#the scenes of just what he does to London and the images of raining severed hands and feet

[lightdancer1]

I keep noting that people who say 'Azula is the greatest evil in all of fiction' are too squeamish to get to the real nastiness:

If they think 'Today is the day I celebrate becoming an only child' is too mean, they'd really find Johnny Bates as disturbing as people in the 80s did when Marvelman was brand new.

The results of this guy going on a rampage to massacre London for fun and profit have yet to be matched in all of modern comic-dom's meaningless brutality and gore. The reason for this is by the time you get to this point and everything else he does in London, well....

You start with this. And it goes from the suave businessman of the first volumes to this guy:

So sure, kids. An eighth grader with a big mouth is your nadir of evil and horrific things you've seen and read in fiction because you are the cartoon equivalent of the person who's only read one book.

[inevitably-johnlocked]

Hey Steph, I saw you said you had a Doctor John part 4 ready to copy and paste? I have an insatiable hunger for angst like that and so far in quarantine I’ve gone through the other 3 parts 😂 I need more

Hi Nonny!!!

I DOOOOO!!!! And LOL I’m HONOURED that you read every fic on my other lists, hahahah!! Here you go, enjoy!!

DOCTOR / CARETAKER JOHN Pt 4

See also:

Doctor / Caretaker John

Doctor / Caretaker John Pt. 2

Doctor / Caretaker John Pt. 3

Sherlock is Sick/Hurt (Sherlock Whump)

Sherlock Whump Pt. 2

Insomnia by TheSingingGirl (K+, 2,635 w., 1 Ch. || Friendship, Humour, Bed Sharing, Sleepy Sherlock) – Sleep is merely the next frontier in what has become the battle to keep Sherlock alive. It’s because of this that John ends up in bed with a sociopath.

Museums and Laboratories by RhododendronPonticum (T, 3,004 w., 1 Ch. || Romance, Angst, Obsessive Sherlock, Anxious Sherlock, Anxiety/Panic Attack, Separation Anxiety, Doctor John, Co-Dependent Sherlock) – If Sherlock’s kitchen was his laboratory, then his bedroom was his museum.

Sleepless nights by El loopy (T, 5,467 w., 3 Ch. || Friendship, Hurt/Comfort, Nightmares/Insomnia, Panic Attack, Worried Sherlock) – Sherlock has a nightmare and John wants to know what it was about. Set during season 1. Three-shot.

Stranded by BeautifulFiction (T, 5,798 w., 1 Ch. || First Kiss, Communication / Relationship Discussion, Pining Sherlock, Sherlock POV, BAMF John, Doctor John, Case Fic, Drinking, Huddling For Warmth, Friends to More) –  When stranded on a derelict barge at high tide, John and Sherlock reconsider their friendship.

Sherlock’s Sleeping Habits by Cumberbatch Critter (T, 11,424 w., 16 Ch. || Friendship, Sleepy Sherlock, One Shot Collection, Fluff, Domestics) – In which John learns about Sherlock’s sleeping habits. Series of unrelated oneshots featuring the one and only ADORABLE Sleepy!Lock! Fluff abounds.

The Hand You’re Dealt by Lady Sam Mallory (T, 12,092 w., 1 Ch. || Hurt/Comfort, Angst, Light Violence, BAMF John, Doctor John, Injury, Friendship) – Sherlock, John and several others are trapped in a building when an explosion disrupts the crime scene they are working.

Kintsugi by distantstarlight (E, 14,772 w., 1 Ch. || Post S4, Emotional Hurt / Comfort, Regret / Remorse, Loneliness, Separation, Drug Use, Healing, Protective John, Sad Sherlock, Dev. Rel., Complicated Relationships, Love, Angst With Happy Ending, Sherlock is Called Freak, John’s Penance, Voyeurism, Doctor/Caretaker John, Guilty John, Detox, Fingering, Love Confessions, Cuddling, Slight Non-Con Turns Enthusiastic Consent, Virgin Sherlock) – Sherlock Holmes becomes estranged from the man he had once considered his best friend after John lets him down horribly in public. It seems that the world’s only consulting detective will be on his own once again…or will he?

The shape of the world around us by Salambo06 (E, 15,058 w., 5 Ch. || Lumberjack John / Botanist Sherlock, Different First Meeting, John Has a Beard, Light Case Fic, Flirting, First Kiss / Time, Masturbation, Love at First Sight, Horny Sherlock, John’s Bum, Bottomlock, Tenderness, Virgin Sherlock, Pining Sherlock, Shy Sherlock, Sexual Fantasies) – Looking through the bush, Sherlock felt his heartbeat quicken as a man passed in front of him. Sherlock frowned, trying to get a closer look despite the bush. The man was wearing a red plaid shirt rolled up to his elbows, and Sherlock couldn’t take his eyes off the man’s arms. Muscular, slightly tanned with golden hairs along his forearms. For some unknown reason, Sherlock found himself imagining them around his waist, holding him tightly. Closing his eyes for the briefest second, Sherlock shook his head. Opening his eyes and looking back to where the man stood only a moment prior, he found himself alone. Great, now his only chance to find his way back to town was gone. “Why are you wearing a suit?”

The Burning of the Leaves by blueink3 (M, 15,915 w., 3 Ch. || Post S4, Angst, Reichenbach, Parentlock, Past Jolto, Idiot John, Sherlock’s a Mess, Puppies, Fluff, Possessive / Jealous Sherlock, Pining Sherlock, Sherlock POV, Matchmaker Sholto, Melancholic Feelings, Emotional Sherlock, Domesticity, Love Confessions in the Rain, Kissing in the Rain, Pet Names, Panic Attack) – After the events of series 4, Major Sholto invites John and Sherlock to lunch one day. It nearly proves to be too much for their tenuous relationship as the past haunts the present, putting the future that Sherlock so desperately wants at risk.

A Home for Us by sussexbound (M, 30,581 w., 12 Ch. || Scars, Bedsharing, Grief, Doctor John, Hurt/Comfort, Post-TRF, Implied/Referenced Torture, Sherlock POV, Pining Sherlock, Suicidal Ideation, Heavy Emotions, Clingy Sherlock, Hallucinations, Disassociation, Emotional Turmoil) – He has been on the road for two years, and he is exhausted. He’s almost accepted that he will never see London (John) again—almost. But then there are nights like tonight, where he is weak, and all he can think of is the warmth of the flat they once shared, the crackle of the fire in the hearth, the teasing smile playing at the corner of John’s lips, the boxes of half-eaten Chinese takeaway balanced precariously in their laps. He aches at the memory of it, at the realisation that it is something he may never experience again.

Points by lifeonmars (E, 53,791 w., 42 Ch. || PODFIC AVAILABLE || HLV Rewrite / Canon Divergence, Married Life, Pregnancy / Baby Watson, Drinking to Cope, Boxing / Fisticuffs, Clueless John, Angst, Minor Medical Drama, Tattoos, Christmas, First Kiss/Time, Eventual Happy Ending, Love Confessions, Doctor John, Sexuality Crisis, Slow Burn, Case Fic, Drugging, Blow/Hand Job, Emotional Love Making, Parenthood, Passage of Time) – What if His Last Vow never happened? This fic picks up a few months after John and Mary’s wedding, in an alternate universe where Magnussen doesn’t exist, but Mary is still pregnant. Life continues – just in a different direction. And slowly, Sherlock and John find their way to each other.

Just To Hold You Close by sussexbound (E, 70,841 w., 18 Ch. || Alternate First Meeting, Sherlock POV, ASD Sherlock, PTSD John, Demisexual Sherlock, Bisexual John, Cuddling/Snuggling, Platonic Cuddling, Enthusiastic Consent, Bed Sharing, Love Confessions, First Kiss/Time, Sexual Tension, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Cuddle Negotiations, For a Case Until It Isn’t, Hair Petting, Sexual Negotiation, Anxiety, Trust Issues, Slow Burn, Panic Attacks, Frottage, Hand/Blow Jobs, Referenced Self Harm / Abuse / Suicidal Ideation, First Kiss/Time, Anal) – When a woman is murdered and the last person to see her alive is recently invalided army vet turned reluctant (and prickly) professional cuddler, John Watson, Sherlock Holmes is pulled into a world of intimacy and intrigue he never could have imagined. John is a conundrum and mystery: frank yet reserved, tender yet angry, open yet afraid. Sherlock is instantly drawn into his orbit, and begins to feel and desire things he never has before.

Thermocline by J_Baillier (M, 83,557 w., 14 Ch. || Scuba Diving AU || Adventure, Angst, Hurt/Comfort, Marine Archaeology, Asexual Sherlock, Horny John, Relationship Drama, Technical/Scuba/Wreck Diving, Slow Burn, Underwater /  Medical Peril, Doctor John, Hurt Sherlock, Anxious Sherlock, John POV, Protective John, Body Appreciation) – John “Five Oceans” Watson — technical dive instructor, dive accident analyst and weapon of mass seduction — meets recluse professor of maritime archaeology Holmes. As they head out to a remote archipelago off the coast of Guatemala to study and film its shipwrecks for a documentary, will sparks fly or fizzle out?

The Bang and the Clatter by earlgreytea68 (M, 137,049 w. || PODFIC AVAILABLE || Baseball AU || Slow Burn / Dev. Rel., Possessive/Obsessive Sherlock, Jealous Sherlock, Mutual Pining, Body Appreciation, Depression, Closeted Sexuality, Family, Sherlock’s Mind Palace, Ogling Each Other, Anxious Sherlock, Panic Attack, Drunkenness, Talk of Forever, Big Feelings™) – Sherlock Holmes is a pitcher and John Watson is a catcher. No, no, no, it’s a baseball AU. Part 1 of Baseball

The Adventure of the Silver Scars by tangledblue (NR [M], 142,458 w., 41 Ch. || S3 Fix-It, Post-HLV/ Post-TAB / Canon Compliant, Case Fic, No Baby, Angst, Humour, UST, Slow Burn, Angry John, Reconciliation, Not Nice Mary / Leaving Mary, Dependent Sherlock, Pining Sherlock, Caretaker John, Fist Fights, It’s An Experiment, Virgin Sherlock, Dancing, Drugging, John Whump, Pet Names, Sherlock’s Mind Palace, Scars) – It’s been thirteen months since Mary shot Sherlock and John finds he’s still pissed off about it. Sherlock had thought everything was settled: John and Mary, domestic bliss. But when John turns up at Baker Street with suitcases, the world’s only consulting detective might not be prepared for the consequences. A new case. Some old scores to settle. Certain danger. Concertos, waltzes, and whisky.

Proving A Point by elldotsee & J_Baillier (E, 186,270 w., 28 Ch. || Me Before You Fusion || Medical Realism, Insecure John, Depression, Romance, Angst, POV John, Sherlock Whump, Serious Illness, Doctor John, Injury Recovery, Assisted Suicide, Sherlock’s Violin, Awkward Sexual Situations, Alcoholism, Drugs, Idiots in Love, Slow Burn, Body Image, Friends to Lovers, Hurt / Comfort, Pain, Big Brother Mycroft, Intimacy, Anxiety, PTSD, Family Issues, Psychological Trauma, John Whump, Case Fics, Loneliness, Pain) – Invalided home from Afghanistan, running out of funds and convinced that his surgical career is over, John Watson accepts a mysterious job offer to provide care and companionship for a disabled person. Little does he know how much hangs in the balance of his performance as he settles into his new life at Musgrave Court.

Free Falling by twistedthicket1 (M, 203,574 w., 38 Ch. || Guardian Angels AU || Guardian Angel John, Fluff and Angst, Humour, Kidlock / Teenlock, Light Mystrade, Passage of Time, Possessive John, Drug Use / Overdose, Victor Trevor, Graphic Bullying, Big Brother Mycroft, Hard Drug Use, Depression, Possessive Sherlock, Possessive John, Panic Attacks, Nightmares/PTSD, Pining, Healing Abilities, Kidnapping, Violence, Torture, Blow Jobs, Virgin John, Emotional Development / Attachment, Mortality, Happy Ending) – All Guardian angels are born with a Chosen human. When this child is born, the angel comes into being to protect and care for them during their life on Earth. For John Watson, all he cares about in the world revolves around his Chosen, Sherlock Holmes. Watching him grow up though, the angel soon learns that God must have had a sense of humour the day he decided to make Sherlock, as trouble seems to follow him like a magnet wherever he goes. John can't decide what's worse, the idea of losing his Chosen one, or the fact that he may be breaking the most taboo law of heaven as he disguises himself as a human to better protect and befriend the beloved detective he's always watched from afar. He was meant to care for him. But what happens when caring evolves into something more? What happens when an emotion an angel is supposed to be incapable of possessing comes to life suddenly and viciously inside John's chest?

[writingonesdreams]

Novel Prep Tag Game

Original tag game by @gottaenjoythelittlethingzz. The questions are great, so I wanted to participate - it made me look at my WIP from a new angle, so thanks! 

Rules: Answer the questions and then tag as many writers as there are questions answered (or as many as you can) to spread the positivity! Even if these questions are not explicitly brought up in the novel, they are still good to keep in mind when writing.

