#ALL HE SEES ARE REPEATING PATTERNS ACROSS THE MULTIVERSE

[fellhellion]

seeing miguel takes that make u say aloud HE DOES NOT KNOW HE IS A FICTIONAL CHARACTER IN A STORY WHERE THE PLOT IS CONSTRUCTED TO ILLUSTRATE A CERTAIN POINT/MEANING BRO 😭

[classickook]

you drew stars around my scars | stephen strange

pairing: stephen strange x gn!reader

summary: just a short little fic about stephen's hands because he needs some love :(

warnings: mentions of scars

word count: 0.7k

a/n: t swift actually wrote this lyric for him fun fact!

you had never seen strange without his gloves on. they were leather and yellow, almost like the kind of gloves one would wear while washing dishes. you always found them rather odd but never questioned it as you had heard throughout the sanctum that strange had been in a horrible car accident years prior and didn’t like talking about his hands. you respected his privacy, but were curious nonetheless.

it wasn’t until one evening while you were sitting across the table from him in the sanctum’s library that the thought resurfaced and crossed your mind again.

his head was bent over one practically large book, old and weathered and in some ancient language or another that you had never seen before. he was far more advanced than you when it came to the mystic arts, hence why you were studying in the library with him and requested his ‘tutoring’ of sorts in the first place.

what with being the current sorcerer supreme and all, you figured he would be insanely busy keeping the multiverse in check, but he didn’t so much as hesitate when you asked for his assistance.

“do they still hurt?” the question popped out before you could stop yourself and you felt your face heat with embarrassment, wishing you could shove the words back in your mouth or maybe even grab the eye of agamotto around strange’s neck and turn back time to five minutes ago. but no such luck.

strange met your eyes, thankfully saying nothing of the blush covering your cheeks. “not as much as they used to.” his tone was calm, even, and didn’t hold any ounce of offense or anger at your brash question like you had been expecting. he seemed almost open with you… vulnerable.

you risked a quick glance down at his hands before asking, “may i?”

he seemed taken aback but nodded at your request.

you took his hands in yours, noticing the way he flinched slightly at your touch, but he didn’t pull away or ask you to stop, so you continued. you slipped off the gloves, one hand at a time, keeping your movements slow and gentle.

once the gloves were removed and set aside, you stared at his bare hands in awe and wonderment—you couldn’t understand why strange would want to hide them from the world. they were large in your smaller ones, littered with long scars that reached from fingertip to knuckle, and knuckle to wrist. you noticed how they trembled slightly, most likely from irreversible nerve damage, but they were beautiful in a way you couldn’t explain. everything about his hands, as much as he despised them, made him special in his own right, and you felt honored to be able to see him so unreserved like this as you were certain not many people had been allowed the same privilege.

you lightly traced your fingertip over the angry scars, still puckered and red even though it had been several years since the accident. “is this okay?”

“yes,” he said quietly, eyes fixated on your hands as they moved delicately across each of his fingers, painting swirls and patterns over the marred skin.

you brought one of his hands up to your mouth and pressed a soft kiss onto his palm, a shaky exhale escaping his lips at your tender touch. you looked up and met his gaze as you picked up his other hand, repeating the same action, and were then rendered speechless by the soft almost whimper-like sound that passed his lips.

while he had always expected people to turn away in disgust at the mangled scars, you treated them as if they were beautiful and capable of anything as you continued to outline each scar with different shapes and patterns, ultimately erasing the terrible memories associated with them.

“thank you,” he whispered.

you weren’t entirely sure what he was thanking you for, but you had a feeling that it had something to do with the kindness you were offering him—kindness he had deprived himself of for quite some time now, always shutting people out to avoid rejection and disappointment.

“you’re welcome,” you said with a smile.

the two of you returned to your studies and he kept one of your hands grasped in his, the gloves nowhere to be seen.

[delyth88]

Episode 6 reaction

Spoilers ahead!

Whoa boy! Yet again that did NOT go in the direction I expected! Overall I really enjoyed that and I’m excited to see what happens next. I can’t believe they left us on a cliff hanger like that!!! I do kinda hope this opens the door to Loki getting to be in the films with Wanda and Dr Strange at some point in the future (I want my magic trio!), but I don’t know if they’ll go there. I keep feeling like they’ll do almost anything but allow him to interact with the Avengers! Lol

So there’s no particular pattern to these thoughts… here we go…

I’m heartbroken for Loki that he lost Mobius in this. Mobius not recognising him just… agh! Can he catch a break?! I guess that makes sense of the odd sense of finality when they hugged goodbye in the last episode. And this comes after he loses Sylvie too. Very different circumstances, but he’s filled with this sense of urgency that they must fix the timeline and then all of a sudden the people he trusts to help him are all just… gone!

That moment when Loki first returns to the TVA. That was heart breaking! While I still don’t buy into the romantic relationship Tom sure can act, and this was so well done. You could see him take a moment to grieve then pull himself together for the greater good – to save the universe. Soul crushing. Ooof.

So yeah, damn. They were going for the romance. *rolls eyes* Ah well. At least I’d had a few weeks to prepare myself. :/

And they went the route of Sylvie betraying our Loki. Now that was interesting. It was something that I really didn’t want to happen, but I actually came out of this thinking that was quite well handled. I thought the idea that they would disagree over the approach to take was quite a good idea. It gave them an opportunity to dig deeper into the differences between these two characters. And I liked that it was a difference born out of their traumatic experiences. I think there’s going to be tons of meta on why Sylvie and Loki made their choices in that moment, and I LOVE that (as of right now – who knows what I’ll think in the morning) I feel like there is actually something to dig in to there, like it wasn’t completely shallow. It wasn’t some stupid repetition of the what’s almost a joke now Loki wants to rule line. And I liked that our Loki was the one who saw the grey areas and wanted some time to analyse it, he wasn’t just hot-headedly set on killing. And I liked that he finally seemed to have some backbone, some drive.

I was wondering where they were going to find some drama from when I saw that the head of the TVA was some new character (who I have to assume is Kang since online is full of how he’s the next big bad). Like how was that going to mean anything to me? Especially when so much of that scene was Loki and Sylvie sitting there listening. (I did love the identical postures with swords across their laps though. 😊) But this worked for me.

And I really thought for a moment they were going to have Sylvie kill Loki. How sad is that that the experience of IW and Endgame has made me fear for the lead character’s life so frickn’ much! Ugh!

One thing that I can see that may have been a problem for some people, and possibly me after I’ve had some more time to think about this, is that the finale had a lot of focus on setting up the next step in the MCU. Now while this is great, especially if it enables Loki to actually participate in events, it does sort of take away from the characters. At this point, for me though, the conflict between Loki and Sylvie worked enough to satisfy me. And then the mad tumble to the end where we get revelation top of revelation was exciting and a very energised way to ‘end’ the episode. But it is definitely NOT any sort of resolution.

And omg what are we going to do knowing where Loki’s at right now for the next months? Years? Till the next season comes out!? Lol

One thing I am grateful for, and again I think it’s a sign of my super low expectations regarding Loki’s treatment, is that I am glad that Loki seems to be relevant to things again. It’s felt so much like they’re trying to ease him out of the universe, so the fact that they wanted to make a second season when they very clearly didn’t need to does make me feel good on behalf of Loki, and Tom.

I felt like Loki had the opportunity to be a little more like my Loki in this episode. Particularly some of his responses while talking to Kang. And I think this just goes to illustrate the point that in the earlier films we’ve seen a lot of time where Loki is in very serious and high stakes situations. And the way this sets up what feels like some big action to come makes me hope that perhaps he might get the chance to be a bit more of that characterisation of Loki in whatever he shows up in the future in.

So, what happened to those shots of Loki in Stark Tower and in Asgard? I am terribly confused. They weren’t in there, right? I didn’t somehow miss them, did I? I thought, when we saw Miss Minutes and her offer, that they might have been moments shown to Loki to entice him to take up the offer. I’m a little disappointed because I was really looking forward to seeing Asgard and Loki in his Asgardian gear again. Did they maybe cut them out for time or some other reason? Were they pieces they filmed pre-pandemic and then decided against using later? If so, why was it in the poster? *shrug*

So no new Loki outfit. ☹ No new Loki powers. ☹ I still feel like the various hints in Episode 5 about Loki’s power really were leading to something and we haven’t (yet?) seen it play out.

Having said that, from the perspective of the end of the season, it now feels like the whole season was a bit of a lull, and bit of a time for Loki to learn about himself (and I would say ‘grow’ but all the talk of Loki ‘growing’ in Ragnarok have made me slightly allergic to that phrase lol), almost as though this is the set up for him to take on something bigger. I dunno. It probably isn’t, it never seems to be, but I plan to enjoy the next however-many-months we have imagining the possibilities.

I liked that Mobius got to have a conversation with Renslayer. That he called her out on all the nice things she’d said but didn’t mean. To me he’s one of those people who it feels worse to have disappointed at you than angry. I also like that he tried to stop her rather than letting her go for some old feeling of friendship or some cliché like that.

So that’s what that pen was all about. So is that a version of Renslayer that Renslayer is protecting? I’m not sure I followed? Or is it just a variant that B-15 found? If so, then why does TVA!Renslayer have the pen?

I get they were going for disarming, contrasting, and just a little mad, but I didn’t particularly like Kang. It’ll be interesting to see how he plays out in the films etc.

I’m here for the multiverse, though!

So, did Sylvie push our Loki into a different multiverse? Does each one have it’s own TVA? Is that a variant Mobius? Or is this some sort of ripple effect that’s changed the course of history, even in the TVA? Questions!!

My list of negative things hasn’t changed much since episode 3 really. I’m still sad that Loki’s characterisation is so different, that they haven’t addressed his time with Thanos or his pain from being Jotun, that he still hasn’t used a lot of magic, and that he never got to see Frigga again. And mostly that he really didn’t seem to be driving the action at all for most of the season. So I think I’m likely to be both happy with this show and disappointed, and apparently completely able to hold both these opinions in my head at the same time. The characterisation and the romance seem to be things I can become more comfortable with on repeated viewings.

I maybe a hopeless fool for Loki, but him having his heart broken and then being thrown into dramatic universe ending peril within the space of two minutes works for me. lol Poor Loki.

Right, that’s enough for me. I look forward to reading other’s thoughts.

Tagging a few folks: @iamanartichoke @scintillatingshortgirl19 @sparklegemstone @pinkpondofasgard @thelightofthingshopedfor @piccolaromana

[anonthenullifier]

In your snapshot au, how would Wanda and Vision react to meeting canon Tommy and Billy? Billy with his alternate family and issues, and Tommy with his sad history.

Thanks for the ask! As is clear from this series, canon is not held to firmly haha. I hope this is somewhat what you were hoping for and that you enjoy it!

The air tastes different, a touch sour. It’s a fact no one else would pick up on, the gustatory senses of humans discerning but also overwhelmed with the endless combination of flavors. Vision does not eat and so breathing presents him the most common ingredient to his taste buds.

Vision nods, lips held in a taut line as he accesses Avenger Protocol 3252, subtitled: So You’ve Found Yourself in the Multiverse...again. Though Vision wrote the majority of the protocol, it was cosponsored and researched primarily by Dr. Strange and Wanda, neither of whom understood why Vision asked for a breakdown of atmospheric elements, but they did it anyway. He scans through the endless lists of Earths and stops once he reaches the 600s, where carbon dioxide ranges from .0039 to .0040%.

Step 1 of Protocol 3252: Ascertain rough multiversic location. Check.

Step 2: Determine if you are alone.

This is always more difficult, the transition between universes occurring with a heady rush and a feeling of discombobulation that often gives way to brief amnesia. Vision scans his surroundings, a verdant park in what appears to be an urban community. There is a bench underneath an oak, one that obscures the sight of him in case anyone were to wander past. Once seated he runs through what he can remember. He was on an Avengers mission, battling some sorcerer of pandemonium, or so the man yelled a few times but Vision did not catch an actual name, far too focused on trying to usher nervous citizens away from the rain of concrete slabs and glass shards. It was not a solo mission, Wanda was there with him, as were Dr. Strange, Captain Marvel, and...others. A hiccup in his memory is concerning, particularly if he wishes to find his way out of wherever he is.

An elongated blink recenters the growing anxiety in the pit of his abdomen, the least helpful thing he can do now is panic. “Wanda.” He says her name both in his mind and in his comm unit, hopeful one, or both, will reach her, assuming she came through with him.

A second of silence rolls into a disheartening thirty seconds and then an agonizing minute, once he reaches two minutes he takes a deep breath, moving on to Step 3: Identify potential resources for return. It is his least favorite step, despite being the single most important one. Another breath expands his chest, synthetic lungs holding onto the sour air several seconds past his normal inhalation, and then they release, his perturbation vibrating out of his lips with barely a sound.

Hesitantly Vision mentally reaches for whatever internet is available here and, once identified, connects. He always accesses major news networks first, the headlines streaming through his mind at a breakneck pace as he struggles to identify any event in this universe that might have occurred to pull him over, leaving the insinuation it was something in his own home universe that led to his desertion. This is fine, this is good information, it just means he has less control than he would like, having to rely on anyone left at the site of his disappearance to bring him back. If Wanda is there, which he so desperately hopes she is (while also feeling guilty at the gnawing want of having her here with him now, even if it means she too is stranded), then she will no doubt get to him soon. This he cannot control and thus it is unhelpful.

The major news networks deemed useless, he dips into the archives about the Avengers, wanting to determine who is on their roster and if any of them have knowledge or capabilities of returning him. Or, as Wanda pointed out the last time this happened, if he were to get stuck, is the team made up of people he actually likes and would feel okay being with for some time. With a touch more force, he sends out a mental ping to his wife, one that he imbues with the weight of his anxiety, hoping that will help carry his signal farther.

He is getting distracted. Consciously and a bit reproachfully, he urges his attention back to the search, the roster, based on news articles and the official photos on the Avengers’ webpage, revealing the team is relatively the same, though he does notice his and Wanda’s pictures are in opposite corners. An oddity since they always put them next to each other. It is tempting to contact himself in these scenarios, except Dr. Strange warns against too much interference with one’s own life, something about ripples being sent across the other universes. He finds Dr. Strange enlightening and yet obfuscating, concepts, like the multiverse, grounded in science and yet the man also throws a shroud of mysticism over it when he wishes not to divulge the secrets of his craft.

This next search is one he knows he shouldn’t do, but curiosity (and a deeply rational justification that, if successful, it would be helpful) gets the best of Vision, mind cycling back to the distance between himself and his wife in the pictures. Search: William Maximoff. Results: 0. Vision frowns. Search: Thomas Maximoff. Results: 0.

Vision stands, immediately launching into a pace of six feet to the right, pivot, six feet to the left, repeat. Nothing in the protocol states he should care about this, all the multiverses different in some way. There are some where he doesn’t even exist as a synthezoid and others where Wanda is the daughter of a powerful mutant. It seems in this one they did not have the boys (a weight latches to his heart and begins to drag it down inch by inch) and it seems possible he and Wanda are not even together. This is where he should drop this line of inquiry and go back to the protocol. Except he can’t, and he blames it on the cognitive distortions caused by traveling unwillingly through the multiverse, his typical even keel knocked askew . Vision conjures up an image of Billy, entering it into a reverse image search, certain that nothing will come up. Results: 28. and a helpful suggestion of, Related search: William Kaplan .

“Vision!” His head snaps up, eyes squinting as he rises from the bench, body swiveling in the direction of her voice. “Vision!”

Yelling for each other is frowned upon in the protocols, comm units and telepathy (if available) much preferred to avoid making a scene, but her voice is untamed and dripping with the same anxiety flowing through his veins. “Wanda!” He rises into the air, just enough to see her stumbling up a low hill, her gait uneven, the left leg overcompensating for whatever is wrong with her right. In exactly 3.59 seconds he is at her side, arms wrapping around her waist to steady her and his lips conveying his relief with a series of five uncoordinated kisses to the part of her hair. “There is a bench over here.”

Gingerly he scoops her up, hovering them over to his spot of cogitation, and then he carefully settles her onto the boards of the bench, easing her right leg so it can lay flat. “I thought I was alone.”

“As did I.”

A smile, fluid and natural, loving and relieved, spreads across her face. “But then I felt you.”

Vision bends, capturing her lips and channeling his own relief into the action, overjoyed at having her with him. Until reality sets in, his prior search illuminating a shortfall in his selfish desires. “If we’re both here, the boys are alone.”

“Let’s find a way back then.” Wanda says it as if it is as simple as walking through a door or clicking your heels three times together. “Where’re you at in the protocol?”

How far his wife has come since their early days when, according to her, protocols were meant to be ignored. “Step 3.”

Impatience underscores her drawn out, “And…”

“I think,” this is where he discovers a crossroads in reasoning, do they go to the Avengers who likely have someone who can help with the multiverse or do they find William Kaplan, hoping he is analogous enough to their own son, one who can tear holes into reality with barely a shrug. “I may have located Billy.”

Wanda rubs her hand along her leg, scarlet sparking from her fingers as she no doubt assesses her injury. “Why do you sound so afraid?”

If he were to label his intonation, it would not have been fear, but his wife is far more attuned to the actual emotions of others, particularly his. Perhaps he is afraid, and it would, logically, be an appropriate response given what he discovered. “Because in this universe his name is Billy Kaplan, not Maximoff.”

“Oh.” A kaleidoscope of emotions filter across her face, eyes and mouth morphing from fear to sadness to disbelief until a single scrunch of her nose breaks the pattern, features dropping into a blank resoluteness she tends to show only on missions. “If we want to get home, we have to try.

———

Trying is always so uncomplicated in the planning phase before it unravels into frayed nerves, Vision’s finger poised in front of the buzzer, unable to commit to pushing a simple button.

“It’s not going to electrocute you.” The usual sardonic edge has been sanded down, revealing the grains of worry piling up in her mind the longer they draw this out.

“Would you like to do the honors?”

“Not really.”

Vision tightens his fingers around hers in what he hopes is a comforting squeeze of understanding and companionship. “Okay.” The two syllables start the countdown, his shaky breath that follows ends it, his finger pressing firmly against the little illuminated circle.

The dull click of the button precedes the crackle of the apartment’s comm system and then a familiar voice comes out of the speaker. “Who’s there?”

