#to stop coal leaving a site

[ludojudoposts]

Premiere - Pit Strike (1977) dir. Roger Bamford, writer. Alan Sillitoe

Starring: Brewster Mason, Bernard Hill, Jennifer Linden, Paul Shane, Paula Tilbrook, Johnny Allan

[athanasius-symposium-of-writings]

The Economic Difference Between The Miner and Mine Owner's Daughter

Chapter Four

Based of this ask

Rated Explicit | Warning: period typical sexism, depression

Ao3

Taglist: @anastasiablossomlove @tfamidoingwithmylife @luopenis

Chapter Three

Golden Cave ruined your family utterly.

The explosion, the suicide pact made by your father, and ordered the workers to follow. The research on the gas that caused the madness. Then the detonation of the charges buried the cave with everyone inside.

You were left with utterly nothing.

When you woke up, the doctor of the mining site said Norton was carrying your unconscious body to the infirmary before the explosion happened. Since that accident, you have been asleep…

For a year.

There were no dreams, no sensation of being asleep for so long! Doctor Dyer even said they started fearing the worst. Not like that was your concern, it was your father and the miners.

The news given to you is beyond heartbreaking…

In a year you have lost everything your father ever owned or built himself, including your home.

Suddenly, you have fallen from the top to now sinking into the bottom.

The life you knew is gone, your mother's family had turned away from you to keep their livelihood secure (though they pay for your medical upkeep), and the families of those miners demanded your blood. It is a nightmare scenario that leaves you helpless.

It was too much for you. The sense of isolation, loneliness, and helplessness quickly takes root in your heart.

Your friend, the doctor whose name is William Dyer, visits you from time to time. Visiting as often as he can with his wife when you are transferred to a mental ward.

Your dark thoughts had led you to a dark option as you grieved.

Staying in a coma felt like a better option.

In the hospital currently, you sit alone in your room facing the window. A dark and cloudy day, no one is out in the yard because it rained yesterday. It fits your current moods, dark and gloomy. A shell of your former self these days as nightmares plague your mind, you jump at shadows when you force yourself to stay awake.

There are whispers in your mind you swear are voices of those lost in Golden Cave.

Go back. You must go back. You must find out what happened that day!

You stare at your lifeless expression in the window, there are dark bags under your eyes now.

A knock makes you slightly turn towards the door as it takes your attention for a second only for you to ignore it once more to stare outside the gloomy world.

“You have a visitor!” A nurse enters your room, “If you need anything someone will be right outside.” Leading in whoever before closing the door.

There's a second of silence, then the sound of a heel-clicking against the floor as your visitor walks towards you. He stopped only when you spoke.

“Please leave me, Doctor Dyer,” Wiping your tears, “I am afraid I am in no state to be pleasing company.” You dare not look at your friend as you look like a mess. Unkempt hair, your medical gown stained with tears, your face puffy from crying so much.

There is a deep chuckle, one that makes you confused, “Oh, how the mighty have fallen.” A voice that haunts you chills you to the bone. Nights you dreamed about him yet it always feels like a jumbled mess-- All of those dreams, however, end in a way you are shameful to admit: erotic.

Not sure why, yes you did find him attractive but such ideas never crossed your mind out of respect for him.

“Mr. Campbell?” Your voice cracking as you slowly turn around, “I…” When you look at him– Up for he towers over you– He appears different.

A haircut and dyed a lighter shade of brown hair. His skin is clean, no longer covered by the muck of dirt and coal. His attire is bright red, accented by his shoulder gold colored lined cape, with black long boots. Then there is a mask on his face, it hides the scar on his face. The hat was taken off the moment he entered as he held it in his white gloved-covered hand.

No longer does he dress like a prospector, no, he is like a dapper gentleman from some stage play. At least he appears healthy, that you are most grateful for.

“You appear well.” Smiling so gently to him genuinely happy to see his fortune changed.

“Quite,” He moves forward but stops midway when you flinch, “You mousy now? Tsk, when Dyer said you were locked up here I couldn't believe it.” A few long strides and he is beside you facing the window, “To think you would end up here.”

“If you are here to mock me,” Turning your head to look at him, “Please do not.” Begging for a bit of mercy, “It is good however to see you, Mr. Campbell. Despite everything that has happened, I am glad you are safe.”

You still are sweet as honey, you should be broken with all that happened! But you don't remember it… Heh.

“Dyer said you don't remember what happened at Golden Cave.” Ignoring what you said.

You nod then gaze forward as you start explaining what happened.

All you can remember is running into the cave to stop your father. Doctor Dyer says the gas within the cave likely causes you to hallucinate and seems to cause the gap in your memory. The coma though, he does not know what caused that.

“I want to thank you for saving me.” These are the last words to follow.

“Don't see why you should.” Turning around to lean against the hard glass of the window, “Look at the mess you're in.” Crossing his arms.

“Perhaps.” It has been… Hard to put it lightly, “It seems fortune has smiled on you these days. The gold rose pin is a little much though.”

If only you knew how he obtained this wealth. The cost of being now the one on top. If he had to make the choice again… Well, he crossed that threshold of morality the moment he had you in that cave. Taking you, listening to the dark part of himself; his life is now in a place he wants to be. In control and wealthy.

“What brings you here today?” Making conversation, “How have you been?” Curious.

A part of him wishes you would not smile at him, but the other half is excited by you smiling at him. How you have no idea how tainted you are because of him.

He turns to face you as he pulls out an envelope, sealed by ink with a crest design on it, he gives it to you.

Take it in your hand with an inquisitive expression. Why does it have the crest of your mother's family on it?

“I have a business proposal for you.” Cold and cutting to the chase, “One I'm sure you are well acquainted with.”

When you open the envelope, reading each paper, you back away with shock on your face.

“How—” In utter disbelief.

“Money is power, sweetheart. You know that. Don't worry I didn't write that, they did. Figured the best way to settle your pop's debts is to get their granddaughter–” He stopped when he noticed you tearing up but laughing humorlessly.

“Seems karma has a way of balancing out indiscriminately.” You cannot believe this, “Now I am the one owing the company store.”

Sixteen tons. What do you get? Another day older and deeper in debt— He is aware of the miner's song.

“Debt is inevitable. At least, you won't be breaking your back digging for coal.” Shrugging.

“No… Instead, I will be on my knees for you.” A deadpan expression before you sigh. 

Oh, you remember those words, huh? Cute.

“There are worse things that can happen, (Name).” 

You know that. You truly do know that. It just makes you feel bitter, being tossed to be another person's problem. Helpless as these papers basically layout: you have no choice if you want to survive.

There is a harsh reality you must face as a woman of this world: marriage is your only way to stay alive.

“When?”

“In May. A spring wedding. Everyone loves spring weddings from what I was told.”

“And you… Do you agree with this?”

“Why not? They see the advantages and they know how good it would look to marry you to a former employee. One that saved you too. Your father has no kin aside from you and the company is going belly up, I can just absorb it into my own.”

“... What happened to you in a year?”

He does not answer, he instead pulls out a ring from his pocket, “Yes or no, simple as that.” Showing you the ring held up by his thumb and index finger: Gold. An engagement band. Simple with lovely patterns on it.

You offer your left hand to him.

[sureuncertainty]

so as a former employee of RMS Titanic Inc, I have some thoughts I need to get out about this whole current situation, or I will literally explode.

for context, I worked for RMST Inc. for a year and a half as a tour guide and artifact specialist. The company owns the salvage rights to the wreck site, and partners with Oceangate and other companies to retrieve artifacts. the artifacts are used for educational purposes only, in the museum that I worked at, although they weren’t above selling little bits of coal from the Titanic in stupid little tchotchkes like snowglobes and hourglasses.

i dedicated so much of my life and passion to that company and that museum and was treated like absolute dirt lol. and I didn’t even get the worst of it, I had friends and coworkers whose safety and wellbeing was consistently disregarded for the sake of profit, fighting desperately for corporate to stop pretending to care about the legacy of Titanic when all they really cared about was making money

so despite my initial shock at reading about what was going on with the missing submersible, I can’t say I’m surprised. This is what fucking happens when you cut corners and put profit over everything else. If only there was some big historical event that we could look to that would show us just exactly how dangerous that can be...  oh wait.

Jack Thayer, who was 17 when he survived Titanic, said that “the world woke up on April 15, 1912″, which pretty much sums up how SURE people were in 1912 that they would never make those same mistakes again. They realized had gotten complacent and swore things would be different. They enacted safety laws, pointed fingers at survivors, created conspiracy theories to try to explain what happened, all out of fear of it happening again. And yet, history always repeats itself

and now people are fucking OBSESSED with the Titanic, they find it fascinating,  they won’t fucking leave it alone, and the company I worked for, and Oceangate, and others, capitalize on that because they’re greedy and want to make money off of it. all they care about is how to profit off of it. they PRETEND to care about Titanic but they don’t. They never did.

I also actually have a personal connection to one of the five members of the team in the submersible. I met P.H. Nargeolet at the event our museum did commemorating the 110th anniversary of the sinking, I spoke to him and heard firsthand some of his accounts of dives to the wreck site, I even took a picture with him. He cared, he cared so much about Titanic and its legacy, and so do I and so did so many of my friends I worked with. The company we worked for took advantage of our caring, it took advantage of how passionate we were about it in order to line its executives’ fucking pocket

I’m horrified, I’m devastated, I’m vindicated.

on the one hand, I hope this ruins them. i want to watch the company die. there’s a satisfaction in that. but the shitty thing is how much suffering has to happen for things to change. i just wish good people didn’t have to die to make change happen. I wish people cared first, before tragedy strikes. I wish our world wasn’t so fucked up and shit like this didn’t happen. But it did. And it does. And money won’t save any of those people any more than it saved John Jacob Astor or Benjamin Guggenheim, or any of the other rich greedy assholes who died on Titanic. I’m not celebrating their deaths. But I won’t ever forget who suffers the most. The coal trimmers and the stewards and the minimum wage guest service associates at the museum I worked at.

I’m glad I don’t work there anymore. But some of my best friends still do. And I don’t want them to suffer more because of this. All I can hope is that it enacts meaningful change that actually lasts. But I know that’s just wishful thinking.

[myemuisemo]

The fiery bowels of hell are the setting for chapters VIII and IX of The Valley of Fear, in the two most recent Letters from Watson -- or, it's Pennsylvania.

Referring to "this most desolate corner of the United States of America" as of 1875 made me think first of Pittsburgh, but that's not possible, as Pittsburgh's steel industry didn't start until that year. This place in the grimy folds of the Allegheny mountains has been going for a while.

My heart says that the Vermissa Valley is an expy of the Wyoming Valley in the northeastern part of the state, where there is a string of towns from Carbondale at the northern end, through Scranton and Wilkes-Barre, down to Nanticoke. The iron furnaces of Scranton, Grant, and Company had the largest production in the United States in 1865, according to the Anthracite Museum. This is anthracite coal-mining territory, as well: the hardest, blackest, and purest grade of coal.

(Had I known I'd be reading this novel in 2024, I'd have made a point of visiting the Anthracite Museum when I went to Scranton in 2019. I was mostly there for the Steamtown National Historic Site, the massive railroad museum.)

The little single-line railroad could be any of a number of lines, since the Scranton area was the birthplace of railroading and very heavily served. It's possible that the train is a narrow-gauge line, better designed for handling mountains.

Given the meanness and muddiness of the settlement where the twinkling-yet-threatening John McMurdo stops, it's probably not Scranton: that had already passed 35,000 in population by 1875. Wilkes-Barre was a bit above 10,000, which still seems large. Of course, the point of the Wyoming Valley is that there is an almost continuous string of little towns, and we don't know why McMurdo wants any one town more than another.

The presence of a Market Square in chapter IX doesn't indicate much, as that was a common design wherever Connecticut settlers had perched -- which includes Wilkes-Barre, the site of the post-Revolutionary War scuffle between the states of Connecticut and Pennsylvania, known as the Penn-Yan Wars. ("Connecticut sea-to-sea" is also why Ohio has a Western Reserve where the towns look straight out of New England. The Nutmeggers calmed down before getting west of Ohio, though.)

