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rowanstories-blog · 7 years ago

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Anchored (Ghostpunk)

Suffix: -punk

Denotes a fictional and aesthetic genre based on the noun to which it is suffixed, usually involving ahistorical or anachronistic technology and its effects on society.

I often wonder what my living self thought of the world. Customer satisfaction with PSI Industries is at a solid 93% and holding, so odds are I was one of the billions of people who used PSI tech on a regular basis. Still, I can't help but hope that I wasn't one of those people. I admit I may be a bit biased, being dead now and all, but a genderless presence can dream, right?

My first memory is a fading light. I've been told that's normal, fine, okay, just-dandy, and nothing at all to be concerned about. Since finding out the common trope of the dead walking into the light in order to find peace, no amount of synonyms for okay seems to quiet the unsettling nag in me, the one telling me that a fading light is not at all normal, fine, okay, and so on. Once the light vanished, the world appeared to me, or I suppose I should say re-appeared, on account of the whole living-then-dying thing. I awoke in an unkempt apartment in one of Boston's still-standing brownstones, to the voice of the still-living man I'd soon learn was one of PSI Industries's many customers. As was explained to me, I failed to pass on (which was normal, fine, okay, et cetera), and the man, Yehya, was my 'living volunteer' who help me find out what held me to the living world so I could find peace. What kindness, I thought, that a living person had such altruism in his soul to help the dead. I wonder if I was so trusting while alive.

It's hard for me to imagine what the world must have been like before PSI Industries. From what I've been able to gather, the leading tech giants of the world had been focused on Artificial Intelligence, trying to create computers that could think and learn like people. That race came to a screeching halt when the irrefutable proof of ghosts came out. After all, why create a machine for complex tasks when the dead can do them for you? Now, the world basically runs off of ghost labor. We're the security for your homes, the planners of your day, the walkers of your dogs. We cook, we clean, we organize, and I'm sure more than one living person has used a ghost to attend to their more personal needs. We're the invisible force that runs the world now, all in hopes that whoever bought us from PSI Industries can uncover what's tethering us to the world in order to release us.

Did you notice the problem with that last statement? I didn't, for a long time. Yehya started small with his requests, like turning off the computer at night if he forgot. Then he started asking me to cook his ramen for him, which felt like far too simple a task to delegate to someone else. This led to cleaning the apartment, doing the shopping, telling him what he had to do each day, and whatever else comes out of his spoiled mouth. I suppose it could be worse; I could have been bought by some sweatshop making the same sweater for eternity, or a factory with no breaks, ever. I've heard some of the living using us in such ways, since ghosts don't have rights. We're not people in their eyes, not anymore.

I'm thankful that Yehya gave the the task of doing the shopping, since it let me leave his apartment. PSI Industries must have hated the idea of ghosts ignoring their assigned living person and wandering off to solve their own mystery, so each customer has a PSI-Anchor, which we ghosts are attached to. Without the permission of the living person, we cannot move beyond the walls of the building they occupy, or beyond a radius of about twenty yards if the Anchor is outside. If you thought of owners and dogs with that description, congratulations because you're totally spot-on with that. Anyway, with Yehya's permissions set on the PSI-Anchor, I was allowed to leave the brownstone and wander in the outside world for an hour each day, where the pieces started to fall into place.

As ghosts, we're invisible to the living, but not to each other. I was the only ghost in the brownstone, but outside, I saw hundreds, if not thousands, of other souls around the city. The living's movies always show ghosts as semi-transparent people, but we look to each other more like wisps of light and mist emanating from a quasi-human shape. We can be hard to spot, even to each other, but once I focused on seeing others against the harsh lights of the living world, I noticed just how many of us there are. There's a ghost at every stoplight, one part security and one part technician. Children running through the streets have ghosts for protection. Business-folk have two ghosts, if not more, following their every step, communing with each other about their affairs. It's as if a whole second world is blanketed over the first, just as active and populated, but entirely unnoticed.

I became good friends with Morgan, the store ghost who was lucky enough to remember parts of their past. They were a parent of two, twins. They don't remember their partner's face, but they say that the thought of them fills their being with a warmth unlike any other. Despite knowing all of that, they were no closer to moving on than I, and seemingly resolved themself to an afterlife of retail. Their owner, I mean 'living volunteer,' kept pushing off their questions about looking more into their life with excuses about how busy he was, how much the business needed him, and several more I've chosen to forget on account of being so mind-numbingly stupid.

I told Morgan that I'd ask Yehya to help them after he helped me. "You do that," Morgan said with a chuckle, "I'll be waiting." I see now that it wasn't a chuckle of gratitude, but amusement, the same chuckle a parent gives a child when they babble on about things they don't yet understand.

Keeping to my word, I did ask Yehya. We're invisible and inaudible to the living, but the PSI-Anchors, along with keeping us nearby and having a light Anchor blink when we're present in the same room, also have a recording function. The current version picks up a lot of static and unrelated vocalizations, but it gets the job done.

Through this feature, I told Yehya a bit about Morgan, and how busy the shop owner was. "I bet," said Yehya, focused on his online shooter game.

I asked if he would be willing to help Morgan once I moved on. "Sure," said Yehya.

I asked if he had found any new information about what may be keeping me here. "Not yet," said Yehya.

I asked if he had an idea of how long it would be before he got more information. "Dunno," said Yehya.

I commented that it had been so long since he volunteered to help, but he hadn't done anything at all yet, despite me helping him with anything he asked. Yehya put the device on mute.

Morgan laughed at me when I vented my frustrations. It's a laugh I can still hear as clearly as I did then. "Why would he help you? He paid money for you, and you do everything he wants. Helping you means you leave. Why would he, or any of the living, want that? C'mon, open your eyes."

That's when it all made sense. Of course a society reliant on an invisible labor force would never willingly give that up. But why hadn't ghosts revolted? "The living aren't stupid," Morgan said. "They know to let us go, eventually. But they're trickle-truthing us, giving us a little bit every so often to keep us hooked, making us think that they're out solving our mystery. Between tolerating that for a few decades or being stuck for eternity, which would you choose?"

Based on my immediate internal response to that question, I can conclude that my living self hated binary choices. I was, and still am, an Option C, screw-it-all kind of thinker. However, rebelling against the binary in such a way requires a level of awareness and forethought I didn't yet have. I told Morgan I'd figure out a way to move on without the enslavement of the living. "You do that, and I'll buy you a drink," Morgan said with a chuckle. I chuckled too. Thinking of a ghost with money or a drink seemed just as comedic as a horse at the bar.

I decided I'd need to learn more about the world, but that proved to be much more difficult than I thought. Computers and smartphones have an anti-ghost barrier around them, preventing us from accessing the Internet. Likewise, certain buildings have the same protections, one of which is libraries. Yehya only allowed me out of the brownstone for an hour a day to shop, but even with such a short time, I managed to piece together some information from the ghosts of the area. Ghosts that could go outside and commune with others were generally aware of the truth of their situation, but had resolved to stick it out. Some believed that doing well at their assigned tasks would convince the living to free them sooner, and had an anecdote or two about others being shown such special treatment. Others had rumors of ghosts who revolted, and now suffered an eternity of darkness without rest in prison-like devices designed by PSI Industries to contain "troubled souls." No one I spoke to had ever seen one of these so-called PSI Jails, but the idea of them caused an undercurrent of fear in the ghost world. There were some who spoke of PSI-Guns, PSI-Poisons, and more, but such accounts of objects harming or destroying ghosts were scattered and unreliable. I wanted to believe the same of the PSI-Jail, but something primal inside of me couldn't help but fear that PSI Industries had such technology.

Months into my servitude, Yehya decided to re-try his hand at college. The nearest campus was too far for me to ever reach with my hour time limit outdoors, but after a few weeks of studying his schedule, I came up with a plan. The PSI-Anchor had the same anti-ghost barrier as phones and computers, so I couldn't touch it directly, but with some clever 'accidental' bumps to the desk as I swept, I managed to knock the PSI-Anchor into his backpack. The next day, I sat beside Yehya on the subway, hoping desperately that he wouldn't look into his bag and see the PSI-Anchor's light blinking, revealing my presence. As expected, he didn't touch his textbook-filled bag at all, opting instead to play flashy games on his phone the entire way.

I have no doubt that I learned more than Yehya during that day at the college. I still couldn't access the library, but so many classrooms had their own bookshelves, and students often left their notebooks lying around the dining hall or the gym's locker room. I drifted through the walls of the college, stopping to hear the contents of lectures, then moving on if the topic was irrelevant to my needs. Whenever I found an empty room I read as much as I could, flipping through the pages and darting my vision around the pages in order to quickly find out if the information would help me or not. If a living person walked in on me, they'd see books open and pages flying as if stuck in the winds of a tornado, and immediately know a ghost was to blame. Thankfully, no one did.

I learned several important things that day.

First, the anti-ghost barriers were all thanks to a material called black tourmaline, which had been touted as an anti-spirit mineral for centuries. Turns out the ancient living got at least something right. In order to stop the ghosts from interfering with Internet-based devices, each one has a crystal of black tourmaline inside, usually near the battery or power source of the device. For buildings, the crystals were placed at each point of the doorways or windows.

Second, one of the PSI Industries offices was located in Cambridge, the area just above Boston. It had once been an office in a Harvard start-up building, but the discovery of ghosts and the invention of PSI technology led to Harvard devoting the entire building to their needs.

Finally, upon purchase of a 'loaded,' or ghost-attached, PSI-Anchor, the living is given a message with all of the details about the dead, including a proposed timeline to reveal each key element. These messages are emailed to each customer from PSI Industries.

This knowledge led to a plan, a third option in response to Morgan's obey-or-suffer binary. I still felt woefully under-informed about the way of the world, but despite that, I couldn't handle the thought of quietly obeying a world like this anymore. It would take focus, and practice, and a whole lot of luck, but I would carry out my plan.

When I told Morgan about it, they didn't chuckle their usual semi-condescending way. They made no noise for a while, their wispy form standing still, the emotion emanating from them a strange mix of concern and awe. After a while, they chuckled, and spoke. "If you can do that, forget the drink, I'll buy you a whole damn bar."

It took a bit over a month for the pieces to fall into place just right. Yehya left his smartphone on the top of a cabinet, just under a shelf with his game-replica swords and props. All it took was one screw pulled out to topple the entire thing over.

Yehya's attention broke from his game mid-match, for the first time I ever saw that happen, at the sound of the crashing shelf. Swearing, he ran over to the rubble, assessing the damage. "What the... Ghost, you better fix this," he shouted into the air. Looking back at the objects scattered around the area, he finally noticed his phone, screen shattered.

He picked it up in a panic, hitting the sole button on the device over and over. "Oh come on, no, no, no," he mumbled as his fingers ran over the screen. "What am I supposed to do on the T now?"

Just as expected, Yehya wasn't the type to go out to the phone store to get the screen replaced; he only ever left the apartment for the college, and every day he debated with himself aloud about whether he should bother. He tried to get me to do it, but after reminding him that I couldn't touch the phone, he gave up without realizing that he could have put it in a box, bag, or really any other container for me to interact with. Instead, he turned to online tutorial videos, resolving himself to fixing the screen on his own.

I returned from my shopping a short while later with a new screen and some special tools, as listed by Yehya as he parroted the videos. With an overabundance of confidence downloaded from online, he began to take the phone apart piece by piece. I watched with enough stress to re-kill me as each part came undone, looking at each component for what I needed to find.

There. Right when I noticed it, I flung the water bottle by me across the room, slamming it against the wall. Yehya jumped and turned around to look at the source of the sound, and in that moment I raised the tweezers I had stolen from the bathroom and yanked out a tiny black circle from next to the battery.

"I hate these neighbors," Yehya grumbled as he turned his attention back to the phone pieces. With his vision turned away, I brought the clamped tweezers as low as I could manage to the floor and darted into the bathroom.

Staring at the tiny black circle, I felt a deep, repulsive presence emanating off of it. I knew black tourmaline repelled ghosts, but I didn't realize just how disgusting it would feel being near it without the encasing metal of the electronics they protected. It felt as though the wisps of my being were being clogged with tar, and, despite not needing to breathe, the sensation still felt suffocating. I could only stand to look at it for half a minute maximum before tossing the stone into the toilet and flushing it down.

"Don't waste water," Yehya yelled.

I returned to his side just in time to see him powering on the phone and breathing a sigh of relief. Now the fun would begin.

Over the next few weeks, I got quite a stash of embarrassing photos and videos through the phone while Yehya wasn't paying attention. It took some practice to use, but I had every night as he slept to figure it out. The Internet was way more complicated than I anticipated, but I managed to figure out how to use email and post on Instagram, which is all I needed.

When I felt I had enough, I told Yehya to take me to PSI Industries. "What? No, no. Why would I ever listen to you?"

I grabbed the phone and pulled it away from his reach. "Wha- you're not supposed to-"

I started playing one of the videos I had taken of him wiping himself with a delivery box, and remarked that it would be such a shame if it were posted online. "How, how did you-"

I pulled up another of him using an aimbot in one of his games and commented that it would be so awful if it got emailed to his opponents. "A-are you blackmailing me?"

I only got five seconds into the third video of his nightly ritual before he agreed to bring me to Cambridge.

"This is stupid," he mumbled on the T heading to PSI Industries. "You know they've got anti-ghost blocks on basically everything, right?" I used his phone to type that it was certainly a good thing he wasn't dead then. He replied with some expletives, and one of the other passengers shuffled a few seats further.

Waiting outside the building made every second feel like an hour. My question on 'what would happen if a PSI-Anchor went into a blocked building' was answered as Yehya posed as a Harvard potential and got a tour of the PSI-Industries office: I became stuck in the 25-yard zone outside of the building's walls. The wait was awful, but the view in Cambridge felt more natural, less polluted, than the section of Boston I had spent all of my afterlife in. I tried to focus on that silver lining rather than thinking about what was taking Yehya so long.

Suddenly, my awareness blurred, and I felt myself moving rapidly before coming to a sudden stop. I found myself in a dark office, with Yehya crouched behind the desk, his hand holding five dark, revolting-feeling cubes. The PSI-Anchor on the floor blinked, alerting him to my presence, and he tossed the cubes to the side. That experience answered the 'what would happen if a blocked building suddenly became a not-blocked building and the PSI-Anchor was inside' question I didn't think to ask.

"I broke the window crystals and the PSI-Indicator for this room," Yehya whispered, "so you can be in this office, but anywhere else will trip the alarm. I also took out the crystal in the desktop." He moved to leave, and I asked where he was going. "I'm going home. I'll find a way to crack this new code you put on my phone, and the next ghost I get won't be this annoying." Before I could move, he stepped outside of the office door and vanished from view. I felt tempted to follow, but the thought of alarms stopped me, and my PSI-Anchor in the building meant that I couldn't leave out the window. I had no choice but to see my plan through.

Thankfully for me, Meg Odel of Public Relations was a very trusting woman, and left her desktop open despite stepping out of the room. After watching Yehya mess with his computer, I was far more familiar with their workings than phones, and found a database of the ghosts under PSI Industries in a matter of minutes.

Now or never. The database had an email group option for information and updates pertaining to PSI devices, so all I had to do was email out the information of the ghosts to each customer, and ensure they'd open it when the ghost could see.

I typed out the perfect email subject line: "IMPORTANT INFORMATION - OPEN FOR GHOST AND LET READ." All caps, to grab attention. In the email, I put some dummy text about how PSI Industries is so great, about how their volunteers are working hard, blah blah. Then, in the middle of the text, where someone skimming wouldn't notice, I put information tags, which would be replaced with information from the database for each email recipient. If it worked right, someone like Morgan's owner would open the email, vaguely skim it, and let Morgan read it, and Morgan, paying more attention, would notice the bullet points about themself that the owner had been sent scattered in the dummy text. With that information, ghosts wouldn't need the living anymore; the ones who didn't pass on immediately would know exactly what to do without any other help.

The door opened, and at the sound of a single footstep, an alarm blared. The woman in the doorway stumbled back in shock, and I caught a glimpse of a PSI-Indicator on her person. With the alarm going, I knew I only had moments to do what I needed to do. With a rapid move, I sent out the email, then moved to the window with Yehya's email account that I had opened with his information. A quiet ding played below the alarm's blast, and I saw an email pop up from PSI Industries with an all-caps subject line. Living people flooded into the room as I clicked it.

Then, nothing.

That's where I'm at now. Nothing. Nowhere. Nothing to see, nothing to hear, nothing to feel. I can't remember what happened after I clicked the email. Did I read the email and pass on, and this is what passing on is? Or did the people that came into the room put me into a PSI-Jail like the street ghosts warned? I don't know, and despite me thinking it all out like this, I don't feel any closer to the answer. I don't even know if my email did anything. I like to imagine that society came to a screeching halt when the working dead rebelled, but the more I think about my plan, the more I see the flaws in it. What if the company immediately sent out another email saying not to open mine? Or what if the living actually took the time to read and noticed the hidden information, or the ghosts couldn't be bothered to read and missed it entirely? Still, I like to think that even if I didn't free the ghost population, I at least made the living think twice about using us as their tools.

I feel pretty content with what I've done, and now I get to rest without being bossed around every hour of the day. Even if this isn't the eternal rest, it will do, at least for now. Ask me again in a century.

