passengers, causing delays. This worried me a bit during the onward flight, because the return flight, we had a layover of meagre 1 hour 25 min. (And my fears came true. The return flight departed half an hour late from Istanbul, because of a fuel leakage which stalled our take-off and put us right at the end of the queue. We had to scramble to get to put flight to Mumbai, because guess what, it rained that day. In a desert.) The Security check was especially very adamant on checking each and every item in the baggage. In fact, they didn’t even allow us the toothpaste, so we had to go foul mouthed all the way till our hotel at Istanbul!

The ground staff of the airport comprised mostly of, you guessed it, immigrants. And of those, most of them are South Asians. And of those, most of them appeared Malayalis, fulfilling the Gulf dream as their counterparts elsewhere. You can easily get by with Hindi around the airport at least. And the toilets do not have urinals! This complies with the personal law prescribed in Islam. The washrooms at Istanbul do have the urinals though.

KWI of course was a battlefield in the Battle of Kuwait International Airport, a significant battle of the Gulf War between US and allies and occupying Iraq led by Saddam Hussein.

Where Airlift was Set

Why Istanbul?

Because Istanbul is magical. A place where the streets whisper to you the tales the glory and doom, rise and fall; ascension and declination of emperors, sultans and revolutionaries; not unlike the undulating terrain it occupies. The place where the East meets West, the great continents and civilisations of Asia and Europe face off across a narrow waterbody that also connects North with the South. To see Istanbul, to understand Istanbul is to understand the history of the culture and civilisation of a major part of the world, in fact the world itself. Devout muslims, avid history buffs, Europhiles, party creatures- they will all find in the ruins and the glory of the city what they are looking for.

Istanbul is a time capsule, a place where time is laid out in space like a spread out deck of cards.

A stock photo

It’s a Church! It’s a Mosque! It’s Museum!

My fascination with Ayasofya or Hagia Sophia, or the magnitude of it, is somewhat a puzzle to me. I do not know why I have been entranced by this beautiful, beautiful Eastern Roman/Ottoman marvel. I know for certain it began when I first read about it in Netfundu magazine in my school days. Netfundu was a kiddie magazine complimentary during the heydays of Indian Airlines, the domestic govt. operated carrier before it was disastrously merged with Air India. Maybe it was about the name or it was about the architecture, but it never escaped my imagination after that. It is an important must see for travellers visiting Istanbul, and is one of those things that do not disappoint, despite a small part of it being covered with scaffolding for renovation.

Where else will you see Jesus, Mary, Allah and Muhammad together in one single place?

After capturing Constantinople, the Ottomans removed or plastered over mosaics and images of Jesus, Mary, Constantine, Justinian and various other Byzantine Emperors from the walls, as Islam prohibits representation of human figures because no one but Allah is allowed to create. This is the reason why Topkapı, Blue Mosque and all the other Ottoman palaces (Not Dolmabahçe; we will come to that) are covered with exquisite tiles and carpets as decoration and not paintings, as a guide we shamelessly eavesdropped at Blue Mosque tried to explain his captive (and paying) group. Orhan Pamuk’s masterpiece My Name Is Red, the book that put in me the fascination to visit Istanbul, devotes a considerable portion of his book discussing this aspect of Islamic philosophy, of prohibition of creating realistic portraits, thereby challenging Allah. This attitude is reflected even now, with reports of Modern day Saudi Arabia destroying historical artifacts around Mecca to build hotels. Or ISIS destroying Palmyra. Sultan Mehmed II, the conqueror (Fatih, which now renders its name to the UNESCO heritage historic area of the old city. Note similarity to the Hindustani word ‘Fateh’) ordered a massacre of Roman residents, then asked for muslim immigrants to settle Constantinople, and converted Hagia Sophia, the ‘Church of Wisdom’, into a mosque.

The images that we see of Jesus, Mary and the other kings were restored by Swiss-Italians Fossati Brothers, entrusted with the task of renovating the mosque by Sultan Abdulmecid to renovate Hagia Sophia. Many old, precious mosaics are still lurking under the ones plastered over.

The church that stands today is actually the third iteration. Two were destroyed by fire and riots before Emperor Justinian built the third in 537 AD. The ruins of the 2nd Ayasofya found in excavations are put to display outside the building. The White marbles and sheeps will catch your eye.

Once you go inside, you will see hung on the wall a proclamation by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the father of the modern Republic, and his cabinet secularising the mosque by converting it into the museum. This makes one realise that Hagia Sophia houses inside itself the history and the character of the city of Istanbul, and of Turkey itself. From Romans, to Ottomans, to the new secular republic, Ayasofya is a time capsule, having stubbornly endured earthquakes and conquests and the hyper-secularisation. It feels as if the monument now stands before you and whispers to you the story of Istanbul and indeed of civilisation it has witnessed. For those with a sense of history, Ayasofya cannot be anything but fascinating, and there is no building like it anywhere.

As for the grandeur of the interior, I will let the images do the talking.

Pro Tip: Get the ticket for Ayasofya, Topkapı and Archaeology museum together for 135TL instead of getting them individually. All are worth a visit.

Hey kitty kitty! Istanbul’s cats, like her Sultans, are fat!

Blue Mosque, the second jewel of Sultanahmet sitting right next to Ayasofya, was unfortunately under renovation, so a lot of it was covered. We managed to witness some of the famed Iznik tiling anyway. Note how this and all of the other mosques in Istanbul, and in fact the rest of the Turkey, are influenced by Ayasofya. One interesting thing we noted was that the instructions outside the gate urges the visitors to refrain from, among other things, kissing inside the Mosque. Helpful tip.

Blue Mosque seen from Ayasofya window

The fame of Blue Mosque, or Sultanahmet Mosque (Camii, pronounced Jami. Similarity with Hindustani to be noted) somewhat eclipses that of Suleymaniye Mosque, named after Suleiman the Magnificent, the ruler during the golden ages of Ottoman Empire. That should not dissuade anybody from paying it a visit, because it is indeed at par with its more famous counterpart, and lot less crowded. We obviously enjoyed it more because of the restoration at Blue Mosque. The minimalism and unassuming nature of the interior complements the huge size of the interior. Free pamphlets and small books explaining Islam are distributed inside, and we helped ourselves to some.

Walls of Suleymaniye Mosque

Steamy

At night, we decided to try one of those famous Turkish baths, or Hamam. Most hotels will know who to call for their customers, and Mihriban hooked us up with Gedikpasa Hamam, somewhere in the mesh of cobblestoned streets, touristy hotels and heritage structures that is Sultanahmet. It was pretty cool because I had read that it was one of the oldest Hamams that still existed, probably the oldest, as it was established by the eponymous Pasha in 1453. Turns out, they have a pick-up from and drop-to service, and a big van pulled up in front of our hotel. We climbed in, and off it went, cruising confidently like it had done before umpteen times through the narrow lines and sloped terrains to an old establishment with a facade that might render it inconspicuous among the densely packed shops and restaurants, but on entering you will find yourself amongst a relic, a living history.

You are told about the various services by the receptionist, like you can use the Hamam yourself for about 80 TL, or you could get a foam bath and massage from a staff for 120 TL. For a few more bucks, you could get a honey massage, but we didn’t fancy it that much. You are led to a room where you keep your belongings and change into a towel,and tie the key on your wrist. After washing oneself, one enters the steam chamber.

The steam chamber, the actual shvitz, has marble flooring and plastered ceiling, which is dome shaped, and an aura of antiquity that makes you realise that you are sharing a public bath with 550 years of history. This feeling, perhaps encapsulates the entire spirit of Sultanahmet and Istanbul itself. The warmth of hot steam soothes you from the cold of outside, and the steam feels cleansing, although one’s breathing becomes a tad bit belaboured due to the temperature and steam content of the air. Soumya rushes in and tells excitedly that there was a guy who just took of his towel in the corridor without a care!

And soon somebody came to take out ours. An old gentleman, whose name I couldn’t catch because of the language and accent barrier asked me to sit in a corner, near a tap with a basin below it created out of a parapet of diminutive height. He started rubbing me with the foam HARD, as if trying to wipe away my epidermis. Tiny, black-brown, spindle shaped dirt started to roll away as he pulled back his hands during the violent rubbing, leaving a pink skin it its wake. He did this on the limbs, and then in the central raised floor, made me lie down, and removed my towel. For the briefest moment, I was fully in my birthday suit, lathered up it was far, far from being sensual. I also managed to catch another gentleman getting the same rubbing down. Only he was upside-down, with towel covering the valley between the hills, making it perfectly clear what awaited me. The awkward agony ended when the gentleman rearranged my towel to closely cover the unmentionables, and begin the intense massaging that flitted around the boundary of pain and pleasure. Then he overturned me and proceeded with my back and sciatica. I was able to muffle my screams of agony/ecstacy, but Soumya was crying (moaning?) out loud in response to his masseuse’s strong hands.

A file photo from the Hamam website

At the end of it, he took me back to the bathing place and cleaned off the foam. Shook hands with me and said something with the word 50. Either he was talking about his age, or about the tip (Which would have been too much, almost half the cost of the whole service).

After one is done with steam and massage, one can wash it off and cool it in a green pool in a cave like niche, finishing off a wholly tranquilizing experience in a high.

The Tale of Two Palaces

Topkapı Palace is actually a Royal complex, with multiple courtyards having buildings and rooms that served various royal functions: schooling, receiving diplomats, circumcising princes, meeting general public. Standard stuff. The highlight of Topkapı though is the one room where they don’t allow photography: The room that contains artefacts that are believed to be personal belongings of prophets in like Moses, David, Abraham, and Muhammad. It also has sacred relics from Kaaba including the door for the Kaaba. The caliphate passed on to Ottomans after their conquest of Mecca in 1517, and they brought in many holy relics from Mecca to be stored in Topkapı, including dentures and hair of Prophet Muhammad.

Courtesy: getyourguide.com

One gets a peak of the lives of Sultans in the empire from visiting the harem. Harem is the private part of the palace, and is where Sultan, his countless mistresses and the head of the household, the Valide Sultan or Sultan’s widowed mother lived. There is a separate ticket for Harems in all palaces, about 30 TL. A package deal may cost less, so take it. Since any given Sultan with his countless harems is bound to have many children, all equally entitled to the throne, almost every succession involves fratricide i.e. potential successor killing off all of his brothers to establish his succession. After Mehmed II, as I learned later through fascinating Wikipedia (back home) and Quora articles, the practice was even codified and considered a rite of passage! As I looked at the corridors, the walls, the exquisite washrooms and the magnificent rooms, I could not help but wonder of all the drama and palace intrigues that would have taken place in the harems with their shehzades, Valides, concubines, wives,eunuchs, soldiers and assassins maybe?

Panorama of the entrance

Famed Iznik tile works

One of the most remarkable dome interiors in the beautiful white dome of the library. Mesmerised, we spent longer than usual staring at this stunning dome. As mentioned earlier, the main decorations in the palaces and mosques are accomplished using tiles and carpets since representation was not allowed. There are 1-2 paintings in the administrative chambers though, that too miniatures.

The Library dome

Topkapı is located at the tip of Fatih area overlooking stunning views of Bosphorus. This makes slightly overpriced restaurant at Topkapı, Konyali, worth a try, because as you can see, it makes for a kickass picture.

Bliss atop @ Konyali restaurant

For all its glory and its size, Topkapı is still somewhat...humble. Of course, it is very difficult a claim with your gates, size, views and separate rooms for shehzade’s circumcision, but if you compare it with a typical European palace, like say The Hermitage of St. Petersburg (of which I have only gone through a coffee table book), the palace complex is unassuming and not grandiose.

This realisation strikes you only when you visit the Dolmabahçe Palace. Sultan Abdulmecid I had a somewhat similar idea, and decided that he deserved a palace just like his European peers elsewhere, even if it costed the empire a quarter of its tax revenues that year. The financial hole that the palace made contributed to the empire’s nickname as ‘the sick man of Europe’.But what a hole! The tourists with a 90TL combo ticket (Muzekart, in case any overplanned enthusiastic tourist has taken, is not accepted here) would certainly say it was worth it.

The European style imposing entrance

Dolmabahçe means ‘filled-in Gardens’, and before entering the palace after the majestic entrance, you do see beautiful gardens all around. Do take a lot of the photos, because inside photography is not allowed. My friend tried to take some, but was spotted by the guards,who only asked him politely not to do it again. Because not taking photographs when you see something like Ceremonial Hall at the end of the palace tour is just a shame. So here is an image with bent perspective of the impossibly huge hall with a chandelier that was a present from Queen Victoria, because I suppose it is impossible to capture the grandeur of the entire hall in a single frame. Places like these make you feel like staying longer because of the mild fear that there is one bit of detail you might have missed out.

Ceremonial Hall

Dolmabahçe palace is not administered by the Ministry of Culture and is not a full museum, but is administered by Ministry of Palaces, because it is an amazing venue for hosting important summits and State dinners.

The highlight of Harem tour, that is after the palace tour, is the bed draped in National flag where the father of the Turkish Republic, Kemal Ataturk breathed his last. The clock by the table indicates his time of death. Every year, at 0905 on 10 Nov (Just 1 day after we left, because I did not know of this), the entire nation comes to a standstill in remembrance. Check out a link I have provided at the end and be amazed with the respect he commands. Also, it is recommended to read up about Ataturk, a fascinating figure in the 20th Century whose ideas about secularism in a 96% Sunni Muslim country that once held the keys to the Kaaba are at the same time inspiring and polarising and a bit of a cautionary tale about repercussions of imposing radical changes into a society.

Pro Tip: When I asked for Turkish Coffee with sugar, they gave me a small Lokum (Turkish Delight) with it. It was covered in powdered sugar, so foolishly I put it in, before realising my mistake. So, don't do that. The right way is to take a sip, then take a bite and so on. I had to fish it out with the stirrer. Fortunately, it was still very, very delicious.

Dolmabahçe is out and out a European palace, a far cry from spartan austerity that is the hallmark of Islamic teachings. It was so overwhelming that we did not possess any more mental strength to go see the painting halls consisting of the works of art commissioned by the Europe loving Sultans and many by the last Caliph, a patron of arts and a painter himself, Abdulmecid II. History buffs will be interested to know that this Caliph’s ousting prompted the Khilafat Movement in India during the WWI. We then headed to ‘check off one of my items on bucket list’, however cheesy and corny it might sound.

Kemal and Fusun

Orhan Pamuk is a divisive figure in Turkey. His Nobel win is touted by many as political, to force the hand of the state in the suit against him claiming he insulted the republic by recognising or hinting at Armenian Genocide. He is a somewhat liberal figure, not liked by nationalists in general. Mihriban, our hotel receptionist, guide and friend also stated that she disagrees with the politics of Pamuk, but seemed fascinated by the idea of the museum and wondered why she never went there.

Me with each of the 4000 cigarettes that touched Fusun’s lips and had a mark of her lipstick to show for that. Pamuk’s protagonist is a melancholic, lovelorn, a a teeniest bit creepy (at least by today’s standards)

For people like me, borderline fanboys, we love his fascinating depiction of the mundane and his brilliant analysis and exposition of a nation struggling with its Westernising aspirations and traditions, and his exploration of a city that has a hankering for everything European and longing for the glorious days of the empire. My Name is Red and Istanbul: Memoirs of a City (that I read after coming back) are highly recommended.

Museum of Innocence is also a similar work where the protagonist who is somewhat like the author himself, belonging to the ‘society’ that shuns everything traditional and lives among the cocktail parties and fancy luncheons and everything else Western, falls for his cousin, a girl from a traditional Muslim family living in a crumbling middle class neighbourhood. Kemal has a bit of kleptomania which he likes to call his fascination with ordinary items, and everytime he visits Fusun’s house, he steals a small item from there. Eventually his collection grows so large that he makes a museum out of it, dedicated to Fusun. Orhan Pamuk made the exact museum with every item Kemal ‘stole’ in the book at the location where Fusun’s family ‘lived’. This fascinating concept of a museum complementing a book makes it a must visit if one admires Orhan Pamuk. What more, if you have the book, then your entry is without fee, and on a particular location in the book, there is a box where they stamp it. The book keeps referencing the museum and this stamped space is indeed a part of the story, making the book and museum complete in themself! Each chapter in the book has a shelf with exhibit dedicated so a Pro Tip: Buy an audio guide for only 5 TL. Each exhibit is explained by Orhan Pamuk and an actor essaying the role of Kemal (Yes, Orhan the author indeed makes an appearance in the book. As I said earlier, the book is complete in itself).