1. Describe your novel in 1-2 sentences (elevator pitch)

A wolf that can take on a human form befriends a human boxer Rhys and accompanies him on his journey across the desolated wastelands between the big cities to find his little brother Oliver. On the way they meet the thoughtful scribe Anise and are followed by the dedicated hunter Cole. 

2. How long do you plan for your novel to be? (Is it a novella, single book, book series, etc.)

A novel for now. 

3. What is your novel’s aesthetic?

Desolated wastelands, big cities scattered across the continent, dried up earth, sand and dust, wind, cloudy and misty weather, dust and smoke covering the atmosphere, wolfs, ruins of smaller cities and villages

4. What other stories inspire your novel?  

Mostly anime series like Wolf’s rain, Megalo Box, Banana Fish, books like Darker shade of Magic, Outsiders by S.E. Hinton, White Fang by Jack London 

5. Share 3+ images that give a feel for your novel

6. Who is your protagonist?  

Vincent, the wolf, that was seperated from his pack and aimlessly traveled human cities. He takes on the human form to fit in with humans and to hide from hunters. 

7. Who is their closest ally?

Vincent meets and befriends Rhys, the reckless and driven boxing prodigy that needed help to cross the desert to reach his hometown to reunite with his younger brother Oliver, he didn’t see in 6 years. Vincent grows quite attached to him, starts to feel responsible and incredibly protective of him. Rhys has bit of intimacy issues, but learns to trust Vincent and regards him as sort of a brother. 

8. Who is their enemy?

Cole, the disciplined and dedicated hunter. He trained boxing and martial arts with Rhys and joined the hunter association to hunt and sell wolf’s skin. His father is the ruler of Holland, charged with Amsterdam - the most populated city of the West (since all people live in the few big cities left) Cole’s parents have made him see wolves as enemies for infiltrating human cities. Cole made it his goal to hunt them to meet his father’s vision of protecting people from the wolves. He is perfectionalist obsessed with improvement - he wants to create order in the chaos the world was left in after the catastrophe and is willing to do anything for it. His goal to hunt wolves is based on this desire to improve the world. 

9. What do they want more than anything?

Vincent wants to be loved and needed, a part of a family or pack so he could have somewhere to belong to.

Rhys wants to find his younger brother, but what he actually needs is to find peace of mind. He wants to prove himself and have someone to believe in him.

Anise wants to find meaning and purpose in the starving world around her where everything has to have a purpose and people try so hard to survive, yet forget to actually live. She wants to collect and organises books, since she values knowldge and firstly joins the duo to search for new books in the abondened cities. 

Cole wants to improve the world and create order and security.

10. Why can’t they have it?

Vincent can’t be with his original pack, because wolves are hunted by humans and it’s easier and safer to travel alone then in groups. 

Rhys feels worthless for only knowing how to fight and wants to reunite with his brother, because that was the last time he felt full and at peace. But since they parents divorced and he didn’t get along much with his father, he didn’t see either his mother or brother in last 6 years and spent them in fights a lot. Now he doesn’t know if he has any worth outside of fighting and that’s what makes him restless and self-destructive. 

Anise works as a scribe and teacher, because that’s the role people consider useful in this decayed world. She doesn’t believe all that much in her work, because she thinks people should be learning from books from Before the apocalypse and not just recording what happened After. 

Cole considers wolves to be the natural enemies to safety of  humans since the discovery of their ability to take on human forms. He doesn’t understand how they survived after majority of animals and natural life perished and fears they want to take over humans.  

11. What do they wrongly believe about themselves?

Rhys believes he has to fight everything to prove his worth and that emotions and needing help are a sign of weakness.

Vincent believes he can’t have a family or bonds anymore because he is a wolf in a human world.

Anise believes her life doesn’t have meaning outside of collecting knowledge.

Cole believes he can improve the world by hunting down something he doesn’t understand. 

12. Draw your protagonist! (Or share a description)

Vincent looks like a slim young boy with messy dark brown hair, pale skin and  icy blue eyes in his human form. In his original wolf from he is a white wolf with amber-yellow eyes.

Rhys is muscular and tall with dark olive skin, black curly hair and dark eyes. He is covered in scars, most notably on his arms and on his right cheek. 

Anise has long blond wavy hair, grey eyes and ivory skin. 

Cole is tall, but less muscular then Rhys. He has black hair falling in his green eyes and fair skin.

Plot Points

13. What is the internal conflict?

Rhys is so set on fighting and reaching his external goal - reuniting with his brother and protecting him - that he doesn’t realize he actually needs to accept himself and his faults and find internal peace in caring about people and living with them. He needs to realize he doesn’t have to prove anything, doesn’t have to be strong every minute to be useful and worthy of love and recognition. 

Vincent mostly only has a bit conflicted emotions regarding his storng protective feeling towards a human, when humans are the ones that drew his pack apart and hunted him for so long. Otherwise he just wants to belong somewhere and enjoys his new pack.

Anise wants to find meaning - she was afraid to want anything, always concerned only with activities that were neccessary for survival or for being useful in the dying society that has few resources. She values knowledge and wants to find and collect the books left abondened through out the country, so the cognition of the pre-apocaliptic world would be saved. Through knowing Rhys and Vincent she sees how someone can still have desires and enjoy simple pleasures like watching stars or dancing and finds her meaning in living, fullfilling her dreams in hunting for the lost books. 

Cole struggles to improve the world but isn’t going about it in the right way. 

14. What is the external conflict?

The journey to cross the wastelands is difficult and is very rare for someone to attempt to go on one. People are gathered only in their big cities, valuing their resouces while other cities and the country have been abondened. Smaller cities that still have inhabitants are rules by violent gangs, the routes are long and one needs a lot of supplies since there is nothing on the way to eat or drink, with unpredictible weather and frequent sand storms. 

Additionally Vincent is hunted by Cole and since Rhys defends him, he is in danger too. 

15. What is the worst thing that could happen to your protagonist?  

Rhys failing to find and care for his younger brother, which he would see as a sign he is worthless and deserves all the bad that happened to him. 

Vincent never having a pack again and no one he could be himself with. 

Anise staying static, living a planned out life in the city full of anxious people and doing something she doesn’t believe in. 

Cole feeling like he failed to contribute to helping the world get better. 

16. What secret will be revealed that changes the course of the story?  

It's not that much of a secret as a bit of a plot twist that Oliver, the younger brother that the main characters looked for the whole time, actually didn't want to be found and wasn't very keen on seeing his older brother again, since he was very angry with him. But the issue gets solved, when the brothers reconcile at the end.

17. Do you know how it ends?  

Not exactly sure, just that Vincent, Rhys, Anise, Oliver and maybe Cole stay together, either make a living by continuing to travel and collecting lost objects or finding place to stay and build together.

18. What is the theme?  

What self-worth is based on for people - family, higher purpose, dreams, success, abilities.  Finding a meaning, fullfilling a purpose or recovering when one’s purpose or dream was lost. Having dreams and meaning when the world is falling apart starved and if every activity has to have a point and what does it mean.

19. What is a reoccurring symbol?  

Wolf, moon, wind, clouds, dust, whirlwind, books 

20. Where is the story set? (Share a description!)  

The story is set in post-apocalyptic future Europe, where earth has dried up and smoke and dust have cover the sun to the point that it’s hard for people to survive. So people migrated from all over the country into big cities, where they live very closely together. The land inbetween pretty much turned to uninhabitable wasteland, with many cities and villages left empty. 

21. Do you have any images or scenes in your mind already?  

Yes I have several scenes in my head, that I’m working on connecting into a logical plot. 

22. What excited you about this story?

The growing trust and protectiveness between Vincent and Rhys, the bonds Vincent forms with Anise and Oliver, how the enstraged brothers Rhys and Oliver reconcile again and Cole’s transition from an enemy to friend. I’m also exicited about Anise’s romance with Rhys, who at first challanges her views and believes. Also Cole serves as the main bad guy, but is actually an antagonist, who will redeem himself and befriend the other characters in the process. 

23. Tell us about your usual writing method!  

I always start with characters that I stick in different scenarios or in my favourite movies and series or books and let them interact. From those I mostly get inspiring scenes that I try to connect through a plot. Afterwards I work on characterisation, world-building, research details and outline stuff a bit. I also write little snippets that sometimes turn long and can be used as chapters. 

[topweeklyupdate]

TØP Weekly Update #54: COVER ME (7/13/2018)

Finally, after months of solid drought, the barren wasteland known as the TØP fanbase has finally been blessed with rain. And not just a gentle sprinkle; it’s been a consistent heavy downpour, a veritable flood. Even before new music, this week gave us new content from the group every single day. There will probably be something new out by the time you’re done reading this. So let’s not waste any time! Here’s your week in Twenty One Pilots news.

This Week’s TØPics:

Your Band Is Back: Trench Coming This October

“Jumpsuit” and “Nico” Released

New Logo/Theming/Everything

Josh Speaks

And SO. MUCH. MORE.

Major News and Announcements:

This time last week, I was certain that we would be getting new music on the 6th because it was my birthday. Turns out, myself and many others in the Clique read a little too deeply into Clancy’s promise that “everything would be different” by morning. We did not receive new music on that date, which, for the record, was way earlier than most reports had pegged. The fanbase wanted music ASAP and interpreted the letter to fit that, and anyone who said the band lied about when music was coming was just not being honest with themselves. 

Things were different starting last Friday. On the one-year anniversary of their departure, Twenty One Pilots directly reached out to their fans for the first time, not through the wide platform of social media, but with an email message to their mailing list.

The message only consisted of the subject line “ARE YOU STILL SLEEPING?” and a gif of an opening yellow eye, with images fitting the iconography of the Dema site flashing under the eyelid. The Clique basically lost their minds at this direct contact, so much so that major publications like Billboard finally started to report on the long gestating speculation. Everyone was excited to see the eye open over the course of the day, bringing everything full circle and culminating (presumably) with new music.

That... didn’t happen. Rather, dmaorg.info was restored after being down for only a few hours, and this gif of torches was added onto the site. This indicated that Clancy had escaped Dema, and the Clique promptly set about assuming that the next day would mark the band’s full return. Further, the name of the gif, “they_ca_ntseeFCE300″, seemed to confirm what people would be speculating ever since Josh dyed his hair nearly two years ago: the next era’s color would be yellow (specifically, FCE300) to symbolize hope and light pushing back against the dark.

The next day brought with it another update from Clancy (and the general concession among the Clique to stop expecting new music every night and just go to bed). In one of my favorite bits of attention to detail so far, Clancy’s latest journal was messily handwritten on a scrap of paper, due to the fact that he had successfully escaped Dema and was now traveling through- big shock- a region called “Trench”. The writing itself is kinda rambly and generic (so I can relate), with Tyler Clancy marveling at how much he loves being in the trees being alone out in nature. That said, I do love that there is a definite story being presented, with Clancy experiencing changes, taking action, and going on a real journey through this world that Tyler’s created.

On the back of the paper, however, is something much more interesting: a blown-out image that, when reversed, revealed a dead body. That was creepy enough as is; far more creepy was the Clique’s CSI-level discovery that this ripped photo fit with several other dmaorg.info images in a giant puzzle. Who was this man? Was this a random poster that Clancy grabbed as he escaped, or are we supposed to take it as a metaphor? Was it a random citizen of Dema? A bishop? Clancy himself? Blurryface? So many questions.

Twenty One Pilots truly made their mainstream return on July 9th, when they posted a second video of a half-opened eye, not just for hardcore fans, but on all of their social media platforms. This return was accompanied by a total overhaul of the band’s general branding: a new yellow-and-black ||-// logo was revealed for the new era, while the old “silence” banners and even the website subscription box were covered up by bright yellow tape. Billboards featuring the logo on this yellow tape aesthetic sprang up in cities all around the world, from London to Toronto, Berlin to Melbourne, even an entire building in São Paolo. The boys were back.

On Tuesday, Twenty One Pilots again returned to social media to post a second video. The eye, now about 3/4 open, depicted even more of this medieval battle, now with the addition of the Watchers on the cliff throwing... something (rocks? rose petals?) into the air. Instead of generic white noise, this clip was scored by a muffled but still obviously crunchy bass line. As radio stations across the country began to tweet about a major alternative release coming Wednesday morning (with a few even mentioning they were from Columbus), we finally knew that we were going to be ok....

New Releases:

And then I was not okay.

Early Wednesday morning, Twenty One Pilots dropped two singles and announced the names and dates for the next album, Trench, and tour, Bandito. My prediction from last week was 100% correct, and you all may thank and validate me in the comments below like and subscribe. “Jumpsuit” is our main single with a full cinematic music video, while “Nico and the Niners” is the more lore-heavy low-key song for the fans. I’m going to pull back from fully going in on picking apart every sonic and thematic element of both songs and save that for (hopefully) a less busy week, but you know I gotta write about their first new music in two years. Cause that’s what I do: I write too much.

