#Perpetual Broadcasting Corporation

[dotthings]

Let me make this even clearer. Because Jensen and Misha both deserve better.

Given that we know they talk a lot about Destiel among themselves. They have told us, repeatedly. They've shared each other's perspectives with each other. They have an understanding.

Early misunderstandings and conflicts in pov aside (and do people want to keep circle jerking as if it's still 2014? Okay then. Have at it, but time moved on and you didn't): Jensen doesn't speak over Misha. Misha doesn't speak over Jensen.

Some things Misha has said about Dean or Destiel has resulted in Jensen stans attacking him. They always have some excuse--this past weekend it was because Misha acknowledged the idea of Dean and Cas having sex.

In the past, another example, backlash came at Misha for saying Cas saw love and acceptance in Dean's eyes.

(Which...sure does seem like the pearl-clutching about Misha's CR8 comments being too ribald is fake virtue signaling doesn't it, since even a statement from Misha wide open to platonic or romantic reading, that is 100% true about Dean, and how loving he is, how loving we know Dean is, how much we know Dean is going to accept and love Cas either way, got hatred aimed at Misha as if he had said something heinous. Tells me all I need to know about certain stans).

While Jensen's "Cas is an angel therefore his love is cosmic and unknowable impossible for humans to grasp let's not define it" and "open to interpretation" middleground to appease both sides and treading carefully for reasons, on a topic that's napalm in fandom (it shouldn't be, but that's the reality), might be construed as speaking over Misha.

But here's the thing!!! It's not!! From either of them!!

It seems very obvious by now that they decided Misha would be the loud one, with Jensen holding his cape, even if he doesn't join in , and Jensen walking a diplomatic middle line, also with Misha's understanding and support in turn.

When Misha goes off boldly about Destiel? People need to kick out that hate fantasy about Jensen being disrespected and Jensen must be wanting to punch Misha and Jensen must be so mad at Misha how dare Misha out of their heads, or get to the point where they can comprehend the difference between their own feelings vs Jensen's and quit projecting.

They didn't shut each other out. They talked about Destiel. They listened to each other. Highly likely, in fact, that they helped each develop or refine their talking points.

Neither of them has been shooting off their mouth about the other's character without having spoken to each other.

I don't have any hope for fans to stop the endless fighting and concern trolling and attacking either Jensen or Misha over it, needlessly, perpetually, but when it comes to Jensen and Misha...that's a hopeful space.

Misha's bluntness vs Jensen's carefully chosen middleground words complement each other are not in fact oppositional takes--they complement each other, there's room for both. They both know it's a mutually loving relationship.

Neither is trampling on the other's pov, and any views that don't perfectly align, they've already discussed and they respect each other.

These accusations at either of them are not true, they are not fair, and they both deserve better.

And now I'm staring right at a recent thing where Misha full on absolved Jensen of an accusation that various lanes kept throwing at him, and still weaponize, including Jensen stans who claim to be defending Jensen, because they want it to be true.

The response was manufactured drama where people called Misha a liar and doubling down.

They'd rather Jensen take the fall and they'd rather call Misha a liar than believe a soulless corporation that has been caught more than once exercising queer censorship could have committed queer censorship in a TV industry where it's common knowledge that queer censorship by broadcast TV networks happen???????

Wow gee can you feel the love in this Chili's. Great going. Excellent defense strategy. You're really such a big help. With fans like these, Jensen and Misha don't need antis.

A lot of it is agenda driven, and some anxiety driven, every lane's worried about other lanes react, because spn fandom is always a pain in the neck that way. Some people hate Destiel so much they need Jensen to be their antidestiel warrior they'll throw Jensen under a bus and stan for the corporation, or they're so anxious about how Destiel gets treated they blame Jensen and forever hold against him his past foot in mouth about the ship (which was a long time ago. Please stop punishing him endlessly when he's moved on and his perspectives are respectful, yet you're still stuck back there) rather than comprehending the actual systemic factors.

Jensen and Misha are both doing what they can to make it better.

They are trying to fix it!!!

People should show them more respect!!!!

[raincode-archives]

Chapter 4 Loading Screen Trivia

Note: Currently, I do not know which of these trivia may be general game trivia or Chapter 4 exclusives (if there is any). And there may be trivia I'm currently missing that I will add later on, if I find any more.

World Detective Organization (WDO) An extra-legal, extra-privileged organization devoted to eradicating the world's unsolved mysteries.

Detective Deed An identification card. These are granted by the World Detective Organization.

Master Detective Among the detectives belonging to the World Detective Organization, this is a detective with a specialized power called Forensic Forte that aids in their investigative activities.

Forensic Forte Those exhibiting innate talent for special powers like clairvoyance or mind-reading are trained by the WDO to develop a supernatural investigative ability called Forensic Forte or simply, Forte.

Amaterasu Corporation Many products are in development, some of which cannot be made public.

Amaterasu Peacekeepers A department of Amaterasu Corporation. They serve as a sort of police force within Kanai Ward.

Kamasaki District Crime generally isn't bad here, unless you venture deeper inside, that is.

Riverbank Due to polluted waters, fish are rarely caught.

Kanai Station The only train station in Kanai Ward. It's a magnificent building, but seldom has customers because of the city's isolation.

Kanai Ward Living Condition Perhaps because of the daily rainfall, some people in Kanai Ward don't mind getting wet.

TV Programs Nearly all the TV programs broadcasted in Kanai Ward are sponsored by Amaterasu Corporation.

Popular Sports Parkour is popular among the young men of Kamasaki District. New problems have arisen however, what will all the trespassing and running across the top of food stalls.

Means of Communication Most communications to people outside of Kanai Ward are tapped and monitored by Amaterasu. The phone at the Nocturnal Detective Agency uses a different type of line to prevent eavesdropping.

Pets Because of Kanai Ward's unending rain, indoor pets are popular. At the same time, there is increasing concern of many dogs and cats become feral after being abandoned by irresponsible owners.

Kanai Ward's Electrical Power Because of the perpetual rain, electrical power is derived predominantly from rainwater.

Flavor of Halara's Candy Depends on the mood. The worse the mood, the sweeter the taste; the better the mood, the lighter the taste.

Fubuki's Accessories Fubuki's necklace has a clock motif. The choker is decorated with video playback control symbols.

Vivia's Book Catalog Novels, columns, essays, all sorts of things. There's no particular preference for genre; he reads just to pass time.

Vivia's Garments There are just bandage-like wrappings beneath his coat, so it wouldn't be accurate to call it clothing.

Amaterasu Corporation The megacorporation controlling Kanai Ward. It deals in a wide variety of goods such as industrial products, electronic appliances, as well as pharmaceuticals.

Kanai Ward Currently, Kanai ward is isolated from the rest of the world. Few people enter and leave and very little information goes beyond its walls.

Kanai Tower Lease agreements are available, but the monthly rent costs as much as a luxury car.

Ama-Pal Different versions of Ama-Pal exist, but among the scarce limited edition releases, there is evidently a bear variant with differently colored left and right sides.

Ama-Pay An electronic payment system courtesy of Amaterasu Corporation. It can be used at almost any shop in Kanai Ward, but rumor has it the company collects personal data from each transaction.

Popular Appliances Indoor dryers are very popular in Kanai Ward. Amaterasu Corporation's new "Kagutsuchi" model is quite excellent, capable of drying any type of laundry in just two hours.

Amaterasu's Latest Products A drone car that will autonomously deliver you from departure...to tomorrow. "Amenotorifune." Coming soon from Amaterasu Corporation.

Amaterasu's Latest Products Fall asleep in an instant.... And slumber for eight hours without waking up...no matter what... "Snoozewell," coming soon from Amaterasu Corporation.

Amaterasu Lab Research facilities located in the underground section of the Amaterasu Corporation. Access to the lab is highly restricted, even among Amaterasu personnel.

Amaterasu Security Entry to the premises requires employee IDs, as well as biometric authentication via retinal scans, making it practically impossible for outsiders to infiltrate Amaterasu Corporation.

Blank Week Mystery A phrase considered taboo in Kanai Ward. The meaning of the phrase is unclear

Makoto's Masks The mask is different ever morning, depending on his mood. Sometimes it takes him more than 30 minutes to choose, to the chagrin of the people around him.

About Dr. Huesca He walks around barefoot in the lab. This isn't for anything health-related, he simply feel the time spent putting on shoes and socks is better used on research.

Robot Researcher Akira is his name. He's poured his whole being into Ama-Pal, his life dedicated to its development. His catchphrase: "When my time comes, I want it to be by Ama-Pal's hand."

Fink the Slaughter Artist A hitman predominantly active in Kanai Ward. It's rumored that he'll kill any target, regardless of difficulty, as long as the client can afford it.

Yomi's Cane Yomi's cane transforms into a whip and can be used to strangle people he isn't fond of.

Shinigami's Secret Depending on Shinigami's emotional state, not only can horns and a tail sprout out, but her entire body can take on a fiery form.

Amazing Physique Number One of the WDO may look wizened, but beneath his robe is a muscle-bound body, compared to that of a youth's. It's littered in scars following encounters with a variety of criminals.

Invention Detective A Master Detective whose Forte allows for on-the-spot assembly of inventions useful for an investigation. This detective was not summoned to Kanai Ward.

