#so post bombing and SHE'S insisting they go to the vaults and then he's left out. no wonder she wants to kill her mother

[savingthrcw]

"No one's going to find us here. We're safe." / Janey, maybe something from her childhood either pre or post bombings? @yformaldehyde

"But what if they do? Daddy..." Little Janey held tighter onto his father's shirt, "People were yelling they wanted to open the Vaults, what if we can't get in? What if they get in?" It was all so scary; they had explained in school how people wouldn't last long after the bombs, and now all those strangers wanted to be saved, and Janey understood that, but she also wanted her dad to take her there before the door closed, because she needed her mom too. She wanted her dad to get back on the horse so he'd be far from the angry people. "We have to go to mom. She's waiting for us," she insisted, expecting people to figure out that they were going to be in the Vaults too any moment now.

[ramblings-of-a-mad-cat]

Who is the Mole?

@dalekofchaos I’m not taking any chances, your Ask will be given the security it deserves, from the demons of Tumblr who have been eating my messages! 

So, who is R’s agent? Well, let’s look at what we know. They’re apparently someone within the walls of Hogwarts, that this dark witch has regular contact with. It’s never established when the mole arrived, but MC seems to think that it was after Rakepick left, and that would make sense. Let’s narrow down the suspects. 

It’s not Jacob. Make no mistake, he is shady and he always has been. But he comes and goes. They specifically talked about a mole being present at Hogwarts. Plus, why would the White-Robed wizard flee when Jacob showed up, if he was on their side? Jacob is clear. 

It’s not Alanza. She simply arrived too late in the story. Why would R wait this long to have another agent planted at Hogwarts? One who could not slip in undetected, but would inevitably have attention drawn to herself by transferring? What’s more, Alanza declined to join the Circle and she admitted to knowing Rakepick. I know a lot of people think that it’s her, but if she’s a spy, she’s a pretty lousy one. Alanza is clear. 

Of the younger characters, the only one who isn’t canon is Beatrice. With how much focus she’s gotten, it’s a possibility. But she’s almost always under the watchful eye of Penny, or hanging with Ismelda. The only time she wasn’t, she nearly drowned in the Black Lake. She can’t even go to Hogsmeade, no way she’s meeting up with R in secret. Not to mention, she would never be on board with having her mind probed if she was the mole. Beatrice is clear. 

Regarding the rest of the Year 6 characters, Talbott and Chiara are both secretive and keep their distance from the group. But we already know why they do this, they have well-established backstories and character-based reasons for why they would. Beyond that, the mole should want to join the Circle. They should want access to that intel. Just like Alanza, Chiara didn’t even want to join at first. No, I’m gonna say Talbott and Chiara are clear.

I could go through every member of the Circle, but I’m going to streamline the process and say that I don’t believe it’s anyone who was introduced from Years 2-5. The way HPHM is written, the only characters who get major plot importance are the Year 1 characters,and the people who are “guest-starring” in the current year, who were introduced in that Year. I consider The Year characters to be possible suspects, but I’ve gone through why it won’t be them. Many people suspect Tulip, but when was the last time she was relevant? Or Barnaby, or Jae, or Badeea? Sorry, no way it’s anyone who guest starred in a past year. Let’s go through the Year One folk, because I believe it is one of them. 

Penny has simply never had the relevance that Ben and Merula have had. She didn’t even have a connection the plot prior to Year 5, prior to Beatrice’s introduction. I’ve talked about this before, but assuming you chose not to bring her along on any adventures, she could, in theory, but cut from the first four years, without the story changing much. Which is not to say Penny isn’t important, just that I don’t think she’s the mole. Penny is (basically) clear. 

Merula’s loyalty has always been questionable, even as a major of hers, I don’t deny this. I can believe that even now, she would work against MC. The only question then, is when did this start? Did Rakepick give her this job before the Portrait Vault? Was Merula in on that? It might explain why Rakepick told MC to look out for her. But we’re forgetting one key detail about this character. She’s a terrible liar. This has been well-established. Merula’s emotions get the better of her. She would have given herself away by now. If this theory is true, she would need to pull a serious long-con, and I just don’t believe she’s capable of doing that. Merula is clear.

Ben has always been suspicious. From Year 2 on, Rowan them-self suspected him. It’s abundantly clear that he’s keeping secrets. Who did he write that letter to, prior to the Portrait Vault? Why did he insist on coming? Does he remember the time that he was kidnapped, or not? Why did he panic upon seeing Rakepick for what we can only assume was the first time? He’s hiding something, definitely. However...Year 5 seemed to settle the question of “who’s side is he on?” by using Rowan to prove that R can and will Imperius people, and exonerating Ben from his time as the Red Cloak. What’s more...Rakepick aimed that curse at him. She tried to kill him outright, and she couldn’t have known that Rowan would rush in. She wouldn’t do that if he were the mole. Maybe Ben can be trusted, maybe not, but regarding this...Ben is clear.

But hold on, I said that I believed one of the Year 1 characters in the mole, didn’t I? And I do. I’ve talked about this before, but I sincerely believe that the Mole...is MC. 

Now, I’m not saying that MC is pulling a long-con, that they’ve always been loyal to R, and that even the player didn’t know it. That would be one hell of a twist by itself, but people would probably hate it. No, I think that MC is the mole...without knowing it. I have on many occasions, expressed doubts about Moody. I know he’s canon, but like I said, R has proven that they can and will use the Imperius Curse. That would be a way to use Moody as a secret villain without breaking canon, and it’s not like we haven’t seen that done before. Seriously, the way he’s acting in this game, particularly his encouragement of MC’s revenge and blood-lust? This reminds me more of Barty Crouch Jr’s impersonation than anything else. We know from the Weird Sister TLSQ that the Cabal was planning to contact Moody and “see what he knows” about the Sunken Vault, and the Coral Key. (A quest that, curiously, has since been removed, and it seems like they’re not putting it back. I wonder why...) At the end of Year 5, not long after Rakepick abandoned her role as R’s agent at Hogwarts, Moody shows up and abducts MC. Swearing them to secrecy, almost always insisting that they not tell Jacob and their friends important information, or otherwise encouraging them not to. Think about it, what new information has Moody actually provided? Compared to the fountain of intel that MC has been providing him, for no real reason. MC told him about the Circle almost immediately. Now, Moody isn’t the dark witch, but suppose she was the one who Imperius’d him? If my theory about this is true, then MC has been passing information to R, without their friends knowing, for this entire year. That would make them a mole. 

Of course, they have no idea. Which means that in this context, to call them a “mole” or a spy isn’t really accurate. It’s twisting the facts. But I firmly believe that’s the interpretation that we’re going with here. Which is a good lead-in to another phase of this theory that I have. Not only do I think R has been using MC as a mole, the way they’ve been using them as a weapon to open the Vaults this entire time...I also believe that R wanted MC to find out this bit of information. I believe that entire Infiltration was a trap, that R knew MC was there, and that it went exactly as they wanted it to. Setting aside my theory about Moody, I have to confess that the “advertisement” MC and Merula found at the Whomping Willow never made any sense to me, and felt like bait for a trap. Seriously, even if we ignore that the tip-off about The Whomping Willow being a secret meeting place was almost certainly referring to the Shrieking Shack, and not this...why would R do something like that? Leave a note like that out in the open, for any student or teacher to find? It’s not like dark witches and wizards are going to be prowling around Hogwarts that often. Wouldn’t it make way more sense to post that around say, Knockturn Alley? No, they wanted MC to find th at. Not to mention the tone of the note, “Dark wizards, come one, come all!” Please, if I’m a dark wizard, and I read that? My first thought is, “Well, this is clearly a sting. I’m not getting involved.” Not to mention, this wouldn’t be the first time MC tried to crash an R meeting based on written information that they supposedly left laying around. The Forbidden Forest was a trap, and Rowan paid the price. So why wouldn’t this be a trap? Sure, it seemed to go well...but I can’t help remembering the White-Robed Wizard’s line about how R would never let MC learn something that they didn’t want MC to know...

And that’s just it. They wanted MC to know that there was a mole. They wanted MC to tell the Circle that there was a mole. Moody instructed MC not to say anything about R wanting them to join and someday lead, but he didn’t tell them not to bring up the mole. Really, it isn’t so much that they wanted MC to know, it’s that they want the Circle to know. They want The Circle of Khanna to know there’s a mole. They want MC to find out about R’s plan for them, and they want MC to keep this plan from the Circle, so that when the time comes, R can drop this bomb. That MC is the mole, and always has been. MC can deny it of course, but what will they do when it comes out that they’ve been reporting to R (Through Moody) all this time? There’s a reason no one else is ever in those scenes - not even Jacob. There’s a reason Moody has been trying to put distance between MC and their friends. Imagine if The Circle finds out that MC knew R wanted to recruit them, and they said nothing? People have been speculating that MC losing a friend in an “unexpected way” might be referring to the mole, and how one of their friends is a traitor. But it could work in the opposite direction as well. If people find out that MC is a “traitor” I mean...how are Ben and Merula going to handle that news? Sure, some people might not immediately turn on MC, some people might believe them, or be uncertain...but R has been building up “evidence” of this for months, and Ben and Merula are both in a place of being so traumatized and unstable that they’d probably just buy it hook line and sinker. And they’re the co-leaders of the Circle. They might, at that point, kick MC out. Or at least call for a vote. 

And what happens if MC is expelled from the Circle? The very organization they formed to honor Rowan? They wouldn’t be able to investigate the Vaults anymore, because they’d be working against two secret organizations, one within the walls of Hogwarts. The Circle of Khanna, presuming MC to be a spy for R, would never let them within fifty feet of their investigation - hell, they could be the opponent that MC has to face, from the Centaur’s prophecy. (Or it could be R’s leader.) The Circle, at least initially, wouldn’t take MC back or trust them.  But the Cabal? Oh, you just know that they would open their arms to MC and welcome them to join, pointing out that they have nowhere else to go...not saying MC would agree to join them, but this could be R’s plan. This could be the big choice that MC has to make from the Centaur’s prophecy. Suppose Dumbledore was told by Circle members that MC is an R agent, and, oh I dunno...expels them as a result? We’ve all speculated than an expulsion arc is coming. If it is, that would be the perfect opportunity for R to try and get their claws into MC. 

Thank you for sending me the Ask! This has been a lot of fun, and I’ve enjoyed getting all these suspicions out in the open. 

[ernmark]

heyo!!! m sorry to bother, and I understand if it would be too much work, but would u mind recapping what happened between Juno and Peter? I have pretty bad memory problems and no time to listen to it all again like i wanna, so i’m just sad for boys but also confused lmao

It’s not a bother at all!

(Actually, it’s a whole lot easier for me to write a post like this than to do original writing, so I’m especially happy to do it).

If you have any questions or need any clarification, just let me know and I’d be happy to elaborate!

So a super quick review of Juno and Peter’s history together:

Juno Steel and the Murderous Mask:

Peter was hired by a deranged Xenoanthropologist-turned-Martian-Furry named Miasma to steal an Ancient Martian death mask from a local mob/reality TV family, the Kanagawas. When his first attempt was thwarted by a murder, he returned to the scene of the crime disguised as Agent Rex Glass of Dark Matters (the Solar System’s super shady FBI organization), but the Kanagawas would only let him near the crime scene if he was accompanied by Juno. 

Lots and lots of flirtation was had. They were trapped in a closet together, Peter punched Juno down a hallway at Juno’s request, they fought off a bunch of genetically engineered monsters together, Juno took a pretty nasty hit for Peter, and Peter tenderly stitched him up while making a teasing remark about “playing doctor”. During all of this, Juno quietly deduced the truth about the real murderer, and about Peter’s role as the original thief of the mask. In the big parlor scene at the end, they worked together to subdue the murderer. 

Peter then persuaded Juno to take him back to his apartment, probably fully intending to bed him and then sneak out with the mask during the night. He pulled Juno into a kiss, sneaking the keys to Juno’s safe (where the mask was kept) out of his coat while Juno was distracted. Unfortunately for him, Juno wasn’t distracted. He’d figured out Peter’s game a while ago, and used Peter’s distraction to get him into handcuffs and call the cops.

Peter wasn’t fazed by any of this (more turned on, really), and so he offered to run away with Juno, so the two of them could go adventuring together. Juno refused and let the cops take him away. When he was gone, he found a note left behind, in which Peter assured him that he really did want them to run away together, and signed it “your better half, Peter Nureyev”. He then made his escape.

Juno Steel and the Midnight Fox:

This is the latest of several episodes in which Peter has been stealing artifacts for Miasma and Juno has been hunting the two of them down, over the course of which Juno swallowed a Martian pill that gave him very costly mind-reading powers. 

After all his leads dried up, Juno went to a local art smuggler, Valles Vicky, and did a case for her in exchange for help from one of her contacts. At the end of the case she called the contact, and it turned out to be Peter. Peter made his entrance by breaking into Juno’s apartment and waiting for him to turn on the light before he announced himself, because he’s dramatic like that, and then dragged Juno off on another adventure.

His first words to Juno since Murderous Mask: “Hello, Juno. It’s been a while.”

Juno Steel and the Train from Nowhere:

They drove directly from Juno’s apartment to the Oasis Casino in the middle of the desert, where Peter had an appointment to play a high-stakes game of Ragnian Street Poker with retired hack jewel thief Brock Engstrom. In order to get Juno in the room with Engstrom and his bodyguard, Nuryev introduced the two of them as Duke and Dahlia Rose, a husband-and-husband duo of bright-eyed jewel thieves from the Outer Rim. He even bought Juno a lovely suit as part of the disguise, which Juno took particular offense to. 

Peter and Engstrom gambled secrets, with the stakes being that Juno would be killed if Peter lied about any of the secrets he revealed. Juno took offense to that, too, but Peter insisted that he would give up all his own secrets and weaknesses before he let that happen. 

After some further surliness and poor communication skills between the two of them, Juno figured out that Engstrom was cheating, and together they were able to force Engstrom to reveal the secret of the Utgard Express high-speed vault.

Things were going great and they were heading back to their shared hotel room with a questionable number of beds, but Juno had to be Juno and he accused Peter of taking secret orders to murder him. Peter pointed out that the “secret orders” were in fact very bad doodles, and that Juno was being a jackass, and he went to bed.

That night, an assassin tried to murder them, so the two of them had to make a break for it, and they wound up stealing Engstrom’s car, the Ruby 7 (previously owned by Jet Siquiliak of the Pirate Crew). They made it onto the Utgard Express, but were caught by Brock Engstrom and his bodyguard in the process. More adventures were had, more flirting happened, and Engstrom’s bodyguard made Juno especially nervous about his feelings for Peter. So as soon as the two of them were defeated and our heroes stole what they needed to get, Juno lashed out and tried to distance himself again. 

Just as they were making their escape, they found themselves cornered by Miasma, who had hijacked the Ruby 7 for herself. She ordered Juno into the car at gunpoint, and then intended to murder Peter and leave him in the desert to rot. Using his very painful mind-reading powers, Juno realized that she needed him alive, so he threatened to kill himself if she harmed Peter. Miasma agreed to let Peter live, but to bring him with them as leverage over Juno.

Peter Nureyev and the Angel of Brahma:

Miasma took Juno and Peter to an Ancient Martian tomb deep underground, where she’d set up a lab and bunker. There she proceeded to force Juno to probe Peter’s mind for multiple tests of his (very, very painful) mind reading powers. Peter often insisted that Juno take time to rest, but Miasma tortured Peter during these lulls in order to motivate Juno to continue. Typically Juno worked himself until he lost consciousness, and then they’d be dragged back to their cell.

This continued for somewhere between days and weeks. 

When Miasma got dissatisfied with Juno’s progress, she forced him to go into Peter’s memories, where he witnessed Peter murdering Mag. This seriously freaked him out, but Miasma insisted that he continue or else she would start cutting off bits of Peter for motivation. Juno relented, and kept watching until he passed out.

When Juno woke up, he was messed up by what he’d seen, but wasn’t ready to talk about it. Peter asked him why he’d never bothered to look into his backstory before, and Juno admitted that he was afraid of what he’d find. Peter insisted that he look into Peter’s memories now and see it for himself, and he could make his decisions about Peter then– whether Peter was worth his time, or whether they would part forever after all this was over. Juno nervously agreed, and he looked back into Peter’s mind on his own terms (while holding hands with Peter. I feel this is important.)

He witnessed the events on Brahma, where teenage Peter and his adopted father Mag attempted to stop the tyrannical leaders on New Kinshasa from murdering petty criminals with their flying laser city of death. They infiltrated New Kinshasa as Mag and Peter Ransom and made their way to the reactor core of the city, and got as far as stealing it… only in the process, Peter learned that disabling the city’s lasers would also wind up killing everyone in the city, and mass murder was really not something he was okay with. During the argument, Mag revealed that he’d been lying about all the things he’d said to motivate Peter– he’d say whatever was necessary to win Peter over to his cause. Peter was horrified and demanded Mag give back the reactor core. When Mag refused, Peter murdered him and replaced the reactor core, saving the people of New Kinshasa. He was caught in the act and identified as Peter Nureyev, and he used his capture to essentially hold the entire city hostage, threatening to bring it down if they continued their reign of terror. He then made his escape, but his true name was forever linked to the ransom of New Kinshasa.

During all of this, Juno went too deep and was having some major health complications, and Peter panicked and called the guards for help. After they assured him that Juno was okay, he knocked them out (killed them?) and attempted to drag Juno out, but Juno was too heavy to carry and in too much pain to leave under his own power. Peter made his own escape, swearing to return for Juno.

Juno Steel and the Final Resting Place

Miasma got what she needed from Juno, and she decided to finally execute him. At the last second, Peter (disguised as one of Miasma’s minions), shot her and the other minion and rescued Juno in a very heroic fashion. 

Together they ventured deeper into the tomb in order to find one of Miasma’s artifacts, the bomb that wiped out the Ancient Martians, so that they could destroy it. Once they got inside, though, they found Miasma there, mysteriously still alive. Turns out she’d spliced herself with Ancient Martian DNA, and was now effectively immortal and a whole lot more eldritch. 

They fought her, all the while figuring out her plan: she was going to hide in the bunker alone and use the bomb to wipe out all other life on Mars, because she’s charming like that. 

The bomb’s countdown was triggered, and Juno dove into Miasma’s memories in order to find out how to deactivate it. He pushed himself too hard, though, and his mind-reading powers destroyed his right eye in the process. He did, however, come up with a plan. He pushed Peter out the airlock and locked himself and Miasma inside with the bomb, keeping her away from it so she couldn’t escape or get rid of the bomb. While Peter desperately begged Juno to open the door, Juno admitted that Peter was the best thing that ever happened to him, and that his one regret was not taking Peter up on his offer to run away together. 

The bomb went off, and Miasma was killed. Juno, however, wasn’t: the bomb was only meant to kill Ancient Martians, as a form of mass suicide for their hive mind species, and had no effect on humans. Juno, who was more than suicidal at this point and wanted nothing more than to go out with a big heroic blaze of glory, was in shock that his last hurrah was taken from him. And also in shock about literally everything else that had happened to him in the past week.

Peter kissed him, took him back to a clinic (unfortunately, they couldn’t save Juno’s eye), and then back to a hotel in Hyperion City. He acknowledged that Juno had said what he had in the heat of the moment, and he didn’t have to go with Peter if he didn’t want to. Juno assured him that he did want to (oddly specific wording on his part). Overjoyed, Peter took Juno to bed, and a sexy time was had by all.

Afterward, Juno stayed up to watch Peter sleep, then rolled out of bed, put his clothes on, and walked back into his office. On his way out, he heard Peter murmur his name in his sleep, content that he and Juno would embark on their grand adventure in the morning. 

