#I imagine to a time traveler from the past a modern doctor's office might also be intimidating

[radioactivepeasant]

Snippet Friday: Faulty Info au Strikes Back

Jumping back to the first chapter I'd posted, this is the immediate follow-up. Warnings for mentions of medical trauma (via the Dark Warrior Program)

The scanner the young woman waved over Jak's body was old technology by the standards of most. Cast-offs from Haven, welded together with bits and curses. But to Jak, it was as strange and new as the vehicles he'd seen since his rescue. What was the woman looking at on that screen? What could she see? He craned his neck, trying to see.

"Keep still, young'un," the woman scolded.

She waved the boxy device close to Jak’s ribcage and it sounded a long tone. The medic frowned at the readout and tapped it a few times. Periodically, she stopped to write something on a notepad. Jak watched the medic get a little more tense with each note, and her eyes darkened a little bit more. He knew by now that when someone's eyes looked like that, pain was sure to follow. 

They hadn’t strapped him down, though. And the door was unguarded. Weary though he was, Jak was pretty sure that he could escape the woman and the king both if he had to. The question of where to go after that was shoved away, to be dealt with later.

The medic returned and sat down on a stool across from Jak. "How old did you say you were again?" she asked.

"Fifteen." Jak closed one eye to think. "Maybe almost sixteen? I don't know what season it is."

For some reason, that seemed to be the wrong answer.

"You're sure?" The medic pressed, "That's how old your parents say you are?"

The dark eco throbbed, hot and acidic, against Jak’s ribs. His mood darkened with it.

"I never had parents," he signed, and not very politely, "Uncle had to guess."

An expression of understanding crossed the medic's face. "Ah. Were you tall as a little tot?" she asked.

Jak shrugged. "I guess so."

He'd always been taller than Keira and Daxter, anyway. There weren't many other children to compare heights with in Sandover.

"Why the questions, Maud?" Damas asked from the back of the room. He folded his arms and raised a brow. "Do you suspect his age is incorrect?"

The medic, Maud, leaned back to retrieve her notebook and flipped through the pages. 

"My lord," she said, "this young'un's physical development has been altered slightly by the dark eco poisoning, but not enough to change the development of his bones."

"My bones?" Jak was alarmed. "What about my bones?!"

Maud didn't look up from her notes, missing Jak’s question. "Comparing average Spargan and Havenite skeletal development to the eco scan, this boy has barely entered puberty. He can't be older than thirteen, by my calculation."

Thirteen?!

There had to be some mistake. Jak wasn't that young! He was just a late bloomer, that's what Samos always said. 

Samos wouldn't have sent a thirteen year old kid to fight Gol and Maia and all those Lurkers alone, right? 

...right?

Damas reached out and took the notes from the medic, and a chill ran down his spine. Only thirteen. This child was only thirteen and he had already suffered so much.

Please, Precursors, Winds, Volcan- anyone: don't let Mar suffer the same-!

Dark eco had been pumped forcibly into the boy's body for several months at least, according to the scan. Oddly, where most poisoning cases would have already had the unstable eco spreading through their body, Jak's case was isolated to his torso.

"How is-" Damas's voice betrayed him, weakening to a croak. He swallowed, cleared his throat, and asked, "How severe is the concentration of eco? Will he require an antidote?"

Maud sucked on her teeth and grimaced. "Ayup, I think so. Don't rightly know how he's keeping it from getting into his muscle fibers right now, but I doubt he can keep it up forever."

That, at least, Damas knew how to fix. Wordlessly, he moved to the shelves full of jars and boxes and began hunting for the ward's carefully conserved supply of light eco. The search, at least, could hold his attention and keep his mind from wandering too far from the matter at hand.

"What of his immunizations? Has he had any?" He asked over his shoulder.

"He said they didn't have a doctor in his village, just a green eco sage," Maud answered, "Which suggests he hasn't had many of his shots."

Jak immediately recoiled at the mention of shots. They were going to inject him with something! Blind panic seized him, and he bolted.

No more! No more pain! I won't let you!

"Hey, no-!" Maud skidded around the bed and jumped in front of the door. "Dangit, kid! You're still poisoned!"

Wild-eyed, Jak tried to shove her aside. The young woman barely budged. Spargans, it seemed, were very solidly built. Maud raised her hands and spoke quietly, trying to calm him, but the words seemed to float above his head as if he was underwater. Maud stepped closer, hands coming too close to Jak to feel safe. Panicking, he snapped at her fingers; she pulled back quickly. The dark eco boiled in Jak’s blood, and he could feel it spreading, seeping deeper into him. 

No-! 

With all his might he pushed at the chaotic substance, forcing it back into the wounds. 

His emotions were raw, and at any moment he felt he was about to snap. The medic still blocked his escape.

I don't- I don't want to hurt you! But- But you need to move!

With a silent snarl, Jak drew back and tensed to charge the woman, fist raised.

For years after, he would wonder how the king had moved so fast. One second he was peering into a glowing jar behind the counter, then within a heartbeat his arms were around Jak, restraining him as gently as he could manage against his chest. 

Jak thrashed in his grip, desperate to escape, but Damas held firm.

"Stop," he grunted, trapping Jak's arms beneath his own. "Stop, child! She will not harm you! Be still. Be still, Jak."

Jak couldn’t speak like this, hands pinned to his sides. He shook his head violently and tried to force a word -- a sound, anything -- out of his throat. A rusty, scratchy, cry faltered and trailed off between gasps for air.

Damas tightened his arms. "Be still, child. Be still," he whispered, over and over until at last the boy went limp. His heart still hammered against Damas's forearm, and the king frowned. He doubted the boy had calmed. More likely he feared the consequences of further resistance.

"Poor kid." Maud shook her head and slowly relaxed her guarded posture. "I'm betting he doesn't have any kinda good association with doctors. Lemme make a chart up for him, and we can figure out immunizations later. I think for now the light eco is the most we should do."

She crouched in front of Damas, trying to look into Jak's eyes.

"Hey, hey there, soldier. Breathe, breathe in now."

She waited until Jak had sucked in a ragged breath, then gave him a sympathetic half-smile. "Now breathe out, nice and slow. Easy does it, eh, kid? No shots today, it's okay."

Suspicious, Jak narrowed his eyes at her. The medic didn't seem to be offended. She stood and offered the glowing jar to Damas.

"I'd rather counteract the worst of the dark eco exposure and let that settle before introducing anything new to his system. For all we know about dark eco, it could exacerbate any potential diseases instead of inoculating him."

Damas sighed heavily. 

"Boy," he said, "I am going to let go now. Do not try to bite the medic again. She opened the clinic in the middle of the night to help you, is that understood?"

Oh, Jak understood. But that didn't mean he believed it.

He nodded and waited for a chance to run.

Before he could try, the jar caught his attention. This close to it, he could feel the contents being drawn towards him. It was...eco. Not dark eco, but warm, bright, good eco! Even after the experiments, he could still feel it!

It wasn't quite like green, nor blue or red or yellow. It was...it was all of them at once, just like during the battle against the Acherons. Was it really, truly, light eco? All the way out here?

Damas opened the jar and dipped two fingers into it. Light swirled around his hand, not quite liquid, but not quite vapor. 

He was channeling! Was the king a sage as well? Was that possible? Jak couldn’t stop himself from reaching out for the ball of light. 

"Don't-!" Damas tried to pull it out of the boy's reach. 

Only a trained channeler could use eco to heal another. Without training, it could end up doing far worse damage than the wounds it was meant to heal.

To his bewilderment, the light eco all but leaped from his fingers to the boy's outstretched hand. It jumped from finger to finger in sparks before being absorbed into the skin. Jak yelped in surprise and shook out his hand, then blinked down at his torso with wide eyes. One cautious hand pressed against the skin over his ribcage, gently prodding.

When Jak looked up, the shock was evident on his face.

"It...can heal?"

It took a moment for the medic to answer, as Damas was still staring at the boy with a perturbed look.

"Ah...that is, yes, yes it does. But you- kiddo, how'd you-" Maud scratched her freckled nose and squinted at him. "Only sages and the king can float that stuff around like that."

"Yeah, and me." Jak shrugged in a distracted fashion. "I think Samos wanted me to be a sage, but he gave up."

After a moment, he realized the sage's sign nickname wouldn't mean much to people from another city, and amended, "the Green Sage tried to train me to be like him, but I was too wild."

Damas and Maud exchanged a meaningful look. 

If the boy was claiming to be a channeler, that could explain the Baron’s interest in him. Channelers had become rare in the last two generations, and now only Sages remained. If word got out that a young boy had begun channeling light eco-

Like Mar? Like I can?

Stop. Don't do this to yourself. Focus on the task at hand. Focus on preparations for tomorrow's tasks. Focus on the next breath, the next step. 

"This visit will remain confidential," he announced. It was not a question, nor a request.

"Of course, lordship." The medic saluted him gravely. "He's one of my patients now. Would help if I had a responsible party to schedule with, but I s'pose it can't be helped."

Damas glanced down at Jak, who watched him with a mixture of curiosity and caution.

"I..." Damas blew out a breath. 

"I intend to declare the boy a ward of the city until his last known relatives or connections come forward. Winds know we've had our share of them in the years after Atys. Until a guardian can be appointed, I will handle matters for him to preserve confidentiality."

The medic made a little "hmph" noise and bobbed her head. "Makes good sense t'me, sire. The whole city don't need to see his chart, after all."

She pivoted on her heels to face Jak.

"You take care, kid. When you've gained some weight, and the light eco has been fully integrated into your system, then we can talk about vaccines."

"What's V-A-K-S-E-E-N-S?" Jak spelled out the unfamiliar word as best he could. 

Maud cracked a smile that was considerably easier in manner than her earlier ones.

"What's a vaccine? It's...think of it like a medicine where we take a tiny, weak, itty-bitty form of a really nasty disease -- like Dune Pox, or White Flu, or Crane Cough -- and we inject it into your bloodstream. It's not enough to make you sick, it's just enough to teach your body what those germs look like. Then your blood cells learn to hunt down and destroy those diseases."

Jak remembered Samos talking about germs once or twice as a little kid. Nobody else in the village ever seemed to know what he was talking about. Little beasties too small to see that made you sick? Equally tiny bits in your blood that hunted the little beasties? It all seemed like a silly story for children. Something to make sick days easier to bear.

"That sounds fake." He narrowed his eyes skeptically. "Blood doesn't fight, it's just blood."

Maud blinked several times. She glanced up at Damas. "Remedial classes?" she guessed.

"I suspect so," Damas agreed.

Maud picked up the medical scanner again and took it back behind the sandstone counter. "I'll be running some tests on these results in the morning. Should I contact you if I find anything of note?"

With a sharp nod, Damas answered, "You have the palace frequency should the need arise." 

"Understood." Maud dragged her stool back and took a seat. "I'd have liked to keep Jak for observation after that light display, but I doubt that would be good for his emotional state. Will you alert me if there are any changes?"

Ah. Damas hadn't anticipated that. The boy would require supervision for the next few hours to ensure that the light eco was working as intended. Usually, patients remained in the medical ward until the observation period was over. But Maud was right: the longer Jak was around medical equipment, the more agitated he was becoming. High levels of stress wouldn't help his case much.

Well. You did say you would look out for the boy until a place could be found for him. It's not Sig or the boy's fault that you didn't fully think that through. 

Damas gave a short, sharp, nod, then guided Jak out of the clinic. The boy was decidedly more subdued than he had been a moment ago, and thanks to the light eco, his breathing had finally calmed. Between streets, he periodically glanced up at Damas, then away just as quickly. By the time they'd gotten to the palm row, Damas had had enough of it. He stopped and turned to look down at Jak. Jak winced and hung his head, signing a contrite apology.

"I am not the person you should be apologizing to, young one," Damas answered. He clasped his hands behind his back and clicked his tongue. "I understand that you panicked. I understand that you feared for your safety. You do not know us, why would you trust strangers? But fear dulls the senses, Jak. You must learn to breathe first, and act second."

Jak fidgeted with his fingers and stared down at his feet. None of the twisting motions were words. Just the awkward fidgeting of a frightened boy. He nodded miserably. 

Damas stepped closer and crouched slightly to look him in the eye. Don't think of Mar. Don't think of him, he told himself, no matter how much it felt like a betrayal.

"Every person in Spargus has a part to play and a job to do," Damas gently admonished the boy, "Maud's role is to ensure that our citizens are safe and healthy, and to treat them when they are injured, not injure them further. That's her job. If you had managed to harm Maud back there, she might have had difficulty caring for other citizens tomorrow."

Ashamed, Jak hitched his shoulders. He knew the man was right. And it wasn't like he'd even wanted to hurt Medic Maud. But he almost had, anyway, hadn't he?

"I'm sorry I tried to bite her," he signed again. "I'll...Should I go apologize?"

The king shook his head. "Wait for the morning. When the clinic is officially open, then you may apologize. If you are reminded of something that happened in Haven, or something she is doing causes you pain, you can tell her, or me. But I will not have you attacking my people, is that clear?"

"Yes sir." Jak's hands moved so little that he was barely above a whisper.

Damas nodded curtly and straightened. “Good. We wish to see you recover from your trials, Jak, but there will be rules to follow in this city. For the sake of clarity, consider "no biting the medic" your first rule."

Not that having such rules had prevented little ones from occasionally biting Maud and the pediatrician, Petros, before. Jak certainly wouldn't have been the first to try to take a chunk out of the person with the needle. Damas knew it was a little too optimistic to hope he would be the last.

The remainder of the trip to the palace was unnervingly quiet. The boy stole glances periodically over his shoulder, in the direction of the clinic, with a perturbed expression. Perhaps the details of his moment of panic were beginning to set in. Or perhaps he was stinging from the scolding. He walked with the body language of a younger child, fidgeting with guilt. It was a blessing that the dim torchlights did not illuminate them enough for Damas to see the color of Jak’s eyes. The reminders of his son clung to his ribs and ached with every breath.

Please be alive, my son. Be strong, for me. I will find you, I promise. 

[happymeishappylife]

Books I’ve Read in 2022 - Part 2

11. The Lost Hero by Rick Riordan (Book # 1 of The Heroes of Olympus)

I took a break from reading the Percy Jackson series and I’m kinda sad about because while he isn’t even in this book, this was such a fun read. I immediately loved Piper, Jason, and Leo, and learning about this new Roman camp as opposed to Camp Halfblood is intriguing. But the adventure to get these three to Camp Halfblood and then out on their quest to also help restore Jason’s memory is quite a story. And thankfully Leo’s sarcastic comments really help to cut tension in this book even if his own childhood is traumatic.

12. Vanished by Kat Richardson (Book #4 of the Greywalker Series)

Seeing a happy Harper Blaine who is committed to Quentin is a refreshing take in this novel compared to her unhappy relationship before, but having to go to London to safe her ex and his little brother was quite a leap and yet super satisfying and intriguing. Getting to see a little bit of Harper’s past and see how connected she was to the Grey even before she died is intriguing. I can’t wait to see that explored more though it looks like the vampires about to ramp up in the novels to come.

13. Essential Muir edited by Fred D. White

Another book I took from my previous office. I was expecting not to like it since I wasn’t that thrilled with Walden, but Muir, unlike Henry David Thoreau, really had some great descriptions of his travels and an appreciation of the world around him though all he did was travel. I also found that through his travels we learned a lot about how the early American wild was and how it interacted with his history. And while there is elitism and racism towards indigenous people, there is also a respect from Muir that makes this unexpected.  My only complaint (and yes this comes from the Landscape Architect) is I did not need paragraphs and paragraphs of Latin plant names that Muir sees everywhere he goes lol.

14. Daemons Are Forever by Simon R. Green (Book #2 of the Golden Torc Series)

I was really curious to see where these novels went since it felt like the climax of the series happened in book 1, but now that Eddie Drood is trying to rebuild his family’s estate and still save the world I found the novel surprisingly more interesting than I imagined and the stakes just as hyped as the first. The only weird part was connecting the Droods as early ancestors to the Deathstalkers from Green’s space opera. Once I get back to those it will be interesting to see how Giles time in modern England compares to his struggles in space.

15. The Travels of William Bartram

Another naturalist book I took from my previous company. I think by this point while I found these interesting, it was starting to wane on me and out of the three this is the one that didn’t keep me interested as much. Like Muir, Bartham really likes to go on about plants and while if you were a researcher that might be interesting, as a reader it is super boring and makes you fall asleep easier.

16. Doctor Who: Corpse Marker by Chris Boucher

Picking up right after the Robots of Death ends, the Doctor and Lela arrive at the same place just many years in the future. Here they find older versions of the men and women they save from the mining ship and learn that there is a new invention making the robots they fought before even more deadlier. It was a great way to build after the show though I was a little disappointed that I hadn’t quite gotten to this episode in my rewatch before reading it. I watched it shortly after though and it still connected really well in my opinion.

17. City of Night by Dean Koontz (Book #2 of the Frankenstein Series)

Having defeated their police captain, who Carson and Michael were horrified to learn was one of Victor’s creations, they now team up with his original monster now named Deucalion as they tackle the task of taking Frankenstein down. But the build up in this novel as both Carson and Michael are hunted and poor Artie is targeted by Victor’s autistic creature is palpable and page turning. Now that things are ramping up in danger too, Koontz suspense is in all its glory and I can’t wait to see what happens in the next novel.

18. Night of Many Dream by Gail Tsukiyama

I never realized that Hong Kong also got invaded by Japan when they invaded parts of China. Maybe it is because I still consider Hong Kong so separate that this never occurred me and unfortunately this isn’t well taught. But this novel was so interesting not only because of its history but because it was focused on the perspectives of two daughters and their aunt and their own individual struggles of relocating to Macao and how that changes them. Then as we see them all get older and deal with the beginnings of World War II, getting into the  Chinese film industry, and the struggles of immigrating to America, we get insight into so many ideas and deep feelings of what connects all of us and it is really beautiful.

19. An Absolutely Remarkable Thing by Hank Green

This has been on my list for years and I generally enjoyed it and am very curious as to what happens next because the sci-fi part of the story really intrigues me. And while I like the deep dives and thoughts from April on fame and how media creates the problems we face as a modern society, I personally had a hard time relating to her just because I really don’t use a lot of social media and generally don’t care about numbers (hence why I am here lol.). 

20. Doctor Who: The Ruby’s Curse by Alex Kingston

Who better to write a song about River Song than the woman who plays her! Alex knows her voice so well that it really is hard not to hear River speaking throughout the entire novel, whether that be her actual self or her fictional Melody Malone. While the story got very wibbly wobbly towards the end I also appreciated that this played with twists in space more than other novels and that River got her own awesome adventure that was solely just being an outlaw.

[upthenorthmountain]

Heartwood - Chapter 1

A few years ago now, Charis recommended to me the book The Blue Castle by Lucy Maud Montgomery, or maybe she didn’t recommend it so much as talk about it a lot, so I read it and it is a lovely book and a wonderful Kristanna AU all by itself. But then a few days ago I suddenly had an Idea about how I could rewrite it - or enough of it, it’s not a perfect copy - into a modern AU. So here we are and here we go.

Huge thanks to @karis-the-fangirl as always, who untangles my plotknots and fills in my plotholes.

Chapter 1

Anna Rendell woke up on the morning of her twenty-fifth birthday and realised she’d never lived a day in her life.

Not lived, anyway. Not lived as people should live. 

She sat up and looked around her bedroom. It was her bedroom, because it had her bed in it, where she slept; it led into the dressing room where her clothes were stored; it was the only room where she could close the doors and reasonably expect that if someone wanted to come in, they would at least knock, even if they didn’t wait for an answer.

But as she looked around, she realised she hated it. It didn’t look like a room someone actually lived in. It looked like a hotel room, in some kind of expensive boutique hotel with a pretension to minimalism. The walls were white, the bedclothes were white, the furniture - what there was - was white. There were no pictures, no ornaments. Everything she owned was hidden behind a white door, and if she left anything out, it would be promptly put away by one of the changing cast of staff that were constantly waiting, just out of sight, to make sure no one ever left a single stamp of living on this empty house.

The house was not entirely empty. There was one other person - Anna’s older sister, Elsa. When their parents had died, when Elsa was eighteen and Anna only fifteen, Elsa had been left as her sister’s guardian, and had taken the job very seriously indeed.