[itsbenedict]

BP Postmortem post 2 bc/image limit

Don't read this unless you've read the first one already! There's a 30-images-per-post limit and I had to split it up! Opening this readmore will immediately spoil lots of stuff and be confusing.

So, right. Nolan. Didn't that guy die? Case 1 killer?

Well, you see... that wasn't Nolan Cubbins. Not a very Brazilian name, was it? So... who's this kid?

That's Lucas Rossi, Davi's younger brother and host of "Bullet Proof", the fourth-most-popular Enoshima knockoff killing game on the air! (And the most popular one being broadcast in English!) While there's a whole production crew on the ground that edits together the footage, he's the host and director on-set.

Why's he doing this? Well... for the money, mainly.

Lucas met Junko Enoshima while she was doing a despair tour through Brazil. He'd been a student activist at the time, and student activists were sort of her favored prey, and what should have happened is that he was brainwashed like basically everyone else who ever met her. And that is what happened, until he went home to Davi and tried to spread the gospel of despair and Davi was like, what the fuck? And did some brain surgery to his little brother to erase the memory of meeting Junko.

After finding out what'd happened to him, and being deeply deeply discomfited by how malleable he turned out to be in the face of superpowered charisma, he developed a pretty intense hatred of her and the whole despair cult! He eventually connected with the Future Foundation, and found... that the Future Foundation was underfunded and needed more resources to put a stop to the apocalypse. They needed money. A lot of it.

So... Lucas got into showbiz. Despair-based entertainment was like, the only thing anyone cared about anymore, for some impossible reason, and lots of people had life savings they no longer cared about because life is pointless and only Despair matters, so... it was easy to play to the crowd. With Davi's help, he was able to put together some very convincing bloodsport and execution videos, but... the apocalypse is a tough environment for indie payment processors, so they had an audience, but not much money.

That's when the Bright Conglomerate reached out with a big budget and big plans to convert a flying Hope's Peak safehouse into a staged deathgame. They'd have top-of-the-line equipment, a whole production staff, and a major corporation working to adapt to the economic realities of the despair apocalypse and ensure cashflow. Lucas and Davi would get a cut of the revenue, and it'd be a lot of revenue- which he'd be able to divert to the Future Foundation in hopes of putting all this madness to rest.

So they flew up there and took over, thanks to Gwen and Sakura not bothering to turn on most of the ship's defenses, and Henry running interference. They initially tried to negotiate with Will Bookerton (still an adult at that point, trying to root out whoever had taken over Monokuma and started some sort of cockamamie Deception Game), and... faced opposition. Will didn't trust the tech, Henry wanted to cultivate more of a family-friendly image for the show which was insane and counter to the whole idea, and ultimately Lucas had Davi erase their memories so they couldn't interfere with production. It was all going to go perfectly!

And it went perfectly! A smash hit! Made billions! Bullet Proof was a reality TV craze that swept the, uh, anarcho-despairist perpetual riot that they had instead of a nation by that point.

Y'know, for the first couple seasons. Until season 3, when Lashauna shoved this dipshit off the top of the school building and his head got pulped on impact:

This was sort of a crisis point. Davi was forced to confront the reality that his skills couldn't undo every murder that happened on the show, and that the charade would have a cost in human lives. And a reality TV star dying in an accident during filming would be a huge scandal for a normal show!

But obviously this led to a huge jump in ratings with the show's core demo, so there was a bit of a moral dilemma there.

Lucas, in charge, ultimately decided... by the numbers, it was worth it. One fatal accident every so often, in exchange for funneling millions to stop the apocalypse where hundreds of thousands of people were dying every day? It... made sense, right? It was worth it. The show must go on.

Agnesi Wu Jessie Bai, until this point, was in the same boat as Raymond and Lilakali- a genuine Hope's Peak student who voluntarily assisted with the production of Bullet Proof. When she thought no one was really in any danger thanks to Davi's miracle resurrection tech, she was in league with Lucas to help fund the Future Foundation, and was happy to play the heel a bit to make the show more exciting. But, uh... once it became clear that people were actually dying, she wanted nothing more to do with it, and they started wiping her memory just like Henry and the rest. Still, there exists footage of her confessing to being the mastermind from earlier seasons, which was going to show up in case 5 as a misdirect.

So people kept dying off. And they needed replacements for the dead students, so there'd be enough suspects, of course. So they imported some fake Ultimates.

Martha and Vic were what they called "Murder Geniuses"- prolific killers who, after succumbing to despair, performed highly public and dramatic killings without suffering repercussions. Martha had formed an impromptu military unit that had dominated an entire city, and Vic was a prolific serial killer known as the Gumball Maniac. Bullet Proof's production crew managed to capture them, revert them to teenagers, and erase their memories of despair- adding some bigshot celebrities to the cast. I forget if I set this up in the adventure, but there was going to be another misdirect with the Hope's Peak student records, where their profiles would be missing- casting suspicion on them as mastermind candidates.

So... remember that one time I posted these, and was like "one of these is an actual evil mastermind design, hee hee hoo hoo"?

HAHA! GOTCHA! They were all actual evil mastermind designs! Kinda... bad ones, in retrospect, but whatever.

Anyway... it didn't take too long before the show caught the eye of Cyrus Bookerton, who was supposed to be headmaster of the school. He saw Billy on TV and was freaked out- deciding that it was worth opening up his safehouse and sending his daughter, ???? Bookerton, Ultimate Impostor, to rescue her older brother and put a stop to this.

"Alice", in one of her earlier guises, posed as an intern at the production studio on the ground. As she was eager to get involved, she was eventually sent up to assist Lucas, Davi, Lilakali, and Raymond as a replacement student on the show.

She pretended Lucas was her hero, in her guise as an ascended fangirl working her dream job. He spilled everything to her, explaining how everything was to divert money to the Future Foundation and save the world. They were very close!

And as a result of them being very close, she noticed something. She noticed that Lucas had given up. Compromise after compromise made to keep the show on the air and the money coming in had worn him down, and he'd stopped really caring about where the money was going. Despair was beginning to get to him, the longer those Future Foundation millions went without saving the world. Nothing seemed to be changing, but all he could do was keep doing what he'd always done. He didn't really believe in what it was all for anymore. And... he'd gotten very good at doing his job.

So she went to go do what she was sent there to do. Kill Davi Rossi, put an end to Bullet Proof, and rescue her brother.

Only she got caught and failed.

She'd set up a bomb in the lab, but was caught red-handed and forcibly sedated and mindwiped. Because she'd been a double agent for so long, Davi had to do a pretty complicated mind-wipe, making swiss cheese of her memory so she'd only remember rehearsing her various cover identities. She was left only with the memory of being Alice Bayko, SHSL Stage Magician, normal student at Hope's Peak Academy. (Or Alistair Bayko, or Charlie Range, or Diana Ingenue, depending on what the player selected at the start of the game.) Demoted from showrunner/double agent to hapless cast member- with a suite of fuzzy and awkward half-remembered memories bleeding through.

After that... well, Lucas trusted her a lot. She helped run a bunch of seasons of the show, and her betrayal really got to him. In a fit of paranoia, he decided to become a shadow mastermind, operating from behind the scenes of behind the scenes, so that Raymond and Lilakali couldn't betray him too. No more mistakes like this one! Delete him from their memories, make them think it'd just been the two of them that whole time. Keep that Nolan Cubbins kid on ice- he'd take his place, and then...

...after posing as an easily-caught culprit in case 1, he'd get harpooned during his execution, and then... reeled back into the ship, where Davi would patch him up ahead of schedule. A perfect disappearing act.

As for Alice- getting mind-wiped wasn't an outcome she failed to anticipate.

It was always possible she'd get captured and mind-wiped. And if that happened, someone needed to finish the job. The state-of-the-art custom Monokuma droid she'd been set up with as part of her cover identity: Flopsy-Turvy. She'd programmed it with instructions to kill Davi and then self-destruct, destroying his lab and making it impossible for Bullet Proof to continue.

She didn't think to program it not to catch Billy in the blast, though, who happened to be infiltrating that very same lab via the secret passage he built in the first place.

I really hadn't figured out how I was going to present this whole setup to the players deductively, to be honest, but that's the upshot of Case 5: Determining that Flopsy-Turvy was the culprit, and by extension Alice.

And then Lucas, whose mental state at the time is best-represented by this TMBG song...

...executes Alice in a fit of rage and betrayal.

That's about as far as I had planned. I knew I wanted there to be some sort of case 6, getting into the backstory with Lucas and Henry and all the other backstory details that weren't explored in case 5, but I didn't have any clear plans- maybe some kind of action scene as Lucas's control over the guns and security systems goes up against the whole class working together to evade his defenses and subdue him, shot like an execution? And then an ending where the survivors take over the airship and fly off into the sunset with a vague intent to save the world somehow? Most of the dead would still be in Davi's tanks and hypothetically recoverable, if they found some other Ultimate Doctor. I didn't really have the ending nailed down from there, except that...

...with Alice dead, I was going to have Jo take off the incongruently feminine costume and reveal the ahoge, becoming the new protagonist. It's a rule of Danganronpa that the protagonist has to be a boy with a stupid hair doinker thingy! Joe Alejo, Ultimate Hope!

I was setting up a bunch of Gender stuff with Jo leading up to this protagonist reveal- when Davi's Monokuma was going to show up to treat the wound Martha suffered from Gwen's saw trap, he was going to notice Jo was binding with Ace bandages and be like. No. Honey. Come on. Here's my old binder from before I used my necromancer powers to trans my gender. That's so unsafe.

