#And this being despite several panels showing him exercising and much of it being things for flexibility and cardio

[azol-otl]

Honestly the more I hear people calling Jason a tank, the more I think that the people writing it are just short

[pan-of-light]

Invasion

[Originally posted on AO3]

 Riddle was sure he hated it when Floyd’s attention was on him. Nothing good ever followed, and the worst part was that Floyd was so volatile there’s no way for Riddle to even predict what might happen until he’s as red as a rose and shouting unbecomingly at the other. Actually, no, that wasn’t quite right. There was something even worse than being in Floyd’s line of sight: It was being completely ignored.

 Of course, with someone as moody as him there had always been moments of peace and disinterest, but this had been over a week! After almost two years dealing with that giant shadow behind him, threatening to wrap around him and devour him entirely, to go so long without even a “Goldfishie!” echoing behind him was unthinkable. Riddle didn’t believe Floyd could be planning to do something to him, specifically, but every day that passed when their paths crossed and he didn’t even receive a glance seemed to add to the weight in his chest, to the point it became unbearable.

 He tried not to think about him. The school had been busy enough as it is, from everything like the normal hassles of a new year to Overblot going to “rare condition few had even heard about” to nearly half a dozen cases in as many months. Everyone was busy, and as Azul’s right hand man, Floyd should be, too. Even though Riddle constantly saw him loitering around and doing weird things, well, Azul’s success even after his contracts were destroyed proved the man had a method to his usage of the Leech siblings. He had to, right?

 Shaking his head, Riddle tried to focus on something else. Summer was approaching, and with it, swimming exercises constantly in PE. Last year he'd done… Acceptably enough, but he had to try harder to set a better example this year. Of course, thinking about swimming reminded him of mermen, but Floyd was not going to magically appear before him, and his formal request to access the pool to practice before classes wasn’t going to magically write himself. And Riddle could only force one of those things to happen.

 Floyd would never follow his will, anyway. Same grade, different dorms, Riddle had nothing over him, and even if he did, he doubted any of it would work. Floyd was someone who didn’t go with the flow, seeming instead to be outside of it entirely, reaching in to mess with his head and make his stomach do nervous flips before retreating back into his own little world, where Riddle could never reach.

 Being around Floyd felt a lot like drowning in feelings Riddle wasn’t familiar with and didn’t know if he wanted to be. And he hated not knowing himself.

--------

 Professor Vargas accepted Riddle’s paperwork with ease, praising him for demonstrating the extra initiative to tone his muscles. After paperwork came the key, the empty locker room before morning classes, and finally, the pool.

 It was a large, heated indoor pool, filled with mineral water to minimize chlorine exposure to non-human students, and maintained clean and warm thanks to volunteers in the sports clubs, solar panels, and a small but well applied use of magic every now and then. Despite the best efforts of exterior illumination, Riddle still couldn’t see much when he looked down, staring over the edge into the pool. There was no reason to be scared. He’d been here several times the past year for class. The fact that the early hour left the water looking like a polished black mirror, only giving back his own stare and nothing else was unsettling, but could easily be explained by the time.

 The water was calm, until it wasn’t. Riddle was supposed to be alone. He thought he was alone. But as he’d been distracted by his own contemplation, something cold and strong shot up from the water, grabbing his ankles in a vice grip and dragging him in.

 Riddle barely had time to hold his breath, and it didn’t matter much. The water wasn’t heated at the moment, and the sudden cold knocked what little air he’d managed to hold onto out of him as he was dragged all the way down, until he could feel his feet touch the bottom of the deep end of the pool. And as suddenly as he was grabbed, he was free, kicking himself up to the surface to breathe.

 He turned his head around frantically, searching for whatever had grabbed him, cursing his carelessness. His pen was back in the lockers, and while he could use magic without it, in an unfamiliar environment under attack by an unknown assailant he was at a disadvantage. Especially when he’d been dragged to a part of the pool he couldn’t stand in, having to bob awkwardly to avoid going under. He couldn’t even begin to imagine who it could be. Even after he began making amends, Riddle was under no impression he’d gotten his dorm mates, or the rest of the school, to forgive him. There probably wasn’t a single person in the school he could think of that he hadn’t exploded at or threatened, and generally just driven away. A few Unbirthday Parties didn’t make up for his time as a tyrant. He knew that better than everyone else.

 But without proper footing and lighting, he was little more than a sitting duck in the water. He’d see a ripple here, a bubble there, but whatever caused them was always nowhere near the area by the time his eyes could focus on it. By the time the panic and cold left his brain enough so he could think clearly, so that he could realize how his attacker could stay underwater for so long, it was too late, and the great wave formed by Floyd emerging behind him and leaping onto him pushed him underwater again.

 Bubbles sprang around him as Floyd tried to say something that Riddle couldn’t hear, even though Floyd’s mouth was so dangerously close to his ear, even though he was wrapped tightly in a hug against the merman’s smooth skin. Every fear and worry he’d felt the past few minutes vanished, being replaced by a familiar irritation. He was angry, of course. Angry at how being treated like this was making him smile, like all was right in the world.

 And a bit angry he couldn’t breathe. He tried elbowing Floyd to get let go, and while his attempt was a valiant failure, Floyd got the point and released him, surfacing right next to him with the same dopey grin he always had when it was Time To Bother Riddle And Fill His Stomach With Butterflies. Angry butterflies, Riddle’d insist, if he ever tried admitting it out loud. (He would not).

 “F-Floyd!” Riddle sputtered, ungracefully, “What are you doing here?!”

 (Riddle thought this was a valid question. Considering Floyd’s attendance records, he hadn’t even been totally sure the other could be awake at this hour).

 “Ehh? But I should be asking you that, Goldfishie~ Me and Jade always use the pool since the leg potion gets uncomfortable at times. You’re the intruder here, you know?”

 Shit, Jade. Riddle had been so caught up in Floyd’s unusual behavior that Jade’s usual behavior had slipped his mind entirely, and he started looking around for the less openly evil twin, earning a laugh from Floyd.

 “Jade’s busy helping Azul this week. I was thinking it was going to be totally boring to swim alone, but then you showed up, Goldfishie~! Isn’t this great?”

 This was the worst possible situation. At least warm water would have given Riddle as excuse for his outrageous blushes, but of course someone used to living under the sea would have turned off the heaters. He was tempted to just call Cater to come paint him the proper color for “still in cold water”, honestly.

 “Not great at all,” Riddle tried to maintain his composure, and he didn’t even need to look at Floyd’s smug grin to know he was failing. “I came here to practice swimming, and I won’t have you bother me.”

 Floyd muttered a lame okay as Riddle swam to the edge of the pool, grabbed the corners to stabilize himself and kick off, trying to at least start one lap down the pool. It shouldn’t have surprised him that when he opened his eyes to make sure he wasn’t veering off his lane that Floyd was right below him, matching his pace easily and even giving him a little wave when he realized Riddle was looking, almost making him choke on pool water in frustration.

 It was a small miracle Riddle reached the other end, clutching the pool’s edge as Floyd popped up behind him like the world’s soggiest Jack-in-the-Box and crowded him against the wall. It felt kind of odd. Usually Riddle had to strain his neck to get a proper look at Floyd’s face, even in his dorm uniform, but in the pool like this, he could actually look straight into his mismatched eyes. Far too close for comfort. Or not close enough. He couldn’t tell.

 “You really need to swim more if you already can’t breathe just from that…” Floyd teased, poking Riddle’s cheek. It had nothing to do with swimming! It was just too much. Closeness. Nerves. Something he could never command or push away. No matter how little Riddle wanted, Floyd just gave him more and more.

 So Riddle decided to take more, interrupting whatever was coming out of Floyd’s mouth next with a kiss. He had to move from gabbing onto the pool's edge to Floyd's shoulder to not go under, but it just meant the kiss was even closer. It was even a small victory, the first time he managed to make Floyd stop and stay still, even if for a second before the other responded with more, pushing Riddle against the tiled wall and trapping him there with his larger frame, while his mouth opened just a bit, inviting and dangerous and completely willing. Riddle wasn't discouraged by the sharp teeth, even trying to show off his own with a bite to Floyd's lower lip, which was responded to in kind before the kiss progressed into a more 'proper' thing, with lips and tongue and just the tiniest taste of blood that neither of them really knew who came from and neither of them cared, too invested in taking in more of each other.

As small a thing as it was, Riddle considered it a loss when he had to pull away from the kiss first to breathe. Even if he could see Floyd cheating, keeping his neck underwater and feeling his gils move, it was a loss he didn't like. So he kissed back, again and again, letting Floyd aimlessly drift them around the pool as they slowly tried to explore each other. At one point he even found himself completely submerged, only able to breathe the air Floyd gave him, unable to hear or see anything else as the water muffled and hid away everything but the two of them. He felt a bit sad when that ended, as Floyd had gotten bored and tried to change the positions of their lips again and finally remembered Riddle couldn't breathe underwater unassisted.

 It was only when Riddle surfaced and saw the sun shining in from the skylights at the edge of the pool area that he realized how much time had passed. The wall clock told him he hadn’t missed any classes yet, but that yet was dangerously close to going away entirely. He let out a curse under his breath, trying to untangle himself from Floyd, who’d used his unfairly long tail to wrap around him so  thoroughly   it was a wonder Riddle hadn’t noticed how close they were before. Or maybe he’d just been too intoxicated in finally getting something from Floyd to care.

 Floyd, however, refused to stop squeezing him.

 “Let go, Floyd, we have class!”  

   “Ugh, don’t wanna.”

 Riddle was gonna strike that expression from his vocabulary someday. But first, he needed to find a way to regain use of his legs. And arms. His whole body would be preferable, actually.

 “I’ll cut you a deal, how does that sound? Let me go now, and after classes and club activities are over, you come by Heartslabyul and I’ll entertain you as long as you want.” thankfully, not an empty promise. He had no outstanding prefect duties to work at, he could do his homework while Floyd was at basketball, and if any troubles arised, well, Trey could handle it for a night. Part of him trying to change should include him getting some nights off to himself, after all.

 “Hmm….” Floyd seemed deep in thought for a while, before releasing Riddle entirely (and leaving him a bit disoriented without the giant merman holding him afloat), getting out of the pool with practiced ease as the potion he used to look human took effect again now that he was no longer submerged. Thankfully for Riddle’s heart, it also came with pants. He wasn’t sure what he’d do if he ended up staring at a stark naked Floyd right now.

 “I’ll hold you to that, Goldfishie~” and with that, Floyd was gone, leaving Riddle alone in the cold pool. The temperature did wonders to rapidly ice his teenage libido as he considered the consequences of the deal he’d proposed Floyd. Idly, he traced the bite marks on his lips with his tongue. Those consequences would surely be worth it.

[aforrestofstuff]

What do you think the OPM characters' guilty pleasures would be? I feel like Tatsu loves soap operas and Atomic Samurai secretly loves a really popular boy band, like SMAP

Thanks for your request, anon! Sorry this took me so long to get to, you were buried in my inbox lol. But I hope this was worth the wait because oh boy this required all 3 of my brain cells.

Tornado of Terror: As you said, soap operas. She also loves candy apples in canon. But...she also is a HUGE fan of those really cheesy Cosmopolitan magazines that have all of the personality quizzes and the “which hot male celeb would date you” scenarios. She doesn’t fall for it one bit. In fact, she hate reads those fuckers in the same way that people pay to go see bad movies. It’s fun.

Silverfang: Yoga and following along to some cheesy-ass 80s workout videos. I’ve said he likes yoga in a previous headcanon, but he also likes to exercise along to some obnoxious 80s pop while some dude in a leotard instructs him on what to do from a TV screen. He wears sweatbands and legwarmers, too. The whole shebang. He only does it when he’s alone, though. Sometimes he’ll try to teach yoga to his disciples as a way to help them decompress after a long training session, but his workout tapes are his best-kept secret.

Atomic Samurai: I don’t know what a SMAP is, but he’s definitely got some questionable music choices going on considering he’s... well, the way that he is. I’d say he likes to listen to old country, like Marty Robbins and Glen Campbell. It’s really funny because you’ve got this intimidating man from Japan (or a fictional universe basically set in Japan) with a badass katana and shit but inside that empty head of his, there’s just a faint “out in the west Texas town of El Paso....”

Child Emperor: Picking at scabs. He’s often on his knees fixing shit in his lab, and he probably gets burned all the damn time from playing around with lasers so he’s undoubtedly always has a wound healing somewhere. Whenever he’s working on something, he’ll just absentmindedly pick at his scabs. It’s a bad habit and he knows it, but nothing beats the feeling of peeling off an entire patch of that shit. So satisfying.

Metal Knight: Buying books. He doesn’t even read them. He just buys bigass novels with smart-sounding names to fill up his library because he thinks it’ll make his dick grow another three inches or some shit. One of the few things he likes in this world (besides homicide) is the smell of a new book. If he’s feeling particularly pissy, he’ll go into his library and just ssssssnnnnnnnnnniififfffffffffff. He spends an outrageous amount of money on it. If he has anyone over (which is unlikely, but hypothetically speaking) and they mention his library by asking something like “have you read all of these?” It’ll be one of the few times in his life that he’ll feel shame.

King: Reading and writing fanfiction based on his favorite video game/anime series. Nobody knows he does this except his small following online, of course. And even more so, nobody online knows he’s an ultra-popular S-Class hero who’s friends with the most powerful man on earth. He’s actually a pretty decent writer, he just doesn’t take himself too seriously so the plotline to his stories tend to get a little haywire and overly self-indulgent. Let him have his fun. He just wants to be a Sailor Scout.

Zombieman: Singing. He actually used to be a good singer (he sounded like a discount Steve Perry back in the day), but constant smoking really fucked up his voice. He might as well have lungs the size of grapes because he can’t carry a note for more than 2 seconds without wheezing like an accordion with asthma. He’s never sang in front of anyone before because he thinks it’s silly thing that isn’t worth showing off. Play anything from The Eagles though, and he’ll have a hard time resisting.

Drive Knight: He likes to open up panels in his arms and legs to play with the wires (basically a robot’s version of nerve endings, I’m assuming) just so he can feel something. It’s kind of sad because he doesn’t experience pain or the cold or being tickled... (I know what y’all are thinking and you’d better STOP). So he sometimes takes it upon himself to dick around with his insides and dip his toe into what it feels like to be human, even if it’s just for a little bit. He’s super secretive about it (he’s just secretive about everything, really) because he doesn’t want anyone to know that he desires something outside of being a weapon of mass destruction justice.

Pig God: His whole schtick is basically indulging in a guilty pleasure — pigging out on delicious food with no regard whatsoever for one’s overall health. Other than that, however, he does like to collect body pillows. There, I said it. All he fucking does is eat and he’s too much of a big boi to be going out 24/7, so he’s gotta be on the internet/watching anime/playing video games/reading manga during all of that downtime between his stints of doing hero work. His bed is fucking ginormous to handle all of that big boy-ness and on it, he has his body pillow nest. He rests on a throne made for kings. A true icon.

Superalloy Darkshine: Also working out along to some cheesy 80s exercise videos. His hero outfit was inspired from what those ravishing instructors would wear on the television. Well, it was supposed to be a full leotard but it ripped every time he flexed just a tiny bit so the speedo is the only thing that’s left. He’s gotta hella rhythm and keeps up with the music using little to no effort. Although, he can’t go too hard because he’s also a big boi and he’ll literally shake the entire building if he gets too turnt up. Dance muscle boy, dance.

Watchdog Man: Eating too many dog treats lol. Sometimes while he’s stationed on his little podium thing, visitors will leave him little offerings like dog treats and other miscellaneous food items/toys. He never takes them or eats them in front of people, but he often brings everything home with him after a long day just to gobble that shit up. He’s gained a little weight since he started doing it but you can’t even notice it because his suit is hella bulky. Some of it is due in part to stress-eating because being a dog and dude at the same time is hectic, but it’s honest work.

Flashy Flash: Racing shit. Whenever he’s on his travels during, say, assassination missions or hero work, he gets hella bored really quickly. So, to help with this, he’ll often race birds or planes flying in the sky on his way to his destination to see who’s quicker (it’s always him). Sometimes he’ll even play catch with himself by throwing a pine cone or something and running to the place he guesses it’ll land before it even touches the ground. He just does a ton of weird speedster shit whenever he’s bored and he’ll deny it if anyone asks.

Genos: Purposefully putting a little bit too much oil on his joints after each upgrade so he’ll be as slick as a salamander. It’s a really funny feeling to be able to move your limbs with little to no resistance without having to worry about popping or breaking anything. It just makes him feel so agile despite being like, a hunk of actual metal. If he wasn’t so uptight, he would loosen the screws in his fingers to he can bend them almost all the way back (he’s actually thought about it a few times), but both Dr. Kuseno and his 3 remaining braincells attested to that. He just likes to tinker around with his body and see what weird shit he can do. It’s a bad habit because it’s led to a few things being broken on multiple occasions.

Metal Bat: Zenko’s shitty pop music. Whenever he drops her off at school or piano practice, he’ll immediately go home and blast that shit on full volume (because he’s practically deaf from always jumping out of falling buildings and continuously blasting music in his earbuds) while doing chores and the like. He’s one of those people that HAVE to have something going on in the background as they’re getting shit done. He’d rather be caught dead than listening to the OPM equivalent of Taylor Swift because he knows Zenko would never let him live it down.

Tanktop Master: Wearing suits around the house when he’s not even going anywhere. He’s got to wear his tanktop 24/7 whenever he’s in public to keep up The Image (which he has no problem with, he genuinely loves the tanktop ideology) but he also needs to feel fancy every once and a while. So, if he happens to have the time while in between appearances, he’ll prance around in a suit tailored just for him. Because he’s so fucking huge that he had to pay someone a large sum to custom make an outfit that actually fits. He is 7-motherfucking-feet tall. 7.

Puri-Puri Prisoner: Making Valentine’s Day cards all times of the year. Listen, it gets boring as hell in prison. Sometimes the guards will let all of the inmates have a little glitter and glue to keep themselves busy because no harm can come of a little arts and crafts, right? He likes to make cards on the daily just to let all of his lovers know how much he appreciates them. If they express even the slightest amount of disdain for his creations, he’ll spent the next week crying in the darkest corner of his cell block. He also likes origami. Origami is huge in prison because it’s hella time-consuming and guaranteed to calm a busy mind. His favorite things to make are little unicorns.

Amai Mask: Bath bombs. There have been several mishaps in which he’s used a poorly-made bath bomb and came out of the tub looking like Shrek but he’s grown and lot since then, okay? After a long day or a particularly stressful concert, he’ll sink into some hot water and drop a ball of lavender-scented goodness in there. It’s become a bit of an addiction because he’s got multiple cabinets dedicated solely to his collection, but at least he always smells divine.

Iaian: Shakespearean dramas. Kama got him hooked on theater shit and he’s since ripped through all of the most well-known plays. He thinks in iambic pentameter. It wasn’t always noticeable since he’s a quiet, well-reserved guy but his fellow disciples and Kami have recently noticed that he’s developed a bit of a dramatic flair. Even worse, he’s started calling himself a knight whenever he puts on his armor. Everyone prays it’s just a phase but seeing as how stubborn Iaian is, that seeks highly unlikely. Kami is dying inside because he can’t handle another drama nerd.

Okamaitachi: Soap operas, like Tatsumaki. Kama is the most dramatic out of all of the disciples so it’s only natural that she’d like the most dramatic genre of any show out there. She doesn’t exactly watch them religiously though. She’s the type of viewer to drop off the face of the earth for three seasons and come back without knowing what the fuck is going on (because the disciples have limited access to cable due to Kami’s dumbassery and ignorance to anything technology-related), but still cry during the finale anyway because oh no these people are so hot and one of them is deaaaaaad and the other one is that person’s long-lost sister....

Bushidrill: Taking alcohol from Atomic Samurai’s stash every so often. Bushidrill knows what the good shit is and he could buy it himself if he wanted to, but why would he when there’s a perfectly good alcoholic to steal from living right down the hall? He only takes in small doses because, believe it or not—he’s smart, but Kami isn’t gonna notice regardless of whether or not Bushi takes 1 or 5 bottles at a time because the old shit couldn’t spot a purple raccoon if it was 3 feet in front of him. There have been times where Bushi has opened bottles of Kami’s alcohol right in front of him just to play God and he always, without missing a beat, says “Oh, we have the same taste. How neat.”

Fubuki: I’ve said this before in a previous headcanon, but she has a mild obsession with Victorian aesthetic. She’s got a small collection of semi-authentic ballgowns that cost upwards of a-fuckton-of-money each, but anything’s worth it to be able to play dress-up with Lily. Fubuki’s favorite thing is making Lily feel beautiful because everyone has been an insecure teenager at one point and she knows how it feels to not be comfortable in one’s own skin. This isn’t exactly a guilty pleasure because she’s not guilty about it, but it’s almost gotten to a point where an intervention is needed. She’s got so many damn dresses and sooooo much fine china....

Saitama: Retail therapy, lol. Saitama is only good at budgeting because he has no choice given how fucking poor he is, but give this boy even a little bit of leeway and he’ll buy the ugliest clothes (to which he thinks look poppin’) and the best meats without even batting an eye. His entire manga collection is the product of him having little to no self control the moment he realizes he’s got a bit of money to spend on himself. This is also the only time he’ll experiment with cooking because now he can actually afford to fuck up, literally.

Mumen Rider: Sweets! I’ve said this in a previous hc but he has a major sweet tooth. You can substitute salt for sugar in any given recipe and he’ll see it as a major improvement because he just goes absolutely buckwild for anything sweet. His pancreas is suffering, but he believes nothing feels better than curling up under the covers on a rainy day with a heaping helping of milk chocolate. The only thing that makes him feel better after getting beat to shit is a kiss on the cheek and box of his favorite cookies (and some bananas, lol).

Sonic: Like Flash, he also likes racing things. But, in addition to that, his guilty pleasure is doing his own hair in elaborate hairstyles (when it was longer). He’s pretty much homeless so he’s got a lot of time to himself in between murders. This is when you can find him sitting in the woods somewhere braiding flowers into his hair and tying it off with a moss ribbon. He’d never admit he does this because he’s a big macho man and he’d probably cry.