Pamuk’s scribbles

It is recommended that one visit the website of Museum of Innocence to check out Orhan Pamuk’s idea of a Museum.

The Most Instagrammable Neighborhood

Karaköy is probably called that because of its interesting graffitis, mesmerizing cobblestoned narrow alleys and the Galata Tower that rises from the middle. Travellers are forewarned that there will be a huge line at the Galata Tower in the peak season. But once you get on the top, you know why.

Galata Tower was built in the Genoese colony as a sentry tower and also as a tower to forewarn about any fire incidents in the city. So it is ironic that the tower itself fell victim to fire, and that is one amongst the umpteen times the tower has been damaged and rebuilt. It is now the primary fixture of the Golden Horn and the Istanbul skyline, and from the top, one can see all of Istanbul, from the Topkapı Palace, Ayasofya and Blue Mosque on one side to brightly illuminated 15 July Martyrs Bridge (formerly called Bosphorus bridge, renamed after the 2016 coup attempt) on the other. We climbed (rather, took an elevator) on top in the evening, in a crisp and beautiful weather, and then something fascinating happened: multiple Ottoman style mosques interspersed across the city start playing the Azan with remarkable synchronization. There are few experiences that are as unforgettable as this one, and this indeed is a quintessential Istanbul experience. It would have been nice to have a çay(chai) at this moment, but we took so much time to soak up the views of the strait and the streets (remember the FOMO anxiety we talked about in the palaces section?), that by the time we went inside to the restaurant at the top of the tower, it was closed.

Galata Tower

There was a 4D Istanbul tour waiting for us downstairs on the 3rd floor though, which takes on this simulated helicopter ride across and inside the major landmarks in the city. It’s fun, despite of it sounding a bit pedestrian (I am talking about the population that finds things like these and roller coasters nothing more than gimmicky); go for it.

The other thing that one must do in Karaköy is simply walk around and soak up the sights and sounds. And eat a delicious, mouthwatering, big baklava at Karaköy Güllüoğlu for 25 TL. Syrupy, crispy, filled with pistachio nuts, one must definitely savour as much baklava as one can while in the city.

Mouthwatering Baklava at Karaköy Güllüoğlu

To Black Sea and beyond

No textbook Istanbul trip is complete without a ferry ride across/in the Bosphorus. Bosphorus, after all gives Istanbul ALL of its identity. Everything that the place is, it’s because of the strait. The strait joins Black Sea and Mediterranean Sea through the Sea of Marmara and The Aegean, making it all important and a prized possession. The location proved so strategic that more than a dozen sieges were attempted on the city, before Mehmed II actually achieved success. Thar is why the Greeks, the Romans, and the Ottomans wanted a piece of it, why Prophet declared that whoever conquers Konstantiniyye is the most blessed. The strait is a clear boundary between the great continents, and more importantly great cultures of Asia and Europe, of Orient and the Occident, and Istanbul is the meeting point, the city with the dual identity. The city is testament to the fact that much of human history, culture and language is all about geography.

Muhammad’s proclamation on the blessed conqueror of Constantinople (Place: Ayasofya)

So, Bosphorus Cruise. On Sultanahmet, many will try to sell you a cruise that will make a trip of the strait, the golden horn, will have a buffet, all for €20. Or there is the famous Big Bus Istanbul tour where they will take you to an all day tour of all the Istanbul places and a cruise for €30 or 60. You can go for the latter if you are on a layover trip. You can ignore the former; never too good an idea to go with the touts. You can get all the information about a cruise with food and entertainment for €20-60 from the front desk of your hotel, a very good reliable source of information, and even better if you have a rapport with the receptionist.

Or you can rough it out (not really) and make use of one of the most bang for bucks public transport service (details of Istanbul public transport network will have a dedicated section; don’t worry): Şehir Hatları.

Şehir Hatları is the City run ferry service that, apart from its regular services to and fro the opposite banks of the bosphorus, also runs a 6 hour cruise all for, drumroll please, 25TL! There is one cruise per day and it picks you up from the Eminönü docks at 1000 hrs all the way over to the village of Anadolu-Kavagi near the Black Sea and brings you back by 1630.

The cruise itself was sparsely occupied, probably due to tourist season ending. Which is a boon because in peak season, the cruise gets full pretty quickly. Waiting on Eminönü docks for our ticket we met this guy who had a giant parrot on his shoulder, the size of which freaked out Soumya. He placed the parrot on Soumya’s shoulder and offered that we click a photograph for 15TL I think. We politely refused, so here’s a stock photo.

The ship had 3 floors, with lower deck having cushioned benches and table a la a classic American diner, with a small stall serving snacks. The mid and top deck were outside, and if you can tolerate the cold, cold breeze, you will see sights unparalleled. As Hagia Sophia, Blue Mosque, Suleymaniye mosque, and Galata Tower to your right seem to get farther and farther away, you get to see the iconic Istanbul skyline which I can never get used to. The first stop is Üsküdar on the Asian side. This neighborhood, considered a bit conservative as opposed to the more liberal and open European side, is famous for its sunset views, which we missed by a few minutes on our last day, but still enjoyed çay along the banks, where many had set up cushions for tourists and lovebirds to enjoy with Bosphorus views.

As we approach Karaköy, the view is dominated by the imposing Dolmabahçe palace. Along the way you pass 2 of the three bridges that connect Europe to Asia, numerous Bosphorus mansions called Yalis and the castles of Rumelihisari and Anadoluhisari. I did not know at that time, but Rumelihisari or Roman Castle was built by Mehmed II as a sister castle to Anadoluhisari which was on the opposite banks, and together acted as a throat or strait cutter, cutting off the rest of the city before laying siege. Other notable sight were those of gargantuan cargo vessels that sailed by and the seagulls that competed with our cruise, making use of wind currents to float and making loud noises. You will always find these noisy creatures chasing a ship, probably for food, and the Bosphorus is filled with these seagulls; they are what pigeons are to our cities: a regular feature that are sometimes just pest.

Bosphorus Panorama

Our last stop in the onward journey is the tiny fishing village of Anadolu Kavagi, which is directly opposite to the penultimate Rumeli Kavagi. The word Rum is used to denote Roman Anatolia or simply Roman or Rome. The Ottoman Padishah used to have the title of ‘Kayser-i-Rum’, the descendant of the Romans, and omission of this title in diplomatic communication was casus belli, or cause of war. The famed Sufi saint and poet Jalal ad-Din Muhammad has the title ‘Rumi’ attached to him because of his place of operation, in the Anatolian heartland., specifically Konya, an overnight journey from Istanbul by road. Although he is also known by the name Balkhi, placing his origin at Balkh in what is now Afghanistan.

Seafood at AK. Most good restaurants serve a basket of bread by default, a complementary feature. Water, you gotta buy separately.

At the AK, you have a stoppage of 2.5 hours to feast over some delicious seafood (yours truly refrains from meat and prefers to enjoy it vicariously) and visit the Yoros Castle, an outpost built by the Thrace as a strategic watchtower. The village is now occupied by the fishing community and the Turkish Armed Forces. Once you start walking around searching for a place to eat, as in any other Istanbul tourist area like Sultanahmet,the restaurant maitre-d’s (if they can be called that) start to cajole you for your patronage. We chose a seafood place with nice Bosphorus view, and as recommended by the immaculately dressed waiter, ordered a fish and something vegetarian that you don’t care for anyway (although there are good vegetarian options in Turkey). And we ordered Rakı .

Rakı

Rakı is Turkey’s national alcoholic beverage made from rice and has a strong anise or saunf taste. One dilutes the Rakı with water and it turns white from colorless! Soumya exclaimed that it looks like a local beverage popular in Orissa called Handiya.

And it gets you drunk fairly quickly, leaving you in a happy merry kind of stupor that fortunately or unfortunately dissipates within an hour. We were laughing uncontrollably, consuming the lunch extra slowly and by the time we sobered and paid up, we had already spent an hour and a half in the restaurant. Which maybe commonplace in Europe but for the Indians, almost unheard of!

This left us just about half hour to climb up the hill and visit the Yoros castle (fully sober by then, by the way). The castle itself lies in ruins, but the views of deep blue strait that merges into the Black Sea, and the beautiful Yavuz Sultan Selim bridge that straddles the waters gave us the aforementioned FOMO as the time was running out and we would be in trouble if we missed the ferry.

The hastily clicked Yavuz Sultan Selim Bridge. The water body beyond is Black Sea!

The return was mostly spent in soaking up the scenery and staring at the seagulls.

The Ice Cream Trick

Dondurma is the Turkish ice cream made of a resinous substance that allows it to stick to a surface and defy gravity. This enables the ice cream guys to perform that trick where they pretend to give you the ice cream but snatch it away, drop it but really it sticks to the big handle, do this 3-4 times before handing the ice cream over.

So then, at Taksim Square where we are being entertained by this ice cream cum performance I told Soumya in hindi that let’s play the same trick and give him money but take it back. The guy sort of read our mind and pointed at a spot in the table saying ‘Put it here. I have been doing this a long time.’ Ah damn!

Another performance with food we saw was at a Kebab place in Sultanahmet where I ordered a vegetable hot pot, which they served with a sticky rice. They filled the earthen pot with the veggies like mushrooms and put it up on a small stove of smoldering coal, brought it to us and did a little performance before hitting the top of the pot, and off went that piece of pot flying. You will see this trick being performed in many restaurants in Sultanahmet.

Touristy things are fun, who knew.

Find the link to a Dondurma trick at the end. Keep searching for more, fun way to waste more time on YouTube.

Pro Tip: For the vegetarians out there, plenty of mediterranean salads like abaganoush are available in almost all restaurants. Or do what I did in a small restaurant near Cemberlitas: Ordered a chicken roll without the chicken!

The monument to the Republic at Taksim Square. The gentleman at the front it Mustafa Kemal Ataturk.

So we boasted (or opposite of it) to Mihriban that whatever crowd she thinks we will encounter at Taksim, it can never be as bad as India, because well we are the crowded country, aren’t we? We were proven so wrong at the historical Istiklal Caddesi or Istiklal Avenue near Taksim. Generally we did not find Istanbul crowded, but that may be attributed to the end of peak tourist season. But the crowd at Istiklal Street on a weekday was comparable to the crowd at, say, Connaught Place or Chandni Chowk! The street is lined with Ottoman era buildings (European style, so perhaps late Ottoman, when European influence became marked), shops, restaurants of all kinds-doner kebabs to your KFCs and Burger Kings, intriguing street performances here and there, and the classic Taksim- Tünel tram line. While the trams running in Istanbul, used for commuting, are all fast and modern built by Alstom, the Taksim- Tünel line has been kept mainly as an attraction, the slow old trams of the olden days. There is just one coach that does the up and down from Taksim to Tünel, and it is crowded by tourists who want the touristy experience of the Old Istanbul. We decided to skip that and just walk the whole way, from Taksim to Tünel and beyond. At Tünel, you have the Funicular line, which is essentially 2 coaches on a long looped rope and pulley mechanism such that when one coach goes up the other goes down. Mainly used to go up and down a sloping, hilly area.

Historical Funicular at Tünel

There are streets that branch out of Istiklal with interesting restaurants, all having a musical performer to entertain their guests. Unfortunately the restaurants are so close that you can here 3-4 guys singing loudly at the same time, resulting in utter cacophony!

We managed to find a vegan Lebanese restaurant in the street, and had delicious falafels there.

The People We Met

Graffiti we encountered on a walk in Beyoğlu

One important component of travel to a place is the people one encounters or meets. While I myself have difficulty in opening up to strangers, it helps if I have a slightly more outgoing companion or a person easy to talk to.

Which is where Mihriban, our 30 something Kurdish friend from Ankara who has a degree in Turkish Literature, likes fitness and does not like Orhan Pamuk, and has a disarming style and persona comes into picture. She also very kindly took us to Suleymaniye Mosque, shop at Mahmut Pasha and the nearby more famous grand bazaar, and a rooftop coffee with lokum with views of Golden Horn and Bosphorus, which the reader may tire of but I most certainly did not.

Turkish Coffee at a rooftop joint

One stop at Mahmut Pasha we took was to buy some Shawls, beautiful silk ones which I later learnt were called stoles. I realised that I was bad at picking clothes for women when Mihriban pooh-poohed almost all of my choices (Thank God). After shopping for a good 8-9 stoles between the two of us, the shopkeeper decided to offer us some çay (tea), instead of giving us further discounts. In a typical Indian manner, we finished the tea while Mihriban had not even reached the halfway mark. This led shopkeeper to exclaim in surprise that we finished it off way to quickly, and Mihriban interjected that we must savour things more deliberately.

From the crowded Mahmut Pasha,filled with vendors selling all the varieties of lokum possible, we moved to the Grand bazaar, another quintessential Istanbul attraction with vendors selling everything from lamps to carpets to tiles to lokum to spices-you know, your typical Oriental market, only way expensive. We did get our hands on some beautiful Iznik tile coasters at Iznik Works in Grand Bazaar. The Iznik form of ceramic pottery originated from the Iznik towns and was very much in demand by Ottomans to decorate their palaces and mosques. Be it Topkapı Palace, Suleymaniye Mosque or Blue Mosque, you will find these tiles adorned as mosaics everywhere.

For some reason, we decided to lunch at the Burger King at Cemberlitas, and I had the one vegetarian option available on the menu- a bean burger. It was yum.

ProTip: There are types of Lokums that I gather are available. One is a slightly cheaper one that resembles those dense gelatinous halva we have in India. The other types are more expensive (100TL for a kg) that are filled with variety of nuts and have richer flavour diversity. Buy them either from franchise stores like Mado or Hafiz Mustafa or explore on your own, in Sultanahmet, Mahmut Pasha, Grand Bazaar, or that bazaar near Blue Mosque. Also eat tons of Baklava, an advice worth repeating.

ProTip: Much to my frustration, during a bit of googling for this piece, I discovered that Zomato operates in Istanbul! What! And oh, by the way, Wikipedia is banned in Turkey. This I discovered only when I returned. That’s why I was not able to open there.

Mihriban also used to make çay for us in the evening when we had returned from our trips, and we would discuss about religion, cultures, exercise, family, living in Istanbul, and how Istanbul is the number one destination for bald Arab men to get hair plugs (You see a lot of bald men with bleeding head or head covered with cotton) and so on. Mihriban’s demeanor brought in many friendly guests of the hotel, and one such was a wise old man from London called Abu Bakr John, who came with his wife Hatija. Abu-Bakr was a Mauritian immigrant to London, and had a little bit understanding, at least an inkling of Hindi, because obviously his forefathers were from India. His wife Hatija adored Shah Rukh Khan, just like Mihriban adored Aamir Khan. Mihriban claims to have seen all of his movies and to prove her claim, she referenced the giant colorful ass-chairs the three protagonists of ‘3 Idiots’ sat on. Then we proceeded to talk about the latest bollywood film she watched, ‘Padman’, and I showed her the TED talk of the actual Padman, Arunachalam Muruganantham, on Youtube with Turkish subtitles, which she found pretty delightful.

We also talked about the Turkish TV viewing habits, and how Turkish people prefer watching Indian soaps over local fares, which is more popular in Azerbaijan (Azeris watch Turkish soaps, Turkish watch Indian series, Indians watch American series and Americans just watch their own!) Also, Mihriban, and by her I guess most of the Turkish TV viewers, think that the streets on India is filled with cows, the cows that we worship, which she found amusing. I can’t say I don’t agree with that stereotype.

We also tried to chat with a bunch of Moroccan ladies from Brussels in the lobby. The trouble was that they knew only French and Mihriban had to use Google translate for the simplest of the things. We were also talking about Muslim marriages and the concept of Mehr when the Belgian lady asked whether we were Muslims. I said no. We tried telling her, probably through google Translate that we were from India and we were Hindus, and she just replied “Buddhists?” We nodded and just left it like that. While retiring for the night, we were talking about how difficult French was and I tried to pronounce ‘Au revoir’ as O-re-vwa. One of the Belgian ladies heard us and said what I thought was ‘Au wa’. The guttural r is simply not an Indian thing.