By 1875, the Wyoming Valley was loaded with Germans, Irishmen, and Welshmen, all jostling for mining work that was, in the aftermath of the Panic of 1873, increasingly ill-paid. It was thus a scene of great industry but not great happiness.

I'm not sure what Doyle has in mind for the shacks with verandas lining the streets, so I'll just share an example of an 1876 "company town" house from New Haven, Connecticut. The big factories build tons and tons of these. At one point in the 1990s, I lived in one (not this one). This sort of house typically has three bedrooms on the second floor, a little bedroom off the dining room on the first floor, and enough space for two bedrooms in the attic. So you could squeeze a boarding house in here.

With the boarding house comes the landlord's beautiful daughter. Poor Ettie! She can't get McMurdo to leave her alone, nor can she shed her other suitor. Did she have friends among the daughters and wives of her neighbors, or is she another rose blooming alone in harsh soil?

The Eminent Order of the Freemen are presumably expies of the Freemasons: I guess if the members are going to be dreadful in an organized way, it's necessary to invent a pound-shop knock-off (though the Mormons certainly didn't get that courtesy in A Study in Scarlet).

We're still in the era when fraternal organizations were vital in giving a man entry into society in a new place. You might know no one -- but if you knew the secret handshake, you were instantly provided with friends and business partners. The Welsh Philanthropic Order of True Ivorites was present in the Wyoming Valley; and of course, Odd Fellows were everywhere. (Throw a stone in an old mining town in the U.S., and you'll hit an Odd Fellows Hall. it'll often be one of the oldest buildings still standing.)

The fact that the Freemen's lodge leader is called the Bodymaster -- I assume this is supposed to sound menacing, but it has the ridiculous feel of something the Clampers would have come up with. Yes, fraternal orders were so popular that there was a parody version formed in the 1850s: E Clampus Vitus. The Clampers faded, with the rest of the fraternal movement, after the 1870s -- only to rise again in the 1930s and establish their mission as preserving local history in the West. So many an historic monument in small-town Caliornia has E Clampus Vitus on its plaque as the sponsor.

Since the Bodymaster is excited about making counterfeit currency, I feel this secret society will not be as fun as the Clampers. Having a side line in murdering people, as the Scowrers, also is not quite a gentleman's work.

I'm presuming McMurdo is Douglas, so he's going to get the girl and not get killed -- but something else will surely go very, very wrong.

[allisonreader]

@inklings-challenge Here’s my challenge story for this year.

Grandfather's Story

(Not a true story.)

There’s a story that my grandfather always liked to tell about his days working in a coal mine. He would always tell it to his kids and then us grandkids. Most of us weren’t sure whether to believe it, but he swears that it’s true.

His story starts with a tragedy.

A tunnel had collapsed and miners had died. Others were injured and managed to get out of the mine.

My grandfather had been one of the men tasked with shoring up the tunnel so that the dead could be safely removed to be given to their families for proper burials.

He and the other men took a canary in with them. An important alarm system for them even though they weren’t actively mining.

They had been working for several hours and had managed to bring all but one of the dead up. This particular gentleman had been buried in the wall collapse more than any of the others had been. As soon as they had managed to recover him, my grandfather and the other miners swear on their lives that the canary spoke. Telling them that they needed to leave before the tunnel collapsed further, before the bird fell completely silent.

Not a single man my grandfather worked with hesitated. They grabbed the dead man and booked it out of the mine as quickly as they could. Just making it out before the tunnel did indeed collapse behind them.

The canary returned to its regular singing once out of the mine.

Not a single one of those miners; my grandfather included, heard that canary or any other, speak like that again. My grandfather was certain that if the canary hadn’t spoken that all of them working to retrieve that last man would have been buried and died.

When that canary died, he was buried with all the dignity of a human and was given his own highly attended funeral. All the miners who were there that day, came to honour the bird that not only saved their lives but allowed families to bury their loved ones as they wanted to.

I still find it hard to believe that the canary spoke, but it’s also hard to argue with the amount of witnesses. Plus my grandfather loves to tell the story and I won’t tell him what to believe when he was the one who was there.

🐦‍⬛🐦🐦‍⬛🪹🪺🐦‍⬛🐦🐦‍⬛

So fun fact. I wrote this fairly short story during the duration of a one of the sprints that I've held this year. It came from out of nearly nowhere where, as I certainly never had anything planned like this for Team Chesterton, either this year or previous. I also have only given it a basic once over before posting it. (Mostly out of fear of not deciding to not post it if I leave it too long.) I'm still not super confident about it. Part of that is because of how I wrote it feels very much like a post that you would come across in the wild on this site in some ways. By which I mean I feel like it's more written like a post telling a story than how I typically write stories. Anyways I think I should stop over explaining before this becomes more of a mess than this note might already be.

(Three days after originally posting; post note. I'm pretty sure the nerves about sharing this were more just typical new posting than actually about the style. Because the story does exactly what I intended it to do. Be a quick story told in a way like I'm telling friends/explaining this story that is passed down by family. So I mean it's definitely not that I don't like it, it's just generally not how I write fictional stories. Anyways this is to say that while I might not have been confident, doesn't mean that I don't feel accomplished in what I have written. Now I probably really have over explained at this point.)

[nichenarratives]

Hurricane Heller 15

A Niche Narratives Fanficiton.

last | first | next

[tw for: period typical anti-semitism, anti-semitic terrorism, mentions of ww1]

15. Chag Sameach

Of all the months in the year, Mordecai despises December. Not only is it unbearably cold for a short haired feline, but it's also the time of year that complete strangers feel the need to wish one another holiday greetings for a celebration he does not acknowledge, bid for charity, or generally put their noses where they don't belong. While such behaviour does lead to an increased interrogator workload, the anticipated flush of funds is swiftly swallowed by increased electricity or coal and wood costs, leaving him exhausted and miserable, with very little to show for his efforts.

However, with the United States' continued involvement with ongoing disputes in Eurasia, such restrictions would worsen swiftly; food, electric and fuel shortages plague the poorer sectors of the city, while continued contractions in economic growth and massive inflation raise domestic prices for what remains available. Despite hating the cold, Mordecai stops purchasing coal for the fire and rations what he has left, his home practically an icebox that wilts his plants and tests his immune system on a daily basis. 

All high calorie or shelf-stable food, especially wheat, meat and fatty foods, are harshly rationed so excess can be sent to the frontline. Kosher meat in particular gets increasingly more difficult to source, leading to a restricted diet of soups or broths that do little to warm or fill his stomach. He loses weight and has to layer numerous blankets to sleep at night, though often nods off in the warmer launderette back room due to restless nights as frost gathered along the windowsill.

Despite being willing to do his duty for a country that openly despises his people, Mordecai is swiftly removed from the conscription pool due to severe myopathy, instead watching his neighbourhood become almost a ghost town overnight. As one of the few remaining men, a cluster of those deemed too sickly or disabled to serve, he's highly aware glares and quiet remarks questioning his patriotism follow him down the street, but that's the least of his concerns.

It's never been more dangerous to walk the streets openly sporting a kippah or tallit, as rumours from the frontline of an Semitic conspiracy to transform Europe into a Jewish haven begin to infiltrate the city. While known to the family, most in his area of the city aren't aware of his religious affiliation, but that doesn't prevent his concerns regarding his mother; she still takes his sisters to Sabbath services each Sunday even as reports of arson attacks during prayer, rising assault cases and even false arrests hit the papers.

He's still not spoken to them since his brief interaction with Esther, but that doesn't abate his concern; estranged he may be, but he's far from distant. He still slips their - recently thinned - allowance under the door, but adds an afternoon walk past his childhood home to his schedule, to ensure smoke rises from the chimney as mother makes the evening meal.

It's a reassurance they made it home safe, one he clings to until before his next walk.

By the seventh of December and the United States' official declaration of war on Austria-Hungary, Mordecai is forced to shut down the two least profitable enterprise's, the races and the launderette, and moves his base of operations to the most stable business; the Casino.

A week before Christmas, the seasonal celebration most of the city has preoccupied itself with to feed their sullen souls, Mordecai gets an unexpected visit from Gabriel in his office at Casino Royale. Since they usually only converse at the old quarry - their new interrogation site, after the factory was reopened to manufacture artillery for the war effort - the tom is wary when the man is shown in. Offered a drink, Gabriel gladly accepts before sitting down in a plush chair opposite Mordecai with his usual broad, toothy grin. 

Working closely with the family for a year allowed Mordecai to gather more intelligence on his coworkers, and Gabriel is no exception. The pure white persian is Mr Savage's most trusted Cleaner, a man who finds, secures and after an interrogator is done with them, disposes of the loose ends that running a shady business tends to produce. He's also technically the monochrome tom's direct manager, paid enough to give Mordecai a third of it after his work is complete, a lucrative arrangement for the cheerful feline.

"Afternoon, Kosher," he states, taking off his hat and placing it on the desk before getting comfortable, slinging a calf onto the opposite knee and leaning back in his chair. Sharp eyes scale around a room far larger and more appealing than the Launderette store room before returning to bored emeralds, the cheerful feline digging in his breast pocket for a smoke. "Nice digs. Who'd you have to kill for this pretty piece?"

"Fiores," the monochrome tuxedo responds blandly, closing his ledger with a sigh as the persian cracks up with laughter,  an ear flickering in irritation as he waits for him to settle. It takes an enforcer placing a scotch on the rocks before him for Gabriel to quiet down, though he chuckles even through sipping the liquor. Mordecai sits back and regards him with narrowed eyes, unamused. "Why are you here, Gabriel? I'm exceptionally busy."

The man hums through a mouthful of whiskey and swallows with a gulp, lowering the glass slightly to point at Mordecai with his index finger. "You're always busy," he observes, not at all perturbed by the other, as he's grown accustomed to Isaiah Fitzgerald's direct style of communication. When he deepens his glare, Gabriel dips his spare hand into a pocket and withdraws a Christmas card, offering it across the table. "The boss asked me to deliver this in person."

Mordecai sighs softly before he leans over to take the card, placing it face down on the table, without looking inside, his gaze remaining on Gabriel. While unoffended by the gaudy, decorated tree and snow-surrounded robin on the front, he's had enough of the imagery already; the city seems to have gone mad with it this year. "Jewish practices don't observe Christmas," he states. "But I can send a return card, if that is customary."

Gabriel pauses to light up, apparently not put off by the lack of an ashtray. Mordecai wrinkles his nose as he sucks on the offensive stick, the scent of burning tobacco permeating the small office before he even exhales.

"Open it," the persian feline instructs, leaning back with that same irritating smile still plastered across his face. Mordecai begrudgingly opens it flat on the table and finds no seasonal greetings.or message besides the name 'Kosher', above a date and time, scrawled in the bottom left corner. Mordecai frowns and glances up. "It's an invitation," Gabriel clarifies. "To the boss' annual poker game; a Christmas thing, but I don't know anyone brave enough to refuse an invitation. I don't think you're fool enough to be the first, either."

He pauses to down the rest of his whiskey, the ice clinking against the glass, before placing the empty tumbler down and retrieving his hat. "Be outside and ready to go," Gabriel elaborates as he replaces his hat, wide smile not leaving his muzzle. "And bring a gift. We usually aim for about half a month's wage. Just don't try giving him money; if he wanted cash, he'd cut your wage."

The persian stands, laughs at his own joke and sees himself out of the office. Once he's gone, Mordecai frowns at the invitation again, holding the card open with a splayed palm. December 24th; 1300 hours. With no prior plans and certain a refusal will see him floating in the bay Christmas morning, Mordecai is forced to think on what gift he could source in six days for the head of New York's largest crime syndicate.

What do people even give for Christmas?

oOo

Unfamiliar with Christian traditions and without the energy or time to conduct sufficient research, Mordecai falls back on Passover tradition and purchases a bespoke Seder plate; a simple white ceramic with a gold leaf trim, and a central tree of life motif. The branches of the tree link to six shallow, gold trim bowls set into indents on the plate, as another gold tree motif adorns the interior of each bowl to match.

While a traditional Seder plate may possess inscriptions to denote intended contents of bowls, Mordecai is painfully aware Mr Savage doesn't care for Passover traditions, so forgoes the inscription to allow free use of the ceramic plate as a serving dish for any occasion. He even fills the bowls with dried fruits and nuts before boxing up the bastardized Seder, securing a simple card inscribed with the traditional chag sameach on top.