Wanda mouths Is that Teddy? and Vision nods, certain she is correct but he needs to focus on their task without distractions. He pushes the button and does his best to sound calm, “It is Vision and Wanda Maximoff,” this should be enough, except he has no way of knowing how highly (or not so highly) regarded or familiar they are to this universe’s Teddy, “from an alternate universe.” Wanda’s eye roll clearly spells out how she feels about his choice of words. All that matters is if it works, so he ignores her unspoken derision and waits for a response.

A staticky, “Ummmm one sec,” ends the conversation, leaving them in an anticipatory, antsy silence.

Ten minutes, 37 seconds, and 28 milliseconds later the elevator to their left dings, the door crawling open to reveal Billy standing there in jeans and a gray sweater, black hair styled more maturely than what Vision has ever seen from him. In fact, he appears at least a few years older than their own universe’s Billy. “Um hi,” the man studies them, blue licking the elevator doors to hold them open, his eyes scanning over them, briefly becoming fascinated with their interwoven fingers, and then he seems to reach a decision, a curt nod followed by a, “Why don’t you come on up.”

Vision allows Wanda to go first, his hand staying firmly on her back as they walk and it remains there throughout the dense silence of the elevator ride and the even denser, slower silence as they walk down the hall and enter an apartment. Teddy warmly greets them, “Come on in, have a seat.” Which they do, Wanda choosing a loveseat so they can sit together, her attention locked on the little dance of the two men, Teddy kissing Billy’s cheek and whispering something before disappearing behind a wall. He returns shortly after with a couple cups of tea and some chips.

Where Teddy seems mildly jovial and an expert host, Billy lowers himself into an armchair, suspicious eyes never leaving Vision and Wanda. “So what universe are you from?”

A philosophical debate the team had upon beginning to map the multiverse, a conclusion reached that Vision never much cared for. “We label our universe, egocentrically, as Earth-1.” An iota of amusement quirks up Billy’s mouth and Vision is confused at just how quickly pride fills his chest at the accomplishment. “Based on atmospheric readings, you are somewhere between Earth-600 and Earth-650, by our scientific labeling.”

Billy takes in the information, quietly sorting it with whatever knowledge he possesses and then follows Protocol 3253 (So You’ve Discovered Another You from the Multiverse), “How’d you get here?”

“We aren’t sure,” Wanda grips Vision’s knee as she talks, allowing her unease to flow into his body instead of her words, “We were battling a sorcerer and then the next thing we remember is being here.”

The explanation is considered and sorted, Billy’s mouth dropping into a downward concave. “Why’d you seek me out,” now he makes eye contact, a touch of animosity in his voice, “can’t the Scarlet Witch control reality in your universe?”

Wanda’s, “I can,” is small and bordering on timid, but her voice builds back up to her normal confidence when she provides what, at least in their universe, is the truth. “But not as well as you.” This doesn’t kick start any sort of remark, and so she tries an example, “Last week you casually sent your brother into an alternate dimension because he ate the last brownie.” Wanda laughs at the memory, concern breaking briefly into the joy of reminiscing, “It took me an hour to get him back and only because you,” she falters, realizing she is breaking protocol by treating this Billy as the same person, “our Billy finally told me where to look.”

The explanation is lost on the man in front of them, his mind stuck at the beginning of the story, “My brother?”

Vision nods, gently laying out the information, “Tommy Maximoff, your twin.”

A quiet, “We grew up together?” threatens to tear Vision’s soul in two, his body desperate to march over and envelop his son in his arms. Except this could not be his son, Kaplan a name Vision has never heard and it is clear that this universe’s Tommy may not be a Maximoff or even a Kaplan either.

Instead of a hug, Vision layers his, “You did,” with as much paternal warmth that he can, and then he clarifies the statement, their sons not yet adults and not even close to being done growing, “you are.”

“I,” Billy stands, lets out a deep sigh, turns towards them, then away, makes eye contact with Teddy (who may or may not have tears in his eyes), and then he simply states, “I’ll be back,” before disappearing through the floor in a blue portal.

Vision’s never had this effect on his son, and he turns his worry towards Teddy, “We have upset him.”

“Um,” the blonde haired man mulls over how to respond, “I think it’s safer to say the universe upset him.” A marginally more uplifting, yet still devastating fact. “He’ll be back.”

They wait in tense silence, Wanda leaning into Vision’s side, his body responding by wrapping an arm around her shoulder. And then there is a blue portal next to the coffee table, Billy yanking Tommy through with him.

In true Tommy fashion, neither his words nor opinions are minced, “What the ever loving fuck is going on?”

Wanda shoots Vision a look, warning him not to correct the language, and, just to be sure he won’t go full on polite police, she handles the response with a simple, “Nice to see you too, Tommy.”

Tommy doesn’t respond to her, turning to gesticulate wildly at Billy, “You said it was an emergency. I don’t want to get roped into whatever,” he flails an arm towards where they sit, “this is.”

“Tommy, slow down and look at them.”

An epic, unfiltered roll of his eyes conveys how very done with this situation the speedster is, but he obliges anyway, silently scrutinizing Wanda and Vision until he reaches a conclusion, “You look way cozier than you should.” Another sweep of scrutiny and another observation is provided, “Like the new look, Vision.” The use of his name stings, not because it is his name but because he has only ever heard it from their son in anger. Tommy doesn’t notice the effect it has, returning the conversation to Billy, “so what’s going on?”

“Multiverse shenanigans.”

“Ugh,” his disdain is evident, “great. Why am I here?”

Billy sits back down, picking up the no longer steaming cup of tea and takes a sip. “Can you tell us about your universe.” A broad question, one he realizes before anyone can answer. “About us, specifically.”

The question in Vision’s mind is where to start in the story, whether they begin with the inception of his and Wanda’s relationship or if they simply wish to know the barebones of the story, only the pieces where they themselves fit. “You’re our sons.” This isn’t the bombshell revelation he expected, neither Billy nor Tommy are surprised by this, which only grows the confusion that took root during Vision’s initial discovery of this universe’s Billy. “We have raised you and loved you for the last sixteen and a half years. You are part of—”

“Wait,” Tommy holds up a hand to stop the explanation, “the whole time?”

Wanda’s, “Yes,” is unflinching, “We’ve watched you grow into incredible men.”

To see Tommy speechless is unnerving, to know it is not a happy speechless is suffocating. Vision asks what he isn’t sure he actually wants to know, “Why does this seem unusual?”

A derisive laugh, one Tommy is a master of using, echoes around the apartment. “Oh I don’t know, because we’re the reason Scarlet Witch went insane, the reason she killed you,” he points at Vision and the words are nonsense, describing an action Wanda would never do. “Because as if that wasn’t bad enough, I won the lottery of reincarnation and had a shitty life I didn’t ask for. And then you two, you two don’t even try to be part of—”

“Tommy,” Billy stops the tirade, his twin throwing up his arms in frustration before crashing down onto a beanbag in the corner of the room. “Let me explain.” And he does, all of the harrowing details from Master Pandemonium to Mephisto, the dissolution of this universe’s Vision and Wanda’s marriage, and then he gets to their reincarnation. “Mom’s a psychologist,” the word mom causes Wanda to flinch, “dad’s a cardiologist,” and this forces Vision’s heart to metaphorically drop through the floor. “They’re good people, they try hard but I think my powers scare them a bit. High school was tough.” The way he says it implies it is an understatement.

“My parents are divorced, absent is a good word for them,” Vision’s heart enters the core of the Earth where it dissolves in fiery anger at the way this universe has treated his family, forcing them to be separated instead of together, “can’t blame them, though, I might have been a bit of an asshole trouble maker, went to juvey a few times,” Tommy pauses long enough to eat a chip, “got experimented on in there,” and this, above all else, sends Vision’s mind into despair. His memories of saving Tommy are superimposed with the knowledge that this man in front of him, this sarcastic, resilient man endured the same event ( and then worse) only without the knowledge he’d be saved, without the confidence that love would protect him. “But then I got broken out and we’ve been doing the Young Avenger thing for a while.”

“Do you,” Wanda falters, and Vision assumes it is because she, like him, is torn between wanting to know more while also being overwhelmed by all they’ve learned and all their boys have experienced here, “see us...them often?”

A shared stare, one that’s so common in the Maximoff household, provides the answer, each of them daring the other to say it. Billy, as usual, loses. “Depends...sometimes but not regularly.” He shrugs as if what he is saying is a simple fact of life instead of a dagger that can pierce vibranium skin, “everyone’s got lives to lead.”

“I see.” Those two words are empty and pointless and yet Vision can’t figure out anything profound or hopeful, far too burdened by what they’ve learned.

“Um I’m sure you want to get back to your sons,” the statement elicits in Vision a mixture of hope and yet also a harsh sting at the detached way Billy stated your sons . “So um you all ready to go home?”

Wanda stands first, holding out her hand for Vision to use (even though he does not physically need it) as he rises as well. “I think we should go while we can.”

They stand in a lopsided circle, staring at one another and then anywhere else. Wanda breaks the silence,“Thank you for helping us and for,” Vision wonders how she’ll finish it, because he himself doesn’t know what is appropriate here, “for talking with us.”

“Yeah,” Billy has always relied on empathy in moments of sadness, which is true of him here as well, a thirty degree slope of his lips enough to convey his honesty, “I’m glad to know in one universe we got to keep you as parents.”

A wetness rolls along Vision’s cheek, fingers lifting to brush aside the sorrow he’d been trying to hold in. Wanda doesn’t even attempt to levy the dam, her tears coming on strong as Billy, followed by a slightly reluctant Tommy, hugs her. A tendril of scarlet pulls Vision into the mix, his arms engulfing their divided family.

“We should go.” Wanda smiles sadly at them, her hand touching Tommy’s cheek first and then Billy’s, “We are so, so proud of who you are.”

“Alright, this is now too cheesy for me.” Tommy says it despite the fact Vision can also detect the quick swiping away of the speedster’s own tears.

Billy waves his right hand, opening a portal. Before walking through, Vision realizes he has one more thing to say. With three steps he is in front of Teddy, his hand held out. Once the man takes it, he shares a comforting fact, “It was nice to see you Teddy. I am glad you found each other here as well.”

A beaming smile emphasizes his elated, “Me too.”

With a final look at the three men, Vision and Wanda walk through the portal, stepping out into a landscape of ruination and collapsed buildings. Vision takes in a breath and is met with the familiar air of home. “We are in the correct universe.”

Despite the upward curve of her lips, his wife is unsettled, mind having not left their alternate lives. “How could we have just abandoned them?”

Vision weighs her question, himself also confused at the information. “I do not believe it is in our authority to judge decisions we do not fully know all the variables to.”

“Ever the infuriating diplomat, Maximoff.”

“Oh, my darling,” he swings her around, allowing him to grasp her shoulders firmly, face lowering just enough to rest his forehead to hers, “I cannot begin to fathom all they told us,” he will eventually, he reasons, what they learned today will no doubt haunt his thoughts and lead down many pathways of deep contemplation, “but what I do know, is that even though they may not have the Maximoff name anymore, they are still our sons, and no matter the universe, we will love them fiercely.”

Wanda accepts it, even if she seems less than wholly convinced, “I hope so.”

“Come along,” he twines his fingers through hers, giving her arm a slight tug forward, “I would like to find our boys and hug them for a few hours.”

“They’ll hate it.”

Vision shrugs, “They will survive it.”

[facultativeactivity]

Facult,

The lego people form all. You are one of them. Your body is many of them. You think you're the one breathing? They move your lungs just as they beat your heart. You think you're the one thinking and judging these words you're reading? They whisper the thoughts into your head.

And the lego people in turn are made of lego people. It's lego people controlling lego people "all the way down" with no beginning and no end and you're sandwiched somewhere in between eternity and forever.

And you're not just one of the lego people, you're all of them. They are your mirror reflections scattered across spacetime. Your past, your future, and your potential.

The nature of reality is to ask what should be experienced within the void of nothing. That question is all there is.

"In the beginning there was the word."

Then when that question is asked, you ask what that question is. Then you ask what THAT new question is.

So we are constantly asking "what is this question? " when we look out at the world around us. The world is always tempting us to figure it out and to develop our own idea of it.

But the source of the world comes from the very first question: "what should exist in the void", or "what Am I" which in a way are the same questions if you're in a void with nothing but your self.

This recursive seeking creates the infinite YOUs that have been called lego people. They've been called elves and gnomes too. Sometimes people see them as repeated versions of their bodies.

As for the jester, I have less experience with him, though I believe he's an amalgamation of lego people just as everything else is. He's a higher order one. Sort of the mind and the hive of the hivemind. It's possible we each have a jester. It's also possible he's us before we jumped into this multiverse. Us before we asked the question "who am i in a void?", kicking off a Big Bang of self-recursive discovery. He seems to play a managing role, so i could see him as the us before this reality, conducting the lego people to form our experience.

He's trapped in the same loop of questioning that we are. His questions pertain to our entire reality and what happens when he moves it.

If it helps, you can see the lego people as embodiments of the question they are currently asking within spacetime, and how the answer of your current question looks when factoring their question into account.

That's a really interesting take on the questions of existence and experience anon, thank you for sharing!

So, if the jester is located at a higher level in this endless repeating pattern, does that mean that (for me) the jester is a giant copy of myself, built of countless small copies of myself including me, and the jester see me as one of the lego people? While for the countless lego-people that creates me, I'm the jester, and the jester is also just one lego person from the viewpoint of an even higher level me? I dig that idea.

Next >>

[redantsunderneath]

DC COMICS: Incoherence as Not-a-Bug-but-a-Feature (Spoilers for Batman 89-100)

Due to the emergence of the new Batman villain character Punchline, I wound up buying the last 12 issues of Batman and reading them in a single sitting. I’ve had trouble following DC comics for a while, constantly feeling that they were in trouble since back in the mid 2000s (with a glimmer of hope here and there). The act of reading DC comics has been a frustrating experience, where individual good stories and runs were laying around in the context of a lot of things that didn’t make sense while the company’s thrust felt chaotic and ideas not well blended. Every status quo change seemed hard to figure out the rules of enough to parse the context.  We’ll get into the background of this, but my reading today of this extended stretch of comics that keeps losing the plot in favor of a fever dream of what’s happening at the moment with specific characters that refuse to cohere, it became obvious that what I had been looking at as subtext or critique was actually the text. I could see the messed up trees but was missing the the forest the universe was trying to describe.

What happens in these issues (Batman current series 89-100, I missed the beginning of the first of 2 arcs) is rolling war between the major Batman villains and the heroes (plus Harley Quinn and Catwoman), which shifts into a Joker and Joker adjacent vs. all as the Joker double crosses everyone then manages to steal Bruce Wayne’s fortune.  We meet 3 new baddies – Underbroker, whose schtick is putting ill-gotten gains beyond the reach of the legal system (with an explicit line to rich globalists drawn), the Designer, who back in the day offered the four A list Batman villains plans to achieve what they most wanted, and Punchline, who is your toxic ex’s new millennial GF who really has it in for you (there is also a new good guy Clownhunter, which is a whole different thing, and a new costumed detective that predates Batman).  This doesn’t convey the chaotic nature of what is happening issue to issue, but there’s more than one Batman hallucinogenic spirit quest, dead characters ostensibly walking around, a plan revolving around the Bat’s origin story that tells some version of it several times, and a no-nonsense declaration that the Joker, as the Devil of the Batman spiritual system, cannot die.   The whole thing has the effect of convincing you there is no definitive sequence of events, only versions.

Alan Moore’s Killing Joke is not a favorite of mine, for a number of reasons.  But the ending holds up.  The Joker has done terrible things there is no antecedent for, and Batman wonders aloud if this never-ending dance they do ends in anything but both of their deaths; can they uncouple from the unhealthy duality the cycle of which simply repeats.  The Joker responds, well, with a joke about two lunatics trying to escape an asylum.  One jumps the roof to the next building, while the other is too scared to try.  The escapee offers to hold a light while the other crosses on a beam but he says no, no you’ll just cut the light while I’m half way across.  This not very funny joke nonetheless has a bunch of resonances – BM and Joker as conspiring co inmates, BM wanting to break out, a commentary about their natures (almost a reversal of the frog and scorpion story where the scorpion won’t go because he knows how this ends), but mostly it implicates BM as the one who is enabling the cycle, the reason why it won’t end.  They both laugh uproariously, and the ambiguous final panels can be read as the fundamental realization of his complicity causing BM to kill J.  A lethal joke indeed… except, next month, we see the both of them again.  In broader context, the ceaseless cycle of the diad is reaffirmed.  This has been hellaciously sticky as an idea in the Batmen universe.

My realization of what DC has been doing is pretty banal in its pieces. Marvel has “ground level” heroes while DC has a mythos, a pantheon.  Their archetypal makeup is strong, the seven JLA members lining up with the pantheon of Greek gods and the Chakras weirdly closely.  DC has big characters that are somewhat flat which they can use tell big bold individual stories that are cool the way legends and fables are cool. But these stories require bold strokes that a bit incompatible with each other. People get attached to these iterations. Meanwhile, Marvel trucks in soap operas where the characters give you an empathetic stand in and are narratively flexible. Marvel events are usually about the writer vs. the company, asking you to sympathize or deconstruct the creative impulse amid efforts to impose control or order.  DC’s events are about editorial vs. the audience, the shapers vs. the forces of the world.  It may seem obvious, given this description, that DC’s focus is on an archetypal tableau though it may be less obvious that this tableau is under extreme pressure from expectations when trying to tell ongoing tales month in, month out (or semi-monthly in some cases). The stories are constantly compared against the big stories that have gone before, and the audience’s ideas of the characters exert pressure to push them in directions that capture “the” version they believe in.  This circle is not possible to square.

DC and Marvel both have a multiverse of sorts.  DC used to tell “Elseworlds” stories which were later tucked into pocket universes.  DC invented crossing over between “realities.”  DC’s continuity is heavy baggage and they began to have “Crises” to resolve the narrative incompatibilities.  These only made things worse as you can’t get rid of the past people have a relationship with – it will come back.  Now you have to explain that away too.  Marvel just lets it lay – forget about the iffy stories, they count, sure, just no one is ever going to talk about them unless they have an angle.  Marvel continuity is all angles and amnesia. This is just easier to do with dating and rent and your ancient aunt’s medical bills than with Gods. Marvel’s multiverse is about sandboxes that you can always dump into the mainframe if they work (and never really mention the sandbox again).