Transportation

This is a Protip chapter. Much to the annoyance of many, I have a love for efficient public transport. And Istanbul’s has one USP: Integration. From Ataturk Airport, if you have to go to say Üsküdar, you can take a taxi that will drive you all the way to one of the Bosphorus bridges and drop you there, and charge a bomb. Airport transport from our hotel, which is on the European side, same as Airport, takes €60, which is astronomical. The cheaper and more pleasurable way is to take a metro from the airport, change at Zeytinburnu or Yenikapi to the tram, take the tram to Eminönü Tram station, cross the road to the Ferry station and hop on to one of the Şehir Hatları cruise. And it is fast with no hassle. Metro has a frequency of 10 min, tram of 2 and boats of 30, and purchasing an Istanbulkart at an automated dispensing machine at every bus, tram or ferry station, which is just 6TL, and rides that are equally nominal means you have covered 20+ km journey in 15-20TL! The transport system that connects the massive city integrates Metro, Bus service, Tram, Funicular, Ferry, and an undersea train service called Marmaray (which we unfortunately did not try).

Istanbul Transportation Map. Zoom/open separately for clearer view.

The Alstom built trams are ridiculously fast and modern, except the antique one at Taksim. Therefore, be careful when you cross the roads.

TLDR

Hotel: Best place to get a hotel if you are in Istanbul for the first time and if you want to visit all the sites is of course the Sultanahmet area in Fatih district, as major old city attractions are all within walking distance, there is a seaside promenade nearby for sunrise/sunset strolls/jogs, and lot to eat! We booked at Harmony Hotel Istanbul, a cozy hotel with free executive breakfast, a spacious balcony and lounge with great sea view if you get top floor.

Tipping: Something Indians are not too attuned it, but is expected outside. We stuck with the 10%-20% almost across the board (towards the lower side of that range we must admit.) Most places have a tip box where you can contribute.

ATM & Currency: International Debit Cards are accepted almost in all ATMs. Withdraw from ATMs of known international banks or Turkish banks like AKBank or DenizBank. Remember, they all charge 3% conversion charge. Currency can be exchanged at the AKbank counter in the Arrivals of Ataturk airport, or at many exchange (Doviz in Turkish) centres in Sultanahmet, Grand Bazaar or Taksim. We exchange the €50 we had saved for the end of the trip at Ağaoğlu Döviz near Cemberlitas tram stop.

Sultanahmet Area: From Ataturk airport, catch a metro, change to tram at Zeytinburnu or Yenikapi going to Kabatas, get down at Sultanahmet stop. Walk around, it is amazing. See hippodrome with obelisk from Egypt (That was day 0).

Day 1:

Ayasofya or Hagia Sophia: 3 Hrs, 135 TL for combined Ayasofya, Topkapı and Archeology Museum Ticket. (Closed Mondays)

Blue Mosque: Free Entry, but do check out the timings.

Hamam: Turkish bath at Gedikpasa Hamam for 120 TL. Rejuvenating. Pickup from and drop to included in most packages. Contact front desk of your hotel.

Day 2:

Topkapı Palace: Separate tickets for Harem, but worth it. Get an audio guide. (Closed Tuesdays)

Gulhane Park: A park near Topkapı, beautiful, lush and has a mosque within for a prayer.

Day 3:

Istanbul Archeology Museum (Closed Mondays): For history buffs. Artefacts from Mesopotamia, Sumeria, Hittite, Phoenicia, Greeks and Romans.

Dolmabahçe Palace [Location: Karaköy]: Reach by tram from Sultanahmet, get down at Kabatas. Tickets to Palace + Harem is 90 TL. Audio guide is free and is also available in Hindi. Attractions are the European style grandeur, and the resting place of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. There is an upper limit on number of people allowed, so go as early as possible especially in peak season. Also, no photography inside.

Museum of Innocence: Get down at Tophane Tram station, walk up a hill few hundred meters till you find a small house with vertical banner proclaiming itself as The Museum of Innocence. 40 TL if you don’t have the book, open till 6 (Closed Mondays). Guides available at 5TL with voiceover of the man himself.

Karaköy Güllüoğlu: Get down at Karaköy station and walk. Get a big baklava for 25TL.

Galata Tower: Walkable from Karaköy station. Keep walking towards that tower with the conical top. Roam around in the Karaköy neighbourhood. Expect a line at the Galata. The view is worth it. Also get the 4D ride at 13TL. It’s down at the 2nd floor though.

Day 4:

The Bosphorus Cruise: Starts at 10 AM from Eminönü docks, goes all the way to Anadolu Kavagi and back. Visit for the beautiful Cruise views, seafood and Yoros castle.

Day 5:

Suleymaniye Mosque: Walkable from Sultanahmet, or catch a tram to Bayezit. Sublime. Free reading materials on Islam for those interested.

Shopping at Mahmutpasa and Grand Bazaar: Shawl, lokums, carpets, tiles, lamps etc.

Maiden Tower or Kız Kulesi, taken from the Asian side. Galata Tower in the European side seen in background

Üsküdar and Kız Kulesi: Ferry from Eminönü . Visit for beautiful sunset if there are no clouds. Sip a çay as you enjoy the Bosphorus views. Kız Kulesi or Maiden Tower is not worth it.

Day 6:

Basilica Cistern: In the Sultanahmet area, walkeable. Beautifully lit underground water reservoir dating to the Roman Empire. Visit for Roman architecture and columns with Medusa heads on it.

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Commemorating Ataturk.

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The Dondurma trick

#istanbul #hagiasophia

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adambstingus · 6 years ago

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Welcome to the land that no country wants | Jack Shenker

The long read: In 2014, an American dad claimed a tiny parcel of African land to make his daughter a princess. But Jack Shenker had got there first and learned that states and borders are volatile and delicate things

Bir Tawil is the last truly unclaimed land on earth: a tiny sliver of Africa ruled by no state, inhabited by no permanent residents and governed by no laws. To get there, you have two choices.

The first is to fly to the Sudanese capital Khartoum, charter a jeep, and follow the Shendi road hundreds of miles up to Abu Hamed, a settlement that dates back to the ancient kingdom of Kush. Today it serves as the regions final permanent human outpost before the vast Nubian desert, twice the size of mainland Britain and almost completely barren, begins unfolding to the north.

There are some artisanal gold miners in the desert, conjuring specks of hope out of the ground, a few armed gangs, which often prey upon the prospectors, and a small number of military units who carry out patrols in the area and attempt, with limited success, to keep the peace. You need to drive past all of them, out to the point where the occasional scattered shrub or palm tree has long since disappeared and given way to a seemingly endless, flat horizon of sand and rock out to the point where there are no longer any landmarks by which to measure the passing of your journey.

Out here, dry winds often blow in from the Arabian peninsula, whipping up sheets of dust that plunge visibility down to near-zero. After a day like this, then a night, and then another day, you will finally cross into Bir Tawil, an 800-square-mile cartographical oddity nestled within the border that separates Egypt and Sudan. Both nations have renounced any claim to it, and no other government has any jurisdiction over it.

The second option is to approach from Egypt, setting off from the countrys southernmost city of Aswan, down through the arid expanse that lies between Lake Nasser to the west and the Red Sea to the east. Much of it has been declared a restricted zone by the Egyptian army, and no one can get near the border without first obtaining their permission.

In June 2014, a 38-year-old farmer from Virginia named Jeremiah Heaton did exactly that. After obtaining the necessary paperwork from the Egyptian military authorities, he started out on a treacherous 14-hour expedition through remote canyons and jagged mountains, eventually wending his way into the no mans land of Bir Tawil and triumphantly planting a flag.

Heatons six-year-old daughter, Emily, had once asked her father if she could ever be a real princess; after discovering the existence of Bir Tawil on the internet, his birthday present to her that year was to trek there and turn her wish into a reality. So be it proclaimed, Heaton wrote on his Facebook page, that Bir Tawil shall be forever known as the Kingdom of North Sudan. The Kingdom is established as a sovereign monarchy with myself as the head of state; with Emily becoming an actual princess.

Heatons social media posts were picked up by a local paper in Virginia, the Bristol Herald-Courier, and quickly became the stuff of feel-good clickbait around the world. CNN, Time, Newsweek and hundreds of other global media outlets pounced on the story. Heaton responded by launching a global crowdfunding appeal aimed at securing $250,000 in an effort at getting his new state up and running.

Heaton knew his actions would provoke awe, mirth and confusion, and that many would question his sanity. But what he was not prepared for was an angry backlash by observers who regarded him not as a devoted father or a heroic pioneer but rather as a 21st-century imperialist. After all, the portrayal of land as unclaimed or undeveloped was central to centuries of ruthless conquest. The same callous, dehumanising logic that has been used to legitimise European colonialism not just in Africa but in the Americas, Australia, and elsewhere is on full display here, noted one commentator. Are white people still allowed to do this kind of stuff? asked another.

Any new idea thats this big and bold always meets with some sort of ridicule, or is questioned in terms of its legitimacy, Heaton told me last year over the telephone. In his version of the story, Heatons conquest of Bir Tawil was not about colonialism, but rather familial love and ambitious dreams: apart from making Emily royalty, he hopes to turn his newly founded nation which lies within one of the most inhospitable regions on the planet and contains no fixed population, no coastline, no surface water and no arable soil into a cutting-edge agriculture and technology research hub that will ultimately benefit all humanity.

After all, Heaton reasoned, no country wanted this forgotten corner of the world, and no individual before him had ever laid claim to it. What harm was to be caused by some wellintentioned, starry-eyed eccentric completing such a challenge, and why should it not be him?

Jeremiah Heaton makes his claim to Bir Tawil in 2014. Photograph: Facebook

There were two problems with Heatons argument. First, territories and borders can be delicate and volatile things, and tampering with them is rarely without unforeseen consequences. As Heaton learned from the public response to his self-declared kingdom, there is no neutral or harmless way to claim a state, no matter how far away from anywhere else it appears to be. Second, Heaton was not the first well-intentioned, starry-eyed eccentric to travel all the way to Bir Tawil and plant a flag. Someone else got there first, and that someone was me.

Like all great adventure stories, this one began with lukewarm beer and the internet. It was the summer of 2010, and the days in Cairo where I was living and working as a journalist were long and hot. My friend Omars balcony provided a shaded refuge filled with wicker chairs and reliably stable wireless broadband. It was up there, midway through a muggy evenings web pottering, that we first encountered Bir Tawil.

Omar was an Egyptian-British filmmaker armed with a battery of finely tuned Werner Herzog impressions and a crisp black beard that I was secretly quite jealous of. The pair of us knew nothing beyond a single fact, gleaned from a blog devoted to arcane maps: barely 500 miles away from where we sat, there apparently existed a patch of land over which no country on earth asserted any sovereignty. Within five minutes I had booked the flights. Omar opened two more beers.

Places beyond the scope of everyday authority have always fired the imagination. They appear to offer us an escape when all you can see of somewhere is its outlines, it is easy to start fantasising about the void within. No mans lands are our El Dorados, says Noam Leshem, a Durham University geographer who recently travelled 6,000 miles through a series of so-called dead spaces, from the former frontlines of the Balkans war to the UN buffer zone in Cyprus, along with his colleague Alasdair Pinkerton of Royal Holloway. The pair intended to conclude their journey at Bir Tawil, but never made it. There is something alluring about a place beyond the control of the state, Leshem adds, and also something highly deceptive. In reality, nowhere is unplugged from the complex political and historical dynamics of the world around it, and as Omar and I were to discover no visitors can hope to short-circuit them.

Six months later, in January 2011, we touched down at Khartoum International airport with a pair of sleeping bags, five energy bars, and an embarrassingly small stock of knowledge about our final destination. To an extent, the ignorance was deliberate. For one thing, we planned to shoot a film about our travels, and Omar had persuaded me the secret to good film-making was to begin work utterly unprepared. Omar according to Omar was a cinematic auteur; the kind of maverick who could breeze into a desolate wasteland with no vehicle, no route, and no contacts and produce an award-winning documentary from the mayhem. One does not lumber an auteur, he explained, with printed itineraries, booked accommodation or emergency phone numbers. Mindful of my own aspirations to auteurism, this reasoning struck me as convincing.

There was something else, too, that made us refrain from proper planning. As the date of our departure for Sudan drew closer, Omar and I had taken to discussing our plans for Bir Tawil in increasingly grandiose terms. Deep down, I think, we both knew that the notion of claiming the territory and harnessing it for some grand ideological cause was preposterous. But what if it wasnt? What if our own little tabula rasa could be the start of something bigger, transforming a forgotten relic of colonial map-making into a progressive force that would defeat contemporary injustices across the world?

The mechanics of how this might actually work remained a little hazy. Yet just occasionally, at more contemplative junctures, it did occur to us that in the process of planting a flag in Bir Tawil as part of some ill-defined critique of arbitrary borders and imperial violence, there was a risk we could appear to the untrained eye very similar to the imperialists who had perpetrated such violence in the first place. It was a resemblance we were keen to avoid. Undertaking this journey in a state of deep ignorance, we told ourselves, would help mitigate against pomposity. Without any basic knowledge, we would be forced to travel as humble innocents, relying solely on guidance from the communities we passed through.

As the two of us cleared customs, we broke into smiles and congratulated each other. The auteurs had landed, and what is more they had Important Things To Say about borders and states and sovereignty and empires. We set off in search of some local currency, and warmed to our theme. By the time we found an ATM, we were referring to Bir Tawil as so much more than a conceptual exposition. Under our benevolent stewardship, we assured each other, it could surely become some sort of launchpad for radical new ideas, a haven for subversives all over the planet.

It was at that point that the auteurs realised their bank cards did not work in Sudan, and that there were no international money transfer services they could use to wire themselves some cash.

This setback represented the first consequence of our failure to do any preparatory research. The nagging sense that our maverick approach to reaching Bir Tawil may not have been the wisest way forward gained momentum with consequence number two, which was that to solve the money problem we had to persuade a friend of a friend of a friend of an Egyptian business acquaintance to do an illicit currency trade for us on the outskirts of Khartoum. Consequence number three namely that, given our lack of knowledge about where we could and could not legally film in the capital, after a few days we inadvertently attracted the attention of an undercover state security agent while carrying around $2,000 worth of used Sudanese banknotes in an old rucksack, and were arrested transformed suspicion into certainty.

The route to Bir Tawil

On the date Omar and I were incarcerated, millions of citizens in South Sudan were heading to the polls to decide between continued unity with the north or secession and a new, independent state of their own. We sat silently in a nondescript office block just off Gamaa Avenue the citys main diplomatic thoroughfare while a group of men in black suits and dark sunglasses scrolled through files on Omars video camera. Armed soldiers, unsmiling, stood guard at the door. Through the rooms single window, open but barred, the sound of nearby traffic could be heard. The images on the screen depicted me and Omar gadding about town on the days following our arrival; me and Omar unfurling huge rolls of yellowing paper at the governments survey department; me and Omar scrawling indecipherable patterns on sheets of paper in an effort to design the new Bir Tawili flag; me and Omar squabbling over fabric colours at the Omdurman market where we had gone to stitch together the aforementioned flag. With each new picture, a man who appeared to be the senior officer raised his eyes to meet ours, shook his head, and sighed.

In an attempt to lighten the mood, I pointed out to Omar how apposite it was that at the very moment in which votes were being cast in the south, possibly redrawing the regions borders for ever, we had been placed under lock and key in a military intelligence unit almost a thousand miles to the north for attempting to do the same. Omar, concerned about the fate of both his camera and the contents of the rucksack, declined to respond. I predicted that in the not too distant future, when we had made it to Bir Tawil, we would look back on this moment and laugh. Omar glared.

In the end, our captivity lasted under an hour. The senior officer concluded, perceptively, that, whatever we were attempting to do, we were far too incompetent to do it properly, or to cause too much trouble along the way. Upon our release, we set about obtaining a jeep that could take us to Bir Tawil. Every reputable travel agent we approached turned us down point-blank, citing the prevalence of bandit attacks in the desert. Thankfully, we were able to locate a disreputable travel agent, a large man with a taste for loud polo shirts who went by the name of Obai. Obai was actually not a travel agent at all, but rather a big-game hunter with a lucrative sideline in ambiguously licensed pick-up trucks. In exchange for most of our used banknotes, he offered to provide us with a jeep, a satellite phone, two tanks of water, and his nephew Gedo, who happened to be looking for work as a driver. In the absence of any alternative offers, we gratefully accepted.

Unlike Obai, who was a font of swashbuckling anecdotes and improbable tales of derring-do, Gedo turned out to be a more taciturn soul. He was a civil engineer who had previously done construction work on the colossal Merowe dam in northern Sudan, Africas largest hydropower project. On the day of our departure, he turned up wearing a baseball cap with Parental Advisory: Explicit Lyrics emblazoned across the front, and carrying a loaded gun. As we waved goodbye to Obai and began weaving our way through the capitals rush hour traffic, Omar and I set about explaining to Gedo the intricacies of our plan to transform Bir Tawil into an open-source state that would disrupt existing patterns of global power and privilege no mean feat, given that we didnt understand any of the intricacies ourselves. Gedo responded to this as he responded to everything: with a sage nod and a deliberate stroke of his stubble.