He waits outside on Christmas Eve in heavy winter gear; his coat collar popped against the cold, a deep red scarf tucked into his overcoat and thick leather gloves. Standing under the awning over his front door to avoid the wind, he still shivers, so is thankful when his ride is punctual. At exactly one, the usual estate car pulls up to the curb, and Mordecai wastes no time getting in if only to get out of the cold.

Placing the gift down on the left hand seat, Mordecai sits far to the right, diagonal to the driver, who only glances over his shoulder before they pull away. No words are exchanged, which isn't unusual, so Mordecai spends the time blowing into his palms or briskly rubbing his hands together in his gloves, shoulders hunched and coat pulled high around his neck, until he's sufficiently warmed up.

The drive downtown is short. They turn into a neighborhood the tuxedo isn't familiar with, though the tall, narrow homes, boarded windows where shattered glass would otherwise let in the cold and flaking exterior plaster is familiar enough as they pass through. 

Soon enough, they leave the slums and pass into a middle class area, before slipping into the entertainment district.

Mordecai has never been this far into the city before. Bright neon lights glimmer and shine outside every restaurant and bar, denoting cocktails, liquor or burlesque shows, all a stark contrast to the dim storefronts of his own neighbourhoods. In addition to the visual clutter, muted music thrums around the car, swelling and abating as they pass establishments in a constant tide against the dark.

Despite it being new and mildly overwhelming, he takes it all in through narrowed eyes, no change in expression besides folding ears back at the cacophony of conflicting sounds or squinting against the glare reflecting off his pince nez. Silently, he hopes he has no reason to return to this area of the city besides forcibly attend another of Savage's parties; it's abhorrent to tolerate.

A short while later, they pull up outside a diner deep in the heart of it all. Mordecai thanks the driver, tips him fifty cents and slides out of the cab with the gift box in hand, pausing to study his destination as the cab pulls off. Stanley's sports a cursive neon proclaiming its existence for miles, though its green and red words flicker as the power grid fluctuates and stabilizes, likely due to the egregious electrical consumption of the surrounding area.

The diner is double fronted, with large windows either side of an equally large door covered by drapes, reducing those inside to simple, dark shapes set to a blinding backdrop. A raucous racket escapes through windows, left ajar to vent cigarette smoke. Classic music rounds out the affronting mixture; one of a dozen Christmas songs on repeat all over the city, drawing guests into screeching along, many already half-drunk anr celebrating their half day off work.

Dark ears folding back, Mordecai grimaces. Establishments like these are a personal nightmare, usually filled with drunk patrons getting too handsy in dark corners, deafeningly loud conversation and a considerable lack of personal space. Yet I have no choice, do I? He thinks bitterly, his personal invite to this shindig tucked into a breast pocket. If I don't partake, I may as well sign my own death certificate.

With that sobering thought, he takes a steadying breath and stepping forward, pushes the door open to step inside.

The decor is excessively bright; chairs, tables and even wall decor of bright red is offset by plain white wall tiles, a single black accent tile periodically set in walls and floors. Booths line the walls, while metallic folding chairs and tables line up to create walkways between the booths and the counter, at which a number of red leather stools reside facing an open kitchen, the chef stressed and hot, sweat running down his face to the towel around his neck.

Classic Christmas music, jovial laughter and off-key singing assaults the tom's senses, accented by the clang of kitchen utensils and conversations being shouted over the noise of it all. Unable to spot Gabriel in the diner, Mordecai flattens his ears to his skull and carefully approaches the bar. 

He's briefly interrupted by a drunken construction worker tripping over his own feet, reaching for Mordecai to catch him; the monochrome swiftly pivots out of reach, present held away, and the man lands face-first in someone's side salad, the momentum of his fall dragging it to the floor with him. There's a heartbeat of mostly silence before the worker sits up and languidly licks mayonnaise and lettuce off his face, to which the whole dinner bursts out laughing, many a drunkard raising their glass in cheers to a fallen comrade.

Mordecai backs away from the scene, turning around only when his back hits the bar. A young woman behind the bar giggles as the construction worker tries to get back up, slips on a sliced tomato and falls right back down on his behind. The tom clears his throat, placing the gift box down on the counter once 'Kendall' meets his gaze. "My presence was requested by Mr Savage," he states, cringing as he's forced to raise his voice to be heard above the ruckus. "However, I cannot locate him. Please hand him this with my regards."

She looks him up and down, chewing gum with her mouth open, then Kendall smiles and leans her elbow on the bar, resting her chin in a palm to meet his gaze. "Well, ain't you a sight for sore eyes," she drawls, blonde ringlets framing her face having escaped the messy bun on her head. Mordecai wrinkles his nose as she leans closer and bats her lashes "You goin' home with somebody tonigh', sugar? 'Cause I'd sure like t'open you up after midnigh'."

Unable to decide if he finds her proposition or her incessant gum chewing more abhorrent, Mordecai is blunt, though the current political climate forces him to reconsider the obvious 'I'm Jewish' response. "I'm not interested," he states after a moment of consideration, pushing the present towards her across the counter. His own expression stays disinterested as her own smile sours. "But as previously stated, I'd appreciate it if this could be handed to Mr Savage. Tonight, if possible."

"You got an invite?" Kendall asks sharply as she straightens behind the bar, still obnoxiously chewing the wad of gum as she taps her claws on the counter top. She regards the tom with a slight glare, all semblances of friendliness gone. "Savage always sends 'em invites for private par'ies. Ya got one, ya can hand it to 'im ya'self. Otherwise it's goin' out that there door with ya."

With a tired sigh, he reaches into his coat and produces the invitation, holding it between his index and middle fingers as he offers it to her. Kendall takes the card and flips it open, then glares at Mordecai through thick lashes. "Should'a guessed you was the Yid, with them manners." White brows knit into a scowl, but Kendall only rolls her eyes, unlatches a hinged countertop and raises it, beckoning him through with a curled finger. "C'mon. The boss' waitin' on ya. This way."

[pb-dot]

Spooktober Sunday Special III

We're back to our poor Jake, and today we're going to get a good long look at our mysterious captor. This is where things start getting a little body horror-y so be forewarned.

14.09.552?

Recovered from Site A after the Incident.

It’s been a couple of days, and I have mostly spent my time in trying to understand my captor. I hope this effort will allow me to establish a dialog and negotiate for my freedom, but I see now that I have my work cut out for me.

The first few days he was absent, dropping in to deliver whatever food and drink he had scavenged for me for the day and otherwise leaving me to my exile. In these brief visits, his heavy cloak was more than sufficient to cast him in complete shadow from the flickering oil lamp he had stocked my cell with. He took on an almost mythical stature to me back then, appearing in my mind’s eye like a shadow being. The first time he did one of his impossible jumps up into the vertical coal chute, I half believed the darkness within had undone the cloak’s clasps and dissipated into its brethrens darkness in the corners of my room.

Just before his second-to-last visit, I felt a terrible tiredness overtake me. I hope it is the lack of sunlight and sporadic food and water intake the last couple of days, and not some more ominous malady. Whatever the reason, I rested on my simple bedroll in the corner of my rough-stone cell as I heard the rumbling of the chute.

He landed rougher than he used to, which is to say his cloak dipped in such a way that one might imagine his knees buckling. He regarded me, his hood shifting slightly indicating, at least to me, some sort of curiosity. “What do you want?” I asked, expecting no response per usual. While he did not answer directly, he did do something unexpected. One long, gangly arm emerged from the darkness of the cloak. I couldn’t quite see the hand at the end of the appendage from my supine position, but the glimpse I caught seemed off in some way I couldn’t quite articulate. Once the hand, in whatever form it took reached its goal of the rough-hewn brass clasp holding the cloak together and undid it, however, I was at once struck with a barrage of sense impressions that left me unable to contemplate the matter of the hand.

For all my life, I’ve lived under the impression that there are rules to the human body, inherent design specifications to the divine machinery of man that stipulates what makes a man more than a creature. None can touch these stipulations any more than they can change when the tides come in or when the seasons change, I thought. I was so, so wrong.

The man whose mere existence shattered my understanding of what a human should be, what we could be, stood before me, disrobed and seemingly unashamed in the face of his inherent blasphemy. He had been a beautiful man once, I could tell at a glance, but what he had become, what had surely been done to him had done its best to stop it, to twist beauty into something else. It wasn’t ugliness, it was something distinctly other, an un-beauty of sorts.

His long arms had been beautifully shaped before they had been cut up in long precise cuts crossing the forearm and elbow up towards the shoulders. His arms had perhaps been hairless from the get-go, or something about the process in which the flesh was pulled apart to allow room for the mechanical joints that brought to mind the gearwalker actuators had rendered them so. I couldn’t see the mechanism with which the pale white metal contraption was fastened to the body, but bumps in the flesh around the mechanism hinted at screws or rivets of some kind.

One hand, the right, was almost natural-looking, and you could be forgiven for believing it was a regular hand covered by an unusually elaborate metal glove if you hadn’t seen the joining area. A maw of the shiny white metal dug into his flesh, and I could see strings of raw flayed flesh move in and out matching with the slight fidgeting movement of the hand. The left hand, by comparison, was alien to the point of incomprehension, and it wasn’t just because my captor kept the entire arm straight and unmoving. In the strictest sense, the arm didn’t end in a hand as much as in a brass casing about the size of a hand. Although I couldn’t see them from my angle, I had little doubt that the white metal teeth dug into the left arm in a similar way. The casing was almost featureless, wasn’t it for a wide gap at the top of the thing, the exact purpose of which I could not puzzle out.

His knees had been modified in a similar way to his elbows, although the mechanisms were embedded deeper in the limb, almost enough that the part of me that couldn’t stop thinking about how and why all of this was done would wonder whether any part of the actual knee remained. One foot looked about as normal as one could expect, but the other one was replaced entirely with a metal simulacra, no doubt the source of the clangs I heard when he pursued me.

The captor's shoulders were altogether more complicated, and in some way, it made the grotesque invasive modifications easier to bear. I found my brain cataloging the handiwork of it all. Much more flesh had been torn away here to allow enough room for the massive hungry-looking gears that allowed for the coaxial movement the joint requires. The mechanism that supplied these large gears, and what appeared to be a rotational mechanism attaching the arm to the shoulder gear pair, was hidden by the big gears, but even in the low lights, I could see the edges of the stripped pectorals and trapezoidal muscles to somewhere within the mechanism. My mind tried to stick to the engineering of it all, how to convert pull motion to rotational motion, gear exchanges to maximize power, but try as I might, the sheer horror of this that I saw before me became overwhelming.

Someone, I realized, had brutalized this poor creature. Someone had stripped muscles and tendons of their protective layers and wound them to gears and springs, someone had scraped skin, dislocated joints, cut and pulled and pried flesh from its natural state. They had drained and rerouted blood, cut nerves, pulled tendons, and surely more. They had made a mockery of the human form in order to... what? Make a creature stronger than a man? Make a machine they could instruct, a machine that could learn? Was it all for the sheer hubristic desire to remake or change what nature had made? Or maybe even just to see if they could?

Fighting both nausea and deep dread, I found myself again asking my captor "What do you want..." now more a mewling complaint than a demand I am ashamed to admit.

For the first time since he had disrobed an eternity and yet not more than minutes ago, my captor moved, moving his normal-looking hand to gesture at his unmoving left arm. As this pantomime obviously failed to communicate what he wished to tell me, my captor shook his head in annoyance. I can not tell whether it was at himself or at me, but whichever it was, the cure was the same as he quickly snatched his cloak from the floor and bound up into the coal chute again.

I am, needless to say, shook at the sights I have seen today. Even now, my mind revolves around this creature that has captured me, but as disturbing as it all is, one thing is interesting to me. Either this is a precursor to some insight I have not yet fully understood or a show that my capture is finally eroding my sanity. Either way, it bears noting.

Despite all the terrible things forced on my poor soul today, what my mind has refused to let go of are the three notable things about my captor I have not yet put in writing. First, the number 13 tattooed between his right eyebrow and the edge of his cropped blonde hair, secondly, his tired blue eyes, and third, the way his delicate lips were sown together with rough thread.