She had overseen Anna’s education, and made sure it was a good one, made sure that Anna worked hard. She’d brought her back here, to their parents’ house, and she’d made sure that she met the right people and did the right things. And nothing else. Anna didn’t know what use that education had been, when she’d never worked a day in her life - never needed to, never been permitted to. All she did was go to the gym, and take tea with her friends - none of whom she liked, or who liked her - and do charity work, which meant sitting in dull meetings where no one ever made a decision, or attend lunches and balls where she had to constantly watch herself and her behaviour. 

Everyone thought she was rich. But despite the house, the car, the credit card, the charity donations - she didn’t have a single penny she could call her own and actually spend as she wished. Her parents, in their wisdom, had locked their money up tight in a trust. Elsa could use it for herself and for Anna’s expenses. But Anna would only be able to take her share once she married, or once she turned thirty, whichever came first.

The credit card bill went to Elsa. And Elsa only approved of a handful of shops. She didn’t agree with travelling (and oh, how Anna longed to jump onto a plane, or a boat, or a train going further than the city). She had Ideas about what Anna should wear, and if she didn’t like something Anna had bought, she’d have someone return it. Elsa herself only wore white, or very pale pastels, and she thought that Anna should do the same; and never, never pink or red, not with Anna’s auburn hair. 

And today was her birthday. She didn’t think Elsa would plan anything, as such. Doubtless there was an extremely tasteful gift wrapped perfectly in white paper, somewhere in the house. Tasteful to Elsa and her associates, anyway - Anna was quite sure it wouldn’t be to her taste. What she’d really love was something bright, and colourful, and completely useless - a painting for her wall, a rug for her floor, a scarf or maybe a completely impractical necklace. She’d seen a woman in town, once, wearing a necklace made of huge beads in bright primary colours, and almost gasped out loud. Imagine owning something like that, and being able to keep it, and wear it and look at it whenever you wanted. 

When she was thirty. Anna had a lot of plans for when she was thirty. So many, in fact, that it wouldn’t be possible to do them all - but that didn’t matter. She would do some of them.

Or perhaps she would get married first. That would also give her the freedom she wanted, though perhaps not the independence; and the older she got, the less likely it seemed that it would happen. Elsa would only steer Anna towards young men she thought were suitable, and they were all as bland and colourless as everything else in her life. Better to wait here in limbo for another five years than shackle herself to one of them.

Quietly - there was nothing to make noise, there was no one to make noise with - Anna rose, and got ready. She opened the doors of her dressing room and looked at the line of dresses hanging neatly, in colour order, though none of them were what she would call colourful. Well, today she didn’t even feel like the pale blue or the mint green or lemon yellow - she took down a white sundress, and a white cardigan to match. She wasn’t good at wearing white, it was true, but someone else always seemed able to get the stains out; and white was the colour that got the most approving looks from her sister. And it might as well be white. If she couldn’t wear what she wanted, white would do.

She put up her hair in a low chignon, and she put in her silver earring studs and strapped her thin silver watch round her wrist. That much jewellery was acceptable. Then she went downstairs to breakfast.

-----

Elsa was already at the table; normally she would have chided her sister gently for being late (it was almost three minutes past eight), but as it was her birthday, she seemed to be allowing Anna a little licence. “Happy birthday,” was all she said, and handed over the gift and a white envelope. Anna thanked her and put them to one side; she couldn’t open them at the table. Elsa nodded and returned to her breakfast. They ate in silence.

It wasn’t until they were both finished, and the plates had been spirited away, that Elsa spoke again. “Do you have any plans for today, Anna?”

“Oh. Yes. I’m having lunch with Donna and Portia.” Donna and Portia were not particularly nice or interesting women, but they’d invited themselves to have lunch with Anna on her birthday, so she supposed she would. Oh, no, wait - was Elsa asking because she’d planned something? For a moment’s Anna’s spirits soared. “Why do you ask?”

“Stephanie asked me to tell you that the doctor’s office rang. They wanted to reschedule your annual check-up to today, it’s now at 3pm. I’m sure you’ll be done with lunch by then.”

Stephanie was Elsa’s personal assistant. Anna stared at her sister, open-mouthed. “But it’s my birthday,” she said. Goodness, she couldn’t think of anything worse than having the lengthy annual check-up on her birthday, with all the poking and prodding - internal and external - and blood tests and goodness knew what, they always managed to think of something new.

Elsa looked at her, the barest hint of puzzlement showing on her face. “You just said you had time.”

“I mean - I guess -”

“Then there’s no problem.”

“I guess.”

Elsa stood, picking up her coffee cup. “Have a nice lunch,” she said. “I’ll see you at dinner.”

“See you at dinner,” Anna said, quietly. 

Should she move the appointment again? She probably could. Stephanie would raise an eyebrow, but she’d make the call. Or Anna could ring herself, of course. But Elsa….it was probably easiest just to do it. Get it over with. Anna would time how long it took and allow herself a window of Birthday Time tomorrow.

-----

Anna had nothing to do that morning. She read a little, and she walked in the garden, and she thought about going shopping but there wasn’t anything she wanted, or at least nothing she wanted that she would be allowed to have. So after a while she walked all the way up through the empty bare house and into the attic. If she walked carefully round the old pieces of furniture still stored up here - nice furniture, warm wood with carved designs, mirrors with golden curving frames, chairs with little curly feet and rich red velvet cushions - she could reach the window at the end. Anna pulled over one of the chairs (brushing it down first so that she wouldn’t cover her white dress in dust), and sat looking out. From here, you could see right over the garden and the fence, right over the other houses and out to the woods on the horizon. The trees were green and resplendent in the late spring. Anna put her chin in her hands and imagined them swaying slightly in the breeze. She’d walked in those woods, more than ten years ago, when her parents had been alive and everything had been different. She wondered if the bluebells were out. 

Anna fumbled in her pocket and pulled out her phone. She didn’t have her headphones, but no one would hear her all the way up here, if she turned the volume low. She needed a little - just a little - John Foster to help her through today. He had definitely recorded a song about bluebells - or that always made Anna think of the bluebells, shimmering like the sea under the branches of the trees in the wood. She set it playing, tinny through the phone speakers, and closed her eyes. The sun through the window was instead being filtered through the leaves of the trees. She couldn’t smell dust, but the rich earth, teeming with green things pushing their way to the light. Maybe she wouldn’t travel, when she had her freedom; maybe she’d just go up to the woods and lie down in a clearing until her soul was clean. However much time that took.

Oh, no, speaking of time, she was going to be late for her lunch - the boring lunch she didn’t want to have, but was apparently all her birthday would be, so she’d better go and try and enjoy it. What else was there to do?

-----

Despite the sun, the town centre was cold between the buildings. Anna’s toes froze in her white sandals (what a silly, impractical colour for a shoe - but they went with the dress) as she walked towards the restaurant. She hadn’t chosen it, Portia had - and Anna knew why, it was because she knew Anna would pick up the bill. And what did that matter? She didn’t actually have to pay it, but she still resented it, somewhere deep down. It was Anna’s birthday and maybe she’d rather eat somewhere different. Maybe she’d rather go to somewhere where you were served a decent plateful of food, food you could recognise, rather than a set of coloured blobs and smears that meant you were still hungry even as you left the place.

Her friends - she didn’t have any others, so Anna supposed that after all she’d rather claim them as such than not - were already there, and soon they were settled at their table, with glasses of wine and plates of what was probably meant to be food. Portia was talking about her dog, as usual. Anna knew that she did genuinely love the dog, but she wished Portia could talk about something else for just two minutes.

“I wish I could have a dog,” she said, when Portia paused for breath. “But Elsa’s allergic.”

“I can’t imagine Elsa with a pet,” Donna said.

“Elsa would have a cat, with long white hair,” Portia said, “And a diamond collar.”

“No, she’d just have tropical fish,” Donna said. Anna bit the inside of her lip. Why did everything always end up being about Elsa?

-----

At half-two Anna made her excuses, paid the bill, and went out into the square. She’d meant to call a cab, but it was a nice day after all - perhaps she’d walk, it wasn’t far to the doctor’s office. 

As she was leaving the square she heard someone call her name, and turned.

“Mrs Davies!”

“Anna, please! Call me Lillian.”

“Oh, I can’t call a teacher by her first name.”

“I haven’t been your teacher in a long time. It’s Lillian. How are you, dear?”

“Oh, I’m very well, thank you! How are you?”

“I’m wonderful, dear. Just moved back to town to help them out with the bats. Have you heard about the bats? Down in Bennett’s Field?”

“No?”

“They’re going to build on Bennett’s Field, houses, and of course people have got to live somewhere, but there’s a rare species of bat in the woods right there. The locals have been trying for years to get it recognised as an SSSI - Site of Special Scientific Interest, you know - so they won’t be able to build. But they can’t get there to get the evidence. So,” Lillian’s eyes glinted, “We’re setting up a camp on the field. Just until we can get this sorted out. Once they start building it’ll be too late.”

“Isn’t that - illegal?”

“Oh, not very. Hardly illegal at all. Not the kind of illegal that matters, anyway. What are you up to these days? Want to join us?”

“Oh, no!” Anna said automatically. “I couldn’t - I have to go to a doctor’s appointment -”

Lillian laughed. “I didn’t mean right now! But, the more the merrier. Do you good to get out of the house. And there’s a whole group of us.”

A young man had come out of the Co-op behind her and was waiting, holding a couple of bags. “Recruiting, Lil?” he said.

“Just another ex-student,” Lillian said cheerfully. “I need you all down there so I can boss you about, like old times.”

Now Anna recognised the man. He’d been at school with her, though a couple of years above. Gosh, he’d got tall. And broad, too, in the shoulders.

The man - Kris, she was fairly sure his name was Kris - was looking her up and down. “I wouldn’t bother with this one, Lil,” he said. “She doesn’t look the type. I’ll be in the camper,” and he walked off and down the street.

“Don’t mind Kristoff,” Lillian said. “He’s probably just talking about your lovely shoes, which are so pretty but not really right for the forest. No, you know where we are, Bennett’s Field, in the corner closest to the trees. Bring a tent and a sleeping bag, it’s just like Guide camp. We’d be glad to have you. Bring your friends,” and she walked off, waving. Anna waved back, and stood for a minute. 

Then she shook herself. Doctor. She had to go to the doctor. Hopefully the appointment wouldn’t last too long.

-----

The check-up started as it always did. Some samples taken, then questions while the samples were processed somewhere else. Then Anna was checked over, and results came back and the doctor looked at them. And then usually they would be done, but this time the doctor frowned at her computer, and tapped her fingers on the desk. Then she said “Excuse me,” and made a telephone call; then she repeated a few of the tests she’d done before.

Then the doctor said brightly that they had a new scanner, just a few months old, and Anna would need to come into the other room to be scanned. Just one last thing to check, it wouldn’t take long. This way, please.

-----

And now Anna was dressed, and sitting back in the doctor’s office, and barely an hour had passed. But there are those moments that forever split your life into Before and After; the only one she’d known up until now was when the police officers had knocked on the door to tell her and Elsa that their parents had died. But now, this.

It was her heart. The doctor had shown her some lines on a graph, and spoken in a kind and soothing voice. Really, Anna was very fortunate it hadn’t given her any trouble up until now, and without the new scanner they might never have known. Any sudden, severe shock might cause fatal heart failure. And her heart would fail, most likely, within the year. Certainly within eighteen months.

“I’m so sorry, Miss Rendell,” the doctor finished. “I know it’s a lot to take in.”

“Yes,” Anna managed, drawing a shaky breath.

“Now, if you would like, I can refer you to my colleague in the city,” the doctor said. “There are more tests they can run and it’s possible they may be able to do something.”

“What sort of tests?”

“Well, I’m not sure. More scans, I expect, probably investigative surgery. Would you like me to do the referral?”

Anna shook her head. She couldn’t think. A year! A few months more, if she was lucky.

“Perhaps,” the doctor said, in a kinder voice, “You would like to come back in a few days and we’ll talk about it some more.”

“Yes,” Anna said, seizing on that. “Yes, I think so.”

“Now, you don’t need to do anything in particular. Just try to take things calmly. No big shocks. I’ll give you a list of symptoms to watch out for and when to go to the hospital. And I’ll put this all in writing for you, I know these things are hard to take in. We’ll talk again in a couple of days. Miss Rendell?”

“Yes,” Anna said. “Yes, I’ll - go. Thank you.”

-----

Anna was halfway home before she remembered that she could have called a cab. Should have done. After all, she was dying. A laugh escaped her before she could stop it. She’d never lived, and now she was dying.

A loud exhaust coming towards her made her look up. An ancient VW campervan, bright orange, trundled along the road past her, the driver leaning one arm out of the window; it was Kristoff, tapping his hands on the door to the radio, listening with a half-smile on his face as Lillian in the passenger seat talked to him. The air through the open window blew his hair into his eyes and he pushed it out of the way. For a moment his eyes met Anna’s, then the campervan was gone, putt-putting its way down the road towards the woods.

[meditationnearme]

Is This Crazy New Treatment The Cure To Your Insomnia? - how do you reduce stress

NuCalm promotes itself as neuroscience-backed tension and sleep technology. In practice, though, it simply helped me nap. I recently awakened from a delightful 20-minute nap. Really, it was more of a 10-minute half-nap half-trance, preceded by ideas of what I required to accomplish today that slowly liquified into the types of non-sequitur visions that take place because earliest phase of sleep.

In some way, this was rejuvenating. For the last week, I have actually been checking out the NuCalm system. According to its website, NuCalm is "the world's only trademarked neuroscience innovation clinically shown to deal with stress and improve sleep quality without drugs." It includes a neuroacoustic software application app utilized for 20- to 120-minute increments, an eye mask and the abovementioned processing discs, and in practice includes listening to ambient, cinematic sounds (comparable to this) with your eyes closed and a sticker label stuck to your inner arm.

Each of the elements are designed to set off the body's parasympathetic nervous system, which aids with recovery and relaxation. The disc is created to launch gamma-aminobutyric acid, a neurotransmitter that inhibits cortisol and adrenaline. With this and the app, NuCalm halts your body's tension action and therefore the mental and physical toll tension can handle the body.

military, 49 sports teams and in over a million surgical treatments. Some dental offices even utilize it for clients who hesitate of the dental expert. NuCalm's 'bio-signal processing disc' Although the product is touted as a way of possibly healing the body from injury, addiction and physical concerns, it appears predominately useful for relaxation and anxiety.

By this procedure, my use of NuCalm was a success: After my 20-minute session this afternoon, I certainly felt far more refreshed and awake. While a few of my sessions kept me conscious the whole time, I at least felt a bit more relaxed than previously. At the start, I 'd believed I was supposed to treat the session like a meditation, preventing letting my ideas roam.

Why I was so focused upon events of this age during my session is a secret to me, but regardless, I think I still dropped off to sleep for about five minutes. Unusually enough, a FAQ section of the app states that memory recollection is a typical characteristic of "theta brainwave variety," and that recalling memories in this phase allows you to dissociate negative feelings from them.

Overall, NuCalm did enable me to take best little afternoon naps in a structured method. I am decent at sleeping as it is, but I do believe something about NuCalm, whether it be the discs or the noises or the timer, made those naps more effective than usual. One glaring problem with NuCalm, nevertheless, is its rate.

Perhaps as I keep utilizing it, I'll find that this is a totally reasonable expense for the advantage of much better relaxation, health and sleep. At this moment, however, I 'd pay possibly $10 a month. The app likewise requires some major upgrading, as it presently only uses 3 various session types (recharge, reboot and rescue) at differing lengths and with a rather cumbersome layout.

Instead, it feels rudimentary, with lesser parts of the app like the post-session debriefing FAQ totally nonfunctional. I have actually taken some fantastic naps this last week, and I'll keep utilizing NuCalm for this function. It's a nearly simple and easy way of fitting 20 minutes of pure relaxation into my day. Whether those bio-signalling dics do anything, I'm still suspicious in addition to a cleaner app, I 'd need to get a bit more trust in the science to pay $60 a month.

Magdalene Taylor is a junior staff writer at MEL, where she began working two weeks after finishing college. Her work is a mix of cultural analysis and service, covering whatever from reconsiderations of low-brow hits like Joe Dirt and Nickelback to modern disability issues, OnlyFans and the kinds of small concerns about life like why baby carrots are so wet.

According to the company, thirty minutes of NuCalm is equal to 2 to 3 hours of corrective sleep. The NuCalm website boasts that the de-stressing treatment takes simply 2 minutes to administer and less than 5 minutes to accomplish its effects, making it the extremely meaning of a quick repair.

With its sleek website and claims of high-tech, borderline-magic outcomes, I half expected my NuCalm experience to occur in the literal future or, at really least, a center that reeked of sci-fi vibes. I believe I was imagining a workplace that looked like the ship from Passengers and a large set-up reminiscent of the memory-implanting tech from Total Remember or possibly even a coffin-like pod directly out of The Fifth Component.

My NuCalm treatment was not administered on the set of a motion picture, but it also wasn't administered in a dental expert's workplace. On the early morning of my visit, I drove across Los Angeles to Santa Monica to the workplaces of an authentic medical professional to the stars, whose Hollywood customers includes starlets, authors and motivational masters, and who boasts know-how in energy medication, integrative medication and bioidentical hormone replacement treatment.

Rather, my NuCalm experience began in a (actively) dimly lit waiting room that looked more like the living-room of an eccentric, well-traveled college professor than a medical center. The doctor was fashionably late not with another patient, simply in getting to the office. While the tardiness might usually have actually frustrated me, here, it appeared like part of the experience, almost like a sneak peek of the outcomes of the high-tech treatment that awaited me.

Throughout a quick consultation, the physician discussed the NuCalm procedure and summarized the science behind it (more on that later). The gist of the system, I learned, was this: I would chew a tablet of gamma-Aminobutyric acid, or -aminobutyric acid (or GABA, for short), a repressive neurotransmitter suggested to decrease activity in my nerve system.

I would listen, through headphones, to binaural beat music music with two various balanced pulses that activates Alpha and Theta brain waves, which are connected with the very first stage of deep sleep and meditation. Likewise, I would be blindfolded. And, in Doc Hollywood's workplace, I would do all of this while lying on a waterbed although the waterbed, I learned, is not a standard or needed element of the treatment.

I was led to a small exam space (or, possibly, a large closet), where I was offered a big GABA tablet and told to chew but not swallow it while the medical professional marked time the binaural beats and connected the Biosignal Processing Disc to my wrist. Lastly, after what seemed like a much longer duration of time than it possibly could have been, I was informed to swallow the GABA vitamin sludge, which had the artificially sweet, fruity taste and distinctly milky taste and texture of Flinstones vitamins that are a couple of months past their expiration date.

The NuCalm treatment itself was completely pleasant. The music was calming but interesting (I've since registered for a binaural beats playlist on Spotify bless the web). The milky, orange-adjacent taste of the GABA tablet didn't remain in a particularly noticeable way. And the waterbed was warmed, that made for a relaxing place to lie down and rest.

What am I doing incorrect? Why don't I feel calm? If science can't make me chill TF out, am I just a lost cause? Perhaps if I do a body scan, I'll be able to feel the results. That's a good concept. I'm going to do a body scan. This will resemble mindfulness on steroids orange-flavored, healthy steroids.

I am broken. I was wrong. It was not practically over. Maybe it's the kind of thing you can't feel in the moment, however I'll observe a substantial distinction when it's over. I have a lot work to do. Stop thinking of work and being stressed. That beats the entire purpose.

I asked how typically he advised that individuals come in for NuCalm treatments and he stated that it differs, but that some individuals "need it daily." I couldn't help however think, based on my experience and the lack of concrete outcomes, that that appeared excessive. He handed me some research study further discussing the science behind NuCalm prior to rushing off to his next appointment, and I left sensation disappointed and a little anxious about my failure to feel less distressed through the treatment.

For the record, it's not. I discovered the experience to be a little New Age-y in practice, however the system really is based in science. Drawing from neuroscience research into the patterns the brain goes through throughout natural periods of relaxation, every component of NuCalm is created to simulate that process and prompt a stressed brain to switch gears to a more relaxed state.

NuCalm works specifically on the body's inhibitory system, the GABAergic system. This gadget is bio-mimetic in that it resets the naturally taking place negative feedback loop of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis, which when properly functioning is expected to shut down and stop releasing cortisol from the adrenal glands after the end of a stressful occasion.

Individuals in this state are physically not able to have a distressed reaction. Within moments of application, users will start to feel remedy for the 'fight-or-flight' considerate nervous system action and their tension hormonal agent (cortisol) levels will start to decline as the HPA axis is hindered." Here's a quick breakdown of the science behind each phase of the NuCalm process.