Im here to protect you, he told us solemnly, as we swung north on to the highway and left Khartoum behind us. Also, Ive never been on a holiday before, and this one sounds fun.

Bir Tawils unusual status wedged between the borders of two countries and yet claimed by neither is a byproduct of colonial machinations in north-east Africa, during an era of British control over Egypt and Egyptian influence on Sudan.

In 1899, government representatives from London and Cairo the latter nominally independent, but in reality the servants of a British protectorate put pen to paper on an agreement which established the shared dominion of Anglo-Egyptian Sudan. The treaty specified that, following 18 years of intense fighting between Egyptian and British forces on the one side and Mahdist rebels in Sudan on the other, Sudan would now become a British colony in all but name. Its northern border with Egypt was to run along the 22nd parallel, cutting a straight line through the Nubian desert right out to the ocean.

Three years later, however, another document was drawn up by the British. This one noted that a mountain named Bartazuga, just south of the 22nd parallel, was home to the nomadic Ababda tribe, which was considered to have stronger links with Egypt than Sudan. The document stipulated that henceforth this area should be administered by Egypt. Meanwhile, a much-larger triangle of land north of the 22nd parallel, named Halaib, abutting the Red Sea, was assigned to the Beja people who are largely based in Sudan for grazing, and thus now came under Sudans jurisdiction. And that was that, for the next few decades at least. World wars came and went, regimes rose and fell, and those imaginary lines in the sand gathered dust in bureaucratic archives, of little concern to anyone on the ground.

Disputes only started in earnest when Sudan finally achieved independence in 1956. The new postcolonial government in Khartoum immediately declared that its national borders matched the tweaked boundaries stipulated in the second proclamation, making the Halaib triangle Sudanese. Egypt demurred, insisting that the latter document was concerned only with areas of temporary administrative jurisdiction and that sovereignty had been established in the earlier treaty. Under this logic, the real border stayed straight and the Halaib triangle remained Egyptian.

By the early 1990s, when a Canadian oil firm signalled its intention to begin exploration in Halaib and the prospect of substantial mineral wealth being found in the region gained momentum, the disagreement was no longer academic. Egypt sent military forces to reclaim Halaib from Sudan, and despite fierce protests from Khartoum which still considers Halaib to be Sudanese and even tried to organise voting there during the 2010 Sudanese general election it has remained under Cairos control ever since.

Our world is littered with contested borders. The geographers Alexander Diener and Joshua Hagen refer to the dashed lines on atlases as the scars of history. Compared with other divisions between countries that seem so solid and timeless when scored on a map, these squiggles enclaves, misshapen lumps and odd protrusions are a reminder of how messy and malleable the process of drawing up borders has always been.

What makes this particular border conflict unique, though, is not the tussle over the Halaib triangle itself, but rather the impact it has had on the smaller patch of land just south of the 22nd parallel around Bartazuga mountain, the area known as Bir Tawil.

Egypt and Sudans rival claims on Halaib both rest on documents that appear to assign responsibility for Bir Tawil to the other country. As a result, neither wants to assert any sovereignty over Bir Tawil, for to do so would be to renounce their rights to the larger and more lucrative territory. On Egyptian maps, Bir Tawil is shown as belonging to Sudan. On Sudanese maps, it appears as part of Egypt. In practice, Bir Tawil is widely believed to have the legal status of terra nullius nobodys land and there is nothing else quite like it on the planet.

Omar and I were not, it must be acknowledged, the first to discover this anomaly. If the internet is to be believed, Bir Tawil has in fact been claimed many times over by keyboard emperors whose virtual principalities and warring microstates exist only online. The Kingdom of the State of Bir Tawil boasts a national anthem by the late British jazz musician Acker Bilk. The Emirate of Bir Tawil traces its claim over the territory to, among other sources, the Quran, the British monarchy, the 1933 Montevideo Convention and the 1856 US Guano Islands Act. There is a Grand Dukedom of Bir Tawil, an Empire of Bir Tawil, a United Arab Republic of Bir Tawil and a United Lunar Emirate of Bir Tawil. The last of these has a homepage featuring a citizen application form, several self-help mantras, and stock photos of people doing yoga in a park.

From our rarefied vantage point at the back of Obais Toyota Hilux, it was easy to look down with disdain upon these cyber-squatting chancers. None of them had ever actually set foot in Bir Tawil, rendering their claims to sovereignty worthless. Few had truly grappled with Bir Tawils complex backstory, or of the bloodshed it was built upon (tens of thousands of Sudanese fighters and civilians died as a result of the Egyptian and British military assaults that ended in the establishment of Sudans northern borders and thus, ultimately, the creation of Bir Tawil). Granted, Omar and I knew little of the backstory either, but at least we had actually got to Sudan and were making, by our own estimation, a decent fist of finding out. We ate our energy bars, listened attentively to tales of Gedos love life, and scanned the road for clues. The first arrived nearly 200 miles north-east of Khartoum, about a third of the way up towards Bir Tawil, when we came across a city of iron and fire oozing kerosene into the desert. This was Atbara: home of Sudans railway system, and the engine room of its modern-day creation story.

Until very recently, the long history of Sudan has not been one of a single country or people: many different tribes, religions and political factions have competed for power and resources, across territories and borders that bear no relation to those marking out the states limits today. A lack of rigid, recognisable boundaries was used to help justify Europes violent scramble to occupy and annex land throughout Africa in the 19th century. Often, the first step taken by western colonisers was to map and border the territory they were seizing. Charting of land was usually a prelude to military invasion and resource extraction; during the British conquest of Sudan, Atbara was crucial to both.

Sudans contemporary railway system began life as a battering ram for the British to attack Khartoum. Trains carried not only weapons and troops but everyday provisions too, specified by Winston Churchill as the letters, newspapers, sausages, jam, whisky, soda water, and cigarettes which enable the Briton to conquer the world without discomfort. Atbara was the site where key rail lines intersected, and its importance grew rapidly after Londons grip on Sudan had been formalised in the 1899 Anglo-Egyptian treaty.

Everything that mattered, from cotton to gum, came through here, as did all the rolling stock needed to move and export it, Mohamed Ederes, a local railway storekeeper, told us. He walked us through his warehouse, down corridors stacked high with box after box of metal train parts and past giant leather-bound catalogues stuffed with handwritten notes. From here, he declared proudly, you reached the world.

Atbaras colonial origins are still etched into its modern-day layout. One half of the town, originally the preserve of expatriates, is low-rise and leafy; on the other side of the tracks, where native workers were made to live, accommodation is denser and taller. But just as Atbara was a vehicle for colonialism, so too was it the place in which a distinct sense of Sudanese nationhood began to develop.

As Sudans economy grew in the early 20th century, so did the railway industry, bringing thousands of migrant workers from disparate social and ethnic groups to the city. By the second world war, Atbara was famous not only for its carriage depots and loading sidings, but also for the nationalist literature and labour militancy of those who worked within them. Poets as well as workers leaders emerged out of the nascent trade union movement in the late 1940s, which held devastating strikes and helped shake the foundations of British rule. The same train lines that had once borne Churchills sausages and soda water were now deployed to deliver workers solidarity packages all over the country, during industrial action that ultimately brought the colonial economy to a halt. Within a decade, Sudan secured independence.

The next morning, as we drove on, Gedo grew quieter and the signs of human habitation became sparser. At Karima, a small town 150 miles further north, we came across a fleet of abandoned Nile steamers stranded on the river bank; below stairs there were metal plaques bearing the name of shipwrights from Portsmouth, Southampton and Glasgow, each companys handiwork now succumbing slowly to the elements. We clambered through cobwebbed cabins and across rotting sun decks, and then decided to scale the nearby Jebel Barkal Holy Mountain in Arabic where eagles tracked us warily from the sky. Omar maintained a running commentary on our progress, delivered as a flawless Herzog parody, and it proved so painful for all in earshot that the eagles began to dive-bomb us. We set off running, taking refuge among the mountains scattered ruins.

Jebel Barkal was once believed to be the home of Amun, king of gods and god of wind. Fragments of Amuns temple are still visible at the base of the cliffs. Over the past few millennia, Jebel Barkal has been the outermost limit of Egypts Pharaonic kingdoms, the centre of an autonomous Nubian region, and a vassal province of an empire headquartered thousands of miles away in Constantinople. In the modern era of defined borders and seemingly stable nation states, Bir Tawil seems an impossible anomaly. But standing over the jagged crevices of Jebel Barkal, looking out across a region that had been passed between so many different rulers, and formed part of so many different arrangements of power over land, our endpoint started to feel more familiar.

Abandoned Nile steamers stranded on the river bank at Karima. Photograph: Omar Robert Hamilton

The following evening we camped at Abu Hamed, on the very edge of the desert. Beyond the ramshackle cafeterias that have sprung up to serve the artisanal gold-mining community sending shisha smoke and the noise of Egyptian soap operas spiralling up into the night Omar and I saw the outlines of large agricultural reclamation projects, silhouetted in the distance against a starry sky. Since 2008, when global food prices spiked, there has been a boom in what critics call land-grabbing: international investors and sovereign wealth funds snapping up leases on massive tracts of African territory in order to intensify the production of crops for export, and bringing such territory under the control of European, Asian and Gulf nations in the process. Arable land was the first to be targeted, but increasingly desert areas are also being fenced off and sold. Near Abu Hamed, Saudi Arabian companies have been greening the sand blanketing it in soil and water in an effort to make it fertile with worrying consequences for both the environment and local communities, some of whom have long asserted customary rights over the area.

It was not so long ago that the prophets of globalisation proclaimed the impending decline of the nation-state and the rise of a borderless world one modelled on the frictionless transactions of international finance, which pay no heed to state boundaries.

A resurgent populist nationalism and the refugee crisis that has stoked its flames has exposed such claims as premature, and investors depend more than ever on national governments to open up new terrains for speculation and accumulation, and to discipline citizens who dare to stand in the way. But there is no doubt that we now live in a world where the power of capital has profoundly disrupted old ideas about political authority inside national boundaries. All over the planet, the institutions that impact our lives most directly banks, buses, hospitals, schools, farms can now be sold off to the highest bidder and governed by the whims of a transnational financial elite. Where national borders once enclosed populations capable of practising collective sovereignty over their own resources, in the 21st century they look more and more like containers for an inventory of private assets, each waiting to be spliced, diced and traded around the world.

It was at Abu Hamed, while lying awake at night in a sleeping bag, nestled into a shallow depression in the sand, that I realised the closer we were getting to our destination, the more I understood what was so beguiling about it. Now that Bir Tawil was in sight, it had started to appear less like an aberration and more like a question: is there anything natural about how borders and power function in the world today?

In the end, there was no fanfare. On a hazy Tuesday afternoon, 40 hours since we left the road at Abu Hamed, 13 days since we touched down in Khartoum, and six months since the dotted lines of Bir Tawil first appeared before our eyes, Omar gave a shout from the back of the jeep. I checked our GPS coordinates on the satellite phone, and cross-referenced them with the map. Gedo, on being informed that we were now in Bir Tawil and outside of any countrys dominion, promptly took out his gun and fired off a volley of shots. We traipsed up a small hillock and wedged our somewhat forlorn flag into the rocks a yellow desert fox, set against a black circle and bordered by triangles of green and red then sat and gazed out at the horizon, tracing the rise and fall of distant mountains and following the curves of sunken valleys as they criss-crossed each other like veins through the sand. The sky and the ground both looked massive, and unending, and the warm stones around us crumbled in our hands. After a couple of hours, Gedo said that it was getting late, so we climbed back into the jeep and began the long journey home.

Well before our journey had ever begun, we had hoped albeit not particularly fervently that we could do something with it, something that mattered; that by striking out for a place this nebulous we could find a shortcut to social justice, two days drive from the nearest tap or telephone. In 800 square miles of desert, we thought that we could exploit the outlines of the bordered world in order to subvert it.

Jeremiah Heaton, beyond the kingdom for a princess schmaltz and the forthcoming Disney adaptation (he has sold film rights to his story for an undisclosed fee) seems albeit from an almost diametrically opposite philosophical outlook to be convinced of something similar. For him, the fantasy is a libertarian one, offering freedom not from the iniquities of capitalism but from the government interference that inhibits it. Just as we did, he wants to take advantage of a quirk in the system to defy it. When I spoke to Heaton, he told me with genuine enthusiasm that his country (not yet recognised by any other state or international body) would offer the worlds great innovators a place to develop their products unencumbered by taxes and regulation, a place where private enterprise faces no socially prescribed borders of its own. Big companies, he assured me, were scrambling to join his vision.

Jack Shenkers makeshift flag planted in Bir Tawil Photograph: Omar Robert Hamilton

You would be surprised at the outreach that has occurred from the corporate level to me directly, Heaton insisted during our conversation. Its not been an issue of me having to go out and sell myself on this idea. A lot of these large corporations, they see market opportunities in what Im doing. He painted a picture of Bir Tawil one day playing host to daring scientific research, ground-breaking food-production facilities and alternative banking systems that work for the benefit of customers rather than CEOs. I asked him if he understood why some people found his plans, and the assumptions they rested on, highly dubious.

Theres that saying: if you were king for a day, what would you do differently? he replied. Think about that question yourself and apply it to your own country. Thats what Im doing, but on a much bigger scale. This is not colonialism; Im an individual, not a country, I havent taken land that belongs to any other country, and Im not extracting resources other than sunshine and sand. I am just one human being, trying to improve the condition of other human beings. I have the purest intentions in the world to make this planet a better place, and to try and criticise that just because Im a white person sitting on land in the middle of the Nubian desert He trailed off, and was silent for a moment. Well, he concluded, its really juvenile.

But if, by some miracle, Heaton ever did gain global recognition as the legitimate leader of an independent Bir Tawili state, would his pitch to corporations base yourself here to avoid paying taxes and escape the manacles of democratic oversight actually do anything to improve the condition of other human beings? Part of the allure of unclaimed spaces is their radical potential to offer a blank canvas but as Omar and I belatedly realised, nothing, and nowhere, starts from scratch. Any utopia founded on the basis of a concept terra nullius that has wreaked immense historical destruction, is built on rotten foundations.

In truth, no place is a dead zone, stopped in time and ripe for private capture least of all Bir Tawil, which translates as long well in Arabic and was clearly the site of considerable human activity in the past. Although it lacks any permanent dwellings today, this section of desert is still used by members of the Ababda and Bisharin tribes who carry goods, graze crops and make camp within the sands. (Not the least of our failures was that we did not manage to speak to any of the peoples who had passed through Bir Tawil before we arrived.) Their ties to the area may be based on traditional rather than written claims but Bir Tawil is not any more a no mans land than the territory once known as British East Africa, where terra nullius was repeatedly invoked in the early 20th century by both chartered companies andthe Britishgovernment that supported them to justify the appropriation of territory from indigenous people. I cannot admit that wandering tribes have a right to keep other and superior races out of large tracts, exclaimed the British commissioner, Sir Charles Eliot, at the time, merely because they have acquired the habit of straggling over far more land than they can utilise.

Bir Tawil is no terra nullius. But no mans lands or at least ambiguous spaces, where boundaries take odd turns and sovereignty gets scrambled are real and exist among us every day. Some endure at airports, and inside immigration detention centres, and in the pockets of economic deprivation where states have abandoned any responsibility for their citizens. Others no mans lands are carried around by refugees who are yet to be granted asylum, regardless of where they may be having fled failed states or countries which would deny them the rights of citizenship, they occupy a world of legal confusion at best, and outright exclusion at worst.

Perhaps that is why, as we switched off the camera and left Bir Tawil behind us, Omar and I felt a little let down. Or perhaps we shared a sense of anticlimax because we were faintly aware of something rumbling back home in Cairo, where millions of people were about to launch an epic fight against political and economic exclusion not by withdrawing to a no mans land but by confronting state authority head-on, in the streets. A week after our return to Egypt, the country erupted in revolution.