Tag List

@ettawritesnstudies @mrbexwrites @teacupsandstarlight @anonymousfoz @wrenofthewords @sm-writes-chaos @dyrewrites @owlsandwich @olive-riggzey @athenswrites @kingkendrick7

If you want to be put on the Tag List for this project, please interact with my Tag List Post

[odder-oddish]

Between Breaths

From the beginning, they had each other. Though that was sometimes more of a curse than a blessing. The constant threat of a painful death doesn't leave much time for connection, but two souls move closer nonetheless. A look into the progression of Claudette and Meg's relationship, through glimpses of the different trials AKA, I absolutely adore this ship and think these two were made for each other. Because if there's one more thing we need in this world, it's queer women.

Also, this is my account now. I posted once about a week ago on @oddest-oddish, but now, I can't even log into it. So, it's me again, with a new blog and a hope that things go a little more smoothly.

The nurse is downright terrifying. Meg has seen her four times now, and only escaped against her once. Having Nea around certainly evens the playing field; it's nice having another competent survivor around. The two of them trade hits for each other and manage to steal the attention of some of the killers when the other needs a breather. But there's only so much she can do.

Meg hates her role in many of the trials. She knows that she could act more selfishly, like Dwight or Claudette do, but when her heart starts going, she can't help but step into the spotlight, always going out fighting, often the only one in the group willing to take the risk.

Which leads to her current predicament. Her shoulder is bleeding badly, having been dug into by a rusty bone saw several times already. Meg's head is pounding as she runs back to the top floor of the coal tower, the nurse right on her heels. The generator up here must have been recently finished, as it hadn't been lit up the last time she was here. The nurse teleported right next to her, but Meg was faster, bolting out of reach and leaping off the building.

As she ran from the tower, Meg spotted movement behind a stack of crates. Claudette was kneeling behind them, attempting to remain out of site from the nurse. So this was why generators still weren't finished. Who knew how long she'd just been waiting around, letting everyone else take the heat from the killer.

"Would you stop being a coward and do something?" Meg shouted, loud enough for Claudette to flinch and back away from her. It wasn't just the nurse she had to worry about; Meg was furious. "I've been running my ass off over here"

"So-Sorry. I'm sorry," Claudette whisper yelled, but as the nurse came in for the kill, she still made no move to help.

Meg cursed at Claudette as the bone saw knocked her to her feet. While she hadn't succeeded in evading the nurse, she had piqued the killer's curiosity. Instead of picking up Meg, the nurse began to look around, locating Claudette and beginning chase.

Maybe it was cruel, but Meg felt a smug sense of satisfaction as the nurse dropped Claudette on a hook only a minute later. That feeling was quickly replaced with a tearing pain as Meg met the same fate soon after.

____________________

The Hillbilly was a cruel killer, especially today. After knocking Meg to the ground with a vicious attack from his chainsaw, he left her bleeding out on the ground. Maybe a nearby generator was nearing completion and he wanted to disrupt the progress or perhaps he'd seen someone else and wanted to give chase. Either way, Meg was left on the ground, slowly bleeding out. Her vision was blurry and her head hurt. She felt like crying, but forced herself to stay strong, trying to get back on her feet.

Suddenly, she heard a rustle in the bushes. Through hazy eyesight, she made out a familiar brown jacket nearby.

"Help me dammit!" she said, voice strained. The figure, Claudette, made no effort to move. "He's not even here. Either help me out or do a generator or something." Nothing.

"I'm coming Meg, hang on," shouted another voice.

___________________

The Trapper must have been having a bad day. That or he really wanted Meg dead. He'd been so focused on chasing her that Meg hadn't come across a set trap yet. Sure, there were times he'd leave her, but those were probably to chase David or Feng Min. At least, that's what Meg assumed.

"Maybe stay away from the gas station," she told David, as he and Claudette worked together to bandage her injuries. "He broke a lot of the pallet over there. Nothing you need to worry about, of course." The last sentence was directed towards Claudette, who bowed her head, looking away from Meg. She finished wrapping Meg's shoulder then turned away, probably to sit in the corner again.

Several minutes later, Meg was running through stacks of abandoned cars, evading the trapper when she saw Claudette from the corner of her eye. She was about to yell instead when a loud snap stopped her. Claudette was hunched over a massive bear trap, having just disarmed it.

Later, as she ran to the old shack after knocking a pallet over the trapper's head, Claudette's head poked up from the other side of the window. She held up a hand to stop Meg from leaping over the window as she once again disarmed a set trap.

Wait, had she been doing this the whole time? Maybe the trapper had been setting up traps, but if Claudette was sneaking around behind him, she could have stopped him from getting any use out of them. Meg gave Claudette a curt nod before turning to the generator in the shack. As it neared completion, Claudette scurried off again, this time to close a trap in front of the exit that Meg definitely wouldn't have seen.

"Good eyes," said Meg, as Claudette began to open the door.

"Thank you. I'm happy to support you when you keep putting yourself in danger for us," she answered.

____________________

Claudette was indeed becoming an extremely supportive teammate. Sometimes, when Meg was injured, Claudette would follow blood trails on the ground and find her to give her a quick patch-up. She worked on generators whenever she wasn't needed elsewhere to keep the team moving towards their goal. Recently, she'd asked Jake to teach her how to break the hooks. Because she moved so stealthily, killers didn't know she was nearby until she was there, knocking the hooks to the ground. Meg began to appreciate seeing her near the campfire as they burned offerings together, preparing for the trial ahead.

"Do you want this back?" Meg asked after an extraordinarily easy trial. They were waiting by the exit, waiting for Yui to work her way around the map, just in case the Clown managed a lucky couple hits. She held out a flashlight to Claudette. Meg had been using one of her own at the beginning of the match, and when the batteries ran out, Claudette came out of nowhere, pressing a new one into her hand.

"No thank you. I don't use them often, and I found a really good med-kit in the basement," Claudette answered. "Thank you though. I appreciated you saving me earlier."

"Couldn't have done it if you hadn't found it for me," said Meg, clicking it a couple times. "Hey, can I show you something that might help you in the future when you're jumping windows?"

Claudette nodded, so Meg led her over to a nearby window. "If you put more effort into the initial jump, and then use your hand as a guide, you can avoid hitting your feet against the top of the ledge." Meg took a running start and cleared the window with ease. "It's a lot quieter this way, so the killers won't notice. Give it a shot."

Claudette ran towards the window and tried to copy Meg's move. But without the same level of coordination, her hand slipped and she tumbled over the window instead. Meg immediately rushed to her side. "Fuck. I didn't explain that well. Try to focus on getting more heigh on your lower foot," she said. "It takes a lot of power. Even I can't pull it off consistently."

While they waited, Claudette tried a couple more times, eventually clearing the vault silently, though she staggered a lot as she landed, trying to right herself after the vault. Meg whooped for her, and at the same time, she saw Yui in the distance.

"Let's get outta here," she said, opening the exit door. "Maybe we'll find a fallen tree and you can give it another go."

"I'd like that," said Claudette, offering a bright smile that Meg had rarely seen. Her heart thumped aggressively, and she didn't think this was the Clown's doing.

____________________

The first generator had been completed without anyone being found. Either the killer was having a rough start or someone was being stalked. Meg shuddered at the thought of the latter but brushed it off as she leapt over a window to the bottom deck of the abandoned ship. To her surprise, she landed just inches away from where Claudette was standing. When she saw her, Meg's jaw dropped.

Meg had always thought Claudette was attractive, in the cute, nerdy sort of way. But today, she was wearing a sleeveless golden dress with a stunning pattern embroidered on the front. It was backless, and Meg had to tear her gaze away before she got too distracted by her friend. Were they friends now? Claudette's hair, which was almost always pulled up or fit under a hat, hung freely, framing her face perfectly. She was stunning.

Meg wasn't the only one distracted by Claudette's outfit. The other woman was looking at the swamp ground hesitantly, sticking a foot out almost as if she was testing the temperature of the pool.

"You good?" asked Meg, voice oddly hoarse in her throat.

"Oh, you startled me. It's just, all muddy and gross, and I'm wearing sandals and…" Claudette trailed off.

Meg frowned. They'd been through a lot worse than this. Through the months, Claudette had braved chainsaw wounds, hatchets to the back, and drops from second story buildings. A little mud shouldn't mean much, unless-

"Is it like, one of your sensory things you told me about?" asked Meg.

Claudette nodded. "I don't like the way it feels on my feet. It's all cold and distracting." She looked embarrassed about it.

In the distance, Jane screamed in pain. They had to get moving to make the most of their early lead. "What size are they?" Meg asked.

"Um, I don't know. Probably like an eight," said Claudette, clearly confused by the question.

"Not much smaller than mine." Meg kicked off her shoes and gestured to them. "Will these work?"

"I- are you sure, Meg?"

"Course. Need you on your A game for this."

"Thank you so much," said Claudette, hurrying to slide the shoes on. They clashed horribly with the dress. Meg privately thought she looked adorable with the mismatch, then cursed herself for thinking it.

Meg didn't know for sure that the shoes made a difference, but the trial went smoothly. Twice she looked up to see Claudette running from the Trickster, ducking and weaving around throwing knives. She looked confident, in control. Meg watched as she faked moving one way before running back and slamming a pallet down on his head. Claudette had come so far in these trials, and she was a thrill to watch.

Next to her, David cleared his throat loudly. "We're supposed to be doing generators, not oglin' our teammates," he said roughly.

"Shut it," said Meg, but she ducked her head down and began working with some of the wires on the generator.

The rest of the trial went by quickly, Claudette and Jane keeping the Trickster from getting a single hook. On her way to the gate, Meg spotted Claudette's sandals on the boat. She hooked a finger through the ankle straps and carried them with her. Maybe she'd appreciate having them back.

____________________

"Meg, you okay?" Claudette asked, pulling her off the hook. Meg had spent the last five minutes running from the Hag, and only one generator was left. She panted from exertion, sweat sticking her hair to her forehead.

"Yeah. Let's get out of here. No point patching me up when we're so close to finished." Meg began to walk to the basement of the preschool. Suddenly, there was a gasp behind her. Claudette grabbed her around the midsection, pulling her back.

"Trap!" she said. Meg looked down. Claudette was right. One more step and she would have stepped on one of the Hag's traps, summoning her right to them. She'd almost gotten them both killed.

"Good eye," said Meg, straining to catch her breath. "I owe you one."

"Just, be careful next time."

Suddenly, Meg became extremely aware of the fact that neither she nor Claudette had attempted to move. They were still standing at the top of the stairs, Claudette's arms wrapped around Meg's middle. The preschool was a rather chilly realm, so having someone this close was… warm. Calming.

All too soon, and yet, far later than she should have, Claudette's arms dropped to her sides. "Here, let me destroy it, and we'll get this generator done." Meg nodded and followed Claudette to the basement, her mind slightly hazy, lingering on the touch.

And that night, if she wrapped her arms around herself and pretended it was someone else, who could blame her?

____________________

Dying to the Entity wasn't as bad when Meg knew she was the only sacrifice of the trial. The ground was alight as the realm threatened to collapse on them all, and the Huntress had posted up right in front of Meg's hook, hatchet in hand, humming that dark lullaby. They'd been extra sharp this time; a single blow had knocked Meg to the ground.

But knowing that her friends would escape made the pain more bearable. Three of them surviving made it all feel okay.

Suddenly, she heard a noise from behind her. "Dun dun duuun duun duun duuuuun," a low voice was copying the Huntress' tune, a poor mimicry of the original. The Huntress turned, searching for the source of the sound and Ace popped his head out from behind a bush, clicking his flashlight and shouting at her.

"Ace, what the hell?" she shouted, when suddenly, hands were at her sides, pulling her off the hook. Claudette had used the lapse in the Huntress's attention to pull Meg off the hook. She held a finger to her lips, and Meg did her best to hide her cries of pain as they ran for the exit. They were just about to leave when Meg spotted a glowing totem next to a rotting fence. It definitely had not been lit the last time Meg passed it.

"Hah- you missed me! Is that the- wait why are you so fast?" Ace shouted in the distance.

"Take this," said Claudette. She handed Meg her med-kit before crouching down to destroy the totem.

"So I take it we're gonna go save grandpa?" Meg asked, pulling out gauze and beginning to treat the worst of her wounds.

