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imagesofthegreatgull · 4 years

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Hybrid Rainbow

Joy has always been a rare and precious commodity. I would argue, though, that in the developed world (Wherever, exactly, that is), it has become somewhat less rare in recent times, as standards of living and education continue to go up. That’s an absurdly privileged thing to say, I realize, but I’m trying to start this thing as evenhandedly as I can. I understand about suffering and poverty; I’m reading A Tree Grows In Brooklyn right now, even! Okay, saying we’re closer now than ever to utopia is going to smack of ignorance no matter how you phrase it, but it also strikes me as undeniably true, in the grand scheme of things. I think most people--aside from the fascists--would refuse a one-way trip in a time machine to any previous era, or at the very least, would recognize that it wouldn’t improve much of anything for them. As unruly as our age is, it’s still probably the best one we’ve gotten thus far, and as the boot-heel of oppression starts to ever so slowly ease up its pressure on the necks of the long-suffering masses, the question has begun to enter into the collective consciousness: what is to be done with joy when it begins to fall, unbidden, into your life with something like abundance? What is to be done if moments of joy no longer must be pried with great effort and sacrifice from the rockface of life, but lie strewn liberally throughout our days, needing only the will and lack of embarrassment to seize them?

Thus far, the latter-day generations have faced up to this problem with decidedly mixed success. The idea that expecting anything other than the very worst leaves one vulnerable to the universe’s cruel whims has been stamped upon the human brain for centuries, and has left many sadly unable to recognize their own privilege (Which, by the way, is a big part of why a whole lotta white folks refuse to admit they have it better than anyone else and continue to dig their heels in against progress because to them it looks like cutting in line). It is still widely accepted that constantly finding joy and peace and purpose in one’s own life is the purview of children and children alone, that it is a naivete to be grown out of. We have the impulse always within us to be hard, to be warlike, to show the world that we’re not weak and frivolous but monsters to be feared, without emotions to be appealed to or ideals to be fallen short of.

Remedying this problem has turned out to be one of the primary functions of counterculture. If it is often unhelpful to simply look at the entire value system of one’s parents and say “Fuck that”, as it tends to foster a rather negative self-definition, still, if part of that value system is a deeply entrenched distrust of happiness, “Fuck that” may be exactly the response called for. The beauty of “Fuck that” is that it leaps past the slow loss of faith in something and arrives immediately at a flat rejection of it, and since much of the history of civilization has been bound up with blind faith in arbitrary and harmful things, the ability and the courage to flatly reject something, to give it no credit for however widely accepted it is but to dismiss it as bullshit from the ground up, is a step forward in human consciousness tantamount to the reinvention of the wheel.

The great irony of the end of the sixties is that all the hippies were miserable for no reason: they won. Rock n’ roll did change the world, it just didn’t immediately transform it on every level into an unrecognizable nirvana. For all the apparent emptiness of its utopian dreams, the basic thrust of the thing worked out just fine: that particular cat will never be put back into its bag, and those ideas are now out in the ether forever, always waiting for someone to find them and be inspired to change their own life and the lives of those around them for the better. The same goes for the punk rock revolution a few years later: they may not have brought the bastards down, but they did successfully bring personal liberation to a lot of people, and poured exactly as much gas on the fires of populism as they intended to. Culture, and in particular art and in particular music, cannot, unassisted, change the world, but it can change your world, and has been changing small worlds all over the frigging place at least since those mop-topped Brits set foot on American shores and probably since Johnny B. Goode learned to play guitar just like a-ringin’ a bell.

The thread can get lost, however. Culture is always a reflection of the people, and the people still spend a lot of their time bored, frustrated, and terrified of letting on that they have feelings about stuff. Young people especially, formerly the eternal pirate crew waving high the flags of “Liberty” and “Up Yours”, in recent times have often capitulated and resigned themselves to no more than a few stray moments of fun pilfered from the fortresses of the almighty Money Man-Kings, usually in the form of drugs, sex, and reckless self-endangerment. The cost of the hippies and the punks giving up their battles is that the counterculture lost its intellectual leadership, at least until the resurgence in political literacy in the 2010s. In the wasteland following the 70s, there were no John Lennons or Joe Strummers to look to for guidance; even the people who were elected to speak for their generation seemed adamant that there was fuck-all they could really say. Yeah, it’s nice to know that someone else feels stupid and contagious, but that’s not really a direction, is it? The generation-defining message Kurt Cobain and his peers sent out was “We’re all way too fucked up to do anything about anything”, and that introspective moodiness pervaded American underground rock music from the invention of hardcore at least all the way up to the moment Craig Finn watched The Last Waltz with Tad Kubler and said “Why aren’t there bands like this anymore?” and set out with rest of the Steadies in tow to remind everyone that music can save your immortal soul and that hey, that Springsteen guy was really onto something, headband and all, and together they all successfully ushered in the New Uncool and now we’ve got Patrick Stickles wailing that “If the weather’s as bad as the weatherman says, we’re in for a real mean storm!” and Brian Fallon admitting “I always kinda sorta wished I looked like Elvis” and everything’s great, except it’s not, everything’s fucked, but rock n’ roll is here to stay, come inside now it’s okay, and I’ll shake you, ooo-ooo-ooo.

The point of all this is my belief that even with the responsibility rock music has to provide cathartic outlets for dissatisfaction, is has an equal or greater responsibility to provide heroes. I think it’s time we all got over pretending that we’re better than the need for heroes, because we all insist on having them anyway, imperfect roses by any other name, and we’d do a hell of a lot better selecting them if we just admitted what we were after. We don’t just want particularly talented comrades, we want King Arthur, Robin Hood, Superman, Malcolm Reynolds. Damn it all, they don’t need to be perfect, they don’t even need to be all that great really, and yeah, Arthur dies, and Robin never gets Prince John, and Superman can’t save everyone, and the war’s over, we’re all just folk now, and John Lennon beat women and Van Morrison is a grumpy old fart and John Lydon’s a disgrace, but it’s the faith that counts. The faith that there’s something greater than ourselves that some people are more keyed into than others, and that whatever they can relay from that other side is what’ll see us through. All the best prophets are madmen, and madmen aren’t always romantic fools; sometimes they hurt people, or fail at crucial moments due to a compulsion they can’t control. Let he who is without sin etcetera, right? Why not cast aside realism and sincerely believe in something or someone, huh?