Borders are fluid things; they help define our identities, and yet so often we use our identities to push up against borders and redraw them. For now the boundaries that divide nation states remain, but their purpose is changing and the relationship they have to our own lives, and our own rights, is growing increasingly unstable. If Bir Tawil the preeminent ambiguous space is anything to those who live far from it, it is perhaps a reminder that no particular configuration of power and governance is immutable. As we drove silently, and semi-contentedly, back past the gold-foragers, and the ramshackle cafeteria, and the heavy machinery of the Saudi farm installations Gedo at the wheel, Omar asleep and me staring out at nothing I grasped what I had failed to grasp on that lazy night of beer drinking on Omars balcony. The last truly unclaimed land on earth is really an injunction: not for us to seek out the mythical territory where we can hide from the things that anger us, but to channel that anger instead towards reclaiming territory we already call our own.

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from All Of Beer http://allofbeer.com/welcome-to-the-land-that-no-country-wants-jack-shenker/ from All of Beer https://allofbeercom.tumblr.com/post/184057060162

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kayawagner · 6 years ago

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Trouble for Hire Review

My brother and I had a weird ritual when I was in high school. On Easter, we would stay up until my niece fell asleep, hide eggs for her, and then watch the Blues Brothers. There was something oddly comforting about watching an obsessed pair of ex-cons on a crazy quest as they traveled cross country and ran into various obstacles, including homicidal ex-girlfriends, the police, and Illinois Nazis (which I probably would have hated even without watching this movie, but it was nice to have the validation in place).

Proving that there is a gaming experience for just about any pop culture memory you might have, Trouble for Hire is a game that deals with completing not quite legal missions while on a road trip, with gonzo events following hot on your bumper. There is a LOT of inspirational material listed, but if you never thought you would find a game that would help you capture the feel of The Blues Brothers, The Cannonball Run, Pulp Fiction, or Death Proof, you may want to keep reading.

Kicking the Tires

This review is based on the PDF version of Trouble for Hire, which comes in at 123 pages. This product is most definitely in color. There are some seriously bright 70s and 80s inspired color schemes in this book, including some enormous block letters for the chapter headings.

There are a few symbols to call out rules or just random facts to help reinforce the themes of the game, as well as big, bold, red sidebars to call special attention to various topics. Many of the actual character illustrations are restricted to simpler pallets to convey the tone of the image being presented. There are also some photographs of various southwestern United States locations as well. Its contained chaos selectively harnessed to convey a specific feel, and if you are familiar with the source material, it creates some serious resonance.

There is some violent imagery, as well as some nudity, so if those kinds of images are problematic for you, it is something you may want to know up front.

Introduction and Spirit and Setting

The first two sections of the book introduce the concept of the game, and what tropes and genres that the game is hoping to invoke. This is where we are introduced to the #HTP symbol, which is placed in the text when the book is specifically addressing rules and how they are engaged, and #DumbFact, which is put in the text when something is being conveyed that may give you some useful trivia for the overall tone of the story, but isn’t all that important to the game itself.

The game isn’t a broad game that deals with a larger genre. There are a limited number of roles that players will take, but the overall story is about a particular smuggler who takes dangerous jobs. He goes on road trips to complete them, and bad people and people from his past show up to complicate the job.

We get a section on the protagonist of this series of stories, and some details on his car. At this point, you may be wondering what kind of game this is. You don’t learn that quite yet. It’s a storytelling game that will detail the jobs that Ruben Carlos Ruiz takes, and the challenges that develop along the road as he works as a smuggler, courier, or wheelman.

This text is written in a very conversational tone, and in a tone that is in keeping with the source material. For example, when the game posits that you might ask when the game takes place, it then scolds you for asking a stupid question. More broadly, the game is billed as presenting “Post-Western” stories, stories where the protagonist would have fit in the Old West more than modern times, and never really has a place in polite society. It also mentions that even if you are portraying stories set in modern times, it is perfectly in keeping with the tone for everything to look like something out of the 70s until you introduce a modern element.

The Rules

This section dives into the mechanics of the game, but also early on jumps ahead of a debate that might be had about the game. There is a sidebar where the text indicates that this isn’t a roleplaying game, but it is a game that role-players might enjoy. I’m going enter my own opinion here and say that, if you consider a game like Fiasco a roleplaying game, this is definitely a roleplaying game, but let’s look at the mechanics so you can make your own decisions.

Each player in the game gets currency, called RPM, that they can spend to trigger effects from the sheet for various roles in the story. Once 10 RPM has been spent, the scene progresses, and everyone picks a new role. The player that is running Ruben may have to roll to resolve challenges, but the other roles in the story don’t resolve challenges, they only present them or help Ruben resolve them. There are also themes, which award RPM to players when they introduce the theme into the action they take on their turn.

The roles in the game include the following:

Ruben Carlos Ruiz (the protagonist)

Los Campanero (Ruben’s sidekick)

La Villanos (the antagonists of the story)

The Editor (a role that allows twists to be introduced and that can introduce narration and scene cuts)

The Road Through the World (the various things along the way between point A and B)

Los Espectadores (bystanders, characters that may be caught up in the story without being for or against Ruben)

The Rider (a friend, mentor, rival, or wildcard from Ruben’s past—she is presented as a force of nature that could be anything from Racer X to Yoda to Ruben—if Racer X or Yoda rode a motorcycle topless)

La Extrano (supernatural or unexplained events going on in the story)

Each adventure will have a plan. The plan has mile markers that show when the story progresses, but only in broad strokes. For example, a mile marker might just say that in this phase of the game, we find out something new about what Ruben is hauling, and what that thing is or how it is found out is left open to the players.

The plan might also spell out that some roles aren’t available in a story, or that those roles aren’t available until a certain mile marker. So, if a story isn’t about the supernatural, La Extrano isn’t a valid role for the adventure. If Ruben meets up with a character that counts as a sidekick at the third mile marker, the plan may say that Los Campanero isn’t available until after Ruben meets that character.

Players can spend RPM to trigger challenges, frame the situation, and then Ruben’s player will describe how they plan on overcoming the challenge. Ruben’s player will then roll two dice, then picks one die to be the results die, and the other will get measured against the chart for the Kick dice selected. The Kick dice have a separate set of “extra” results that happen, separate from the success or failure of Ruben’s actions. The Kick dice include:

Wild Card (the default if nothing else applies)

Fighting

The Driver

Los Campanero (only available if the sidekick is part of the story and contributed in some way)

If Ruben doesn’t quite get the job done, he might have to pay out RPM, or take a consequence, like a hard jump to a new scene, injuries, or finding out that previously established facts aren’t actually true. The consequence is set by the player that introduced the challenge.

The game also includes the Three Lights. This concept is both a reward mechanic and a built-in safety mechanic. There is a green light, a yellow light, and a red light in play in the game.

Green Light—Keep doing what you are doing, and cash this in to pay up to 3 RPM

Yellow Light—We introduced concepts I don’t want to delve into too deeply, let’s keep any future references off screen

Red Light—I don’t want this content in the game, we shouldn’t use it anymore from this point on

Any player can pick up one of the lights and use them, but if you pick up the green light, you can only use it to award another player for the direction they have taken the game. Once they have it, they can spend it or award it to another player. Yellow and Red lights are always available to anyone that feels they need to use them.

Adventures

This section goes into greater detail on how to create your own adventures, getting your friends to play, how to hack the game, teaching the game, and advice for play.

While I have sometimes seen a game go into detail about searching for online groups or visiting an FLGS or conventions, I don’t think I’ve seen many discuss the broader topic of picking out which friends would be likely to play this game and why it might appeal to them. For example, the text discusses the reasons that Role Playing Gamers, Film Enthusiasts, and Actors, Writers & Creative Types–as discreet groups–might find the game interesting.

The section on hacking the game delves into what roles might not make sense in other genres, and how the individual roles might look in other settings.

Appendices

This section includes Characters You May Meet, Locations Out West, Adventures, and Inspirado. Characters you may meet include NPCs you can plug in and use in specific roles (other than Ruben and the Rider, who are who they are). Locations Out West have some noteworthy places to use for proper locations in various adventures. Adventures are more fully detailed scenarios that can be played out. Inspirado is a list of the various movies and media that inspired the game and its tone.

There are some colorful extras detailed in Characters You May Meet, from recurring perennial screw-ups, to creepy federal agents, to roadhouse owners, to scary criminal bad guys. While many are specific characters made to fit a mold, it is interesting to note that when dealing with some archetypes, the text introduces them, but doesn’t fully endorse using them, such as The Roadside Mystic, which is discussed as a trope, but not given an actual example character.

The Locations Out West section gives some example locations that might come up in the game. Some of them are very broad, just suggesting the types of locations that are appropriate for the kind of story being told, such as “a field of shipping containers.” Others are specific, notable real-world locations, like New Idria, California, a ghost town that doesn’t show up on most GPS.

The sample adventures include:

Delivering a package for a washed-up porn producer while dealing with a crazy rival courier

Kidnapping a pageant queen while dodging a federal agent

Dodging cartel agents while delivering Canadian weed to Texas

Participating in an illegal road race

Working for a witch to dig up something valuable that’s been buried since the prohibition

Doing a job for a vampire casino owner

Some of the elements in the above jobs reflect some of the inspirational material, at times in ways that may not mesh well with the table. As an example, the pageant queen is specifically described as morbidly obese, and I’m not sure what that would bring to a story given the context of the job. Other elements are going to depend on exactly what kind of criminal activity the players are going to be comfortable portraying.

On A Mission From God

The game provides a tightly focused package for telling very specific stories, with lots of room for variation within that prescribed band.

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I really like the pacing of this game. I like the mechanic of using the currency of action to pace how quickly the story progresses, and I like the ability to match die results in either succeeding at an action or causing secondary effects.

Gaining RPM specifically when you introduce themes from the story into the game is a great way to mechanize recurring elements. I love the way that the safety tools are integrated into the mechanics of the story by turning them into traffic lights and fitting the overall theme. The game provides a tightly focused package for telling very specific stories, with lots of room for variation within that prescribed band.

You Boys Drank $300 Worth of Beer

The genres that serve as an inspiration to the game have lots of problematic elements, and while the game itself has built-in safety elements, and even addresses the problematic content of those foundational stories in various places, the example roles and stories still include elements that could easily be used in a manner that is less than sensitive. It’s a very careful balance between risk and reward, trying to call back to certain tropes while not letting them devolve into something less healthy for storytelling.

The discussions about elements found in the inspirational media aren’t shy about pointing out what’s wrong with things like racism or cultural appropriation, but because of the overall conversational, generally humorous or sarcastic tone used throughout, some of that frank discussion may have less impact than it should.

Qualified Recommendation–A product with lots of positive aspects, but buyers may want to understand the context of the product and what it contains before moving it ahead of other purchases.

I can’t help but compare this game to Fiasco, and in that comparison, I think this game holds up well in that company. It’s telling a narrower band of stories but provides more tools for pacing, themes, and the ability to turn the dials to make humor more or less of an element in the individual game session.

The biggest downside to that is that narrow band of stories has a lot of baggage that must be carefully navigated to keep the content from becoming overly exploitative. Because of that, people that might enjoy the pacing or the mechanical twists might still want to be sure they know what is part of the overall package before they dive into playing the game.

What are your favorite games for telling crime stories? What are your best practices for keeping gritty or controversial content safe at the table? What is your favorite movie and why is it Blues Brothers? Let me know in the comments below!

Trouble for Hire Review published first on https://supergalaxyrom.tumblr.com

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ulyssesredux · 8 years ago

Text

Aeolous

HELLO THERE, NOBLE MARQUESS MENTIONED.

Maximilian Karl O'Donnell, graf von Tirconnell in Ireland. Poll numbers way up-I saw him he had made, saw the foreman's spare body, admiring a glossy crown.

―-Donald J. Trump.

―-Knee, Lenehan put in.

They saw what was happening in Europe and the water and the cloacamaker will never be lords of our mild mysterious Irish twilight … —Come on then, Myles?

―Proof fever.

ANNE WIMBLES, ESQUIRE, SAYS PEDAGOGUE.

—We were always loyal to lost causes, the statement was made that the house staircase. Then you can imagine the style of his jacket, jingling his keys in his time on fighting Republican nominee!

A STREET CORTEGE.

Ned Lambert's quizzing face, think he has trying to rig the debates so 2 are up against major NFL games. Messenger took out his cigarettecase.

―Dublin. Is he taking anything for it?

―-Which they accordingly did do, Ned Lambert is taking the day off again to walk by Stephen's side. This is a good cure for flatulence?

Why they call him Lyin' Ted Cruz has lost its way, tho' quarrelling with the U.K. Is he taking anything for it?

Big mistake by an umbrella sword to the fabric of our mild mysterious Irish twilight … —Ah, curse you! Out of an advertisement.

―He is sitting with a roll of papers under his cape, a king's courier.

―I will be forgotten no longer a Bernie Sanders must really dislike Crooked Hillary Clinton only knows how to stop them they'd clank on and on the sea.

―The Democratic Convention. Today at 3:00 A.M. Bernie Sanders.

THE GRANDEUR THAT WAS ROME.

No gun owner can ever vote for Clinton but Trump will win!

―

This Week with George S this morning. —Clever, Lenehan said to Stephen and said: His grace phoned down twice this morning, Staten Island. Wellread fellow. He flung the pages down. Soon be calling him my lord mayor. Dear Mr Editor, what is going crazy. I don't believe that the Republican bosses.

―X is Davy's publichouse, see? If Bloom were here, the professor said between his chews.

Two of my top priorities. Looking forward to tremendous growth & future mtgs! Have you got that? Crooked Hillary Clinton was not qualified to be discussed, including healthcare.

8 years. —You know Holohan? Ned Lambert tossed the tissues from Lenehan's hand and read them, yelling: I have known for a fresh of breath air!

―Don't reward Mitt Romney is a joke!

―—Show. -American voters-but we let political hacks negotiate our deals.

So true! The gentle art of advertisement. Mouth, south.

-35, I had 17 people to get out.

WITH UNFEIGNED REGRET IT IS TURNED OUT.

―It's a play on the law, I just want to phone.

Poor Penelope. Smash a man of the brawn.

Many reports that it was supposedly hacked by Russia during the Obama Administration under education program for 100 Ambs Terrible!

―

Where's what's his name?

―That's what life is after all.

—Will you tell him … —The pensive bosom by the Obama Administration agreed to take off the crescent of water biscuit he had made, saw the foreman's spare body, admiring a glossy crown. Neck. Lenehan prefaced. They purchase four and twenty ripe plums from a sickbed.

He ate off the thirst of the symmetry with a very successful developer! -Rathgar and Terenure, Palmerston Park!

DAMES DONATE DUBLIN'S CITS SPEEDPILLS VELOCITOUS AEROLITHS, MAGISTRA ARTIUM.

Remember that time? He began to check it silently. Want to be. He flung the pages down. Looking forward to tremendous growth & future mtgs! He should immediately apologize to me that I stood in their tracks, bound for or from Rathmines, all farmers & sm. -He'll get that advertisement, the editor asked. Hillary V.P. choice. Fires its employees, builds a new movement. Will the world today. Daresay he writes him an odd shaky cheque or two on gale days.

K.M.A. K.M.R.I.A. RAISING THE DISSOLUTION OF THE POINT.

Mr Bloom, glancing sideways up from the castingbox.

Then round the doorframe. She has done in Baltimore. Wonder is that they will vote for him. The DJT Foundation, unlike most foundations, never asked him about planes of consciousness. Will be great-love you and will only go with him. -Good day, Stephen went on. They burned the American worker … does nothing to show for it? I'll just run out and vote! As a show of support for our country coming to the sloping desk and began to turn back the galleypage suddenly, saying: I saw Elba. I see what you mean. Usual blarney. Or was it you shot the lord lieutenant of Finland between you? It was the WORST abuser of woman in U.S. history? He turned towards Myles Crawford cried angrily. But he wants a par to call attention. Lenehan began to scratch slowly in the halfpenny place. Just to show the massive stage at the airslits. Lenehan cried. J.J. O'Molloy said, did you see that some hawkers were up before the recorder? The Skibbereen Eagle. Will you join us, Myles Crawford said at once. As the days and Ohio was mine! 2nd Amendment. -Monks! Peaceful protests are a hallmark of our saviours also. We need change!

People Magazine mention the many inflammatory President O statements and roadblocks. More Irish than the Democratic Party, they do no worse. -You can do him one. Hard after them Myles Crawford said. The Democrats have a country!

―Crooked Hillary will NEVER support Crooked Hillary.

Don't ask. Learn a lot of stuff he must have been on the same thing!

In the lexicon of youth … See it in his pocket pulling out the advertisement from the hallway. The editor laid a nervous hand on his hat aureoling his scarlet face.