"If that's ok. He didn't want to go back, but insisted I didn't go alone."

"Saving me was your idea?" Claudette was never one for reckless rescue attempts. She assumed it had to have been Ace's plan (it certainly wasn't Felix's). But Claudette had insisted they come back for her. Meg's heart did a weird flip again as she finished bandaging herself up.

Claudette nodded as she finished cleansing the totem. "Shall we?"

"Yeah, we got this. Together."

What followed was sixty seconds of absolute chaos. The two picked Ace off the ground while the huntress searched a nearby locker for another hatchet. After dodging the next throw, the women shielded Ace from a nearby hit before Felix stole her attention, running for the opposite door. With Ace staggering along behind them, Meg and Claudette made it back to the original exit.

"Thanks, man," Meg told Ace as they passed through the open doors.

"Don't mention it," said Ace. "I was just surprised Claudette suggested it. Well the whole distraction bit was my deal, but she was adamant we go back for your ass." Claudette looked away as soon as she was mentioned, hiding her face in her jacket. Curious.

"Felix is never gonna let you hear the end of it," said Meg, punching him in the shoulder. The Huntress's melody carried over the air, so the three of them left the realm.

"I know, I know," said Ace. He sighed dramatically but couldn't help but smile at his partner's mention.

"I think it's sweet," said Claudette. "Having someone look after you like that."

"You mean like you just did?" Meg asked. It was meant to be a joke, but Claudette's expression immediately went blank. She sped up through the fog, hurrying back towards camp. "Did I say something wrong?" she said to Ace.

"I don't know. You tell me," he said. His eyebrows were raised high above the lenses of his sunglasses, and he seemed to be holding back a laugh. They returned to camp, Meg even more confused than ever.

____________________

The generator must have been about halfway completed as Meg approached it. She could hear muffled voices as she climbed the stairs of the asylum. She peeked into the doorway to see Zarina and Claudette working. Zarina was laughing about something as they worked.

"You don't really think so, do you?" asked Claudette. Her voice had risen in pitch and taken an airy tone, a sign she was embarrassed.

"What are you guys talking about?" Meg asked, opening a nearby chest.

"Nothing!" Claudette's answer came suspiciously quick and Zarina laughed again.

Towards the end of the trial Claudette was running for her life from the Oni. One more unfortunate hit and she was dead. He chased her into a narrow passageway between two large walls, easily closing the distance.

Zarina was just outside the alley, but not close enough to help out. Without thinking, Meg leapt over the wall's only window, coming between Claudette and the demon as his sword swung down. She grunted in pain and Claudette made a surprised noise. "Let's go!" shouted Meg. With Zarina's assistance, the women made it to the gate that Yun-Jin had finally gotten open.

Zarina leaned in close to Claudette. "I told you so," she said, just barely loud enough for Meg to hear.

Claudette slowed as they made their way back to camp. She was always quiet, but her expressions seemed even more stoic. Her eyes were glassy and she kept looking up at Meg before quickly averting her eyes. Meg wanted to ask what she was thinking about, too see if Zarina had offended her or made her upset, but she sensed that now wasn't the time. Meg would just have to wait and see.

____________________

"Did we all make it?" asked Meg, running up the hill of the swamp towards the exit gate where her best friend waited.

"Yeah, I had the siblings leave early. They're a little too new to risk having them wait behind," said Claudette.

"Aw, waiting for me all by yourself? You almost sound like you care about me."

"You know I do." Claudette took Meg's hand as they left the trial grounds together. Meg's heart leapt at the touch as they headed out into the fog.

____________________

"Claude, I've got another EMP if you need it." Meg entered the shack with the device in hand. A strange orb was stuck to Claudette's back, and two others lined the shack's walls.

"That'd be great," said Claudette, busy at a generator. Meg fired the device and the mess on Claudette's shirt disappeared. "Thanks."

Meg nodded and knelt by her side. The generator was nearly complete, so in a few seconds, the shack was filled with a bright light. "Remember when all we had to deal with was chainsaws and bear traps?" she asked. "Now we're fighting evil robots with 3d printers."

"A lot sure has changed," said Claudette. "You don't run full speed at the killer anymore."

"And you don't sit on the sidelines, letting me."

"Touche."

____________________

Meg was nearly finished with a generator in the red forest when she heard two sets of footsteps. The people were out of view. Meg left the generator to join them when she heard the sound of Claudette gasping in pain, but froze when she heard a voice.

"So, are you two like, official yet?" came a low, yet feminine voice.

"Elodie, shh. She's in this trial, you know," Claudette answered.

Meg turned the corner to see Elodie and Claudette. The older woman had a med-kit and was mending a tear on Claudette's arm. Claudette's other arm was covering her face; she was completely flustered.

"Hey guys, need some help with that," Meg asked, crouching down next to them. Claudette made a small sound of embarrassment but leaned closer to Meg anyway. The chainsaw had left gnarly gashes on her side, taking a little more time to patch up.

"There, all better!" Meg announced after a moment. She leaned forward and placed a kiss on Claudette's forehead.

"Meg!" she gasped. Elodie chuckled and left to find a different generator.

"Sorry. You're just adorable when you're flustered," said Meg, not sorry in the slightest. Claudette's face scrunched up further as Meg led them back to the generator.

"You're lucky I love you," said Claudette. Meg froze on the ground, looking up at her. Claudette seemed frightened at what she'd just said, covering her face with her hands. "I- I'm sorry. I know we haven't been a thing for long, but just, I've known you for so long and-"

"Claudette, it's okay. I feel the same way; I just don't know if I can say it yet. But it's alright. I liked hearing you say it." Claudette didn't move, so Meg pulled her into a hug and held her for a moment.

"Thank you," whispered Claudette.

"You're welcome. But you kinda smell like shit right now, so let's get out of here before anymore cuddles, okay?"

Still flustered, Claudette joined Meg at the generator, and it lit up a moment later. When the trial ended, Meg threw an arm around her, going to make good on her promise.

____________________

"What?"

"Nothing!"

"Dude, you're staring."

Meg, Claudette, and Dwight were all working on the same generator surrounded by a corn field. Jake was somewhere else, running from the Wraith. The trial felt like it had years ago, when it was just the four of them. And yet, as Meg looked at her girlfriend, she realized just how much had changed.

Dwight kept glancing up from the generator, looking between the two women. He opened his mouth as if he had something to say, then closed it.

"Just spit it out already!" said Meg.

"Fine. But, please don't be mad," said Dwight.

"Whatever. Just say it."

"Okay, okay. Wouldn't- wouldn't the generator get done faster if you weren't holding hands?"

____________________

I just, I like these two. They make me happy. More writing coming soon. I've got a few different pieces in the works. Open to suggestions or requests, btw, so let me know if there's something you'd like to read more of.

[sillypinkboy]

Too Late To Say I Love You

Charcters: Joe Fixit, Bruce Banner, Jake Lockley, Leonard Samson

Relationships: Bloody Protectors (Joe Fixit x Jake Lockley)

Word Count: 785

Tagging: @goodoldfashionedengineer

Notes: Hey it's angst I wrote after the last issue of the main moon knight run. So. Yeah. Major character death. Sorry in advance!

──────── ⋆⋅☆⋅⋆ ───

Callused hands gently grazed scared skin. A single breath hung on hot air, ash and coal fell around them. The night was as dark as it could get in such a big city. Originally two faces just meant to - that just wanted to blend in, they’d grown into more. Both knew to keep their heads down. Both knew the danger they were putting themselves through. The thought never could stop them.

Electricity danced between their hands, dying with a sudden wind. Silver eyes dragged against tanned skin, desperate for something. A pulse. a wish. a word.

Both knew death wasn’t something they should deal with - or they did.

Joe had seen the explosion, or at least, the aftermath. He knew that he was supposed to be there. He moved as quickly as he could. Nothing.

Shouldn’t the cabbie be back? Why is he just laying there? Why won’t he breathe?

Joe begged for anything. Just a sign. A small movement. Something to say he was still there.

Nothing came. Nothing changed. An unfamiliar panic bubbled up behind his throat. In his chest. Tears burned in the back of his eyes, but didn’t leave.

Just a bloody corpse. No, a lover. Someone that he didn’t want to lose. Someone he shouldn’t have been able to lose. Someone that he should be able to have lunch with, someone to keep close.

Someone special left to just another body. Just another number. Someone to be forgotten by anyone that knew anything.

It’s not Jake’s name to the body. It’s Marc’s. It’ll be Marc’s funeral. Maybe Steven’s. But not the unknown cabbie.

Why? Why did he have to do this?

Why couldn’t he have stayed out of it for once?

Joe sat silent. He knew it wasn’t Jake’s fault. Dying came with the business.

The heroes won’t remember who Joe won’t forget. He knows that. Tears threaten to pour.

They feel like a fire against his skin, enough to hurt and hurt until you can’t take it. He holds the body close, before he falls. And falls and falls and falls.

Bruce woke up, eyes burning. A familiar hero in his arms. Ash sticks to blood soaked fabric, turning a gray into a red.

His chest beats heavily and he tries to figure out where they ended up.

A destroyed building. A grave site. There’s a desire to leave that pulls at the logical side of his brian. A knowledge to alert the other of what’s happened. His reasons for being there sat unknown, but he tried to leave. But, his body betrays him.

It sits unable to move. Unable to stand. Unable to register what has fully happened.

Blood seeps onto his hands.

He stays unable to move.

Why had Joe brought him here? They’d never been close to the vigilante, Moon Knight. Was it something about the person behind the mask?

His hand twitched.

Recognition set in. Jake. The guy Joe had been seeing.

His throat tightened at the thought of losing someone that close. He took a deep breath - like Leonard had taught him. He took another. And another.

Eventually, he gained control over his movements. A control to leave them. To tell the others. To try and plan for the aftermath.

Bruce gently moved the body off him, laying it face up. He stood up slowly, his body still shaky.

He sent a simple alert- just one to the other heroes. He hoped it reached. Knowing he needed to get out, he left the beeper behind, tucked into the vigilante’s hood. Then he left.

He tried to get as far as quickly as he could, not that it mattered. He just needed to get out. To try and find someone, anyone to help them.

He sits tucked away in a coffee shop, dialing their closest friend.

⋆˖⁺‧₊☽◯☾₊‧⁺˖⋆

Months passed, days blurred. Concern had been sparked in everyone. Joe never seemed to let himself be alone. He stopped reaching to be in charge - instead choosing to hold himself to the side. To being a passive viewer.

The change was welcomed by Bruce at first. It was one less fight in his head. One less problem to worry about. The joy of it wore thin, eventually.

The worst of it all was the worry that Leonard had towards it. There was a call. It was late into the night. Unexpected, even. The doctor had asked if Joe was still there, if he had been heard from. The worry for Joe was somewhat unexpected, keeping in mind how much he had been a problem. Bruce had been honest. Told the doc what he knew. The call wasn’t much of a long one, but enough to leave something sour behind.

[bluecoolr]

For Life Or Until Fault

Alt Timeline 2.0 - Darrell x Odile Part 2

Warnings: MINORS DNI! Main characters are slasher ocs! stalking(?), descriptions of dead bodies, implied cannibalism, implied murder

Darrell is my oc

Odile belongs to @solmints-messyocdiary

Odile cowered behind the trunk of an ash tree, hoping the man wouldn't see her. Heart hammering, knees trembling, she looked to see if he had followed her.

She breathed a sigh of relief when she saw him walk back inside. Putting her fingers in her mouth, she bit down slightly to try and fight the tears.

She'd been looking all day for Belle - the only company she had in that desolate place. She was so worried, afraid the poor dog had been hurt or taken to the pound.

She was fine, thank goodness, but she was wearing a collar. Her fur was washed. She had been fed.

Was that bad?

Surely, Odile should be happy that her friend found a new home. Besides, she always knew that Belle would abandon her, too. What had she to offer anyway?

Her heart stung as she finally broke, tears pouring down her cheeks.

She was already missing her, her puppy dog kisses and her warmth. She just wished she could have said goodbye.

Maybe she could try?

Odile dried her face with the skirt of her dress.

Yes. She could sneak into the old manor house once the strange man had fallen asleep.

Darrell woke up with a start. He'd seen the willowy fingers slip on the pane in his dream.