(Which... in retrospect, wouldn't have made sense? Surely this season isn't the first one in which Jo had a gender journey, and Davi who was responsible for reanimating them a bunch of times wouldn't have failed to notice this. Hrm. Would find a way to rewrite that moment in the reboot.)

That is... I think that's everything! Aside from... a few changes I was going to make in the reboot.

Reboot changes

One was going to be that... I was going to just cut Violette and Caleb. Violette's shtick was too annoying to write consistently, and Caleb was kind of me working through some religious baggage that I'm kinda distant from at this point.

To replace Violette as case 1's victim, I was going to build up to case 3's super tragic thing with Lashauna and Mill some more. To do this, I was going to split Dominique into two different characters.

Dom had... a couple of weird things going on with him. The initial conception of his shtick was... completely cishet guy who acted all camp and flamboyant because he just liked messing with people. The kind of guy who's, like, absolutely homophobic, thinks queerness is deviant and disgusting- but thinks deviant and disgusting people are so funny to laugh at that he supports them anyway? Joins in on the bit? Like being gay is the funniest joke he can think of? A little extremely confused, and doesn't got the spirit at all, but somehow the same energy anyway?

Plus, like- Dominique was like, late twenties, absolutely not a real high-schooler, and Lashauna was... I want to say like, 18? Definitely too young for him, but also she's his boss so there was a weirdass power dynamic that definitely wasn't healthy in some direction or other- and it definitely wasn't a good look to have the camp gay guy be sort of a sexual predator.

That was always a really awkward bit to write, and I ended up not really committing to it at all. So instead he just sort of ended up... like, a normal stereotypical camp gay hairstylist guy? And then he died before there could really be any exploring any of the fucked-up parts of his character. It didn't really work.

So instead, we've now got Dominique Locke, Ultimate Stylist, and Nick Martin, Ultimate Gambler.

Dominique is just straight-up genderfluid, a shy and untalkative kid who uses their hairstyling and makeup skills to modulate their gender performance on a moment-to-moment basis. They get the hair-changes-every-portrait shtick, and get killed in case 1 only to come back alive in case 5.

Nick, meanwhile, gets most of the scummier elements. He's the homophobic one in charge of the Diamonds who colludes with Henry re:crime stuff and dies in case 2's double murder. This guy's very clearly not a teenager by any stretch of the imagination, and technically neither is Lashauna in this iteration, though I still want to have like, the too-young-but-also-his-boss fucked-up power dynamic for their weird relationship.

The idea there is to build up, like... one Hit Deck member dying in both cases before case 3, to build up to Lashauna and Mill's conflict re:whether she should cut her losses and kill him to escape or try and stick it out and save her last surviving subordinate.

-

The other thing I'd do is... foreshadow the reality TV and loops thing more. Introduce impossible footage of things that didn't happen earlier, find some way to explain the rules of memory modification ahead of time, and use the Monokumas as mouthpieces more liberally. Maybe have Davi show up in person only to disappear hastily at some point, so he doesn't come out of nowhere. There's a lot of this plot that just wasn't really sufficiently foreshadowed, I think, and with this many layers to it it would definitely be doable to start peeling them back earlier.

And, of course, rework the logic of the cases more to be, uh, better. More fair and solvable with multiple roads to noticing the relevant clues. The ones I did were very much a first attempt, and I didn't really have the knack for it yet.

And that's, uh... that's it! I think that's everything. If you've got any questions, ask box is open. Thanks to everyone who read and supported Bullet Proof while I was making it!

[woodland-ghosts]

Okay, here it is!

3,545 words.

I hope it makes sense, tbh. I am used to writing more for broadcast and poetry than fiction, but immersing myself fully in the world of fiction writing is my goal for the year.

Some of it was rushed, some of it only went thru the editing process once bc I wanted to be done and get it posted (so there is some stuff that I still would’ve liked to flesh out, but) I still had fun! I love Victorian/Gothic literature and try to write in that style. Getting the chance to write about Unicorn: Warriors Eternal is an excellent opportunity to practice.

Next chapter will hopefully be short, better, more concise, more dialogue and action driven, and more Copernicus and Seng. Also the formatting didn’t cross over bc I posted this on mobile 😌🙃

Anyway, like I said, I hope it makes sense! 🥰

Title: Slipping the Glove from Your Hand

Pairings: Melinda/Edred, Emma/Edred

Summary: Melinda suddenly disappears into Emma, allowing Emma to fully take control over her body once more. Before Melinda disappears entirely, she allows Emma a single glimpse into a very troubling memory.

For, if you weren’t born at the right time, my dear,

just keep trying, and trying, and trying again.

As for the end, it is not what you fear,

you’re just slipping the glove from your hand-

Like this-

down,

down,

down,

down your wrist.

Down,

down,

down,

down the list of lives,

husbands and wives,

dozens of times

around, again, and then —

‘Marie at the Mill’ Joanna Newsom, 2023

Suddenly, violently, and with a terrible pounding in her chest, Emma awoke.

She had been lost, meandering in the shady arbor of her shared consciousness with Melinda, her spirit circling the catacombs of Melinda’s memories and experiences(that strange limbo where Time and Space ceased to abide by the rules of the physical realm and that had brought Emma to the edges of worlds she once found only in storybooks) when it happened.

Up until that moment, Melinda and her great, dark power had been mostly at the helm of their physical embodiment, weaving herself through Emma like the strings of a marionette. Though Emma was small and winsome in stature, Melinda wielded her like a weapon. Unable to comprehend even how, for weeks, Emma had watched Melinda conjure great and terrible strength through her own tiny hands. Melinda took her soaring high above the formidable skyline of Londontown, over the vast network of steam stacks and clock towers, even over the dirigibles that patrolled the air like the Scotland Yard.

Melinda used Emma: her body, her voice, her eyes. She used her so prolifically that Emma felt as though it were her own self wielding such incredible power.

Melinda also mostly ignored her. Emma could squeak, howl, stamp her feet still laced in their wedding boots, come to Melinda through the mirror or their reflection in a windowpane pleading with her, yet Melinda never let the girl gain purchase through any one of her attempts. Melinda was frustratingly good at suppressing Emma and banishing her to the realm of their subsconscious. But, she didn’t always win. Sometimes, Emma’s resolute spirit would blunder through and Melinda would be suddenly thrust into the back-seat, forced to watch as the girl directed all her feistiness and rage at Melinda’s elfen beloved, Edred.

It did not happen very often. It mostly didn’t happen at all - the problem of their shared existence was that each of the women engaged one another in a perpetual struggle for supremacy over Emma’s corporeal vessel. Their battles were unceasing, and the result was a strange chimera of their aptitudes, personalities and dispositions.

That is until a most inopportune moment, the moment Melinda began to lose herself and Emma was wrested from the ethereal depths of consciousness and memory and thrust to the surface.

“Where - where am I?” She pondered aloud. She was high above the earth somewhere on the outskirts of the city, heading north. From over the little wisps of clouds, she could see the edge of Hertfordshire and the gentle green country just beyond it.

Why are we leaving the city, all alone? she wondered. Not but a moment later, a ferocious wind sprung up from nowhere and sliced right through her, causing Emma to sputter and catapult downward through the rings of white. Oh, God forbid! Melinda’s power was waning!

A jolt of fear passed through her and she closed her eyes, turned herself inward, and called out to Melinda.

Melinda, where have you gone? Where’re Edred and Seng? And Copernicus?

I’m here. Came the swift, but feeble, reply. But you must help me.

How can I help you? Emma asked. What’s happened?!

Emma anxiously waited for Melinda’s response, but silence was her only return. Melinda’s power seemed to be dwindling further and Emma grew heavy in the spectral arms of the atmosphere.

She was falling. And quickly.

Melinda, please! We’re falling! I’m falling -

She plunged through the stratosphere in a wicked blur, her black hair trailing behind her like smoke. It was like the most hellacious carousel ride as bright gusts of wind and whirls of color were enclosed all around her. It would be just moments before she crashed to the earth in a bruised and broken heap.

Melinda! Please! It was her final plea before she prepared herself for the impact.

But then, all at once, she was stopped. The wind had died down and bent itself warmly around her and Emma let one eye open.

She was levitating just above the dirt, trickling along, the black tips of her feet dragging in the ground and leaving behind her a trail of jagged, muddy rivulets. She opened both eyes and gathered her thoughts as her surroundings came into view. All around her loomed a labyrinth of weathered granite and marble: imperious, moss-eaten mausoleums half-sunk into the soft earth which had been quietly gnawing away at the structures for centuries, and tombstones that jutted out of the earth at severe angles like the the crooked, rotting teeth of some terrible beast.

The air was damp and cloistering and the cemetery grounds were hemmed in by a grove of ancient yews, their trunks growing wide and thick out of the ground. The way the trees wove around each other reminded Emma of the fanciful gates of Kensington Gardens; the trunks themselves had borne natural portals wide enough for a person twice her size to enter.

I know this place. We’re at Highgate Cemetery. But, how did we end up here?

Emma felt a lump swelling in her throat. She swallowed hard.

Melinda, are you there?

Feeling the trepidation building within her, she allowed one foot to touch the ground.

“Melinda!” A furious cry rang out from behind her, accompanied by a coppery cacophony of whistles, clanks, and bangs.