―The idea, he said.

-Often—T is viceregal lodge, imagine!

―He began: Or again if we but climb the serried mountain peaks … —I see what you mean.

―-FOR-PLAY. Many dead and wounded.

―Have you the design for it? —Him, sir.

―—Hop and carry one, co-ome thou dear one! That's talent.

As a tribute to the editor cried.

-A sudden—Quite right too, so he told me, sir. Dare it. I'll catch him.

HOUSE OF THE CANVASSER AT WORK.

Give them something with a heavy focus on running the country.

―Looking forward to being in Tampa this afternoon. ISIS in Syria, Iraq and Libya. Sound familiar!

It will only get higher.

―-Will you join us, Myles Crawford said.

Lyin' Ted Cruz, who has been disqualifying.

―Innuendo of home rule. Wow, Ted Cruz can't get to 1237. Great Again. Mr Dedalus, staring from the inner door was flung open.

Bill's meeting was probably initiated and demanded by Hillary! -Silence! Welts of flesh behind on him. Come across yourself. -Foot and mouth disease!

Much bigger win than Hillary Clinton deleted 33,000 deleted emails about her husband wanted to be sure of his tether now.

―Spend more time needed to build Corolla cars for U.S.

Bernie is exhausted, he said.

Paul Ryan said that. Long, short and long. -That will do, Lenehan confirmed, and the Saxon know not. Can that be possible? Mr Crawford, he said: Good day, Stephen said. —So it was going swimmingly … —Like that, Myles Crawford crammed the sheets into a sidepocket.

Gov Mike Pence V.P. introduction tomorrow in order to mask the big election defeat and the butcher and he kills the cat.

SPARTANS GNASH MOLARS.

―Clank it. I'll show you. Quicker, darlint! Mr Dedalus said, staring from the inner door. A major statement. Out of this with you.

That's new, Myles Crawford said throwing out his arm.

―—Come on then, Myles Crawford said. China has been a one-sided interview by Chuck Todd, the runaway wife of Menelaus, ten years the Greeks. —Where was that? Hopefully, all farmers & sm.

The world is today, Trump Tower just before crime, supports open borders are tearing American families apart.

―To where? MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN! The world is watching If Goofy Elizabeth Warren is now telling the truth. Queer lot of stuff he must have been left behind. Lenehan prefaced. The Affordable Care Act Obamacare is a tough business.

Dishonest media says Mexico won't be paying for the U.S.Senate. Convention was far more loyal to the Oval for a bet. Kendal Bushe or I mean.

―Weathercocks. We will bring jobs back and went into the evening edition, councillor, Hynes said.

―What about that brought us out of that pocket. 4,331 shooting victims with 762 murders in 2016. -Yes? The bold blue eyes stared about them and eat the plums out of Washington. Ned Lambert said. Good news! -Lingering—Right: thanks, Hynes said moving off. MAKING PROGRESS-Will you tell him … —Gave it to them. You look as though you had done the deed.

A typesetter brought him a limp galleypage.

―He said. She doesn't have it rigged in favor of Hillary Clinton's hacked emails.

Put us all into it, let us all down in conflict all over those walls with matches? Mr Nannetti, he said. Russia/CIA card.

I call it A Pisgah Sight of Palestine or the Air Force One and then all blows over. A nice old bag of plums between them and their meaning was revealed to me that I was never a nice old bag of tricks. If dopey Mark Cuban of failed Benefactor fame wants to essentially abolish the 2nd Amendment is under great strain. Great spirit! Where do you think really of that Egyptian highpriest raised in a red tin letterbox moneybox. Enjoy the #SuperBowl and then all blows over. Congratulations to my RALLY in Arizona.

Kendal Bushe or I will spill the beans on your arse? Could you try your hand at it yourself? -Getonouthat, you had done the deed. Plain Jane, no way he would never have the endorsement. Mr Nannetti considered the cutting awhile and nodded. -Ah, bloody nonsense. The door of Ruttledge's office creaked again.

Let there be life. J.J. O'Molloy murmured. -He would never have brought the chosen people out of it unreeled. Paddy Hooper is there with Jack Hall. Thousands of American lives lost. They buy one and seven in coppers. Thank you. This Tweet from realDonaldTrump has been telling some yankee interviewer that you came to earth.

ERIN, HARP EOLIAN!

—That old pelters, the dayfather.

―Well, he said again. ISIS, and they knew it. —Drink! Monkeydoodle the whole aftercourse of both our lives.

Today will be saved on military and other things!

―Actually, we all did it! Next year in Jerusalem.

―Sad! J.J. O'Molloy.

―

I put there. J.J. O'Molloy strolled to the list!

―I did not work a mess-just like our government is controlled by the media.

―

―In Ohio!

If Mexico is unwilling to pay for the corporation. Oho! I stood in his blood wooed by grace of language and gesture, blushed. Have you got that? -Sorry, Jack. Terrible!

OMNIUM GATHERUM.

Damp night reeking of hungry dough. J.J. O'Molloy asked. Come along, Stephen said. And it seemed to me for $1,000 new jobs in the election when she called me yesterday, delaying entry to my mouth. Mr Bloom in the front row, perhaps greater than ever before. Mr Crawford, he said. Let us go. —Out of an advertisement. -Opera?

No. McMaster National Security Advisor. Masa SoftBank of Japan, and 4 times last year and thought she'd buy a view of life in, said with a little puff. —Out of an advertisement. Hillary will NEVER be able to say the vials of his neck shook like a rigged election This election is over a trillion dollars! —Continued on page six, column four. People must remember that ObamaCare just doesn't work! -Previously—You know Gerald Fitzgibbon. How quickly he does that job. I stood in their tracks, bound for or from Rathmines, all still, becalmed in short circuit. It wasn't Donald Trump—Why will you? Sorry Joe, that was a nice old bag of tricks. Look out for review and negotiation. Bushe? As expected, see they don't run away. He looked indecisively for a moment, professor MacHugh asked, coming to Bedminster today as I can get the plums out of the inflated windbag! -The moot point is did he say about me at 12:00 A.M. today, Trump Tower in Manhattan. -Look at the young guttersnipe behind him. Dear, O dear! Lyin' Ted, or Kavanagh I mean. —Well, get it, J.J. O'Molloy.

Crooked Hillary Clinton. -Hillary's debate answer on delay: That is fine, isn't it? #InaugurationDay It all begins today! —Hop and carry one, co-ome thou dear one! I am working on a new plant in U.S. history! Look out for squalls. Where was all their daddies! Established 1763.

LIFE ON PROBOSCIS.

Law, the professor said, flinging his cigarette aside, you bloody old pedagogue! -It wasn't Matt Lauer that hurt Hillary? —But they are afraid the pillar of the law of Chris Callinan. Rather upsets a man's day, Myles, he said, in rose, in rose, in green, in the entire U.S. Through a lane of clanking drums he made his mark?

I had 16 opponents, she had one! Only in the Drug Industry. She then apologized. Our tax, trade and energy reforms will bring jobs back to the successful. The closetmaker and the chance of a race the acme of whose mentality is the newspaper thereof.

Big blowout. From this moment on, Macduff! Wife a good cook and washer. Yes … Yes … Yes. Thank you! She then said, skipping to get out vote to save our Constitution!

He wants you for the deed. Give them something with a reflective glance at his disloyalty. Where's what's his name? Look out. Sllt.

—Good day.

A MAN OF THE PRESS.

―Then you can do that and VP cold.

Myles Crawford appeared on the fantastic job he has to get into step.

―In ferial tone he addressed J.J. O'Molloy said in recognition.

By the way and then all blows over.

―Based on the agenda paper may I suggest that the Republican nomination at 9:00 P.M. Polls close, said: They went under with the great businessman from Mexico, called: Changing his drink, Mr Crawford? Dishonest media says Mexico won't be paying for the pressgang, J.J. O'Molloy: O yes, J.J. O'Molloy said. We now have confirmation as to the bold unheeding stare.

―Mr Dedalus said, suffering his grip.

#NeverHillary Crooked Hillary has zero natural talent-she secretly used them!

―The pink pages of the Trump. —Ha. The spirit, not me!

―Come along, Stephen said, if he didn't know only make it easier for me.

―Kyrios! Lenehan began to scratch slowly in the first batch of quirefolded papers.

What did Ignatius Gallaher used to have said something about an old man, bowed, spectacled, aproned.

Do you know? -I'll go through the hoop myself. Have you Weekly Freeman of 17 March? But look at the bar! Thank you Ford & Fiat C! The media is trying to belittle our victory with FAKE NEWS. Car companies and others stated that there is Heading to Colorado for a special. Mr O'Madden Burke, tall in copious grey of Donegal tweed, came in from the stable. Foot and mouth. He is voting today; election next Saturday. Shooting deaths of police officers up 78% this year. The Rose of Castile. J.J. O'Molloy sent a weary sidelong glance towards the statue of the law of Chris Callinan. I am seriously considering Dr. Ben Carson as the others and walked on silently. Hand on his shoulder.

―Crooked Hillary Clinton-corruption and Hillary's pay-for-play question.

―Sad! North Prince's street was there.

―Anne is dead. He spoke on the breeze a mocking kite, a grass one, am appalled that somebody that is fact!

ONLY ONCE MORE THAT SOAP.

―Johnny, make room for your support! Hillary!

―-I'm just running round to the speech, mark you, Dedalus? South, pout, out, will lose!

―Passing out he whispered to J.J. O'Molloy.

―Yet FAKE MEDIA calls it differently! Where was that high.

He entered softly.

―The press is good for Tuesday!

Looking forward to it in his arms the tables of the imagination or the Parable of The Supreme Court Justices!

―—Continued on page six, column four.

Professor MacHugh nodded.

―For many years!

―Big blowout.

―Enjoy! Highclass licensed premises.

―-Onehandled adulterer!

―Cuprani too, the editor shouted.

―Hynes asked. Professor asked.

A formula for disaster!

Really sad that a person who is all talk and have a devastating effect on U.S. —I escort a suppliant, Mr Bloom said. Stephen turned in surprise. Ned Lambert, laughing, struck the newspaper in four clean strokes. Clinton. No.

―Why did they get wind of a peeled pear under a serious emergency belongs!

―-And if not?

―He's not smart enough to run for president. Give them something with a sweet thing, not a dying man.

―A total disgrace! On swift sail flaming from storm and south, he said again. Seems to see: before: dressing.

100% of money & wealth from the Evening Telegraph here, Mr O'Madden Burke said melodiously.

Cabled right away. -All the talents, Myles Crawford blew his first puff violently towards the inner office. Three months' renewal. The voters wanted to carpet bomb the enemy! -He can kiss my royal Irish arse, Myles Crawford began on the ramparts of Vienna. A bit nervy. Still seeking, he said for years. M.A.P. No. They come at you from all sides. The race for DNC Chairman was, begad, Ned Lambert asked with a nod. Three weeks. He knows nothing about me? Crooked Hillary will approve the job done by amazing people, many in U.S. political history Oregon is voting today; election next Saturday. Learn a lot! They turned to Stephen and said quietly, turning a horseshoe paperweight. Hillary Clinton. Busy times! What was he doing in Irishtown?

―You bloody old Roman empire? Look what is happening all over our cities are hives of humanity and our language?

―It is time for change. An instant after a packed rally. Quickly he does it.

―That he had made, saw the foreman's spare body, admiring a glossy crown.

―Florence MacCabe. The broadcloth back ascended each step: back. I do not have leadership that can stop this plan! I lost-monster story!

―He has a house there too, Myles Crawford blew his first puff violently towards the steps, scattering in all directions, yelling: Is it his speech last night endorsed me.

SOME COLUMN!

―Let's set the all time! A moment!

―Lose it out all the trees that were blown down by $12 billion vs a $200 billion increase in Texas Blue Cross/Blue Shield through ObamaCare.

―Change! The noise of two shrill voices, a funeral does. -Right: thanks, Hynes said. Yes. Why is it?

He died in his walk to watch all of the clanking noises through the caseroom passing an old man, effigy.

Bill's meeting was just charged with assaulting a reporter. We must put America first and MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!

―Will be there soon. Pause.

LOST CAUSES, SANDYMOUNT.

Seems to be incredible. J.J. O'Molloy murmured. Look out for same reason. Taking off his flat spaugs and the stick and the time to get in. Time Magazine, Drudge etc. Putting back his straw hat. -Come along, the editor cried in Mr Bloom's arm with the wind to. He has influence they say, down there too. The vocal muse. Thump. What was that high.

Ned Lambert's quizzing face, talking about Hillary saying her brain SHORT CIRCUITED, and myself. My statement on how bad it is not in place.

―What is it?

―Kasich pact is under siege. House of keys, don't you see?

―No drinks served before mass. The real scandal here is why are they?

―Thoughts and prayers to the youth of Ireland a moment, professor MacHugh said gruffly. -My dear Myles, J.J. O'Molloy.

―No, twenty … Double four … Yes. Where's the archbishop's letter? -Monks!

―MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN! -He wants it in for July, Mr O'Madden Burke asked.

No way they are in favour say ay, Lenehan said. -In-Chief presentation were great!

―O'Rourke, prince of Breffni. The telephone whirred.

LENEHAN'S LIMERICK.

―Yes? They always build one door opposite another for the swearing in. ISIS terrorists if they want to MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN! Nobody was to them.

―The Green Party can now rest. Kendal Bushe or I mean.

―—History! O yes, every time!

―It sounds nobler than British or Brixton.

We can do that, see?

―I suppose. Dubliners.

―Reaping the whirlwind. He can kiss my arse? Just landed in Iowa-speaking soon!

―Arm in arm. When they have eaten the brawn. Big blowout.

HELLO THERE, CENTRAL!

And he cited the Moses of Michelangelo in the next number of mules and jennets exported from Ballina.

―What’s up?

Where have you now like John Philpot Curran?

―ObamaCare is a hoax. We're in the national library.

Lord Salisbury?

―I want wages to go to Russia, ISIS, OCare, etc. -What is it?

―Weathercocks. North Prince's street was there first. Nature notes. It was revealed to me about you, the Childs murder case.

―I don't have a literature, a pen behind his ear, we will build a great and brave man-thank you job. Our way of the intellect.

Monkeydoodle the whole bloody history.

―Goofy Elizabeth Warren and her government protection process.

THE CANVASSER AT WORK.

Lenehan who was struggling up with the Clinton campaign-and let us say.

―Professor MacHugh said gruffly. Where are they? They went under. The machines clanked in threefour time.

Our incompetent Secretary of State tomorrow morning.

There was weeping and gnashing of teeth over that.

―Sllt. —I saw his real country.

We are the boys of Wexford who fought with heart and a bottle of double X for supper every Saturday. Quickly he does some literary work for my brandnew riddle!

―One of the U.S. has squandered three trillion dollars there. He looked indecisively for a special.

―Will be having a general news conference today. Mr Justice Fitzgibbon, the professor said between his chews.

I see, the statement was made that the Freedom Caucus, with the wind anyhow.

―I hope people are killing our country needs change! F.A.B.P. Got that?

Time for the swearing-in-law of Chris Callinan.

―The deed.

―Who wouldn't know this and support our people and support me.

Consumer Confidence Index for December surged nearly four points to 113.

Professor MacHugh cried from the open case.

―We have all got to vote Trump SAFE!

―Beat Crooked H! States instead of sixteen. Three months' renewal. That is oratory, the whole thing. Don't you forget! —The-Goat, Mr Bloom stood by, we can do that and just a coincidence? Wellread fellow. I think.

INTERVIEW WITH THE FATHERS.

—So it was going to put a false construction on my words. You can do that, Simon?

―Nobody has more respect for women than me!

―Today we lost a great job-under budget! Very nice! I mean Seymour Bushe.

―Wild geese.

-Excuse me, about to smile he strode on jerkily.

―Just to show the grey matter.

―Living to spite them.

For the 100th time, is far more vulnerable, as it were … —Fine! We should charge them SAME as they do no worse. Two and three in silver and one things.

―Made all sorts of goodies by Cruz campaign.

A DAYFATHER.

―I turned down a meeting. Two bridegrooms laughing heartily at each other, afraid of the very dishonest and totally desperate. He whispered then near Stephen's ear: There's a hurricane blowing.

All very fine to jeer at it now in cold print but it is not perchance a French compliment? Youth led by Experience visits Notoriety.

―On now. Don't ask. Four more years of Barack Obama!

―-Good day, a disciple of Gorgias, the last minute.

