#Have we learned nothing from our blood-spattered history?

[thegreenleavesofspring]

I'm turning off notifications too. I stand by what I said but I'm too tired to keep dealing with the abysmal morons who are willfully misinterpreting it in the worst possible ways so they can feel better about themselves. Says a lot about the state of modern Christians when they get their panties in a wad over someone saying "pray for their souls".

[batarella]

The Commander - Part 8 (Arkham Knight x Reader)

We finally know the Commander’s history! Leave a comment and tell me what you think!

WORDS: 3165 WARNINGS: VIOLENCE. ANGST. WEW.

Masterlist

THE COMMANDER - MASTERLIST

-----

Breathe in. Breathe out.

One thousand yards.  Only a hundred yards further than the last one. This should be the farthest she’ll hit. If she actually does hit it. There were a number of birds flying over the trees standing above them. She wanted to hit them instead, but they weren’t far enough.

She only barely hit nine hundred yards yesterday. Once out of the thirty times she tried over and over again. A thousand will have to take the whole of her senses away. If only she could block out her own sense of touch, that would be great. She didn’t need them when firing a sniper.

And there was tall grass in her optics as well. Some yellow, some green, and they waved around with the wind. The target was already small as it is. She could barely see it with all these plants in the way.

She squared her shoulders, placed her good eye on the scope and breathed. She pulled the trigger and felt the sharp recoil on her shoulder.

She’d learned to ignore the ringing that came after it.

After a minute, Uncle placed a hand on her other shoulder, and her stomach sank. That wasn’t good. With binoculars on his other hand, he murmured. “A bit off to the left. Again.”

Young Y/N bit her gum. She was hungry. But there was no getting anywhere if she kept doing it like this. She quickly reloaded the rifle and placed her elbow on top of her folded knee, with the other one flat on the ground.

Breathe. Breathe. Breathe.

The recoil felt just a tad bit more painful. Y/N looked into the scope and still, the bullet hole hit slightly to the right.

“What’s going on?” Uncle asked her. He wasn’t mad. This was her first time at a thousand yards.

“I think it’s the wind.”

“You can't work around the wind. If you keep crying about how it ruins your shots, you’ll never hit the center.”

“I know.”

“Again.” He folded his arms in front of his chest.

Breathe. Keep breathing.

And she did it. Over and over and over. Kept breathing, pulling the trigger, the pain in her shoulder less and less bearable.

Just another day. She got over it a long time ago.

“I can't do it, Uncle.”

“Yes you will.” His voice was stern. He never got angry. But she never pushed him enough to go ballistic on her either.

“I want to go home.”

“Fire the shot, Y/N.”

The ringing on her right ear became harder to ignore. She was gonna go deaf if this kept going on.

“Slow your heartbeat. I can feel you getting tense.”

The sun was starting to fall under, and the country side was a dark place if not for the sun. She’ll have three hours for her nap. Tops. Before they leave for the city tonight. The mafia leader who hired him wanted an entire rival gang gone. Uncle told her it was good if she came along, maybe even pull the trigger herself if it was close enough.

“I’m scared about tonight.”

“Stop being scared,” he said. “This is how you learn.”

“What if Batman and that red and yellow sidekick comes around again? We barely made it out the last time.”

They ambushed her and her uncle up on a rooftop. Robin was a hard one to fight off, and the snarky remarks he made while she tried her best landing a good one in the head didn’t help either. Like a parrot that just wouldn’t shut up.

“Two Face has been paid to stage a bank robbery as a distraction. Either he takes care of that or a warehouse full of drug dealers.”

Y/N had her gun lowered. Her limbs began giving out.

“Again.”

Breathe. Again. Slow the heart.

She looked back into the scope and fired.

xxxxx

Every single day. She’s held a gun in her hands.

Every day, she fired at a target that stood further and further away, each time she hits the center.

For tonight, it was farther than any average shooter could manage. She stood atop of the barracks’ roof, surrounded by nothing but grass and a few trees. The night was cool, warm enough for her to be staying out at this hour and not freeze to death. She breathed and a cool cloud of smoke escaped her lips.

In. out.

A whopping two thousand yards

Even with the scope, it was difficult to focus on. She had no assistance of any type. There were no troops around. She had no vision enhancing technology. It was just her, the moon, the gun in her hand, and target. A scarecrow from a far away barn.

The wind wasn’t strong, but it could easily move the bullet.

There were no tensions anywhere in her body. Her muscles were fully relaxed, her eyes completely focused, her mind in a calm, thoughtless state. This was her zone. This is when she felt most peaceful.

Her finger pulled the trigger.

The loud noise that followed after were enough to possibly deaf any passer by, but she remained unbothered. Uncle had made sure her ears had the strength of steel. Nothing deafened her anymore. Not even if a large drum hit close to her face.

Guns were an extension to her limbs. An extension to what she was. She could feel it merge with her body the moment she picks one up from the armory. She took out her binoculars and looked into the target.

Bullseye.

Xxxx

“What happened?”

They’d only just arrived yesterday. The Commander barged down the halls of the barracks with her Lieutenant Commander, Beckett, trailing behind her and keeping up with her pace.

“His name is Peter Hugo. He was recruited a few weeks ago-“

“How many weeks, Lieutenant?”

“Four weeks. He stayed with eight other men in the second floor. Unit 14.”

They turned to the corner, past the canteen. They said they held the culprit in the underground.

“Is the Knight coming?”

“Lieutenant Gray should be on his way to tell him.”

“Run me down exactly what happened. Don’t miss a detail.”

Beckett swallowed. “Hugo waited until you and the Knight were gone for Gotham. His first strike was about two days ago, just as you left. He was found hiding in the meeting area where he knew Deathstroke would be meeting with Crane and the other Lieutenants. It wasn’t until after the meeting when the cleaners found Slade’s cup of coffee laced with poison.”

“Poison?” The Commander shrugged. The man knew he couldn’t beat Slade at combat.

“The next day, we found him going into the kitchens with another batch of poisons with him. He’s been in the undergrounds since. Slade’s instructions.”

They went down the stairs, where they were met with a small, mechanical elevator. Beckett pulled the metal gate open and the Commander stepped inside.

“Right down here, sir.”

“That son of a bitch should’ve been taken out by now.”

Jason, fully clothed in his armor and his face covered with the same blue visor. He didn’t give her so much as a glance when the two Lieutenants gave him the room to step inside. Commander Y/N took a step to the right, then the Lieutenants went in with them and stood at the front, closing the gates and turning the lever.

The buzz from the noise made the lift last longer than it already did. The walls were dark, and they could see it move upward as they descended. They only had a single light bulb at the top, and the room, as cramped up as it already was, was made even smaller when Jason folded his big arms in front of him.

The Commander slightly turned her head, just to glance at him with the side of her eye, but looked forward before he’d come to notice.

As far as she knew, nothing happened in Gotham.

The elevator reached the underground. And the hallway leading down seemed even darker. The lights were so dim, she couldn’t see past the only lit room a few doors down. When they reached there, it didn’t even look like an interrogation room. It was like a supply closet emptied out. At the center was a man, held together with ropes around his legs and chest, his arms tied to the back of the chair as he held his head down.

Peter Hugo wasn’t much of a brute. In fact, he was quite thin. But the sharp look of his eye and the scars on his neck told them he was, in fact, quite the fighter.

Jason walked up to the man and gripped his hair.

“Who sent you?”

“I’m not talking to you!”

A hit to the jaw.

“If you keep hitting him like that, he won't be able to speak at all,” the Commander said.

Jason didn’t listen to her. He grabbed him by the hair again, pulling the chair along with him into place. He was bleeding through his mouth. Jason pulled on his scalp until Hugo’s screeching cries were too hard to hear.

“Talk.”

“Fuck you.”

A gun swiftly points at his forehead. Hugo didn’t even have the time to look up. He stared onward, still avoiding the terrifying look on Jason’s visor.

“You talk, and I’ll kill you quick enough to make it painless. Waste our time and you’ll beg me to pull the trigger.”

“Watch me.”

Jason hit the back of his head, pushing the chair down so his head would hit the ground. “Gray. Beckett. Spit it out of him.”

The Commander stood aside and watched. Not a strain on her face. Beckett was first to strike, landing the tip of his shoe right at Hugo’s unarmored chest. Gray didn’t hold back either, and his hits landed right on his teeth. A few spattered onto the floor and his blood pool started to spread further out.

“Talk!”

A painful scream when a couple of his ribs broke. It took a few minutes, and Hugo finally squealed.

“Some mogul from Armenia hired S-Slade-“ he coughed blood. “Then the bastard held off when he wanted double the pay last minute.”

“So he asked you to kill him? A small time mercenary who thought poison was the way to do it?” The Commander finally spoke.

“Fuck off!”

Beckett hit his head again. He was too weak to move. “Fuck!” Hugo cried.

“What do we do with him, sir?”

“I’m playing my end of the bargain. We kill him. Nice and quick.”

The Commander stepped forward, eyeing the man. She didn’t remember much about him. Just that he was timid, mediocre in her training sessions and couldn’t fire a bullet even when the target was in front of him.

Jason turned to her.

Slowly, he walked up to her, and spoke so silently she could make out his real voice from the visor’s filter.

“Kill him.”

He handed her the gun.

And the look Hugo hand on her when Beckett pulled the chair up again, making him look at the commander straight into her eyes, it was like he was daring her.

This woman couldn’t do it.

What does she have that made her the commander?

Anyone can take her place.

The Knight must’ve wanted her ass to look at up on the platform.

Some of these men forgot who she was. Who she really was.

“Take him upstairs. I want everyone to watch.”

They were wrong to think she was the commander for just her marksmanship, her knowledge in battle strategies, her will to lead. It was none of that. In fact, the men who knew exactly who she was, didn’t give the decision a second thought.

Some of these men forgot, or simply didn’t know. And the look Hugo gave her, it was obvious, he hadn’t a speck of an idea.

The Commander was the woman hired by the United States Secretary of State to assassinate three political enemies in their own homes on the same night.

The Commander was the woman called by three rival drug lords in Mexico to kill each other, and all three ended up with bullets stuck to their mouths.

The Commander was the woman who staged a suicide on a certain American financer convicted as a sex offender, paid millions by the biggest names in the world involved in the famous scandal.

The Commander was the woman who had the highest, and most notable, kill count out of all the men in the barracks.

She wasn’t here because she was good. She was the Commander because she’s proven it. Before she was even recruited. Only she had Deathstroke have a run for his money.

And she took them all out without having to stand less than five hundred yards away.

These men were mercenaries from all over the world. But everyone who knew her, who knew who her uncle was, kept their silence. And when they all turned to her, holding a gun while the Lieutenants lugged a man tied to a chair, brought him up to the platform where dozens of men watched on, she knew they had it right to keep silent.

Hugo looked at her, and the Commander reveled at the hundred pairs of eyes, watching as she let everyone knew why she was who she was.

She shot him right in the forehead. And the man didn’t even fall to the ground as his lifeless eyes stared blankly at the ceiling, blood dripping into his sockets.

Jason watched, and everyone was silent.

Another integral part of her training involved this moment. The hindrance of any feeling of guilt the moment you’ve pulled the trigger.

She’s mastered that quite well.

Xxxx

Bullseye.

Again.

And again.

Two thousand one hundred yards this time. That was her estimate. She moved from the scarecrow to the rooster wind vane above the same farm. So far it had three bullet holes on his little head. Y/N reloaded her gun and looked into her scope for the fifth time that night.

She had to keep her hands busy, otherwise she’d be stuck in her quarters and be forced to mull over him.

But the universe wasn’t that kind to her.

“You know.”

The chilling voice filter that had gone all too familiar. She hated it. She wanted to tear it off his face and smash it with her boot. Y/N ignored the voice behind her and pulled the trigger.

She couldn’t hear the wind vane, but it spun viciously like a storm had hit. This time it was just at the rooster’s thin neck.

“Get out of here.”

“Who told you?”

Commander Y/N reloaded her gun. She had three bullets left.

Jason didn’t sound angry. But she had no right to play victim.

“My uncle.”

She could hear him wrap his hand in a tight fist, even from a distance. The Commander focused on the scope.

“I didn’t know Joker called in Deadshot, too.”

“He did. Floyd was in Belle Reeves. But he didn’t want even if he could. He isn’t like that.”

“How nice of him. Everyone else didn’t seem to think so. Two Face. Penguin. Riddler. They all took turns at the crowbar,” Jason said. “How did he tell you?”

Y/N didn’t want to have this conversation. There wasn’t anything he said that she didn’t already know. “About a year ago when I last visited him.”

She fired another shot. The bullet landed on the wind vane’s arrow. She slowly pulled out another one.

“Why?”

Reloaded. Deep breaths. In and out.

“’Cuz he asked if I wanted to go into Arkham and… torture you.”

She fired the bullet before she could even focus on the scope. The wind vane didn’t turn. She hit the rooftop.

“You were in there for a year,” she whispered. “How are you still alive…”

“Did you hope I’d die?” Jason’s filtered voice echoed. “Maybe you should’ve taken Joker’s offer.”

“Don’t pretend we weren’t out to kill each other! No one wanted to hire me after you took me down every fucking time I got close to a target, Robin.” Y/N finally turned around.

“Part of the job. And you were the only one who was out to kill me, kid. Batman wouldn’t let me even if I wanted to.”

“Is that why you recruited me? So you could kill me from within?”

Jason fucking laughed. “You give yourself too much credit.”

She finally placed the gun to the floor, turning around to face him.

“We were enemies. You called me in to the militia knowing you had your history with Deadshot’s little partner.”

“Sidekick.”

“Partner!”

She was fuming, standing close to him while his eerie looking visor stared back.

“I only want Batman dead. I don’t care about anyone else,” he growled. “And I knew you. I knew what you could do. That’s why I called you in. This isn’t about some grudge.”

Jason took a step back. His voice was starting to crack. “Joker… beat any smidge of hope left in me. And turned me into this…” he choked.  

Y/N watched him slowly crumble, holding himself up. A part of her hated him so much. The same part that destroys her from the guilt that came with her knowing.  

And the other part wanted to pull him close and tell him how the nightmares will be over soon, that it hurt her to even think about him being hurt, too.

“I’m sorry…” she said. “I’m so sorry-“

“Don’t!” Jason took a step back and screamed. “You knew what happened.”

“I couldn’t do what Joker did to you-“

“How does it feel, huh? To have known I was in an abandoned wing in Arkham, tortured everyday at the brink of death and you didn’t do anything about it…”

“Jason-“

“You could’ve helped me. Or helped Joker. Either way, I didn’t expect you to just sit there and be some coward hoping I’d die.”

“Fuck you-“

“You were right. Deadshot turned you into a mindless machin-“

A strong, massive punch right into his visor. And it broke, some of the pieces scattered on the floor. Y/N’s hand immediately formed a bruise and she winced at the painful shocks running up her arm. Jason almost toppled to the ground, turning his head back before she landed her knee right into his chest.

Jason fell to the ground, but as the Commander charged, he caught her leg and flung her across the ground. He stood up, brushing the pain off his chest. Her hit went past through the armor. Good. Her strength will diminish before long.

Y/N pulled herself up, tearing a part of her suit to wrap around her knuckles. The pain can be ignored. For now.

Batman’s and Deadshot’s young wards. Now the Arkham Knight and the Militia Commander. The fight that was always meant to be.

If they were lucky, no one had to be thrown out of the roof before the sun rises.

-----

THE COMMANDER - MASTERLIST

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  Taglist: everyartistwas-firstanamateur  @sarcasmismyfirstlove @damned-queen-of-gotham @idkmanicantenglish @wunderstell @birdy-bat-riya @get-loki@everyday-imfangirling @comic-nerd-dc @multifandoms916 @icequeen208@offendedfishnoises @egdolan @xemiefx @arkhamtoddler @elsenthal@mythicbitchx @supremehaunter @ burning-alive

[aethelflaedladyofmercia]

The Long Walk

(We have a lot to celebrate this month: 30 years from the publication of Good Omens, one year since the series came out. I, myself, have some big milestones: 666 followers, 200k+ on AO3, and 30 fics posted! And I’m about to hit 4,000 Tumblr posts. Naturally, I choose to celebrate with something VERY melancholy

(This fic was inspired by my prompt for @itsthearoway - milestones of Crowley and Aziraphale through history - but was written right after I went into self-isolation. It’s a bit of a reflection on death, life, and hope. I’m not tagging it for death because technically there are no on-screen deaths, but if you are avoiding fic that make you think about mortality DO NOT READ THIS. It’s hopeful, but also very angst.

(Thank you all! I’m working on a longer light-hearted fic about the early days of the arrangement for @itsthearoway that I hope to have the first chapter ready for in a couple of days. Here’s to another 200k!)

--

The Long Walk - A short saga of the world, two observers, and the question: what is it all for? (1697 words)

Also on AO3

The sands stretch away from the Walls of Eden, eternally in either direction. Endless empty wasteland. Unrelenting heat fills the air, beaming down from the sun, up from the dunes. The kind of heat that nothing can live in.

Through the endless empty wasteland walk an angel and a demon, side-by-side.

“Seems an awful waste,” says the demon. “Build a whole world with nothing in it. If the Almighty is so powerful, why not make everywhere like Eden?”

“Eden was special,” says the angel, sadly. He hasn’t been cast out, not in the way the humans and the demon have. But the Garden’s time is over, and he can move on, or fade with it. “Eden was perfect.”

“Yeah, a perfect prison.” The demon rolls his eyes. “Too perfect for the likes of me.”

“No, not perfect like that. Perfectly balanced.” The angel holds out a hand, tipping it side to side. “The weather, the animals, all life, everything hung perfectly from the slightest thread. The was no…no room for deviation, you might say. No room for evil, yes, but also for good. For knowledge. For choice or free will. Once the humans had that, they had to leave. Even if they stayed, it all would have fallen apart.”

The demon considers as they walked. “That’s your ‘ineffable’ explanation?”

A shrug. “It makes sense, doesn’t it?”

“Not really.” The demon looks at their surroundings. “And it still seems an awful waste. Sending the humans out here to die.”

“Oh, I don’t think it will come to that. They may yet find something outside the Garden. Look.”

Ahead of them, a shape bursts from the shade of a dune, a small lizard, mottled brown, running for all it's worth to cower in the next shadow. “There’s still life,” says the angel. “Still a chance.”

A thousand years.

Frozen winters.

Drought-filled summers.

A Flood covers the land, and recedes.

Through lands scoured clear of any trace of life walk an angel and a demon, side-by-side.

“Not much of a chance, if our sides keep interfering,” the demon says, watching the brown river rush past between barren banks.

“You shouldn’t say things like that,” the angel chides.

A snort. “You’d say the same if it were my side that did this.” Silence, apart from footfalls in the mud. “Well, go on. Tell me it’s all part of the Plan. I can practically hear you thinking it.”

“Well it is. I might not understand it, but it must be.”

“Some Plan. A thousand years of struggle and toil, for what? Just to be destroyed like that.”

“Nonsense.” The angel points overhead at a flitting dove. The first bird either of them has seen since the rains began. “It isn’t over yet. And we can’t know until it’s over.”

Two thousand more years.

Cities rise.

Cities fall.

Sodom.

Thera.

Troy.

They walk together through the empty streets of what had once been the world’s greatest city, past shattered walls and burned out homes and the remains of a wooden horse.

“They’ve learned from you,” the angel says, an edge of bitterness.

“They’ve learned from us,” the demon corrects, but without rancor.

The angel pauses to study the remains of a temple, altar within shattered, blood spattered across the floor from more than sacrificial animals. “Either way, they surpassed their teachers.”

“They did.” In the distance, past once-impregnable gates that will never close again, high-masted ships depart. Not the attackers, returning victorious to kingdoms that have been destroyed in other ways; these are the survivors, in search of a new home. “Do you suppose they’ll do any better the next time?”

“We must hope,” said the angel, looking where white flowers grow through the cracks in the path. “We must always hope.”

Phoenicia.

Persia.

Carthage.

Rome.

Empires grow.

Empires topple.

They walk, tracing the path of an aqueduct, still valiantly carrying water to an empty city, miles away.

“You know, I really thought they had something this time,” sighs the angel, watching the rodents burrow beneath the monumental stones.

The demon tosses his head, looking at the endless span of arch on arch, crossing a continent. “They did.”

“Next time,” the angel says, with confidence he doesn’t feel. “Next time they’ll get it right.”

“They will. For a time.”

“Oh, there is no need for you to be…pessimistic,” the angel snaps.

“It’s not pessimism, it’s – oh, never mind.” The demon saunters a little faster. “I think I see a village up ahead. Probably have something to drink there.”

Wars rage, brought by raiders or kings or desperate humans.

Famine crawls from town to town, spurred on by locusts, by ice storms, by greed.

Pestilence crosses the world again and again.

Death. Death. Death.

An angel kneels in the street, holding a human’s hand. The human isn’t moving.

A demon materializes from the shadows behind him. “Give it a rest. You can’t do anything for him now.”

“I know.” He stands up. “But I had to try.”

All around them, the city stands silent. Not empty. Humans locked in their homes, afraid to go out, afraid to be too close, afraid the plague may catch them, too.

“He should have fled,” the angel says sadly. “Left the city while he still had a chance.”

“Not everyone can run,” the demon points out.

“I know.” After a time, he walks again, the demon beside him. Past empty fountains, abandoned marketplaces, homes boarded shut. “The city has changed so much. Do you remember that lovely restaurant we used to visit?”

“Burned down. Almost a thousand years ago.” The demon shrugs. “Vandals. Or Goths, maybe.”

“Ah. Pity.”

From a nearby alley, the stench of death. The demon tries to look away, only to find himself meeting the angel’s eyes.

“You won’t find anyone in there.”

“I know. But I have to try.”

The demon sighs, but follows him in. “I hate this century.”

“You always say that, dear.”

New continents.

New art styles.

New wars.

New technologies.

Until one afternoon the world ends – and is made anew.

And only one small group of humans will ever know – and an angel and a demon, stepping off a bus together at three in the morning. The city isn’t empty, merely asleep.

Not ready to go inside just yet, they walk around the block, listening to foxes rummage through rubbish bins, watching lights flick on, here and there, where another insomniac has risen from bed.

“What do you suppose comes next?” the angel wonders, when the silence becomes too much. “For the humans.”

“Dunno.” The demon tosses his head, hands stuck in his pockets. “More of the same, I would guess. Life, death, love, hate, good, bad. Human stuff.”

“But something has to change,” the angel insists. “The world nearly ended for…for Heaven’s sake,” he finishes, voice full of irony. “But if it was the Plan, it must mean something. What’s it all leading to?”

“We might find out. Depends what comes next. For us.”

“Ah.” The angel slows. Stops. “Do you…do you suppose they’re very angry?”

The demon turns to face him with a snort. “What do you think?”

“I think…I think…” His hands straighten his waistcoat, smooth his tie. “I think that whatever comes next, however much time we have…I should like to carry on as we always have.” His tone is light, his eyes searching.

A slow nod. “Yeah.” The demon reaches out, gently squeezes the angel’s shoulder. “Yeah. Me too.”

When they start walking again it is, as always, side-by-side.

“And, you know, I would like to see how it all turns out.”

“You and me both, Angel.”

More time passes.

The world grows old. Ancient.

Another war. The Really Big One. Bigger than any seen on Earth or in Heaven.

Everybody fights.

Everybody loses.

When it is over – when all things are over – there is nothing left.

No world, no Paradise, no eternal torment. No Hosts of Heaven, no Legions of Hell.

No humans, no Satan, no God.

Just an endless, eternal expanse of nothing and, somewhere in the featureless plane, an angel in white, kneeling, alone.

Slowly, the darkness around him resolves into another shape. The demon steps forward, fighting back a smile. “There you are. You survived.” As if he hasn’t been frantically searching. “Thought as much. You’re very hard to kill.”

The angel doesn’t respond.

“It sure was a mess, though, wasn’t it?” The demon shakes his head ruefully. “Should have expected it, really, but right at the end when –”

“I was wrong.” The angel hasn’t moved, eyes still locked on the endless Nothing. “Thousands of years, millions of sunrises, and for what? There was never any point.”

“No, Angel.” The demon kneels beside him, rests a hand on his shoulder. “I mean, yeah, you were wrong. Because the ending was never the point. It was the journey – all those millions of days, filled with love and hate and smiling children and fighting with friends and favorite foods and annoying songs and struggles and choices and…and life. Everything they never would have had if they’d stayed in the Garden. That was the point. That was always the point.”

“Perhaps,” the angel tries to smile. “It was lovely, wasn’t it? While it lasted?”

“Yeah. It really was.” The demon helps him to his feet. “And, you know, it’s not completely gone.”

He waves a hand, long fingers trailing through the void as they had at the beginning of time, helping to shape the stars. He gathers together every atom, every wisp of matter, closer, closer, into a ball. The angel presses his hands into it, and together they compress it, tighter, denser, until –

A spark. From neither. From both.

BANG.

The void fills once more.

With chaos.

With potential.

With light.

The demon looks around, nodding with approval. “What do you think, Angel? Time for another walk?”

He gazes out at the disks of galaxies forming in the expanding cloud of debris. “Do you…do you think things will be different this time?”

A shrug. “Only one way to find out.”

Through the glowing crucible of a newborn universe walk an angel and a demon, side-by-side.

[chroniclackofselfpreservation]

Creatures of the Night

Chapter 23 - the world of shut doors and countless walls

Back to the Beginning   < Previous chapter / Next chapter >   

AO3

Masterlist

(TW: graphic depictions of violence (stabbing), blood, mild panic)

(The title of the chapter comes from "The Ruins of Bam" by Garous Abdolmalekian.)

Roman sliced and buttered Dorian a piece of bread from the loaf Patton had baked just before their whole word had flipped around, pretending not to notice Virgil stand with his back pressed against the pantry door, right where he could see both Dorian and Remus.

The demon sat innocently on one of the kitchen stools, waiting for his food. Roman glanced over at the hobgoblin, who was nonchalantly blowing snot bubbles to entertain himself. Remus didn’t seem all that concerned for his own safety. Either he didn’t care about his own well being, or was confident Virgil would petition for his survival.

Roman handed the bread to Dorian, who accepted it graciously. He leaned back against the counter, enjoying his own toasted bread. Roman was fairly certain that the demon didn’t need to eat.

It had probably been a long time since he’d eaten anything substantial.

Roman’s bread turned sour on his tongue as a dark thought entered his mind. Had it been his mother?

He felt nauseous and wasn’t sure he could swallow what he’d bitten off.

“So,” Dorian said, happily munching on the bread, “did Ursula end up killing the sibyl and the boring one?”

Roman choked on his toast.

Virgil’s folded arms tightened against his chest. “She Displaced them.”

“Oh? Where to?”

Roman recovered, swallowing painfully. “You know, for not wanting to help at all, you seem awfully interested.”

He leaned back in his chair, defiant. “Intrigued, more like.”

“She sent them to Kulong,” Virgil said, glancing over at Roman. Concern flashed across his features, and Roman, leaning casually against the counter, shoulders relaxed as he desperately tried to stop thinking about how his mother died, wondered how Virgil could tell something was wrong.

The demon’s eyebrows shot up, an unabashed laugh pealing out of him. “The prison island? Ha! That’s too perfect.”

“You really tiptoed around our feelings, huh?” Roman snorted, looking down to hide the pain lancing through his eyes.

Dorian shrugged, continuing around the bread in his mouth, “You need to get that sibyl back if you’re going to have any chance of defeating Ursula. There hasn’t been an oracle born for nearly half a millennium. You’d be fools to waste such talent.”

Virgil stilled. “Wait, an oracle? Patton’s not an oracle. There’s no way.”

Dorian stared at him. “You’re not serious.”

“I’m pretty sure I would have noticed if I was living with an oracle.”

“You’ve spent too much time with these mortals,” the demon sighed, giving up.

“That’s rich, coming from you,” Virgil muttered, averting his eyes.

“Please,” he sneered, gesturing at Virgil’s human form. “You’re a familiar for Witch Queen’s sake, yet you pretend like this. It’s shameful.”

“You don’t know a thing about me,” he hissed. Virgil gripped his talisman inside his pocket so hard Roman worried he might shatter it.

“That’s enough, Dorian,” Roman said, voice low and warning. The demon looked anything but placated, an eager grin playing at his semi-scaled face. Roman’s mind registered the shift in tension, and he found his eyes scouting the kitchen.

“I doubt you could tell a kelpie from a red cap anymore.”

“Shut up.”

Roman pushed off the counter, grabbing the loaf of bread and walking over to the knife block, his posture the epitome of calm.

“Oh?” Dorian growled, his voice inhumanly low. “Say it again, familiar. I dare you.” The stool scraped against the tile as he rose to his feet. Roman could practically smell the barely contained fear radiating from Virgil. He casually grabbed two steak knives.

Dorian’s lip curled and his hand shot out.

Roman reacted almost in tandem with the demon, whirling around and impaling Dorian’s hand onto the counter before his arm had even fully extended. Not a moment later, the second knife thudded between the demon’s ribs.

Virgil recoiled so violently he slammed into the pantry door, disappearing into a streak of black dashing up the stairs.

Dorian grimaced. “You insufferable child,” he spat, the black blood filling his mouth spattering across Roman’s face.

Roman didn’t even flinch.

“You are a guest in my house, snake,” he snarled. “I suggest you treat my friends with respect.”

“You can’t—”

Roman twisted the knife. “No. You can’t. You can’t kill me, and unless you want me making your new freedom as miserable as possible, you’ll leave Virgil alone.”

“You’ll only waste what little time you have.”

Roman pulled the knives out with a squelch and walked over to the sink. “If you aren’t going to help us, leave us alone.” He pumped soap into a sponge and scrubbed the black liquid off the utensils.

“I just want to make sure you kill her. That’s it.” Dorian muttered, his wounds sparking with magic as they healed.

“Aw, Dory, you’re worried about me.”

“I most certainly am not.”

Roman wagged one of the newly clean knives in his direction, smiling as if he hadn’t just stabbed him twice. “Whatever helps you sleep at night.”

Dorian bristled. “You are well aware I’m incapable of the function.”

Roman winked.