[diredigression]

Fallout February, Feb 12, Wasteland Recipes AND Comradery

Another edit of an old chapter, that kind of fits both prompts. Sad comradery is still comradery, right? And half fitting both prompts counts for one full prompt right?

~~~~~~~~~~~~~ 

Sole, Chapter 2

She isn’t sure how long she’s been awake. She assumes she must have slept, but she can’t summon the effort to care about when.

All she knows is that she has been working. Trying to make the place habitable, whatever that means here. She and Codsworth have cleaned the inside of what had once been a house, the neighbors’ house, people she probably had been friendly with before they were vaporized or had asphyxiated in that vault. She’s probably supposed to care. But all she really cares about is how had they managed to let their house fall into such disarray? The missus must be so ashamed. The atrociously dirty floor, giant bug carcasses scattered throughout, door falling off the fridge, not that the fridge works anymore anyway. Codsworth tends to the maintenance of the doors and equipment, to the extent that they can be fixed, occasionally bringing furniture from neighboring houses, while she sweeps and scrubs the floors and tables. 200 years abandoned or no, the state of the place is shameful. Mr. Garvey had chosen the house for its convenient workshop. She had intended to insist on hosting them at her own home; she knew she had left it pristine. But she hadn’t actually been able to make herself go to it. A wall had gone up in her mind around the idea, and something very quiet and deep had convinced her that trying to circumvent it wasn’t a good thing.

Not that she really believes it has been 200 years. That was silly. Cod’s real time clock hardware must’ve been damaged in the bombing. She hasn’t bothered asking her new companions either. She does believe that the bombs fell; she’d seen it, after all. At least, she can mostly convince herself of that. And just look at the state of the place. But 200 years? Incomprehensible.

Mr. Sturges has been working outside. He’s patched the holes in the roof and the walls, trying to weatherproof the building. As for Mr. Garvey, she vaguely remembers him gathering them together in the Concord street, the three survivors, and shepherding them towards Sanctuary. Missus Murphy had wanted them there, after all. Had somehow known about her old home. Convenient, as she would have led them that way anyway. Where else felt safe? Upon arrival though, once bedrolls were laid out and he’d made sure everyone had eaten and had their injuries tended, once Mr. Sturges had repeatedly assured him that everyone was okay and there was nothing else he need do, that all the injuries would mend even though apparently they’d long since run out of stimpaks and she had none of her own—Mr. Garvey had gone dark. He’d spent the next…however long it’s been…wrapped in his bedroll, empty eyes staring across the room, barely moving but to accept the food she’s diligently fed him.

Scrubbing floors, cooking, feeding recalcitrant eaters. Life almost feels normal. Except she doesn’t usually cook with bug and dog and these things Mr. Sturges called “tatos” that are definitely not actual tomatoes. But that’s life in wartime, learning to cook with whatever you have available. She is no stranger to this. She makes do. It’s not like she can taste the food, anyway, and the same probably applies to Mr. Garvey. Mr. Sturges offered to cook and to feed Mr. Garvey multiple times, but he apparently finally realized that she only meets this with mortification rather than appreciation and finally stopped. Damned if she isn’t still capable of doing her job, and how dare he imply otherwise.

They fall into routine, and eventually she begins tracking time again. Wake, prep breakfast for the men and then herself. Clean whatever is next on the list. Prep lunch. More cleaning. Prep dinner. Haul water to the bathtub, as the running water isn’t working. Take a bath. It’s bad enough that she only has her skintight vault suit to wear, day after day. She can’t stand the shame of being filthy around company, no matter how much water she has to haul. Go to bed, her in one room and the men in another. Mr. Sturges had tried to convince her to sleep in the same room, something about keeping watch and staying safe. But what is going to hurt her in the house? And god forbid she sleep in the same room with strange men.

Day after day, the routine continues. The house becomes less dirty and better walled. Cook, clean, wash, sleep. Cook, clean, wash, sleep.

Then one day, Mr. Garvey returns to life.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

She’s trying to spoonfeed Mr. Garvey a vegetable stew, the dinner she’s been most comfortable making lately. It’s been hard to make herself feed it to someone when she knows it isn’t salted, because apparently salt is an impossible ingredient to find here in the post-nuclear-apocalypse. But she can’t taste the lack of salt, so she makes herself pretend it’s fine. They have to eat something or starve, after all.

It’s been a hard day. Mr. Sturges has cobbled together a water purifier, somehow managing to scavenge sufficient supplies from across the town. Judging by the cursing she heard, it hasn’t been a pleasant task. Mr. Garvey is being harder to feed than usual, starting to actively fight her instead of placidly accepting whatever she makes him do.

Then he starts sobbing, words slipping out between great, horrifying wails. “I can’t even f…freaking…eat right.”

She looks up for Mr. Sturges, frantic. She’s vaguely aware that this isn’t his job, she’s supposed to be good at this, but she can’t bring the ability to mind. But he’s right there, taking Mr. Garvey from her, cradling him against his chest. “Hey, now. I’ve got you. I’ve got you.”

“I can’t move. I can’t help you rebuild. I can’t even eat right.”

“Come on, there’s nothing to apologize for. You worry about you, and everything will take care of itself.”

“I’ve failed everyone who ever relied on me. I led them to Concord. I got them killed. They’re dead because of me.”

“You’ve been through a rough time, man. The worst. But it’s not your fault. You got us out of Quincy, you got us out of Lexington. You—you saved my life, man. I wouldn’t be alive if not for you. And you tried your damndest to save their lives too. That’s all any of us can do.”

“They’re all dead…”

Mr. Garvey’s sobbing softens into sniffles, and Mr. Sturges holds him and whispers gently. She slips out of the room. This is no longer her duty.

[timeagainreviews]

“The Faceless Ones” gets a facelift

Back in 2011 when I was first getting into Doctor Who, I managed to track down the Loose Cannon Reconstructions of the missing Doctor Who episodes. For those, like myself, who did not grow up on Doctor Who, classic Doctor Who can be a bit of an adjustment. The editing is slower. The dialogue is closer to theatre than television, and there is so much padding. That being said, over time I grew to love classic Doctor Who and rewatch it more than I do the new series. Regardless, the reconstructions have always been a bit of a slog to get through.

Watching a reconstruction is tedious, even with good writing. The fleeting moments where some fan shot a four-second clip pointed at the television are like small oases of movement in the desert of static imagery. Despite the valiant efforts of some truly talented fans, nothing will ever beat the real thing. So whenever a new animated remake of a missing Doctor Who episode is announced, I get excited. The opportunity to see these static images once more brought to life with movement is always good news. Except maybe when that announcement is "Fury From the Deep," when clearly "The Evil of the Daleks," is next in line, but that’s a gripe for another review.

For my review of "The Macra Terror," I watched the colour version of the story. However, this time around, I decided to stick with the classic black and white, which I found I much prefer as it feels appropriate to the storyline. I almost feel like the colour versions are an attempt to rope a younger audience into watching something old. As these animated reconstructions go, I feel as though the animation has gotten increasingly better. However, I can’t exactly say that this time. I will go into it further but suffice it to say, I feel as though some corners were cut. That isn’t to say that there aren’t moments of brilliance. For instance, the inclusion of the mugshots of both the Roger Delgado and Sacha Dhawan Masters into the background was a clever little easter egg.

"The Faceless Ones," is a bit of an odd story from beginning to end. Frankly, it’s overly long and a bit clunky, but at its heart is a mystery that keeps you wrapt with anticipation. It starts with the Doctor and his three companions- Jamie, Polly, and Ben landing the TARDIS at Gatwick airport. It’s a strange bit of storytelling from the outset as the primary source of conflict comes from the fact that the Doctor and his friends are trespassing where they shouldn’t be. The Doctor basically says "Cheese it, the fuzz!" and they scatter, running away from the police. The true point of this sequence is to split the group up. While running from the police, a strange group of mystrerious men load the TARDIS onto a flatbed and drive it away. Polly wanders into a building with a chameleon logo, where she witnesses the ray gun murder of a nosy inspector. Now the story has focus, we now have a mystery.

The Doctor and his pals go in and out of states of capture at the hands of airport security with such regularity that it begins to become laughable. Having no passports, the Commandant wants to keep the Doctor and Jamie for questioning, but the Doctor insists they look for the body of the man Polly saw murdered. The airport’s Commandant fills the role of the insufferable prick trope just long enough to draw the proceedings out into a proper six-episode runtime. I understand the need for a character’s refusal to believe in aliens as a reasonable reaction, but it becomes repetitive after three or so episodes. Luckily, the man actually proves to be rather useful further down the line, which is a nice break from the usual trajectory of such characters in Doctor Who which is usually one that leads to their and/or others’ demise. He does eventually acquiesce and go looking for the body, but they find nothing.

We learn that the man murdered was an inspector by the name of "Gascoigne." The men responsible for his death, Spencer and Blade, believe he may have been sent by the parents of one or more missing people. There are a few pieces to the puzzle early on. We’re shown a collection of postcards, over which Gascoigne was murdered. There also is the case of this strange organisation- Chameleon Tours and their collection of unused foreign stamps. We know the two things play in together, but how exactly is unknown. All the while, Ben seems to bumble from scene to scene with not a lot to do other than save people at the last moment, which seems to be all he’s ever really good for. As final stories for companions go, "The Faceless Ones," does a great job making a case for the departure of both Ben and Polly. As opposed to going out on a high, Ben and Polly’s own uselessness is highlighted here as they almost seem like an afterthought.

This is made even more painfully obvious when the brand new character of Samantha Briggs is given more prominence and agency within her first scene than Ben or Polly get in the entire serial. We learn that Chameleon Tours is some sort of front for a shady bunch of aliens that replace people by taking over their identities. Polly, having been kidnapped is replaced by a body double, pitting her against the Doctor and Jamie. Acting as though she’s never seen the two, she goes off to work at her new job as a receptionist for Chameleon Tours. This is where we meet Samantha, a young girl from Liverpool searching for her lost brother. All she had to go on was a postcard from her brother sent from Rome. Polly’s double benefits in no way by helping her learn the truth, so Samantha’s enquiries are deflected.

Around this time, Inspector Gascoigne’s partner, Inspector Crossland, has gone looking for him which leads him to the Commandant. He informs him that he’s there investigating his missing partner and looking into the activities of Chameleon Tours. Throughout this bit of the story, I honestly couldn’t tell you what Ben is up to. He’s a fart in the wind as far as the story is concerned. Other than being sent off to investigate, there is very little for him to do. The fact is, this is the Doctor and Jamie show at this point. The Doctor once again tries to plead with the Commandant, and once again runs away feigning a bomb with a bouncy ball. Jamie goes off to eavesdrop in the waiting area outside Chameleon Tours, which is where he overhears Samantha talking to fake Polly.

All the while, the baddies have a mole in the air traffic control room in the form of Meadows, a man replaced by a chameleon body double early on in the story. Because of this, they know the Doctor is a threat. While Jamie and Samantha flirt and compare notes, the Doctor heads back to the Chameleon Tours hangar to seek out Ben and further answers. There he discovers a penlike device which was used earlier to kidnap Polly. The Doctor pockets the device and continues his investigation. It is at this moment when the Doctor discovers the original Meadows in a crate, unresponsive, but seemingly alive. Spencer watches the Doctors activities over CCTV and draws him into a room which he proceeds to fill with cold gas. After a struggle, the Doctor plugs the gas nozzles with rags and covers the camera with his oversized coat. Upon arriving, Spencer finds the Doctor, seemingly unconscious, that is, until the Doctor springs awake and sprays Spencer in the face with the pen device and makes a break for it.

Jamie and Samantha have pieced together by now that Chameleon Tours give their young passengers pre-stamped postcards ahead of their flights. Their claim is to save the travellers time by posting the postcards for them, but in actuality, this is to dupe their families into believing they made it to their destinations. It’s a rather sinister plot which still leaves quite a few unanswered questions. Namely- if the passengers don’t arrive at their destinations, where do they end up? It’s enough for Crossland to consider a lead which he brings to the Commandant’s attention, but they’re afraid to tip their hand too much. If they halt the Chameleon Tours flight to Zurich, they may never find the answers or evidence they’re looking for.

The Doctor finally wins the Commandant over to his side by showing him the pen device can freeze fake Meadows’ tea instantly. At first, I thought the Doctor was antagonising Meadows, but it turns out, he simply didn’t recognise his face from the catatonic man in the crate earlier. It’s funny to imagine this, as modern Doctor Who would never allow such a lapse in the Doctor’s memory, but it’s part of why I love the Second Doctor so much. You can buy that this man is simultaneously the smartest man in the room, while also believing he would forget such an important face. There’s a sort of effortless absent-minded brilliance to Troughton’s performance that I just find utterly charming. The point is driven home by a small little one-off line where the Doctor asks Meadows if they have met before. Villains are left to wonder just how much the Doctor knows, up until he’s standing over their smouldering corpse muttering "Oh crumbs."

After the Doctor’s display, and Crossland’s encouragement, the Commandant gives the Doctor free reign of the airport for twelve hours to investigate. At this point, Jamie and Samantha arrive with the envelope of postcards giving Crossland enough cause to go question Blade. The Doctor, Jamie, and Samantha head off to look into the room where the Doctor was gassed. However, as the Doctor is leaving, Meadows plants a device on his back. Crossland finds Blade aboard a flight but discovers the plane is not a normal plane at all. After serving the passengers food and drinks, the stewardess seals them behind a giant vault door. I got a kick out of this bit as the animators were clearly having fun designing hip '60s inspired passengers on the plane. In fact, some of the background character designs throughout most of this serial range from inspired to questionable. Either way, it was nice to seem them at least trying, for the most part. The plane disembarks with Crossland aboard. Blade encourages Crossland to watch on a screen as the passengers vanish into thin air.

Meanwhile, the Doctor, Jamie, and Samantha go back to the hangar to try and find the command centre of the Chameleons. While searching, they discover a monitor showing a live feed from the room where Meadows was copied into fake Meadows. However, before they can go search for the room, the device on the Doctor’s back is activated, knocking him to the ground. Spencer emerges and renders them unconscious with another pen device. Upon waking up, our three heroes have discovered themselves unable to move, and in the path of a laser, very slowly creeping toward them, or at least Jamie or maybe Samantha. Either way, someone is going to die if they don’t work fast enough. This is such a cute moment in the episode as it’s like something from a bad James Bond film or Austin Powers. The villain leaves the heroes unattended while a laser slowly inches toward them. Classic.

It’s moments like these that really make me sad the episode is missing as I would have loved to see the faces Patrick Troughton pulled while struggling to move. Jamie and Samantha are able to move just enough for Jamie to use Samantha’s compact mirror to deflect the laser back at itself. Having destroyed the machine, the trio is suddenly very much not paralysed as they all stand up, good as new. Adorable. It’s a great little slice of campy goodness that is pure genre inspired fun. I’m all about it. All the while, Blade informs his director that he has an "original," in the form of Crossland for him to possess.

The Doctor and his friends find the conversion room where the airport medic, Nurse Pinto, is helping convert another Chameleon. The conversion involves attaching what looks like a Wiimote to each subjects’ forearm and transferring the biological information of the human victim to the Chameleon. After some adjusting, they’re able to talk like a human and even recall the memories of their original. In this case, it’s Jenkins, one of the immigration officers at the airport. I rather liked a small detail here that Jenkins still lived with his parents. Call me crazy, but it was a bit of character building that made you feel for a guy. Classic Doctor Who is full of those moments if you know where to look for them.

The Doctor and Jamie pretend to be a doctor and patient as to throw Pinto off their scent. But even if she believes their story, she’s still not going to allow them into the X-ray room where she performs her vile conversions. Jenkins and Spencer watch from a monitor, angry that their enemy has once again escaped his fate. But they let the Doctor leave as they have bigger plans and will let him come to them in his own time. Upon returning to the control tower, the Doctor learns that Crossland has been unheard from in quite some time.

At about this time, the crew of the control tower really begins to take shape. The secretary, a woman named Jean just kind of comes out of leftfield as MVP. First, she drops the bomb that not a single airport has reported ever receiving passengers from a Chameleon Tours flight. And then even further, allows herself to act as a decoy long enough for the Doctor to go root around in the X-ray room. Jamie goes off to find Samantha who has bought a ticket on the next Chameleon Tours flight in an attempt to take the investigation of her missing brother into her own hands. It seemed a bit weird to me that she would do this, seeing as they were already uncovering a huge chunk of the mystery at this point, but I guess the writers needed a reason to thrust Jamie into the action as he pockets Samantha’s ticket and goes in her place. That is, before stealing a rather saucy kiss from the precocious lass. Seriously, why was she never a companion? Samantha was awesome. Samantha 2020.

The Doctor finds two of the Wiimotes and completely misses the original Nurse Pinto propped up in a closet behind him. Once again, the brilliant imbecile misses the biggest clue right under his nose. Hoping to call Meadows out, the Doctor returns to the control tower again. But he’s not there. This is one of the most frustrating elements of this story- the constant back and forth between locations is enough to give you whiplash. On top of that, there is the constant cycle of capture and escape, capture and escape, capture and escape, that really bogs this story down. I wish it could have been more streamlined because as you may guess, they end up back in the X-ray room shortly after. Agh! Pick a fucking location and stick with it! Honestly, it’s writing like this that loses me the most and is why I couldn’t tell you where Ben is at this point in the story. Seriously, where is Ben? I don’t even care anymore.

Jamie gets taken onto Samantha’s flight in her stead. Only when the food and beverages are served, Jamie is off to be sick in the loo. He was referring to aeroplanes as giant metal beasties in the first episode, and now he’s flying in one. The dude may be made of sterner stuff, but even the best of us get airsick. Due to this, Jamie doesn’t disappear like the other passengers. Must be something to do with the food and drink, huh?  Having realised Jamie took her ticket, Samantha becomes irate, but the receptionist guides her to Jenkins who of course pulls a ray gun on her. Another ray gun. Another capture. Woof.

The control tower tails the Rome flight with Jamie aboard with a small fighter jet, which honestly is a little weird. Did they just happen to have this fighter jet and pilot on hand? Is this a thing airports usually have? I honestly don’t know. Either way, the sequence doesn’t make much sense other than maybe they had some stock footage of a jet they kind of thought was cool. It’s funny then that the footage should now be missing and thus needs to be recreated by a computer years later. What was probably ten minutes of film splicing back in the '60s is now hours of rendering. These CGI plane shots are honestly one of the few times where the animation is more impressive than live action. So kudos to the animation department as those shots are genuinely cool.

Despite their cool rendering, the fighter jet is no match for Blade’s lasers as it is quickly shot out of the sky. It is just around this point that the Chameleon flight must have also crashed as it too disappeared off the radar. However, the Doctor believes that as opposed to going down, the plane actually went up- into space.  Of course, the Commandant gives this theory zero credence. But the Doctor is absolutely correct as we see the plane’s wings fold back like a rocket ship and thrust higher and higher into the sky until it approaches a large black satellite orbiting Earth. This is once again one of those moments where I am cursing the lack of footage as I would relish the ability to see the models built for this sequence. I will say however, this is, once again, a crowning moment for the animation department.

Now aboard the satellite and unaffected by the plane’s vanishing trick, Jamie discovers drawers full of what appear to be small people lying unconscious. At this point, the plot still hasn’t really come fully together, so seeing tiny people in drawers is just mind-boggling. You think you have some idea as to how or why these bodysnatchers are doing what they’re doing and the story throws us this brain bender. Hats off to the writers because I challenge anyone to say they saw this bit coming ahead of time. As it turns out the passengers didn’t vanish, so much as they were shrunk down into tiny people. The reason why? Because the satellite wasn’t big enough. Which actually makes a lot of sense in some ways. Terry Pratchett once wrote that a gnome character of his was the richest man in Ankh-Morpork, by ratio. If his resources stretch further, then a dollar buys him more than it would a full-sized man. Brilliant.

After discovering the jet pilot was electrocuted (by lasers somehow), the Commandant is beginning to soften to the idea that the Doctor is onto something with his spacemen theory. After confronting Meadows with the Wiimotes, our MVP Jean stops his ass with a rolling chair. Seriously, I love Jean. Jean 2020. At this point, Meadows just kind of becomes their bitch and totally spills the beans about their plans. How their planet faced a catastrophe and how they needed new bodies, new faces. He even gives up the satellite position and the fact that they have some 50,000 young people on board, ready for conversion. He even leads them to where the real Nurse Pinto is being held. I think if they’d have broken out the thumbscrews he would have copped to kidnapping the Lindbergh baby. What a chump.

Around this time in the story, the animation begins to take a serious nosedive. Nurse Pinto kills a policeman with a ray gun, and I swear to God that the policeman has a partner that looks exactly like him. Now, I know this is a story about body doubles, but reusing the same character design on two separate human characters in the same scene is just lazy. I thought at first that perhaps the actors in the original version were twins. But then, later on, you see two of the same faced cops in a scene together again! So it’s not just twins, it’s triplets, evidently. And they all grew up to be coppers on the same beat. Sorry animators, but you’re nicked!

Shortly after, the link between Nurse Pinto and her original is broken and fake Nurse Pinto turns into a pile of clothing and some sort of amniotic fluid. Her water just broke in the worst way possible. I’ve said it before, but part of me wishes they would improve upon some of the foley in moments like these. Mark Ayres does a great job mixing and remastering what was already there, but would some sound effects be completely out of line? Some squidgy squashy mess would have gone a long way to sell this moment. I figure a seasoned Doctor Who pro like Ayres would really be able to deliver such a thing. Also, if you ever get curious to know what Mark Ayres looks like, I’ll save you a google search and just say- he looks exactly how you picture a guy named Mark Ayres to look. Just a little fun fact there.

The real Nurse Pinto and the Doctor decide to pretend to be chameleons at this point so they can infiltrate the satellite. However, Spencer’s not having it as he’s onto them, but he allows it because he has plans to take turn the Doctor into an original for yet another Chameleon. Upon arriving on the satellite, the Doctor discovers Jamie has been turned into a Chameleon as well, which is rather funny as the Doctor laments the loss of Jamie’s charming Scottish accent. Those two, I swear. It’s as Frank Rossitano from 30 Rock once said "I’m not gay gay. I’m just gay for Jamie." Before they can turn the Doctor into one of their ilk, the Doctor destroys their machine buying the Commandant down on the ground some time to find the originals the Chameleons were linked to.

All the while, the Doctor is sowing seeds of doubt among the Chameleons that their director, in the form of Crossland, only cares for himself. That he wouldn’t care if he endangered them into becoming puddles themselves. He drives the point home by bluffing that they have found the locations of the originals. It’s a gambit that actually seems to work as Spencer and his men begin to question their director. The Commandant, on the ground level, is still plugging away, trying to save the day from his end. I kind of love the Commandant for following through with the Doctor’s bluff, and with such gusto. As I said, he really comes into his own by the end of the story. It’s kind of a shame that the guy never got a name. In the same vein as Counter Measures, I could see him, Jean, and maybe even Crossland in their own spin off adventures. They’re really a great group of one-off characters. Nurse Pinto and Samantha can come too.