#ghost #punk #writing #short story #creative

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blessuswithblogs · 7 years ago

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On the anti-imperialist roots of the Super Robot genre

Tadao Nagahama is probably not a name you're familiar with. I won't reproach you for it, it's been a while, I had to look it up myself to help me remember. However, Nagahama is an extremely important person for my current subject of discussion: the anti-imperialist, anti-war roots of the Super Robot genre. Shinzo Abe, the current prime minister of Japan, probably most widely known in the west for wearing a Mario hat to promote the next olympic games, has been in his own quiet (and not so quiet) way contributing to the rise of hard right nationalism, historical revisionism, fascism, and a whole bunch of other nasty isms that have found traction in today's sociopolitical climate. Recently, I saw in passing a tweet about how the ever-popular, ever-mystifying Kancolle had an episode where Japan ended up winning the battle of Midway. Propaganda in media is nothing new, but that was quite egregious, even by my desensitized standards. It got me thinking a little bit about my own niche anime interests and how the common perception of the mecha genre is probably one either of random Gurren Lagann bullshit or simplistic, thinly veiled pro-Japan ideology packaged in a kid friendly, larger than life veneer. In a lot of ways, early Super Robots shared more in common with classical American Super Heroes than actual Japanese Super Heroes like Kamen Rider, which evolved into their own tokusatsu genre quite distinct from either paradigm.

I cannot rightly dispute these preconceptions as wrong, but I do want to at least bring up that some early, influential franchises rejected this narrative. One of the first of these, of course, is Mobile Suit Gundam. While now we have the distinction between Super Robot (robots that are like larger than life super heroes) and Real Robot (robots that are presented in a realistic context as weapons of war using standardized technology employed by military and paramilitary forces to project force) for tedious nerds to bicker over indefinitely, in the days of the original Gundam, that distinction did not exist. Indeed, to play for ratings, Yoshiyuki Tomino, famed creator of the Gundam franchise, had to make many concessions to his sponsors and make Amuro Ray's Gundam more like its more popular contemporaries, with goofy mid-season combination upgrades and some extremely anachronistic weaponry like a beam trident and a huge, MS sized ball and chain. On the back of his later success, Zeta Gundam and the seemingly never ending number of side-stories like War in the Pocket and Stardust Memory, Tomino would actually go on to revise the original series in a definitive movie compilation that cut out a great deal of filler and blatantly unrealistic (or at least immersion breaking) elements. This version is extremely good by the way. Give it a watch if you're interested in the genre's history or if you just like old sci-fi.

The reason I bring this up is sort of my roundabout way of arguing that while the Gundam of today is made of entirely different stock than Super Robots, the original article deserves a space in this discussion. The discussion being, of course, the distinctly anti-nationalist bent of a lot of early Super Robot shows. In all of its many incarnations, good, bad, and inbetween, Gundam is a story about war really sucking and how tragic it is that we fail to understand one another because it's easier to just kill one another instead. Now, of course, a lot of fans are either too thick to understand this subtext (and text-text) or simply willfully disregard it because they like cool robots that shoot lasers. Basically think of Dan Ryckert's relationship with Metal Gear. While certainly not all Gundam series have been good, they have always been faithful to these ideas, which is laudable. In broad strokes, anyway. SEED Destiny was pretty weird in spots.

Mobile Suit Gundam 079, which chronicled the One Year War, was not at all shy about this. The One Year War began as a movement for Spacenoid (a slightly ridiculous term for a person living in a space colony or on the moon) independence from the hopelessly corrupt Earth Federation. Naturally, the Federation did not take kindly to this and moved to suppress the movement, but found itself overmatched by the Principality of Zeon's advanced Mobile Suit weapons. To keep an even footing in the war, the Federation resorted to using nuclear weapons and other atrocities on largely civillian colonies to buy time as they developed their own brand of Mobile Suit. In retaliation, Zeon counterattacked with an even more devastating new weapon: dropping space colonies on earth. All told, the One Year War was not a good time to be alive, and nearly half of the Earth Sphere's total population died in one way or another. While all this was happening, the original founder of the independence movement died under suspect circumstances and power was seized by the Zabi family, who were Really Bad News. The Federation, meanwhile, turned to conscripting child soldiers in a desperate bid to keep pace.

This all culminated in the creation of the Gundam by Tem Ray, Amuro's emotionally absent father. Due to Circumstances, Amuro finds himself in the cockpit and becomes the most important soldier in the war overnight because the Gundam is several orders of magnitude more powerful than anything Zeon can field. The character of Amuro is explored most fully in Char's Counterattack, when he is a fucked up adult instead of a fucked up kid, but from the outset, Amuro is defined by forces completely out of his control and his fatalistic acceptance of his own lack of agency. Despite his nigh legendary piloting skills, Newtype powers of precognition and telepathy, and status as hero of the One Year War, Amuro might actually be the most passive motherfucker in the god damned galaxy. This puts him immediately at odds not only militarily but interpersonally with the dreadfully overambitious if mostly well-intentioned Char Aznable, his lifelong rival. Their entire history of conflict is based entirely upon the simple irony that they both want the same thing but, despite being Newtypes, lack the ability to understand this. The One Year War's violence and brutality defined them and their relationship to another, because of a petty twist of fate that put Amuro in the Gundam's pilot seat instead of some other sap.

Gundam uses many more overt methods of conveying that the One Year War is not glamorous or cool or just. Characters die regularly on both sides of the conflict, oftentimes for no real reason other than "this is war, sucker." Tomino developed quite a reputation for this style of storytelling, earning the moniker Kill-'em-all Tomino, especially in some of his non-Gundam works like Aura Battler Dunbine and Space Runaway Ideon. The entire continent of Australia got rendered uninhabitable by colony drops. The White Base, the federation battleship housing the Gundam, is crewed and staffed almost entirely by people who have yet to reach 20 years of age and they've got a pack of prepubescent toddlers running around on the ship because they've got nowhere else to go. I personally find the interpersonal conflicts acting as microcosm for ideology and war to be the most interesting, and most intrinsically Gundam thing about the franchise, but you don't have to go looking between the lines to find evidence of the show's ardent anti-war, anti-nationalist proclivities. The intensely nationalistic Zeon is surreptitiously usurped by a power-mad dictator without anyone even catching on after Ghiren Zabi uses a giant ass space laser to kill both his father and an influential Earth Federation general while they're trying to broker a peace deal. The death of that general, in turn, allows the worst elements of the Federation government to run amok and eventually create the deeply fascist Titans in Zeta Gundam, who make it a point of policy to oppress spacenoids as brutally as possible.

So Gundam, at least, has profound roots in the denunciation of military power as a metric of moral superiority. That's not really news to most people. Oddly enough, it's the most obsessive of fans that tend to miss the memo because they're presumably too busy making sure Mobile Suit measurements are exactly as documented and all character motivations are completely rational and logical, like them. Let's dig a little deeper for some more surprising examples of this kind of ideology in unlikely places. It should be noted, of course, that I am not heralding Gundam as some sort of bastion of progressive thought. Tomino's sexual politics are located roughly in the Stone Age until about 2000's Turn A Gundam, where they progress to about on par with inudstrial revolution social mores. Progress, I suppose. This is a problem with a distressing amount of media, especially in the 70s and 80s, but I'm trying to look at the bright side of things. At least it's not Cross Ange, right?

Moving on, when we look at the genesis of Super Robots as a genre of animation, we will invariably look to Go Nagai. Though a number of shows about large robot men fighting evil like Tetsujin 28 and the live action Giant Robo came first, the seminal Mazinger Z had the popularity and iconic staying power to define everything that came after. Though I could write a great deal about Go Nagai and his Dynamic Robots, they don't really pertain to my particular topic of discussion today because Go Nagai was about as progressive as a sack of bricks. His work was largely apolitical, at least in the sense that he did not intentionally make his stories about contemporary political issues, so at very least Kouji Kabuto never waxed nostalgic about the time Japan was allied with Nazi Germany. In fact, one of the show's major villains, Count Brocken, is a reanimated SS officer cyborg who carries his head around with him because of a decapitation in a previous life. Generally speaking, not a good or sympathetic guy, despite his protests to the contrary. Go Nagai focused on themes of brotherhood and being outcast by society for just being too damn hotblooded and having sideburns that were just too damn thick, though these mostly manifested in his manga. The TV adaptations of Mazinger, Getter Robo, and Grendizer were largely sanitized and inoffensive.

I mentioned Tadao Nagahama at the beginning of my piece, and it is now with him we come to a very important point in the genre's history. Nagahama was the director of three particular Super Robot shows: Combattler V, Voltes V (here the V is treated as the roman numeral, so it's really Voltes 5), and Toushou Daimos (roughly, Brave Leader Daimos). Colloquially, these three are known as the Nagahama Romantic Trilogy, and they are denoted not only by the iconic designs of the robots themselves, towering, blocky things made out of many constituent parts in a fairly sensical way (as opposed to the famously Unpossible Getter Robo), but also by the injection of genuine interpersonal and ideological drama into the proceedings. They were also super popular in other areas of the world, much like Go Nagai's Dynamic Robots. Voltes V in particular was popular in Southeast Asia. Combattler V was instrumental in cementing the notion of The Honorable Rival in the genre, a character aligned with evil that still conducted themselves with decorum. While you would find few such characters in the ranks of Dr. Hell's armies or King Vega's invasion force, in the Romantic Trilogy, they were critical to the show's success. Combattler V was not especially revolutionary, but it laid the groundwork for Voltes V, which in many ways was.

Voltes V is the tale of the Boazan Empire, an interstellar civilization with an expansionist streak and a highly stratified caste system. Unlike previous villainous organizations, the Boazans are noteworthy for being three dimensional and not painted in shades of black and white. The Boazans invade earth for the purposes of annexing it to their growing empire, with the crown prince Hainel leading the charge. Their battle beasts are too much for earth's military (and the militaries of many other planets), but the super electromagnetic robot Voltes V, piloted by a team of five headed by Kenichi, appears to beat them back. Things become interesting when we learn about Kenichi and his two brother's lineage. Their father, the brilliant scientist behind Voltes V's construction, is actually a Boazan expatriate. Not just any expatriate, but former royalty, no less. Boazan's strict caste system is based solely upon whether or not a citizen has horns. If they do, they're nobility. If they don't, well, uh, sucks to be them. Such a system, already untenable, is exacerbated by the fact that the vast majority of Boazans don't have horns. It's a rare genetic mutation. The whole Boazan war machine is powered by a gigantic underclass of slaves-in-everything-but-name. Kenichi's father believed that this was morally reprehensible and that reform was necessary. Unfortunately, this was not a popular opinion among the nobility, and he was disgraced, de-horned, and ousted for his ties to rebellion movements.

Complicating matters even further, he had a son while on Boazan, the aforementioned Prince Hainel. After relocating to Earth to escape persecution and devise some way of bringing change to the empire, Kenichi's father settled down and had a family. Now bereft of horn, he was largely indistinguishable from the average earthling. Parallel evolution is a concept emrbaced heartily by old sci-fi in both Western and Japanese media, probably because people thought alien babes were hot. Fair, honestly. At any rate, Kenichi engages in mortal combat with his half-brother's forces on a regular basis, which creates interpersonal tension mostly lacking in earlier shows. Sometimes Duke Freed got snippy at Kouji for being all love and peace at the Vegans but that was usually resolved at the end of the episode. Hainel himself gradually changes, too, starting out as arrogant, dismissive, and openly ashamed of his connection to a disgraced expatriate and his sons but gaining more depth as time goes on. The end of the show takes place on Boazan itself, with Voltes V spearheading a hornless revolution while Hainel turns on the emperor, vengeful and disgusted by his cowardice. Or maybe it was a movie. Look it's been a long time and I'm going from memory give me a break.

For a kid's TV show at the time, this was honestly pretty wild. Voltes V was not shy about displaying its moral core: people are not defined by the circumstances of their birth, and systems of government based upon the oppression of an underclass deserve only to be destroyed. Voltes V is not as morally complex as Gundam, but it is leaps and bounds ahead of many of its Super Robot contemporaries. Nagahama believed in a sort of fusion of genuine human drama and moral complexity with the more simplistic, bombastic style of storytelling common to his predecessors, and it resonated with viewers all over the globe. At the time of airing, a number of Southeast Asian countries were under the thumb of repressive dictatorships, and the final episodes had to be heavily censored and edited so as not to promote seditious ideas. That, more than anything to me, is the mark of something that is genuinely anti-nationalist in nature. Who would know better than fascist dictators themselves?

The final entry in the Romantic Trilogy, Toushou Daimos, continued the trend of creating morally and politically complex circumstances in which the karate robot made of transforming trucks must punch bad guys. The aliens of the day are the Barmians. The Barmians, however, buck convention and come to earth in genuine peace. Their story is a tragic one - their planet was destroyed in a catastrophe, and the survivors were evacuated on the aptly named mobile space city Small Barm. Due to severe space and resource constraints, a billion Barmians have to remain in cryogenic sleep while a skeleton crew of nobles and military officials keep Small Barm afloat as they search for a place to live. Naturally, they find earth to be a charming place as any to settle down (as it must have seemed in the early 80s before the environment started collapsing) and initiate negotiations with the governments of earth to try and accommodate their people. Expert martial artist and principle protagonist Ryuzaki Kazuya is the son of a brilliant scientist who created the robot Daimos and the special Daimolight energy that makes it so scary strong. Said scientist is part of the diplomatic delegation sent from earth to Small Barm (in some universes alongside the illustrious Rilina Peacecraft, but that is a story for another time entirely) and is a major proponent of the Barmian's request for peaceful integration into earthling society.

Regrettably, this all goes awry when the Barmian hardliner military faction assassinates the King of Barm during the meeting with poison and blames the earthling delegation on it, engineering their own perfect casus beli for a war of domination against Earth. Fascists are remarkably bad at sharing and getting along with others, as has been demonstrated. Prince Richter, the honorable if somewhat dim and hot tempered son of the King wasn't too hot on the assimilation idea because of his prideful belief that the superiority of Barm's culture and technology should allow them to dictate more favorable terms, but was ultimately loyal to his father above all else and acquiesced to the idea. When his father is assassinated, of course, he flies into a rage and declares earth to be the enemy of Barm and kills Kazuya's father. So there's a lot of bad blood between the two of them. Kazuya and Daimos stand up against Barm's battle beasts and prevents the invasion from progressing. He eventually meets and falls in love with princess Erika, Richter's sister. Where Richter is brash and hasty, Erika is intelligent and patient, and much more compassionate. These qualities allow her to see that the circumstances of the King's death, and any motivation the Earthling's might have had to assassinate him, were extremely suspect. They part ways, but Erika eventually joins a resistance faction on Small Barm against the military hardliners who had assumed power. Richter continues to dance to their tune, too consumed by misplaced anger and vengeance to see what is really going on. Erika's relationship with Kazuya only makes him more unreasonably mad.

Of course, Earth has its own hardliners, and in his battles, Kazuya not only has to contend with Barm's battle beasts, but General Miwa, an odious Earth-supremacist convinced that all Barmians, regardless of their disposition, must be eliminated immediately and without mercy. If we want to talk about more alternate universe scenarios, for reference, Miwa was a fucked up enough dude to cast his lot in with the Blue Cosmos organization after his Barmian extermination ambitions never panned out. He really fucking sucks. Ultimately, Kazuya and Erika manage to uncover the plot to assassinate the King, defeat the military holdouts, and bring the peace their fathers wanted about. Where Voltes V presented a scenario of a civilization run by ultra-nationalists needing to be restructured from the ground up, Daimos offers the inverse: a peaceful, tolerant civilization in a time of crisis gets hijacked by a few selfish, warmongering fascists and nearly destroys itself. Coming to understand and love one another, even when from different planets entirely, is an even bigger theme in Daimos than Voltes V, and is in many ways a more personal story. A romance, if you will, for a romantic trilogy.

Nagahama's Romantic Robots were well loved around the globe and left a lasting impact on their genre, encouraging those who came after to experiment with more complex themes and characters, even in the larger than life universe of Super Robots. While not all (or even very many) of these successors live up to this high minded ideal, it's an important part of the history of Japanese animation, proving that drama and politics were not just for Gundam or more "serious" shows. We can see the legacy of Nagahama in a number of more contemporary titles. Evangelion is so much more about interpersonal conflict than actual robots that the final episode of the TV series didn't even have any fighting in it (albeit mostly due to budget constraints). People hated it, of course, and Hideki Anno went on to make End of Evangelion to either appease or piss off further the angry fans, but it happened nonetheless. Gun X Sword represents an evolution of the genre into that of a pseudo-western, where heroes and villains are separated by the thinnest of ideological margins despite the fantastical robots and setting. Gurren Lagann briefly flirts with political complexity before promptly imploding on itself (maybe this one is a bad example). Even Shin Mazinger, an unabashed love letter to older Go Nagai properties, managed to create a surprisingly affecting and compelling character (dare I say, Protagonist?) in its reimagining of Baron Ashura.

The Mecha Genre used to be, and still kind of is, one of my big guilty passions in life. This essay is more personal in nature than a lot of my others, because from time to time I feel like I have to justify to myself why I like this garbage even when it's weird regressive shit. I guess the compromise I have found is that, in certain circumstances, it can be weird progressive shit, too.

#super robots #super robot wars #gundam #media analysis #tadao nagahama

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sasasarararara · 7 years ago

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The Infallible Girl: Chapter 4

Trial by Fire

“Isis pulled her Duel Monsters deck out of its drawstring bag. To most of the world, it was simply a toy. To her it was both an outward expression of her soul and a tool of immense power. She absent-mindedly cut the deck and examined the card she had stopped at. She didn't need the Torc to predict which one it would be. It was always her favorite.

"Blast Held by a Tribute."

It had been in the lone Duel Monsters booster pack that Malik and Rishid left in the alleyway as they fled from the game shop. The card graphic depicted a figure holding a ball of fire in their bare hands. It was prepared to sacrifice itself to the opponent's monster, then burn for the sake of the other cards on its team.It was prepared to give up everything for its family.