Guys, “Jumpsuit” is a straight-up banger. Featuring a killer driving bassline, some of Tyler’s most impassioned screams, and a truly devastating bridge, I have not tired of this song one bit in the last few days. It takes me on a complete emotional journey in just four minutes every time, and it does so mainly through its soundscape (there’s only the hook, three couplet verses, and that damn bridge). It’s so, so, so, so good, potentially (dare I say it) the best sonically arranged and produced song the band has ever released.

So... what’s “Jumpsuit” about? Well, a lot of things, but in a word: pressure. Again, the lyrics are super vague, I think deliberately so. Clearly the song is about the singer feeling pressured by others into taking a path that he does not want to travel down. That bridge, delivered in an eerie detached falsetto, shows Tyler pushing back even at his weakest point, stating that he will not submit to what others want him to do unless they “grab him by the throat, tie him down, and break his hands.” Certainly you can argue that this is about the music industry. The “breaking his hands” line is killer in that context, as it signifies that the industry can’t control him without taking away the things that makes him valuable to them in the first place, his artistic ability and freedom. You can also say that it’s just playing straight into the concept, with Clancy breaking away from the bishops’ control. But the deliberate vagueness of the lyrics means that the audience can apply the message- and the empowerment of that killer bassline- to whatever struggle they are facing. That’s pretty darn rad.

The music video, directed by “Heathens” and “Heavydirtysoul”’s Andrew Donoho, is sick. Tyler (looking extra fly in his new yellow hooded jumpsuit) attempts to flee from this creepy Red Riding Hood old dude on a white horse (Nico?) through what is certainly a Game of Thrones filming location while other figures in yellow duct tape jumpsuits look on from the cliffs above. Tyler is captured by the bishop, who “smears” him by putting the black Blurryface makeup on his neck. Tyler is freed briefly from the bishop’s control when the other yellow-clad figures throw yellow petals down on him, but he is chased down knocked out or killed. The others flee the scene, save for one very handsome looking drummer boy... Oh, and there’s a bunch of intercut clips of Tyler on the car from “Heavydirtysoul” for some reason.

Besides those “Heavydirtysoul” scenes, which truthfully don’t connect much to the story of the video beyond artificially welding it onto the end of the Blurryface Era, this is one of the band’s best videos yet. It totally fulfilled all of my expectations of a more epic scope for this era, from the gorgeous Iceland setting to the dope as hell costumes to the implication that the story might continue on from this point. And there are tons of little Easter eggs, from brief flashes of the nine bishops to possible cameos from the Josephs and Duns. We don’t really know for sure if Tyler is playing Clancy or if the red dude is Nico, but it will certainly be fun to continue to fill in the blanks as we move forward and (hopefully) hear more from Tyler directly.

“Nico and the Niners” is a weird track, but one that I still absolutely love. In some ways, it’s a more traditional tøp track, with some of the raggae elements found on Blurryface and a rap verse to fit all of Tyler’s lyrics in. But in other significant ways, it’s a totally different path for them. For starters, just look at that title: it’s very explicitly about this album’s concept from top to bottom, with Tyler singing about fleeing Dema and its bishops’ control and even heavily referencing “Jumpsuit”; there’s clearly going to be a great deal of thematic cohesion in this project. But there’s also just the general vibe of it: just as “Jumpsuit” was a heavier rock song than anything we’d yet seen from the band, "Nico” is way more laid back, its repeated references to being high and even its visualizer of assorted shrubbery making it a potential stoner anthem (whether that was Tyler’s intention or not). Regardless, the song is brimming with character and hooks, and it’s already grown on me significantly in just a few days.

Oh, and one more thing: this song lives up to its Dema-referencing title and content by being cryptic af. The track is littered with reversed audio in the instrumental bits, including the “we are banditos” snippet from dmaorg.info and another sample of someone who sounds a lot like Josh saying “We will leave Dema at true east, renounce Vialism [the bishops’ ruling philosophy, alluded to be Clancy in an earlier journal].” I swear, if all it takes for Tyler to make all this stuff is a year break, he should do this after every album.

With all that new music, the fact that we finally have a name for Album 5 almost got lost in the shuffle. Trench was a popular guess over the last few days thanks to dmaorg.info, but it’s good to finally know for sure. Graphic designer Brandon Rike from the Blurryface Era is back again, revealing a cover featuring a badass-looking vulture/falcon/whatever, some new logos (including the return of FPE!), and some more yellow tape that appears to be covering the names of the rest of the album’s songs. Not too much else to say at this point; we’ll just have to wait until some of that tape gets peeled off between now and October 5th.

Finally, let’s talk about the Bandito Tour. It bears mentioning that, amidst the otherwise overwhelmingly positive positive atmosphere of the band’s return, this tour name received the most general opposition from fans and non-fans alike. The fact that “bandito” was probably going to turn up in a lyric from two decidedly white dudes was already enough to put some folks on edge, but the idea of an entire tour of predominantly non-Hispanic tweens flooding arenas and calling themselves banditos was enough to turn a few people against the band. And look, I get it- I hear “bandito” and the first things I think of are John Wayne Westerns and Speedy Gonzalez, and I get why a lot of fans might feel uncomfortable with that. But, to be fair, the band hasn’t used any of those stereotypes and banditos is a word for outlaw used in a number of Romance languages. Perhaps most interestingly, there’s not yet any evidence that the word even appears in the album itself. So far, the only appearance of “bandito” is in a coded message on dmaorg.info and in reversed audio in “Nico”. If this does turn out to be a name meant to only make sense to the most hardcore of fans, it is almost redeemed (I mean, I still think the name is a little silly, but I’m already in presale).

So, with that out of the way, let’s actually talk about the tour itself. It will be an international arena tour- even if the band’s sound is not going in a pop direction, they still clearly feel confident that the Clique will show up wherever they go. The first show will be hosted in Nashville (their first arena concert in that market) on October 16, not even two weeks after the release of the full album. What a baller move, and much preferred to the Blurryface rollout where we didn’t hear most of the songs on the record until nearly two months after the album release and they didn’t play near me for even longer. The boys will tour the U.S. until November 21, even playing arenas in a few markets that they’ve never played large venues in before, and then hit up Australia and New Zealand in December.

The most objectively interesting leg will be in Europe from January through March. Not only will the band play their first arena shows in markets like Moscow, Oslo, Stockholm, Copenhagen, Central Poland, and Manchester, they will return to markets like Dublin and Glasgow they’ve been absent from for years. Most exciting, Twenty One Pilots will play their first shows in Bologna and Stuttgart and venture into the countries of Ukraine, Switzerland, Spain, and Portugal for the first time ever. Needless to say, the rabid fanbases of all of these regions are super excited, and I’m super excited for them!

Other Shenanigans:

While Tyler has continued to stay silent (much as he has since mid-Blurryface Era), Josh immediately jumped back on Twitter with a standard Josh joke and even resumed his morning workout Snapchats. On Thursday, Josh even called into BBC Radio One with Annie Mac to give a quick interview about the new era. He didn’t provide a ton of information, but it was just a delight to hear our kid’s voice again. A few tidbits of info:

Josh reported that he was calling from Trench, I hate him.

The sick bass riff on “Jumpsuit” was born from soundchecks toward the end of Emotional Roadshow. He says that, as a result, it sounds closest to the Blurryface sound, serving as a good transition into the new era. (If this is what he thinks is close to Blurryface on Trench, this album’s gonna be nutter butters.)

Both Josh and Tyler are really nervous about the elaborate rollout, both out of the usual fear that no one stuck around and out of wariness of severely disappointing people when they hear the actual music (so far, so good...)

Trench continues to have the “diverse” sound of the previous records and also was designed to be played live.

Josh also tuned into Apple Music’s Beats 1 for an interview with Hanuman Welch. This conversation was less about the new album and more about the “hiatus”. More tidbits: 

The band views collaboration as a “sacred” thing, and while they’re not against it in the future, it has to be done in a context that makes sense and not merely for marketing purposes.

The band has never used the word hiatus because they’ve been working. They drew back from the spotlight to allow themselves some time to recharge, but also because they were worried of oversaturation (particularly after the Grammys pushed them into that next-level pop culture sphere). Rather than make a bunch of social media posts that didn’t mean anything just to stay relevant, the band decided to draw back, focus on music, and in the process “thin the weeds” of fans who weren’t the diehards.

For the last few albums, the music has come from a specific personal place the band was at while write, whether it be a spiritual journey with Vessel or tackling insecurities on Blurryface. Josh says the same remains true with Trench, but notes that there will be a little more fleshing out themes by working on a specific story with this one (he still says it’s not really a concept album, but ok).

Believe it or not, we are not done. While the boys were blazing a brave new path forward, another bit of content reminded us of where the band came from. Greg Wells, the producer who made Vessel the masterpiece it was, gave an hour-long interview to Billboard’s Pop Shop Podcast. He mainly speaks about getting started in the industry back in the 90s and working on the mega-blockbuster Greatest Showman soundtrack, but he does talk about Vessel for a bit approximately forty minutes into the interview. I won’t give the exact time-code, not because I’m lazy, but because the entire interview is worth listening to. Greg just seems like a rad dude. His laid-back nature and the seriousness he takes with his craft really shine through; he and Tyler must have gotten along just fine.

Community Spotlight:

The Clique took some heavy losses over the last year, as a great deal of old fans moved on to greener pastures. But that just left room for a whole host of new fans to rise to the occasion and help us get through that long drought. Today, I wanted to give a shout-out to GingerSheep and Stolen Potential, two Clique vloggers that have really kept the fanbase informed and uplifted and have been working their butts off reporting on the daily content. I know how long it takes me just to research and write one of these- I can’t imagine the work that then goes into filming and editing on top of that nearly every day. Hats off to you, good sirs. Make sure you all check out their channels if you haven’t already! But, you know, don’t stop reading these. I have bills to pay with all the Tumblr money I’m not making.

Well, that wasn’t too much, was it? If you made it all the way to the end, mad props. See you next week for a slightly tamer week (probably).

Power to the local dreamer.

|-/

[rhetoricandlogic]

The Limitless Perspective of Master Peek, or, the Luminescence of Debauchery By Catherynne M. Valente

Issue #200, Special Double-Issue

, May 26, 2016

AUDIO PODCAST

EBOOK

(Finalist, Eugie Foster Memorial Award, 2017)

When my father, a glassblower of some modest fame, lay gasping on his deathbed, he offered, between bloody wheezings, a choice of inheritance to his three children: a chest of Greek pearls, a hectare of French land, or an iron punty. Impute no virtue to my performance in this little scene! I, being the youngest, chose last, which is to say I did not choose at all. The elder of us, my brother Prospero, seized the chest straightaway, having love in his heart for nothing but jewels and gold, the earth’s least interesting movements of the bowel which so excite, in turn, the innards of man. Pomposo, next of my blood, took up the deed of land, for he always fancied himself a lord, even in our childhood games, wherein he sold me in marriage to the fish in the lake, the grove of poplar trees, the sturdy stone wall, our father’s kiln and pools of molten glass, even the sun and the moon and the constellation of Taurus. The iron punty was left to me, my father’s only daughter, who could least wield it to any profit, being a girl and therefore no fit beast for commerce. All things settled to two-thirds satisfaction, our father bolted upright in his bed, cried out: Go I hence to God! then promptly fell back, perished, and proceeded directly to Hell.

The old man had hardly begun his long cuddle with the wormy ground before Prospero be-shipped himself with a galleon and sailed for the Dutch East Indies in search of a blacker, more fragrant pearl to spice his breakfast and his greed whilst Pomposo wifed himself a butter-haired miller’s daughter, planting his seed in both France and her with a quickness. And thus was I left, Perpetua alone and loudly complaining, in the quiet dark of my father’s glassworks, with no one willing to buy from my delicate and feminine hand, no matter how fine the goblet on the end of that long iron punty.

The solution seemed to me obvious. Henceforward, quite simply, I should never be a girl again. This marvelous transformation would require neither a witch’s spell nor an alchemist’s potion. From birth I possessed certain talents that would come to circumscribe my destiny, though I cursed them mightily until their use came clear: a deep and commanding voice, a masterful height, and a virile hirsuteness, owing to a certain unmentionable rootstock of our ancient family. Served as a refreshingly exotic accompaniment to these, some few of us are also born with one eye as good as any wrought by God, and one withered, hardened to little more than a misshapen pearl notched within a smooth and featureless socket, an affliction which, even if all else could be made fair between us, my brothers did not inherit, so curse them forever, say I. No surprise that no one wanted to marry the glassblower’s giant hairy one-eyed daughter!

Yet now my defects would bring to me, not a husband, but the world entire. I had only to cut my hair with my father’s shears, bind my breasts with my mother’s bridal veil, clothe myself in my brothers’ coats and hose, blow a glass bubble into a false eye, and think nothing more of Perpetua forever. My womandectomy caused me neither trouble nor grief—I whole-heartedly recommend it to everyone! But, since such a heroic act of theatre could hardly be accomplished in the place of my birth, I also traded two windows for a cart and an elderly but good-humored plough-horse, packed up tools and bread and slabs of unworked glass, and departed that time and place forever. London, after all, does not care one whit who you were. Or who you are. Or who you will become. Frankly, she barely cares for herself, and certainly cannot be bothered with your tawdry backstage changes of costume and comedies of mistaken identity.