It’s rather weird to me that the Chameleons opted to hide the originals as opposed to just taking them with them in the first place. After Samantha and Jean discover 25 cars registered to Chameleon Tours, they set off to search the car park. We find out that the catatonic originals have been stowed away in the cars to slowly die while the conversions complete. This may seem like a really dumb place to stash a body, but it’s not exactly unheard of. The airport of the city I’m from actually missed a truck containing the body of a man for eight months. Either way, it’s an odd little plot hole that exists mainly to give the Doctor something to hold onto and create dissent within the ranks. There is literally no reason not to take the bodies until the process is done. But ok.

Seemingly out of nowhere, the great stool pigeon that is Meadows, grows a pair and escapes from his guards. This is where the animation gets really ropey. I don’t know if it’s because the black and white versions are a 4:3 aspect ratio as compared to the 16:9 ratio of the colour versions, but as Meadows wrestles free, his body proportions are comically incorrect. His arms look about several inches too short, and they are positioned in such a way that the shoulders are set far too high. My guess is that the animators originally made this scene for the widescreen ratio, and merely squashed the image, thus shortening the arms for the black and white version. As opposed to, you know, bending the elbows. He tries to subdue Samantha but eats pavement. Slow clap for Meadows. Meadows 2016.

To prove they aren’t bluffing, the Commandant removes the link on Jenkins arm which turns him into a puddle aboard the satellite. This sends the Chameleons into a frenzy and they shoot their director, killing fake Jamie in the process. The Doctor negotiates with the remaining Chameleons to return all of the missing people and even agrees to help them find a cure for the catastrophe that set them on this path in the first place. After finding Crossland stuffed in a locker like a high schooler, he and Jamie go back home.

Down on the ground level, Jamie parts ways with Samantha, which is really kind of sad considering what a great character she turned out to be. What's even worse is that with Ben and Polly up and deciding to stay in 1966 London for basically the most boring of reasons, there was definitely a vacant spot for her to fill in the TARDIS. I would have really liked to see her as I instantly identified with her plight to find her brother. My family has experienced the disappearance of a loved one, and I know exactly how that feels to not know whether someone you love is alive or dead. They absolutely nailed that part of her character, and it was great to see it portrayed accurately. She could have been great. Instead, she stays behind and Jamie continues onward with the Doctor. However, the episode ends on a note of mystery- the TARDIS appears to be missing! Hopefully one day I’ll be able to follow up on that mystery with yet another animation to review, but until then, you’ll just have to wait! That is unless you already know.

All in all, the Faceless Ones is a pretty cool story with some rather lousy execution. There are quite a lot of moments that work to its benefit, but it’s marred by it’s bloated runtime. This story could have easily been told in four parts, and I feel as though it was a perfect candidate to be edited down into a single movie à la "Planet of Fire," or "Terror of the Vervoids." The strongest elements are the characters. And another bit of praise is that it was a slight departure from the base in peril episodes that dominated the Second Doctor Era. I do rather like Brian Hodgson’s score as it was genuinely creepy at parts. It evokes memories in me of the Woodsmen in Twin Peaks dancing to the impossibly slowed sounds of Beethoven’s "Moonlight Sonata."  

Regardless of any ropey bits of animation, I absolutely admire the work and craft of the animators involved. The character likenesses were an improvement upon "The Macra Terror," (especially Polly). There are points where you know the production team had to invent shots from thin air to fill the gaps that existing tele-snaps and sound simply weren’t illustrating. There’s a lot of creativity involved that evokes a lot of the same spirit of the original series. There’s also those really fun opportunities to retroactively tie the old series to the new. Such as the Dhawan Master, or yet another Magpie Electricals reference. Although they are far from my favourite companions, it’s also nice to finally see Ben and Polly’s send off in proper motion. As always, it’s the next best thing to the original.

[drummergirl231-2]

Scrooge in “Raiders of the Doomsday Vault!”

I am BEYOND excited the writers are finally addressing this issue.

The reason so many fans still hold to the outdated theory that Della took the rocket on a whim comes from nothing other than Scrooge’s monologue from “The Last Crash of the Sunchaser!”

“She found the rocket, and decided to go for a little test run in orbit.”

Scrooge believes she took it on an impulse, because that was the reputation she had with him.

But even in the IDW comics, Scrooge was often wrong about Della rushing blindly into danger. Sometimes things that went wrong were because of her luck, not because she did something foolish. Other times she was seeing the angles and jumping into action because she’d figured something out and just hadn’t bothered to explain the plan to her uncle or brother. It’s not that she didn’t think things through. It’s that she didn’t talk them through.

This comes into play toward the end of the episode. 

Back to the first half, though.

Scrooge was quick to compare her taking the Sunchaser Cloudslayer to her taking the Spear of Selene.

But there is a big hint that the two situations weren’t alike: the note.

If Della took the Spear of Selene on a whim without a thought to the consequences, she wouldn’t have bothered to leave a note. She’d just leave, like she did in this episode with the plane. And if she didn’t think about the consequences, why would she say she was sorry for taking her own present for a spin before she even left?

It sounds like she also left Donald a note.

Telling Donald what she wanted to name her kids sounds normal enough, but writing it down in case no one could understand him? Sounds like she knew she might miss their hatching, even though we know she never meant to leave them.

Why would she leave notes if she didn’t mean to leave? I’ll get to that later.

Back to Scrooge.

Scrooge was so happy to be reunited with Della, but as they settle into their new normal, all the pain and anger from losing her and everything else he went through because of it was bound to come back, and it has.

With the memories of losing Della fresh in his mind, Scrooge’s frustration with her and Dewey grew with each issue in the vault. Also, Glomgold didn’t help.

Scrooge blamed Dewey and Della both for the damage, but ice froze the buttons on one side, Dewey broke the vent and the panel on the other side, ice froze the sprinklers, and Von Drake’s overall design for the vault was kinda insane, to be honest. 

Scrooge did his best to give them the benefit of the doubt, but his emotions were running too high.

“Ugh! Okay, calm down. Just need to open the door using the panel... which the children broke. So! We simply climb out that vent... that has also been compromised by Della and Dewey’s senseless actions. All for good reasons, don’t want to jump to any conclusions...”

(I’d like to point out that Scrooge and Glomgold couldn’t have fit through that vent anyway if Della couldn’t.)

His anger continued once he found Della and Dewey and knew they were alright.

With the golden tree trunk blocking the nearest exit, she had no choice but to listen to Scrooge give her  heck for everything that went wrong at the vault, until at last he asked:

But he was wrong about Della. She had thought about how she’d get out of it. She’d thought ahead. 

And it is no mistake that the Della Mystery Theme started playing in the background here.

He did decide to trust her, and it all worked out. He saw that she did indeed think things through.

All through this scene, particularly while Scrooge was yelling at Della, I expected him to outright say this was just like the time she took the rocket, echoing Donald in “Woo-oo!”

“This is the Spear of Selene all over again!”

But Scrooge didn’t bring it up... this time.

He’s still carrying that hurt, and it’s bound to come up again later. There’s no way this scene resolved those emotions for him.

But I think this scene foreshadowed a few things... that Scrooge is wrong about Della, that she does think things through, that there is an explanation for why she took the rocket, and that he’s going to have to believe her when she tells him.

From a storytelling perspective...

Do you honestly think when Scrooge finally lets all those emotions out and yells at Della for leaving, all that’s gonna happen is Della will say he’s right and she’s sorry? She’s already said she’s sorry. She apologized before she left and when she came back, and if that didn’t fix it, saying it a third time won’t fix it, either. 

The writers wouldn’t tell the whole truth of why she took the rocket in 90 seconds of one episode in the first season, and it’d be anticlimactic for Scrooge to have all these emotions build up and for Della to just say sorry again. That’s just writing in circles. This story needs one more twist... some big revelation to bring Scrooge closure and to repair their relationship.

After all, we already know Scrooge’s memory was a bit faulty in remembering Della in that cosmic storm.

We learned in “What Ever Happened to Della Duck?!” that she was not stubbornly insisting on flying through that storm with a grin on her face. She was terrified for her life and calling for help.

She’s not quite as reckless as he thinks she is.

So if she didn’t take the rocket on a whim, and didn’t mean to leave, but thought it out enough to leave notes, and was sorry before, during, and after the ordeal, how do we reconcile all of that?

The rocket may have been sabotaged... or so Della thought. 

She tripped the wire and thought she had to blast off to save half of Duckburg. @alliterative-albatross‘ brilliant theory involves the Buzzards trying to do away with Scrooge. They threatened Gyro to rig the rocket with explosives, but Gyro, who respects Scrooge, installed fake bombs to buy himself some time. Perhaps Della tripped the wire while investigating the conspiracy, a countdown began, and she had just enough time to leave notes, suit up, and blast off so the rocket wouldn’t blow up where there were people. Of course, she would have eventually realized the bombs weren’t bombs at all, leading to years of regret for ever stepping foot on the rocket.

Frank did say that the reason Della’s messages never made it to Earth and the reason the rescue ships’ sensors didn’t pick up signs of life were spoilers, so there was definitely something devious going on with Della’s disappearance. 

Also, would the biggest emotional arc in the show be isolated from any external forces or villains? I don’t think so. There’s got to be another connection.

As much as it bothers me when people leave insulting comments about Della on my posts - taking Scrooge’s monologue at face value and ignoring everything we’ve learned about Della since then - I absolutely loved seeing Scrooge deal with these emotions in this episode. It only proves the mystery of her disappearance isn’t resolved yet.

[the-pan-ace-writings]

Chapter 11 Things left unspoken

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 As soon as she was able to function without feeling extremely nauseous and could breathe without the ache in her ribs she left for Nick Valentine’s office.      “Nick, it's going to be a little bit before I continue our investigation, I just.. I can't right now. I-” her voice cracked and she looked at the door frame she was leaning in refusing to look at Nick at that moment. She felt him place a hand on her shoulder comfortingly.     “You take your time, its a lot. Come back here when you’re ready.”      “Thank you.” it was whispered before she turned away from his office, she tried to walk with her normal confidence but it was clear she was starting to crack again. She felt weak. Like when she had just exited the vault, it took her a long time to collect herself and glue composure back together. She just wanted to go back before things had started to fall through. 

    She steeled herself before she entered the room again. She had been fixing her armor before she had left, she could hear the water running in the restroom.      She spent the majority of the time collecting and packing her ruck, and she had finished equipping her armor when MacCready had stepped out of the restroom dressed and damp towels in hand.      “Where are Winlock and Barnes anyway?”      “Mass pike interchange, they’ve set up on the old overpasses.” He started packing up his own ruck and had swung his newly cleaned rifle over his shoulder. “It's probably a day worth of travel”      Dogmeat had gotten up from his spot on the bed and was now standing near the door wagging his tail anxiously looking back at them. Riona shook her head in amusement at the dog.      “I guess we’re starting now.” She double checked her equipment and opened the door.      The market place was surprisingly busy for the time of the morning it was but It was still manageable to maneuver, they were just about to leave before MacCready insisted on stopping to collect more medical supplies.      “We went through a lot the last time we went out, should get more.” He went off with Dogmeat for a moment and Riona sat down on a fence trying to plot out the best way to get to the interchange, she had decided to avoid going towards the west tunnel of the interchange because it was likely collapsed. She was still working on plotting out their path when they had returned, MacCready was looking over her shoulder leaning on the fence she was perched on, She tipped it towards him to show their path.      “Figured we could go up north, then west to take the bridge than to try going through the tunnels.” She looked up at him expectantly waiting for him to give feedback.      “Looks good Boss,” He said with a smile and pushed off the fence waiting for them to leave.      They traveled with relative ease until they hit a portion of the city MacCready had called hangman's alley. Riona grumbled, they would have to clear this before they could continue, She tugged on her helmet and put her visor in place before flicking on her sword.     They both could hear a firefight going on in the near distance which set them on edge.      “Cready’ watch our back” She was already crouched down by one of the doors to enter hangman’s alley, trying to unlock the chained doors. Once they swung open it the alley broke into chaos.      There was a guard post right next to the door, she immediately climbed up onto it and gutted the raider that stood post there. She could hear others running from their dilapidated shacks, and hear one or two yells in the signature psycho high. Dogmeat had bolted in after her and crashed into another raider, pinning them down on the ground, Riona had made short work of the entrapped raider.      MacCready had taken out a raider that was perched upon one of the roofs, that was taking aim down at Riona. Of which was currently fist fighting a psycho raider, it took mere seconds for Riona to lose her patients with the raider who had managed to disarm her. She had kicked his legs out from under him and slammed his head into the workbench that she was previously pinned against, a curtain of red dripping down from it and her face splattered.      It was a relatively short battle and one that only Riona had managed to come out dirty. But she was excited to continue their journey, she was excited to have an attainable goal, something physical and something she knew the outcome. So when she took off her visor and helmet she was beaming, s look MacCready hadn't seen on her before.      “You just like killing' things dontcha?” he knocked his shoulder into hers, she pushed back and looked up at him.      “I'm just glad to be getting stuff done.” she placed her visor and sword back at her hip, before biting her lip and looking away from him fiddling with a strap on her shoulder. “We should only be going north for a little bit more.”      It was relatively quiet for being in the outdoors, occasionally Dogmeat would bolt off to collect some items that Riona hadn't seen. It was a peaceful kind of silence that had become rare in the commonwealth and even rarer when if you traveled the commonwealth often. Riona had decided to start flicking through the radio stations and had settled on the diamond city radio, which had been playing jovial songs.      “I wonder how they managed to find so many different songs after the bombs, their tapes had been hard to keep before.” She was just saying what floated off her mind at the moment and occasionally humming along. MacCready seemed momentarily surprised before looking down at her again.     “What was it like? Before the bombs?” He tried to sound nonchalant, not wanting to dive into her past and make her uncomfortable. She hummed and pulled on the lapels of her coat, it was becoming the time of year that she would expect to see snow soon, her new coat and armor doing little now to defend against the chill.      “It was… Different. It wasn't violent near our homes or in our towns but it felt like it could happen any day. There were supply shortages all the time for the home front, almost everything had been pushed to back our military. Cars couldn't drive, there was no fuel for anything that wasn't deemed important, and the fusion cars that are left on the roads today were too expensive and hard to obtain. We were waiting for the shoe to drop...I was apart of the Army before. They had just started a real campaign into fusion power, it was powered the majority of what we had left, it was introduced into schools and hospitals which had been important enough to keep power. Our armor was powered by it, and it was mostly what our group troops had used.      I had joined when I turned 18, it was in the middle of the riots in Canada, almost immediately after my training they sent my unit to the Alaskan front. I couldn't tell you how long we were there on that front but I had finished my first contract on that front. I was a little less than two years into my second contract when I was sent home, pregnant.      I was forced back home. I hated it. Back to Nate, a coward. He thought it was a good thing, glad that I was pregnant, even though it wasn't going to be his. He thought a baby would fix our marriage. We never should have gotten married in the first place, he was nervous when I had joined, and when I came home from basic he insisted we get married.      He got to enjoy the creature comforts that my service rewarded, the home in Sanctuary, and easier access to supply. When I got home I had taken up needlepoint just trying to forget what I had seen and to forget who I lived with. It all felt like a blur at that point.      When Shaun was born it was like a little light had been brought into my blur of life, I poured everything else I had at that point into caring for him. He wasn't even a year old when the bombs fell when he was stolen.” she was silent, and pulled at her fingers, adjusting anything that her hands could find, anything to avoid looking at MacCready after her likely oversharing. She hadn't thought of before in real detail until he had asked, it was something she had never really wanted to delve into when there were other things to do. She frowned, it was deep, her brow was furrowed. “I'm sorry, you're not here for a life story, it was chaotic before, difficult to navigate, this, today is much easier to manage.” It was short, stern and not really open for anything else.      “Riona, I didn’t mean to bring up bad memories or upset you.” He was soft spoken, something which surprised Riona entirely, she met his eyes and noticed how incredibly worried he seemed momentary, he seemed extremely stressed out about the whole scenario at this point. She didn't like it.     It was silent once again before she pointed out that they had to start traveling west on the road they had met. Dogmeat had found a large stick that he was dragging along the road and kept bounding between the both of them. She was smiling once again, as she picked up a smaller stick and chucked it for the dog, Of which bolted after it leaves the small tree he was dragging behind. Dogmeat had crashed into her when he returned with his stick, knocking her off balance and nearly to the ground when MacCready had caught her. She laughed lightly as she straightens, collecting the stick to toss for dogmeat.      “Thank you Cready’” it was like playing with Dogmeat had taken years off of her, the normal scowl marks and stern face had melted into a warm smile.      It was MacCready’s turn to throw Dogmeat's stick when he had bounded back towards them, When he looked at Riona she was fixing her hair, pulling it from the messy bun into a braid that hit on her mid-back.      “How old are you?” it came out thoughtlessly, slipped from his tongue without a moment of thought put into it. She looked up at him, eyes wider than normal. He was beet red and was stammering an apology.     “25, I think. Give or take a few hundred years” She chuckled at that and bumped into his side. “Cready’ it's not that big of a deal, don't worry bout’ it.” She had half a mind to laugh at him, she had no idea he could get so flustered over something like that. “How old are you then?”      He looked strained for a moment, deep in thought and she thought he wasn't going to answer her until he spoke. “22” She was surprised, it was only three years but she would have guessed that he was at least her age or older, with how stressed he looked all of the time. She supposed a life out in the commonwealth would do that to you though.    “Oh, I didn't expect that,” she laughed, trying to lighten the mood again. He smiled     “What? You expect me to be old like you, huh?” He had a grin growing as he looked down at her. She feigned offense, pressing a hand to her chest and putting a haughty look upon her face.      “Well, I'll be! I'm not old! You're just jealous” she was laughing fully leaning against MacCready as they walked, it had fallen quiet again, songs from the radio slowly filtering in. Dogmeat had joined them again and was currently struggling between carrying his throwing stick and another small tree. She had checked the map on her pip-boy, they were probably a few more hours out.     They walked close for a while, she was worrying her lip again when she let out a small huff and wound her arm through his without saying a word, she had a slight blush graced across her face, which only deepened when she felt his handset on top of hers.     They stayed like that, undisturbed on their travels to mass pike interchange, they stopped about a half hour out to set up in an abandoned shack to rest through the night. 

Next

[tracies-tales]

can we pleeease get another game gyaru ficlet 🥺🥺

as a matter of fact, i just passed 700 followers (i’m still reeling over that one!!) and i’ve been trying to come up with a new ficlet idea and LUCKY DAY MY FRIEND this is the first suggestion i’ve gotten in awhile!! and you know i love my gal pals, so really how can i say no? :D 

this is gonna be a semi-continuation of my last game gyaru fic so i’d refer to that one first maybe, but buckle up y’all we in for a wild ride~

(ps this one starts a little steamy/mild nsfw)

Daniella pushed Arina back against the wall beside their bed, leaning forward to place her leg between the shorter girl’s. She leaned to kiss her neck as Arina said, “Shouldn’t we, I don’t know, be getting a mission debriefing or something right now?” Arina set her hands on Dani’s waist anyway, pulling her forward.

Dani giggled, “As opposed to what we’re doing instead?” She kissed Arina’s jaw, her fluffy hair tickling her nose. 

“Technically we could be doing this at headquarters,” Arina pointed out, biting her lip with a quiet moan as she felt Dani’s teeth nip at her jugular.

“Oohh, kinky,” Dani said, then peered up at her, “but I like having you here, all to myself.” She shifted up to press their chests together and leaned down for a kiss, which Arina enthusiastically reciprocated. Arina grasped at Dani’s scarf with one hand, and she had just slid her other into the mass of dark curls atop Dani’s head when they heard their work phone ring, making the pair groan in a much different context. 

“Come on, now?” Arina whined.

“Look what you did, you cursed us,” Dani said, giving her a peck on the forehead before she stepped away to answer. She brushed her hair out of her face before she pressed a button on the projector and typed in a short code. 

Veronica’s head appeared floating as a small hologram in the room. “Ladies, hope I’m not interrupting something,” she said.

“Nope, not at all,” Dani said with a tight smile. “What’s happening?”

“We’ve got a new lead,” she replied, the image suddenly showing a glass case which had a hole melted in the side of it. Whatever artifact had been within it was missing. “Security footage was shut down before the theft occurred in this vault, but the microphones planted in the same room picked up on the voice of your favorite villainess.”

Arina raised a brow as she straightened her vest, “Brianna herself showed up? Doesn’t she usually send grunts like Roxanne to do her bidding?”

“She does, which is what interested me so much about this,” Veronica said as the hologram switched back to her head. “The item taken was a watch.”

Dani and Arina exchanged a look. Arina said, “Oh shit, now she’ll be able to tell time. Guess we ought to turn in our badges now; it’s game over, guys.”

Dani nodded mournfully, “Maybe it even counts her steps.”

As Arina gasped theatrically, Veronica interrupted to say, “Yes, a watch which can show time across multiple timelines.”

Arina paused at that, “So, like…a watch that can read the future?”

“If the curator is to be believed, yes. The armed guards posted outside the vault were killed and the security system bypassed, which would have notified authorities of a break-in to begin with,” Veronica explained.

“Of course, leave it to Bri,” Dani said. “She might be a bit of a bitch, but she’s a genius.”

Arina rubbed her hands together, “So, what’s the mission?”

“Retrieving the watch is your top priority,” Veronica said. “An item so valuable fortunately was installed with a GPS tracking system, but the signal was lost just after they entered a small town called Onimore. You’ll have to do some digging once you get there to locate the exact building it’s in. You’re only to engage Brianna’s crew if it’s absolutely necessary,” she added firmly.

Dani scoffed as she tossed a small bead bomb up and caught it again repeatedly, “Stealth is our middle name, bosslady.”

“Yeah, tell that to the last five damage reports,” Veronica said. “Move out as soon as you’re prepared.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Arina saluted her before she pressed ‘end call.’ As soon as the hologram was gone, Dani tackled her backwards onto the bed. Arina snorted, “Were you listening to a word of what was said?”

“Yeah, Brianna’s responsible, stole a watch, get it back,” Dani said, slipping her top off. “We’ll make it quick, she’ll never even know we’re late to pick up the car.”

“Oh, if you insist,” Arina grinned, pulling her down into a kiss. 