And so was she.“

Trigger Warning: Descriptions of violence.

Isis didn't bother trying to conceal her amazement in Turgoman. There was no point. The place was massive. Vehicles came through in unceasing waves. People from all over the world swarmed around her. The sounds of motors, chatter, laughter, horns, yelling, and general turmoil deafened her.

There were more people in this one place than Isis had met in her entire life.

And this was only the bus station.

The press of the crowd hampered her progress to the exit. Each time she was bumped by a stranger she expected a quick apology, but none ever came. A few times she accidentally hit people and, likewise, nobody seemed to mind. Nobody noticed.

She soon gave up trying to cut her own path and let the push of the crowd guide her out of the station. It was then that she got her first good look at Cairo. She hadn't known exactly what to expect from Egypt's capital city but had a vague idea that it would be a larger version of the village.

She couldn't have been farther from the truth.

Cairo was more massive and teeming with life than she possibly could have imagined. The crush of people around Isis made her feel claustrophobic in a way that the Tomb never had. The scents of the city made her head spin. It took mere moments for her to become completely disoriented.

Isis stepped clumsily out of the crowd and tilted her head up in hopes that the sight of the open sky would ease her anxiety. This turned out to be a mistake. From this angle the skyscrapers looked ready to topple over and crush her at any moment. And was it just her, or were they closing in on each side?

She quickly looked away from the monstrous buildings before nausea overwhelmed her. The last thing she needed to do was vomit in the middle of all these people.

Isis stood still for a few more moments and gave the world time to stop spinning then started on her way again, wondering vaguely where to go. She had originally planned to get food and rent a room that evening, but that was before she knew how massive Cairo was. Her situation, which was already painfully difficult, was becoming more complicated by the minute.

But she had to do something. Her brothers needed her.

Isis decided to explore the city on her own for a while and learn as much as she could. Anyway, things weren't so bad. She had money, clean clothing, and food in her bag, and the Millennium Torc to guide her way. She straightened her back and set her jaw. If anyone could do this, it was her.

A strange thought drifted across her mind. I've never met anyone so in command of their destiny. Isis had no idea where it came from. She was pretty sure it wasn't the Torc. As protective as it was, it had never spoken words of encouragement. The sentiment felt like a memory, only she couldn't recall where it had originated. Regardless of where it came from, it gave her a rush of confidence. She squared her shoulders, set her jaw, and faced the city.

As she walked Isis felt a slight pressure on the shoulder her bag was slung over, but she ignored it. It was probably just someone bumping into it. She kept walking only to feel the pressure again.

"Look down."

Isis took the advice of the Torc and saw an arm elbow deep in her bag. She was being robbed in broad daylight while surrounded by hundreds of people. But growing up with brothers and minimal parental supervision had prepared her to dispense rough-and-ready justice at a moment's notice. Without a second thought she stomped hard on the thief's foot and drove her elbow into their ribs. The pickpocket withdrew their arm with a pained yelp. Only then did Isis get a good look at her assailant. She was shocked to see a girl who couldn't have been more than nine or ten years old.

"I am sorry!" Isis gasped. The girl, however, did not seem overly upset by the encounter. She gave Isis a measured look and a small shrug as if to say, "You got me." Clearly this was nothing unusual for her.

Her dispassionate response did nothing to make Isis feel better. She dug through her bag for a handful of bills and held them out to the girl. "Take this offering as a token of my sincere apologies," she said. The girl snatched the money with snake-like speed and melted back into the crowd without a word.

The whole interaction confused Isis. The little girl had looked so tired and dirty. Was there nobody to take care of her? And not a single person had noticed besides Isis, and even then only thanks to the Torc. It shocked her that anyone would have to resort to theft and begging, but especially a small child. Isis had never seen poverty before. The little village was far from wealthy, but everyone she had encountered seemed well fed and relatively content. What kind of place let its children go hungry?

A sudden noise made Isis jump. She turned to face a man who was shaking his head in disapproval. "Whew, that was a lot of money," said the man. "You shouldn't give so much to beggars. It only encourages them and causes a nuisance."

Isis glared at the stranger. Who was this person to tell her what to do with her own possessions? "It is my money, and I will do with it what I choose," she said shortly.

The man scowled back at her. "Weird accent you got there. You're not from around here, are you." It wasn't a question so much as an observation. A small shiver of fear ran up Isis' spine, but she calmed herself before any emotion showed on her face. Cairo was massive and she'd already seen people from across the world. He'd probably think she was just another foreigner.

"That is right." She raised her chin and narrowed her eyes imperiously, daring the man to comment further.

He rolled his eyes and mumbled "damn tourists," under his breath. "Always making it difficult for the rest of us."

Half a dozen retorts flooded to Isis' mind, but instead she turned her back haughtily and continued on her way. The nerve of that man! The servants would never speak to her like that, and from a stranger it was even more insulting. However, as much as she was loath to admit it, he did raise an important point. She had given away what felt like a lot of money. On top of that she'd nearly been robbed of everything.

When Isis was out of sight of the nosy stranger she pushed the money down to the bottom of her bag so that it would be difficult to reach. Additionally, positioned the bag so that the zipper was in front of her where she could easily see anyone trying to rob her. Then, for what felt like the millionth time in ten minutes, she gathered her resolve and stepped back into the teeming streets of Cairo.

As the initial shock of the city wore away, Isis began to notice how fascinating it was. Buildings both new and old flanked the roads, each one full of mysteries and a life all its own. The occasional statue or minaret gave the streets a surreal, anachronistic ambiance. Stalls similar to the ones in her home village lined the roads. They sold food, colorful juices, and any number of random items labeled variously as "souvenirs" or "curios."

People, particularly westerners, seemed most attracted to the stalls selling trinkets but Isis was immediately enchanted by the food vendors. Meals in the Tomb typically consisted of the few things Rishid knew how to cook and were rather bland. Meals with the Rahals had certainly been more exciting, but nothing she'd ever eaten could compare to the street food of Cairo. The aromas of roasting vegetables, toasting bread, fresh fruit, fried pastries, boiling stews, and more spices than she had known existed assaulted her stomach by way of her nose. All she'd had to eat that day was a few handfuls of dried fruit. Even the scent of charred lamb and chicken was painfully enticing despite her distaste for meat.

Isis followed the scent of sautéed onions to a cart and ordered flatbread stuffed with grilled vegetables and feta cheese with a cup of icy water that had been tinted green by the sheer amount of cucumbers floating in it.

"You're not from around here, are you?" the vendor asked as he prepared her food. "I've never heard an accent like yours before. Where you from, kid?"

This time Isis was prepared for the question. "Saudi Arabia," she answered without hesitation. "I come from far out in the country and our dialect is different. This is my first time in Cairo."

The vendor beamed. "Well, welcome to our city. Hey, is this your first day?"

Isis smiled. "I just got off the bus about an hour ago," she answered. "I'm still trying to find my way around."

From the country side, fresh off the bus, strange and fake sounding accent, finding her own way around? The man looked her up and down, his eyes lingering on her baggy hand-me-down clothes, over-stuffed duffel bag, and noting the lack of any adults. Ah, a runaway. There were more and more every day. "This'll be your first meal here, then?" the man asked. Isis nodded. "Well first taste of Cairo is on the house," he said as he passed the glistening plate toward her.

"I, uh, do not have a house," Isis answered with a frown. "I am sorry. But I do have money." She dug her money out of her bag once again and held it out. "How many pounds is it?"

The man stared at her for a moment, trying to conceal his pity. Offering what looked like all her money to a stranger? She won't last the night. Allah, save these kids. "No, dear, it's an expression. It means I'm giving it to you for free." He gently pushed her outstretched hand away. "And to go with it I have some free advice. Don't go waving that money around, okay? Most people are decent, but there are those out there who would take advantage of you."

Isis blushed and put her money back in the bag. That was two strangers in a row who'd noticed her unfamiliarity with money. Apparently it was a much more complicated subject than she'd thought. "Thank you," she said. "You are very kind."

The man waved his hands dismissively. "I'm glad to help. It's a big city," he answered. "I've lived here all my life and I still feel lost sometimes. Is there anything else I can help you with?"

"There is one thing," she said. "Do you know of any cheap places to stay the night?" the prospect of finding a place to sleep had begun to concern her. She had passed a few hotels but they were all intimidating and seemed very fancy. Isis didn't know much about money, but she knew she probably couldn't afford a place like where Malik and Rishid were staying in her vision.

The vendor pointed her in the direction of a hostel a few blocks away. "You'll have to share a room," he explained. "But it's mostly university students on backpacking tours. It should be safe." Isis thanked the vendor again and began to head in the direction of the hostel, eating her stuffed flatbread as she walked. The taste somehow surpassed even the scent of it and the cucumber water was the most refreshing thing she'd ever tasted.

She was licking the last drops of grease off her fingers as the sun finished setting and the city burst into light. Rows upon rows of street lamps flickered on, neon signs glowed above storefronts, and even the windows in the buildings above her gave off a soft, golden glow. Isis gaped at the shimmering city, hardly able to believe her eyes. It felt like she was walking in a dream. She found herself desperately missing her brothers. If only she could have seen Malik's face the first time he'd experienced Cairo at night… Just imagining his expression made her giggle despite her broken heart.

The hostel was on the second floor of a squat building that was slightly set off from downtown Cairo. It cost £413 (about $25) a night and smelled permanently like baked goods thanks to the café on the first floor. The proprietor led Isis to a cramped room where three other girls were already staying. Just like the street vendor had predicted they appeared to be European students. They were huddle together on one of the room's four beds looking at what appeared to be trinkets from the souvenir stalls. As Isis entered the room, they smiled and greeted her in a language she didn't recognize. She waved shyly at them, kicked off her shoes, and settled onto the only bed free of luggage.

In that moment she wanted nothing more than to relax, change into the pajamas Farah had packed for her, and get back to the book about the sorcerer, but there was still work to be done. Quite important work.

It was time for her to figure out her money.

She knew the basics, but based on her encounters with the pickpocket, the annoying man, and the kind vendor, it was becoming clear that the subject was much more complicated than she had expected. Though she had helped the servants shop during the past year nobody had ever explained in any detail where money came from, the meanings of the different pound notes, or how to budget. She didn't even know what a lot of money vs. a little was.

Isis pulled her money out and quickly totaled it up. It added up to £6554 (roughly $400 USA) which seemed like a big number, but she wasn't sure how far it would stretch. The hostel had cost £413, and the menu at the food cart said her meal would have cost £82 ($5) if she'd had to pay for it. Isis figured she could get by on two meals a day. But there were cheaper items on the menu. So that was…

She found a pen in her bag and began to draft a budget on the hostel receipt. Eventually she came to the conclusion that if she used the money for necessities only, she would have enough for a little over two weeks in Cairo. It wasn't a lot of time, but all she needed to do was find Rishid and Malik. Cairo was big, but they were her family. They were connected. It couldn't possibly take more than a few days to track them down, especially since she had the help of the Millennium Torc and Malik was extremely bad at subtlety. All she had to do was use the Torc to see where he would strike next and be there waiting for him. It would be simple.

The other girls left the room just as she was finishing up her budget. Isis took the opportunity to change into her pajamas, then grabbed her book and sank into the small bed. She felt a little guilty for not practicing with the Torc, but it had been an eventful day and she wanted to relax. Besides, she'd been practicing with it every night for over a week now. Last night's vision in particular had taken a lot out of her. A night to rest her mind would probably be good for her.

Isis read until her eyes were heavy. She fell asleep listening to the hum of traffic and enjoying the scent of baking bread coming in through the vents. Her last thought before drifting off was "we'll be together in no time."

The money lasted less than half the time she had expected. In her budget Isis had only accounted for food and a place to sleep. She hadn't considered things like laundry, personal hygiene, and transportation. Not only that, but most meals were more expensive than she had expected. £82 would get her a vegetable sandwich and water but it wasn't enough to keep her full for hours. Despite her resolve to spend as little as possible, Isis found herself frequently darting into bodegas and buying snack food that was equally unfilling. But snack food was only a few pounds. Hardly anything, really. There could be no harm in buying a pack of crisps. And the waterless hand cleanser was also only a few pounds. And so was the little waterproof map of Cairo. And the giant bottle of tea. And a taxi ride back to the hostel wasn't that much either.

It was shocking how quickly a handful of pounds here and there added up.

On her fifth day in Cairo, Isis had a vision of Malik and Rishid.

They are at a game store and where they are stuffing a bag with packs of Duel Monsters cards. There are employees and customers nearby. Their expressions are placid and void of all emotion. Rishid slings the bag over his shoulder. They run out of the store without stopping for anything else. The only things they take are the Duel Monsters cards.

Isis jolted back into the present and struggled to figure out what to do through the lethargy that always came after a detailed vision. She knew where that game store was. She'd passed it several times already and had even peeked inside hoping to see Malik who had always enjoyed games. It was in the heart of Cairo only a few blocks away from her hostel. Unfortunately, she had taken a bus to a motorcycle dealership on the outskirts of the city.

Isis had no idea how far in the future her vision was. For all she knew it could be mere seconds away. She was more than an hour's walk from downtown Cairo and the bus traveled only marginally faster. The quickest way to the shop was a taxi.

The only problem was that if Isis spent money on the taxi, she wouldn't have enough for a room that evening. It was a huge risk.

But this could be her chance to save Malik and Rishid. If she found her brothers and convinced them to come home, money would never be a problem again. The thought of hugging them, of feeling safe and secure in their arms, of knowing that she'd never be away from them again overruled any argument for prudence.

Isis dove into the first taxi she saw with no regard for the couple it had actually stopped for. She pulled out a fist full of cash and yelled "I will give you all the money I have if you take me to the game store downtown as fast as you possibly can" before the driver had a chance to protest.

The driver, a young man raised on western action movies, grinned and floored the pedal. He had been waiting for this moment since starting the job and couldn't believe it had taken a whole month to be in his first high speed chase. The cab screeched out of the motorcycle dealership and began to rocket toward the heart of Cairo.

Isis was too preoccupied with her own thoughts to process the dangerous speed at which they were traveling. Why on earth were Malik and Rishid robbing a gaming store? And why were they targeting the Duel Monsters cards specifically? A few months ago Isis had smuggled a few packs of Duel Monsters cards into the Tomb, justifying her actions by telling herself that it would be a fun way to teach Malik Arabic. In reality she had read the rules at the small toy booth and had immediately been intrigued. In any case, the game had been fun and easy to hide from their father. Malik had especially enjoyed the colorful pictures and hoarded the prismatic cards for himself, but Isis had a hard time believing he loved the game enough to rob a store specifically for it.

Wait, didn't her reoccurring vision have cards in-

Suddenly the world lurched and turned sideways. Isis screamed as she was flung against the cab's window. Her head slammed into the thick glass and purple spots exploded in her vision. Then the cab lurched again, throwing her in the opposite direction and causing her neck to snap back with a painful pop. Again, the cab lurched. This time the whole car flipped upside down. Isis was hurled from her seat and landed in a crumpled heap on what had been the roof of the cab. With one final spin on its axes, the cab came to a stop. The entirety of the crash had taken no more than five seconds but it felt like an eternity.

Isis rose shakily to her hands and knees and pushed at the battered door until it popped open. She crawled clumsily out of the upturned vehicle and tried to take in her surroundings despite the purple blotches still obscuring her vision. They were on the curb of a busy intersection. Long skid marks traced the cab's path and showed where it had rounded the intersection corner too sharply, hopped the curb, and glanced off a street lamp causing it to flip.

Isis reached back into the cab to take her bag and felt the world reel beneath her. It was a feeling that was becoming all too familiar; the feeling that she was about to faint.

No, she thought furiously. Not this time. Not when I'm so close.

She grabbed her bag with trembling hands, rose to her feet, and began to walk the remaining distance to the gaming shop. As she went she heard people calling to her, trying to help her, but she ignored them. There was no time to be hurt. When the world stopped whirling around her and her vision cleared, she broke into a run. It was agony. Every step made her neck and head throb but she refused to stop. She was so close. So close. So close.

Isis burst around a corner and onto the long downtown street that housed the gaming shop. Even from a quarter mile away she could see police cars with their bright blue lights surrounding the building. Her heart threatened to break at the sight of them but she pushed her encroaching despair away. It didn't necessarily mean her brothers were gone. Maybe the Millennium Rod had finally failed. Maybe this would provide a distraction that allowed her to reach them in time.

But when she reached the shop it was clear that she had missed them. The police officers were already taking statements from witnesses and searching the shop for evidence. Isis ran up to a group of officers paying no heed to the portable yellow barricades shielding the crime scene from the public.

"How long ago did the thieves leave?" she asked breathlessly.

The officers paused in their investigation and regarded her coldly. "Young lady, please stand on the other side of the barricade," he said in response.

"Please!" she begged, trying to keep her eyes from filling with tears. "I can still get to them! Please?!"

The officer put a firm hand on her shoulder led her to the other side of the barrier. "You can't impede an investigation miss, unless you want to be charged with hindering an officer. If you have any information about the crime or suspects, you can give Officer Mahmoud over there a statement. Otherwise, stay out of our way." And with that the officer turned and left.

Isis was about to charge right back in when someone tapped her shoulder. "They went that way," said a small, elderly woman. "About five minutes ago. A kid and a young man went up that ally. I'm the only one who saw, and I told the police I wasn't hypnotized by the mind ray like the rest of them, but they just looked at me like I was crazy-"

Isis took off toward the ally before the old woman could finish her story. Malik and Rishid only had a five-minute lead on her. Maybe she could still get them! There was still hope.