Only this time, he felt the weight of them on his chest.

He sat up, his back stiff from the chaise. He peeled back the blanket that had been pulled up to his chest. Funny. He didn't remember using it the night before. He was sure it had been folded into a neat rectangle at his feet.

Bark!

Isabelle trotted into the parlor. The way her tail wagged made Darrell feel like she was urging him out of bed. "Rough night," Darrell said. "Hungry?"

With the blanket wrapped around him like a shawl, Darrell crouched by the hearth and set his coffee pot over the coals. He busied himself with cooking sausages.

"Stop looking at things that aren't there." He patted Isabelle's croup. She was staring intently down the dark hallway that led deeper into the house. Darrell got down on one knee beside her and squinted. Nothing.

"You're scaring me," he told her as he ruffled the fur of her neck. "Alright, come on. Time to go to work."

From around a doorway, bright olive eyes watched him dress, gather his things, and leave.

They started on their patrol, using the map as a guide. Darrell wanted to inspect the graves, try to find a pattern to the vandalism, see if he could tell where the culprit was coming from.

Darrell made his solemn way through the memorials of the departed. The days were prematurely cold, and he was thankful for the mug of steaming coffee he had brought. It was prime hunting season, if you asked him. The ground was frozen, food was scarce, so the animals ventured out of the woods of their own accord.

He made quick work of the marked sites, snapping pictures of the graves with a funny little instant film camera he impulsively bought in town. He compared dates of death and extent of damage, stuffing the little paper snapshots in his jacket pocket. They jutted out wildly like carnival tickets.

The last grave was cordoned off by braided rope. The cloying scent of turned earth and rot greeted him as he drew nearer. Some of the bodies had been carted off. To be cremated, no doubt. A few, like this one, had been left by investigators. He could make out the shape of the coffin under the nylon tarp. However, other indentations hinted the lid had been removed.

Darrell rested his gun against a granite headstone and stepped off the edge, dropping six feet straight down. He landed with a muffled crunch. Isabelle watched from ear level as he removed the tarp with a snap.

The corpse in the coffin was pale with a putrid tinge of purple and green. Its eyes were rolled back into its skull. Its fingers, once peacefully folded on its stomach, were stiff and gnarled.

He didn't flinch. He never did. Death didn't bother him, and that troubled him.

"Why are you taking pictures?" A boy - about 8 or 10 years old - was standing over him. He was clutching a handful of wilting flowers. A little mourner, come to dutifully lay flowers on a loved one's resting place.

Why was he taking pictures?

He didn't know either. It just felt natural. Like muscle memory.

Darrell tore the film from the camera and inspected the snapshot. "I'm the new graveyard keeper. They're paying me to find who's doing this," he explained. "I'm looking for clues."

The boy crouched beside the hole and picked up the camera. He aimed it at Darrell and took a candid snap. "I know who did it."

Darrell humored him. "Do you?"

The boy carefully removed the film and showed it to Darrell. "A samodiva," he said. "The cops don't believe us. They think it's just a story told to scare kids."

So did Darrell.

"What do they know?" muttered the boy reproachfully.

"So, you think a fairy did this?"

The boy stiffened in indignation. "It's not just me! Grownups talk about her, too! A woman dressed in white, tall and blonde, with fiery eyes. She steals the dead away and… and eats them."

"An evil Bulgarian fairy in Moldova?" Darrell was smiling wryly.

"She killed the other graveyard keepers," the boy told Darrell spitefully. "Why'd you think the job was open?"

That knocked Darrell's grin clean off. A chill went down his spine. At a loss for words, he grabbed the corpse by the wrist. The arm popped right off. The boy immediately got on his feet with a soft gasp.

Darrell turned the arm over, inspecting the purple flesh. Whole chunks were missing. Frowning, he pried Isabelle's jaw open with a finger, trying to see if the bite marks fit a canid teeth pattern.

They didn't.

Besides, he knew they were human the second he saw them.

"Do you believe me now?" demanded the boy.

The pictures burned in his pocket. The dates in his mind like glowing cattle prods. Every corpse had been recently interred.

Fresh, more or less.

Darrell tossed the arm back into the coffin and replaced the tarp. The boy kindly helped him out of the grave. They stood together for a moment, sporting identical shades of pallor. "What's wrong?" the boy asked.

Darrell licked his lips. "I think I saw her," he told the boy, whose eyes grew wide with terror. "Your wicked fairy."

There was a hole in the back of the house. Close to the ground. A chink in its brick armor. Odile found it the first night she snuck in.

It was blocked off by a rough rectangle of bricks, held together still by the same mortar that had crumbled and rotted around it. She wormed her willowy fingers through the cracks, carefully pulled the bricks loose, and squeezed through.

She wormed into the laundry room, which was chock full of ancient washing machinery and other junk. Quiet as a mouse, she wove her way around the clutter, bunching her skirt around her hips so it would snag on any protruding bars or edges.

She hadn't meant to come back. She promised herself that she'd stay away from the stranger. For her own safety, really. Just until the townsfolk's anger subsided. She'd survived several witch hunts before. She could surely hideaway for another one.

Yet, here she was again. Needy girl, she reproached herself. Stupid, silly girl! Why are you here?

She wanted to see Belle.

Up close. Not from a distance, like she had all day.

She crept down the dark hall, past the kitchen with the blackened cooking ranges and cracked tile. Minding her footing on the floor boards, she crossed into the parlor.

Her eyes immediately went to where the graveyard keeper was sleeping, laid out stiffly on a chaise lounge. His nightshirt had hiked up slightly from tossing and turning, and Odile could see his cream-colored thigh in the light of the moon.

She'd been lying when she said she wanted to see Belle. Inching closer, her eyes hesitantly darted from one feature to another. From his hands - large and sinewy - to his collarbone, his throat, and his face - framed by raven locks that spilled over the cushions. He looked like an ink drawing pried from the pages of a story book. Eros reclining. Endymion the Shepherd.

Odile cast a jealous look at the moon, daring her to step down and intervene.

Undaunted, Odile knelt beside the chaise. Scarred hands set primly on the edge, staring up at the sleeping stranger. She'd spent countless hours thinking of him.

How gentle he was. How sweetly he crooned at Belle as he tried his best to dance with her, music pouring into his ears. How intriguing that a man so strong could be so soft at the same time.

Odile lay her head on his belly, strawberry blonde hair tumbling down his sides like a waterfall. She let her head rise and fall with his every breath.

She ran her fingertips up and down his side, wanting to count his ribs - see if he was missing any. Did not God pluck Eve from Adam's side and fashioned her to be his wife?

He stirred and her heart clenched. Frozen with fear, she watched his lashes flutter as his eyes opened just a crack and stared blearily at her. He made no move to go, showed no hint of surprise or terror or disgust. Instead, she felt his hands shift from under her wild hair. He placed one on her head, the other on her cheek. He stroked her hair, ran his thumb back and forth over her flushed cheek.

He closed his eyes with a soft sigh and returned to his dreams.

Smiling, Odile did the same and followed him.

The next morning, Darrell found a single golden strand of hair on his blanket - which had again left its spot at the foot of the bed. The picture the boy had taken of him had vanished from his desk.

[beardedmrbean]

Police in riot gear have started to drag climate activists away from an abandoned village in western Germany they have occupied for months.

Protesters barricaded themselves in to prevent Lützerath from being swallowed up by the nearby Garzweiler open coal mine.

Some activists threw stones and pyrotechnics at police officers as they began to clear the camp.

Protesters climbed into treehouses to make the eviction more difficult.

The village is owned by energy firm RWE, and the last resident moved out over a year ago.

There were violent scuffles as police wearing riot gear moved into the village early on Wednesday to evict the protesters. More than 1,000 police from across Germany took part in the operation.

They dragged some activists, many wearing scarves to mask their faces, away across the muddy ground. The situation was then described as predominantly peaceful as police knocked on doors in the village and asked people to leave.

Some of the protesters have formed human chains, others have taken to treehouses or the rooftops of the village.

Lützerath is literally on the verge of being swallowed up by the vast open coal mine on its doorstep.

RWE operates the mine and plans to extend the works. A huge mechanical digger stands metres from the treeline at the edge of the village.

Although all the residents have left, several hundred climate protesters are determined to stop RWE getting at the lignite that lies underneath Lützerath.

Some have been here for more than a year, squatting in the abandoned brick buildings. And it will probably take police weeks to remove all the barricades and tree houses.

"The coal under here is not needed for anything just for RWE to make more profit," one activist told the BBC.

Two protesters, Anna and Kim, had chained their hands inside a barrel filled with concrete.

"I feel hopeless and sad because most probably this village will be gone," said Anna. "At the same it feels powerful to see how many people are here and supporting this."

Days before the police moved in, the activists were busy reinforcing barricades and preparing piles of bricks. Some were practising their rope-climbing skills.

A series of treehouses, perilously high in the tall trees, are linked by rope so that the activists can move around above the heads of the police.

Activist Dina Hamid rejected the assertion of authorities, that Germany needed the lignite to meet its energy requirements, now that it could no longer rely on supplies from Russia.

"The climate crisis is now, and we know that coal should have been stopped years ago."

Lützerath is likely to be the last German village lost to a coal mine.

The government has pledged to bring forward the phase-out of coal in North Rhine-Westphalia, the state in which the mine lies, to 2030. The national target is 2038.

RWE and the regional ministers have agreed to limit the extension of the mine; plans to demolish and excavate five other villages have been scrapped.

But the battle for Lützerath is not yet over. The activists are pinning their hopes on a German law that prohibits the felling of trees between February and September. That could, in theory, halt the planned excavation, albeit temporarily.

Lützerath is now surrounded by police officers, one of whom told reporters this morning that the site would be cleared.

Even so, the protesters remain determined to hold off the eviction, and what seems to be the inevitable fate of the village, for as long as they can.

[mariacallous]

One hundred miles west of Johannesburg in South Africa, the Komati Power Station is hard to miss, looming above the flat grassland and farming landscapes like an enormous eruption of concrete, brick, and metal.

When the coal-fired power station first spun up its turbines in 1961, it had twice the capacity of any existing power station in South Africa. It has been operational for more than half a century, but as of October 2022, Komati has been retired—the stacks are cold and the coal deliveries have stopped.

Now a different kind of activity is taking place on the site, transforming it into a beacon of clean energy: 150 MW of solar, 70 MW of wind, and 150 MW of storage batteries. The beating of coal-fired swords into sustainable plowshares has become the new narrative for the Mpumalanga province, home to most of South Africa’s coal-fired power stations, including Komati.

To get here, the South African government has had to think outside the box. Phasing out South Africa’s aging coal-fired power station fleet—which supplies 86 percent of the country’s electricity—is expensive and politically risky, and could come at enormous social and economic cost to a nation already struggling with energy security and socioeconomic inequality. In the past, bits and pieces of energy-transition funding have come in from organizations such as the World Bank, which assisted with the Komati repurposing, but for South Africa to truly leave coal behind, something financially bigger and better was needed.

That arrived at the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland, in November 2021, in the form of a partnership between South Africa, European countries, and the US. Together, they made a deal to deliver $8.5 billion in loans and grants to help speed up South Africa’s transition to renewables, and to do so in a socially and economically just way.

This agreement was the first of what’s being called Just Energy Transition Partnerships, or JETPs, an attempt to catalyze global finance for emerging economies looking to shift energy reliance away from fossil fuels in a way that doesn’t leave certain people and communities behind.

Since South Africa’s pioneering deal, Indonesia has signed an agreement worth $20 billion, Vietnam one worth $15.5 billion, and Senegal one worth $2.75 billion. Discussions are taking place for a possible agreement for India. Altogether, around $100 billion is on the table.

There’s significant enthusiasm for JETPs in the climate finance arena, particularly given the stagnancy of global climate finance in general. At COP15 in Copenhagen in 2009, developed countries signed up to a goal of mobilizing $100 billion of climate finance for developing countries per year by 2020. None have met that target, and the agreement lapses in 2025. The hope is that more funding for clear-cut strategies and commitments will lead to quicker moves toward renewables.