I believe in the Pillows. I don’t know hardly anything about them; my expertise of Japanese culture and history extends to the anime I’ve seen and that “History of Japan” YouTube video that made the rounds a while back. I can’t locate them within the Japanese music scene; all their western influences seem obvious to me, and the rest I know nothing about. They’re the only rock band from their country I’ve listened to any great amount of, I don’t speak the language they mostly sing in, I don’t even know their career very well. The particulars of any experiences they might have had that motivated them to make the art they make are not ones I could possibly share in, so, saying that I “Relate” to their work sounds a little preposterous. They ought to be a novelty to me, a band that clearly likes a lot of the same bands I do despite hailing from a foreign shore, marrying that shared music taste with a cultural identity I have nothing to do with, a small, nice upswing of globalism pleasing to my sense of universalism but not having any kind of quantifiable impact on me.

Yet I, like a good many other westerners, believe in the Pillows. I’m a little buster, and my eyes just watered as I wrote that. In fact, it’s likely because of the barriers of language and culture that exist between us that my belief in the Pillows is so strong. Pete Townshend, someone else I believe in, once opened a show by saying “You are very far away...but we will fucking reach you”, and though the Pillows are both geographically (At the moment) and culturally miles away from me, Lord strike me down if they don’t fucking reach me. They reach me in a way many of their American college rock peers, many of their biggest influences in fact, never have. Dinosaur Jr, Bob Mould, Sonic Youth, the Pixies, Nirvana--all these artists speak directly to the American adolescent experience, but though they have all moved me to one degree or another, none of them have produced a body of work I can so readily see myself in as that of the Pillows. Maybe it is the novelty of it, maybe I’m fooling myself and it is just my sense of universalism carrying me away, but there’s something I hear in the Pillows that I don’t hear in those bands, and though the obvious candidate for that thing would be the foreign tongue the majority of the lyrics are written in, when it comes down to it, I think that thing is joy.

Joy, to me, is the possibility glimpsed by rock n’ roll. Not hedonistic pleasure, not a sadistic glee over the outrage of authority figures, but real, true, open-hearted, “Freude, schöner Götterfunken/Tochter aus Elysium”--type joy. Buddy Holly had joy. The Beatles, The Who, the pre-fall Rod Stewart, they had joy. Springsteen’s got joy to spare. Those people have such profound love for their art and their audience that just the continual recognition of the fact that they have a guitar in their hands and they’re being allowed to play it is enough to make them ecstatic, and whenever they want to actually express something serious they have to get themselves under control to do it. Yet, whether it’s the unfashionability of those utopian dreams, or the simple fact that rock music has become accepted by mainstream culture and is now a commonplace, unremarkable thing, but half the people who have picked up an electric guitar for the past few decades don’t seem all that excited about it. From Kim Gordon snarling about how people go down to the store to buy some more and more and more and more, to Thom Yorke moaning about how he’s let down and hanging around, crushed like a bug in the ground, even up to Courtney Barnett asking how’s that for first impressions, this place seems depressing, it’s not really a given anymore, if it ever was, that people who make rock music are very joyful in what they do.

Of course, I’m not demanding that our artists be empty-headed fluff-factories; far from it. The Pillows write sad songs and angry songs same as everybody else. But the important thing is this: every song the Pillows play is played with an exuberance and abandon that is immediately striking, regardless of the emotional content of each song. Channelling that kind of revelry into rock music is both to my mind the initial purpose of the genre in the first place and something which has become so rare as to be remarkable. A veneer of detached cool, a howling ferocity, a whimpering woundedness--these have become the hallmarks of American rock music, and they are nowhere to be found in the Pillows.

At the same time, the Pillows are the very antithesis of artlessness. Joy of the caliber they deal in is more commonly found in folky rave-ups, a lack of musicianship giving way to trancelike festivity. But the Pillows are skilled song craftsmen like few others; their sound has evolved throughout the years, but they tend to settle in the neighborhood of power-pop, abounding in glorious hooks and surprising structures. A hundred unnecessary, perfect touches seem to exist in every song; a pause, a solo, a bassline, all deftly elevating the song into a perfect expression of something sublime, something that always--always--takes ahold of the musicians themselves and imbues their performances with power and purpose the likes of which most little busters can only dream of feeling. It should be testament enough to their brilliance that upon first listen to a song I never know what most of the lyrics mean, but whenever I look up a translation, they always turn out to be exactly what I felt they must be; their songs are so musically communicative that they all but lack the need for lyrics.

This dual nature is why I believe in the Pillows: by so utterly failing to neglect both the highest possibilities of musical composition as an unparalleled tool for capturing emotional nuance and the unrestrained id-like rush that is the province of rock n’ roll, they successfully attain the lofty realm that is--or ought to be--the goal of music in the first place. Never once is there a hint of straying into the realm of primitivism nor into overthought seriousness, and instead they locate themselves somehow exactly center on the scale between punk and prog, lacking the weaknesses and gaining the strengths of both. They make rock whole again by finally disproving the tenet initially laid out by their heroes, your heroes, and mine, The Beatles: the notion that growing up means having less fun. The viscerally exciting early work of The Beatles lacks any of the depth and vision displayed by their later records, but those records are so carefully and expertly crafted that they tend to lose spontaneity, and constantly second-guess themselves where the juvenilia they followed forged unselfconsciously ahead. That legendary career path has laid out a false dichotomy that every proceeding generation of kids with guitars has chosen between, save for the few who could see past it, the ones who heard the wildness in “Revolution” and the wisdom in “Twist and Shout” and realized that they were of a piece, were one and the same, not to be chosen between but embraced fully. Pete Townshend. Bruce Springsteen. Joe Strummer. David Byrne. Paul Westerberg. The Pillows. The real heroes are not those who champion one side or another but fight all their lives for peace between them, knowing that we have not yet begun to imagine what could be accomplished if that were made possible.