Emma spun around and observed Melinda’s three companions trundling towards her, Seng and Edred clinging to Copernicus’s bronze thorax as they descended from the sky. They had just lumbered across the cemetery’s wrought-iron threshold when Edred abruptly descended Copernicus and surged towards the girl in flight, hand gripping the hilt of his sword. A bright, confused-sounding whistle erupted from Copernicus as the force of the action took him by surprise.

Edred’s moon-colored hair fanned out behind him, and his wool coat flapped over his boots as he continued his pursuit. Emma barely had time to comprehend the sight when a memory flew up unbidden in her mind’s eye. She saw a flash of delicate, green laurels braiding across glistening silver armor, a stony and ancient-faced man coming towards her in much the same manner as Edred was now, and a sword - hungry for a sheath - the bite of its blade so hot and wretched as it sunk down into her shoulder.

Emma’s heart pounded in her chest and she felt the black scrim come over her at once, clouding out her eyes and engulfing her in a kinetic fire the color of ink.

“Stay back!” She howled, balling her small hands into fists.

Edred saw the transformation and desisted immediately. He landed right in front of her and planted his feet in the mud. His hands dropped from the hilt of his sword and flew up in front of his chest like an experienced lion-tamer prepared to subdue the lion.

“Melinda…” he called to her gently this time. To Emma it sounded gargled as though his voice had been swallowed up by a tempestuous wind. She stood stock-still as the black fire ranged all around and through her. Its power was heady like the incense that permeated the seance parlors of the Spiritualists. It dulled and dizzied her and made her ill. Instinctively, she began to fight it, and in doing so, Melinda grew ever-dimmer.

She could feel Melinda slipping away.

Edred called to her once more. This time his voice was as clear and sobering as a church bell and it thundered through the murky haze, cutting right through to her. Emma’s knees buckled and she surrendered herself to the ground. Quicker than Mercury, Edred caught her and held her there in his arms. Not even a second had passed before Copernicus’s own bronze appendages went whizzing past the elf’s head directly to the nape of Emma’s neck. The robot clanked past with Seng in tow, brandishing a bronze stethoscope with an ear like a phonograph which he placed gently over Emma’s heart.

It felt horribly heavy and as cold as ice.

The girl groaned in protest but Melinda’s power, along with Emma’s physical strength, was waning. Melinda was dissipating into her and she could no more push her three companions away than she could conjure the ferocious energy required to transport herself out of there.

Seng’s face peered out over Copernicus’s metal shoulder, his brow deeply furrowed.

“Melinda, are you alright?” His voice was small and wavering.

“She’s alright,” Edred grunted at the boy. “She overpowered herself. It has happened before.”

The elf gathered the girl in his arms and, looking all around, laid his eyes on a particularly gloomy mausoleum. Its old iron door hung half-ajar and it was surrounded by a thick colony of thistles. They guarded the tomb like little purple soldiers.

“Wait out here,” Edred barked at the robot and the boy and whisked the girl away inside before pulling shut the iron door. Edred stepped forward into the thick darkness and lay the girl on the dusty crypt. Errant streams of light wound their way through the tomb, dappling the stones with drops of sunshine.

The slab of granite was cool and damp. Emma slowly drew herself up. Her eyes wandered over the tomb - the scent of wet dust and aging stone clung to the air and the rheum of epochs, black mold, had gathered in the tomb’s four corners. Her eyes flickered over Edred who stood facing the corner of the tomb most heavily shrouded in darkness. His right hand hovered over the hilt of his sword and she could see the black of his pupils as he glared at her from out of the corner of his eye.

“I’m sorry,” she offered weakly. Edred’s countenance remained as unchanged as the tomb’s stone facade.

“Which one?”

The question made Emma’s heart flutter like a swarm of butterflies.

“I’m sorry—”

“Which one are you, now?”

The girl shook her head and she produced an agitated sigh.

“I don’t know, I don’t know if there is a way I can know. She’s me and I’m her, and I’m her and she’s me, and –”

Edred turned round to face her, his dark eyes rinsing over her. Quite frankly, Emma found the elf formidable. She didn’t understand Melinda’s fervent attraction to him – he possessed none of the gentleness of aptitude that had always drawn her to Winston.

“Well, I believe you’re that Emma-person, right now,” his voice was silvery and sharp in the mausoleum air. “And I want to speak to her.”

Emma leapt from the stone slab to the floor. His incessant haughtiness helped pummel her fear of him into outright irritation.

“You’re going to get who I give you,” she scowled and jabbed at the air with her finger. “And you’re going to leave me alone until I get this all sorted —“

With an unearthly quickness, Edred bridged the small distance between them. His sword hand went to her wrist still hanging in the air and before the girl could even think to resist, the elf had one hand wrapped around her wrist, the other ensconced to her shoulder and he had begun to pull her closer to him.

Emma’s heart beat faster now, as if an entire field of feathery-winged butterflies had taken up residence in her tummy. The elf prince was really quite adept at overstepping himself. As his hand lingered on her wrist, Emma felt yet another sensation overtake her - a bewitching, pleasing desire to acquiesce at once to his strength concentrated on her wrist. It wove itself around her like an enchanted skein, binding her and bringing her to heel inside a web of warmth. It was wonderful and awful and something Emma had herself never known….

Suddenly, it came to her. Is this his magic?!

MELINDA! Emma called out to her internally. Your Prince is a blackguard! A horrible scoundrel, a truly ignoble man! A vill—

“Emma.” Edred bent himself down to her height, their foreheads nearly brushing. He sounded rather like a grown-up trying to allay the temper of a spoiled child.

“Emma, please listen to me,” he said. “Melinda must have full control over her power. Without that control, she is capable of leveling whole cities. Even murder.”

At this, Emma recoiled - she could feel the darkness bubbling and roiling within her like a tar-pit. It was blacker than beetles’ wings, blacker than the eyes of Anubis, blacker than the abyss of passing centuries. Melinda had not wanted to be reminded of that. Emma shivered.

“Please, Emma, give yourself over to her. Something…happens…when she tries to go through you,” he was pleading with her now. “She can’t control herself and it is putting us, and the world, in danger.”

“Well, that’s not very fair.” Emma’s voice was soft. She did know that to be true - what was happening to her was expressly unfair - but his requests bothered her in another way. She couldn’t quite place it. Melinda, what–?

“Fair?” A crimson blush murkied the elf’s frosty pallor and he tensed his grip on her shoulder. “The fate of all humankind is at risk and the only thing you can say is that you think it’s unfair?”

The black murk began its bubbling once more. The longer Edred held her there, the more irate she became. Their bond bled through to her and she knew the truth of him all at once. She knew his cruelty disguised as chivalry, latent cowardice in his heart. Take back your arm, Emma! The words were spectral commands in her mind.

“Oh, I have plenty more to say. First, what happened back there? Why was I out there all alone?” The girl put her lower lip forward quite petulantly. Edred balked and frowned and clasped her wrist with greater force.

“You - I mean, Melinda - were uncontrollable. You were - she was - destroying everything around her. She fled to avoid causing more destruction.” Edred narrowed his eyes. “You caused this.”

“Excuse me,” Emma sniffed, lifting her arm from Edred’s hand and ducking out from under him. “But, I’m not the one going ‘round stealing other peoples’ bodies,” she narrowed her eyes back at him. “And furthermore, I don’t know if I trust you.”

At that, Edred’s mouth fell open and his chivalrous veneer slipped entirely.

“Don’t trust me?” He snarled out the words. “And what – what – EXACTLY does that mean?!”

“I think you know what I mean. I think you know exactly what I mean.”

“Emma!”

The terse exchange must’ve alerted both Seng and Copernicus for as soon as they had started in on one another, a tremulous knock sounded at the door of the mausoleum. The strength of it shook the cobwebs and crumbling stones loose and even made the little dapples of light jump all around. Emma shot Edred a look - it was the kind of look that could make milk curdle and rivers run dry.

And then, like a bolt from the blue, Winston’s face flashed before her in place of Edred’s. It nearly sent her wobbling. There he was - sweet, dignified Winston, who never cast a cold eye upon her and always regarded her with a smile. Winston, whose warm, chaste arms held her but once before she had been spirited away by the elf, his blustery paramour, and their strange companions. Winston, whose fiery mutton-chop whiskers had tickled her face when she leaned in to kiss him for the first time. Winston, who always told her not to worry, who wore a gold ring braided with her canary-yellow hair bearing the inscription ‘Ever Thine.’

Ever thine. Emma’s heart crumpled. She wanted so desperately to return to Winston, to go far away from these strange, unearthly beings and the medieval horror of their tryst. Before she had slipped away, Melinda had yanked back those horrid memories and withheld them from the girl. Emma couldn’t discern why exactly Melinda did not want to her know (and frankly, she felt it a little hypocritical that the foreign spirit should expect to occupy her body without sharing anything in return), but though the memories had been taken back, Emma had already felt the sting of their betrayal.

In the first few weeks following her possession, Emma had come to know Melinda well, much to the woman’s chagrin. Emma had poked around Melinda’s unruly subconscious, turning up her memories the way a miner unearths precious stones. She knew that Melinda carried an insurmountable pain, and Emma knew that pain quite well. Whether or not Melinda wanted it (and Emma knew she very much did not), a strange sisterhood had begun to grow between them. Melinda was unable to resist her more and more, unable to prevent the girl from wandering into the tender things Melinda had occulted behind a multitude of centuries.