That was long ago. So long that to say the numbers aloud would be an act of pure nihilism. Oh, but I am old, good sir, old as ale and twice as bitter, though I do not look it and never shall, so far as I can tell. I was old when you were weaned, squalling and farting, and I shall be old when your grandchildren annoy you with their hideous fashions and worse manners. Kings and queens and armadas and plagues have come and gone in my sight, ridiculous wars flowered and pruned, my brothers died, the scales balanced at last, for having not the malformed and singular eye, neither did they have the longevity that is our better inheritance, fashions swung from opulence to piousness and back to the ornate flamboyance that is their favored resting state once more.

And thus come I, Master Cornelius Peek, Glassmaker to the Rich and Redolent, only slightly dented, to the age which was the mate to my soul as glove to glove or slipper to slipper. Such an age exists for every man, but only a lucky few chance to be born alongside theirs. For myself, no more perfect era can ever grace the hourglass than the one that began in the Year of Our Lord 1660, in the festering scrotum of London, at the commencement of the long and groaning orgy of Charles II’s pretty, witty reign.

If you would know me, know my house. She is a slim, graceful affair built in a fashion somewhat later than the latest, much of brick and marble and, naturally, glass, three stories high, with the top two being the quarters I share with my servants, the maid-of-all-work Mrs. Matterfact and my valet, Mr. Suchandsuch (German, I believe, but I do respect the privacy of all persons), and my wigs, my wardrobe, and my lady wife, when I am in possession of such a creature, an occurrence more common and without complaint than you might assume, (of which much more, much later). I designed the edifice myself, with an eye to every detail, from the silver door-knocker carved in the image of a single, kindly eye whose eyelid must be whacked vigorously against the iris to gain ingress, to the several concealed chambers and passageways for my sole and secret use, all of which open at the pulling of a sconce or the adjusting of an oil painting, that sort of thing, to the smallest of rose motifs stenciled upon the wallpaper.

The land whereupon my lady house sits, however, represents a happy accident of real estate investment, as I purchased it a small eternity before the Earl of Bedford seized upon the desire to make of Covent Garden a stylish district for stylish people, and the Earl was forced to make significant accommodations and gratifications on my account. I am always delighted by accommodations and gratifications, particularly when they are forced, and most especially when they are on my account.

The lower floor, which opens most attractively onto the newly-christened and newly-worthwhile Drury Lane, serves as my showroom, and in through my tasteful door flow all the nobly whelped and ignobly wealthed and blind (both from birth and from happenstance, I do not discriminate) and wounded and syphilitic of England, along with not a few who made the journey from France, Italy, Denmark, even the Rus, to receive my peculiar attentions. With the most exquisite consideration, I appointed the walls of my little salon with ultramarine watered silk and discreet, gold-framed portraits of my most distinguished customers. In the northwest corner, you will find what I humbly allege to be the single most comfortable chair in all of Christendom, reclined at an, at first glance, radical angle, that nevertheless offers an extraordinary serenity of ease, stuffed with Arabian horsehair and Spanish barley, sheathed in supple leather the color of a rose just as the last sunlight vanishes behind the mountains. In the northeast corner, you will find, should you but recognize it, my father’s pitted and pitiful iron punty, braced above the hearth with all the honor the gentry grant to their tawdry ancestral swords. The ceiling boasts a fine fresco depicting that drunken uncle of Greek Literature, the Cyclops, trudging through a field of poppies and wheat with a ram under each arm, and the floor bears up beneath a deep blanket of choice carpets woven by divinely inspired and contented Safavids, so thick no cheeky draught even imagines it might invade my realm, and all four walls, from baseboard to the height of a man, are outfitted with a series of splendid drawers, in alternating gold and silver designs, presenting to the hands of my supplicants faceted knobs of sapphire, emerald, onyx, amethyst, and jasper. These drawers contain my treasures, my masterpieces, the objects of power with which I line my pockets and sauce my goose. Open one, any one, every one, and all will be revealed on plush velvet cushions, for there rest hundreds upon hundreds of the most beautiful eyes ever to open or close upon this fallen earth.

No fingers as discerning as mine could ever be content with the glazier’s endless workaday drudge through plate windows and wine bottles, vases and spectacles and spyglasses, hoping against hope for the occasional excitement of a goblet or a string of beads that might, if you did not look too closely, resemble, in the dark, real pearls. No, no, a thousand, million times no! Not for me that life of scarred knuckles whipped by white-molten strands of stray glass, of unbearable heat and even more unbearable contempt oozing from those very ones who needed me to keep the rain out of their parlors and their spirits off the table linen.

I will tell you how I made this daring escape from a life of silicate squalor, and trust you, as I suppose I already have done, to keep my secrets—for what is the worth of a secret if you never spill it? My deliverance came courtesy of a pot of pepper, a disfigured milkmaid, and the Dogaressa of Venice.

It would seem that my brothers were not quite so malevolently egomaniacal as they seemed on that distant, never-to-be-forgotten day when our father drooled his last. One of them was not, at least. Having vanished neatly into London and established myself, albeit in an appallingly meager situation consisting of little more than a single kiln stashed in the best beloved piss-corner of the Arsegate, marvering paltry, poignant cups against the stone steps of a whorehouse, sleeping between two rather unpleasantly amorous cows in a cheesemaker’s barn, I was neither happy nor quite wretched, for at least I had made a start. At least I was in the arms of the reeking city. At least I had escaped the trap laid by pearls and hectares and absconding brothers.

And then, as these things happen, one day, not different in any quality or deed from any other day, I received a parcel from an exhausted-looking young man dressed in the Florentine style. I remember him as well as my supper Thursday last—the supper was pigeon pie and fried eels with claret; the lad, a terrifically handsome black-haired trifle who went by the rather lofty name of Plutarch—and after wiping the road from his eyes and washing it from his throat with ale that hardly deserved the name, he presented me with a most curious item: a fat silver pot, inlaid with a lapis lazuli ship at full sail.

Inside found I a treasure beyond the sweat-drenched dreams of upwardly mobile men, which is to say, a handful of peppercorns and beans of vanil, those exotic, black and fragrant jewels for which the gluttonous world crosses itself three times in thanks. Plutarch explained, at some length, that my brother Prospero now dwelt permanently in the East Indies where he had massed a fabulous fortune, and wished to assure himself that his sister, the sweet, homely maid he abandoned, could make herself a good marriage after all. I begged the poor boy not to use any of those treacherous words again in my or anyone’s hearing: not marriage, not maid, and most of all not sister. Please and thank you for the pepper, on your way, tell no one my name nor how you found me and how did you find me by God and the Devil himself—no, don’t tell me, I shall locate this lost relative and deliver the goods to her with haste, though I could perhaps be persuaded to pass the night reading a bit of Plutarch before rustling up the wastrel in question, but, hold fast, my darling, I must insist you submit to my peculiar tastes and maintain both our clothing and cover of darkness throughout; I find it sharpens the pleasure of the thing, this is my, shall we say, firm requirement, and no argument shall move me.

Thus did I find myself a reasonably rich and well-read man. And that might have made a pleasant and satisfying enough end of it, if not for the milkmaid.

For, as these things happen, one day not long after, not different in any hour or act than any other day, a second parcel appeared upon my, now much finer, though not nearly so fine as my present, doorstep. Her name was Perdita, she was in possession of a complexion as pure as that of a white calf on the day of its birth, hair as red as a fresh wound, an almost offensively pregnant belly, and to crown off her beauty, it must be mentioned, both her eyes had been gouged from her pretty skull by means of, I was shortly to learn, a pair of puritanical ravens.

It would seem that my other brother, Pomposo—you remember him, yes? Paying attention, are we?—was still in the habit of marrying unsuspecting girls off to trees and fish and stones, provided that the trees were his encircling arms, the fish his ardent tongue, and the stones those terribly personal, perceptive, and pendulous seed-vaults of his ardor, and poor, luckless Perdita had taken quite the turn round the park. Perhaps we are not so divided by our shared blood as all that, Pomposo! Hats off, my good man, and everything else, too. Well, the delectably lovely and lamentable maid in question found herself afflicted both by Little Lord Pomposo and by that peculiar misfortune which bonds all men as one and makes them brothers: she had a bad father.

Perdita told me of her predicament over my generous table. She spoke with more haste than precision, tearing out morsels of Mrs. Matterfact’s incomparable baked capon in almond sauce with her grubby fingers and fumbling it into that plump face whilst she rummaged amongst her French pockets for English words to close in her tale like a green and garnishing parsley. As far as I could gather, her cowherding father had, in his youth, contracted the disease of religion, a most severe and acute strain. He took the local clergyman’s daughter to wife, promptly locked her in his granary to keep her safe from both sin and any amusement at all, and removed a child from her every year or so until she perished from, presumably, the piercing shame of having tripped and fallen into one of the more tiresome fairy tales.

Perdita’s father occupied the time he might have spent not slowly murdering his wife upon his one and only hobby: the keeping of birds of prey. Now, one cannot fault the man for that! But he loved no falcons nor hawks nor eagles, only a matched pair of black-hearted ravens he called by the names of Praisegod and Feargod (there really can be no accounting for, or excusing of, the tastes of Papists) which he had trained from the egg to hunt down the smallest traces of wickedness upon his estate and among his children. For this unlikely genius had taught his birds, painstakingly, to detect the delicate and complex scents of sexual congress, and the corvids twain became so adept that they were known to arrive at many a village window only moments after the culmination of the act.

Now you have taken up all the pieces of this none-too-sophisticated puzzle and can no doubt assume the rest. My brother conquered Perdita’s virtue with ease, for no such dour and draconian devoutness can raise much else but libertines, a fact which may yet save us from the vicious fate of a world redeemed, and put my niece (for indeed it proved to be a niece) in her with little enough care for anything but the trees and the fish and the stones of his own bucolic life. No sooner than he had rolled off of her but Praisegod and Feargod arrived, screeching to wake the glorious dead, the scent of coupling maddening their black brains, and devoured Perdita’s eyeballs in a hideous orgy of gore and terribly poor parenting. Pomposo, ever steadfast and humbly responsible for his own affairs, sent his distress directly to me and, I imagine, poured a brimming glass of wine with which to toast himself.

“My dear lady,” said I, gently prying a joint of Mrs. Matterfact’s brandied mutton from her fist, hoping to preserve at least something for myself, “I cannot imagine what you or my good brother mean me to do with a child. I am a bachelor, I wish devoutly to remain so, and my bachelorhood is only redoubled by my regrettable feelings toward children, which mirror the drunkard’s for a mug of clear water: well enough and wholesome for most, he supposes, but what can one do with one? But I am not pitiless. That, I am not, my dear. You may, of course, remain here until the child... occurs, and we shall endeavor to locate some suitable position in town for one of your talents.”

Ah, but I had played my hand and missed the trick! “You misunderstand, monsieur,” protested the comely Perdita. “Mister Pompy didn’t send me to you for your hospitalité. He said in London he had a brother who could make me eyes twice as pretty as they ever were and would only charge me the favor of not squeezing out my babe on his parlor floor.”

Even a thousand miles distant, my skinflint family could put the screws to me, turn them tight, and have themselves a nice giggle at my groans. But at least the old boy guessed my game of trousers and did not give me up, even to his paramour.

“They was green,” the milkmaid whispered, and the ruination of her eye sockets bled in place of weeping. “Like clover.”

Oh, very well! I am not a monster. In any event, I wasn’t then. At least the commission was an interesting enough challenge to my lately listless and undernourished intellect. So it came to pass that over the weeks remaining until the parturition of Perdita, I fashioned, out of crystal and ebony and chips of fine jade, twin organs of sight not the equal of mortal orbs but by far their superior, in clarity, in beauty, even in soulfulness. If you ask me how I accomplished it, I shall show you the door, for I am still a tradesman, however exalted, and tradesmen tell no tales. I sewed the spheres myself with thread of gold into her fair face, an operation which sounds elegant and difficult in the telling, but in the doing required rather more gin, profanity, and blows to the chin than any window did. When I had finished, she appeared, not healed, but more than healed—sublimated, rarefied, elevated above the ranks of human women with their filmy, vitreous eyes that could merely see.

I have heard good report that, under another name, and with her daughter quite grown and well-wed, Perdita now sits upon the throne of the Netherlands, her peerless eyes having captivated the heart of a certain prince before anyone could tie a rock round her feet and drop her into a canal. Well done, say all us graspers down here, reaching up toward Heaven’s sewers with a thousand million hands, well done.

Now, we arrive at the hairpin turn in the road of both my fortunes and my life, the skew of the thing, where the carriage of our tale may so easily overturn and send us flying into mud and thorns unknown. Brace your constitution and your credulity, for I am of a mind to whip the horses and take the bend at speed!