Garou: Spicy chips. I’ve said this before in a previous hc, but he absolutely inhales his food without even tasting it half the time so it’s not even like he gets to enjoy the flavor that much. He just likes the burn because he’s a shithead. He also doesn’t fear death or a torn-up asshole, so he’ll eat an entire family-sized bag of the OPM-universe equivalent to Takis without even batting an eye. He’s been beat to shit so many times that the agony that comes with downing so much spice is lost on him. He doesn’t even need water. It’s insane. Someone stop this madman at once.

[tsarisfanfiction]

Wax and Feathers

Fandom: Thunderbirds Rated: Gen Genre: Hurt/Comfort/Family Characters: Scott, Gordon, Virgil, John, Tracy family

Sometimes limits need to be broken. But a limit is there for a reason, and breaking them has consequences. Episode tag for 3.20 "Icarus"

It was fact that everything had a limit. No matter who, or what, there came a point when they just couldn't push any further. This was even true for International Rescue.

Scott liked to pretend it wasn't. Acknowledging limits felt like giving up, but when Thunderbird Two went underwater, or into space, and barely survived the experiences, or Five's immensely strong structure cracked under too much gravity, those limits almost took the lives of his brothers. So, as much as he hated them, he couldn't quite ignore the fact that limits existed.

Thunderbird One was the fastest aircraft in existence. The idea that speed could ever be an issue for her was ludicrous. Her full capability was rarely exercised, unnecessary in all but the direst conditions and, as John was fond of saying, everything Brains designed had a huge safety margin. Even her limit wasn't really her limit; Scott had never tried to push her more out of respect for his father's impressive record than anything else. He didn't want to know if he could beat it. Not without his Dad watching, anyway.

Something was wrong. Experienced pilot, more or less one with his Thunderbird from so many flight hours together, Scott knew the moment he engaged the VTOL to leave the air show and head for home that Thunderbird One wasn't going to make it back without considerable skill and a healthy dose of luck. The noise of her engines was just off kilter to usual, a change that he could feel more than hear it was so subtle.

Subtle, but there. The controls weren't one with him. For the first time in a long time, Scott actually had to dedicate conscious thought to them, counting carefully the beats before the next shift to account for the airspeed. Ever his Thunderbird, One worked as closely with him as she could, responding to his touches, but it was impossible to fall into her usual rhythm.

"Scott?"

He ignored the hologram of his brother appearing in his line of vision, focusing on the readouts flickering up instead and not even daring to spare the time to swipe the floating image away.

"Scott!"

Mach 1.3 seemed to be the sweet spot, Thunderbird One purring along almost as though nothing was wrong, but it was tough to keep her at exactly that speed without autopilot – and with something seriously wrong somewhere in her engines, Scott refused to trust autopilot.

"Thunderbird One, respond!"

John barked in that tone that meant answer me or I'll take control of your Thunderbird. Anyone else taking control of One right now would be disaster. Scott responded.

"What?"

Short, curt. Uncharacteristically so, even for him at his most stressed.

"Thunderbird One's flight pattern is erratic. Are you okay?" His brother sounded worried. Scott didn't have the concentration to spare on reassuring him.

"Fine."

"You don't sound fine."

Scott ignored him as Thunderbird One shuddered. Whatever was wrong in her engine wasn't fixing itself, and instead seemed to be worsening steadily. He was still several hundred miles from base.

Gritting his teeth, he slowed to sub-sonic flight. At least now if she crashed, he had a chance of walking away from it.

"Scott what's going on?" Virgil's hologram appeared beside John's. Gordon quickly flickered into life to complete the trio of concerned looks. "Why have you dropped speed? Did something happen?"

"We're ahead of you, slow poke," Gordon chimed in. "Feel like doing the dishes for once?"

"Gordon!" Virgil snapped. "Scott, speed up or I'm turning around."

He opened his mouth to protest, instinct rebelling at the notion of his brothers coming back to help him, before common sense prevailed. Thunderbird One was deteriorating too quickly. Either he landed her now, while he was over land, or he would get an unwelcome swim somewhere in the Pacific Ocean.

Thunderbird One had hit her limit. She wouldn't make it back.

"John," he said. "Somewhere remote I can land. Now."

"Scott?" Virgil asked, but John's F.A.B cut across him. Scott gritted his teeth as Thunderbird One juddered again, more fiercely this time. Alarms began to wail, belatedly telling him something was wrong with his 'bird.

"Scott, what's going on?" Virgil demanded.

John was still silent, hopefully calculating somewhere he could land with minimal damage and audience.

"I don't know," he lied. "Some sort of engine trouble."

He knew exactly what had happened. Thunderbird One's operating limit was Mach 19. Her top speed was Mach 20. In pursuing Icarus, he'd pushed her past Mach 21.

His brothers thought he'd stuck to Mach 19, closed in using Kayo's flight path, and not sped up past that until he'd hooked Icarus, at which point he was being effectively towed so the only strain was on the tow cable.

At their comparative speeds, the sudden strain from a craft going Mach 19 latching onto a craft reaching Mach 22 would have torn both ships apart. A difference of Mach 3 was no small feat. In order to keep both intact – and consequently both pilots alive – Thunderbird One had had to attempt to match speed. It hadn't gone perfectly, still enough of a difference that the ships had threatened to tear apart, but he'd caught her and slowed Icarus down at least for a while.

"Sending co-ordinates now," John told him, and Scott glanced up at the new destination as they flashed up, making the adjustments to his course. Dimly, he could hear the lower roar of Two's engines over the sound of One's struggling and despite himself relaxed slightly. The sound of a Thunderbird really was the sweetest thing to hear when in trouble.

It was not his best landing, not by a long shot. He tried to set her down gently, feather-light as usual, but the various small shifts in the engine power required to land a supersonic jet proved to be the final straw for his poor, damaged 'bird. With a concerning snap from somewhere behind him, the engines cut out entirely just before the landing struts engaged and she ploughed, nose-first, into the dirt.

"Scott!" a chorus of brothers' voices sounded, and he groaned, straightening up and bringing a hand to his head. No whiplash, hopefully no concussion either he self-diagnosed as he pushed the restraints up and rolled his shoulders. There was sure to be some bruising from that, but nothing worse.

"Thunderbird One, respond!" John snapped as One shuddered in the familiar way that meant her sister was landing right next to her.

"Scott!" Gordon's voice sounded through the comms in stereo with a faint noise from outside One.

"I'm okay," he told them both, fumbling for the emergency override and opening the cockpit. Gordon leapt in before he could get out, pushing him back into his seat.

"We're gonna be the judges of that," his younger brother told him. "Seriously, what the hell happened?" Scott suffered through the brief medical exam, lengthened by the arrival of Virgil who promptly took over from Gordon and did it all again. It spoke volumes of how worried they were that Gordon didn't protest that he'd done it already.

"She couldn't quite hold long enough," Scott admitted. "Something in her engine's broken." He tried to stand, itching to go and see the damage for himself, but his brothers stopped him.

"I'll check the damage," Virgil said, stepping back. "You and that concussion of yours are staying right there until I get back."

"What concussion?" Scott demanded, then flinched as Gordon's gloved hand brushed against the back of his head.

"That one," his blond brother told him. "Why didn't you put your helmet on?"

"Wasn't time," he defended himself. Gordon raised an eyebrow.

"If I could get mine on with a volcano landing on top of me, you could have got yours on when you knew there was a problem." Scott flinched, mind flickering back to the nightmarish sight of the crumpled Thunderbird Four and her limp aquanaut as Penelope pulled him out of the wreckage.

There went any chance of sleep tonight.

He was saved from having to reply by Virgil's reappearance. The dark-haired Tracy looked grim.

"She's not flying anywhere," he declared bluntly. "Her main engine core's completely burnt out. Two'll have to carry her back." Scott had feared as such.

"But Two's already got a full load," Gordon pointed out. "She can't carry One and Four at the same time."

"I'll just have to drop Four off then come back," Virgil sighed. "Gordon, wait here with Scott. Make sure he doesn't do anything stupid. I won't be long."

"F.A.B."

Scott bristled at the implication he might try and get her airborne again. He wanted her home in one piece, and he knew the only way that would happen was by the grace of Virgil and Two now.

The behemoth in question lifted away from the ground slowly, only to engage her thrusters to full as soon as she was fully in the air and disappear off in the blink of an eye. It was easy to forget that although she was sluggish compared to One, Two was still an incredibly fast craft. And Virgil wasn't hanging around.

He went to stand up again, and growled at Gordon as his younger brother put a restraining hand on his shoulder.

"You've got a concussion, Scott," the aquanaut reminded him.

"So you've said," he retorted. "But concussion or not, I'm getting out of this chair and seeing the damage for myself so get out of the way."

Gordon did not get out of the way. But he did, after a moment, remove the hand from his shoulder and offer it instead. Scott tried to deny that he appreciated the help as the interior of his beloved ship swam slightly before his eyes.

"You'll be riding back in Two anyway," the blond menace shrugged. Scott ignored him as he stumbled his way down through the fuselage to the main engine. The internal access panel was still open from Virgil's investigation, and immediately he could see why Virgil hadn't been gone long.

Burnt out was a rather understated way to describe the charred lump of metal that had once housed the engine core, and his engineer brother hadn't even bothered to mention the relay. It was sheered clean in half – clearly the snap he'd heard as his 'bird had fallen the last few metres from the sky. No doubt her other engines were in a similar condition.

Virgil was right. There was no way Thunderbird One would be able to get back in the air under her own power.

"Brains is going to kill me," he groaned, pressing a hand to his face.

"Join the club, bro," Gordon chimed in, before giving off a low whistle. "Woah, how the hell did that even happen?" Scott shrugged, unwilling to admit that Thunderbird One had gone too fast.

"Scott," John buzzed in from his comms channel. "I just reviewed Thunderbird One's flight telemetry. What were you doing at Mach 21.7?"

"Catching a plane," he said, overriding Gordon's yelp of "Mach what?

"No wonder her engines are fried!" the aquanaut continued. "Thunderbird One's top speed is Mach 19. Nine. Teen."

"Technically that's her operating limit," Scott corrected. "Her top speed is Mach 20."

"Mach twenty one, Scott. Twenty one is higher than twenty. My point still stands."

"Point seven," John corrected Gordon. "He reached Mach twenty one point seven."

"That's even worse!" Gordon cried dramatically, hands in his hair. "What even possessed you to do that?"

"We had to catch the Icarus," Scott reminded him, even though his gut churned as he remembered that despite pushing Thunderbird One into this state, he'd still failed. The success story had been the combination of Two and Three. Wrecking his Thunderbird with nothing to even show for it gnawed at his mind unpleasantly.

He heard Gordon sigh and a hand returned to his shoulder.

"Come on, let's go outside."

He didn't move, staring into the depths of his 'bird and the carnage of her engines. She was going to be grounded for weeks with that much damage while Brains repaired her.

But Brains was working on the T-Drive engine.

He sank down to the floor, one hand blindly reaching out to trace the cool metal of her hull as he did so.

Brains would have to stop working on the T-Drive to repair her. They didn't have time for petty delays yet he'd gone and wrecked his Thunderbird without even a success story to excuse the damage and subsequently put a huge dent in their too tight time frame.

Unless he told Brains to leave her, keep Thunderbird One crippled until the Zero-X was complete and Dad was home. But International Rescue needed her.

The Zero-X or Thunderbird One.

Unbidden, bile built up in his throat, catching him off guard as he retched.

"Geez, Scott." Gordon's voice was softer now, and his hands were gentle even as they hauled him to his feet. "That concussion's not happy with you, is it? Let's get you outside." Drained, too burdened by the realisation that he would have to choose between two equally important craft to have any fight left, Scott let himself be led out of his 'bird's cargo bay door.

Gordon guided him to her nose cone, splattered with dirt and streaks of silver cutting through the red where the impact had damaged it, and coaxed him into sitting on the ground with his back leaning against his downed Thunderbird.

"Stay there," he said before disappearing back inside One. Scott watched him go, looking down the long silver fuselage of the plane to the blue stripe around her engines. From the outside, there was no sign of the wreckage. A slightly scratched nose cone and the lack of her landing gear out were the only signs that she hadn't simply landed there.

"Here." Gordon reappeared seconds after vanishing, holding something that glinted in the sun in his hands. "You're trembling," his younger brother explained as the foil blanket wrapped around him. "Nothing to be done about the concussion, though." He sat down next to him, slinging an arm around Scott's shoulders lightly. "She'll be okay. Brains'll fix her up, better than new."

"Brains is working on the T-Drive engine," Scott reminded him. "He doesn't have time to fix her."

"Then we'll fix her," Gordon said matter-of-factly. "You, me, Virgil, Alan. Well, mainly Virgil. Just like we fixed Two up after her little swimming adventures."

Thunderbird Two's damage had been nowhere near as severe as this.

"It'll be okay, Scott," his brother continued. The arm around his shoulders tightened slightly. "We'll save him."

That was his line, to be recited to younger brothers whenever they needed it. Not for them to recite back to him.

It was comforting to hear.

"Yeah," he said as the roar of Two's engines came into earshot, the green behemoth appearing as quickly as she'd vanished. "We will."

"Budge over," Virgil ordered, their comms crackling back to life in unison and with no ceremony. "I'm going to land on top of her and I don't feel like explaining to Grandma why two of my brothers are fried worse than her cooking."

"I'd pay to see you tell her her cooking is bad to her face," Gordon retorted, but he was already on his feet and pulling Scott up with him. Together they backed up, Scott knowing exactly how far was safe and reluctant to get any further from Thunderbird One than required. Gordon pulled him back a little more.

"You couldn't afford it," Virgil scoffed as he positioned his 'bird over her sister. Without a module, she looked flimsier than usual, even though Scott knew she could lift greater weight without one. "Why is Scott in a foil blanket?"

"You said to make sure he didn't do anything stupid," Gordon chirped, a huge grin on his face. "So I make sure he couldn't."

"Resourceful," Virgil commented approvingly. Scott scowled, even though he knew Gordon was lying – or at least, partially lying. He wouldn't put it past his prankster brother to have had multiple reasons for bringing out the blanket. Two's landing struts deployed to their full extent and Scott watched with rigid shoulders as they came down either side of his 'bird, the rear pair barely missing her extended wings.

Thunderbird Two wasn't strictly designed to land on her fully-extended struts, but Virgil made it look easy as she settled daintily over her sister. The grapples fired down and Gordon ran over to secure them. Contained in foil, Scott could do nothing but watch as his younger brothers secured the two craft together. It looked terrifyingly flimsy, four relatively thin cables trailing down from the walls of Thunderbird Two's module bay the only links, but Scott knew that it would hold. Brains put safety first, and in a gift of forethought and paranoia had installed specific places on Thunderbird One's hull for just such an eventuality. She was far better secured to her sister than any other craft could ever be.

Once all three brothers were satisfied, Scott unable to resist joining Gordon if only to instruct ("I know, Scott!"), Thunderbird Two's platform lowered. Mild concussion or not, Scott refused to be treated as a rescuee and won the argument over whether or not he could grapple up to the platform by himself. That didn't stop Virgil from manhandling him into the nearest seat – usually Alan's, directly behind the pilot – while Gordon slid triumphantly into the co-pilot's seat, which was technically Scott's right as commander, but his brothers were clearly having none of it.

"You sit back and call Tracy Island," Virgil told him when he tried to resist. "Kayo's having kittens about what could have brought One down under her watch and Alan's not much better. Now shut up and let me get your 'bird home in one piece."

Scott scowled, fighting his way out of the foil blanket before tapping his comm unit. Beneath him, Two's powerful VTOLs roared into life, straining for a moment before they began to gain altitude.

"Scott!" Alan's voice burst out of his communicator, the small hologram appearing above his wrist. "Are you okay? What happened? Did you crash? Virgil didn't say much."

"I'm fine, Alan," he cut in, silencing his youngest brother's babble. "One's engines gave out, that's all."

"What happened, Scott Tracy." Kayo flickered into view, pushing Alan aside as she scowled at him, eyes sparking dangerously. "Thunderbird One performed just fine during the air show, and no-one unauthorised got near her at any point."

Scott gritted his teeth for a moment before letting out a sigh. His head throbbed and his shoulders ached – reminders that no matter how lucky he'd been, it had still been a crash landing.

"It's nothing to worry about," he told her, conscious that Virgil was listening in from the seat in front of him. Gordon was tapping his own flight controls, already aware of the cause thanks to John earlier and hopefully on standby to prevent any erratic flying from Virgil. Kayo opened her mouth, clearly about to protest that it was clearly something to worry about if it could take a Thunderbird out of the sky straight after a public event. "Catching the Icarus just put too much strain on the engines."

"Mach 19 should not have strained Thunderbird One's engines like that," Kayo disagreed. Scott winced, and her hologram's eyes narrowed. "Scott?"

"Mach 21.7," Gordon interrupted, and Scott shot him a glare as Thunderbird Two dipped slightly. His brother had firm hold of Two's flight controls, which was fortunate as Virgil whipped around to stare at Scott incredulously.

"Excuse me?" Kayo asked, taken aback. "Thunderbird One's operational limit is Mach 19. Even taking into consideration Brains' safety limits, she can't exceed Mach 20."

Control of the conversation was slipping away – if he'd ever had it – and Scott wanted it back.

"Well she did," he snapped.

"And murdered her own engines in the process," Virgil retorted, regaining flight control from Gordon. "Good job."

"But you're okay, right?" Alan piped up again, shoving Kayo back out of view. Blue eyes, washed out slightly in hologram form, looked up at him in concern, and Scott softened.

"I'm okay, little brother."

Alan's worried look gave way to one of relief, and Scott was content to sit back and let him talk, revisiting his part of the rescue – the successful bit, his brain muttered mutinously – and all the fun he had at the show when they weren't saving Professor Kwark. Virgil kept sending him disapproving looks over his shoulder, which he studiously ignored.

"Tracy Island, this is Thunderbird Two." Virgil cut through Alan's retelling of how he swept up Professor Kwark from the remains of the Icarus for the fifth time. "On final approach now. Alan, Kayo, get ready."

"F.A.B."

Scott's communicator blinked out.

He looked out of the window to see their home looming in the distance, growing by the moment. Two's palm trees were folded back already, a blob of green sitting on the runway. Gordon made a strangled noise of protest.

"Did you just dump Four?" he demanded of Virgil, who raised an eyebrow at him.

"Two can't enter or leave her hanger without a module," he reminded him. "That's where her wheels are."

"Point," Gordon conceded with a shrug.

"Now go get ready to unhook One," Virgil ordered, and with a cheeky salute Gordon headed to the rear of the cockpit. "Scott, you are not leaving that seat until Two is back in her hanger."

"She's my 'bird," Scott retorted, standing up. Gordon pushed him back down and before he knew it the foil blanket had been wrapped back around him and the safety belt fastened over the top of it. "Gordon!"

"Concussions don't go away that fast, bro. Don't worry, I'll take care of your 'bird." Scott groaned and let his head fall back, wincing as the headrest made contact with the source of his headache.

"Good thinking with that blanket," Virgil told Gordon. "We should use it more often."

"You should not," Scott snapped, but went ignored as Virgil turned his attention back to their approach and Gordon got ready to rappel out of the hatch.

Two pods trailed out of Two's hangar, set up as landing gear cradles. Scott watched them vanish underneath Two's bulk and a moment later Virgil opened the hatch for Gordon to disappear out of.

The operation began. Scott listened as his three brothers and Kayo co-ordinated the two pods and Thunderbird Two to get One nestled safely on the landing gear and had to bite his lip to prevent himself cutting in. Unable to even see the holographic display Virgil was referencing clearly, he was stuck waiting, and dwelling.

Scott did not do waiting or dwelling well. Never had done, and now so much was weighing down on him at once, it was even worse. Gordon's words had helped, but they couldn't clear all of the worries away. He'd been useless – worse than useless, now an actual detriment to International Rescue – in trying to save Professor Kwark, and now he was useless in even getting his crippled Thunderbird home.

What was he even doing?

Two's engines increased their thrust, pushing the behemoth back into the sky. Below, the two pods carefully manoeuvred back into the hanger, carrying Thunderbird One.

"Still with us, Scott?" Virgil asked as he brought his 'bird down over module four, finally bringing Gordon's beloved sub into the hangar.

"Yeah," Scott grunted, watching as Thunderbird Two finally came to a halt. "I'm fine."

"No you're not," Virgil corrected him, flicking through post-flight checks rapidly. "Your Thunderbird fell out of the sky and you have a concussion. You're not fine, Scott, and none of us expect you to be."

"I'm fine," he snapped.

Virgil sighed heavily and stood up, smoothly stepping around his chair to stand in front of him.

"Come on, big brother," he huffed, releasing the safety belt. "Let's get you in the house."

They were all waiting for him when the platform lowered, Virgil's arm firmly around his shoulders and keeping the foil blanket in place despite his efforts to dislodge it. Alan barely waited for him to step off of it before tackling him into a hug, while Gordon sauntered over at a more leisurely pace to slip his arm around his shoulders from the opposite side to Virgil. Kayo's arms remained firmly crossed but her eyes were soft, and even John was there, standing next to Brains and looking as though he'd come Earthside in a hurry. Grandma wrapped her arms around as many of them as she could reach.

"What-" he started, wondering what had prompted the sudden family gathering in Two's hangar.

"Don't you scare us like that, young man," Grandma overrode him briskly, squeezing tighter before letting them go. "Now, let's get you upstairs."

"I-I'll get started o-on the repairs," Brains excused himself, and Scott's mouth fell open.

"What?" he demanded. "But the T-Drive-"

"Dad wouldn't want us to prioritise him over International Rescue," John overrode him quietly. "Thunderbird One takes priority. You know this, Scott."

He grit his teeth, wishing he could refute what his brother was saying, but John had the annoying habit of always being right.

"EOS and I will continue calculations for the T-Drive," John continued. "This isn't a setback, Scott."

"It shouldn't have happened at all," Scott spat. "It didn't even help."

"Stop talking nonsense," Grandma scolded, hands on her hips as steely eyes glared up at him. "You might not have saved her by yourself, but that isn't Thunderbird One's role. Thunderbird One brings hope, and you, young man, brought the Professor hope that she would be saved. Don't you forget it."