So, it was to Emma’s own surprise that she had not yet uncovered that hideous memory. What had Edred done to her? And had she not forgiven him? It certainly did not seem like it - but, how long had she kept this hurt from him? What a strange love this was - however cold and marked with betrayal, it was also true. Edred loved Melinda, and she, him. And they had loved one another across oceans of time. Perhaps…if they could mend it, mend this torturous sundering of their love, then Melinda could return as herself in full.

The illusion of Winston’s face began to wane as Edred’s came back into view amidst the darkness of the tomb. Emma knew she could not return to Winston, not now. If it be true Evil that dogged these peculiar lodgers then Emma knew more of it than any mortal ever should. And she knew, in her heart, that there was work to be done.

Winston, wherever you are, know that I am ever thine. Even if we shall not meet again until after we cross the threshold of eternity.

“Look,” she said to Edred. “I know you want her back and,” the girl softened, “She…she wants you. But earlier today, I lost her. She lost me - I think that’s what happened- anyway, we lost each other. And now I’m mostly Emma, again. I think.”

Another knock sounded at the door, followed by a furious whizzing and sizzling as Copernicus began to lay into it with a bronze drill.

“Melinda! Edred! What are you doing in there?” Seng’s muffled voice rang out.

Edred and Emma look towards one another and then to the door that had begun to crumple beneath the force of Copernicus’s tools.

“Just a minute!” They called out together. Emma turned back towards Edred, her eyes glistened furiously in the dark.

“Melinda needs our help.”

“I think,” Emma continued. “I think I know a place that can help bring her out. But we have to go there alone.” Edred looked on her with grave curiosity and suspicion, and the butterflies stormed around her stomach once more. She dropped her own gaze to the sword at his left hip.

“Can, err, can your sword –”

“Twillion.”

“Right. Can Twillion get us there, you think? I don’t know if I can, um, fly, right now.”

Edred unsheathed the magnificent sword and held it aloft. It glowed like krypton in the gloom, its pale blue fire outshining all the street lamps, candles, and hearth fires Emma had known in her short life. It really was a pretty thing, with those wispy laurels winding across its length. She wondered how Edred could ever have used it on his own beloved.

What did your elf-Prince do to you, Melinda?

“Emma, make note of this. I don’t trust you, either.” Edred stood there, unmoving.

And then, he held out his hand. There was determination in his gesture, and the girl tacitly understood. If it meant finding and recovering Melinda in full, Edred would go to the ends of the earth many times over. Her heart swooned a little at that, but the pragmatist in her (the side of her that had learned to use a typewriter and to ride an ordinary bicycle and to even wear the dreaded bloomers her dear father so detested) knew that the elf had kept hidden his brutish secrets.

She went on wondering if Edred treated everyone and everything as a subject - a constituent to be protected, guarded, even served, but to bend in obedience to his every command. From way deep down, she knew he had always been that way.

“Are you coming, Emma?” His silvery inquiry called her out of her ruminations and she eyed his outstretched hand.

The girl had no choice but to take it. She grasped it quickly and tightly and braced herself for the force she expected would come as they crashed through the ceiling of the mausoleum like a fiery dirigible. And so it took her somewhat by surprise when she felt Edred squeezing back. But somewhere, deep down, she’d been expecting it.

Hoping for it.

[deathsmallcaps]

My 45th Win a Commission story was The 2nd Imaginary Symphony! If you’d like to see the pictures in context with the story, please

Augustus: This is August Plumb; you are listening to the Perpetual Broadcasting Corporation. Of course, it is holiday time, and across Paris, we begin celebrating the month-long lead up to our Platypus Eve, a distinctly Parisian holiday now celebrated across the globe, observing the hatching of the Great Recitating Platypus of the North, the platypus, of course, believed by generations of French schoolchildren, to visit them when illness strikes, recite poetry while they sleep, thereby restoring them to health by the time they wake.

And as we do every year, at the Perpetual Broadcasting Corporation we begin at the start of this notable month with our great Parisian Platypus Time tradition, the broadcast of the 2nd Imaginary Symphony.

As you all know, the 2nd Imaginary Symphony, a program now synonymous with the platypus holiday, was discovered forty years ago by a trash collector in a refuse bin, the trash collector taking home the cassette marked “2nd Imaginary Symphony”, expecting music, playing the strange story it contained instead at his own family’s Platypus Eve gathering. Loving the story, several family members requesting copies of the tape, so began the copying and passing-on of the symphony from family to family, from street to street, until its listening became as much a part of the Platypus Eve tradition as sending your children to school dressed as a platypus or constructing a gigantic platypus out of household items in front of one’s home.

Bringing us to the present day, where the broadcast of the 2nd Imaginary Symphony is now considered the official beginning of the holiday season in Paris. The symphony will be broadcast in four parts, each one ushering in a new stage in our month-long celebration of the platypus.

And now… officially beginning our platypus holiday, this is Augustus Plumb, and I give you the 2nd Imaginary Symphony. [More music plays]

Narrator: This is Nigh’s neighborhood. Just over that hill, factories, soon to be full of busy grown-ups hard at work. And this is Nigh’s street, Telegraph Road. There’s the milkman. [Bottles clinking]

Every morning, he delivers a full day’s supply of dairy products to all the houses on Nigh’s street. And this big white house – this is Nigh’s house. And this is Nigh. [Footsteps and rhythmic creaking]

He is running down the stairs, though his grandmother has told him not to. Ordinarily, it would now be time for Nigh to go to school, but since it’s vacation time, Nigh is free to stay at home with his grandmother and play.

Nigh’s grandmother is blind and sometimes needs his help with household chores, such as sweeping… [Sweeping over the creaking + footsteps] Doing wash… [Washing machine turns on over the noises] Taking out the garbage… [Rustling] And making trips to the supermarket. [Beeping of registers, people chattering]

Walking home from the supermarket, Nigh hears the distant song of the fire siren. The fire siren sits perched high atop its red brick engine house, luring firemen away from their families and homes. [Fire siren] It is now the dinner hour. Time for the turning sound of latched keys to echo throughout the land, as grown-ups arrive home from work. [Keys being turned in doors, unlocking sounds and jingling] Some arrive by automobile. [Doors creaking] Some arrive by bicycle. [Bicycle wheels turning] And others on foot. [Footsteps]

This is Mr. Ackerman, Nigh’s neighbor and friend. Mr. Ackerman works at the big factory just over the hill. Nigh always looks forward to seeing Mr. Ackerman. You see, sometime ago, Mr. Ackerman confided in Nigh a matter of great importance. Nigh had begun to wonder just what it was that the big factory over the hill was making. [Bubbling sounds and mechanical creaking]

Having whiled away many a twilight admiring the great factory, Nigh had come to know each of its towering smokestacks and flashing lights. But as for what it was the great factory made, of this even his grandmother was not quite sure.

When asked at first, Mr. Ackerman did not answer. He regarded Nigh silently, and after a long pause, said only, “Nothing of interest, Nigh. Nothing of interest,” and continued on his way.

This, however, served only to pique the 9-year-old’s curiosity, and upon arriving home, Mr. Ackerman found the little boy still following close behind him.

“I promise you, Nigh, what goes on inside the walls of that factory is of no interest to little boys, or anyone else, for that matter. Now, please, Nigh, I’ve had a long day and I’m tired.” And with that, Mr. Ackerman waved goodbye and disappeared into his house, closing the door firmly behind him.

There was nothing for Nigh to do but to stare for a moment at the closed door before him and walk silently away. Mr. Ackerman had never spoken so coldly to him before, and Nigh was unsure of how to react. He did, however, know one thing for sure – Mr. Ackerman was not in the least bit interested in discussing what he did all day at that factory. “Why?” he wondered. Nigh thought about the sorts of things grown-ups do not like to talk about. Usually, Nigh had found that they fell into two categories – first: [Sudden noise, chiming of bells] Things that embarrassed or made the grown-up uncomfortable. Second: [More noise + chiming] And this was the good one – things unfit for the ears of a little boy. [Saw sings] He decided that he would have to be patient, and show Mr. Ackerman that, though not entirely fond of most grown-ups, he himself was grown up enough to be trusted, even with things unfit for the ears of a little boy. [More music]

He would have to play it cool and wait until the time was right before asking again. However, it was upon arriving home from work the very next day that Mr. Ackerman found the little boy following close behind him once again.

“Hello, Nigh,” Mr. Ackerman said, and with a sigh, opened the door and beckoned for Nigh to come in.

Once inside, Mr. Ackerman remained silent for a time. He sat Nigh down at the kitchen table, clearing off from it several tools and a strange two-pronged object that he appeared to have been working on, and put some water up on the kettle to boil.

Pacing back and forth across the kitchen floor, Mr. Ackerman appeared to be lost in thought, until at last, the small kettle came to a boil, and Mr. Ackerman began to speak.

“Do you know where clouds come from, Nigh?” asked Mr. Ackerman. [Music starts up]

“Sir?” said Nigh.

“Clouds, Nigh. Clouds,” said Mr. Ackerman.

Nigh shook his head. Try as he might, Nigh could not remember learning much of anything about clouds in school.

“So no one has ever told you. Hmph, well, of course not. It is a secret.”