South Africa came into the JETP agreement with a reasonably mature plan for a just energy transition, focusing on three sectors: electricity, new energy vehicles, and green hydrogen. Late last year, it fleshed that out with a detailed Just Energy Transition investment plan. Specifically, the plan centers on decommissioning coal plants, providing alternative employment for those working in coal mining, and accelerating the development of renewable energy and the green economy. It is a clearly defined but big task.

South Africa’s coal mining and power sector employs around 200,000 people, many in regions with poor infrastructure and high levels of poverty. So the “just” part of the “just energy transition” is critical, says climate finance expert Malango Mughogho, who is managing director of ZeniZeni Sustainable Finance Limited in South Africa and a member of the United Nations High-Level Expert Group on net-zero emissions commitments.

“People are going to lose their jobs. Industries do need to shift so, on a net basis, the average person living there needs to not be worse off from before,” she says. This is why the project focuses not only on the energy plants themselves, but also on reskilling, retraining, and redeployment of coal workers.

In a country where coal is also a major export, there are economic and political sensitivities around transitioning to renewables, and that poses a challenge in terms of how the project is framed. “Given the high unemployment rate in South Africa as well … you cannot sell it as a climate change intervention,” says Deborah Ramalope, head of climate policy analysis at the policy institute Climate Analytics in Berlin. “You really need to sell it as a socioeconomic intervention.”

That would be a hard sell if the only investment coming in were $8.5 billion—an amount far below what’s needed to completely overhaul a country’s energy sector. But JETPs aren’t intended to completely or even substantially bankroll these transitions. The idea is that this initial financial boost signals to private financiers both within and outside South Africa that things are changing.

Using public finance to leverage private investment is a common and often successful practice, Mughogho says. The challenge is to make the investment prospects as attractive as possible. “Typically private finance will move away from something if they consider it to be too risky and they’re not getting the return that they need,” she says. “So as long as those risks have been clearly identified and then managed in some way, then the private sector should come through.” This is good news, as South Africa has forecast it will need nearly $100 billion to fully realize the just transition away from coal and toward clean vehicles and green hydrogen as outlined in its plan.

Will all of that investment arrive? It’s such early days with the South African JETP that there’s not yet any concrete indication of whether the approach will work.

But the simple fact that such high-profile, high-dollar agreements are being signed around just transitions is cause for hope, says Haley St. Dennis, head of just transitions at the Institute for Human Rights and Business in Salt Lake City, Utah. “What we have seen so far, particularly from South Africa, which is the furthest along, is very promising,” she says. These projects demonstrate exactly the sort of international cooperation needed for successful climate action, St. Dennis adds.

The agreements aren’t perfect. For example, they may not rule out oil and gas as bridging fuels between coal and renewables, says St. Dennis. “The rub is that, especially for many of the JETP countries—which are heavily coal-dependent, low- and middle-income economies—decarbonization can’t come at any cost,” she says. “That especially means that it can’t threaten what is often already tenuous energy security and energy access for their people, and that's where oil and gas comes in in a big way.”

Ramalope says they also don’t go far enough. “I think the weakness of JETPs is that they’re not encouraging 1.5 [degrees] Celsius,” she says, referring to the limit on global warming set as a target by the Paris Agreement in 2015. In Senegal, which is not coal-dependent, the partnership agreement is to achieve 40 percent renewables in Senegal’s electricity mix. But Ramalope says analysis suggests the country could achieve double this amount. “I think that’s a missed opportunity.”

Another concern is that these emerging economies could be simply trapping themselves in more debt with these agreements. While there’s not much detail about the relative proportions of grants and loans in South Africa’s agreement, St. Dennis says most of the funding is concessional, or low-interest loans. “Why add more debt when the intention is to dramatically catalyze decarbonization in a very short timescale?” she asks. Grants themselves are estimated to be a very small component of the overall funding—around 5 percent.

But provided they generate the funding needed to bring emissions down as desired, the view of JETPs is largely positive, says Sierd Hadley, an economist with the Overseas Development Institute in London. For Hadley, the concern is whether JETPs can be sustained once the novelty has worn off, and once they aren’t being featured as part of a COP or G20 leadup. But he notes that the fact that the international community has managed to deliver at least four of the five JETP deals so far—with India yet to be locked in—shows there is pressure to make good on the promises.

“On the whole, the fact that there has been a plan, and that that plan is broadly in progress, suggests that on balance this has been fairly successful,” he says. “It’s a very significant moment for climate finance.”

[athanasius-symposium-of-writings]

Green Carnation

Chapter One

I promised a male version of "The Economic Difference Between The Miner and Mine Owner's Daughter" for male readers. Please, oh please do read the tags! If this makes you uncomfortable then move on. I gave a warning in a previous ask about making the male version of this story and subjects it can touch.

Rated Explicit | Warnings: Period-Typical Homophobia, Historical References

Chapter Two

Muscle and blood, bones of iron, and the will to move mountains; are the traits you swear to see in Norton Campbell. He is the youngest of this group, seen as the weakest, yet you have seen the reports of the work output and Norton is one of the top miners. You have seen him work when observing the mining site with your father, you have never seen him leave the mine unless to eat or sleep and everything in between.

Maybe your approach to him was wrong, you only wanted to ask him some questions, or maybe you poked the wrong bear.

Now here you are in a fist fight and barely two swings in you are stumbling around. Your nose is bloody, your eye swollen near closed, and spit out blood before running at him again. The man is a scraper, the one who your father would bet on if Norton was in a fight clubbing as entertainment. The man is all muscle and blood, with bones of iron.

“Stay down!” You had fallen on the muddy ground, “I said stay down!” On top of you with knees pinning down your arms and his fist raised ready to strike. You struggled, at least you think you did, it is hard to tell given you can't feel much.

“Enough!” Shouts the foreman who finally shows up, he probably was just watching. No one likes your father so seeing his son get his ass beaten probably made everyone's day. Two miners pull Norton off you and he lets them willingly, “Get to him to the infirmary,” Shouts the foreman, and a miner helps you up and literally starts dragging you over to the infirmary tent.

“As for you—”

“Let him go.” Speaking up, “He did nothing wrong, understood?” You move to turn in the direction of the small group of men.

“But sir—”

“Understood, foreman?” Assertive this time, “He needs to go into the infirmary too.”

“Yes, sir.”

You look at Norton, the man is cold as the coal he digs, and then you look away, moving off the miner who was assisting you to walk on your own. Pride, maybe, you can stand on your own and take your hits.

The infirmary is quiet as the nurse overlooks you both, you being the worst out of two. 

A patch over your eye, bandages over your ribs, and bandaids on the cuts on your hands and fists. You look like you just boxed with a professional boxer! Norton on the other hand needed some ice, a few bandaids for some cuts, but no worse for wear.

You hiss in pain as you sit on the medical cot then look at Norton who is in front of you sitting at the end of his cot. “Why?” You hear him say it loud and clear.

“Why what, Mr. Campbell?” Fixing your position to be comfortable.

“You could've let them deal with me. Pay one of them to fight me. So why?”

“It was between you and me. You don't like me but nothing you said prior to the fight that wasn't wrong.” The working conditions, the equipment, and everything else in between are a problem. Sure most of the grievances are with your family, and the company too, but the problem is not going to be solved right away. Again this is your father's company and only upon his death will it be yours. “And my offer still stands.”

“Stop trying to butter me up, I ain't being your lapdog.” Crossing his arms over his chest.

“Not a lapdog, a business partner. Equals.”

But being equal with Mr. Campbell is not quite easy given his background; the hatred for those like you, the rich who too often use others to create their stairs to success. Maybe you hoped to make him your business partner, helping give him his footing in this new social and economic status, and maybe just trying to be a friend would lessen the hate-- Towards you at least. You genuinely wanted to make a change in the company, to help the estranged relationship between the employee and the employer; you started to see Mr. Campbell as more than just a man full of anger. His greed is not without reason, when one has nothing he wants everything, you cannot blame him but it worries you.

Fool’s Gold is a material called pyrite that can be used for things like paper. Norton Campbell was livid, the sort of livid that has him ready to break something, until you explain the other uses of ‘Fool’s Gold’.

“Now will you please not break that vase, it is cheap but rather nice. I like to have it as part of the decoration.” You say while leaning against the desk in your study. Well, in your late father’s study before his passing, nature causes.

He looked confused and then realized what he was doing. Norton knows how unstable he can get, seeking mental help for it would be a good idea but he fears he will be locked away. Only you are aware of the voice in his mind after Golden Cave, the mine closed down due to “unstable tunnels” rather than the truth of something is down there. It is not spoken about.

“You must want something out of his,” Placing the vase back and adjusting it to its previous position, “Nothing is free.”

“Please, Mr. Campbell we've talked about this,” Crossing your arms as you sigh while shaking your head, “We are partners,” Explaining yourself again, “When no one else would speak up about my father's treatment of the miners, you did. Both with that mouth of yours and fists. I respect that. I respect you.”

The Prospector scoffs, “Respect. Three years as partners and I still cannot believe getting your jaw rocked suddenly inspired this.”

“Not like I can marry you and take your last name to further prove that I—” You go quiet. Both of you are with him staring hard at you. “Bad wording. Still, I mean it, respecting you.” Dropping your arms from your chest and pushing yourself off the desk, “I need to go get ready.”

Right. Family dinner with that wife of yours. Norton swears she is cheating on you.

“Mr. Campbell?” Stopped mid-way of passing by him, a firm grip on your arm, he moves in closer whispering in your ear. You go still, looking down at the floor in mortifying shock, “H-How?” You were careful! There is no way he could have known! Hell, you are happily married!

“So I'm right?”

A green carnation. It is resting on a suit you wore to the funeral of an old friend. Norton Campbell is very observant, he may not be book-smart, but he is street-smart. Growing up around all types of people, he has seen a lot of things growing up.

Including the green carnation, he saw some men wear where he worked at the time. He would get paid in bread leftovers from a bakery and maybe a coin or two for doing deliveries.

He saw what he believed was a woman and a man wearing a green carnation. Later on, he learned that the bakery had a secret bar called a molly house. By then, he was a young adult, and his deliveries took him to that bar. Shipment deliveries of alcohol and such. He could care less about what anyone did, he wanted money.

If his father did not owe so much in debt, Norton might have still been a delivery boy or a bartender.

When he drove your wife and you from the funeral, he offered out of pity, he saw the flower.

“Where were you really going tonight?” He has you brought back to the spot against the edge in front of the desk, “Your wife is going out too.”

“... Why? Are you going to extort me?!” Clearly upset.

“Huh,” Caging you in with height, size, his arms on each side of your body, “Geez, why bother? You already gave me what I want. Anymore and you should be my wife.”

It is not like he could not imagine you groveling at his feet while Norton calls you ‘Mrs. Campbell’, he has a few times given how often you and him are together. It is like you both were of one mind often, inseparable. Your wife teased it, but he saw how flustered you would get when you think he did not notice.

“Tonight you are going to take me to that spot I know you like to actually go to with your wife.”

“Norton please this—”

“I want you.”

“Don't… Don't say that.”

“Fine.” So he shows you by pushing you down on the desk and kissing you. Not a romantic, no, Norton has you pinned down making you take every bit of raw desire he has for you leaving you stunned and completely in his grasp.

When he finally lets you breathe, you both are breathing hard– Him more so than you– Staring at one another unsure where to go from here. You more so than him.

“Be a good boy and listen.”

[tucsonhorse]

I will not trust nuclear until those sites are *actually* built. Right now in the US there are places where they want to store nuclear waste, but it's not ready because every site is objected to so it's all tied up in legal hassles. Additionally it is not contained or transported in ways that are safe and is left sitting in containers not designed for long term storage because it was just supposed to be transport containers. I will not trade the current, ongoing dangers for slow, agonizing death for lots of people as water and land is poisoned because the government can't get its shit together when we *know* the consequences.

I want eco-friendly energy. I believe nuclear can be a stepping stone to getting to fully renewable energy. I do not trust any government in existence to do it in a way that does not leave marginalized communities swimming in toxic waste while the government "finalizes arrangements" for storage. Nor do I trust any government to actually use nuclear power as a stepping stone, it will be "we're going to switch to nuclear so that we can stop using coal/natural gas asap, and we'll keep building infrastructure to make wind, solar, and water power viable primary sources so we can stop using nuclear" except once nuclear is built they'll never bother to continue. And don't give me the "we have to make them keep moving forward" because that isn't working now with the planet literally superheating, why would it work down the road when that consequence isn't there?