She reached out and rested a hand on his cheek, breaking into a smile.

"Besides, your father would be delighted that you broke his record."

[adrienne-fh]

From the desk of

I woke up this morning dissatisfied with my field assignment. I don’t really get the point other than working with more than one unit. I’m not sure how this ties into data management or analysis - perhaps Kevin is playing favorites? I’m not sure. This is the nature of the beast - feeling out of the loop even if you ask questions. I wonder why I couldn’t work in the Research Unit. So this is what I will do, I will attend as many meetings as I can manage and see where I fit best. Giving walking tours of Fountain House isn’t somethig I’m interested in. Neither is giving orientations. I’m not sure of what is available but meeting new people isn’t high on my list... maybe it’s just a brief moment of ick. I’ll just ask about all the different things I could do.

My research interests lie in the ability for the clubhouse program to develop interpersonal effectiveness. How is clubhouse helping us become fully actualized? Are we successfully navigating the tasks of development as put forth by Erickson (one of my favorite developmental theorists)? How can we help those with SMI grow despite being behind? I am pretty keen on those ideas. I always see room for improvement and I think guidance is lacking. Recovery roadmaps with goals would be neat but in clubhouse the aim is different and we are more self directed. It’s up to the individual to participate in clubhouse and the various activities - just like a person chooses to exercise or sleep all day.

Healthy patterns of coping haven’t eluded me. I went through a horrible series of events that were traumatic and life-altering. I returned to Fountain House to heal after a series of setbacks. I was raped and sodomized and beaten up, followed, and shot at. I still have weird things happen but for the most part, it’s leveling off. There is a lot of unkindness around (mine included). Many people at Fountain House can seem hostile and unhelpful but at the outset, my initial impressions of Fountain House (almost twenty years ago) was possibility and opulence. It had a buzzy feeling that felt alive and electric. The energy moved quickly and gave way to confusing days filled with conflicting priorities. I never really got the hang of it. I just showed up to the meeting I knew I had to be in and sat there, hoping to be inspired enough to get more involved.

I was attacked at Fountain House several times. This is one of the huge reasons why I chose to leave initially. “Once a member, always a member” is the adage at Fountain House. I have returned briefly to see what became of everyone - a few died, a few disappeared, a few went on to live gorgeous lives (elsewhere). I worked. I worked a lot. I searched for jobs and pushed myself to do better than I had done in the many years following my initial foray into the working world. When I was at Fountain House, I was attacked in an elevator, I was attacked with a Lysol can by my roommate in the apartment I lived in, I was raped by my childhood friend in the same apartment; it was the first time he visited as well. I was treated unkindly by the workers at Fountain House, though I can’t recall exactly. I believe it was feeling unheard and forced to do things they were suggesting when all I wanted to do was sleep. I went back to my ex boyfriend’s apartment to get a break from all the chirping and demands I was choosing to ignore. I’m not sure if they knew about the rape but I know they knew about the elevator attack and other times men tired to kiss or hug me at Fountain House when I didn’t know them. Predators are there and are allowed to rehabilitate right alongside the prey. Funny.

This was when I was a Young Adult. I started a sexual harassment training program. Or at least I helped. We had panel discussions. I left during the inception because I couldn’t cope with all that had happened and needed to sleep - much like I did almost fifteen years later when I was attacked again, in my apartment, in my sleep, night after night it eluded me what was happening. The only indication it wasn’t a dream was the gore dripping from my gaping anus and vagina. I felt like fire. I couldn’t move or speak - only sense. Hundreds of times later, it just stopped. Other strange things happened that seemed to take a spiritual bent.

When I started coming to, I realized all I had been through didn’t mean I could JUST sit around and wait to die. I survived. Any special significance to that end? No. I want to live a beautiful life as well. So here I am at an internship, a little more dull, overweight, exhausted - yet determined. I survived. I deal with a lot of frustrating things - neighbors and their children who like speaking through walls and sending Morse code messages so I’ll acknowledge them, people who admit they wanted me to die because I’m a nuisance. Others who threaten my belongings and home. I mainly ignore them because they are too ill to do those things. It takes a certain level of planning and preparation to break into someone’s apartment - unless you just walk in - as what happened a few times since 2017. I heard a few people in the neighborhood have a set of keys. The handyman stole the set of master keys when he got stiffed on pay and subsequently fired. My landlord decided to work with a Turkish man instead of a Russian. The Russian men disliked my landlord and tried to rob him blind, forcing their way into his office, demanding sleeping quarters and pay.

Life is a winding road filled with guideposts along the way. This is one small step in the right direction. The life I want is through all of the hard things. Preparation meet opportunity. Make nice. Describing it as trudging along seems incorrect. Dancing and singing? Floating? I feel so tired and depleted that it is laughable that this will change anytime soon - but I see the end is near.

Until next time...

[ellaenchanting]

Hypnovember Day 15: Ooze

It has been brought to my attention that there is a Hypnomaster69 out there in the kink world. This story is not about him nor are the characters based on any particular people in the community- they're more amalgamations of several people I have known cobbled together with many a Fetlife poster.

Matt oozed down the hotel hallway, surveying the crowd. He had dressed to impress this hypnocon with his favorite sports coat and some brand new shoes. He waved over at one of his older friends in the corner- a guy he went way back with. Matt was glad to see that there were some good people still around in the community. It had all gotten too PC and self-victimizing lately for him.

Matt couldn’t help but notice this year that there were quite a few female attendees who wouldn’t meet his eye. He hated how the hypnokink community had become so judgmental against men. Matt had never hurt anyone- not without their consent at least. It wasn’t his responsibility that some of these younger girls wanted some fucked up things. Matt had always and only been fulfilling both his and his partners' needs. This was kink, after all, not meditation class. Matt had been around awhile- he knew that people wouldn’t do anything under hypnosis that they didn’t secretly want to do anyway. Matt just freed people from their self-imposed baggage. It wasn’t his fault that some previous partners had figured out that kink wasn’t for them and left the community. Everyone was an adult here.

As Matt walked near the registration table, he noticed a young woman that he had never seen before. She was Asian with long pretty hair. Her Pokemon dress hung loosely on her slim body. She was standing all by herself, looking around nervously.

Maybe con wouldn’t be so bad after all, Matt thought to himself.

He walked over to her and waved. 

“Hi! I’m HypnoMaster69! But you can call me Matt. Are you here all by yourself?”

“Yeah,” she said. “I’m Amy. I just saw that this was happening on the internet and I live close by so I took the chance and showed up. I didn’t know that I needed a different name.” She looked down abashedly at "Amy" written in big letters on her name tag.

Matt laughed, pleased. “Maybe we can find another one for you here. Can I give you a hug?”

“Errr.....sure I guess?” she responded, awkwardly leaning in to the hug.

Matt smiled after letting her go. “I’m glad you aren’t weird about physical touch. This is a VERY touchy community- people sometimes find it off-putting if you’re too frigid about that.”

‘Oh,” said Amy.

“I’m happy that I ran into you!” said Matt. “I don’t really have a lot of plans for this con and I like showing new people around. It can be hard to learn the community ropes sometimes. For example, your badge- did you know that putting all the stickers on the top of your badge like that usually means that you’re a hypnotist?”

Amy’s eyes widened a bit. “It does?”

Matt giggled. “Yeah. You’ll probably have thirsty pathetic men falling at your feet all weekend begging you to hypnotize them. It’ll be hilarious. Don’t worry though- I’ll protect you. I’ve been a hypnotist for decades- people around here respect that and won't mess with me. By the way, have you ever been hypnotized before?”

Amy smiled. “Once or twice” She seemed privately amused by something.

Great, a newbie, Matt thought. ‘Well you’ll have a chance to see and experience all KINDS of things this weekend. You’ll love it. If you’d like, maybe we can play together a bit later on? I’d like to show you what you’re capable of.”

“I think I might like that,” said Amy. “Come to a few classes with me so I can see some things I’d like to try and then we can talk about planning some play. Deal?” She extended her hand for a handshake.

“Deal,” Matt said, also extending his hand. 

For a moment, Matt's attention felt diverted somewhere- something was odd.

Matt blinked.

Meh. It probably wasn’t important to think about.

“C’mon, “ said Amy. “Let’s go to the class on anchoring.”

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

Matt sat besides Amy all class. 

Matt was having a hard time paying attention today. The class was so boring that he felt some of his morning sleepiness again. He had thought he had chased those feelings off with coffee but... apparently not. Matt would have definitely presented this class better. He should have insisted on presenting this year.

Fortunately, feeling bored had given him plenty of time to watch Amy. She seemed really engaged in the class. It was endearing watching her take notes and bounce a little bit when she heard something that excited her. Matt would be sure to show her some anchoring tricks later on that would really blow her subby little mind. If she liked this lecture, she would LOVE all the things he could do.

Fantastically, it turned out that Amy was the kind of touchy that Matt was. She would lean over during class and make comments to him- some that he would pay attention to and some would slide right past him in his boredom. He noticed that sometimes when she was talking or when the presenter said certain things, she would lean over and touch his shoulder lightly. That felt nice. She must really be into him.

At the end of class, Amy let Matt see the knitting needles and wool she had brought to con. It was the kind of girly hobby that he wouldn't have normally been interested in, but Amy's enthusiastic rambling about it was captivating. She spoke about the beauty of repetitive patterns. She said that if there was something it was important for her to think about or focus on, sometimes she would repeat that thing to herself with every stitch as a kind of mindfulness exercise. Sometimes she wasn't even aware of what she was thinking- her brain would just repeat important thoughts over and over with each stitch she made and she could just enjoy how good that felt. She also talked about knitting projects as a metaphor for beauty of social cohesion- all the threads working together for a greater whole. It was certainly an interesting perspective.

At the end of the conversation, Amy gave Matt her knitting needles to hold. They felt good in his hands, somehow. Better than he would have thought.

After the next class, Matt asked if Amy wanted to go back to his room to play. Amy declined, saying she wanted to go to more classes. She had really been enjoying sitting next to him, though. Wouldn't he like to come with her and see another class?

He found that he would.

As the day wore on, Matt was pleased to find that he might have a better reputation than he had originally thought. People, especially women, who hadn't talked to him in years came up to him and Amy to speak to them. Amy apparently already had a bit of a reputation online and had connected with many people over Skype prior to con. Matt was surprised about her popularity. He was also surprised to find how many people wanted to speak to him or give him a hug or touch him on the shoulder. He was still feeling tired and wasn't quite keeping track of all the conversations, but it was nice to feel like a part of the group again. People even responded with enthusiasm to the knitting that he held in his hands- saying that they were happy to see him engaging in a new hobby.

Matt kept going to classes with Amy. He was feeling unusually charitable today and let her pick their schedule. He had already seen everything anyway- and watching Amy was encouraging. It was nice to see old ideas through new eyes.

The last class that Amy wanted to go to that day was the Women in Hypnosis panel. Matt pointed out a note in the schedule that men were encouraged not to attend this class, but Amy had talked to the group leader and they were going to make an exception for Matt. That was really nice of them. Matt was glad that they recognized his expertise.

The Women in Hypnosis class ended up being a bit of a bust. From the time he entered the room, it seemed like so many people were talking at once that it was hard to keep track. Women's voices sometimes took on this droning sound and the effect on Matt was pretty soporific. He had fallen asleep early in the class, only occasionally awakened slightly by a touch on the shoulder or someone saying his name. But during those times Amy, still sitting right next to him, would lean over and whisper in his ear that everything was ok- he didn't need to consciously listen to what was going on. He could just go back to sleep.

Despite the sleepiness he experienced in class, Matt felt really great afterwards. The grogginess had lifted and he felt more positive than he had in years. He also felt much more positive towards the women that had been in the class with him. Matt admitted to himself that he had been kind of a jerk in the community sometimes- ignoring women, making rude comments about trans women, showing female partners a lack of respect- but somehow sitting in that class and actually listening to those women for an hour had done him a world of good and given him a lot to think about.

So much to think about, actually, that he wanted to give himself some proper space to process it. Matt decided that he didn't really need to attend the rest of the convention after all. He had already learned everything anyway and it might do him good to take the rest of the days allotted and just enjoy a normal vacation. He heard that there was a beautiful local park nearby.

When he told Amy about his decision, she hugged him again and told him that she understood. She thanked him for being her companion for the first day of her first ever hypnocon. She even let him keep her knitting needles and yarn to remember her by.

When the next year rolled around, Matt decided that he needed a change. Instead of attending the hypnocon again, he would go to a knitting convention that was being held at the same time. He had gotten really into knitting this last year- it relaxed him and made him feel really good about himself. He had been welcomed into that community with open arms, appreciated as one of the few men who shared the hobby.

Matt also kept up with some of his hypnosis friends, including Amy. They never actually did hypnosis together, but they would often chit chat and knit together on calls. Matt loved to listen to her voice as she excitedly talked about knitting projects or kink or other things that were going on in her life. Her life seemed to be going really well. He reflected that his life was going well too. He was so happy to have met Amy at hypnocon last year.

What a fortunate coincidence.

[seraph-novak]

Our Story

Tyrus Month ~ September 6th, “Comics”.

Also available on AO3 ♥

When TJ didn’t show up at the end of the day to walk him to his locker, Cyrus knew something was wrong. His boyfriend had been acting strangely all week, but he’d assumed that TJ was simply occupied with school work, and Cyrus hadn’t had the chance to ask him; he’d barely seen him since their date on Saturday.

But the fact that TJ wasn’t waiting outside his English class on a Friday afternoon like he always did was troubling. TJ never missed walking Cyrus to his locker. It was one of those traditional, couply things they’d grown accustomed to doing since they’d starting dating almost a year ago, and Cyrus always loved having the opportunity to show off his boyfriend and make the other students in the hallways jealous.

If TJ had forgotten to walk with him, then something was definitely wrong. And so, in true Cyrus fashion, he started to panic about the fate of their relationship.

What if he doesn’t like me anymore? he wondered to himself. What if he’s grown bored of me and wants to break up?

He shook off his thoughts and hurried to his locker, eager to get out of the building so he could run home and cry in his pyjamas while binge-watching Sex and the City. He couldn’t stand to even consider the possibility that TJ might not want to be with him anymore. He’d never felt this way about anybody, and he’d honestly believed that TJ returned his sentiments. But maybe he’d been kidding himself all along.

There were tears welling in his eyes by the time he reached his locker. He was in such a state that he almost didn’t notice the sheet of paper that fell to the floor when he opened it.

Casting a confused glance around the near-empty corridor, he bent down to retrieve the glossy page. The bold colours and cartoony style instantly reminded him of the comic books he used to read when he was younger, but his nostalgia was overcome with shock when he recognised the scene depicted on the page.

It was a cartoon rendition of the moment he’d first met TJ, when Buffy had convinced him to get Cyrus a chocolate chocolate chip muffin, and the details were eerily on-point. The first panel showed TJ offering to help Cyrus get the muffin for himself; the second, TJ with his hand on Cyrus’ shoulder, instructing him to simply walk up and take it; and the third, TJ smiling at Cyrus as he took his first bite of the muffin.

Beneath the drawings, in thick, slanted writing, it said: The moment I first met you, I knew you were special. You were dorky and awkward and friends with my nemesis, but I didn’t care. I wanted to help you, and you let me. God knows why, but you did. This is the moment it all started.

Cyrus turned the page over with a frown, searching for some kind of explanation or clue as to why someone (presumably TJ) had slipped this into his locker. On the back of the page, in a red box with yellow writing, were instructions to go to the location portrayed in the drawing. It was like the beginning of a treasure hunt, and Cyrus couldn’t deny the excited intrigue bubbling inside of him.

Nevertheless, he approached the cafeteria with caution.

As it was the end of the day, the large room was virtually empty. There were a couple students cutting through, and a few lunch ladies cleaning up, but that was it. Cyrus stood on his tiptoes and scanned his eyes across the room, expecting to see TJ approaching from somewhere, but soon there was no one but him and one of the lunch ladies left in the cafeteria.

He was about to give up and leave when the elderly woman tapped him on the shoulder and said, “Are you Cyrus Goodman?”

“Um.” He took a step backwards. “Yes?”

The woman smiled and extended her hand, holding out another page. “Your boyfriend stopped by this morning, told me you’d be here at the end of the day. He said to give you this.”

Cyrus slowly took the page. “Did he tell you anything else?”

“Afraid not.”

And with that, he was left alone.

He flicked his eyes over the page as he walked outside, bumping his shoulder into the glass door as he went. The second page of the comic showed him and TJ on the swings: first, TJ complimenting his song, then both of them swinging together, then TJ pushing Cyrus higher than he’d ever been on the swings before. The last panel was a split drawing of TJ and Cyrus smiling at each other, and there was a tiny heart drifting above TJ’s head.

The words at the bottom said: You weren’t afraid of me like most people were. You saw beyond the mean jock and treated me like a normal guy. You trusted me to push you out of your comfort zone, and told me to find you if I ever wanted to talk. This is the moment I started to fall for you.

Cyrus’ heart clenched as he read the final line, a hesitant smile ghosting his lips. Had TJ really liked him since they’d talked on the swings? It was hard to believe.

Without reading the instructions on the back, he made his way to the park. The swing set he and TJ had talked on was luckily empty, which meant he didn’t have to wait around to begin his search. He found the third page fairly quickly; it was stuck underneath the swing Cyrus had been sat on, and he instantly recognised the drawing as the moment he’d invited TJ to his bar mitzvah.

On the page, it showed TJ accepting the invitation, then the two of them smiling at each other – this time with two hearts above TJ’s head. In the bottom corner, there was a doodle of TJ loosening a bottle of Martinelli’s, then watching fondly from the crowd as Cyrus opened the bottle himself.

At the bottom, it said: You wanted to be friends with me, despite everything I’d done. And whenever I saw you doubting yourself, I had the urge to prove you wrong. You’re stronger than you think, Underdog. This is the moment I realised I wanted to be around you as much as possible.

Cyrus blinked back tears as he sprinted to the building where his bar mitzvah had been held, tripping over his own feet several times and slamming into the stone steps before he had a chance to slow down. The next page was resting on the bottom step, and Cyrus’ face quivered with a watery smile as he picked it up. This one showed him and TJ sat outside the gym, when TJ had first confided in Cyrus about his math dyslexia.

The first panel was TJ staring gloomily at the vending machines with Cyrus beside him; the second, him confessing about his dyscalculia; the third, Cyrus assuring TJ there was nothing wrong with him; and the fourth, TJ thanking him for his help. The final panel was a large drawing of them eating cheese puffs and smiling together, with three hearts above TJ’s head.

The words said: Talking to you was easy. You didn’t make me feel weird or stupid for struggling with math, and you encouraged me to open up. You were the first person I ever really trusted to be honest with. This is the moment I knew I wanted to be a better person, for you.

Cyrus swallowed thickly and carefully slid the page into his bag, along with the others. His legs were wobbling as he made his way back to the school – either from all the exercise, or the growing realisation that TJ had gone to all this effort for him. No one had ever done something so romantic and thoughtful for him before, and he was eager to find out what was waiting for him at the end of this treasure hunt.

In the rec room outside the gym, Cyrus found the fifth page at the bottom of the vending machine, poking outside the plastic dispenser. Cyrus grinned at the lively drawings of him and TJ at the children’s gym, surrounded by kids cheering him on as he attempted each of the obstacles with an embarrassing amount of effort.

Beneath the drawing of their chest-bump, with four hearts floating above TJ’s head, it said: I was determined to make you smile, no matter what. Every time we ticked something else off your list, you grew more confident, and it made me happier than I ever thought possible. This is the moment you became my primary source of happiness.

Cyrus ran his fingers over the last word, overwhelmed with the notion that TJ was at his happiest when he was around. Did TJ really enjoy his company that much? The thought made him giddy.

He almost knocked over a trashcan in his haste to get to the gym where TJ worked. Through the glass walls, he recognised some of the regular kids. They were sat in a circle, seemingly waiting for him to show up; as soon as he walked through the door, they squealed and threw their arms around him, chanting his name and tugging on his jacket.

“Hey, guys,” he said, smiling despite the loss of his lower body. “Has TJ been here today?”

One of the older kids shouldered her way through the commotion and handed Cyrus the next page. “He told me to give you this,” she said, her shoulders proudly bunched up. “He trusted me the most ‘cause I’m the oldest!”

Cyrus ruffled her hair in thanks and said his goodbyes, then stepped outside to read the page in private. There were only two panels on this one. The first showed him, TJ and Buffy walking away from the gym after their one-on-one basketball game, and the second showed TJ looking over his shoulder with a soft smile, an abundance of hearts crowning his head.

The words splitting the two panels in half said: You inspired me to admit to my mistakes and start being kinder, and you made me realise that being the best isn’t always important. This is the moment I realised I was in love with you.

Cyrus’ heart swelled, tears of happiness rolling down his cheeks and onto the page. He wiped them off before they could smudge the drawings, then made his way towards the school gym. He barely had the energy to speed-walk now. TJ had already told him he loved him before, but it never failed to make him feel weak in the knees. Plus, he could sense he was coming to the last few stops of the treasure hunt, and he didn’t want to rush.

Outside the gym, the next page was stuck to a glass door. Cyrus’ stomach fluttered as he recognised the scene depicted in the drawing: it was late in the evening, and TJ was teaching Cyrus how to play basketball on the court outside his house. In the second panel, beneath the drawing of Cyrus finally scoring a basket, it showed him jumping into TJ’s arms and kissing him for the first time. It perfectly captured the memory, and Cyrus could almost feel the tingling sensation of TJ’s mouth moving against his own.  

At the bottom of the page, it said: I never dreamed you might like me back, but that night, you surprised me. I still can’t believe you’re actually mine sometimes. This is the moment you became my boyfriend.

Luckily, TJ didn’t live far from the school, so Cyrus didn’t have to race across town to find the basketball court in the drawing. When he got there, there was a single basketball sitting beneath one of the baskets, the words ‘Hey, Underdog’ written in black marker on the top. Beneath the ball, Cyrus found the next page.

The first panel showed TJ and Cyrus shyly holding hands as they walked down the street; the second, the two of them sitting in a booth at The Spoon, sharing a chocolate milkshake across the table; the third, TJ attempting to throw baby taters into Cyrus’ mouth (a lot of them ended up on the floor); and the fourth, TJ draping his scarf over Cyrus’ shoulders as they walked through the door, his lips pressed against his temple.