There is a shift that occurred in the industry in the 2004 to 2005 era that is less remarked upon than many upheavals in comic’s history. Marvel had gone through a period of incredible new idea generation in the early 2000s after a late 90s creative cratering but had just fired the pro wrestling inflected soul of that moment (Bill Jemas).  DC was coming off of a period of trying to do moderately updated versions of what they basically been doing all along. The attitude was “yeah we’re under stress from the combined history of these characters, but we got to keep telling the stories.” Geoff Johns was one voice of DC over the 99-04 period that showed potential - he seemed to get how to find the core of characters and push them into a new in sync directions if they over the years have lost a clear identity.  But mostly he had internalized a basic schism between something mean that the audience wanted, and something good and wholesome about the characters themselves, and figured out how to mess around with this in a equilibrating fashion.

Interestingly, the ignition point of the main forces that were going to blow DC over the next decade and a half was a comic that had virtually nothing to do with any of those main forces. Brad Meltzer, a novelist, was hired to do a comic called Infinity Crisis, which sold extremely well and was, justifiably or not, recognized as an event.  At the same time, everyone also kind of hated it because the dark desires of some DC fans were pushed forward just a bit too much for comfort and for a comic with Crisis in the name it didn’t do a whole lot other than “darken” things.  Nonetheless, this lit an “event” fire at both companies.  Marvel chose a shake up the status quo for a year, then do it again, pattern and was off to the races (I have written about this, and more, here) while continuing its Randian framing of beleaguered do-gooders opposed by rule making freedom haters.

As this was playing out, Dan Didio quietly took power in DC Editorial.  His outlook was more Bloomian – he seemed to spark off of writers who exhibited anxiety of influence. He recognized Johns was the one person they had could be promoted into something of a universe architect, starting work on two key projects from which the rest would evolve. The first, was bringing back Hal Jordan as Green Lantern and diffracting the GL universe into its own symbolic system, with parts frisson-ing other parts, and almost a Magic the Gathering color scheme of ideas. The other was to build up to Infinite Crisis, which would become the model for most of their universe changing events until the present day.

The basic frame is this: DC heroes want to be good (in a sense of their inherent nature) but forces outside form a context that makes them fall.  It’s a very gnostic universe, DC.  They  examine reflections of the concepts, invent scapegoats for certain tendencies (see Superboy Prime as entitled fanboy, Dr. Manhattan as editors that try and fail to mend things, etc), make characters violate principles, rehabilitate them, then show that the world if anything is more broken than before.  This is kind of Johns’ thing and it fits Didio’s narrative as historicval tension fetish.  But then came Scott Snyder (not to be confused with Zack) who began to work on Batman in 2011.  Since then, as much as Justice League is pushed as the central title and Lex Luthor has been pimped, Batman has been the core of the universe and the Joker the core villain.

Snyder had the same continuity conflict wavelength but was significantly more meta and able to contain multitudes than Johns.  He was the first to make an explicit mystery of how there could be several Jokers around at one time (who are the same but not, he posited 3 – man, Christians!) that seems prescient given the near future coexistence of filmic Jokers that are not able to be resolved.  I believe he was the first to begin to tease out an idea – that different versions of things in comics are not a diffraction or filter effect, a using the set of things that work best for that story and leaving the rest, but are a matter of the archetypal system of the audience coming apart. From an in story perspective what appears to happen is that multiple versions of incompatible things exist in the collective unconscious of the continuing narrative, and this is something that the characters may become conscious of.  

The run I just read is written by James Tynion IV building on the above trends.  The trick seems to be going all in on the Jungian aspect (at Jung’s most religiously epiphanic).  The Designer was a progenitor and adversary to Batman’s predecessor and his intellectual approach eventually defeated the detective… broke him.  At some point in early Batman history, the Designer brought the top four Bat-baddies together and offered each, in turn, a plan to achieve what they most desired: the Riddler, a way to achieve an empire of the mind; the Penguin, power; and Catwoman, money.  They are all elated as they await the Joker to come out.  The Joker emerges with a furious Designer on his heals and promptly shoots him dead.  He explains that he didn’t like his joke in the form of a fable – the devil offered four people the path to their greatest desire: the three chose earthly things, but the Joker’s wish was to be him, to become the devil.  The story proceeds to suggest that the Joker just exists, he is present as a necessary component in the system.   You can kill him, yet he is alive.

DC has been using physics metaphors for the nature of their reality since Flash of Two Worlds in 1963.  The multiverse as a continuity concept was their idea and the holographic universe of the hypertime was a thing.  It seems like since Dan Didio took over, they’ve been heading towards a concept of broad superimposition, of measurement effect being weak, of the universe being like a quantum computer with all possibilities coexisting and the story instantiating not one reality but a path through all the possible ones.  By making Batman trip balls through quite a few issues and relive his origin from different angles, the story is one of its own instability and the heroic task that confronts our hero is attempting to actualize the world.  The Joker is the Devil in the sense of lack of fixed meaning, of relativistic chaos, of the world not making sense because it’s unmoored nature with ultimately no knowability.  Batman, in this story, functions as a postmodern knight crusading against the impossibility of epistemological grounding.

There’s more going on, sure.  One plot is, literally, defund Batman.  There is rioting, people brainwashed by being exposed to toxic ether, people paid to go to theaters even though they will die as a result, and questions about neoliberalism similar to that one Joker movie. Punchline has no personality yet (Tynion’s not the best at that) but she serves well as a generational foil for Harley – a rudderless ideological vacuum susceptible to Joker-as-idea-virus rather than an unfulfilled MD who felt alienated due to the structures of her life and was seeking escape into structureless possibility.  The Designer stuff is both continuity play (See why they changed from goofy villains to more “realistic” ones! Look how pulp heroes informed superheroes!), a comment on the nature of a longstanding narrative (strong intentions die out as Brownian motion overwhelms momentum), and a lawful evil/chaotic evil setup of the dualism of apocalypses (overdetermined authoritarian vs. center does not hold barbarism).  But the thing that ties this to the past decade and a half of DC is the sense that the reality is fluid and susceptible to change or outright s’cool incompatibility.

This is different than other flavors of meta in superhero comics.  Grant Morrison believes the archetypes are stronger than the forces that seek to bend them.  Alan Moore wants you to deconstruct your sacred cows and probably hates you personally.  Marvel might play with self-awareness, but effortlessly resolves inconsistencies after it’s finished playing.  DC, at this point, allows you to watch the waves solidfy into symbols and dissolve, and the constant confusion and lack of grounding is more of a choice then I thought this time yesterday.  The conflict theory of DC reality has been in full swing but this looks to be turning towards a kind of Zen historicism, holding contradictory things in your mind at once. Warren Ellis’ JLA/Authority book is the nearest comparable text I can think of. I need to call this, but I didn’t even talk about Death Metal, DC character multiplicity as meta-psychosis event extraordinaire.  Comics just keep getting weirder.

[whole-dip]

My Trip to Omega Mart

Opened in 2021, Omega Mart is an immersive art experience that utilizes numerous artistic mediums to tell a layered and thematically rich story to guests. A story that actively involves the guest in various different ways, challenging their sense of physical space, as well as eliciting questions of consumerism, family, love, and even the nature human connection. This story is told within a massive space comprised of roughly four main physical spaces, each with their own smaller spaces wherein guests may engage with physical media to the level of their interest. Omega Mart was developed by an artist collective known as Meow Wolf, a group formed in 2008 that specializes in immersive art experiences that are often referred to as psychedelic, dreamlike environments. Previous works include The Due Return, an immersive art experience depicting an alien ship that travels through time, The House of Eternal Return, an immersive experience showcasing a house that seemingly exists in multiple dimensions, and various other immersive art experiences across the country. I visited Omega Mart, located in Las Vegas, recently and this piece will focus on my visit. Please keep in mind that Omega Mart is often updated in small ways and some of my account may not totally reflect your visit, be it in the past or future. Along with that, I will be going into great detail about my experience and if you plan to visit Omega Mart with no prior knowledge, you may not want to read this until after you visit.

 Omega Mart, is located within Area 15, an immersive art space located near the Las Vegas strip. As you enter, you’ll find yourself in massive blacklit warehouse that’s a sort of psychedelic mall. Individual kiosks show glow in the dark shirts and various other rave theme toys. To the left, lies the massive front entrance of Omega Mart. Flanking the entrance are walls with various advertisements for Dramcorp products that you’ll find inside. The entrance itself takes the form of an omega symbol, the central arch being a sort of portal inside. Once you enter, you find yourself inside, where else, Omega Mart. All around you are neatly organize aisles of typical products like cereal, household cleaners, salt and spices, like any other mall. The produce section lies to your left, meats to your right. A bluish glow from the fluorescent lights above gives the same sense of blah that you’d find in superstores like Wal Mart; inoffensive smooth jazz warbles out from speakers above you. It’s all drab and expected, until you pay closer attention. The products are all hilariously surreal, and there are truly hundreds of them on the fully stocked shelves. You’ll find cans of tattooed chicken, bottles of gender fluid, even zalg “America’s forgotten vegetable!” As you inspect the items their enticing labels show something more sinister going on. Most continue the absurd humor but a few seem to break brand style and urge you, beg you, to wake up from what you’re doing, to run away from where you are, to get back to reality, if it even exists any more. At times, the music will seemingly forget its place and skip incessantly as it repeats the same few seconds of music over and over to a maddening degree, only to go back to normal as though nothing happened. At other times, we hear Walter Dram, former CEO and founder of Omega Mart, and parent company Dramcorp, talk through the speakers. He’s exhausted, coughing and barely able to speak, halfheartedly assuring us that Omega Mart is the best supermarket in the universe, the he is Omega Mart, Omega Mart is him. He almost stumbles over his words, telling us about savings and being endlessly lost in the store. This story continues in the produce section, where on video, Walter advertises Omega Mart’s Valley of Plenty in-store brand. There, he, along with daughter Cecelia (heir apparent to Omega Mart and Dramcorp), showcase the incredible fruits and vegetables available for sale. He describes how he found the valley of plenty and admired the hard working local farmers as, taking the opportunity to share the fruits of their labor with the world. Just as the promo video ends, Walter drops his commercial persona and turns into his true exhausted self. He asks if he has to do it again. Cecelia reminds him that it’s his job, that soon she’ll take his place and that for now it is his duty to work. Walter sighs, resigned to his fate. Moments later, the commercial begins again, Walter repeats his spiel.

 As you explore, you’ll find various hideaways that take you to different locations. One such vestibule is the janitor’s closet, which houses nightmarish creatures made from brooms and mops. Their wood handle necks twist around and their fringed rag tails drip with glowing slime. Once you pass through, you enter the Dramcorp factory floor. Unlike the clean(ish) plastic of Omega Mart, the factory is a metallic horror of purplish browns, machines groan all around you as vile liquids ooze through pipes. On the floor above lies Dramcorp’s corporate offices with ominous glows seeping out from its closed doors. Here in the factory, you learn that Dramcorp has been utilizing something called, “Source” to develop and manufacture new products. Omega Mart itself is somehow fully infused with the dreamy, psychotropic qualities of source, but Dramcorp has refined it to make products addicting on a spiritual level. In one hidden corner we find a glowing orb that once was Walter Dram. He laments about his greed and how he went too far in his pursuit of profit. Now, his daughter Cecelia runs Dramcorp and he can only watch as she continues to be woman he raised her to be. Throughout the factory you’ll see that the refinement process is messy and various factory machinery are in disarray as employees try to clean up emotional messes and bliss outbreaks. Signs warn you of rooms with giant bugs or maddening corridors. In another corner, a particularly broken machine is spilling source runoff as a river out of the factory and into Seven Monolith Village.

 Seven Monolith Village is a small valley community in the Nevada desert where Dramcorp’s source runoff pools. Here, the psychedelic energy of the source has transformed the sleepy town into a living Alex Gray painting. The sun bleached rocks crack open with bright colored lines and massive desert wildlife like wolves and snakes now glow in fractal patterns. Giant humanoids made of pure energy slowly appear around you, only to disappear from our plane of existence moments later. Exploring the village leads us to find that the town has been ravaged by Dramcorp’s pollution and is near uninhabitable. One of the few people left Charlie Dram, owner of the local gas station and estranged brother of Walter. In his small gas station, we see that Charlie has begun a new business of collecting source runoff and selling it as a sort of psychedelic elixir. His phone regularly rings with calls from regular customers looking to make purchases from Charlie, many of them Dramcorp employees looking for an escape from their corporate lives.

 Next door to Charlie is a small shack that’s home to Marin Dram, grandniece of Charlie and daughter of Cecelia Dram. Looking through her room we learn her story. Years ago, Cecelia, along with her father Walter, discovered the original, raw source, a remnant of ancient visitors to our Earth from a parallel dimension. Drinking of that well, Cecelia and Walter discovered receive a divine vision for how to make Omega Mart the most profitable supermarket in the multiverse. From there, they tirelessly worked to study the source, finding that it is the wellspring from which all life emerged and all ideas come from. With this knowledge, they developed Omega Mart’s products as addicting and powerfully satisfying. Along with that however, came Marin, an immaculate conception born of both Cecelia and source, with strange abilities unseen by anyone before. Marin was raised by Charlie while her mother was busy running the company, but Cecelia began taking an interest in Marin and the potential for her to lead Dramcorp and Omega Mart into a new age of even greater prosperity. Pushed too far by her mother’s need to groom her into the next CEO, Marin opened a portal and fled our world for somewhere else, and everyone has been looking for her since. The only remains of Marin are lingering projections of her dreams, surreal music videos of being tormented by her mother, teen heartbreak, and visitations from ethereal beings. Now, all of Seven Monolith Village and Dramcorp alike are searching for Marin, to save her, or use her.

 Nearby in another home within 7MV you are drafted into the fight against Dramcorp by an anarchist group fighting against the capitalist propaganda and the abuse against human lives, as well as the earth itself. You must venture back into Omega Mart, as well as Dramcorp’s factory, and hack into their systems before you finally enter the corporate offices.

 Dramcorp’s offices are a nightmarish cavern of cubicles, computers, and offices. The executive portraits have haunting smiles and smoke billows from all around as lights flash in strange patterns. Behind each test facility door are horrific sounds and lights. Each office tells a small story of business drones that work tirelessly in hopes of one day ascending into management nirvana where they will exist fully with the company. All the while, employees drown themselves in the very same poisonous runoff elixirs that they sell in the store downstairs. After hacking into all three branches of Dramcorp’s reach, my involvement with Meow Wolf’s story was complete, though I suspect more is yet to come were I to visit again in the future.

 Omega Mart is rich with themes that comment on capitalism, spirituality, emotional relationships, and much more. The biggest difficulty that has always pervaded immersive art experiences, even those that can be found at theme parks like Walt Disney World, is the difficulty in having thematic density when the audience is not guaranteed to be interacting with the art as intended. While other mediums have the benefit of standardized ways to consume them such as film or literature, immersive art spaces have no set path in which the guest should traverse the space, nor even the guarantee that guests will be able to have the time to interact with the art in ways sufficient of fully understanding the plot. Because of this, many immersive experiences rely on using a heavier hand with its themes and utilizing narrative devices that directly speak to the audience. Commonly, this comes in the form of narration that speaks directly to the audience. Meow Wolf however, takes the risk of the audience not being able to experience the story in the event that they miss key elements. Meow Wolf mitigates this by making it clear through the use of electronic media and hiding certain show elements that guests should be in somewhat of a scavenger hunt mindset. While most of the guests I noticed on my visit had no prior knowledge of their Omega Mart experience involving a story, it was very clear upon entering to everyone that a major aspect of their visit would be interacting with the story should they choose. Meow Wolf themselves have stated that they look to make their stories accessible to all people on the level of the audience’s choosing. A visitor to Omega Mart would not feel ripped off by having not experienced the full story, but rather someone might feel as though their ticket gained value for having fully experienced the depth of Omega Mart’s characters and world.

 Even so, there is still a challenge when designing the story that comes with the nature of the medium of immersive art. Truly, there is no one specific art form that takes center stage here. Each room in Omega Mart could potentially involved artistic use of light, sound (musical and practical), wood work, print design, sculpture, painting, writing, and much more. The challenge in designing Omega Mart is to not only make individual pieces of art that resonate with the audience, but to bring them together within a space that is narratively cohesive rather than just a series of interesting things in a large room. Meow Wolf’s artists were able to pull that off. A common example of that level of connectivity is the referential nature of each space, details in one room would be seen in other rooms, often with new contexts and plot information that would provide greater thematic depth. Many of the humorous gag items available in the grocery store’s aisles could also be found in Dramcorp’s development offices where they could be viewed not as the silly puns you originally saw them as, but now as cynical totems designed on a molecular level to be addicting to consumers. Even more than that, the overall story itself would only be possible by intricately weaving a story throughout the space in a way that guests could understand how each room referenced the other together to create the whole. The end result being an experience in which guests can fully feel as though they visited specific places, met complex individuals, and had meaningful interactions, all of which I did during my trip.

 One of my biggest concerns before visiting was that Omega Mart’s story would be told in a way that said overarching ideas that were ultimately hollow. I dreaded that the only message Meow Wolf would leave me with is the trite “Corporation Bad” that so many hollow pieces of art tout. While a far more nuanced anticapitalism message is a major theme of Omega Mart, the story itself smartly anchors itself within the story Marin Dram. Marin’s story is one that I personally found to be profoundly relatable. The echoing dream in her bedroom mirror has stuck with me for days after my visit, along with the incredibly vaginal nightmare in a nook nearby. Marin’s story reflects each of the themes of Omega Mart’s message, that of feeling used by other, tied between two worlds, and the commodification of bodies for the sake of industry. There is a terrible sadness that I felt in my core as Marin cried at the school dance, only moments later to be covered in milk and cereal by her mother in some feeble attempt to become one with the family business. More than that, the Dramcorp, and the Dram family’s Cecelia and Walter themselves, tout plastic products as the quick fix solution to loneliness. We’re urged to question how we fill our own emptiness with products, or even how we use others as a means to an end. Walter and Cecelia use and consume their loved ones for their goals in much the same way Omega Mart’s customers are primed to use ridiculous products. There is a sadness to the way Cecelia can only connect to others through consumption. She can only connect to her daughter by offering products, she puts her father in the source well to be consumed by the store, ultimately she’ll be consumed herself by whomever is her successor as CEO. Everything in Meow Wolf’s Omega Mart experience is punctuated by the ways they can be balled up in put into your mouth for digestion.