That hope evaporated when she reached the ally. Not only was it empty, but it led to a dozen other alleyways and streets. Those alleyways and streets led to hundreds of buildings, thousands of doors, and millions of people. She turned this way and that, frantic to find a clue. The rapid motion made her head throb and her neck seize up again. The only thing she spotted was a lone pack of Duel Monsters cards lying in the middle of the ally. She picked the card pack up, looked at it through dull eyes, then sank to her knees and began to cry openly.

She had lost them. She had lost everything.

Isis found it easiest to measure time in terms of events.

It had been nine months since she had lost the last of the money that the Rahals had given her. Nine months since she had been able to pay for a room to sleep in, or a hearty meal, or basic human comforts.

It had been eight months and two weeks since her shoes had worn out. They had been made for a mostly sedentary life in the Tomb. The paved streets and sidewalks of Cairo had eaten through the hardened canvas with ease. After a few weeks of walking, they had been reduced to gray rags.

It had been eight months and one week since her last full night's sleep. Between aching hunger and fear of theft or worse, she found herself waking up frequently to change locations.

It had been eight months since she had sold most of what Farah had given her. The book, the spare clothing, most of the contents of the first aid kit, the bus pass, and every other non-essential item in her bag with the exception of her mother's headpiece and the photograph of her brothers was sold for less than one night's rent in a cheap hostel.

It had been seven months and three weeks since she first resorted to begging. The idea of asking strangers for help made her stomach hurt, but she couldn't eat her pride. Soon she learned that western tourists were most likely to pity her and give her money while native Egyptians would usually shoo her away with a scowl. She didn't know which reaction shamed her the most.

It had been seven months and two weeks since a vision showed her that Malik and Rishid had left Cairo. She saw them in a city whose buildings made Cairo's skyscrapers look like mere toys. She would eventually recognize the city as Dubai, but in the moment it looked like they may as well be on another planet while she was stranded in Cairo. She had debated going back to the Tomb but it was over 300 miles away. She also didn't know what she'd find when she got there. The idea of seeing her father's body sickened her. The idea of meeting servants who thought she was responsible for his death was even worse. No. She couldn't go back.

It had been seven months since she'd lost her curves. Pervasive hunger and near constant movement had robbed her of the small amount of body fat she had to spare.

It had been six months and one week since she had first resorted to theft. She told herself that she would only take small necessities such as food and fresh water. It was nothing like the crime spree that Malik and Rishid were on but it still made her conscience pang with guilt.

It had been five months since her last period. Her body didn't have energy to spare for unessential processes. From what Isis knew, this wasn't supposed to happen until she became pregnant and there was no chance of that. At first she was vaguely concerned but this soon gave way to relief. It was one less thing to worry about.

It had been four months since she had been poisoned. She had eaten what looked like a perfectly fine pastry that she'd fished out of a trash can near an upscale bakery. That should have told her that something wasn't right. Nobody would throw away an untouched pastry, especially from such an expensive store. It was lying right on top of the trash can, still wrapped in tissue paper, unsullied by the garbage. Isis had taken it as a gift from the gods, but of course it wasn't. The following two days were a haze of pain. She vomited more food than she could have possibly eaten and drifted in and out of a fever. Relief only came when she desperately stumbled into a mosque where she sometimes slept (rarely though. Competition for refuge in shelters and churches was fierce and often a hunting ground for thieves and other predators) and begged for help from the worshipers. They had given her water and let her sleep until her fever broke, then sent her on her way. Before leaving, a fellow refuge seeker had warned her that sometimes upscale restaurants would purposefully throw away food laced with rat poison to discourage beggars and dumpster divers.

It had been two months and since the Millennium Torc had last responded to her. She had been making good progress with it before the gaming shop incident, but was hard not to blame the Torc for losing her brothers. Why hadn't it told her about the cab accident? Why hadn't it told her about the rat poison? Why couldn't it tell her how far in the future events were going to happen? Why had it failed her so horribly? After that day she had given up on the gentle coaxing method and gone back to demanding it give her the answers she wanted. Her practice sessions had become more and more frantic as the months wore on. She had changed from raging at the Torc to begging it for guidance, often to the point of tears. The more desperate she became, the less active it was. Finally it stopped interacting with her entirely. The only visions she still received were echoes of the very first one.

It had been four hours since she had attempted to rob the wrong tourist. Usually they were easy prey. On the rare occasion that she was caught, their reaction was simply to yell at her or stare in wide-eyed astonishment. A few times they had even given her the money she had attempted to steal. It was strange to think that she had once done the exact same thing. When she remembered her first days in Cairo, it almost seemed like she was thinking of a different person.

Isis crept silently through the crowd at the train station. Her eyes never left her target: the suitcase of an overweight man in a suit. When robbing tourists, Isis usually chose people like him who looked like they were coming to Cairo for business. They didn't carry as much cash as regular tourists, but they frequently had valuable goods like watches and cell phones that she could sell. It also helped that Isis felt much less guilty stealing from them than from visiting families.

She had been following this particular man for a few blocks, hoping to find the right moment to make her move. It didn't seem too difficult. As he walked down the street his eyes drifted from the buildings to the crowd to the street vendors and back again. His suitcase rolled loosely behind him, completely vulnerable. It was clearly his first time in Cairo. 'What a fool,' she thought. 'He's lucky it's just me robbing him. I'm practically doing him a favor.' Again, Isis was taken aback by the idea that she had once been just as naïve.

He turned off the crowded street and into the labyrinth of alleyways that laced through Cairo's less picturesque neighborhoods. That was a little odd, Isis noted. Most westerners tended to stay exclusively downtown amidst the museums, shops, and restaurants. The backways tended to intimidate them. But this man didn't seem especially bright which was all the better for her. He continued through the near empty lanes, making turns seemingly at random, with an expression of good natured confusion. Isis followed him at a safe distance. It was a little tricky now that she didn't have a crowd to blend into, but she was able to make use of the shadows caused by the press of buildings that overhung the streets.

They were approaching an abandoned clothing factory when an electronic chiming sound caused the man to pause. He pulled a pager out of a little holster on his belt and began to fiddle with it. He even set the suitcase down so that he could use both hands. It was the perfect opportunity. Isis grinned humorlessly and pulled a Swiss Army Knife out of her waistband. She'd found it in the gutter a few months ago. It was almost completely broken with the exception of one application: the screwdriver.

Isis darted forward silently and picked the trunk-style suitcase's lock with the screwdriver. She winced as it opened with an audible click but the man was too absorbed by his pager to notice. She hesitated for just a moment before diving into the case. 'Look down,' she thought. 'Don't make me do this. I'm just under your nose. Look in my direction and I'll go.' But he didn't. She'd done this a dozen times before and each time her conscience raged against her. Her bruised morality hurt almost as much as an empty stomach.

Almost. At the end of the day integrity wouldn't feed her.

Delicately, and praying that the hinges were well oiled, Isis eased the suitcase open a sliver and began to dig through the contents, relying on her sense of touch rather than vision. Her eyes never left the man's face. If he so much as glanced away from the pager she was ready to bolt.

First Isis pulled out a wallet, then a second pager, then two cellphones, and finally a portable CD player. She could hardly believe her luck. Who on earth needed two phones and two pagers, and what are the odds that Isis would find them? This was the best haul she'd ever come across. The money she made selling the electronics could feed her for a week and there was no telling what she'd find in the wallet. This suitcase was a veritable gold mine.

The first thing Isis had learned about theft was to never get greedy. The more you took, the more likely you were to be caught. And taking an entire suitcase or bag was unthinkable. The movement and obvious lack of property would attract attention within seconds. If the owner of the bag didn't see you then another pedestrian certainly would, and too often they'd want to help the target. It was much easier and safer to go for smaller items that wouldn't be missed for some time. So far Isis had taken just enough from the man to likely avoid getting caught. She knew that pushing her luck any further would be foolish.

But it had been so long since her last solid meal. Longer still since she'd slept indoors. The idea of taking enough to rent a room was too tempting, especially now that the weather was starting to get cold at night. If she found one more thing to sell, she was sure she'd be able to rent a cheap hostel room. Maybe even one with a shower…

Once more she delved into the suitcase, still not taking her eyes off the man. He seemed to be involved in a heated conversation with the person on the other end of the pager. As soon as he stopped typing the little device would chime with a new message. He was completely absorbed and looked as if he would be for at least a couple of minutes.

Isis dug blindly until she felt an interior pocket. She reached in hoping to find valuables that had been tucked away for safer keeping; maybe a nice watch or a silver flask. Instead she grasped what felt like a plastic bag full of powder. She cautiously pulled it out and glanced briefly at the mysterious loot. It was a big zip-top freezer bag full of what looked like cooking flour. She couldn't help but wonder at the strangeness of it. Maybe he was a baker.

She hastily tucked the bag of flour down her shirt with the rest of the contraband. It was worthless compared to the electronics, but it would fill her up on a painfully hungry night. Anything helped.

Isis would later thank the gods that she'd never tried to eat the "flour."

She reached back into the suitcase's interior compartment and felt a few more bags of flour which she ignored. 'He must be some kind of chef,' she thought. 'Who else would carry so much flour around with them?'

A grin flitted across her face as her hand brushed something metallic. This was more like it. Metal usually mean value. She explored the object a little more, trying to determine if it was worth taking. It had a hole on one end, some sort of lever or switch that could be flipped with some effort, a couple of other movable parts, what felt like a handle…

Sudden realization hit her like a train. A gun. She was holding a gun. She had just touched the trigger of a gun. She had just pulled the trigger of a gun. It must be unloaded or otherwise inactive, thank all the gods.

Never in her life had Isis expected to encounter a gun while pick-pocketing. She'd never even seen one up close. She was sure it was valuable, but handling even an unloaded gun was so far beyond her comfort level that the very notion scared her. And it raised so many more questions. Who was this strange baker with so many communication devices and a gun?

At this point it occurred to Isis that she may be in over her head. In any case going back into the suitcase had been a mistake. It was time for a hasty retreat.

She withdrew her now trembling hand from the suitcase and began to crawl away when disaster struck. One of the cellphones down her shirt began to ring cheerfully and flash. Immediately the man's attention snapped away from his pager to where Isis was crouching. Between her lumpy shirt and glowing stomach, it was pretty obvious what was happening.

The man's demeanor changed from jovial confusion to cold rage. "You bitch," he hissed in perfect Arabic.

This was far from the affronted yet pitying reaction she was used to upon being caught by tourists. Isis pulled at the hem of her shirt and let the stolen goods fall to the ground, save the bag of flour which had become stuck to her torso by cold sweat. "Sorry, sir," she said and lifted her hands in a placating gesture. "Sorry!"

"You're sorry?" he said in a shrill, mocking imitation of Isis' voice. "Do you know what you've done? How much you could have cost me?" He began to advance toward her. "Do you know what you've seen?"

She shook her head frantically, eyes wide with fear, and began to back away. "No, no I'm just hungry," she whispered hoarsely. "I'm sorry!"

She turned to run away right as the man lunged at her. He was startlingly quick for his size and managed to grab her by the Millennium Torc. She coughed as it dug into her throat and restricted her breathing. The man dragged her into the abandoned clothing factory and threw her to the ground.

"You've seen my face," he growled. "You've seen my products. Hell, you may have seen my ID for all I know." He punctuated each sentence with a kick to her ribs. "If I let you get away, who knows who you'll tell?"

"Nobody!" Isis spluttered. "I won't tell anyone, I swear it!"

The man sneered down at her. "That as may be, but you see…" He knelt until his face was inches from hers. She could smell meat on his breath. "I can't let you get away with trying to steal from me. Not without teaching you a little lesson."

With that he began to pummel her mercilessly. Isis curled into a ball to protect herself but it barely made a difference. The man rained blow after blow upon her, first with his fists and then with his feet. He didn't stop when she sobbed out another apology. He didn't stop when she began to bleed. He didn't stop when pain caused her words failed her.

After what felt like an eternity the man's onslaught came to an end. As he stepped away Isis rose to her hands and knees to make her escape only to see him rummaging in the suitcase. Her mind immediately leapt to the gun and she began to scrabble to her feet. There was no way she could run faster than he could shoot, especially in her current condition, but she wouldn't just sit there and be executed.

Just as the man turned to her with the gun, the bag of flour freed itself from her stomach and toppled to rest on her feet. It had sprung a small leak giving her ankles a fine coating of powder. The man froze and stared at the ripped bag. His expression changed from cold rage back to cheerfulness and he slowly tucked the gun into his pocket. "Easy there, sweetheart" he said, his voice dripping with forced gentleness. "Now you just stay riiiiiight there- DON'T MOVE- and I'll take that for you."

His syrupy façade only faltered as Isis swayed slightly on her feet. She stilled herself, too afraid to disobey. Though the gun was now in his pocket it would take him only seconds to draw it again.

Between the man's reaction and the way the powder made her feet tingle, it had become obvious to Isis that it was not flour. The man slowly approached her and began to reach for the bag. As he knelt Isis felt the strange sensation of the world falling away from her.

It was her first vision in months.

The man kneels and removes the bag from Isis' feet. He slides his nice shirt up to cover his mouth and nose. He uses his tie to gently brush the remaining powder off her legs and into the bag. All the while he speaks to her in a soothing voice, calling her pet-names and urging her not to move. The platitudes sound like curses when spoken by such a foul person. When all the powder is back in the bag he ties off the leak and carefully sets it behind him. Isis begins to back away but the man draws his gun, aims, and-

Isis was plunged back into the present. The man had paused mid kneel as Isis gasped in shock from the vision. "Hush," he soothed. "Stay still, kiddo. I'll get you all cleaned up and you can be on your way."

"Hold your breath," the Millennium Torc whispered. Isis obeyed.

"Cover your nose." Isis clamped a hand over her nose.

"Kick."

Isis' foot, which was still holding the bag of what she now assumed to be drugs, smashed against the man's chin. It burst with the force of her kick and the man was consumed by a cloud of white powder. Despite the all of the man's caution, Isis' attack took him by such surprise that he gasped before remembering to hold his breath.

"Run," urged the Torc.

Isis didn't need to be told twice. She spun on her heel and sprinted toward the door, adrenaline and fear making her forget how horribly she ached. The man tried to roar out a stream of obscenities, but his words came out in frenzied slurs. As Isis burst out the door of the factory she heard a blast from the gun and the ping of metal as the bullet ricocheted harmlessly off the wall several yards away from her.

She was able to run for several blocks before collapsing against a building, her injuries finally catching up to her. "Keep going," the Millennium Torc ordered. She had a brief vision of the man running out of the building, his eyes wild and his breath quick. His head snapped back-and-forth spastically as he tried to decide which way to go. He noticed the trail of blood specks that she had left behind and began to follow it.

Isis forced herself up and continued on. Each breath she took felt like a knife in her side but she knew she had to keep going. The Torc had bought her some time but it appeared that whatever was in the bag had only energized the man further.

Fortunately she was only a few blocks away from her bag. It was stashed in an industrial dumpster down one of Cairo's many back alleys. She'd memorized its garbage removal schedule a while back and knew she had several days before it would be emptied. It was the perfect place to store her belongings when she needed to travel light.

Isis stood on her toes and tried to push the heavy lid off the dumpster. Stretching her battered body was torturous and, try as she might, the lid wouldn't budge. She was too inured to do what had felt like nothing just a couple of hours ago.

Just as she was about to give up, the Torc made one last demand. "Hide. The man is upon you," it whispered barely perceptibly. Sure enough Isis could hear spastic mumblings, half in Arabic and half in a language she didn't understand, from around the corner.

She planted her hands firmly against the dumpster's lid and summoned up her last bit of strength. With a push so painful it made black spots dance in front of her eyes she was finally able to heft the lid and scramble into the dumpster. She closed it over her, taking care not to let it slam, and hunkered down in the garbage.

She lay with her ear pressed to the wall of the dumpster and listened as the man, still mumbling frantically, rounded the corner and walked towards her. She hardly dared to take a breath lest he hear her. His footsteps made scrabbling noises on the unkept street and she caught the occasional crude insult against her as he passed by her hiding place.

Only when the sounds of his footsteps completely died away did Isis allow herself to relax. She rested her head against her bag and nestled down amongst the refuse. During her stent in Cairo she'd slept in some pretty questionable places, but never anywhere as shameful as in a dumpster. However, in that moment of pain and exhaustion, the garbage felt better than the most comfortable bed. Isis gave a final, painful sigh and drifted off to sleep.

It had been five minutes since Isis had given up.

She awoke to a combination of pain, hunger, and cold. While still warm during the day, Cairo's winter temperatures could plummet to freezing at night. The dumpster kept the wind off of her but the thin metal walls seemed to amplify the cold. Isis reached out blindly and grabbed a handful of what felt like old newspapers and tried her best to pull them over her for warmth. Her efforts hardly helped and even the small movement caused pain to ripple through her.

She ran her hands over her face and sides in an attempt to assess her condition in the dark. Her left eye was swollen shut and her jaw ached at her touch. Her mouth tasted like blood and she realized that she was missing a molar. Dried blood from her nose crusted her chin and chest. Her arms and legs were probably a patchwork of bruises and she had several scrapes and open wounds on her shoulders and knees where she'd hit the ground.

The most concerning issue of all was her side. There were no open sounds but every time Isis took a breath it felt as if she was being stabbed from the inside. She had a horrible suspicion that the culprit was a broken rib. All the other wounds would heal over time on their own but a broken rib, especially one pressing into her side, would take a long time to heal and severely restrict her movement. It would be impossible to pickpocket if she couldn't run away.