* * * * * * * * * *

Logan supposed he should have been more interested in Patton’s studies with Daveigh. However, he couldn’t “read” any of the prophetic text that they apparently could, and he was too rife with worry over Patton’s well being to properly investigate it.

After a night to for Patton to recover, Daveigh apologized profusely and promised never to do anything remotely similar to what she’d done yesterday without asking permission first. Patton had forgiven her almost immediately. Logan, however, was slower to trust.

After a surprisingly plentiful breakfast of various roots and fruits, everyone had gone about their business.

That is, expect Logan. He didn’t exactly have much in the way of “business” at the moment.

He sat only a few feet from Patton, leaning back against a tree trunk and trying not to seem too distracted as they went on and on about their abilities and the history of oracles.

Mikhail milled about camp completing various chores. Jorryn had disappeared at the rise of the sun and hadn’t been seen since.

The air was humid, but not as hot as yesterday. A cacophony of bird calls echoed around the valley, filling the air with a sort of white noise for Logan to lose himself in.

He thought about Killian.

Eudora had called him a master arcanist, and there had been something in him that intrigued Logan. He looked as if he’d once been well respected. A teacher of some kind? Perhaps it was that commonality that drew him to the man?

Be wary of conjecture, his father’s words echoed in his mind. You don’t know he’s anything yet. List what you know. Go from there.

A sad smile played at Logan’s lips. If anyone would have known how to handle their current situation, it would have been him.

List what I know, he told himself. They were on an island—most likely in the Pacific given the climate. He and Patton were alive and uninjured. Reminded of his injuries, Logan ran his tongue across the tooth that had cracked when he’d fallen into the ocean.

It was fine. As if nothing had happened.

He remembered what Patton had said about Eudora healing them that night, ridding them of their need for glasses. Patton no longer sported the scars Remus had clawed into his cheek either. Logan was grateful, even if the idea of being grateful to the ill-mannered witch made him grimace.

What else? A relatively hostile green man, two oracles, a mentally scarred arcanist, and Mikhail. He’d called himself a magicless witch earlier, which made Logan wonder as to his reason for being imprisoned.

Logan could ascribe his own capture to accident. Mikhail, on the other hand, seemed like a powerful leader. An ambassador, perhaps? Still, Logan had no clue what the title “master arcanist” meant. How was that different from being a witch? As for Jorryn, Logan was even more in the dark on his abilities. The Fey hadn’t exactly been a topic of study for him until very recently.

What do I do? he pleaded at the canopied sky.

The answer came without resistance. Logan knew exactly what his father would have replied.

Gather more data. The answer’s here, but you can’t connect dots you can’t see.

“Lo?” Patton inquired gently, placing a hand on Logan’s knee. He blinked, returning to the present.

“Where’s Daveigh?” he asked, looking around.

“She had to, er, use the restroom,” Patton said as gracefully as possible. “How are you? You look bored—and you’re never bored.”

Logan sat up off the tree and ran a hand through his hair. “How could I be bored? We’re stuck on a mysterious, magical island,” he said with more contempt than he’d meant. Sighing, Logan supplemented, “Sorry, Patton. I did not mean to be snappish.”

Patton stuck him with a meaningful look, pulling his crossed ankles closer to himself. “Come on. Something’s distracting you. What’s on your mind?”

Logan opened his mouth to reply, but found a trickle of guilt running down the back of his throat. “It… It’s nothing important. I’m more concerned with making sure you’re okay.”

Patton’s smile became a bit more deliberate. “I’m just fine, Logan. I promise.” Before Logan could point out yesterday’s incident, he continued, “Yes, I’m glad you were here to help me out yesterday, but we figured out why it happened for the most part, and it won’t happen again.”

“For the most part?” Logan echoed dubiously.

“Tell me what you were thinking,” Patton insisted, and Logan reluctantly capitulated the change in subject, though he fully intended on coming back to the issue.

“I want to go see Killian.”

Patton’s brow furrowed, as if that wasn’t what he’d been expecting at all. “Why?”

Logan shrugged. “I’ve got a feeling. There’s something I need to learn from him.”

“Why not go now?”

Logan desperately tried not to stare at Patton like he was a complete idiot. “I’m not leaving you alone here.”

He smiled innocently. “I’ll be perfectly fine, Lo.”

“We’ve known these people for all of eighteen hours. I doubt that qualifies them for unmitigated trust,” Logan hissed, leaning forward and shooting a glance at Mikhail, who stood several feet away chopping wood with a stone axe.

Patton’s smile grew exasperated, and he looked down at his feet, chuckling.

“I’m sorry, did I say something amusing?” Logan asked, genuinely confused.

“No, sweetheart,” he replied, placing a hand on Logan’s cheek. “It’s just that there are very few people in this world I trust.” He gave his cheek a gentle pat and retracted his hand. “None of our new friends have made that list just yet. You don’t have to worry.”

Logan’s mind reeled as he desperately tried to recall what Patton had just said. His brain had metaphorically shorted out when Patton had touched him.

“Um,” he said, blinking and lifting his own hand to his cheek. Logan met Patton’s eye. “This is unusual.”

Patton looked jittery, but in a good way. Like he’d just jumped off the highest platform at Wakeby Rec Center pool, his face flush and eyes bright. “What is?”

“You.”

He laughed. “Thank you?”

Logan tried again for words—coherent ones this time. “You seem different.”

Patton stood, brushing off his pants and stretching. Logan felt his face heat.

“I guess I’m just feeling a bit more myself these days.”

[dimpledsarcasm]

Little Text I wrote waaaay back when they released the teaser pics (you know the one of them around the campfire?)

Clarke you didn’t kill him. You didn’t kill him. Is all that was going through my head as my eyes flitted to Bellamy beside me. He was next to me, but so so so far.

Although it happened 125 years ago I still couldn’t get over it. Ha you’re hilarious I snorted to myself.

Apparently Bellamy couldn’t get over it too. Yeah that’s why he held you when Jordan played us Monty’s video.

My eyes flitted to him again, but he wasn’t staring at me, he wasn’t even staring at the fire and was instead looking out at the landscape. What I would give to know what was going on in his head… There was a time when I used to know exactly what he was thinking, but that phase was long past.

My eyes raked over his side profile. The beard he grew in the years we were apart, the fire cast shadows on his face, but his freckles were ever more prominent. God I had forgotten how many freckles he has. His unruly brown hair, that was currently being stroked by Echo. My eyes moved to her, only to realize she was already staring at me. The hatred in her eyes was unmistakable. I couldn’t blame her, I had left the guy she loved for dead.

My eyes moved back to the fire. Never in a million years did I think I would let Bellamy die.  I had let a village be bombed for him, I couldn’t even kill him to save the human race. Damn I’m pathetic… and a horrible person. I added as an afterthought.

I wonder what would’ve happened if he had never opened that door 131 years ago, if I had shot him. The Blakes would both be dead. I’d be a pariah and heartbroken— yeah as though you aren’t that now. But, I wouldn’t have been separated from my mom, “Wonkru” would never have happened, nor the cannabilism… But I wouldn’t have met Madi. I wouldn’t be a mom.

My head had gone through all of those scenarios in the 6 year period where it was just me and Madi on the surface of the earth. What if the shot hadn’t killed him, but just disabled him. He never would have forgiven me for Octavia’s death, but… No Madi, remember Madi Clarke.

I sighed. At least he was alive. That’s all I could tell myself. I looked at him again, Echo be damned, at least he was alive.

I still couldn’t get over the beard. He looked like a man now, no longer the reckless man-child, all heart and no brain, he’d been way back when. No, now he was a mature, self-assured individual and I’m sure the woman holding him is what led to that.  

I closed my eyes and looked at the ground. Damn I miss the days where I could suppress my feelings, where they didn’t affect everything I did. Didn’t they though Clarke?  

For once, I could utterly disagree with my internal voice. No, they didn’t. Even when I was with Lexa, she encouraged me to think with my head. My heart twinged. Her face flashed before my eyes, hair to the side, brown eyes wide filled with happiness and… love, lips parted in lust. How self-assured she’d become in bed. I smirked.

Then her face flashed before my eyes again, but this time dark blood pouring out of her mouth, eyes wide in shock and lungs heaving up in down, taking in her last breaths. I closed my eyes tighter, forcing the image out of my head. It’d taken me a long time for that not to be the thing I saw whenever I closed my eyes— well whenever I closed my eyes other images flashed by; the expanding bloodstain on FInn’s shirt when I stabbed him, Well’s makeshift grave, Anya’s mud-spattered face as she died, Jasper cradling Maya’s radiation-destroyed body, my dad’s face filling up the screens of the Ark knowing he’d be sentenced to death, the—

“Clarke?” I snapped out of my reverie.

“What?” I asked breathless

“We’ve been trying to talk to you for the past couple minutes,” Echo said with an edge to her voice,  “If you’re not alert Clarke you’ll put us all in danger.” I looked at her. There were so many things I wanted to say and even though my eyes flashed in anger, I exercised master restraint.

“You’re right. I’m sorry, it won’t happen again.” I said, trying my best to keep any anger out of my voice. She wasn’t worth it. I would not let her get the best of me. Not to mention, she was also right, we were on a foreign planet with who knows what out there and I couldn’t afford to be off my game… Man, what a familiar feeling, I snorted.

“Clarke?!” Echo said.

“Yes, yes, what were you talking about?” Shaw chuckled and I ignored Bellamy’s concerned eyes, I could feel his stare burning into my skin and I felt a blush rising to my cheeks, thank god I could blame it on the fire.

“Well, we were discussing as to where we should be headed tomorrow, downstream or upstream the river.” Miller said. I glanced at him.

“Wouldn’t upstream be best? There’s an advantage to higher ground.” I replied automatically.

“Yes, but as I was saying, downstream obviously will bring us to a larger body of water and that’ll be important for farming, not to mention that if we need to get away or cover our tracks we can just hope in and float or hike down.” She explained.

“While that might be true, we still don’t know if the water is drinkable, not to mention what’s the weather on this planet? If it’s flashfloods, we’ll be grateful for the higher ground.” I retorted.

“Bellamy already said that.” Echo say flatly.

“Oh. Well, then I agree with him.” I replied feeling my cheeks heat up. My eyes flickered to Bellamy to see him staring at me intensely. There was a flash of a smirk on his face and I looked away, the blush creeping up my neck.

“Figures.” Muttered Echo.

“Okay well let’s put it to a vote. Upstream?” Jackson said looking around. I raised my hand, so did Bellamy, Shaw and Miller. He paused, “I guess it’s decided.”