It's really the primary repressive neurotransmitter system in brain circuits. Gamma-Aminobutyric Acid is a relaxation neurotransmitter that the body produces naturally when we're preparing yourself to sleep, so the strategy of utilizing GABA supplements to signify the brain that it's time to relax makes good sense. What's not completely clear, nevertheless, is how effective oral GABA supplements remain in triggering those advantages.

While some studies have actually revealed that GABA can cross the blood-brain barrier, others have shown the opposite, suggesting a possible placebo result behind perceived benefits of the supplements. Researchers agree that more research is needed to figure out how useful GABA supplements really are. According to NuCalm's website, the disc "simplifies the process of triggering the parasympathetic worried system, by tapping into the body's Pericardium Meridian with specific electromagnetic (EM) frequencies." The disc (which, again, was a round sticker, about the size of a quarter, that was used to the within of my wrist) was, undoubtedly, my greatest source of apprehension at the same time, and NuCalm's official explanation of the science behind it highlights the most Brand-new Age-y vibes of the company.

It is hypothesized that if you can restore the frequencies that take a trip through the Meridians you can reinstate ideal physiology. Each NuCalm disc holds the EM frequency patterns of GABA and its precursors to provide a pure biological signal to your body. When put on the within your left wrist, at your Pericardium-6 acupuncture point, the disc sends a signal to the pericardium of your heart to trigger regional parasympathetic nerve fibers, which then transfer the signal to your brain telling it to increase vagal nerve output and start the process of decreasing the body.

In 2017, Gwyneth Paltrow's GOOP promoted a $120 brand name of bio-frequency stickers, leading to a short-lived viral moment for the tech. Sadly for proponents of the devices, the action wasn't fantastic, with Mark Shelhamer, previous chief scientist at NASA's human research division, significantly decrying the GOOP-endorsed product as "snake oil." Although the NuCalm site describes that "each disc holds the electromagnetic frequency patterns of GABA and its precursors to provide a pure biosignal to your body," it's unclear exactly how putting the sticker on your wrist sets off that shipment.

[myrskytuuli]

Goldie O’Gilt and Her relationship with Children Over the Years

So the most obvious reaction to this episode was write a ficlet. Obviously. Yes, this is way too angsty and serious, but you know me  ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ 

As a child, there has been a special type of fear that educational pamphlets aimed for little girls had roused in her. The world of print had been populated solely by glowing mothers, surrounded by litters of rosy cheeked children, all advising young girls to stay away from bad literature and suffragette movements. They had unnerved her childish mind, this army of almost identical women in the almost identical living room. She had imagined them preserved inside a great big glass cube, rows and rows of them kept inside the office of the man who printed the pamphlets.

Tell us a story Goldie’mama!

Goldie doesn’t like children. They are small, and easily breakable, and needy. They get everywhere, are always on the way, and trust you unconditionally if you just show them the smallest bit of kindness.

Goldie herself grew out of childhood very quick, and zoomed past her girlhood in one fast flash, taking the mantel of womanhood maybe too early. But that is all ancient history by now and therefore unimportant.

When Goldie is trapped in Pandemonium, the imps jab her with thousands of splinters all over and talk to her about her son.

Goldie doesn’t like it that Scrooge has suddenly decided to dedicate his life to raising two small twins. Della and Donald are suddenly all there is in his life, and Goldie’s flirtations are no longer enough to draw him to leave Duckburg. There are more important things, like the kid’s school plays and taking care of them when they are sick and helping them with their homework. Goldie doesn’t especially like being jealous of ten-year-olds, but she is.

Women who got their education from pamphlets with the mothers in glass-cubes in them might have not known what their own bits looked like, but being part of the profession Goldie had had an entirely different education. She knew all about vinegar-soaked sponges and chemical syringes and douches. She always knows a guy who knows a guy who knows a guy who can get you illegal rubbers. She’s careful with this, if not with anything else in her life.

It’s why she feels so stupid laying down in her room at the Blackjack saloon, missing a certain sourdough and his uncomfortable cabin in the woods. She never does this anymore, not without a sponge and a rubber both, the men who pay themselves to bankruptcy to afford her eager to comply with every restriction that she throws at them. 

But this time she had been too caught up in her own desire to manage any rational thought to filter through her brain. She spends a minute imagining a little duckling with Scrooge’s eyes and her hair.

Then she gets up and goes looking for the stash of syringes and chemicals that the girls keep in the dressing room.

Goldie is subscribed to her granddaughter’s beaktube channel and watches all of her videos religiously. DickieDee94 does not know that she even has a grandmother, and Goldie aspires to keep it that way.

                                   When the green one calls her, she is too surprised to end the call then and there. That turns out to be a mistake, as the child turns out to be amusing enough to keep her interest piqued. Plus, he has a valid point in that it will make Scrooge very annoyed.

Returning back to Klondike after decades is harder than she expected. There is a certain weight in Dawson, the city that made her in so many ways. Gave her taste of the stars, of things that will haunt her forever. Money, power, glory, the L-word.

But the shadows in Klondike are also starker, deeper, and the memories of her at her worst are what makes her drop by the local orphanage and dumb the entire prize of her latest heist into their office. Goldie is under no illusion that you can buy your way out of sins, but there is something about the little girls playing queens and princesses with crowns made of tin-cans that touches even her.

She blames the drugs, as in both the weed she had been on when she joined in the orgy, and as in the ease of birth-control pills in this modern world of wonders. The weed made her forget about condoms and the birth control pills were so small, and easy to use that it was easy to forget whether you had taken one or not.

She is already in the hospital lobby, when she hesitates. She imagines a little girl, with her eyes and eyes of…someone, following in her footsteps. Helping her in her cons. Her teaching the child all her tricks. Travelling with a companion who accepted and understood her completely and perfectly.

She’s not afraid of the procedure, like the doctor suggests when she decides to cancel her appointment. She knows that this is not the traumatic and painful experience that it was before, but the image of the little version of Goldie O’Gilt at her heels is too tempting.

When Goldie is 18, her customer says that he won’t pay her if there is a rubber involved. She is still a child in many ways, and bends, believing that bad things don’t really happen to her. But they do, and her fellow girls take her to a secret doctor. He is barely older than she is, and just as scared. In a way, it is just as much his life on the line as hers. She might die for his mistake, and he might lose everything for her slip of a tongue.

It is as painful as she has heard, but the fear is worse. The knowledge that others have died on this table. Biting the cloth in her mouth, the small room with a mould stain in the ceiling that she keeps staring.

She is feverish for a week afterwards, but that is manageable. After the week she can work again and that is all that matters.

Snakehips’ husband still comes to the Blackjack every evening. Goldie still remembers the excitement in the dancer’s voice when she had told Goldie that she wouldn’t be coming to work anymore, she was getting married. Goldie didn’t believe in marriage, but she tried to be happy for Snakehips.

She wished that Mr. Storkesby had proven her wrong, but he hadn’t. There he was, buying Goldie’s whisky and getting close the percentage girls on Goldie’s dancefloor.

Goldie visited Mrs. Storkesby one night on a whim, in their small cabin at the outskirts of Dawson. She was there, tending to their son and smiling.

“Oh, I don’t mind that he still goes to the saloon. I have this little angel to keep me company!” She smiled down at her baby in a way that Goldie found incomprehensible.

Goldie’s egg hatches a son, which throws her off the loop instantly. It hits her then and there, that it won’t be a small version of her that she has to raise, but a person. Individual, helpless person that she has no idea what to do with.

The green triplet keeps sending her text messages where he wheedles, begs, argues, and whines about how much he wants to be her new apprentice. Goldie tells herself that she is keeping them for comedic value only.

“Well done sweetie! You will make a splendid mother one day.” her mother compliments seven-year-old Goldie when she brings her ailing mother tea to her bed.

The child welfare services take her son from him when Jaden is nine. She can’t exactly blame them, as she was the one who contacted them. Jaden is heartbroken, as he is still too young to realise that it is not normal that his mom leaves him alone for days at end and that he has almost died two times in the last two weeks.

“Give me my aunt back!” The green triplet yells, as brave as a lion, releasing Goldie from the glass-cube that she has been imprisoned in. He is clever, brave and sharp. There is a suggestion of young Scrooge in him, but not enough that Goldie cannot admit that it is mostly her sentimentality talking. He is a child who has been raised by extraordinary good parental figures. He is a child who despite having such great parental figures, has still chosen Goldie as an honorary aunt.  

Goldie slips the photograph of Louie Duck in her wallet, and for the first time ponders about the grey area between full motherhood and full stranger-hood. The avenues that honorary aunt-hood might open. The beautiful muddy ground of extended familial relations. She doesn’t stay of course, but she does think about it all a lot.

[letmeringabell]

Legends Never Die - Chapter 2

Chapter 2 : Fancy Meetin’ Ya

I know, I'm posting really fast. But you've just gotta let the creative juices flow before I experience untimely burn-out that makes it harder to write. On the side-note, I really love Ada Wong's design, I think there's something just so mysterious and pretty about her design. So, imagine Vanessa as Ada.

Why Vanessa? Well, I only liked Vanessa because you could shorten it to Van. I also considered Vesper, and Diana, which I think are suitable names.

Also, can you tell I'm a fan of longing glances and slow burn? Yeah, I eat that shit up. I'm a sucker for fics of these cliches, and I always wanna die. But anyway, do tell me what you think of this chapter, whether I'm going too fast, too slow, whether i'm writing too much or too little. If you have any headcanons or scenarios, tell me now or forever hold your peace. Or do I forever hold my peace? I don't know man.

(3185 words)

AO3 link : https://archiveofourown.org/works/20806688/chapters/49454489

-

The flurry of sand and desert heat hadn’t been too kind on him, but when has Outworld weather been known for Southern hospitality? Nevertheless, he counts his lucky stars that he’s finally back, because the last mission has his bones ragged. The last mission hadn’t been hard, just tiresome; One of Kotal’s ‘trusted’ partner had been selling Imperial secrets behind his back, and who better but Erron Black to chase the bugger down?

Only this partner was highly elusive—Sending him high and low, left and right, and running all around to catch a whiff of the man. He had roamed from city to city, from village to village, and his target manages to sneak away at the last moment each time. The whole cat-and-mouse chase is enough to drive any man insane, but the cowboy isn’t deterred by the challenge so arrogantly posed. In fact, he waits, bides his time on the down-low patiently for any misstep by his target.

Although, a word from the wise is overdue; One must never let their guard down during a chase, especially when the predator had been the masked marauder himself.

Yet all it takes is one afternoon for the man to forget, wondering through busy markets without a care in the world, while Erron patiently stakes out in a room of one of the buildings nearby with his rifle aimed surreptitiously at the man’s head. The reminder had been fatal; All it takes is one shot, and the man falls without a sound.

The chaos that ensues after makes up for the silence in the man’s death. Everyone gathers around the corpse, and screams at the horror of the whole situation. He feels no need to wait around and collect the man’s body; The news of that man’s death will travel around, and that is proof enough that he had been successful in his headhunting. Nature had given everyone something to fall back on, and sooner or later, someone’s gotta fall on it.

And this time, it was that man’s turn to fall.

And it was his time to tap out for the night, had enough of all these games of cat-and-mouse. Gotta rest the old bones before conquering the days ahead.

Imagine his surprise when he got back to the Palace, to see the place filled to the brim with Special Forces units. He sees the Kahn having a conversation with the Commander, and saunters towards them, ignoring the hushed whispers on the sidelines.

“Hola, Miss Cassie Cage.”

“Erron, how awful it is to see you.”

“I assure you Darlin’, the feelings mutual,” He shoots back, “What brings you over to our humble abode?”

It is Kotal that cuts through their ‘cordial’ banter, “I have invited Special Forces here to help strengthen our ties with Earthrealm. Kitana and Jade will take care of their day-to-day needs, you will overlook their sparring sessions.”

Erron glares at the Kahn, but he lets it slide – The Kahn always compensates for his time generously. It is what keeps him loyal, and motivates him to undertake all sorts of janky missions for the sovereign. There is never a dull time serving Kotal, and he appreciates the unpredictability in his missions. It keeps him preoccupied, and least of all, keeps him entertained.

He excuses himself and leaves the Kahn and Commander to their affairs. Besides, he has an errand to attend to; A drop-off of rare medicinal herbs for the doctors at the Infirmary. All of them had requested for this specific breed of Spider Lilly, said it was good for re-energizing the tired soul. He could care less about the methods used in re-creating that effect, what mattered was the results.

He doesn’t bother with knocking when he enters the Infirmary. They know it’s him by the sound of his footsteps and they scramble to surround him like moths to a flame. He hands over the flower, and they thank him profusely. Appreciation and gratitude are good for the soul, but when a man’s tired, nothing sounded more tempting than a sip of whiskey and a comfortable bed to sleep on.

He looks up and catches sight of a woman leaning against the doorway of the unused office. Short raven hair, equally dark eyes, and she stands hardly the height of Sonya nor Cassie Cage (at least, from this distance), but looks strong enough to easily throw a man over her shoulder should he look at her the wrong way – Fitting, for a person working in the Special Forces.

It doesn’t hurt that she’s easy on the eyes as well. So, he tips his hat off to her, Howdy unspoken in his greeting towards her. He knows she can’t miss it, because he catches her in the act of sizing him up as well. Yet, she seemed confused, and a little curious? Nevertheless, she seemed to return the gesture with a small nod of her own before closing the door to retreat into the room.

“Who is she?”

She is one of the Doctors from Special Forces, one of them had replied. She had been part of the Special Forces Delegation, and assigned to the medical unit in the Palace infirmary. She came to learn and bring back Outworlds treatments and cures back to Earthrealm. A question pops into his head-- Aren’t Earthrealm’s medical practice vastly different from Outworld? In Outworld, doctors use high-level magicks to heal wounds of all variety—Burns, grazes, you name it. Given the supernatural nature of Outworlds modern medicine, he highly doubts she can learn anything from these doctors who uses spells instead of science.

 (Then again, the only thing he knows of medicinal remedies is when his own Pa spat whiskey into his wounds, and damn, the pain had been one sonuvabitch to swallow)

-

“The Valerian root helps patients deal with their anxiety, a form of sedative, one might say. But taken in large and uncontrolled amounts, only backfires and induces insomnia.”

“What about this?”

“The Goldenseal root is used as an antiseptic. Again, if consumed in large amounts, is highly poisonous and will only further irritate the eye and skin.”

“And this?”

“The Echinacea leaf is commonly used to prevent flus or colds, but long-term use could disturb the body’s immune system.”

“Basically, too much of anything is a bad thing.”

-

Making medicine with the herbs and plants found in Outworld is challenging. The art of making medicine in Outworld, she finds, is similar to chemistry – If she places too little of one herb, the supposed effects don’t flourish and are made redundant because it is overpowered by the potency of other herbs. Yet, if carelessness had been her approach, she could easily induce unknown side-effects, or worse, actually kill a person. Thus, the delicate balance of underwhelming and catastrophic are outcomes she monitors like a hawk.

She enjoys this side of her work nonetheless. It allows her to better understand the more traditional aspects of her work, and expand on more creative options should modern medicine fail in being readily available.

However, the paperwork, and regular inventory checks are cumbersome all the same. Her rationale is that sometimes, you’ve just got to sit through the unsavory parts of the job so that you can reap its benefits. That doesn’t mean she can’t silently complain about how uneventful some days, or how stagnant her progress in learning can be. It’s become a point of contention, and it’s only been 2 weeks since her first day in Outworld. Her hands are itching for something new to work on.

Bored eyes cast sweeping glances over the city, and of course, she catches a glimpse of the cowboy himself. Ah, today is the training session between Outworld and Special Forces’ Soldiers. He is relaxed; There is a slight slouch in his posture, and he didn’t seem too interested in the body-tossing action happening right before him. She can tell, that he is still hypervigilant – His arms are at his side, and are steadily poised beside the holsters on his pants. All it takes is one motion to swipe his pistol up, and BANG!

And as much as she hates to admit it, her thoughts do float around the masked man she had met, no, seen. She hadn’t talked to him, nor has she passed him by in the past 2 weeks. She had asked her colleagues about the man, and the responses she had gotten were strangely varied – ‘He’s the Kahn’s main headhunter’, ‘A man who knows how to drink any man under the table’, and ‘Save a horse, ride a cowboy’. The last phrase had been told, but felt unneeded. Any person’s business under the sheets, is nothing she wants to know about. Least of all, his business.

But you are curious, a small voice whispers in the back of her mind, He is the leading man shrouded in mystery and danger.

She reprimanded herself; There are other things to be curious about.

-

The whole day has been a bore, and its starting to make his hands itch and fret restlessly. Apparently, today’s training session had been requested by Miss Cage, what better way there is to strengthen the bonds of friendship than participating in friendly kombat? He could just shut one eye, and believe her desire for camaraderie between soldiers of two realms, but he can see through her bullshit as clear as day, and it makes him raise a wary brow at the Commander.

The logic behind her unspoken reason had been sound – It is best to fight as many types of kombatants as you can, provided that one chooses their opponents well. Any Tom, Dick and Harry can get the theory down easy. But if you don’t have the practice, the real hand-to-hand experience, one can only expect to have their asses handed to them over and over again. Face-to-face Kombat allows fighters to exercise their real-time reactions, gives them the chance to better their reflexes and recognize the precise moment to either move forward and attack, or retract and defend.

So, today is a masterclass in Outworld Kombat for the Special Forces. However, the session is but a double-edged sword. Just as the Special Forces had come to learn and observe, the army had come prepared to do the same.

His eyes search for any telltale of black within the sea of browns and blondes, and is only greeted by her absence in return. He wants to make her acquaintance, and knows that she is a doctor for the Special Forces. That doesn’t give him the right to be waltzing into her office without any sort of official business. It would only invite talks of rumors and gossip to fly around, and he would be doing them both a favor by abstaining from such behavior.

So, what’s a man to do to earn his trip to the doctor’s office without seeming like such an ass?

He looks at Miss Cage, unless, the stirrings of a brilliant idea come to mind.

-

“Yo, Clint Eastwood! You too chicken to step into the Kumite zone with me?”

“Put your money where that mouth is, darlin’.”

-

So maybe he had been a little harsh, but Cassie had no qualms with dishing out her own brand of revenge – One rapid, well-timed kick to the core followed by a solid punch to his face. A just reward for insulting a beloved father. Outworld Soldiers are surprised by his lack of vigor in the fight, but none of Special Forces are surprised that Cassie is fierce in defending her family’s honor.

His face might hurt, and his pride a little wounded, but the fight had yielded results. He is sent to the Infirmary to await doctor’s treatment.

He waits because she is out for the moment, so he takes the chance to look around the room. There is nothing out of the ordinary; There is a couch placed near the door to welcome guests (or, patients), the books are shelved back-to-back against each other, and labelled for trouble-free browsing. He finds that most of the books are medical in nature, save for a select few in herbology and astronomy. A doctor must have her hobbies, he digresses. Everything on the desk is neatly arranged with each item assigned their designated corners; stationeries in one corner and a stack of papers in the other.

He picks up the top most paper on the pile, and lets his eyes roam over the elegant handwriting. He thinks she could easily be an artist because the sketches of various flowers and herbs are so lifelike, they mimic the figure of their real-life counterpart. There are arrows pointing to formulas and possible side-effects everywhere, and although her workspace maybe organized, her notes are just a jumbled mess.

But he admires her tenacity in the research because her notes are an impressive study in Outworld’s green.

Clack!

He turns around, and speak of the devil; She is there in the flesh, and a lot taller than he remembers.

“I’m sorry for the wait. My name is Vanessa, and I will be attending to you this evening.”

She ushers him to the seat beside her table, and begins her task; She listens to his heartbeat, flashes a light into his eyes, and asks him the routine, “Where do you feel pain?” and “Does your family have a history of serious diseases?”. He answers honestly and concisely – It’s just my face, and, I reckon not. She faithfully jots down whatever he says down into a piece of paper, and reaches for something in one of the drawers.

“First off,” She starts, and he sees a medical kit being placed on the table, “I can save you the trouble and stitch your wound now, but you’re also free to leave if you don’t want my medical attention, because in my understanding, Outworld has different and better ways to treat you. So, what will it be?”

Straight to business. “Have on, Miss Vanessa.”