It is simply not possible to excel so surpassingly as I have done and remain anonymous. God in his perversity grants anonymity to the gifted and the industrious in equal and heartless measure, but never to the splendid. Word of the girl with the unearthly, alien, celestial eyes spread like a plague of delight in every direction, floating down the river, sweeping through the Continent, stowing away on ships at sea, until it arrived, much adorned with my Lady Rumor’s laurels, at the palazzo of the Doge in darling, dripping Venice.

Now, the Doge at that time had caused himself, God knows why or by dint of what wager, to be married to a woman by the name of Samaritiana. Do not allow yourselves to be duped by that name, you trusting fools! Samaritiana would not even stop along the side of the road to Hell to wrinkle her nose at the carcass of Our Lord Jesus Christ, though it save her immortal soul, unless He told her she was beautiful first. Oh, ’tis easy enough to hate a vain woman with warts and liver spots, to scorn her milk baths and philtres and exsanguinated Hungarian virgins, to mock her desperation to preserve a youth and beauty that was never much more enticing than the local sheep in the first place, but one had to look elsewhere for reasons to hate Samaritiana, for she truly was the singular beauty of her age. Black of hair, eye, and ambition was she, pale as a maiden drowned, buxom as Ceres (though she had yet no issue), intoxicating as the breath of Bacchus. Fortunately, my lady thoughtfully provided a bounty of other pantries in which to find that meat of hatred fit for the fires of any heart.

She was, quite simply, the worst person.

I do not mean by this to call the Dogaressa a murderess, nor an apostate, nor a despot, nor an embezzler, nor even a whore, for whores, at least, are kindly and useful, murderers must have some measure of cleverness if they mean to get away with it, apostates make for tremendous company at parties, despots have a positively devastating charisma, and, I am assured by the highest authority, which is to say, Lord Aphorism and his Merry Band of Proverbials, that there is some honor amongst thieves. No, Samaritiana was merely humorless, witless, provincial, petty, small of mind, parched of imagination, stingy of wallet and affection, morally conservative, and incapable, to the last drop of her ruby blood, of admitting that she did not know everything in all the starry spheres and wheeling orbits of existence, and this whilst believing herself to possess all of these that are virtues and eschew all that are sins. Can you envisage a more wretched and unloveable beast?

I married her, naturally.

The Dogaressa came to me in a black resin mask and emerald hooded cloak when the plague had only lately checked into its waterfront rooms, sent for a litter, and commenced seeing the sights of Venice with its traveling hat and trusted map.

Oh, no, no, you misapprehend my phraseology. Not that plague. Not that grave and gorgeous darkling shadow that falls over Europe once a century and reminds us that what dwells within our bodies is not a soul but a stinking ruin of fluid and marrow and bile. The other plague, the one that sneaks on nimbly putrefying feet from bedroom to bedroom, from dockside to dinner party, from brothel to marital bower, leaving chancres like kisses too long remembered. Yes, we would have to wait years yet before Baron von Bubœ mounted his much-anticipated revival on the stage, but never you fear, Dame Syphilis was dancing down the dawn, and in those days, her viols never stopped nor slowed.

That mysterious, morbid, nigh-monstrous and tangerine-scented creature called Samaritiana darkened my door one evening in April, bid me draw close all my curtains, light only a modest lantern upon a pretty lacquered table inlaid with mother of pearl which I still possess to this day, and stand some distance away while she removed her onyx mask to reveal a face of such surpassing radiance, such unparalleled winsomeness, that even the absence of the left eye, and the mass of scars and weals that had long since replaced it, could do no more than render her enchanting rather than perfect.

It would seem that the Dogaressa danced with the Dame some years past. Her husband, the Doge, brought her to the ball, she claimed, having learned the steps from his underaged Neapolitan mistress, though, as I became much acquainted with the lady in later years, I rather suspect she found her own way, arrived first, wore through three pairs of shoes, departed last, and ate all the cakes on the sideboard. But, as is far too often the case in this life ironical, that mean and miserly soul found itself in receipt of, not only the beauty of a better woman, but the good fortune of a better man. She contracted a high fever owing to her insistence upon hosting the Christmas feast out of doors that year, so that the gathered noblility could see how lovely she looked with a high winter’s blush on her cheeks, and this fever seemed to have driven, by some idiot insensate alchemy, the Dame from the halls of Samaritiana forever, leaving only her eye ravaged and boiled away by the waltz.

All was well in the world, then, save that she could not show herself in public without derision and her husband still rotted on his throne with a golden nose hung on his mouldering face like a door knocker, but she had not come for his sake, nor would she ever dream of fancying that it was possible to ask a boon of that oft-rumored wizard hiding in the sty of London for any single soul on earth other than herself.

“I have heard that you can make a new eye,” said she, in dulcet tones she did not deserve the ability to produce.

I could.

“Better than the old, brighter, of any color or shape?”

I could.

She licked her lily lips. “And install it so well none would suspect the exchange?”

Perhaps not quite, not entirely so well, but it never behooves one to admit weakness to a one-eyed queen.

“You have already done me this service,” said she to me, loftily, never asking once, only demanding, presuming, crushing all resistance, not to mention dignity, custom, the basest element of courtesy, beneath her silver-tooled heel. She waved her hand as though the motion of her fingers could destroy all protestation. The light of my lantern caught on a ring of peridot and tourmaline entwined into the shape of a rather maudlin-looking crocodile gnawing upon its own tail, for she claimed some murky Egyptian blood in the dregs of her familial cup, as though such little droplets could mark her as exceptional, when every dockside lady secretly fancies herself a Cleopatra of the Thames.

“Produce the results upon the morrow! I will pay you nothing, of course. A Dogaressa does not stoop to exchange currency for goods. But when two eyes look out from beneath my brow once more, I will present you with a gift, for no particular reason other than that I wish to bestow it.”

“And if I do not like your gift, Clarissima?”

Puzzlement contorted her exquisitely Cyclopean visage, causing a most unwelcome familial pang within my breast. “I do not take your meaning, Master Peek. How could such a thing possibly occur?”

There is, it seems, a glittering point beyond which egotism achieves such purity that it becomes innocence, and that was the country in which Samaritiana lived. In truth, had she revealed her gift to me then, or even promised payment in the usual manner, I might have refused her, just to experience the novel emotion of rejecting royalty—for I am interested in nothing so much as novelty, not love nor death nor glass nor gold. Something new! Something new! My kingdom for something new! But she caught me, the perfumed spider, wholly without knowing what she’d done. I did indeed take up her commission, and though you may conclude in advance that this recounting of the job will proceed according to the pattern of the last, I shall be disappointed if you do, for I have already told you most vividly that herein lies the skew of my tale.

For the sake of the beautiful Dogaressa, I took up my father’s battered old pipe and punty. I cannot now say why; for a certainty I owned better instruments by far, and had not touched the things in eons except to brush them daintily with a daily sneer. Perhaps a paroxysm of sentimentality seized me; perhaps I despised her too much even then to waste my finer appliances on her pox-punched face, in any event, I cannot even say positively that the result blossomed forth from the tools and not some other cause, and I fear to question it now. I sank into the rhythm of my father and grandfather and his before him: the dollop of liquid glass, the greatbreath of my own lungs expelled through the long, black pipe, the sweet pressure and rolling of the globule against the smooth marver stone, the uncommon light known only to workers of glass, that strange slick of marmalade-light afire within crystal that would soon ride a woman’s skull all the way through the days of her life and down into her tomb.

The work was done; I fashioned two, an exquisitely matched pair, in case the other organ required replacement in the unseen feverish future. Samaritiana, in, so far as I may know or tell, the sole creative decision of her existence, chose not one color for the iris but all of them, dozens of infinitesimal shards chipped from every jewel in my inventory: sapphire, jade, emerald, jasper, onyx, amethyst, ruby, topaz. The effect was a carnival wheel of deep, unsettling fascination, and when I sewed it into her flesh with my golden thread she did not wail or struggle but only sighed, as though lost in the act of love, and, though her faults were called Legion, they were as yet unknown to me, thus, as my needle entered her, so too did my fatal softening begin.

The Dogaressa departed with her stitching still fresh, leaving in her wake but three souvenirs of our intimate surgery: one gift she intended, one she did not, and her damnable scent, which neither Mrs. Matterfact nor Mr. Suchandsuch, no matter how they scrubbed and strove, could remove from the premises. I daresay, even this very night, should you venture to my old house on the High Street and press your nose to its sturdy bones, still yet you would snatch a whiff of tangerine and strangling ivy from the foundation stones.

The gift she intended to leave was a lock of her raven hair, the skinflint bitch. The other, I did not perceive until some weeks later, when I adjourned to my smoking room with a bottle of brandy, a packet of snuff, and a rare contemplative mood which I intended to spend upon a rich, unfiltered melancholy as sweet as any Madeira—for it is a fact globally acknowledged that idle melancholy, like good wine, is the exclusive purview of the wealthy. To aid in my melancholy, I fingered in one hand the mate to the Dogaressa’s harlequin eye, rubbing my thumb over that strange, motley iris, marveling at the milky sheen of the sclera, admiring, unrepentant Narcissus that I am, my own skill and artistry. I removed my own, ordinary, unguessable, nearly flawless glass eye and held up the other to my empty socket like a spyglass, and a most thoroughly stupendous metamorphosis transpired: I could seethrough the jeweled lens of that artificial eye! Truly see, without cloud or glare or halo—ah, but what I saw was not the walls of my own smoking room, so tastefully lined with matching books chosen to neither excite nor bore any guest to extremes, but the long peach-cream and gold hall of the palazzo of the Doge in far-distant Venice! The chequered black and white marble floors flowed forth in my vision like a houndstooth river; the full and unforgiving moon streamed glaucous through tall slim windows; painted ceilings soared overhead, inlaid with pearl and carnelian and ever-so-slightly greyed with the smoke of a hundred thousand candles burnt over peerless years in that grand corridor. Women and men swept slowly up and down the squares like boats upon some fairy canal, swathed in gowns of viridescent green cross-hatched with silver and rose, armored in bodices of whalebone and opal, be-sailed in lacy gauze spun by Clotho herself upon the wheel of destiny, cloaked and hooded in vermillion damask, in aquamarine, in citron and puce, their clothing each so splendid I could scarce tell the maids from the swains—and thus looked I upon a personal paradise heretofore undreamt of.

But there were worms in paradise, for each and every beauty in the Doge’s palace was rotting in their finery like the fruit of sun-spoiled melons within their shells. Their flesh putrefied and dripped from their bones and what remained turned hideous, sickening colors, choleric, livid, cyanic, hoary, a moldering patina of death whose effusions stained those bodices black. Some stumbled noseless, others having replaced that appendage with nostrils of gold and silver and crystal and porcelain, and others, all hope lost, sunk their visages into masks, though they could not hide their chancred hands, the bleeding sores of their bosoms, the undead tatters of their throats.

Yet still they laughed, and spoke animatedly, one to the other, and blushed in virtuous fashion beneath their putridity. Such is the dance of the Dame, who enters through the essential act of life, yet leaves you thinking, breathing, walking whilst the depredations of the grave transact upon your still-sensate flesh, making of this world a single noisy tomb.

My breath would not obey me; my heart ricocheted amongst my ribs like a cannon misfired. Was it truly Italy I saw bounded in the tiny planet of a glass eye? Had I stumbled into a drunken sleep or gone mad so swiftly no asylum could hope to catch me? I shot to my feet, mashing the eye deeper into my socket until stars spattered my sight—closer, look closer! Could I hear as well? Smell? Taste the tallowed air of that far-off moonlit court?

I could not. I could not hear their footsteps nor inhale their perfume nor feel the fuzzed reek of the mildewed canals on my tongue nor move of my own volition. I apprehended a new truth, that even the impossible possesses laws of its own, and those unbendable. I could only observe. Observe—while my vision lurched forward, advancing quickly, rocking gently as with a woman’s sinuous gait. Graceful, slender arms extended as though from my own body, opening with infinite elegance to embrace a man whose head was that of a Titan cast down brutally into the pit of Tartarus, so wracked with growths and intuberances and pulsating polyps that the plates of his skull had cracked beneath the intolerable weight and shifted into a new pate so monstrous it could no longer bear the Doge’s crown, which hung pitifully instead from a ribbon slung round his grotesque neck. Those matchless arms which were not my own enfolded this hapless creature and, encircling the middle finger of the hand belonging to the right arm, I saw with my altered vision the twisted peridot and tourmaline crocodile ring of the Dogaressa Samaritiana.