“Whatever.” Echo huffed and went back to stroking Bellamy’s hair.

~~~~~~~

While being alone with Madi and my radio it had seemed simple.

We woke up in the morning and gather berries from the surrounding area, in later years, we’d make jam and spread it on edible bark. Once we’d had our breakfast, I’d teach Madi some theory, we’d go through English, history, science… all of the things I learnt on the Ark, I tried to teach her. Next, Wwed go swimming then we would dry off and have a quick lunch of smoked meat (whatever we caught the night before would have been stewing till we ate it).

In the afternoon, I’d move on to practical training, fighting skills, weapon making, sewing wounds, hunting and later, driving. Madi’s village was a peaceful refuge for vegetarians, from what I could deduce, so Madi knew a few things— mostly what she had learned on her own before I showed up. She was a star pupil, or maybe I was a good teacher? I think it was a bit of both.

In late afternoon, we’d set up camp, initially Madi would collect wood and eventually we’d start taking turns making food, we’d sharpen and clean our weapons and I would sneak off with my radio to chat with Bellamy. It didn’t take long for Madi to deduce what I was doing so this was unofficially declared the moment in the day for alone time.

For supper we’d eat a mix of the meat or fish we caught and some random vegetables that Madi had dubbed yellow strings. And then we’d get ready for bed. I would draw a bit, Madi would practice her writing as well as drawing the star maps I taught her and we’d end the night with my telling her stories about my friends. It was our quiet peaceful routine.

Quiet. Simple. Easy.

It was unlike anything I’d ever experienced. On the ark, although I’d had a pretty sheltered childhood, it was always about rationing, best behaviour at all times and a lot of wondering what earth was like. Not to mention the grief. The grief when my friends’ parents were sentenced to treason and got floated, grief for the nonstop bullying Wells and I got, grief for my dad getting floated, grief because I thought I was going to be floated…

When I finally made it to earth, the grief didn’t change. It became tenfold and next came stress, survival stress. Basically it was do or die. I ended up taking charge. I guess I had been bred for it. But, that’s essentially what happened. Of course Bellamy and I butt heads initially due to it. He was the de facto leader and I, princess (god I hate that nickname), swooped in to challenge his every move. Of course, it wasn’t my fault his every move was the opposite of what I thought needed to be done…

But then people started dropping like flies, we were picked off by the grounders one by one and our morals were questioned to the point that even calling them morals is a hoax you used to sleep at night.  Of course I also fell in love and had sex, etc.

Then our ‘reinforcements’ came and that ended up being a mess as well. I ended up killing the boy I loved and would later murder an entire mountain full of people.

I fell in love again and then watched that person die too. Then I had to worry about a stupid crazy homicidal robot starting a cult ridding people of free will.

And the last couple months before the Earth went to hell was spent on figuring out how to save the human race. Saving the human race was the mantra that had been ingrained in me from the very beginning. On the Ark, I learnt that nothing really mattered a part from saving the human race. Nothing else.

So when primfaya happened and I was the only person left on the surface of the earth (everyone else was either underground or in space)… Well, thank god for Madi because otherwise, I definitely wouldn’t of made it. My mentality of saving the human race transferred onto Madi. I became her default mom, and her, my daughter and she was all that mattered. Still talking to a preteen girl for 6 years wasn’t exactly socializing in my opinion.

Which is why it wasn’t only Madi and I. It was Madi, I and Bellamy, or rather a radio, but I just maintained the idea that he could hear me and couldn’t respond. I knew that was total bullshit, you don’t hang out with Raven Rayes for ages and not realize that the radio waves would not be making it past the radiation clouding the earth, let alone through space to the revived Ark.

Yeah no way he even knew I was alive. But, I pretended anyway, because the alternative— the idea that I truly was alone and couldn’t talk to Bellamy, or worse that Bellamy and the others hadn’t actually made it to safety— well there’s only so much a person can take before going insane. So, I spoke to my radio. I told Bellamy all of my fears, all of the little victories, like when Madi wrote her first English sentence or when I found the edible bark, I told him about the new discoveries and my theories on what to do next. I spoke to him about Lexa, and Finn, and Wells. I told him everything. In one of my loneliest (horniest) moments I told him the fact that I missed having sex, masturbation just wasn’t cutting it anymore (that was never mentioned again)…

So, seeing him again, after speaking to him everyday for 6 years? Well, that was a pretty massive shock to my system, not to mention that he had gotten even hotter during that time.

Those 6 years had given me plenty of time to deal with Lexa’s death and realize I was completely and utterly in love with Bellamy. Of course I also acknowledged that it was the Clarke of 6 years ago that was in love with the Bellamy of 6 years ago… Somehow that didn’t translate into my brain when I first saw him. Instead all I wanted to do was discreetly pinch myself, because there was no way he was here with me. The second was, this must be true because even my imagination wouldn’t have been able to fathom how hot he’d be with a beard. And we fell back into this routine of Clarke and Bellamy.

Quiet. Simple. Easy.

Granted we were also dealing with his sister, Octavia, turned overzealous-dictator, a shitton of ex-felons and a war on the last survivable place on earth… But it didn’t matter because it was Bellamy and I and we could do this.

At least I thought we could. That is until I saw Echo run into his arms for a PG13 make out session, that is until he called ‘spacecru’ his family and didn’t include me, that is until he betrayed me by turning my daughter into a weapon… putting her directly in the bloodthirsty vision of Octavia who’s homicidal tendencies seemed to have gone on steroids since having last encountered her above ground.

So I left him to die.

Alright I know, stupid move, clearly turning Madi into the head of Wonkru was the best, most nondestructive choice at the time, but I didn’t see it that way and I reacted brashly. I still needed to apologize for that I guess. It was interesting that he had forgiven me so quickly though, blaming it on my “mama bear instincts” (he finally recognized what Madi meant to me). The speed in which he had been quick to lose that grudge really proved to me that he definitely was no longer my Bellamy. He seemed to be a mature, level-headed, amazing man that I no longer knew. We are strangers. And that probably broke my heart more than seeing him with Echo did.

I removed my eyes from the fire and looked around me. Actually all of these people were strangers now and for the quadrillionth time since primfaya I felt like bawling my eyes out.

That was something I discovered during those 6 years—how utterly emotive I could be. Jeez the emotion oozing out of me disgusted me. But, because I was able to focus it on Madi all this time it was okay. Except Madi was still in cryosleep and I was here with a guy I might possibly still love, his girlfriend (who hated me), a random-ass stranger that was cool, and just an overall blast from the past couple of friends, not too mention I had just found out that two of my closest friends had lived an entire life together filled with happiness and a peaceful ending so that we could live, so that the human race could survive.

Yeah my poor isolated self could not keep up with the varying situations.

I got up, feeling angsty. I definitely needed to loosen some of the tension I felt building up.

[ehyde]

Again

@acertaincritic requested Present!Su-won and BeforeTheCoup!Su-won (but already planning) meet, and discuss whether or not it was/is worth it.

This isn’t...exactly this prompt, but it’s certainly the result of it. It’s set in the same au as my other time travel fics: essentially, Hiryuu Castle is riddled with portals through time, though not many can access them. Suwon is among those who can.

Disclaimer 1: one of the other fics in this au, What We Make, contains a crackship that is...somewhat relevant...to this fic. I think this stands alone just fine, but if you want more context, that’s where to find it.

Disclaimer 2: while not technically a Suwon Double fic, I’ve shamelessly borrowed elements of @sorasan000‘s Suwon Double theory

2018 words, featuring past!Suwon, present!Suwon (technically between-Kin-and-Sei-arcs!Suwon), King Il, and time travel that makes about as much sense as the stuff in the Terminator franchise

AO3 link

When Suwon feels the familiar tug of Hiryuu Castle’s time portals, it's already too late. Upon his ascension, he'd made a promise never to visit the past again. He's learned much over the years, from eras both distant and more recent, but as Kouka's king, it was time to put the past behind him and look to the future...or not. He wouldn't have chosen to step through this portal, but he's in the past now, with no way to return home other than to let things take their course. A day or two, maybe less. The portals have always sent him home in due time.

Suwon smiles to himself. In his previous visits, he was always a student, learning from the great rulers and generals of the past. Now here he is, fresh from his own victory, one step closer to restoring Kouka to that past glory. Would history’s greats be proud of him? One man, in particular, surely would…

Now, when exactly has he found himself? If he's already here, there's no point containing his curiosity, after all. The palace is similar to the one he knows—almost too similar. The portals have never taken him anywhere so recent, but is it possible? Could he meet—? Then a familiar young man rounds the corner and Suwon’s eyes widen. This is the recent past, yes—far, far too recent.

“Lord Suwon!” Minsu’s broad smile almost hurts to see. “We weren’t expecting you this early. Shall I tell Princess Yona you’re here?”

“No, don’t—!” He takes a deep breath and composes himself. “I came early to do some business in the city,” he improvises. “Don’t tell Yona, she’ll only be disappointed I can’t spend time with her yet.” Minsu accepts this easily; Suwon has done this before.

He leaves the palace straight away. If he were to see them now… You can change things, his mind whispers to him, and why not? he wants to answer. It’s not as if he believes in some grand plan. Still he leaves. With a portal to this era, he could find himself trying to make things right forever, if he lets himself. This is why he chose to look only forward.

“Oh! Excuse me.” Ah. Perhaps he should take looking forward literally, too. “Wait. You...I…” That voice. Suwon looks up. The man he bumped into is...himself.

“What are you doing here?” he asks. “You’re not expected for another week.”

“I...came early, to take care of some business in the city…” Of course. He’s done this before, after all. “But I should be the one asking you that question.”

“I discovered a new portal.” His younger self nods in understanding—he’s been exploring Hiryuu Castle’s time portals for years—but still there’s a question in his eyes. “Purely by accident. I don’t intend to make a habit of this.”

The younger Suwon looks over the elder, taking stock of his appearance. “You’re king,” he says, eyes falling on his golden hair cuff. “How long has it been?”

“Eight months, perhaps?”

“Such a narrow portal! Well, come with me, I know a place—” He breaks off in laughter. “And so do you!”

Together they walk to a quiet inn where they know they won’t be disturbed. “Tell me everything,” says the younger man.

Of course he would ask. And of course he’ll tell. “I don’t remember this,” he begins. “Meeting my older self. History is changing already.”

His younger self shakes his head. “History hasn’t happened yet,” he replies, and Suwon nods.

“Well then.” The coup must be on his mind. It’s only two weeks away, isn’t it? But he finds himself reluctant to bring it up immediately. “The most important piece I have to tell you is about General Sujin’s rebellion…”

They go over everything, or nearly. Still he doesn’t ask about the coup, and finally, Suwon can’t stand it. “Yona will be all right,” he reassures his younger self.

“...yes? None of this has anything to do with her.” His eyes widen has he abruptly remembers—Yona was never supposed to see. “Did—did something happen to her?”

“...he’s her father, of course she’ll be affected.”

“No, it’s more than that, I can see it,” he insists. “What happened?”

What should he say? He can warn himself to be more careful...if he wants the outcome to change. But what he’d thought he wanted for them—for Yona and Hak to go on all unknowing—would that really have been better?

And the other way to avoid hurting them isn’t even an option. Il has to die.

“Tell me,” his younger self insists again.

“Yona saw,” he reluctantly admits. “She knows.”

“Then I’ll make sure she doesn’t this time.”

“And then what? I know you haven’t really thought about that.” Because he hadn’t.

The younger Suwon is silent for a while. “Tell me,” he finally asks. “Does it feel as good as it should? Vengeance.”

“It feels...over.” And that will have to be enough.

His past self looks down. “That will have to be enough, he says, reminding Suwon that they really are the same person. Then he looks up again, into Suwon’s eyes, and opens his mouth to speak, but no sound comes—he’s flickering out of sight. That was quick, Suwon thinks, before he realizes—the other Suwon is the only thing that’s flickering. The world isn’t shifting around him as it sends him back to his own time, it’s...sending his younger self back instead.

“Wait!” he cries out, but it’s too late. He’s alone.

He sits there frozen for nearly an hour, thinking surely the timeline will sort itself out. It always does. But nothing happens. He remains here, in the past, and—they were so close to the same person, is that why?—and he never even told his younger self where to find the portal.

Finally, he stands up. He’s not expected in the palace for a week, and he has business in the city.

The week passes. His other self hasn’t returned, and he knows he’ll have to take his place. If he doesn’t...could he change the future so much he might jeapordize his very existence? And when his future self is really his past self...no, he has to go back. Has to see them again. Has to smile at Yona and tell her how much she’s grown (and oh, how much she will grow still), has to laugh with Hak as they compare their skill. He knew what was coming the first time around—why does this hurt so much more?

Hak tells him he’ll gladly serve him as king and he knows, knows he can’t do it. Can’t let them stay here unknowing, not when he’s seen Yona’s frozen tears and felt Hak’s bloody thirst for vengeance. He can live with many things, but not with that lie.

But he also can’t let them go, and he finds himself wondering the unthinkable.

He goes to Il the night before Yona’s sixteenth birthday. “Uncle, I know we have not always seen eye to eye. And what I’m about to tell you may be hard to believe. But there are ways of connecting the past to the future—”

“So she did tell you, in the end.”

Suwon blinks. “You know.”

“I followed your mother once, after one of her secret rendezvous with King Hiryuu. Hmm,” he frowns to himself. “And she agreed you were never to know.”

Mother knew followed by Il tried to keep this from me? followed by Hiryuu. What?

“Now, I thought I’d made it clear to you that Hiryuu has nothing to do with you.”

Now Suwon is just irritated. “This isn’t about the past. It’s about the future. I could let Father rest for Yona’s sake, but your obsession with that ancient king is going to get our country killed. I’ve seen what will happen. I know what can be done—”

“No. My daughter is Hiryuu. You are not.” And his face makes it clear that nothing more will be said.

What just happened? It’s clear they were talking past each other, Il so sure he already knew what Suwon was saying. Just what did he think he knew?

Mother knew about the time portals. Mother had met with Hiryuu. And Il thought he wanted to be Hiryuu—?

No. Impossible! But even if it were true— Does he really think I’ve forgotten what he did to Yuhon? Did Il think it didn’t matter? A scream of frustration escapes him into the empty night. There will be no compromise with King Il, nor does he ever wish there to be.

The hairpin was Mother’s. She told him it was a gift. Suwon supposes it’s only fitting that Yona have it now.

He waits until the last possible minute in the place the the portal left him, still hoping against hope that his younger self will return from the future and do what is rightly his to do. What will happen if they never trade places again? He’ll live through all those months again, until...what? The portal opens, dooming him to repeat this night yet again? Is this what has come of traveling history so freely up until now?

Is this what comes of being born of two different eras?

It’s time. “You made a mistake,” he says to Il. “This was never about Hiryuu. This is for my father. For Yuhon.” What did he say the first time? Does it matter? Yona walks in, and it’s like watching someone else. The words he chooses won’t make a difference yet he has to say something, and he’s almost grateful when Keishuk and the soldiers chase her away.

At least nothing is on fire this time.

“You—it’s tonight?” Suwon had thought himself alone in the king’s chamber. Who—? He looks up. “I finally found the portal again. We can—” His younger self freezes at the sight of blood spattered on Suwon’s robes.

“I’ve killed him twice now,” Suwon says. “You won’t remember it at all. How—?”

“Yona. Hak.”

“Yona ran…”

“Clean yourself up,” his younger self commands. “I’ll go after her.”

“No, wait—!” But he’s already gone. The other man doesn’t know what happened, won’t know the right things to say—but Suwon can’t let himself be seen, not now. Powerless, he watches from an empty guard tower.

This is wrong. Hak and Yona are supposed to get away. If he’d thought they couldn’t he would have done more to change things! Where is Minsu? Why is his past self just letting this happen?

Because I told him Yona would be fine. He grabs a bow from the guard tower’s weapons rack. It’s a cheap distraction, poorly aimed, but it’s enough.

“I’m sorry,” his other self when they find each other again, when they’re alone together, when it’s quiet. “I don’t know why it took me instead of you.”

“Because we’re the same.” Or because they don’t belong in any one time in the first place. “But what’s done is done.” And that trite phrase can never hold true again, either.

“Well, hopefully you’ll be the one to go back this time. I don’t think anyone suspected—what would they even suspect?—but there were things I just—”

“What happened?”

“The Water Tribe’s daughter, are we really together? Everyone seemed to think so…”

“What? No, that’s—”

“Ah, good. She was kidnapped by Sei—but she’s safe now. Oh, and Sei will become Kouka’s vassal state. We didn’t even need to deploy the army.” He says that like it’s a good thing. “And Hak...Judo tried to kill him, even after he helped us. Have things really become like that?” He helped…? “I would have kept them out of it, I know I would have. What changed, between me and you?”

“...and you came straight back here and had to draw a sword against him. I’m sorry.” Not sorry enough, says the look in his eyes. “Someday you’ll understand.”

“...and you?” he finally asks after a sigh of reluctant acceptance. “Did everything go according to plan? Did anything change at all?”

Nothing and everything. “No,” he tells himself firmly. “Nothing has changed.”

[clive-owen-and-the-knick]

Interview Magazine Clive, 2015

https://www.interviewmagazine.com/film/clive-owen#slideshow_48144.7

There are moments in Clive Owen’s performances— many, many moments—when his eyes seem to go white hot, when he looks to be possessed, by a demon, a drug, or the religious fervor of a maniac. This possessor is very often so powerful it threatens to propel him toward its end no matter the evident destruction being done to his body—the rumpled suit of flesh of which might, at any moment, sag off him entirely. Not that that would stop those eyes from getting to where they are going. As he tells his friend, fellow actor and musical legend RZA, Owen likes to walk a knife’s edge with his characters. And it can be terrifying to see him do it, from his haunting breakout role in Mike Hodges’s great Croupier (1998), in which Owen plays a sociopathic card sharp with seething charm, to Mike Nichols’s Closer (2004), in which Owen embodies sexual obsession unto the point, nearly, of self-immolation. Owen’s globe-trotting Interpol agent Louis Salinger in Tom Twyker’s The International (2009) is probably the world’s worst co-worker and maybe its greatest villain hunter. Like so many of Owen’s greatest creations, Salinger is a man who torches his life and well-being on the pyre of his crusade. And nothing will stop that crusade. Even Owen’s sad sack Theo, a scarred former revolutionary in Alfonso Cuarón’s adaptation of the apocalyptic P.D. James novel Children of Men (2006), manages to muster a powerful, messianic purpose.

But Owen’s Dr. John Thackery, an obsessive surgeon in turn-of-the-century New York, in Cinemax’s The Knick, is peak possession—a semi-functioning addict driven to Icarus heights by cocaine, ambition, and garden—variety narcissism. On the gladiatorial stage of the Knickerbocker Hospital’s auditorium-style operation room, spattered by blood and viscera, his smock and eyes a blazing white in director Steven Soderbergh’s light, Owen’s Thackery is like something out of Goya—his hound-dog face falling to bits with fatigue, and those eyes are a marvel of passion, paranoia, discovery, delirium, regret, and maybe just plain old madness. And The Knick, which returned for its second season in October, along with Owen’s return to the stage after 14 years, in Harold Pinter’s Old Times on Broadway this fall, seems to fulfill the promise made all those years ago by Croupier: Owen, at 51, is now, as he was then, one of the most intensely watchable actors on screen and stage.

RZA: I would say The Knick—which I love—is a show where, through the eyes of the medical profession, we see a unique view of New York history. How do you feel being those eyes, Dr. John Thackery? Are you learning things about our city that were previously unknown to you? 

OWEN: Well, the thing I loved about the whole vibe of The Knick is that it presented period drama in a way that I hadn’t seen before. I mean, I’m English and I’m used to coming from a world of period dramas, where there’s a very polite restraint to everything. Everybody’s sort of sitting in drawing rooms. And the thing about The Knick is it’s really about what it was to be alive then. It was a dangerous, scary place. And for the majority of people, it was not sitting around in drawing rooms; it was a very low-life-expectancy, dangerous, dark world out there, and it was something that I’ve never really seen before in a period drama. And then this character—who is possibly the most complex, unusual lead character I’ve ever read—he was kind of out-there, doing appalling things sometimes, but kind of brilliant and kind of wild.

I like the high-wire act, playing someone who is not entirely straightforward, not something easy, palatable.  

RZA: I first discovered your talent as an actor in the film I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead [2003]. You played a character who was removed from city life but had to return to the London underworld to avenge his brother’s death. You went from, like, a calm woodsman to a badass gangster. What did you do to prepare for that role? 

OWEN: That film was directed by Mike Hodges—he did Croupier, and the original Get Carter [1971] with Michael Caine, who’s a very good friend. He has a very lean style of filmmaking, very economical. He doesn’t overdo things. And that film was very pared-down. Again, it’s like Thackery, and like a lot of parts I’ve played, like this part in the play that I’m doing now, I like the high-wire act, playing someone who is not entirely straightforward, not something easy, palatable. You look at a film like that and you look at Thackery in The Knick, you’ve got to take people on that journey, and it’s not an easy one. It’s abrasive and strange and difficult—like life is, like people can be. And I love the challenge of that. I love playing someone, and telling a story, that is full of conflict.

RZA: Now, I really liked this episode of The Knick where Thackery learns to ride a bike, and you had this excited, boyish face. [Owen laughs] It was far away from his intense seriousness. Are you a bike rider?

OWEN: I am, and I was trying to look like I couldn’t ride a bike … It’s interesting you picked that scene out, because there were a few people, Steven included, who thought that it was an important scene because of that —because he’s such a complex, murky character, and then there was this boyish quality. 

RZA: It was really cool. I love Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid [1969], and I love the bike-riding scene in that, but you topped that scene for me. [Owen laughs] Can you give us fans any secrets about this coming season? 

OWEN: The great thing is that Steven Soderbergh came back to direct all ten episodes, which meant that we just hit the ground running. There was no time being spent setting anything up. We had already developed these characters, this world. And I think the big thing about season two is it’s much more expansive. We go out of the hospital more. We see lives outside, we see much more of what’s happening in New York away from the hospital. The beauty of television at the moment, and the beauty of doing something like this with someone like Soderbergh, is that you can really go for it. There is no censor. There is nothing you’re trying to package that you’ve then got to sell in a marketplace, as with a film. You gather viewers and you gather support, and you go, “Okay, we’ve done that. Now it’s important to follow this through.” Steven has done that wholeheartedly. And there’s no question that having him at the helm is a huge deal. He’s got great taste and he’s fearless as a director. His work is bold and intelligent—he doesn’t pander. I loved being around that.

[nacchi-nacchi-nacchi]

Advanced Darkness

When Bikini Bottom is destroyed by Godzilla, the carefree lives of SpongeBob, Squidward and friends change in an instant.

Pain, loss; fear of death is etched into our bodies and minds. And so we are dragged forward, whalefalls into stiller and stiller seas. Will there still be a feast, when we arrive at last?

By Nacchi.

Squidward took a long draw from his cigarette and flicked the still-lit butt onto the prostrate Sandy. The cherry-red flame burrowed carelessly through her plastic suit and sunk with a hiss into the sea of soft fur below, a dying star in the starless dusk of Neo Bikini Bottom. A wisp of greasy smoke curled up from the wound, the stench of burning hair joining the odors of piss and rancid oil in the alleyway.

"Everyone is in pain all the time, Sandra. Either you master that pain, or you learn to crave it."

Sandy's hands were leaden, her arms like sponge. Her once-muscular body had collapsed around the willpower which had built it up, a dead weight all the greater for the life she had spent in it. She could not even brush the cigarette from her back. Finally, with an impossible, defiant effort, she brought herself to her knees.

"No," she said through gritted teeth. Her mouth moved uselessly around the next words, opening to release not sound but foamy, pink blood. Squidward snickered.

"No? Is that all y—"

"No."

Sandy lifted her head to look Squidward in the eyes. For one moment, though he would never have believed it himself, the octopus felt true fear.

"That's just… what you tell yourself. That's just… how you justify hurting people." Sandy spoke more forcefully now, spattering the front of her helmet with blood.

"Because… it feels good. Because… because… you're weak! Weaker than a… Y-you-"

Two of Squidward's heels crashed down with an explosion of glass, and night came to Neo Bikini Bottom.

Neo Bikini Bottom resembled its predecessor in name only. It was a dark stretch of filthy concrete that sprawled out across the sand like a great scorch mark, punctuated with ugly steel buildings jutting from the earth with neither rhyme nor reason. Never before had the capacity of modern industry to create entire towns without a moment of thought or a single happy coincidence been so clear. The entire city was a bare-minimum, disposable stage on which the survivors could act out bare-minimum, disposable lives, forever stumbling after the dream of a day when they might lose themselves completely in the performance and forget the cheapness and flatness of the set. No one who had witnessed the original town's fate would believe in any other sort of place, or in any other sort of life.

Tragedy, as always, had been sudden and ridiculous. One summer day the blue horizon had darkened, and moments later the sunwashed Bikini Bottom was gone, transfigured instantaneously into a giant handful of rubble strewn across the vast seafloor. Only later would survivors piece together a fragmented tale—some godlike, titanic being, dragging itself across the floor of the Pacific, had plowed straight through their small pocket of civilization. It had probably been a totally arbitrary and thoughtless action—that Bikini Bottom was in its path was simply another coincidence of physics, as random and cruel as the reactions in the primordial brine from which life was first born.

Mr. Krabs had been killed instantly, dashed against the splintered remains of his favorite money-counting desk. SpongeBob, too, had been flattened, but fate was not so kind to the sponge; without any organs to crush, he would live on past the world into which he had been born, would live on to see the carcass of the town putrefy beneath its concrete shell. For the rest of his life he would be searching for bloodstains washed too quickly away in the name of reconstruction, desperate to convince himself of the reality of a past the others would sooner forget. Only SpongeBob had resisted Plankton's so-called rebuilding of Bikini Bottom, dragging out a series of grim protests that even he knew were doomed from the start; Embarrassed on his behalf, most of the town averted their eyes from what amounted to little more than public self-flagellation. When the sponge accepted Plankton's offer to work at the hollow shell of the Krusty Krab, the townspeople of Bikini Bottom were merely relieved to see the painful memory pass through its death throes and at last grow silent. And so SpongeBob was granted the small mercy of being allowed to vanish quietly into history, and nurse his festering wounds alone in the darkness. Plankton never even bothered to ask him the secret formula for the once-legendary Krabby Patty; there was no point anymore, nothing to compete with.

Ironically, Mr. Krabs himself would be remembered as a hero. He was cast in bronze and placed at the site of his old restaurant, gazing proudly off into the horizon on which death had first appeared. This was a particularly cruel trick on Plankton's part: the money-grubbing owner of the restaurant would be remembered as a beloved son of Bikini Bottom, forever honored with a view of his rival's absolute success. No trace of the crab himself remained beneath the gilded veneer of heroism; Eugene Krabs had at last been destroyed completely, wiped even from history.

Squidward, upon returning from a vacation to find his home destroyed and his workplace somehow even worse than before, had stood before the wreckage for hours, wordlessly holding the broken halves of his clarinet. There was nothing to say, and nothing to do. Reality stood before him, a smoking ruin, a bloodslick strip of sand. Bikini Bottom had always been nothing, he realized. Anything that had been anything wouldn't have vanished like this. Wouldn't have been so dwarfed by the monster that had trampled over his entire life. A life lived amongst nothing, worth nothing. Death would have been preferable, but suicide suddenly seemed an absurd proposition—how does one throw away nothing? It was meaningless, a logical impossibility. For as long as he lived he would suffer, and that alone was something onto which he could grasp. The pain deep within him compacted into a hard, heavy core, colder and denser than steel. An anchor to life. He dropped the shards of his clarinet and walked onward, onward into the endless and directionless open sea, not to be seen again for years.

When the Americans first contacted him in a panic, somehow reaching his shellphone with their sob stories of the same beast incinerating their great cities and slaughtering their masses, it was only with great effort that he had refrained from laughing at their arrogance. He had always heard of the amazing industry and frightful power of the human race—all come to nothing, in the end. But there was one thing that had chafed against him: as long as this godlike beast, this Godzilla, lived, the humans could spin their fairytales, could see themselves as a race of defiant underdogs. Only by destroying Godzilla and leaving in its place the haunting memory of their absolute powerlessness would their humiliation, and by extent the complete affirmation of the emptiness of the world from the top down, be complete. Or was that just his own personal fairytale, one final attempt to deceive himself into believing that the choice between murder and certain death meant anything? Either way, when the Americans' pleas for compassion inevitably turned to threats of violence, Squidward was ready.

The Americans planned to use a device called the Oxygen Destroyer, which had apparently been deployed in the past to obliterate a similar creature. A single unit would render a good portion of the Pacific Ocean an anaerobic graveyard and strip the flesh from the bones of every organic lifeform unfortunate enough to be trapped within its waters. It seemed the scientist who had developed it had given his life to ensure that it would never be used again—Squidward envied him. He must have died believing firmly that he could stand in the way of the proliferation of destruction, a pursuit to which humanity had always been willing slaves. In the end, he had only slowed the Japanese government's efforts to recreate the horrific device, which in turn would be stolen by the Americans and, at great expense, strengthened well beyond any reasonable point. Squidward couldn't help but admire their drive; if lives were worthless, and ending them profitable, America had—perhaps predictably—thrown itself wholeheartedly into an exceptionally lucrative industry.

Sandra was unlucky. She had cornered Squidward in an alley as he hauled the device home through the murky evening of the reconstructed city. It seemed the Americans had reached out to her first, and revealed too much in their haste. Once, long ago, he would have feared her. But she had been at her home when disaster struck, and had spent hours pinned beneath her great tree, blanketed in broken glass. Her muscles were scarred and atrophied, her once gratingly loud voice a painful rasp. With a fatal, stupid defiance, she had attempted nevertheless to stop him. And so he stepped forward into the lightless future, expecting to plummet into a chasm too deep and dark to ever return from. Only, there was no chasm—or rather, he had already been at the bottom all along. Killing, dying, saving, living. It was all the same within the terrible shadow of the past.

Wasting no time, Squidward immediately began preparing to bring about the end of days. It seemed only appropriate, however, that he should deploy the Oxygen Destroyer somewhere with a nostalgic backdrop. Some trace of the old Squidward still remained in him, it seemed—he would kill that lingering piece there, in the awful restaurant which had made him so miserable back when he still had the capacity to feel misery. It was hardly surprising to him that SpongeBob was still in the back of the restaurant even in the dead of night, and even less surprising that he was easily able to overcome the sponge, shoving him into the meat freezer with neither hesitation nor explanation. Even so, SpongeBob knew enough. He could see a terrible resolve in the octopus's eyes, and the shadow of death was reflected in the dull metal of the device.

His pores beginning to fill with ice, the sponge could only stare helplessly from the freezer as Squidward set about turning Neo Bikini Bottom into a cemetery. For a moment Squidward stared blankly into the blue water, toward the ruins of his old house. SpongeBob wondered if he might be remembering better days. Things had been so carefree then. It was still beyond comprehension that all throughout those grease-scented years something incomprehensible and unstoppable had been slumbering deep within those frigid, dark, ancient places beyond even Rock Bottom. That all of their petty struggles over the Krabby Patty formula, all of their trials and triumphs, had been inevitably bounded by that deferred horror, minuscule, invisibly small in proportion to it. Perhaps, SpongeBob thought, all happinesses were small happinesses—moments, trapped in fragile bubbles of ignorance, where you might find some effervescent bliss, or at least a pocket of numbness, just enough to seduce you into enduring another day within the freezing sea of time. And then, as Plankton placed his arms on either side of the Oxygen Destroyer, the coldness became absolute, and SpongeBob thought nothing at all.

Squidward's face was blank as he turned away from the activated Oxygen Destroyer. He himself could not decide what it was he had done. Had he made the only choice available to him, or had he at last exacted revenge for all those worthless days, those long, corrosive years of pointless work and restless evenings that had eaten away at his soul? What did he feel? Why did he still feel nothing?

Sandy, SpongeBob, all the inhabitants of Neo Bikini Bottom… were they merely a casualty of his quest to destroy himself?

Lost in thought, Squidward turned just in time to see a restaurant table seemingly suspended in the water inches from his face. For a moment it was as if it were moving in slow motion, and then reality snapped back into motion along its horrible trajectory. His world spun, reorienting itself painfully against the floor with a burst of stars and a fountain of blue blood. Over him stood Patrick Star, dumb, uncomprehending, unstoppable, half of a dripping Krabby Patty in hand. Death incarnate.