She moves silently and deftly—She is quick at work to prepare all of the equipment, and arranges them in immaculate order on the tray in front of her. She disinfects the problem area, before filling the syringe with a clear liquid from one of the labeled bottles, and once he nods her assent, injects the anesthesia to help numb the pain during the stitching process.

Her gloved hands move nimbly, suture in one hand and the needle holder in the other, the constant loop of entry and exit is executed with practiced ease. Her hands don’t tremble, nor do they hesitate in fear of misstep. She is sure and confident with each push-and-pull, and it assures him that she is not without skill.

He takes the time now, to take a proper and closer look at her. Her short hair accentuates the high cheekbones and angular sharpness of her facial features and her eyes are a darkened grey; a reminder of misty mornings, and ominous fog. Her skin is glass-like, clear, no visible scar or blemish in sight. He spots the light dusting of freckles on tanned skin, no doubt, a result from the sun and heat of Outworld. She is what a cat would look like in flesh and blood, a thought he keeps safely to himself.

He will admit, she is a pretty little thing. Even so, the minute slouch in her posture, the mistiness and redness in her eyes, and the prominent dark circles under them is very telling. Underneath all that loveliness, is a woman exhausted. Whether it is the research or the field work that has her running on low fuel, he reckons that she could do with a few more hours of sleep.

She starts talking, her voice a soothing cadence to distract from the obvious monotone in the environment, “How did you get these wounds?”

“A souvenir from the past assignment, a man had gotten close enough to graze me with his knife, but not smart enough to actually kill me.”

“And why does your face hurt?”

“That’s a souvenir from your Commander,” He catches the question in her eyes, and the amused tilt of her lips, “That clown and his ten-gallon mouth deserved all the insults.”

“You really are a glutton for punishment,” She chuckles, sealing the stitch shut.

She gives him the standard doctor’s order – Rest and no sudden movements, or else he would risk exposing himself to an infection due to his torn stitches. He’s heard it all, from day one until day now, but he is thankful that she keeps it short and sweet.

“Do you sleep well, Mr. Black?” She interrupts him leaving, pulls out a bottle for him to see. “You can take it, it’s free.”

“Well, look who we have here, a doctor playing crafty salesman on a hot Sunday afternoon. Nothing in this world comes for free, so what’s the catch?”

She raises her arms in mock defeat, her expression is full of mirth, and a playful smile reaches her eyes, “Okay, it’s not FDA approved yet, but I know for a fact that it works. Cassie uses it, Jacqui uses it, and a few hundred others can also attest to its success.”

He raises a curious brow at her, a sign for her to continue her sales pitch. No matter how much she tries to hide it, he can tell that she is proud of her creation, because her voice is full of it, “It helps eases tenseness, and makes sleep easier, but unlike other soporific drugs, it doesn’t bring about excessive drowsiness, so you’re still able to react appropriately to any possible threats.”

Soporific, what a five-dollar word.

But he has something else in mind, because he leans in and places both arms rigidly on the arms of her chair, effectively trapping and confining her in the tight space between his arms. He leans towards her, and stops when the gap between them is nose-to-nose. He admits that he is shameless and forward in his flirting, but he wants to see how she would respond-- would she retreat further into her seat, or would she lean forward, would she bridge the gap between them?

So, she responds, neither further nor retreating. She stays still in her position; Her hands are firmly placed in her lap, while her grey eyes are staring straight back at him, her gaze sharpening into that of gentle steel.

“Hey Van, I was wondering if you had- Oh.”

Both of them immediately turn their heads towards Jacqui, the deer in headlights. Jacqui is full of apologies, because she is standing there, stumbling over her words, and says sorry over and over again for disturbing whatever doctor-patient examination they were having, and speeds out of the room faster than the pace she came in. Jacqui’s interruption breaks whatever tension, anticipation and apprehension swimming in the room, and it calms and cools the heat between them.

The Cowboy finally stands straight, his smirk hidden behind his mask and makes his way for the door.

“I’ll see you around, Miss Vanessa.”

[elizadoolittlethings]

Cyberons, sexy Zygons and Mark Gatiss: the bizarre world of the unofficial Doctor Who spin-offs

An oral history of the franchise's unlicensed spin-offs with Sylvester McCoy, Nick Briggs and those at the heart of Who's fan-made films

By Thomas Ling

Tuesday, 27th November 2018 at 1:19 pm

Colin Baker, the man who played The Sixth and arguably proudest Doctor, was next to naked. But he didn’t seem bothered by the bare front peeking through his limp dressing gown. And nor by the vision of a dying Peter Davison that had caused him to collapse while presenting a live TV weather report moments earlier.

Instead, in this semi-stripped moment, his focus belonged solely to Nicola Bryant, the actor who had played Doctor Who companion Peri – and the woman currently planting kisses down his exposed chest.

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A surprising turn, many would think, but Baker seemed completely at ease. Yet soon there would be things he couldn’t ignore.

Soon he’d unearth a plot to replace humans with a synthetic race that could survive a poisoned atmosphere. Soon he would encounter a mysterious Michael Moore-style filmmaker who took the appearance of Sylvester McCoy. And, perhaps most worrying of all, soon he’d witness an apparition of Jon Pertwee that would vanish as unexplained as it had appeared.

Of all the directions Doctor Who could have taken, few could have predicted this. Yet the above is exactly how many fans celebrated the show’s 30th anniversary in 1993: watching a half-naked Colin Baker in The Airzone Solution, a fan-made straight-to-video multi-Doctor story.

Except this wasn’t actually a Doctor Who story. Not officially, anyway. But while Baker, Davidson, McCoy and Pertwee weren’t actually playing Time Lords, The Airzone Solution was Doctor Who in all but name. As McCoy explains to us, the film was “a kind of shadow of Who. Something different with major Whovian influences.”

And although not a licenced Doctor Who production, The Airzone Solution had more of a standing in the fandom than anything the BBC had gifted Whovians since putting the show on hiatus four years earlier in 1989.

While the amateur filmmakers behind Airzone managed to reunite four Doctors for an hour-long special, the BBC’s planned anniversary extravaganza The Dark Dimension collapsed completely mid-production. From its wreckage the Beeb merely marked three decades of the most influential British sci-fi creation with a Doctor Who/EastEnders crossover introduced by Noel Edmonds.

True, this Children in Need short saw the Tardis back on BBC1, but Romana riffing with the Mitchell brothers and the Fifth Doctor crossing paths with Pat Butcher was hardly the glorious return of the Time Lords many had imagined.

So, with fans’ appetites unsatisfied, thousands fed their hunger for Who with The Airzone Solution and the string of 24 other spin-offs films that emerged in the show’s wilderness years – the decade and a half without a regular Doctor Who TV series.

They weren’t official BBC stories, but they did heavily borrow from Doctor Who mythology and featured a mix of past actors, characters and suspiciously familiar monsters (no points for guessing what the ‘Cyberons’ were based on).

More importantly, though, these films nurtured Who’s biggest stars of the revived series. Writer and actor Mark Gatiss, voice of the Daleks Nicholas Briggs and writer Robert Shearman, alongside the likes of Alan Cumming and Reece Shearsmith: all cut their teeth on these films.

And while many of these stars might look back at them with a blush, the spin-offs may well be the reason they ended up working on the revival show.

Despite their shaky CGI, shoestring Sontarans and nymphomaniac Zygons (more on that below), these films actually silently shaped the Doctor Who we know today…

The first, the unoriginal, you might say

It all started in Wartime. All 25 spin-offs were sparked by this 35-minute one-off, a fan-made story that centred on Whovian favourite Sergeant Benton. Although not a household name for modern Who viewers, Benton was a stalwart soldier of the Pertwee era of the show, a key UNIT officer who battled against Cybermen, Daleks and even dinosaurs on Britain’s streets.

Yet it’s not the return of original actor John Levene as Benton, the character’s surreal confrontation with his soon-to-be-widowed mother or even the fantastically 1980s CGI skull that stands out about Wartime. It’s the release date: 1987, two years before Who was pulled off air.

In other words, Wartime wasn’t made in response to the cancellation, but for a very different reason.

“We made Wartime because we weren’t happy with the way that Doctor Who was going and we thought we could do better,” says Wartime producer Keith Barnfather, one of the founding members of the Doctor Who Appreciation Society and former BBC and Channel 4 employee.

“That was an absolute joke considering the funds available. The only reason that [Wartime] got made was that everyone who did it did it virtually for nothing.”

With borrowed costumes, a minuscule budget of only a few thousand pounds and a filming location they had never visited beforehand, Barnfather and his newly-formed production company ReelTime Pictures got Wartime in the can in just three days ­– about a fifth of the time it takes to film a modern Who episode.

The result: a creaky-looking drama with questionable effects and an enthusiastic but ultimately forced performance from Levene. But all these glaring flaws weren’t important. All that mattered was it had got made. A group of fans had actually put together a real self-contained show set in the world of Doctor Who.

“I was happy – it was the first time we did anything and we actually finished it!” says Barnfather. “It’s not a bad little drama. Even today I can watch it and not cringe.”

Most importantly, however, Wartime proved that independent spin-offs were possible. It showed that Doctor Who stories didn’t require Doctor Who on BBC1. Because when the show was finally cancelled two years later in 1989, other also looked to put their own Who adventures on camera.

And this time the Doctors themselves would want in…

The Time Lords materialise  

Determined, brilliant, completely barking mad: there are many ways to describe Who filmmaker Bill Baggs. Indeed, some labelled him all three after he founded BBV Pictures in 1991, kick-starting projects with some truly out-of-this-world ambitions.

Why? Although only a young video editor at BBC Nottingham, the aspiring director/actor aimed to do more than tell Doctor Who stories about background UNIT soldiers. Baggs wanted the Doctors ­– and plenty of them.

Staggeringly, he got one in his first film. After a script was cobbled together for short drama Summoned by Shadows, Baggs approached Colin Baker to play a lead character known simply as The Stranger, a mysterious and eccentric unnamed traveller who roams time and space with a younger companion. Nothing like The Doctor, of course.

And despite not actually playing a Time Lord, or knowing virtually anything about the film, or having met the man behind it, Baker signed up.

“I could not believe it. I was wetting myself with excitement!” remembers Baggs. “As a Doctor Who fan you have little fantasies about this, but you never expect them to pan out! I was blown away and deeply honoured.”

Although we can’t be sure of Baker’s motives for coming on board – he declined to speak to us about the spin-offs – Baggs puts forward one theory: “I think from Colin’s point of view, he was doing a lot of theatre work after Doctor Who, so why not give up a few days and potentially invest in me, fool that he was,” he says with a laugh.

“From his point of view, I had no profile. He didn’t know me from Adam, apart from being this potentially up-and-coming director. But if you show passion and desire then often people will support you.”

Whatever the reason, Baker did join the project. And despite Baggs becoming cripplingly star-struck after meeting him at rehearsals (“I asked him for a cup of tea and disappeared down the corridor!”), filming soon started in true Doctor Who style: in an empty quarry – the same one, in fact, where Baker had filmed Attack of the Cybermen years earlier.

https://www.dailymotion.com/video/xanrcw

Like Wartime, this drama had a minuscule budget (just £3000 in total) and, as with the majority of Doctor Who’s 1980s episodes, it hasn’t aged well. Baker’s wonderfully understated performance, however, still shines through. He’s quiet and thoughtful throughout, showing fans exactly what his widely-criticised Doctor could have been.

As Mark Gatiss later told Doctor Who magazine (issue 332) about the films: “I remember watching them and thinking they didn’t look very flashy, but in terms of trying to portray real characters they were a massive improvement on Doctor Who!”

Gatiss wasn’t the only one taken with Summoned by Shadows and what would become ‘The Stranger series’ – thousands bought the films on VHS by post and at conventions.

Demand became too high, in fact. “I had to set up three VHS machines in my bedroom and I was duplicating videos through the night,” says Baggs, recalling how he had to call on his parents to help his videotaping “mini-factory”.

Above: a clip from The Stranger: More than a Messiah

So many copies would be sold, in fact, that by 1993 Baggs had the confidence to embark on a project bigger than anything he done before: a one-off special for Who’s 30th Birthday, The Airzone Solution, the film that would eventually feature a scantily-clad Colin Baker.

Fortunately, that scene doesn’t represent most of the film. Penned by the emerging Nicholas Briggs, Airzone was an environmental thriller set in a near-future Britain where pollution forces the government to build giant filtration plants to clean the dying planet.

And in true Doctor Who style, these centres actually serve a much more sinister agenda: kidnapping and experimenting on innocents to create a new species of human.

Baker once again signed onto the project and Baggs convinced Peter Davison to jump aboard (“that was another moment of punching the air!” Baggs recalls). This was soon followed by McCoy, a monumental achievement considering he was technically still Who’s incumbent Doctor.

Like previous spin-offs, this was by no means a major project with BBC1 exposure and a large pay-packet. But, for McCoy at least, it was a way of keeping the fandom thriving.

“We wanted to feed a hunger that was alive at that time for more Doctor Who,” he says. “I knew the BBC had made a huge mistake by putting Doctor Who into hiatus. I also knew the fans loved [the spin-offs]. For the fans I thought ‘yeah I’ll do this!’”

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Furthermore, with a TV revival appearing absurdly unlikely in 1993, McCoy considered the project the only way Who could survive on screen.

“You might find this hard to believe, but I don’t really have a Tardis. I couldn’t really travel back in time and tell everyone ‘we’re going to make a TV film and then they’re going to bring it back again!’” he chuckles.

With these three star signings, others followed suit. Actors including Nicola Bryant, original Davros star Michael Wisher and the then-relatively-unknown Alan Cumming all joined the film.

But then someone even the omni-ambitious Baggs thought too unattainable got in touch: Jon Pertwee, The Third Doctor. “Sylvester came to me one day and he said ‘I’ve been speaking to Jon Pertwee and he’s been asking why he’s not in it. He might get in touch!’” Baggs remembers.

Sure enough, the call came, with Baggs happily at the former Doctor’s mercy. “It was very charming to actually have an actor so connected to the show call and say ‘I’m in it, whether you like it or not!’”

Pertwee may have been completely unfamiliar with the script when he turned up to set the next day – Peter Davidson actually had to hold up cue cards for him during scenes – but in it he was. And for two days, four Doctor Who leads were brought together for some good old-fashioned low-budget sci-fi.

“It obviously didn’t have quite the financial support that the BBC gave Doctor Who. But it was great because the fans were so involved,” recalls McCoy “We were treated very well. We all had a great time!”

McCoy’s recollections of the shoot are all positive, whether teasing Baker “for taking his job”, filming a chase scene that would fail any modern risk assessment (“I took my glasses off and would be driving around half blind!”), or simply spending time with his Doctor Who co-stars.

“I remember filming and just sharing the day with Colin, Peter and the glorious Jon Pertwee. It was great because it was still alive. When the BBC stopped it, you thought ‘well, that’s it, goodbye’. Doctor Who is one of the great jobs,” he says.

“And although this wasn’t Doctor Who, it was very like Doctor Who.”

The Pandorica opens

As suddenly as the Tardis surfacing from the time vortex, a whole series of Doctor Who spin-offs materialised after The Airzone Solution. Some good. Some bad. All brilliantly weird.

For ReelTime, the makers of Wartime, the next Who project entailed a team-up between Elisabeth Sladen’s Sarah Jane Smith and The Brigadier (a role reprised by original actor Nicholas Courtney) in a story called Downtime featuring the Great Intelligence and some gloriously low-budget Yeti monsters.

This was followed up by adventures featuring Sontarans, a Shakespeare-loving Draconian and even former Doctor Who companion Sophie Aldred, this time playing an unnamed character with, completely coincidently, the same direct way with words as Ace.

But while these characters were typically used with the BBC’s permission, other spin-offs – mostly those created by maverick Bill Baggs under BBV Pictures – simply gave a heavy nod to Who, such as the murderous robotic machines featured in Cyberon or the aforementioned interstellar traveller The Stranger.

But despite the glaring similarities, there seemed to be little fear of the BBC shutting down production. “We didn’t care!” laughs McCoy, who starred in many of Baggs’s later spin-offs. “They deserved to get annoyed because they abandoned it and the fans!”

On other occasions the dramas blended the show’s characters and actors in ways that, simply put, just didn’t make a lot of sense – even by Doctor Who’s timey-wimey standards.

Take the Torchwood-esque PROBE series, directed by Baggs and penned by future Who and Sherlock stalwart Mark Gatiss, a writer slowly gaining success with The League of Gentlemen at the time.

This mid-1990s series centred on the Preternatural Research Bureau, a paranormal investigations unit led by classic Doctor Who companion Liz Shaw, a character Baggs had got permission to use. Original actor Caroline John even reprised the role, a casting that appeared to ground the drama firmly within the world of Who.

However, for rights reasons PROBE wasn’t permitted to mention The Doctor or most events surrounding the show – a restriction that meant Liz was forced not to recognise a non-Time Lord character played by John Pertwee, an actor she had shared adventures with during his tenure as The Doctor.

Mostly, however, the spin-offs followed new characters battling old Doctor Who baddies as they wreaked havoc over the planet. Most notable of which were the Auton films.

Featuring the likes of Reece Shearsmith and CGI that rivalled that seen in the 2005 revival show, the first two of BBV’s ‘Auton Trilogy’ of the late nineties are widely considered the best independent Who spin-offs.  

“They are by no means perfect, in fact they’re horribly flawed. But I wrote and directed both of them under fairly impossible budgetary and time constraints, with a lovely team of actors,” says Nicholas Briggs. “I think we managed to create something that worked pretty well.”

However, Auton’s biggest impact on the Who fandom came just before the revival of the main show. Just as the BBC had to reach a deal with the Terry Nation estate to use the Daleks in the show (negotiations that fell through at one point overallegations the broadcaster wanted to make a ‘gay Dalek’ cartoon), they had to consult Bill Baggs, who still held the rights to the Autons thanks to an agreement with the estate of creator Robert Holmes.

“Before it restarted, the BBC phoned me up and asked me if was okay for me to do an Auton show,” laughs Baggs.

“I told this to my wife thinking she wouldn’t say anything, but it happened to be the weekend she was at the Gallifrey convention. And a bit later I got a phone call saying ‘why does the whole universe know that the first episode is an Auton one?!’ I had to apologise humbly.”

Furthermore, some have said characters created for these fan-made spin-offs may have actually inspired those that appear in the main show. Foremost of which: Kate Lethbridge-Stewart, UNIT commander and daughter of the Brigadier.

Kate appeared in Chris Chibnall’s The Power of Three in 2012 and the 50thanniversary special The Day of the Doctor – but a character with the same name, background and blonde hair first featured in fan-made film Downtime 17 years earlier.

“Let’s just say we came to an accommodation,” says Downtime producer Barnfather on his subsequent chats with the BBC around their use of the character. “I would never do anything that would hurt the programme or bring it into disrepute.”

Yet Kate Stewart aside, can we say these fan-made spin-offs really gave more to Doctor Who than they took? Did they really inspire the plots of modern Who? Considering the stories the show has produced since its 2005 revival: absolutely not.

However, what if you judge the impact of the spin-offs by the talent they gifted to the main show years later? Well, that’s when things get a lot more interesting…

Stars are born

However flawed these films were, they’re where the Who writers of today learned their craft. They didn’t just make talent like Mark Gatiss and Big Finish head Nick Briggs known amongst dedicated fans, they also gave them a platform to jump to the main show. And, even more importantly, they nurtured the creativity needed for their later projects.

Briggs is the prime example here. Through his extensive work in the world of unlicensed Who he perfected performing Dalek voices, mastering the equipment and vocal tics needed to make a convincing tinpot terror. And this meant when the BBC announced the Doctor Who revival, Russell T Davies was quick to get Briggs on board.

“[Davies] had me in mind from the moment he’d decided he was bringing the Daleks back – not just because he thought I was good at doing Dalek voices, but because he was aware that I had the technical know-how to recreate them,” Briggs explains. “In the absence of a BBC Radiophonic Workshop, I was the sort of total solution. Very lucky for me.”

However, the spin-offs did much more than offer Briggs a route onto the main show. “Any ‘turn around the block’ creating something, no matter how flawed, is invaluable experience for a writer or director or any kind of creative person,” he says.

“It’s one thing to dream, but it’s quite another thing to get the practical experience of actually creating and finishing something.

“[The spin-offs] gave us a real ‘go’ at bringing a dream to life, and helped us realise that we could not only create something, but create something worthy of an audience.