 As an aside, I am somewhat disappointed in how prevalent the discussion of Omega Mart’s lore is both at the experience and online. Much of the discussion’s online is primarily about dissecting the origin of the source, the details of dark nula and light nula, and various other inconsequential details related to the world that props up the thematic meat of Omega Mart. Omega Mart, while not bashing the audience with its message, is not particularly subtle with what it wants to say. It is abundantly clear that Omega Mart’s messages of anticapitalism and reverence for emotional connection are the intended takeaways. One of the biggest drawbacks in how Omega Mart tells its story is the moments in which, typically on phones, the audience is given a neat summary on everything in the story so far. This is very much a personal gripe.

 Omega Mart’s most prominent medium is perhaps space itself. The uniting factor in every individual piece of art that makes up the whole is the unification of space itself, and the clear delineation of crossing the threshold from space that is wholly not Omega Mart, into a space that wholly is. Within that space, Omega Mart’s guests will find themselves walking, climbing, crawling, and even sliding at they traverse the location. We see this create transitionary vestibules like the janitor’s closet from earlier, but also a space bending soda freezer or even a staircase from the store to the offices that has the numbing drone of music fade into haunting groans with each step. As guests traverse the space they also find themselves crossing paths with staff and other guests, all of which flesh out Omega Mart just by the vary nature of being there together. Guests will find themselves falling back into the same patterns and habits they exhibit when visiting real grocery stores, struggling to pass each other in cramped aisles, knocking baskets accidentally and apologizing, all the motions of a grocery store, but none of the actual purposeful substance of visiting a normal grocery store. This contrasts with the purposeful halts guests will make when experiencing the dreams in Marin’s room, stopped and fully enraptured by a story beat. While Omega Mart as an experience is easily considered hard to describe, the actions guests take while there, reading, talking on the phone, navigating a blog, walking up stair, are all deceptively simple.

 However, this comes at a cost. Omega Mart, like much of Meow Wolf’s previous work, is not particularly accessible to many different types of people. The House of Eternal Return has been criticized in the past for not being wheelchair accessible. Omega Mart remedies this by always having multiple ways to access new areas including wide open pathways and an elevator, but the thrill of tunnels, rock climbing, and narrow passages are impossible to experience. Really, anyone who is not able bodied and below a certain size will have challenges when experiencing Omega Mart. Not only that, Omega Mart’s usage of the full emotional spectrum means that some experiences, specifically those that utilize sensory overload to intentionally elicit anxiety in guests, would be almost impossible for many neurodivergent guests, or just guests with sensory difficulties. None of the main experiences and plot requires guests to directly engage with intense rooms or inaccessible spaces, but there still might be a disappointment in some guests when finding that they are unable to fully experience every inch of Omega Mart.

 Meow Wolf has been around since 2008, but beginning with the opening of House of Eternal Return in 2016, Meow Wolf has exploded in popularity and is noted by the theme park industry as a group to watch. House of Eternal Return even received an award for outstanding achievement by the Themed Entertainment Association, one of the industry’s highest honors. While many people are oblivious to the small movements within the themed entertainment industry, the larger pushes done by groups like Disney and Universal do get noticed by the general vacationing public. Some have noted that what Meow Wolf is doing today, could in fact be what Disney is doing a few years from now. Meow Wolf’s principles could be most applicable in the upcoming Galactic Starcruiser experience that also promises to be similarly immersive and engaging to guests. More than that, Meow Wolf does consider their work to be made for the general public rather than niche crowds of art lovers and theme park fans. This is clearly evidenced by how many guests I saw at Omega Mart surprised to find out there was a story at play, some of which actively chose to not engage with in out of disinterest. One does wonder if a version of Meow Wolf’s immersive experiences, bigger than an escape room but not quite EPCOT, that tells a complex story with characters and themes, could be common relatively common place for most people to visit. Meow Wolf is wholly unique in their execution, but spaces of play, even for adults, aren’t. At the same time, while Dave and Buster’s and barcades may be popular, how likely is it that middle class office workers would clock out and head to something like Omega Mart? Even beyond that, Meow Wolf actively updates their experiences in various ways and their website encourage guests to visit at least once a year. I certainly would not be opposed to visiting again in a year, but the experience would be less akin to going on a rollercoaster a second time and more like rewatching a movie. I can’t see typical socialization, small talk and the like, occurring in a place like Omega Mart.

 Ultimately, Omega Mart sets out to, and very much does, create a thematically rich experience that is truly mind bending and challenges the ways we consider our traversal of space, and our connections with others. While everyone will likely come out with a different experience to varying levels of intensity, I personally found my trip to be one of the most spiritually intense experiences of my life, one that drastically made me rethink my relationship to others, as well as to myself. I don’t think visiting Omega Mart should require pre and post consultation with a therapist, but I do encourage guests to be prepared to have at least one of their ideas about the world to be radically challenged. Time will tell if Meow Wolf’s continued work in the world of immersive art experiences is sustainable with an audience, but for now Omega Mart is unlike anything you’ve ever seen before and afterwards you may find yourself to be unlike you were when you entered.

[internetkatze]

Tagged by @obstinaterixatrix !!

Rules: List the first lines of your last 20 stories (if you have less than 20, just list them all!). See if there are any patterns. Choose your favorite opening line. Then tag 10 of your favorite authors!  

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I have fewer that 20 published, But I guess I can list some of the unpublished ones too ;) 

1. Untitled WIP (Wandersong, unpublished 2021) The flight home was long enough that, despite Miriam's unease, by the time they had made it to her house, the worst of her anxiety had been replaced by a heavy blanket of exhausted resignation.

2.  Echoing Notes (Wandersong 2020) The world was ending, until it wasn’t. The sun rose again, against all odds, casting its beams of light across an improbable planet, bathing its inhabitants in the most welcome daybreak.

3. Still The World Keeps Turning (Doctor Who, 2020)  She sees the world afire, again.

4. OSTINATI (Wandersong, unpublished 2020)  An unfamiliar face greeted the Bard as they made their way up the hill towards Langtree Village.

5. Split Complementaries, And Other Approaches to Musical Composition (Wandersong, unpublished 2020)  Kiwi rose with the sun, impossible though it was to see through the Chismest haze; the date on the calendar hesitantly suggested it might have been early summer, although the weather all but shouted otherwise.

6. What Do You Want To Hear? (Doctor Who, 2020) "So, Doc, any thoughts yet?"

7. Untitled WIP (Doctor Who, 2020)  The wonderful thing about time is that it never stops, so if you happen to find yourself in a bad situation, eventually you will be carried away from it into hopefully a better situation.

8. An Urgent Request (Good Omens, 2020)  The door crashed open, jangling the entrance bell with all the alarm of an air raid siren.

9. Fracture (Doctor Who, 2020)  He scans the horizon, under the Australian sun, brimming with anticipation.

10. New Year’s Fic (Good Omens, unpublished 2019)  And now it was 2009.

11. As a River Flows on a Pathway to the Sea (Good Omens, unpublished 2019)  Geological timescales are a funny thing, to angels.

12. Black Magic on Mulholland Drive (Lucifer/Good Omens crossover, unpublished 2019) A sunny morning in LA is par for the course. A rainy morning in LA, while uncommon, isn't entirely outside of the realm of possibility*. A foggy morning in LA, however, suggests something surreal is afoot.

13. Heaven’s Over Us (Good Omens, 2019)  Aziraphale stood at the edge of a precipice.

14. Aziraphale Gets A Smartphone (Good Omens, 2019)  If one were to believe that the universe isn't just one single instance of existence created by God according to the ineffable plan, but rather a collection of several universes—a multiverse, if you will—one might believe that each of the other universes contains something almost, but not quite, entirely unlike any other.

15. About Face (Good Omens, 2019)  By the time they arrived at the front door of Crowley’s flat, it was the dead hour, too late to be night and too early to be dawn. 

16. Identity, Ineffability, and Other Things we Don’t Understand (Good Omens, 2019)  "Crowley."

17. V1 (Good Omens, unpublished 2019) The problem, Crowley had decided, was feelings.

18. Hard Landing (Good Omens, 2019)  The problem, Aziraphale had decided, was feelings.

19. Adventures in Attempting to Purchase a Book From that Weird Old Soho Bookshop, A.Z. Fell & Co. (Good Omens, 2019)  [New Topic] Does Anyone Have A Copy Of Clockwork House Vol. 6?

20. The Question of Who (Sherlock, 2012)  "I've told you before. You see, but you don't observe."

Also as a bonus have two original stories:

1. Untitled WIP (original, 2019) A star shot through the sky and landed right outside my window, at a horrible hour of the morning.

2. Untitled WIP (original, 2019)  There was a witch at the top of the mountain, or so I had been told; I had never been there—I had neither the means nor inclination.  

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Patterns, hm... Well, I certainly like to go for either a highly descriptive line that establishes the scenario right away, or a short and catchy line that’s intriguing enough to make you want to read the next line, which is then usually the highly descriptive line. Generally speaking I do favour a compact writing style that fits as much information as possible into as few words as possible in each sentence, so it’s not surprising my opening lines are like that too.

I’m often tempted to open with a line of dialogue, but I’ve heard that’s offputting, so I try to avoid it. Still, there are some cases when that works best, usually when the dialogue itself establishes some important information right away. (In the case of #16, that’s an entirely dialogue-only piece, so the first line establishes it’s Aziraphale who speaks first.)

It’s kind of hard to pick a favourite because I’m very fond of all of these for different reasons. For example, 4 looks very plain, but leads into scenario where the “unfamiliar face” is quickly established to be someone the Bard should know, but doesn’t. And then later the same line gets repeated again in different contexts, developing the theme further. I love 9 because not only does it quickly locate where in the timeline this canon divergence begins, it also establishes a metaphor that, when combined with the next two lines, becomes relevant to the entire fic. 12 and 14 were both jokes I wrote to myself to make myself laugh and fell in love with especially as I developed the jokes further. 17 and 18 make a pair.... except I never actually published 17 so the joke is lost too RIP

Honestly I think the main takeaway here is I should actually finish my WIPs sometime lmao

TAGGING: @wyvernquill @fremulon @gottagobuycheese @theoldaquarian @theplatinthehat @picnokinesis @maskedhero 

IDK HOW MANY MORE FRIENDS WRITE FIC TBH and i dont remember everyones usernames either if you’re reading this and u write stuff consider urself tagged

[purgatoryandme]

Do u think Tony looks across other multiverses to check if Howard was abusive to him in all of them ? + can u write a short Drabble of that IF YOURE UP FOR IT

When Reed first approached Tony about his multiverse project, Tony was hesitant. The idea of having that much power, of being able to know so much (see all the wrong he’s done), was overwhelming. The idea of having to work with Reed for months was almost as bad. Still…curiousity had always been his burden to carry. He was never able to ignore it for long. Reed didn’t really want Tony working on the project, per se. He just wanted a hand with the machinery. It kept Tony’s interest sated for awhile. Kept his hands busy. But then Reed found a universe where Howard went to prison early on in Tony’s youth. That in itself wasn’t all that interesting (a lie - it was VERY interesting). No, the look on Reed’s face afterwards is what really caught Tony’s attention.He’d had a revelation. One that involved, to some degree, an old scar of Tony’s jawline (just a nick - one nick amongst hundreds of worse ones since he became Iron Man - that he’d had since childhood). Reed was rarely wrong. He didn’t understand people at all, but given physical evidence…Well, let’s just say Tony could guess what Howard was arrested for in that universe. The vindictive pleasure it gave him (the burning need to know if he never managed to make Howard like him) drove him to start asking Reed questions. Leading questions. About his life in the multiverse. It didn’t take long for Reed to let him start looking himself. It didn’t take long for Tony to find a pattern.His father profits off of conflict. His friends die or they don’t (that part doesn’t matter, though Tony wishes it did). He drinks or he doesn’t (the drugs are worse). Tony is sensitive (soft and small and smart). Tony is never anything but sensitive in these worlds. He tries to impress Howard. It ends with a nick in his jaw from a signet ring that never looks the same. Odd, how things don’t change, even when they do. It hurts to see the worlds where no one hurts him. It hurts Tony worse to see the ones in which they do (their reasons always reminding him that he cannot be soft - it was never meant to be, not really, not the way he’d like). “I believe,”Reed mutters over the rapid sound of Tony’s ragged breathing, “That it is the height of insanity to repeat something over and over while expecting significantly different results.” He stiffly avoids looking at Tony, but Tony knows Reed is addressing him.“The multiverse is ripples,” Reed continues louder, warming to his favourite topic and forgetting that his captive audience is quite literally having a panic attack on the floor, “Not a whole new pond. Nothing is static, but the flow can only change so many ways while one point - you - still exists.”He gestures at himself, a hard jab at his head since Reed would never gesture to the heart for emotional matters, “It is not fate. There is no fate - no soul. Only you and the decisions that lead to you and the decisions you were able to make in the position you were in.” Tony’s breathing is slowing, if only through his sheer incredulity at how poorly Reed is comforting him right now. “Besides,” Reed frowns, his gaze drifting over to Tony before skittering away to his multiverse viewing machine one again, “There is no world where a man beating a child is in the right, I think.” Reed is not a particularly comforting man. Not empathetic, not likely to hand out platitudes or kind words. Somehow, it makes a statement Tony has heard a thousand times before (rarely in relation to himself) do more than drift around his brain like a fine mist. Instead, it gains weight and settles. Odd, how things change, even when they stay the same.Worlds upon worlds, and Tony never managed to be soft and remain unscathed. Worlds upon worlds, and he was never in the wrong for trying to be soft in the first place. A shaky laugh escapes him.“I think I’m done with the multiverse, Reed.”He sighs. Reed frowns at him, offended, but doesn’t refute his claim. Probably because he wants Tony to leave, though in this moment Tony is grateful for the silence. He collects himself, piece by piece, and taps the nick in his jaw.Even if he never made it as a child…Well, he hopes he can soft in his twilight years. A real grandpa in every world. Yeah.Tony smiles, just barely, and pats the multiverse viewing machine even as Reed glowers at his hand. “All of you are going to knit so many sweaters.” He whispers to it, “Or I will for you. I just need to learn how to knit first. I will - just you wait.”

[imjustthemechanic]

Our Own Demons

Part 1/? - A Bolt from the Blue Part 2/? - A Different World Part 3/? - Stark At Home Part 4/? - Pot Roast Night Part 5/? - Space-Pie Continuum Part 6/? - Energy Signature Part 7/? - Miss Potts Part 8/? - Bot from Beyond Part 9/? - Even the Odds Part 10/? - Miss Potts Arrives Part 11/? - Truth Hurts Part 12/? - The Third Reality Part 13/? - Thor and Odinson Part 14/? - The Tesseract Platform Part 15/? - Prime Suspect Part 16/? - Jailbreak

What if Tony Stark really were the villain of the Marvel universe?  How would that work?  Tony himself is about to find out, as he battles his inner demons (and some outer ones, too) across a multiverse of infinite possibilities.

Tony sat up straight across from the female cop and folded his arms across his chest, determined not to let her intimidate him. “If that was Sid,” he said, “are you Nancy?”  He immediately thought he should have said Marty instead… Marty would have been funnier, but too late now.

“I’m Officer Zsivoczky,” she said.

“‘Nancy’ it is.”  Tony sighed heavily.  “Look, I know you guys think I killed Pepper.”  It was a struggle even to say that.  “I didn’t. I wasn’t here.  The guy people saw was not me.  He was from another world.”  Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the lawyer twitch, and added, “I know how it sounds, but seeing as New York City was half-flattened by aliens a couple of years back, I’m sure you can suspend a little disbelief for this.”

Nancy was not interested.  “Where’s her body, Stark?” she asked.

“Not in this reality,” Tony insisted.  “The other me, the bad guy, he took her away.”  The other me.  Now he sounded like Bruce.  They were going to think he had multiple personalities or something.

Her eyebrows rose.  “You admit there’s a body, then?”

“No!”  Tony put his head in his hands.  “I can get her back, but you have to let me go.”  If he had a suit… and some of that energy from the tesseract.  SHIELD had a bunch of that in storage from their experiments with it.  He’d read about that in the files he’d downloaded.  They would have moved it now, with all their secrets out, but maybe he could figure out where to.  He and Dr. Foster had talked about the resonant frequencies they’d need.  He could find that other reality and get her.

“Where did you put her?” Nancy demanded.

“I didn’t do anything!” said Tony.

“Our client is done answering questions,” one of the lawyers announced – probably, Tony thought, because his answers were embarrassing them.  “I’m sure you are aware that Mr. Stark suffers from post-traumatic stress, and your unfounded accusations are…”

“They are hardly unfounded!” said Nancy.  “We have eyewitnesses to Mr. Stark meeting Ms. Potts at the LACMA and putting her in a car.  We have the car in question, with her hair and his blood in it.  We have him, looking like he’s had the hell beaten out of him by somebody desperate to defend herself.”  She gestured to Tony’s scraped and bruised arms.

“I’m Iron Man,” said Tony.  “I was fighting a robot.”  The words sounded hollow even to him.  They didn’t believe him.  Nobody would.

“Between the last time you were seen in New York and when you were sighted in Los Angeles there’s plenty of time for you to have made the flight in one of your suits,” Nancy told him.  “And the time since is more than enough to dispose of a body. Where is Ms. Potts?”

“Why would I have hurt her?” Tony asked desperately.

Nancy’s voice was cold.  “Only you know that.”

Tony lowered his head.  “No more questions,” he said.  “I’m done.”

With his lawyers there to enforce his wishes, the interrogation was over, but the police could – and did – book him.  He was photographed and fingerprinted and swabbed like a criminal, then put in an orange jumpsuit to be taken back to a cell.

“When’s the bail hearing?” he asked.