Still reeling, Squidward grabbed the spatula SpongeBob had left on the grill. It was red hot, and the half-melted plastic handle seared his tentacle as it closed around it, but he hardly noticed. Patrick, of course, was oblivious, shouting some nonsense about his friend. It seemed he was working himself into a rage intense enough to boil over his brainless lethargy.

"And," he shouted, standing over the mangled Squidward, "Here comes the giant fist!"

So, this is it, thought Squidward. This was not a punishment for the others, though Patrick probably meant it as such. It was just the order of things. The will of Patrick which set his fist into motion, the machinations of Squidward which would bring the ocean to ruin, all were merely expressions of the unchallengeable gravity which dragged each of them along from moment to moment. Always downward, downward, toward the unknowing, lightless void at the bottom. Entropy, inanimate and inviolate; an emptiness more perfect and infinitely more cruel than any god.

If random violence was the order of the world, then reproducing that power was neither radical nor admirable—to forever pantomime the currents of nature, throwing one's own body again and again upon pyres erected to no purpose, that was the hell of beasts. But, then, what else was there but the tyranny of that understanding? Was an octopus not a beast? Was it not right and proper, or at least blameless and inevitable, that he should injure, kill, be injured and be killed? It had nothing to do with pleasure. Yes, that was it! That was why he had felt nothing! There was no room for joy, and no cause for guilt, as they all inscribed their memories, their wounds, upon each other's rotting minds and bodies. This world was endlessly blasted by lightning-bolts of agony—Squidward was made of conductive flesh, and so he conducted. There was nothing else, no sins to absolve and no ablutions to perform.

When the beast first passed, some thought to sate its thirst for blood, and so win its cooperation. The rich smoke gave them away. For days the scent of alder and salmon fat hung over the remains of the Kelp Forest. Arrogant fools, to think that our flesh was worth anything at all…

The fist came, and at the same time Squidward drove his burning spatula deep into the core of the starfish, propelled by instinct as much as any desire for vengeance. There was a shout, a cloud of steam, and the impact of Patrick's blow—a torrent of confused sensations that overflowed the octopus' brain as it was pulverized into a viscous fluid. Carried over its liquifying circuits at the last moment, the taste of Squidward's own blood in his mouth was just like that of a Krabby Patty.

Patrick stumbled over to the refrigerator door and put his immense brute strength to work peeling the steel from its hinges. He knew something was wrong with him, but he didn't know what—he had to ask SpongeBob, whose frozen form he could just barely make out through the glass. As he flung the door behind him, Patrick's momentum sent him careening across the bloodied floor with a crash. He felt… funny. As though something that had been hanging on by a thread for years had finally snapped, and the tension which had been tugging at the edges of his conscious for all that time had instantaneously vanished. His arms fell to his side, limp and immovable, as he drifted weightlessly through daydreams, abstract impressions that spun outward from whatever had passed for thought, unravelling as they went. Patrick, always separated from reality by a lacy veil of ignorance, hardly noticed as the last embers of his primitive mind smoldered out and the soft dreams gave way to a velvety, opaque sleep.

Shivering, melted frost evaporating off of him in great puffs of steam, SpongeBob cooked. He slid the spatula ever so carefully beneath the patty, savoring the slight give of the browned meat coming off of the grill and the subtle flex of the burger as it flipped through the liquid aether. Beyond the glass walls of the Krusty Krab, shimmering in the chemical haze, the dawn sun was rising incarnadine.

The patty landed with a soft pat and pronounced sizzle. It was perfect.

Yes, thought SpongeBob, as the first bubbles began to lap at the windows, This is good.

He stepped over the twin wrecks of Squidward and Patrick, leather shoes slippery against the gory floor, and gathered together two golden-brown buns, the crisp lettuce, the just-so pickles. There, in the sizzling silence, warmed by the grill, SpongeBob constructed the perfect Krabby Patty.

It's okay now, he thought. Things will be right again, soon enough.

The dull sounds of a faraway hysteria reached the kitchen, dying out just as a fizz signaled that the front door of the Krusty Krab had been breached. Shutting the kitchen door, SpongeBob went into the cupboard and found the small jar of secret ingredient that he had stowed away all those years ago, scraping it from the ruined floorboards and picking out the splinters. There, in the twilit confines, he savored an authentic Krabby Patty. At last, it was exactly as he had remembered. A dusky illumination bled in through the cracks of the door, dyeing the shadows a dark red. He closed his eyes and let the old memories envelop him in a warm ignorance. He had been away so long in a strange world, separated from his home by a growing and impassable sea of time. But now he knew.

The dead ocean would not become a cemetery. A cemetery was something the living bore inside of them, their hearts growing heavier and heavier with the ghosts of the past until at last the weight of their loss dragged them down into the darkness. Something they projected onto stones and mounds and urns quite content to sit silent until the end of time. No, this time it would be a real, proper end. A complete death sweeping in and leaving only bleached bones and chitin and sponge, white and smooth as fresh-fallen snow. With no scars to read, and no one to read them.

SpongeBob felt joy blossom in his breast for the first time in all those years. He did not fear disappearing back into the blinding, glimmering whiteness. No, far from it.

He was ready.

Originally posted June 2018. Description updated when I decided the old one was really bad.

[netherwar-rpg-blog]

Welcome to the Wardens, Bo! Your application for a WARRIOR OC has been accepted with a Clive Standen FC.

The application can be found under the cut. You have 48 hours to create a roleplay account (cannot be a sideblog) for your character and we will be updating our opening date soon!

C H A R A C T E R - I N F O

T H E - B A S I C S

Name: Duncan Golwren

Title: The Bear of Norvik

Gender: Male

Age: 35

Class: Warrior (Two-handed Warhammer)

Faceclaim: Clive Standen

C H A R A C T E R - D E T A I L S

Nationality: Norvik

Appearance:

Despite being a lord’s son, Duncan is quite the rugged man. His chest is riddled with scars from his chest down to his ankles. He’s been in numerous bar fights from his younger teenage days, and he’s been in countless fights in attacks from barbarians and the like. He’s a rough and tumble guy with a rough and tumble figure. He’s a bit unkempt from time to time, always forgetting to trim and shave his beard or cut his long hair. He’s actualy forgotten to cut his hair for so long that it now reaches to the middle of his waist. He is often sporting a black eye, depending on what kind of day it is and is usually sullen looking though he’s not always that way.

Personality:

Positive: Courageous; Firm; Magnanimous; Studious; Suave; Unfoolable

Negative: Argumentative; Disorganized; Forgetful; Vague; Well meaning; Wishful

C H A R A C T E R - B A C K G R O U N D

History:

Oh to describe the life of Duncan Golwren in words. The youngest child in the Golwren family, Duncan definitely did not fit the part. Even as a young boy, he was a large child. To keep up with his brother, Robert, he would do far more than was required to get strong. He had more time to train and grow strong as his brother prepared for the lordship. And while that happened, Robert got killed in the process. Hunting and the dangers of hunting led to his death from his horse falling on top of him.

So, Duncan took up learning how to run Norvik. He didn’t like it at first, preferring the rough and tumble life he enjoyed before. But, he was now in charge of managing hundreds of thousands of people. Terrifying. But, he always made time to practice his fighting.

One person that kept him going was his sister. She inspired him to not kill everyone and just run away. And it was his little nephew that also kept him going. When he was born, though the entire castle shunned him, Dunk took care with teaching him everything he could.

Jonie, as Dunk referred to him, was a spunky kid that Dunk adored. Jonie reminded Dunk of himself when he was little. So, he fostered him, despite his family’s disapproval of the boy. However as time went on, they grew apart, and Jonie left. So, Dunk found other kids to foster and help.

But for a spell, he went to Highwing to dance with the nobles (another wild concept from his mother). That was when he met her. Her name was Lyra, and she was INFURIATING. And by the sun and stars, she really knew how to piss him off. First ball they went to (separate of course), they argued for a solid hour about the color red. The second, they screamed about whether or not tomatoes were fruits or vegetables. The third night, they were caught in a hallway together, kissing.

Not long after, Dunk begged her to marry him, on his hands and knees, clutching the hem of her skirts. She of course, said no, but he asked again and again and again until she finally said yes. Blessed with the beautiful forbidden fruit, he planned to immediately start a family. But then those stupid rifts started happening, and now, he’s heading off (Lyra in tow) to help these Warden folks and try and save the world. One war hammer swing at a time.

Reason for joining the Wardens:

Most of the reason he joined is to prove himself. As the youngest Golwren, he’s in line for the lordship, but his father doesn’t see him as good enough yet. He’s strong, but he’s still a bit scatterbrained when it comes to adult things. So, he’s joining the Wardens (and his wife won’t let him go alone) to gain some respect from his Father and grow up.

Desired Connections:

The Wife — Lyra Golwren came with Duncan to provide help for the Wardens because she wanted to as well as to accompany him. He loves her dearly though they fight plenty. They married when they were older, due to his bachelor ways and her less than excited disposition to get married. But when they first saw each other, they fell in love on sight and marriage has only brought them closer.

The Renegade — Dunk always loved his sister, and when she had her first child, he loved him too. Jónas wasn’t much younger than he was, so he still adored him like he was his little brother. Jónas was a sweet kid, and Dunk loved to hold him when Jónas was a baby and Dunk was about 6 or 7. They grew up as friends until Jónas ran off.

The Protector — How to describe the relationship between Lalo and Dunk? While Lalo was nothing to sneer at, Dunk always towered over him. They often hung out and played as kids when Darian got horses from Lalo’s father. The fast friends grew up only a year apart and became dear friends. But god, Dunk was always growing larger each time Lalo saw him, and so eventually, the Lord’s son became somewhat of a father figure despite his efforts to be a brother.

R O L E P L A Y - S A M P L E

Your character has been travelling along a rugged road in bitter winds when they are suddenly leapt upon by desperate, rougish bandits. They demand gold, or they will use their swords. How does your character respond?

TW: Sex mention, language, gore, violence

“HA HA HA!” Dunk continued to laugh at the 6 or 7 bandits who demanded his money. “Honey,” he said to his wife; “Stay on your horse. I’ll handle this. No need to get blood on that pretty dress.” The bandits continued to stand ready as Dunk dismounted his horse.

“We mean it! We’ll kill yehs! Give us y’r gold, poncy lordling!’

“All right! All right! Let me get my piles and piles of gold, you fucking Southern shits.” Dunk hated and loved the South. Part of him hated the weather. Part of him loved it. Norvik cold got to him some times. Ah, but still he loved the Southern women. Tits bouncin’ around in the heat. Now, of course, he was faithful to his wife. She had enough to grab for him. Didn’t hurt to look though. As he dismounted, he yanked the giant warhammer from his back and heaved it over his shoulder like it was nothing.

“All right, so which one of you whoresons is first?”

Duncan picked for them, slamming his hammer down on the first bandit he saw. Like a fly, the warhammer cracked through the bandit’s skull and left the head on his shoulders in little pieces that flew across to spatter on the bandit’s friends. A devilish grin spread on his lips, and he gestured for the next guy to walk forward.

Thankfully, they all rushed him at once, so taking care of them was as easy as swinging his warhammer once in a sweeping motion, taking out the man on the end immediately and crashing his fresh corpse into his friends. After that, it was just a matter of breaking legs and finishing them off with a comically small dagger on his belt. He turned back to his wife, sweet Lyra, with her nose wrinkled. But she smiled at him a moment later, and he smiled back.

“Oh, I am just going to ravish you when we get to the inn.”

[fortey]

Morbius, The Living Vampire

“Breathe.  Breathe deeply.  I want you to smell the blood draining from your body.  You can smell it, can’t you?”

The laughter is so forced and hollow.  The laugh of a mirthless, hateful being.  Mocking laughter.  It is all the more offensive because it is true.  The scent of blood is so strong.  So overwhelming.  As is the hunger.

 It’s just before 5am on a Sunday. No rational person should be awake right now and yet here we are. The sun hasn’t even threatened to rise yet.  There is only the darkness of the early morning.  No birds, no sounds of life.  The only car on the road is a Royal Blue 1970 Plymouth Hemi Barracuda, one of the few indulgences in the life of Dr. Michael Morbius.  He found it on eBay when looking for seat covers for his previous vehicle and bought it on a whim for $45k.  It took a chunk of his savings, but what was he saving it for? He was fairly certain retirement wasn’t an option.

Though he had achieved a degree of success as a hematologist, his career had long since diverged from his intended desires to something less noble.  There was a time when the Hippocratic Oath was something he believed in and felt strongly about.  There was a time when he wanted to make a difference.  There was a time.

The thrum of the Cuda engine filled his head as much as the darkness filled his eyes.  There was nothing else but pulsing night.  He refused to let his mind wander these days. He didn’t dream any more. Discipline was key.  He was stalwart.  Steadfast. He was a monster.

When he had started his residency all those years ago, things were so much different.  It felt like the world was different.  Maybe it was.  Back then monsters didn’t exist.  The sun still shone brightly.  He was a man who helped people.  

His nature was to be a forthright man.  He was firm and authoritative but not unreasonable and never condescending or arrogant.  At least that’s how he saw himself.  Growing up, his mother had worked as a nurse and he had experienced more than on awkward encounter between his mother and a cocksure doctor who talked down to her. He never wanted to be that kind of man. Instead he became something worse.

Empty streets passed by the windows of the Cuda.  Empty buildings. Empty world. His chest felt tight, he palms cold.  He had taken this drive many times.  Each time was worse than the last.  He hated it. He was on his way to murder someone.

It had been just over six months ago. He was in his office working late, finishing neglected paperwork. The door opened without a knock. Hadn’t it been locked?  He wasn’t sure at the time.  He knew now it had been, not that it mattered.  A locked door was a childish contrivance.

He’d lifted his head. The man in the doorway stood tall. Tall and menacing.  He wore non-descript dress pants, Italian shoes and a light jacket over a simple blue dress shirt.  His hair was close cropped.  His eyes a pale blue, like a frozen lake.  And his flesh was ashen and deathly.

The man who was not a man knew more than he had a right to. He knew Morbius’s family.  His history.  His life.  He knew Julia.  His wife. The beautiful woman who tolerated all of his quirks, his long hours, his insufferable colleagues and his inability to remember important dates.  How long ago that all seemed.  

“Doctor,” he had said with a voice like oil, seeping into your flesh and making you feel dirty.

“Can I help you?”  His voice wavered.  He felt fear in his gut.  Why?  It seemed silly.  Back then it seemed silly.  In that moment.  He was just a man, wasn’t he?

“Oh yes, you can help me. It is the blood, you see.  The blood is sickness and I need a cure, doctor.”

Morbius stared at the man, his fanatical tone causing the doctor to immediately lean back in his chair.

“If you need an appointment, please call my secretary –“

“I need you, doctor. Together we may yet surprise the Daywalker.  I need your expertise to make me like him.”

“I don’t under-“

The words died on his lips. The man was in the doorway and then as if time skipped a beat he is practically on top of Morbius.  His hand is frozen and feels like a vice.  It grips Morbius’ jaw with crushing strength, choking the breath from him.  He lifts Morbius as though he were a ragdoll.

“I will make this simple for you, doctor.  You will do as I say, when I say, without question, or you will watch as everyone you have ever known dies screaming your name.”

His arm rose.  Morbius rose.  The man’s thumbnail pressed into Morbius’ cheek, sliced flesh, burrowed inside. Morbius screamed, a strangled and muffled whimper against the man’s hand.  The cold, dead thumb pierced his cheek and crushed through his molar, pushing the tooth from his jaw as though plucking corn from the cob.  Blood filled his mouth, spilled over the man’s cold hand as he stared up at Morbius’ limp form.  And as Morbius watched with wild eyes, the man opened his mouth to catch the drops of falling blood as they spattered against his tongue. And his long, curved fangs.

The man dropped Morbius to his desk the way anyone else would drop an old coffee cup.  He crushed his laptop and scattered papers before rolling off to the floor, cradling his broken face. The tooth tumbled over his lips and landed on the floor, shattered and bloody.  The man simply adjusted the cuffs of his shirt.

“I trust, doctor, our working relationship will not be problematic.”  

Morbius groaned, lifted himself.  The man stepped away, investigating Morbius’ degrees on the wall.

“What do you want?” Morbius sputtered, his jaw painful as blood dripped over his lip.  The man didn’t bother to turn.

“Have you heard of Blade?” he said.  Morbius furrowed his brow as he clawed to his feet, slumping back in his office chair.

“Blade?” The word triggered some memory, somewhere in his mind.  A news story from years ago. An incident in a club and a manhunt.  But not or a man.  A vampire.  A vampire who killed other vampires.

“He was one of those people. Like a mutant or something. Spiderman or the Avengers.”

“No, doctor, not like Spiderman. Not a silly man in pajamas quipping at circus sideshow acts who fancy themselves criminals.  He is a vampire.  But not just a vampire – he is something more.  He has our strengths but not our weaknesses. He walks in the sunlight.” The man turned then.  His expression hardened.  His eyes narrowed.  Rage.  He seethed.

“This…thing, walks in the light! And for generations, since time before time, we have cowered in the shadows like animals.  I refuse to be a prisoner in shadow, doctor. I will stand in the sun.  You will make it happen.”

Morbius stared at the man – the vampire – dumbfounded.  His request was madness.  How could he ever do such a thing?  What would that even entail?

“I –“

“Don’t understand? Don’t know how to help me?  It is the blood, doctor.  The blood makes us as we are.”  He reached into his jacket then and pulled a USB key from his pocket, tossing it on Morbius’ desk.

“Read the files.  We have researched much and learned much. The genetics of a vampire are complex. But the blood is key.  Our blood. Blade’s blood.  Human blood.  You will unlock what our scientists have been unable to solve or you and your loved ones die. You will tell no one or they die. You will be at my beck and call or they die.  Do you understand now?”

Morbius swallowed hard. Madness.  Utter madness.  The vampire raised a hand, brandishing a smart phone.  He turned it on without looking and a video began to play on the small screen.  The footage was dark at first and then a flash of light.  There, on the screen, was Julia.  Chained to a wall, wet and dirty.  Her breathing was ragged, she shook as though freezing.  

“Oh my God…” the words were a hissed whisper.  The vampire smiled.

“I am the only God you need concern yourself with, Dr. Morbius.  Read our research.  Allow that beautiful brain of yours to develop an approach to our treatment. The sooner you succeed, the sooner you see her again.  Alive, and in one piece.  The longer you take…I cannot vouch for the self control of those who are watching over her.  Our hunger is strong, doctor.  

Suddenly the creature was simply not there.  A blur of movement and then nothing.  Morbius sat alone with his blood and his pain.  And a USB key.  He grabbed his phone and quickly dialed 911 before pausing, his finger hovering over the little green icon that would connect his call.  Julia.  What would happen to her if he called the police?

As if he had spoken the question aloud, a text alert appeared on the phone.  An image.  Julia’s face, her eye angry purple and swollen shut.  Morbius set the phone down, taking a handful of tissues from a box and pressing them to the hole in his cheek.

He sat in silence for minutes that stretched on like hours before packing up his things and leaving the hospital.  He sutured his own wound and passed it off as an accident in the kitchen when anyone asked. For two days he had no contact with the vampire as he poured over the data it had provided him.  Bloodwork from dozens of different sources, dating back decades.  Information clearly obtained from skilled physicians in immunology, virology and more. Despite himself, Morbius was fascinated. The blood of the vampire was distinctly unique and completely alien in many ways.  It was virus-like, a living thing it seemed.

Video clips on the key showed samples of the blood interacting with colloidal silver, with sunlight and with samples of human and animal blood.  The cells decayed rapidly in the sun, protein chains unravelling like threads pulled from a sweater.  The silver caused malignancies, what appeared to be gross mutation and impeded cell growth and reproduction.  But the blood, the human blood, it attacked.  A human blood sample lasted mere minutes in the presence of vampire blood.  The virus-like cells would attach to a human sample and a complete RNA rewrite would occur.  The human blood cells were taken over, replaced, by vampire.  In minutes.

The vampire came for him that night.  He had brought a car, driven by a silent man with paper-white flesh and yellow eyes. They drove across town to an industrial district, beyond an old security fence into a massive complex of warehouses with broken windows and chained doors.  They stopped at a non-descript building, seemingly identical to all the others, and the vampire took Morbius inside, where a lab awaited him.  A lab with subjects.

“You will need samples to work with.  I have provided everything my team has said you will require.  Your work will be done here.  If you require anything further, you are to tell Varney.”

The vampire gestured to a slender man in a lab coat.  His hair was long and tied back in a pony tail, his eyes were deep set and surrounded by wrinkles.  He smiled, his fangs visible, and reached a hand out to shake.  Morbius didn’t take it, and the vampire simply let it drop as though it had never occurred.

“A pleasure, Dr. Morbius. I have studied your work extensively and was the one who recommended you for this position. I will work as your assistant during this process.”

Morbius frowned.  “Do you have experience?”

The vampire chuckled and shrugged modestly. “I did work with Antoni van Leewenhoek for some years. Shall we begin?”

Varney lead him into the lab area, a massive space simply in the center of the otherwise empty warehouse. Desks, tables and a bevy of expensive and rare diagnostic tools and machines filled the space.  Some of the technology was so cutting edge his own hospital didn’t have it yet.  Some were things he had never even seen and others were practically antiques.  It was as though he had entered a medical museum.

The back wall of the lab area was where the subjects were housed.  People. In cages.  Men, women and children in archaic looking cells.  Most appeared dirty, bedraggled and clearly sedated.  Morbius came to learn they were more often than not homeless or in the country illegally.  The sort of people whose disappearance would mean little to most.  People who didn’t get on the news for missing dinner.

The first subject was an average-sized man with thick, black hair and day old stubble.  His clothes were torn and bloody, his jaw swollen and one of his arms broken.  He stared at Varney and Morbius with unmasked hatred mixed with fear as the vampire approached his cell.

“I would like to show you what little progress I have made so far, doctor.  With a serum I have devised from a sample of Blade’s blood, you will see how the interaction between human and vampire blood is quite illuminating.  I am able to temporarily sheath the vampire cells in a protein barrier that allows for limited light exposure, but it does break down quickly.  It does not replicate the blood of the Daywalker, however, which, you will notice, is not so dissimilar from human blood.”

Varney unlocked the cage and grabbed the man inside by the leg.  He screamed and tried to fight but Varney’s strength was inhuman.  He may as well have been selecting a rat from a tank.

“Please, do we have to do this?” Morbius asked.  Varney smiled, a curious expression that seemed sorrowful and amused at once.

“We do, doctor. Remember what is at stake.”

“But I cannot kill one person to save another.”

Varney nodded, holding the man down on a gurney and lashing him in place with restraints.

“I do understand your plight, doctor Morbius.  I am a real doctor, though I was trained long before much of the science you now know. Do no harm is a fine credo, but how often is it true?  Human doctors weigh and measure life all the time.  How many new pills reach the market after killing a handful of people with side effects during trials?  It is the price of progress.”

The vampire busied himself preparing a syringe as he spoke, cleaning a site on the man’s arm and drawing blood.

“But it’s not right.”

“No, Dr. Morbius.  But it will happen with or without you.  The only difference is whether you and your loved ones die as well.  You have no choice, doctor.  He will not let you.”

“Who is he?”

Varney looked at him then, his eyes cold and distant.  His expression was stern.

“The one who will kill you. Now look here.”  He turned away then and directed Morbius to a computer screen hooked up to a microscope.  Blood pumped from the man on the gurney into a vessel and then slowly piped down into the machine.  On the screen, red blood cells wooshed and swirled.  Varney adjusted the settings and then inserted a line into his own arm connecting to a different machine.  A split screen showed both blood types before the vampire pressed a yellow button.  A yellow plunger deployed and a clear liquid injected into both chambers.  The screens became abuzz with activity.

On the left screen, the human blood mixed with what looked like white blood cells.  At first the interaction was barely noticeable but as time passed it became clear that some of the new cells were breaking down the old cells.  On the vampire side the reaction was much more energetic, with the white cells and red cells attacking each other.  While the red cells seemed to kill some, the white cells would frequently envelope the red.

“You see, doctor.  The Blade serum tries to implement vampirism on the human host but only in the most rudimentary way.  The cell decay is nearly non-existent and the replacement is rare, on the scale of one in 10,000.  In this way we believe Blade is actually incapable of reproducing as other vampires do. But see here with my blood – both samples react violently and the Blade cells encompass my own in a protein layer. However, as I said, this is short lived. The reaction is almost an emulsification like water and oil.  Soon they will separate again.”

“What is the effect of the protein barrier?”

“Humanity, doctor.  Or as close as we will ever get.  The ability to walk in light, if only temporarily. While the sheath lasts, the blood will remain stable.  But if you leave a sample in direct light, it will decay in short order.  Larger samples will combust.”

“So you need me to stabilize the protein,” Morbius said.  Varney nodded.

“Yes.”

“Then what are the human subjects for if the serum comes from Blade?”

Varney looked at the man strapped on the gurney and then his sample on the screen.

“We use them as a baseline. His blood before and then, after we turn him into a vampire, his blood after.”  Morbius’s breath caught.  He stared at the man on the table, struggling weakly in his bonds.

“You will turn him? I don’t understand.”

“You will.”  Varney flicked another switch and removed the line from his own arm.  Another set of switches and the machine attached to the man reversed. Blood pumped down the IV line in his arm.  Within seconds the man’s body stiffened and seized.  He growled in his throat as his back arched against the bonds, his teeth clenched and eyes shut tightly.

“I am now introducing my blood into his system.  I find this method simpler than biting.  Less cleanup,” Varney said.  The man thrashed and screamed.  The bonds of the gurney strained and stretched.  Varney produced a pair of thick sunglasses and put them on before pulling a small, black remote control from his lab coat.  He did not speak as he stepped behind a large tinted screen.

“You may wish to avert your eyes,” Varney said before pressing a button on the remote.  A light above the man strapped to the gurney turned on. Not particularly bright, but glowing blue and bathing the man’s whole body.  For a long moment nothing at all happened.  Varney watched from behind his screen and Morbius watched both the man and the vampire.  But slowly the man began to writhe harder, his growls becoming more desperate.  A smell filled the room, an oily smell like overcooked bacon.  Tendrils of smoke rose from the man’s body seemingly at random and his flesh began to redden.  The first blister appeared on his forehead, then more followed.  The forehead blister popped but instead of liquid a small gout of flame erupted.  Then more, some beneath his clothing.  The man screamed as his shirt caught fire.  Morbius took a single step and was stopped, Varney’s grip on his wrist like iron.

“Please just watch, doctor,” the vampire said.  The man screamed louder as fire engulfed his body.  In moments he was nothing but fire and then, just as quickly, it burned itself leaving a charred husk of remains.  Varney pressed another button on the remote and the light turned off.  He removed his glasses.

“You see, ultraviolet light makes short work of vampire physiology.  With the serum active he would have lasted perhaps five minutes. Our best results have been seven minutes.  We need to make it indefinite.”

The ensuing days were a blur of numbers; serum versions and blood samples and innocent victims.  The vampire who forced him into this position was a regular figure, watching but rarely speaking.  Morbius never learned his name.  In truth he didn’t want to know.

Varney proved a competent assistant.  He probably could have managed most of the work on his own, but as time progressed Morbius did notice a lack of the ability to think creatively in the vampire doctor.  He met Morbius’ new ideas with openness but also a degree of awe that seemed unscientific, as though thinking outside of the box was difficult for him to master. In a way it made sense.  If Varney was being truthful and, from the things he said Morbius did not suspect otherwise, then the vampire was nearly 500 years old.

Two weeks had passed with no progress.  The serum itself was little more than a synthesized plasma.  The entire mechanism of how it worked was completely foreign to Morbius.  Blood was supposed to behave a certain way, but vampire blood, and Blade’s blood, were working with a whole different set of rules that didn’t ascribe to any medical science he could understand.  Was it even science at all?  If a vampire was a monster, a beast from stories come to life, what did that mean? Beings like Thor defied known science, were vampires the same way?

On the night of the 21st day the vampire who had enlisted him into this endeavor stopped Morbius at the warehouse door.

“I have something to show you.  Come with me,” he said.  Morbius obeyed without speaking.  The vampire lead him to the far end of the warehouse, a massive stainless steel door, the kind you’d see on a restaurant freezer.  “Open it.”

Morbius looked at the door, then the vampire.  The door was clean, shiny silver.  The handle thick and polished.  He hesitated only briefly then pulled the door open.  A light inside buzzed to life.  Morbius’ legs shook, gave out.  He fell to his knees.  The vampire simply walked away.  He said nothing.  Did nothing. Just left.  Inside, Julia’s tattered remains were frosted over with a thin layer of ice crystals.  Her arm was still shackled to the wall at the wrist.  But the shoulder was not attached to her body.  It lay in pieces, connected by nothing more than a frozen blood slick. Only her head was clean, placed at the head of the remains, eyes still open but frozen and fogged over, looking at him.

“No…” his voice was a whimper.  He scrambled forward, across the ice, at once wanting to try to save her, salvage her but also repulsed by what they had done.  He could not even hold her.

“You said….if I helped you…” his words so quiet.  “You said…” Louder now.  “You said I could save her!” he raged.

“I said you needed to be quick, doctor,” came the voice from across the dark warehouse.  “You should have listened.”

“It’s impossible!  You can’t…it can’t work like that!”

“It had better work like that soon, doctor.  Your mother and father are next on the list.  If we run out of people you care about, then you will die and we’ll find another doctor.”

Morbius felt his stomach knot.  His face flashed hot with rage.  He forced himself to look at her again, her broken body and what they had done to her. There was no way he could have saved her.  No way he could have finished any work in such a short time.  They must have known.  They did know.  They never planned to free her at all.  They had no intention of freeing him from this either.  Success or failure, he would die.  They would all die.

Morbius staggered to his feet, slamming the freezer shut behind him as he lurched back to the work area. Varney averted his eyes, busying himself with samples.  They finished the day with barely a word between them.  And the next.  And the next.

Two months had passed with nothing.  Then Morbius arrived to find the body of his mother nailed to the wall with railroad spikes. Two more months and so too his father. He was told the next victims would be his sister Alyssa and her family.  Her husband Paul, a firefighter.  Their children Sarah and David.  Sarah was only 14, David 10.

The police had come to investigate Julia’s disappearance at first.  And then, suddenly, evidence she had left Morbius.  A credit card trail showing she had bought a plane ticket and left the country.  A mysterious attorney who claimed to have spoken with her on the phone.  All set up by the vampire.  A bullshit smokescreen.  And when his parents vanished, their house was sold.  Their accounts showed they had purchased a property in the islands.  They’d retired.  Friends and family were at once furious and confused.  Morbius played along, claiming ignorance.  If any of them knew, they would become victims.  He could tell no one.  He was a prisoner without a cell.  

And now, as Morbius drove to the warehouse in the darkness of the early morning, his mind raced for an answer.  A way to stop the vampire, and save himself and what remained of his family.  He had been making progress on the serum, had found a way to stabilize the protein sheath for a longer period of time, but nothing substantial.  The vampire blood was so aggressive.  If there was a way to slow the red vampire cells so the white serum cells could do their work…

Morbius braked hard. That was it.  They had spent all this time working on the serum as a way to alter the blood when they needed to work on the blood to alter the serum. Help the serum fight the red blood cells and overpower them.  An autoimmune blood disease, like hemolytic anemia.  Make the blood fight itself then use the serum.  It was the only semi-plausible idea he had come up with since this started.

At the warehouse Varney was ready with another sample round and more subjects, which Morbius quickly brushed aside.

“Can you get me a chemical compound?” he said in lieu of introduction.  Varney looked mildly confused but nodded.

“Whatever you require.”

“Phenylhydrazine.  Get me phenylhydrazine as fast as you can.”

“We can have it in several hours,” Varney assured him. “May I ask why?”

“An idea.  I want to give a subject a serious case of anemia.”

“Vampires cannot get sick with human diseases, doctor.”

“No, but a human can before he becomes a vampire.  And during that transition we may be able to alter the blood enough for the serum to take hold.”

Varney smiled a toothy smile, showing the points of his fangs.  He nodded.

“I see.  A novel idea.”  He pulled a cell phone from his coat pocket and dialed, quickly rattling off instructions about the substance and where to find it.

Morbius began scribbling out some notes as he waited for the phenylhydrazine, researching dosing and hemolytic anemia.  It wasn’t the best way to achieve such a goal in lab conditions and there would be side effects but at this point it couldn’t possibly matter.

It was the unnamed vampire with the blue eyes who brought the chemical to them, less than an hour later. “Am I to assume we’ve made progress?”