I wish all environmentalists a very suck cocks in hell

[travelingtheusa]

KENTUCKY

2024 May 24 (Fri) – We didn’t do much today.  Stayed in the campground and watched all the RVs coming in.  This is Memorial Day weekend and we expect the place to be full by tonight.  Glad to be leaving tomorrow.

2024 May 23 (Thu) – We had a delightful tour of a historic town in Tennessee.  Rugby was founded by a British gentleman.  It is kind of ironic to think that an Englishman moved to the United States to build a town for Englishmen.  He, along with many friends, were disgusted with the customs of the times.  The eldest son of wealthy families received everything when the father passed away.  The other kids had to depend on the kindness of that older brother.  So Rugby was established as an egalitarian town for “second sons” where everyone would be given a chance to succeed without the shame of doing menial labor.  There were several Victorian style homes around the area.  We watched a video about the establishment of Rugby, then followed a guide around to three buildings – a church, a free public library, and the original home of Hughes, the founder.  The library had over 7,000 books and magazines all printed prior to 1900.  It included the complete works of Charles Dickens. 

      On the way back to the campground, we stopped at Phillips Drive In, number one in Oneida.  I got a Jerry pizza, which was basically a cheeseburger on a pizza.  Paul got a corn dog.  Both meals were OK.

      We had ferocious thunderstorms last night and today.  A camping club of some kind was setting up yesterday afternoon.  At 9:00 p.m. I heard doors closing.  When I looked outside, I sat some people trying to put up a tent in the pouring rain.  I put on the outside lights for them, hoping it gave them some light to see by.  They packed up and were gone this morning.  So were the teenagers from the camping club.  The weather cleared up for a little this afternoon then storms moved in again later in the day.  Poor Sheba has been spending most of the last two days hiding in the closet.

2024 May 22 (Wed) – We drove to Yahoo Falls and took a hike on the trails.  It was about 2-3/4 miles roundtrip.  There was one part that was pretty rough with steep steel stairs.  Otherwise, it was a very pleasant walk through Daniel Boone Forest.  We had a small water fall, muddy trails, rocks, tree roots, and an intermittent creek.

2024 May 21 (Tue) – We drove to the Blue Heron Outdoor Museum.  It was a most unusual museum and very interesting.  The Blue Heron Mining Camp used to exist on the site.  There were about 200 workers and 24 families living and working there at one time.  The museum consisted of a tipple, covered pavilions with story boards, and a large area for loading rail cars.  They could load 6 rail cars at a time with different grades of coal.  A tipple is a sorting machine that divides the coal into different size pieces, each having a different purpose.  The pavilions each had recordings by people who used to live in the town, recalling their happy days there.  Unlike so many other mining operations we have visited, the Blue Heron Mining company was very paternalistic with its employees and treated them very well. The mine (also called Mine #8) was in existence from the early 1900 until the 1960s.

      After the self-guided tour, we drove into Stearns for lunch and Taco Bell.  Then we picked up groceries at Kroeger.

2024 May 20 (Mon) – We stayed in today, nursing our sore muscles from yesterday’s strenuous cave tour.

2024 May 19 (Sun) – We drove to Mammoth Cave for our reserved tour.  It was the first tour of the day in that category.  There were other kinds of tours going on already.  They have about 8 different types of tours.  Ours was called the Historic Tour.  There were 110 people on our tour.  Way too many to really enjoy the tour.  It started with a park ranger giving an introductory talk.  The group then walked down a long, sloping walkway to the natural entrance to the cave.  The tour itself was disappointing.  They walked straight in until they came to a large area that the group could assemble in.  This continued throughout the tour.  We were not able to stop and admire different features because we had to keep up with the group.  There was one part of the tour called the Fatman’s Misery.  It was a narrow walkway that wound its way through waist high rock.  The walkway was so narrow that you could not walk naturally.  You had to shuffle one foot behind the other.  A couple of places, I had to squeeze around the projecting rock.  I wonder if the park rangers ever look at someone and say, “You won’t fit on this tour.”

      The cave was interesting.  Wish we could have had more idle time to explore it.  It was a 2 mile walk for 2 hours.  No formations.  No stalactites.  No stalagmites.  None of the usual cave formations.  We were as deep as 350’.  The end of the tour was a grueling 150 steps all at once.

      After the cave tour, we went to lunch at the Windmill Restaurant.  There was a big line when we walked in and it kept up for over half an hour.  Even so, we were served fairly quickly.  The food was good.  Paul had a bologna sandwich and I had something called the Manhattan, which was an open faced roast beef sandwich with mashed potatoes and gravy.

2024 May 18 (Sat) – We drove to Mammoth Cave for a tour.  We got there at 11 and the earliest tour we could get was 1:30 p.m.  We would have had to hang out for over 2 hours.  So we bought tickets for a tour tomorrow and just toured the museum.  Mammoth Caves is over 400 miles long and they believe there are 600 miles to be discovered yet.  This is the largest cave system in the world.

      After we returned to the campground, we did the laundry.

2024 May 17 (Fri) – We tried to go to the Lost River Caverns this morning.  It was an hour drive only to find the tours have been cancelled for 2 weeks because of all the rain they have been having.  They could have put it on their website.  We stopped at Slim Chickens for lunch.  I guess the name is a play on the singer, Slim Pickens.

2024 May 16 (Thu) – We went to Crystal Onyx Cave.  It is a privately owned facility.  There are lots of funky figurines and statues around the place – items taken from old amusement parks and shops.  There were lots of aliens and dinosaurs along with other stuff – old jeep, gas pumps, broken rides, tent, etc.  The building where we checked in was stock full of jewelry, gemstones, rocks and geodes.  When I asked if they were all from the cave, I was told they were not.  The owner, who bought the place in 2011, goes to shows and buys all the stuff around the place and in the store.

      Gary, our guide, brought us into the cave for a half-mile walk through some of the coolest formations we have ever seen.  He even pointed out cave crickets and salamanders.  The overall color of the cave was brown – very UNcolorful.  But the cave was alive!  There was moisture and water run off everywhere.  Also, a couple of puddle, a tiny jet stream of water shooting out of the wall, and a small pool about waist deep.  It was a very enjoyable tour.  And it was just Paul, the guide and me.

      For lunch, we ate at El Mazatlan.  It was quite good.  I had a taco salad in a giant taco rather than a bowl.  Paul had a tamale and burrito with rice and beans.  Afterward, we stopped at IGA to pick up a few things.  That is a very small grocery store with limited selections. 

2024 May 15 (Wed) - We went out to lunch at Cracker Barrel today.  Otherwise, we stayed in for the most part. 

2024 May 14 (Tue) – We stayed in the campground all day.  It rained again tonight.  There were a few lightning bolts and Sheba took off for the closet.

2024 May 13 (Mon) – We packed up, said goodbye to all our Rocky Tops Chapter friends, and headed out from Smyna, TN, at 11:00 a.m.  We only had a little over 100 miles to drive today and check out was not until 1 p.m.  As it was, the GPS took us on a local, traffic light littered roadway and we wound up getting into Cave Country RV Park in Cave City at 2 p.m.  The staff was very nice and we were led to our campsite by a staff member driving one of those ubiquitous golf carts.  We have a pull through site with full hookups.  There is a pool (not opened yet) and a small exercise area with a stair stepper, a treadmill and a stationary bicycle.

      After set up, we drove out to Food Lion to get water and then to Bojangles Chicken for lunch.  It rained tonight.  The sun has been burping massive solar flares and providing fantastic views of the aurora borealis as far south as Florida.  I have been trying to see them but the sky has been overcast every night.

[notwiselybuttoowell]

Backers of the European Union's ambitious Green Deal suffered a major blow on Tuesday after the European Commission scrapped plans to push farmers to use fewer pesticides and slash carbon emissions.

The volte-face by the EU's executive body was a response to weeks of protests by farmers who are angry about falling profits, red tape, rising costs and the burden of the EU's flagship Green Deal, a pioneering effort to make the EU the world's leader in fighting climate change by drastically reducing carbon emissions by 2050 and restoring natural systems.

Tuesday's developments could be seen as a defeat for those advocating Europe must move away from heavily subsidized industrial farming both for the good of nature and for the fight against climate change.

The Green Deal set out to make agriculture in the EU more organic and less polluting, but those aspirations are now in jeopardy.

In a speech to the European Parliament, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced the end of a proposed law seeking to slash pesticide use by 50% by 2030.

She said the bill had become a “symbol of polarization” and that it had be nixed after its progress stalled within the EU's legislative process. The rules already had been watered down considerably, upsetting environmentalists. She said a new pesticide bill would be proposed after negotiations with farmers, environmentalists, agrochemical companies, banks and others.

In a separate announcement about a new strategy to reduce emissions by 90% by 2040 compared to 1990 levels, the commission deleted language calling on the agriculture sector to make big cuts in its carbon emissions. In earlier drafts, the plan targeted emissions linked to farming, such as methane belched by cows, and called on farmers to reduce their livestock herds and Europeans to eat less meat.

Also angering environmentalists, the new goals omitted deadlines for phasing out coal, oil and natural gas, and did not call for an end to subsidies for fossil fuel projects, environmental groups said. Earlier drafts included tougher measures.

Instead, the guidelines focused on reaching the 90% target by using technology and methods to remove carbon from the atmosphere or stop it from being emitted at industrial sites. Such approaches are controversial because they are deemed ineffective and untested by many scientists.

The European Environmental Bureau, a Brussels-based non-profit, called it a “careless plan” unlikely to achieve its goals because of an “over-reliance on expensive and unproven technologies.”

Tuesday's concessions to farmers came a week after the commission delayed by a year new requirements compelling many large farms that get EU funds to set aside 4% of their land for nature. Under this rule, farmers will need to leave land fallow or plant such features as hedges and trees.

In her speech, von der Leyen made it clear that she was ready to take farmers' complaints seriously and she showed willingness to retreat from the Green Deal, a policy she's made central to her presidency.

She is coming under intense pressure not only from farmers but also her political group, the conservative European People's Party, the main force in the European Parliament.

The EPP has increasingly spoken out against many of the more stringent aspects of the Green Deal, arguing they are too costly for industry and farmers. In doing so, the EPP is seeking to stave off far-right rivals who are courting farmers as they surge ahead of June elections for the European Parliament.

For her part, von der Leyen may be shifting her stance along with the EPP because she is likely to seek a second mandate as commission president following the elections.

Environmentalists blasted von der Leyen's backpedaling and said weakening the Green Deal will end up hurting farmers by worsening the climate crisis and causing further damage to nature.

“Politicians ignoring scientific advice on helping farmers move away from overproduction of meat and dairy makes climate change worse and leaves European farming more exposed to extreme weather,” said Marco Contiero, an agriculture policy specialist for Greenpeace. “Farmers are nature's best allies, when the rules, markets and subsidies don't force them into a desperate choice between industrial production or bankruptcy.”

Philippe Lamberts, a leader of the Greens in the European Parliament, accused the EPP and other political groups of “disinformation” and “outright lies” about how the Green Deal and Green parties were to blame for the problems faced by farmers.

“They pretend to listen to the farmers; actually, they dictate to the farmers what they should say: Point the finger at the Greens,” he said during a news conference. “When you listen to the farmers, what do they tell you? That they are crushed by an economic system that gives them zero profitability, zero degree of freedom.”

He said the cause for the farmers' woes lies with political groups like the EPP that back free-trade deals, big agrochemical companies, the food retail sector and banking institutions.

“They've been screwing the countryside and then they pose as their saviors,” he said. “And that's just an outright lie.”

Lamberts said carrying out the Green Deal will involve big changes for farmers. To achieve this change, he said the EU needs to reform its hugely subsidized agricultural system so that farmers aren't paid subsidies for what they produce but rather for taking costly environmental measures.

“In a well-functioning market economy, they [farmers] should be able to sell their wares, what they produce, with a profit and then get rewarded with subsidies for services they provide to society that they cannot be paid for,” he said. “I mean, when you restore biodiversity, you cannot sell biodiversity on the market; but that is work and every work must be compensated by an income.”

More on this component in the ongoing saga, in the form of an article from early February