I cast the glass eye away from me, sickened, thrilled, inflamed, ensorcelled, the fire in my midnight hearth as nothing beside the conflagration of curiosity, horror, and the beginnings of power that crackled within my brain-pan. In that first moment, standing among my books and my brandy drenched in the sweat of a new universe, an instinct, a whisper of Truth Profound, permeated my spirit like smoke exhaled, and, I confess to you now, all these many years hence, still I enshrine it as an article of faith, for it was with breath that God animated the dumb mud of Adam, breath that woke Pandora from stone, breath that demarcates the living and the dead, breath with which we speak and cry out and divide ourselves from the idiot kingdom of animals, and breath, by all the blasted saints and angels, with which the glassblower shapes his glass! The living breath of Cornelius Peek yet permeates every insignificant atom of his works; each object broken from his punty, be it window or goblet or cask or eye, hides the sacred exhalations of his spirit co-mingled with the crystal, and it is this, it is this, I tell you, that connects the jeweled eye of the Dogaressa with the jeweled eye in my hand! I dwell in the glass, it cannot dispense with me any further than it can dispense with translucency or mass, and therefore it carries the shard of Cornelius whithersoever it wanders.

Let us dispense with a few obnoxious but inevitable inquiries into the practicality of the matter, so that we may move along past the skew. How could this mystic connection have escaped my notice till now? It is only sensical: Perdita vanished away to the Netherlands with both marvelous eyes, and no window nor goblet nor cask is, in its inborn nature, that organ of sight which opens onto the infinite pit of the human soul. Would any eye manufactured in the same fashion result in such remote visions? They would indeed, my credulous friend. Does every glassblower possess the ability to produce such objects, should he but retain one eye whilst selling the other at a fair price? Ah, here I must admit my deficiency as a philosopher, for which I apologize most obsequiously. It cannot be breath alone, for I made subtle overtures toward the gentleman of the glassmen’s guild and I can say with a solemn certainty that none but Master Peek can perform this alchemy of sclera and pupil. Why should it be so? Perhaps I am a wizard, perhaps a saint, perhaps a demiurge, perhaps the Messiah returned at last, perhaps it owes only to that peculiar rootstock of my family which grants me my height, my baritone, the hairiness of my body. Grandfather Polyphemus’s last gift, lobbed down the ancestral highway, bashing horses as it comes. I am a man of art, not science. I ask why Mrs. Matterfact has not yet laid out my supper oftener than I ask after the workings of the uncluttered cosmos.

Thus did I enter the business of optometry.

When you have placed a mad rainbow jewel in the skull of a Dogaressa as though she were nothing but a golden ring, a jewel which drove the rotting men of Venice insane with the desire to tie her to a bridge-post and stare transported into the motley swirling colors of the eye of God, lately fallen to earth, they began to say, somewhere in Sicily, advertisement serves little purpose. I opened my door and received the flood. It is positively trivial to lose an eye in this wicked world, did you know? I accepted them warmly, with a bow and a kerchief fluttered to the mouth in acute compassion, a permanently sympathetic expression penciled onto my lips in primrose paint—for that moth-eaten scab Cromwell was finally in the grave, where everything is just as colorless and abstemious and black as he always wished it to be, so full of piss and vitriol that it poisoned him to the gills, and Our Chuck, the Merry Monarch, was dancing on his bones.

Fashion, ever my God and my mother, took pity upon her poor supplicant and caused a great miracle to take place for my sake—the world donned a dandy wig whilst I doffed my own, sporting my secret womanly hair as long and curled as any lord, soaking my face in the most masculine of pale powders, rouges, lacquers, and creams, encasing my figure, such as it ever was, in lime and coral brocade trimmed in frosty silver, concealing my gait with an ivory cane and foxfurred slippers, and rejoicing in the knowledge that, of all the men in London, I suddenly possessed the lowest voice of them all. So hidden, so revealed, I took all the one-eyed world into my parlor: the cancerous, the war-wounded, the horse-kicked, the husband-beaten, the inquisitor-inquisited, the lightning-struck, the unfortunately-born, the pox-blighted, and yes, the Dame’s erstwhile lovers, for she had made her way to our shores and had begun her ancient gambols in sight of St. Paul’s. And for each of these unfortunate angels of the ocular, I fashioned a second eye in secret, unknown entirely to my custom, twin to the one that repaired their befouled faces, with which I adjourned night by night to a series of successive smoking rooms, growing grander and finer with each year, holding those orbs to the light and looking unseen upon every city in Christendom, along with several in the Orient and one in the New World, though it could hardly be called a city, if I am to be honest. And Venice, always Venice, the first eye and only, her eye, gazing out on the water, the moonlight, the dead.

In this fashion, I came to know that the Doge had died, succumbed to the unbearable weight of his own head, long before Samaritiana appeared on my night-bestrewn doorstep, the saffron gown she wore in the moonlight, and every other in her trunk, torn violently, soaked with bodily fluids, rent by the overgrown nails of the frenzied rotting horde who had chased her from the palazzo through every desperate alleyway and canal of the city, across Switzerland and France, in their anguished longing to touch the Eye of God, still sewn into the ex-Dogaressa’s skull, to touch it but once and be healed forever.

But of course I aided the friendless and abandoned Good Samaritiana as she wept beside her monstrous road. Oh, Clarissima, how dreadful, how unspeakable, how worthy of Mr. Pepys’ vigilant pen! I shall have to make introductions when you are quite well again. I sent at once for a fine dressmaker of my acquaintance to construct a suitable costume for the lady and save her from the immodesty of those ragged silken remnants of her former life with which, even then, she attempted to cover her body with little enough success that, before the dressmaker could so much as cross the river, I learned something quite unexpected concerning the biography of Samaritiana, former queen of Venice.

She was quite male. Undeniably, conspicuously, astonishingly, fascinatingly so.

I called up to Mrs. Matterfact for cold oxtongue, a saucer of pineapple, and oysters stewed in Armagnac, down to Mr. Suchandsuch for carafes of hot claret mulled via the latest methods, and listened to the wondrous chimera in my parlor tell of how that famous Egyptian blood was not in the least of the Nile but of the Tiber, on whose Ostian banks a penniless but beautiful boy had been born in secret to one of the Pope’s mistresses and left to perish among the reed-gatherers and the amber-collectors and the diggers of molluscs.

But perish the lad did not, for even a grass-picker is thoroughly loused with the nits of compassion, and the women passed the babe one to the other and back again, like a cup of wine that drank, instead, from them. Now, it is well known to anyone with a single sopping slice of sense that the Pope’s enemies are rather like weevils, ever industrious, ever multiplying, ever rapacious, starving for the chaff of scandal with which to choke the Holy Father and watch him writhe. They roved over the city, overturning the very foundational stones of ancient Rome in search of the Infallible Bastards, in order, not to kill them like Herod, but to bring them before the Cardinals and etch their little faces upon the stained glass windows as evidence of sin. My little minx, having already long, lustrous hair and androgyne features more like to a seraph than a by-blow son, found it at first advantageous to effect the manners and dress of a girl, and then, when the danger had passed, more than that, agreeable, even preferable to her former existence. Having become a maid to save her life, she remained one in order to enjoy it. Owing to the meager diet of the Tiber’s tiniest fish, little Samaritiana never grew so tall nor so stout as other boys, she remained curiously hairless, and though she escaped the castrato’s fate, her voice never dipped beneath the pleasing alto with which she now spoke, nor did her organ of masculinity ever aspire to outdo the average Grecian statue, and so, when the Doge visited Ostia after the death of his first wife, he saw nothing unusual walking by the river except for the most beautiful woman in the Occident, balancing a basket of rushes on her hip with a few nuggets of amber rolling within the weave.

“But surely, Clarissima,” mused I, savoring the tart song of pineapple upon my tongue, “a bridegroom, however ardent, cannot be so easily duped as a vengeful Cardinal! Your deception cannot have survived the wedding bower!”

“It did not survive the engagement, my dear Master Peek,” Samaritiana replied without a wisp of blush upon her remarkable cheek. “Oh, mistake me not, I do so love to lie—I see no more purpose in pretending to be virtuous in your presence than I saw in pretending to be fertile in his. But there could be no delight in a deception so deep and vast. It would impair true marriage between us. I revealed myself at Pentecost, allowing him in the intensity of his ardor to unfasten my stays and loose my ribbons until I stood clad only in honesty before His Serenity and awaited what I presumed to be my doom and my death. But only kisses fell upon me in that moment, for the Doge had long suppressed his inborn nature, and suffered already to get upon his departed wife the heirs he owed to the canals, and though my masquerade, you will agree, outshines the impeccable, he would later say, on the night of which you so confidently speak, that some sinew of his heart must always have known, since first he beheld me with my basket of amber and sorrow.”

I did not exchange trust for trust that night among the oysters and the oxtongue. I have a viciously refined sense of theatre, after all. I made her wait, feigning religion, indigestion, the vicissitudes of work, gout, even virginity, until our wedding night, whereupon I allowed Samaritiana, in the intensity of her ardor, to unfasten my stays and loose my ribbons until at last all that stood between us was the tattered ruin of my mother’s ancient bridal veil, and then, not even that.

“Goodness, you don’t expect me to be surprised, do you?” laughed the ex-Dogaressa, the monster, the braying centaur, the miserly lamia who would not give me the satisfaction of scandalizing her! That eve, and only that eve, under the stars painted upon my ceiling, I applied all my cruellest and most unfair arts to compel my wife to admit, as a wedding present, that she had not known, she had never known, never even suspected, loved me as a man just as I loved her as a woman, and was besides a brutal little liar who deserved a lifetime of the most delectable punishment. We exchanged whispered, apocryphal, long-atrophied names beneath the coverlet: Perpetua. Proteo.

Samartiana treated me deplorably, broke my heart and my bank, laughed when she ought to have wept, drove Mrs. Matterfact to utter disintegration, kept lovers, schemed with minor nobles. We were just ferociously happy. Are you surprised? I, too, am humorless, witless, provincial, petty, small of mind, parched of imagination, stingy of wallet and affection, a liar and a cad. He was like me. I was like her. I had, after all, seen as she saw, from the very angle of her waking vision, which in some circles might be the definition of divine love. I have had wives before and will have again, far cleverer and braver and wilder than my Clarissima, but none I treasured half so well, nor came so near to telling the secret of my smoking room, of the chests full of eyes hidden beneath the floorboards. Samaritiana had her lovers; I had my eyes, the voyeur’s stealthy, soft and pregnant hours, a criminal sensorium I could not quit nor wished to.Yet still I would not share, I held it back from her, out of her reach, beyond her ken.

The plague took her in the spring. The Baron, not the Dame. The plague of long masks and onions and bodies stacked like fresh-laid bricks. I buried her in glass, in my incandescent fury at the kiln, for where else can a man lose his whole being but in a wife or in work? These are the twin barrels in which we drown ourselves forever.

It soon came to pass that wonderful eyes of Cornelius Peek were in such demand that the possession of one could catapult the owner into society, if only he could keep his head about him once he landed, and this was reason enough that, men being men and ambition being forever the most demanding of bedfellows, it became much the fashion in those years to sacrifice one eye to the teeth-grinding god of social mobility and replace it with something far more useful than depth perception. Natural colors fell by the wayside—they wanted an angel’s eye, now, a demon’s, a dryad’s, a goblin’s, more alien, more inhuman, less windows to the soul than windows to debauched and lawless Edens, and I, your servant, sir, a window-maker once more. I cannot say I approved of this self-deformation, but I certainly profited by the sudden proliferation of English Cyclopses, most especially by their dispersal through the halls of power, carrying the breath of Peek with them into every shadowy corner of the privileged and the perverse.

I strung their eyes on silver thread and lay in a torpor like unto the opium addict upon the lilac damask of my smoking room couch, draping them round and round my body like a strand of numberless pearls, lifting each crystal gem in turn to gaze upon Paris, Edinburgh, Madrid, Muscovy, Constantinople, Zurich—and Venice, always Venice, returning again and again, though I knew I would not find what I sought along those rippling canals traveled by the living dead. It became my obsession, this invasion of perspective, this theft of privacy, the luxurious passivity of the thing, watching without participating as the lives of others fluttered by like so many scarlet leaves, compelled to witness, but not to interfere, even if I wished to, even if I had liked the young Earl well enough when I installed his pigment-less diamond eye and longed to parry the assassin’s blade when I saw it flash in the Austrian sunset. I saw, with tremulous breath, as God saw, forced unwilling to allow the race of man to damn or redeem itself in a noxious fume of free will, forbidden by laws unwritten not to lift one hand, even if the baker’s boy had laughed when I offered him a big red eye or a cat-slit pupil or a shark’s unbroken onyx hue, any sort, free of charge, even the costliest, the most debonair, in honor of my late wife Samaritiana who in another lifetime paid me in hair, not because she would wish me to be generous but because she would mock me to the rafters and howl hazard down to Hell, begging the Devil to take me now rather than let one more pauper rob her purse, even if I saw, now, through his eye, saw the maidservant burning, burning in the bakery on Pudding Lane, burning and screaming in the midnight wind, and then the terrible, impossible leap of the flames to the adjoining houses, an orange tongue lasciviously working in the dark, not to lift one hand as what I saw in the glass eye and what I saw in the flesh became one, fusing and melding at last, reality and unreality, the sight I owned and the sight I stole, the conflagration devouring the city, the gardens, and my house around me, my lovely watered ultramarine silk, my supremely comfortable chair stuffed with Arabian horsehair, my darling gold and silver drawers, as I lay still and let it come for me and thee and all.