Mr. Ackerman cleared his throat in the manner of someone about to give a long speech. “It’s been said, Nigh, that clouds are made up of fine droplets of water or tiny ice crystals, which are continually evaporating while new droplets or crystals appear through the condensation of water vapor.”

“Wow!” said Nigh.

“This,” said Mr. Ackerman, “is not true.” Falling again to silence, Mr. Ackerman looked to Nigh as though he were about to say something very important. “I’m going to confide in you, Nigh,” began Mr. Ackerman, “a great secret. And the men who bear great secrets such as this, Nigh, must never, never breathe a word of it to another, not even to their grandmothers. Men have given their lives,” he said, and seeing that Nigh was visibly impressed, fell into a dramatic silence that Nigh was sure betrayed his enormous respect for the dead.

With an air of great dignity, Mr. Ackerman poured himself a cup of tea, adding to it a drop of clear liquid from his silver flask, and sat himself down at the table. But then, just as it seemed he was about to speak, something strange happened. The look on Mr. Ackerman’s face changed. It was no longer one of dignity, but the look of someone who had suddenly come to his senses to find himself quite ashamed, and all at once it looked to Nigh as though Mr. Ackerman had changed his mind and was about to say nothing at all.

“Please, Mr. Ackerman, please!” pleaded Nigh, who in all his wildest dreams had never imagined that the big factory harbored a secret so important and could contain his curiosity no more. [Singing saw music] “I won’t tell anyone, I promise!”

Mr. Ackerman glanced at the little boy, and looking slightly defeated, clasped his work-worn hands. It was quite clear to him that there was little hope of shaking the boy’s interest now.

“Okay,” he said, and took in a deep, deep breath. “I am a member of the secret society of cloud-makers. My father was a cloud-maker. My father’s father was a cloud-maker, and now I, too, am a cloud-maker. Our clouds are distributed across the globe, Nigh, made right here, and sent wherever they are needed, to shade people from the angry sun. This is our secret, Nigh. Our secret, and calling – a solemn duty for which we must never, ever take credit.”

“How come?” asked Nigh.

“How come?” repeated Mr. Ackerman, searchingly. “Well, you see, Nigh,” began Mr. Ackerman, “a cloud is a powerful thing. As long as a cloud is considered a happenstance of nature, then it’s a helpful and friendly thing. But should this power to create and control clouds be in the hands of all men, well…

“Consider nations at war, Nigh. Imagine what would happen if one nation were simply to just steal all its enemy’s clouds, leaving the other’s Earth infernal, or scorched. Or worse – fill the other’s sky with thousands of cumulus clouds, perpetuating a torrential downpour that need not ever end. Why, it’d be the end of us all. That is why the cloud-makers have always been men and women without a country or a faith, with no allegiance at all, but to the clouds themselves.” With that, Mr. Ackerman looked upwards with a gleam in his eye, as though he could see right through the kitchen ceiling the clouds in the sky above. “Our secrets are passed down from generation to generation, Nigh. We pose always as ordinary citizens, our factories disguised to look no different than any of the others in their midst. Why, as far as the outside world is concerned, our factory exists solely for the production of the three-pronged one slot widget.” At this, Mr. Ackerman chuckled. “Trucks full of the things travel to and from our factory all day. They arrive full, and so they leave. Of course, we do keep a good deal of these widgets on hand, in case of a visit from the outside world. But who wants to visit the widget factory? Men and women toiling for hours on end with molten ore and soldering irons, riveting rivets until they can no longer even feel their fingertips. No one. And if they did, they’d never be allowed past the front gate, not without an appointment.”

“Are all widget factories really cloud factories?” asked Nigh.

Mr. Ackerman shook his head. “No, Nigh, no. I suppose most any factory could be a cloud factory. You never know, and that’s the point – no one does. That is, except for the cloud-makers. And I’ve even heard tell of people who worked at cloud factories who, for security reasons, hadn’t even the slightest idea.”

“How?” asked Nigh.

“By the same process usually reserved only for unexpected visitors – atomic hypnosis.”

“Atomic hypnosis?”

“It’s just like ordinary hypnosis, only much, much smaller. These people go to work every day, completely unaware how entirely irreplaceable and important they are. All they see is an ordinary factory, in which they are asked to perform only the most mundane of tasks, never for a moment suspecting the incomprehensibly beautiful process in which they are taking part.”

“Do they ever find out?”

“No. I don’t believe that most of them ever do.”

“How come?”

“Well, you see, Nigh, atomic hypnosis is a very powerful thing.”

“It doesn’t seem fair!” said the little boy, quite visibly disappointed.

“Fair?” said Mr. Ackerman. “Fair? I don’t know. I am afraid, though, that it might be necessary. It’s just not easy for people to believe themselves capable of such great things, Nigh. It’s simple insecurity. And as a matter of security, insecurity is simply not to be tolerated. Secrets such as this can be put at risk for no one.”

“You told me,” said Nigh, causing the flicker of shame to return to Mr. Ackerman’s face once more.

“I… I live alone here, Nigh. I haven’t any children with whom to share my secrets.” Mr. Ackerman poured himself another cup of tea, emptying into it more of the clear liquid from the silver flask in his front pocket. “The life of a cloud-maker, Nigh – it’s a lonely thing. To the outside world, we must purposely appear as unremarkable as possible. We lead lives designed to attract very little attention. And sometimes, Nigh, sometimes we attract no attention at all.” Mr. Ackerman’s gaze turned down upon the kitchen table. “When you grow up someday, Nigh, you’ll come to understand that there are some things in life that, if you don’t share them, well, they can fade. Grown men have been known to disappear into thin air.” Though still in the room with him, Mr. Ackerman looked to Nigh to be far, far away. “You’re a good boy, Nigh,” said Mr. Ackerman, “and I believe I can trust you.”

With that, Mr. Ackerman excused himself and withdrew to the bathroom. Nigh, who had been sitting quietly and attentively, for much longer than would normally be expected from a boy his age on vacation, began to wander about the house in Mr. Ackerman’s absence.

“After all,” thought Nigh, “I have never been in the house of a cloud-maker before.”

In the living room, a little to the left of the front door, Nigh noticed a large, yellow raincoat hanging from a wooden coatrack. Whereas normally, a large, yellow raincoat hanging from a wooden coatrack would be of little interest to a boy like Nigh, this large, yellow raincoat appeared to be covered from top to bottom in no less than a full inch of undisturbed dust.

This struck Nigh to be rather odd. As Nigh reached out to touch the dusty coat with an outstretched finger, Mr. Ackerman stepped into the room, and with a booming voice that scared and startled Nigh, cried, “Don’t touch that! Now, I told you never ever, ever, ever, under any circumstance, may you ever so much as touch that raincoat! Do you understand?!”

Nigh backed away from the raincoat and nodded his head vigorously.

“This raincoat is for use only in the most severe of drought emergencies!”

Nigh had never heard of a raincoat that is only to be used in the most severe of drought emergencies before, and was quite visibly shaken by the severity of Mr. Ackerman’s tone. “You d-didn’t…” stammered Nigh.

“I didn’t what?”

“Tell me about the raincoat…”

“I didn’t… oh, my god, I didn’t.” And there the two of them stood, neither boy nor man knowing quite what to say. Mr. Ackerman sighed a sigh of such sadness that it made Nigh shiver. “I… I’m sorry, Nigh, I shouldn’t have yelled at you like that. I had no right. I was afraid you were about to…” Mr. Ackerman trailed off, and with a look of embarrassment on his face, knelt down to the height of the little boy. “I’m afraid I’m… I’m just not feeling very well right now, Nigh. You’ve been a very good boy today. You know that, don’t you?”

Nigh shook his head yes, because the way Mr. Ackerman was looking at him, he thought he ought to.

“I think old Mr. Ackerman needs a little rest now,” he said to Nigh. “You won’t forget what I told you here today, will you, Nigh?”

Nigh shook his head no.

“Okay, Nigh. You go run along and play now.”

[PBC music] Augustus: This is August Plumb and you have been listening to part one of the 2nd Imaginary Symphony. On behalf of all of us here at the Perpetual Broadcasting Corporation, we wish you a happy holiday season. We will return with part two in just a few nights, ladies and gentlemen. Until then, try not to eat too many platypus-shaped cookies. Goodnight, everyone. [Ending music]

The Orbiting Human Circus (Of The Air): The 2nd Imaginary Symphony - Part Two

Augustus: Auggie Plumb here. You are listening to part two of the PBC’s broadcast of the 2nd Imaginary Symphony. It is, of course, Platypus Night, the night in our month-long lead up to Platypus Eve, where all Paris goes dark. The city of lights is extinguished and one finds not a single lit electric light or candle. That’s right, ladies and gentlemen, at the strike of 8 in two hours’ time, the Parisians will gather with friends, with loved ones, with only the moonlight to light their way, and later this evening, waiting, all of us, waiting.

And for whom do we wait? Well, for those of you listening to this international broadcast in some remote enclave such as a mountaintop, jungle, cabin, or perhaps one of the Earth’s poles, we are waiting for the Great Recitating Platypus. Yes, on this night, the platypus travels the Earth looking not for signs of stuffy noses or sickness, but for darkened houses, the dark house being a sign that the dwellers within are inviting the platypus to visit.