Just as they bypass the divide between what Patrick Stickles termed the Apollonian and Dionysian tendencies of rock (I prefer to think of the usual battle as being between the Dionysians and the Athenians, with the true devotees of Apollo being most of those heroes I keep referring to, except Dylan, who might be a Hermesian), so too do the Pillows bypass the Pacific frigging ocean. And the Atlantic, to boot. Their music quotes the Pixies and The Beatles directly, and obviously owes much to Nirvana and all their college rock predecessors who spent the entire 80s desperately stacking themselves until the doomed power trio could finally vault over the wall. Their first record is practically a tribute to XTC. They do speak a lot of English, too. I’m informed that much of western culture is seen as the epitome of coolness in Japan, which might explain their obsession with Baseball, and apparently sprinkling a bit of the Saxon tongue into the mix is far from uncommon in the music scene(s). Regardless, there is something ineffably touching to a distant fan in a foreign land about hearing Sawao Yamanaka spit “No surrender!” or exclaim “Just runner’s high!” It looks from here like a show of mutual effort to understand me as much as I’m trying to understand them. They’re generous enough to have already walked to the middle where they’re asking me to meet them, a middle where it doesn’t matter that I don’t have a suffix attached to my name or that they don’t wear shoes in houses. The invisible continent that all forward-thinking and sensitive people come to long for is where the Pillows are broadcasting from, because they’ve realized that its golden shores and spiraling cities are attainable. They’re attainable with joy, with the fundamentally rebellious act of refusing to let the fascists bring down even your globdamn day, because who the hell gave them that power other than us? I know enough about Japan and America to know that either one accusing the other of being imperialist and socially conservative to a fault is a fucking joke, and to know that we’ve done a lot more wrong to them than they’ll ever do to us and the presence of the Pillows amounts to a “We forgive you”, not an “I’m sorry”. Having watched a decent amount of anime, which is basically the result of Japan’s mind being blown by western media and then proceeding to show their love by often almost inadvertently surpassing their inspirations, I know that the only way to save our respective national souls and everybody else’s too is to put our knuckles down, have Jesus and Buddha shake hands like Kerouac tried to explain that they would anyway, and embrace each other’s dreams and passions and adopt them into our own.

It takes better people to inhabit that better world, and in case that sounds like fascist talk, I mean we’ve got to do better, not be better. It’s no physical imperfection that holds us back, nor a mental imperfection exactly, as we all have our own neuroses and if we expunge those then we’ll be kissing art and lot of other vital stuff goodbye. No, it’s our discomfort with ourselves, our world, our neighbors, our aliens, that keep us from seeing that crazy sunshine. If we can’t even acknowledge the greatness around us, that surplus of joy I mentioned a while back that we just seem to have no idea what to do with, then we have no hope of ever achieving further greatness, of ever quelling man’s inhumanity to man down to an inevitable fringe rather than the basic order of the world.

There was always more to do

Than just eat and work and screw

But now that there’s time at last to do those things, we’re still afraid to, afraid that we’ll come up empty, that the search for fulfillment leads only to disappointment, better to hang back and play it safe, better not to risk becoming one of those people I shake my head at and pity and will secretly envy until I die. It’s a new world, and we must learn to be new people. I believe in the Pillows because I believe they make excellent models for that new kind of person. The way they behave in the studio and on the stage is the way people behave when they’re truly free, and we’ve all been set free already or will be soon, so if we’re going to try and learn what the fuck is next from anyone, I think we might as well learn from the Pillows. At least, that’s one of the places we could get that insight. There’s a lot of art and a lot of philosophy and political theory to sift through to in order to put together a workable 21st century identity, and the Pillows are hardly the only people to have begun making the leap. But because of a silly thing like the size of the earth, the infinitesimal size of the earth even compared to the distance between us and the next rock we’re gonna try and get to, not everybody is getting their particular brand of free thought and action, and I happen to think that’s regrettable, and it’s my will as a free individual to rectify it as much as I can.

Writing about music really is worthless, isn’t it? I haven’t said jackshit about what the Pillows actually do other than to vaguely qualify their genre and temperament, and the only more useless thing I could do than not describing their songs would be to describe their songs. If you don’t hear the bracing weightlessness in “Blues Drive Monster”, or the aching nostalgia in “Patricia”, or the soul-bearing cry in “Hybrid Rainbow” then nothing I could write about those would be more effective than “Little Busters is a really good album.” The better primer might be Happy Bivouac, from a few years later; it has the melancholic rush of “Last Dinosaur”, the ascended teenybopper “Whoa, whoa, yeah” chorus in “Backseat Dog”, and the intro that should make it obvious immediately that you’re listening to one of the best songs ever recorded which opens “Funny Bunny”. Those two, Runners High, and Please, Mr. Lostman are the classic era, selections from the former three immortalized in their biggest claim to western fame, the FLCL soundtrack, a brilliant use of their music that could warrant an equally long piece. Before and after those four are periods of experimentation and discovery equally worth your time, not all of which I’m familiar with yet. See, now I’m just an incomplete Wikipedia article; it’d be equally worthless to expound upon the individual bandmates, on the pure yawp of Yamanaka’s vocals, on the passionate drumming of Yoshiaki Manabe and the supernaturally faultless lead guitar of Shinichiro Sato, or the contribution of founding bassist Kenji Ueda, which was so valued by the others that when he left he was never officially replaced (They’re so sweet). I’m not here to write an advertisement or a press-release, I don’t really even know why I’m here writing this, but I know that I believe in the Pillows, that they’re important, and that people should write about them. I’m being the change I want to see in the world, get it? That’s all we can be asked to do.