“Actually making things engenders a feeling of permission to create. That’s a big hurdle for any creative person. Do I have the right to create, to communicate, to entertain? Having practice at making something helps to give you that feeling of permission.”

Mark Gatiss echoed a similar sentiment in a League of Gentlemen blog, explaining that although he didn’t want it to be released on DVD, he had gained valuable experience writing The Zero Imperative, his first ever TV script.

“Christ, for all I knew, they were the only things I would ever get to make,” he said. “And I learned a frightening amount from working on them.”

And one of the lessons Gatiss appears to have learned is how to work with some tricky characters. Namely, Bill Baggs.

“I’m a constant meddler when it comes to the scripts,” recalls Baggs. “But Mark tolerated that really well. I remember we would sit together and improvise scenes, which I loved. I’d like to get hold of his writing sometimes and give it a tweak and an edit, but I take my hat off to him. He’s been so successful. There’s nobody else who deserves more and having that experience with him is fantastic.

“But Mark probably wouldn’t have his career in Doctor Who without BBV.”

So, why didn’t Baggs end up working on Doctor Who like Gatiss? Why is it that the man at the heart of the unofficial fandom spent, as he puts it, “a lot of time wondering when the phone was going to ring”?

Rather than being asked to direct an episode, why did Baggs fail to break through to the show, instead funnelling his energy into an alternative medicine, Emotional Energy Healing, and becoming an ‘Akki energetics practitioner’?

Despite Baggs’s assertion that he could work on the main show if he wanted to but simply chooses not to, there could be another reason behind his absence. As Gatiss once told Doctor Who magazine, although he had a “great time”, Baggs “had some very strange ideas as a producer.”

And although Gatiss was referring to Baggs’s tendency to swap scenes around “arbitrarily”, this isn’t one of the strange ideas that fans eventually knew him for.

The misadventures of Doctor Screw

We should say this up front: Bill Baggs wasn’t the first to bring sex into the Whoniverse. During the show’s hiatus years, characters such as Bernice Summerfield (written as a companion of Sylvester McCoy’s Seventh Doctor) were often portrayed enjoying some, shall we say, advanced docking maneuverers on the Tardis. Summerfield even apparently had a fumble with The Eighth Doctor himself in book The Dying Days.

However, while ReelTime Pictures kept their films PG and in a similar style and ilk to the main show, stablemate BBV and Bill Baggs became ever more proactive in bringing the saucier side of Who to screen.

That image of a naked Colin Baker we brought up before? The one where he romped with Nicola Bryant, who played Peri in Who? That was thanks to Baggs, who directed the unscripted scene (from under the bed – “I had to! There was no space in that room!”) against the wishes of writer Nicholas Briggs.

“I’m credited as the writer of The Airzone Solution, but I did not write that scene,” Briggs says adamantly. “It was irrelevant to the plot. [Baggs] seemed to agree with me. But I later found out that he just gave up arguing because he could see I wouldn’t change my mind. Then he deliberately deceived me and wrote the scene in any way.”

Baggs, however, stands by it. “Everyone had an opinion about it,” he says. “People got grossed out by it and some found no problem at all.”

But that scene was nothing compared to 2008’s Zygon: When Being You Just Isn’t Enough, dubbed by one reviewer as “the only Zygon-based soft-porn film ever to have been made”. And that’s not an exaggeration. Fortunately, it doesn’t feature the red starfish-like aliens making use of their suckers, but the 18-rated film does see the Zygons at the centre of some very NSFW activities in human form.

Although billed as a serious drama, Baggs openly says it was initially envisioned as something more titillating. “I met a guy at a convention who was into soft porn and he convinced me there was a market for it – not that I had a massive desire to produce a soft porn film, but you’re always interested as a director/producer what markets there were.”

But looking back now, Baggs concedes the project was a misstep. “It was my mistake and nobody else’s,” he adds, before quickly adding: “I’m glad I tried it, though. It was a massive learning experience.”

Zygon wasn’t quite the end of Baggs’s spin-off ideas, with BBV releasing When to Die, a PROBE drama in memory of Liz Shaw star Caroline John in 2012.

However, since then Baggs has been focused on producing theatre dramas, and although he and McCoy still enjoy times together at conventions, the sun has set on the golden time (and space) of BBV films.

A fandom regenerates

26th March 2005, 7pm. For fans across the world, this was the moment the ‘real’ Doctor Who returned to screens. After over 15 years of waiting, the universe’s foremost Time Lord returned in a regular series, captivating a whole new generation of Whovians.

But for the makers of the spin-off films, it was a bittersweet moment. Producers like Bill Baggs had spent years trying to cater for fans with nowhere else to go, fuelling the fandom with films made possible by pure passion for Who. And now it was over: the fans just didn’t need BBV.

As Baggs says, “It was frustrating on one hand and utterly delighting on the other.

“Before they announced they were reviving Who, Alan Cumming and I were actually going to do a special drama, an anniversary special for BBC South with Alan Cumming as The Doctor,” he laments. “But we ended up getting a call from a Who producer telling us we had to stop because the show was coming back – that’s when I first found out.”

Today BBV only operates a small web business and while Barnfather and ReelTime Pictures still film an occasional Who spin-off, they mostly specialise in the likes of archaeological videos in the Greek world (“We’ve got quite the reputation in Cyprus”).

Yet some still claim that fans owe a great debt to Barnfather and Baggs. “Thereason why we’ve got Doctor Who now on television is thanks to those fans who did it way back then,” says McCoy. “The fans of today should be thankful to him because he helped keep alive Doctor Who.”

But is it really true that without their work keeping the fandom alive, the BBC would have never recommissioned the show? Not everyone is convinced.

“That’s absolutely rubbish,” says Barnfather. “The programme would have come back – it’s a franchise that will never die! Even if the Doctor Who fandom didn’t exist, the BBC would have brought it back.”

“The facts just don’t support it,” agrees Briggs. “The people who made the decision to bring back Doctor Who to television had no idea that any of these things existed.”

Yet while it may not be the reason for Doctor Who’s revival, it’s undeniable that these films fostered talent that would change the Tardis forever.

Perhaps more than anything, the films represent how the fandom and the series are forever intertwined. These 25 forgotten spin-offs demonstrate that the line between dedicated fans and the show is beautifully permeable, ideas and talent forever travelling between the two.

And that’s still true to this day. Remember WhoLock, the viral video that imagined two of TV’s greatest characters together? Or the perfect fan-made trailer for Peter Capaldi’s first series? The editor of these films, who goes by the pseudonym John Smith, actually went on to work as a VFX artist for Doctor Who.

This is the real beauty of Who: its fans are constantly creating, inventing new ideas that could make their way on screen in years to come. It’s a collaboration that makes Who and its lead Time Lord arguably stronger than any other sci-fi fandom.

And sure, this symbiotic relationship might bring to light some of the stranger facets of the fandom, or a nymphomaniac Zygon or two. But, just like the Tardis, these spin-offs have often taken The Doctor where he didn’t want to go, but precisely where he needed to.

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[x]

[ohgoddard]

Fist of Fire: Omega.1.4.

Heroes dying is nothing big, unless they were big of course. They die all the time, the villain arms race pulling ahead for but a few minutes. However, its never for long. A villain can never stay in power for long. Unless they’re in congress. I did my fair share of damage to those guys too, believe me. I hated those bastards. In my quest to achieve a quiet head, I had to pop a few. Some were heroes. At least they called themselves that.

Making the honor “hero” a job is up there in the stupidest things humanity has done. No one signs up to be a hero, they are intrinsically one. This is where you get people like the Ultra-Knight, and the race riots of Carson City after his ‘crusade against crime’ ended three dozen lives. Three dozen black lives. The agency covered for him, laying a marvelous case out that pointed to some law infraction in each of the persons lives, calling it all probable cause. Even the fourteen year old who happened to be carrying eyeliner she accidentally didn’t pay for. You can imagine how the case was received.

I was fed up with it. Not with the case specifically, however I was in those crowds in Chicago, but with Heros in title only. People who saw life saving as a paycheck and not the obligation that comes with their job or circumstance. I detest hero academies, hero schools, the whole agency. They may call me an abomination of the costume, a terrorist, but I am more of a hero than they ever were or will be. Because I knew when the “hero” wasn't a hero at all. I’ve been pulling on your chain recently doc, so i’ll give in just this once. Then it's back to the usual lunacy. Celerity of mind only comes once in a while, I hope you understand.

Fantasma was my first. Not my first killing, that was done a few months before hand. Some pimp in a brothel with kids. No, Fantasma was my first hero killing. This might surprise you, because the official cause of death was ‘blunt force trauma by result of duty’. I was that trauma. Fantasma was a sick man. He used his powers of invisibility to get blackmail and perv on the people. He used his office as a way to escape consequence. No one is going to believe you, that a hero would blackmail you? Watch you while you sleep and shower? Record you in your intimate moments? Preposterous it would seem.

No one had proof. How can you, when the very man you claim to be stalked by cannot be found. The police most likely knew, but did not do anything. They used him to go beyond the 4th amendment, search a perps home without them knowing. Had I known what he was doing sooner, no doubt would I have done the same. It would have saved lives. I know all too well of the suicides he has caused. Some of them were at his insistence for some sick game. I found all of this in his files he kept on every single person he blackmailed. For someone so great ta breaking in, he kept a surprisingly lax protection for himself. But I am getting ahead of myself. I do that sometimes.

Did you know Fantasma watched you too, doctor? I am surprised as you are. I thought I remembered your name when I heard it. I read it in those files of his some time ago. You must have been traveling in the city at the time. He hadn’t the time to confront you I suppose. Not like he had anything worth knowing on your file. You were gone too quick. Count yourself lucky, doctor. He did awful things to the women he liked. Anyways where was I? Yes, right.

The voices told me about Fantasma. I heard his name countless times but ignored it, much like every other hero name I heard that wasn't my own. However this one managed to get past me, I could not tell you why. Perhaps it was because it was a cry for help. A cry for help from someone to stop Fantasma. In my usual speed, and backed by an increasingly rare curiosity into the problems of the public, I went over. Stopped a car wreck, a mugging, bank robbery on my way there. No one ever talks about those. Always the bad, never the good. I made my way to the cry, but I could not find it. It had stopped. 

My search revealed the body of a young man, no older than 22. Three gunshots in his chest. A Polaroid resting on his wounds, covered in his blood. It was a clear shot of him and another man, being very… close with another. I found his body in an alley, in between two tall brick buildings. Dozens of people walked by, yet few could tell me if there was even an alley there, let alone if they heard a gunshot. This boy called out Fantasma’s name before he passed, before someone shot him. Now I am the last person to tout my investigative skills, but even the most fly-brained of private eyes could figure out where to go from here. But I needed proof. Not because I was going to go about this in a legal way, mind you. No, I needed to know for myself. I didn’t care then for the politics between the agency and the public, I still do not. However, there are plenty of people that steal the identities of heroes. I do not want to execute an innocent.

I still haven't, by the way. I only take care of the crooks.

Around this time people still thought I was the real Omegaman. I still by birthright, technically. You get what I mean. So strolling into the Chicago branch of the hero agency was a piece of cake. Now you may have a hard time imagining this building because its been destroyed a few times in its lifetime, so let me paint you a picture. Think of the most beige and sad administration office ever. Lifeless grey cubicles lay beyond the pretty receptionist in the lobby. Filled with a few dozen hard-working pencil pushers who kept up with hero jobs, categorizing them, and other boring maintenance tasks. A farm of human life and effort. Truly, the realest evil is the ones we cannot punch away.

Anyways I walked in, costume in full, and just walked into the records room. Omegaman was not to be questioned. His duties were beyond that of Ted Bizby, hero accountant. The records rooms were old school. This branch had not caught up to the modern day, and it made things a variety of easy and difficult. Easy in the sense that everything I needed was kept in one succinct file, easy to read and handle. Downside, the sorting system of the past century seemed to have also evaded the Chicago branch of the agency. With my super-speed and with great effort given to cover my tracks, it took me seven hours. Over nine-hundred heroes in the city, I know in my broken mind the identities and weaknesses as documented by the agency by heart. I also found Fantasma. Frances Garcia-Hernandez. Aged 39, lived in a four room home on the outskirts of the city. No wife and children. God has little miracles for us all. Attached in the file was a picture of him, visible. A thin goatee went around his flabby face. His body was not made for fighting. It would make things easy for me.

What made it even easier was the forty five page complaints against this hero. Every single one followed the same story. Blackmail. Each complaint was flared on the paper, “investigated; dismissed”. I took his file and left the agency. While flying back to my home at the time, a woman’s homeless shelter, I pulled up my phone to check the police database.

Every person who complained on that list is dead. Natural causes. Varying from falling A/C units, debris from nearby hero fights, stray gunshots from gang fights, you name it. It doesn’t take Sherlock Holmes to know this is bullshit. It seems impossible, of course, that any one person can do all this. But not any person is invisible.

It was three days after I made my discoveries that I flew to his home. Crime never sleeps, but I need to. He lived in a very small gated community beyond the city boundaries. Fantasma seemed to live in irony, being someone who breached others security, kept lax home security, but at the same time wanted the very best money could buy. A man of very puzzling interests. Shame that many of them were illegal. His home was a modest one, two rooms per each of its two floors. I came as Kiara that day. It was very easy to get into the gated community, apparently Mr. Garcia-Hernandez had many young women callers. You can imagine why.

Can you see why not all  my murders were bad? I even hesitate to call them murders. More like the removal of cancerous tumors. Or de-leeching.

It was early evening when I knocked on his door. I had dressed in a hoodie and jeans to look as normal as possible. It made it all the more sickening when he opened his door and smiled at me. He stood about my height, but luckily packed exactly as much danger as I expected. He was dressed ina  wife-beater and boxers. His teeth were a disgusting yellow, and his balding head managed to actually cap it off with peak creep. He said to me, “Why, I don’t remember having an appointment today. But my memory is spotty and I could always use the company.” His breath reeked of alcohol. The hero of the people indeed. He put his long and controlling arm around me and beckon me into his home, and I took note of the speed he locked the door behind me. The first time he has done that.

This was not the first time I had been in his home obviously. I had been here before, in the room upstairs filled with industrial servers where he kept gigs of blackmail. But he didn’t know that. And now I had him trapped. This is where the agency’s official deah report differs. It reads that a villain had found his identity and infiltrated his room and killed him in his sleep. What happened was I beat him with a chair leg. Brutally. He had no chance. I rendered him the first stage of human evolution, the sludge he truly was at his core. I spent hours beating him. I tore him apart with my hands after the chair leg broke. He was long dead before hand but I didn’t care.

He would feel all the pain he caused.

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

“That will be all for today, thank you.”

She sounded much more strained today. I turned my head to look at the doctor, doing my best not to intimidate. I asked her with genuine sincerity ,”Doctor was I too descriptive today?”

“No,” she replied. “No, you were good today. I think we are making progress. By.. by getting you to open up about your problems we are closer to fixing what is wrong with you.”

She was lying. She is not ok. Something about her heartbeat. Her sweat. She is scared. But this isn't the fear of me, no I know what that feels like. It's the fear of.. Oh i'm an idiot.

“Doctor, don’t worry about your information getting into the wrong hands. I used his servers to smash him into pieces. He had no back ups. You and many others are safe from copycats.”

A slowing of the heart, a strained smile. “Thank you for your reassurances, Kiara-”

“Omegaman.”

“Omegaman. But I am ok, really. These sessions are about you.”

I flash her my gayest smile. “If you still feel scared, I can escort you to safety.”

It had the intended effect, the heightened heart rate and the blood rush to the cheeks. Her usual professionalism took over, sadly.

“Miss Ki- Omegaman. This is a professional environment. That is all for today.”

I laughed as they carted me back to my room. I still need to sell the crazy look.

[miyu-hyperfixates]

Train attendant!MDZS AU (part 1)

So I’m currently reading a C novel called Card Room. Which is basically the MC and ML having to go through several survival/puzzle/escape/mystery rooms. And the arc I’m reading right now is about murders occurring on a three-days trip train and the two main characters have to investigate and solve them. In real life, one is a forensic doctor and the other one is a police investigator, so it’s pretty easy for them. In the context of the room though they are impersonating train attendants.

And at some point after discovering the first victim, the forensic doctor rattled a bunch of medical facts and the witnesses around him where like “???” and one of them even went like “Are train attendants really that amazing nowadays? You know medicine?!”

So then a plot bunny emerged in my mind about an universe where aboard a train all staffs are actually hidden (or not so hidden) badasses... Like if you’re familiar with the TV tropes terminology they are all either  Ambiguously Trained or Almighty Janitors.  And because my mind always come back some way or another to MDZS nowadays.

So imagine the MDZS characters... It might be that after canon, all of the characters for some reasons miraculously came back to life and all the cast managed to reach immortality. Or that all of them are actually the reincarnation of the canon characters and remember their past lives (and got the same skills/abilities). Anyway, no matter the reasons, they are all chilling in the modern areas and for some reasons are actually all ‘working’ as staff members of this special train.

Except none of them actually bother to hide their skills or even try to appear normal... Some do try to at least do their jobs but well, with more or less success depending on the person ...So of course pure chaos and mayhem follow!

[Note, this is written in a sort of outsider perspective... So most of the time I use identifiers while referring to characters. The parts in brackets are mostly the thoughts/reactions of the passenger witnessing the general craziness of the MDZS’s characters....

Note 2: Also this is supposed to be pure crack, so please do note take anything seriously. ] 

Coach 1 &16 - the Driver coaches

So one of the thing a passenger on the MDZS Express might notice that the driver carriages are actual very long compared to standard ones. They are like half the length of a passenger carriage, which can usually house up to twenty rows of seats. What does the driver needs such a huge space?  

It is a staff only area so passengers are not allowed to access it. But periodically passengers sitting near the door would able to hear a loud “swooshing” and “thumping” sounds, as if someone was violently swinging a baseball bat in there.

Only few staff members are seen venturing into there. And the driver is hardly seen by anyone.

Most of the time it’s a very handsome man wearing all white clothes with a constant serene smile on his face, who’ll gentle knock on the door carrying foods into the driving carriage. The 1m90 driver will then open the door and welcome the man in, a very soft expression on his usually stern and scary face.

Occasionally a short attendant with a vermilion mark on his forehead, wearing a crisp and sharp uniform (he is probably the only one wearing the proper attendant uniform) and looking very aggravated will knock on the door. Compared as to when the man in white walked in, the atmosphere was definitively full of aggression and tension.

The few times the driver decided to leave his coach, his default expression seemed to be “I’m going to beat someone to death” scowl or something... and the passengers will witness this huge ass man carrying an equally huge ass fake (”It must be fake right? Who’ll allow a driver to carry such a weapon?!”) saber on his back strode down the aisle....the first time it happens all the passengers collectively froze in fear... Random passenger A: terrorist?! Is this a terrorist attack?! Are we all going to die?!

But after a while they got used to it and soon realized that they were always two outcomes to this situation. The terrorist  driver will either disappear for forty to sixty minutes and then come back significantly less tensed. Or he’ll come back less than fifteen minutes later dragging with him a wailing man and muttering something about training. The door will close behind them with a huge slam and then screams of distress could be distinctively heard from inside. (”Is this a murder? Do we need to call the police?!!!”)   

If you’re courageous enough to try to talk to him, when you see him walk by... Don’t ask him for the arrival times, or information about the stations and so on, he’ll just look blankly at you and say “How should I know? Go ask the short bastard.” (Aren’t you the driver of this train?!!!) [By the way if you ask him where the train is going, he’ll answer something like “north”]

Coach 15 - the staff coach

This is also a staff only areas, containing the staff’s offices and beds.

According to some staff members the cabines are soundproof. When asked why they would need such a thing, most of the attendants would shudder violently and mutter something about “everyday”. 

What nearby passengers use to describe this coach is “excessively loud”, “occasionally explosive”, “might cause the entire nearby carriage to shake from the shockwave of whatever is going on in here” and “believe me you don’t want to know”.

So let’s keep it at that. 

Coach 2 -  first-class seat coach

This is actually one of the most low key coach? Apart from being next to the driver carriage (and the drama that comes with it) there isn’t actually much excitement there.

For some reasons this seem to be the less popular coach? Only first-timers (who can afford it) would usually buy those types of tickets.

Recurrent passengers would pick up other coaches, not because it’s too expensive but because this coach is “kinda boring” 

Coach 3&4 - business-class seat coach

Those two coaches are managed by three persons: a married couple and another woman (who seems to be a close friend/sister of the wife?). All of them are wearing Tang dynasty clothes and they looked so classy in it! As if coming straight out of an ancient period drama.