~~~

Dani and Arina eyed the barbed top of the electric fence. Arina set her hands on her hips and shook her head. “Damn, you’d think she’d at least have made her defenses a little more fun.”

“Tell me about it,” Dani replied, pulling a device which looked something like a Swiss army knife from her pocket. She fiddled with it until it folded into a clamp, which produced a soft electrical hum of its own. She squeezed the handle and closed it around a part of the fence, tapping at the chain-link a few seconds after. “We’re all set. Your move, baby bear,” she smiled.

Arina grinned back and jumped forward; she scaled the fence in due time, getting her own wire cutters from her pocket to laser-cut some of the barbed wire out of the way. She motioned for Dani to follow before jumping down the other side. Dani triple-wrapped her scarf around her neck so there was no excess flowing behind her as she fell, landing safely in Arina’s arms. Arina kissed her nose before putting her down so the two could make their way to the seemingly abandoned warehouse of a building.

Dani softly said, “Twenty credits says this is a trap.”

“You’re on,” Arina said, leading the way to the back of the building where an old loading dock was. She picked the lock of the human-sized door, peeking her head in without seeing anyone. She crept her way in, staying low with Dani right behind her. She froze and held up a hand when she spotted a guard. 

Dani narrowed her eyes and dug a metal bead out of a hidden pocket in her scarf. She gave it a squeeze between her fingers, waiting three seconds before chucking it at the back of the man’s head. He winced as it struck him, but collapsed a moment later as it released a cloud of gas which knocked him out. Arina dragged his body behind a box as Dani pressed forward, scanning the area. She noted there was a truck in front of every garage door to the loading bay and a large, two-panel trap door in the center of the floor, along with a crane hook hanging from the ceiling above it. 

She pointed up when Arina was looking her direction. Arina followed her finger and grinned, taking her grappling gun from its holster. She fired it at the catwalk above them, hooking it to a railing. She put her arm around Dani and hauled them both up. They grabbed the railing and hauled themselves up the remainder of the way, not noticing until Arina had unhooked the grapple that a guard was staring at them, jaw partly slack.

There was a moment of silence before Dani asked, “What, this rack too big for you?” before she grabbed the gun from Arina’s hands and shot the hook at him. It nailed him in the chest and knocked him onto his back. “Go, go move!” she said, turning the other way and sprinting.

Arina followed suit, retracting the grappling hook so he couldn’t pull it. They made their way to a control room with glass windows as an alarm blared to life.

“So much for stealthy,” Arina said. 

“It’s fine, this makes it more interesting,” Dani smiled, digging another bead from a pouch in her sash. She gave it a squeeze and threw it, the bead creating a minor explosion which cracked one of the windows into the office. Dani stood to the side as Arina moved in, slamming her gun into it to break it. She pushed her way in and unlocked the door, Dani locking it again behind her. She took a phaser gun from her own holster and took a position at the broken window, firing a stun shot at the first guard who appeared at the top of the stairs, making him fall backward and trip another.

Dani asked, “How’s it coming back there?”

“Working on it,” Arina retorted, pressing a button which opened the trap door. In the basement, a harness still around it, sat a metal crate. Arina grinned and figured out how to lower the crane, glancing over her shoulder to where Dani was ducking shots from the guards and firing back some of her own. “God you look hot when you do that,” she said.

“Thanks, I really like going for the plasma-swept hair look,” Dani said, wincing as there was a bang at the door. “You sure that’s the right crate?”

“It had better be, or I’ll skin Brianna myself,” Arina grumbled. “Meet me at one of those trucks?”

“I’ll save you a seat,” Dani said, getting up and throwing open the door. As the man on the other side stumbled forward, Dani kneed him in the face and shot him with a stun blast, followed by a shot at his cohort. Arina ran out and down the catwalk again, flipping a guy over the railing before she climbed onto the rail herself and jumped off. She grabbed the chain of the crane and slid down with a, “Woooo!” When she hit the bottom, she hooked the crate for them and called up, “Got it!”

Dani hit the switch to bring it back up before she left the room herself, jogging down the stairs. She shot a guard and said, “’Scuse me!” as she stepped over his body. She skid to a halt when she spotted a woman with short silver hair in a black suit with gold trim standing at the bottom of the stairs.

Brianna said, “Evening, girls. Leaving so soon?”

“Ugh, with the cliches, Bri. Find a new evil genius line,” Dani said. She quickly fired her gun, but Bri dive rolled to the side, drawing her own gun as she stood. She aimed it at Arina as she rose up on the crate. “Drop the gun,” Bri instructed.

A pulse of fear beat through Dani’s chest before she said, “If you say so,” and chucked the gun at Bri’s face. Bri had to dodge it as Dani ran forward, grabbing her wrist and moving it up so she could only fire towards the ceiling.

Arina started pulling back and forth on the chain, making the crate begin to swing. She pulled out her laser cutter and waited for the opportune moment, starting to saw through the chain so that it broke as it swung towards a truck. The crate landed on their floor, but not in a truckbed as intended. Arina groaned and started pushing it towards the vehicle.“Sorry hun, but you’re not robbing me today,” Bri said, twisting out of Dani’s grip, aiming her gun for Arina’s back. 

Dani shouted, “Ari!” and tackled Brianna as a shot rang out. Arina winced as it left a gash in her side, but she continued shoving the crate forward determinedly. 

“You girls don’t know when to quit, do you?” Bri asked, kneeing Dani in the gut and throwing her to the side. Dani hit the ground and rolled, dodging another shot from Bri’s gun. 

Arina said, “That’s one of our best qualities,” as she threw a flash grenade. She yelled, “Smile!” as their code word so that Dani would know what to prepare for. Dani shut her eyes just before the room exploded in a flash of blinding light. Bri stumbled back and put her hands to her face as Dani ran over, helping Arina load the crate into the truck.

“You okay?” she asked.

“I’m fine,” Arina waved a hand. “It was a lucky shot, anyway.”

“Shit, wait, we need a key!” Dani frowned.

Arina twirled one around her fingers, “Lucky for you I nabbed one off an unconscious dude. Let’s roll.”

Dani grinned and jumped into the driver’s seat, shouting, “Get fucked!” out the window while Arina hit a button on the wall to open the door and climbed into the passenger side. She put the keys in the ignition for Dani, who slammed the pedal to the floor as soon as the engine revved to life, peeling out of the garage. 

Dani laughed as they sped past some guards, who fired at them as they made their way to the front gate. “Oh man, the look on her face,” she grinned, setting a hand on Arina’s knee. “You did good back there.”

Arina had a hand on her side, leaning back in the seat. “Not as good as you.”