It occurs to me that people believed in Harvey Dent too, and that didn’t turn out so well. Hell, let’s leave the comic book pages behind, people believe in Donald Trump, they think he’s a hero, and that’s all going down in flames as I write this. Having heroes can be dangerous, but I still believe it’s not as dangerous as not having heroes. “Lesser of two evils” sounds an awful lot like one of those false dichotomies between fun and intelligence or between misery and foolishness I mentioned earlier, so, let’s call it a qualified good. I’m not much of a responsible world-citizen if my only effort towards bringing the planet together is spinning some sweet Japanese alt-rock tunes and bragging about how open-minded I am, but if I do ever end up doing anyone any good, then I’d consider it paying forward the good done to me by the Pillows, among others. They helped me form my identity as an artist (Read: functional human being) and they made my adolescence a lot easier. Actually, that’s a lie: my adolescence was (And continues to be) pretty easy already, and the Pillows reassured me that I wasn’t avoiding reality by feeling that. While American bands sang about the downsides of being a mallrat or a non-mallrat, the Pillows offered a vision of teenagedome much like my own, one that was grandly romantic, in which suffering wasn’t a cosmic stupidity but a trial with pathos and merit, and joy was not an occasional indulgence but a constant presence, whether it was lived in or lost and needing recovery.

That’s the old idea of youth, the youth of John Keats, the youth that makes the old miss it, makes it required that we explain to them that it’s still there, it never left, it’s a dream, a momentary affirmation, an attitude, a muttered curse word. So many of my peers, now no longer engaged in a constant race to stay out of the grave as their ancestors were, seemed intent on beating each other into their tombs, as if reaching walking death before their parents was the only way to outgrow them. There’s so much life just lying around and it’s just plain wasteful to let it lie in the sun and rust in the rain. There’s space enough to stretch, to not keep who you are awkwardly curled up inside yourself, to breathe the air and taste the wine and dig the brains of your fellow travelers in this loosely-defined circus. I found that space in the Pillows, having often suspected it was there, and while everyone is going to find that space in their own way--or not, still, tragically not--I have to think that experience was due in part to some innate and unique quality of the music itself, not just a complimentary sensibility contained within myself. The Pillows are free, and that makes them freeing, it’s easy as that. Their liberation is plain as day; it rings in every chord, every snare-hit, every harmony; it’s up to us ascertain what we can do in our own limited capacity to hoist ourselves up to their level and give some other folks a boost along the way and a hand to grab afterwards. It’s the gift that art gives us, and the Pillows just give it more freely than most is all, which is why I think the suggestion to listen to them is more than just a solid recommendation. Like the insistence on listening to The Beatles, or The Clash, or any of the others, it’s a plea to save your soul, to learn the language of tomorrow and drink the lifeblood of peace and love and piss and vinegar, or else you’ll be lost, lost, lost.

Can you feel? Can you feel that hybrid rainbow?

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theonyxpath · 4 years

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By Lauren Roy

Jo’s breath fogged the Perspex case, momentarily obscuring the prototype from view. Inside, the device lay dormant, all sleek silver curves and a blank interface awaiting its commands. On its own, Jo told herself, it was just a machine. It made no moral judgments. It saved lives or ended them, and the person who fed it the instructions was to thank or blame, not this lump of metal and wires.

Jo hated it a little bit anyway. She also needed it, and that made her hate it even more.

“Hey, kiddo, shake a leg, yeah?” Blake had been on edge all night. They’d gotten into DuttonTech so smoothly — fake badges letting them into restricted areas, Jo’s disguised tools sailing through security, green lights across every board. Blake trusted Jo and Dana to get them in, sure, but the fact he’d gone the last few hours without having to subdue so much as a slightly suspicious intern was making him antsy. Jo couldn’t blame him; Archangel never hired their crew for the cakewalk jobs.

But she wasn’t going to let Blake’s nerves unsteady her hands. She was elbow deep in the display case’s guts, only the last set of clamps and a weight sensor left to bypass. Easy peasy lemon-squeezy. She’d be home and in her pajamas in less than two hours, cracking a pint of victory ice cream and texting Leanne with the good news, that help was on its way. This was a killing machine in Dr. Alexander Dutton’s hands, but in Leanne’s possession? Jo’s sister could use it to save thousands.

She just had to unlatch the clamps.

Blake checked the cameras for the hundredth time. Downstairs, the security guards in their cozy little command room were watching the same looped feeds of Dutton’s lab Dana had set up hours ago. He knew the timing of their rounds, knew which guards just jiggled the occasional doorknob and which would swipe their access cards and look around the empty, after-hours rooms. He’d studied the dossiers Dana gathered for him over the last few weeks. The patrol team closest to their floor right now consisted of an ex-military type and a guy whose pre-DuttonTech police record was peppered with assault charges from bar fights. Ideally, Blake wouldn’t have to trade blows with either of them, but he believed in being prepared.

Waiting was killing him. He’d offered to smash the case when they first got here, just grab and go, but both Dana and Jo had shot him down. Something about delicately calibrated this and potentially volatile that. Of course, that described everything that DuttonTech put out these days, especially the volatile part. Blake had seen firsthand the damage the company’s products wrought. He’d wielded some of them himself, back in another life.

He’d never stop paying for that. Could never. But working for Archangel assuaged some of the guilt. He clenched his fists and tamped down the urge to find some other volatile thing and pitch it into anything that looked delicate.

Dana had six different data feeds scrolling past on her glasses’ left lens, telling her all DuttonTech systems were normal. She was jacked into the guard station’s audio, listening to two guards being wrong about the top five horror movies of all time. She’d set her little worm free on DuttonTech’s R&D servers — after, of course, she downloaded clean versions of the files to her own drive to peruse later. According to her own internal stopwatch (ONE one thousand, TWO one thousand) her team was right on schedule.

It was too bad they’d never be able to take credit for tonight, because damn, they were good. She imagined herself at some fancy Archangel cocktail party, regaling new cells with the story. Maybe she would embellish it, just a little, add in a tiny scuffle so Blake could have his crowning moment of awesome. Add in a few extra lasers for Jo to have to limbo under, and…

Click.

“Shit,” muttered Jo.

The lights in the lab went red.

There was an extra clamp. There was an extra freaking clamp, and it was so tiny and so obvious in hindsight, exactly where Jo would have put one if she wanted to protect her valuables from someone like herself. It hadn’t been on the blueprints Dana procured in one of her hacks, because of course it wasn’t. Dutton was notoriously paranoid. He’d either installed it himself, in secret, or had one of his lackeys do it and…what? Wiped their memory? Had them killed? Transferred them to a DuttonTech facility in Antarctica? Jo wouldn’t put any of that past him.