“The judge has decided there won’t be one,” Sid replied, holding the cell door for him.  “They couldn’t set it high enough that you wouldn’t be a flight risk.”

Of course they couldn’t.  “I want to make a phone call,” Tony said.  Since calling Pepper clearly wasn’t going to do any good, he would call Rhodey.

The police stood around and watched as Tony sat using the phone at a detective’s desk, listening to it ring.  He didn’t doubt that everything he said was going to be recorded.  It didn’t matter, because he would tell the truth.  Telling the truth at least meant you never needed to remember what you’d lied about.

“Hello?” asked Rhodey’s voice.

Tony had been holding his breath, terrified that Rhodey, too, would be mysteriously unreachable.  Now it roared in the mouthpiece as he let it out.  “Rhodey, it’s me,” he said.

“Tony?”  The surprise in his voice was audible.  “Where have you been?”

“Fighting robots in an alternate reality.  It’s a long story,” said Tony.  “Are you okay?  Is Bruce okay?  We were all on a government hit list.”

“I know,” Rhodey said.  “We’re all fine, don’t worry – except Pepper.  Nobody’s seen her in days.  I’ve been trying to tell people that if you took her away, it was to protect her.  I know you wouldn’t have it in you to hurt her.  Where is she?”

“I don’t know,” Tony admitted miserably.  How many times was he going to be forced to say that? Tony always preferred to give the impression that he knew everything, so having to say he didn’t know something, repeatedly, stung.  Having to say he didn’t know where Pepper was… that was ten, twenty, a hundred times worse.  “At least, I sort of know, but like I said, there’s alternate realities involved  I know how to go find her, but I have to get out of here.  These people think I killed her.”

“I know,” Rhodey repeated gravely.  “Like I said, I’ve been trying to tell them that’s not you, but you have to admit the evidence doesn’t look good.  The DA thinks nailing Iron Man for murder will be her ticket into congress.”

“Great,” said Tony.  On top of everything else, politics.  “I need help, Rhodey.  I can get to her and I can get her back, but I can’t do it alone.”

“They’re not gonna let you out of there,” Rhodey warned him. “There’s not gonna be a bail hearing for a guy who could pay the GDP of some small countries, and I can’t help you while you’re in jail for murder.”

Tony nodded.  He understood what his friend was saying, and exactly how he ought to reply. “Do me a favour.  Call the Met and tell them I won’t be at the Gala this year.”

“I’ll do that,” Rhodey replied.

With the call finished, Tony went quietly back to his cell, running his fingers along his forearms as he did.  The Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan had an exhibit on arms and armor, and a few years ago Tony had donated an old suit to it.  The museum staff had no idea it was still functional – either he or Rhodey could send it a signal from a cell phone that would activate it in the event that either of them needed a suit and didn’t have access to any others.  It would seek out the transponders in Tony’s body.  All he had to do was wait.

Twenty minutes later, the female cop with the unpronounceable name stopped by to give Tony his dinner.  This appeared to be spaghetti and meatballs, although appearances could be deceiving.  “Thanks,” he said as she handed it to him.  “Say, what’s the odds that this contains any actual food?”

“It’s not drugged, if that’s what you mean,” she said. “What do you think we’re trying to do?”

“If I’m being honest, I think you’re trying to railroad me,” Tony replied.  “You must feel pretty jazzed, arresting Iron Man and all.”

Nancy met his gaze evenly.  “You’ve always been able to get away with anything, haven’t you? Well, you know what?  The richest man in the world can’t get away with murder.”

“I’m not the richest man in the world,” Tony corrected her, “but if I see him, I’ll tell him so.”

Her eyes narrowed.  “I’ve seen you on TV.  You’ve always thought you were a really funny guy, haven’t you, Stark?”

“It’s my chief coping mechanism,” Tony told her – and then he felt a sharp pinch in his right arm.  That was the transponder.  The sizzle of a mild electric shock was its way of alerting him that the suit he’d summoned was approaching.  He’d figured he’d better build in some kind of alert system after nearly embarrassing himself in front of the AIM mooks last Christmas.  “You might wanna duck,” he warned Nancy, then dropped his spaghetti and rolled under the bed.

Half a second later, the Met suit blasted the wall down.

Tony could hear Nancy yelling for backup, but he didn’t even look at her as he wiggled out from under the cot and crawled over the rubble. He couldn’t afford to.  He had to get into that suit.  It opened for him, and when he stepped inside the pieces clicked into place around him with an easy familiarity.

“Hello, JARVIS,” said Tony, as the familiar HUD popped up.  “Did you miss me?”

Very much, Sir, the familiar voice replied.

“Can’t wait to hear about it,” said Tony, “but for now we can…”

“Freeze!” a voice shouted.

Tony looked up to see six cops pointing guns at him. He frowned.  “Really?” he asked.  “I mean… really?  You’re threatening Iron Man with a Glock 22?”  He wasn’t even offended by it, just mystified.  It was public knowledge that the suits could take an anti-tank round – footage of it had made the news years ago.  What did these people think they were going to accomplish?

The cops plainly hadn’t considered that.  They exchanged some nervous glances, each hoping one of the others had a better idea.  Apparently nobody did.

Tony was kind of curious what they might come up with if he stuck around, but there was no time for that.  So he waved and said, “bye, now!” and took off.

In the gathering dusk, the lights of Leesburg dropped away below him, and Tony took a moment to watch as the terrain and air traffic control information appeared in the display, getting his bearings.  Once he had that, he began circling, settling into a holding pattern while he figured out where to go next.  “Okay, JARVIS,” he said.  “What did I miss?”

I believe it will reassure you to know that Captain Rogers and Agents Romanov and Hill, along with a new ally, First Lieutenant Samuel Wilson, are being hailed as heroes in the media for their role in exposing the conspiracy within SHIELD. Unfortunately, they are also all out of work now.

“Tell them there’s always a place for them at Stark Industries,” said Tony.  Rogers wouldn’t accept, but the others might.  “Before we go on, though – the cops must have some kind of record of where they picked me up, and since I’m a celebrity it was probably on the news.  I need you to find that spot, because we gotta track down the truck I came back in.  It’s probably got what I need in it.”  If SHIELD – or HYDRA – were taking the wormhole platform away, they were probably also hiding any leftover tesseract juice they had in storage.  Hopefully, they would put related things in the same place.

Searching now, Sir, said JARVIS.  A map came up in the HUD, and several points illuminated.  Photographs from Google Earth appeared next to each as JARVIS attempted to match the location to images from news websites.

“There!”  Tony stared at one particular image, which JARVIS obligingly enlarged for him.  “The overpass with the white building visible over the hill – where is that?”

That is where the Loudoun County Parkway crosses State Route Seven, said JARVIS.

The area nearby matched – there were the trees and fence he remembered, and he knew he’d seen that building that was peeking out over the crest of the overpass.  “That’s it,” said Tony.  “That’s where we stopped.”  He thought for a moment.  “If I remember correctly, Route Seven goes directly from Washington to Leesburg. Where’s it go after that?”

State Route Seven ends in Winchester, Virginia, said JARVIS.

“Is there anything there they might be stopping for?”

JARVIS brought up a couple more photographs – brick buildings, a copper-roofed gazebo, and a man with a bald head and big horn-rimmed glasses.  The dean of the Shenandoah University School of Arts and Sciences is Dr. Kassander Xanthopoulos, an expert on higher-dimensional physics.  SHIELD consulted him several times in relation to the tesseract, before bringing Dr. Erik Selvig in on the project instead.

“Awesome,” said Tony.  “That’s where we’re going, then.  Now, on the way you can tell me what happened while I was gone.  We had a power surge somewhere over Kansas – then what happened?”

[imagine-loki]

Long And Lost

TITLE: Long And Lost

CHAPTER NO./ONE SHOT: Chapter 20 of 21

AUTHOR: FadingCoast

PROMT/ORIGINAL IMAGINE: Imagine being Loki’s old friend/Lover in Asgard, but you left for Earth a long time ago. For all he knows, you might be dead, but you’re still alive and you’ve been working with SHIELD and/or the Avengers.

PAIRING: Loki/Sigyn RATING: Mature. NOTES/WARNINGS: No warnings for this chapter. The prologue is set right before Avengers. The first chapters are set after Civil War. Chapter 4 and on, are all during Ragnarok.

Also on Ao3 Tumblr masterlist

Feedback is always appreciated!!

.-

Ch. 20: I’ve always been more comfortable in chaos.

I’m on my way, love.

Sigyn smiled as she looked at the horizon. The sun had already set, and the stars blinked into view. Somewhere among those stars, Loki was on a cruiser ship, making his way back to her.

I hope we get there soon. Thor has been a pain in my asgardian soul since I told him everything.

Sigyn chuckled to herself.

Do you have any idea how far are you?

A vague one. But we need to resupply. It isn’t a straight route.

Sigyn closed her eyes, wishing with all her being Loki made it in one piece. It had been little over a week since the destruction of Asgard, at least for her. Loki didn’t have much notion of time in space.

She’d spend those days trying to keep her head busy. She started training Wanda, who had come back with Steve and Natasha for a short visit.

Wanda was a great student. It wasn’t just how powerful she was, but a matter of redirecting all that energy in a useful form. Wanda had to keep reminding herself that of she unleashed her powers mindlessly, her friends could easily get hurt too. So Sigyn recruited Natasha to help with Wanda.

Steve took over training with Bucky, who had been nothing more than a wet blanket since their last conversation.

Her foresight became his doom. Sigyn always knew when he’d come, and what he’d say. She wouldn’t give him a chance to explain, cause there was nothing to explain. Nothing she didn’t already know either.

Bucky was basically screwed. And Sigyn found it hard to care much for it.

She had other priorities now, and her heart was with Loki all the time. These snippets and conversations were sacred to her. In the cooling night air, Sigyn felt warmness spread through her, static ghosting over her skin. The equivalent of a hug. A short lived moment of calm: someone was coming.

Ooh, something has gotten you mad.

You can see who’s coming.

Did you tell him that I will disembowel him?

Sigyn smiled to herself, and stood up before Bucky could sit by her side.

“The quinjet is ready to leave?” She said dryly, reading Bucky’s mind before he could speak.

“Would you stop doing that?” Bucky huffed. “I’ve been trying to apologize–”

“You know I can read your mind.” Sigyn interrupted. “You don’t want to apologize. You want to justify yourself, and there’s a difference.” She tried to walk to the hangar, but Bucky stood in front of her.

“What am I supposed to do then?”

“Get over it.” She stated. “I’ve said it before: what you want from me is never going to happen.”

Bucky hung his head. “I-”

“You have hope, you think you can convince me that you are ‘better’.” She said adding air quotes to the word. “It doesn’t work like that!”

“I know.”

“You always say that.”

Sigyn huffed and shook her head. In a sudden move, she put her hand on Bucky’s chest, making him gasp loudly. The feelings he was being fed were too much. Love, respect, trust, warmth, passion, compassion… a thousand years of sharing everything. The way it filled his every single cell was overwhelming. He started shaking, his body not able to contain the surge of emotions.

“You can’t go against it, Bucky.” Sigyn said softly, releasing him from the spell. “Nor I would let you.”

.-

The quinjet left Sigyn in London before taking Steve, Natasha and Wanda to Belfast. Stephen Strange was waiting for her in the made up landing site, portal ready to get back to the sanctum. He even had tea for her, and they had a pleasant breakfast while discussing Sigyn’s lessons, healing magic and information about Thanos.

One unspoken question hung over them. Stephen didn’t know how to ask.

“I thought you didn’t like me reading your mind.” Sigyn smiled knowingly.

“Just this once…” He said.

“I cannot heal what’s already dead, Stephen.”

“I am not dead.” He mused.

“You’re a doctor. What happens when you cut the basic supply systems of a cell?”

“It dies.” Stephen shifted in his chair. “But it has been proven that some nervous cells are capable of regenerating.”

“Indeed. Living cells are capable of multiply and replace the damaged tissue. Those cells already did their job and fixed your hands the best they could.”

He let out a deep breath. “But it wasn’t enough.”

“What is dead cannot be healed, cause there’s nothing to heal.”

Stephen sighed deeply. “I know now why none of my experiments worked.”

“I am sorry. I can lessen the tremor if you want me to.” Sigyn offered, getting a confused look from Stephen. “The new tissue is hyperexcitable. That I can fix. It won’t stop the tremors completely, but it will help.”

He nodded and extended his trembling hands on the table.

“Let’s make a lesson out of this.” She said.

Sigyn took one of Stephen’s hand in between her own. A golden light made his hand glow, it felt warm and prickly.

“As you must know, magic in its simplest form is energy manipulation.” She explained, and he nodded. “What you do with spells is channel energy, manipulate it, bend it, stretch it. You can open a portal to another dimension, send a message across the multiverse.” His hand started to burn a little, and the softening scars itched. “Healing is trickier cause you’re not dealing with something lifeless that will bend to your command. Life has her own way and you’re trying to make her go in the other direction.”

“Entropy.” He said in realization. “The universe tends to chaos.” Stephen watched Sigyn nod and smile. “Is that why you married him?”

“There are many reasons for that.” She answered. “Chaos is part of his nature, makes sense that most people don’t like him when they spend all their lives trying to control something they can’t. Odin tried, Thor tried, Frigga tried…”

“And you succeeded.”

Sigyn shook her head. “I didn’t try. I never wanted to control him. I understand his nature and just go with it.” She said. “I love him for everything he is. Why would I try to change him?”

The burning feeling on his hand got worse, and Stephen flinched.

“I think that’s enough for today.” Sigyn said, the gold glow fading a bit.

“I can take it.” He started, wanting her to continue.

“But your hand can’t.”

The hot sensation was replaced by a cool soothing one. Stephen relaxed and moved his hand. He immediately noticed the difference between the one Sigyn had treated and the one she hadn’t. He smiled.

“Above all, a healer needs patience, and a real high frustration tolerance.” She stood up and walked to one of the many portals. “The Ancient One used to have a garden here.”

“Yes, it was moved to the upper floor.”

Stephen led her upstairs and inside the garden. Sigyn picked a tree and took a fruit. Without separating it from the branch, she summoned a small blade and cut a deep gash on it.

“Heal it.” She ordered. “Will its energy to heal itself.”

Stephen looked confused, but still put his hand on it. Orange circlets surrounded his hand and the fruit. He concentrated hard, feeling the resistance from the life force of the fruit. He managed to heal barely half an inch at the bottom of the gash before he had to rest.

“It’s much harder than you make it look.”

“I’ve had 5 of your lifetimes of training.” She smiled. “Again.”

Stephen repeated the exercise several more times, with little success. He was draining himself with the effort. His orange circlets were dimmer with each attempt.

“Enough.” Sigyn said when the last circlet broke mid try. “You fight against it too much. It must heal itself, you just have to guide it.”

The lesson kept going for another hour, until Stephen was sweating and exhausted. Sigyn made him stop despite his protests, and gave him a few titles to read.

The next few days followed the same pattern. It was hard for her to teach Stephen patience. So she had him meditate for a few hours every morning. Whatever progress was slow, but it was there. He also had to be very grateful, Sigyn’s treatment of his hands had greatly reduced the shaking.

Loki also made a few appearances on the Sanctum, just to inform Stephen that he was fulfilling his part of the deal and how their situation had changed. Stephen was very understanding of Asgard’s situation, but he was just one man, in no position of power. Combining efforts, they tried to get a portal to the ship, but the gem was too powerful and would resist any treatment. There was nothing for them to do but go at the speed of the cruiser.

Loki didn’t like that. Fear grew inside of him with each passing day. He needed to get to Midgard, but at the same time dreaded it. Would people of Earth actually let him live there? Loki didn’t need him to like him, he just needed some peace. Peace he hadn’t seen in 300 years.

He was staring out the bay window when Thor found him.

“May is ask what is on your mind?” Thor asked. “You’ve been growing restless lately.”

“I’m just wondering if it’s a good idea to bring me back to Midgard.” Loki said.

“Probably not, to be honest.” Thor chuckled, he needed no explanation for Loki’s reservations. “But I wouldn’t worry, brother. I feel like everything’s gonna work out fine. Besides, there’s someone waiting for you over there.” Thor added with a smirk.

Loki couldn’t manage to hide his smile, almost rolling his eyes at his brother’s optimism. He wished he could feel that way too, but hope was still uncomfortable and terrifying. Thor patted Loki’s back, sharing a smile, but it quickly faded as both brothers observed the large shadow that loomed over their ship.

.-

Only one chapter left!!!

[haberdashing]

The Other Portal

AU where, when items are lost in the Bottomless Pit, they come to Ford... regardless of his current location in the multiverse.

AU created by @gravity-what.

on AO3

Also on ff.net (no link because filters)

It was snowing.

To be more precise, it was snowing inside the cave where Ford was currently residing.

To be most precise, it was snowing in a circle roughly a dozen feet in diameter, with Ford at the circle’s center. The flurry followed him around, shifting to match Ford’s every step, leaving damp ground and confusion in his wake.

Oddities related to the laws of physics were par for the course in the Nightmare Realm, true, but this one seemed unique to Ford, unusual enough that none he encountered could (or would) offer an explanation. The inexplicable snowfall eased up after several hours, thick showers turning to a light dusting of flakes before fading away entirely, but it lingered in his thoughts for some time afterwards. He hadn’t seen anomalous weather elsewhere in the Nightmare Realm- hadn’t seen any weather, truth be told, only calm, featureless swaths of space. So why there? Why him?

The question faded from his mind over time as his journey continued, as he jumped into the nearest wormhole to escape the Nightmare Realm for dimensions unknown. But it returned with a vengeance when, while laying down in a makeshift shelter, having finally managed to drift off, he was abruptly hit in the face with a thick clump of snow and a shower of pine needles.

(By the time he managed to return to sleep, the snow was long melted, but the pine needles remained, a sign that the bizarre occurrence was more than a mere dream.)

Another self-contained snowstorm hit Ford not long after- a few days, it seemed, but Ford hadn’t kept track, had only the vaguest sense of how time passed by, of sunrises and sunsets endlessly repeating. It ended in time, only to be replaced with another. The flurries soon seemed as inevitable as the rising and setting of the sun (or suns, in some cases) until, after (weeks? months? years?) some length of time, rain fell instead of snow, cold water and sharp pine needles pummeling Ford all at once.