Dani mellowed a bit when the wound was brought back to mind. “Hang in there, baby. We’re getting you home.”

~~~

Veronica stood with her arms crossed as Dani and Seth unloaded the crate from the bed of the truck. Seth tucked his dark hair behind one ear, the stripe of blonde hair moving with it. Veronica said, “Well, let’s take a look see,” and nodded to him. Seth plugged a handheld hacker into a panel on the side of the keypad lock, and moments later the light turned green with a click.

Dani moved to stand proudly by Arina, until she saw what it was that Veronica removed from the box. A hand written note with the words, ‘Better luck next time, xoxo -B’ was in her hand. 

Arina snatched the note and read it a few times before she said, “Son of a bitch.”

[doublerumnukacola]

Addictionary

Present, Week 11 in the Wasteland

The Old State House was quiet, as usual. Only the occasional chat between Neighborhood watchmen was heard. It was one of the few things Goodneighbor and Diamond city had in common; their guards spent more time trading gossip than doing their jobs, left a lot of slack for Fahrenheit to pick up.

The air in Hancock’s office was musty and damp, the few sunbeams that filtered through the thick moth-eaten curtains were cluttered with dust motes and drifting smoke. Fahrenheit sat at the desk, holding her cigarette in one hand, and writing notes with the other. Hancock woke up on his couch, listening to the scratching of pen on paper, the long sighs of smoke, and the occasional murmur of something chess related.

He stretched out his sore limbs, hearing the familiar pops and creaks of his joints. He sat up slowly, propping his feet on the ground. His head was already starting to ache, he needed a hit of something. Jet was the obvious solution.

He rummaged around in the couch cushions, there was always a spare canister wedged in there. He struck gold as his finger wrapped around a dusty jet canister. He gave it an experimental puff to clear out anything stuck in the mouthpiece, last thing he needed was to choke on a piece of lint while inhaling brahmin dung fumes. He took a long hit, the chems burning into his lungs, spreading a shock of energy throughout his body.

“Why don't you just drink coffee like the rest of us?” Fahrenheit asked in her usual monotone.

“You kidding? You know how bad caffeine is for you?” He joked, “My Uncle drank coffee everyday since he was ten, dropped dead of a heart attack at twenty.”

“And coffee was what killed him?” She asked, a skeptical smile on her face.

“No, he was sleeping with some married dame in the stands, had a heart attack when her husband came home early. But the coffee didn't help.” She exhaled sharply, which was as close to rip-roaring laughter as he was going to get. She looked down at her notes for a moment.

“A few things happened while you were out, but nothing too noteworthy.” Fahrenheit mused. Hancock leant back and groaned. He hated these long reports he took another hit of jet, which wasn’t smart, it’d only make the lecture seem longer. “A caravan came in for Daisy, a few packages came for Doctor Amari, and piles of super mutant corpses are dotted around Goodneighbor.” Hancock coughed mid-hit as she finished her notes.

“What?!” He spluttered through coughing fits. She looked down at her papers again.

“The Vault dweller, aka the general of the minute men, aka the Silver Shroud, killed no less than eighty-two Super Mutants, judging by the amount of semi-intact corpses.” Hancock rubbed his skull, he could feel the headache starting to come back.

“Any reason why?” He asked, it felt as though there was something he was forgetting but it wasn't quite coming back to him….

“Because you asked.” A voice answered behind him.

“Pawn takes king…” Fahrenheit muttered to herself in amusement. Hancock stood up slowly, doing his best to grin at Sole who was standing in the doorway, looking particularly chipper.

“Right on cue, Sister.” He greeted, but the gaps in his memory were still bugging him. “But catch me up on when exactly I set you up on this little job.” Sole frowned.

“The other night, at the Third Rail when you… Never mind.” She started, but thought better of finishing the story. “Consider it my way of being a good Neighbor.” She winked, before turning to leave.

“Hey, where’re you going, killer?” Hancock called after her.

“Got business with Kleo. Bullets don’t buy themselves.” She called back. He had to smile at that. He heard the State House door shut behind her and turned to face Fahrenheit.

“How long was I out?” He asked seriously.

“Since I found you passed out on this sofa, it's been about a day and a half. Not the longest you've ever been out, but it's up there.” She replied, glancing at her notes again. “Last reports show you leaving the Third Rail, the Vault dweller hanging on you, heading towards the Rexford Hotel, entering the hotel, and you leaving a while after that, alone.” Hancock fought through the fog, trying to remember. He vaguely remembered speaking to Charlie….

“Take a mentat, usually jogs your memory.” Fahrenheit advised. It irked him, but she was right. He popped open the tin, only a few left. He dumped the contents into his mouth, crunching the mints into a peppermint paste. He could feel the fog instantly clear. It came back to him in a flash.

“Oh shit I did ask her to do that.” He grumbled, “Why did I think that was a good idea?” She checked her notes again.

“We discussed the growing Super Mutant problem three days ago.” Fahrenheit explained. “I suggested a perimeter of plasma mines to deter them, but you made the point that it would also deter caravans and drifters coming in. Your solution was to send someone to take out the closer nests, without getting attention from the larger ones. In addition, we both noted that some were necessary to keep the raider population distracted.”

“I don't remember that last part…” Hancock cut in. Fahrenheit looked up from her papers.

“As we were discussing this, I noted that you’d had two tins of mentats. You were ‘delightfully rational’. That’s a quote.” Hancock shuddered. Two tins was a lot, even for him. He'd have to take it easy.

“Fine, and I guess we decided to send in our personal atom-bomb as a solution?” He hazarded a guess. She shook her head.

“You just said you would take care of it. Next thing I hear is that everything within a miles radius of Goodneighbor has been shot, blown to pieces, or in one instance permanently spasming in in a pile of garbage.” Hancock gave her a confused look. She looked down at her notes.

“Yeah, says right here: ‘permanently spasming in a pile of garbage’. She shrugged her shoulders. Hancock adjusted his hat, pulling it further up his brow.

“Well, gives the Raiders something to… She killed them too. Didn't she?” Hancock asked tiredly. She nodded.

“There's good news, though.” She added. “The lack of threats was what brought in the ‘packages’ to Doctor Amari. Got a lot of positive attention from our friends on the freedom trail. The bald one in sunglasses has been snooping around more than usual. I suppose he likes to think that drifter outfit is fooling someone.” She smirked.

Hancock groaned, that guy really got under what was left of his skin. Something about all the cloak and dagger routine really clashed with his way of doing shit. He needed another tin of mentats, he could already feel the haze returning. He reached into the cushions again hoping he’d be lucky a second time.

Fahrenheit frowned, it seemed too soon for his high to be wavering. He successfully fished out a bent tin of Mentats, popping it open and topping up his high. She knew if she attacked directly he’d shut her out.

“Hancock...” She started, but he knew that voice. He shot her a look. She cleared her throat, trying to adjust her tone. “Have you ever considered a fresh start?”

“Pardon?” Hancock asked in surprise, expecting one of her lengthy lectures.

“A clean slate. Starting over.” Fahrenheit reiterated. “Have you given it some thought?” Hancock crossed his arms, studying her expression. Nothing was straight forward with Fahrenheit, and there was a point to this. But he took the bait anyway. “Sure, the idea’s appealing. Get out on the open road again, bring the fight to someone else for a change, rather than wait for it to bang on my front door.” He answered with a shrug. “But a town needs its Mayor, otherwise the shit show falls in on itself.” Fahrenheit gave a soft snort.

“I’ve grown up here, Hancock.” She countered. “Until Vic came in and took over, the place did fine running itself. A figurehead Mayor would run it just as well as a real one.” Hancock looked away.

Nobody understood Goodneighbor like Fahrenheit. She’d never travelled far from it, knew every inch of it, every soul that passed through its gates. He’d watched her grow up on his visits from Diamond City, back when he still had a nose. So if she said it could live without him, he believed her.

“What brought this on?” He asked. “Getting a bit too cosy behind that desk?”

“You’ve been distracted from the second you met the Vault dweller.” Fahrenheit replied bluntly.

“Pfft, ‘the second’ I saw her?” He questioned skeptically. “How do you figure?” She flipped back through a stack of notes and pulled out a sheet of paper.

“You stabbed Finn.”

“He had it coming.”

“Then you introduced her to Goodneighbor.”

“Obviously, introductions always come off friendlier after cold-blooded murder.”

“After she walked away, you stepped into a lamp post.”

“Bullshit.”

“Says right here in my notes, ‘stepped into a lamp post’ followed by ‘Threats to all witnesses.”

“Tell me Sunglasses wasn’t there…”

“I could tell you that, but I would be lying.”

Hancock sighed. It was true, if it weren’t for Fahrenheit and Sole, he’d be out on his ass right now, probably with a few more bullet holes than he was comfortable with.

“Say I went along with this.” He started. “Where would I go?”

“Where ever the Vault-dweller takes you, i’d imagine.” She guessed, rearranging her notes. “Now that she’s back to business as usual, she won’t be staying much longer.” Hancock thought for a moment.

“You seem to have this all planned out…” He observed.

“It’s my job.” She replied, grinding out her cigarette. She looked away for a moment. “There is one condition, though.” He knew it was coming and it still pissed him off.

“Cut the bullshit and tell me.” He snapped, rubbing his forehead in annoyance. He popped a few more mentats, it cleared up the pain a little.

“See Amari about what we discussed…” She started hesitantly. “About the fixer-”

“Really, all that for another lecture on chems?” He asked, anger starting to boil off of him.

“You need it this time.” She insisted. “You can’t go five minutes without taking something. How do you plan on surviving in the wastes if you keep looking for a fix?” He was silent. He had a problem. The words were on her lips, but she knew better than to say it. The cliché was too much.

“You don’t have to go clean completely. You just need to get to a point where you can use chems again, rather than them using you.” He groaned, she was right. How was she this good without a pick-me-up?

“You got me.” He conceded. “But you sure you guys will be fine without me? I don’t want to come back to a smoking crater.”

“Unlikely,” She mused. “The Vault dweller hauled in enough guns and armour this morning to weaponize every drifter and Watchmen for a year. Kleo is still leaking lubricant over the hoard.” Something clicked. Sole and Kleo…? He fought through the haze.

“Hold it…” Hancock cut in. “If she's already shown Kleo a good time today, why did she say she was going there just now?” Fahrenheit shrugged.

“I suppose she lied.” Fahrenheit hazarded a guess. Hancock’s head was working overtime. Why would she lie…? Shit, Daisy….

“Where did that caravan blow in from?” Hancock asked frantically. Fahrenheit looked down at her notes, then frowned.

“Some place called…” She squinted at the writing. “The Republic of… Dave? It's somewhere in the-”

“Capital Wasteland.” Hancock finished for her, already flying down the stairs.

----------------------------------------------------------------

“-Sorry, sugar, I haven't seen head or tails of him since he left weeks back.” Daisy apologised.

“Are you sure he hasn't… hasn't even sent a letter?” Sole pressed, her voice lowered to just a hoarse whisper. Daisy shook her head, a sad look in her eyes… A sad and guilty look.

Hancock watched from the doorway, caught between wanting to give Sole space, and wanting to investigate what Daisy was hiding for himself. He compromised, knocking on the doorway to announce his presence. The two women looked up, Sole pausing to clear her throat and wipe the corners of her eyes. Funny, this was the same woman who left at least eighty-two Super Mutants dismembered at his doorstep.

“Hate to Interrupt, but word on the street is there there’s going to be a pretty groovy shindig at the Third Rail tonight, thought I’d extend an invitation to a few lovely ladies.” Hancock grinned, strolling into Daisy’s store.

“What are you doing here then? Kleo’s next door.” Sole joked, clearing her throat to mend the cracks in her voice.

“Kleo’s no good at parties that don’t involve target practice.” Hancock started to explain.

“So what’s the occasion?” Sole asked, a little curious. “Isn't everyday with you a party?”

“Flattering, but this one’s special. It's a farewell party.” He explained. Sole opened her mouth to ask more, but Hancock gave a wave of his hand. “Working out party details with Fahrenheit, but I’ll be back to see you later, Daisy. To sort out some, ‘party supplies’.” He finished, eyeing Daisy, who refused to meet his gaze. With that he turned and strode off, head already starting to fog up. He was going to need to be at the top of his game tonight.

[yanagi-uxinta]

Adam Taurus, fandom, and redemption.

Okay this is my first proper RWBY analysis post because after several weeks of having mine and several other fans’ opinions misconstrued and shit on just because we like a *problematic character* I’m fed up. So if you don’t like Adam, you’re sick of all the RWBY bickering on your dash, or you just want to look at cat pictures and chill, best give this post a miss.

For all my annoyed tone, I’m going to try and bring this down and do an actual examination of Adam in general, why his fans are frequently said to want his character to be redeemed (whether we do or not), and what we mean by ‘redemption’ in the first place. I will not use this post to shit on people’s ships or anything like that, and honestly Bumblebee probably won’t have much or anything to do with this analysis at all.

Disclaimer: I am only speaking for myself. I know several other Adam fans who will likely agree with me, in the broad strokes of my argument if not the fine detail, but there are going to be those who disagree completely with what I say. This is just my take on what the hell has happened to the reaction to Adam’s character and the fandom since the end of volume 6. Of course there will be spoilers so if you’ve not seen the last few episodes of volume 6 yet, don’t continue reading! The rest will be under the cut with spoilers from the outset.

So since Adam’s death in the show, a lot of discussion has centred around how his writing was handled, both for his character and for the larger Faunus discrimination plot that his character tied into. While I may not personally have enjoyed the turn his character took, I will not be berating the writers for that or shouting about Monty, as that isn’t fair to anyone, is disrespectful to Monty himself, and we’ve always got fanfiction for our ‘I would have preferred this’ scenarios.

Looking at the writing alone, let’s have a recap of what we’ve got, focusing first on what we see of him, then what other characters say about him. This is going to get long, fair warning, as quite a few of the complaints I’ve seen on Adam reviews so far have been how people have left certain scenes and information out to support their story. I’m trying not to do that, but given I’m also summarising and trying not to quote every scene and mention, I might miss a few things. Apologies if I do.

- Adam was introduced as a high-ranking member of the White Fang.

- He was older than Blake, cast estimates say by about 5 years.

- He was a skilled swordsman with an extremely powerful semblance, and is used to leading raids for the White Fang. He started back when Ghira was in charge; this is also when he first killed in order to save Ghira’s life during a fight against humans. While he initially accepted Ghira’s admonishment, Sienna’s claim that he was a hero and the other WF members cheering him seemed to facilitate his later ruthless nature. He showed particular enjoyment when attacking SDC locations and staff, where his killing was not encouraged, but it also wasn’t punished.

- He initially believed in better rights for the Faunus, and that the White Fang would bring about a revolution.

- He shows no compassion for humans, and a willingness to kill them if they get in his way.

- He rejected Cinder’s first recruitment attempt because she was a human advocating for a ‘human cause’, despite her claiming they would both benefit.

- Cinder chose to ambush a Maiden rather than push the issue with Adam, and only returned to press-gang him into service after she had acquired half of the Fall Maiden’s power.

- Blake left between Cinder’s two visits. Adam’s lieutenant was shown swearing to bring her back, only for Adam to tell him to ‘forget it – it’s time I returned to Mistral and-’ here he is cut off by Cinder’s return.

- Adam worked with Cinder after his people were either injured or murdered by her, Emerald and Mercury, since the only options given to him were to work with her for lien and dust, or die – implied to be by immolation. Cinder had to demonstrate her Maiden powers to get him to agree since until she did, he seemed willing to fight.

- Adam had enough sway with the White Fang that even after their numerous casualties during ‘Breach’, that they continued to follow his orders.

- He participated in the Battle of Beacon, where he provided the ships in which the Grimm were smuggled in, and was seen fighting and presumably murdering Atlas soldiers and Academy students.

- This is where his anger and the first signs of abuse of Blake became apparent. He saw Beacon as an opportunity to strike back at humanity en masse; to destroy their communications and one of their main signs of strength – the Academy, despite Beacon accepting multiple Faunus students. He sees peace and equality as impossible, and undesirable. He equates Blake’s ‘impossible’ desire for an equal society with his desire for her; and rather than try to get her back, he decides to destroy everything she loves as he sets out to impose his version of justice on humankind. At this point, his two goals are balanced. He starts by amputating Yang’s arm when she, a human, comes to Blake’s defence, and would have killed her had Blake not intervened.

- After Beacon Falls, Adam is pursued by authorities, and meets all attempts to bring him into custody with ‘brutal force’.

- He returns to Sienna Khan in Mistral. Here he is ‘punished’ for his participation in the Battle of Beacon, but we get no details on what that is, only that it wasn’t as severe as it could have been. Adam does not seem affected by the punishment at all, and pressures Sienna to agree to the attack on Haven. It is implied he has explained his deal with Cinder to Sienna, but we do not know to what extent or if he mentioned how he was recruited. All Sienna seems to know is that these ‘humans’ are an unknown quantity who have given Adam empty promises, and that Adam’s agreement to fight at Beacon demonstrates his talents being wasted by short-sightedness.

- Adam calls in Hazel to explain more. Here we learn that the White Fang practices execution for treasonous acts – something already covered briefly with Tuckson.

- Sienna believes the Faunus cannot win a war against humans, which seems to be her leading motivation behind not starting one as opposed to any moral reasoning. Adam disagrees, and Sienna takes the chance to listen. Adam’s argument is that the Faunus are superior, and they have the help of Hazel’s ‘master’, which would swing the war in their favour. He believes humans should serve the Faunus. Sienna does not directly rebuke him, but seems frustrated as she says she’s ‘had enough of this conversation for tonight’, and orders the guards to escort them out.

- This is when Adam’s ambitions are revealed. He performs a coup against Sienna, saying he is doing what’s best for the Faunus. He murders Sienna, pinning the death on an anonymous human huntsman, and makes her a martyr. When Hazel objects, Adam’s reasoning is that Salem was dubious about Sienna’s willingness to cooperate – with him in charge, that issue is removed.

- As High Leader, he orders the Albain brothers to slaughter Blake’s family in Menagerie, but to bring Blake to him alive after they made a stand against his leadership. Here his composure is shown to be slipping, and the Albain’s imply they will replace him if his sanity suffers too much. This is the first time we see him close to losing control; he was angry at Beacon but still completely in control of his reactions. The attack fails thanks to the Belladonnas refusing to go down easy, Blake working with Sun, and being able to convert Ilia mid-fight. The Albains are killed or imprisoned, Menagerie rallies behind Blake against Adam.

- At the attack on Haven, Adam oversees the setting of the bombs on the CCT and the Academy, and orders the small team back to ‘perimeter watch’.  Before they can, Hazel is thrown out of the building, distracting the group long enough for Blake to arrive and demand they stand down. Adam’s obsession is brought back up again; he’s amused that after the attack in Menagerie failed, Blake ‘delivered herself to him’ anyway. He is taken aback when Blake’s back-up arrives, called the ‘brothers and sisters’ of the White Fang members. In one case, this is literal. Adam insists they are enemies, but is interrupted by the arrival of the Mistral Police Force with Kali. His emotions get out of hand again; backed into a corner he tries to detonate the bombs in a mass murder-suicide attempt, which fails thanks to Ilia disarming all of the bombs. His own people start to doubt him, even as Adam justifies his actions as making humanity pay for what they’ve done – even though the vast majority of the people present are Faunus, not humans.

- When Hazel refuses to offer aid, Adam attempts to murder Blake. This is the infamous ‘dodges into the sword slash, cracks him on the back of the head’ move. This initiates a battle between the eight White Fang members, Sun, Ilia, and the Menagerie army.

- This is where Volume 5’s poor writing, pacing, and placement make things awkward (please, no arguments. While 5 had it’s enjoyable moments, even the writers have flat out said it was rushed and there is a 2 hour long video on all the placement issues of the Ruby vs Cinder team fight alone. You can like it by all means, I’m not saying don’t like it, but from a technical standpoint it’s bad). Adam is still on the ground after ordering the start of the fight, despite a battle around him, Blake running a quarter of the way around the courtyard following Hazel getting dragged back indoors by Weiss’ lancer, seeing her team, watching Yang chase Raven into the Vault, silently communing with Ruby, and running back outside around a quarter of the courtyard again... only to be standing in front of him, still kneeling on the ground, at the opening of the next episode. And when we see Blake running, she’s not doing her super-fast run from the Black trailer and choosing to be Yang’s partner back in Volume 1, it’s a normal jog. So Adam just... stayed kneeling on the ground until plot plonked Blake back in front of him rather than diving into the battle around him. I digress.

- The White Fang are overwhelmed/disarmed. Adam gets back up, says he will make Blake regret ever coming back (on her own terms, I assume he means...). More police are inbound, as are huntsmen... despite Qrow not being able to find any earlier in the season... and Blake claims she is here for Haven, not Adam – even though her sole reason for being on the continent is stopping Adam. Discrepancies aside, Adam continues to paint Blake as a coward who cannot face him without back up, claims he has powerful friends – something refuted by Sun. The White Fang are being arrested, Hazel is... offscreen pissing off everybody else with his semblance, and Blake says she has ‘more important thing to deal with’ than Adam making her regret coming to Haven. Adam gets pissed, attacks Blake and Sun for a few seconds, then makes a run for it since the police airships have a spotlight trained on him, and as Blake speculates, he wants to lure the two of them away and pick them off.

- Adam observes Hazel fleeing with Emerald and Mercury, and chooses not to make contact.

- This is where the short confuses the timeline slightly. I’ll go with what I think makes the most sense/is implied by the narrative.

- Adam returns to the WF throne room, only to hear the remaining free WF members complaining about his abandonment at Haven. Considering Ilia said only Adam escaped Haven, it’s unclear how the rest of the Mistral WF members knew what happened since this scene is implied to have happened as soon as Adam returned from Haven. Either these were a part of the ‘perimeter watch’ and weren’t accounted for by the police, Ilia was wrong about the success of the police (unlikely as we see all eight of the WF Haven group being apprehended), or this is a continuity error. Either way, Adam demands they step away from his throne, implying the group were considering a coup. Whether they were or not, Adam initially explains his demand as ‘we have work to do’. When they refuse, citing his abandonment of the WF at Haven, he repeats his demand. They refuse: ‘We’re not taking orders from you anymore. We heard you folded the moment you got sass from the Belladonna girl. I guess she’s got more control over you than you-’ It is at this point – specifically on the word ‘control’ – that Adam draws Wilt and slaughters everyone in the room. He retakes his throne seeming completely calm and not even out of breath, muses on ‘the Belladonna girl. Blake,’ stands, and slashes his throne apart and screams.

- I assume this is where the scene from the end of his short fits in, where he drops his mask in the forest and staggers as if exhausted. It seems to me that Adam has massacred every White Fang member left in the headquarters, explaining his fatigue, and in dropping the mask he is abandoning the White Fang and thus the Faunus – choosing to focus solely on Blake.

- Two weeks later, Blake sees him blindfolded and hooded on the train headed for Argus. This implies, with his admission of stalking her later, that in those two weeks he tracked her down and followed the group to the station, sneaked onto the train through the open door Qrow points out to Dee and Dudley, and was intending to take the train to Argus with the group and was waiting for a chance to get Blake alone. With the grimm attack derailing the train, Adam is taken to Argus with JNR, and presumably waits there for Blake to arrive. It is possible he is the reason for the technical issues Terra Cotta-Arc is being blamed for, but that is pure speculation and he could have been lying low for the day and a half it takes RWBY, Qrow, Oscar and Maria to arrive.