The wife especially is very beautiful, she looks to be in her thirties but she’s actually the mother of the restaurant cook and the scary guy who is always scowling and whose job is unknown, and the adoptive mother of the bartender of the bar. She is also the grandmother of the two young waiters... which made her closer to sixty(”?!” “what is this witchcraft?” “Actually what kind of supreme good genes go through this family?!”)   

By the way... the other female attendant, her close friend? She is the other grandmother of the rich looking waiter in the restaurant car. And of fucking course she looked to be in her mid-thirty. (WTF)

This coach is actually quite popular? One of the reasons is of course because the two beautiful ladies attracted a lot of admirers.

But really like 70% of them are here because they want to witness the show. This coach is known as the scums lashing coach. If anyone dares to do anything improper or is particularly misbehaving, the two kickass ladies will strike them down either with their sharp tongues or with their even sharper martial skills (if the person in question tries to use force) .

It doesn’t matter if the opponent is a 2 meter mountain of muscles, they will knock them down as if it was a troublesome fly.

Regulars with particularly scummy acquaintances  would book this coach tickets hoping that they will act out of hand and be taught a lesson.

Misbehaving and very rude passengers from other coach will also be bumped up or down to the business class by the other attendants. Some of them are probably thinking that they are lucky.... but oh boy are they wrong.     

Meanwhile the husband is just serenely drinking tea in the background... Occasionally he’d ask if they need help getting rid of the trash on the floor.

Coach 5 to 8 - second-class seat coaches

Those coaches’ attendants are probably one of the weirdest combination of personalities.

There’s one man dressed in white who looked super innocent and clueless about basically everything. He is very kind and nice... but don’t try to ask him anything more that the layout of the rows.

Everywhere this man goes, there is always going to be another man looming behind him. This man is dressed completely in black and looks very serious and sorta gloomy. However his face will soften significantly whenever the white dressed man looks at him.

Another attendant from this coach is a blind young girl, carrying a walking stick. She is irreverent sometimes downright rude with a huge potty mouth and for some reasons she’ll always manage to whack the legs of the people making fun of her with her stick. And no assholes she doesn’t care if you want to go complain to her boss. 

And then there’s the psychopath. For some reasons right in the middle of showing you to your seat, or answering one of your question, he’ll randomly take out a knife a play with it, while smiling creepily and staring at you, as if he was picturing how you’ll look with your intestine out of your body.

At this point, the blind girl would smoothly walk over apologize, “I’m sorry he didn’t take his medicine yet.” and out of the blue she’ll whacked him hard in the head with her stick (hard enough that he lost consciousness). “here you go, please enjoy your travel.” Then for good measures she’ll kick him when he’s still down and walk away.

Also because those four coaches house most of the train seats, statistically speaking this is also where the vermilion guy will be. And so, more often than not, you’ll witness the train driver stomping forward and start a fight with the short guy. And whoa is it wild and aggressive. Despite behind a whole head shorter than the driver, he’ll still bite back without fear and words like “strangling to death” or “dismembering” would be throw around.

When it happens the blind attendant would heave a huge exasperated sigh and take out an electronic device before making a general announcement via the train speakers; “To smiley face, meat-head and his royal pain-in-the-ass dimpleness are causing trouble again, please come to couch 5 and deal with them before someone lose their heads because of their bullshits.”

Then less than five minutes later, the man dressed in white would stride in very peacefully, smoothly insert himself between the two fighters and then easily pick them up by the back collar, one in each hand, like particularly misbehaving kitten. (”WTF?!!!! How strong is that guy?!”) He’ll then proceed to walk toward the nearest cupboard and throw them in before locking it and placing a weird looking talisman on the door. (”.........” “Are you exorcising them? What the hell?”)

And for twenty whole minutes no sounds could be heard from the cupboard despite the periodic shockwave on the door as if someone was violently knocking on it.

Two minutes after the ‘knocking’ on the door stopped and then it was cut neatly in half. (”.....”) Allowing the two previously very aggravated people to escape from the cupboard. For some reasons though they looked significantly calmer (”Maybe they fought it out?” “Yeah, sure, that’s what happened”).     

Of course before anyone could react, a youth wearing heavy make-up ran in and wailed, “Nie-zongzhu why do you keep doing this?!! Don’t you know how to use the door? This is the tenth one this week.” The so-called meat-head: Ah... My bad. His royal major pain-in-the-ass dimpleness: Don’t worry, Xuanyu, the cost of the door will be deducted from da-ge’s pay... Though to be honest, considering his destructive track-record... he’ll probably need to be working here for more than three centuries before he’ll actually get any salary. You’d think he’ll learn some restraint after a while. The meat-head: You - Smiley face, smoothly taking both their hands and dragging them away: Okay you two, let’s go eat something. 

The non-specific coaches staff members:

As mentioned before there is exactly one (1) attendants wearing the attendant uniform. He is the most competent and proper staff member (not that it’s very hard, considering who are the competition) and probably the most reliable too (when he is not busy picking fight with huge saber carrying men or being locked up in cupboards). For that reason he is not in charge of a specific coach, but of all the passengers of the trains. His efficient and memory are kinda super scary... If you’re boarding the train in the morning, then rest assured that in the afternoon this attendant will know and remember your name, age, seat numbers, tickets numbers, Id number (from the ID Card that you showed him for like two seconds when he checked your tickets)  and food preference.

The staff member with the serene smile and dressed in white doesn’t seem to have a specific carriage either. The most likely coaches you might find him in are the 2 or 14 coaches (depending on which is closer to the driver), the bar (where he’ll chat with his brother), the coach no.13 where you’ll see him drink tea with his uncle. (This seem to be a huge family business? What’s up with all the kinship between the staffs?! Are they all connected to one another?) Or alternatively you’ll see him accompanying the most perfect employee of the century.

He seems very idle and doesn’t have a specific job? [His official job description entails dealing with NMJ and JGY’s foreplay quarrels and to keep things from turning too R18 rated in the bar... because the bartender and the guqin player are not trusted to keep their wandering hands to themselves in public]  

There is an attendant who is officially in charge of coach 2 or 14 (whichever is further away from the driver) but you’ll never actually see him there. Like he’ll stroll around in every other coaches except the one he is supposed to work in. And because he is dressing very casually you won’t even actually identify him as a staff member. He’ll smoothly insert himself into your passenger group and then happily chat with you. It’s only when the driver will barge in, dragging the attendant out to either “go do your fucking job” or “It’s time to train!” that they’ll realize that the one talking to them was a staff member.

So this attendant will come chat with you and somehow he know private information about you that he shouldn’t possibly know about and casually mention it the conversation, like “Oh, I heard your father got admitted to the hospital, is he better know?” or stuff that even you didn’t know about “Your boyfriend is such a dickhead for shitting on you with your brother.”

Afterwards it will lead to conversation like this: after the attendant had been dragged away “Oh I didn’t know your friend worked on this train!” “My friend? I thought he was yours? I actually never met him.” “Eh? Then how come he knew about your sister going to that concert tomorrow?” “I thought you told him!” “No I didn’t!” “...” “...”  

So scary.

So words spread around about that MDZS Express attendant who seems to know a lot of things and that he can be found in the second-class seat coaches. And so some people specifically book a ticket there to track him down and ask him information.

 But once they managed to corner him, his eyes would get very huge and he’ll frantically shake his head before hiding behind his fan, all the while crying “I don’t know!!! I really don’t know!”

His reaction was so intense that some would actually be taken aback... “Did we get the wrong guy?”

Then the attendant would flee and rush towards another one, “San-ge, please help me!!! Those passengers are bullying me!!!”

He got a very flat look from the ‘San-ge’ in question that seemed to say ‘Are we really still doing this?’, but even though this San-ge showed no sympathy whatsoever he still came to the passenger and told them “We are very sorry for not being able to help you. How about I bump you up to the business class coach as an apology? As a lot of passengers have sneakily tried to enter the business class areas by claiming to being bumped up by our staff members, we have established a password of sort. Once you reach the coach please make sure to find the lady wearing yellow and tell her ‘Don’t you think the dishwasher is an incompetent moron?’... She’ll take care of you. ” 

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

Right so this got way longer than expected, so you’ll get the rest of the coaches (restaurants, bar, infirmary, sleeper coaches) in another part.

Like I mentioned above I wrote this in an “outsider” POV so most of the time I didn’t mention any names.... But did you manage to identify all the characters?

Also a lot of characters ‘working’  in the second half of the train have already been mentioned obliquely before. So you know more or less in which coach they are. The only one I didn’t mention is the infirmary... but well I don’t think it’s hard to guess who work there haha.

[topicprinter]

I started Vine Street Digital after working in the advertising industry for several years. I’ve always loved being a Pay Per Click marketer but I absolutely hated the traditional agency life. In a lot of agencies, specialists and client managers are given an unmanageable amount of work which leads working insanely long hours. It’s also a pretty high pressure environment most of the time - everyone has KPIs they’re trying to meet and the better you get at what you do, the more pressure you feel.Ultimately this leads to high employee turnover. After working at agencies big and small I realised that a “Senior” person was someone who lasted more than a year. This kind of employee churn leads to a poor experience for the clients. It’s hard to get someone experienced managing your advertising if most people are leaving after a year. So you can imagine that the client churn is just as high.ImageWe tend to suffer burnout, stress and a myriad of other mental health issues just by being alive nowadays. But it was definitely exacerbated by a high pressure workplace with a very poor work/life balance. It’s not a new issue for agencies and you can read a huge range of articles on the topic like this one from 2016 right up until recently this year.I don’t think I had a lightbulb moment, I had a breaking point. I was physically and mentally unwell and I felt trapped in my career. My future wasn’t mine anymore and if I continued this way my work would always have to come first or I’d have to simply walk away. That’s when I decided to start Vine Street Digital - to do the marketing that I loved so much, but take back control of my life.I started the same way most freelancers start; as a solo operation. I took everything that I hated about marketing agencies and basically did the opposite; management was transparent, no lock-in contracts, no overload. Many agencies are great at making a high quantity of sales, but not quality sales. Clients are promised the world with nothing to back it up. So I learned to be very upfront and set clear and reasonable expectations, and if the prospect didn’t like it then so be it. As Brené Brown would say; Clear is Kind. Unclear is Unkind.How did you get your first three clients?Like most freelancers, getting my first few clients was tough! I also started with virtually no money so I couldn’t even use my own PPC skills to advertise myself. I had been in the industry for a while so I had some network behind me, but the insane non-compete clauses from past agencies meant that tapping into that network was impossible. So basically my strategy was to make a new network and I did that by giving advice. PPC is confusing if you don’t do it everyday, so business owners can get very stressed and desperate while they’re trying to understand it. I’m good at setting boundaries and I don’t work for free, but providing quick answers to questions, pointing people in the right direction and little pieces of advice went a long way. My absolute best platform for doing this was Reddit, which brought me my first few clients. Some of the contacts and advice I’ve given on there still brings in the occasional lead even today.How did you validate the idea?The big turning point was at about the 6 month mark. The way I’d set things up and the strong values I’d set for myself in the beginning were paying off. New enquiries were coming in but referrals really started taking off. The sheer number of referrals was what validated my idea and pushed me to stop being a freelancer and start being an agency.Who is your target demographic?We work with a range of clients across a vast range of industries. Mostly they’re either a small to medium business owner or they’re a marketing manager at a large company. We’ve worked a huge range of industries; plumbers, doctors, software companies, music producers, e-commerce retailers, travel agencies, restaurants, hotels, financial advisors, business coaches and everything in between. About 60% of our clients are based in Australia, 25% are in the US & Canada, and 15% are in the rest of the world. I’ve had a few weird and wonderful clients over the years mostly because of the industry they work in. Some fun ones have been cannabis related or online sex toy retailers. But I think the strangest request was from a marketing manager who was trying to fudge the numbers to his boss. He asked if we could “maybe do a little bit worse with our results this month” because he’s worried “his boss will think he’s unnecessary if it goes too well too quickly”. It was an absolutely bizarre train of logic and I had never been asked to do worse at my job before. Super weird. Any tips for finding first employees?The major shift from freelancer to agency happened mostly just by adding staff. But this posed a complicated question; how do I prevent Vine Street Digital from becoming just another toxic place to work? I wanted to give my employees the same freedom, flexibility and work/life balance that I’d achieved by being a freelancer, without all the terrible things about being a freelancer. This is why Vine Street Digital does not subscribe to the traditional office life – everyone at the company is on a flexible work arrangement. We don't have a physical office location – we're all 100% remote. Many of us work from home at least part of the time, but it's about finding what's right for you. Not all of us are productive in an office type environment. Some of us like to go to cafes, libraries or even just take our laptops outside. Not only do employees choose where they work, but they also choose when they work. This isn't just flexible start times, this is true freedom to decide when you're going to be most productive. You can start whenever you need, take a break whenever you need or, if all of your work is done, simply sign off early.This freedom and flexibility creates a productive work environment and addresses the very modern problems of burnout and high employee turnover. But most importantly, it creates an inclusive and accessible environment where staff can design their own lifestyle. No one has to sacrifice their careers for their desire to travel, have children, or live rurally. Staff with mental and/or physical disabilities have not only found this workplace to be accessible, but truly comfortable. They don't have to explain, prove, or justify their needs. Because we all have needs and we all tailor this workplace to suit whatever they might be.Sounds pretty good right? Finding my first few employees was not difficult. The job description is appealing to anyone let alone someone suffering in a traditional agency. When I interviewed people I looked for stories like mine, and I didn’t have to look very far or very hard. Posting on job sites brought in a huge number of applications. For entry-level positions I looked outside of agency life and approached university job boards and career counsellors - being able to travel and work is the dream for most uni students! I think that finding your first few employees is an exercise in your own beliefs and values and being able to identify those things in someone else. My advice is to make sure you’re actually offering something of worth - people spend so much of their time at work that you need to give them more than just money. My advice is to ask yourself “would I take this job?” but also “would I encourage a family member or a loved one to take this job?”. The reality is that time is becoming so much more valuable than money so why should someone spend all this time with you?What motivates you when things go wrong? What is the end goal?There are a few big picture goals for Vine Street Digital and for me as well. I initially started this business to create a more balanced and healthier life for myself. Starting a business isn’t usually synonymous with a balanced life and I can tell you that the first two years were hard. There’s always financial stress with a new business, but generally if you’re the founder or even co-founder you’re doing pretty much everything yourself. I had to wear so many hats that it felt like I was being pulled in all different directions. When I became overwhelmed and things were going sideways, my motivation to keep going was my big picture goal of a better work/life balance. It didn’t always feel like I was balanced, but the pathway to getting there was mine to decide. The one big thing you have going for you as a business owner is that your destiny is your own and that in itself is motivation enough for me.Do you have any advice for someone just starting out?Being a business owner/founder/CEO is more than logistics and leadership. It’s also the biggest test of the relationship that you have with yourself. I have a few pieces of advice based on the things I learned about running a business and how that impacts your own well-being.Don’t set yourself on fire to keep others warmLearning to set boundaries with your team and your clients/customers is extremely important. The temptation when you first start out is to say yes to everything. But ultimately if you start compromising too much just to please those people, you’ll burn out and not even have a quality thing to show for it. When you’re done, you’re done. Don’t feel guilty about that.On the note of burnout, it’s important to understand that you don’t have to work 12 hour days to be a good business owner. There’s a lot out there about “hustling” but honestly, it’s just an excuse to be busy for the sake of busy. Understand where your limits are and when you’re not firing on all cylinders anymore. When that happens, don’t feel guilty about walking away and having some downtime. If you’re not in a good place, you won’t be good for your business.Get out of your own wayI’m still learning how to do this one and it’s the main issue I’m facing now. As you go along, particularly at the beginning, ask yourself “what would happen if I fell off a cliff? Would my business keep going?”. It sounds morbid but it’s basically just a way of saying that you need processes and systems in place that can be taught or outsourced. I regret not documenting a lot of my systems early on because I had to do it when it was already too late. Things bottlenecked with me a lot which they shouldn’t have. Learn to let go and to delegate, and a part of that is documenting what you’re already doing.What is stopping you from being 3x the size you are now?There’s 9 of us at the moment and I’m still finding certain things are bottle-necking with me. Scaling the team (perhaps into multiple teams) really relies on having those systems, processes and checklists down pat. While this is something we’ve come a long way on recently, it’s still a bit of a hurdle at this point. What apps do you use to run your business?Slack is extremely vital for us because everyone here works remotely. It’s our main connection to each other both in terms of our work and our culture. We love slack because it allows for a lot of integrations - our favourite is giphy. We also use it to play get to know you games as well as things like “shout out fridays” where we acknowledge another team member for something great that they did. Our culture and communication is nearly all in here.LastPass is also a vital program for us simply because of the nature of our business. We’re remote and we often need to access clients’ credentials so security is a big focus for us. LastPass is great for keeping all those credentials secure but it’s also good for sharing internally with very minimal risk.One of my personal favourite programs is Calendly. We work with clients all over the world and we move around ourselves, so we have to schedule a lot of meetings across time zones. Calendly is a lifesaver when it comes to that!How is the business doing today?Right now we’re doing about $40k AUD per month, so not a fortune by a long shot. But I’m particularly proud of the growth year on year that we’ve managed to achieve. We don’t have any “sales” people here and everything comes from our reputation and our own PPC marketing. So it’s a great validation to see continued growth from that. Would you ever sell the company?In terms of selling the company, I’ll honestly say I don’t know. A good reason to sell the company would be if I stopped being the right person to run it. If I ever lost my passion or became too removed from the vision then I’m hoping I’ll recognise when that is and step back.  If you enjoyed the interview, the original post is here.

[bountyofbeads]

In the 1930s, the poet Langston Hughes published what remains one of the most honest descriptions of that dream:

"A dream so strong, so brave, so true

That even yet its mighty daring sings

In every brick and stone, in every furrow turned

That’s made America the land it has become"

The poem, though, is laced with a counterpoint of protest: “America was never America to me”—not to the “man who never got ahead”; “the poorest worker bartered through the years”; or “the Negro, servant to you all.” Still, for all its outrage, the poem ends with a paradoxical yearning: “O, let America be America again,” Hughes wrote. “The land that never has been yet.”

"Hearing stories of the American dream as a boy in New Delhi, Chetty adopted the faith. When he became a scientist, he discerned the truth. What remains is contradiction: We must believe in the dream and we must accept that it is false—then, perhaps, we will be capable of building a land where it will yet be true." PLEASE READ 📖 Or LISTEN 👂ON AUDUM AND SHARE TY🙏🙏🏽🙏🏾🙏🏿

The Economist Who Would Fix the American Dream.... No one has done more to dispel the myth of social mobility than Raj Chetty. But he has a plan to make equality of opportunity a reality.

GARETH COOK | AUGUST 2019 ISSUE, Updated at 3:47 p.m. ET on July 17, 2019. | The Atlantic Magazine | Posted July 21, 2019 |

RAJ CHETTY GOT his biggest break before his life began. His mother, Anbu, grew up in Tamil Nadu, a tropical state at the southern tip of the Indian subcontinent. Anbu showed the greatest academic potential of her five siblings, but her future was constrained by custom. Although Anbu’s father encouraged her scholarly inclinations, there were no colleges in the area, and sending his daughter away for an education would have been unseemly.

But as Anbu approached the end of high school, a minor miracle redirected her life. A local tycoon, himself the father of a bright daughter, decided to open a women’s college, housed in his elegant residence. Anbu was admitted to the inaugural class of 30 young women, learning English in the spacious courtyard under a thatched roof and traveling in the early mornings by bus to a nearby college to run chemistry experiments or dissect frogs’ hearts before the men arrived. Anbu excelled, and so began a rapid upward trajectory. She enrolled in medical school. “Why,” her father was asked, “do you send her there?” Among their Chettiar caste, husbands commonly worked abroad for years at a time, sending back money, while wives were left to raise the children. What use would a medical degree be to a stay-at-home mother?

In 1962, Anbu married Veerappa Chetty, a brilliant man from Tamil Nadu whose mother and grandmother had sometimes eaten less food so there would be more for him. Anbu became a doctor and supported her husband while he earned a doctorate in economics. By 1979, when Raj was born in New Delhi, his mother was a pediatrics professor and his father was an economics professor who had served as an adviser to Prime Minister Indira Gandhi.