Snow, rain, pine needles, and the occasional clump of dirt and grass all fell onto or around Ford at any given moment. He couldn’t control it. He couldn’t prevent it. All Ford could do was accept it.

Sometimes it was helpful.

(Ford was tied tightly to a stake, surrounded by dozens of blue humanoid beings twice his size, one of which held a torch filled with green fire just far enough away that the downpour surrounding Ford could not extinguish the flames.

As it turns out, not everyone was entirely willing to accept the reality of dimensional travel. Some of the natives of Dimension 331/D, having seen Ford enter through a convenient wormhole, had in fact proven themselves exceptionally unhappy with the concept, and wanted to take out their anger on him. Others supported Ford, or at least supported his right to continue living, but that group was smaller and consistently out-shouted by those calling for his execution.

But if they were going to burn him, they were going to have to wait out the storm.

The rain had started shortly after his arrival in this dimension, and by the time the natives had subdued him he was drenched, as were the few others who had dared to approach him. The dual suns of this planet dried the others, but Ford only grew wetter as the storm surrounding him and him alone raged on.

It was only a matter of time, though. The rain always ended. Whether it took minutes or hours or days mattered little if he couldn’t convince the people of this dimension to let him go, and as time went on, more and more of the crowd turned against him...

But then a thick tree branch, as long as Ford was tall, fell from the sky with the raindrops, tumbling through the air before smashing into the torch, instantly putting out the flames and spreading splinters of damp wood across the muddy ground.

They let him go after that.

The natives of Dimension 331/D called it “a sign”. Ford called it the universe giving him a break for once.)

Sometimes it was... less than helpful.

(The plan was simple. Ford had already sneaked into the facility and followed the coronium cube as it was moved into a less-secure side chamber. All he had to do was wait as the guards did their rounds until none were left in the room, leaving the coronium open for the taking, and then he’d be one step closer to finally completing his quantum destabilizer.

And he’d already found a decent spot to watch the area without being noticed. The supply closet where Ford currently stood was directly across the room from the cube’s current location, with three slits at eye level letting him monitor its current status. The closet was nearly empty, leaving him plenty of breathing room and decreasing the odds that anybody would bump into him while searching for supplies. Once the guards left, he would be ready to strike.

Suddenly, a white blob appeared in Ford’s field of vision.

Ford blinked, and it disappeared, but soon another took its place. Something white was - Ford rubbed his eyes, and the second one disappeared- catching on his eyelashes, falling from somewhere. Dandruff, perhaps? Or had a container broken open, spilling some sort of alien chemical onto him?

Ford carefully tilted his head upwards, attempting to ascertain whether he was being assaulted by chemicals from above, and felt something cold and wet brush against his forehead.

Not dandruff, then. Not alien chemicals, either.

Ford’s heartbeat quickened as he realized the true source of the cold and the white, realized the implications. The supply closet was big, but not big enough. If snowflakes were landing on him, snow would be falling on the other side of the door as well.

How long until the guards noticed that one of their closets was snowing?

The answer, as Ford soon learned the hard way, was exactly two minutes and forty-seven seconds.)

And once or twice, it had saved him from near-certain doom.

(The indigo sands of F’thangor seemed endless.

How long had it been since he’d entered the desert? Eight sets of sunrises and sunsets? Nine? Ford was losing track. But he’d been out of any form of sustenance since the fifth sunset, and Ford had yet to see another soul the entire time. There were no landmarks in the desert, no trees or rocks to mark where he had been, only rolling sand dunes and the sun there to guide him.

His steps were slow now, slow and shaky, but he kept moving towards where his research indicated the nearest wormhole was located, though his skin was baking under the bright blue sun. He had to keep moving, had to make it through this, had to finish the quantum destabilizer and get rid of Bill Cipher once and for all, he couldn’t let twenty-odd years of travel and work end here...

When he felt the first drop, he thought it was his imagination, or a hallucination brought on by thirst and the heat. But a second drop followed, and then a third, the drops growing closer together until he felt several at once, until the individual drops were no longer distinguishable.

Rain.

Ford had begun to think he would never feel rain again.

He lay down, not caring that the dark sands burned against his back, and swallowed gulp after gulp of cool, sweet water as the raindrops sank into his clothes and fell onto the ground around him, heat draining away with every drop that evaporated under the hot desert sun.)

But Ford eventually learned that there was more to this strange phenomenon than self-contained weather patterns.

The first item that showed evidence of human involvement was a piece of paper topped with the words “Murder Hut Suggestions”, written in thick red ink with block lettering. The remainder of the text was written in scribbled cursive, made even harder to decipher since the ink comprising the rest of the text went from thin to nonexistent at points, but from what Ford could make out it was complaining about the inaccuracy and awkwardness of the name “Murder Hut”. A valid complaint, Ford thought. With the possible exception of a haunted house, any business calling itself the “Murder Hut” was unlikely to attract much in the way of visitors.

Ford didn’t know for certain how long it had been since he’d left his home dimension, but the date written on the paper of 06/18/82 seemed accurate enough. Four months, then. Four months he had spent hopping dimensions.

More such papers appeared on an irregular basis. The format changed over time, the labels printed instead of hand-written, the paper sturdy card stock rather than flimsy sheets clearly ripped out of a cheap notebook. The name “Murder Hut” was eventually replaced with the name “Mystery Shack”, though the descriptions of the business in question- some sort of tacky tourist trap, it seemed- remained the same, as did many of the complaints alleged against it.

These suggestion cards might have been a mere novelty if the owner of this “Mystery Shack” wasn’t addressed time and time again by the name of Stanford Pines, and if its address wasn’t also Ford’s own back on Earth.

Other items appeared as well as time went by:

A collection of love letters, from and to people whose first names were a mystery but whose surnames were familiar, which as a rule displayed an entirely unhealthy degree of obsession on the part of the apparently-spurned author. (Discarded post-haste.)

Money- American currency, specifically, always in the form of dollar bills rather than coins, mostly ones but occasionally fives, tens, and even a few twenties. (Kept, even though the currency was entirely useless in the vast majority of dimensions Ford frequented, even though he knew he’d never return home to spend it.)

Cryptic notes in too-precise handwriting, usually made out to Stanford or “Stan” Pines, though a few other names made their way into the mix. (Discarded.)

An opened letter that told of the death of one Filbrick Pines, referred to in the letter as the intended recipient’s father. (Kept, for reasons Ford couldn’t quite name.)

A locked box containing a box of golden teeth that, upon examination, seemed to force their wearer to tell the unembellished truth. (Ford kept them long enough to write a detailed note on their workings, then got rid of them; the truth was a dangerous thing for him these days.)

All these and more added up to one conclusion: In some strange other world, one Stanford Pines, living in the same house Ford himself had owned, was running a kitschy tourist trap rather than seriously studying the supernatural, and for reasons unknown Ford was receiving a handful of this other Stanford’s personal effects.

But it wasn’t until thirty years after the beginning of this odd phenomenon, when he had nearly destroyed Bill once and for all only to lose the opportunity at the last second, after stepping through a portal that had appeared at exactly the wrong time, that Ford realized that the bizarre dimension in which somebody by the name of Stanford Pines ran this “Mystery Shack” was in fact his own.

[overhere-series]

Over Here: Chapter Three

And there we are! Last of the revisions on these opening chapters are now officially finished, enjoy the book from here with a far better exposition. 

Cass’s alarm blares to life. She fumbles her phone off the nightstand like a wet bar of soap, thumbs the alarm off and curls back into the covers again. Images from her dream persist- a brown bird, a black hole, a town so alive with color it belongs in one of her dad’s books. They don’t fade to fuzz as most dreams do, stark and vivid as the bridges tend to be. If anything, it’s all coming into sharper focus as she wakes.

But the pent-up panic it gives her begins to ease as she takes in the whiff of incense wafting up from her dad’s studio. Eyes closed, she listens for the thrum of his music downstairs, be it the beats of radio fodder or high-speed banjo strumming.

None of his familiar genres welcome her, though, just a jazzy number droning soft from a source there in the room with her. The incense swirls more lavender than cinnamon.

“Is everything alright?” a lilting, reedy, painfully familiar voice asks.

Cass sits up with a jolt that sways her bed-no, hammock. She crashed out in a hammock, cushy pillows and blankets lumped beneath and around her. Thin tapestries are draped across the ceiling instead of painted stars like her room back home, too, matching the root-like patterns of the rugs that cover the floorboards.

Unlike the collection house, there’s not a glint of metal or plastic among the wood and cloth besides the radio on a table in the corner.  The source of the music then, though how it’s playing she can’t guess. It looks like it’s got flowers growing into the grate of its speakers.

The feather-haired guy preening in the wall mirror thumbs the stringy bass hums and foreign but pleasant voice down.

Cass presses her face into the pillows and groans.

“Cass?”

She glares at him with half her face still pressed to the pillows. So he can get a good look at her unamused eyes without distraction.

Far from being intimidated, Winston just cocks his head. Her dirty looks need to step up their game, apparently. “Are you alright?” he repeats.

“Can’t be,” she hisses. “Still here.” The wavering fear from the dream ebbs back, worse than before as a shred of relief comes arm in arm with it like a new pal it’s picked up. Add in how comforting the tweaks on the sounds and scents of home are in this place and her feelings get too tangled for her to deal with this early in the morning.

The rest of last night bleeds back to her, including how she’s come to find herself crashed out here. Here being another world, but also this sort of hotel the bird got them into after the whole sylphs incident. Cass had passed out within minutes of getting to the room, too tired even to rail Winston for more answers. A full night’s rest later and her energy to handle this place has made a comeback, though.

More of a comeback than she likes. She’s almost eager to get going, more than just to get back home.

Winston still his head tilted at her. He seems to have cleaned up when she was out, suit spotless white and feathers ruffled in a slightly less mad scientist mess than when she saw him last. Almost like the feathers grew with the grain of normal hair, framing his face in a weirdly owlish way.

“That sound, do you know what made it?” he asked.

Cass holds up her phone for him to see, but snatches it back when he reaches to take it. He draws away as she puts her legs over the side of the hammock and stretches. “It’s an alarm, birdbrain,” she says, and tosses the phone in her bag. “You guys have radios, for crying out- forget it, don’t worry about it.” Not the time to be debating tech capabilities of this place, even if she has no idea how they’ve wired electricity into this firetrap of a house or where the stations are coming from.

“It’s an alarm but I’m not to be alarmed?” Winston asks.

She rolls her eyes at the grin on his face and laces up her shoes. “Aren’t you a comedian. Thanks for not waking me up, early-”

She cuts herself off before she can finish the pun tucked in the taunt. The absence of new clothes and a shower makes her itchy and does a lot for her patience to see a joke in any of this disaster.

Winston just folds the blanket she’s dumped to the rugs instead of getting all peeved. Once she has her bag across her back, Cass takes him by the elbow to keep him from tidying the rest of the room.

“Come on, sooner we’re on the road, the better.”

*

From the hippy hotel they take off over that mossy bridge, careful to skirt the patch of lyreblooms this time around. Silence hangs between the pair as they walk. They may as well be on some scenic nature hike at the pace Winston ambles, Cass’s quick strides overtaking his wider ones with no real effort. He strolls along with his hands in his pockets, taking in the shift of the leaves from those ribbony reds to a purple like plum trees. Like he’s just as amazed with his own world as Cass probably should be.

Of course, he also ends up the one to break their silence. “Making another alarm?”

She’s got her phone in her hands. No service, no wifi, but she dials her house anyway. All she gets is angry beeping in her ear. She growls. “Might as well. Probably the only thing I can do with this thing now.”

“May I?” Winston curls his fingers in an apparently multiversal ‘gimme gimme’ gesture.

Cass hands it over, frustrated but nosy to see what he’ll do. She watches out of the corner of her eye as he explores it.

“Oh!” he says after a moment. “I’ve never seen one of this kind alive before- something about the material keeping magic out.” His fingers blur a bit, something surrounding them that she can’t quite see.

With it the screen flickers, her default background of Painted Hills going pixels until he tosses it back. The phone’s so hot to the touch she almost hot-potatoes it back. “What did you even do?”

“Nothing! Just a small drop of magic but that must be a bit for such a device to cope with,” he notes with a laugh. “I’ll leave the tampering to Marshall. He has a way of making metal and glass do his bidding somehow, though this inbetween material doesn’t respond near as much.”

“What, plastic?”

“Yes, that. Over Here still has yet to crack it, or at least this side of it. Those inorganic creations of yours aren’t bad as iron but still...”

“You can’t actually call it that,” she says. Her lips press tight together. A safe, slightly mocking question, even if she blurted it out. “Over Here. It’s dumb.”

“In relation to your world, we can and do,” he laughs. “The country we’re in at the moment is Ellis. Certainly not the worst of places for an otherlander to fall to.”

Cass bristles at his phrasing, like she’s the alien here next to a barefoot bird in a tux who walks through walls. The fact that this world even made up a word for people like her- or that there’s people like her period- doesn’t make her feel any better about the sound of it. “So if I’m an otherlander, what’s that make you? Doesn’t explain to me why you’re a bird in my world and a person in this one. Like do you change in the gap or-”

She flinches as Winston disappears from her side.

On the ground instead is the bird from the park, still tapping along the path.

“Okay. Werebird.”

She tenses up as the bird pauses, wings spread wide, and sprouts back up to her guide. Another shimmer she can’t quite see encases what probably doesn’t make for a pretty transformation. At least she’s not subjected to some drawn-out Animorphs cover stuff, quick enough that she might have blinked and the bird popped back into Winston.

He fluffs a hand through his newly messy feather hair and walks on. “Magician, actually,” he tells her, voice cracking bad as Stan’s.

She goes stiff, containing a spasm in her chest that’s definitely not a laugh. “Right. Meaning?”

“Meaning I create and perform magic, as do most in this world.”

“You guys are real subtle,” she says, faux impressed. “And do you cut yourselves in half or is it more like card tricks?”

“Perhaps I ought to get to the root of things, yes?” he replies. Cordial as ever, Winston stops and reaches into the branches above them. Clumps of little black berries weigh them down, letting him pick a bunch off. “In this world, where there’s life, there’s magic. Every living thing creates it in one form or another, though humans more than most.”

“Okay.” A rehearsed answer, sincere enough it’s not condescending since it has to be common knowledge here. Cass watches him pull a small bottle from his jacket and take up his stroll again beside her.

Absently he crams the berries inside, dying his long fingers blue in the process. “Because humans produce more, they can control their magic and use it to shape the world around them. It’s why I exchange forms, whisk, or do this.”

“Do what?”

He spits in the bottle, pops the cork on, and shakes it up. After a second he holds it up to his eyes and, satisfied, shows it to Cass. “Making a focal- a magic focus, if you will. Put enough of them together in a particular manner and you have an amalgam of them, like Marshall’s device. Something of a magical machine, I believe? If we’ve time I’ll show you more.”

“I’m cool with not watching you spit magic on things.”

Winston shrugs, not the least bit sheepish. “I’d have used pure magic, but then you wouldn’t have been able to see it.”

Cass squints at the bottle. A tiny shimmer might have glinted on the glass, but nothing too flashy. “Still can’t see it,” she says.

“Don’t worry, you will,” he assures, stowing the bottle in the little leather bag he keeps his coins in. “Either way, the ink will last longer that way and we’ll be able to scribe Marshall and the others.”

She lags behind a second as he picks up the pace. “Wait, what?”

“The scribing ink, it’s for sending messages without-”

“No! The seeing thing. Why can’t I see magic? I saw the gap just fine.” A heat rises in her chest along with her panic. How many things like the sylphs are out here that she can’t see? The less she needs to rely on the bird, the better, but being blind until something triggers her magic vision or whatever bothers her more than she cares to admit.

But Winston just walks on. “Your eyes will adapt,” he says. “Give it time.”

Questions sit in Cass’s mouth, begging to be spat out already, but she grits her teeth against them. Probably just going to open the floodgates on another nonsense non-explanation. She grips the straps of her bag and keeps an eye on their surroundings. Not like she’ll be here long enough for this to matter.

The trees grow tidier than they were in the last town, back to flashy reds and violets without being so tangled and overgrown. The pair continue downhill with the stream and eventually come to the crumbling remains of another bridge. From here the forest gives way to a crop of hills. Vineyards stretch like nets over them, dotted with big houses here and there. No more magical than wine country back in Oregon.

To her dismay, though, the town across the bridge looks about as magical as the last. More of those mossy stones lay together to form the road at their feet, leading past cabins and trees to a tidy square of more brick buildings. Long strands of flowers and green flags stamped with a silver tree hang between the rowhouses. In the right light, it looks a little like the vines grow through the bricks and into the walls.

“Stay close,” Winston says. Cass glances from the buildings to the buzzing street of people. She jogs up behind her guide, shoulders high like a touch from these people can burn her.

Snatches of conversation pass through one ear and out the other. It’s not long before she sees how the clothes on these magicians seem to lack seams, how their faces and complexions can line up with any garden variety Earth human but off slightly. They don’t seem at all concerned with the two travelers, preoccupied with heading to their own individual point A’s and point B’s. Or chatting on porches, or chasing kids around. Cass trains her stare on a select few, like a guy in a sweeping skirt leaning against a house with a moody look on his face. Or a cat, who leaps down a branch of flowers and morphs into a woman to talk to the moody guy.

She catches Winston’s arm to keep from stopping to study them all. Her hands itch for the sketchbook in her bag, but she gets sucked out of it when Winston looks down at her.

She lets go. “What? I’m trying not to lose you out here,” she mutters, then forges on when he just tilts his head again. “Do you even know where we’re going?”

“Somewhere for decent directions,” he says. He cranes around, eying the signs above each building before settling on one. Whatever it is, he drifts toward it and beckons her with a quick ‘come along’.

Cass doesn’t even have time to grab him before he darts inside, leaving her to pause under a wooden sign that reads Fausts’ in loopy painted print.

Minutes later she sits staring at the spread on the table with her arms crossed. The warm, yeasty scent of fresh bread curls around her, fruit glistening in its bowl just like the beads of condensation on the glass of amber juice placed beside them. More jazz swoons from a radio, pluckier than the stuff she knows with more piano and guitar than horn. Cass’s dark brows narrow in concentration, her jaw tight.