The words said: This was one of the happiest days of my life. I’d always thought first dates were supposed to be awkward and uncomfortable, but with you, I felt completely at ease. You spilled milkshake on my shoes, and you kept stealing from my plate, but I didn’t care. I was just happy to be there with you. This is the moment I knew I wanted all my future dates to be with you.

Cyrus was on the verge of sobbing as he ran to The Spoon, his heart hammering like crazy against his ribcage. He wasn’t sure how many more these he could take before he completely lost control of his emotions.

At The Spoon, Amber was waiting for him with a knowing smile. The ninth page was dangling from her fingers, shining off the fluorescent lights spilling from inside the café. Cyrus made a grab for the page, but she snatched it away at the last second, and he felt like a petulant child as he stamped his foot impatiently.

“I like you, Cyrus,” Amber said, “but if you break my baby brother’s heart, there’ll be consequences. Got it?”

Cyrus rolled his eyes. “You know I’m insanely in love with him, right?”

Amber smiled. “Right answer.”

She handed him the page, then returned to her customers with a deliberate swish of her ponytail. Cyrus was tempted to ask her what was going on, but the drawing on the page caught his eye and knocked the breath out of his lungs before he got the chance. 

It was a single panel, bordered by miniature doodles of muffins, swing sets, and basketballs. In the middle, TJ was drawn in a dark blue suit, his hands clutching a sign flaunting the word ‘PROM?’ in capital letters. The cartoon version of himself was facing TJ, so Cyrus couldn’t read his expression. He was so caught up in the scene that it took him a moment to realise that their surroundings looked a lot like his backyard...

Beneath the drawing, it simply said: This is the moment I ask you to go to the prom with me. What do you say?

Cyrus blinked at the page for a few moments, his mind slowly catching up with the situation. He’d been standing there, stock-still, for almost five minutes solid when a passing car snapped him out of his trance, and Cyrus suddenly realised what was going on. According to the rules of the treasure hunt, his next stop was his own backyard, where TJ would be waiting for him in a dark blue suit, ready to ask him a question. And all Cyrus had to do was show up and give him an answer. 

He slipped the page into his bag and ran – a leg-pumping, sweat-inducing kind of run – all the way home. His face was aching from smiling so much by the time he got there, and he was so distracted by the prospect of seeing TJ that he almost missed his mom and Todd sitting in the kitchen.

“Hey, there,” his mom said, her eyes twinkling. “You look a little out of puff.”

Cyrus bent over and grabbed his knees as he struggled to catch his breath again. “I ran here.”

Todd chuckled. “Does this have anything to do with TJ standing in our backyard?”

“He’s really here?”

“Yep.” His mom smiled. “He’s been waiting for you.”

Cyrus licked his lips and grinned. “Is he wearing a blue suit? Does he have a sign? Does he look adorable? I mean, he always looks adorable, but –”

“Why don’t you go see for yourself?”

He glanced down at his shirt, now freshly damp with sweat, and ran a hand through his hair. “But I look terrible!”

“You look fine, sweetie.”

“But –”

“That boy has been pacing up and down our backyard for an hour,” Todd said, resting a fatherly hand on Cyrus’ shoulder. “He’s even more nervous than you are, okay? You have nothing to worry about.”

Cyrus took a deep breath. “I really love him, you know?”

His mom pinched his cheek with a smile. “I know.”

“He’s great, isn’t it?”

“He is.”

Cyrus pulled at his collar. “I know I’m stalling, I just... This is a pretty big deal. I don’t think there’s ever been an openly gay couple at our prom before.”

“I’m proud of you,” his mom said, giving him a quick hug before ushering him outside. “Now go make history!”

Cyrus smoothed down his outfit, gave his armpits a sniff, then walked through the back door. TJ was at the opposite end of the yard, his back turned to Cyrus. He was staring at his shoes and talking to himself, presumably rehearsing what he was going to say. It was probably the cutest thing Cyrus had ever seen.

“Hey,” he said, his voice breaking slightly.

TJ jumped and turned around. “Cyrus, hey! You’re here.”

“Yep.”

“Did you find all the pages?”

Cyrus took them out of his bag (neatly stacked in order) and lifted them up for TJ to see. “It took me a while, but yeah.” He tried to swallow the lump in his throat, but it didn’t stop his words from sounding gargled. “I can’t believe you did all of this.”

“Well, Walker helped me with the drawings,” TJ said, self-consciously rubbing the back of his neck, “but the rest was me. I know it’s kinda sappy, but –”

“It’s perfect.” Cyrus held the pages against his heart. “You have no idea how much this means to me.”

TJ smiled softly as he made his way across the yard, his hand reaching out to thread their fingers together. “I know you’re a sucker for romance, so I wanted to make it special.”

“You really went all out.”

“Yeah.” TJ laughed. “Was it too much?”

“I loved it,” Cyrus said, squeezing TJ’s hand. “I’m just glad you’re not bored with me.”

“What do you mean?”

Cyrus shrugged. “I thought you’d been avoiding me all week because you didn’t like me anymore.” He ducked his head with a sniff. “I guess I was just being paranoid... But when I didn’t see you after class today, I didn’t know what to think.”

TJ placed a finger beneath his chin and tilted his head upwards. “Did you think I was breaking up with you?”

“Maybe.”

“Cyrus, I –”

“It’s not your fault.” He straightened TJ’s tie and smiled. “You were trying to do something romantic, and I jumped to conclusions. I just find it hard to believe you actually like me sometimes.”

TJ shook his head. “Are you serious? I’m the lucky one here.”

“I think we’re both pretty lucky.”

“That’s true.” TJ cupped his cheek. In the rising twilight, his eyes were a hazy shade of grey, and he’d never looked more handsome. “So, about the prom.” He waved the sign above his head. “What do you say, Underdog?”

Cyrus wiped away his tears and smiled. “I would love to go to the prom with you, TJ.”

He wrapped his arms around his boyfriend’s neck and kissed him sweetly beneath the stars, his heart hitching at the first touch of TJ’s lips against his own. The sign dropped on the grass beside them, long forgotten, and Cyrus giggled as TJ lifted him up off the ground.

“Careful with the pages!” he said between gasps of laughter. “You’re gonna crush them!”

TJ kissed him on the cheek, then lowered him back down. “Walker said he’ll make us a binder to keep them safe. We can look back on them when we’re grey and old, and remember how much of a sap I used to be.”

“You’ll always be a sap,” Cyrus said fondly. “But I love you for it.”

TJ touched the small of his back and brought him closer, their foreheads falling softly against each other. “I love you too, Underdog.”

They stood like that for what felt like hours, swaying together in the middle of Cyrus’ backyard, the cooling air raising goosebumps on their skin. The smell of Todd’s cooking drifted through the gap of the open door, and the sound of dogs barking to each other across the neighbourhood filled the silence between them. It was a perfectly normal day, but the world suddenly felt different, like it was full of opportunities Cyrus hadn’t even considered before now.

“You know,” he said, his words muffled against TJ’s chest, “if this is how much effort you put into a promposal, I’m expecting one heck of a marriage proposal... You better start planning.”

As soon as he said it, his cheeks prickled with heat. He was about to play it off as a joke before things got awkward, but TJ’s gentle smile took him by surprise. He didn’t look horrified at the idea of marrying Cyrus someday. If anything, he looked relieved, as if he’d been waiting for Cyrus to say what he’d already been thinking.

“Don’t worry,” TJ said, kissing the blush on the tip of Cyrus’ nose, “I’ve already started.”

[pianopadawan]

Descent, A Poe x Hux Fanfiction  Chapter 5

Chapter 5: Distance - AO3 Link

Plot Synopsis: The collapse of the Empire brought not peace but chaos. The New Republic has given way to power lust and corruption. War wages on with rekindled desperation between the Resistance and the First Order, the spawn of the Empire turned disenchanted military branch of the Republic. A new generation must enter the battle, bound to one side or the other.

Amidst the inferno, the teenage corporal Armitage Hux is faced with unstable authority over a doomed mission. Meanwhile, the Resistance fleet’s most promising young pilot, Poe Dameron, finds himself climbing enemy ranks for the sake of a tenuous “greater cause”. In the most fortunate of cases, chance meetings in troubled times strengthen both parties. At other times, one man’s rise to fame will mark the other’s descent into madness.

Rating: Mature

Chapter 5: Distance

Poe holds his breath as the technician approaches with his datapad. To his relief, she hands the device back to him.

“You’re registered with the database now,” she says. “Take care of this. It gave my team problems, took them longer than usual to synchronize the systems.”

“Oh, did it?” Poe asks. “Do they know why?”

“Probably just the usual trouble with older models,” the technician replies. “Nothing that would affect the function.”

“Good to know,” Poe says, masking his relief. “Well, thank you.”

After exchanging salutes, he leaves for the landing bays. His day has been surprisingly slow-paced, by the First Order’s standards at least. He even had a chance to catch a few hours of sleep after the briefing. It’s almost too calm for comfort.

He follows the row of numbers projected above the doors until he reaches A9. A quick scan of his code cylinder gains him entry.

The door snaps shut behind him. The lights flicker on as he steps onto the landing bay, the same cold glow that permeates the rest of the base. There are few windows in this area, and he hasn’t been permitted to step outside since his arrival. Whether it’s fear of hostiles or of deserters that keeps all the cadets locked inside, Poe isn’t about to question the rule.

Still, a bit of real sunshine and fresh air would be nice. So much for this being the First Order’s beach resort…

The shuttle is in the center of the landing bay, bound in place by several thick cords anchored to the walls. It’s a little smaller than the other Xi-class models he’s seen. A quick survey of the exterior features reveals a pair of proton cannons, both of which look as if they’ve never been used.

It’s already past the agreed meeting time, and Armitage has yet to arrive. As far as Poe knows, First Order soldiers do not have a reputation for being late. He wonders what excuse Armitage will come up with. He’s already sure it’ll be a lie.

Poe circles to the other side of the shuttle and finds the identification code printed at the base of the rightmost wing. After another quick look around to assure that he’s alone, he takes out his datapad. He leans back against the shuttle, hoping to obscure the screen from any security monitors hidden above. The device scans the shuttle ID easily. The Resistance should receive the transmission within seconds.

He stays on his datapad a little longer flipping through information on scheduling and other trivial matters before placing the device back in his pack. There’s still no sign of Armitage. A flurry of concern creeps into the back of Poe’s mind. He pushes it aside. It’s unlikely anything has happened to his partner, at least within the safety of the base, and even if something did happen, it isn’t anything for him to worry about.

He makes his way inside the shuttle next. The interior is surprisingly spacious. There’s even a small bunk built into the wall across from a sonic refresher. The pilot’s seat faces the main control panel lined with an extensive set of buttons and switches.

There’s a smaller panel in the back for operating the rear cannon. Apart from this feature, there doesn’t appear to be any need for a copilot unless the ship were to fall under attack. If all goes well with Poe’s transmission, the Resistance should know to stay clear of their shuttle.

The shuttle door opens with a deep hum. Armitage’s shadow stretches across the floor as he ascends the ramp.

“I thought you weren’t gonna show,” Poe says.

“I was delayed,” Armitage replies in a staid tone. His eyes are downcast, his red hair tousled in such a way that he looks disheveled despite the impeccable uniform. “My apologies. Such late arrivals will not be a regular occurrence, I can assure you.”

“It’s fine. It’s really fine… I… well, I just got here not too long ago.” Poe watches as Armitage approaches the main control panel. He appears to be masking a limp. “What happened to you?”

The question escapes before Poe can think better of it. He immediately regrets asking.

“Nothing,” Armitage snaps. “I’m perfectly fine, I…” He pauses, regaining his composure. When he speaks again, the words are labored. “I had a meeting with several senators from the Republic. They were here to discuss resource funds for my division and my squadron needed a representative.”

He glowers at Poe as if he’s challenging the pilot to question his explanation.

“Alright, that’s okay,” Poe says. He notices a bruise forming around the soldier’s chin. The injury looks new. He makes sure not to linger on it for too long. “You’re here and that’s all that matters.”

Armitage gives him a wary frown before craning his neck to look around the shuttle. He makes his way to the front of the ship and leans over the main panel.

“You want to sit down or…” Poe offers, but Armitage cuts him off with a firm “No.”.

Poe crosses his arms, letting his back slide against the shuttle wall. He watches as Armitage switches on the controls. The panel illuminates with a bright, red glow. The soldier’s hand wanders across the surface, stopping over a pair of silver levers. He murmurs something to himself.

“What was that?” Poe asks. Armitage scowls at him, making the pilot feel as if he’s intruded on something very private.

“S8 Class Particle Shields,” Armitage says. “One covering the front.” He indicates the topmost lever. “Another covering the back.” He points at the bottom lever. His finger moves to two buttons by the side. “Microray shields on the right and left sides.”

Poe lets out a whistle of surprise. “That’s a lot of security,” he remarks. “More than any of the shuttles I’ve ever flown.”

“They’ve been added in,” says Armitage. There’s a new note of muted fascination in his voice, which is probably pure excitement by his standards. “Normally, a ship this size wouldn’t have such equipment.”

“Are we expecting an X-Wing blockade or something?” Poe chuckles, hoping to keep the question light. Armitage however, responds in an even graver tone than before:

“We’re transporting valuable cargo. The shuttles are small and having a full artillery with shields uses twice the fuel of an unarmed ship the same size, especially the shields. The S8 shields alone nearly double the fuel usage. It’s inherently inefficient. They wouldn’t be using shuttles with full shields and artillery if there wasn’t a high probability of meeting hostiles.”

At first, Poe thinks to ask how Armitage happens to know the power logistics of S8 shields, or half of what he’s pointed out about the control panel for that matter. It doesn’t sound like the type of thing a drill sergeant would cover between exercises. After some consideration, however, Poe decides against questioning the soldier on the subject. The most he’ll get is an excuse.

“Well, if we’re expecting some unfriendly company,” he says. “We should probably cover the artillery controls.”

“Pardon?” The suspicion in Armitage’s voice makes a flutter of unease run down Poe’s spine. Then again, he’s starting to think Armitage’s default tone is somewhere between suspicious and accusatory.

“The artillery controls,” Poe repeats. “If we’re gonna run into trouble, we should probably know how to shoot it down.”

“I know that.” Armitage catches his temper again, subdues it to a icy kind of formality. “Isn’t that the kind of thing you’ve trained for? I find it difficult to believe a fighter pilot your age would still have to review how to fire a cannon.”

Now, Poe feels his own anger rising within him. He replies in what he hopes is a polite manner:

“Of course, I’m familiar with them. Toggle for cannons, missiles, mag pulse, deuterium-tritium switch…” He points to each feature as he lists them. “Controls to aim, adjust monitor… all that. I just thought that we should go over your controls while you’re here.” He nods at the back of the shuttle. “Unless you plan on having me sprint down the shuttle to operate both the front and the rear cannons while we’re under attack which doesn’t sound too efficient, if you ask me.”

“No, I would never suggest something so absurd,” Armitage says. “I’ll operate the rear cannons if we need them, but I can review my own controls without your assistance. I’ve fired a blaster before…”

“This is a little different from a blaster.”

“It’s the same concept on a general level.”

“Well, I guess you could say they both blow things up.”

“I was referring to the similarities in the physical principles behind the particle beam of a blaster and that of a proton cannon, but I suppose both comparisons are valid.”

The two men exchange disgruntled stares. Poe takes a deep breath.

“Would you like me to show you? Just to make sure we’re on the same page?” he asks.

To Poe’s relief, Armitage nods, alebit reluctantly, green eyes flickering with annoyance. They walk to the back of the shuttle – Poe ignores the way Armitage lags behind – and switch the secondary control panel on. Poe runs through the most important features, how to aim at targets on the monitor, the kinds of momentary glitches to look out for and how to fix them. Armitage makes no comment other than a few clarifying statements. His petulance has died down. Without it, he seems drained.

“It’s a lot to cover,” Poe concludes the lesson. “Probably too much to learn in less than a day, to be honest, but we’ll manage.”

“I can handle it,” Armitage says. He doesn’t look at Poe. Instead, he fixes his eyes on the ground and murmurs, almost but not quite to himself, “I’m not stupid.”

It’s not the kind of comment Poe would expect from the man who but a moment ago was giving him such a belligerent lecture on shields and power reserves. The shift catches him off-guard.

“Of course, you aren’t,” Poe says.

Armitage turns to him, his brow furrowed, silently requesting elaboration.

“You’re not stupid, I mean,” Poe continues. The words race before his thoughts, before his better judgment about caution when speaking with the enemy. “You know more about the mechanics than I expected, hell, more than I’d expect some pilots to know… it’s impressive.”

Armitage tenses. After a long, baffled look, he mutters a quick “Thank you”. He rests a hand on the console, rapping his fingers over the switch for the rear shields.

“These will only hold off an attack for so long at a far range,” he says, “Especially if there’s more than one ship after us. The Resistance doesn’t usually send lone fighters. The shuttle is too awkward to maneuver an escape.”

Poe considers this. The grim realization of what the mission could entail creeps up on him with predatory hands.

“We’ll have to shoot them down then,” the words are bitter gall in his mouth. “If they attack, that is. Depending on their formation, I may be able to handle most of the offensive. All we can do for now is hope for a smooth flight.”

The idea of a smooth flight is starting to sound ridiculous. Armitage gives the pilot a strained smile. He then draws back his sleeve to check his watch.

“I had best not strain the curfew too far,” He says. “I have certain privileges related to the mission, but they only go so far.”

“Yeah,” Poe nods in agreement. “I should turn in too. It’s late. I think I’ll just stay here a little longer to check the cannons again.”

“I will see you here in the morning for the departure then?”

“That sounds about right.”

“Good,” Armitage says. His hand flies upward in a salute. The gesture seems out of place for reasons Poe can’t pinpoint. “Good night, Dameron.”

Poe returns the salute. “Good night…” He hesitates, realizing that he still doesn’t know his partner’s surname.

“Armitage,” Armitage fills in.

“Yes. Good night, Armitage.”

Poe waits for the doors to close behind his partner before he takes out his datapad. He opens the file with the mission details and selects the tab for “personnel”.

“Personnel: 2. No profile information available,” the screen reads.

So Armitage’s apparent lack of a surname isn’t so trivial.

Poe sits down and runs a hand through his hair. He has yet to receive confirmation from the Resistance concerning his earlier transmission. The possible consequences of a failed transmission are even more worrying now.

He remembers when he was first drafted into the First Order, a petrified eleven-year-old swearing loyalty to an enemy force far larger and colder than his young imagination could ever have envisioned. He thought often then of his parents’ war against the Empire.

He had once spun fantasies of fighting such an enemy, but those were only inane stories over which he’d had sovereign control. Now, he found himself confronted with a very different game of pretend. The other Resistance spies and their allies in the Senate comforted him as they were able, but above all they were sure to drill into him the importance of keeping his cover.

“Follow their protocol. Do whatever it takes to do well on the simulations, no matter how wrong they seem. It’s the only way to catch the officers’ attention.”

“People will get hurt. Don’t question it. Your progress helps the Resistance in the long run.”

“All it takes is for them to find one of us, then the whole operation goes down. And it’s not just us. It’s our families, our friends…”

“Fight for them, kill for them if you have to. We all make sacrifices. Just remember who the real enemy is, what you’re really fighting for and you’ll be on the right side.”

Remember who the real enemy is. That’s the rule. Poe just needs to stick by it.

But rules are much harder to follow in practice.

Later that night, Armitage storms out of the barracks, the jeers of his squadron pounding in his ears. His left hand grips his bag, which he packed earlier for fear of precisely this kind of trouble. The other clenches his blaster.

He steps into the refresher. It’s deserted at this hour. His pulse still races as he removes his clothes. The water is freezing when he first turns it on. He steps in anyway, unable to care less about the chilling temperature.

He closes his eyes, trying to beat down that subverting feeling of vulnerability, of weakness. When he cannot subdue it, he pushes it away.

For one blissful moment, everything is distant. He opens his eyes and imagines the world through an observer’s lens. He watches the water drip off his shivering, naked frame. He hears the rush of the water like a cry in a memory long-forgotten. He shifts the frame downward and sees the blood pooling at his feet.

Then, he steps out of the shower and faces his own, pathetic reflection in the mirror. He wants to scream at it, wants to bash that sobbing wretchinto the marble counter before him until his skull shatters.

His fist collides with the counter, hard enough to scrape his knuckles. The fresh wound stings and realization floods back to him, drowning him. He forces himself to be alright.

He straightens his uniform, gathers his bag and steps out into the hall. A sickening feeling churns in his gut as he looks back in the direction of the barracks. It is then that he violates protocol for the second night in a row and heads directly to the shuttle bay. He tells himself it’s madness, ordering that he turn around this instant and return to his proper place with his squadron. But none of that seems to matter.

He enters Landing Bay A9 with his code cylinder. Dameron is gone now, unsurprisingly. Armitage knows it’s better that way. He needs to be alone.

He climbs the shuttle ramp, wincing with each step. The bleeding has stopped, and for that he’s grateful. He can ignore pain well enough.

The shuttle is dark inside. Both control panels are switched off. Armitage approaches the main controls, runs a ghostlike hand over them. He gazes out the front window of the ship, out the entrance to the landing bay where dark fields of stars can be seen behind a hazy screen.

He has to drag himself away from the view. He staggers to the shuttle’s bunk and slowly lifts himself onto the mattress. There, he shuts his eyes and pleads for sleep.

[thebibliomancer]

Essential Avengers: Avengers #197: Prelude of the War-Devil!

July, 1980

Lets keep this biweekly Avengers fest rolling. Because that’s what fests do. They roll.

The cover this time is going for that “here’s a bunch of things what happened here” approach, with some FILTHY LIES.

Also, Jarvis seems to have taken Vision’s job as tiny logo mascot. I am Okay with this.

So in this issue apparently: the Avengers will get stuck in an elevator because Real World Problems can happen to them too. I’d like to see Superman stuck in an elevator. No, really. I would. How would that even work? The man can tear apart moons and fly. We also see an outside shot of the Avengers Mansion but I doubt that will happen. We see Wonder Man and Beast mobbed by women so Beast’s sexy, sexy blue fur continues to work its odd aphrodisiacal magic. We see Ms Marvel having a romantic walk on the beach with Scarlet Wanda. And we see the silhouette of the titular WAR-DEVIL.