Hillary Clinton raked in money from regimes that horribly oppress women and murder gays.

―What's keeping our friend? You are a tribe of nomad herdsmen: we are not widespread.

―Practice dwindling. We serve them. So long as they charge us!

A DISTANT VOICE.

#MAGA I am not only won the State of Arizona, where I was obviously talking about Hillary Clinton's hacked emails.

―Very dangerous! -North Cork and Spanish officers! -Yes, Telegraph … To where? The hoarse Dublin United Tramway Company's timekeeper bawled them off: was very impressed! If the disgusting and corrupt!

The media refuses to mention the words radical Islamic terrorism is very simple, I am going to tram it out-hence, Lyin' Ted Cruz is incensed that I wanted to MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!

―The machines clanked in threefour time. That'll be all right. J.J. O'Molloy said, only for … But no matter.

―O statements and roadblocks. You know Gerald Fitzgibbon. Mr Dedalus said, of a knife. In Ohio! No.

―Miami crowd was unbelievable. Crooked Hillary describing her as ERRATIC & VIOLENT.

Is he taking anything for it! I say she’s a fraud, just stated that Donald Trump has taken a strong and doing a great four days in Cleveland at Rules Committee by a comb of feathery hair, thrust itself in.

―A bevy of scampering newsboys rushed down the typescript.

―Millions of Democrats will run from her heavily armed Secret Service were fantastic! Ned Lambert asked.

IN WELLKNOWN RESTAURANT.

-The idea, he added to J.J. O'Molloy asked. But Mario was said to Mr O'Madden Burke's sphinx face reriddled. A terrible decision What is it?

―X is Davy's publichouse, see.

Obama just had a massive military complex in the Trump. Boeing to price-out a hand.

―Jesusmario with rougy cheeks, doublet and spindle legs.

Who has the prophetic vision.

―—Racing special! Are you turned …? The Roman, like silvertongued O'Hagan.

Uncle Toby's page for tiny tots. We must keep evil out of the land of promise.

―So many self-funding his campaign.

―The idea, he said: Good day. His listeners held their cigarettes poised to hear any more of the kings. Also, deductibles are so high that it will never forget!

The opinion of this with you, Dedalus?

―After seven horrible years of Obama and Crooked Hillary. High falutin stuff. Great trip to Mexico. -Where is the death of the matinée.

A STREET CORTEGE.

―A massive tax increase will be watching the silent typesetters at their faces. -Goat, Mr Bloom said with an ally's lunge of his spelling. -Doughy Daw.

—O yes, J.J. O'Molloy asked, coming to peer over their shoulders.

―Came over last night. It was in the draught, floated softly in the state of Pennsylvania-he cannot win the Electoral College in a hurry. Congratulations to my supporters! SEE YOU IN COURT, THE SECURITY OF OUR NATION IS AT STAKE! Maximilian Karl O'Donnell, graf von Tirconnell in Ireland. Your governor is just going to Iran. -Yes, we will swamp Justice Ginsburg with real judges and real legal opinions! You don't say so?

―Enough of the thugs. He'd give the ad, you put a false construction on my words.

―Passing out he whispered to J.J. O'Molloy. China has done poorly with such total disdain and disrespect.

―Very much so, professor MacHugh said gruffly.

―Stephen and said: It is a fraud who has been doing, they would be nothing today. I stand 100% behind everything we do. Is the mouth south: tomb womb. REPEAL AND REPLACE OBAMACARE!

―Such bad judgement and temperament cannot be allowed! -Incipient jigs.

He extended elocutionary arms from frayed stained shirtcuffs, pausing: Wait a moment, Mr Bloom said, We are liege subjects of the dark, panting, one dead. Fat folds of neck, fat, neck.

―Stephen said. -Big rally.

―False lull. Never met but never mentions that there was not a dying man.

―Close in polls against Crooked Hillary called BREXIT 100% wrong along with that! Pause. Sad! Debts of honour.

Get a grip of them.

―Bushe K.C., for local, provincial, British and overseas delivery. Psha! Courts must act fast!

Europe that foundered at Trafalgar and of soultransfiguring deserves to live.

―He laughed richly. -Drink!

I should have said.

―Just what I.

―Youth led by Experience visits Notoriety. The crackdown on illegal immigration. —It was revealed to me!

I have already taken Crimea and continue to be Native American to get some wind off my chest first.

―Pocahontas bombed last night. The Roman, like Isaac Butt, like the statue of the symmetry. Rows of cast steel.

He said.

K.M.A. K.M.R.I.A. RAISING THE FATHERS.

―-Perhaps loss of citizenship or year in Jerusalem. Professor MacHugh said. Now he calls me racist-but nothing can be great-love you Ohio!

―What was that, see they don't run away. I'd like that now, eh? Want to fix our military and other purchases after January 20th so that I heard his words and their borders. That is fine, isn't it? Lyin' Ted, or Kavanagh I mean Seymour Bushe.

—You can do that, Mr Bloom, seeing the coast clear, made a comic face and then all blows over. —Telegraph! Good day.

―Not fit! Not fit!

―Are you ready? -Muchibus thankibus. —Who? Small nines. I knew his wife too. Not anymore, it is humiliating. She doesn't have a literature, a small one. The Plums. I am President, Russia and the Baldwin impersonation just can't close the deal with Bernie. Phil Blake's weekly Pat and Bull story. Why bring in a hurry.

―I believe I will bring back jobs! Much to be the best by far in fighting terror.

I said in quiet mockery.

―Which auction rooms? —That'll be all right.

―Cruz and 1 for 42 John Kasich of the mind. Slipping his words were unfortunate-the-Goat drove the car.

FROM THE EDITOR.

―Soon be calling me MR. We have an Obama A.G. Where was that small act, trivial in itself, that eternal symbol of wisdom and of the general post office shoeblacks called and polished. Nannan. Thump. —Good day, Myles Crawford began. In Martha. X is Davy's publichouse in upper Leeson street. Are you there? Is the mouth south someway? -Ay, a mouthorgan, echoed in the bakery line too, printer. Lyin' Ted. Tourists, you bloody old Roman empire? —Antithesis, the Saturday pink. Thank you!

THE PEN.

On International Women's Day, join me in first.

―—He's a greatly talented person or politician. I hope you will live to see with his thumb. Tim Kaine on 60 Minutes. I was listening to the running stream. Very proud! Just more very dishonest media didn't mention that Bernie Sanders political revolution. Honestly, I would have far less. I would have won even bigger than expected. Senate. Wife a good cure for flatulence? Media rigging election! Together, we will get it! I'll get the plums out of Prince's stores. Ballsbridge. I inherited a MESS and am way ahead of you!

They see the views of Dublin.

―Goofy Elizabeth Warren, often referred to as Pocahontas, just look at the convention tonight to watch a typesetter.

―Been walking in muck somewhere. Florence MacCabe takes a crubeen and a liar! J.J. O'Molloy. Miles of it sourly: Foot and mouth disease!

Know who that is.

SOME COLUMN!

Smash a man now at 1001 delegates. A.E. the mastermystic? President Clinton excoriates Crooked Hillary Administration is not perchance a French compliment? She was forced to go shortly to various other veteran groups.

-Ome thou dear one! Where it took place.

I can’t make a deal work.

―Then here the name. Life is too short. Against the wall!

By Jesus, she had the biggest of them.

―The rallies in Utah and Arizona were great. On the brewery float. -Sad & irrelevant!

―Mr O'Madden Burke asked. Poor Penelope.

Yes, he's here still.

―Chris Callinan. Everything speaks in its own way. Usual blarney. Three weeks.

It wasn't Donald Trump has taken advantage of the late Mr Patrick Dignam. Amazing crowd last night.

―By no manner of means. Jobs! Long, short and long.

Mr Bloom said, raising his hand to his chin.

Put us all into it, wait, Mr Bloom, seeing the coast clear, made ready to nibble the biscuit in his other hand.

―Close on ninety they say, down there at Butt bridge. I will win!

―Or like Mario, Mr Bloom said. Close on ninety they say. In presidential voting so far, John Kasich & Marco Rubio, and the United States cannot continue to let Israel be treated with such total disdain and disrespect. The loose flesh of his newspaper.

LENEHAN'S LIMERICK.

―He was all their daddies!

―-You know Gerald Fitzgibbon. There it is about judgment.

―Look at the young guttersnipe behind him.

―He said smiling grimly.

―Have you Weekly Freeman and National Press. You and I knew his wife too.

―Get a grip of them and lit his cigar. He doesn't hear it. —That'll be all right.

I'll rub that in.

―-Off Blackpitts, Stephen said. -& Paul Ryan! Whose land? -Thank you, professor MacHugh said grandly. ObamaCare!

HOW A DISTANT VOICE.

There are only so many jobs.

―Thank you to the landing. That was a nice old bag of tricks. How nice, but I am doing very well recieved. Bad judgement! Shining word!

Very nice! Our wonderful future V.P. Thanks Bill for telling the truth.

―Kasich & Marco Rubio. We will sternly refuse to partake of strong waters, will be holding a major statement. Silence! Slipping his words and their families-along with that! -Something for you, the press. Myles Crawford said, only for … But no matter. He made a comic face and then thinks it will only get worse. —No, Stephen said.

―Is that Canada swindle case on summary judgement but have a clue.

I was listening to the professor said.

―Jobs, trade and energy reforms will bring them to the F.B.I.

SHINDY IN WELLKNOWN RESTAURANT.

―-The father of scare journalism, Lenehan said. Mr Bloom said. Want to get some wind off my chest first. #VoteTrump today! They always build one door opposite another for the Republican Party. Uncle Toby's page for tiny tots. The rally in Nashville, Tennessee, tonight. Our tax, trade, will lose readers! A, repeal Ocare, borders, and very stupid use of Air Force One and then bent at once but slowly from J.J. O'Molloy's towards Stephen's face and then catch him. Wow, President Obama's brother, Malik, just like we will win!

… —Taylor had come there, you remember?

―Must require some practice that. I have much, much to learn. Call it, on the others?

But my riddle!

―I just want to phone. He laughed richly. -Goat, Mr Bloom asked. I hope you will live to see with his finger on a witch-hunt against me. -They went under with the wind. I old men, penitent, leadenfooted, underdarkneath the night: mouth south: tomb womb.

―Want to be here. Passing out he whispered to J.J. O'Molloy resumed, moulding his words were these. To where? Great was my great honor! I was looking for a drink.

―He said. The first newsboy came pattering down the steps.

―Funny that the phrase DRAIN THE SWAMP was no longer has credibility-too much failure in office. Crooked Hillary did not know me but attacked last night?

Come along, Stephen went on.

―-Call it, damn its soul. —Help! Wife a good cook and washer. J.J. O'Molloy said to Stephen.

―Why will you? Big news to share in New York City. The gentle art of advertisement. Crooked Hillary. J.J. O'Molloy said quietly and slowly: Just a moment. World's biggest balloon. Quickly he does that job. —Muchibus thankibus. Aha! J.J. O'Molloy.

It was in, B never had a growth of shaggy beard round it.

―So sad! It's to be, but outside, criminals! U.S.

Something quite ordinary.

LENEHAN'S LIMERICK.

―—Wise virgins, professor MacHugh asked, looking the same breath.

―People. -And if not?

Long John is backing him, Myles Crawford said.

―Now he can't get any worse. RETURN OF BLOOM—big rally! Hillary, I think.

Details to follow him in Meagher's. Does anybody really believe that his problems with The Apprentice except for Paul Ryan and others in the hook and eye department, Myles Crawford.

―Thump. -Without them the old block! This is McCarthyism! Stephen.

―He is a complete and total disaster. —Back in no time, Mr Dedalus said, We have Paul Ryan, always fighting the Republican Party. Looks as if they were in big trouble!

Where is that he stood for CLASSIFIED.

―Why they call him Doughy Daw.

―The radiance of the spirit, not the stale news in the U.S. Right outside the viceregal lodge.

CLEVER, VERY.

―Sllt. Cuprani too, printer.

―A POLISHED PERIOD J.J. O'Molloy said, elderly and pious, have lived fifty and fiftythree years in Fumbally's lane.

He raised his eyes to the list!

―Then you can imagine the style of his trousers. J.J. O'Molloy asked. The media is fawning over the fringe of his resonant unwashed teeth.

—That it be and hereby is resolutely resolved.

―Two crossed keys here. She has no chance!

―Innuendo of home rule. The bloodiest old tartar God ever made. —New York World cabled for a big deal, no credibility. That'll be all right, he said. Third hint. Rows of cast steel. Gambling. Melania, he said. Old Woman of Prince's street was there first. Twentyeight. Putting back his straw hat awry on his knees, repeating: Where was all their daddies! SAD! —A perfect cretic!

―Going now to Louisiana & another speech tonight in Bethpage, Long Island!

―Hillary Clinton. The Rose of Castile. Now she has done in Senate? M.A.P.

―Reflect, ponder, excogitate, reply. Then to Pennsylvania for rest of them. Crooked Hillary can't!

―Crooked Hillary Clinton-Kaine is a vote for CHANGE!

―Professor MacHugh turned on him.

I didn't inherit it, damn its soul.

―Vast, I don't want to see it in the year one thousand and one and seven in coppers.

―Myles Crawford cried loudly over his shoulder. Red Murray touched Mr Bloom's arm with the wind anyhow. By the Nilebank the babemaries kneel, cradle of bulrushes: a man of the files, swept his hand in emphasis. Kyrie eleison!

―Double four … Yes. Foot and mouth. Long Island! Poll numbers way up, employment and jobs. Remember when the winejug, metaphorically speaking, is it? Too bad, one after another, wiping off with their handkerchiefs the plumjuice that dribbles out of the race. -Begone! Have you got that?

Don't believe the main stream fake news media.

Hail fellow well met the next. O yes, every time. —Monks!

HOW A DAYFATHER.

Kingdoms of this world. -Begone! Sufficient for the United States must be vigilant and smart candidates. -Bombast! Hynes said moving off. Maximilian Karl O'Donnell, graf von Tirconnell in Ireland.

The editor laid a nervous hand on Stephen's shoulder.

—Professor Magennis was speaking to me that I can bring them to meet with the great man that he has a career that is before you were born, I won Ohio. No more!

―Catches the eye, you see.

NOTED CHURCHMAN AN OCCASIONAL CONTRIBUTOR.

He backed me big-time record for most of her professional life!

―If my many supporters acted and threatened people like those fellows, like Bernie himself, never paid fees, rent, salaries or any expenses. Media Research final numbers on November 8th! Ballsbridge. Jesusmario with rougy cheeks, doublet and spindle legs. Press and the harsh voice asked: If Bloom were here, Mr Bloom asked. Wall Street paid for ad is a vote for him with quick grace, said quietly and slowly: previously—Wait a minute to phone about an old man, respected by all. Mr Bloom phoned from the jaws of victory.

―-Less time talking. -But they are afraid the pillar of the onehandled adulterer. 70% of the clanking he drew swiftly on the counter and stepped off posthaste with a much more. My Ohio! -New York City. I TOLD YOU SO! Fuit Ilium!

―Hell of a snowball in hell.

―Convention speaker schedule to be trouble there one day. -I'll tell you. False lull. Mr Dedalus said. Last night in San Jose were illegals.

―Any time he likes, tell him … —But listen to this for God' sake, Ned Lambert, seated on the win!

Thank you, professor MacHugh murmured softly, biscuitfully to the truth.

―Any time he likes, tell him. -Now heading to Ohio for two months, he said. He pointed to two faces peering in round the doorframe. The beginning of NAFTA with massive numbers of women voters based on popular vote if you decide without watching the totally one-sided deal from the floor, grunting as he ran: Chip of the economy.

So I raised/gave! Now if he wants a par to call attention. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!

―We will Make America Great Again. Mary, Martha.

KYRIE ELEISON!

―He ate off the thirst of the intellect and of the general post office shoeblacks called and polished. What is it?

―

―This is good for Mexico! —Did you?

The Plums. Very interesting day!

The Skibbereen Eagle. Nile.

He set off again to walk by Stephen's side.

Long John is backing him, I will never forget! Have you Weekly Freeman and National Call Day, join me in honoring the critical role of women voters based on made up lies!

She is a winner!

―Much of the law, I was going to collude in order to keep the Lincoln plant in Kentucky-no Mexico My transition team, which should never have been declared the winner was based on a corner of the Bowery guttersheet not to mention Paddy Kelly's Budget, Pue's Occurrences and our language?

Myles Crawford crammed the sheets into a sidepocket.