“You’re not going to eat anything?” Winston prompts.

Her stomach rumbles almost on cue, silent but no less insistent for it. When did she eat last? Pizza back him, an eternity enough ago that she can’t argue with a free meal.

But her old knowledge of magic makes her hesitant to touch a thing. Reminds her of how fae trapped people with banquets they couldn’t resist, or how Persephone got roped into the underworld from just a couple of seeds.

Still, she’s not exactly at a banquet in the woods or the Greek realm of death. Despite the waitress levitating dishes in a cloud around her and the wood-paneled style of a vineyard inn, the restaurant they sit in now manages to have a small-town diner vibe. Everyone chatters around them like they know each other, though she and Winston receive some raised brows and pitying smiles dressed as they are.

Not exactly a swords and sorcery tavern or anything, but it springs to mind all the rules she’s been ignoring since she got here. Shit, has she given anyone her full name? Cassandra Ryan Douglas isn’t usually her opener but does it have to be first, middle, and last or just what she calls herself?

Winston staying polite and patient as ever only feeds her suspicions, but she reaches for the juices after a few seconds of his staring. Putting off sipping it and his pestering in one fell swoop.

His eyes shift soon to the contents of his jacket on the table, anyway. As soon as the waitress led them to a table, he dumped out his ink bottle, coins, and a strip of cloth that could be a bowtie out in front of him. Wherever they go when he goes bird, Cass doesn’t want to know.

She slouches in her seat. “How’s that plan coming, featherhead?”

“Along. I’m stitching one,” he says. He nibbles some bread in thought, oblivious to the looks they’re getting.

The waitress, probably a Faust since it looks like everyone running the place shares the same thick black hair and stocky build, wanders back to top off their drinks. Well, Winston’s. “Anything else you two need?” she asks.

“You wouldn’t know how to go about getting to Haven by week’s end, would you?”

Faust flourishes a hand for her cloud of empty glasses and tops off one for the table beside them. There’s a flicker of surprise on her at the question, but it passes quick. “You sure you want to try the week before the festival?” she says, dubious. “All we have here are those two-seater fliers on the hill. I don’t want to tell you your luck for getting tickets this time of year, either.”

“Don’t remind me,” Winston says, still tracing the grain of the table like he can read an answer from it. “Where would the nearest land port be?”

“Malone,” Faust says. Her eyes lingering on Cass’s flannel and the bag on the back of her chair. When Faust’s stare goes to the copper hair gnarled to the side of Cass’s head her face burns.

Winston plays with the bottle from his jacket. “From Pendle Creek? Two days just to go around the marsh, not to mention the full trip to the edge of it. I don’t know if we’ve that sort of time.”

“Well, you can’t slip through those marshes,” Faust warns. “Even the wardens won’t stir up the nameless out there.”

“Not if we can’t help it, no. What about the nearest train station?”

“There’s one in Clemence if you’re willing to walk. And if you’re not afraid of heights. Not sure what your luck is during festival week but it’ll be cheaper. Anything else I can do for you two?” Her flock of empty dishes accumulates as she speaks with them.

“A map, please, if you have it.” Winston beams at her, though the moment Faust spins around he rubs his fingers beneath his eyes. Under his breath he mumbles something along the lines of ‘coffee’.

Cass snorts and downs the last of her juice. Nice to know the bird’s even a little miserable under all his cheer, and that the juice isn’t perfect enough to be dangerously irresistible. As she wolfs down the rest of the food, she manages to get a question out. “What’s this festival about?”

Winston blinks. He has this lost, backlit stare like he’d forgotten her. “It’s the solstice festival,” he explains. “The longest day of our year.”

“I know what a solstice is.” The first week of June over, they’ll be having the first day of summer in about a week back home, though Earth doesn’t put a lot of song and dance on it.

Winston notes her crossed arms and goes for reassurance again. “It’s an old holiday here, nothing to be nettled about. It just addles any plans we make if everyone’s traveling at once.”

So the Christmas airport rush, just magic. “So you’re saying you have a plan, though.”

He rolls the ink bottle in his hands. “I’ll get a few messages home and then it’s a train to Malone, I suppose,” he says. “We’ll just have to hope we can get passage all the way to Haven, but just getting that far without those marshes would be gift enough. Fragments are the last thing we need.”

He leans back in his chair, eyes closed and hands folded on the table. Had he actually slept at all last night? Doesn’t matter to Cass if he hadn’t, but since he’d been up before her she has to wonder. So long as his at least early bird if not insomniac tendencies don’t keep him from guiding her, she’ll take it.

Slumped in her seat, she rolls a coin across her knuckles, tries to keep from fumbling it when she fudges the trick. “Uh huh. How long should that take?”

“Only a few days, at best.”

“What’s at worst?”

“It depends. If my work comes up, we might be just a little delayed.”

“What work?” The fleeting image of the bird at a desk plinking at a keyboard makes her mouth twist. Like this guy seriously has a job- but fancy suits and coins have to come from somewhere, she reasons.

“Here’s the map you asked for,” says Faust as she swings by again. She slips Winston a scrap of paper, which he pockets the same moment the doors fling open.

The vast majority of the customers turn their heads, the murmurs between them already striking up. The girl in the doorway has the same coarse dark hair, pale skin, and stocky frame as the other Fausts in here, panting as she looks the room over. Her eyes light on every face in the restaurant, even Cass’s for a second, but eventually she collects herself and heads for the kitchen with a stiff jaw.

The rest of the room lulls back to its previous thrum of voices and clatters, but the waitress and the girl add their arguing to the mix. The waitress puts hand to her mouth, eyes wide at the girl’s grim expression.

Cass snaps her fingers in front of Winston’s beak of a nose. The bird’s been watching the scene unfold with keen interest, stowing his stuff back in his pockets. He still doesn’t meet her eyes until she snaps again.

“What?” he says.

“It’s not our business,” she tells him. “C’mon, we paid up and we’ve been in this town too long as it is. Let’s go. We’re going to Clemence now, right?”

Winston’s eyes are already back to the scene at the kitchen doorway, but he pushes out of his chair and snatches up the last of his bread without arguing. They’re almost to the door before Faust grabs Winston’s arm and yanks.

“You,” she says in a low tone. “You’re a longcoat, aren’t you? A warden?”

“Do you have need of one?” Winston doesn’t pull away from Faust, or from Cass who’s taken his other arm and prepared to tug-of-war for him. This is my bird, don’t make me fight for him.

But Faust inclines her head, like she doesn’t want to be caught nodding but would definitely take up a brawl to get Cass’s guide from her. There’s a look on her face more fierce than any glare Cass can drudge up to match it, a menace in her stare that can melt glass. It softens when she gives a nod to the girl at her side.

“There’s this voice…” she begins.

“A voice with direction or all around you, up here?” Winston taps a finger to his temple with his newly freed hand.

“Up there. There’s a wall of thickets and they followed this- this… there’s something in there with them,” she murmurs, barely holding composure. She can’t be more than thirteen or fourteen, maybe Cass’s brother’s age. “My brother and sister.”

“And my niece and nephew,” Faust tags on. “It’s a nameless, isn’t it?”

“Likely so. How long ago?”

“Half hour.”

Winston rakes a hand through his feathers, appearing to actually be mulling this over. Cass gets a grip on his jacket. Is he even serious? They’re going after some missing kids just because- what, is this his job? How often does this even happen?

Considering the sylphs and his finesse handling those, probably more than rarely. Still, he’s not dragging her out on a rescue mission without so much as an explanation.

“Wait, what the hell’s a nameless?” she rasps, trying to stay sotto voce as the rest of them.

“Are you otherlander?” the girl asks, scanning Cass over. Seeing more of these magicians with their seamless clothes and bare feet makes her flannel and battered track shoes stick out, but her lack of know-how alone doesn’t help either. Cass flushes red.

“It’s a bit of cover,” Winston confides, all but stage-whispering behind his hand. “We’re both wardens, though we are in a bit of a rush hence the…” He waves to their attire and, though Faust raises a brow, her niece seems to buy it. “We’ll see what we can do, yes? We may need help finding this barrier.”

The girl takes a deep breath and nods. Her eyes are red at the bottoms, tears pressing but her mouth a white line of resolve. At the sight of it, Cass’s anger with the bird wilts. Not this kid’s fault something happened to her siblings, and even so she’s holding it together to help them even if she’s probably scared out of her mind to go back to where she lost them.

“Definitely,” Cass says. “That’d be really brave of you. To show us. What’s your name?”

“Hazel Faust,” the girl says. Her eyes still look full to spilling tears all down her cheeks, but she wipes it on her sleeve and braces herself to show them out. Her aunt takes moment to hug her, tell her everything will be okay, the whole bit.

Winston offers Cass a grateful grin. Her face just burns even more.

[batterymonster2021]

Questions No One Knows the Answers to (Full Version)

New Post has been published on https://hititem.kr/questions-no-one-knows-the-answers-to-full-version-5/

Questions No One Knows the Answers to (Full Version)

On a average day at university, endless hours are spent studying the answers to questions, but right now, we’ll do the opposite. We’re going to focus on questions where you can’t be trained the solutions seeing that they may be unknown. I used to puzzle about quite a few matters as a boy, for illustration: What would it suppose like to be a dog? Do fish suppose ache? How about bugs? Was once the massive Bang simply an accident? And is there a God? And if that is so, how are we so definite that it’s a He and not a She? Why accomplish that many harmless persons and animals undergo terrible matters? Is there quite a plan for my existence? Is the future but to be written, or is it already written and we simply are not able to see it? But then, do i have free will? I mean, who am I anyway? Am I only a organic machine? But then, why am I aware? What’s cognizance? Will robots come to be conscious someday? I imply, I kind of assumed that some day i’d be instructed the solutions to all these questions.Anyone need to comprehend, correct? Guess what? No person is aware of. Most of these questions puzzle me more now than ever. However diving into them is entertaining because it takes you to the brink of expertise, and you by no means be aware of what you’ll be able to to find there. So, two questions that nobody on earth is aware of the answer to. (tune) repeatedly after I’m on a protracted plane flight, I gaze out in any respect these mountains and deserts and take a look at to get my head round how substantial our Earth is.After which I don’t forget that there is an object we see everyday that would actually match 1,000,000 Earths within it: the solar. It appears impossibly large. However within the fine scheme of things, it can be a pinprick, certainly one of about four hundred billion stars in the Milky method galaxy, which you will see that on a clear night as a pale white mist stretched throughout the sky. And it will get worse. There are perhaps one hundred billion galaxies detectable by our telescopes. So if every superstar used to be the scale of a single grain of sand, simply the Milky way has enough stars to fill a 30-foot via 30-foot stretch of seaside three ft deep with sand. And the whole Earth does not have adequate shores to symbolize the celebs in the overall universe. The sort of seaside would proceed for literally 1000’s of millions of miles. Holy Stephen Hawking, that’s plenty of stars. However he and other physicists now think in a fact that is unimaginably greater still.I mean, initially, the a hundred billion galaxies within range of our telescopes are usually a minuscule fraction of the whole. House itself is increasing at an accelerating p.C.. The massive majority of the galaxies are setting apart from us so quick that gentle from them could certainly not attain us. Nonetheless, our physical truth here on earth is intimately related to these far-off, invisible galaxies. We are able to think of them as a part of our universe. They make up a single, tremendous edifice obeying the same physical legal guidelines and all made from the same varieties of atoms, electrons, protons, quarks, neutrinos, that make up you and me. However, up to date theories in physics, together with one referred to as string thought, at the moment are telling us there might be numerous different universes built on exceptional forms of particles, with extraordinary homes, obeying distinctive legal guidelines.Most of these universes would in no way support life, and might flash in and out of existence in a nanosecond. But however, mixed, they make up a sizeable multiverse of feasible universes in as much as eleven dimensions, proposing wonders beyond our wildest creativeness. The main version of string conception predicts a multiverse made from 10 to the 500 universes. That’s a one adopted by means of 500 zeros, a quantity so enormous that if every atom in our observable universe had its own universe, and all the atoms in all those universes each had their own universe, and also you repeated that for 2 extra cycles, you’ll still be at a tiny fraction of the complete, particularly, one thousand billion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillionth. (Laughter) but even that quantity is minuscule compared to a further quantity: infinity. Some physicists feel the space-time continuum is actually infinite and that it includes a limiteless quantity of so-called pocket universes with varying houses. How’s your brain doing? Quantum idea provides a whole new wrinkle. I imply, the theory’s been demonstrated actual past all doubt, but interpreting it is baffling, and some physicists feel that you could most effective un-baffle it in the event you think that significant numbers of parallel universes are being spawned every moment, and plenty of of those universes would without a doubt be very like the world we’re in, would incorporate a couple of copies of you.In one such universe, you would graduate with honors and marry the character of your desires, and in one more, now not a lot. Good, there are still some scientists who would say, hogwash. The one significant answer to the question of how many universes there are is one. Only one universe. And some philosophers and mystics could argue that even our possess universe is an illusion. So, as you will see, correct now there is not any agreement on this question, not even close. All we know is the answer is somewhere between zero and infinity. Good, i guess we all know one more thing. This is a pretty cool time to be learning physics. We just maybe undergoing the most important paradigm shift in talents that humanity has ever visible. (track) somewhere in the market in that huge universe there have got to most likely be numerous other planets teeming with life.But why don’t we see any proof of it? Good, that is the famous question asked by way of Enrico Fermi in 1950: the place is everybody? Conspiracy theorists declare that UFOs are traveling all the time and the reviews are simply being blanketed up, but actually, they don’t seem to be very convincing. But that leaves an actual riddle. Previously yr, the Kepler space observatory has determined 1000s of planets simply round neighborhood stars. And in the event you extrapolate that information, it appears like there could be half of one thousand billion planets simply in our possess galaxy. If any individual in 10,000 has conditions that would support a form of existence, that is still 50 million feasible life-harboring planets proper here within the Milky method.So here’s the riddle: our Earth did not kind unless about nine billion years after the massive Bang. Countless different planets in our galaxy must have fashioned prior, and given existence a danger to get underway billions, or absolutely many hundreds of thousands of years previous than happened on the earth. If just a few of them had spawned clever existence and began creating technologies, those applied sciences would have had thousands of years to grow in complexity and energy. In the world, we now have seen how dramatically technological know-how can accelerate in simply one hundred years. In thousands of years, an clever alien civilization might without difficulty have unfold out across the galaxy, perhaps growing giant energy-harvesting artifacts or fleets of colonizing spaceships or wonderful artistic endeavors that fill the night time sky. At the very least, you’d think they’d be revealing their presence, deliberately or otherwise, by way of electromagnetic signals of one type or another. And yet we see no convincing evidence of any of it. Why? Well, there are countless possible answers, some of them quite darkish. Maybe a single, superintelligent civilization has indeed taken over the galaxy and has imposed strict radio silence on the grounds that it can be paranoid of any advantage opponents. It’s simply sitting there ready to obliterate whatever that turns into a chance.Or probably they are no longer that smart, or perhaps the evolution of an intelligence capable of making refined technological know-how is some distance rarer than we’ve got assumed. In any case, it’s best happened once on the planet in four billion years. Probably even that was once particularly lucky. Possibly we’re the first such civilization in our galaxy. Or, maybe civilization incorporates with it the seeds of its possess destruction by way of the incapability to control the applied sciences it creates. However there are countless extra hopeful solutions. For a start, we’re no longer looking that hard, and we’re spending a pitiful amount of money on it. Simplest a tiny fraction of the stars in our galaxy have particularly been looked at closely for indicators of exciting alerts. And might be we’re no longer looking the right method.Maybe as civilizations improve, they rapidly realize conversation technologies a long way more subtle and valuable than electromagnetic waves. Maybe all the motion takes situation inside the mysterious lately learned darkish topic, or dark power, that show up to account for most of the universe’s mass. Or, maybe we’re watching on the improper scale. Perhaps clever civilizations come to appreciate that life is finally just problematic patterns of understanding interacting with every other in a gorgeous way, and that that can happen more efficaciously at a small scale. So, just as on the earth, clunky stereo systems have contracted to lovely, tiny iPods, might be clever existence itself, with the intention to diminish its footprint on the environment, has became itself microscopic.So the sun procedure probably teeming with aliens, and we’re just now not noticing them. Might be the very strategies in our heads are a form of alien existence. Good, ok, that is a loopy thought. The aliens made me say it. However it’s cool that recommendations do seem to have a life all of their own and that they outlive their creators. Might be organic existence is just a passing phase. Good, inside the next 15 years, we might start seeing real spectroscopic information from promising local planets with the intention to disclose just how lifestyles-friendly they possibly.And in the meantime, SETI, the search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, is now releasing its knowledge to the general public so that hundreds of thousands of citizen scientists, might be together with you, can convey the vigor of the gang to become a member of the search. And here on earth, amazing experiments are being finished to take a look at to create life from scratch, lifestyles that perhaps very exceptional from the DNA types we know. All of this may occasionally aid us understand whether the universe is teeming with lifestyles or whether, certainly, it is simply us. Either reply, in its possess manner, is awe-inspiring, on the grounds that although we are on my own, the fact that we consider and dream and ask these questions could yet grow to be one of the vital main details concerning the universe.And i have a further piece of good information for you. The quest for capabilities and figuring out by no means gets stupid. It does not. It can be virtually the opposite. The extra you recognize, the extra robust the sector seems. And it is the loopy prospects, the unanswered questions, that pull us forward. So stay curious. .