- Adam somehow becomes aware of the plan to steal an airship, or possibly follows the group to the cliffside, shadows Blake and Yang long enough to figure out where they are headed, and beats them there. Either way when Blake tries to disrupt the comms tower, she finds all the staff murdered and Adam waiting for her. Adam admits he’s followed her, waiting for her to separate from the group. In this conversation/fight, he swings between bitterness that she ever entered his life at all, and swearing he’ll never let her go again. He is inconsistent with whether he wants Blake dead, or as a trophy.

- We get to see a wider scope of Adam’s fighting abilities in his battle against Blake and later Yang. He attempts to psychologically manipulate and intimidate both as well as physically fighting them. He refuses their attempts to defuse the situation, turning the scenario into life-or-death. When he is disarmed by Yang, rather than shoot one of them with the gun still on his belt, he instead dives for the broken Gambol Shroud, racing Blake. Blake and Yang prove faster – though there are a few minor placement issues here as well, with how far Adam is from the sword after catching his foot on it and taking two steps away, as well as how close his hand was to it in the shot before Blake seizes it – and is killed when both girls stab him with the broken pieces through the chest and back. He staggers to the cliff edge and falls, his body hitting the rocks before falling into the river below.

We hear about Adam via Blake more than we see him on screen. In order:

- Blake calls him a partner or mentor, who changed, and whose ideal world wasn’t perfect for everyone – i.e. humans. Given her descriptions of the White Fang to Weiss and her sketching Adam in her notebook as if she misses him, at this point in time it seems like Blake still thought Adam was misguided like the WF, forced to take drastic measures in the face of the racism espoused by humans like Weiss and Cardin, who called the White Fang pure evil and the Faunus animals respectively. However she still called him a monster for the actions he took, which made her run away. She later calls him someone very dear to her, and describes how he changed – gradually. Little choices that built up that he told her not to worry about; starting as accidents, then self defence, until even Blake was convinced he was right. We see one of these conversations in the short, where Adam has recently killed on a mission and Blake is calling him on it. Adam very quickly and easily turns the conversation around – placing the death as an unavoidable casualty of fighting, himself as the person willing to do what has to be done for the cause, and implying Blake wants him to abandon the Fang, ‘like her parents’. This changes the argument on Blake, leaving her to refute a claim she never made, give him support when he professes his fear she doesn’t believe in him anymore, and does not address the actual issue she brought up. Talking to Sun, Blake goes through her own changing perception of him – how he was justice, then passion, but she later saw him not as hatred or rage, but spite. ‘He won't accept equality, only suffering for what he feels the world did to him, and his way of thinking is dangerously contagious.’ The word ‘feels’ here is complicated, since we now know what the world did to him and it was genuinely horrific, but ‘feels’ implies that it is an imagined slight; something Adam has blown out of proportion. Blake later tells Yang that ‘he never really liked people telling him what to do.’ She says that he’s strong, but his real power comes from control – he would get into her head and make her feel small, which she now says was him pulling her down to his size (I mean he’s six foot four, so how tall was Blake to start off with?).

So that’s Adam in a recap. While the slow change Blake talks about isn’t shown much, we do see his continuing changes in the show – he does go from someone whose focus was Faunus revolution, to revenge against humanity and Blake, to believing only he can lead the Faunus – ironically echoing Blake, who thought she was the only one who could figure out the White Fang’s plans back in volume 2 – and murdering his mentor to do so, to abandoning the Faunus cause entirely when it becomes apparent that he is no longer in control of the White Fang, because Blake tarnished his reputation, and thus deciding to hunt her down to the exclusion of all else. We see his ambitions rise as his emotions spiral out of control, and it is emotions – so well contained in his first appearances – that get him killed when in his anger he forgets he has a gun on his belt and instead goes for a broken sword.

Adam is proven to be a horrible, violent person, even if he started out differently – something we don’t see directly as an audience; the closest we get is his silent moment of regret after his first murder. So how come so many people were invested in his character, when what we’ve seen of him has been so consistently bad and cruel?

Some people just like a good villain – which Adam was, when he had the complexity of both Faunus rights and going after Blake. A lot of people didn’t like the reveal he was an abuser in volume 3, preferring the revolutionary character who felt betrayed by a partner in a freedom fighting army, compared to the ex-boyfriend angry at the girl who left him and put that personal insult on an equal level with fighting for the rights of his entire species. Personally I didn’t mind the twist, though I do think they should have built it up a bit more prior to the reveal – Blake only expresses her discomfort at his treatment of humans and how violent he became in the White Fang raids before Beacon, and never implies he was abusive towards her. This of course could be her needing the distance and time to realise it, and the Fall of Beacon being the biggest wake-up call possible, but we don’t get any confirmation of that. Either way, I liked the volume 3 Adam. He not only thought he was fighting for his people, he had a personal stake in Blake’s story, and it was the level of threat he presented to Blake and the rest of the main cast that made him intriguing and something to look forward to, even though his actions were despicable. It was the conflict he offered that made him a character I liked. He presented not only a physical threat, but a philosophical one as well – because his methods got results. Blake’s didn’t – her parents already proved that.

But what about those who didn’t like that, who just wanted the revolutionary, and the student-mentor relationship between him and Blake? Or those who lost interest in Adam after volume 5, and only gained it back in 6 after his face reveal? From what I can see, a lot of it has to do with that reveal of the SDC scar on his face.

The SDC is well known for its atrocious working conditions and reliance on Faunus labour. As we discover in volume 6, they brand Faunus. This explains Adam’s ruthlessness in the SDC portions of his short and the Black trailer; he is striking back at the place that abused and marked him, even if the individuals he’s attacking had nothing to do with his personal trauma.

Now for all our speculation, we don’t know how or when Adam was branded. What we do know is the SDC branded a Faunus not only on his face, but over his eye, permanently disfiguring and blinding him on that side. Whether they practice slavery or not is not yet confirmed, though given the connotations of branding – like ranchers do to cattle – it is highly likely.

I’ve seen a few references to how in different parts of history, known criminals were often branded or permanently marked in some way or other so they’d be recognised, raising the possibility that Adam was branded after a botched raid on the company. However, in these historical instances where the marking was a part of the law, there was a set designation for the brand – for example, in ancient Rome marked robbers with ‘F’, and in Britain in the mid-1500s brawlers were branded with an ‘F’ for ‘fraymaker’. If Remnant’s punishment of criminals involves branding – something that has been largely abolished since the 1800s in our world – then they would not brand them with a company name.

Given Remnant is meant to be (very approximately) socially analogous to our so-called first world civilisations depending on what aspect you’re looking at, I highly doubt branding is an accepted legal punishment. That places the convention and the blame solely on the SDC – and if that is the case, then they have some very worrying analogues to branding in American slavery practices. Some would have a set logo they would use, others would use a basic hot iron and try to make a particular symbol or letter, as is the case of a Micajah Ricks, who when describing a runaway slave he was looking for, ‘burnt her with a hot iron, on the left side of her face, I tried to make the letter M’.  Now we know that Remnant as a whole outlawed slavery back when the Vytal Treaty was signed 80 years before the show began, but that hasn’t stopped effective slavery continuing today in prisons and it still occurs in certain parts of the diamond trade today, so the SDC practicing slavery dressed up as employment - or hidden entirely - is not outside the realm of possibility. 

If my speculation here is accurate, then what Adam’s face reveal tells us is that he was a slave, and was branded either to mark him as property, or for attempting to escape. We know the branding was done a long time ago as it seems fully healed, but we do not know how old Adam was when it occurred – if he was a child or not. We don’t have an official age for him, but if I recall Arryn and Barb estimated his age to be around 23 when volume 3 was airing or just finished, making him approximately 25 in volume 6. According to the NHS website entry on burns, ‘more severe and deeper burns can take months or even years to fully heal, and usually leave some visible scarring.’ Given the extent of Adam’s scarring, we know his was a deep burn, at least a third degree – and with how dark some of the discolouration is, it’s possible the deepest sections were fourth degree, which indicates tissue death. The site says that burns can be sensitive to direct sunlight for up to three years, though to take care to use factor 50 sunscreen on the burn and avoid direct midday sun as much as possible after this period as well. Even if Adam was branded after a failed raid with the White Fang, we seem him first don the mask in his character short back when Ghira was leader – five years or more before the show. If Adam was 23 during 3, he was either 23 or 22 at the start of Volume 1, not counting the trailers where he was likely 22. Five years before volume 1 would make him 18. Assuming the Adam short opening was after the burn had fully healed – I’m taking three years healing period here as a ballpark – he would have been 15 at the oldest when he was branded.

Now this speculation is based off assumptions, since all we know about Adam’s backstory is that he was branded by the SDC. That’s it. But I hope that this speculation is at least reasonable and rational, and backed up with enough evidence to at least be plausible. So if you’re still with me this far, we have either a child or a teenager being branded on his face for either criminal activity – and given Ghira was peaceful and did not condone Sienna’s later tactics, it’s doubtful Adam was working for the White Fang if this brand was because of a crime – or because he was a slave, who may have tried to escape.

And people wonder why anyone has even a shred of sympathy for the character.

Seriously though, the scar reveal makes all of Adam’s actions against humanity understandable, if not justifiable. The revolutionary people liked at the start received more backing and rationale for his actions, and even some of Adam’s more ambitious and villainous actions started to make sense – his coup against Sienna, for example. Adam had become so twisted by his hatred of humanity that a partnership he was initially forced into at fire-point became, in his mind, the best chance he had to get revenge on humanity – and Sienna wasn’t on board with that alliance or their actions, so he justified her murder as the Faunus needing him instead of her, because only he could bring them the justice they deserved.

The scar was also when a lot of people started raising the possibility of a redemption arc. Now the desire had been there before, since the very beginning in fact. But this was when it started looking like a genuine possibility, with the knowledge that the team were heading to Atlas, the source of Adam’s abuse, next. I know when I saw the reveal, my fears they were going to kill him off this season were eased a bit – surely this was setting up a future plot point? Why make the brand SDC if it wasn’t; any other brand – simple numbers even – would have conveyed the same story and had the same impact, without making it look like Adam would be a part of the future story.

And yes, I said ‘this season’. Adam I feel was always going to die, and a lot of his fans were fine with that. What we have issue with is the execution (no pun intended) of his death – something lots of people have already covered. What I want to focus on is the reason ‘redemption’ was bandied about as a possibility.

Now, let me clarify what I mean by redemption. I think when people see the word they think what we wanted was Adam to become good, to have his sins forgiven and to become a hero in reality and not just in his mind, to team up with RWBY and go up against Salem, potentially going down saving Blake as a last act of goodwill, or surviving to lead the White Fang and Faunus properly.

That’s not what I wanted. That’s not what most of us wanted.

When a lot of the Adam fans I’ve talked to mentioned ‘redemption’, there were two things we wanted. One was for the writers to redeem their bad handling of him (and everything else) in volume 5. Of particular note is how sudden the change is in his character between 3 and his first ‘live’ appearance after becoming High Leader as the holo-message to the Albains.  The only scene between the two is his coup against Sienna, where his ambitions and ruthless rationale become clear, along with how content he is with his deal with Salem, but where - like in 3 - he is overwhelmingly in control. Sienna was already overthrown before that scene even starts, she (and the audience) just doesn’t realise it. Yet the next scene we have of Adam, he’s screaming in fury - and this isn’t the raised voice of Heroes and Monsters, where he tells Blake ‘what you want is impossible’. This is an uncontrolled emotion that he visibly has to fight to rein in - compounded by Fennec’s comment that ‘he seems unwell’. With that one line, Adam’s character is changed - he is now unstable when prior to this scene, he was one of the most collected characters on the show, even in the face of defiance from both Blake and Sienna. A lot of people see this scene as the beginning of the end, if not the outright death, of Adam’s character.

By and large the writers managed to claw back Adam’s respectability in 6, with the exception of how he died - it being that instability and emotional lack of control that got him killed. The other thing Adam fans wanted when discussing redemption was for Adam to find balance again as a villain. Let him be a threat. Let him be terrifying. But don’t let his existence revolve around Blake, especially now we’ve seen his face and know what his original motivations were. If she gets in his way in his pursuit of justice, great. He’ll go after her and her loved ones. But he won’t go out of his way to do so. His desire to elevate the Faunus should have stayed strong. Yes, some people wanted Adam to forget Blake entirely and just focus on helping the Faunus, but I feel that would have been too big a reversal for his character. Adam is a villain, and the vast majority of us don’t mind that. We like that; it’s one of his selling points. He’s one of the most effective ones in the show (again, ignoring volume 5 where everyone became an idiot, hero and villain alike).

We all know Cinder is evil and is totally remorseless about the Fall of Beacon and the lives lost, same as Adam. We know she has a personal grudge against one of the main characters, and wants to kill or severely harm them, again, same as Adam. We know both want power. And when they divert from their original purpose, it is to get revenge on a member of the main cast. The difference? Adam succeeds. He helps destroy Beacon. He provides a direct threat to two of the main cast. Even in the weakest volume, he becomes the leader of the White Fang and would have succeeded in blowing up Haven had Blake not had prior warning of his plan and turned up to stop him – Team RWBY had no idea he was there or what his plan was; if Cinder and co’s plan had gone as they thought it would (so Vernal was actually the Spring Maiden) I imagine after killing Ruby and Qrow and securing the relic, their plan would have been to use Raven to teleport out before Adam detonated the bombs. When Adam abandons the White Fang, he finds Blake within a few days to two weeks and stalks her until he gets the chance to confront her. Cinder is responsible for the Fall of Beacon, but when presented with the chance to get revenge on Ruby, the character she’s been murdering illusions of since Beacon, she goes after Jaune instead (and fails to kill anyone except Vernal). Cinder gains the full Maiden powers, yes, but almost immediately loses her social power amongst Salem’s group when she’s maimed by a fifteen year old and does not gain that power or influence back. She is ostracised from Salem’s group because of her failure at Haven, leaving her a vagabond having to murder and steal for money and clothes to try and buy information – on Ruby. Yet Cinder never comes into contact with Ruby all season.  

This is one of the reasons why Adam is more compelling – though I won’t say likable – than Cinder. The other is we actually have a glimpse of his backstory supporting his goals, unlike Cinder who could have popped up fully formed watching Emerald steal and we’d be none the wiser.

It is also why most of us were fine with Adam dying. He’s a villain, and villains tend to die and deserve it. It’s the way he died, and the timing, that annoyed us and sparked this whole month-long debate. A lot of our complaints could probably have been averted if a) the scar had said anything other than SDC, b) if he’d not forgotten about his gun OR he’d forgotten about it earlier in the match to foreshadow his lapse in concentration later, and c) Yang’s line about who he was pretending to be. It’s a good line, don’t get me wrong, but it does not make sense for Yang to say it. If Blake had said it, it would have worked and given us more insight into Adam – that he’d changed far earlier than we first though, and kept the facade going to keep Blake sweet. But Yang doesn’t know him. She knows very little about him, and she and Blake have had one very short conversation about him since Beacon, during which Blake never implies that Adam was pretending to be better than he was. If the line had been ‘the person you used to be’, then fine, great, that works perfectly because it’s consistent with the knowledge Yang has of him.  

There’s also the group that say Blake and Yang murdered him, and it wasn’t self-defence. I’ll be honest, I’m on the fence. Did they have other options, once he was disarmed? Yeah, probably. His aura was broken and Yang, a hand-to-hand fighter, was behind him. She could have sucker punched him and knocked him out rather than slowing down to pick up a broken sword to stab him with. Did they feel like they had those options, in the moment, after giving him several chances to walk away and he was diving for a weapon? Probably not.  Would I have preferred to see a scene where (if they had to kill him now) there was zero ambiguity? Yes. However the writers made their choice, and we’ll have to see what they do moving forward. I won’t be dropping the show or boycotting or anything like that, but I am disappointed in their handling of it, especially when the finale was so lacklustre. They should have saved the Adam fight for the final episode, if only to give us the emotional stakes completely lacking in the Cordovin fight.

Speaking of moving forward, I would like to see the death have an impact in the next volume. There wasn’t much time in the finale for an in-depth look at Blake and Yang’s emotional state, but this is something that should be explored in volume 7. Killing a human is different to killing Grimm, and while team RWBY have been guilty of endangering or ending lives before (hi nameless White Fang goons on the exploding train!) the narrative has never addressed it, and I feel this is a good place to. Adam wasn’t just a faceless, nameless enemy who you didn’t directly kill, even if you left them to the Grimm or they got caught in an explosion you survived. He was Blake’s mentor, partner, lover, and nightmare, and she killed him with her own hands. He was only ever a monster to Yang, one who changed her life forever and haunted her ever since, but he was a person and she killed him and saw how devastated Blake was afterwards. Blake had an emotional breakdown in the immediate aftermath, but this was used to reinforce her relationship with Yang instead of explore her complex relationship with Adam in its final moments, and I feel like one scene where only one of the two characters is upset over what they did is not enough to cover a subject that should be quite deep and managed tactfully.

All we can do is hope that the writers do well next volume, and given how strong the majority of volume 6 was I think they will. They’ve shown their willingness to take feedback on board, and while nothing else can be done with Adam’s character (unless as Kerry says they decide to pull a Darth Maul), I hope they do the impact he’s had on the characters justice and we get to see a more in-depth look at the conditions that made him who he was: a warped, broken man who was a victim, a survivor, but who took the wrong path and became a villain.

Edits: Included a couple of points thanks to a friend on Discord and @blek-is-a-cat, thanks to you both!

[letitrainathousandflames-archive]

So my dear friend @lectricies is feeling sad lately so I offered to write him a Rainbow Six: Siege fanfic featuring the game characters and the Doc/Rook ship. I really liked how this is going as a draft and I may write an actual fic on ao3 later on. I know I don’t usually post fics here so I’ll hide it under the cut. And now, back to our regularly scheduled nonsense! Thanks!

Castle and Mute were at it again. Those two could not spend literally ten seconds together without starting some kind of shit, which was especially annoying when everyone was locked into an armored car headed to the assigned location many miles from the base.

“What I’m saying is that I absolutely cannot protect you if you stay out of cover!”, said Castle for what seemed to be the tenth time.

“Do you want me to bypass security or do you want them to have eyes and ears on us?” pointed Mute, who, most unfortunately for everyone in the car, was actually very hard to ever shut up. “I need to be at a smaller distance to be able to jam their equipment, and it’s not my fault you’re too much of a fucking coward to set your covers a bit further up.”

“Who the fuck are you calling a coward…”

Everyone else rolled their eyes, already expecting someone to finally deal the first physical blow.

“Shut up” cut Rook sharply; Castle and Mute turned to face Rook at the exact same time, and it would’ve been funny if they both weren’t pissed as hell. “Can’t you guys just chill and like, not hate each other’s guts just until we get there? I’m trying to focus here.”

Mute’s frown was replaced by a wide provoking grin.

“Oh, yeah, you do need focus, huh, Rook. God forbid you hand us the wrong grenade again like you did in Chile.”

Castle clicked his tongue before Rook could answer.

“Leave the kid alone. He’s doing he’s best.”

“My point exactly”, agreed Mute “Like I’m trying my best when I try to get closer to their servers, and the enemy soldiers try their best to blow my head off in the meantime, and I pray that you guys fucking do your part and cover me.”

Castle rolled his eyes.

“Right, boy. I’mma take you by the goddamn hand all the way through this time, like a walk in the park. That good enough for ya?”

Rook exchanged a glance with Doc and could see he was trying to suppress his laughter, and such task became ten times worse when he tried to do it while looking at Rook’s face as he shrugged:

“Can’t do a thing for this old married couple.”

“I swear to god, dipshit”, grumbled Mute to Rook, “Just my luck, getting to go on yet another mission with you morons.”

“Funny, I was gonna say the same thing.”

The armored car slowed down, unable to keep going because of the debris blocking the road. Smoke started to put on his gas mask, and the last thing Rook could see before the filter covered his mouth was a wide grin.

“Get ready, you morons, it’s showtime.”

Doc got up sighing and opened the heavy door. Rook went right after him and Doc tuned to Smoke.

“Just make sure not to poison anyone of us with your gas bombs this time, okay?” Doc looked over his shoulder to Rook and smiled back shyly. “Hey. Bonne chance.”

Rook nodded. It was a funny thing, hearing Doc’s French in the middle of all the angry shouting in the English of their fellow soldiers. Sometimes Rook caught himself thinking of how much he wished to hear more French on Doc’s raspy voice, the smile in every cadence of it. This was usually when Rook would also realize how much he wanted more of Doc’s, much more than his French words, or how much he wished the gentle grasp he’d occasionally lay on his own shoulder would last a bit longer.

The mission was not exactly simple: their target was the daughter of a Russian diplomat, recently kidnapped by – and can you even imagine how complicated that was – an American group of rogue agents working on their own terms in Russian territory. Long story, a whole big mess, but the big guys wouldn’t say shit about it: how did they let it happen, who were the rogue agents, how did it all come to this.

They were team who would actually get the recue job done and they knew nothing about their mission purpose. Rook was fucking pissed at that, but there was nothing he and his teammates could do, they weren’t the bosses of anything, they were just goddamn pawns there to take orders and get shit done. Rook hated that. He hated not trusting his own bosses.