“Just an idea,” Morbius answered.  

“A single idea can alter history. Do you understand the process Dr. Morbius is about to undertake, Varney?”

“I do,” the vampire assistant said deferentially.

“Very good.  Then proceed.”  Varney looked at the other vampire and hesitated.  No words were spoken but Varney’s shoulders seemed to slump.

“I apologize, Dr, Morbius.”

“For what?” he asked, preparing the phenylhydrazine for injection. Varney took his wrist then and Morbius’s eyes widened.

“I truly have enjoyed our time together.”  The vampire yanked him forward, using his other hand to catch and spin him in midair, slamming his body down on the empty gurney.  His head crushed against the stainless steel.  A sensation of wet warmth spread under him as Varney tightened restraints.

“Please…” Morbius began. Varney’s expression was grim as they made eye contact but he did not stop.  Once the restraints were in place, the vampire set the syringe against Morbius’ flesh, inserting the needle and depressing the plunger.  The chemical burned its way into his arm and throughout his body.  He groaned and thrashed, pain spreading everywhere.

“How long?” the vampire asked.  Varney began preparing an IV.

“Minutes.  That dose of phenylhydrazine is fatal.  It will either succeed or fail within the next 15 minutes I should think,” he said.  The other vampire nodded as Varney plunged a second needle into Morbius’ arm.

Nothing in his life had prepared Morbius for the sensation of the vampire blood entering his body. The pain of the phenylhydrazine destroying his red blood cells was swept aside.  Instead, the feeling of freezing overcame him; the terrible burning cold of being out too long in winter, of holding ice too long in your bare hand. It seared his insides, filled his skull like icy fire and threatened to burst from his very pores.  He screamed.

Pain wracked his body. His muscles spasmed with an electric intensity, each one alive with pain unlike anything he had ever felt.  Was this death?  The vampire cells eating away at his human blood, making him into a monster?

“And now the serum,” he heard Varney say over the sound of his own agony.  He was right.  They had never planned to free him.  His parents had died for nothing.  Julia had died.  For nothing. For this monster.

A second wave of pain, then. Liquid razors biting into his insides, barbed wire being dragged between bones, wrapping tight around internal organs. He choked, vomited and felt his mouth fill with blood.

“What is happening?” the vampire asked.  Morbius’s body jerked and seized.  An audible snap filled the room as his back bent and broke as though made of twigs. The pain was all consuming.  His body was gone, there was only his mind and the pain now.  Fire. Ice. Steel. Lightning.  Agony heaped on suffering. He vomited blood like a geyser.

“I do not know,” Varney replied.  “The phenylhydrazine is reacting too violently, I have never seen this before.”

The vampire stepped forward, leaned down close to Morbius’ face.  Beyond the pain Morbius felt his presence.  His breath caught as he tried to focus on the vampire, tried to see him, scream at him, rage against him and make him feel this pain.  

“Breathe.  Breathe deeply.  I want you to smell the blood draining from your body.  You can smell it, can’t you?”

He laughed.  Morbius breathed in and the smell of blood filled his senses, mingled with pain.  And then something new.  Hunger. Need.  He looked at the vampire then, his features calm as he laughed and laughed and laughed.

The restraints gave way as though made of tissue.  The laughter seemed to hang in the air.  The smell of blood became thick and tired.  Even the air jellied, slowed to an unearthly crawl.  Nothing moved except Morbius.  He lunged.  The pain had faded away like steam rising through the air, only faint wisps left throughout his body.  Now he was energized, powerful.  He felt alive in a way he never had before.  His heart raced, and he could hear the blood rushing in his own ears.  

Fangs bit into the vampire’s throat.  Slowly, painfully slow, Varney’s eyes widened in shock.  The vampire’s hands moved as though in mud.  No, they were not slow.  It was Morbius who was so much faster.  Time seemed almost frozen around him as he pulled the vampire’s throat out with his teeth and then removed its entire head with his hands.

Time started again. Morbius stood still.  At his feet the vampire body twitched.  He dropped the head to the ground.  Blood dribbled from his mouth.  With his tongue, he traced the outline of the two fangs in his mouth.

Varney stood motionless.

“Aren’t you going to run?” Morbius asked.  Varney shook his head.

“No, doctor,” he answered.

“You want to die?”

“No, doctor.”

The two stared at each other for a beat, silence stretching on.

“Free the subjects, Varney. Your work is done.”

“Yes, doctor.”

Morbius headed for the door as Varney unlocked the cells.  Outside, the first rays of light crept to the horizon.  Morbius stared east for a moment, then sat down on the hood of his car.  The black of night softened to blue and purple and then pale reds, oranges and yellows began to appear.  Through a crack between buildings, the first rays of sunrise hit him square in the face. He flinched, instinctively.  The sensation was not pain, but discomfort. He felt himself tiring, weakening. His skin grew hot.

Holding a hand before his eyes, Morbius watched with a detached interest as a sunburn set in. The skin darkened, tiny blisters formed. So, not a true vampire nor a Daywalker. Something new entirely.  

People, former subjects, began to run from the building.  Some paused upon seeing Morbius, fear taking hold anew.  He was their tormentor as much as the vampires, wasn’t he?  He was a monster.  And if he could have he would have told them they were wrong, that he was forced to do what he did, that he was not a monster.  Except that as each one ran out, he could hear the blood pumping in their veins, and smell it on the air.  And he wanted it.  So badly did he want it.

His skin continued to burn as he drove off,  heading down side streets and trying to stay in the shade as much as possible. Eventually he made his way to an abandoned factory and hid himself away in the shadows, waiting for night, when he would decide what to do now.  Not a man. A monster.  A living vampire.  

[kayawagner]

Cthulhu Live! [BUNDLE]

Publisher: Skirmisher Publishing

This special 75% off bundle contains everything needed to play Cthulhu Live, the licensed live-action version of the popular Call of Cthulhu tabeltop RPG! These include the core rulebook; 10 self-standing adventure scripts, including the just-released "One Starry Night"; and a companion suite with more scenarios and numerous other resources to support play. It also includes a self-standing murder-mystery style scenario.

Cthulhu Live 3rd Edition (LARP) Regular price: $9.99 Bundle price: $2.47 Format: PDF This newest and best edition of Cthulhu Live includes a richly detailed and uniquely playable rules system that incorporates decades of best practices and refinements from hundreds of gamers worldwide. Features of this self-contained live-action roleplaying game include:  All-new rules for skills, combat, Sanity, Magic, and Psychic powers. Extensive information on organizing events, stagecraft and special effects. Guidelines on role-playing Outsiders tainted by the touch of the Mythos. New and improved photographs, graphics, and other images, including works by renowned Cthulhu Mythos artist Richard Alan Poppe. A screen-friendly lo-res version of the book that includes the "parchment" background of the original print edition and red blood spatters that had to be printed blac... Der Leere Blick: Ein Skript für das Cthulhu Live Rollenspiel 3. Edition (Sight Unseen: A Script for Cthulhu Live 3rd Edition) Regular price: $3.99 Bundle price: $0.99 Format: Watermarked PDF Der Leere Blick is a German-language version of the Sight Unseen script for the Cthulhu Live 3rd Edition live-action role-playing game and designed for use with the rules for it. This script can also be easily adapted for use with other horror and Mythos-oriented games, such as Call of Cthulhu. It ideal for a LARP party with friends or as a convention event and offers hours of fun, intrigue, and horror.  Can we trust our senses? How do we know that what we see is real? Are our eyes inherently deceptive and prone to misdirection? If so, then such flawed organs must be removed, for only in blindness can one perceive the truth: that all the world is horror.  Der Leere Blick/Sight Unseen is an unnerving multi-media LARP experience like no ... Mythos Society Guide to New England Regular price: $6.99 Bundle price: $1.73 Format: PDF The Mythos Society Guide to New England is an expansive universal sourcebook by veteran game designer Clint Staples that can be used to enhance any horror, mystery, or adventure roleplaying scenarios set in New England. It is particularly suited for Mythos-oriented games like Call of Cthulhu and Cthulhu Live. It is also a fun and provocative read for anyone interested in the esoteric history of New England, and a resource for stories or other projects that have horror or the weird as themes; are based on or inspired by the works of H.P. Lovecraft or other Cthulhu Mythos authors; or are set during the period between the two World Wars.  The Mythos Guide to New England provides a record of the land and its inhabitants, its prehistory and history, and its n... Arcanum Imperii: A Script for Cthulhu Live 3rd Edition Regular price: $5.99 Bundle price: $1.48 Format: PDF TOGA! TOGA! TOGA! But life in ancient Rome isn’t just one big party. The Second Triumvirate has been shattered and Rome is embroiled in civil war once again. Octavian has declared Marc Antony and his Egyptian queen, Cleopatra, enemies of Rome and the legions march south toward Alexandria. The situation seems dire for Marc Antony following destruction of his fleet at the Battle of Actium, but in the dusty hills of Macedonia a dark secret of the empire is waiting to be unveiled.  Governor Publius Artorius Stabo thought he was comfortably distant from the war. He was happy taking bribes and tribute from the local Macedonian nobles, indulging himself with slave girls, and avoiding his shrew of a wife. Then, a ragged band of survivors from  Actium washed up on his s... Cthulhu Live 3rd Edition Companion Suite Regular price: $9.99 Bundle price: $2.47 Format: ZIP File The stars are right for the eagerly anticipated release of the Cthulhu Live 3rd Edition Companion Suite! This collection of computer applications and support materials was created specifically for the thoroughly revised, expanded, and improved 3rd Edition of the Cthulhu Live live-action role-playing game (LARP). Skirmisher partnered with Mantra Design Studio to produce this collection of resources (which were originally released as a Companion CD-ROM). With a stunning graphic interface and a soundtrack by Midnight Syndicate, this is a fantastic tool resource for Keepers and Players alike that is compatible with PC, Mac, and Linux platforms. This suite of resources includes: * Advanced character creation program. * Character Card Creator. * Government ID Badg... Cthulhu Live’s Mysteries of the Mythos: Murder at Miskatonic Regular price: $2.99 Bundle price: $0.74 Format: PDF Miskatonic University, that ivy league institution of higher learning that has produced many a fine young adult ready to shape the world the way they see fit. With diverse courses such as Peruvian Basket Weaving, Modern Occult Legends, and Ancient Languages, Miskatonic has a class for any student. And with the award-winning sports team, the Fighting Cephalopods, even the athletic scholar can find his path to a brighter future among these hallowed halls.  There is, however, a class not in the curriculum that one person on campus is about to earn a masters in. That class is Murder 101. This class has only one test, but the final is a real killer. Who will pass this course? Will it be the jock? What about the bookworm? And let us not forget about the professional rival! Only time an... House of Pain: A Script for Cthulhu Live 3rd Edition Regular price: $4.99 Bundle price: $1.23 Format: PDF Welcome to the New World Order. It’s the autumn of 1991, and the world isn’t what it used to be. Saddam Hussein’s army lies in smoldering ruins. The Soviet Union is suffering its death throes. Germany has been reunified. Africa is aflame with small bush wars. Across the world, the balance of power is shifting. Old powers are dying out and the playing field of the future will be a chaos of warlords and rogue states. In this full-length adventure for Cthulhu Live 3rd Edition, the players are power-brokers who have been invited to a private summit to help form the geopolitical landscape of the next century. But while they plot their moves and hide their secrets, they may find that they themselves are pawns in a much larger, more ancient game. This adventure incl... Muerte al Chupacabras!: A Script for Cthulhu Live 3rd Edition Regular price: $3.99 Bundle price: $0.99 Format: PDF For three decades, Hobbsbad, New Mexico, has lived in fear of El Chupacabra, an unseen monster that comes in the night and feeds on blood. Every few years, the attacks become more frequent, and then stop just as quickly and mysteriously as they began. Nothing has been able to stop this malevolent creature. Now, one man has done the impossible and captured El Chupacabra alive, and tonight, he plans to reveal his prize to the world - or at least the highest bidder. Hobbsbad has been thrown into chaos, as crackpots, cryptozoologists, reporters, and ranchers swarm into it! Muerte al Chupacabras! is a scenario inspired by B-movies and pseudoscience that is designed to be played with 15 or more players and two to four staff members. Although it is meant to stand on its own, this script... Old Man of Damascus: A Script for Cthulhu Live 3rd Edition Regular price: $4.99 Bundle price: $1.23 Format: PDF The Kingdom of Jerusalem in 1190 is in dire peril. Saladin’s army has retaken Jerusalem. The crusader army is in tatters. The once-mighty Christian kingdoms of Palestine are crumbling. In the easternmost provinces of the Christian kingdoms, the fortress of Li Vaux Moise has been under siege for three months. The defenders have tried to hold out, but the fortress is clearly about to fall, and the commander of the Muslim army has requested a meeting to discuss terms of the garrison’s surrender. But there are dark forces at work here far greater than any mortal army. Ancient evils from the wind-swept deserts stalk the stone walls, hungry for blood and power. Terrible, mind-shattering secrets from beyond the stars lie ripe to be exposed. Horrors beyond the comprehension of both... One Starry Night (Cthulhu Live) Regular price: $1.99 Bundle price: $0.49 Format: PDF “One Starry Night” in Arkham, celestial bodies align and cause revelations from a lost city, a stolen artifact, and predictions of impending apocalypse to come together in horrifying and deadly ways.  This scenario is designed for use both with Skirmisher Publishing’s Platinum-bestselling Cthulhu Live live-action role-playing game (LARP) and Chaosium’s Call of Cthulhu tabletop roleplaying game. It is written for two to five Investigators and a medium-sized staff and designed to be played over several locations all within driving or walking distance.  Cthulhu Live is a live-action roleplaying game (LARP) version of the popular horror roleplaying game Call of Cthulhu, based on the works of horror author ... Sight Unseen: A Script for Cthulhu Live 3rd Edition Regular price: $4.99 Bundle price: $1.23 Format: PDF Can we trust our senses? How do we know that what we see is real? Are our eyes inherently deceptive and prone to misdirection? If so, then such flawed organs must be removed, for only in blindness can one perceive the truth: that all the world is horror. Sight Unseen is a LARP experience like no other. When an assortment of Arkham citizens check into the local hospital for surgery, they find themselves blinded by a madman and forced to confront the unearthly terror he has unleashed upon the world. Sight Unseen is a game script for Cthulhu Live 3rd Edition and requires the Cthulhu Live 3rd Edition game rules. The text contains the game overview and timeline; detailed guidelines for simulating blindness in LARP, including safety precautions; prop, special effec... The Ageless (Cthulhu Live) Regular price: $1.99 Bundle price: $0.49 Format: PDF Around this time every year, just as the leaves begun to change, Sir Arthur Westfield holds a grand salon at his manor of West End. The gathering always attracts a healthy mix of dilettantes, eccentrics, and academics. Often little more than a pretense for Westfield to show off his new acquisitions and oddities, it is also a chance for deals to be made. A renowned patron of the arts and sciences, many a man has worked long into the night, maneuvering the old man into some business arrangement or endowment. It remains to be seen what deals tonight may bring ... “The Ageless” is a live-action role-playing game script designed for 10-15 participants and a medium-sized staff. It is stat'ed for the Gold bestselling Cthulhu Live 3rd Edition system but is rules light an... The Green Fairy: A Script for Cthulhu Live 3rd Edition Regular price: $6.99 Bundle price: $1.73 Format: PDF Paris at the end of the 19th century: a city of lights, music, excitement at the approach of the new century and aflame with the creative spirit of the Bohemian revolution. But for months the city has been locked in a state of fear as the brutal murderer known as the Raptor stalks the steep streets and narrow alleyways of the north-end hill neighborhood of Montmartre. Many refuse to leave their homes by night. Others frequent establishments such as “The Green Fairy,” an absinthe bar and popular meeting place for artists, actors, whores, criminals, and the well-to-do seeking to taste the thrills and pleasures of Montmartre. This evening, the patrons of “The Green Fairy” will be joined by a visitor beyond their darkest nightmares.  The Green Fairy... The Island: A Script for Cthulhu Live 3rd Edition Regular price: $4.99 Bundle price: $1.24 Format: PDF When their ship is sunk by a freak storm. the survivors swim to the nearest land, a small island off the New England coast. Safe on land they feel that their troubles are over ... but they are wrong. The Island is a Cthulhu Live live-action role-playing (LARP) game scenario for up to 13 players. It is set in 1947 and brings the characters face-to-face with their own twisted lineages and the madness carried in their very souls. The text contains the game overview and timeline; prop, special effects, and stagecraft tips, including instructions for creating an elaborate working Moon Clock prop; and detailed character sheets and backgrounds for the player characters. Ideal as an event for a Live Action Role-Playing (LARP) party with friends or as a convention event, it offers hours ... The Return of Cyris Crane (Cthulhu Live) Regular price: $1.99 Bundle price: $0.49 Format: PDF Last autumn, Cyris Crane, brilliant businessman, loving father, world traveler, and one of the wealthiest and most respected men in Arkham, ventured into the Arkham hill country and disappeared in a sudden blizzard. Now, he has returned, much to the joy of his friends and family, and he has summoned them to his home to make a pronouncement to them ... "The Return of Cyris Crane" is a LARP scenario designed to be played with minimal staff and a small number of players. The only staff required are the Keeper and, if possible, a Stage Manager. It is stat'ed for the Cthulhu Live 3rd Edition system but can easily be adapted for use with other LARP or tabletop games.  Cthulhu Live is a live-action roleplaying game (LARP) version of the popular horror r... WitchFinder: A Script for Cthulhu Live 3rd Edition Regular price: $3.99 Bundle price: $0.99 Format: PDF Set in Yugoslavia in 1943, during the height of World War II, this tense and exciting scenario focuses on the struggle between Allied and Axis special operations teams to seize control of information critical to control of the Balkans. Players can assume roles as military or civilian operatives in one of four opposing factions, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the SS Ahnenerbe occult operations division, the Communist partisans, or the Chetnik royalist freedom fighters. Little by little, however, the characters will begin to realize that their war is not the first to have left its mark on the region in which they are battling for supremacy - and that their actions are uncovering a powerful and dangerous evil that is beyond anything they ever expected to face. WitchFinder...

Total value: $80.84 Special bundle price: $19.99 Savings of: $60.85 (75%)

Price: $80.84 Cthulhu Live! [BUNDLE] published first on https://supergalaxyrom.tumblr.com

[delwray-blog]

THE GREATEST HOAX EVER PERPETRATED UPON CHRISTIANITY

Exposing the Enemy

By Pastor Del Wray

All “Political Correct” speech is Jewish Censored speech.

“Before Americans Can Take Back America, They Should Know Who To Take It Back From”.

The TRUTH is always "anti-Semitic" to the JEWS!

The single most way to determine if anything you read, regarding the "Jewish Problem", is factual and true is to observe if the Jews have labeled it "anti-Semitic". If they have, then it is factual truth, as they HATE being exposed for what they REALLY are...the children of SATAN! John 8:43-44

 “Why do ye not understand my speech? Even because ye cannot hear my word, Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar, and the father of it.”

 In our time more than ever before, the chief strength of the wicked lies in the cowardice and weakness of good men... All the strength of Satan’s reign is due to the easy-going weakness of Christians. Oh! If I might ask the Divine Redeemer, as the prophet Zachary did in spirit:

 “What are those wounds in the midst of Thy hands? The answer would not be doubtful: With these was I wounded in the house of them that loved Me. I was wounded by My friends, who did nothing to defend Me, and who, on every occasion, made themselves the accomplices of My adversaries. And this reproach can be leveled at the weak and timid Christians of all ages, of all countries.”

 THE SECRET DRIVING FORCE OF COMMUNISM

 Communism as Destroyer

 Of all revolutionary systems, which throughout human history have been devised for the destruction of our civilized values, Communism is without doubt the most perfected, most efficient and most merciless. In fact it represents the most advanced epoch of the world revolution, in whose postulates it therefore not only acts to destroy a definite political, social, economic or moral institution, but also simultaneously to declare null and void the Church Jesus Christ founded as well as all cultural and Christian manifestations which represent our civilization.

 All revolutionary currents of Jewish origin have attacked Christianity in its different aspects with particular one-mindedness. Communism, spawned from this same revolutionary stream of thought, seeks to banish Christianity for the purpose of causing it to vanish from the face of the earth, without even the slightest trace remaining. The

Destructive fury of this satanic striving, which brings before the eyes of the world the most terrible pictures of terror and destruction which are possible to imagine, can only be based on the essence of Nihilism and the most evil, hate-filled rejection of everything hitherto existing. For otherwise, one would not be able to understand the indescribable

Insanity of its criminal acts and the spirit of destruction, of annihilation, of insult, of contradiction and of resistance by its leading personalities against everything, which represents fundamental features not only of Christianity but of religion in general.

 The purpose of Communism is, as we have indeed seen in Russia and in the other lands where it has been introduced, none other than to enslave the people in the economic, political, social, human and super-human sense, in order to make possible a minority rule through violence. From an international aspect, the goal cannot be clearer:

 "To attain through violence world domination by an insignificant minority, which destroys the rest of humanity by means of materialism, terror and, if necessary, by death, completely indifferent to whether in the process the enormous majority of the population must be murdered."

 The urge to murder, which has characterized the leading Soviet personages, is known well throughout the world. There are few, who upon learning of the bloody purges, which have been undertaken by the Marxists in Russia, will not be seized by shudders of horror.

One needs only to recall a few details to fill the most stout hearts with fear and alarm.

 "In its beginnings the Red Terror strove above all to exterminate the Russian Intelligentsia."- As proof of this assertion S.P. Melgunow affirms the following, in which he refers to the "Special Committees", which appeared in Russia in the first period of the Social revolution:

 "The special committees are not organs of law, but of merciless extermination according to the decisions of the Communist Central Committee. The special committee is neither a commission of investigation nor a court of justice, but itself determines its own powers. It is an instrument of battle, which acts on the internal front of the civil war. It does not pardon whoever stands on the other side of the barricades, but kills them.

 "It is not difficult to form ideas of how in reality this extermination proceeds, when in place of the nullified legal code only the revolutionary experience and conscience command. This conscience is subjective and experience allows complete free play to the will, which always, according to the position of the judge, takes on more or less furious forms."

 "Let us not carry on war against individual persons" - wrote Latsis - "but let us exterminate the Bourgeoisie as a class. Do not investigate, through study of documents and proofs, what the accused has done in words and deeds against the Soviet authority. The first question to be placed before him runs as to what class he belongs to, what is his origin, his education, his training and his profession".

 During the bloody dictatorship of Lenin, the Committee of Investigation under Rohrberg (Rohrberg, C), which after the capture of Kiev entered this city with the White volunteers in August 1919, reported the following:

 "The entire concrete floor of the large garage (this was the place where the provincial Cheka of Kiev had carried out executions) was swimming in blood, which did not flow but formed a layer of several inches; it was a grisly mixture of blood with brain and skull fragments as well as strands of hair and other human remains. The entire walls, holed by thousands of bullets, were spattered with blood, and fragments of brain as well as head skin adhered to them.

 "A drain ditch of 25 cm width and 25 cm deep and about 10 m long ran from the middle of the garage to a nearby room, where there was a subterranean outlet pipe. This drain ditch was filled to the top with blood.

 "Usually, immediately after the massacre, the corpses were removed in Lorries or horse-drawn wagons from the city and buried in a mass grave. In the corner of a garden we came upon an older mass grave, which contained about 80 corpses, in which we discovered signs of the most varied and unimaginable cruelties and mutilation. There were corpses from which the entrails had been removed; others had different limbs amputated and others again were cut into pieces. Some had had the eyes poked out, while the head, the face, the neck and the torso were covered with deep wounds. Further on we found a corpse with an axe in the breast, while others had no tongues. In a corner of the mass grave we discovered many legs and arms severed from the trunk."

 The enormous number of corpses, which have already been laid to the account of Communist Socialism and which increase terrifyingly all the while, will perhaps never be exactly known, but it exceeds everything imaginable. It is not possible to learn the exact number of the victims. All estimates lie below the real figure."

 In the Edinburgh newspaper "The Scotsman" of 7th November, 1923, Professor Sarolea gave the following figures:

 "28 Town officials; 1,219 Clergy; 6,000 Professors and teachers; 9,000 doctors; 54,000 Officers; 260,000 soldiers; 70,000 Policemen; 12,950 estate owners; 355,250 intellectuals and of the free professions; 193,290 workers and 215,000 peasants."

 The Information Committee of Denikin on the Bolshevistic intrigue during the years 1918-1919 records in a treatise about the Red Terror in these two years "one million, seven hundred thousand victims." In the "Roul" of 3rd August 1923, Kommin makes the following observation:

 "During the winter of 1920 there existed in the USSR, 52 governments with 52 Special Committees (Chekas), 52 Special Departments and 52 revolutionary courts. Besides countless subsidiary Chekas, transport-networks, courts on the railways as well as troops for internal security, there were mobile courts, which were dispatched to mass executions in the places concerned."

 To this list of courts of torture must be added the special departments, i.e., 16 army and divisional courts. All in all one must estimate 1000 torture chambers. If it is borne in mind that at that time district committees also existed in addition, then the number rises further. In addition the number of governments of the USSR increased. Siberia, the Crimea and the Far East were conquered. The number of Chekas grew in geometrical ratio.

 According to Soviet data (in the year 1920 when the terror had still not ebbed and the reporting of news was not restricted) it is possible to establish an average figure for every court; the curve of executions rises from one to fifty (in the great cities) and up to one hundred in the regions recently conquered by the Red Army. The crisis of terror was periodic and then ceased; in this manner one can daily estimate the (modest) figure of five victims..., which, multiplied with the thousand courts, gives a result of five thousand, and thus for the year roughly one and a half million. We recall this indescribable slaughter, not because in its totality it was either the most numerous or the most merciless to arise from the special situation and inflamed passions consequent on the first victories of the Bolshevist revolution, but because today, one hundred years after these mass executions took place, all this might otherwise be obliterated from the present Communist picture, even for the persons who were contemporaries of the events and who today, still alive, have forgotten those tragedies with the ease with which people forget not only unpleasant events which do not directly concern them, but even those to which they fell victim.

 Unhappily, time has shown us a truly demonic excess of Communism in its murderous activity, about which we give no details and do not present the monstrous statistics because all this is known to us. Several of these cruel bloodbaths have only taken place recently, so that one still seems to hear the lament of the persecuted, the death-rattle of the dying and the dumb, and the terrible and haunting complaint of the corpses.  

 It may suffice to recall the recent giant bloodbaths in Hungary, Poland, and East Germany and Cuba as well as the earlier mass killings by Stalin and the annihilation of millions of Chinese through the Communist regime of Mao-Tse-Tung. But also the Communist attempts at revolution, which failed to achieve lasting permanence, such as that of Bela Kun who occupied Hungary in such a brutal way in the middle of 1919; of Spain in 1936, where the Bolsheviks gained control of Madrid and parts of the Spanish provinces and murdered more than 16,000 priests, monks and nuns, as well as 12 Bishops; further the happily unsuccessful attempt in Germany, its most successful realization in the Red Republic of Bavaria in the year 1919. All these attempts were in fact orgies of 1918, which was directed by Hugo Haase, and which had blood and unrestrained bestiality.

 One must also not forget that this apocalyptic storm, which brings a flood of corpses, blood and tears, falls upon the world with the sole goal: to destroy not only the Christian Church but the entire Christian civilization. Before this shattering picture the world asks itself with heavy heart: who can hate our Christian features in such a form and try to destroy them with such Godless fury? Who has become capable of instigating this bloody mechanics of annihilation? Who can with such insensitivity direct and order this monstrous criminal process? And reality answers us completely without doubt that the

[Bolshevik] Jews are those responsible, as will later be proved.

  THE CREATORS OF COMMUNISM AND ITS SYSTEM

 There is absolutely no doubt, that the Jews are the inventors of Communism; for they have been the instigators of the dogma, upon which that monstrous system is built, which at present with absolute power rules the greatest part of Europe and Asia, which stirs up the lands of America and with progressive certainty floods over all Christian peoples of the world like a deadly cancerous growth, like a tumor, which steadily devours the core of the free nations, without apparently an effective means of cure being found against this disease.

 But the Jews are also the inventors and directors of the Communist methods, of effective tactics of struggle, of the insensitive and totally inhuman government policy and of aggressive international strategy. It is a completely proven fact that the Communist theoreticians were all Jews, unheeded of what system the Jews lastingly use, as well as the theoreticians and the experienced revolutionaries, which has veiled from the eyes of the people, where they lived, their true origin.

 1. Karl Heinrich Marx was a German Jew, whose real name was Kissel Mordekay, born in Trier, Rhineland, and son of a Jewish lawyer. Before his famous work "Das Kapital" which contains the fundamental idea of theoretical Communism, whose concepts he strove with inexhaustible activity up to his death in the year 1887 to spread over the world, he had written and published with the Jew Engels in the year 1848 the Communist Manifesto in London; between 1843 and 1847 he had formulated in England the first modern interpretation of Hebrew Nationalism in his articles, as in the publication in the year 1844 in the periodical "Deutsch-Franzosische Jahrbiicher" (German-French Year Books) under the title "Concerning the Jewish question", which shows an ultra-national tendency.

 2. Friedrich Engels, creator of the "First International", and close collaborator of Marx, was a Jew and born in Bremen (Germany). His father was a Jewish cotton merchant of the city. Engels died in the year 1894.

 3. Karl Kautski, whose real name was Kraus, was the author of the book "The Beginnings of Christianity", in which he mainly combats the principles of Christianity. He was the most important interpreter of Karl Marx and in 1887 published "The Economic Doctrine of Karl Marx Made Intelligible for all." "The Bloodbath of Chisinaw and the Jewish Question", in the year 1903, "The Class Struggle", which for Mao-Tse-Tung in China was the fundamental book for Communist instruction; and the work with the title "The Vanguard of Socialism", in the year 1921. He was also the author of the "Socialist Programme" from Erfurt, Germany. This Jew was born in the year 1854 in Prague and died in 1938 in The Hague (Holland).

 4. Ferdinand Lassalle, Jew, born in the year 1825 in Breslau. He had interfered in the democratic revolution of 1848. In the year 1863 he published his work entitled "Open Answers", in which he outlined a plan of revolution for the German workers. Since then he worked tirelessly for a "Socialist" crusade, which was directed at the rebellion of the workers. For this purpose he published a further work under the title "Capital and Labour."

 5. Eduard Bernstein, a Jew born in Berlin in the year 1850. His principal works are "Assumptions concerning Socialism", "Forward, Socialism", "Documents of Socialism", "History and Theory of Socialism", "Social Democracy of Today in Theory and Practice", "The Duties of Social Democracy", and "German Revolution". In all his writings he expounds the Communist teaching and bases it on the views of Marx. In the year 1918 he became Finance minister of the German Socialist state, which, however, could fortunately only maintain itself a few months.

 6. Jacob Lastrow, Max Hirsch, Edgar Loening, Wirschauer, Babe, Schatz, David Ricardo and many other writers of theoretical Communism were Jews. In all lands are found writers, almost exclusively Jewish, who preach Communism to the masses although with many opportunities they strive to give the appearance in their writings of a feeling of humanity and brotherhood. We have indeed already seen in practice what this means.

 However theoretical all Jews mentioned may have been, they were not satisfied with setting up the doctrinaire bases, but each one of them was an experienced revolutionary, who busied himself in whatever particular land he found himself, to factually prepare the upheaval, to direct or to give it support. As leaders or members of revolutionary associations known only to one another, they took more and more active part in the development or Bolshevism. But apart from these Jews, who in the main were regarded as theoreticians, we find that almost all materialist leaders, who develop Communist tactics, also belong to the same race and carry out their task with the greatest efficacy.

 As indisputable examples two movements of this type can be recorded:

 A) In the year 1918 Germany was showpiece of a Communist, Jew directed revolution. The Red Councils of the republic of Munich was Jewish, as its instigators prove:

Liebknecht, Rosa Luxemburg, Kurt Eisner and many others; with the fall of the monarchy the Jews gained control of the country and the German government. With Ministers of State Haase and Landsberg appear Kautsky, Kohn and Herzfeld. The Finance minister was likewise a Jew, had his racial fellow Bernstein as assistant and the minister of the Interior, likewise a Jew, and sought the collaboration of his racial brother.

 Doctor Freund, who helped him in his work.

 Kurt Eisner, the President of the Bavarian Councils Republic, was the instigator of the Bolshevist revolution in Munich.

 "Eleven little men made the revolution", said Kurt Eisner in the intoxication of triumph to his colleague, the Minister Auer. It is no more than right to preserve the unforgettable memory of these little men, who were, in fact, the Jews Max Lowenberg, Doctor Kurt