[airoasis]

Questions No One Knows the Answers to (Full Version)

New Post has been published on https://hititem.kr/questions-no-one-knows-the-answers-to-full-version-5/

Questions No One Knows the Answers to (Full Version)

On a average day at university, endless hours are spent studying the answers to questions, but right now, we’ll do the opposite. We’re going to focus on questions where you can’t be trained the solutions seeing that they may be unknown. I used to puzzle about quite a few matters as a boy, for illustration: What would it suppose like to be a dog? Do fish suppose ache? How about bugs? Was once the massive Bang simply an accident? And is there a God? And if that is so, how are we so definite that it’s a He and not a She? Why accomplish that many harmless persons and animals undergo terrible matters? Is there quite a plan for my existence? Is the future but to be written, or is it already written and we simply are not able to see it? But then, do i have free will? I mean, who am I anyway? Am I only a organic machine? But then, why am I aware? What’s cognizance? Will robots come to be conscious someday? I imply, I kind of assumed that some day i’d be instructed the solutions to all these questions.Anyone need to comprehend, correct? Guess what? No person is aware of. Most of these questions puzzle me more now than ever. However diving into them is entertaining because it takes you to the brink of expertise, and you by no means be aware of what you’ll be able to to find there. So, two questions that nobody on earth is aware of the answer to. (tune) repeatedly after I’m on a protracted plane flight, I gaze out in any respect these mountains and deserts and take a look at to get my head round how substantial our Earth is.After which I don’t forget that there is an object we see everyday that would actually match 1,000,000 Earths within it: the solar. It appears impossibly large. However within the fine scheme of things, it can be a pinprick, certainly one of about four hundred billion stars in the Milky method galaxy, which you will see that on a clear night as a pale white mist stretched throughout the sky. And it will get worse. There are perhaps one hundred billion galaxies detectable by our telescopes. So if every superstar used to be the scale of a single grain of sand, simply the Milky way has enough stars to fill a 30-foot via 30-foot stretch of seaside three ft deep with sand. And the whole Earth does not have adequate shores to symbolize the celebs in the overall universe. The sort of seaside would proceed for literally 1000’s of millions of miles. Holy Stephen Hawking, that’s plenty of stars. However he and other physicists now think in a fact that is unimaginably greater still.I mean, initially, the a hundred billion galaxies within range of our telescopes are usually a minuscule fraction of the whole. House itself is increasing at an accelerating p.C.. The massive majority of the galaxies are setting apart from us so quick that gentle from them could certainly not attain us. Nonetheless, our physical truth here on earth is intimately related to these far-off, invisible galaxies. We are able to think of them as a part of our universe. They make up a single, tremendous edifice obeying the same physical legal guidelines and all made from the same varieties of atoms, electrons, protons, quarks, neutrinos, that make up you and me. However, up to date theories in physics, together with one referred to as string thought, at the moment are telling us there might be numerous different universes built on exceptional forms of particles, with extraordinary homes, obeying distinctive legal guidelines.Most of these universes would in no way support life, and might flash in and out of existence in a nanosecond. But however, mixed, they make up a sizeable multiverse of feasible universes in as much as eleven dimensions, proposing wonders beyond our wildest creativeness. The main version of string conception predicts a multiverse made from 10 to the 500 universes. That’s a one adopted by means of 500 zeros, a quantity so enormous that if every atom in our observable universe had its own universe, and all the atoms in all those universes each had their own universe, and also you repeated that for 2 extra cycles, you’ll still be at a tiny fraction of the complete, particularly, one thousand billion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillionth. (Laughter) but even that quantity is minuscule compared to a further quantity: infinity. Some physicists feel the space-time continuum is actually infinite and that it includes a limiteless quantity of so-called pocket universes with varying houses. How’s your brain doing? Quantum idea provides a whole new wrinkle. I imply, the theory’s been demonstrated actual past all doubt, but interpreting it is baffling, and some physicists feel that you could most effective un-baffle it in the event you think that significant numbers of parallel universes are being spawned every moment, and plenty of of those universes would without a doubt be very like the world we’re in, would incorporate a couple of copies of you.In one such universe, you would graduate with honors and marry the character of your desires, and in one more, now not a lot. Good, there are still some scientists who would say, hogwash. The one significant answer to the question of how many universes there are is one. Only one universe. And some philosophers and mystics could argue that even our possess universe is an illusion. So, as you will see, correct now there is not any agreement on this question, not even close. All we know is the answer is somewhere between zero and infinity. Good, i guess we all know one more thing. This is a pretty cool time to be learning physics. We just maybe undergoing the most important paradigm shift in talents that humanity has ever visible. (track) somewhere in the market in that huge universe there have got to most likely be numerous other planets teeming with life.But why don’t we see any proof of it? Good, that is the famous question asked by way of Enrico Fermi in 1950: the place is everybody? Conspiracy theorists declare that UFOs are traveling all the time and the reviews are simply being blanketed up, but actually, they don’t seem to be very convincing. But that leaves an actual riddle. Previously yr, the Kepler space observatory has determined 1000s of planets simply round neighborhood stars. And in the event you extrapolate that information, it appears like there could be half of one thousand billion planets simply in our possess galaxy. If any individual in 10,000 has conditions that would support a form of existence, that is still 50 million feasible life-harboring planets proper here within the Milky method.So here’s the riddle: our Earth did not kind unless about nine billion years after the massive Bang. Countless different planets in our galaxy must have fashioned prior, and given existence a danger to get underway billions, or absolutely many hundreds of thousands of years previous than happened on the earth. If just a few of them had spawned clever existence and began creating technologies, those applied sciences would have had thousands of years to grow in complexity and energy. In the world, we now have seen how dramatically technological know-how can accelerate in simply one hundred years. In thousands of years, an clever alien civilization might without difficulty have unfold out across the galaxy, perhaps growing giant energy-harvesting artifacts or fleets of colonizing spaceships or wonderful artistic endeavors that fill the night time sky. At the very least, you’d think they’d be revealing their presence, deliberately or otherwise, by way of electromagnetic signals of one type or another. And yet we see no convincing evidence of any of it. Why? Well, there are countless possible answers, some of them quite darkish. Maybe a single, superintelligent civilization has indeed taken over the galaxy and has imposed strict radio silence on the grounds that it can be paranoid of any advantage opponents. It’s simply sitting there ready to obliterate whatever that turns into a chance.Or probably they are no longer that smart, or perhaps the evolution of an intelligence capable of making refined technological know-how is some distance rarer than we’ve got assumed. In any case, it’s best happened once on the planet in four billion years. Probably even that was once particularly lucky. Possibly we’re the first such civilization in our galaxy. Or, maybe civilization incorporates with it the seeds of its possess destruction by way of the incapability to control the applied sciences it creates. However there are countless extra hopeful solutions. For a start, we’re no longer looking that hard, and we’re spending a pitiful amount of money on it. Simplest a tiny fraction of the stars in our galaxy have particularly been looked at closely for indicators of exciting alerts. And might be we’re no longer looking the right method.Maybe as civilizations improve, they rapidly realize conversation technologies a long way more subtle and valuable than electromagnetic waves. Maybe all the motion takes situation inside the mysterious lately learned darkish topic, or dark power, that show up to account for most of the universe’s mass. Or, maybe we’re watching on the improper scale. Perhaps clever civilizations come to appreciate that life is finally just problematic patterns of understanding interacting with every other in a gorgeous way, and that that can happen more efficaciously at a small scale. So, just as on the earth, clunky stereo systems have contracted to lovely, tiny iPods, might be clever existence itself, with the intention to diminish its footprint on the environment, has became itself microscopic.So the sun procedure probably teeming with aliens, and we’re just now not noticing them. Might be the very strategies in our heads are a form of alien existence. Good, ok, that is a loopy thought. The aliens made me say it. However it’s cool that recommendations do seem to have a life all of their own and that they outlive their creators. Might be organic existence is just a passing phase. Good, inside the next 15 years, we might start seeing real spectroscopic information from promising local planets with the intention to disclose just how lifestyles-friendly they possibly.And in the meantime, SETI, the search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, is now releasing its knowledge to the general public so that hundreds of thousands of citizen scientists, might be together with you, can convey the vigor of the gang to become a member of the search. And here on earth, amazing experiments are being finished to take a look at to create life from scratch, lifestyles that perhaps very exceptional from the DNA types we know. All of this may occasionally aid us understand whether the universe is teeming with lifestyles or whether, certainly, it is simply us. Either reply, in its possess manner, is awe-inspiring, on the grounds that although we are on my own, the fact that we consider and dream and ask these questions could yet grow to be one of the vital main details concerning the universe.And i have a further piece of good information for you. The quest for capabilities and figuring out by no means gets stupid. It does not. It can be virtually the opposite. The extra you recognize, the extra robust the sector seems. And it is the loopy prospects, the unanswered questions, that pull us forward. So stay curious. .

[ntrending]

An evolutionary biologist takes on the absurd bodies of superheroes

New Post has been published on https://nexcraft.co/an-evolutionary-biologist-takes-on-the-absurd-bodies-of-superheroes/

An evolutionary biologist takes on the absurd bodies of superheroes

Evolutionary biologist Shane Campbell-Staton loves reading comic books almost as much as he loves studying unusual animals. Now he’s combining his twin passions in a new podcast, The Biology of Superheroes, co-hosted by fellow geek Arien Darby. The podcast uses comic book characters to explore big ideas in science and technology. Campbell-Staton recently sat down with Nexus Media to talk about his new project, his favorite superheroes and his ongoing research into the ways climate change is driving evolution. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

You have a podcast where you talk about the biology of superheroes. Which superheroes?

We try to take characters from the comic book universe, not just superheroes, but also other figures of science fiction — dinosaurs, robots, giant monsters. We use them as archetypes to explore the place where fact meets fiction.

Let’s talk about Spider-Man, the subject of your first two podcasts.

Arguably, the thing that separates Peter Parker from other superheroes in the comic book universe is that he uses these webs. These webs are a huge part of his persona. And Spider-Man doesn’t produce spider silk in the way that a spider would. He has to engineer it.

So, the first question in that scenario is, “What would he use as inspiration?” Obviously, there is a huge diversity of spiders in the world. If you’re trying to develop a tool, you want go out into the real world and see how animals have come up with extreme solutions to solve similar problems. This is a really valid and popular means for scientists to wrap their heads around problems that are presented in the real world. It’s called bio-inspired engineering.

When we’re considering Spider-Man, one question is, “Can spider webs actually accomplish what we see in the comic books?” If we look at the biomechanics of silks, the answer turns out to be “yes.” Spider silks are extremely strong and very versatile. The drag line of spider silk, pound for pound, is stronger than steel. If you scale that up to the size of the webs that Spider-Man is producing, they could very easily support his body weight and help him catch bad guys.

How about the Flash?

One of the central plot lines for the Flash is his ability to move between parallel universes. You have numerous parallel worlds that are vibrating at slightly different frequencies, and you have slightly different versions of superheroes and other characters in these different universes. They never meet each other and they never see each other because they are vibrating at different frequencies. The Flash is able to vibrate from one universe into another universe, allowing him to explore the entire DC Comics multiverse.

If we follow the Flash on his adventures, not only do you see the same species on most of these parallel Earths — you see humans, for instance — you also see different variations of the same individuals popping up across each of these Earths. Thinking about the multiverse invites the question, “If you have four and half billion years of evolution playing out independently on each of these Earths, and you get almost the exact same result each time, what does that say about the process of evolution?”

This is a classic question in evolutionary biology: if you replay the tape of evolution, do you get the same result over and over again? This is a question that people have been chasing for decades. In some cases, in the real world, we see that the answer is “yes.” If presented with the same environmental challenges, natural selection drives independently evolving lineages down very similar trajectories.

On the other hand, there are one-off events, oddities like the duck-billed platypus. It has a bill and a beaver tail it uses to navigate through the water and locate crayfish and crustaceans and things like that. There are a lot of animals that live in very similar habitats and have very similar lifestyles, but none of them look anything like the platypus.

The DC multiverse is the ultimate biology experiment.

Exactly. In the real world, we only have one Earth, but there are ways that scientists in the real world can study repeatability. In some cases, they study islands, which act as independent universes. In other cases, they look at bacteria evolving in petri dishes. A lab full of petri dishes represents a multiverse. You can give independently evolving lineages of bacteria the same challenge to see if they find the same solutions. It’s not as cool as traversing the DC multiverse like the Flash, but very similar techniques are being used to explore the repeatability of evolution in the real world.

How did you get into comic books?

I actually got into comic books pretty late in life, when I was a graduate student doing my PhD at Harvard. In the process of writing my dissertation, I started to get pretty stressed. I needed something that was intellectual candy, something to get my mind off the rigors of academia.

I remember I was walking through Harvard Square one evening, and I passed this underground comic book shop, and in the window, I saw this comic book. It was Superman vs. Muhammad Ali. It had this really big classic cover where Muhammad Ali was facing off with Superman, and they both had boxing gloves on, and I thought, “I have to see how this ends.” Superman and Muhammad Ali face off in a room that has red-sun radiation, which basically makes Superman human, and Muhammad Ali whips his butt really thoroughly. That was the first comic book I ever bought, and it got me hooked.

I went back to the store and got a few different comic books, and that was my guilty pleasure while writing my dissertation. As I was reading comic books, I started to come up with all these really weird questions. A certain scenario would present itself in a comic book, and I would wonder about the biology behind it. This became so persistent that I taught a small course at Harvard on the biology of superheroes. We talked about Batman. We talked about Ironman. We talked about zombies. We talked about the Flash and a few other comic book characters. A lot of the undergrads came away from that course having learned a lot of the classic ideas that they would have learned in an intro bio course. That’s what spawned the podcast.

I’ll be an assistant professor at UCLA starting in July, and that’s actually the first course that I’m going to be teaching at UCLA. We’re talking about everything from evolution and physiology to brain machine interfacing and artificial intelligence.

You study how animals adapt to climate change. Do you talk about climate change in your podcast?

In our last episode, we talked about Jurassic Park and resurrecting ancient species. Obviously, this is a really fun topic to talk about. I interviewed Beth Shapiro, a geneticist who focuses on conservation genetics and the genomes of ancient species, and we talked about whether it’s possible to get DNA from dinosaurs and how we go from getting genes from an extinct species to creating a living, breathing animal. That’s all really fun to think about, but the last question is “Why would we do this?”

If we’re not going to resurrect ancient dinosaurs and have fun eating cotton candy watching them do their thing, why would we invest so much in this technology? Well, it turns out that that same technology is being used right now to help conserve species that are on the verge of extinction and potentially bring back species that have been driven extinct by human activity.

We just got news that the last male northern white rhinoceros died. Obviously, we have species like the dodo bird and the passenger pigeon and the black-footed ferret, which is on the verge of extinction. That brings up the idea of genetic rescue. The ability to tinker with the genomes of a species and reintroduce improved versions of those genomes into wild populations to help them recover — that same technology would be required to bring back a wooly mammoth.

What species do you focus on in your research?

I’m a herpetologist by heart, so I work mostly on reptiles and amphibians. A lot of my recent work is studying how changes in climate affect the form and function of wild populations. I published a paper last year looking at the effects of the polar vortex storms that swept the Southeast in the winter of 2013 to 2014. The polar vortex is a pattern of Arctic air that spirals around our poles. As the planet warms, the poles are warming faster than mid-latitudes, which causes that pattern to become more wavy, and it sends these periodic bouts of polar air to mid-latitudes. Here, in North America, it causes these extreme cold events.

It just so happened that in late 2013, I was studying the evolution of cold tolerance in this one reptile species, the green anole lizard, which is native to the United States, but its ancestors come from Cuba, which is very warm and thermally stable. So I had data on cold tolerance in these populations. I had data on gene expression.

So, I took advantage of this particular event to ask, “In the survivors of this storm, do we see any signature of natural selection taking place?” And the answer, in this case, was “yes.” We saw that in the southern part of species range, the survivors of the storm were significantly more cold-tolerant than the population was before the storm.

So much of the talk about climate change is that it’s happening so fast that plants and animals can’t adapt, so it’s surprising to hear that you see that change in such a short period of time.

I think this is something that we are increasingly coming to understand. When we think about contemporary evolution, this is a field that is only a couple of decades old. Now, we’re starting to see an uptick in the number of people who are focused on trying to understand how human perturbations to the environment are not only affecting ecology and extinction, gene flow and species distribution, but also the process of evolution. And we are starting to see evidence that animals around the world are adapting.

Jason Munshi-South is doing work in New York City looking at mice that are adapted to urban environments, and he’s seeing very strong signatures of selection in diet. Mice that are living in cities are eating a lot of the junk food that people leave around, while their cousins in more natural habitats are eating grasses and seeds and insects and that sort of thing. In response, the genes that are involved in digestive processes seem to be diverging between cities and natural habitats.

Pollution is also a factor. Andrew Whitehead’s group has been studying pollution adaptation in small fish called killifish. He’s shown that these animals have colonized these very polluted waters several different times, and we see these repeated signatures of selection in parts of the genome that help them to cope with the deleterious effects of being in these polluted waters.

That feels like cause for some small measure of cautious optimism.

I think it’s easy, when you hear that things are adaptively evolving, to think that things are going to be okay, but we still don’t really know. Because the thing is, when we talk about natural selection, that comes at a cost: death. When you have an extreme pressure that has a large death toll, the individuals who are left behind are better adapted, but in the meantime, all of this genetic variation that would have been in the population gets lost because everything is driven down this one specific trajectory.

In the case of the polar vortex storm, what happens if it’s a drought next time? Or a heat wave? Lineages that may have been better adapted for those types of events may be lost now. We just don’t know. There is lot more data that needs to be gathered to understand how the different types of selective pressures — from extreme weather events to urbanization to pollution—play out over longer periods of time to determine who survives, who dies, and how that translates into extinction and speciation and other important biological processes.

So, who are your favorite superheroes?

It’s funny because I think most of my favorite superheroes are actually scientists. Spider-Man, obviously, is a favorite of mine. Peter Parker is one of the most brilliant minds in the Marvel universe. Bruce Banner — I love me some Hulk. He’s one of my go-to characters. Batman is obviously classic. There is just so much to that character, so much depth and history. He’s got a dark side that you don’t see in many other characters.

As we move along with the podcast, we’ll continue to think about aliens and giant monsters and robots and artificial intelligence and all of these fantastical ideas, and explore the science behind them. I think it’s really important to bring these conversations to the real world. We’re being thrown so much information from all over the place. It’s not necessarily all from reputable sources. If we can go through this mental exercise of separating fact from fiction when it comes to these fantastical ideas like comic book superheroes, maybe that will help us to better discern fact from fiction when it comes to the more serious issues, like climate change.

Jeremy Deaton writes for Nexus Media, a syndicated newswire covering climate, energy, policy, art and culture. You can follow him @deaton_jeremy.

Written By Jeremy Deaton