The rogue group had bunkered themselves in an abandoned church in Murmansk, or, as Caveira had muttered to herself while analyzing the maps, “the cold ass-end of nowhere”, and Mute had already placed a loop video in every single security camera on the way, which allowed them to take cover in the snow-covered woods close to the church.

Smoke, Caveira and Mute were the first ones to get closer to the blocked windows. The abandoned church was in the middle of a wooded area and Rook would appreciate the beauty of the large wooden construction and the whole fairy tale landscape if they weren’t on a mission and it wasn’t 12 goddamn degrees. Caveira slid down the snow-covered roofs landing on the floor as silently as a cat would. She touched her ear shaking her head with a frown.

“No way to enter through the roofs.” said her in their common line “The only gap between the boards is too narrow.”

“Could I fit a gas bomb or a grenade there?”, asked Smoke’s eager voice

It was Doc who shook his head now, hiding behind a large oak tree and touching his own ear:

“Friendly reminder that this is a rescue mission and poisoning or exploding the hostage would be a bad idea.”

Mute climbed on the roof not even as silently as Caveira had, and everyone grits their teeth, worried about any alarms he might’ve triggered. The guy’s voice was giddy as a little girl’s in the line before Castle could even tell him to get the fuck down:

“Got me an optic wire through it! We got, uhh… Ten big bad guys, all armed and dangerous, and a person lying on the floor, hands and feet tied up and a hood over their head, now I’m only guessing, but that’s probably our victim. See? We don’t need to have Pulse in every mission, guy’s a pain in the ass if you ask me.”

Castle patted Rook on the shoulder.

“I’ll get in and cover for Rook. Rook, you take down as many of them as you can, make the best out of your bulletproof armor and my cover. Caveira, you get in there as fast as you can and take the hostage out to safety. Smoke, stand by until the hostage is cleared out. Then you can throw as many grenades as needed. Doc, you stand by for any emergencies and take a look at the hostage’s condition as soon as she’s cleared out.”

Caveira rose her brown eyes to Castle’s direction in the woods.

“Sir, my specialty is not rescuing people, I could eliminate the targets instead…”

“No.” cut off Castle “There’s only one entrance and I’m going to drag all attention to it, so your stealth would be rendered useless. What I want is you to be as quick as you can and take the hostage out. ”

Caveira still tried to argue as Castle and Rook approached the church:

“That’s not my…”

“We don’t have time to chat. Now get in position.”

Rook looked at Castle while Caveira stood behind them with a grim expression on her skull-painted features. Castle nodded. Rook lift up his leg and kicked the door in with a single blow. In a quick motion, Castle set his armored panel in front of the door, barricading it completely. They were lucky that the front door was so small – literally thank god for Russia’s small wooden churches; the enemy soldiers were trapped in, and Rook’s team was covered by the bulletproof material.

Rook aimed carefully. Ten targets. Easy. That was when a door to the left of the pulpit opened, and twelve armed soldiers poured out of it. Rook managed to land three headshots before they started shooting towards him and he ducked behind Castle’s cover, breathing heavily as the bullets clanged against the armored material.

“Holy shit, Mute, thought you said ten.”

“My bad” said Mute sounding genuinely sorry “The camera only got the main room in the church.”

“Great.” said Castle, getting up quickly to shoot a few rounds of his shotgun and then get back into cover “You and your useless tech-shit, it sounds like we’ll fuckin’ need Pulse next time if we get out of here alive.”

The silence in the line meant exactly how upset Mute was; dude never ever shut up about anything. Smoke insisted, his voice barely audible under the heavy gunfire:

“Castle, let me toss a small one in there.”

“No. We need the hostage alive”, Castle grit his teeth to then turn to Rook “You get up with me now, eliminate as many of them as you can. Caveira, you use our distraction and get in there. Doc, shoot her with a boost on my go.”

“Roger that.” said Doc in his raspy voice and for some reason Rook felt 150% safer knowing he was under his watch, under Doc’s watch. He was safe. Everything would be all right.

“Target’s exactly under the cross, on the far back” said Mute “Watch out Caveira, they’re all heavily armored, you won’t be ably to tackle any of them down easily.”

There was that weird, silent moment that precedes the getting in the middle of a messy shotout. Then the moment was over, and this was it, do or die. Just like every mission. Castle screamed “now”, getting up again and Rook got up simultaneously. Doc pulled the trigger and a hypodermical shot hit Caveira right in the neck. She grunted as the adrenaline rushed through her veins, vaulting over their cover.

“This shit always hurts.”

Rook shot each target with his usual impeccable focus. Right on their heads until their helmets collapsed and then into the shattered glass straight to their skulls, one after the other. Caveira rushed to the nearest cover, behind a thick wooden column, then to the next one, getting closer to the target. A bigger soldier was standing right in front of the tied up girl, almost as guarding her, and Caveira cursed under her breath. She’d have to kill the big guy then. No problem.

Despite wearing the ear mufflers, the gunfire was deafening. Castle knelt behind the cover to reload while Rook covered for him, seeing the dents the bullets were leaving in the cover. Shit.

“It’s gonna collapse soon. Caveira! Get it done with!”

“Easy for you to say”, muttered Caveira, getting slowly closer and closer

There were few targets now. Caveira got to the side of the big soldier, eyeing his bulletproof equipment, searching for a weak spot…there. Thigh. Big artery, bleeds nicely and has a bonus of making the target drop like a heavy bag. Nice.

Caveira crept behind the enemy, stabbing him and pulling the blade up towards the armored spot on his crotch. The soldier grunted, dropping down to his knees, and Caveira pulled her knife back, sabbing him on the now exposed spot between his neck and the vest. The man dropped dead and the blood pooled under his body. All the while, other soldiers turned to face her, but Rook and Castle shot them dead before they could do anything. Caveira looked around attentively.

“Clear?”

“Clear.” answered Rook with a sigh “Now get…”

Mute’s voice interrupted him:

“Shouldn’t we double-check if…”

“Get the hostage out”, said Castle cutting him off “hurry up.”

Caveira ripped the hood off the woman’s face. She looked absolutely terrified, her face wet with tears as she wailed, and seeing Caveira’s skull-painted face did not seem to improve the situation very much.

“We’re here to rescue you.” Said Caveira in a monotone voice; the girl kept crying and screaming “We’re here to rescue you! I said WE ARE HERE TO RESCUE YOU!”

Caveira picked her up with an effort – the girl kept kicking and screaming.

“Shit, I don’t know if she can’t speak English or the gunfire got her deaf but… stop moving! Fucking hell, Doc, can you shoot this bitch with some anesthesia or something? Goddamn…”

Rook was the first one to see the hidden soldier appearing from behind a column. They thought it was clear and failed to listen to Mute’s advice. Their fault—My fault, thought Rook, vaulting over the cover before he could even understand what he was doing. He ran to Caveira, pulling her down by her vest.

“Get to the ground!”

The enemy soldier did not have a gun in her hand, but a small device. She pressed a button on it before Rook could take a full turn and shoot her, and a drone came flying towards him. Rook opened his arms to cover Caveira and the hostage from harm and Castle shoot the soldier; She dropped instantly, but the drone kept coming to land on Rook’s chest like a magnet attracted to a metal surface.

And the thing shocked Rook so hard it made him drop to his goddamn knees. One of his teammates shouted his name, but he couldn’t recognize which one while he tried to pry the drone off his armored chest. The next jolt of electricity it sent on him was hard enough to make him want to heave, and he simply dropped sideways on the wooden floor, shaking heavily.

“Mute?!” screamed Castle, knocking over the armored cover “Mute, there’s some electronic device on Rook, I think it’s frying him!”

Mute and Doc were rushing into the church before he could even finish the sentence. Mute picked a small device off his belt pocket, pointing it to Rook’s chest. Rook’s face was red and veins throbbed on his forehead. His eyes were wide and pain-stricken and the damn thing was sending another blow on him. His breathing was ragged and shaken due to the electroshock.

“Chill, chill I gotcha!” said Mute tensely, pressing a few buttons on his device “Killin’ it right now… done!”

Rook managed to finally rip the drone off his chest and it was the last effort he managed to make before feeling like his whole body had become a puddle of jelly on the floor. Doc knelt by him, his mask-covered face hovering over Rook’s, concern in his eyes.

“Rook, can you speak? Can you say your name and rank for me, please?”

“Ju- Julien… Nizan.” said Rook, his still-shaking voice coming out through gritted teeth “Def-fen-d-der… F-Fuck, I wanna throw up.”

Doc let out a tense laugh, holding Rook’s arm down and pressing his hypo gun against it.

“Here, this will make you feel a little better.”, he shot a hypodermic syringe in Rook’s arm “There. Better?”

He touched Rook’s face with his gloved fingers and Rook shivered, but he was pretty damn sure that wasn’t the electricity anymore.

“Yeah.” he managed “Better.”

Doc was still caressing Rook’s face absently, looking straight into Rook’s eyes as if he were looking for something into them.

“I’ll check the hostage, okay? You stay down.”

Rook nodded weakly as Doc got up, walking towards Caveira and the hostage, and he almost thought he was still feeling the aftershocks when he understood what the hell was that weird feeling in his guts.

Goddamn butterflies.

[ntrending]

Sandia Lab wants to keep nuclear material out of the wrong hands

New Post has been published on https://nexcraft.co/sandia-lab-wants-to-keep-nuclear-material-out-of-the-wrong-hands/

Sandia Lab wants to keep nuclear material out of the wrong hands

Steve Hill paces—patrols, really— in front of four projector screens in a classroom at Sandia National Laboratories, outside Albuquerque, New Mexico. He has close-cropped hair, a straight back, and a swaggering demeanor that together suggest he’s either former military or law enforcement. If you were unsure, your doubts dissolve when you hear him call dice “a tool to determine chance-based outcome.”

The phrasing could be right out of a police report. So yeah, he used to be a cop. And now he’s a “high-risk security professional” at ­Sandia. On this May afternoon, Hill is standing in front of a room crowded with regulators, power-plant employees, research reactor runners, and other types who work with nuclear materials. They’ve come from all over the world to take the lab’s security training course. Through lectures, tech demos, case studies, and hands-on exercises, they learn how best to keep their radioactive stores out of the wrong hands by constructing the strongest possible protections around them. Though used for good purposes at their facilities, uranium and plutonium are uranium and plutonium—if they get out of peaceful hands and into other ones, they can do very real damage.

Hill is giving his trainees instructions for a tabletop exercise in which they will form opposing teams and game out an attack on a fictional nuclear complex, the Lagassi Institute of Medicine and Physics, where a stash of plutonium pulses at the core. The good guys will try to protect it from the bad guys, who will devise a plan to infiltrate. By playing out scenarios on paper, participants can find weak knees in their own site’s design, and dream up ways to brace them.

During my two-day stay, I’m never left alone. My chaperone, a press officer who is not permitted to be more than a few feet from me at any time, leans over and whispers, “This is getting to be more and more like Dungeons & Dragons.” She’s not wrong.

I look around the room at the attendee name cards. Each lists the person’s homeland: Australia, Canada, Congo, Japan, Lithuania, Philippines, Poland, Slovakia, South Africa, United Arab Emirates. Some people here are in charge of security at a specific facility, while others are regulators and policymakers, or plant inspectors.

Yoko Kawakubo, a woman from the Japan Atomic Energy Agency in Tokai, takes studious notes. Back home, she’s in charge of a national training course on nuclear safeguards that serves not just the island, but also emerging Middle Eastern and Asian countries. “I just started,” she tells me later. “I’m new.” And that’s true, but she’s been working for years on other nuclear security projects and on nonproliferation, both especially fraught in the only country where an actual nuclear bomb—dropped by the nation running this course—has detonated.

My attention returns to Hill as he explains the rules of nuclear D&D. Time begins, he says, when the good guys first detect the bad guys trying to penetrate Lagassi. “I have an AK-47,” he says, pretending to be a bad guy. “I’m going to pull it out. Bang-bang. That’s a point of detection.”

Although this seems an obvious detail, the students jot it down in their notebooks. Hill closes with a final thought: “If there are an equal number of good and bad guys, the bad guys will likely win.” Because the bad guys will choose the time, place, and method—all of which they can tailor to suit the facility’s vulnerabilities. “The adversary has the element of surprise,” he says. The class exits and heads toward other rooms, where we’ll play the game.

The exercises are Kawakubo’s favorite part of the course, she tells me. Practice makes perfect, she believes, and there’s only so much of that you get in real life. Plus, she relishes the opportunity to ask questions of people who aren’t new to this. “During lunchtime, I ­always interrupt my leader,” she says.

Kawakubo and her 49 classmates are far from the first scholars of this strange discipline. In fact, this is the 40th anniversary of the program. Formally called the International Training Course on the Physical Protection of Nuclear Material and Nuclear Facilities, it began in 1978, when Congress passed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Act. The legislation focused on limiting the breeding of nuclear weapons while simultaneously fostering peaceful uses of atomic energy. That’s a tough balance to manage, because while only some radioactive material is pure enough to be called weapons-grade, nearly any radioactive ­material can be used to make some kind of weapon.

The act also demands that the U.S.—as the country that officially set off the nuclear-arms chain reaction—shoulder some ­international responsibility. To wit, “the Department of Energy … shall establish and operate a safeguards and physical security training program,” it declares.

To create and run the course, the DOE looked to its national labs. The government had founded many of the research centers during the Manhattan Project, which developed Little Boy and Fat Man, both dropped on Japan. The labs have since helped create a host of other bombs that were detonated in the desert or still sit in silos. Sandia National Labs generated the nonnuclear parts of that first weapons initiative.

Sandia comprises a sprawling complex, much of it inside the gates of Kirtland Air Force Base. Its low, bland buildings, a mix of brick and cement fashioned into the rectangles popular on 1970s college campuses, spread over open terrain dotted with bunkers and the occasional wind tunnel. To the east, the Sandia mountains—so named because, like the desert, they turn watermelon-pink during sunset—loom over the flat floor, looking like they’re lit from within. This lab leads the others in expertise about physical protection: how to keep people physically away from your valuables—your uranium, your armory, your people. That’s why it hosts this training course. Additionally, the instructors are experts in transportation security, nuclear safeguards, international policy, and risk management.

Nowadays, the course is co-sponsored by the National Nuclear ­Security Administration, which responds to atomic emergencies around the world, and by the International Atomic Energy Agency, a United ­Nations–affiliated group that fosters peaceful nuclear technology.

Kawakubo and her peers work on those applications—the kind that make energy for cities and scientific data for physicists. So it’s a ­little strange for them to contemplate the violence that others could invoke. Kawakubo says that up until the 2011 earthquake that took down the Fukushima reactor, her country was experiencing a nuclear ­renaissance and people had pretty positive feelings about it. “The fear was not so big for the public in that period,” she says. “We had some kind of mood that we should promote nuclear power.” Fukushima left people feeling warier. And not without reason. Now, Kawakubo has to think through all the other things that could go wrong.

As the five game groups edge toward their tabletops, I decide to use the bathroom before the exercise starts. My chaperone insists she has to come with me and stand outside my stall door. I joke about escaping through the window, and she counters, very seriously, that I’m not allowed in bathrooms with windows, so that won’t be a problem.

We can debate the necessity of restroom guarding, but the course itself is more important than most people realize. It turns out the IAEA has logged 1,174 incidents of confirmed or likely acts of trafficking nuclear material between 1993 (just before it established its database) and 2016. Those are only the ones they know about. Besides that, there have been 1,894 incidents of unauthorized transport of nuclear material. ­Today, trainees practice on paper how to guard against it.

I follow a group of nine led by Robert Bruneau, a tall guy with a closed-mouth smile, who specializes in the cybersecurity of nuclear power plants. He stands outside the circle of students, who begin to set little plastic Army figurines on a blueprint of the Lagassi Institute—half of them representing the invaders and half the protectors.

On a big sheet of paper taped to the wall, a sample attack plan shows, in neat columns, what the bad guys might do: Drive up, use a ladder to climb the barrier wall, approach the inner facility on foot. The good guys, in their own columns, start to track how they will react. For each step, both sides slide the plastic figures around the blueprint.

When it’s time to get away, a trainee playing one of the bad guys takes Matchbox cars out of a Ziploc bag, and like a child playing Quiet ­NASCAR, rolls the vehicles toward the facility.

“Wait,” the team referee says. The cars brake. “Are those blue squares buildings?” he asks, referring to shapes on the blueprints.

“Yeah,” the driver says.

“You can’t drive over them,” the referee responds. It’s a strange reminder that this is all just a representation, for pretend. Nonetheless, we still have to follow all the rules.

In another room nearby, led by instructor Matt Erdman, who is a Sandia physical security expert, the bad-guy team’s plan is also taped up, and also involves Matchbox cars: “1. Run to wall 2. Jump wall 3. Into car 4. DRIVE INTO SUNSET.”

Right after I walk into this second scenario, the red (bad) team reaches the inner door and rolls the 10-sided die—the tool to determine chance-based outcome—to reveal whether a gunshot kills a blue team member (yes). Then a blue shoots a red. Roll the die. Red dies. Another die roll. Another blue dies. The bad guys push on, breach the vault, and grab Lagassi’s radioactive material.

Jeana Lee Sablay, a research specialist at Philippine Nuclear ­Research Institute, picks up the die and tapes it to the red team’s ­escaping plastic man. “The plutonium,” she explains, smiling.

It is key, students learn, to detect intruders as soon as is possible; the farther away you can see your trespassers coming, the better. Build a better detection system, station more cameras and more guards. Next, they should delay the thieves so as to increase the time between trespass and actual encounter with radioactive material. More walls, more fences, more locked rooms. Separate your valuables so it’s harder for the bad guys to grab and go. That can mean the difference between figures carrying a radioactive die into the world or being carted into court (or coffins, if we’re being morbid). Unfortunately, at the close of this exercise, the bad guys DRIVE INTO SUNSET.

The next day, everyone returns to learn that perhaps the problem isn’t always a red team trying to drive off into the sunset. Perhaps it’s just a guy who wears a red shirt, a guy you see every day, simply doing his job. Until he’s not.

“We want you to understand that there is an insider threat,” says Joel Lewis, a nuclear security specialist from Lawrence Livermore Labs. Also: You could be it. “All of us are insiders at a facility,” he continues. “They’d let us in the gate. We have the potential.”

Take Leonid Smirnov. The engineer had been with the Luch Scientific Production Association in Podolsk, Russia, for 25 years, working on reactors that supplied nuclear material to the country’s space program. In 1993, a time when post-Soviet wages were down and Smirnov was hard up, he read a newspaper article about the value of the kind of highly enriched uranium he handled every day.

He needed a stove. He needed a refrigerator. He had an idea.

He began moving minute quantities of the element into ­lead-lined jars when his co-workers weren’t looking. He’d take them home, stash them on his porch. He was patient, taking only amounts smaller than the facility’s error margins. When he’d done so more than 20 times, accreting more than a kilogram, he set off for Moscow, confident he’d find a buyer. Instead, authorities apprehended him at the ­Podolsk train station—not because they suspected him, but because he’d run into neighbors who’d been stealing batteries from their own workplace, and police searched the whole group.

A lot of nuclear villains are like this: not reprobates, merely humans who need something and see a way to get it. The gap between good and bad isn’t as wide as it seems. Which is something the ­Inter­national Training Course slams home hard.

It’s strange to think of a seed like that stuck in the core of our beings, waiting for a critical mass to pop through the surface. After the lecture, we all look at one another, I think, a little more suspiciously, as we leave the classroom and walk toward a facility that, until 2007, held ­Category I nuclear material—the kind most likely to become part of a missile. ­Sandia kept the place intact, with its old security measures and ­radioactivity containers, to help train teams like this one.

Outside, the sun beats down and blinds. We walk past a high fence and through a set of double doors, one of which has a sign warning “there has been an increase in unauthorized disclosures to uncleared individuals.” This building leads to an interior courtyard, where a walkway goes down into the old processing facility. There are metal detectors, badge sensors, pin pads, and guys with guns. This latter aspect is strangely unfamiliar to Kawakubo. She laughs nervously as she edges past them into a poorly lit room. (We learn later the firearms were fake.) A bunch of containers that look like paint cans sit on an industrial metal shelf. Tamper-evident seals resembling blue painter’s tape span their lids, pretending to protect the imaginary radioactive material inside.

This, Lewis says, is the Springfield Processing Plant. The class is to look for something amiss—anything indicating insider tampering. The students poke around, pick up the cans, set them down, and generally try to look busy. Then Kawakubo finds it: a broken seal. She walks over to a scale and discovers that the container is lighter than it should be. ­Radioactive material is missing—but where has it gone?

The students scour the space for the atoms that, were they real, could kill them. Soon someone finds it in an empty can, ready to be hauled out with the trash.

Lewis urges Kawakubo and her peers to think like criminals and imagine how this room abets theft. If you were an insider, how would you pull a Smirnov? And if you wanted to thwart a Smirnov, how would you do so?

Don’t put your empty cans in the same place as your full ones, the students say. Install more lights. Add cameras to the corners. Wand a Geiger counter over ­employees when they leave. If there’s an emergency evacuation, wand everyone once they get to the safe room.

“Your security needs to guard against ­mistakes—because they are exactly what an insider threat will exploit,” another instructor, Michael Tuell, tells us. And what stops people from going rogue isn’t an appeal to their moral compass. It’s knowing there’s a speed trap. “One of the things that helps everybody stay good is their chances of getting caught.”

RELATED: Why can’t we decide what to do about nuclear energy?

As everyone trudges back to the classroom, Kawakubo and I visit an area where Sandia scientists test out security systems for industry and defense organizations. Inside a gravel-​covered, fenced rectangle lurks a multitude of physical protection mechanisms. We walk in front of a microwave sensor, which works like the lasers that detect intruders in bank-heist movies. Then there’s a chain-link fence crisscrossed with fiber-optic cable. If you touch it, the light’s path through the cable changes. Pretending to be heisters, we bend it before stepping into the active infrared sensor, which feels for human heat. Beware, the guide warns, the backward-barbed wire.

They don’t just proactively test equipment here, the guard points out. They also demo it to special forces so they can learn how to circumvent these same obstacles—should they, say, encounter a fiber-optic fence while ­infiltrating an enemy installation.

This unsettling duality—in the potential of raw elements, in the nature of everyday people—had needled me throughout the entire visit. Especially when I would get up after a lecture to toss a coffee cup into the trash can 5 feet away, and my chaperone would shadow me: When people treat you like you’re about to do something wrong—escape through a bathroom window, pocket some plutonium during a fire drill—it almost makes you want to rebel. I felt like running away only because someone treated me like I would. The surveillance made me feel not just like the authorities thought I could be bad, but like I actually might be, or might want to be.