Isis gingerly rummaged through her duffel bag until she felt a tattered grocery sack that held a few stale slices of bread and an apple she'd been nibbling on over the last couple days. It was the last of her food. She began to eat a piece of bread without bothering to ration it. It didn't matter anymore. There was nothing left she could do. It was time to give up.

"I do not believe that."

Isis froze. The soft voice seemed to be coming from inside the dumpster with her, but even in the dark Isis was certain she would know if someone else was there. "Who's there?" she asked, her voice hoarse from the congealed blood in her throat.

"Somebody who has been searching for you for quite some time now," the voice responded in classic Egyptian. "Do not be alarmed, Miss Ishtar. I am a friend."

It dawned on Isis that she had heard this voice before. The last time she'd heard it she had been scared to her core. This time, however, she was too exhausted to feel anything beyond annoyance.

"Listen," she rasped, not bothering to conceal the frustration in her voice. "I'm not in the mood for games, or riddles, or threats. I also refuse to talk to the air. Show yourself."

"Ah, that is more what I was expecting from you." A faint shimmer like a heat haze filled the dumpster and began to take shape. Eventually the stranger from the village sat across from her. He was holding the Millennium Ankh out towards her, the tip hovering just above her heart. It gave off a soft light which allowed Isis to see the interior of the dumpster clearly.

The stranger smiled and lowered the Ankh. "Good evening, Miss Ishtar," he said. "I am glad that you are finally ready to speak to me."

"I suppose you're here to take the Millennium Torc," Isis said flatly. "Well go ahead. I'm done with it." She began to unhook the clasp when the man held up his hands in a placating gesture.

"I am not here to take your Millennium Item," he assured her. "I could not even if I wanted to. It is yours and yours alone." He gently touched the Millennium Ankh around his neck. "I have my own Item and as of right now, it is all the responsibility I wish for.

Isis lowered her hands but kept glaring at the man. "What do you want then?" she asked. "Are you here to tell me how badly I've failed? How much of a disappointment I am to my family? Or are you just here to make more threats?" Tears began to roll down her cheeks making her swollen eye and open scratches itch. Her heart began to beat faster and a wave of heat flooded her face. "Why won't you leave me alone?!"

Her annoyance was turning into genuine anger. Up until that day, no matter what Cairo had thrown at her, she had held onto hope that things would get better, that the Torc would start working again, that her brothers would come back to Egypt, and that they could be a family once more. In order to keep her resolve she had pushed all other emotions deep down inside of her. As far as Isis was concerned she didn't have the time or energy to dwell on fear, anger, or pain.

This system had worked fine for as long as she could remember. It had kept her strong in the Tomb and allowed her to survive her father's death and her brothers' betrayal without succumbing to grief. But now she was starting to slip. The last few hours were proving to be too much for her to repress and the sudden appearance of the stranger was the final stroke. Nine months of buried feelings came bubbling up to the surface.

"Who are you?!" she shouted, her anger finally boiling over. Her voice cracked and her ribs sang out in pain. The volume of her outburst filled the dumpster and made her head throb, but she didn't notice. What was a little more pain after all that she'd been through?

The stranger simply gazed back at her, his expression unfathomable. His impassive reaction only angered Isis more.

She slammed her fist against the metal wall, scraping her knuckles and sending a shock of pain down her arm. "Bast's tits!" she cursed. "Answer me!"

The stranger sat motionless.

"How dare you- how dare you- defy me?!" she screamed. It was an old phrase that sprang naturally to her lips. Other familiar words followed close behind. "You insolent fool!" she roared. "You simpleton! You stupid child! You blasphemous cur!" You-! You…"

Her tirade echoed in the small space and rounded back on her. These were words that Isis had heard dozens, if not hundreds, of times directed at her and her brothers. They had cut like a knife and made her feel small and foolish. Hearing them again, especially in her own voice, reignited those feelings of weakness and the trauma of the last few months amplified them beyond what she had ever experienced.

Isis covered her face with her hands and began to sob as her rage dissolved into grief more potent even than the night her brothers abandoned her. She slumped against the dumpster wall and let despair wash over her. The stranger, the dumpster, her injuries, the Millennium Torc, and everything else seemed to drift away until the only things left in the world were Isis and her misery.

She stayed this way, crying so hard it made her chest and sides ache, for what seemed like hours. Eventually her energy waned and her sobs turned into a soft whimper. As she calmed she noticed a warm sensation. It started at her feet and began to spread up her legs and into her torso, easing her physical pain as it went. Slowly she opened her good eye to see the stranger kneeling before her with his hands wrapped around her feet.

"Wh-what are you doing?'" she sputtered.

The man glanced up at her with a look of concern on his face. It was the first time Isis had seen his expression change. "Warming you. Helping you heal. I can not soothe your broken spirit, but I can at least make your wounds easier to bear," he answered. As he spoke the warmth continued to flow up her shoulders and neck, her tension dissolving in its wake. As it moved to her face she found herself able to open her bad eye.

Isis sniffled and wiped some dried blood away from her eyelid. "Thank you," she said. "I… I'm sorry I yelled at you…"

"It is quite alright," the stranger assured her. "Trust me when I say that I have survived far worse than being yelled at. Metaphorically speaking, anyway." He smiled and began to rub her ankles so gently that she couldn't feel his touch. More warmth raced through her. "And you are right to ask who I am," said the stranger. "I know you, Isis Ishtar. I know your family. I know your history. I know your mission. It is only fair that you should know me."

The stranger sat back against the opposite wall of the dumpster and extended his arm. "My name is Shadi."

She grasped his elbow in greeting. "Thank you," she said with a small, wavering smile. "How did you know-" Her words were cut off by a gasp as her hand slipped through Shad's previously solid arm as if it was nothing but mist.

Shadi smiled. "Ah, your Torc has begun to work again. You must be feeling better if you have enough energy to break my corporeal form."

"You're an Akh?" she asked nonchalantly as if meeting disembodied spirits was a common occurrence. Her sudden, unnatural calmness did little to mask her fear. She silently prayed that his strange abilities were simply gifts from the Millennium Ankh.

"Indeed," he replied. "I was born with a sacred duty. However, I was killed before my destined time of passing and there was nobody to inherit my task. Thus the gods saw fit to bind my soul to the Millennium Ankh until my mission is complete."

That didn't bode well. Isis had read about Akhs in the Ishtar family texts. It was said that if someone died with unfinished business, Osiris would combine their Ba (personality) with their Ka (living soul) to form an Akh, a dead spirit that could interact with the living, and send them back to the realm of the living until they were ready to move on. According to the texts they were extremely rare and usually very dangerous. It was said that a good person should have no worldly matters pressing enough to keep them from the afterlife. A wicked person, however, would have their souls tied to greed, power, or worst of all, vengeance. It was said that an Akh seeking vengeance would stop at nothing until it got what it wanted.

Like most kids, Isis had been morbidly fascinated by the idea of ghosts. For a while she had been sure there was an Akh living in the closet outside her room. Once she had even asked her father to tell her more about them. In those days, though still reclusive, Mr. Ishtar had seemed to enjoy it when Isis asked about matters of history and religion. At least one of his children was interested in it, though it was the wrong one.

Isis had expected a history lesson while secretly hoping for a ghost story. Instead her father had flown into a rage seemingly out of nowhere. He had raged at her, yelling that women shouldn't concern themselves with such matters and that she should know her place. Then he accused her of stealing texts from his private collection. She had broken down into tears and told him that she had learned about them from a common religion scroll, which he immediately confiscated and locked away. She had sworn to him that she would never read of, speak of, or even think of Akhs ever again.

It had been the first time Isis' father lost his temper with her, and it had been more terrifying than any evil spirit she could imagine. However, it had confirmed her suspicions; if a simple question about Akhs upset her father so deeply, then they must be very real, and very dangerous. And here was an Akh that had possessed a Millennium Item. The only more powerful beings she knew of were the gods themselves.

She was completely at his mercy.

"Please, do not be afraid," said Shadi. Isis shifted uneasily. She thought she'd been doing a good job of keeping herself calm but apparently he hadn't been fooled.

"I'm not afraid," Isis lied.

Shadi smiled gently at her. "Yes, you are. I can sense it." He held the Millennium Ankh up between them for Isis to look at. "Do you know the abilities of the Millennium Ankh?" he asked.

"Only a little" she answered. While Malik had learned the intricacies of every Millennium Item, Isis and Rishid had only been allowed to learn the very basics.

"I figured as much. Here." Shadi slipped the Ankh over his head and passed it to Isis. "It's okay, you may hold it," he said in response to her anxious expression. "Take a look. What does it resemble?"

She turned the glowing Ankh over in her hands. As she did, she noticed the notch at the base of the stem. "It looks like a key," she answered.

Shadi nodded encouragingly. "Precisely. And what do you think it unlocks?"

"I know it lets you look at a person's soul. So would it unlock… a soul?" Shadi nodded again. "But I have no idea what that means," she admitted. "It sounds like mind reading, but that's what the Millennium Eye does."

"Ah, good reasoning," Shadi said approvingly. "It does not let me read a person's thoughts in the manner of the Millennium Eye. No, the Ankh is far more powerful than just that. By unlocking someone's soul I gain access to their emotions, their memories, their intellect, and their ambitions. To put it in simple terms, I can see the very essence of their being." He smiled gently. "As you may imagine, detecting your fear did not pose a challenge."

Isis stared at him in awe for a moment, then whispered, "you… you know everything about me? You can see it all?" She raised her hands to her head as if to protect herself from the Ankh.

Shadi made a calming gesture. "I assure you I would never violate your mind in that way. I only use the full power of the Millennium Ankh if I absolutely must. If I am not mistaken, your Millennium Torc will sometimes show you visions you did not request. The Millennium Ankh does something similar. You are radiating fear, along with about a dozen other strong emotions, and the Ankh cannot help but channel them."

Isis relaxed a little and lowered her hands. "Well, okay I guess," she conceded. Still, she didn't relish the idea of someone sensing her feelings and was not yet sure if she could trust Shadi. He seemed sincere, but the man from earlier that day had seemed naive. Seeming wasn't good enough. "You said that the gods sent you back to complete your sacred duty. What is your mission?" she probed, hoping that the Millennium Ankh wouldn't expose her distrust.

A brief look of discomfort crossed Shadi's face only to be instantly replaced by his customary tranquility. Whatever it was, it didn't seem to bother him very much. "I have a duty similar to your brother's. In fact, I myself am a Tomb Keeper," he replied.

This caught Isis' attention. "You're a Tomb Keeper?" she gasped. "Does that mean we're related?"

"Very distantly, yes. Our family branched off from yours a long time ago. We are the clan Shin."

"I thought we were the only Tomb Keepers!" Isis exclaimed. She had known that there were five more Millennium Items that must need protecting but had been discouraged from asking about them. While her fascination with history was smiled upon and her basic understanding of their rituals was a compulsory, her father had made it clear that anything pertaining to the Items and their powers were strictly his and Malik's business. In the interest of self preservation, Isis had not pressed the subject.

Still, she couldn't be sure that Shadi was telling the truth. While Isis desperately wanted to believe him, she'd studied the Ishtar family genealogy and had never seen the name Shin.

"Why have I never heard of you?" she asked.

"I cannot say for certain, but I have my suspicions. I knew your father…" Shadi let the sentence trail off and watched Isis. It seemed like he was waiting for a reaction, but she simply returned his gaze in silence. "I saw his soul," he continued after a moment's hesitation. "He was very, ah, traditional in his views. He most likely did not approve of my family's more proactive approach to protecting our Millennium Items. I believe he did not want you or your siblings to know that there were Tomb Keepers who could interact with the world."

Isis nodded. That certainly sounded like something her father would do. "Is that why the family split up? Because you wanted to go outside?"

Shadi gave a small chuckle and shook his head. "No, not at all. In fact, the decision to divide the family was met with much sorrow. It was, however, necessary. I assume you know about the dangers of grave robbers?"

Isis nodded again.

"Then you can appreciate their predicament," Shadi continued. "While grave robbers have always posed a problem for us, they have never been as bad as they were during the eighteenth and nineteenth century. That time is referred to as 'the Age of Enlightenment.' It was a quest for knowledge that swept across North America, most of Europe and into Africa. Scholars from across the world began to search for any new information they could find."

"That sounds nice," Isis said. It seemed like an endeavor that Malik would enjoy.

"It is true that much good came of it," Shadi conceded. "However, that knowledge came at a high price for many. One thing that fascinated these scholars was ancient people, and in their mind the best way to learn about ancient people was to rob their graves."

Isis grimaced scornfully. "Archaeologists," she sneered. "Yes, I know about them. We have a whole group of servants whose job is to keep them away."

"Be thankful that you did not have to deal with Enlightenment archaeologists, if you can even call them archaeologists," said Shadi, his expression transforming into an uncharacteristic look of bitterness. "In modern times they must follow strict guidelines while excavating, but a mere hundred years ago they took what they wanted with impunity. Countless graves were unearthed. Thousands, if not millions of artifacts were stolen. Bodies were taken and put on display for cheap entertainment. Some especially reprehensible thieves even used mummy skin in the production of medicine and paint."

"That's disgusting!" Isis gasped.

"Indeed," Shadi nodded. "We decided in those times to spread the Millennium Items out. We reasoned that should their resting place be found and sacked, the thieves would only get a few items which could then be more easily recovered."

As Isis listened she became aware of Shadi's odd speech affectation. He spoke of long past events as if he had personally experienced them. She shrugged it off as a strange habit. Regardless, his story made sense. Growing up she had been told stories about archaeologists the way most children were told stories about boogie men. However, she still had several questions.

"Why did you come looking for us in the village?" she asked. "You said that you had no suitable person to inherit your role as Tomb Keeper. Does that mean you left the other items unattended?"

Shadi smiled with approval at her question. "Not as such," he said. "You see, my duty is a little bit more complex than that of your father and brother. I do not merely protect the sacred items. My mission is to use the ancient prophesies along with the powers of the Millennium Ankh to make sure that each Millennium Item reaches its chosen master at the appropriate time. If necessary I train each bearer how to use their item. You may think of me as a shepherd for the Items.

"At the moment, all of the Millennium Items are with their bearers. However, things are not happening the way the scriptures foretold." He glanced down at his hands. Isis watched as they flickered briefly, then solidified once again. "Events which were fated to take place over a number of years have come to pass in mere months. It would appear that someone- or something- can manipulate the flow of destiny. I knew that you and your brother were about to inherit your Millennium Items years before you were ready. That's why I came to find you; to help guide you."

Isis was struck by a pang of guilt at the mention of someone manipulating fate. "Was… was it my fault?" she asked, already fearing the answer. "Did I throw fate off its course by taking Malik outside?"

"No," Shadi answered. "You did nothing to harm fate. The initial incident occurred several weeks before your misfortunes began. And rest assured that no mere human, no matter how willful, could achieve that."

"Still," Isis sighed. "If I had not taken Malik outside none of this would have happened. At least some of the blame is mine." She looked down at her soiled clothes and emaciated form. "I deserve this." She could feel another flood of sorrow coming for her.

Shadi reached out and placed his hand over hers. A wave of warmth shot up her arm and quelled the grief before it consumed her. "Miss Isis… my dear cousin," he said quietly. "I sense the weight you bear. You are burdened by a measure of guilt that nobody should have to carry. I wish I could take it away from you, but even using my Millennium Ankh I can only ease your pain temporarily. All that has happened was destined to happen. It is not your fault."

Isis didn't answer. Shadi's words were kind but she was sure she was more at fault than he claimed.

"Would it help if I showed you other possible outcomes?" he asked. "I saw into the souls of the men pursuing you, Paki and Nizam, the day you left the Tomb for good and I found some disturbing ambitions."

Isis glanced up at Shadi, her interest piqued even through the haze of guilt. "What were they plotting?" she asked.

"I believe that if fate had moved at its correct pace, you would have been married to Paki in a few years' time to secure their role in your family. Then upon your father's death, they planned to manipulate Malik into leaving the Tomb and seeking out the other items so that they could assume their powers and use them for selfish means."

As he spoke, Shadi raised the Ankh and positioned it just over Isis' forehead. She had to stop herself from staring at it cross-eyed. "If that had been the case, you and your brothers would have united to thwart them and come into your Items in the right time. However, with fate the way it is now…"

There was a burst of gold light and a sensation of movement as Isis was plunged into a vision. Unlike the immersive nature of her visions this one flickered by in a series of images, each one lasting no more than a few seconds. The effect was similar to watching a faulty television.

The vision began, First there was the Tomb. She saw her father sitting at a table, reading from a text. As soon as she looked at him, she knew he was in a foul mood. It had nothing to do with his actions or anything he said. The knowledge simply seeped in from out of nowhere. Furthermore, she knew he was in a rage because he had caught Malik trying to sneak out of the Tomb the previous day.

The vision changed. Suddenly Paki and Nizam were there. They wanted to discuss the future. They had just said something that upset her father. He was in no mood to think about that. Who were they to suggest such an arrangement? It was his choice, not theirs.

The vision changed. Her father's mood had shifted from seething anger to an unbridled rage. He was yelling at the men. Nizam held up his hands pacifyingly. He wanted to calm the situation. Paki was glowering. Now he was starting to lose his temper. He had been working for this family all his life. He deserved power. He deserved privilege. He deserved Isis.

The vision changed. Paki was standing over her father. Her father's eyes were open, staring at nothing. His face was bruised and some of his bones were broken. Paki's knuckles were bloody. It hadn't been difficult. Master Ishtar, though not yet an old man, was weakened from more than a decade of too little food and too much mourning. Paki however was a strong young man. Nizam was horrified, but already plotting how to conceal the murder He was going to frame Rishid. Malik was peaking in through the doorway completely unnoticed by the men.