I did not die, for heaven’s sake. Perish the thought! Death is terrifically gauche, don’t you know, I should never be caught wearing it in public. I simply did not get up. Irony being the Lord of All Things, the smoking room survived the blaze and I inside it; though the rafters smoked and blackened and the walls swelled with heat like the head of a Doge, the secret chambers honeycombing the place contained the inferno, they did not stove in nor fall, save for one shelf of books, the bloody Romans, of all things, which, in toppling, quite snapped both my shinbones beneath a ponderous copy of Plutarch. Mrs. Matterfact and Mr. Suchandsuch fought valiantly and gave up only the better part of the roof, though we lost my lovely showroom, a tragedy from which I shall never fully recover, I assure you. And for a long while, I remained where the fire found me, on the long damask couch in my smoking room, wrapped in lengths of eyes like Odysseus lashed to the mast and listening to all the sirens’ mating bleats, still lifting each in turn and fixing it to my empty socket, one after the other after the other, and thus I stayed for years, years beyond years, beyond Matterfact and Suchandsuch and their replacements, beyond the intolerable plebians outside who wanted only humble, honest brown and blue eyes again, their own mortal eyes, having seen too much of wildness. And what, pray tell, did I do with my impossible sight, with my impossible span of time?

Why, I became the greatest spy the world has ever known. Would you have done otherwise?

Oh, I have sold crowns to kings and kings to executioners, positions to the enemy and ships to the storm, murderers to the avenging and perversities to the puritanical, I have caused ingenious devices to be built in England before the paint in Krakow finished drying, rescued aristocrats from the mob and mobs from the aristocracy by turns, bought and traded and brokered half of Europe to the other half and back again, dashed more sailors against the rocks than my promethean progenitor could have done in the throes of his most orgiastic fever-dream. I have smote the ground and summoned up wars from the deeps and I have called down the heavens to end them, all without moving one whisper from my house on Drury Lane, even as the laborers rebuilt it around me, even as the rains came, even as the lane around it became a writhing slum, a whore’s racetrack, a nursery rhyme.

Look around you and look well: this is the world I made. Isn’t it charming? Isn’t it terrible and exquisite and debased and tastefully appointed according to the very latest of styles? I have seen to every detail, every flourish—think nothing of it, it has been my great honor.

But the time has come to rouse myself, for my eyes have begun to grow dark, and of late I spy muchly upon the damp and wormy earth, for who would not beg to be buried with their precious Peek eye, bauble of a bygone—and better—age? No one, not even the baker’s boy. The workshop of Master Cornelius Peek will open doors once more, for I have centuries sprawled at my feet like Christmas tinsel, and I would not advance upon them blind. I have heard the strange mournful bovine lowing of what I am assured are called the proletariatoutside my window, the clack and clatter of progress to whose rhythm all men must waltz. There is much work to be done if I do not wish to have the next century decorated by some other, coarser, less splendid hand. I shall curl my hair and don the lime and coral coat, crack the ivory cane against the stones once more, and if the fashions have sped beyond me, so be it, I care nothing, I will stand for the best of us, for in the end, the world will always belong to dandies, who alone see the filigree upon the glass that is God’s signature upon his work.

After all, it is positively trivial to lose an eye in this midden of modernity, this precarious, perilous world, don’t you agree?

[kierongillen]

Writer Notes: The Wicked + The Divine Christmas Annual #1

Spoilers, obv.

There's a backbone of Specials which I consider essential to WicDiv's plot. This is one of the main reasons we've ended up putting the Specials trade into the schedule before the last trade in the series rather than after it – as fractally as WicDiv is structured, this is information you should know before the end rather than after it.

They also work off a weird time-switched aspect – so they're read at the time of publication (for single readers) and also at the latter point in the story (for trade readers). In other words, they're revealing different information and to different import depending on whether you read them as they're released or as they're collected.

Which is an interesting challenge.

The Christmas Annual is the first Special which doesn't work like this. Looking at the schedule, we thought it healthier to add an extra month to the gap between arcs. The next arc is six issues, as is the one after that. We decided to add another special, and then saw what would be fun to do.

This was a boon for me. The problem is never not having enough material, y'know? The difference between something I'd like to do and something that is essential I do is narrow. Jamie had the idea of going back to periods we skipped and showing some of their key moments. I initially kicked against it a little, but when the thing I was trying proved too hard to make work, it seemed the simplest thing to do for me, and seemed a cute gift to the fans in a year that's been pretty fucking brutal.

(That we rarely get happier than bittersweet speaks to me, really. All happiness is tinged with sadness. “I love you” is married to “and one day we will all be dead”.)

But it was also a fun time. We got a gang of our favourite people together and did a bunch of short stories. Most of all, I got to write a bunch of people I haven't written for a while. I've missed them.

How were the stories chosen? Rapidly! The main limitation was not choosing anything which would spoil anything in Imperial Phase: Part Two. The Specials are designed to be spoiler-free for any trade which isn't released when it's released. We also wanted to show a bunch of kissing and similar social activities, as for a book which has as much emotional and sexual stuff driving the characters, there's relatively little on panel.

I wrote 'em, showed them to the gang, and then we worked out who we could ask to draw them. I was expecting I would remove several of them, but they all ended up going in, with tweaks in some cases in the story's focus. In terms of the characters selected, I definitely paid attention to characters who had relatively little screen time – so, Lucifer, Inanna and Tara.

Jamie's Cover

Using a bought Photoshop filter, this actually a lot more work than Jamie was expecting. It is wonderful though. It is to my eternal regret we never actually arranged it as a Christmas Merchandise thing. This is a delight to me. Really, we're aware that Jamie doesn't do many playful covers, so this was an opportunity we grasped with both hands. For all the iconic drama, there's also a playfulness to WicDiv that doesn't always show up on the covers.

Kris Anka's Cover

It's a Christmas Annual in the mode of a British Annual – in that these are annuals released at Christmas rather than having Christmas as a major theme per se. Anyway, despite all that, Inanna and Baal in hot make-out beneath the mistletoe is an absolute joy. I am pleased we get to do this.

IFC

The main editorial note to Designer Sergio was “Tackier! Tackier!”

The photo was taken in North London cocktail bar “Every Cloud.” Jamie is probably drinking some manner of Old Fashioned. I think I'm drinking some kind of Buttered Rum-containing cocktail. Chrissy draped the only decorations she could find over our heads.

1-6

Kris Anka! Jen Bartel helped out on inks on this as well, due to time constraints. Kris is currently on a Marvel Exclusive, so we had to get permission to do this story. Marvel said yes, so thanks to them enormously.

Yes, if you examine the timeline, Valhalla was certainly erected quickly. And yes, “Erected quickly” is a major theme in this story.

It's one of the lighter stories in the issue – obviously delineating what we know about Baal to this moment says a lot, and the same for Inanna.

I tried to write the scripts to the artists, but I also was interested in leaving it open for them to express things in their own ways. Generally speaking, I let the artists choose how to show the characters in a sex scene, as I want to see their own interpretation. It was a delight to see Kris go as far as he did here.

We did wonder whether we'd be okay with showing hard cocks. We're told that hard cocks are fine, but ejaculation is the problematic limit. I'm glad it's not an issue. This is a hot scene, but it's primarily a romantic one.

I love what Matt is doing with the panel on page 5 – the pinks and purples of Inanna here.

Baals expression on the first panel is very funny, as is the confidence in panel 3 of it.

7-8-9-10

There's seven stories, but several were just two pages. We realised the best way to do it would be to group the shorter of the long ones with the short ones so all collaborators get 5-6 pages each. This makes it much easier with trade royalties down the line, and organising 5 artists (plus colourists and flatters) is a significantly easier one than organising 7 (and their associated collaborators).

This is the first of the stories coloured by Tamra Bonvillain. I've never worked with Tamra before, but we loved her work, approached her, and she said yes. Thanks for joining us on this journey.

The artist here is Rachael Stott, who is probably best known for her Doctor Who work, but is about to do Motherland for Vertigo with Si Spurrier, which looks excellent.

There was quite a lot of careful balloon work here, to try and guide the eye and provide the necessary exposition (or really, reminders – all this is building upon or just showing events that have been alluded to earlier.) The eye-guiding is key ��� for example, due to a minor quirk of the first two panels, the Shard is hidden by the column which means that the view in the second panel feels instantly wrong. We end up disguising the shard with the dialogue so it's far less noticeable.

This event is alluded to by Lucifer in issue 3 of WicDiv.

The penthouse is the one we see in issue 1, which I presume is rented by the Pantheon for their purposes.

Writing Lucifer after all this time was a pleasure. Well, pleasure may be the wrong word. She's herself, and she's always very able to show bits of herself. Lucifer says things that no one else in the cast does, which is obviously one of her huge problems.

Yes, the first panel of page 9 did make me think of an OBJECTION! style WicDiv Phoenix-Wright-esque game.

The panel is also a place where we really had to do the work to put this in continuity – the obvious assumption would be that Baal is pissed off about Lucifer sleeping with Sakhmet, which is only really a minor cause of WTF-ness.

That Lucifer explicitly fucked with Baal and Inanna was hinted at early in WicDiv and made explicit in WicDiv 23. Inanna didn't consider the relationship exclusive, as he doesn't see why anyone would automatically assume a romantic relationship is exclusive. Inanna's great weakness is not always realising that everyone is like him.

The “You're a bad person” ties off why Lucifer and Sakhmet never slept together many times, also mentioned in issue 3. Sakhmet, I suspect, just doesn't like the complications and drama. She is deeply averse to complications.

The last three panels are classic comedy steady-angle shots. That the sprinklers aren't visible led to adding an alarm sound at lettering, to avoid the possible assumption that Baal made it rain indoors or something.

Reading this I find myself thinking about Lucifer in the Special versus Lucifer in the Annual – in the sense that we're seeing her much more humanly, which is leaning into what makes her comic (and awful). The last three panels are not ones you could imagine in The Faust Act, as seen through Laura's star eyes. Nice fucked off expression in the last panel from Rachael.

11-12-13-14-15

Chynna Clugston Flores is just one of my indie comic crushes. Blue Monday is basically one of those key links between 90s and 00s comics. Bryan Lee O'Malley pitched Scott Pilgrim as Blue Monday meets Dragon Ball Z. We pitched Phonogram and Blue Monday meets Hellblazer. She's a wonder.

As such, writing for her was a dream, and I was explicitly writing for her. While this is much more rigid in terms of panel shapes than Chynna would write for herself (the steady angle on the two people in the front seat is very much me trying to write a sort of claustrophobic talking heads kind of set-up) but I'm really exploring a very Chynna type place.

I've been thinking of Dionysus as a “Umar” for a while. When thinking up Dio, the image of writer Umar Ditta leading the Thought Bubble dancefloor was definitely in my mind, and I thought it'd be fun if they share a name, despite being very different dudes. (Not least that Umar could bench Dionysus now.) I asked Umar, and he said yes, so Umar he is. His first comic Untethered has just come out, and is well worth your attention.

This is the second sort of story in the special. One is just showing some key things which impacted the rest of the book, which were usually sexy funtimes. The other was showing some key relationships in the pre-pantheon lives. We've said that Dio was a friend of Baph and Morrigan, but never actually showed what that meant. It was good to get it here.

For those studying the timeline, this is the same day as Hazel become Amaterasu. It would also be the same day Dio takes a photo of Morrigan, and Cameron sits in the tunnel waiting for Morrigan. Busy day!

If I call out my fave Chynna moments, we're going to be here forever. Cameron with his sign on the rain is a joy. Honestly, this is such an odd thing – it makes me imagine what a Blue Monday set in the Midlands would be like.

There was a panic when page 12 arrived and I thought that Chynna had (for some reason) reversed all the seating orders in the car and had the car riding on the wrong side of the road. This is obviously a disaster, because the only way this story works is the characters' speaking order is based upon where they're sitting. But then we realised that the page had been flipped in the dropbox for some reason. Phew.

The quote is from Young Avengers 13, which came out a week or two before this arrived. Yes, I know.

(The question who wrote YA13 in this universe, when Kieron Gillen's career ended with Phonogram: Rue Britannia, is open.)

Page 13 was designed to be a mood break of the lived-in autobio, and Chynna really goes for it, in terms of the leaves and the panel breaking. Not using techniques in the whole piece makes them especially meaningful when they turn up. Tamra also did wonders in the colouring, going for the spooky autumnal reds, teals and purples.

(Tamra and Matt basically split the issue near 50:50.)

This is definitely a more Morrigan way of publicising gigs rather than standing outside shitty clubs and passing out flyers.

The WHAT!? panel is everything I could have hoped for.

The “Oh god. He puns. Morrigan fucked a punner. A wet punner's in my car.” immediately made me feel that I'm trying to channel a Warren Ellis character.

The off-panel MOTHERFUCKER is also a delight.