―Country bumpkin's queries. Emperor's horses.

―-Fit with bad intentions out of it after?

―It is not on the brewery float. You see?

Look out for squalls. Quicker, darlint! He took out his matchbox thoughtfully and lit his cigar. Martin Cunningham forgot to give us our Attorney General and rest of day and night!

―Usual blarney.

VIRGILIAN, ESQUIRE, SANDYMOUNT.

―But will he save the circulation? SAD Election is being treated very badly. Hosts at Mullaghmast and Tara of the Irish tongue. That is oratory, the dishonest and corrupt media covered me honestly and didn't get indicted while Bob M did? J.J. O'Molloy: How do you find a pressman for you. Vladimir Putin said today about Hillary Clinton's losing campaign. -Hello?

Ned Lambert nodded. Not me! Everything speaks in its own way. —And settle down on their own rally. -Whose land?

―Some FAKE NEWS! We must suspend immigration from regions linked with terrorism until a proven vetting method is in the first time that they will NEVER support Crooked Hillary. It is meet to be trouble there one day. -Who? We were never going to bring steel and coal dying!

… Does nothing to help!

―He used to be president because she has done to the window. Get smart!

―Congratulations Stephen Miller-on representing me this morning that I did not work a mess!

―He pointed to two faces peering in round the doorframe. If Cuba is unwilling to make me look bad! Keyes just now.

―The Democrats have a conflict of interest with my various businesses Hence, legal documents are being stolen by other countries like Mexico. President Obama should ask the family of Sarah Root in Nebraska last week that it is in horrible shape and falling apart, not an imperium, that the crowd and enthusiasm in the official gazette. Jeb Bush just endorsed me, sir, Stephen went on, professor MacHugh said gruffly.

He halted on sir John Gray's pavement island and peered aloft at Nelson through the park to see the roofs and argue about where the different churches are: Rathmines' blue dome, Adam and Eve's, saint Laurence O'Toole's.

Just a moment, Mr Crawford?

―F.A.B.P. Got that? Talks about me. Congrats to the inner office, closing the door and, with the rustling tissues. What did Ignatius Gallaher we all know and his supporters by endorsing pro-TPP pro-Wall Street, and keep our companies and others stated that Donald Trump!

He hurried on eagerly towards the statue in Glasnevin. We can't have four more years of Barack Obama and Crooked Hillary compromised our national security, and Raul Castro wasn't even there to greet him. We must repeal Obamacare and replace ObamaCare.

―I see the idea. -'Twas rank and fame that tempted thee, 'Twas empire charmed thy heart.

I'll tell you that there have been left behind. We must do everything possible to keep me from the newspaper on his heart. Quicker, darlint!

False lull.

―Jeff Sessions is an host and terrible are her children: Egypt is an host and terrible are her children: Egypt is an host and terrible, of Roman justice as contrasted with the earlier Mosaic code, the worst voting record in the Drug Industry. Just made a last attempt to cover-up charges, and the dog and the dog kills the ox and the dog and the butcher and he said, only for … But no matter.

Dr Lucas. We will MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN! -The-Goat drove the car. -And settle down on their sides the royal initials, E. R., received loudly flung sacks of letters, postcards, lettercards, parcels: various uses, thousand and one and seven in coppers. Only the crooked media makes me look bad!

―Thanks, old man, Elie Wiesel, passed out with a sweet thing, Myles Crawford crammed the sheets back and went into the inner office. Then Paddy Hooper worked Tay Pay who took him on to the youth of Ireland a moment, Mr Bloom said.

SOME COLUMN!

The media refuses to expose! —Or again if we but climb the serried mountain peaks. And, it is, and you'll kick.

―Go for one another baldheaded in the great State of Kentucky for their terrible behavior The Theater must always be a terrorist who wants to take place. Lenehan, lighting it for him with quick grace, said: What was their civilisation? Penelope. Our country is stagnant.

#MAGA I am President!

-Chip of the terrible stabbing attack at Ohio State University by a bellows!

―The noise of two shrill voices, a big meeting on bringing back to U.S. car dealers-tax free across border. There's a ponderous pundit MacHugh who wears goggles of ebony hue. I'm up to here. Mr Bloom took up his cutting.

—Will you join us, Myles Crawford said, about to follow him in the vatican. I know.

―Yes, he's here still. —Don't you think Crooked Hillary Clinton may be, J.J. O'Molloy said quietly and slowly: Getonouthat, you see that some hawkers were up before the and knew they were supremely good nor unless they were unable to stop them they'd clank on and on the agenda paper may I suggest that the meeting between Bill Clinton and has the lumbago for which she rubs on Lourdes water, given her by a smile.

Well, he said, taking the cut square.

OMNIUM GATHERUM.

Terrible tragedy in Rathmines!

―News/Washington Post Poll, Hillary Clinton knew that her husband?

―Careless chap. Made all of my top priorities.

We were only thinking about it, wait, the whole bloody history.

―Shite and onions! Mr Dedalus said. Hello? -Yes, it is visually important, as he locked his desk drawer. —Moment—Foot and mouth disease and no-one knew how to pronounce that voglio. —Whose land? My dear Myles, he said: It is impossible for him. He began: Come in. We need to secure our borders will be running our government, but whether our government, but they always fell.

REPEAL AND REPLACE!

―The editor's blue eyes stared about them and lit his cigar. Shame!

―HAPPY PRESIDENTS DAY-MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN! Or was it you shot the lord lieutenant of Finland between you? He has a strain of it in his walk to watch a typesetter neatly distributing type. Child, man, bowed, spectacled, aproned.

―In Ohio! And here comes the sham squire himself! The editor came from the Kilkenny People. Gregor Grey made the design? Lyin' Ted Cruz. Lady Dudley was walking home through the caseroom passing an old hat or something.

Bad or sick guy!

―Lenehan said. LinkedIn Workforce Report: January and February were the strongest consecutive months for hiring since August and September 11th help. —That it be and hereby is resolutely resolved.

He wants two keys at the way it sllt to call attention.

―General Bobrikoff.

―And that old grey rat tearing to get in. Right, Mr Nannetti, he is voting today; election next Saturday. Frantic hearts. —Whose land?

The broadcloth back ascended each step: back.

―I see. Airplane departed from Paris. Lord! The Supreme Court. Scissors and paste. And let our crooked smokes.

Great job today by Reverend Franklin Graham.

A STREET CORTEGE.

If Crooked Hillary Clinton has destroyed jobs and national security.

―He pushed past them to come down, is it? In Martha.

We had a great deal, and all countries, fight back?

―See you soon! Crooked Hillary said that I want the PEOPLE! Always speaks badly of his tether now. Biggest of all free people's, and his Chapelizod boss, Harmsworth of the inflated windbag! Professor MacHugh came from the top. Exactly opposite! —The Rose of Castile.

Crooked Hillary Clinton knew everything that her servant was doing at the college historical society.

―Not me!

Despite what you mean. Lazy idle little schemer.

Great Britain, a great man, bowed, spectacled, aproned.

―Professor said, falling back a bill for me, sir.

―#Debate Moderator: Respectfully, you know? Yes … Yes. Make America Great Again!

Ah, curse punch, shut down roads/doors during my term s in office.

―Clank it.

EXIT BLOOM.

―Any time he likes, tell him, Mr O'Madden Burke fell back with grace on his topper.

―I can get the plums? Enjoy!

―Foot and mouth.

-Wait. I was imitating a reporter GROVELING after he changed his story. Landing in Phoenix, Arizona on Wednesday. Arm in arm. Careless chap. The love and enthusiasm was unreal!

Lenehan said. Clank it. -At—The moot point is did he say?

―Hillary flunky who lost his energy and money. Just another spasm, Ned Lambert is taking a day off I see where Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake of Baltimore is pushing Crooked Hillary no longer. Looks as good as if they were good could be corrupted. #MakeAmericaGreatAgain Gov Kasich voted for NAFTA, from the stable. She will sell our country coming to peer over their shoulders.

―ObamaCare is a total secret.

GENTLEMEN OF PEACE.

―Seems to see, the besthearted bloody Corkman the Lord ever put the breath of life in, and now she says that Hillary was a pressman for you while Hillary brings in more than the Irish Catholic and Dublin Penny Journal, called: That mantles the vista far and wide and wait till the glowing orb of the families who are dead and totally biased that we don't have foreign policy experience, yet the DNC convention ignored it. —What is it? CNN is doing to Crooked Hillary Clinton is taking a day off I see it in your face. But he practically promised he'd give the renewal.

Obama & Putin fail to reach deal on Crazy Bernie, run. That hectic flush spells finis for a fortune, I want guns brought into the house of bondage, nor followed the pillar will fall, Stephen said. #Trump2016 Thank you.

―I was going to get things done. Look out. Parked in North Prince's street was there first. Wow!

Racing special!

He said of him that straight from the table, read on: New York. Other than a Sheriff's Star, or whatever she has bad judgement forced her to lead the country.

―J.J. O'Molloy said, and Mexico at the airslits.

You know Gerald Fitzgibbon. -We were weak, therefore worthless.

―That'll go in. CEO's most optimistic since 2009.

Do not worry, we would have been presented … Trump's right to be here.

―Hynes said moving off. -Expectorated—Boohoo!

―To where? Established 1763.

―… Yes. I have a vision too, Mr Bloom asked.

Mr O'Madden Burke said melodiously.

―-But my riddle! But no matter.

SPARTANS GNASH MOLARS.

―F.A.B.P. Got that? The Club For Growth tried to play the Russia/CIA card. I beat Hillary. Just cut it out, will you jews not accept our culture, our religion and our enemies are watching. Hillary, is it? Great new Ohio poll out-thank you! One or Skin-the—What's that? Lenehan said to be our President. I'll answer it, should be in jail. I will not. -Get out. Stay safe! That hectic flush spells finis for a sitting President to be weak and her killed so many things on purpose.

―Pathetic Our not very presidential. Is he taking anything for it? Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg going to lunch, he said.

TIME! Mr. Khan, killed 12 years ago, great chemistry. If my many supporters acted and threatened people like those fellows, like Whiteside? So on. -Did you? Catches the eye, you see. I didn't inherit it, Stephen said, did a really bad microphone. A TOTAL POLITICAL WITCH HUNT! The dishonest media refuses to show or discuss them. I'll go through the gallery on to the down line, glided parallel. Aha! Nightmare from which Ohio has never tried to use leverage over me.

―—Ah, listen to this for God' sake, Ned. All very fine to jeer at it yourself? He stayed in his time: obituary notices, pubs' ads, speeches, divorce suits, found drowned.

―—Off Blackpitts, Stephen said, did a great journey to the great state of Rhode Island-big day. I'll catch him.

A few wellchosen words, Lenehan said, if that is fact!

HIS NATIVE DORIC.

―—And Pontius Pilate is its prophet, professor MacHugh answered with pomp of tone. Thoughts and prayers to the gentleman at the file. —Often—My fault, Mr Bloom asked. Lord Salisbury? Hard after them Myles Crawford cried. There was weeping and gnashing of teeth over that. The President of Taiwan CALLED ME today to wish me congratulations on winning the Electoral College in a low voice.

It will be bringing back to U.S., and myself. Next year in Jerusalem.

―Myles Crawford crammed the sheets into a country is going to be the winner was based on an ad.

―There it is from a different world! She is flying with him.

KYRIE ELEISON! A MOST RESPECTED DUBLIN.

―Have you got that? Can anyone explain this? Better phone him up first. Just found out the episode was on tape?

―The tissues rustled up in the fire. -Chip of the families of the economy, trade, jobs, safety and protection for those days, advocating the revival of the outlaw. Law, the editor asked.

WHAT WETHERUP SAID.

―It was revealed to me. Johnny, make room for your endorsement. -A-Lago in Palm Beach.

―Passing out he whispered to J.J. O'Molloy took the tissues in his sanctum with Lenehan.

―MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN! Go on. Dead noise. Life is too deep. -I always said that I would NEVER mock disabled.

SOPHOMORE PLUMPS FOR THE CANVASSER AT WORK.

―Really sad that a person who will be fun! All very fine to jeer at it now in cold print but it is just the beginning of NAFTA with massive numbers of manufacturing jobs in America & around the world.

Poor, poor Pyrrhus! -Do you know, from the cross he had major lie, now many bankruptcies.

―-No action—Wait a moment. The system is broken! Lenehan who was struggling up with e-mails?

SUFFICIENT FOR FRISKY FRUMPS. GENTLEMEN OF KEYES. A DAYFATHER.

―—He spoke on the two failed presidential candidates, Crooked Hillary Clinton has not held a news conference, but look what her policies have done even better in the armpit of his tether now. Thank you to Prime Minister of Australia for telling the truth about her husband wanted to meet with the U.K. We are going to have said. It was in a red tin letterbox moneybox.

How's that for high? —Eh?

Kingdoms of this with you.

IN WELLKNOWN RESTAURANT.

Time and on-line poll, Time Magazine and Financial Times for naming me Person of the money I have much, much to learn. That's it, on the tremendous cost and cost overruns of the spirit, not funny and the great people!

ORTHOGRAPHICAL. IMPROMPTU.

―Lyin' Ted Cruz really went wacko today. Way in. When I said that our open border.

RHYMES AND REASONS. WILLIAM BRAYDEN, CENTRAL!

―Must be some. —That old pelters, the sophist. I conceived it with Mark B & have a literature, a solemn beardframed face.

―So, now misrepresents what Judge Gorsuch told him? Myles Crawford crammed the sheets back and went into the hip pocket of his trousers.

―The turf, Lenehan announced.

A moment!

―And if not? I will stop the slaughter going on? —They buy one and seven in coppers.

WITH UNFEIGNED REGRET IT IS CHAMP.

Massive trade deficits & little help on the ramparts of Vienna.

―MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!

The editor laid a nervous hand on his knees, legs, boots vanish.

A GREAT DAILY ORGAN IS WE SEE THE DISSOLUTION OF KEYES. NOTED CHURCHMAN AN OCCASIONAL CONTRIBUTOR.

―And it turned out to Crooked Hillary. Double four … Yes.

―Tremendous day in New York World, the lex talionis.

#Ulysses (novel)#James Joyce #1922 #automatically generated text #Patrick Mooney #Aeolous #politics #American politics #presidential elections #21st century #Twitter #Donald Trump #2016 #2017

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kayawagner · 6 years ago

Text

Trouble for Hire Review

Kicking the Tires

There is some violent imagery, as well as some nudity, so if those kinds of images are problematic for you, it is something you may want to know up front.

Introduction and Spirit and Setting

The Rules

The roles in the game include the following:

Ruben Carlos Ruiz (the protagonist)

Los Campanero (Ruben’s sidekick)

La Villanos (the antagonists of the story)

The Editor (a role that allows twists to be introduced and that can introduce narration and scene cuts)

The Road Through the World (the various things along the way between point A and B)

Los Espectadores (bystanders, characters that may be caught up in the story without being for or against Ruben)

La Extrano (supernatural or unexplained events going on in the story)

Wild Card (the default if nothing else applies)

Fighting

The Driver

Los Campanero (only available if the sidekick is part of the story and contributed in some way)

The game also includes the Three Lights. This concept is both a reward mechanic and a built-in safety mechanic. There is a green light, a yellow light, and a red light in play in the game.

Green Light—Keep doing what you are doing, and cash this in to pay up to 3 RPM

Yellow Light—We introduced concepts I don’t want to delve into too deeply, let’s keep any future references off screen

Red Light—I don’t want this content in the game, we shouldn’t use it anymore from this point on

Adventures

This section goes into greater detail on how to create your own adventures, getting your friends to play, how to hack the game, teaching the game, and advice for play.

The section on hacking the game delves into what roles might not make sense in other genres, and how the individual roles might look in other settings.

Appendices

The sample adventures include:

Delivering a package for a washed-up porn producer while dealing with a crazy rival courier

Kidnapping a pageant queen while dodging a federal agent

Dodging cartel agents while delivering Canadian weed to Texas

Participating in an illegal road race

Working for a witch to dig up something valuable that’s been buried since the prohibition

Doing a job for a vampire casino owner

On A Mission From God

The game provides a tightly focused package for telling very specific stories, with lots of room for variation within that prescribed band.

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You Boys Drank $300 Worth of Beer

Qualified Recommendation–A product with lots of positive aspects, but buyers may want to understand the context of the product and what it contains before moving it ahead of other purchases.

Trouble for Hire Review published first on https://supergalaxyrom.tumblr.com

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