The vision changed. Malik had the Millennium Rod. He was using it to torture Paki. Nizam was already dead. So much rage poured out of him that it made Isis ill.

The vision changed. She, Rishid, and Malik were standing outside among the ruins. They were having nearly the exact same fight they'd had nine months ago. Malik blamed the Pharaoh for Nizam and Paki's actions. During the argument with their father, Nizam had spoken of the will of the Pharaoh. From there, thing happened exactly as they had in reality, except there were now three bodies instead of one.

The vision faded away and Isis was back in the dumpster, staring at Shadi in dumbfounded silence. "That- that is what would've happened?!" she spluttered when she was finally able to speak.

"I cannot say for certain, but based on their souls, previous actions, and the prophesies, that is my best prediction," Shadi answered. "My Ankh does not allow me see the future like your Torc, but it does allow me to see the past and present so clearly that predicting people's future actions becomes a simple matter, and I have had much practice.

"In any case, you can see that what happened is not your fault. No matter what you had done that day, your father would still have died, Malik and Rishid would still have run away, and you would still be where you currently are." As Shadi spoke, a rare smile began to cross Isis' lips. Though the vision had been disturbing to put it mildly, the knowledge that she had not single-handedly destroyed her family filled her with relief. She knew that Shadi was right; it would take her a long time to completely let go of the guilt. She had still transgressed horribly by smuggling Malik out of the Tomb and despite what she'd been told was sure she'd caused at least some of what had happened, but in that moment she felt as light as a feather.

Shadi smiled and pated Isis companionably on the head. "What matters now is that you learn how to use the Millennium Torc, and that's why I am here. Of all the Millennium Items, it may be the most challenging to master. But you are its chosen one and should be proficient very soon, especially since you have already had almost a year of practice with it."

This immediately snuffed out Isis' glimmer of hope. For all of the Millennium Ankh's powers, it seemed that Shadi was unaware of her failure with the Torc. "I… I don't think I'm the Torc's chosen one," she admitted. "It hasn't worked for me in months. I just get a headache when I try to use it, and the only visions it sends me are nightmares. It gave me a vision today, but only because I was about to die."

Isis began to fiddle with the Torc as she spoke. It had become something of a nervous habit. Sometimes she woke up because she'd been holding it so hard in her sleep that the Eye of Horus left marks on her palm. "Shadi, it doesn't want me. I failed."

"Failed?" Shadi repeated incredulously. "You have not failed. Far from it. Please, tell me you know what powers the Millennium Torc possesses."

"It shows me the future," Isis said with a shrug. "That's about it, right?"

Shadi sighed and shook his head. "Your arrogant, archaic father deserved everything he got. The nerve of leaving one of his children unprepared," he hissed. "But that is beside the point. No, that is not all the Millennium Torc can do. The morning you left the Tomb we met in the village. I was there to guide you to safety and teach you how to use the Torc, but I unwittingly chose a horrible time to appear and you fled. The power of my Millennium Ankh allows me to sense souls from vast distances, especially if they are entwined with my sacred mission. Why do you think I did not pursue you? For that matter, why do you think I approached you when you were so full of fear?"

This caused Isis to pause. "I… I don't know. When I woke up in the Rahal's house I was so relieved that I didn't think much about it. I actually assumed that you were a hallucination from exhaustion. Then you mentioned seeing Paki and Nizam and I assumed that they distracted you."

"They did distract me, but only for a moment," Shadi answered with a smile. "And I might add that I am delighted you met Kakra. Now I feel a fool for not seeking her out immediately."

"Who's Kakra?" Isis asked.

"Ah, one moment," Shadi said, then made small upward gesture with the Millennium Ankh in her direction. "Oh I see she's using her Saudi name now. You know her as 'Farah.'"

"You know Farah?" Isis asked in surprise. "How?"

Shadi smiled and shook his head. "Now is not the time to discuss her. If she withheld her identity from you, she had a good reason to do so. For now, let us just think of her as a family friend. More to the point, why do you think it took me nearly a year months to find you?"

Isis just shrugged.

"And why do you think you can break my corporeal form so easily? Would you like to hazard a guess?"

While Isis didn't know the specifics, it was fairly clear where these questions were guiding her. "It has something to do with the Millennium Torc," she said.

"Indeed," Shadi confirmed. "The Millennium Torc has three powers: it shows you the past, it predicts the future, and it defends the bearer's present, especially from other Millennium Items. For nine months it has made you invisible to my Millennium Ankh. Even during our discussion tonight it has been preventing me from reading some of your feelings. In fact," Shadi grinned, "this has been one of the most interesting conversations I have had in quite a long time for that reason."

"How?!" Isis gasped. "I never even knew it could do that."

"It's a passive ability. It decided that I was a threat based on your discomfort toward me and hid you. In nine months, the concealment only wavered once and that was earlier this day. You mentioned that you had your first vision in a long time today?"

Isis was sitting up as straight as she could with her injuries. "Yes!" she answered, desperate to hear more.

Shadi nodded. "I am certain that is when the Millennium Torc stopped hiding you from me. Like all Millennium Items, it takes energy to use the Torc's powers. Based on the emotions I read while you slept as well as your appearance, I am correct in assuming that you are quite exhausted most of the time, both physically and mentally?"

Isis cringed at the thought of having her soul read while she slept, but Shadi was right. "I've been tired for a long time," she confirmed.

Once again, Shadi took her hand and sent a wave of heat through her body. "Indeed," he said. "That is why you have not been able to use your Torc to the fullest extent of its abilities. You only have enough energy for one power at a time and it chose protection from you. And not merely protection from me. It has been subtly guiding you through the streets of Cairo. This is a dangerous city and the fact that it took you nine months to have a violent interaction is miraculous considering how sheltered you were."

"I was also poisoned," Isis interjected. "It didn't stop that."

Shadi raised his eyebrows pointedly. "Did you die from the poison?" he asked.

"No, I stumbled into a Mosque and… got help…" Isis only had a handful of blurry memories from the poisoning. She remembered stumbling down a street and entering an open door at random, then waking up on a cot.

"There you have it," Shadi responded. "You have not failed, Isis. You have been effectively working with the Millennium Ankh for months. Truly, you are the chosen bearer."

Isis found herself unable to stop smiling. "I'm not a failure," she repeated.

"Not at all," Shadi confirmed, matching her smile. "And as you practice with it, your skill will grow immensely. I look forward to teaching you, dear cousin."

"Thank you!" she exclaimed. "I am so eager to start! Wen can we- aaugh!"

Isis' words were cut off by a sharp pain in her side. In her excitement she had tried to sit up on her knees. It had been a mistake.

"Slow down," Shadi said. "The Millennium Ankh can only help soothe your pain. It cannot heal broken bones and open wounds."

Isis sighed in disappointment and eased back down onto the old newspapers that carpeted the dumpster. She had almost forgotten her injuries. "How does the Ankh soothe pain?" she asked, hoping to distract herself from the freshly revived discomfort.

"In simple terms, it convinces your mind that you cannot feel pain," he answered. "But there will be plenty of time for questions and answers when you have recovered. For now…" Shadi held the Millennium Ankh to her forehead once again. This time, instead of a vision, Isis felt herself becoming drowsy. Her body slumped against the dumpster wall of its own accord. "Sleep."

The command was impossible to ignore. The last thing Isis remembered before drifting into a deep sleep was a feeling that she hadn't experienced in almost a year.

It was the sense of warmth and safety that comes only from family.

Isis pulled her Duel Monsters deck out of its drawstring bag. To most of the world, it was simply a toy. To her it was both an outward expression of her soul and a tool of immense power. She absent-mindedly cut the deck and examined the card she had stopped at. She didn't need the Torc to predict which one it would be. It was always her favorite.

"Blast Held by a Tribute."

It was prepared to give up everything for its family.

And so was she.

#Yu Gi Oh!#yu gi oh #yugioh #isis ishtar #Ishizu #Ishizu Ishtar #marik ishtar #malik ishtar #odion ishtar #Rishid Ishtar #shadi #shadi shin #yugioh dm #yu gi oh duel monsters #fanfiction

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coolgreatwebsite · 7 years ago

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Wonder Boy (2010)

Editor’s Note: This article is about a video, if you don’t want to read the whole history I’ve generously written out just for you (yes, you!) at least head to the very bottom and watch it because oh MAN. Also, very special thanks to the Something Awful Retro Game Thread’s Random Stranger for getting this whole nightmare snowball rolling with a lot of the initial info and digging.

I feel like making this post is just asking for the subject matter to disappear, but my desire to share this is too strong. If you’ve looked at this website before, you’ve probably realized I like old video games. I can’t say Wonder Boy has been a series I’ve cared about outside of finally playing and really liking Wonder Boy 3 and Monster World 4 semi-recently, but there’s one thing that’s kept the series in my mind for the past 4 or so years. Actually, I’m getting way ahead of myself here. Any of y’all remember Chakan the Forever Man?

Chakan is a real piece of shit Sega Genesis game that managed to be mildly successful mostly by just kinda being there while the system was hitting full steam in America. It managed to make enough of an impression that it still gets brought up in retro game discussions every so often, mostly in the context of “remember that trash fire?”, but there’s one person in particular who refuses to let the Forever Man die: Chakan’s creator, Robert A. Kraus.

I’m not sure how many people who ended up playing Chakan and never thinking about it again realized this, but it’s actually a licensed game based on a comic book series that started sometime in the 80s! The word is that Ecco the Dolphin creator Ed Annunziata met Kraus (or RAK, as he signs his work) at a comic convention and the two somehow ended up collaborating on a Genesis game from there. The game came out, Annunziata and the rest of the world moved on, but RAK remains dedicated to Chakan. And you know what? More power to him. His aggressively late-90s website’s Chakan section is packed full of attempts to keep the property relevant, from new comics to board games, and as much as I think Chakan is maybe not so great on any level I admire his drive. RAK is not who I’m here to talk about. The true subject of our particular story can be found within the weirdest attempt at making Chakan hit it big, the Chakan the Forever Man movie. Specifically, we're here to talk about its combination Star/Director/Writer/Producer/Editor. Enter Robin Morningstar.

There’s not really a clean “origin story” for Morningstar that I can find online, but the scarce info that is available pretty much tells you everything you need to know. His IMDB page attaches him to six movies, of which he is Actor/Writer/Producer/Editor/Director on five. His sole interview about the project paints a vivid picture of an undeservedly egotistical independent filmmaker, especially when combined with this deleted comment (fortunately preserved by Something Awful poster wa27). The only surviving image of the Chakan movie (above) looks like something my friends would have made in high school. All of this is funny, but admittedly not TOO crazy outside of the fact that someone decided to make a bad movie that can be sorta tied back to an obscure-ish Genesis game. But if you take a closer look at that IMDB page, that’s where things start to get interesting. The first film Robin Morningstar is attached to is... Wonder Boy? And his biography page (almost assuredly written by the man himself) says he worked on it with... Uwe Boll?!

I’m being a little anachronistic by putting in a picture that was only available after the fact, but the trailer was the first thing that was found and it doesn’t seem to be online anymore so it’s a stand-in for that. Anyway. Digging deeper initially raises more questions. If Boll was involved, why didn’t he get a director credit? The movie appears to be entirely computer generated and at a level of quality that almost seems like an actual joke, so how did he even factor into it at all? As usual, information is scarce but just enough is there to piece things together. First, and most importantly, a defunct print-to-order Amazon listing confirms that this does exist and isn’t some weird fever dream. The entry on Morningstar’s bio mentions the film was “jinxed”, and the film’s trivia section references a news story in Retro Gamer Magazine issue 51. A quick google search reveals the “news story” was actually an (EXTREMELY buckwild) interview with Morningstar from about two years before the film’s release that goes into how Morningstar and Boll were having trouble getting the Wonder Boy rights from Sega and Westone. Wonder Boy’s IMDB FAQ gives the final word, saying that Boll left the project after failing to secure the rights, leaving Morningstar to take the helm and release an unauthorized CGI version two years later that was still about Wonder Boy and also named Wonder Boy.

With that mystery solved and nothing beyond the trailer to be found, the Wonder Boy movie seemed doomed to the obscurity of a funny sequence of forum posts and the occasional outside person seeing the IMDB entry and going “wait, they made a Wonder Boy movie?” However, the sequence of discovering all of this formed a sort of unbreakable link between Chakan and the Wonder Boy movie in my mind. If I ever saw Chakan get brought up for some reason, I kind of HAD to say “oh hey, did you know the Chakan guy still makes Chakan and some weirdo made a Chakan movie and also a hellishly awful looking CGI Wonder Boy movie?” That would always be the first thing I’d think of.

Flash forward to today, where Chakan was mentioned in a Discord server I’m in. I did the usual “haha oh boy get a load of this” routine, only this time I couldn’t find the trailer. What I found instead was a “review” of the movie on YouTube, uploaded 10 months ago. It’s one of the most 1000% unfunny things I’ve ever seen so I’m not going to even link it, it splices in some footage of some Spanish show and fake subtitles over them and it’s just really not worth even glancing at. But I noticed it was using footage that wasn’t from the trailer. Then I saw it. At the bottom of the description, under the “show more” button, was a link to another YouTube video. An unlisted YouTube video on a different account, uploaded in 2015. It was lying hidden for two years. I’m so happy to finally say this.

Please enjoy the entirety of the 2010 feature length motion picture Wonder Boy.

youtube

#article #video

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ciathyzareposts · 5 years ago

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Eric the Unready

In September of 1991, Bob Bates of Legend Entertainment flew to Florida for a meeting of the Software Publishers Association. One evening there after a long day on the job, still dressed in his business suit, he took a walk along the beach, enjoying a gorgeous sunset as he anticipated a relaxing dinner with his wife and infant son, who had joined him on the trip.

Yet his mind wasn’t quite as peaceful as was the scenery around him. He was in fact wrestling with a tension which everybody who does creative work for a living must face at some point: the tension between what the artist wants to create and what the audience wants to buy. Bob had made Timequest, his first game after co-founding Legend, as a self-conscious experiment, meant to determine whether a complicated, intricate, serious, difficult parser-driven adventure game was still a commercially viable proposition in 1991. The answer was, as Bob puts it today, “kind of”: Timequest hadn’t flopped utterly, but it hadn’t sold in notably big numbers either. Steve Meretzky’s decidedly lower-brow games Spellcasting 101 and 201, which had bookended Timequest on Legend’s release schedule, had both done considerably better. Bob had already started making notes for a Timequest II by the time the first one shipped, but he soon had to face the reality that the sales numbers just weren’t there to support more iterations on the concept.

Now, in the midst of his walk on the beach, a name sprang unbidden into his head: “Eric the Unready.” Such a gift from God — or from his subconscious — had never come to him before in that manner, and never would again. But no matter; once in a lifetime ought to be enough for anyone. He found the name hilarious, and chuckled to himself over it the rest of the way to the restaurant. At last, he knew what his next game would be: a straight-up farce about a really, really unready knight named Eric. With that decision made, he was ready to enjoy his evening.

The more he thought about the idea upon returning to daily life inside Legend’s Virginia offices, the more he realized that it had more going for it in practical terms than most rarefied bolts from the blue can boast. Indeed, it was an idea about which no marketer could possibly have complained, being well-nigh precision-targeted to hit the industry’s commercial sweet spot as accurately as any Legend title could hope to. If the success of Legend’s Spellcasting games hadn’t sufficiently proved to the company how potent a combination comedy and fantasy could be, there was plenty of other evidence on offer. Adventure gamers loved comedy, which was just as well given that it was the default setting the form always wanted to collapse back into, a gravitational attraction that could be defied by a designer only through serious, single-minded effort; these realities explained why Sierra made so many comedies, and why LucasArts’s adventure catalog contained very little else. And gamers in general just couldn’t get enough fantasy; this explained the quantity of dungeon-crawling CRPGs clogging store shelves, not to mention the success of Sierra’s King’s Quest adventure series. To complete the formula for sales gold, Bob soon decided that Eric the Unready would also toss aside all of Timequest‘s puzzle complexity to jump onto what Legend saw as another emerging industry trend: that of making adventure games friendlier, more accessible to the non-hardcore. In short, Bob’s latest game would be easy.

So, Eric the Unready was to be an unabashed bid for mainstream success, as safe a play as Legend knew how to make at this juncture. But such a practical commercial profile isn’t necessarily an artistic kiss of death; like all of the best of such efforts, Eric the Unready is executed with such panache that even a jaded old critic like me just can’t help but love it in spite of his snobbishness.

Inveterate student of history that he is, Bob’s first impulse upon starting any project is always to head to the library. In fact, one might say that his research for Eric the Unready began long before he even thought to make the game. The name itself actually has an historical antecedent, one which was doubtless bouncing around somewhere in the back of Bob’s mind when he had his brainstorm: Æthelred the Unready is the name of an English king from shortly before the Norman Conquest. The epithet had always amused Bob inordinately. (For the record: the word “unready” in this context means something closer to poorly advised than personally incompetent. Nevertheless, it was the latter, anachronistic meaning which Bob was about to embrace with glee.)

After the project began in earnest, Bob’s research instinct meant lots of reading of contemporary fantasy, a genre he had heretofore known little about. More out of a sense of duty than enthusiasm, he worked through Margaret Weis and Tracey Hickman’s Dragonlance and Death Gate novels, Michael Moorcock’s Elric saga, and even Stephen R. Donaldson’s terminally turgid Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever.