So clearly a lot going on here.

Last time though. Last time: The Avengers jut got back from a three-parter where an escaped mental patient turned out to be a clone which led the Avengers to shut down a secret academy for training henchmen, goons, and mooks and fight Taskmaster for the first time. Jocasta Did A Thing and now the Avengers have realized they’ve been ignoring her and promise to try to do that less.

Also, further back, Scarlet Witch decided to take some soul-searching time off of the team after taking some soul-searching time in Transia. Her asking for more vacation time sparked a huge blowup by Agent Gyrich that eventually led to the Avengers being freed his heavy yoke. So good job, Wanda. I bet nobody has ever enacted such lasting change just by asking for a vacation.

We start off and I am immediately proven wrong when the big issue starting splash page is an outside shot of the Avengers Mansion.

What a fool am I.

But what a fool is climate. Because the Taskmaster was defeated earlier in the day according to the caption boxes but its a bright sunny day when it had been snowing when the Avengers left to chase Wasp who was chasing Selbe, the aforementioned clone.

New York weather is a mystery.

Also a mystery: the inkers for this issue because they go uncredited.

The establishing shot of the Avengers Mansion was just a comedic transition when an annoyed exclamation zooms in to show the Avengers all trapped in an elevator.

Beast is annoyed that such a mundane problem would happen to them and shudders if word got out to the Daily Bugle. And also its kind of crowded. For some reason all the Avengers decided to take the same elevator.

... Maybe they exceeded the weight limit? I’m sure it must have higher tolerances than normal elevators but you packed ‘legally an appliance’ Jocasta, built like a gorilla made of muscle Beast, and ‘wears a suit of armor’ Iron Man in the same elevator car.

Vision decides to do the thing he’s capable of doing and just intangibles out of the elevator car to free up some space.

And he gets kind of a phrase-catcher situation here as Beast thinks, in the manner that people often do, that the Vision’s ghosting still gives him the creeps no matter how often he sees it.

Poor Vision. He’s demonstrated time and again that he is a real boy with feelings who wants to do good and even his allies think he’s creepy.

Anyway, Wasp, Yellowjacket, and Ant-Man decide to help out with the space issues too by shrinking tiny-size.

Ant-Man even climbs onto Iron Man’s shoulder so he can give his considered opinion as an electrical engineer as Iron Man tries to fix the elevator panel.

Which I guess means the problem is in the electronics and not the pulley or cable or anything.

I don’t know how elevators work so I must assume its magic and physics making an abomination baby.

Wonder Man, who has mild claustrophobia from years spent dead in a coffin, suggests just OH YEAH’ing out of the elevator.

But the Avengers are somehow WAY over-budget for repairs this month. SOMEHOW. (I bet its Wonder Man’s fault)

Anyway, no need to put some red in Tony’s checkbook. Iron Man just found and fixed the problem so the elevator is on its way again. The one page and change nightmare is finally at an end.

I’ll note that Ant-Man did not give a single piece of electrical engineering expertise the whole time he was on Iron Man’s shoulder. I think he just wanted to ride on his shoulder.

When the elevator reaches the ground floor, Jarvis is there to greet them with seltzer and aspirin because Vision told him what had happened and Jarvis is considerate like that.

And a little jowlier than usual. He looks a bit Hitchcockian. Might be from the change in art team.

Jarvis also has phone messages that came while the Avengers were gone and/or stuck in an elevator.

Someone called to ask to do an interview with Captain America and a Ms Zimmerman called for Beast.

Beast reveals that he has set Wonder Man up on a date. In the same panel that we see Wonder Man grabbing the entire bottle of aspirin. He tries to get Beast to talk this over but the excited blue friend is already sprinting out of the room.

Captain America tells everyone else that they have forty-five minutes to shower and change into fresher clothes (except you, Jocasta. You’re naked) because he’s calling for a debriefing session.

And then in the most dramatic panel possible without a lightning strike, Jarvis thinks to himself:

Jarvis: “Oh, dear, and the coffee percolator broke down this morning! Will they ever forgive me?”

Seriously. This panel needs a dramatic sting.

MEANWHILE, at Stark International Detroit, a Dr. Cowan and Mr. Karnowski talk about a project almost being done. Tomorrow final testing will begin.

On RED RONIN!

I guess the titular War-Devil.

Red Ronin had to be rebuilt after its head was severed by “those awful mega-monsters.”

So lets unpack some stuff. Red Ronin is a giant robot. Which was built in a collaboration between Stark International and Japanese scientists. For SHIELD. With the intention of fighting Godzilla.

SHIELD had an anti-Godzilla giant robot.

Just let that soak in. SHIELD commissioned a giant robot. To fight Godzilla.

Amazing.

Anyway. Mr. Karnowski commiserates with Dr. Cowen that he put so much of himself into the restoration project that giving it up to the test team tomorrow will be like giving up his own child.

But Dr. Cowen reveals that he doesn’t intend to give Red Ronin up to anyone. A statement he punctuates with a wrench to the back of Mr. Karnowski’s skull.

I knew I couldn’t trust a comic book character with a shitty soul patch. Even though I could only see it on the same page that he revealed his treachery.

We’ll revisit this treacherous bad facial hair man later.

Lets check in with Cap using the most ridiculous exercise equipment imaginable.

Look at that thing. What even is that. Does it revolve in some way? Do you pull it? Which muscle groups does it work?

Anyway, Iron Man comes in to interrupt Cap’s exercise routine as he so often do, apparently. And he brought Jocasta because the thing he wants to talk to Cap about is promoting her to full Avengers status since she’s helped out so much lately.

She’s basically been like Hercules, crashing on the Avengers’ couch despite not being an Avenger but also she hasn’t been eating all of their grapes because she does not eat. So she’s automatically a better house guest for that reason.

Cap thinks its an excellent idea and decides to bring it up at the next regular meeting (as opposed to a debriefing session) and Jocasta runs off to tell the others.

She manages to emasculate Cap by effortlessly lifting the exercise equipment out of the way and exclaiming it isn’t very heavy rather than just walk around it.

Captain America: “‘Not very...?’ *Sigh* I think maybe I’ve had enough exercise for one day.”

Iron Man: “Could be, Cap. Could be.”

Look, Cap. Self-improvement is admirable. You can’t let yourself be discouraged just because you’ll never become a beautiful robot no matter how much weight you lift.

Meanwhile, the greatest and most dramatic plot point in this whole issue is solved.

Vision solves the broken percolator issue by heating it up with his Solar Beam, ensuring that the Avengers have coffee at their meeting and don’t hate Jarvis forever for something out of his control.

Hooray Vision!

Jocasta rushes in to tell Jarvis and Vision that she’s going to be nominated as an Avenger. And then fishes for what Vision thinks about that.

He tells her congratulations. In his most Spock-esque stoic pout.

She realizes that he’s still feeling feelings about Wanda’s absence and says that if she, Jocasta, becomes an Avenger, she, Jocasta, will be around a lot more in case Vision needs anyone to talk to.

Vision broods moodily out the window and tells her he’ll keep that in mind.

“The words that flow from the synthozoid’s lips are hollow, as if each sits lonely, isolated within its own syntax. And they are cold...”

... I think Jocasta has maybe feelings for Vision. Why do potential love triangles keep happening to him??

I mean, I can understand why Jocasta is drawn to him. She tried in an earlier issue to establish a bond with him as they are both robots but then she tried to sympathize with his feelings so he yelled and broke stuff while claiming he had no feelings.

Out of everyone, he is the most able to empathize with her situation but also the least likely. Because he is wrapped up in himself.

If Jocasta has Wasp’s feelings, she might also have feelings for Yellowjacket without being able to do anything about it because he’s with Jan. Although later on, after Hank Pym and Janet Van Dyne divorce, Jocasta does date Hank for a while. Who she views as the god of robots rather than any direct familial relation. Which doesn’t strike me as a good foundation for a lasting relationship but maybe she just wanted to make out with god for a while.

I think Jocasta also dates Aaron Stack for a bit but I don’t know what they have in common aside from both being robots.

Anyway, we cut to a cold New Jersey beach where Wanda has rented a cottage so she can sort out her life, think about what she wants, and to be alone.

And then Ms Marvel shows up to give Wanda unsolicited life advice.

Because Carol Danvers.

Ms Marvel: “I hope you don’t mind my being here, Wanda. But I believe I understand what you’re going through -- and I thought you might want some advice from a sister Avenger.”

Its apparently common knowledge that one of the things Wanda took a thinking vacation to think about was whether she wants children.

Ms Marvel: “But just consider what that would do to you career as a super heroine. You’d have to focus so much of your life on a single individual, an infant, and at the expense of an entire populace that looks to you for protection. You’re a vital person, Wanda, one that half the women in the world would probably kill to be. Surely you find that more ‘fulfilling’ than any silly stereotype of having a baby?”

...

.......

These are important issues to consider when deciding as a superhero whether to have a baby or not and while Wanda doesn’t agree with Ms Marvel’s reasoning she has been considering these issues and come to the same conclusion.

But still. Geez. This feels like the writers’ piling more straw onto the straw feminist characterization that they’ve given Ms Marvel recently. I’m not familiar with her solo series. Maybe she was always like this. But she seemed chiller in her earlier Avengers appearances. Back in those crazy days during the Korvac Saga.

Also, I know that Avengers #200 looms on the horizon. This feels like karmic set-up and that makes me angry.

There’s this trope called the law of inverse fertility which basically means that in fiction the more you want a child the less likely you are to get one and vice versa.

So Ms Marvel giving a big speech about how having a baby is stupid compared to saving the world and then getting a mysterious pregnancy at the end of this issue... It just feels vindictive.

Ugh.

Anyway.

Scarlet Wanda: “When the Vision and I first married, we decided against having a family, figuring it wouldn’t be fair for a child to have parents who might be killed at any time by just doing their jobs. But with all that’s happened lately concerning my own parents, and with my brother’s impending fatherhood, I had second thoughts. That is, until I was able to put my responsibilities into perspective. Which means that while I’d dearly love to have a child some day, I realize that my life as an Avenger -- and the love I share with the Vision -- are what really matter now.”

In fact, her mind made up, Wanda was even about to return to New York when Ms Marvel stopped by with her unsolicited advice.

But suddenly, Ms. Marvel feels dizzy and collapses.

MEANWHILE, another outside establishing shot of Avengers Mansion!

Iron Man actually arrived ten minutes early for the debriefing. He wanted to send a summary of the battle with Taskmaster to the Fantastic Four so they can be on the lookout for any more goon academies.

But also: he wanted to talk to Cap before the meeting.

He finally tells Cap of the soul-searching he has been doing and how he has decided to step down officially as Avengers chairman.

Humorously to me, Cap immediately asks if it was because of something he did but Iron Man says that he just needs to spend more time helping his boss Tony Stark WHO IS DEFINITELY NOT HIM with his problems.

This comes as a shock to Captain America who thought he was only replacing Iron Man as chairman temporarily but since his mind is made up, Cap says he’ll schedule an election meeting as soon as possible.

And then time for the debriefing meeting. Or rather the post-debriefing meeting.

An hour passes so we don’t actually have to watch what a debriefing meeting consists of but apparently it involves relating, collating, and recording data and impressions from their recent battle.

None of these people know how to sit in a chair. Look at you, Cap. Why do you have one foot up on the chair? Iron Man... you are on the complete opposite side of the room as your chair and the meeting hasn’t been adjourned until this panel. Jocasta... don’t lurk over someone like a creeper. And Beast... just don’t.

Cap tells everyone that he’ll circulate a memo about the election meeting in a day or two because in an organization where you count all the members on two hands, official memos are definitely required.

And also, how come we haven’t seen any of these memos?

I would absolutely love to see some official Avengers memos about.... fridge use and appropriate dress code and stuff. Make it happen, Marvel.

With the meeting adjourned, its time for R&R so Beast tells Wonder Man to get dressed in his “stepping-out duds.” Wonder Man says he’s never been lucky with blind dating but Beast bets he’ll have the time of his life “even if you aren’t covered with blue fur!”

He knows! He knows the secret of his own success with women! Its canon! Women in the Marvel Universe love blue furry guys!

See also: Nightcrawler.

Nearby, Ant-Man thanks Yellowjacket and Wasp for keeping his secret identity a secret and then takes off on flying ant. Although he goofuses that up a little and ends up dangling from the ant’s leg as it flies off.

Yellowjacket tries to excuse himself to go back to his lab and do science but Wasp makes him an unstated (but probably sex related) offer that can’t refuse.

Evening strikes and we get to see the double date that Beast set up was at a 60s rock revival at Madison Square Garden.

It makes perfect sense. Its music that Wonder Man is familiar with and anyone that goes to a 60s revival probably likes old stuff thats stuck in the past.

The double dates show up: Melissa Zimmerman for Beast and her friend Candy Brown for Wonder Man.

Candy immediately latches onto Simon’s arm and says she loves strong men and Wonder Simon thinks that maybe this won’t be so bad after all but then a small child name Chauncey wanders over with popcorn and a balloon and he’s Candy’s son and also he recognizes Simon as Mr. Muscles.

And jumps on him and crawls all over him and tries to ride him.

Candy had to bring Chauncey to the date because the sitter cancelled. Also she’s divorced because her ex Myron just didn’t understand children so she dumped the bum.

Good for you, Candy.

Simon is less than thrilled though. And he whispers an implied violent threat to Beast.

Try to keep an open mind, Simon. Nobody likes getting stuff sprung on them or having children try to strangle them but think of it like this. She’s a single mom trying to get back out there after a divorce. And you’re a single dude trying to get back out there after being legally dead for years.

Meanwhile, back at the mansion, the less social people.

Iron Man comes into the TV room where Vision is slouching with amazingly bad posture watching something called Connections.

I guess Vision doesn’t have to worry about hurting his back with bad posture though. Lucky synthetic jerk.

The armored Avenger tells the android Avenger that he just heard from Wanda that she’s coming back. She had to take Ms Marvel to a hospital but as soon as she’s good to travel, she’ll return to the mansion.

Iron Man: “She hopes by tomorrow. She says she’s eager to see you. I, um, just thought you’d like to know.”

Vision: “That’s very considerate, Iron Man. Thank you.”

Iron Man: (Hmph. Anyone else would be jumping for joy to hear that his wife was returning after an extended leave. But not the Vision. I wonder if any of us will ever really understand him?)

Of course, what Iron Man misses as he turns to leave is the tiny smile that Vision gets when he hears the news.

I don’t want to judge too harshly. Vision is a hard guy to read. His emotions are either incredibly downplayed or explosive. But you’ve been allies and friends with this guy for years. Learn to read him and accept that he emotes differently.

Although it would be funny if Vision tried to express himself more clearly by yelling his emotions.

Like this.

So Vision smiled and a pile of angels got their wings, presumably. I guess issue over?

Wait. Dangit. There’s that... prelude to the War-Devil thing. And I guess maybe we should follow up on why Carol collapsed even though we already know through the bitter lens of hindsight.

So at Stark International Detroit, some security guards are doing a search because Mr. Karnowski and Dr. Cowan never checked out with the rest of the late shift.

They find an unconscious Karnowski stuffed behind some equipment and wonder where Dr. Cowan could be.

And then Red Ronin launches out of its silo.

Dr. Cowan talks to himself or maybe to Red Ronin about how he secretly altered the cyber-helmet that controls Red Ronin to only respond to his commands.

Dr. Cowan: “I-I was so scared. So very scared. I was sure all along that my secret work would be discovered. B-but now we’re one, Ronin, and we’re free to achieve our ultimate goal: the regrettable, but very necessary, instigation of -- WORLD WAR III!”

Okay. So. This guy isn’t behaving rationally. And he just stole a giant robot designed to fight Godzilla. To start World War III.

Less than good.

Meanwhile, a hospital in southern New Jersey.

Scarlet Wanda Frank finds Ms Marvel’s doctor and asks if she’s okay. The doctor believes she is but wants to run more tests.

Scarlet Wanda: “May I see her?”

Doctor: “Oh, definitely, she could use the moral support. For some reason, she seems to be taking the news of her condition rather badly.”

Scarlet Wanda: “‘Condition’...?”

Doctor: “Yes, though I don’t see why she should be upset. After all, nausea and fainting are quite common symptoms for someone who is -- THREE MONTHS PREGNANT!”

And we get to see Ms Marvel crying in a hospital bed.

Fuck you committee of writers and editors that decided on this plotline and intentionally or otherwise punished a feminist character who did not want children with a mysterious pregnancy. Fuck you.

I’ll talk a little bit more about the committee of bad ideas when we hit #200 but Jim Shooter said that everyone could blame him so fuck you Jim Shooter.

Terrible, terribleness of this plotline aside, I detect a new formula in this issue.

Like the Taskmaster arc, we’re starting with a slower initial issue with downtime and character beats for the Avengers while the problem that will fill two additional issues is teased.

Last arc it was sort of a mystery centered around Selbe which ended up just being a precursor to a bigger thing. Cloning for organ transplants revealed secret villain academies.

This time its a giant robot. That was built to fight Godzilla.

I kind of like this format. I don’t know if I’d like it if it kept just being three issue arcs back to back but I like the breather issues with character beats and Avengers R&Ring.

The Ms Marvel stuff aside, its interesting that as we approach issue 200, it does feel like there's a big shakeup due. There’s going to be a new Avengers chairman. Jocasta is up to be voted onto the team. Scarlet Witch will return.

The Ms Marvel stuff aside, I am excited to see what the book does in the upcoming future.

Follow @essential-avengers. I passed my 200th Essential Avengers post a ways back but I didn’t make a big deal about it. Because I forgot to keep track of the numbers what with annuals and crossovers. Maybe when I repost it on the essential-avengers blog I’ll remember to.

[linkspooky]

Hide and Saiko: The Terrorists Who Don’t Do Anything

I’ve been suspecting it for a long time, but after this chapter it’s become quite clear.

Both characters are observant of the environment around them, and driven by simple and pure emotions of love. I don’t want to understate how genuine these emotions of love are.

It’s love in both cases, that is their greatest strength and their greatest weakness. 

I know I occasionally float a “Hide might be an ultimate antagonist theory” as a thought exercise but my interpretation of Hide has always been the most boring Hide theory of all, that he really is just somebody who wants to look out for Kaneki no matter what, and his strongest abilities are being a slightly clever and observant kid.

That’s exactly it though, in the realization of Hide as somebody whose in it for Kaneki, not only does the good nature of his character shine, but also his several limitations. This discussion is not to degrade Hide, or Saiko, but rather to render both of them as characters whereas before this point they’ve just kind of floated around in the narrative.

A character needs to have a flaw, in order to have conflict, and then an arc. For all of those people who want to focus on the positives of Hide that’s fine, but his role in the story will always come from his negatives. As if there’s no conflict, there is no story. So for the people who want to see Hide as important, ironically, he has to be flawed in order to be important in the story. 

I think it’s important also that Hide hangs around characters like Amon, Akira, Marude, characters who otherwise are told to the audience they have importance but have yet to be punished narratively for showing a clear flaw and therefore end up doing little to nothing for arcs at a time. It’s my opinion that this arc is there time to shine finally as characters, and therefore be punished as characters. 

The question is then, after spending all this time writing a huge disclaimer about it what exactly do I believe Hide’s flaw to be and how does this connect to Saiko?

“Do I need another reason? He he.”

That is exactly it though, how far exactly has Hide gone for Kaneki? He loves him, so he’s willing to face down Kaneki as a giant red monster in order to try to save him and pry him out of it, yet apparently that love wasn’t strong enough for Hide to do something so simple as tell Kaneki he was alive. 

What Hide says much earlier, is pretty illustrative of his role in things so far.

All Hide has done so far is watch, which is to say he’s acted entirely passively. Even if his intentions were good and wholesome which once again, I believe they are, ultimately his actions amount to nothing. Hide says the reason he went to the Auction was to watch for an opportunity to save Kaneki.

Hide hears at the auction, the sounds of Kaneki being tortured but ultimately does nothing. Other than make a small move in the hopes that somebody else will do something.

Which is where we get the parallel to Saiko, Saiko also hears the sounds of Kaneki screaming from torture over the loudspeakers.

Ultimately though, Saiko does nothing. She hesitates terrified to face Seidou, and yet we see in the same situation that despite the danger from both the CCG and the other members of Aogiri it’s Hinami who moves.

Hinami who remember had the least to gain in this situation. Who was protecting something that did not even remember her anymore as her brother, unlike Saiko who wanted Sasaki to come home safe to her, and Hide who wanted to save Kaneki in this situation.

Utlimately what moves Saiko is not Sasaki’s own pain, but rather the fact that he might leave her. That she might lose her space of refuge in him.

So despite Hide having good enough reasons not to move, the fact that the Washuu were hunting him for one, or that he wasn’t powerful enough to face Seidou on his own it ultimately doesn’t really excuse his inactivity, because we see somebody who did take that risk, and for that fact got punished over and over again for Sasaki’s sake out of pure love for him. Hinami sat in prison for six months because of this selfless decision of hers. Neglected to the point of near insanity and despair. 

Yet ultimately, Hinami is able to do something that Hide and Saiko are incapable of. Confronting Kaneki, which is what happens when he finally comes to see her again.

Which is thematically ultimately what Hide needs to do, not to save Kaneki but rather to confront Kaneki about himself. While Hide’s inactivity did play a role in it, taking the blame for it all and saying that he needed to save Kaneki or make better use of himself is also flipping the exact opposite direction, and not really looking at the situation at face value. 

Hide and Saiko are ultimately characters with good intentions, but their huge fear of confrontation is ultimately what leads them to reinforcing the status quo rather than challenging it.

Hide pretty clearly says the reason why he didn’t want to move was because the Washuu were after him, but Hide also never really took any steps himself against the Washuu, and always relied on other people to move on in his stead. In fact, Hide actually moved against the one person who did a really good job of getting rid of all the Washuu. For the sake of the restoration of the CCG, the thing that every other terrorist group in the manga has been against. 