16-17-18

Emma's one of my favourite people, but I haven't worked with her since a B-side in the second issue of Phonogram: The Singles Club, with a Kate Bush short story. (EDIT: Plus in the Young Avengers Afterparty, which I’d blanked. This is the second time that’s happened to an artist from that. Which, given the time period I was writing that, is unsurprising). So it's lovely to get back with her, and she does some of my favourite work in the Special. Do go and have a look at her Breaks, which she draws and co-writes.

When Tara has had so little panel time, trying to work out how to approach her is key – and Emma manages to find a place which is clearly her, but also informed by Tula's iconic take. Matt also brings us much of those choices to the page in the colours.

It's useful, as this story almost acts as a prequel to issue 13. It's essentially the first time Tara pitches what she wants to do to Ananke, a moment which is at least alluded to in 13.

I wrote the story originally as two pages – specifically, the last two pages. I talked about it with Editorial Assistant Katie, and she noted it's a shame we never actually see Tara happy ever. Which struck me as true, and a problem – at least in part this Special is about showing different sorts and times of happiness. So I added the first page, which is my best pitch for Tara at her most positive. This is the unspoken stuff that's under the surface in issue 13, and Tara talking about the drive is one of her main bits of happiness. I talk about how the cast are all me in different ways? Tara definitely includes the part of me which never feels better than after having written something I think is good. I've certainly done the “if get a disease which means I have six months to live, have I got time to finish writing WicDiv?” maths.

Much like issue 13, I wrote considerably more captions than are used on the first page. You write it like a diary entry and then edit to the core.

I always say that an artist can make the script their own, and that I try to write to the minimum number of panels. Of all the artists in the script, Emma's the one who added most panels. This looks great, and is very much a part of her style.

Quick call-out to Clayton in the second panel of page 17: that tiny string of notes positioned either side of those captions is beyond perfect.

The last page is all kinds of sad. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I'm pleased with how the masks work on the page.

19-20

Second Rachael story. She's an enormous Lucifer fan, so was very excited to do this.

This is as simple as the stories get, in terms of a tiny yet meaningful continuity insert. This was there already, but I felt underlining it and reminding people of it at this point in the narrative is meaningful for obvious reasons.

(I had things I wanted to do in Imperial Phase II which I never found space for – or when I did find space, felt off and wrong.)

Writing Laura captions again after all this time was definitely a thing which took a while to find again. But I liked it.

(Spangly New Thing has captions to the fore again, for various reasons, so them as a formalist element is certainly on my mind.)

21-22-23-24-25-26

This absolutely was formative Indie Crush mode. Carla Speed McNeil's Finder was one of my initial loves when I came into comics in the early 00s. It's just astounding stuff. I'd suggest starting with Mystery Story, I suspect, but there's two big omnibuses of it, and I'd recommend just getting them. She's continuing doing other Finder stories alongside her work elsewhere.

It was originally 5 pages, but Carla suggested an extra page. I'd deliberately left an extra page space in the issue, in case anyone wanted more space... and Carla grabbed it. Good work.

When writing this, I was thinking of Carla's storytelling... but I also realised that a part of Carla's storytelling is to warp and make her own. Seeing what she would do with my script was a big part. I wanted the Carla magic applied, and she did – the extra page is a big part of that.

Notice how Tamra uses the palettes to distinguish the two different settings. Eleanor in the dark and Hazel in the light seems pretty useful, right?

That Lucifer and Amaterasu were friends and knew each other were one of the elements of the background I never had a chance to really run with, for obvious reasons. In the same way as I wanted to do some Dio/Baph pre-scenes, doing a Lucifer/Amaterasu: The Early Years appealed.

H's fanart was mentioned in issue 15, I believe.

As much as it's a dual story, it's really more about Lucifer. Amaterasu may not even appear to really aware of how much she's been slighted in the story. Or maybe she is? It is Eleanor's perspective. This is also the first dialogue we've ever had as Eleanor, rather than Lucifer reporting Eleanor. The resentment and anger is so much cleaner, the saying the unsayable aspect with less glitter.

Hazel is right. Eleanor is mean.

Adding a page appealed for various reasons, but at least part of it was that it's the only in-story chance to see a Lucifer performance. There was an alternate cover in the first arc, but it's not the same – though it's probably the same performance. We've talked about her Brixton performances before, and this is there. This would be a gig that Laura saw, as previously referenced.

The last page (and final panel of page 5) is a take on a scene that's already on canon – specifically, the story as reported in the WicDiv Magazine Special.

The last-minute panic of the issue was Jamie realising we'd forgotten to have Amaterasu’s facepaint on her in the final panel, so that was a quick patch from Tamra. Phew.

The “I'm sorry” panel is A+.

As an example of the Carla Speed McNeil of it all, the last montage of shots is her addition, which brings a visual closure to the sequence.

27-28

Back with Emma Viceli, with a missing scene after issue 8. The actual core details were alluded to in issue 10, but this actually takes us there. If you remember, at this point Inanna and Baal are no longer in any way romantically involved, but fucking the best friend of someone you were with is almost always drama. The purple and red colouring seems to make that be the subtext there.

We checked Laura's age here repeatedly, to ensure she was 18 in these images. It would be actively illegal if we messed up.

Clearly my fave thing is the call back to issue 4's PLAY IT COOL gag.

This issue's structure came after all the art started coming in. It's a mix-tape curation – in terms of what's the best order to take people on a journey. Things like Kris' story being first seemed obvious – his was the alternative cover after all, featuring Inanna and Baal, which makes it a de facto lead story. That this story is furthest along in the timeline made it a suitable end, plus that we open with Inanna/Baal. The real thing is that it's a story which ends with something resembling a concluding beat. “This is going to be complicated” feels like something that ends an issue in the way that many of the stories don't. I suspect the only other credible option was Chynna's story, with Dio/Baph riding off down a motorway. What feels like it could be an ending? What feels like Closure?

IBC

The titles were all added in the last minute, when we realised the best way to actually discern which story was which for the credits was to actually give them a title.  

SUMER LOVING was miscorrected to SUMMER LOVING at every stage of production, and had to be changed back every time. There is no love for Sumerian humour in the modern comic market place.

Anyway – off for the season now. The Imperial Phase II trade drops in January, followed by The Wicked + The Divine 1923 special in February and the new arc in March.

Thanks for reading.

[esonetwork]

Timestamp #TW1: Everything Changes

New Post has been published on https://esonetwork.com/timestamp-tw1-everything-changes/

Timestamp #TW1: Everything Changes

Torchwood: Everything Changes (1 episode, s01e01, 2006)

  Evolving from Excalibur, a science-fiction crime drama idea from Russell T. Davies, Torchwood was developed as a post-watershed (mature/adult audience) companion to Doctor Who. It was the first spin-off for the franchise since K9 and Company twenty-five years earlier.

The series (and this story) begins with murder. PC Gwen Cooper and her fellow officers are investigating the crime scene, but are quickly escorted away as Torchwood arrives. Led by Captain Jack Harkness, the team of Doctor Owen Harper, Suzie Costello, and Doctor Toshiko Sato get to work. Gwen, meanwhile, moves to higher ground in a parking garage to get a better view.

We’ve seen two of these characters before: Captain Jack last appeared in The Parting of the Ways, and Tosh chased a modified pig-alien around a morgue with the Ninth Doctor in Aliens of London.

Jack waxes about contraceptives in the rain as Suzie puts a metal gauntlet on her hand and examines the corpse. The gauntlet shocks the corpse back to life for two minutes, during which time the team interrogates the dead man for clues. The victim didn’t see who stabbed him, and Jack’s questions about death also prove fruitless. The team is frustrated and Gwen is startled when Jack asks her for advice. Gwen responds by running away.

Gwen arrives home later and joins her boyfriend, Rhys Williams, in front of a television drama as they catch up on the day. They go to bed, but Gwen spends the night sleepless. The next day, she asks Yvonne to look up Jack Harkness before taking coffee to the detectives investigating the murder. She and her partner respond to a bar brawl and suffers a blow to the head. At the hospital, she notes a familiar figure in a blue coat racing up the stairs and gives chase, but she stops at the top floor because it is sealed in plastic. She asks a porter about the seal, but he’s no help, so she breaks it and investigates.

She finds what she assumes to be a man wearing a mask – a standard Doctor Who alien, yeah? – and asks about the man in the coat. The porter returns to update Gwen and is soon eaten by the creature. The Torchwood team springs into action as Jack escorts Gwen from the room. When Gwen goes back outside, the Torchwood team drives away so she gives chase in her patrol car.

Her partner is left behind at the hospital.

She runs the license plates as Yvonne gives her an update on Jack Harkness and his history. The chase ends at Wales Millennium Center, but Gwen loses the team when she looks away. Control has no record of the license plate, and Gwen and her partner – he walked all the way there – can find no evidence of where the team went. Also, there are no missing porters at the hospital. Dismayed, Gwen goes home where she lies to Rhys and continues her investigation of the Millennium Center.

She follows a hunch and visits Jubilee Pizza where she learns that they frequently deliver to Torchwood. She orders a pizza and hand delivers it to the address on file. Ianto Jones points her down a secret passage and Gwen arrives at the Hub in Torchwood Three, home to the Cardiff team. She spots a water feature in the center of the room, a severed hand bubbling away in a container, and the team who are all apparently ignoring her as a joke.

They tell her that they have been watching her stalking them for the last three hours. They also explain how they erased the evidence of the porter’s murder. As a pterodactyl squawks overhead, Jack offers to show her the murderer. It’s the creature from the hospital, commonly referred to as a Weevil by the team, which is part of a group living in the sewers.

Returning to the Hub, Jack makes introductions to the team despite Gwen’s protestations that Torchwood is classified. Jack hands out job assignments before escorting Gwen out via the scenic route. They rise up on a platform into Millennium Center, shrouded in a perception filter. Jack presumes that it’s because “there was once a dimensionally transcendental chameleon circuit placed right on this spot, which welded its perception properties to a spatial-temporal rift” – we call it Boom Town – but otherwise it’s just cool. They head to a local bar where Jack challenges Gwen’s lack of belief with the undeniable evidence of the Christmas Invasion and the Battle of Canary Wharf. After a little back and forth, including Jack’s revelation that Torchwood scavenges alien technology to prepare for a future invasion, Jack dissuades Gwen of the idea that Torchwood is trying to solve the stabbing murders. They’re just trying to figure out the gauntlet, and the more violent the murder, the better for the device.

Jack gives her a little trivia: Torchwood One was Canary Wharf in London, Torchwood Two is in Glasgow, Torchwood Three is this team in Cardiff, and Torchwood Four has vanished. Jack also reveals that he drugged Gwen’s drink in order to erase her memory and maintain the team’s secrecy. She races home to jot down as much information as possible before she collapses. Ianto hacks into her computer and erases the file.

Oh, and the idea that all that alien technology is supposed to stay in the base? Tosh, Owen, and Susie have all ignored that mandate. Tosh scans a copy of A Tale of Two Cities with one touch and uploads it to her computer. Owen tries to pick up a girl (and ends up in a threesome) with an alien pheromone spray. Suzie uses the gauntlet to resurrect a dead fly.

Owen’s a bit of a git, honestly.

Rhys wakes Gwen the next morning with coffee and a kiss, concerned that she was drinking after a head wound. Later at work, Yvonne reminds her about Captain Jack Harkness. Gwen goes up to the detective offices and spots the mock-up of the murder weapon, an image that haunts her all day as images of her lost trip to the Hub flit through her subconscious. In her home office, she spots a brochure for Millennium Center with a note scrawled on it: “Remember”.

Gwen returns to Millennium Center and finds Suzie, who produces the murder weapon with the hope of breaking Gwen’s amnesia. Suzie pulls a gun, remarks that only Gwen can make the link, and reveals that although she loves her job it is driving her mad. She killed three people in order to get practice with the gauntlet. During her confession, Jack comes up the lift, presumably hidden by the perception filter. Suzie can see through it and shoot Jack in the head before turning the gun on Gwen, but Jack rises up behind her to stop the threat.

Suzie decides her own fate by committing suicide.

Gwen remembers, Ianto puts the gauntlet in storage, the rest of the team surrenders their illicit tech, Suzie goes into the Torchwood morgue, and Jack is immortal. Jack was made immortal by Bad Wolf, and he’s in search of the right kind of Doctor to help explain it. He asks Gwen to keep it quiet before asking her to join Torchwood.

She accepts as the pterodactyl flies overhead.

  As pilots go, this was a great one. It’s dark and moody, establishing the direction and atmosphere for the series to come. We get to catch up with Captain Jack again, though the mystery of where and when he’s been since he encountered Bad Wolf is still a mystery. I also enjoy how we are in Gwen’s shoes for this story, uncovering the mystery as she does.

Since this is a spin-off and not primarily set in the Doctor’s timeline, there will not be a regeneration handicap. Not that it needs one at any rate.

    Rating: 4/5 – “Would you care for a jelly baby?”

    UP NEXT – Torchwood: Day One

  The Timestamps Project is an adventure through the televised universe of Doctor Who, story by story, from the beginning of the franchise. For more reviews like this one, please visit the project’s page at Creative Criticality.