All of us, like this technology, show one of two faces, depending on the circumstances. We could be the defenders or the infiltrators. The protectors or the threat. Plutonium powers spaceships and also explodes over ­cities. Bombs both defend and kill. Kawakubo smiles at our guide and nods, silent, as she places her hand in front of another sensor. It’s up to her, and her classmates, to make sure the good guys stay good—and win.

This article was originally published in the Winter 2018 Danger issue of Popular Science.

Written By Sarah Scoles

[the-pan-ace-writings]

February 12th ~ Comradery

 Fallout February Master List

  It was an old gas station even in its prime, the owner ran a body shop and maintained a small carport which was mostly used by the citizens of Sanctuary. Its bright red rocket was its namesake, and remained still in its now slightly dilapidated post nuclear bombing state, 

   The red rockets only residents now are a pod of mole rats and a surprisingly healthy non feral German Shepherd. A man of his own, who mostly spent lazy days basking in the sun that filtered through broken windows and terrorized the unfortunate mole rat who wandered too close. 

    He ushered in the newest settlers of Sanctuary like he was born for it. A sad couple, a reenactor, a mechanic and an older woman who reminded him of his name. Dogmeat joined this rag tag bunch into the cul de sac, and watched the reenactor start to set up a base around the yellow house with the workbenches. 

    They had all been settling down around a fire that evening when they heard movement coming from the house across from them. A Mr.Handy had burst out of the house and stared at them, frozen. Dogmeat sat up and met the sacred gaze of Mr.Handy before laying his head back down on his paws and slightly wagging his tail. He watched the leader get up and great the Mr. Handy and converse till the warmth of the fire lulled him back into sleep.

    Dogmeat had been around the sanctuary for a long time. Mama Murphy keeps insisting it's because he is waiting for the blue soldier. Dogmeat didn't really know why he’d said but he did enjoy the constant doting from Codsworth and being able to go on patrol with the General when he wasn't couped up in his office pouring over information and maps. 

    It was a cool winter afternoon when they heard the screeching of metal and a pained out cry from just outside Sanctuary. Preston and him took off towards to the sound with weapons raised, only to find a woman dressed in a blue vault suit sat collapsed on a metal plate covered in what looked like bug goo, clutching a small pistol. They were both startled when she stood up and leveled her pistol at Preston with unsettling skill. 

   She trembled with rage and teetered the line of exhaustion, her hair had fallen out of what was likely a neat bun, it was white and spattered with blood, her hands white knuckled the pistol, fingers grubby and knuckles broken, clear tear tracks went through the dust and grime of the vault. Dogmeat was enthralled with her, he had found his reason to have stayed in Sanctuary, he was going to protect this person with everything he had.

    Dogmeat had stopped paying attention to anything going on between this woman and the general, but wagged his tail and followed closely when they started back to sanctuary, and he sat on the porch in front of the blue house that Codsworth had come out of so long a go. He said there long after she refused to leave the building, he could hear her crying and he had tried to get in on multiple attempts but was always thwarted by doors or Codsworth.

   She was in there for about two days, and he had almost gotten in when Codsworth was filling buckets of water for a bath, but decided to stop when Codsworth dragged him away and came close to trapping him inside the yellow house.

   “Stop.” it was short and stern, Codsworth had had enough of his tomfoolery. He decided to wander around in the gardens and along the walls of sanctuary till the sun rose. 

   He watched her enter the generals office and when she came out she was set on a mission. She left sanctuary with the the points of a settlement not too far off, and Dogmeat had decided he’d follow her. Protect her.

[doublerumnukacola]

Part 2

The Old State House was quiet, as usual. Only the occasional chat between Neighborhood watchmen was heard. It was one of the few things Goodneighbor and Diamond city had in common; their guards spent more time trading gossip than doing their jobs, left a lot of slack for Fahrenheit to pick up.

The air in Hancock’s office was musty and damp, the few sunbeams that filtered through the thick moth-eaten curtains were cluttered with dust motes and drifting smoke. Fahrenheit sat at the desk, holding her cigarette in one hand, and writing notes with the other. Hancock woke up on his couch, listening to the scratching of pen on paper, the long sighs of smoke, and the occasional murmur of something chess related.

    He stretched out his sore limbs, hearing the familiar pops and creaks of his joints. He sat up slowly, propping his feet on the ground. His head was already starting to ache, he needed a hit of something. Jet was the obvious solution.

He rummaged around in the couch cushions, there was always a spare canister wedged in there. He struck gold as his finger wrapped around a dusty jet canister. He gave it an experimental puff to clear out anything stuck in the mouthpiece, last thing he needed was to choke on a piece of lint while inhaling brahmin dung fumes. He took a long hit, the chems burning into his lungs, spreading a shock of energy throughout his body.

“Why don't you just drink coffee like the rest of us?” Fahrenheit asked in her usual monotone.

“You kidding? You know how bad caffeine is for you?” He joked, “My Uncle drank coffee everyday since he was ten, dropped dead of a heart attack at twenty.”

“And coffee was what killed him?” She asked, a skeptical smile on her face.

“No, he was sleeping with some married dame in the stands, had a heart attack when her husband came home early. But the coffee didn't help.” She exhaled sharply, which was as close to rip-roaring laughter as he was going to get. She looked down at her notes for a moment.

“A few things happened while you were out, but nothing too noteworthy.” Fahrenheit mused. Hancock leant back and groaned. He hated these long reports he took another hit of jet, which wasn’t smart, it’d only make the lecture seem longer. “A caravan came in for Daisy, a few packages came for Doctor Amari, and piles of super mutant corpses are dotted around Goodneighbor.” Hancock coughed mid-hit as she finished her notes.

“What?!” He spluttered through coughing fits. She looked down at her papers again.

“The Vault dweller, aka the general of the minute men, aka the Silver Shroud, killed no less than eighty-two Super Mutants,  judging by the amount of semi-intact corpses.” Hancock rubbed his skull, he could feel the headache starting to come back.

“Any reason why?” He asked, it felt as though there was something he was forgetting but it wasn't quite coming back to him….

“Because you asked.” A voice answered behind him.

“Pawn takes king…” Fahrenheit muttered to herself in amusement. Hancock stood up slowly, doing his best to grin at Sole who was standing in the doorway, looking particularly chipper.

“Right on cue, Sister.” He greeted, but the gaps in his memory were still bugging him. “But catch me up on when exactly I set you up on this little job.” Sole frowned.

“The other night, at the Third Rail when you… Never mind.” She started, but thought better of finishing the story. “Consider it my way of being a good Neighbor.” She winked, before turning to leave.

“Hey, where’re you going, killer?” Hancock called after her.

“Got business with Kleo. Bullets don’t buy themselves.” She called back. He had to smile at that. He heard the State House door shut behind her and turned to face Fahrenheit.

“How long was I out?” He asked seriously.

“Since I found you passed out on this sofa, it's been about a day and a half. Not the longest you've ever been out, but it's up there.” She replied, glancing at her notes again. “Last reports show you leaving the Third Rail, the Vault dweller hanging on you, heading towards the Rexford Hotel, entering the hotel, and you leaving a while after that, alone.” Hancock fought through the fog, trying to remember. He vaguely remembered speaking to Charlie….

“Take a mentat, usually jogs your memory.” Fahrenheit advised. It irked him, but she was right. He popped open the tin, only a few left. He dumped the contents into his mouth, crunching the mints into a peppermint paste. He could feel the fog instantly clear. It came back to him in a flash.

“Oh shit I did ask her to do that.” He grumbled, “Why did I think that was a good idea?” She checked her notes again.

“We discussed the growing Super Mutant problem three days ago.” Fahrenheit explained. “I suggested a perimeter of plasma mines to deter them, but you made the point that it would also deter caravans and drifters coming in. Your solution was to send someone to take out the closer nests, without getting attention from the larger ones. In addition, we both noted that some were necessary to keep the raider population distracted.”

“I don't remember that last part…” Hancock cut in. Fahrenheit looked up from her papers.

“As we were discussing this, I noted that you’d had two tins of mentats. You were ‘delightfully rational’. That’s a quote.” Hancock shuddered. Two tins was a lot, even for him. He'd have to take it easy.

“Fine, and I guess we decided to send in our personal atom-bomb as a solution?” He hazarded a guess. She shook her head.

“You just said you would take care of it. Next thing I hear is that everything within a miles radius of Goodneighbor has been shot, blown to pieces, or in one instance permanently spasming in in a pile of garbage.” Hancock gave her a confused look. She looked down at her notes.

“Yeah, says right here: ‘permanently spasming in a pile of garbage’. She shrugged her shoulders. Hancock adjusted his hat, pulling it further up his brow.

“Well, gives the Raiders something to… She killed them too. Didn't she?” Hancock asked tiredly. She nodded.

“There's good news, though.” She added. “The lack of threats was what brought in the ‘packages’ to Doctor Amari. Got a lot of positive attention from our friends on the freedom trail. The bald one in sunglasses has been snooping around more than usual. I suppose he likes to think that drifter outfit is fooling someone.” She smirked.

Hancock groaned, that guy really got under what was left of his skin. Something about all the cloak and dagger routine really clashed with his way of doing shit. He needed another tin of mentats, he could already feel the haze returning. He reached into the cushions again hoping he’d be lucky a second time.

Fahrenheit frowned, it seemed too soon for his high to be wavering. He successfully fished out a bent tin of Mentats, popping it open and topping up his high. She knew if she attacked directly he’d shut her out.

“Hancock...” She started, but he knew that voice. He shot her a look. She cleared her throat, trying to adjust her tone. “Have you ever considered a fresh start?”

“Pardon?” Hancock asked in surprise, expecting one of her lengthy lectures.

“A clean slate. Starting over.” Fahrenheit reiterated. “Have you given it some thought?” Hancock crossed his arms, studying her expression. Nothing was straight forward with Fahrenheit, and there was a point to this. But he took the bait anyway.

“Sure, the idea’s appealing. Get out on the open road again, bring the fight to someone else for a change, rather than wait for it to bang on my front door.” He answered with a shrug. “But a town needs its Mayor, otherwise the shit show falls in on itself.” Fahrenheit gave a soft snort.

“I’ve grown up here, Hancock.” She countered. “Until Vic came in and took over, the place did fine running itself. A figurehead Mayor would run it just as well as a real one.” Hancock looked away.

Nobody understood Goodneighbor like Fahrenheit. She’d never travelled far from it, knew every inch of it, every soul that passed through its gates. He’d watched her grow up on his visits from Diamond City, back when he still had a nose. So if she said it could live without him, he believed her.

“What brought this on?” He asked. “Getting a bit too cosy behind that desk?”

“You’ve been distracted from the second you met the Vault dweller.” Fahrenheit replied.

“Pfft, ‘the second’ I saw her?” He questioned skeptically. “How do you figure?” She flipped back through a stack of notes and pulled out a sheet of paper.

“You stabbed Finn.”

“He had it coming.”

“Then you introduced her to Goodneighbor.”

“Obviously, introductions always come off friendlier after cold-blooded murder.”

“After she walked away, you stepped into a lamp post.”

“Bullshit.”

    “Says right here in my notes, ‘stepped into a lamp post’ followed by ‘Threats to all witnesses.”

    “Tell me Sunglasses wasn’t there…”

    “I could tell you that, but I would be lying.”

    Hancock sighed. It was true, if it weren’t for Fahrenheit and Sole, he’d be out on his ass right now, probably with a few more bullet holes than he was comfortable with.

    “Say I went along with this.” He started. “Where would I go?”

    “Where ever the Vault-dweller takes you, i’d imagine.” She guessed, rearranging her notes. “I imagine now that she’s back to business as usual, she won’t be staying much longer.” Hancock thought for a moment.

    “You seem to have this all planned out…” He observed.

    “It’s my job.” She replied, grinding out her cigarette. She looked away for a moment. “There is one condition, though.” He knew it was coming and it still pissed him off.

    “Cut the bullshit and tell me.” He snapped, rubbing his forehead in annoyance. He popped a few more mentats, it cleared up the pain a little.

    “See Amari about what we discussed…” She started hesitantly. “About the fixer-”

    “Really, all that for another lecture on chems?” He asked, anger starting to boil off of him.

    “You need it this time.” She insisted. “You can’t go five minutes without taking something. How do you plan on surviving in the wastes if you keep looking for a fix?” He was silent. He had a problem. The words were on her lips, but she knew better than to say it. The cliché was too much.

“You don’t have to go clean completely. You just need to get to a point where you can use chems again, rather than them using you.” He groaned, she was right. How was she this good without a pick-me-up?

    “You got me.” He conceded. “But you sure you guys will be fine without me? I don’t want to come back to a smoking crater.”

“Unlikely,” She mused. “The Vault dweller hauled in enough guns and armour this morning to weaponize every drifter and Watchmen for a year. Kleo is still leaking lubricant over the hoard.” Something clicked. Sole and Kleo…? He fought through the haze.

“Hold it…” Hancock cut in. “If she's already shown Kleo a good time today, why did she say she was going there just now?” Fahrenheit shrugged.

“I suppose she lied.” Fahrenheit hazarded a guess. Hancock’s head was working overtime. Why would she lie…? Shit, Daisy….

“Where did that caravan blow in from?” Hancock asked frantically. Fahrenheit looked down at her notes, then frowned.

“Some place called…” She squinted at the writing. “The Republic of… Dave? It's somewhere in the-”

“Capital Wasteland.” Hancock finished for her, already flying down the stairs.

-----------------------------------------------------

“-Sorry, sugar, I haven't seen head or tails of him since he left weeks back.” Daisy apologised.

“Are you sure he hasn't… hasn't even sent a letter?” Sole pressed, her voice lowered to just a hoarse whisper. Daisy shook her head, a sad look in her eyes… Sad and guilty.

Hancock watched from the doorway, caught between wanting to give Sole space, and wanting to investigate what Daisy was hiding for himself. He compromised, knocking on the doorway to announce his presence. The two women looked up, Sole pausing to clear her throat and wipe the corners of her eyes. Funny, this was the same woman who left at least eighty-two Super Mutants dismembered at his doorstep.

“Hate to Interrupt, but word on the street is there there’s going to be a pretty groovy shindig at the Third Rail tonight, thought I’d extend an invitation to a few lovely ladies.” Hancock grinned, strolling into Daisy’s store.

“What are you doing here then? Kleo’s next door.” Sole joked, clearing her throat to mend the cracks in her voice.

“Kleo’s no good at parties that don’t involve target practice.” Hancock started to explain.

“So what’s the occasion?” Sole asked, a little curious. “Isn't everyday with you a party?”

“Flattering, but this one’s special. It's a farewell party.” He explained. Sole opened her mouth to ask more, but Hancock gave a wave of his hand. “Working out party details with Fahrenheit, but I’ll be back to see you later, Daisy. To sort out some, ‘party supplies’.” He finished, eyeing Daisy, who refused to meet his gaze. With that he turned and strode off, head already starting to fog up. He was going to need to be at the top of his game tonight.

-------------------------------------------

Sole left Daisy’s store with a sad wave. It had been a difficult few weeks, hell it had been difficult since she left the damn vault… But her mind quickly brushed away the thought, protecting her from dwelling on it.

She was getting tired of the sights and sounds of Goodneighbor. The excursion this morning had been refreshing, she’d almost felt like her old self. There was something cathartic about sniping a Super Mutant suicider and watching it take out five of its closest friends. Perhaps another stroll through the ruins was needed. Maybe she’d stop by the old North Church, there was usually an errand or two to do there.

The ruins were unnaturally quiet. She'd seen to that earlier. She may have been a little overzealous. She missed the familiar sound of gunfire in the distance and the occasionally exploding car or vertibird.

She continued towards the Boston Common. She needed to find a quiet spot to collect her thoughts and count her caps before she went to the church. There were a lot of both.

Just then she heard the shift of gravel behind her. She continued, feigning ignorance, but glancing around using her peripheral vision. It was lucky she’d planned this detour beforehand, Boston Common was ideal for unwanted company.

She continued on, towards Swans pond. She could hear the hesitation in the interlopers footsteps. The white roof of the ancient bandstand was well in view, as well as the infamous sunken swans.

Sole could have launched a fat man into this lake any time she wanted, she’d considered it once or twice as well, but she didn't for this reason in particular. She stood at the fence around the murky pond. She bent down, looking for a suitable stone. Sole smiled to herself, and activated her stealth boy...

Hiding out in the Boylston club, she could still hear the behemoths roars, and the crash of lobbed debris. Who ever had been tailing her would be a million miles away by now if they had any sense. Not many had the reckless sense of adventure that would lead to exploring the area, much less find this place.

She sat on one of the dusty armchairs, amongst the former club members. It was a macabre scene, skeletons in decaying suits, some with cigars still clenched in their jaw. The ruckus outside notwithstanding, it was quite a peaceful scene. There were a few wine bottles dotted around, some still filled, but she knew better than to indulge. After all, she’d snooped around on the terminal behind the counter, and it wasn’t the bomb that finished these gentleman off.

After a while the roars subsided, the behemoth settling back into the pond, returning to their slumber. She'd have to be extra quiet about leaving, couldn't risk waking them again.

She was starting to drift off in the chair, when the front door creaked open, and shut quietly. Her heart rate shot up instantly. Who would come here? Who would be so stupidly diligent in their surveillance? It didn’t match the M.O. of the institute, and certainly not of any raider group she’d pissed off…

“Honey, I'm hooome!” A familiar voice sang out quietly, poking their head around the corner and into the lounge, sunglasses catching the shafts of light.

“Oh dear, you look so haggard. I’ll bet traffic home was just murder.” Sole joked, her heart rate returning. She should have known it was him.

“Oh you wouldn't believe it! Hey is this seat taken?” Deacon smiled, plopping himself on the couch, careful not to disturb the skeleton beside him. “Some jerk nearly cut me off, literally. A whole car just came at me.” Sole laughed as Deacon mimed the car flying over his head, ducking down for effect.

“Really? Because I had a creep tail me home, had to ask him politely, but firmly, to buzz off.” She countered. He leaned back, running a hand through over his scalp.

“Alright that’s fair.” He admitted with a grin. “It’s just been difficult to get ahold of you lately.”

“Are you kidding? I’ve been in the same place for nearly a month. Not too hard to track someone in Goodneighbor.” Sole snorted.

“Really?” Deacon asked, forcing the surprise in his voice. “All I’ve seen around Goodneighbor is some mopey Vault dweller in your clothes. This morning was the first time I’ve seen you in weeks.” There was silence. He had a point, but he could have made it without being a dick. He took a breath. “Soooo wanna talk about it?” He sat forward, resting his chin in one hand like an attentive therapist. Finally she sighed. Time to fill him in on her latest episode.

“It was a few weeks ago, or so people tell me. Feels more like months. We’d just gotten a cure for Duncan, his kid. I knew he’d go back and see his son, but I’d hoped we could do it together… And that we’d do it after we found Shaun...” She paused. “When he left, I kept expecting a letter… A message in a bottle… Even a  fucking smoke signal would be nice…” She gave a small bitter smile. “I forgot how nice it was to swear, at least sober anyway.”

“I’d heard about that,” Deacon noted. “Always struck me as strange that a guy willing to run with ruthless mercenaries would avoid swearing.” Sole shot him a look, he held up his hands in surrender and made a motion of zipping his lips.

“Anyways…. Nothing came. After a week I stopped checking up on Daisy. After two I started to drink. Not sure how much time I spent after that, just crying and drinking, don’t remember too much of it.”

Deacon wanted to say something, but he remembered zipping his lips. Instead he pointed at Sole, then wrung his fist on the corner of his eye with one hand as if sobbing, and with the other hand mimed chugging a bottle, then a sudden thumbs down and a disapproving look. It was as impressive as it was irritating. Sole ignored him all the same and continued.

“Hancock picked me up, gave me a job, I sobered up, and I'm not looking back.” She concluded.

“Except this afternoon when you came crying to Daisy again.” Deacon added, receiving another sharp look from Sole, but she prefered it over mime.

“A moment of weakness.” She admitted. “But hope’s not an easy thing to let go of.” She looked forlorn at the dirty window beside them that once overlooked the common. Deacon stood up slowly, hesitating over his next words, but he decided to come out with it anyway.

“The prick used you to save his son.” Deacon said bluntly. His jovial demeanor falling for a moment as he looked down at Sole. “I mean, he gets a gold star for motive, a dying kid is pretty good justification, but he still played you.”

“No…” She denied softly, pulling herself off the armchair. She hated people looking down on her, and he knew it.

“Going out to kill Winlock and Barnes was a test to see how far you’d go for him. Killing a few ferals and grabbing a cure were nothing compared to taking on a fleet of gunners.” Deacon continued, a bitter edge to his voice now. She clenched her fist, she tried to focus on her breathing rather than his bullshit. “But don't worry, the sick kid part was true. I checked up on that through quite a few channels. Couldn't believe he wasn't just selling it-” Deacon was cut off by Sole’s fist striking him across the face, breathless and shaking with anger.

“You’re wrong…” She countered sharply, eyes welling up. “Sure, he left. And I don't expect him to come back, or understand why, but he loved me. And I… I loved him…” She glared down at Deacon, who was rubbing the red mark on his face. He felt lucky she hadn't just shot him.

“...That was real. Not a manipulation… Not a lie…” She spat at the floor beside him. “ But I know that's something of an alien concept to you.”

“An alien concept, huh?” He said thoughtfully, rubbing out the last of the soreness, even in her rage he could feel that she held back. “Maybe. But a liar knows a liar.” He started towards the front door. “And you can't lie to me, Sole.” He continued softly. “You didn't really love him. No matter what you tell yourself.” He dodged another swing, letting her knuckles connect with the doorway, she winced in pain, clutching her damaged fist.

“You can be a real bastard sometimes…” She hissed. “What makes you such an authority on the subject of my love life? Last I checked you wanted nothing to do with it.” A smirk flashed across his face, sunglasses glinting.

“We both know that was just a crush for you. Fresh out of the Vault, you’re bound to fall for the first handsome man that doesn't try to disembowel you.” He said knowingly.

“What about Preston?” Sole countered, trying to suppress a smile.

“OK you were bound to fall for the second handsome-” He tried again.

“Sturges.” She added, allowing a small smile now.

“He is a very pretty man…” Deacon agreed.

“Arturo Rodriguez.”

“The gunshop guy in Diamond city? I mean admittedly I think he’s been on everyone's Christmas list for awhile…”

“Nick Valentine.”

“Not being sythnist but…”

“Danse.”

“Not being asshole-ist but…”

“Tinker Tom.”

“Ooh I’ll have to tell him you said that.”

“Don't bother, he’s too in love with MILA.” Deacon waved his hands in surrender.

“OK I get it, you resisted many a handsome man before you fell for me.” He admitted. “But it was still just a crush. Happens to the best of us. Working long hours in high pressure situations is bound to cause a few sparks to fly.”

“Tell that to a heartbroken Agent Charmer, who ended up in Goodneighbor to nurse a broken heart.” She recalled, trying to force her smile. “Ended up taking any job that took her away from the Railroad, even taking on a merc to watch her back…”

“And look at Charmer now!” He said enthusiastically. “All grown up and moving on to bigger and better heartbreaks!” Sole smile became more genuine. “You’ll find someone, Sole, but in the meantime just refocus on the Railroad, refocus on Shaun. It takes a lot to keep our little family going, but we’re so close to bringing down the institute and finding him. We can't afford anymore delays.” Sole was quiet. “Clearing out around Goodneighbor was a big help, helped us send out a few packages that had been sitting around. Keep up like that and You’ll get Agent of the month in no time.” He leaned in and smirked. “It's been Carington 6 months in a row, so you got a lot of competition.”