Which is why it strikes me so odd that Hide and Saiko get referred to as terrorists, because both characters (Hide at least did live on his own for awhile and hide from the law), don’t actually want to break apart the systems that ideally are the one thing terrorists are for.

I mean, Saiko didn’t even show up for the supposed “rebellion” against the CCG that she inspired. She literally slept through it, even though she was the one who was so concerned for Yoriko’s sake she left it entirely up to Urie.

Hide also this arc, showed up not to help Goat fight against the 24th ward raid, but rather to help out Urie, who is somebody he didn’t even know even though he claims his real goal is to be doing all of this out of love for Kaneki. So, Amon and Akira as well, claim that they can be finally motivated to move out of love for Kaneki.

Yet we see scenes in the past where they could have stayed around and helped him, but rather left for their own purposes. So, what exactly is so different now?

Narratively it’s because their back is against the wall, and that is the main flaw. They don’t act, they react. They act with no agency for themselves and therefore only take direct action when someone else acts upon them. 

If somebody punches you in the face, and you punch them back you aren’t the one who started the situation. It’s not a unique character action on your part, most people would react violently if somebody else walked up to them and punched them in the face. 

Therefore there is a clear difference between acting with agency as a character, and simply reacting. Hide and Saiko, and by extension, Akira, Amon and Marude react to this whole situation. They act like they can save Kaneki now, but have little to no self awareness for how they let it get that bad in the first place. It reminds me of “Saved from the Web”.

Saiko temporarily saves Urie, but she doesn’t do anything at all to address the behavior that caused Urie to end up like this in the first place. The next significant arc, we see that Saiko is back to pushing Urie to handle everything on his own because she doesn’t come with him to rebel against Furuta, and we see that’s also the exact same lesson Urie has internalized upon himself. 

Ironically it’s why the chapter is called “Saved from the Web” but we see at the ending, despite Saiko’s actions the web is very much still there. 

So we see again in this arc, characters like Saiko and Hide who still care very deeply for Kaneki but ended up doing effectively nothing to save him from Dragon.

In comparison to Hinami, who was once again able to step up and act at great personal risk and detriment to herself.

She’s the one who ends up totally broken at the end of this arc, while Hide and Saiko are still looking up to things as if there is still hope.

If you take the remake chapter as canon though, it’s also implied that Hide’s fear of confrontation has been a thing with Kaneki since the beginning. The implication is pretty clear here, that he simply watched and let Kaneki go on the date with Rize despite knowing how dangerous it was, because he was afraid of the confrontation otherwise.

So we ultimately have the flaw in their love. Saiko and Hide can have all of the love in the world for Sasaki, but if they’re unwilling to confront him, and only want to love him from afar than their love will never reach him. 

Both characters, who are strong, clever, and observant in their own right, but instead choose to be passive and take orders, or operate almost entirely through others. 

Which means also their own individual characters have not done much, or had much time to shine. If Saiko and Hide want to be able to act on their love though, to save Sasaki and Kaneki, then they have to actually be able to do that. To move on their own volition and not just when things are forcing their backs against a wall to move, and also to actually be able to confront Kaneki, not just face him with 100% accepting love. 

As ultimately, the person they are trying to save Kaneki from now is not V, the Washuu, or even the CCG, but rather his own self. 

Yet I wonder if the characters present around them even have the visual clarity necessary to see that. After all, both Akira and Amon are so persuaded by the thought of Kaneki’s love for Hide, and their own reasoning of wanting to save their friends and yet...

As we’re reminded in Title they’ve completely forgotten about Seidou Takizawa’s existence, their own friend in need of saving. 

If Amon and Akira are the couple in coats in the above panel, (it matches the overcoats they’re wearing here) they’re shown distinctly walking away from both :Re and Seidou himself. 

It’s important to remember that Amon’s already said this sort of thing before.

His entire purpose for those three years was to save Seidou and Kurona, yet when they both save him, Amon completely forgets about them and doesn’t even ask about them when he wakes up. Apparently he wasn’t that concerned for the people he spent three years searching for, once he saved them once.

Now, after running away from Kaneki, once again Amon wants to save him and believes that’s a worthy enough motivation to move. Seidou, thankfully already has a response for this.

Amon waited until Seidou had already killed Houji to save him. Why? We might never know but it’s hard not to suspect that there’s an element of convenience and avoiding confrontation to these timings. Amon picked a point at which he could swoop in and be the hero to Akira, rather than showing up and having to oppose Akira and Houji in order to protect Seidou from them, because they were the ones who were trying to kill him in that situation.

Then there’s Akira and Amon in the current situation as well. They had no interest in helping Kaneki when his goal was to take down the CCG and Furuta for the sake of ghouls, and were happy enough to simply spectate the conflict as if they had nothing to do with it.

However, when it came time to fight Kaneki as a ghoul who was rampaging against humans, a fight where they could conveniently, finally join back with the CCG again one that did not reflect the moral amibiguities that Furuta brought up when he became it’s head, to once again be unambiguous heroes saving Kaneki and Cooperating from the CCG, only then, suddenly do they find the will to move. 

Anyway, I’m repeating myself by this point but I think it’s an important fact to nail down. The love of almost every character in this series is flawed, and despite good intentions the lack of situational and self awareness here in these characters charging in to save Kaneki, is likely only going to make the situation worse. 

Until these characters actually rebel, or move to save Kaneki when there’s actual risk to them and their beliefs, until they start to break the cage, Saiko and Hide, and the rest of Marude’s gang are really only going to be terrorists in name only.

Or perhaps, the terrorists who don’t do anything. 

[johhhhhhnintheusa]

Curiosity

I think it's safe to say at this point that I am a massive nerd.

As such, one of my hopes was that I'd be able to go to a nerd convention while I'm in America.

I've been to a few in London and they're a lot of fun. Lots of people walking around in ridiculously intricate costumes, panels, markets and artists.

I actually volunteered at a convention last year, which was some of the best fun I've ever had. I'd say I enjoyed the volunteering more than actually going to the convention itself.

Either way, I'd kind of given up on being able to go to a convention here. They all seemed to be happening at times I wasn't in that area, or they were already full.

However, I did manage to go to Anime Expo right here in LA. I'm not the biggest purveyor of anime, but it was still a good time.

If nothing else, I got to play Guitar Hero for what I realised is probably the first time in ten years. Time has not been kind to my abilities.

I would also like to counter a myth. Some people maintain that nerds don't exercise. To those people, I say you have never seen one play Dance Dance Revolution. The guys playing at the convention were a blur of flailing legs, sometimes dancing over both the player one and two pads. They are almost always glistening with sweat afterwards.

Actually I'll counter another myth. People who say that exercise leads to weight loss also need to watch people play this game. Some of them are as big as they are graceful.

And they're pretty graceful.

Some of them.

Sometimes.

I spent an afternoon at the convention, in which time I started to consider why I enjoyed volunteering more than attending.

I think I just seem to derive enjoyment from other people having fun, particularly those I care about. For those reading this who attended my leaving drinks at work, that was probably a factor in why those sorts of things make me uncomfortable. I'm a support player, rather than the main event. I'm comfortable in that role and I like performing it.

While not the greatest segway in the world, another thing about myself is that I like to have seen both sides of a story. And I'm aware that sometimes I receive information skewed to a certain point of view.

Which brings me to the main topic of conversation. I am not a religious person. I don't begrudge people their religion but it's not something I feel I need in my life. I don't deny that it can be a positive force in people's lives, just as sometimes it can be destructive when utilized improperly.

The religion is almost never the problem, it's the people who practice it making it imperfect.

And there's no denying that religion can be tribal. Generally, a subscriber of one religion will believe in that religion and disavow all of the many others.

I'm staying in Hollywood, a place which happens to contain a Scientology building.

I don't believe I've ever met a Scientologist, so I decided to take the opportunity yesterday to go in and speak to some.

Oh yes, that's something I did.

I'm very conscious that the main things I've heard about Scientology are negative pieces in the media, stories about it being a cult, brainwashing, intimidating or following people. Tom Cruise jumping on Oprah's sofa. And that one episode of South Park. I'm sure I'm not alone in that being my only exposure to it.

And I know that the very notion of me talking about Scientology in the same breath as religion may seem abhorrent to you. But like I said, religion is tribal.

At its core, nobody knows which religions are correct and which are just words. They could all be horseshit, one or some could be true, but they can't all be right.

And I feel it's naive at best to dismiss Scientology based solely on negative perception, considering some of the evil shit purveyors of more established religions have done.

Just to be clear, in case you're now frantically reading this to see how far down the rabbit hole I've fallen, I've not been converted. I'm still your lovable neighbourhood agnostic.

With that out of the way, I walked to the main desk. Everyone in the building is wearing a uniform; a black waistcoat and white shirt, with a monochrome tie. Everyone wears a name badge and a Scientology symbol pin. I tell the man at the desk that I'm here to ask a few questions about them.

He says this is a self-guided tour and directs me to the walls of the room. Each wall has a large TV in it with seating in front of it. Each TV plays several videos on subjects relating to what Scientologists believe, who L Ron Hubbard was etc.

In case you don't know, the core of their belief is that you aren't your body or your mind. You are a Thetan (pronounced THAY-TEN, apparently), essentially a soul.

Your brain just controls the rest of the body, and you control the brain. They believe the mind, which contains all your experiences and sensations, is separate to the brain, and that this travels with the Thetan.

They also believe that Thetans are immortal, and that when the body dies, the Thetan simply becomes another human, similar to ideas of reincarnation. So they also believe that you have the memories and experiences of all of your past lives, including all the pain and negativity.

Scientology is the process of making sure that this negativity is expunged from the mind, so that you can be happier, more productive etc. At least that's what they believe.

I decided not to bombard the host with questions, of which I had many, so I just quietly watched the videos for a while. But then out of nowhere, the host comes over and asks me why I'm here.

I tell him what I told you, that I was just curious to hear things from their perspective. This quickly leads to a barrage of questions from me about what I'd seen so far.

For example, one of the things they believe in is called the reactive mind. This is the part of the mind (again, not the brain) that collects every negative memory and unhelpfully plays this back to you.

The example they showed is one of someone getting sick eating a certain food one time because it was improperly prepared. Then when someone offers you the food again at another time, the mind plays back the sensations you experienced before and you feel nauseous despite not actually eating the food. That this is irrational and through Scientology can be removed.

I asked him if he thought the reactive mind was completely negative. He said yes. This didn't sit right with me, so I gave him an example.

I said that if someone, when younger, put their hand in a boiling pot of water, they would use the memory of that pain not to do it again in the future, and that to an extent that's how we learn.

The host replied that this is actually a facet of the analytical mind, rather than the reactive one. That this is ok.

I'm not entirely convinced by this explanation, since there are times we don't have time to analyse anything. The fight or flight response for example is instinctual, and has largely aided our survival as a species since the beginning. Negative memories would inform that as well.

Ug see tiger, then see Zub. Tiger eat Zub. No more Zub. Ug no go near tiger. Tiger bastard.

One of the more famous, alarming things people mention about Scientology is the whole...aliens crashing in a volcano thing. I didn't want to outright ask about that (for the record, nobody there talked about it, nor did any of the videos. I think they're trying to distance themselves from it) but I thought I'd ease into it.

So I asked him if Scientologists believe in evolution, since Thetans solely inhabit human bodies and humans weren't always as they are.

This leads us to one of the main tactics I encountered: instead of answering a question, directing you to read one of the books, or attend a course.

I asked him why he can't tell me the answer. He says one of their rules is that they can't verbalize what is in the books.

I pointed out that that seems to be what the videos I just watched were doing. I also said, gently, that this is one of the biggest problems people have. That it's all set up so you need to pay money to get answers.

Any time this is brought up, with anyone I spoke to, it provokes the same response: "just go the library and read it". Always the same inflection no matter who you ask.

I asked him why it's a rule that the answers can't be verbalized. He told me that to do so would be to dilute the message.

Essentially, they're worried about Chinese whispers. This...sounds reasonable in theory but also incredibly convenient.

For the record, I tried to discuss this with two people and both times it didn't go anywhere. Seemingly their role is to get you in the door and reading the material. They won't give you much other than vague platitudes about what the religion can do.

At this point, while I definitely have learned more about what they believe, I feel as if I'm hitting a brick wall in terms of what information I can glean from speaking to them.

The host, perhaps sensing my frustration, walks me over to a small grey device. It has a dial readout and attached to the device are two cylindrical handles connected to the main device with wire.

It's an e-meter. Until now, I believed this device was used daily to assist in expunging negative thoughts or feelings. And that the device measures the level of these feelings.

The host is very quick to correct me that it doesn't measure anything. It registers the negativity that you're thinking about.

He asks me to think of a time I've been stressed.

Naturally, as when anyone is asked a question like this, I'm not thinking about something stressful. I am literally thinking the phrase 'hmm, stressful situation, stressful situation. What's a stressful situation I can think about as this man just asked'.

But before I can consciously think about an actual situation, he jabs a finger at the dial and says 'there, what were you thinking about just now?'

I tell him that I haven't even started yet and he asks me to keep thinking. This happens two or three more times until we kind of give up. But essentially, the device doesn't actually do anything to remove negativity. You just need to think of it as a tool a Scientologist therapist uses to find negativity in you so they can remove it somehow. Again, very vague.

He is very insistent that I should go on the first course to learn more because I'm clearly interested. It's only 50 bucks he says.

Here we go.

I tell him I need to conserve money, which is true, and that I can't spare it. Then he tells me about a free personality and IQ test they can do in the building.

Immediately I'm sceptical, but I show interest. He brings me a form to fill in. It asks me for my full name, full address, number, email, age, so much information. I write my first name and my age and leave the rest blank.

He leaves to get a test officer ready for me.

[maldonadohoward]

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[doctorwhonews]

Shada (DVD/Blu-Ray/Steelbook)

Latest Review: Shada Written by: Douglas Adams Directed by: Pennant Roberts, Charles Norton Produced by: Graham Williams Cast Tom Baker (The Doctor), Lalla Ward (Romana), David Brierly (K9), Christopher Neame (Skagra), Daniel Hill (Chris Parsons), Denis Carey (Professor Chronotis), Victoria Burgoyne (Clare Knightley), Gerald Campion (Wilkin), Shirley Dixon (Ship), Derek Pollitt (Caldera), James Coombes (voice of the Kraags), John Hallet (Police Constable), David Strong (Man in Car) Cover Art: Lee Binding (DVD, Blu-Ray), Adrian Salmon (Steelbook) Originally Released: November 2017 Shada Reborn Quite possibly a record-breaking candidate for the longest filming period for a single script, Shada bridges two millennia – from 1979 to 2017 – and represents a heroic effort to finally plug one of the most egregious gaps in the Doctor Who canon. In a way, Shada mirrors the antagonist of that other great Douglas Adams story, City of Death. Just as Scaraoth is shattered into dozens of versions of himself across the centuries, the industrial action that stymied the original production of the serial saw it fractured into a number of variants and doppelgangers. Most famously, Adams decided the root concepts and ideas behind his final Doctor Who script were too good to waste and they found their way into his Doctorless novel Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency. In 1992, a rough edit of the surviving footage was patched together with exposition from Tom Baker and some unsympathetic synthesizer music. Later again, an animated incarnation saw Paul McGann’s Eighth Doctor reunite with Romana and K9 and a new supporting cast to cure a nagging feeling of something undone in Cambridge 1979. But this Shada is very much the real deal. The entire surviving cast have been reunited to record the missing dialogue, the missing sequences have been animated where appropriate, though brand new models and have constructed and filmed by the Model Unit to act as inserts in the live action scenes, and a brand new score by Mark Ayers is constructed like an act of musical archaeology to recreate the instruments, methods and style of 1970s legend Dudley Simpson. It can never by Shada as it would have been, but it by far lays the strongest claim to being the definitive article. As with any such project, the team had to make creative decisions and not everyone will agree with all of them. For instance, with Denis Carey (Professor Chronotis) and David Brierly (K9) having died since their original contribution a couple of minor scenes requiring them are left unanimated, while others have their presence reduced to lines which could be reproduced from other recordings of the actors. While some no doubt may have preferred soundalikes to be used to make as complete a version as possible, it’s a sensitive decision and highlights that, in fact, the missing moments were largely padding anyway. Similarly, but much more controversially, is the decision to assemble Shada as a 138 minute film rather than as six episodes. (It even has - steady yourself - a pre-titles sequence). This will go against every instinct of many long term fans, still sore from VHS cassettes of hacked down stories and the fight to get episodic releases. But in this case it seems to work. Watched in one sitting it makes for a breezy, fun, adventure – yet the way the story is paced would have seen the episodic version with a curiously uneventful Part One and a number of extremely undramatic cliffhangers (only the midway point would have given us something as genuinely brilliant as “Dead men require no oxygen”). For me, the only genuinely poor decision is to seize on the existence of the original K9 prop, some original wall panels from the 1979 set, and the surviving (bottom) half of an original Kraag monster costume to recreate a few shots of K9 fighting a Kraag. I appreciate the sentiment behind it, but the fact the surviving bit of set to squeeze them into is so small, and the Kraag only visible from the waist down, makes for a weirdly, and unintentionally silly, looking moment that takes you out of the flow of the story more than the switches to animation do. Few would argue, though against the decision to bring in Martin Gergharty and Adrian Salmon to do design work for the animation. Not only are they brilliant in their own right, creating clear lined, loyal yet character-filled, interpretations of the cast in warm, friendly colours, it also helps smooth over the slightly stilted, flash style – the characters may not feel like they have a full range of human movement, but the presence of Gergharty’s art, so familiar to the readership of Doctor Who Magazine, makes it feel almost like panels from the beloved DWM comic strip brought to life.   Shada Reviewed But has all this effort simply been an ultimate exercise in obsessive, fannish, completeness? Are we seeing the resurrection of a poor story just because it’s there to be done, or the completion of a classic in its own right?  In short – is Shada actually any good? As it happens, Shada is brilliant jewel to add to Doctor Who’s crown if one, like all the most spectacular diamonds, not without its flaws. One the wittiest of Who scripts, and certainly with one of the most fascinating premises, at six parts it’s basically City of Death with extra portions. Famously, one of the script’s biggest critics is its own author – written, as it was, at a point when Douglas Adams was juggling several different projects and deadlines and pouring his greatest effort into his own personal work rather than Doctor Who. Considering that a billion years from now, stuck in the glovebox of an interplanetary roadster, the fruits of that rival project may be the last sign of the human race’s existence, it would be churlish to complain about that but still, Adams is being ungenerous about the serial. In almost every way, this is the fullest encapsulation of the latter half Tom Baker years. Tom himself exudes the same sort of relaxed charm, peppered with moments of total nonsense that marked City of Death while Lalla Ward has never seemed more possessed of an unearthly beauty. All of their scenes together are a joy and something as simple as them going boating, or visiting an old friend in his rooms for tea is all stuff I could watch hours of, even without any alien menaces showing up. And the alien menace that does show up is stupendous – possibly the most unbelievable thing about the whole story is the revelation on the commentary track that the people in the background of Cambridge genuinely ignored Christopher Neame in his outrageous hat and slowing silver cape as if he was an everyday sight. But the massively fun campness of Neame’s character Skagra is balanced by the imaginative and typically Adamsian plot the villain has hatched. Skagra is unusually preoccupied with the heat death of the universe in several billion years’ time and obsessed with stopping it. Like solving the central question of  Life, the Universe, and Everything the main stumbling block to finding the answer is processing power – so he’s going to absorb every mind in the universe into one great gestalt entity, so that every being in creation is simply a conduit for finding a way to save it without the petty distractions of life. In a way, it’s Douglas Adams inventing cloud computing thirty years early and typical of the scientific verve and imagination he brought to everything he wrote. (Tellingly, a year later his replacement would also craft a story about forestalling the heat death of the universe but, while propounding the superiority of ‘hard science’, would solve it by inventing some space wizards who use magic words to make it go away).There are undoubtedly flaws, mostly as we race towards the end with the mounting sense of a script with the ink still wet and no time for afterthought or final drafts. Chris Parsons is probably the best of the solid young everymen Doctor Who has ever featured, and pitched perfectly by Daniel Hall, yet despite early episodes spending more time of introducing and building on his character, he gets lost in the shuffle of the climax. There’s even a dramatic scene of Chris making a vital deduction and racing out to save the day, only for Adams to be plainly unable to think of anything to give him to do once he gets there (a problem Gareth Roberts ingeniously solved in his 2012 novelization but which, presumably for purity’s sake, the producers here don’t take the opportunity to steal). Meanwhile, the Kraag outfits are really quite poor, even for the era that gave us the Nimon and the Mandrel, and a lot of the location film work in Cambridge feels rather loose and in need of a tighter edit.Yet, there’s an inescapable magic to Shada that goes well beyond its status as a mythical ‘lost’ story, and had it been completed in 1979 it would still have been regarded as one of the highpoints of Season Seventeen.   Extras This release comes with a full set of extras the complement the story perfectly. A commentary orchestrated by the unsinkable Toby Hadoke on less funding than the bus fare into town sees him interview Neame and Hall about their experiences during filming, and Gergharty and animator Ann Marie Walsh about the pressures and effort involved in creating the project against incredibly tight deadlines. Taken Out of Time interviews many of the those involved in front of and behind the cameras on the original production to build a picture of exactly how it came to abandoned in the first place. Strike! Strike! Strike! uses contributions from those involved in industrial relations at the time to help explain exactly how the unions of 1970s television came to be so powerful, and give a potted history of their rise and fall through the lens of how industrial action had impacted Doctor Who over the decades both negatively (when it was at the BBC) and positively (when it was arch rival ITV left showing blank screens opposite the Doctor’s adventures).  Both of these are proper, half hour documentaries that tell a story of their own almost as compelling as Shada itself. There’s also fascinating Studio Sesssions - 1979, showing the working methods of the cast and crew in-studio as the cameras roll between takes. Most fun of all is are the Dialogue Sessions – in which we get to see Tom Baker and Daniel Hall record their contributions for the animation, with all Tom’s uproarious ad libs and suggestions for improvements to the script intact. The extras are rounded out with the video of the Model Unit filming of Skagra’s space station and ship, as well as the TARDIS model, new footage taken of Daniel Hall and Tom Baker’s stand-in as reference for animation, photo galleries, as well as the obligatory Now and Then tour of what the Cambridge locatoins look like three decades on. ROM content even includes a full set of scripts, storyboards, and the 1979 Doctor Who Annual (if, rather bizarrely, packed as 56 separate image files).The Steelbook release goes even further to try and lay claim to the definitive Shada package – with a third disc containing the 1992 reconstruction and the 2003 Paul McGann web animation adaptation (remastered for viewing on TV screens rather than computer monitors). About the only thing not included is the novelization.   Presentation and Packaging The DVD version has a slightly astonishing error where the coding that tells a television to display it as 16:9 or 4:3 is messed up – meaning that if watched on a 4:3 television the image will appear in the centre of the screen, with black bars on all sides – top, bottom, left and right. On a modern 16:9 television it displays the picture correctly (with bars on left and right as this is archive television intended as 4:3) but even then some resolution is lost as the image is basically being blown up to fit. That said, you’d be hard pressed to actually notice the lower resolution on viewing the DVD and it probably still looks better than it would have done on the average 1970s domestic television. All the same it’s disappointing to see such hard work by so many involved obviously handed off to someone much less fastidious at the eleventh hour for authoring the DVDs. It should be stressed, however, that the Blu-Ray and Steelbook don’t share this flaw so, if it’s going to bother you, those are the routes to take. The cover art, some may remember, was the cause of a bit of a social media flap last year when Clayton Hickman’s distinctive and unusual scarf patterned cover was ditched at the comparative last minute. In the final result, Lee Binding’s replacement is… fine, if a little bland and stilted seeming, probably as a result of the tight deadlines under which it was done. Strangely, a vestige of Hickman’s original design lingers on in the insert booklet.  “Bland” is not something anyone could accuse the Steelbook art of. Undoubtedly DWM’s most marmite love-him-or-hate-him artists, Adrian Salmon provides a cover piece in his distinctive, angular, impressionistic style. Personally, I love him. A thread long dangling frustratingly at the corner of Doctor Who history, Shada is reborn by a massive and dedicated effort by a hugely talented team to reveal it as an all time classic mix of Douglas Adams’ trademark whimsy and intelligence. Handsomely accompanied by a great set of extras and marred only by some inexplicable technical sloppiness, this is a must for any collection. But one, perhaps, to get on Blu-Ray if possible.   http://reviews.doctorwhonews.net/2018/02/shada_dvd_blu_ray_steelbook.html?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=tumblr

[secretagentspydetectiveninja]

The Misadventures of Prince Kim - chapter 44

I have a lot of new followers recently, so I guess I’ll reintroduce this fic - it’s basically a royalty AU where most of the characters are members of royalty or nobility and at a boarding school that teaches them how to rule.