Rosenfeld, Caspar WoUheim, Max Rothschild, Carl Arnold, Kranold, Rosenhek, Birnbaum, Reis and Kaisser. These ten with Kurt Eisner van Israelowitsch led the presidency of the Revolutionary court of Germany. All eleven were Freemasons and belonged to the secret lodge N. which had its seat in Munich at No. 51 Briennerstrasse.

 The first cabinet of Germany in the year 1918 was composed of Jews.

 1 . Preuss, Minister of the Interior.

 2. Freund, Minister of tlie Interior.

 3. Landsberg, Finance Minister.

 4. Karl Kautski, Finance Minister.

 5. Sciiiffer, Finance Minister.

 6. Eduard Bernstein, secretary of tfie State Treasury.

 7. Fritz Max Colien, director of the official information service. (This Jew was earlier correspondent of the Jewish "Frankfurter Zeitung").

 The second "German Socialist government" of 1918 was formed of the following Jews:

 1 . Hirsch, Minister of the Interior.

 2. Rosenfeld, Justice Minister.

 3. Futran, Minister of education.

 4. Arndt, Minister of education.

 5. Simon, State secretary of finances.

 6. Kastenberg, director of the department of science and art.

 7. Strathgen, director of colonial department.

 9. Wurm, secretary of food.

 10. Merz, Weil, Katzenstein, Stern, Lowenberg, Frankel, Schlesinger, Israelowitz, Selingsohn, Laubenheim, etc., took up high posts in the ministries.

 Among the remaining Jews who controlled the sectors vital to life of the German state, which had been defeated through the American intervention in the war, were found in the year 1918, and later:

 1. Kohen, President of the German workers and soldiers councils (similar to the Soviet council of soldiers and workers of Moscow in the same year).

 2. Ernst, police president of Berlin.

 3. Sinzheimer, police president of Frankfurt.

 4. Lewy, police president of Hessen.

 5. Kurt Eisner, Bavarian state president.

 6. Jaffe Bavarian finance minister.

 7. Brentano, Industry, trade and transport minister.

 8. Talheimer, minister in Wiirttemberg.

 9. Heimann, another minister in Wiirttemberg.

 10. Fulda, in the government of Hesse.

 1 1 . Theodor Wolf, chief editor of the newspaper "Berliner Tageblatt."

 12. Gwiner, director of the "Deutsche Bank".—

 B) Hungary in the year 1919. On 20th March 1919 the Jew Bela Kun (Cohn) took over power in Hungary and proclaimed the Hungarian Soviet republic, which from that moment on was submerged in a hair-raising sea of blood. Twenty-eight (28) Commissars formed with him the new government and of these 18 were Israelites. That is an unheard of proportion, when one bears in mind that in Hungary lived one and a half million Israelites compared to 22 million inhabitants. The 18 Commissars held the actual control of rulership in their hands and the eight Gentile Commissars could do nothing against them.

 "More than 90% of the members of the government and the confidence men of Bela Kun were also Jews. Here follows a list of members of the Bela Kun government:

 1. Bela Kun, general secretary of the Jewish government.

 2. Sandor Garbai, "official" president of the government, who was used by the Jews as a Hungarian man of straw.

 3. Peter Agoston, deputy of the general secretary; Jew.

 4. Dr. E. Landler, Peoples commissar for internal affairs; Jew.

 5. Bela Vago, deputy of Landler, a Jew with the name Weiss.

 6. E. Hamburger, Agriculture Commissar; Jew.

 7. Vantus, deputy of Hamburger; Jew.

 8. Csizmadia, deputy of Hamburger; Hungarian.

 9. Nyisztor, deputy of Hamburger; Hungarian.

 10 Varga, Commissar for financial affairs; Jew by name Weichselbaum.

 1 1 . Szkely, deputy of Varga; Jew by name Schlesinger.

 12. Kunftz, Education minister; Jew by name Kunstater.

 13. Kukacs, deputy of Kunfi; a Jew, who in reality was chilled Lo winger and was the son of the director-general of a banking house in Budapest.

 14. D. Bokanyi, Minister of labour; Hungarian.

 15. Fiedler, deputy of Bokanyi; Jew.

 16. Jozsef Pogany, War Commissar; a Jew, who in reality was called Schwartz.

 17. Szanto, deputy of Pogany; a Jew named Schreiber.

 18. Tibor Szamuelly, deputy of Pogany, a Jew named Samuel.

 19. Matyas Rakosi, trade Minister; a Jew, who in reality was called Matthew Roth Rosenkrantz, present Communist dictator.

 20. Ronai, Commissar of law; a Jew named Rosentstegl.

 21. Ladai, deputy of Ronai; Jew.

 22. Erdelyi, Commissar of supply; a Jew named Eisenstein.

 23. Vilmas Boehm, Socialisation Commissar; Jew.

 24. Hevesi, deputy of Boehm; a Jew named Honig.

 25. Dovsak, second deputy of Boehm; Jew.

 26. Oszkar Jaszai, Commissar of nationalities; a Jew named Jakubovits.

 27. Otto Korvin, political examining Commissar; a Jew named Klein.

 28. Kerekes, state lawyer; a Jew named Krauss.

 29. Biro, chief of the political police; a Jew named Blau.

 30. Seidem, adjutant of Biro; Jew.

 3 1 . Oszkar Faber, Commissar for liquidation of Church property; Jew.

 32. J. Czerni, commander of the terrorist bands, which were known by the name "Lenin youth"; Hungarain.

 33. Illes, supreme police Commissar; Jew.

 34. Szabados, supreme police Commissar; a Jew named Singer.

 35. Kalmar, supreme police Commissar; German Jew.

 36. Szabo, supreme police Commissar; Ruthenian Jew, who in reality was called Schwarz.

 37. Vince, Peoples Commissar of the city of Budapest, who in reality was called Weinstein.

 38. M. Kraus, Peoples Commissar of Budapest; Jew.

 39. A. Dienes, Peoples Commissar of Budapest; Jew.

 40. Lengyel, President of the Austro -Hungarian bank; a Jew named Levkovits.

 41 . Laszlo, President of the Communist revolutionary court; a Jew, who in reality was called Lowy.^

 In this government which for a time held Hungary in thrall, the chief of the Hungarian Cheka Szamuelly, besides Bela Kun, distinguished himself through countless crimes and plundering. While the latter rode through the land in his luxury automobile (with the symbol of a large gallows mounted on the vehicle, and accompanied by his capable Jewish woman secretary R. S. Salkind, alias Semliachkay), the former travelled through Hungary in his special train and sowed terror and death, as a contemporary witness describes:

 "That train of death travelled snorting through the black Hungarian nights; where it stopped, one saw people hanging from trees and blood which ran on the ground. Along the railway line naked and mutilated corpses were to be seen. Szamuelly dictated his judgments in his train, and whoever was forced to enter never lived to tell the tale of what he saw. Szamuelly lived constantly in this train. Thirty selected terrorists ensured his security. Selected executioners accompanied him. The train consisted of two saloon wagons, two first-class wagons, which were occupied by the terrorists and two third-class wagons for the victims. In the latter executions were carried out. The floor of this wagon was stiff with blood. The corpses were thrown out of the windows, while Szamuelly sat comfortably in the elegant workroom of his compartment which was upholstered in rose-coloured damask and decorated with polished mirrors. With a movement of the hand he decided over life or death. "

  THE HEAD OF COMMUNISM

 There exists therefore not the slightest doubt, that the Marxist theory (Communism) is a

Jewish work, just as is also its every action, which aims at putting this doctrine into

practice.

 Before the final establishing of Bolshevism in Russia the directors and organisers of all

Communist movements in their entirety were almost solely Jews, just as the great

majority of the true organisers of the revolutions were to which they gave the impetus.

But in Russia, as the first land where Bolshevism finally triumphed, and where it was and

still is the fulcrum or driving force for the Communising of the world, the Jewish

paternity of the system of organisation and of Soviet praxis also allows no doubt or error.

According to the irrefutable data, which has been fully and completely proved and

recognised by all impartial writers who have dealt with this theme, the Communist work

of the Jews in the land of the Czars is so powerful that it would be useless to deny this

disastrous triumph as their monopoly.

 It suffices to recall the names of those who have formed the governments and the

principal leading organs in the Soviet Union, in order to know what one has immediately

to think of the clear and categorical proof of the evidence.

  I - MEMBERS OF THE FIRST COMMUNIST GOVERNMENT OF MOSCOW (1918)

 (Council of Peoples Commissars)

 1. Ilich Ulin (Vladimir Ilich Ulianov or Nikolaus Lenin). President of the Supreme

Soviet, Jew on mother's side. His mother was called Blank, a Jewess of German origin.

 2. Lew Davinovich Bronstein (Leo Trotsky), Commissar for the Red Army and the Navy;

Jew.

 3. losiph David Vissarionovich Djugashvili-Kochba (Joseph Vissarianovich Stalin),

Nationalities Commissar; descendant of Jews from Georgia.

 4. Chicherin; Commissar for foreign affairs; Russian.

 5. Apfelbaum (Grigore Zinoviev), Commissar for internal affairs; Jew.

 6. Kohen (Volodarsky), Commissar for press and propaganda; Jew.

 7. Samuel Kaufmann, Commissar for the landed property of the State; Jew.

 8. Steinberg, law Commissar; Jew.

 9. Schmidt, Commissar for public works; Jew.

 10. Ethel Knigkisen (Liliana), Commissar for supply, Jewess.

 1 1. Pfenigstein, Commissar for the settlement of refugees; Jew.

 12. Schlichter (Vostanoleinin) Commissar for billetings (confiscation of private houses

for the Reds); Jew.

 13. Lurie (Larin), President of the supreme economic council; Jew.

 14. Kukor (Kukorsky), Trade Commissar; Jew.

 15. Spitzberg, Culture Commissar; Jew.

 16. Urisky (Radomilsky), Commissar for "elections"; Jew.

 17. Lunacharsky, Commissar for public schools. Russian.

 18. Simasko, Commissar for health; Jew.

 19. Protzian, Agriculture Commissar; Armenian.

 In the Appendix at the end of this volume can be found the interesting and illustrative

lists of the Jewish officials in all the government bodies of the Soviet Union, the

Communist Party, the Red Army, the Secret Police, the trade unions, etc.

 Of a total of 502 offices of first rank in the organisation and direction of the Communist

revolution in Russia and in the direction of the Soviet State during the first years of its

existence, no less than 459 posts are occupied by Jews, while only 43 of these offices

have been occupied by Gentiles of different origin. Who then has accordingly carried out

this terrible revolution? The Gentiles perhaps? Another statistic, which was published in

Paris by the counter-revolutionary newspaper "Le Russe Nationaliste", after the victory

of the Jewish Communists in Russia, reveals that of 554 Communist leaders of first rank

in different offices the racial composition was as follows:

  Jews 447

Lithuanians 43

Russians 30

Armenians 13

Germans 12

Finns 3

Poles 2

Georgians 2

Czechs 1

Hungarians 1

 During the Second World War, and from then on up to our present time, the Jewish

clique which rules the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics, continues to be very

numerous, for at the head of the names stands Stalin himself, who for a long time was

regarded as a Georgian of pure descent. But it has been revealed that he belongs to the

Jewish race; for Djougachvili, which is his surname, means "Son of Djou", and Djou is a

small island in Persia, whither many banished Portuguese "Gypsies" migrated, who later

settled in Georgia.

 Today it is almost completely proved that Stalin had Jewish blood, although he neither

confirmed nor denied the rumours, about which mutterings began in this direction. -

 Let us look at a list of the Soviet officials in the government of Stalin:

 1. Zdanov (Yadanov), who in reality was called Liphshitz, foriner commander in the

defence of Leningrad during the 2nd world war. Member of the Politbiiro up to 1945 and

one of the instigators of the decision which excluded Tito from the Cominform in the

year 1948 and who shortly afterwards died.

 2. Lavrenty Beria, Chief of the M.V.D. PoUce and of Soviet heavy industry, member of

the Soviet Atom industry, who was executed upon orders of Malenkov, and in fact for the

same reason for which Stalin liquidated Yagoda.

 3. Lazar Kaganovich, director of Soviet heavy industry, member of the Politburo from

1944 to 1952, then member of the Presidium and at present President of the Supreme

Presidium of the USSR.

 4. Malenkov (Georgi Maximilianovich Molenk), member of the Politburo and Orgburo

until 1952, then member of the Supreme Presidium, President of the Ministerial Council

after the death of Stalin; Minister in the government of Bulganin since 1955. He is a Jew

from Ornsenburg, not a Cossack, as is asserted. The name of his father, Maximilian

Malenk, is typical for a Russian Jew. In addition there is a very important detail, which

reveals the true origin of Malenkov and also of Khrushchev. The present wife of

Malenkov is the Jewess Pearlmutter, known as "Comrade Schans chuschne" who was

Minister (Commissar) for the fish industry in the Soviet government in the year 1938. If

Malenkov had not been a Jew, it is extremely unlikely that he would have married a

Jewess, and the latter would also not have married him. There exists no official

description of the life of Malenkov. This is certainly to be attributed to the fact that he

does not want his Jewish origin to be discovered.

 5. Nikolaus Salomon Khrushchev, present chief (1963) of the Soviet Communist party,

member of the Politburo since 1939, i.e. since the year when Malenkov was chosen

member of the Orgburo. He is the brother of Madame Malenkov, i.e. of the Jewess

Pearlmutter. Khrushchev is a Jew and his real name is Pearlmutter. Also, the present wife of Khrushchev, Nina, as well as the wives of Mikoyan, Voroshilov, Molotov, etc., are

Jewesses.

 6. Marshal Nikolaus Bulganin, at present first Soviet minister, former bank official, was

one of the ten Jewish members of the Commissariat for the liquidation of private banks in the year 1919.

 7. Anastasio Josifovich Mikoyan, member of the Politburo since 1935, member of the

Supreme Presidium since 1952, Trade Minister and Vice-president in the Malenkov

government. He is an Armenian Jew and not a true Armenian as is believed.

 8. Kruglov, chief of the M.V.D. after Beria. Upon command of Kruglov the imprisoned

Jewish doctors were released who had been imprisoned by Riumin, sub-chief of the

police, during the rulership of Beria, in the year 1953. Likewise Jew.

 9. Alexander Kosygin, member of the Politburo up to 1952, afterwards deputy in the

Supreme Presidium and Minister for light industry and food in the Malenkov

government.

 10. Nikolaus Schvernik, member of the Politburo up to 1952, then member of the

Supreme Presidium and member of the Presidium of the Central Committee of the

Communist party; Jew.

 1 1 . Andreas Andreievich Andreiev, who was known as the "Politbureaucrat" of 3 A,

member of the Politburo between 1931 and 1952, Jew from Galicia (Poland). He writes

under a Russian pseudonym.

 12. P. K. Ponomareno, member of the Orgburo in the year 1952; afterwards member of

the highest Presidium and culture minister in the Malenkov government.

 13. P. F. Yudin (Jew), deputy member of the highest Presidium and titulary of the

Ministry for building material in the Malenkov government in the year 1953.

 14. Mihail Pervukin, member of the Presidium of the central committee of the

Communist party since 1953.

 15. N. Schatalin, official in the sub-secretariat of the Central Committee of the

Community Party.

 16. K. P. Gorschenin, Justice minister in the government of Malenkov.

 17. D. Ustinov (Zambinovich), Soviet ambassador in Athens (Greece) up to the second

world war; defence minister in the Malenkov government.

 18. V. Merkulov, Minister for state control at the time of Malenkov.

 19. A. Zasyadko, Minister for the coal industry under Malenkov.

 20. Cherburg, Soviet propaganda chief.

 21. Milstein. one of the Soviet espionage chiefs.

 22. Ferentz Kiss, Chief of the Soviet espionage service in Europe.

 23. Postschreibitscher (Poschebicheve), former private secretary of Stalin, at present

chief of the secret archives of the Kremlin.

 24. Ilya Ehrenburg, delegate for Moscow in the Supreme Soviet, Communist writer;

likewise Jew.

 25. Mark Spivak, delegate from Stalino (Ukraine) in the Supreme Soviet of Moscow.

 26. Rosalia Goldenberg, delegate from Birobudjan in the Supreme Soviet.

 27. Anna E. Kaluger, delegate of Bessarabia in the Supreme Soviet, Her brother, not

Koluger, but Calugaru in Rumanian, is a Communist official in the government of

Rumania.

 Also Kalinin, one of the great Soviet officials under Stalin who died some time ago, was

a Jew.

 It is only too well known, that the Anti-Semitism of Stalin was a misrepresentation of the

facts, and that the blood bath among the Jews (Trotskyists) which he carried out in order

to assert his power, was performed by other Jews. In the last instance the struggle

between the Jew Trotsky and the Jew Stalin was a struggle between parties for control

over the Communist government, which they created, it was purely a family dispute. As

proof, the following list of Commissars for Foreign Affairs, during the period when

Stalin got rid of some certain Jews, who had become dangerous for his personal power.

 1. Maxim Maximo vich Litvinoff, Minister for Foreign Affairs up to 1939, when he was

replaced by Molotov. He afterwards occupied high offices in the same ministry up to his

death in February 1952. He was born in Poland as son of the Jew Meer Genokh

Moiseevich Vallakh, a bank clerk. In order to conceal his real name Maxim Moiseevich

Vallakh, Litvinoff used various pseudonyms during his real career, among them

Finkelstein, Ludwig Nietz, Maxim Harryson, David Mordecay, Felix, and finally, when

he became an official in the Communist regime of Russia, he took on the name of

Litvinoff or Litvinov. When this Jew was replaced by Molotov in the Year 1939, the

Jews of the western world and the entire Jewish-Freemasonic press began to cry out that

he had been removed by Stalin because he was a "Jew", but they kept quiet afterwards

concerning the fact that up to his death Litvinov remained in the ministry. Why also say

this, if it was not of interest for the conspiracy? In the Memoirs of Litvinov, which were

published after his death, he wrote that in his opinion nothing would alter in Soviet

Russia after the death of Stalin. In fact, Stalin died a year after Litvinov and nothing was

altered in the Soviet's internal and external policies.

 What the West calls change in the policy of the USSR, is simply nothing further than a

skilled propaganda for the necessities of the plan for world rule through the Jews.

Nothing has altered since the death of Stalin. A certain unrest may have arisen on account of the lack of a new leader of the stature of Stalin or Lenin, that is all. For this reason the Jewish-Freemasonic conspirators of the West wish to paint the Soviet-Communist black raven over with the glittering colours of "Pacifism", "Coexistence", "Human friendliness", etc., in order to introduce it to the world as something harmless, until a dictator with the same lusts of his predecessors arises.

 When Litvinov asserted that nothing would alter with the death or Stalin, he knew very

well, that this would be so, because Stalin was nothing more than one of the handymen of the Jewish band, which rules the USSR, and because after him other Jews would be at

hand, to carry on the plan of world domination, for which Bulganin, Baruch, Reading,

Thorez, Mendes France, David Ben Gurion and many others are cooperating.

 In continuing the list of Jews in the Ministry for Foreign Affairs of the USSR, we

mention:

 2. Andreas Januarevich Vishinsky, now dead, who was foreign minister of the USSR

before the death of Stalin and afterwards permanent representative of the Soviet Union in the UNO. There he missed no opportunity to sling his obscenities against the non-

Communist lands, exactly as in the times when he was "Peoples Judge." His Jewish name was Abraham Januarevin.

 3. Jakob Malik, Soviet representative in the UNO and a great personality in the Soviet

diplomatic hierarchy; Jew.

 4. Valerian Zorin, for a time ambassador in London and likewise a great figure of Soviet

diplomacy, who changes his post according to necessity.

 5. Andrei Gromyko, diplomat. Minister for foreign affairs since 1958.

 6. Alexander Panyushkin, former Soviet ambassador in Washington, ambassador in

Peking during the year 1955, who is regarded as the actual dictator of Red China.

 7. Zambinovich (Ustinov), ambassador in Athens up to 1940.

 8. Admiral Radionovich, ambassador in Athens between 1945 and 1946, i.e., as the

Communist coup d'etat in Greece was prepared; Jew.

 9. Constantin Umansky, ambassador in Washington during the Second World War and

afterwards official in the Ministry for foreign affairs in Moscow.

 10. Manuilsky, former representative in the Ukraine and in the UNO, at present President of the Ukraine; likewise Jew.

 1 1 . Ivan Maisky, ambassador in London during the war, afterwards high official of the

Foreign Ministry in Moscow.

 12. Madame Kolontay, ambassador in Stockholm until her death in March 1952; Jewess.

 13. Daniel Solod, ambassador in Cairo in the year 1955. The latter, supported by a Jewish

group which belongs to the diplomatic corps in Cairo, directs the Israelite conspiracy

inside the Arab world under Soviet diplomatic protection, without the Egyptian

government noticing this. This government should not forget that David Ben Gurion, first minister of Israel, as well as Golda Meyerson, Israel's Minister in Moscow, are Russian  Jews like David Solod.

 At present, according to confirmed data, 80% to 90% of the key positions in all ministries in Moscow and the remaining Soviet republics are occupied by Jews.

 "I do not believe that there can be any doubt of the origin of all those who occupy the

highest posts in Moscow since the first moment of the revolution; for the Russians it is a

lamentable fact that after all this course of time things are much worse, for the number of Jews who live in Russia has increased in frightening degree. All important leading

positions are in their hands... "-

 As in Russia the countries of Europe where Bolshevism has gained control, are also

completely ruled by a Jewish minority; the latter always appears in the direction of the

Communist government with an iron, criminal and merciless hand, so as to attain the

utter enslaving of the native citizens through an insignificant group of Jews.

 More convincing than any other proof is an exact surveying of the most principal leaders

of the Bolshevist governments of Europe, which are always found in the hands of the

Israelites. We will quote the most principal ones:

 A - HUNGARY

 1. The most important Communist leader since the occupation of this land by Soviet

troops is Mathias Rakosi, an Israelite, whose real name is Mathew Roth Rosenkranz, and

who was born in the year 1 892 in Szabadka.

 2. Ferenk Miinnich, First Minister in Hungary in the year 1959 after Janos Kadar.

 3. Erno Gero, Minister of the Interior until 1954.

 4. Szebeni, Minister of the Interior before tfie Jew Gero.

 5. General Laszlo Kiros, Jew, Minister of Interior since July 1954, simultaneously chief

of the A.V.O., i.e. the Hungarian police, which corresponds to the Soviet M.V.D.

 6. General Peter Gabor, chief of the Communist political police of Hungary up to 1953, a

Jew, who in reality was called Benjamin Ausspitz and was earlier a tailor in Satorai-

Jeujhely, Hungary.

 7. Varga, State secretary for economic planning; a Jew, who in reality is called

Weichselbaum; former Minister of the Bela Kun government. He was also President of

the supreme economic council.

 8. Beregi, Minister for foreign affairs.

 9. Julius Egry, Agriculture minister of the Hungarian Peoples Republic.

 10. Zoltan Vas, President of the supreme economic council; a Jew, who in reality was

called Weinberger.

 1 1 . Josef Reval, the editor of the Hungarian press and director of the Red newspaper

"Szabad Nep" (The Free People); a Jew; who is really called Moses Kahana.

 12. Revai (another). Minister for national education; a Jew named Rabinovits.

 13. Josef Gero, transport minister; a Jew named Singer.

 14. Mihaly Farkas, Minister for national defence; a Jew named Freedman.

 15. Veres, Minister of State.

 16. Vajda, Minister of State.

 17. Szanto, Commissar for purging of enemies of the State, in the year 195 1 sent by

Moscow; a Jew named Schreiber; former member of the Bela Kun government.

 18. Guyla Dessi, Justice Minister up to 1955; today chief of the secret police.

 19. Emil Weil, Hungarian ambassador in Washington; he is the Jewish doctor who

tortured Cardinal Mindszenty.

 Among other important Jewish officials to be mentioned are:

 1 . Imre Szirmay, director of the Hungarian radio company.

 2. Gyula Garay, judge of the Communist "Peoples court of Budapest."

 3. Colonel Caspo, Sub-chief of the secret police.

 4. Professor Laszlo Benedek, Jewish dictator for educational questions.

 The sole important Communist of Gentile origin was the Freemason Laszlo Rajk, former

minister for foreign affairs, who was sentenced and executed by his Jewish "brothers" for

his "betrayal."

 B - CZECHOSLOVAKIA

 1 . Clemens Gottwald, one of the founders of the Communist party in Czechoslovakia and

president of the country between 1948 and 1953; a Jew, who died shortly after Stalin.

 2. Vladimir Clementis, former Communist minister of Czechoslovakia for foreign affairs,

"sentenced and executed" in the year 1952; Jew.

 3. Vaclav David, present foreign minister of Czechoslovakia (1955); Jew.

 4. Rudolf Slaski, former general secretary of the Communist party of Czechoslovakia,

"sentenced" in the year 1952; a Jew by name of Rudolf Salzmann.

 5. Firi Hendrich, present general secretary of the Communist party; Jew.

 6. Andreas Simon, sentenced in the year 1952; a Jew named Otto Katz.

 7. Gustav Bares, assistant of the general secretary of the Communist party; Jew.

 8. Josef Frank, former assistant of the general secretary of the Communist party,

"sentenced" in the year 1952; Jew.

 C - POLAND

 1. Boleislaw Bierut, President of Poland up to 1954; Jew.

 2. Jakob Berman, general secretary of the Communist party of Poland; Jew.

 3. Julius Kazuky (Katz), minister for foreign affairs of Poland, who is well known for his

violent speeches in the UNO; Jew.

 4. Karl Swierezewskv, former vice-minister for national defence, who was murdered by

the Anti-Communist Ukrainian country population in south Poland (the mass of the

people is not always amorphous); Jew.

 5. Josef Cyrankiewicz, first minister of Poland since 1954, after Bierut; Jew.

 6. Hillary Mink, Vice-prime minister of Poland since 1954; Jew.

 7. Zenon Kliszko, minister of justice; Jew.

 8. Tadaus Kochcanowiecz, minister of labour; Jew.

 The sole important Polish Communist of Gentile origin is Wladislaw Gomulka who was

removed from political leadership since 1949, when he lost his post as first minister.

 Sooner or later he will share the same fate as Rajk in Hungary.

 D - RUMANIA

 1. Anna Pauker, Jewess, former minister for foreign affairs of the "Rumanian Peoples

Republic", and spy No. 1 of the Kremlin in Rumania up to the month of June 1952. Since

then she has remained in the shadows in Bucharest up to the present day, naturally in

freedom. This Jewish hyena, who was originally called Anna Rabinsohn, is the daughter

of a rabbi, who came to Rumania from Poland. She was born in the province of Moldau

(Rumania) in the year 1892.

 2. Ilka Wassermann, former private secretary of Anna Pauker, at present the real

directress of the ministry for foreign affairs.

 3. Josef Kisinevski, the present agent No. 1 of the Kremlin in Rumania, member of the

central Committee of the Communist party and vice-president of the council of ministers.

 He is a Jew and comes from Bessarabia; his correct name is Jakob Broitman. Also he is

the real chief of the Communist party of Rumania, although "officially" the general

secretary of the party is the Rumanian locksmith Gheorghe Gheorghiu Dez, who,

however, only plays the simple role of a political front. Kisinevski took his present

pseudonym from the name of the city of Kisinau in Bessarabia, where before the arrival

of the Red Army he owned a tailor's workshop.

 4. Teohari Georgescu, minister for internal affairs in the Communist government of

Bucharest between 1945 and 1952; at the present time he has been reduced to a second-

rank post, although he was "officially" "expelled" from the Communist party. He finds

himself in the same position as Anna Pauker. His real name is Baruch Tescovich. He is a

Jew from the Rumanian Danube harbour of Galatz.

 5. Avram Bunaciu, likewise a Jew, is the present (1955) general secretary of the

Presidium of the great national assembly of the "Rumanian peoples republic", i.e. the real leader of this assembly, for the "official" president Petru Groza is only an old

Freemasonic marionette, who is married to a Jewess and plays only a purely static role.

Avram Bunaciu is called in reality Abraham Gutman (Gutman translated into Rumanian

is the corresponding name for "Bunaciu", i.e. the pseudonym taken on by this Jew).

 6. Lotar Radaceanu, another Minister of the Communist government of Bucharest

"deposed" in the year 1952, but who in 1955 reappeared on the honorary tribune. He is a

Jew from Siebenbiirgen and is called Lothar Wiirtzel. Since the "Wiirtzel" in Rumanian

translates "Radicinu", this Jew has simply transferred his Hebraic name into Rumanian

and is now called "Radaceanu".

 7. Miron Constantinescu, member of the central Committee of the Communist party and

minister for mining and petroleum. Now and then he changes his ministerial posts. He is

a Jew from Galatzi (Rumania), who in truth is called Mehr Kohn, and as is customary

among them, uses a Rumanian pseudonym.

 8. Lieutenant General Moises Haupt, commander of the military district of Bucharest;

Jew.

 9. Colonel General Zamfir, Communist "security chief in Rumania and responsible for

thousands of murders, which this secret police has perpetrated. He is a Jew and comes

from the Danube harbour of Braila. He is called Laurian Rechler.

 10. Heim Gutman, chief of the civil secret service of the Rumanian Peoples republic;

Jew.

 11. Major-General William Suder, chief of the information service and of counter-

espionage of the Rumanian Communist army. He is a Jew, by name Wilman Siider and

former officer of the Soviet Army.

 12. Colonel Roman, former director of the E.K.P. service (education, culture and

propaganda) of the Rumanian army up to 1949, and at the present time Minister in the

Communist government. His name as Jew is Walter.

 13. Alexander Moghiorosh, minister for Nationalities in the Red government; Jew from

Hungary.

 14. Alexander Badau, chief of the Control Commission for foreigners in Rumania. He is

a Jew who originates from the city of Targoviste whose real name is Braustein. Before

1940 his family in Targoviste possessed a large trading firm.

 15. Major Lewin, chief of press censorship, Jew and former officer of the Red Army.

 16. Colonel Holban, chief of the Communist "Security" of Bucharest, a Jew named

Moscovich, former Syndicate (Union) chief.

 17. George Silviu, general governmental secretary of the ministry for internal affairs; a

Jew named Gersh Golinger.

 18. Erwin Voiculescu, chief of the pass department in the ministry for foreign affairs. He

is a Jew and is called Erwin Weinberg.

 19. Gheorghe Apostol, chief of the general labour union of Rumania; he is a Jew named

Gerschwin.

 20. Stupineanu, chief of economic espionage; Jew by name Stappnau.

 21. Emmerick Stoffel, Ambassador of the Rumanian Peoples Republic in Switzerland; a

Jew from Hungary and specialist in bank questions.

 22. Harry Fainaru, former legation chief of the Rumanian Communist embassy in

Washington up to 1954 and at present official in the ministry for foreign affairs in

Bucharest. He is a Jew named Hersch Feiner. Before the year 1940 his family possessed a

grain business in Galatzi.

 23. Ida Szillagy, the real directress of the Rumanian embassy in London; Jewess; friend

of Anna Pauker.

 24. Lazarescu, the "Charge d' Affaires" of the Rumanian government in Paris. He is a Jew

and is really called Baruch Lazarovich, the son of a Jewish trader from Bucharest.

 25. Simon Oieru, State under-secretary of the Rumanian state; Jew with name of

Schaffer.

 26. Aurel Baranga, inspector general of arts. He is a Jew; Ariel Leibovich is his real

name.

 27. Liuba Kisinevski, president of the U.F.A.R. (Association of anti-Fascist Rumanian

women); she is a Jewess from Cernautzi/ Bukowina, and is called in reality Liuba

Broitman, wife of Josif Kisinevski of the central Committee of the party.

 28. Lew Zeiger, director of the ministry for national economy; Jew.

 29. Doctor Zeider, jurist of the ministry for foreign affairs; Jew.

 30. Marcel Breslasu, director general of arts; a Jew by name Mark Breslau.

 31. Silviu Brucan, chief editor of the newspaper "Scanteia", official party organ. He is a

Jew and is called Briikker. He directs the entire campaign of lies that attempts to deceive

the Rumanian people concerning the true situation created by Communism. At the same

time the Jew Briikker directs the fake "Antisemitic" campaign of the Communist press of

Rumania.

 32. Samoila, governing director of the newspaper "Scanteia"; he is a Jew; Samuel

Rubenstein.

 33. Horia Liman, second editor of the Communist newspaper "Scanteia"; Jew with the

name of Lehman.

 34. Engineer Schnapp, governing director of the Communist newspaper "Romania

Libera" (Free Rumania), the second Communist newspaper on the basis of its circulation;

likewise a Jew.

 35. Jehan Mihai, chief of the Rumanian film industry. Communist propaganda by means

of films; a Jew, whose name is Jakob Michael.

 36. Alexander Graur, director general of the Rumanian radio corporation, which stands

completely and solely in the service of the Communist party. He is a Jewish professor

and is called Alter Biauer, born in Bucharest.

 37. Mihail Roller, at present President of the Rumanian academy, is a sinister professor, a Jew, unknown before the arrival of the Soviets in Rumania. Today he is "President" of

the Academy and in addition he has written a "new history" of the Rumanian people, in

which he falsifies the historical truth.

 38. Professor Weigel, one of the tyrants of the university of Bucharest, who directs the

constant "purging actions" among Rumanian students who are hostile to the Jewish-

Communist regime.

 39. Professor Lewin Bercovich, another tyrant of the Bucharest university, who with his

spies controls the activity of Rumanian professors and their social connections; an

immigrant Jew from Russia.

 40. Silviu Josifescu, the official "literary critic", who censures the poems of the best

poets like Eminescu Alecsandri, Vlahutza, Carlova, etc., who all died centuries ago or

more than half a century ago, and alters form and content, because these poems are "not

 in harmony" with the Communist Marxist ideas. This literary murderer is a Jew, who in

truth is called Samoson losifovich.

 41 . Joan Vinter, the second Marxist "literary critic" of the regime and author of a book

with the title "The problem of literary legacy" is likewise a Jew and is called Jakob

Winter.

 The three former secretaries of the General Labour League up to 1950, Alexander

Sencovich, Mischa Levin and Sam Asriel (Serban), were all Jews.

 E - YUGOSLAVIA

 1. Marshal Tito, who with his real Jewish name is called Josif Walter Weiss, originates

from Poland. He was an agent of the Soviet secret service in Kabul, Teheran and Ankara

up to 1935. The true Brozovich Tito, in origin a Croat, died during the Spanis civil war in

Barcelona.

 2. Moses Pijade, general secretary of the Communist party and in reality the "grey

eminence" of the regime, is a Jew of Spanish origin (Sefardit).

 3. Kardelj, member of the Central Committee of the Yugoslav Communist party and

minister for foreign affairs; is a Jew of Hungarian origin and is called in reality Kardayl.

 4. Rankovic, member of the Central Committee of the Yugoslav Communist party and

minister for internal affairs, is an Austrian Jew and was earlier called Rankau.

 5. Alexander Bebler, member of the Central Committee of the Communist party and

permanent representative of Yugoslavia in the UNO, is an Austrian Jew.

 6. loza Vilfan (Joseph Wilfan), economic advisor of Tito, in reality the economic dictator

of Yugoslavia, is a Jew from Sarajevo.

 Since not so many Jews live in Yugoslavia as in other lands, we find a greater number of

natives in the Communist government of this land, always however in posts of the second rank; for the above mentioned principal leaders in reality control the Yugoslav

government completely and absolutely.

 Have you read and seen enough? The greatest enemy of the Christian Church in America and the world is the Jews! Jesus warned us of the Jews “The Synagogue of Satan”.

Freemasonry Favors and Spreads Communism, Which Is a Jewish Creation.

They’re all Jews, people that run this country and they are America’s greatest enemy.

[lara56w43990-blog]

Gamification.