But that didn’t matter now. Their cover was blown. Dana was counting off the seconds until security got to them, her fingers flashing over her tablet’s screen. “We’re about to have company.”

Blake came and crouched beside Jo. He glanced at her hands, frozen on the prototype. “Kiddo, we’ve gotta run. Now. If you don’t have it free, you have to leave it.”

“I can’t.”

He frowned. “You stuck?”

“No.”

“Something gonna cut off your fingers if you move?”

“No.”

“What is it, then?”

Jo closed her eyes and pictured her sister’s face. “Leanne. She’s with the LRE in Caracas.”

Blake’s sharp inhale told her that he hadn’t known. Jo didn’t talk about Leanne much. He and Dana knew that Jo’s parents had been dissidents, murdered by their government for speaking out. They knew she and Leanne grew up in safe houses where they were never truly safe, and that Jo had turned to Archangel when she got old enough to be more than a charity case for the organization. That was about as much intel as Jo ever shared, because talking about Leanne made her worry. And worry had sharp, sharp teeth.

“You saw the emails Dana intercepted. Dutton’s going to sell this to the enemy, then that’s it for the resistance. This isn’t just about Leanne.”

Blake might let everyone else in Archangel think he was all muscle, minimal brains, but Jo knew better. He’d read the whole dossier, not just the guards’ vitals. “How long do you need?” His voice was deadly calm.

“However long you can buy me.”

“Get that thing out of there.” Then he was gone.

“We’re doing what now?” Dana gaped at Blake as he assessed the camera feeds on her tablet. She’d managed to lock the guards out of the elevators for the time being but couldn’t keep them out of the stairwells. One patrol had only been a few stories down.

He grunted as the patrol he was monitoring gained another landing. “We’re holding tight until Jo gets that damned thing free. What else can you do to keep them out of here?”

Dana peered around the lab. Until now, she hadn’t really let herself see everything. Sure, she knew the layout, and had a strong idea of what other projects DuttonTech’s brain trust were working on, but being here in meatspace? The temptation to start taking things apart would have distracted her from their mission. She’d kept her eyes firmly on her work and ignored the siren song of the shiny.

Now, though… She took it all in, performing a frantic inventory with a glance. “Get me a screwdriver,” she said, “and every inch of wire you can find.”

For a hasty build, it was impressive. Dana had to guess at what a quarter of the parts she found even were, but as she stared at the small mountain of electronics Blake dumped on the desk, the schematic came together in her head. The spliced wires and electrical tape meant it would never win any beauty pageants at the hackathon, but that didn’t matter.

As long as it did its job.

She dragged her cobbled-together creation out into the hall. It whined as it powered up; the highpitched tone of power gathering combined with a low, ominous hum. Dana listened a moment, until it sounded stable enough, and darted back inside. As Blake shoved a pair of desks across the doorway, Dana scuttled further into the lab and planted herself near Jo. The other woman nodded slightly, acknowledging her presence, but didn’t peel her eyes from the device inside the case.

“How are we looking?” Dana asked.

“There’s a wire on the last clamp. It’s what tripped the alarm. I’m trying to make sure it’s not going to fry the whole thing when I remove it.”

“Smart,” said Dana, then, “Oops, hang on, big noise.” On her tablet’s screen, the camera view showed two guards emerging from the stairwell. She counted (ONE one thousand, TWO one thousand, THREE) and yelled, “Blake, NOW!”

Across the lab, Blake slammed his fist down on the trigger Dana rigged. He dropped into a huddle, covering his ears.

The lab doors were, by necessity, prettied-up fire doors. Sure, deep-pocketed investors on a grand tour of DuttonTech could glance through the extra-thick glass to see scientists bustling about within, but if something exploded during a demo, those investors (and their wallets) would be safe. Now, those same doors muffled the worst of Dana’s sonic barrage. The pair of guards dropped to the ground, hands covering their ears as they writhed in pain.

The disruptor’s effects would only last for so long, though. Already, Dana could tell the pulses were losing their potency. “Thirty seconds, Jo. Then they’re back on their feet and super pissed.”

It was impossible. Jo held the wire pinched between her fingers, this hair-thin filament, and knew it was all for nothing.

Stupid, stupid, stupid. Leanne, I’m sorry.

If she’d only taken one last look, she’d have spotted the trap. If she only had another five minutes, she could undo it. But time was well past up. Blake and Dana stood by the doors, their jaws set, their expressions grim. That awful thrumming pulse outside let out one last whump, and an eerie silence took its place.

If she was fast enough, faster than she’d ever been in her life, she could mitigate the damage. Not prevent it entirely, but… But enough.

Jo steadied the prototype with her left hand, readied the wire in her right.

She held her breath.

Pulled.

The spark traveled up her fingers, to her wrist, straight up to her elbow. The sharp tang of hot metal, melted plastic, and seared flesh filled the air. Had she taken the brunt of the jolt? She thought so but wouldn’t know until Dana got a look at the device later. When they were safe. Jo pulled the prototype free of its case and ignored the tingling in her fingertips. She joined Blake and Dana at the door. “Let’s go.”

In the hallway, the security guards were gaining their feet. Blake smiled.

The first one got up. He staggered as his balance betrayed him, but Blake wasn’t going to take that for granted. Guy like this? He had to fight after being pepper sprayed, tazed, or whatever the hell else they made Navy SEALs do. Sure, Dana’s device had done its damage, but Blake bet this guard was exaggerating its extent. It’s what he’d have done.

Three strides and Blake was in the ex-SEAL’s face. Sort of. The dude was a giant, six-and-half feet tall with a neck like a tree trunk. Blake only came up to his chest. His opponent swung, a short, sharp blow that would have knocked a weaker fighter flat. But Blake had training of his own. He deflected the jab, but as he’d suspected, the guard wasn’t as bad off as he’d pretended. More shots rained down, driving Blake backwards toward the lab.

A streak of red skittered down the hall toward him. Jo had liberated one of the lab’s fire extinguishers and shoved it his way. Blake danced out of the ex-SEAL’s reach and scooped it up. Only one shot at this. He swung it in a high haymaker arc, cranking the extinguisher’s heavy bottom into the ex-SEAL’s jaw. The big man went down in a graceless heap.