So if you ever have a bit of spare time and want to read it so far, be prepared for 155k+ words of: Prince Kim being an idiot, Prince Max also being an idiot, lots of fluff, lots of angst, lots of crack, timey-wimey nonsense, geography lessons, assassination attempts, civil wars, a venomous snake that’s a surprisingly good lacrosse player, starcrossed Adrienette, too many unrequited crushes, Pharaoh Alix being the coolest person alive (but also an idiot), and the slowest burn Kimax you will ever read!!

Also on AO3 as always, where you can read the whole thing.

The new gym opened early the very next morning. Kim had made a pact to be the first one there, but he arrived only to look through the glass to see someone familiar already inside, little black pigtails tied up in red ribbons, tapping buttons on the panel of a treadmill–

“MARINETTE!” he yelled, bursting through the door.

“Kim?” She looked up at him, surprised, then smiled and waved. “I’m so glad you’re here too!”

He strode up to her and put his hands on his hips. “How dare you get here before me?!”

Her smile fell immediately. “I couldn’t sleep, and I needed some way to get my thoughts away from… well…”

Oh, of course. She was probably missing Adrien again.

“You were thinking about your pet cat, were you?” he asked. That was the code that people seemed to have been using for Adrien recently.

“Yeah, I was.” She looked around a little, but there were no guards nearby to overhear. She leaned in closer and whispered, “I think I might send him a letter later.”

“But won’t they check the mail?”

“I could just do it secretly. Write a letter to my parents asking them to give my regards to my pet cat Felix, something like that, I’m sure they’d understand what I mean…”

“Yeah, maybe that’ll work then…”

“Anyway!” she said more loudly now, standing back. “Ready for some exercise?”

Kim nodded. “Of course I am! Remember when we were little kids and we used to go for runs together?”

Marinette giggled. “How could I forget? Those were so fun. Our caretakers were always losing us in the woods and getting so stressed out.”

“And you were always getting so annoyed that I could run faster than you. Which is still true, by the way.”

Marinette stepped up onto the treadmill’s conveyer belt and pressed a few buttons. It started moving slowly, and she walked along on it. “Are you sure? Because I’ve been doing a lot of training these recent holidays, while you and Max were busy having loosely defined lacrosse matches and slow-dancing with each other at the Peace Ball.”

Kim felt the heat creeping up his face. “Did Alya tell you about that?”

“Yep. She and Nino told me about lots of things. Like you getting a new nickname thanks to a cheeky servant from Max’s kingdom. Emperor Palpatine, was it?”

“Everyone else has got tired of calling me that, so don’t you start now!”

“Don’t worry, I won’t!” Marinette increased the speed on the treadmill slightly. “And I was told in lots of detail about the lacrosse match too. It sounded fun!”

“Yeah, it was.” Kim hopped onto a nearby treadmill himself and pressed a few of the buttons, not really knowing how to work these machines. It started up with a jolt, knocking him off balance slightly, though he quickly righted himself and began walking. “I’m so good at lacrosse now.”

“Indeed. I’m sure Max thinks so, anyway.”

Kim didn’t say anything. He looked away and hoped Marinette would assume that his red face was from the exercise – despite the fact that the treadmill was still only going at walking pace and he didn’t know how to change it.

“Apparently you also did some responsible royalty things, like going to International Alliance meetings and making allies with some of the most powerful countries in the world.”

“Yeah, I totally did that,” Kim said, running a hand through his hair and ignoring that most of the International Alliance members seemed to be have been treating him like some lost little kid that they were taking pity on, rather than a future leader who needed their assistance.

“Good! Hopefully with their help, things will be sorted out soon. And then… Adrien…”

She didn’t finish, but she didn’t need to. If the Agreste Empire lost power somehow, or Emperor Gabriel calmed down somewhat, then Adrien might be able to return to school freely without fear of house arrest. And Kim would be able to go home too.

“How do you make this thing go faster?” Kim asked, changing the subject. He pressed a few buttons but all it did was increase the incline of the slope slightly.

“Here,” Marinette said, leaning over and showing him.

“Ah, thanks…”

He pressed the button again and again until the machine was going fast enough for him to need to jog. There, that was better!

“I also heard about you getting stuck in that lift with Alix for several hours,” Marinette continued. “Even Alya says she doesn’t know exactly what happened there.”

“It’s a secret,” Kim said, trying not to laugh. “No one will ever guess. But you’re welcome to try.”

“Hmm… fist fight?”

“Nope.”

“A, um, repeat of the winter party incident?”

“Still nope.”

“Did you tell her about your crush on Max then?”

“Pfffff, she already knew about that, I told her ages ago…”

“So you DO have a crush on Max!” Marinette yelled, far too loud.

“What?! I – NO, I mean… I never said anything about… I…”

“You just admitted it!”

“No I didn’t!” Kim said quickly, silently cursing himself.

“I knew it, I knew it! I figured it out even quicker than Alya did–”

“Well don’t tell anyone!” Kim quickly looked around but luckily there still wasn’t anyone else in here. Of course he had guessed that Marinette already knew, but at least she hadn’t properly said anything about it. Until now, anyway.

“I won’t tell a soul, don’t worry,” she said, laughing a little, “though to be honest, it’s obvious enough that I don’t need to tell anyone.”

Kim just didn’t say anything. If that was the case, then did Max himself know? Or would he be the last person to figure it out? And why was that always the case with people Kim had crushes on?!

Marinette turned her treadmill up faster, to the point where she was running at a slightly higher speed than Kim. He could have sworn she had the tiniest of smirks on her face. The kind that she would do on purpose a lot when they were much younger, when she won tennis matches against him in the scorching summer heat, or pulled off a particularly successful prank. He remembered how annoyingly charming he had always found it, though he had never quite fallen for her in a way other than friendship. Then again, he was fairly certain that Chloé’s haughty smirk at a certain birthday banquet several years ago was what managed to capture his heart back then, and he knew for a fact that Alix’s competitive smirks were at least 90% of the reason he had ever been interested in her.

Huh… maybe he had a type when it came to girls?

But for now, there was no girl who he was into. Imagining Max cheering him on, he put on his own smirk and turned the treadmill up so that he was running faster than Marinette again.

“I can still run faster,” he muttered.

Rather than saying anything, she just raised her eyebrows and increased the speed of her treadmill again, overtaking him. Well, Kim certainly wasn’t having that. He turned his speed up by several notches. She turned hers up even more, looking like she was starting to tire out a little. Good! Kim carried on increasing his speed, wondering how fast these machines could even go.

They carried on trying to outdo each other for the next few minutes, Marinette now huffing and puffing as she tried her best to keep up despite her much shorter strides. Kim couldn’t help chuckling a little. There was no way she would ever be able to beat him, no matter what! Alright, she was very determined, he could admit that much. But it was no real challenge.

“Just give up and slow down before you fall over,” Kim said, grinning, tiring out himself somewhat now – though surely nowhere near as much as Marinette.

“Never!” she managed to gasp out, before turning up the speed to the point where she was practically sprinting.

“Hah, you’ll never beat me!” Kim taunted, increasing his speed well beyond hers, knowing she would never be able to catch up. “I’m the fastest runner for my age group in my entire kingdom, and probably faster than anyone at this school, I bet I could even outrun a panther, that’s how fast I–”

His foot slipped. The next thing he knew, he had been flung backwards off the treadmill and was lying on the floor.

“Kim! Are you okay?”

Marinette pressed a button that slowed her treadmill to a stop, then jumped off and ran over to him, still sounding so tired out that she could hardly speak. Kim sat up, rubbing the back of his head. It didn’t even hurt that much – he was just embarrassed.

“I’m fine, don’t worry,” he said, standing back up and trying to look casual. “I’ve decided I don’t like treadmills.”

Marinette managed to let out a little laugh through her heavy breaths. “Because you fell off?”

“No, psshhh, I just prefer running outdoors on actual real life ground. Yeah. And I’m still faster than you. And don’t even think about telling anyone what just happened.”

“Of course I won’t.”

“Thanks, Mari.”

Maybe it was a better idea to try out some of the other equipment instead, and perhaps this time not accidentally get into a competition with Marinette. Thank goodness Alix wasn’t here, since she was probably the one person who would make Kim feel even more competitive than that. And thank goodness Max wasn’t here either – what if he had seen Kim fall off the treadmill like some kind of idiot? That would just be the worst thing ever. But Max hadn’t wanted to come to the gym, preferring to get ahead with some homework in peace during these early hours of the day. Phew.

Kim turned around to see someone tapping on the glass outside the gym, holding up a water bottle–

Not just anyone! Max!

Kim quickly wheeled back around, holding his hand up to the side of his face to shield it from view. “Marinette… please tell me that’s not Max standing outside…”

“That’s Max,” Marinette sighed.

“Do you think he saw me just now?”

She shrugged. “Ask him.”

He heard the door of the gym opening, followed by Max’s voice.

“Kim? You forgot your water bottle! I don’t want you to get dehydrated, so I brought it to you – make sure your fluid intake is adequate, alright? Oh hello Marinette, good to see you too…”

Kim took a deep breath, then went over to Max to take the water bottle. He was still in his pyjamas, his springy hair somewhat scruffy, a sleepy grin on his face. It was so oddly… cute. And when Max stifled a yawn, and pushed a few fingers under his glasses to rub the sleep dust out of his scrunched-up eyes, Kim had to hold back a gasp. How was Max just so… so effortlessly… perfect?

“I’m assuming you aren’t injured?” Max asked.

“Ahahaha, w-why would I be injured?” Kim asked, taking a quick sip from the water bottle.

“It looked like you had a bit of an accident with the treadmill.”

“You saw that?” Kim was sure he was blushing, so he looked away and hoped the bright yellow lights in here would make it less noticeable. He would fight that stupid treadmill if he could.

Max put a hand on Kim’s shoulder. “It didn’t look very serious, and such accidents are very common with treadmills, so I’m not worried. But if you notice any unusual pain or differences in movement then make sure you go to the medical centre and get it checked up, just in case.”

How was Max such a sweet person? It was unfair, that was what it was. Unfair that it made Kim’s heart beat so much faster than any exercise ever could.

“I will, thanks Max,” he said. “And thanks for bringing me my water bottle.”

“It’s no problem. Keep up the exercise, both of you – you’re doing an amazing job! Anyway, I’ve got work to be getting back to, so I’ll leave you now…”

Flashing them another precious smile, Max waved and walked off out of the room again. Kim immediately put down the water bottle and pulled the top of his shirt up so far it was covering his entire face, feeling too flustered to function. Max was just so cute, so sweet, so wonderful, so amazing – Kim was going to go crazy if he didn’t do something about it soon!!!

“You are a mess,” he heard Marinette saying.

“Like you were with Adrien?” he mumbled, still hiding his face in his shirt.

“I was probably worse, I couldn’t even talk to Adrien. But Kim – I want you to remember something.”

He felt her pulling the shirt back down from his face to reveal her looking at him somewhat more seriously than before.

“Max is your best friend,” she said. “Don’t let this crush on him change that. Yeah, you were embarrassed about falling off a treadmill in front of him, I would be the same with Adrien! But would you have been so embarrassed about it before you fell in love with Max? Or would you have not minded, since he’s your best friend and you know he won’t judge you for things like that?”

She was right. Or at least… kind of.

“I think it’s just when other people are around,” he admitted. “Not that I’m annoyed that you were here, or anything! It’s just… when I’m with him, and it’s just the two of us, it’s so comforting, and I don’t feel like an idiot. But when there are other people around, that’s when I get… kinda… self-conscious, I guess…”

He hated saying this kind of thing, being introspective, all of that stuff. But this was Marinette. He’d known her longer than anyone else, even longer than Max. If there was anyone he could tell absolutely anything, it was her. (Except for what happened in that lift, of course.)

“Fair enough,” she said. “Hey, are you going to give him a Cupid sticker on the Cupid Festival day?”

He looked at her sudden bright, excited smile. Everyone seemed so keen to get the two of them together. It was so nice to know how supportive people were.

“Probably,” he said, shrugging. “I’ll do something, at least. I have to tell him.”

“Yes, you so do! I’m sure it’ll go really well! I’m rooting for you!”

Kim gave the top of her hair a quick ruffle. “Thanks, Mari. You’re the best. Well, except at sports, because I’m the best, and I’m gonna prove it. What’s next?”

Marinette looked around. “We could go for the spinning cycles next, but don’t fall off this time!”

Kim laughed. “I won’t, I promise you!”

The two of them headed over to the other side of the room and continued their gym session, as a few more student began to trickle in now that it was slightly later in the morning.

14th February was not too far away now. Not far away at all. The month of February had already started, and time was running out to make preparations in order to ensure that Operation: Kimax would be a success. Alix had sort of been procrastinating on it. She knew she had to do it without Alya’s help, but who else to ask? Sure, she had other friends in the class, but still. It was pretty obvious that most of these “friends” found her a bit intimidating, despite her best efforts not to be.

Oh well, there wasn’t enough time left to wait any longer. She had to get going now.

“Mylène!” she called from the library entrance, waving, earning her glares and shushes from the rest of the students in here who were trying to work – at least until they saw that it was Pharaoh Alix, and they quickly looked back down without complaining further.

Mylène looked up and saw her, returning the wave along with a sweet smile. Thank goodness Mylène was nice and friendly. She would definitely help.

Alix went over and sat beside her, taking her pet snake off her neck and putting it down on the table to wander around freely. Mylène wasn’t afraid of it anymore, it was fine. “I need your help with something.”

“Of course!” Mylène said. “What is it?”

Now how to put this? Technically speaking, she wasn’t supposed to tell anyone about Kim and Max both being stupidly head-over-heels for each other. She really hadn’t thought this through.

“I need to set someone up on the day of the Cupid Festival,” she said.

“Kim and Max?”

“Uhhh… maybe. Anyway, I don’t know what to do. I’m guessing they’ll go to that one fountain in the school grounds, you know the one, so I was thinking… I might decorate it or something? Is that a sufficiently romantic thing to do?”

“Sounds good to me!”

“Okay… so how do I do that? Put flower petals in it or something? I don’t even know where to get those from, I can’t just go picking them off flowers in the school grounds, or Mendeleiev’s gonna give me a detention…”

Mylène began writing something on a scrap of paper. “I have some ideas, but it’s going to involve getting help from some of the others too for things that aren’t my area of expertise.”

“I guess I’ll try,” Alix said, feeling her heart sinking at the prospect of having to talk to the others too. Hopefully those “diplomacy” lessons she’d been forced to attend when younger would help her now. “Oh, and by the way, how’s your kingdom doing? At the conferences in the holidays I heard there were landslides and stuff, so…”

“Not great,” Mylène said, still writing. “I wanted to stay back and help with the relief efforts, but my father told me I’d be better off at school. But things are improving.”

“That’s good to hear.”

“And thank you for asking. You and Ivan are the only ones who did.”

Really? Well… maybe most of the others didn’t know. Mylène’s kingdom was small and comparatively insignificant with many other countries.

“Here you go,” Mylène said, giving the piece of paper to Alix. “Some suggestions about who to go to for help with setting up these people who are probably Kim and Max.”

Alix looked down at the list.

-Rose and Juleka: which flowers/decorations to get -Chloé and Sabrina: nearby flower vendors -Nath: sketch out best arrangements -Ivan: tall enough to reach top of fountain -Nino: distract Kim and Max -Marinette: keep Aurore and Mireille in a good mood!

“Thanks,” she said, trying not to sound as annoyed as she felt about having to speak to all these people.

“Not a problem! Let me know if you need any more help.”

“I will.”

Alix picked up the snake and took the piece of paper with her as she left the library. Right. Rose and Juleka were first on the list – they would know what sort of flowers to use. Where would they be? Hmm, it was a Saturday morning, right? Rose worked in the gardens. She would be there. Maybe with Juleka, too. It didn’t matter, as long as one of them was around.

Sure enough, going into the school grounds, Alix spotted Rose and Juleka giggling and spilling bits of water over each other with their watering cans. It was cold out here, with their breaths swirling into mist, and the plants were mostly barren, but they didn’t care. Those two were the most romantic kids in the class. If anyone would be able to get Kim and Max together, it was those two. But then again, that wasn’t their job. It was Alix’s.

“Uh… hi,” she said, feeling awkward about interrupting them.

“Hi!” Rose said, smiling so very cheerfully at her. “What’s up?”

“I need your help with something. I’m decorating the fountain for my friends on the Cupid Festival and I don’t know which flowers and stuff to use.”

“Use black roses,” Juleka said. “They look cool. And they also symbolize death, which is even cooler.”

“Um…”

“No death? Okay, sorry. Use red roses then. They symbolize love.”

“Red roses,” Alix repeated, wishing she had a pen to write it down with. She turned to her snake. “You got that? Red roses.”

The snake nodded. Juleka stepped forwards and gave it a little stroke on the hood. “I hear this little guy won a lacrosse match in the holidays. That is so cool.”

“Actually, we lost the lacrosse match.”

“Even cooler. I want a lacrosse snake too now.”

“Carnations!” Rose said. “Those symbolize love too, which would be perfect for the Cupid Festival! Red and white carnations especially. I learnt that in my flower arrangement class back home once. Oh Juleka, I should take you there sometime, you’d love it!”

“Flowers are rad,” Juleka said.

“They are, they really are! Oh, and don’t forget red chrysanthemums. Those mean love too. Lots of flowers mean love!”

Love, sure… but what kind of love? This was why Alix always hated the Cupid Festival. Didn’t friendship count as love too? Because this was the one day of the year when apparently, it didn’t. Or was inferior to romance somehow. No one ever gave any value to the yellow friendship stickers – no, if it wasn’t a red, heart-shaped Cupid sticker then no one cared. As if friendship meant nothing.

“I don’t think they’ll care what the flowers mean as long as they look nice,” she said, hoping she didn’t sound bitter.

“In that case the roses and carnations would be the best,” Rose said. “And I’m not just suggesting the roses because of my name, I promise!”

“Thanks,” Alix said. “That’s all, I guess. Gotta go do some other stuff.”

“Already? Alright, well have fun! And I hope our suggestions were helpful!”

“Bye snake,” Juleka said, blowing a kiss at the little reptile.

Alix took another look at the piece of paper as she left those two alone to carry on flirting or whatever they were doing.

-Chloé and Sabrina: nearby flower vendors

Right, apparently these two would know exactly where to buy flowers. The market in the merchant square had grown so much over the past year (except for the quarantine period, of course) that it would be impossible for her to find what she was looking for quickly, especially since she never really went there and wouldn’t know her way around. At least Chloé and Sabrina, who were constantly shopping, would know where to get things from. And she had managed to make fairly good friends with Chloé while they were both protecting Adrien several months ago. It wouldn’t be too bad.

It took quite a while of searching and interrogating random passing nobles before she managed to track them down. Chloé was getting her hair done at the school saloon while Sabrina sat in the corner with a magazine.

“Hello, Your Majesty, would you like an appointment?” one of the staff members said as soon as she came in.

“No thanks,” Alix replied, feeling rather protective of her messy pink hair all of a sudden. “I just wanted to talk to Chloé.”

“Did I hear someone say my name?” Chloé called, turning around in her chair. “Alix! Lovely to see you! What are you doing here? Finally decided to turn that dreadful hair into something respectable?”

Ignoring that entirely, she said, “Where in the merchant square can I buy flowers?”

“Flowers? Oh, I know the best place! Why, were you thinking of giving some to someone during the Cupid Festival? Because no offence darling, but something like that would seem very fake coming from a person like you.”

“I’m not giving flowers to anyone, ew. This is for something else. So where do I get them?”