In the end, none of it would prove to have been necessary — and this was all for the best. Eric the Unready has little beyond its “fantasy” label in common with such po-faced epics. The milieu of the finished game is vaguely Arthurian, as you might expect of a game written by the Anglophile creator of Arthur: The Quest for Excalibur. This time out, though, Bob tempered his interest in Arthurian myth with a willingness to toss setting and even plot coherence overboard at any time in the name of a good joke. As such, the game inevitably brings to mind a certain Monty Python movie — and, indeed, there is much of that beloved British comedy troupe in the game. Other strong influences which Bob himself names include Douglas Adams, Terry Pratchett, and, hitting closer to home, Steve Meretzky.

The humor of Eric the Unready might best be summarized as “maximalism with economy.” Bob:

My [plots] were always meant to be scrupulously well-designed,. There was never a logical inconsistency. All of them were solidly constructed. But with Eric the Unready, I consciously said, “If I see the opportunity for a joke that doesn’t quite make sense, I’m going to do it anyway.” Toward the end of the project, I wondered how many jokes there were in Eric. I can remember counting that there were over a thousand of them. It’s just crammed full of funny material: in the newspapers, hidden in the conversations, hidden all over the place.

The economy comes in, however, with Eric the Unready‘s determination never to beat any single joke into the ground — something that even Steve Meretzky was prone to do in too much of his post-Infocom work. As Graham Nelson and others have pointed out, one of Infocom’s secret weapons was, paradoxical though it may sound, the very limitations of their Z-Machine. The sharply limited quantity of text it allowed, combined with the editorial oversight of Jon Palace, Infocom’s unsung hero, kept their writers from rambling on and on. But text had become cheap on the computers of the 1990s, and thus Legend’s software technology, unlike Infocom’s, allowed the author an effectively unlimited number of words — a dangerous thing for any writer. A Legend author was under no compulsion whatsoever to edit himself.

Luckily, Bob Bates’s dedication to doing the research came through for him here, in a way that ultimately proved far more valuable than his study of fantasy fiction. He had been interested in the mechanics and theory of comedy long before starting on the game, and now reread what some of the past masters of the form — people like Milton Berle and Johnny Carson — had to say about it. He recalled an old anecdote from the latter, which he paraphrases as, “Not everybody is going to like every joke. But if you can get 60 percent of the people to laugh at 60 percent of your jokes, you’re a success.” One of the funniest writers ever once noted in the same spirit that “brevity is the soul of wit.” Combining these two ideals, Bob’s approach to the humor in Eric the Unready became not to stress over or belabor anything. He would crack a joke, then be done with it and move on to the next one; rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat. “There’s always another bus coming,” says Bob by way of summing up his comedy philosophy. “If you don’t get this one, don’t worry; you’ll get the next one.”

At this point, then, I’d like to share some of Eric the Unready‘s greatest comedic hits with you. One of the pleasures for me in revisiting this game a quarter-century on has been remembering all of the contemporary pop culture it references, pays homage to, or (more commonly) skewers. Thus many of the screenshots you see below are of that sort — wonderful for remembering the somehow more innocent media landscape of the United States during the immediate post-Cold War era, that window of peace and prosperity before history caught up with us again on September 11, 2001. (Why does the past always strike us as more innocent? Is it because we know what will come after, and familiarity breeds quaintness?)

But another of my agendas is to commemorate Legend’s talented freelance art team, whose work was consistently much better than we had any right to expect from such a small studio. Being a writer myself, I have a tendency to emphasize writing and design while giving short shrift to the visual aesthetics of game-making. So, let me remedy that for today at least. The quality of the artwork below is largely thanks to Tanya Isaacson and Paul Mock, Legend’s two most important artists, who placed their stamp prominently on everything that came out of the company during this period.

Each chapter includes a copy of the newspaper for that day. Together, they provide a running commentary on Eric’s misadventures of the previous chapters — and lots of opportunities for more jokes. Shay Addams, the publisher of the Questbusters newsletter and book series and a ubiquitous magazine commentator and reviewer, rivaled Computer Gaming World‘s Scorpia for the title of most prominent of all the American adventure-game superfans who parleyed their hobbies into paychecks. (Scorpia as well showed up in games from time to time — perhaps most notably, as a poisonous monster in New World Computing’s Might and Magic III, her comeuppance for a negative review of Might and Magic II.) Alas, Addams disappeared without a trace about a year after Eric the Unready was published. Rumor had it that he took up a career as a professional gambler (!) instead.

A really old-school shout-out, to Scott Adams, the first person to put a text adventure on a microcomputer. “Yoho” was a magic word in his second and most popular game of all, Pirate Adventure.

The computer-game industry of the early 1990s still had some of the flavor of pre-Hayes Code Hollywood. Even as parents and politicians were fretting endlessly over what Super Mario Bros. was doing to Generation Nintendo, computer games remained off their radar entirely. That would soon change, however, bringing with it the industry’s first attempts at content rating and self-censorship.

The “tastes great, less filling” commercials for Miller Lite were an inescapable presence on American television for almost two decades, placing athletes and B-list celebrities in ever more elaborate beer-drinking scenarios which always concluded with the same tagline. They still serve as a classic case study in marketing for the way they convinced stereotypically manly, sports-loving male beer drinkers that it was okay to drink a (gasp!) light beer.

We couldn’t possibly skip an explicit homage to Monty Python and the Holy Grail, could we?

Wheel of Fortune — and the bizarre French obsession with Jerry Lewis.

More risque humor…

David Letterman’s top-ten lists were a pop-culture institution for almost 35 years. Note the presence on this one of Vice President Dan Quayle, who once said that Mars had air and canals filled with water, and once lost a spelling bee to a twelve-year-old by misspelling “potato.”

Rob Schneider’s copy-machine guy was one of the more annoying Saturday Night Live characters to become an icon of its age…

Speaking of Saturday Night Live: in one of the strangest moments in the history of the show, the Irish singer Sinead O’Connor belted out a well-intentioned but ham-fisted a-capella scold against human-rights abuse in lieu of one of her radio hits. At the end of the song, she tore up a picture of the pope as a statement against the epidemic of child molestation and abuse in the Catholic Church.

Some of Miller Lite’s competition in terms of iconic beer commercials for manly men came in the form of Old Milwaukee and its “It just doesn’t get any better than this” tagline. (Full disclosure: Old Milwaukee was my dad’s brew of choice, I think mostly because it was just about the cheapest beer you could buy. I have memories of watching John Wayne movies on his knee, coveting the occasional sip of it I was vouchsafed.)

Madonna was at her most transgressive during this period: she had just released an album entitled Erotica and a coffee-table book of softcore porn entitled simply Sex. Looked back on today, her desperate need to shock seems more silly than threatening, but people reacted at the time as if the world was ending. (I should know; I was working on a record store when the album came out. Ah, well… even as an indie-rock snob, I had to recognize that her version of “Fever” simply slays.)

My favorite chapter has you exploring a “galaxy” of yet more pop-culture detritus with the unforgettable Captain Smirk, described as “250 pounds of captain stuffed into a 175-pound-captain’s shirt.” (This joke might just be my favorite in the whole game…)

Fantasy Island, in which a new collection of recognizable faces was gathered together each week to live out their deepest desires and learn some life lessons in the process, was one of the biggest television shows of the pop-culture era just before Eric the Unready, when such aspirational lifestyle fare set in exotic locations — see also Fantasy Island‘s more family-friendly sibling The Love Boat — was all the rage. It all really does feel oddly quaint and innocent today, doesn’t it?

Eric the Unready manages to combine all three of actor and decadent lifestyle icon Ricardo Monelban’s most recognizable personas in one: as Mr. Roarke of Fantasy Island, as Khan of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, and as a pitchman for Chrysler.

And at last we come to Gilligan’s Island, a place within a three-hour sailing tour of civilization which has nevertheless remained uncharted — the perfect scene for a sitcom as breathtakingly stupid as its backstory.

Eric the Unready is the first Legend game to fully embrace the LucasArts design methodology of no player deaths and no dead ends. Even if you deliberately try to throw away or destroy essential objects out of curiosity or sheer perversity, the game simply won’t let you; the object in question is always restored to you, often by means that are quite amusing in themselves. Just as in a LucasArts comedy, the sense of freedom this complete absence of danger provides often serves the game well, empowering you to try all sorts of crazy and funny things without having to worry that doing so will mean a trip back to your collection of save files. Unlike many LucasArts games, though, Eric the Unready doesn’t even try all that hard to find ways of presenting truly intriguing puzzles that work within its set of player guardrails. In fact, if there’s a problem with Eric the Unready, it must be that the game offers so little challenge; Bob Bates’s determination to make it the polar opposite of Timequest in this respect carried all the way through the project.

The game is really eight discrete mini-games. At the start of each of these “chapters,” Eric is dumped into a new, self-contained environment that exists independently of what came before or what will come later. By limiting the combinatorial-explosion factor, this structure makes both the designer’s and the player’s job much easier. Even within a chapter, however, there are precious few head-scratching moments. You’re told what you need to do quite explicitly, and then you proceed to do it in an equally straightforward manner — and that’s pretty much all there is to solving the game. Bob long considered it to be the easiest game by far he had ever designed. (He was, he noted wryly when I spoke to him recently, forced by popular demand to make his recent text adventure Thaumistry even easier, which serves as something of a commentary on the ways in which player expectations have changed over the past quarter-century.)

All that said, it should also be noted that Eric the Unready‘s disinterest in challenging its player was more of a problem at the time of its original release than it is today. Whatever their other justifications, difficult puzzles served as a way of gumming up the works for the player back in the day, keeping her from burning through a game’s content too quickly at a time when the average game’s price tag in relation to its raw quantity of content was vastly high than today. Without challenging puzzles, a player could easily finish a game like Eric the Unready in less than five hours, in spite of its having several times the amount of text of the average Infocom game (not to mention the addition of graphics, music, and sound effects). At a retail price of $35 or $40, this was a real issue. Today, when the game sells as a digital download for a small fraction of that price, it’s much less of one. Modern distribution choices, one might say, have finally allowed Eric the Unready to be exactly the experience it wants to be without apologies.

Certainly Bob has fantastically good memories of making this game; he still calls it the most purely enjoyable creative endeavor of his life. Those positive vibes positively ooze out of the finished product. Yet there was a shadow lurking behind all of Bob’s joy, lending it perhaps an extra note of piquancy. For he knew fairly early in Eric the Unready‘s development cycle that this would be the last game of this type he would get to design for the foreseeable future. Legend, you see, was on the verge of dumping the parser at last.

They had fought the good fight far longer than any of their peers. By the time Eric the Unready shipped in January of 1993, Legend had been the only remaining maker of parser-based adventure games for the mainstream, boxed American market for over two years. As part of their process of bargaining with marketplace realities, they had done everything they could think of to accommodate the huge number of gamers who regarded the likes of an Infocom game much as the average contemporary movie-goer regarded a Charlie Chaplin film. In a bid to broaden their customers demographic beyond the Infocom diehards, Legend from the start had added an admittedly clunky method of building sentences by mousing through long menus of verbs, nouns, and prepositions, along with copious multimedia gilding around the core text-adventure experience.

As budgets increased and the market grew still more demanding, Legend came to lean ever more heavily on both the mouse and their multimedia bells and whistles. By the time they got to Eric the Unready, their games was already starting to feel as much point-and-click as not, as the regular text-and-parser window got superseded for long stretches of time by animated cut scenes, by full-screen static illustrations, by mouseable onscreen documents, by mouse-driven visual puzzles. Even when the parser interface was on display, you could now choose to click on the onscreen illustrations of the scenes themselves instead of the words representing the things in them if you so chose.

Still, it was obvious that even an intermittent recourse to the parser just wouldn’t be tenable for much longer. In this new era of consumer computing, a command line had become for many or most computer users that inscrutable, existentially terrifying thing you got dumped into when something broke down in your Windows. The last place these people wanted to see such a thing was inside one of their games. And so the next step — that of dumping the parser entirely — was as logical as it was inevitable.

Eric the Unready wouldn’t quite be the absolute last of its breed — Legend’s Gateway 2: Homeworld would ship a few months after it — but it was the very last of Bob’s children of the type. Once Eric the Unready and Gateway 2 shipped, an era in gaming history came to an end. The movement that had begun when Scott Adams shipped the first copies of Adventureland on hand-dubbed cassette tapes for the Radio Shack TRS-80 in 1978 had run its course. Yes, there was a world of difference between Adams’s 16 K efforts with their two-word parsers and pidgin English and the tens of megabytes of multimedia splendor of an Eric the Unready or a Gateway 2, but they were all nevertheless members of the same basic gaming taxonomy. Now, though, no more games like them would ever appear again on the shelves of everyday software stores.

And make no mistake: something important — precious? — got lost when Legend finally dumped the parser entirely. Bob felt the loss as keenly as anyone; through all of his years in games which would follow, he would never entirely stop regretting it. Bob:

What you’re losing [in a point-and-click interface] is the sense of infinite possibility. There may still be a sense that there’s lots you can do, and you can still have puzzles and non-obvious interactions, but you’ve lost the ability to type anything you want. And it was a terrible thing to lose — but that’s the way the world was going.

I found the transition personally painful. That’s evidenced by the fact that I went back and wrote another parser-based game more than twenty years later. A large part of the joy of making this type of game for me is the sense that I’m the little guy in the box. It’s me and the player. The player senses my presence and feels like we’re engaged in this activity together. There’s a back-and-forthing — communication — between the two of us. It’s obviously all done on my part ahead of time, but the player should feel like there’s somebody behind the curtain, that it’s a live exchange. It should feel like somebody is responding as an individual to the player.

As Bob says, point-and-click games are … not necessarily worse, but definitely different. The personal connection with the designer is lost.

A long time ago now in what feels like another life, I entitled the first lengthy piece I ever wrote about interactive fiction “Let’s Tell a Story Together.” At its best, playing a text adventure really can feel like spending time one-on-one with a witty narrator, raconteur, and intellectual sparring partner. I would even go so far as to admit that text adventures have cured me of loneliness once or twice in my life. There’s nothing else in games comparable to this experience; only a great book might possibly compare, but even it lacks the secret sauce of interactivity. Indeed, text adventures may be the only truly literary form of computer game. Just as a book is the most personal, intimate form of traditional artistic expression, so is a text adventure its equivalent in interactive terms.

Granted, some of those qualities may initially be obscured in Eric the Unready by all the flash surrounding the command prompt. But embrace the universe of possibilities that are still offered up by that blinking cursor, sitting there asking you to try absolutely anything you wish to, and you’ll find that the spirit which changed the lives of so many of us when we encountered our first Infocom game lives on even here. Don’t just rush through the fairly trivial task of solving this game; try stuff, just to see what the little man behind the curtain says back. Trust me when I say that he’s very good company. One can only hope that all of those who bought Eric the Unready in 1993 appreciated him while he was still around.

(My huge thanks go to Bob Bates for setting aside yet another few hours to talk about the life and times of Legend circa 1992 to 1993.

Eric the Unready can be purchased on GOG.com. It’s well worth the money.)

source http://reposts.ciathyza.com/eric-the-unready/

#retro games #dos games #retro #crpg #adventure #amiga #oldcomputers #8bit #16bit #blog #repost

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rodrigohyde · 6 years ago

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A. Lange & Söhne Against The World: The Watch Snob

Lange Saxonia Vs. Patek Calatrava

Dear Watch Snob,

I have been reading your articles for the past few years and I have grown to really enjoy them. This is my second time reaching out to you. Your advice, in your published article “Precious Time”, was extremely helpful. As I mentioned in my previous article, I had a number of personal tragedies to deal with over the past year and your articles have provided me with humor and a “welcome distraction” in a difficult time in my life.

I am reaching out for your advice once again to help in my desire to create only a two-watch collection that will last me for the next ten years or more.

I am turning 50 years old soon and I have grown really tired of waiting for Rolex watches and buying Rolex watches over the past few years that I don’t really want, to possibly get the watch I do one day. Your advice on waiting for the Rolex GMT Pepsi Jubilee sports watch in SS fits with my desire to reduce my watch collection and I am still waiting for it from my AD – no hurry though. This watch deserves a spot in my two-watch collection.

Anyway, I want to add a classic and simple dress watch as my other watch. I am torn between the A. Lange Saxonia Thin 37mm and the Patek Calatrava 5196J-001 Yellow Gold. From reading your articles and seeing the Saxonia in person, I now understand your love for A. Lange and your disdain for the Patek price creep. However, there is a feeling of horological history from Patek that I can’t deny either.

For a man who only turns 50 one time, would you recommend the Patek or the A. Lange in a two-watch collection, along with the 126710 BLRO? I am torn between two great watches.

Keep up the wonderful articles, as politics continue to tear Americans apart, your articles and our common love for watches can bring people together.

Related: The Watch Snob Says: What's On The Inside Counts, But Make It Look Good

I must say, I find Patek Philippe rather difficult to like as much as I used to, or would like to, these days. They embody, in so many ways, everything that is wrong with the Swiss watch industry – it has always been a rather stuffy, condescending firm but when the quality and integrity of design was good, you not only forgave these shortcomings, but found in them a charmingly anachronistic experience of old-school, old-style Swiss luxury watchmaking.

At the prices they currently ask, however, and with the lapses in finish and in general design integrity they’ve exhibited in the last ten years, what used to feel charmingly leisurely now feels incurably sclerotic; I have no issue with a company making money and if one doesn’t care for the cut of Patek’s jib, one simply votes with one’s wallet. I don’t mind them making money hand over fist, necessarily; I do mind that they seem rather obviously to not care much about anything else.

That said, the 5196J is one of the nicest watches they make – everything that one likes about Patek Philippe is present in the reference, and it is as tasteful a fine Swiss wristwatch as you could want. The caliber 215 PS is not the nicest movement Patek has ever made, but it’s not bad and overall it is a watch that one could wear for the rest of one’s days, with no regret. It should be about half as expensive as it is, but then one could say that about most of its competition.