Blake looked back to where Dana and Jo huddled in the doorway and signaled them forward. Jo winced as she passed the first guard. Then she stopped short. “Uh. Blake?”

He thought the second guy was down for the count. It was the bar brawler, the one who should’ve been an easy takedown except…except he’d managed to unholster his sidearm and push himself to his feet. His arm wavered, but even if his aim was off, the hallway was narrow enough that he’d probably hit one of them.

“Easy, now,” said Blake. “Let’s all be calm.”

“Drop the extinguisher,” said the guard. “And you, put down the device.” He swung the gun toward Jo, and Blake felt his heart hit his stomach. That wasn’t a standard-issue piece. It was a DuttonTech special; destruction in Glock’s clothing. Blake had carried one of the previous generation himself. He’d seen what they could do, how the bullets tore up a body as they passed through.

“Okay.” Blake lowered the extinguisher, hoping to get the guard’s focus back on himself. “Look, we’re cooperating, see?”

“Oh, fuck that,” snarled Dana. She shoved past Blake, keeping to the other side of the hall from the guard — out of arm’s reach, but drawing his attention.

“I’ll shoot!” The guard whirled to follow her. His finger tensed on the trigger.

Blake barreled forward. He could never beat a bullet, but he had to try. The corridor seemed miles long, the air thickened like molasses. The guard might as well have been on the other side of the world, for all the good Blake could do. He saw the trigger pull back in agonizing detail, heard Jo screaming Dana’s name.

Dana just kept walking.

The gun didn’t fire.

Time started again, and Blake plowed into the guard at top speed. He drove him back and slammed his wrist against the wall until he dropped the weapon. Blake got a forearm across the guy’s neck and twisted to look at Dana. “What the hell?”

“Oh. Yeah.” She stopped fiddling with her eyepiece and came to stand beside him, still well out of the guard’s reach. She addressed the guard instead of Blake. “That thing that split your eardrums two minutes ago? I also had it resonating at the same frequency as the timing crystal in your shiny new gun. Probably cracked it. You shouldn’t pick it up again.” She gave Blake an apologetic grin. “I should have told you: I don’t make unitaskers. Learned it from a TV chef. Now will you knock him out, so we can go?”

Archangel paid damned well. Jo funneled most of her paychecks down to Leanne, helping to fund the revolution and keep her sister fed, clothed, and armed. With what was left, she bought tools to help with her craft. One of the first things she’d learned was, to be a good thief, you ought to have a good getaway car. So, she sunk a ridiculous amount of money into an old tank of a car and paid even more to have it tuned up, tricked out, and street legal. It had served her well so far, and now, with DuttonTech heavies chasing them through the city’s 3 A.M. streets, Jo prayed it’d get them home safe one more time.

It took 10 blocks for the black SUV to catch up to them. She’d figured a clean getaway was too much to ask, but Jo cursed the universe anyway. “Get ready,” she said, and jammed on the gas. Bullets hit the car’s frame like a sudden spate of rain. The back window spidered with cracks but held firm. She was glad she’d splurged on the bulletproofing.

The SUV sped up, drawing even with them. Jo stared ahead at the rain-slick street. The good thing about pulling off their heist so late at night was that no one drove in the business district at this hour. They had a good straightaway and, as she watched, all the lights turned green. In the rearview, Dana flashed her a thumbs-up.

Metal screamed, and the whole car shuddered as the SUV slammed into their side. Jo fought the wheel to keep them on the road. In the passenger seat, Blake swore as the door crunched inward.

PULL OVER, came a voice over the SUV’s bullhorn. RETURN WHAT YOU STOLE, AND WE’LL LET YOU GO.

Blake flipped them off.

Another sideswipe, and the car rode up on the curb. Jo swore and yanked them back onto the street, but not before she took out a row of newspaper boxes.

“You know what?” said Blake. “We’re risking our lives for this thing, I think we deserve a demo.” He pulled the prototype from the backpack Jo had shoved it in.

“Uhhhh.” Dana poked her head into the front seat. “Remember that talk we had about delicate and volatile?”

“She’s right. And I might have damaged it when I took it out of the case,” said Jo. “We don’t know what it’ll —”

But Blake was already pushing buttons, and the blank interface was responding to his touch. The options flashing by read stun, pulse, and stream, and a slider ran from low to high. Blake selected pulse and pushed the slider all the way up.

“Point it at them, not us!” Dana shrieked.

Blake turned the device and held the business end up to the window. Jo caught a glimpse of the SUV driver as he aimed. All the color drained out of the DuttonTech security woman’s face. She turned her wheel, disengaging the SUV from Jo’s car, but not soon enough. Blake slapped the automatic window button, and as soon as he could get the prototype’s nose through the gap, he fired.

THOOM.

They couldn’t see the pulse, but they felt it. Jo’s fillings buzzed. Every bone she’d ever broken ached like there was a storm overhead. The SUV flipped up and over, and for one terrible second, Jo could see what the pulse had done to the people inside, how none of their features were in the right places anymore. How everything had gone so very red. She’d be seeing that in her nightmares for years to come.

None of them said anything as they pulled away. In the rearview, Dana’s eyes were wide, her lips gone white. Blake let out a ragged sigh. The device’s interface blurred, cleared, then switched to one blinking red word:

Error.

The sun was coming up by the time they got back to their safehouse. Dana switched on the morning news while she examined the prototype. Not a word about their break-in at DuttonTech. Not a peep about a late-night car chase in the business district, nor any stories about a deadly crash. DuttonTech had covered it all up. Was that good for them, or bad?

Can’t worry about that just now. Let’s make sure we’re not going to explode first.

She handled the device gingerly, as if it might wake up and turn the three of them into human slag, but it turned out there wasn’t much chance of that. She could see the burn marks where Jo had pulled it from its kill switch. Once the casing came off, the insides were about as fried as she’d expected, even though Jo had taken some of the shock. “I don’t know how this even turned on in the car, let alone fired.”