“I’m a little busy right now but Sabrina could show you on the map.”

“Cool, thanks.”

Alix went over to where Sabrina was sitting. She had already got a map of the school out of her bag and was opening it up.

“It’s here in the north-east quadrant of the merchant square,” Sabrina said, pointing at an area of the map. “You can’t miss it once you’re nearby. If you want flowers for the Cupid Festival, I would suggest going there the previous day so that they’re not out-of-stock. Don’t worry about reserving an order in advance – you’re the highest ranked student at this school, so they won’t refuse you service.”

“Thank you.”

“If I may ask – what do you need flowers for if you’re not going to give them to anyone?”

“Isn’t it obvious?” Chloé said. “She’s making some sort of plan to help Kim and Max get together. You should have seen those two at the dance the other night. They’re certainly going to be a couple sooner or later.”

“I’m just gonna leave now,” Alix said quickly. How was everyone figuring it out? Maybe Kim and Max really were just that obvious. But then why didn’t they notice themselves?!

Anyway, the flowers could be ordered later once she was sure exactly how many she needed. Next up on the list: Prince Nathaniel.

Drat. She had never even spoken to him once in her life, she was sure. He went out of his way to avoid people. Would he even answer if she knocked on his door?

Well, she had to at least try. She left the saloon, went back to the dorms, then knocked on the door to his room. Surprisingly enough, he did open it.

“I need your help with something,” she said.

“Um.. okay… come in…”

He wasn’t even looking at her, he was looking at the snake and seeming slightly terrified. Was he afraid of snakes? So many people here seemed to be. In any case, she entered the room to see that it was even messier than her own, with scrunched up pieces of paper and piles of laundry everywhere.

“You know that fountain in the school grounds?” she said. “I have to decorate it for the Cupid Festival, don’t ask. The decorations are probably gonna be flowers and stuff. Mylène suggested I ask you to sketch out some possible arrangements, because I have no idea what I’m doing.”

He looked a little more at ease. “What kind of flowers?”

Alix tried to remember. “Red roses… white and red carnations… yeah, those.”

“Those flowers symbolize love. And that fountain is the one that Kim and Max always hang out at. So you’re trying to set them up.”

His voice was quiet, but his tone and words so matter-of-fact. He almost looked slightly smug.

“Whether that’s true or not is none of your business,” she said.

“So it’s true. Okay. I’ll sketch something.”

He opened up a sketchbook lying on the desk and grabbed a pencil out of many that were lying around, then he sat there and began drawing. It was honestly a marvel that he could see through his hair, considering it covered most of his face, but he really was a very good artist. Even the tiniest of lines, the quickest of sketches, managed to convey senses of details and shadows. Everyone always said that his kingdom produced the greatest artists and sculptors. But Alix had always assumed that was just a stereotype or something. Apparently in Nath’s case, it was actually true.

“You’re nervous,” he said, quiet as ever.

“What?”

“Nervous.” He was still drawing, not having even lifted his head to look at her. “Because if your friends get together, they might stop paying attention to you.”

It was like a sudden punch to the gut.

“I said it’s none of your business,” she snapped.

“Sorry, just an observation. Though for the record, I’m sure they wouldn’t stop hanging out with you just because they got together.”

For a few seconds she held her tongue, refusing to say anything, before her emotions were too strong and she gave way.

“What if they do?” she said.

“They wouldn’t. They care about you.”

Her fists were already clenched without her realizing. “Platonically. Which seems to matter to people less. And these days all they ever talk to me about is each other.”

“How does this look?” Nath said suddenly, holding up the sketchbook. There was a ring of roses around the top of the fountain, and the carnations were in bunches lower down.

“Looks nice,” Alix said.

“Good. I’ll colour it too, and then you can keep it for reference.”

“Thanks.”

“Anyway,” Nath continued, pulling a box of imported markers out of a drawer, “I get the feeling you’re worried about your friends abandoning you. I know what it’s like to not be good at making friends, or being a loner. But Kim and Max won’t abandon you.”

“How do you know that?”

“Just a gut feeling.”

Gut feelings were certainly not good enough to go on. Anyway, Nath didn’t even know anything about her. He was just some random kid in their class. None of this even mattered to him – he was probably just trying to amuse himself.

“Have a little faith in your friends,” he said. “They care about you. I can tell.”

“Why are you even talking to me about all this?”

He shrugged. “On the off-chance that I’m wrong, you’ll probably want a back-up friend to actually be there for you.”

“You… want to be my friend?”

Nath just nodded, carrying on the colouring.

“Jeez, and all this time I thought you were shy…”

“Being shy and being quiet isn’t the same thing. Though, uh, yeah. I am shy.” He lowered his head a little further towards the desk, practically hunched over his sketchbook.

“Well sure you can be my friend. But you’ve got to stop… you know… doing that thing.”

“What thing?”

How could she describe it? Somehow figuring out my inner thoughts and fears and talking about them as if they’re nothing?

“Stop acting like a therapist or something,” she said finally.

“Why? I want to help.”

“Well you can’t help, okay?! Just trust me. Cupid Festival is the worst. People are the worst. Once they get a significant other they throw everyone else away. I see it happen all the time, and I don’t want it to happen to me, because I can hardly ever make friends anyway and I can’t lose the ones I have. But I will! And I know I will! And I’ll be helping them do it, because they’re my friends, and I want them to be happy!”

“Not everyone’s like that though, you don’t know if–”

“But I do know!”

For quite a while now Alix had been refusing to think about the stupid, cursed, other timelines – especially since she was the only one of them still left at school, so it didn’t matter anyway. But now she just couldn’t help it.

“I know because it’s happened before,” she said. “Kind of. Other timelines. You know, that power thing Fu told me about, you must have heard about it by now. Because in the other timelines, in those stupid spring holidays last year, when Kim got together with m– uh, someone, he was such an obsessive hopeless romantic he didn’t care about anything or anyone else, just casting everything else aside like it didn’t even matter! And Max actually likes him back, so if they get together now they’ll just – no one else will matter to them–”

“Spring holidays, you say?” Nath’s tone hadn’t even changed at all. “That was a long time ago.”

“Less than a year, actually.”

“But so much has happened since then. Quarantine, the stuff with Adrien, Kim’s grandfather dying, all those things. If you’d have asked me last year during the spring holidays, I would have said that someone like Kim was not ready for a relationship. Even with Max. But now? He’s grown up a fair amount. Everything is different.”

Was that true? Was Kim more sensible now? And would that make a difference?

Well… maybe it would. Hopefully it would.

“So you think this time he’s going to be more sensible about things,” she said.

“Yes, exactly.”

“Okay. I’m… I’m gonna believe you. So you’d better not be wrong.”

Through his hair, she saw him smile. “I’m sure I won’t be.” Then he quickly sat up and tore the page out of the sketchbook, handing it to her. “Done!”

She took a look at it. How had he done something so detailed so fast? It really was very good.

“This is awesome,” she said. “Thanks.”

“You’re welcome.”

“I’ll see you in class, I guess.”

“Yep. See you. Oh wait – one last thing! What happened in that lift?”

Seriously, did everyone know about the lift thing? And why did they care?

“I’m not telling you,” she said.

“Alright, but quick question. Was it anything stupid?”

“Surprisingly, no.”

Nath smiled again. “In that case, Kim definitely has grown up a lot since last year. I don’t think you have anything to worry about.”

“Huh, I guess you’re right.” Alix couldn’t help but smile a little too. Nath was way smarter than she had realized. Maybe being so quiet had given him ample opportunity to observe everyone until he knew them all really well. Having him as a friend would probably actually be a good idea.

And best of all, he wasn’t afraid of her. The shyest, quietest classmate, the one who never spoke to anyone at all – and he wasn’t afraid of her. Thank goodness.

Leaving the room, she took another look at Mylène’s list.

-Ivan: tall enough to reach top of fountain -Nino: distract Kim and Max -Marinette: keep Aurore and Mireille in a good mood!

Right. Those three would have to be sorted out on the day before the Cupid Festival, 13th February, as well as actually going and buying the flowers. She still had a while. At least for today, she had done a good job. Phew! Operation: Kimax was going well.

[ice-guy]

Endurance. A year in space, a lifetime of discovery - book review

Scott Kelly has the world record of longest spaceflight. 340 days, almost a full year. Just recently astronaut Kristina Koch came quite close with 328 days. 

The book Endurance tells two parallel stories: about the year in space 2015/16, and the life story of Scott and how became an astronaut together with his twin brother Mark.

A year in space doesn’t sound like such a feat when we consider that there are people traveling to the International Space station ISS all the time and soon we are planning to go to Mars. The story about the year in space gives a very personal story on the risks and challenges with space travel and shows that space travel is still far away from easy and risk free.

When Scott gets home after the year in space he can hardly walk despite 2 hours of exercise he has done every day during his year in space. The book begins with him at a welcome home dinner 2 days after returning to earth. Every joint in the body hurts, legs are swollen and he has fever. When he is laying down his skin burns from a rash over his back as it is not used to gravity and pressure. The body has adapted to zero gravity in many ways by reducing bone mass, muscles etc and getting used to gravity again takes months.

Scott also gives a personal account of how difficult it is to be isolated both mentally and physically. Having your spouse and kids back on earth and trying to keep up the distance relationships despite reasonable connectivity. Being away from nature, from fresh food, inside a small metal structure floating in space. If something happens to your health, there is no doctor to examine you and perhaps perform surgery or give you a specialized drugs to treat. Supplies are not as certain as they might seem. Several cargo rocket launches failed during Scotts year in space and supplies were running out. It is also interesting to understand how frail the ISS is as a living environment. There is a constant risk of fire, a collision with space debries and particles and In order for astronauts and cosmonauts to be able to live, there are many processes that need to work seamlessly 24/7. Many are things we don’t need to worry to much about on earth. These are things like producing oxygen from water, removing excessive CO2 from the air, recycling water, ensuring solar panels are working, to working toilets, waste disposal etc. Everything has to work, all the time otherwise there will be serious problems very fast.

Scotts life story that is told in parallel to the year in space is encouraging for someone who hasn’t succeeded that well in early school years. He is barely managing his school and lacks vision of what he wants to do with his life until one day as freshman in college he picks up a book about a test pilot who went to space and gets excited, and finds his passion. He envisions himself as a fighter pilot and astranout and starts planning on what it takes to become one. Due to poor study performance he has to really put in all efforts. He only gets into a Maritime College but after working on his study technique and working hard, he gets into a flight school from where he graduates and gets to fly F14 Tomcat on aircraft carriers. After missions in e.g. Persian Gulf he becomes a test pilot and a few years later he applies to NASA to become a space shuttle pilot. He manages to get in to NASA at the same time as his twin brother. Scott goes onto flying two pace shuttle missions, first in 1999 fixing Hubble and second in 2007. Before his year long journey on ISS in 2015/16 he spent 3 months on ISS in beginning of 2011. It is quite a story of twin brothers becoming astronauts from growing up in a modest blue collar family with a father who is an alcoholic police officer and a mother who pushes herself to become a police officer in her mid career.

The book is highly recommended for anyone interested in astronaut life, how it is to live on ISS and inspiring personal success stories.

Links:

Scott Kelly reflects on his year in space https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mupWhk2cbT0

Stunning views from ISS https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xg9R4yykvqU

[lightshadowverisimilitude]

Colony Vs. The Tax Evaders for Freedom and Justice

This fills the tentacle square on my bingo card.  Challenger @rose-on-the-mountain, who is also responsible for the Tax Evaders. 

I’m not sure if this will actually fit into the Happy Lights ‘verse, or if it’s just a fun sort of what-if scenario, but I hope you enjoy it!

“They call themselves The Tax Evaders for Freedom and Justice,” Steve explained. He rubbed at the center of his forehead. “They’re registered as a church.”

“That is a joke,” Tony insisted. “There’s no way that is actually not a joke.”

Steve shrugged helplessly. “That’s what the file says. They’ve recruited some B-list villains including… The Kangaroo, Asbestos Lady, and… Flag Smasher?” He was miserable just reading the names and pushed his tablet away so he could put his face in his palm.

“Wow,” Clint said, “You are a massive troll, Cap, but I don’t think even you could troll this hard. Why are we getting called for this one? Isn’t this something that the cops can handle? Or, you know… the local biker gang?”

“We don’t really have anything better to do at the moment,” Steve pointed out, “And it would be a good training exercise for our newest member.”

The colony didn’t quite understand the point of chairs, but it was trying to imitate its human colony members. Several of the larger tentacles were coiled around the empty chair at the briefing table, and the rest were spread out over and around the table to keep limbs wrapped around their humans. It was a small subcolony of only forty-seven members who had come back with ‘Steve Colony’ after their last trip to the colony homeworld, and looked intent on setting up a permanent colony presence.  

“Can’t we just sic the IRS on them? I mean…The Church of the Tax Evaders for Freedom and Justice. Really,” Clint persisted.

Think of it like a team building exercise, Tony suggested, and the colony lit up gold at his mental voice. I have new arrows for you to try out.

Sold! Clint agreed.

Sold! the colony repeated, flickering through a quick rainbow of colors, and then asked, Sold?

The colony did not understand currency, and the last time Tony had tried to explain the concepts of buying and selling, they’d ended up in a circular loop of Why? for most of the night. About the only thing the colony had been attracted to during the conversation was Tony unleashing financial ‘logic’ into the colony mindspace. It was a good thing they weren’t interested in using the colony’s understanding of math to their own benefit, because they could just about take over the world with only minimal effort and the colony’s help.

Let’s not start that conversation again, Bruce pleaded. “Asbestos Lady?”

Steve checked the notes. He grimaced, but offered, “Apparently she’s fire-proof?”

“And dying of asbestos poisoning?” Sam guessed. His chair was conspicuously tentacle-free, but he had his head propped up on one fist and was casually petting the magenta tentacle that had wrapped around his water glass, the end periscoped up to eye level and nuzzling against his fingers. It flickered gold and the colony was suffused with a definite sense of smugness at the attention. “Has the colony been cleared to leave the tower?”

“Technically or theoretically?” Tony asked innocently. He was completely bound to his chair by a dozen thick loops and being towed around the table at the colony’s leisure.

Sam hastily held up a hand. “I don’t even want to know. Plausible deniability is a thing.”

~*~

This is beyond ridiculous, Natasha said, from her perch in the rafters in the main room. How did these people even organize enough to get a lease?

The Church of the Tax Evaders for Freedom and Justice was in a strip mall that had seen better days. The building was previously a Baptist church built in the 70’s, with the original pale green-gold carpet and wood paneled walls. The only change CTEFJ had made to the décor was to cover the cross-shaped lighter section of paint at the front of the chapel with a hand-painted sign reading, Down with the Man! Remember the Tea Party!

History was not their strongest subject, obviously, Clint said. Below them, a dozen men and women in business suits sat among the pews while their ‘pastor’ gave a rousing speech about the evils of taxes. Asbestos Lady is in the hallway.

I’ve got The Kangaroo in the back office, Tony said, Sounds like he might be talking to Flag Smasher. This guy really has a thing against flags. I’m not even sure that he’s protesting against government – I think he just genuinely hates flags.

Sitting in the back pew in a trench coat and a wide brimmed hat, Steve leaned back to see if he could get a visual check of the colony.

Now? the colony asked, bright neon excitement shivering in the colony bond. Now? Soil is cold and hard. Not pleasure, it added, just to remind Steve that it was locked up in the vents and didn’t appreciate the chilly metal. Tastes bad.

Okay, go ahead, Steve said, standing. He saw the pastor’s eyes flicker to him, and just dropped his hat onto the pew. “Sorry to interrupt,” Steve said, immediately getting the attention of the gathered congregation. “I’m here on behalf of the New York City Police Department, and I would like to ask you all to accompany me to the station. We have some questions for your… er. Congregation regarding a recent string of thefts.”

“Government dog!” the pastor yelled, pointing a finger at Steve. “Pawn of the man!”

Steve slid the trench coat off and pulled his shield off his back as hands started reaching into purses and pockets. He held out one hand forestallingly. “Please don’t,” he tried.

Outside the double doors, a great crash and a feminine shout of rage distracted the crowd long enough for Natasha to drop out of the rafters behind the pastor. She wrapped an arm around his throat, pulled his right wrist behind his back, and suggested, “Don’t do anything stupid.”

The pastor replied by shouting, “Kill the government dogs!”

Guns came out and Steve dove for the doors while Natasha dragged the spitting, screaming pastor out the side door. Sam popped in through the double doors and tossed a flash bang in before the civilians could start firing.

“So much for asking nicely,” Sam muttered. He opened the door after a moment and they watched as a dozen tentacles burst up from the floor vents to wrap around the suit-clad figures and drag them down. Two gun shots went off and the colony went red, as it yanked firearms away and shook the offenders.

Gently, Steve reminded them. The last thing they needed was the colony in the news for unnecessary force.

Flag Smasher and Kangaroo are tied up in the office, Tony announced. Isn’t this bouncy guy is on a kid’s TV show?

He played Captain Kangaroo back in the 90’s, Clint said. Asbestos Lady probably needs a medic. She’s not looking too good. Obviously doesn’t watch late night TV.

“I’m guessing by that look on your face, all is going well with the B-Listers?” Sam said, leaning a hip on the doorframe and watching the CTEFJ congregation struggle against a pile of very curious tentacles.

Steve quirked an eyebrow at his friend. After Sam’s initial vehement insistence that he didn’t want to be involved with the colony, Steve hadn’t brought it up. “You know you don’t have to be involved with the colony to get the telepathy, right?”

“I thought it was a telepathy-STD,” Sam said, but he didn’t step away when one of the tentacles slid out from the mass of the colony and slid between their feet to curl up Steve’s leg. “I’m claustrophobic,” he blurted out unexpectedly.

“That explains a lot of things,” Tony announced from behind them before Steve could respond. He twisted his hands so the gauntlets peeled back and he poked Sam in the ribs. “Cuddling not necessary, Wilson.”

Sam rolled his eyes, but gestured at the writhing mass of tentacles curiously passing CTEFJ members from one tentacle to the other while the humans struggled against their hold. “That looks like a nightmare, not gonna lie.”

Not Steve Colony, the colony decided quite firmly, dumping a pile of firearms at Steve feet, and then nudging them away distastefully. The limbs that had gathered up the guns were a splotchy combination of sickly green and bright red.

They stepped out of the way so the colony could start to pass CTEFJ members through the door, where Clint was waiting with a box of handcuffs and an NYPD officer who looked a little pale in the cheeks as she read Miranda rights. The pastor was already sulking against the wall next to Kangaroo and an unmasked Flag Smasher.

Maybe let SWAT handle this type of thing next time? Tony suggested. I’m almost embarrassed to be here in the armor. Or! he put in excitedly, We could have alternate cheesy identities for these kinds of engagements. I have one in the wings.

Spare Parts Man will never be a reality, Bruce interrupted, and a round of laughter went around the colony, tentacles flickering gold and pink at the sound. The tentacle around Steve’s waist practically vibrated in excitement and joy.

The colony had fun at least, Natasha pointed out, helping the officer get one screaming woman out of the coils of a limb and into handcuffs. The colony flashed bright gold and diverted to wrap around her waist. The police officer lost another two shades and Steve worried for a moment that she was going to pass out.

“Ok!” Sam said, his jaw so tight that he could have been chiseled out of stone. He made an impatient gesture with his fingers. “Give it to me. Without the…” he gestured vaguely to where the colony was still wrapped tightly around three CTEFJ members.

“You sure?” Steve asked, more than a little stunned. Sam had persisted on staying out of the colony through an invasion and two trips to the colony homeworld, and despite relaxing the three-foot distance and even going far enough to pet limbs when they presented themselves, Steve hadn’t thought he would change his mind.

Sam nodded shortly. “Do it before I change my mind.”

Steve pulled one glove off and reached out to touch Sam’s bare arm. For a moment, he saw Sam as a kaleidoscope of colors. His aura was shot through with fright, nervousness and a curling thread of excitement. It was nothing more complicated than locating the bright blaze of color that was Sam’s brilliant mind and tying the golden thread that he’d come to think of as Steve colony to it.

Hi, he greeted softly. The colony bond sang with Sam’s presence, sky blue, and steady as a metronome.

Sam’s expression went slack and he stared at Steve in shock, his aura flared greenpinkGOLD, and then Steve drew his hand away and the colors faded.

SAM! The colony howled, making Sam jump.

All around them, the tentacles blazed golden-white and surged toward him. Sam threw himself back against the doorframe, scrabbling for the walls as the tentacles closed in on him.

No grabbing, Steve hurried to say, and they reluctantly stopped a respectful three feet away, though they piled up in a wall two-feet high around his feet and arched up to wave at him.

Um, Sam said, and then glared as he demanded, That was it?

Samuel! Thor boomed into the colony bond – he was a universe away back on Asgard, but his voice was as bright and electric-blue as always. Welcome, my friend!

Steve stood back and watched as the rest of his colony greeted their newest member. He felt the warm-metal press of Tony’s presence in the bond and tapped the thread.

You look pleased with yourself, Tony murmured into the private connection between them. Conscious of their audience, Tony didn’t reach out to him physically, but Steve could feel the solid warmth of him nonetheless.

I am pleased with myself, Steve said, turning to give Tony a smile. In the back of his head, he could hear Darcy enthusiastically greeting Sam from Asgard and telling him all about the pterodactyls and her plan to smuggle one home.

Not going to happen, Lewis, Phil said calmly.

Keep thinking that if it makes you happy, Darcy replied blithely.

Pterodactyl, the colony thrummed.

I guess not too bad for a training run, Tony admitted after watching the last of the CTEFJ congregation being led out to waiting NYPD cars, and the B-Listers to SHIELD containment vans. Asbestos Lady went out on a stretcher with an oxygen mask over her face, craning her neck so she could glare at Clint all the way out the door. Think I can make a costume for the colony?

Forty-seven tentacles in a trench coat? Steve suggested as his earlier trench coat passed through the door straining at the seams with tentacles stuffed through the sleeves, the tails trailing behind.

Tony laughed, and the colony scooped Steve up and pointedly re-wrapped him in his ‘fake skin.’

Colony can nest? the colony asked hopefully.

Yes, Steve said, holding a hand out toward the door. Let’s go home.