When Chetty was 9, his family moved to the United States, and he began a climb nearly as dramatic as that of his parents. He was the valedictorian of his high-school class, then graduated in just three years from Harvard University, where he went on to earn a doctorate in economics and, at age 28, was among the youngest faculty members in the university’s history to be offered tenure. In 2012, he was awarded the MacArthur genius grant. The following year, he was given the John Bates Clark Medal, awarded to the most promising economist under 40. (He was 33 at the time.) In 2015, Stanford University hired him away. Last summer, Harvard lured him back to launch his own research and policy institute, with funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.

Chetty turns 40 this month, and is widely considered to be one of the most influential social scientists of his generation. “The question with Raj,” says Harvard’s Edward Glaeser, one of the country’s leading urban economists, “is not if he will win a Nobel Prize, but when.”

The work that has brought Chetty such fame is an echo of his family’s history. He has pioneered an approach that uses newly available sources of government data to show how American families fare across generations, revealing striking patterns of upward mobility and stagnation. In one early study, he showed that children born in 1940 had a 90 percent chance of earning more than their parents, but for children born four decades later, that chance had fallen to 50 percent, a toss of a coin.

In 2013, Chetty released a colorful map of the United States, showing the surprising degree to which people’s financial prospects depend on where they happen to grow up. In Salt Lake City, a person born to a family in the bottom fifth of household income had a 10.8 percent chance of reaching the top fifth. In Milwaukee, the odds were less than half that.

Since then, each of his studies has become a front-page media event (“Chetty bombs,” one collaborator calls them) that combines awe—millions of data points, vivid infographics, a countrywide lens—with shock. This may not be the America you’d like to imagine, the statistics testify, but it’s what we’ve allowed America to become. Dozens of the nation’s elite colleges have more children of the 1 percent than from families in the bottom 60 percent of family income. A black boy born to a wealthy family is more than twice as likely to end up poor as a white boy from a wealthy family. Chetty has established Big Data as a moral force in the American debate.

Now he wants to do more than change our understanding of America—he wants to change America itself. His new Harvard-based institute, called Opportunity Insights, is explicitly aimed at applying his findings in cities around the country and demonstrating that social scientists, despite a discouraging track record, are able to fix the problems they articulate in journals. His staff includes an eight-person policy team, which is building partnerships with Charlotte, Seattle, Detroit, Minneapolis, and other cities.

For a man who has done so much to document the country’s failings, Chetty is curiously optimistic. He has the confidence of a scientist: If a phenomenon like upward mobility can be measured with enough precision, then it can be understood; if it can be understood, then it can be manipulated. “The big-picture goal,” Chetty told me, “is to revive the American dream.”

Last summer, I visited Opportunity Insights on its opening day. The offices are housed on the second floor of a brick building, above a café and across Massachusetts Avenue from Harvard’s columned Widener Library. Chetty arrived in econ-casual: a lilac dress shirt, no jacket, black slacks. He is tall and trim, with an untroubled air; he smiled as he greeted two of his longtime collaborators—the Brown University economist John Friedman and Harvard’s Nathaniel Hendren. They walked him around, showing off the finished space, done in a modern palette of white, wood, and aluminum with accent walls of yellow and sage.

Later, after Chetty and his colleagues had finished giving a day of seminars to their new staff, I caught up with him in his office, which was outfitted with a pristine whiteboard, an adjustable-height desk, and a Herman Miller chair that still had the tags attached. The first time I’d met him, at an economics conference, he had told me he was one of several cousins on his mother’s side who go by Raj, all named after their grandfather, Nadarajan, all with sharp minds and the same long legs and easy gait. Yet of Nadarajan’s children, only Chetty’s mother graduated from college, and he’s certain that this fact shaped his generation’s possibilities. He was able to come to the United States as a child and attend an elite private school, the University School of Milwaukee. New York Raj—the family appends a location to keep them straight—came to the U.S. later in life, at age 28, worked in drugstores, and then took a series of jobs with the City of New York. Singapore Raj found a job in a temple there that allows him to support his family back in India, but means they must live apart. Karaikudi Raj, named for the town where his mother grew up, committed suicide as a teenager.

“We are not trying to do something that is unimaginable or has never happened,” Chetty told me. “It happens just down the road.”

I asked Boston Raj to consider what might have become of him if that wealthy Indian businessman had not decided, in the precise year his mother was finishing high school, to create a college for the talented women of southeastern Tamil Nadu. “I would likely not be here,” he said, thinking for a moment. “To put it another way: Who are all the people who are not here, who would have been here if they’d had the opportunities? That is a really good question.”

Charlotte is one of America’s great urban success stories. In the 1970s, it was a modest-size city left behind as the textile industry that had defined North Carolina moved overseas. But in the 1980s, the “Queen City” began to lift itself up. US Airways established a hub at the Charlotte Douglas International Airport, and the region became a major transportation and distribution center. Bank of America built its headquarters there, and today Charlotte is in a dead heat with San Francisco to be the nation’s second-largest banking center, after New York. New skyscrapers have sprouted downtown, and the city boundary has been expanding, replacing farmland with spacious homes and Whole Foods stores. In the past four decades, Charlotte’s population has nearly tripled.

Charlotte has also stood out in Chetty’s research, though not in a good way. In a 2014 analysis of the country’s 50 largest metropolitan areas, Charlotte ranked last in ability to lift up poor children. Only 4.4 percent of Charlotte’s kids moved from the bottom quintile of household income to the top. Kids born into low-income families earned just $26,000 a year, on average, as adults—perched on the poverty line. “It was shocking,” says Brian Collier, an executive vice president of the Foundation for the Carolinas, which is working with Opportunity Insights. “The Charlotte story is that we are a meritocracy, that if you come here and are smart and motivated, you will have every opportunity to achieve greatness.” The city’s true story, Chetty’s data showed, is of selective opportunity: All the data-scientist and business-development-analyst jobs in the thriving banking sector are a boon for out-of-towners and the progeny of the well-to-do, but to grow up poor in Charlotte is largely to remain poor.

To help cities like Charlotte, Chetty takes inspiration from medicine. For thousands of years, he explained, little progress was made in understanding disease, until technologies like the microscope gave scientists novel ways to understand biology, and thus the pathologies that make people ill. In October, Chetty’s institute released an interactive map of the United States called the Opportunity Atlas, revealing the terrain of opportunity down to the level of individual neighborhoods. This, he says, will be his microscope.

Drawing on anonymized government data over a three-decade span, the researchers linked children to the parents who claimed them as dependents. The atlas then followed poor kids from every census tract in the country, showing how much they went on to earn as adults. The colors on the atlas reveal a generation’s prospects: red for areas where kids fared the worst; shades of orange, yellow, and green for middling locales; and blue for spots like Salt Lake City’s Foothill neighborhood, where upward mobility is strongest. It can also track children born into higher income brackets, compare results by race and gender, and zoom out to show states, regions, or the country as a whole.

The Opportunity Atlas has a fractal quality. Some regions of the United States look better than high-mobility countries such as Denmark, while others look more like a developing country. The Great Plains unfurl as a sea of blue, and then the eye is caught by an island of red—a mark of the miseries inflicted on the Oglala Lakota by European settlers. These stark differences recapitulate themselves on smaller and smaller scales as you zoom in. It’s common to see opposite extremes of opportunity within easy walking distance of each other, even in two neighborhoods that long-term residents would consider quite similar.

To find a cure for what ails America, Chetty will need to understand all of this wild variation. Which factors foster opportunity, and which impede it? The next step will be to find local interventions that can address these factors—and to prove, with experimental trials, that the interventions work. The end goal is the social equivalent of precision medicine: a method for diagnosing the particular weaknesses of a place and prescribing a set of treatments. This could transform neighborhoods, and restore the American dream from the ground up.

If all of this seems impossibly ambitious, Chetty’s counterargument is to point to how the blue is marbled in with the red. “We are not trying to do something that is unimaginable or has never happened,” he told me over lunch one day. “It happens just down the road.”

Yet in Charlotte, where Opportunity Insights hopes to build its proof of concept, the atlas reveals swaths of bleak uniformity. Looking at the city, you first see a large bluish wedge south of downtown, with Providence Road on one side and South Boulevard on the other, encompassing the mostly white, mostly affluent areas where children generally grow up to do well. Surrounding the wedge is a broad expanse in hues of red that locals call “the crescent,” made up of predominantly black neighborhoods where the prospects for poor children are pretty miserable. Hunger and homelessness are common, and in some places only one in five high-school students scores “proficient” on standardized tests. In many parts of the crescent, the question isn’t What’s holding kids back? so much as What isn’t holding them back? It’s hard to know where to start.

The most significant challenge Chetty faces is the force of history. In the 1930s, redlining prevented black families from buying homes in Charlotte’s more desirable neighbor- hoods. In the 1940s, the city built Independence Boulevard, a four-lane highway that cut through the heart of its Brooklyn neighborhood, dividing and displacing a thriving working-class black community. The damage continued in the ’60s and ’70s with new interstates. It’s common to hear that something has gone wrong in parts of Charlotte, but the more honest reading is that Charlotte is working as it was designed to. American cities are the way they are, and remain the way they are, because of choices they have made and continue to make.

Does a professor from Harvard, even one as influential and well funded as Chetty, truly stand any chance of bending the American story line? On his national atlas, the most obvious feature is an ugly red gash that starts in Virginia, curls down through the Southeast’s coastal states—North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama—then marches west toward the Mississippi River, where it turns northward before petering out in western Tennessee. When I saw this, I was reminded of another map: one President Abraham Lincoln consulted in 1861, demarcating the counties with the most slaves. The two maps are remarkably similar. Set the documents side by side, and it may be hard to believe that they are separated in time by more than a century and a half, or that one is a rough census of men and women kept in bondage at the time of the Civil War, and the other is a computer-generated glimpse of our children’s future.

In 2014, Chetty, Hendren, and the Harvard economist Lawrence Katz asked the IRS and the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which had overseen the program, for permission to take another look at what had happened to the children. When the earlier follow-up had been done, the youngest kids, who had moved before they were teenagers, had not yet reached their earning years, and this turned out to make all the difference. This young group of movers, the economists found, had gone on to earn 31 percent more than those who hadn’t moved, and 4 percent more of them attended college. They calculated that for an 8-year-old child, the value of the extra future earnings over a lifetime was almost $100,000, a substantial sum for a poor family. For a family with two children, the taxes paid on the extra income more than covered the costs of the program. “The big insight,” Kathryn Edin, a sociology professor at Princeton, told me, “is that it took a generation for the effects to manifest.”

Last july, I took a tour of Charlotte with David Williams, the 34-year-old policy director of Opportunity Insights and the man responsible for translating Chetty’s research into action on the ground. Williams and members of his team crammed into the back of a white Ford Explorer with color printouts of various Charlotte neighborhoods as they appear on the atlas. Brian Collier, of the Foundation for the Carolinas, sat in the front seat, serving as a guide.

As the driver headed northeast, the high-rises of “Uptown” shifted abruptly to low-slung buildings and chain-link fences. Collier pointed out a men’s shelter in the rapidly gentrifying neighborhood of Lockwood, where he’d recently seen a drug deal go down a block away from a house that had sold for half a million dollars.

We continued on to Brightwalk, a new mixed-income development with long rows of townhomes, before turning west for a loop around West Charlotte High School, a once-lauded model of successful integration. In the 1990s, though, support for busing waned, and in 1999, a judge declared that race could not be used as a factor in school assignment. Now the student population is virtually all minority and overwhelmingly poor, and the surrounding neighborhood is deep red on the atlas. The homes are neat, one-story single families, a tad rough around the edges but nothing like the burnt-out buildings in Detroit, where Williams previously worked on economic development for the mayor. “It reminds you how hard it is to tell where real opportunity is,” Williams said. “You can’t just see it.”

Opportunity is not the same as affluence. Consider a kid who grows up in a household earning about $27,000 annually, right at the 25th percentile nationally. In Beverly Woods, a relatively wealthy, mostly white enclave in South Charlotte with spacious, well-kept yards, he could expect his household income to be $42,900 by age 35. Yet in Huntersville, an attractive northern suburb with nearly the same average household income as Beverly Woods, a similar kid could expect only $24,800—a stark difference, invisible to a passing driver.

This dynamic also functions in poorer areas. For a child in Reid Park, an African American neighborhood on the west side of Charlotte, near the airport—a place that has struggled to recover from a crime epidemic in the 1980s—the expected household income at age 35 is a dismal $17,800, on average. But in East Forest, a white, working-class neighborhood in southeast Charlotte, the expected future income jumps to $32,600.

There are places like East Forest in cities around the country. Chetty and his team have taken to calling them “opportunity bargains”: places with relatively affordable rents that punch above their weight with respect to opportunity. He doesn’t yet know why some places are opportunity bargains, but he considers the discovery of these neighborhoods to be a breakthrough. John Friedman told me that if the government had been able to move families to opportunity-bargain neighborhoods in the original Moving to Opportunity experiment—places selected for higher opportunity, not lower poverty—the children’s earnings improvements would have been more than twice as great.

In the crimson sectors of Chetty’s atlas, the problem is both the absence of opportunity and the presence of its opposite: swift currents that can drag a person down.

Chetty’s team has already begun to apply this concept in another of its partner cities, Seattle, working with two local housing authorities to navigate the thorny process of translating research into measurable social change. It’s hard for poor families to manage an expansive housing search, which requires time, transportation, and decent credit. The group created a program with “housing navigators,” who point participants toward areas with relatively high opportunity, help with credit-related issues, and even give neighborhood tours. Landlords need encouragement as well. They can be wary of tenants bearing vouchers, which mean government oversight and paperwork. The Seattle program has streamlined this process, and offers free damage insurance to sweeten the deal.

Tenants have just started moving, but the program is already successful: The majority of families who received assistance moved to high-opportunity areas, compared with one-fifth for the control group, which was not provided with the extra services. Chetty estimates that the program will increase each child’s lifetime earnings by $88,000. In February, President Donald Trump signed into law a bill that provides $28 million to try similar experimental programs in other locations. The bill enjoyed over- whelming bipartisan support, and this spring Chetty was invited to brief the Department of Housing and Urban Development. He told me he’s hopeful that the program can be expanded to the 2.2 million families that receive HUD housing vouchers every year. “Then you’d actually be doing something about poverty in the American city,” he said. “What I like about this is it’s not some pie-in-the-sky thing. We have something that works.”

Charlotte is among the cities interested in implementing the Seattle strategy, but officials also want to use the atlas to select better building sites for affordable housing. In the past, much of the city’s affordable housing was constructed in what Chetty’s data reveal to be high-poverty, low-opportunity areas. “Let’s not just think about building X units of new affordable housing,” Williams said. “Let’s really leverage housing policy as part of a larger economic-mobility agenda for the community.”

Opportunity bargains, however, are not an inexhaustible resource. The crucial question, says the Berkeley economist Enrico Moretti, is whether the opportunity in these places derives from “rival goods”—institutions, such as schools, with limited capacity—or “non-rival goods,” such as local culture, which are harder to deplete. When new people move in, what happens to opportunity? And even if an influx of families doesn’t disrupt the opportunity magic, people aren’t always eager to pick up and leave their homes. Moving breaks ties with family, friends, schools, churches, and other organizations. “The real conundrum is how to address the larger structural realities of inequality,” says the Harvard sociologist Robert Sampson, “and not just try to move people around.”

For all he’s learned about where opportunity resides in America, Chetty knows surprisingly little about what makes one place better than another. He and Hendren have gathered a range of social-science data sets and looked for correlations to the atlas. The high-opportunity places, they’ve found, tend to share five qualities: good schools, greater levels of social cohesion, many two-parent families, low levels of income inequality, and little residential segregation, by either class or race. The list is suggestive, but hard to interpret.

For example, the strongest correlation is the number of intact families. The explanation seems obvious: A second parent usually means higher family income as well as more stability, a broader social network, additional emotional support, and many other intangibles. Yet children’s upward mobility was strongly correlated with two-parent families only in the neighborhood, not necessarily in their home. There are so many things the data might be trying to say. Maybe fathers in a neighborhood serve as mentors and role models? Or maybe there is no causal connection at all. Perhaps, for example, places with strong church communities help kids while also fostering strong marriages. The same kinds of questions flow from every correlation; each one may mean many things. What is cause, what is effect, and what are we missing? Chetty’s microscope has revealed a new world, but not what animates it—or how to change it.

Chetty has found that opportunity does not correlate with many traditional economic measures, such as employment or wage growth. In the search for opportunity’s cause, he is instead focusing on an idea borrowed from sociology: social capital. The term refers broadly to the set of connections that ease a person’s way through the world, providing support and inspiration and opening doors.

Economics has long played the role of sociology’s annoying older brother—conventionally accomplished and wholeheartedly confident, unaware of what he doesn’t know, while still commanding everyone’s attention. Chetty, though, is part of a younger generation of scholars who have embraced a style of quantitative social science that crosses old disciplinary lines. There are strong hints in his research that social capital and mobility are intimately connected; even a crude measure of social capital, such as the number of bowling alleys in a neighborhood, seems to track with opportunity. His data also suggest that who you know growing up can have lasting effects. A paper on patents he co-authored found that young women were more likely to become inventors if they’d moved as children to places where many female inventors lived. (The number of male inventors had little effect.) Even which fields inventors worked in was heavily influenced by what was being invented around them as children. Those who grew up in the Bay Area had some of the highest rates of patenting in computers and related fields, while those who spent their childhood in Minneapolis, home of many medical-device manufacturers, tended to invent drugs and medical devices.* Chetty is currently working with data from Facebook and other social-media platforms to quantify the links between opportunity and our social networks.

Sociologists embrace many ways of understanding the world. They shadow people and move into communities, wondering what they might find out. They collect data and do quantitative analysis and read economics papers, but their work is also informed by psychology and cultural studies. “When you are released from the harsh demands of experiment, you are allowed to make new discoveries and think more freely about what is going on,” says David Grusky, a Stanford sociology professor who collaborates with Chetty. I asked Princeton’s Edin what she thought would end up being the one thing that best explains the peaks and valleys of American opportunity. She said her best guess is “some kind of social glue”—the ties that bind people, fostered by well-functioning institutions, whether they are mosques or neighborhood soccer leagues. The staff at Opportunity Insights has learned: When an economist gets lost, a sociologist can touch his elbow and say, You know, I’ve been noticing some things.

In charlotte, Chetty still aspires to practice “precision medicine,” but he told me his initial goal is more modest: to see whether he and his team can find anything that helps. Opportunity Insights is planning housing and higher-education initiatives, but social capital is at the center of its approach. It is working with a local organization called Leading on Opportunity, and looking at nonprofits that are already operating successfully, including Communities in Schools, a national group that provides comprehensive student support, as well as a job-training program called Year Up. Chetty is also using tax data to measure the long-term impacts of dozens of place-based interventions, such as enterprise zones, which use tax and other incentives to draw businesses into economically depressed areas. (He expects to see initial results from these analyses later this year.) Chetty may not have many answers yet, but he is convinced that this combination of data, collaboration, and fieldwork will make it possible to move from educated guesses to tailored prescriptions. “There are points when the pieces come together,” Chetty told me. “My instinct is that in social science, this generation is when that is going to happen.”

Chetty’s pitch to the nation is that our problems have technocratic solutions, but at times I sense that he is avoiding an argument. Surely our neighborhoods can be improved, and those improvements can help the next generation achieve better outcomes. But what of the larger forces driving the enormous disparities in American wealth? Poor people would be better off if their children had better prospects, but also if they had more money—if the fruits of our society were shared more broadly. “I can take money from you and give it to me, and maybe that is good and maybe it is not,” he said. “I feel like there are a lot of people working on redistribution, and it is hard to figure out the right answer there.” To focus on the question of who gets what is also, of course, politically incendiary.

Chetty believes there is more progress to be made through a moral framing that is less partisan. “There are so many kids out there who could be doing so many great things, both for themselves and for the world,” he said. Chetty’s challenge to the system is measured and empirical; it’s one that billionaires and corporations can happily endorse. But his stance is also a simple matter of personality: Chetty is no agitator. He told me, “I like to find solutions that please everyone in the room, and this definitely has that feel.”

In Charlotte, even the circumscribed version of social change that Chetty is attempting looks daunting. Last summer, before the Opportunity Insights team came to town, I drove around to the back of West Charlotte High School, to a hamlet of pale-yellow temporary-classroom buildings, each set on concrete blocks. One building has been given over to Eliminate the Digital Divide, known as E2D, a nonprofit that takes donations of old laptops, then refurbishes and distributes them for $60 apiece to students who have no computer of their own. According to E2D, half of the county’s public-school students have been unable to complete a homework assignment because they don’t have access to a computer or the internet.