“Is that it, then?” asked Jo. “All that work and it’s just…a hunk of metal?” She didn’t have to say her sister’s name for Dana to know she was thinking of Leanne, how she’d been counting on getting the prototype out intact to help her. Dana had made that connection long before she handed Jo and Blake their dossiers.

“Hey.” Dana set her tools aside. “First off, we’ve set DuttonTech back. They don’t have the physical prototype, and their IT group is going to have a miserable time sorting out the mess I uploaded to their servers before anyone there can even think about building another.”

Blake came in from the kitchen, carrying a tray with three coffee mugs and Jo’s pint of victory ice cream. He’d declared getting out alive a sufficient win, and Jo hadn’t argued the point. “She’s right, kiddo. We’re not even close to done. If Dana can’t get this thing up and running, someone in Archangel will know who can.”

“I have an idea about that.” Dana took her mug gratefully. She was bone tired but needed to stave off sleep as long as she could. There was too much to do. “The woman who taught me to do what I do, she studied alongside Dutton back in the day. If we can find her, I think she’ll be able to fill in a whole ton of gaps.”

Jo frowned. “‘If?’”

“No one’s heard from her for a while. She went off the grid, and we don’t know why. Last place she was spotted was Brussels.” Dana set the prototype aside and tapped her tablet awake. “Who’s up for a rescue mission?

The Trinity Continuum Core Rules and Trinity Continuum: Æon are available in print from Indie Press Revolution (core, Æon) or in PDF/print-on-demand from DriveThruRPG.

#Onyx Path Publishing

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robotnik-mun · 7 years

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I usually have answer for questions like these...but what specifically about Mobius: XYL made it so horrendous that not even someone with actual writing talent like Flynn could save it? I'd say that it was just a blank slate and that any competent writer could fix it.

*Sighs, pulls out a bottle of whiskey and a shot glass. Pours the glass. Takes the shot*

Alright, before I get into the specifics, I’m gonna contextualize a few things for you. I want you to picture a comic book, one built primarily (but not exclusively) around action, and despite the intense quality issues it tends to suffer from its still pretty popular, with a fairly vocal fanbase. One day a character is teased- the daughter of a major character, hinting towards an amazing story that will show the future of your favorite characters. Years past, the hype builds up. A hint of what’s to come is given in a story where this mystery character is featured, pulling forth an intriguing scenario in which her father, one of the heroes, will become a villain years later.

Finally it is announced- at long last, this much anticipated storyline is going to happen! We’re going to see the future of the setting, the future of the characters and their offspring! Oh, what things will await? What mysteries will build in the interim? What new villains will operate in the future? What will the children of the heroes be like?

Well, eventually, the storyline finally comes. All that waiting, all that excitement and hype, all of that theorizing... and all it amounted to was a fart in the wind, all noise and fury signifying nothing.

That, in a nutshell, was Mobius 25YL.

Now let us get into specifics. Forgive me if I miss anything, for there is a LOT to get into, so I’ll just summarize what comes off the top of my head.

-Firstly, there was Lara-Su herself. Oh, poor Lara-Su. That’s really one of the great tragedies of the Pre-Flynn era. She had the design. She had the concept. She had the hype- people were doing fanart and fanfiction of her long before she debuted properly in the book. And then 25YL came along, and what we saw was...

....yeah, that. See, it turned out that she wasn’t being trained as a guardian. She was just a normal leading a normal teenage life, and my GOD it was boring. Our opening scene involves her thumping her stupid cousin on the head with a book for insulting the Guardians, and this? This is how she became a Guardian. After everything we had been led to believe, everything we had been wanting to see, the mysterious, much-anticipated Daughter of Knuckles... turned out to be a whiny, entitled little rich girl who literally whined her way into being a Guardian. Not that we got a chance to see her tenure as a guardian, oooh no- it was FAR more important to see her sweet sixteen and a sleepover with her friends, and of course pool party antics. Which brings us to the next point....

-...namely that this story went *nowhere*. Like it was literally the last few issues that the damn plot moved forward and reached a climax. THe build-up took a back seat to what Penders evidently felt was what the audieance REALLY wanted- DOMESTIC DRAMA! Marvel in Lara-Su getting in fights at school because someone had an opinion! Wonder in the glories of her sweet sixteen! Behold the pool parties! Amaze at Sonic’s son being a little pervert! Hey, do you know what we needed more of? Sonic and Knuckles getting in a belching contest at a dinner party! And so on and so forth- the whole thing was basically a domestic drama, a really, really cheesy and badly written one, and these aspects of the story overtook everything else. Even worse, this story dragged on and on and on at a snails pace, and as I said, the only remotely exciting thing happened literally within the last few issues, with the build up being drawn out and unengaging.

-The future was boring. Very, very boring, and even worse, we were told exactly how it got that way. What portions of the story weren’t dedicated to observing the Domestic Life Of The Teenage Echidna were spent infodumping and expositing about the events of the past that led to the present time. And at the present time? Everything was so peachy and perfect it could make you sick. There was no danger, no new menaces to fight in the Post-Robotnik Mobius, everything was just bland and happy and nooo real problems whatsoever. The Kingdom of Acorn now ruled Mobius, and Angel Island was now a superpower, and all the enemies of the past were either defeated or domesticated (more on that below). There was nothing to draw people in. No conflict to engage the readers. Even worse, ss this at the time was regarded as ‘the’ future and not just a ‘What-If’ (the debate of which caused an infamous feud between Penders and Bollers), the exposition ensured that there could not even be a potential mystery in figuring out how things got to this point, because the entire future was now laid bare before us. And since we now knew that this achingly perfect and tranquil future was to come, and exactly HOW Eggman was going to be defeated, there was little reason to become invested in past stories. What’s the point of sticking around when you know how its all gonnna go? Every conflict that took place in the past was now rendered irrelevant thanks to this future, which pretty much gave away the ending.