The Saxonia, on the other hand, is still more expensive than it should be but much less so, and in terms of quality, it gives up nothing to the Patek. Moreover it comes from a company that still shows signs of caring about its clients as people. It is not so much less expensive than the Calatrava that cost alone would be a deciding factor, but that, combined with its impeccable quality, in my view recommend it over the Calatrava. However you know yourself best, and the name Patek Philippe is historically meaningful – if you know in your heart of hearts you would admire the Lange but always wish you’d purchased the Patek, then your course is clear.

Lange Saxonia Vs. Patek Calatrava: Round II

Dear Mr. Snob,

Thank you firstly for your articles. They are a source of knowledge and I look forward to the weekly articles which, read with a good glass of red or scotch, offers much pleasure.

Watch collection to me is a source of aspiration - I strive to do my work as well as the watch makes I admire and I strive to own the best watches by advancing my career.

To mark a career milestone I have been looking at a few watches and would now ask your opinion in my discourse for a worthy choice. My job takes me traveling often and I am enamored with watches that can easily switch time zones and therefore am looking at GMT / Dual Time and World Time watches. I wonder if any one of these two complications is superior to the other? One can surmise that there is a scale of complications with minute repeaters and perpetual calendars being right up there and perhaps the humble day date and power reserve being at the entry levels. If there is such a scale, how would you rank complications by themselves and is a Worldtime superior over a GMT / Dual Time watch or vice versa? I am considering the Nautilus Dual Time, Saxonia Dual Time, Calatrava World Time or Lange 1 World Time. If I am to wear the watch regularly then I suppose the Nautilus or Saxonia will be really good, simple timepieces but for one that will give pleasure and retain value, do you will think a Patek is superior over a Lange? Should it be a Dual Time or a World Time complication? I already own a Reverso Grande GMT as well as a Rolex Submariner.

To summarize:

1/ are some complications more worthy of others?

2/ is World Time complication superior over GMT/Dual Time?

3/ is Patek still superior over Lange?

Or, should I get a Calatrava and a Saxonia with no complications and call it a day?

Well, you have asked not one, but a myriad of questions – let me answer the three you have posed in your summary.

Firstly, no complication is more inherently worthy than any other; with complications, as with watchmaking in general, it is not so much what you do, as how you do it. Modern manufacturing methods mean it is now possible to make any complication inexpensively, and there are now bargain-priced dual time zone watches, as well as perpetual calendars, rattrapante chronographs, and so on. Traditionally, three complications were considered the elite: the repeater, the rattrapante chronograph, and the perpetual calendar – but nowadays, it is the repeater alone that still retains some of the mystique of former days, as it has proven, to some degree, resistant to mass production.

Secondly, the World Time watch is more complex but not necessarily superior functionally. I no longer travel to the extent I once did, however I have noticed over the years that one seldom really needs to know the time in more than one’s immediate location, and at home, for which the GMT/Dual Time complication serves admirably – and moreover, more legibly than a World Time complication.

Finally: No. It has a longer history, and of course continuity of production, but qualitatively, Lange has quietly been beating Patek at their own game for some time now. Go and take a loupe to the movement of a Lange, and the movement of a comparable Patek, and trust your own eyes.

Lange Saxonia Vs. Vacheron Fiftysix

Dear Snob:

I have what I consider a small modest collection that includes among others, a Nomos Tangente, Zenith Pilot Type 20 and Polar Explorer Ref. 16570. I was considering a JLC Master series or Reverso when I saw that Vacheron came out with the 56 Series.

At first blush it appears to be a good value to cost proposition for an automatic in that entry point from Vacheron. I’m curious as to your thoughts on the 56 line. Is the new line worthy of consideration? Or, should one bypass the new offering and instead stick with a JLC or wait a bit longer for the more established Patrimony or possibly an Saxonia Lange?

I am I think somewhat in the minority, in that I find the 56 line rather charming. The objections to it seem chiefly to be that it looks perhaps a bit more obviously chic than one normally associates with Vacheron, but as the watch on which the 56 Collection is based can attest, Vacheron has a long and very rich history of experimenting with unusual case designs .

The Lange will probably hold its value a bit better, but the Vacheron is a charming watch in its own right . It is of course too expensive for what it is – unfortunately an all-too-common thread in this week’s little collection of queries – but Vacheron is no worse in this respect than any other haute horlogerie brand. Some chums of mine feel Vacheron comes it a bit high to price themselves competitively with Patek, to which all I can say is, I know to whom I’d rather give my bit of gold these days.

Send the Watch Snob your questions at [email protected] or ask a question on Instagram with the #watchsnob hashtag.

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from Style channel http://www.askmen.com/style/watch_snob/a-lange-soehne-against-the-world-the-watch-snob.html

#Style channel

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imericwat-blog · 7 years ago

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New Tales in Old Slavery Narratives: A Review of UNDERGROUND and Alex Tizon’s “My Family’s Slave”

Having freed myself from cable for more than a year, I've begun a different relationship with TV shows that pays little attention to their provenance. If I hear of a buzz-worthy show nowadays, there is a multitude of ways (including illegal ones) to find it, least of which actually needs to involve a TV. So a little show called Underground from WGN America began to show up in my newsfeed. Most people can't find WGN America in their TV lineup, let alone name a show on that network. As a library nerd, the Los Angeles Public Library was the first place I looked. Happily they carried the first season on DVD, thus sparing me the trouble of potentially getting a cease-and-desist letter from a network that still touts M*A*S*H on its website.

Underground follows the passage of a group of runaway slaves (The Macon 7) from antebellum Georgia to their freedom. (Spoilers ahead for the first season.[1]) As slave narratives go, this is a relatively a modern take on an old theme, much like a slavery thriller in the tradition of Tarantino's 2012 film Django Unchained. Like that movie, it has a bit of fantasy revenge element. In one scene, a runaway slave holds a white couple hostage in their own house and makes them serve him dinner. For the most part, Underground strikes a better balance between invention and revisionism. That scene is compelling and eventually reveals an important past about a character. However, another scene where a schoolteacher tells August, a slave bounty hunter, that he should spend more time with his son after he got into a brawl with his classmates feels a tad anachronistic.[2]

More consistently, though, the drama is intense because you'd never know how long a good turn would last before the next obstacle surfaces. The moral ambiguity of one character can undo any progress made before the last commercial break. And even when people try to do the right thing, in this environment they could end up hurting someone else.

There are many great characters on this show. My favorite is the head house slave Ernestine (played by Amirah Vann). Ernestine holds a tight rein over her children to keep them safe, mostly through her cunning manipulation of her master, with whom she carries on an affair. (The master fathered two of her three children, an open secret.) But things begin to fall apart as her master/paramour considers a run for the Senate and must appear tougher on his slaves.[3] Ernestine has to resort to more and more devious ways to protect her children, including murdering another slave at one point.

Other characters are just as complex and nuanced - which nowadays seems to be a shorthand for good people who do bad things for reasons that you can understand. Even the two leads, righteous Noah and guileless Rosalee, don't come out pristine. Both have done questionable things that make them wonder why they deserved freedom when others failed. Lying in bed together, Rosalee says nobody could come out clean on the other side of the river, while Noah laments a world where freedom is something they even had to justify they deserved. This scene gripped me because, on the first night of their freedom, Noah and Rosalee are already grappling the implications of their agency: responsibility.

It is a fucked-up world. When August's son grows dubious of his profession as a slave-hunter, he is told that everyone has a good and a bad wolf inside of them. That the audience can't be sure which one would come out in a tough situation for a given character only adds to the tension on this show, without making the views feel the character is being inconsistent. When Cato, the overseer who's been the thorn at Noah's side ends up engineering the runaways' escape after their Plan A fell through, it actually adds to his deviousness and reinforces that he is always playing the long game and looking out for number one.

Liking a flawed character means you are invested in seeing how their stories unfold; they may even challenge your sense of righteousness. What it doesn't mean is that they're justified in their bad choices. In Ernestine's case, she'd passed the point of no return, and it'd be somewhat unsatisfying if she didn't get her come-uppance.[4]

Elizabeth, the wife of a Yankee couple who aid and abet runaway slaves on the other side, understand this. Her husband John, when he was a young lawyer, has once helped a landowner sell a female slave, separating her from her husband. Elizabeth tells John that he doesn't get to be a hero, even if he risks everything to be an abolitionist. It doesn't matter he hadn't understood the weight of his action; every sacrifice he'd make from that point forward is to live down that sin.

Many stories are about the internal conflicts between the good and the bad wolves. Underground doesn't necessarily break new grounds on this. But by using the thriller as a new vehicle for the slave narrative, the show is not only less concerned about proving how slavery dehumanizes - that's a given premise - but it also magnifies, on an hourly basis, the life-and-death decisions the slaves confront, whether they decide to stay or to run away. The stories are told from the slaves' perspectives in ways that are more fully realized than even more serious fares.

It was while I was watching Underground and weighing the reverberations of people's decisions on not only themselves, but also those around them, under that pathological arrangement of human relationships called slavery, that I came upon Alex Tizon's "My Family's Slave" in The Atlantic. Published just a couple months after his death, the essay reveals a secret that the Pulitzer-prize-winning journalist and his family harbored for decades - that his family owned a slave for 56 years. Her name was Eudocia Tomas Pulido, whom Tizon and his siblings had grown up calling "Lola." "Lola" was how Tizon referred to Pulido throughout his essay.

Pulido was bought as a utusan by Tizon's grandfather in the Philippines when she was eighteen years old to take care of Tizon's mother, who was six years younger than Pulido. Twenty-one years after she became a slave, in 1964, Pulido followed the Tizon family when they immigrated to the U.S. Despite some initial reluctance, Pulido seemed to have agreed to the arrangement on the promise that her masters would send remittances to her family in the Philippines, a promise that never materialized. Pulido took care of the children while Tizon's parents struggled professionally. Tizon described Pulido being "more of a parent to me than either my mother or my father. Hers was the first face I saw in the morning and the last one I saw at night." About a decade after they moved to the U.S., when Tizon was fifteen, his father abandoned his family. His mother would later remarried to a Croatian immigrant, with whom she had a turbulent relationship.

Tizon's mother died of leukemia in 1999. Pulido went on to live with Tizon and his family. He wrote, "I had a family, a career, a house in the suburbs - the American dream. And then I had a slave." She would live there for another twelve years, when she passed away from a heart attack at the age of 86.

Tizon's essay, a cover story in a major magazine, received a lot of accolades. His admirers applauded him for his courage in airing his family's dirty laundry, exposing an issue that is still so sadly relevant in our times. (How many people, especially migrants, "willing" or trafficked, still toil in slavery or near-slavery conditions? How are we complicit by being a part of an economy that's predicated on their exploitation?) Tizon's detractors accused him of standing by silently (for the most part) while Pulido suffered his parents' abuse and neglect. They argued that this confessional was too little, too late.

His supporters pointed to his exquisite prose - and it was good; Tizon didn't get his Pulitzer for nothing - as if a man capable of such sensitivity and introspection couldn't be so careless with someone else's life. Didn't he fight with his mother over her complaints about Pulido needing dental treatments? Didn't he give Pulido a $200-a-week allowance once she started living with him in her final years? A handful even called out the complexity of the relationship between the utusan and her mistress as cultural nuances that were harder to grasp by non-Filipinos.

But do we want to dip into the well of cultural explanation? Isn't it more self-defeating to describe slavery, or any class exploitation, as something essential to Filipino culture? Was there a cultural explanation for an ideology that led to this piece of advice from Tizon's grandfather, "They might cry and complain, but their souls will thank you. They will love you for helping them be what God intended"?

Of course, there are Filipinos - in both the U.S. and the Philippines - who embraced a more class or feminist take on Tizon's story. Tizon himself was unequivocal that his parents were slave-owners. To his credit, he recognized the fear and love Pulido had for his family as no different from the slave character in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, an old American film he'd watched as a child. He wrote, "No other word but slave encompassed the life she [Pulido] lived." Besides working without a wage for decades, Pulizo suffered physical, emotional and verbal abuse from Tizon's parents as well as deprivation of basic needs (like a bed and dental care). They held her hostage, refusing to let her go back to the Philippines when first Pulido's mother and then her father passed away.

Tizon was not blind to his complicity. The regrets in his words led some to describe this as a sort of mea cupla. But most of Pulido's stories in the essay focus on the years when Tizon was a child (when he couldn't do much to "free Lola") and the years after his mother died. Missing were decades when Tizon and his siblings were independent adults who could've paid Lola for taking care of their mother or even bought her a one-way ticket back home to reunite with her family. The only recourse he took as an adult was teaching Pulido how to drive, in the hope that "if things ever got unbearable with Mom, she could drive away forever," a solution as half-baked as it was half-hearted. Offering no hint that he had considered more realistic alternatives, he only wrote, "I was no better than my parents. I could have done more to free Lola. To make her life better. Why didn't I?"

This is not a satisfying confessional because the sin continues. Far from being Pulido's story, this is, above all, still a master's narrative. Pulido was relegated to the trope of the "magical Negro." Despite mistreatment, she patiently healed Tizon's mother's grief from her first husband's abandonment and protected her from her second's bullying. The most complex part of this essay to me is Tizon's erasure of his "Lola" as a necessity to his preservation of his relationship with his mother. As important as the relationship between the two women was, Tizon didn't bring up Pulido in his eulogy for his mother. He wrote, "I didn't talk about Lola. Just as I had selectively blocked Lola out of my mind when I was with Mom during her last years. Loving my mother required that kind of mental surgery."

Tizon attempted some contexts for Pulido's tolerance for his mother's cruelty, but we never found out what motivated Pulido besides her servility. If this was Pulido's story, what were her hero's conflicts?

Perhaps Pulido had been condemned to such a prolonged period of servitude that all her stories would surround her masters - though only a master would think so. There is a rare moment in the essay where Tizon allowed a glimpse of a possibility that Lola had her own story to tell. His mother had told him a story about how Pulido, when they were both young, willingly took a beating from her father for her at her request. When Tizon repeated this story to Pulido, he wrote, "She [Pulido] looked at me with sadness and said simply, 'Yes, it was like that.'" How much of Pulido's side of the story Tizon had selectively blocked out? And if Pulido had a chance to read his essay, how much would she quietly concede to these versions as if it was futile to refute them?

The most egregious sign for me that Tizon had not exorcized his bad wolf with this essay was when he asked whether Pulido had ever had sex. She was at least in her seventies then and living with Tizon. Who would ask their "Lola" such a disrespectful question? Who but a master would feel a right to her answer? Never mind that Pulido's sexual and romantic life was highly constricted because of her status as a slave, his question continued to presume his ownership over her sexuality. Worse treatment than this was when Tizon published her answer in his essay. This borders on unethical. Did his "Lola" know she was talking to a journalist, to whom she could refuse such a question? Or did she think she was talking to her master and must offer the truth, even if unwillingly? Even if she hadn't minded giving this personal information to a man she was forced to raise, did she expect that her answer would be shared with thousands of readers?

If Underground offers a new take on a familiar slave narrative, Tizon's confessional essay was the opposite, a gentle but tired master narrative on modern slavery. I would like to hear about Pulido's life. I would like to read its nuances. But they weren't in this essay that was purportedly her story. In a master's narrative, slaves seldom get their complexity and nuances they deserve.

[1] WGN America has just canceled the series after its second season.

[2] The producers also took some chances with the music on the show. The music is not from the period of the historical drama and often invokes hip hop. Accompanying a scene of runaway hunting, the first episode begins with Kanye West's "Black Skinhead" from his Yeezus album (which I love). It's jarring, but it makes the tension palpate. Other musical choices do not work as well.

[3] The original tough-on-crime political rhetoric really meant tough on black people.

[4] Most stories exist in a moral universe because most stories are about the kind of people we aspire to be. Plot A is the external conflict between hero and villain. Plot B is the conflict within the flawed hero themselves. The internal suspense is whether the hero will shed their heroic attributes or succumb to their Achilles' heel in order to resolve the external conflict. Hollywood being Hollywood, characters with this kind of arc, i.e. with "complexity" and "nuance," tend to be male (and usually White). Bad boys still get our sympathy in the end.

Take Walter White in Breaking Bad, a chemistry-teacher-turned-drug-kingpin. Progressively through each season, White was becoming such a badass by besting his opponents in the most awesome way (acquiring the alter ego "Heisenberg" along the way) that many viewers were rooting for him to get out of his toughest jam yet in the final season. Not me. I knew there could only be one ending for Walter White. It was extremely satisfying to hear him finally confess to his wife in the series finale that he hadn't broken bad because he had terminal cancer and wanted to take care of his family. The reason he became Heisenberg was because he liked the power he wielded over others. This craving isn't surprising, given that he had to moonlight at a carwash and let his students humiliate him as his snotty customers, that he felt he was cheated out of a fortune by his former lab partners, and he suffered an inferiority complex as a result of the many jabs at his masculinity from his lawman brother-in-law. Self-knowledge is atonement for many of these complex characters. People could debate whether he's survived the last episode, but the fact that he sacrificed his life to save Jesse, the junkie who was actually the moral compass of the show, leads me to believe that his death was the only sensible conclusion.

There are great stories with an amoral universe, too. No Country for Old Men easily comes to mind. Anton Chigurh, the embodiment of evil, is random (he decides whether to kill someone based on a coin toss) and indestructible (surviving a car crash surprisingly because it would kill most of us). This is why the final monologue from Sheriff Bell, a man of ethics and righteousness feeling powerless in the face of such evil, is so effectively grim.

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