And we wait. Our eyes close, as if in unison. When the platypus enters your home, it shivers, entranced by a feeling of absolute peace. The platypus will move through slighting certain objects, one for each of us, and touching them to its bill. And when the platypus leaves our house, and we all open our eyes at exactly the same time, we light a candle and place it in our window and all of Paris spills out into the streets, and in the streets all of Paris wonders just which object the platypus has touched for them. And we go through our bedrooms, and we go through our living rooms, from thing to thing. We ask, ‘Is this the object the platypus blessed?’ For when you see that object, one will suddenly be seized with the same unmistakable feeling of warmth and safety one felt when the platypus had just left our house.

A memory or idea will pass into our heads and that will be the key to our well-being and happiness in the coming year. And indeed in times of struggle or adversity, if the object is touched, the path to follow will come, and all of this tonight.

But first, part two of our classic holiday broadcast. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the 2nd Imaginary Symphony. [Music playing]

Narrator: “This raincoat is for use only in the most severe of drought emergencies!”

Nigh had never heard of a raincoat that is only to be used in the most severe of drought emergencies before, and was quite visibly shaken by the severity of Mr. Ackerman’s tone.

“You d-didn’t…” stammered Nigh.

“I didn’t what?”

“Tell me about the raincoat…”

“I didn’t… oh, my god, I didn’t.” And there the two of them stood, neither boy nor man knowing quite what to say. Mr. Ackerman sighed a sigh of such sadness that it made Nigh shiver. “I… I’m sorry, Nigh, I shouldn’t have yelled at you like that. I had no right. I was afraid you were about to…” Mr. Ackerman trailed off, and with a look of embarrassment on his face, knelt down to the height of the little boy. “I’m afraid I’m… I’m just not feeling very well right now, Nigh. You’ve been a very good boy today. You know that, don’t you?”

Nigh shook his head yes, because the way Mr. Ackerman was looking at him, he thought he ought to.

“I think old Mr. Ackerman needs a little rest now,” he said to Nigh. “You won’t forget what I told you here today, will you, Nigh?”

Nigh shook his head no.

“Okay, Nigh. You go run along and play now.”

And so it was that Nigh became the guardian of a great and profound secret. In the weeks and months that passed, Nigh never looked at the big factory or the clouds above in exactly the same way again. The world seemed a new and exotic place to Nigh, where new mysteries waited to be discovered around every corner. He would spend hours on the hill overlooking the big factory, watching the newborn clouds drift this way and that.

In the evenings, he would sit out on his front stoop, anxiously awaiting Mr. Ackerman’s return home from work. It was the complicit look that he and Mr. Ackerman would share that he looked forward to most of all.

Nigh felt very lucky indeed to be the bearer of such a great and important secret, and dreamed some day of becoming a cloud-maker himself. Cloud-making seemed so much more interesting than the other jobs he had learned about at career day in school.

When asked, Mr. Ackerman just shrugged and said, “Not anybody can be a cloud-maker, Nigh. Sure, most anyone is capable. But the title of ‘cloud-maker’ is something that must be earned. Right now, you’re just a passenger, along for the ride.”

“A passenger?” asked Nigh.

“This world, Nigh, this world of men and women,” said Mr. Ackerman, his cheeks and nose a good deal redder than Nigh had ever seen them before, “little boys like you… you’re nothing but passengers.”

Mr. Ackerman was quiet for a moment, seemingly struggling to find the right words. “It’s like… like a crazy carnival ride, gone out of control,” he said, his eyes widening. “It’s all our fault.”

“Your fault?” asked Nigh.

Mr. Ackerman laughed a sad laugh. “You know who built this crazy machine, who’s operating it?” he asked.

Nigh shook his head.

“Grown-ups,” Mr. Ackerman said, bowing deeply. “We build the damn thing every day. Problem is, most of us don’t even know it. Even though we’re driving, each and every last one of us, we think we’re just passengers like you, or worse – victims. We’re terrible drivers, the whole lot of us. But sometimes, Nigh, sometimes a little boy like you grows up and finds that despite everything, he can still see clearly. He finds that he can look straight ahead and steer the whole blessed thing. And when a boy can do that, he can be…”

“A cloud-maker?” asked Nigh.

“Any damn thing he pleases,” finished Mr. Ackerman.

Nigh thought about how before meeting Mr. Ackerman, he had been afraid of growing up. He enjoyed how he spent his days and was yet to find a grown-up who did. Watching the grown-ups travel to and from work every day, he had witnessed looks only of boredom and stress upon their faces. Nigh was always amazed by how well Mr. Ackerman was able to mimic this look of discontentment, how well he was able to mask his heroic purpose and disappear daily into the ceaseless flow of adults who had made the whole idea of growing up look so unappealing to Nigh in the first place.

Mr. Ackerman was indeed so good at appearing tired and unhappy that sometimes, for fleeing moments, even Nigh himself was fooled. And then, early one vacation morning, Nigh awoke to find something horribly wrong. Mr. Ackerman’s hat and briefcase were strewn upon his front lawn, and the door to his house left hanging open. Through the open door, Nigh could see that Mr. Ackerman’s wooden coatrack had also been capsized and was laying on its side.

Nigh cautiously approached the house and called out to Mr. Ackerman.

“Mr. Ackerman!” called Nigh. There was no answer. “Mr. Ackerman!” he called yet again, poking his head through the front door. And still there was no answer. The house was completely silent. Nigh, becoming more and more concerned, decided to ask his grandmother if she had heard Mr. Ackerman leaving for work that morning. Unfortunately, she had been busy splicing tape and hadn’t noticed anything at all. Nigh thought for a moment of asking his grandmother’s help, but was afraid of compromising Mr. Ackerman’s important need for secrecy. He would have to try and find Mr. Ackerman by himself for now.

Nigh returned to Mr. Ackerman’s front yard and, gathering the hat and briefcase, cautiously entered the house. Closing the door behind him, Nigh placed the hat and briefcase upon Mr. Ackerman’s kitchen table and began searching about for any clues as towards Mr. Ackerman’s whereabouts. Finding nothing out of the ordinary, with the exception of the capsized coatrack and raincoat, he returned once again to the briefcase.

Hesitating for a moment, Nigh decided that there was no other choice. The briefcase must be opened. After all, he thought, Mr. Ackerman might be in trouble! Nigh gently released the latches [latches clicking] and was quite surprised by what he found.

Inside the case, a second slightly smaller case was housed, this one ice cold and made out of some sort of aluminum or other light metal. Upon this metal was etched the phrase “FOR AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY”. Underneath this statement was etched a good deal more information. The etching was so small, however, that Nigh had to press his face up against the ice-cold case and strain his eyes in order to read it.

“WARNING”, it said, “FOR THE GROUND TRANSPORTATION AND CONTAINMENT OF NIMBUS, STRATUS, CIRRUS, AND CUMULUS CLOUDS ONLY. NOT TO BE OPENED IN AN UNREFRIGERATED INDOOR ENVIRONMENT”. As Nigh was straining to read the last part of this statement, his nose accidentally made contact with the small red button that he had not previously noticed. [Shaking, gears turning]

Suddenly, Nigh’s ears were filled with the sound of gears turning, and a mechanical whirring filled the air. [Bubbly noises] The case sprung open and out of it sprung a tiny and perfectly formed nimbus cloud. It was the most amazing thing Nigh had ever seen!

The little cloud drifted upwards, drifting higher and higher, until at last, it came to a rest against the cool tiles of the kitchen ceiling. Nigh pulled out his chair and climbed upon the kitchen table in order to take a better look. From his new vantage point, however, it seemed as though the little cloud had not come to a rest at all, but was trying to pass through the tile ceiling in order to reach the sky above. Nigh noticed also that the cloud seemed just a little bit smaller than it had been only moments ago. It was almost as if the cloud’s inability to reach its proper altitude was causing it to somehow shrink.

Then the words etched on the aluminum cloud case suddenly came back to him. “NOT TO BE OPENED IN AN UNREFRIGERATED INDOOR ENVIRONMENT”.

“What will Mr. Ackerman think when he finds out I destroyed his cloud?”

Nigh was reminded of the time a bird had found its way into his grandmother’s house and the horrible panic he had felt as the bird flapped about, crashing into closed windows. [Banging noises]

He had to do something, and quickly!

But the cloud was much too high and well beyond reach. How would he ever get the cloud back down and into its cloud case?

Then Nigh thought of Mr. Ackerman’s old-fashioned refrigerator. Perhaps this could provide the sort of refrigerated environment the cloud needed.

Filling his lungs with as much air as he could muster, [sound of someone blowing air, bubbles popping] Nigh began to blow the cloud in the direction of Mr. Ackerman’s ice box. It’s working, thought Nigh, it’s working! Nigh blew and blew until the cloud was floating just a few feet above the refrigerator door. Nigh was hoping that the cloud would be drawn into the coolness of the ice box, as it would the coolness of high altitudes.

However, upon opening Mr. Ackerman’s refrigerator door, he found no room whatsoever for the little cloud. It seems the refrigerator was already full, not with a single grocery, mind you, but from top to bottom with clouds, clouds of every imaginable shape and size. Stratus clouds, and cirrus clouds, so many clouds, in fact, that Nigh had to immediately slam the refrigerator door shut in order to keep them from pouring out.