There was actually a point whilst playing Homefront: The Change that I presumed this may in fact be acquiring good. With Birmingham acquitting themselves properly, looking small and organised after merely 3 days teaming up with Redknapp and Steve Cotterill on the training school, in bare comparison to the disorder from Gianfranco Zola's supremacy, Agbonlahor removed off, all set to incorporate a little character and also zest to a Rental property attack that looked infirm in the vacancy from the suspended Jonathan Kodjia, scorer of 41% of their organization targets this period. For more details on video games as well as the art (and also science) of communication, explore the web links on the next webpage. After spending days locked in strong debate, our international crew of GameSpot publishers and also video developers has finally put together a ranked checklist from the 25 ideal video games from the year. I know this book concerns a magical place, yet this really ended up being actually a wonderful encounter that I am actually certainly not mosting likely to neglect anytime soon. Permit's state a trainee just likes criminal music and wishes to develop an arithmetic board game around it. She could possibly create a band as well as layout the board with unique places, tour stops, and so on Those interested to understand only how greyscaley will certainly Jorah Mormont be in Activity of Thrones season 7 will definitely be actually stired to recognize that Iain Glen, which plays him, has actually also been actually found - although sadly without any prosthetic incrustations on. Considering that it has about ONE HUNDRED twists and none of them bring in feeling, I happened SO SHUT to DNFing this manual. The activity delights the spirit of the fans when the players from one crew placed the ball into the objective from the enemies. Income resides in the end both checkerboard 4k as well as indigenous 4k are a remodeling on the 1080p that we hardly get inside many video games right now. HBO has actually not released any sort of claim on the water leaks - there was enough from a kerfuffle over examine accessibility after period 5 incidents were dripped in 2015 - however it appears most fans are actually thinking the story particulars to become right. I began this publication along with a particular assumption, but this found yourself with one thing pretty much completely other. We discovered how the activity is actually played in Taking Switches, we learned from Rochelle as well as her leaving behind the game all of a sudden, yet our company do not get any answers to just what irritated her to leave - previously. Receive the competitive extracts circulating with the addition of Apple's Activity Center as well as Amazon.com's GameCircle for achievements and also leaderboards. I have never ever read through a manual that is actually ever impacted me this way or even followed me no matter the years that pass. That word would perhaps be ... remarkable if I possessed to illustrate this publication in one word. Gamings enjoy this must certainly never be actually discharged to retail, I would not also have a cost-free copy if I recognized exactly what I recognize currently about this activity after very first palm encounter. Historians considering viewing where a substantial part from community is actually involving along with styles, ideas and material coming from recent ought to - as well as commonly do - want to games. An additional great activity coming from Gemini Rue programmer Wadjet Eye Game, which looks like some failed to remember VGA classic coming from 1995. This game is even worse in comparison to Battleground 5. This is actually meant to become Star Battles Battlefront but instead our experts got nothing. Concerning Blog - Fons & Doorperson's Passion of Making quilts is actually The United States's Preference Making quilts Magazine. They are actually generally extra complicated in comparison to typical board games, with long play times and progression/upgrade aspects evocative video games. The staff responsible for Video game of Thrones has actually additionally verified Ed Sheeran will certainly produce an attendee appeal in the 7th series of the show. Nonetheless, if you agree to acquire the PS4, you'll experience far better resolution video gaming as well as its video game public library is acquiring more powerful weekly. What stands apart about this trailer still today is the way in which this demonstrates the intents of the programmers. Varied Gameplay - The video game integrates an assortment from gameplay styles, including survival, secrecy, melee as well as ranged fight, expedition, and even more. I'm not one from the screaming/crying fangirls of the point, however this was a definitely cool little bit of book. Potential Updates: This part is set aside for potential updates like Incident 5 screenshots and also the Episode 5 launch trailer. Characters Regarding Literary works, funded by the Center for guide in the Library from Congress, motivates students to contact writers. That's not to state that the adventure hasn't already found its own share from inaccurate starts and detours: Computer game tourneys date back to the very early 1970s, as well as tries to turn all of them into watchable movie theater started as far back as the early 1980s. Gamings don't require scholarly verification to offer, but academia needs to engage along with games so as to modernise its approach to public past history. On Game of Thrones, the greatest blades are actually forged off a super-strong, however incredibly pale material called Valyrian steel. When individuals asserted over that had the greatest activities instead of all this fps and also resolution stuff, I miss out on the good old times. If you enjoyed this short article and you would such as to obtain additional info concerning like it kindly browse through our own site. Keep an eye out for this in time 4, when Brienne and the Canine engage in a blood-spattered war.

[mindscapeartist]

Inception, 17

Verrin watched the young woman - both with his eyes, and with the Force itself. The way he perceived it, a serene sort of calm came over her, and as it did, she found herself able to focus her mental energies enough to lift the glass, levitate it towards him, and then direct it to his desk.  When she was done, she looked at him.  Whether she sought approval or not wasn't clear, but her eyes were so very... bright.

It wasn't that Kai's eyes were 'bright with tears', or that her expressions was 'bright with power'.  It was that her eyes were so clear, so pure.  In contrast, his own eyes were lit by the power of the Force, but his long and strong connection to the Dark Side had altered them, making them turn golden yellow, and shot through with lines of orange.  Kai's were... "two colors," Verrin realized.  He smiled a little.  If she ever turned that gaze on an unsuspecting person, then no wonder she found it easy to manipulate them. She almost didn't need the Force to do that!

But she DID have the Force.  And some of the light in her eyes was that power. Verrin nodded, "I'm impressed you found a clear spot to set that glass down."

Maggie was less impressed, because her droid sensibilities and senses told her the exact dimensions of both the glass and the space. But her robotic features did take on the appearance of being impressed. It was part of her programming, after all.

"That was good - VERY good. Some students who make it here have learned that they can manipulate the Force, but they have yet to gain the ability to control it. You seem to be able to manage both, which will give you stronger footing to start. Did you learn all that on your own?  If so - I'm doubly impressed." Verrin commented.

But he added, "Those feelings you were using - the calm... the serenity - they enable you to control the Force.  Jedi practices would have you grow in your ability to remain calm longer, through more duress. By doing so, your focus would grow to the point where you could perform great feats.  The Jedi philosophy is what I find flawed - not their ability to use the Force.

The Sith, on the other hand, approach the Force differently. We embrace our emotions - the anger, the rage... pain... those are some of the easiest emotions to tap power from. But passion is another, excitement, even sadness. Where a Jedi tries to create a dam to control the flood of water, a Sith will attempt to flow freely with the water. We walk a fine line between letting it carry us away, and nudging it in a direction we wish for it to go.

As you read, and learn more of the history of Sith, you'll come across references where a Sith pushed themselves too far, too fast.  They believed they had the ability to control the raging river of Force, but ultimately, it washed them away. Part of your training would entail finding the precipice... that place where you and the Force are one, where you rely on it, and it relies on you.  And together, you'll be able to do great things.

Telekinetically speaking, you lifted the glass.  You should be able to lift that chair, or even the desk.  Can you? Will you draw on your serenity to control the Force to lift it?  Or will you let an emotion bind you to the energies around us, and thereby - together - will you be able to lift that desk.  I can tell you right now that it doesn't matter how heavy it is - I could barely lift one end of that desk physically if I wanted to. But in the Force, what matters is whether or not I can flow with the Force - with all of those particles floating between the molecules of wood fiber.  And with the Force and me acting together..."

The massive desk rose off of the area rug that it sat upon, levitating a couple of inches into the air. Verrin didn't turn his attention from his guest, nor did he stop talking to her.

"... there is almost nothing I cannot move. Granted, I currently cannot conceive of the amount of energy required to lift something as big as a star destroyer... but the principles hold. Theoretically, it should be possible."

He set the desk back down, almost silently. "If you really want to train as a Sith, your instructors will push you, trying to urge emotions out of you that you might have suppressed, or ones that you don't wish to have.  Nobody wants to be angry all of the time.  The energy it consumes can take a terrible toll on the body. Have you ever fallen asleep after a rage, or after a fit of crying?  Of lovemaking? That expenditure of emotion, the burning of adrenaline, takes a toll. We train to be able to stand it longer - to be angrier, to cry harder, to love more intensely. But by doing that, by making that sacrifice of our bodies and spirits... the things we can accomplish... you will amaze yourself."

Verrin stood up and smiled a little. It was always a treat to deal with new Sith, but more so when they were receptive to instruction, and not just busy lashing out at everyone and everything. "I believe you have the capacity to become a fine Sith - a powerful one, Miss Tsintah. You have the potential. Here's hoping you also have the drive to see it through."

He reached out to give her shoulder a gentle squeeze with one hand, and then moved back towards his desk.

"If you are committed, then I'll have Maggie escort you to the dormitories. I apologize for the somewhat simple accommodations, but we've been concentrating efforts on more fundamental issues, and less on luxuries. If you have some, you are welcome to bring them - luxuries, that is. And of course, you'll have immediate access to the Library.  Just a word of warning - there area  group of Sith known as the Guardians who are sworn to protect the Library and its contents. That includes you, while you're inside it.  So you'll find that study is common there, but practicing techniques is not.  There are other places to do that. We don't want lightsabers starting fires, and rivals spattering blood everywhere.

If you have questions, please - ask away."

[samanthasroberts]

What Made This University Researcher Snap?

Update 9/12/2012: Amy Bishop pleaded guilty Tuesday to three counts of attempted murder and one count of capital murder of two or more victims, withdrawing her early plea of not guilty by reason of insanity. Sentencing is set for late September. According to the Associated Press, prosecutors have agreed not to seek the death penalty. Bishop still faces charges in Massachusetts in connection with the fatal shooting of her brother in 1986. Last March, Wired magazine ran this profile of Bishop, delving into her troubled and troubling inner life, dark glimpses of which emerged in three unpublished novels she wrote.

4 pm, February 12, 2010University of Alabama in Huntsville

Shelby Center for Science and Technology, Loading Dock.

Amy Bishop stepped out of the science building and into the afternoon light. She was a solid woman5’8″ and 150 poundsand from a distance, at least, her red V-neck sweater and jeans made her look more like a soccer mom on an errand than a remorseless killer leaving the scene of her crimes. Upstairs, in Room 369R, there was only suffering. Three professors lay on the floor, dying. Three more were wounded.

Now Bishop stood near the loading dock, unarmed. On her way down from the third floor, she had ducked into a restroom to stuff her Ruger 9-millimeter semiautomatic pistol and blood-spattered black and red plaid jacket into a trash can. The 45-year-old assistant professor had also phoned her husband, James Anderson, and instructed himas she often didto come pick her up. “I’m done,” she’d said.

Bishop focused her blue eyes, so fierce under the horizon of her dark bangs. She paid attention to people’s eyes. There was so much you could see in them. Pain. Hardness. Sometimes she envisioned that people’s eyes made sounds. Tick. Tick. Tick. Other times she imagined she could feel eyes boring into the top of her head. Now her own eyes scanned the street. Where was James?

More than two decades earlier, the first time she’d fired a gun with fatal results, James had stood by her. Other boyfriends would have turned their backs. But not James. In the dark days after that 1986 shooting, Amythen a 21-year-old senior at Northeastern University in Bostonhad actually broken up with him. James waited patiently for her to return to herself, then to their relationship. The shooting was ruled an accident, and soon they were getting married, honeymooning in the Bahamas, starting a family. James would stand by her again, when she had problems on the job after earning her PhD from Harvard University. She had no reason to think he wouldn’t stand by her now.

At 4:10 pm, as ambulances rushed to the scene, a Madison County sheriff’s deputy approached Bishop and took hold of her. She looked dazed as her hands were cuffed and she was put into a squad car. Later, during an interrogation that went on for more than two hours, Bishop would insist, “I wasn’t there” and “It wasn’t me.” Her assertions seemed ludicrous, of course. Twelve people who knew Bishop, who saw her almost every day, had spent nearly an hour with her before she started shooting without a word of warning. Nine of those witnesses were still alive.

Yet some would say that when Bishop claimed she wasn’t there, she wasn’t entirely wrong. It didn’t seem to be the Amy they knew who had come to that meeting; another Amy had. Bishop “was someone I trusted,” says professor Debra Moriarity, who survived the massacre. “There were oddities of personality that made you just go, oh, well, that’s just the way she is. But nothing would have predicted any behavior like this. She never appeared hateful.” But that afternoon in Room 369R, “she seemed suddenly different.” Soon, Moriarity and her colleagues would learn that they weren’t the first to have seen Bishop’s dual nature. For years, there had been two sides to this quirky, haughty researcher known for introducing herself as “Dr. Amy Bishop, Harvard-trained.” Many had met Arrogant Amy, who seemed to thrive on order and usually had the upper hand. An unlucky few had encountered another Amychaotic, confused, full of menace. Angry Amy rarely took charge. But when she did, things never ended well.

What makes a smart, well-educated mother of four go on a killing spree? In the more than 12 months since Bishop became the first academic in US history to be accused of gunning down fellow professors, many theories have been offered up. One is that she’s a lunatic. That suggestion came from her attorney.

Bishop’s court-appointed lawyer, Roy Miller, called her simply “wacko.” Later he apologized for his word choice, but he has continued to press the point. “They’re going to try to show she’s sane, that she was just mean as hell,” he tells me, referring to the prosecution, which is seeking capital murder charges against Bishop in the killings of department chair Gopi Podila and professors Maria Ragland Davis and Adriel Johnson. “If they seek the death penalty, which we have to assume they will, our only defense is mental.”

Amy Bishop is taken into custody soon after leaving the building where the shooting took place. The Huntsville Times / Landov

The Wacko theory is often accompanied by the Tenure Made Her Do It hypothesis, which posits that the grueling, years-long process of trying to win a permanent professorshipand the despair that accompanied being denied tenure by her peersmade Bishop snap. This explanation got a lot of traction right after the vicious slayings, in part because it seemed to open the door to a more general indictment of academia. Is the tenure process itself vicious? Some, like Katherine van Wormer, a blogger for Psychology Today who has herself been denied tenure, says it is. “I would describe the denial of tenure as an end to one’s career, to one’s livelihood,” van Wormer wrote after the killings. “Being denied tenure, in effect, fired by your peers, is the ultimate rejection.”

She would complete three unpublished novelsnearly 900 pages of strikingly autobiographical prose.

But the Tenure Made Her Do It assertion is undermined by the calendar. Bishop learned she would not get tenure in March 2009, 11 full months before she transformed a routine faculty meeting into an execution chamber. She appealed the faculty’s decision, thus extending the process. But that appeal was denied for good in November 2009still three months before her alleged crimes. What’s more, although tenure decisions are not public, university officials say Bishop had indicated she’d found out which colleagues had voted for and against her. Yet she shot some of the very people who had supported her. If this was tenure-related payback, it was carried out with less than surgical precision.

Which brings us to the Maniac in Geek’s Clothing conjecture. Let’s face it, scientific and technical fields attract more than their share of socially awkward, obsessively focused oddballs. The history of science is rife with peculiar pioneersthink Einstein, Feynman. And it’s no different today: Tech companies and R&D labs all over the country don’t just tolerate idiosyncratic geniuses; they celebrate them. Why? Because their very ability to think differently, to do or be what’s unexpected, has led to tremendous success (think Gates, Jobs, Zuckerberg).

Every once in a while, though, brainy weirdos turn out to be brutal killers. It happened in 1991, when Gang Lu, a 28-year-old former graduate student in physics at the University of Iowa, killed four faculty members. He was angry that his dissertation had not been nominated for a prestigious award. It happened again in 1992, when Valery Fabrikant, a mechanical engineering professor denied tenure by Concordia University in Montreal, loaded several guns, went to campus, and opened fire, killing four colleagues.

Obviously, not all number lovers and data geeks are potential murderers, just as not all postal workers go postal. But if a scientist becomes dangerously antisocial, colleagues may be slower to notice than people in other lines of work, where eccentricities aren’t regarded as a badge of authenticity. And academia may be especially ill equipped to handle such behavior, since it is organized around protecting differences and safeguarding intellectual freedom. If you’re an academic and a scientist and you’ve gone off the deep end, in other words, you may find it just a bit easier to hide in plain sight.

We like to think that what happened at the University of Alabama a year ago might have been prevented. But the sad truth is that there may be no way to anticipate when or how someone will snap. When it comes to Amy Bishop, the mask of Arrogant Amy made Angry Amy invisible to most everyone, perhaps even to Bishop herself.

December 6, 1986The home of Amy’s parents, Samuel and Judith Bishop

46 Hollis Avenue, Braintree, Massachusetts

Amy had said something that upset her father. That morning they’d squabbled, and at about 11:30 am, Sam, a film professor at Northeastern University, left the family’s Victorian home to go shopping. When he last saw his 18-year-old son, Seth, the young man was outside washing his car. Amy, 21, was in her bedroom upstairs. She was worried about “robbers,” she would later tell the police. So she loaded her father’s 12-gauge pump-action shotgun and accidentally discharged a round in her room. The blast struck a lamp and a mirror and blew a hole in the wall, which she tried to cover up using a Band-Aid box and a book cover. She didn’t want her mother, Judy, to see the damage.

The gun, a Mossberg model 500A, holds multiple rounds and must be pumped after each discharge to chamber another shell. Bishop had loaded the gun with number-four lead shot. After firing the round into the wall, she could have put the weapon aside. Instead, she took it downstairs and walked into the kitchen. At some point, she pumped the gun, chambering another round.

It was lunchtime, and Judy had just returned home from the riding stables. Later she’d speculate that, implausibly, she hadn’t heard the thunderous shotgun blast in Amy’s bedroom because the house was soundproof. She told police she was at the sink and Seth was by the stove when Amy appeared. “I have a shell in the gun, and I don’t know how to unload it,” Judy told police her daughter said. Judy continued, “I told Amy not to point the gun at anybody. Amy turned toward her brother and the gun fired, hitting him.”

Seth dropped to the floor, blood streaming from a gaping wound in his chest. His aorta had been ruptured; his liver destroyed. Judy called 911 at 2:22 pm. The first responder on the scene found Seth lying on his left side, facedown in a pool of blood. Blood and air were escaping each time he gasped for breath, the police report says. By the time Seth was pronounced dead, at 3:08 pm, Amy was long gone. She had run out of the house and headed to a nearby Ford dealership, where she encountered two employees. Pointing the gun at them, she demanded a car and a set of keys, but when they hesitated, she left. One of the men would later say she claimed she’d gotten into a fight with her husband, who was going to kill her.

Minutes later, workers at a local business spotted Bishop. When a police officer appeared, they waved him toward the woman with the gun. The officer told her to drop her weapon, but she complied only when another officer surprised her from behind. She seemed frightened and disoriented, according to police records. Her shotgun was still loaded with two unspent shells, and she had another live shell in her jacket pocket.

Later, police asked Amy if she had shot Seth on purpose. She said noand then her mother told her to stop answering questions, police records state. Judy Bishop said her two children, both violinists, got along well. Just three years before, in her high school yearbook, Amy had pledged: “I, Amy Bishop, hereby bequeath my violin and music to my brother Seth.” Seth Bishop’s death was an accident, his parents said. A tragic accident. And for nearly a quarter century, until Bishop opened fire in Room 369R, authorities would agree.

June 19, 1988Northeastern University commencement

Boston Garden

Graduation day was hot and humid, the sky hazy and overcast. Amy Bishop and James Anderson attended commencement together, heading to the old Boston Garden to hear Erma Bombeck deliver the morning address.

“Success dwells within you,” Bombeck told the graduates. “The trick is knowing it when you see it.”

Northeastern University had been an important place for Bishop, and not only because her father taught there. The private institution that now boasts of treating learning as “a contact sport” had helped Bishop come into her own in two key respects. First, she met the shy, baby-face undergrad who would become her husband. Second, she discovered she had a flair for writing fiction.

Years later, she would tell a friend that she’d been recognized for her writing as an undergraduate and encouraged to develop it further. But her mother and father frowned on the idea. “I think her parents steered her away from humanities and into science,” says Rob Dinsmoor, another friend, who met Bishop in the late ’90s, when they both were members of a writers group in Hamilton, Massachusetts. As a film professor, Bishop’s father knew how tough it was to make it in the arts, Dinsmoor says. “So he was pushing her.” After her brother’s death, she finished her bachelor’s degree in biology. Soon she was on her way to grad school at Harvard.

But she didn’t stop writing. Over the next 16 years, she would complete at least three unpublished novelsnearly 900 type-written pages of strikingly autobiographical prose. The Diary of Abigail White is her first book. It is told from the perspective of Abbie, a 9-year-old girl who is tormented by a shameful secret: She has killed a young boy. Amazon Fever is a futuristic thriller about Olivia, a struggling academic who finally gets the respect she deserves when she saves the world with her womb (having a baby after a rampant virus has unleashed a global epidemic that makes all other pregnant women miscarry). Easter in Boston, dated 2004, follows Beth, a gun-running Harvard researcher who’s testing an anticancer drug that has an unfortunate side effect: It makes mother rats eat their own young. Of all Bishop’s protagonists, Beth is the most fully drawn. Depressed about her life and career, she uses sarcasm to cope, tapping a vein of black humor, as in this exchange about an upcoming potluck hosted by the head of her lab:

Beth’s colleague: “I think I am bringing dumplings tomorrow to Dick’s … What are you bringing?”

Beth: “A gun… Death and destruction. Hell on earth. Horror.”

There’s a strong resemblance between Bishop’s fictional world and her real one. The protagonists in all three novels are scientists (or aspiring scientists) and have strong ties to their Greek heritage (Bishop’s father is of Greek descent). All have tumultuous, violent dreams and daydreamsBishop calls them “eyelid films.” All fantasize about the deaths of those who have wronged them. Abbie and Beth both have artistic fathers, as Bishop does. Olivia and Beth have “brittle,” overbearing mothers; both are involved with loyal but underachieving men who were raised in Alabama, just as Bishop’s husband was. Both have connections to Harvard, a place that was the main ingredient in Bishop’s fragile recipe for self-worth. Both struggle with the “black fog” of depression, lament the politics of the ivory tower, and imagine taking their own lives.

For her part, 9-year-old Abbie likes “to pretend and work herself up to peak fearfulness,” Bishop writesa quality that more than one of Bishop’s friends tell me they recognized in Abbie’s creator. Sometimes Abbie is confused by her gory fantasies but reassures herself: “My imagination strikes again.” Friends of Bishop say that statement also rang true: Bishop had a habit of making things up and presenting them as facts. “I sometimes didn’t believe everything that came out of her mouth. I can’t describe exactly why,” Dinsmoor says. But he admired her suspenseful prose: “She did dread real well.”

Abbie felt cold metal pressed against her forehead… [She] opened her eyes. Inches from her face the red head’s finger curled around the trigger of a revolver. “Surprise.” He pulled the trigger. from The Diary of Abigail White, by Amy Bishop

December 19, 1993the Home of Paul Rosenberg

14 Standish Street, Newton, Massachusetts

Paul Rosenberg was in his kitchen, opening the mail. It was about 11 pm, and the neurologist and his wife had just returned from a week’s vacation. He looked at the package on the counterthe house sitter had found it inside the front storm door. The white cardboard box was about a foot square and 3 inches deep. There were six 29-cent stamps on the box. They had not been canceled.

A medical researcher, Rosenberg had recently attended a seminar on letter bombsthe Unabomber had struck twice that yearand this heavy package looked suspicious. So, gingerly, he cut the tape around the edge with a knife and peeked inside. Two pieces of pipe, each about 6 inches long, were fixed in place. Wires were visible. He carefully shut the box, alerted his wife, and fled.

When the bomb squad arrived, they found that the contraption was designed to go off when the lid was pulled open. Rosenberg hadn’t done that. It probably saved his life.

Less than a month before, on November 30, Bishop had quit her job as a researcher in Rosenberg’s lab at Children’s Hospital Boston. She’d been there just a few months, but Rosenberg told investigators that he’d been instrumental in her departure. Rosenberg told authorities that despite Bishop’s credentialsshe’d gotten her doctorate in genetics from Harvard earlier that yearhe felt “she could not meet the standards required for the work.” One person told investigators that the episode had left Bishop “on the verge of a nervous breakdown.” Rosenberg said Bishop just didn’t seem stable.

Then there was her husband, James Anderson. One witness told investigators that the round-faced computer engineer with tentative blue eyes had it in for Rosenberg. He had said he “wanted to get back” at Rosenberg for his treatment of Bishop, according to case records from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms”to shoot him, bomb him, stab him, or strangle” him. Another witness told investigators that Anderson had trouble keeping a job. Anderson and Bishop were questioned in the attempted bombing of Rosenberg, but no one was ever charged.

Beth remembered what Jack was like when they met and fell in love, alive… Over this last year, he’d metamorphosed into a flaccid, bed-loving loser… Jack wasn’t always that way, ambition-challenged, but he was now. from Easter in Boston

<h31996Beth Israel Hospital Cardiology Department

330 Brookline Avenue, Boston

Bishop was the very definition of stressed out. By now, she had three kids under the age of 6: Lily, born in 1991; Thea, in 1993; and Phaedra, in 1995. Anderson was working sporadically, helping rebuild scientific laboratories or taking the occasional computer programming gig. The couple had constant money problems, friends say, and would soon consider filing for bankruptcy.

It wasn’t supposed to be like this. Bishop cared intensely about appearances, particularly those that connoted status. She wanted an address in Ipswich, she told friends, because the area north of Boston seemed classier than the city. Then there was the matter of her husband’s first name. He was christened Jimmy Jr., after an ancestor who was a Greek ship captain. But Bishop told him that combined with his Southern accent, “Jimmy” made him sound low class. “They think you’re a mechanic or somethinga hick,” Arrogant Amy told Anderson, insisting that the former Eagle Scout call himself James. So he did. “James was a name that Amy gave him,” says Jimmy Anderson Sr., Bishop’s father-in-law, who lives in Prattville, Alabama. “He deserves some kind of a medal for living with her. She was the extreme end of bossy.”

By 1996, Bishop had found employment as a researcher at a Harvard teaching hospital, Beth Israel. She was also doing work at the Harvard School of Public Health, but it eventually began to dawn on her, friends say, that she was not going to rise through the university’s ranks. She had taken multiple maternity leaves. She also had to deal with her severe allergies, which required her to take steroids that sometimes made her “zone out,” she told friends, and lose track of reality.

Bishop was starting to wonder whether it might be a good idea to take her Harvard credentials where she’d be a bigger fish in a smaller pond. Maybe then, she confided to friends, she’d get the recognition she deserved.

As it was, her resentment flared when she felt slighted. Hugo Gonzalez-Serratos, currently a professor of physiology at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, collaborated with her on a 1996 paper about deficient cellular cyclic AMP while they were at Beth Israel’s cardiology department. The paper had nine authors; Bishop was listed second. “She was very angry because she was not the first author,” Gonzalez-Serratos, who was listed eighth, told The New York Times. “She exploded into something emotional that we never saw before in our careers.” Again, Angry Amy had seized control, this time with self-destructive results: Her contract, the Times reported, was not renewed.

Beth’s temper flared and she couldn’t stop herself even though she knew it could be the death of her career… The thought of being some unemployed loser, a non-Harvard, a non-scientist made her shiver at her loss of identity. from Easter in Boston

1999Hamilton Public Library

299 Bay Road, Hamilton, Massachusetts

In her writing group, Bishop said what she thought, whenever it occurred to her, and then was surprised when people didn’t take it well. “She’s kind of clueless socially,” says Rob Dinsmoor, who was a regular. “She would read someone’s story and say, ‘Second paragraph. Doesn’t help. Kill it.’ Or ‘I don’t like this character. Kill it.’ It really wasn’t tactful.”

At one meeting not long after she’d joined the group, Bishop arrived toting hefty manuscripts. Usually, people brought passages or maybe chapters to share. But here was Arrogant Amy, distributing a massive tomeher first novel, the one about Abbie. “She said, ‘I’m sorry to spring it on you like this, but I wanted everyone to look at it before I gave it to my agent,’” Dinsmoor recalls. This was more than the group leader could bear. “He goes, ‘Agent? I don’t think you’re ready for an agent.’ He just went ballistic.”

Bishop didn’t care. She’d hatched a plan that would allow her to escape academia: Writing best-selling novels, Dinsmoor says, would be her ticket out of the drudgery of grant-writing and research that occupied her days and nights.

She aimed high in her role models. Lenny Cavallaro, a friend and writing teacher, recalls that when he told Bishop she could be marketed as “a female Michael Crichton“Crichton also went to Harvard”she was very excited. She was almost foaming at the mouth.” Soon she was hosting the writers group at her home. It was easier, what with three small kids and a fourth on the way.

As in many demanding professions, it’s difficult for women in science to climb the ladder while raising children. But Bishop was determined to master both. In one of her novels, she observes that “in this era of the supermom who’s a great wife, mother, and CEO,” if you’re not all three “you’re a failure.” Maybe the life of a writer would be more accommodating to motherhood than doing research had been.

To read Bishop’s books back-to-back is to be struck by a recurring plot point in all three: a little brother who has died too young. He’s called Luke in two of the novels, and ghostly memories of him appear frequently to those who’ve outlived him. Abbie suffers most from these visions. She is sure she killed Luke by throwing a “fist-sized rock” that hit him in the head. She “fired” it in anger, she admits, but she immediately feels remorse. Now Abbie is doomed to relive the moment of impact, again and again. It’s hard to escape the conclusion that Bishop was channeling her own awful memories of her brother’s death.

By all accounts, Seth Bishop had been his sister’s doting companion, her fellow brainiac, even her savior. Years before his death she was quoted in the Braintree Forum and Observer as saying, “One day when he was about 7 and I was with him, I fell down a small cliff and couldn’t get up.” According to the account, Seth managed to hoist her to safety. “He saved my life that day,” Bishop said.

But as an adult, friends say, she never mentioned his name. Members of her writers group had no idea she’d even had a brother. It was as if Seth Bishop had never existed. But on the printed page, at least, he was always there.

Abbie closed her eyes and saw, almost like a film, the rock hit Luke’s head over and over again. Abbie opened her eyes then closed them again. The eyelid film still played. from The Diary of Abigail White

March 16, 2002International House of Pancakes

Peabody, Massachusetts

It was Saturday morning, and Bishop was about to have a meal with her kids. She asked for a booster seat for her youngesther only son, then an infantbut was told that the last one had just been given to another woman.

Bishop exploded. “I am Dr. Amy Bishop!” she screamed, launching into a tirade. The manager asked her to leave, but before she did, Bishop punched the other woman in the head. Several witnesses said Bishop seemed to have initiated the dispute. But when an officer followed up later, Bishop insisted that the other woman was the aggressor.

She told friends the same thing, explaining that the woman was neglecting her child and that she, Amy, was simply trying to help. She also said that she’d beat the rap by wearing her white lab coat to court, trumping the woman by looking more professional. “She’s like, ‘I’m going to make it go away,’” one friend recalls. Bishop was eventually charged with assault and disorderly conduct, but the charges were dismissed. Her record was still clean.

Bishop’s Ipswich neighbors didn’t know about the booster seat incident, but it probably wouldn’t have surprised them. To hear Arthur Kerr tell it, the problems had begun in 1998, the day Bishop and her family moved to 28 Birch Lane. Their rented moving truck backed into the freestanding basketball hoop where all the neighbor kids played, knocking it down. “At first we thought it was just an accident,” says Kerr, a Boston tax lawyer who lived next door at the time. “But it turns out they did it on purpose. It was just the start of a long, long battle with them.”

In the four-plus years that Bishop and her family lived on Birch Lane, they called the police more than a few times to complain about their neighbors. They didn’t like noise: A boom box on low volume, the sound of bouncing balls, even the ice cream truck was an affront. Bishop “would harass the driver,” Kerr says. “Finally the truck just stopped coming down our street.”

But on Birch Lane, bizarre behavior wasn’t considered normal or acceptable. From the moment he met Bishop, Kerr says, he “could just tell she wasn’t right. I said to my wife right away, stay away from her. She’s bad news.” There was something about her eyes, he addssomething off.

One night, after a new portable basketball hoop in the neighborhood had prompted a series of altercations with Bishop, a couple of parents asked her why the sound of kids playing bothered her so much. The argument almost escalated into a fistfight. “She was belligerent, confrontational, a bully,” Kerr says.

When word spread that the Bishop-Anderson family was moving to Alabama and their home was up for sale, neighbors rejoiced. Everyone agreed: While the house was on the market, they’d keep their lawns immaculateif only to make the neighborhood as appealing as possible to potential buyers.

Kerr remembers the afternoon in 2003, when he came home to see their moving truck pulling away. “Everyone was out in the street, and someone said, ‘Ding, dong, the witch is dead,’” he says. Pizza was ordered. Someone brought beer. It was, Kerr said, “a party to celebrate: Good riddance, Amy. We had a period of darkness, and it was really unpleasant. And then they left, and we were happy again.”

Every time Bishop had gotten into scrapes with the law, she emerged unscathed, her record never seriously marred. Now she had a new job. She was on her way to a tenure-track position at the University of Alabama in Huntsville.

Since the killings last February, university administrators have reviewed the process by which they hired Bishop. President David Williams, who hadn’t yet been appointed when Bishop arrived, says he worried that perhaps her Harvard credentials made some at UAHa well-respected but second-tier schoolturn a blind eye to problems that should have given them pause.