Inside the E2D building is a bright room ringed by a series of workstations where West Charlotte student employees inspect laptops, set up hard drives, and test the final products. Whiteboards, photos, and posters with inspirational phrases like college bound! cover the walls. By the door, a pair of yellow couches serve as a waiting area. When the boys get their computers, they work hard to suppress a smile, whereas the girls are prone to let loose. Sometimes they jump up and down, and sometimes they cry.

I met Kalijah Jones, a young black woman in a pale-pink sleeveless blouse and matching skirt. She had started working at E2D during her senior year, in 2017. Not long into our conversation, she said, “I love my life!”—this despite the fact that she was living in a homeless shelter at the time.

For Jones, the biggest benefit brought by E2D was not the computer or the job, but the social capital the program provided. Last year, she said, E2D’s West Charlotte lab was recognized with a local technology award, and the founder invited Jones and some of her co-workers to join him for the awards ceremony at the Knight Theater, where the Charlotte Ballet performs. One of the other honorees was Road to Hire, a program that pays high-school graduates as it trains them for jobs in sales and tech. The head of Road to Hire was at the ceremony, and he gave Jones a business card, which led to a paid spot in the program’s training program.

But in the crimson sectors of Chetty’s atlas, the problem is both the absence of opportunity and the presence of its opposite: swift currents that can drag a person down. There are, in these places, a few narrow paths to success, and 99 ways to falter. Jones made it through high school despite living in a shelter, and was accepted to Western Carolina University with financial aid. But she decided not to go, in part because she couldn’t imagine leaving her struggling mother and sister behind to live on a campus three hours away. Last winter, the three of them left Charlotte, and the prospects that were beginning to open up for Jones there, and moved to New Jersey, where she grew up. When I last spoke with her, she’d found work at an Amazon warehouse.

One friday evening, I was in Chetty’s Stanford office when a ballerina arrived. Sanvi, Chetty’s 3-year-old daughter, wore a pink tutu with matching hair ribbons and tights. She declined—vigorously—the white sweater offered to ward off the evening chill. Chetty and I had spent hours discussing his research, but when the nanny dropped Sanvi off, it marked the end of the day. Chetty gathered his things and whisked her up in his arms. “Hold me properly, Appa,” Sanvi admonished. Outside, we got into Chetty’s aging silver Acura and headed to an Indonesian restaurant for takeout. Sanvi bubbled with enthusiasm. “I want to be a fairy princess,” she announced from the back seat. “Can I be a fairy princess?” Chetty glanced in the rearview mirror and assured Sanvi that when she grows up, she can be whatever she wants.

After stopping for the food, we pulled up to a light-brown ranch house, with beautiful plantings out front. Inside, the house was clearly Sanvi’s. Taking a seat in the open kitchen, I was surrounded by a tapestry of exuberant finger paintings taped to the walls, interspersed with pages neatly torn from coloring books (penguins, parrots, bunnies, each splashed with color). A pair of persimmon trees were fruiting out back.

Chetty told me that his interest in poverty dates back to the horrifying want he observed on the streets of New Delhi. But only when he built the first version of his atlas did he see what he should do about it. “I realized,” he said, “we could have the biggest impact on poverty by focusing on children.”

Chetty thinks about revolution like an economist does: as a compounding accumulation of marginal changes. Bump the interest rate on your savings account by one notch, and 30 years later, your balance is much improved. Move a family to a better zip code, or foster the right conditions in that family’s current neighborhood, and their children will do better; do that a thousand times, or ten thousand, and the American dream can be more possible, for more people, than it is today.

In the 1930s, the poet Langston Hughes published what remains one of the most honest descriptions of that dream:

"A dream so strong, so brave, so true

That even yet its mighty daring sings

In every brick and stone, in every furrow turned

That’s made America the land it has become"

The poem, though, is laced with a counterpoint of protest: “America was never America to me”—not to the “man who never got ahead”; “the poorest worker bartered through the years”; or “the Negro, servant to you all.” Still, for all its outrage, the poem ends with a paradoxical yearning: “O, let America be America again,” Hughes wrote. “The land that never has been yet.”

Hearing stories of the American dream as a boy in New Delhi, Chetty adopted the faith. When he became a scientist, he discerned the truth. What remains is contradiction: We must believe in the dream and we must accept that it is false—then, perhaps, we will be capable of building a land where it will yet be true.

This article appears in the August 2019 print edition with the headline “Raj Chetty’s American Dream.”

[hermanwatts]

Sensor Sweep: A. Conan Doyle, Barry Smith, Gardner Fox, Manly Wade Wellman, Sundered: Eldritch Edition

Tolkien (Jeffro Johnson): This came up the other day, so I had to look it up. Any classic character that is adapted to contemporary media is consistently mutilated into something they’re not. Most recently this can be observed in the many edits made to Princess Leia and Luke Skywalker in Disney’s cartoon adaptation of the original Star Wars film. It seems a small thing, maybe, but this is how people that hate us actively rewrite our culture right in front of us. Plenty of well meaning people take the knockoff for the original while their imaginations are dimmed. Before long, the waters are so muddied the original inspirational character concept is lost in the noise.

  Authors (DMR Books): Sir Arthur Conan Doyle would have turned one hundred and sixty today. If your average sword and sorcery fan were to be asked, “What British Victorian author had a major and lasting influence on S&S?”, chances are you’d get a blank stare or, maybe, “H. Rider Haggard.” “Sir Arthur Conan Doyle” would not likely be at the top of the list. And yet, Doyle profoundly affected the origins of S&S and continues to influence writers within the genre right up to 2019.

  Weird Tales (Don Herron): All the ruminating in re: Farnsworth Wright getting fired from the editorial chair at WeirdTales caused Brian to go digging through binder after binder until he pulled the note seen above from the trove. He has it mostly because of the “initial signature” of Farnsworth Wright — the squiggly “FW” — not initialed just to speed things up but because Wright, suffering from Parkinson’s disease, had a hell of a hard time doing a full autograph.

  Art (DMR Books): Legendary artist, Barry Windsor-Smith, turns seventy years old today. When I mentioned that fact earlier this week to a couple of older Barry fans, they were like, “No way!” Yes. Way.

Barry Windsor-Smith’s career history is a long and tangled one, spanning over fifty years. Time constraints prevent me–perhaps mercifully, for some readers–from looking at it in detail. For those unfamiliar with the life and work of BWS, you might check out this excellent link here. Or, you can read Barry’s own exhaustive bio here, though it only goes up to about 1995. For this post, I’m only going to touch on the highest of highlights, of which there are several.

  Authors (Goodman Games): Today is the birthday of Gardner F. Fox. Most people know him as the legendary and prolific writer for DC Comics who created the Justice Society of America as well as many of the most iconic DC Comics characters including Doctor Fate, the Flash, Hawkman, and Sandman. He also wrote many of the earliest Batman stories and was the first to introduce the Batarang. His contribution to the world of comics is well documented and uncontested.

  Fiction (Eldritch Paths): I wasn’t planning on it, but somehow I got sucked into rereading Brian Niemeier’s fantastic Soul Cycle series. These books are much better the second time. I say this as someone who’s never reread a novel. I’ll post the links to my initial reviews of each book below. I will be discussing some spoilers here so *SPOILER ALERT*.

  Science Fiction (John C. Wright): In science fiction stories, there are a limited number of ways to explain the conundrum of how time travel might work if it could work (obviously it cannot) but still to make a presentable and dramatic story.

I doubt I can list all the various answers of the various imaginative authors who have attempted in an entertaining way to address the paradox. It makes for entertaining bull sessions by college students and philosophers, however.

  Myth (Walk & Word): I’ll just say it. I like dragons. Yep, I’m that nerdy guy who’s into the fantasy genre: books, movies, art. If it’s about dragons, I’m into it. Now, if you mention dragons in the Bible, most people will immediately think about the dragon in the book of Revelation. However, what many people don’t know is that dragons are mentioned a lot in the Bible, particularly in the Old Testament. In fact, familiarity with these references to dragons in the OT will actually help the reader understand the dragon in Revelation even better.

  Men’s Adventure Magazines (Men’s Pulp Mags): The World War II years are often cited as beginning of the end of the classic pulp mag genre. The years after WWII saw the beginning of the rise of men’s adventure magazines, which incorporated and continued key elements of the pulps, such as painted covers and rousing action/adventure stories. Fans know what someone means when they refer to “pulp magazines.”

  Authors (Goodman Games): Manly Wade Wellman arrived in this world on May 21st, 1903, born literally an ocean away from the place he’d be forever associated with in his later life. Young Manly’s playground was the land of Portuguese West Africa (now Angola), where his father was stationed as a medical officer. It was undoubtedly here, in a land far removed from the staid world of 20th century America, that the seeds of Manly’s imagination found their first fertile ground. Wellman would grow to become an accomplished writer, penning stories in the genres of science fiction, fantasy, occult detective stories, prehistoric adventure, and horror during a career lasting almost 75 years.

  Sherlock Holmes (Pulpfest): Looking for a way to efficiently exploit the growing market of monthly magazines, Conan Doyle decided to offer more of Holmes and Watson. In the summer of 1891, “A Scandal in Bohemia” appeared in THE STRAND MAGAZINE. It would be followed by eleven more tales, one per month for the next year. In writing the stories that became THE ADVENTURES OF SHERLOCK HOLMES, Conan Doyle created the first short story series. In the years to follow, his idea would be imitated across the globe. It resounds to our very day in series television and throughout popular culture.

  Gaming (Eldritch Paths): I’ve never heard of Sundered: Eldritch Edition before yesterday. I saw a trailer and was immediately impressed by the art. This game has some fantastically eldritch art design. Take a look.

Magazines (Cirsova): Cirsova Summer Special Available for Pre-Order!

The Summer Special will be out June 3rd!

The Ghost of Torreón By EDD VICK and MANNY FRISHBERG A strange experiment gone wrong has granted Professor Rigoberto “Beto” Caminante an extraordinary power—the ability to “ride” radio waves!

  Gaming (Jonathan Moeller): A reader emailed to ask that since I’m self-publishing audiobooks if that meant I was going to start self-producing video games based on my books.

Not just no, but heck no!

Audiobooks are expensive. But video games are much more expensive and infinitely more complicated – you have to hire developers, programmers, artists, sound people, music people, QA people, and then the inevitable time fixing and patching bugs. All of that is enormously expensive.

  RPG (Goodman Games): My buddy Bob Bledsaw and I, both being avid wargamers, became fast friends in the fall of 1974. Dungeons & Dragons was the first game we played together and this launched a flurry of weekly adventures that he hosted at his house for about 18 months. Bob was an “older guy” of age 31; the rest of us were in our late teens. Along with D&D being a brand new game concept, we were in awe of his prodigious pace of campaign material production. I later learned that perhaps he had some insomnia that gave him more time than the average guy.

  Fantasy Fiction (Eldritch Paths): Modern fantasy just isn’t as fantastical as it could be. There is so much you can do in fantasy, and yet, the genre is mired in either Tolkien knock-offs or anti-Tolkien knock-offs. This is not a knock on Tolkien. I loved Lord of the Rings, it’s more a knock on Tolkien imitators.

If modern fantasy isn’t using Tolkien as an inspiration, it will tend to use history in a very copy-paste sort of way. I’m thinking here of Brent Weeks’ Night Angel Trilogy. It wasn’t a bad series, but the fantasy elements were the least interesting part of the story.

    Sensor Sweep: A. Conan Doyle, Barry Smith, Gardner Fox, Manly Wade Wellman, Sundered: Eldritch Edition published first on https://sixchexus.weebly.com/

[jenmedsbookreviews]

That’s got you wondering hasn’t it? Well … this is nowt to do with me going for a run. I’m not that daft. But I know someone who is. This weekend Mandie took part in the Spitfire 10k at RAF Cosford, which is an annual event designed to raise money for the RAF charity, specifically this year the RAF100 appeal. This is Mandie’s third year of completing the mammoth run around the RAF base so a massive well done to Mandie on completing the course and on getting her winners medal (and lovely associated t-shirt)

My contribution? Well, I went along to support her which was very nice of me as it meant getting up early on a Sunday morning. While she was doing all the running and such like, I went for a bit of a mooch around the museum. Shamefully, as it is no more than 10 miles from my house, I haven’t been here since my Dad was alive and he passed away in 1991 … Still, it was lovely to have a wander about and I will go back again for a proper visit very soon.

Funnily enough I saw a few planes. And some tanks. And missiles. As you do. Well at least you do at an RAF Museum anyway. Managed to pick up a nice ‘tubby pen’ and thermal mug to commemorate the centenary while I perused the shop too. Tidy.

I’m not completely against exercise. On Saturday morning Mandie and I did a nice lap of Attingham Deer Park, a short 3 miles stroll while the weather was nice. Because we made the opening of the park at 0800 we were blessed with seeing squirrels, rabbits, pheasants and lots of the lovely deer who make the park their home. Because I didn’t have my camera ready enough I only have gratuitous deer pics but you can imagine the other animals scampering about …

Because I haven’t quite lost the wanderlust (and because Mandie wants an excuse for time off work) we did another day out, this time to Powis Castle. Again, somewhere I haven’t been in years but it was fab and ended with a quick jaunt to Charlies where I managed to pick up some lovely Flamingo stationery. As you do.

And I managed some reading too. Go me huh? Book wise, I’ve been kind of good. Ish. Four from Netgalley but all for tours so necessity not indulgence. They were The Warning by Kat Croft; Tell Nobody by Patricia Gibney; Hush Hush by Mel Sherratt and one I can’t tell you about just yet, but it looks really good.

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Book book wise I’ve been very good. Only two. First up was the preorder of the second Amy Winter book from Caroline Mitchell (so new it doesn’t have a cover yet), The Secret Child, and I also bought myself a hard back copy of The Way of All Flesh by Ambrose Parry.

Books I have read

The Way of All Flesh – Ambrose Parry

Edinburgh, 1847. City of Medicine, Money, Murder.

In Edinburgh’s Old Town young women are being found dead, all having suffered similarly gruesome ends. Across the city in the New Town, medical student Will Raven is about to start his apprenticeship with the brilliant and renowned Dr Simpson.

Simpson’s patients range from the richest to the poorest of this divided city. His house is like no other, full of visiting luminaries and daring experiments in the new medical frontier of anaesthesia. It is here that Raven meets housemaid Sarah Fisher, who recognises trouble when she sees it and takes an immediate dislike to him. She has all of Raven’s intelligence but none of his privileges, in particular his medical education.

With each having their own motive to look deeper into these deaths, Raven and Sarah find themselves propelled headlong into the darkest shadows of Edinburgh’s underworld, where they will have to overcome their differences if they are to make it out alive.

Oh how I enjoyed this book. In it we meet newly qualified Doctor Will Raven who has somewhat of a questionable past and one which is coming back to haunt him right from the start. Full of mystery, murder and all things medical, and set in 1840’s Edinburgh, I simply flew through the reading of this book, loving the dynamic between Raven and housemaid Sarah, a young woman who was very much ahead of her time. I’ll be reviewing the book this week, but you can buy your own copy here. By the way, if you’d like to see Ambrose Parry in the flesh, aka husband and wife writing team Chris Brookmyre and Dr Marisa Haetzman, they’ll be appearing at Bloody Scotland at the end of the month. You can find all event tickets (if there are any left as it is selling out left, right and centre) here.

…

The Night She Died – Jenny Blackhurst

On her own wedding night, beautiful and complicated Evie White leaps off a cliff to her death.

What drove her to commit this terrible act? It’s left to her best friend and her husband to unravel the sinister mystery.

Following a twisted trail of clues leading to Evie’s darkest secrets, they begin to realize they never knew the real Evie at all…

Ooh what a twisty thriller this is. Telling the story of very new wife Evie, who takes her own life, this story will shock and enthrall readers. Told through the eyes of Evie and her best friend Rebecca there are many secrets to uncover as we try to work out why Evie chose to end her life. The book is released on 6th September and I’m reviewing as part of the tour (I’ll also have an extract) but if you want to buy a copy for yourself you can find it here.

…

The Lion Tamer Who Lost – Louise Beech

Be careful what you wish for…

Long ago, Andrew made a childhood wish, and kept it in a silver box. When it finally comes true, he wishes he hadn’t…

Long ago, Ben made a promise and he had a dream: to travel to Africa to volunteer at a lion reserve. When he finally makes it, it isn’t for the reasons he imagined…

Ben and Andrew keep meeting in unexpected places, and the intense relationship that develops seems to be guided by fate. Or is it?

What if the very thing that draws them together is tainted by past secrets that threaten everything?

A dark, consuming drama that shifts from Zimbabwe to England, and then back into the past, The Lion Tamer Who Lost is also a devastatingly beautiful love story, with a tragic heart…

Gah. This book. Beautifully lyrical, tragically poetic in style and delivery, a story full of love and loss, this moved me to tears. Literally. Just ask my DPD driver who didn’t quite know what to do with himself when I answered the door in a full on red eyed, wet cheeked mess. I’ll be reviewing on the tour, assuming I can find any words, but you can buy a copy of the book here.

…

Ed’s Dead – Russel D McLean

Meet Jen. She works in a bookshop and likes the odd glass of Prosecco… oh, and she’s about to be branded The Most Dangerous Woman in Scotland.

Jen Carter is a failed writer with a rubbish boyfriend, Ed. That is, until she accidentally kills him one night. Now that Ed’s dead, she has to decide what to do with his body, his drugs and a big pile of cash. And, more pressingly, how to escape the hitman who’s been sent to recover Ed’s stash. Soon Jen’s on the run from criminals, corrupt police officers and the prying eyes of the media. Who can she trust? And how can she convince them that the trail of corpses left in her wake are just accidental deaths?

A modern noir that proves, once and for all, the female of the species really is more deadly than the male.

I don’t know why or how I’ve not read this before but I’m bloody glad I have now. Full of unbelievable unfortunate incidents, poor Jen’s life is turned upside down when she finally decides to give her long term loser boyfriend, Ed, the boot. You just … might not expect quite how much. This had me chuckling to myself and racing through the pages like the devil was at my heels. If you want to find out why, you can grab a copy of the book here.

…

The Proposal – S.E. Lynes

‘The first thing you should know, dear reader, is that I am dead…’

Teacher Pippa wants a second chance. Recently divorced and unhappy at work, she uproots her life to renovate a beautiful farmhouse in the countryside, determined to make a fresh start. But Pippa soon realises: your troubles are never far behind.

When Pippa meets blue-eyed Ryan Marks, he is funny, charming, and haunted by his past. He might just be the answer to all her problems. But how well does she really know him?

She knows the story of his life, the pain that stays with him, the warmth of his smile and the smell of his skin. She knows he can make her laugh over a glass of wine.

Pippa can tell truth from lies. She’d know if she were in danger. Wouldn’t she?

That’s a humdinger of an opening line don’t you think? Never let a stranger in your house, that is what I’ve learned from this book. (To be fair, I seldom let people I know in the house because I’m antisocial but that’s another story). Oh, yes, and be very wary of teachers turned romance authors … This is a psychological story of obsession, written in an intriguing style and littered with literary references that will make enlightened readers smile and now knowingly. I’ll be reviewing as part of the tour but for now you can order a copy of the book here.

…

Not too shabby that, five books. Anyone would think I had nothing better to do … Busy week on the blog. Recap below.

The Hangman’s Hold by Michael Wood

Bellevue Square by Michael Redhill

Fractured by Billy McLaughlin

Bye Baby Bunting by Tannis Laidlaw

Truth and Lies by Caroline Mitchell

The Not So Perfect Plan to Save Friendship House by Lilly Bartlett

Return to the Little Cottage On the Hill by Emma Davies

The Other Victim by Helen H Durrant

The week ahead is a little quieter. But then i’m going to be busy personally so perhaps not a bad thing. Three tours in the offing, The Body on the Shore by Nick Louth; Overkill by Vanda Symon; and After He Died by Michael J Malone.

Hope you have a lovely week all. I am in count down mode now as it is less than three weeks until Bloody Scotland. Cannot wait.

See you next week.

Jen

Rewind, recap: Weekly update w/e 02/09/18 That's got you wondering hasn't it? Well ... this is nowt to do with me going for a run.