-On top of all that, the developments of the characters from the past who were featured in this future were... nonsensical, and in some cases deeply insulting. Knuckles, for example, who had grown up in the wilderness away from cities and the like, was now in a position of power as not only Guardian but the head of the EST, and living very comfortably in a manor, with a maid of all things. Even accounting for the fact that the years change people, this doesn’t really feel like the kind of life Knuckles would ever want to live or COULD ever want to live, instead feeling like a reflection of Penders’ own ideal for what a happy ending should look like. Worse though was what happened to Julie-Su... while her depiction as such was not always very stellar, there was at least a token amount of effort applied to depicting her as a capable soldier and action girl, and prior to the release of this he swore up and down that she would STILL be a badass. This was false. This was very, very false. She was pretty much a stay at home mom who did upkeep on the house, acting as a *painfully* cliche ‘50s Housewife’ at utter odds with her prior depiction. While there is nothing wrong with being a domestic or anything like that, the fact was that this was definitely not how anybody ever wanted to see Julie-Su, and even worse, despite Penders’ touting of the ‘non-traditional’ nature of their marriage (which I should add was a reflection of the fact that he and his own wife operate under a common-law marriage), the fact of the matter was that the marriage was even MORE tradtional and bland than most marriages in media at that time.

And it didn’t end there either. Sonic was now King of the world and pretty much going through a midlife crisis, and Sally, who actually WAS a leader of men during her youth and Queen of Mobius, was now happy and content with taking a backseat to Sonic and letting him make all the major decisions. There are many arguments about whether or not Sonic should have ever been a king or if it fits his character, but the point of order is, nobody at all wanted to see THIS from Sonic, or Sally. The decision to make him King was especially baffling because in real life, that’s not how European monarchy’s work. Sonic is not nobility, and even if he were, his lower rank would ensure that he would only ever be a prince or a regent at best, while Sally would be the one calling the shots thanks to her being higher ranked than him to begin with.

And then there was Lien-Da. Recall how I said some threats became domesticated? Well this here is Exhibit A- wanna now what kind of future Lien-Da has after a lifetime of terrorism, deceit and murder? She’s living comfortabltly in suburbia with her son (with no mention or hint of who the father could be), and is just so gosh darned chummy with her half-sister that they gossip like a couple of old hens. I mean sure, Lien-Da helped murder Julie’s mother and their father, and then had Julie mindwiped twice-over, to say nothing of spending generations trying to murder the Guardians, but it’s all coooool, brah! No hard feelings, no bad blood whatsoever! Why, even Dimitri himself confirms that all of Lien-Da’s ambitions would never ever come true anyway, so hey, why carry a grudge? Family trumps all!

Yeah, I digress. Whatever people envisioned for the future of the characters they loved, this wasn’t it. At all.

-The kids sucked, both as characters and from a design standpoint. For visuals, Lara-Su got off easy, having a reasonably unique and recognizable design that made her an instant hit with a lot of fans... the fact that Penders didn’t design her might have had something to do with that though. Everyone else? Clone children. Clone children as far as the eye can see. Literally they were all just traces of their parents with different clothes, and they had even less going on with regards to personality. The one with the most distinct personality was Manik, who was such a loathesome little creeper that everyone kind of wished he really WAS just as bland and forgettable as everyone else. While obviously children are gonna resemble their parents, making them flat out clones was just a step too far (sadly this would plague the sequel series as well). There have been many fan ideas and conceptions of what the children of our heroes would look like- all of them were better, or at least made more of an effort, than this.

-While the book might have been called “Mobius: 25 Years Later”, it was actually more like “Angel Island Twenty Five Years Later”. Given that this storyline started out as a special called Knuckles: Twenty Years Later, this isn’t really that unexpected, but for a storyline that billed itself as the future of Mobius itself, the focus on Angel Island at the expense of everything else left a bad taste in everyone’s mouth. WHile it would be impossible to cover everyone, it was Knuckles and his family that got the most coverage, with the extended cast getting cameos or token mentions regardless of how important they were in the past. Bunnie and Antoine didn’t show up, Tails only showed up much later, we barely get any action from the other Chaotix... you get the idea. Even worse, Knuckles was pretty much revealed to be the destined savior of the planet, the one to finally defeat Eggman instead of Sonic, and the reveal of what was causing problems in the future would eventually be revealed to be SOnic’s fault! The Knuckles favoritism was incredibly grating, and incredibly disappointing. People wanted to see the future of *Mobius*, not JUST all the parts most relevant to Knuckles. This was the storylien that really did much to establish how little Penders cared about the title character of the series and how hellbent he was on ensuring the ‘legacy’ of his personal pet despite the Knuckles series having been gone for years by that point.

-On a retroactive front, the reveal of Rotor being gay, or rather the rationale and circumstances of it, did a lot to taint the perception of the series. Even when the series was going on, Penders hinted that one of the cast was gay, and didn’t reveal who it was until years after he had left the book...it just happened to be Rotor, who just happened to be tortured in the new 30YL storyline while his supposed lover, Cobor, was dead. That he timed the reveal in such a way that it made Flynn look like a homophobe was suspect enough, but his reasoning behind the reveal was especially troubling, with him declaring that Rotor was gay due to his shyness. Adding insult to injury, there was absolutely no chemistry between Cobor and Rotor, like at all. In a fandom where two characters so much as looking at eachother too long can result in shipping, this was especially noteworthy, as nobody at all shipped Cobor and Rotor before the reveal... and after, for that matter. Penders loudly patting himself on the back for this despite how little he had done in-story to indicate it did a lot to taint the storyline in people’s eyes, and forever made Rotor’s sexuality a touchy subject due to knowing that Penders would always be eager to take credit for it despite having done nothing to build it up. While there was only so much one could really do at the time it was written, that doesn’t excuse the fact that there was so little affection and so little to read into with regards to Cobor and Rotor, due to the fact that believable, human interaction is well beyond Penders’ capacity as a writer.

There is probably more I am not considering. Anyone who has anything to add is free to do so. But in conclusion? For everything that this story promised to be, and for all the ways that promise was broken, this whole thing became a black hole of wasted potential, a vortex of suckage that would consume everything in proximity, and that is why despite everything, a lot of people are not that eager to see it re-visted, believing that its just impossible to un-anchor it from the awful, awful story that spawned, and that there is nothing worth salvaging from it.

They might have a point.

#jdscanvas

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