Faced with a candidate who had a doctorate from Harvard, he says, “the natural reaction of a small university trying to grow is to think, wow.” But a review of the file, Williams says, showed no corners had been cut. “We got recommendations from leading academics,” he says. “We went through the process that we go through for everybody we hire.”

Williams acknowledges that no criminal background check had been performed on Bishop before she was hired. It’s not standard procedure. But the week after the killings, he asked the Huntsville Police Department to put Bishop into their system, just to see what they would have found. The review came up clean: no prior convictions.

In the wake of the massacre, plenty of scrutiny was aimed at the Braintree Police Departmet, whose investigation of the 1986 shooting of Seth Bishop many felt was incomplete. Had Bishop been charged, tried, and convicted for that incident, three UAH professors could still be alive. “At some point in this woman’s life, her bad behavior should have been recognized before she got to UAH,” Joe Ritch, a member of the University of Alabama System Board of Trustees, told The Huntsville Times. “People kept sweeping her bad behavior under the rug, and now we’re paying a tremendous price for that.”

But once Bishop was in Alabama, working in her own lab, conducting research that she hoped would address devastating neurological diseases like Lou Gehrig’s, Parkinson’s, and multiple sclerosis, was there any way her colleagues could have known? She could be rude and dismissive to students and colleagues alike, and her teaching was often seen as disjointed. Was her unusual behavior and abrasive manner a red flag that got missed because some of her fellow academics could be just as odd? The truth bears repeating: Eccentrics are eccentrics; murderers are murderers. One does not imply the other.

If Bishop stands trialpresumably sometime in the coming monthsjurors will be asked to consider her psychological makeup. If convicted of capital murder, she will face either the death penalty or life in prison without possibility of parole. To spare her the harshest punishment, her lawyer must show that Bishop did not know right from wrong. But he has yet to reveal what exculpatory diagnosis he plans to offer.

According to Brenda Wade, a clinical psychologist who has followed this case closely, Bishop’s feelings of insecurityher fear of being slighted, her mood swings, her lack of impulse controlare symptoms of borderline personality disorder. People with this condition often toggle between two extremes, experiencing love-hate relationships, idealizing someone one minute, then being furious with them the next. But they aren’t typically violent. “She’s got something else going on: a remarkable lack of remorse,” Wade says. “That’s a huge feature, and it makes me wonder whether she also has what we used to call sociopathic or psychopathic behavior. Psychopaths have no remorse. In some way, they are disconnected from real life and real relationships.”

While the maze of Bishop’s mind will surely be explored in court, it may never be fully mapped. This much, though, seems clear: The memory of her brother, Seth, haunted her.

They had been friends for years before Luke and after, although after Luke, Ian was ticking. She could hear the ticking in his eyes. She knew how far to push him and usually didn’t go too far but now she was sure she had. from Easter in Boston

March 2008McDowling Drive

Huntsville, Alabama

The two-story green clapboard house that Bishop and Anderson bought when they moved to Huntsville had a strange defect: a split personality. Though their address in the Tara subdivision is listed as McDowling Drive, half of the house actually sits on Greenview Drive. If you stand facing the front door, McDowling heads left, Greenview right. Even Bishop’s house showed two faces to the world. “They’d lose mail all the time,” Bishop’s father-in-law says.

That ongoing confusion proved more than an inconvenience in the spring of 2008, when Anderson Jr. collided with a police car, totaling it. After the accident, police discovered he had an unpaid traffic citationwhich had never arrived in the mailand he was taken into custody on the spot. His father remembers getting a callnot from his daughter-in-law but from a bail bondsman.

Anderson Sr. drove three hours from Prattville and bailed out his son. Even before this, he acknowledges, he didn’t feel particularly warmly toward his daughter-in-law, mostly because of how she mistreated his wife, Sandy. Bishop, who has a fear of the herpes virus, wouldn’t let the woman near her grandchildren because she sometimes got cold sores. “My poor wifeshunned,” Anderson Sr. says.

Anderson Jr. always chalked up Bishop’s weirdest behavior to the pressure she was under. He knew his wife could seem brusque. “She’s a Harvard grad,” he says. “You’re not going to get ‘gushing’ out of somebody like that, sorry.” But he believed they were a team. “We were going to do a lot of work side by side and bring the kids in on it, just like the Curies did,” he says. In the meantime, he’d run the house while she focused on getting tenure.

But by 2008, Anderson Sr. says, when he came to town to pay his son’s bail, the arrangement seemed to be breaking down. The house was “a disaster,” he saysunopened mail amid a storm of clutter. Over a few days, he says, he tried to excavate and set things right. But he cut the visit short after a chilling altercation with Bishop. They were talking in the kitchenabout what, he can’t remember”and suddenly I said something that set her off, and she just totally changed. I have never seen anyone before or after whose face, whose body language, changed so 100 percent. I saw a major difference in her eyes. The color of her skin even changed. It was menacing.”

He takes a deep breath, remembering how the hostility in Bishop’s face made him pack up and head back to Prattville that day. I remind him that right after the killings, he told a reporter he’d called his daughter-in-law “evil,” saying he’d seen “the devil in her eyes.” He nods. “It definitely was frightening,” he says. “I didn’t know who I was talking to.” Until last year, when Bishop was put in jail, he didn’t visit Huntsville again.

In short, Olivia’s career was DOA. from Amazon Fever

March 2009The Provost’s Office

University of Alabama in Huntsville

Bishop sat at the table in provost Vistasp Karbhari‘s office. On the wall in front of her were three of those stylized motivational posters that herald an attribute to which we should all aspire: “Commitment.” “Vision.” “Imagination.”

At times, Bishop had exhibited all three. And yet, her overall academic achievement was lacking, her colleagues felt. Her teaching was scattered; her publication record thin. And when she did publish, the output could be bizarre, as in the case of a paper titled “Effects of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors on motor neuron survival,” which would soon appear in the International Journal of General Medicine. It listed five authors: Bishop, her husband, and three of their four children: Lily B., Phaedra B., and Thea B. Anderson. The B, of course, stood for Bishop. The daughters were kidsnone out of their teens. “It was creepy and kind of weird,” says Moriarity, the professor who survived Bishop’s shooting spree.

Bishop was not without her successes. Much of her research had focused on nitric oxide, which acts as a sort of carrier pigeon between cells, communicating information. But in large amounts, it can turn toxica phenomenon thought to be connected to the onset of certain cancers as well as MS and Lou Gehrig’s disease.

She was researching genetic therapies that might lead to treatments for these neurological disorders by turning on cells’ ability to resist nitric-oxide toxicity. This work had yielded her a $219,750 grant from the National Institutes of Health in 2008. And then there was the new kind of cell incubator, called the InQ, which she and her husband had invented together. UAH president David Williams had highlighted the invention on his blog in November 2008, calling it “remarkable.”

Still, the tenure committee voted Bishop down. Now Karbhari was letting her know: She was out. Asked to describe Bishop’s reaction, he said she seemed disappointed but not angry. “Normal,” he says. (The families of two professors killed in the shooting have since filed wrongful death lawsuits against Karbhari, Bishop, and Anderson.)

When Bishop found out that a member of her tenure review committee had referred to her as “crazy,” however, she filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission alleging gender discrimination and citing the professor’s remark as possible evidence. According to court papers filed in a lawsuit against Bishop and her husband by some of the victims of the shooting, the professor was given a chance to back off from the comment, but he did not. The court filing states, “I said she was crazy multiple times and I stand by that… This woman has a pattern of erratic behavior. She did things that weren’t normal… she was out of touch with reality.”

It was a wonder none of his ex-employees didn’t come back to the lab shooting. Getting fired was bad enough, but to have everyone but her know about it for perhaps weeks in advance was worse. from Easter in Boston

Summer 2009An Indoor Shooting Range

Huntsville, Alabama

Target practice would be fun, James Anderson says his wife told him. “It’s a sport,” he recalls her saying. “And I’m like, you can do this?” If the thought of her brother, Seth, dead from a shotgun wound to the chest, crossed his mind then, he doesn’t say so. But Anderson confirms he did accompany his wife to aim and shoot guns. “I’ll just try it,” he remembers her saying.

2:30 pm, February 12, 2010Tara Subdivision

Huntsville, Alabama

After spending the morning on campus, Bishop drove her classic scarlet 1991 Cadillac back to Tara, to the green clapboard house with the confused identity. Later, Bishop would say she didn’t remember a thing about what she was about to do.

Around 3 pm, her husband took her back to campus. She had a faculty meeting to attend. And when she took her seat, she was carrying a bag with a 9-mm Ruger inside.

The empty clip slid into the 9mm easily. Beth sat on her bed, the gun and its paraphernalia, strewn about, while she worked on it… [She] sat back down with the dictionary. She mulled over words like love, loneliness, hopelessness, despair. She looked at words like suicide and murder. from Easter in Boston

3:56 pm, February 12, 2010University of Alabama in Huntsville

Shelby Center for Science and Technology, Room 369R

When she heard the first deafening boom, Debra Moriarity thought the walls were caving in. “What’s falling?” she wondered as she looked up from the notes she’d been taking. She could hardly make sense of what she saw: Bishop was firing a pistol at her fellow scientists. For the better part of an hour, Bishop had been sitting at the end of a long conference table, listening to a dozen people discuss the biology department’s budget and other matters. Now standing near the room’s only door, she was transformed. Aiming at one colleague’s head after another, she pulled the trigger again and again. Boom. Boom.

Gopi Podila, the department chair who specialized in the molecular biology of plants, was already down and bleeding. So was Stephanie Monticciolo, the staff assistant who’d attended the 3 pm meeting to keep the minutes. Those two had been on Bishop’s right. Now she turned left and shot the person nearest to her: Adriel Johnson, an expert in gastrointestinal physiology. Next to Johnson was plant scientist Maria Ragland Davis. Bishop shot her, too. Then the department’s newest faculty member, molecular biologist Luis Cruz-Vera, was wounded in the chest by a ricocheting bullet or bone fragment. As Joseph Leahy, whose research focused on the biodegradation of hydrocarbons, ducked for cover, a bullet tore through the top of his head, severing his right optic nerve.

Moriarity had dived under the table. Now, kneeling on the rug, she grabbed hold of Bishop’s blue-jeaned leg. “Amy, don’t do this,” she pleaded. “Think about my grandson. Think about your daughter.” Bishop’s eldest daughter, Lily, was a student at the university; she studied biology with some of the people trapped in this room. “Please snap out of this,” Moriarity thought. “This has to stop.” As if in response, Bishop pointed the gun at Moriarity and pulled the trigger. Click. It didn’t fire. Moriarity, still on hands and knees, half-rolled, half-crawled toward the door, Bishop right behind her. Bishop’s eyes seemed cold and “very, very evil-looking.”

Just a few weeks before, Bishop had invited Moriarity, an expert on growth-factor signaling, to collaborate on a grant application to study an enzyme that might inhibit breast cancer. “You know, no matter where I end up, we’re going to write that grant together,” Bishop had said. Because she’d been denied tenure, Bishop would be leaving UAH soon. Still, she’d told Moriarity, “I really want to do that project.” Moriarity thought they were friends.

Now they were in the hall. Bishop took aim at Moriarity again, and again squeezed the trigger. Click. The gun still wouldn’t fire. “Somebody help us!” Moriarity screamed and threw herself back into the room, slamming the door. In the few seconds she was in motion, she could hear Bishop trying but failing to get her weapon to work. Click. Click. Click.

With six people wounded, there was blood everywhereon the table, on the chairs, on the white drywall. Someone used a coffee table to barricade the door. Someone else found a cell phone and dialed 911.

Moriarity and the five others who were unhurt tried to aid their ravaged colleagues, but all they had to stanch the bleeding were napkins and their own clothes. Podilathe affable 52-year-old department chair who had been one of Bishop’s biggest supporterswas on the floor. He would soon die from his wounds. So, too, would associate professors Johnson, also 52, and Davis, 50. Three of the six injured would survive. Cruz-Vera would be hospitalized briefly. But the other two wouldn’t be so lucky. A bullet had entered Monticciolo’s right cheek and exited through her left temple. Her sinuses were shattered, the teeth on the right side of her mouth knocked out. The shot left tooth fragments in her airway. She would be blind in her left eye. Leahy had numerous fractured facial bones that would require wiring his jaw shut, implanting a feeding peg into his stomach, and affixing a titanium plate to his forehead. Eventually he would develop an antibiotic-resistant staph infection. But that would come later. Right now, they huddled in the windowless, fluorescently lit conference room. Just 17 by 21 feet, it was their safe house and also their prison. They had no idea whether Bishop was coming back.

June 16, 2010Norfolk District Attorney‘s Office

Canton, Massachusetts

Norfolk district attorney William Keating didn’t mince words. “Jobs weren’t done, responsibilities weren’t met, justice was not served,” he said in a news conference where he made an announcement: Nearly 24 years after Seth Bishop’s death, a grand jury had indicted his sister, Amy, on a charge of first-degree murder.

Keating said law enforcement officers in Massachusetts had failed in 1986. Police never told the district attorney’s office that after Bishop shot her brother, she tried to commandeer a getaway car at gunpoint and that she refused to drop her gun until officers repeatedly ordered her to do so, Keating said.

After Keating’s media event, William Delahunt, who was district attorney in Norfolk at the time of the 1986 shooting, released a statement along with his former top assistant: They would have prosecuted Bishop back then, but the Braintree police did not provide them with necessary reports and photos from the crime scene.

One photo of Bishop’s bedroom showed a National Enquirer article on the floor. It was about the killing of the parents of actor Patrick Duffy, who played Bobby Ewing on the television show Dallas and also involved the use of a shotgun and the commandeering a vehicle from a car dealership.

Sam and Judy Bishop made their first lengthy statement since the Alabama killings, releasing a pointed four-page statement that reasserted their daughter’s innocence in the killing of their son, accused the news media of sensationalism, and scolded law enforcement for seeking a scapegoat. “This prejudicial, biased review of the 1986 facts is an enormous waste of public resources that does not in any way provide a benefit to the public and proceeds only for the purposes of assessing blame where no blame was involved,” the Bishops said. While they felt “a deep, unremitting sorrow for the families involved” in the Alabama shootings and could not explain what happened there, they said, “we know that what happened 23 years ago to our son, Seth, was an accident.”

“I’m sorry I was spared! I’m sorry I was spared! I’m sorry I was spared!” Olivia in Amazon Fever

June 18, 2010Madison County Jail

Huntsville, Alabama

Two days after being indicted in Massachusetts, Bishop slashed her wrists with a razor blade. She’d imagined, in Easter in Boston, “how easy it would be to just step over the railing and fall backwards onto the parking lot below… Six stories should be high enough.” But killing oneself wasn’t easy after all; she survived. “I tried to kill myself because I was hallucinatory/delusional and could not take UAH and being indicted for my brother’s accident,” she said in a letter to her friend Dinsmoor.

The two had kept in touch after she’d moved to Alabama. She would call him sometimes late at night, just to talk. They’d spoken about two weeks before the killings. She was upbeat about a new project, he said. “She was working on the cell incubator, which I think was going to segue into something called the neurister, which was going to be a computer made of neurons,” Dinsmoor says. It sounded like something right out of a Crichton novel.

Months later, Bishop began calling Dinsmoor frequently from jail. But it was a different Bishop, neither arrogant nor angry. This Bishop was beseeching. She wanted him to try to sell her writingthe three existing novels as well as a diary she was keeping about life behind bars.

Bishop’s dream of being a famous writer hadn’t died. Recently, she asked Dinsmoor to try to sell a poem, writtenimprobablyin rap style. Once, she mentioned sending some money to the families of her victims. “Here we are sitting in jail. Let me go ahead and tell you our tales,” goes the poem “Jailhouse Rap,” which, Bishop told Dinsmoor, has been adopted by her fellow inmates as a sort of anthem. “We sleep and dream our way out of here. Our powerlessness is very clear. ”

She wondered whether she could survive her boy’s childhood. She wondered if she could, without crying, watch her child that looked like Luke run and play. She wondered if she would fear losing Luke again so much that she would wish she were dead. from Easter in Boston

Jim Anderson’s houseMcDowling Drive

Huntsville, Alabama

Bishop’s framed Harvard diploma still hangs in a cubbylike office off the laundry room in the home that her husband hopes like hell he won’t have to sell. With his four children to feed and a wifethe family’s main breadwinnerawaiting trial for murder, money is tight. “Might even go get food stamps,” Anderson says, shaking his head.

He’s calling himself Jim now. Not James. Not Jimmy. Just Jim.

Lately, Anderson says, his family has spent more time than usual in this house. The kids still go to school, of course. Although she’s sitting in a jail cell, their mother remains adamant about that. “Are they doing their homework?” she quizzes her husband when she calls from lockup. “Are they getting out and exercising?

On this night, their three teenage daughters and 9-year-old son have shared a pizza after attending a martial arts class. They’re not shut-insAnderson seems to want to make that clear as he sponges down the blond-wood table in his white-paneled kitchen. Still, he says, it’s often easier to stay close to home.

With the kitchen cleaned up, Anderson leads a tour. First stop is the tiny office where the diplomas hang. Smiling, he points out Bishop’s two and his own “lonesome” one from Northeastern. He leads me past a corkboard that displays a bumper stickerI Love My Country, But I Fear My Governmentand out to the garage.

“That’s where they blew up the pipe,” he says, his voice dismissive. He’s talking about investigators who executed a search warrant back in March. He points to a spot on the floor where they found something suspicious. “They’re like, oh, my God, what’s this? It’s a piece of pipe. Quick, call the robot out. What didn’t get their interest was right above it,” he says. He’d been looking for a way to sterilize cartridges for the InQ cell incubator. He’d built a little chamber that was clamped in the vice. “Gauges, knobs, with a tube leading down to this tank of compressed gas on the ground. I had it labeled so it would be scary: “Do Not Stand In Front of This Device”. And guess where they were standing? I felt like saying, guys, you didn’t notice I had a tank of compressed oxygen in there? And two tanks full of propane?”

He rolls his eyes. Then he heads to his workshop, which doubles as a playroom. There is a low table covered with Legos, a huge periodic table on the wall, a terrarium filled with frogs. On his workbench sits a device that looks like a canister of gas with wires sticking out of one end. Anderson has affixed a handwritten label, block letters on blue packing tape: “This is NOT a Bomb”. He added the label after the search warrant was served, he says, “just in case they showed up again.”

Back in the kitchen, I ask him whether he or his wife ever kept a gun in the house, as has been alleged. “No, no, no. Not with three teenagers,” he says, chuckling faintly. I ask him about the 2008 incident his father describes, when Anderson Sr. and Bishop faced off in the whitewashed kitchen. Does Anderson recognize the kind of transformation of his wife that his father witnessed? “I think I’ve seen it once or twice,” he says, looking down. “But maybe it was just the angryyou know, some people get the angry face.”

I ask Anderson about whether he thinks eccentricity and scientific aptitude go hand in hand. He doesn’t hesitate. “Yeah, I think there’s a certain brilliance and a certain insanity that goes along with it,” he says matter-of-factly. “People ask, well, didn’t you see that in her? Didn’t she act unusual? It’s like, she acted no more unusual than any other scientist I’ve ever been with. You sit down with a bunch of scientists andI hate to say it, buttheir demeanor is more like him.” He nods toward his only son, curled up in a worn armchair in a corner. “You know, like a 9-year-old. Impulsive. Selfish. Me-first.”

Anderson and Bishop’s son, introduced to me earlier as “Kid Number Four,” is bright-eyed and skinny, like he’s going through a growth spurt. He has a drawing pad and a picture book about scary monsters in his lap. His face is rapt as he uses a pencil to copy a plaintive-looking creature, with its arms outstretched.

The boy’s last name is his father’s: Anderson. But his first name is the haunting one. It honors Amy Bishop‘s brother, a violinist who died too young. Seth.

Amy Wallace (amywallace323@gmail.com) wrote about the anti-vaccine movement in issue 17.11.

Source: http://allofbeer.com/2017/09/05/what-made-this-university-researcher-snap/

from All of Beer https://allofbeer.wordpress.com/2017/09/05/what-made-this-university-researcher-snap/

[kayawagner]

Cthulhu Live! [BUNDLE]

Publisher: Skirmisher Publishing

This special 64% off bundle contains everything needed to play Cthulhu Live, the licensed live-action version of the popular Call of Cthulhu tabeltop RPG! These include the core rulebook; 10 self-standing adventure scripts, including the just-released "One Starry Night"; and a companion suite with more scenarios and numerous other resources to support play. It also includes a self-standing murder-mystery style scenario.

*Der Leere Blick: Ein Skript für das Cthulhu Live Rollenspiel 3. Edition (Sight Unseen: A Script for Cthulhu Live 3rd Edition) Regular price: $3.99 Bundle price: $0.01 Format: Watermarked PDF Der Leere Blick is a German-language version of the Sight Unseen script for the Cthulhu Live 3rd Edition live-action role-playing game and designed for use with the rules for it. This script can also be easily adapted for use with other horror and Mythos-oriented games, such as Call of Cthulhu. It ideal for a LARP party with friends or as a convention event and offers hours of fun, intrigue, and horror.  Can we trust our senses? How do we know that what we see is real? Are our eyes inherently deceptive and prone to misdirection? If so, then such flawed organs must be removed, for only in blindness can one perceive the truth: that all the world is horror.  Der Leere Blick/Sight Unseen is an unnerving multi-media LARP experience like no ... Cthulhu Live 3rd Edition (LARP) Regular price: $9.99 Bundle price: $2.99 Format: PDF This newest and best edition of Cthulhu Live includes a richly detailed and uniquely playable rules system that incorporates decades of best practices and refinements from hundreds of gamers worldwide. Features of this self-contained live-action roleplaying game include:  All-new rules for skills, combat, Sanity, Magic, and Psychic powers. Extensive information on organizing events, stagecraft and special effects. Guidelines on role-playing Outsiders tainted by the touch of the Mythos. New and improved photographs, graphics, and other images, including works by renowned Cthulhu Mythos artist Richard Alan Poppe. A screen-friendly lo-res version of the book that includes the "parchment" background of the original print edition and red blood spatters that had to be printed blac... Mythos Society Guide to New England Regular price: $2.10 Bundle price: $2.66 Format: PDF The Mythos Society Guide to New England is an expansive universal sourcebook by veteran game designer Clint Staples that can be used to enhance any horror, mystery, or adventure roleplaying scenarios set in New England. It is particularly suited for Mythos-oriented games like Call of Cthulhu and Cthulhu Live. It is also a fun and provocative read for anyone interested in the esoteric history of New England, and a resource for stories or other projects that have horror or the weird as themes; are based on or inspired by the works of H.P. Lovecraft or other Cthulhu Mythos authors; or are set during the period between the two World Wars.  The Mythos Guide to New England provides a record of the land and its inhabitants, its prehistory and history, and its n... Arcanum Imperii: A Script for Cthulhu Live 3rd Edition Regular price: $5.99 Bundle price: $2.28 Format: PDF TOGA! TOGA! TOGA! But life in ancient Rome isn’t just one big party. The Second Triumvirate has been shattered and Rome is embroiled in civil war once again. Octavian has declared Marc Antony and his Egyptian queen, Cleopatra, enemies of Rome and the legions march south toward Alexandria. The situation seems dire for Marc Antony following destruction of his fleet at the Battle of Actium, but in the dusty hills of Macedonia a dark secret of the empire is waiting to be unveiled.  Governor Publius Artorius Stabo thought he was comfortably distant from the war. He was happy taking bribes and tribute from the local Macedonian nobles, indulging himself with slave girls, and avoiding his shrew of a wife. Then, a ragged band of survivors from  Actium washed up on his s... Cthulhu Live 3rd Edition Companion Suite Regular price: $9.99 Bundle price: $3.80 Format: ZIP File The stars are right for the eagerly anticipated release of the Cthulhu Live 3rd Edition Companion Suite! This collection of computer applications and support materials was created specifically for the thoroughly revised, expanded, and improved 3rd Edition of the Cthulhu Live live-action role-playing game (LARP). Skirmisher partnered with Mantra Design Studio to produce this collection of resources (which were originally released as a Companion CD-ROM). With a stunning graphic interface and a soundtrack by Midnight Syndicate, this is a fantastic tool resource for Keepers and Players alike that is compatible with PC, Mac, and Linux platforms. This suite of resources includes: * Advanced character creation program. * Character Card Creator. * Government ID Badg... Cthulhu Live’s Mysteries of the Mythos: Murder at Miskatonic Regular price: $2.99 Bundle price: $1.14 Format: PDF Miskatonic University, that ivy league institution of higher learning that has produced many a fine young adult ready to shape the world the way they see fit. With diverse courses such as Peruvian Basket Weaving, Modern Occult Legends, and Ancient Languages, Miskatonic has a class for any student. And with the award-winning sports team, the Fighting Cephalopods, even the athletic scholar can find his path to a brighter future among these hallowed halls.  There is, however, a class not in the curriculum that one person on campus is about to earn a masters in. That class is Murder 101. This class has only one test, but the final is a real killer. Who will pass this course? Will it be the jock? What about the bookworm? And let us not forget about the professional rival! Only time an... House of Pain: A Script for Cthulhu Live 3rd Edition Regular price: $4.99 Bundle price: $1.99 Format: PDF Welcome to the New World Order. It’s the autumn of 1991, and the world isn’t what it used to be. Saddam Hussein’s army lies in smoldering ruins. The Soviet Union is suffering its death throes. Germany has been reunified. Africa is aflame with small bush wars. Across the world, the balance of power is shifting. Old powers are dying out and the playing field of the future will be a chaos of warlords and rogue states. In this full-length adventure for Cthulhu Live 3rd Edition, the players are power-brokers who have been invited to a private summit to help form the geopolitical landscape of the next century. But while they plot their moves and hide their secrets, they may find that they themselves are pawns in a much larger, more ancient game. This adventure incl... Muerte al Chupacabras!: A Script for Cthulhu Live 3rd Edition Regular price: $3.99 Bundle price: $1.52 Format: PDF For three decades, Hobbsbad, New Mexico, has lived in fear of El Chupacabra, an unseen monster that comes in the night and feeds on blood. Every few years, the attacks become more frequent, and then stop just as quickly and mysteriously as they began. Nothing has been able to stop this malevolent creature. Now, one man has done the impossible and captured El Chupacabra alive, and tonight, he plans to reveal his prize to the world - or at least the highest bidder. Hobbsbad has been thrown into chaos, as crackpots, cryptozoologists, reporters, and ranchers swarm into it! Muerte al Chupacabras! is a scenario inspired by B-movies and pseudoscience that is designed to be played with 15 or more players and two to four staff members. Although it is meant to stand on its own, this script... Old Man of Damascus: A Script for Cthulhu Live 3rd Edition Regular price: $4.99 Bundle price: $1.99 Format: PDF The Kingdom of Jerusalem in 1190 is in dire peril. Saladin’s army has retaken Jerusalem. The crusader army is in tatters. The once-mighty Christian kingdoms of Palestine are crumbling. In the easternmost provinces of the Christian kingdoms, the fortress of Li Vaux Moise has been under siege for three months. The defenders have tried to hold out, but the fortress is clearly about to fall, and the commander of the Muslim army has requested a meeting to discuss terms of the garrison’s surrender. But there are dark forces at work here far greater than any mortal army. Ancient evils from the wind-swept deserts stalk the stone walls, hungry for blood and power. Terrible, mind-shattering secrets from beyond the stars lie ripe to be exposed. Horrors beyond the comprehension of both... One Starry Night (Cthulhu Live) Regular price: $1.99 Bundle price: $0.77 Format: PDF “One Starry Night” in Arkham, celestial bodies align and cause revelations from a lost city, a stolen artifact, and predictions of impending apocalypse to come together in horrifying and deadly ways.  This scenario is designed for use both with Skirmisher Publishing’s Platinum-bestselling Cthulhu Live live-action role-playing game (LARP) and Chaosium’s Call of Cthulhu tabletop roleplaying game. It is written for two to five Investigators and a medium-sized staff and designed to be played over several locations all within driving or walking distance.  Cthulhu Live is a live-action roleplaying game (LARP) version of the popular horror roleplaying game Call of Cthulhu, based on the works of horror author ... Sex Cult of Cthulhu (Cardstock Characters™) Regular price: $2.99 Bundle price: $1.14 Format: PDF Iä! Iä! Cthulhu fhtagn! Inspired by the fevered imagination of H.P. Lovecraft and the Cthulhu Mythos tradition he began, this set of 15 paper miniatures includes eight different alluring female cultists, three delectable victims in varying states of undress, an idol (in two sizes), and a magic circle (also in two sizes). These miniatures are designed to be compatible with other 25/30mm figures and can be printed out and assembled, as many times as desired. Two versions of each miniature are provided, one in full color and the other in black-and-white. The Sex Cult of Cthulhu is part of Skirmisher's Cardstock CharactersTM line of figures that can be downloaded, printed out, and used in a variety of different sorts of games. Other currently-available sets include... Sight Unseen: A Script for Cthulhu Live 3rd Edition Regular price: $4.99 Bundle price: $1.99 Format: PDF Can we trust our senses? How do we know that what we see is real? Are our eyes inherently deceptive and prone to misdirection? If so, then such flawed organs must be removed, for only in blindness can one perceive the truth: that all the world is horror. Sight Unseen is a LARP experience like no other. When an assortment of Arkham citizens check into the local hospital for surgery, they find themselves blinded by a madman and forced to confront the unearthly terror he has unleashed upon the world. Sight Unseen is a game script for Cthulhu Live 3rd Edition and requires the Cthulhu Live 3rd Edition game rules. The text contains the game overview and timeline; detailed guidelines for simulating blindness in LARP, including safety precautions; prop, special effec... The Ageless (Cthulhu Live) Regular price: $1.99 Bundle price: $0.77 Format: PDF Around this time every year, just as the leaves begun to change, Sir Arthur Westfield holds a grand salon at his manor of West End. The gathering always attracts a healthy mix of dilettantes, eccentrics, and academics. Often little more than a pretense for Westfield to show off his new acquisitions and oddities, it is also a chance for deals to be made. A renowned patron of the arts and sciences, many a man has worked long into the night, maneuvering the old man into some business arrangement or endowment. It remains to be seen what deals tonight may bring ... “The Ageless” is a live-action role-playing game script designed for 10-15 participants and a medium-sized staff. It is stat'ed for the Gold bestselling Cthulhu Live 3rd Edition system but is rules light an... The Green Fairy: A Script for Cthulhu Live 3rd Edition Regular price: $6.99 Bundle price: $2.66 Format: PDF Paris at the end of the 19th century: a city of lights, music, excitement at the approach of the new century and aflame with the creative spirit of the Bohemian revolution. But for months the city has been locked in a state of fear as the brutal murderer known as the Raptor stalks the steep streets and narrow alleyways of the north-end hill neighborhood of Montmartre. Many refuse to leave their homes by night. Others frequent establishments such as “The Green Fairy,” an absinthe bar and popular meeting place for artists, actors, whores, criminals, and the well-to-do seeking to taste the thrills and pleasures of Montmartre. This evening, the patrons of “The Green Fairy” will be joined by a visitor beyond their darkest nightmares.  The Green Fairy... The Island: A Script for Cthulhu Live 3rd Edition Regular price: $4.99 Bundle price: $1.99 Format: PDF When their ship is sunk by a freak storm. the survivors swim to the nearest land, a small island off the New England coast. Safe on land they feel that their troubles are over ... but they are wrong. The Island is a Cthulhu Live live-action role-playing (LARP) game scenario for up to 13 players. It is set in 1947 and brings the characters face-to-face with their own twisted lineages and the madness carried in their very souls. The text contains the game overview and timeline; prop, special effects, and stagecraft tips, including instructions for creating an elaborate working Moon Clock prop; and detailed character sheets and backgrounds for the player characters. Ideal as an event for a Live Action Role-Playing (LARP) party with friends or as a convention event, it offers hours ... The Return of Cyris Crane (Cthulhu Live) Regular price: $1.99 Bundle price: $0.77 Format: PDF Last autumn, Cyris Crane, brilliant businessman, loving father, world traveler, and one of the wealthiest and most respected men in Arkham, ventured into the Arkham hill country and disappeared in a sudden blizzard. Now, he has returned, much to the joy of his friends and family, and he has summoned them to his home to make a pronouncement to them ... "The Return of Cyris Crane" is a LARP scenario designed to be played with minimal staff and a small number of players. The only staff required are the Keeper and, if possible, a Stage Manager. It is stat'ed for the Cthulhu Live 3rd Edition system but can easily be adapted for use with other LARP or tabletop games.  Cthulhu Live is a live-action roleplaying game (LARP) version of the popular horror r... WitchFinder: A Script for Cthulhu Live 3rd Edition Regular price: $3.99 Bundle price: $1.52 Format: PDF Set in Yugoslavia in 1943, during the height of World War II, this tense and exciting scenario focuses on the struggle between Allied and Axis special operations teams to seize control of information critical to control of the Balkans. Players can assume roles as military or civilian operatives in one of four opposing factions, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the SS Ahnenerbe occult operations division, the Communist partisans, or the Chetnik royalist freedom fighters. Little by little, however, the characters will begin to realize that their war is not the first to have left its mark on the region in which they are battling for supremacy - and that their actions are uncovering a powerful and dangerous evil that is beyond anything they ever expected to face. WitchFinder...

Total value: $83.83 Special bundle price: $29.99 Savings of: $53.84 (64%)

Price: $83.83 Cthulhu Live! [BUNDLE] published first on https://supergalaxyrom.tumblr.com