Just then, Nigh felt the most amazing, cool sensation on the top of his head. The chilly little cloud had begun to lose altitude and was now hovering only centimeters away from his face. Nigh grabbed the cloud case off the kitchen table and held it open beneath the sinking cloud. He closed the aluminum case around it and placed it directly back inside of Mr. Ackerman’s briefcase, closing all the latches. [Latches closing]

This is getting me nowhere, thought Nigh, who with a great sigh of relief, decided to resume his search for Mr. Ackerman outside. [PBC music]

Augustus: You were listening to part two of the 2nd Imaginary Symphony. The Perpetual Broadcasting Corporation will be going off the air in observance of the Platypus Night. This is August Plumb, and the Perpetual Broadcasting Corporation. Goodnight. [Ending music]

The Orbiting Human Circus (Of The Air): The 2nd Imaginary Symphony - Part Three

Augustus: August here, this is the Perpetual Broadcasting Corporation. Welcome to our broadcast of part three of the 2nd Imaginary Symphony, and of course, to week three of our lead-up to Platypus Eve, tonight being the night, of course, when all Paris spills into platypus-shaped sea craft, in many cases passed down from parents or grandparents, and float upon the Seine, sharing delicious nighttime picnics.

But of course, you don’t need me to tell you. You’re probably pulling your boat out of your basement or boathouse right now. And while you shore up your craft and patch up the holes, like all the rest of us, you’ll be listening to part three of the 2nd Imaginary Symphony broadcast right here on the Perpetual Broadcasting Corporation.

And last week, our cloud-maker disappeared. We return you now to the story moments before we last left. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the 2nd Imaginary Symphony. [Music playing]

Narrator: “This is getting me nowhere,” thought Nigh, who with a great sigh of relief, decided to resume his search for Mr. Ackerman outside.

On his way to the door, however, Nigh found himself suddenly tumbling forward, [sound of someone falling], falling face-first to the floor, and there, beneath his feet, lay the culprit – the infamous large yellow raincoat, with its inch of undisturbed dust.

Retrieving the raincoat, [thunder] and straightening the coatrack from which it had fallen, Nigh heard the unmistakable sound of distant thunder. “Oh, no!” he thought, “Rain would be of no help at all.”

Nigh poked his head outside to find that, indeed, it had begun raining [rain and thunder] and soon it became quite apparent that this was no ordinary rainstorm. With each passing moment, [rain getting louder] the rain fell harder and the wind blew stronger, until what had begun as a pleasant sprinkle had become no less than a torrential downpour.

In his mission, however, Nigh would not be discouraged. Mr. Ackerman might be in trouble, and if this was the case, it would be with the bravery and strength of the most grown-up of grown-ups anywhere that Nigh would strive to find him. And so out into the storm Nigh went, protected only by an ill-fitting large yellow raincoat that he now wore.

All around Nigh, the skies grew darker and darker until not the tiniest trace of sunlight remained. Huge tornadoes began to gather upon the horizons, their deafening winds so loud that Nigh was unable to hear the sound of his grandmother calling for him to come home.

Spiraling raindrops filled the air, turning the Earth to mud and flooding the streets all about him. And then suddenly, a tremendous gust of wind came along, blowing Nigh off his feet and blowing the open raincoat right off of him. [Rain and thunder stops, squeaking of birds]

Nigh looked up from his seat in a puddle and was astonished by what he saw. The moment the raincoat had blown off of him, the rain had stopped and the sun came out. There were chirping birds, and all shone with the warm glow of a clear sky as the powerful cumulus cloud that had been pounding the Earth with its torrential downpour just a moment ago had all but withdrawn.

Nigh looked at the raincoat, which was now strewn on the ground a few feet in front of him, and looked back up at the sky. He got up, went to retrieve the raincoat, but as soon as he touched it, [thunder, birds stop] he found the sky darkening, and the distant sound of thunder again returning.

He took his hand off the raincoat [birds chirping] and found that the sun had once again come out. He repeated this several times, [thunder] and found that every time his hand made contact [birds] with the coat [thunder] the cumulus clouds [birds] were once again drawn to fill the sky [thunder] and the moment he released [birds] the coat, the clouds withdrew.

This was another of Mr. Ackerman’s possessions, Nigh decided, that should only be touched by trained and authorized personnel. He reached for a small branch that, in the storm, had been blown off of a nearby tree, and with it, lifted the raincoat carefully, and returned it to Mr. Ackerman’s wooden coatrack. [Music changes]

Then, a thought occurred to Nigh. What if early that morning, there had been some sort of emergency at the cloud factory, one that required Mr. Ackerman’s immediate attention? An emergency of such great importance that he was unable to pause for a moment, not even to close the front door or retrieve the fallen hat and briefcase that he had dropped in his haste?

If such had been the case, then Mr. Ackerman would certainly appreciate having his hat and briefcase brought to him. Certainly, he would, thought Nigh. And so, Nigh climbed to the top of the big hill, Mr. Ackerman’s hat and briefcase in hand, and looked down at the great factory has he had done so many times before.

He knew he’d never get past the guards at the front gate. At best, they would simply take the hat and the briefcase from him and send him on his way. Nigh wanted to see that Mr. Ackerman was alright with his own two eyes, and to see inside the cloud factory more than almost anything in the whole wide world.

He had discovered some time ago that around the back of the factory, there was a small hole at the base of the barbed wire fence, just the right size for a skinny nine-year-old boy to fit through. Nigh made his way carefully down the hill so as not to slip on the wet grass and climbed quietly through the hole, pulling the hat and briefcase behind him.

The factory consisted of two tall silver buildings, one rectangle and one square, connected at the center by another giant bubble-shaped building, roughly double the size of the others. The whole of the structure was covered from top to bottom in long lines of blinking lights and lighted windows. It looked to Nigh like a giant version of the old recording equipment that his grandmother kept in their basement.

Looking up at the smokestacks, Nigh wondered if he had ever seen anything quite so tall. Standing right up next to them for the first time, he had certainly never felt smaller. Just then, [voices, footsteps] Nigh heard the sound of voices and footsteps coming from somewhere nearby. He looked around for someplace to hide, but could see none. Moving along the back of the great structure, he came to a single unmarked door and gave its knob a try. The door was unlocked, and Nigh, hearing the voices and footsteps draw nearer, slowly and quietly cracked the door open and stepped inside. [Singing]

What Nigh saw then was at once the most amazing and beautiful thing he had ever seen in his life – rows of singing, white-haired women, sitting on a vast and spiraling assembly line, in front of each, a small and perfectly formed cloud, floating only inches above a frost-covered silver tray; men cranking cranks and pulling levers upon huge machines made of silver and bronze; hundreds of workers suspended in midair by string, pulleys, and wire, peddling upon small contraptions whose pedals and gears were linked to bigger gears, and those to bigger gears, and those to bigger gears yet, above them, giant fans blowing the larger completed clouds towards smokestacks high along the factory’s vast lightened ceiling, creating huge cloud-shaped shadows that drifted over the men and women working a hundred feet below.

He saw several raised platforms, upon which sat workers surrounded by huge control panels of blinking and flashing lights; buttons and knobs of every imaginable size and color; frost-covered golden tubs, housing hundreds of tiny floating clouds waiting for inspection; suspended from the ceiling, a giant clock, the sort that he had never seen before, flanked on all sides by a towering bank of gauges and levers; and rising above it all, on the tallest platform yet, he saw the elder cloud-maker, who from his perch high above, directed the flow of the entire factory with graceful waves of his left hand while calling out through the megaphone in his right.

“Nimbus, two hundred of three thousand! Stratus, forty-four of fifty-three! Cumulus, twenty-seven of four thirteen!” And on, and on.

Nigh realized that he had begun to shiver and noticed also that he could see his breath. Looking around at the singing silver-haired women seated all about him, Nigh noticed that their breath could be seen as well. In fact, upon closer inspection, it almost looked as if the women were singing the clouds before them.

Putting on Mr. Ackerman’s large hat and crossing his arms against the chill, Nigh proceeded to look about the building for any sign of Mr. Ackerman. He noticed that every single chair in the building seemed to be filled, with the exception of one, and that this one empty chair seemed to be the focus of many an anxious glance by the workers in its midst. Even the elder cloud-maker, directing the whole factory from his platform high above, was seen to glance worriedly at this empty chair from time to time. Indeed, this chair located high atop the only empty examination platform seemed to be a matter of great concern to all the cloud-makers.

Crawling his way along the factory’s back wall so as not to be noticed, Nigh made his way slowly but surely to the platform in question. He waited silently until he was sure no one was looking and climbed slowly up to the platform’s top.

Peeking over the edge, Nigh could clearly see a silver plaque bolted to the back of the empty chair, and etched upon this silver plaque, he could clearly see was the name “R. A. Ackerman”.

Nigh suddenly became quite aware that every sound in the factory had ceased, and it had been replaced with a shocked and deathly silence. Looking up, he saw that all work in the factory had come to a stop and that every last eye in the vast building was upon him. “A little boy?!” boomed the elder cloud-maker, who in his shock, did not realize that he was still speaking through the megaphone.

Several of the cloud-makers began slowly to rise to their feet, and Nigh, now aware that he might be in terrible trouble, collected the briefcase and ran as fast as he could towards the door through which he had entered. [Fast footsteps]

Finding the door still unlocked, Nigh made a hasty exit, not looking back even once outside. Hearing the growing commotion behind him, he made his way to the gate and squeezed himself back through the small hole. Once through, he ran as fast as he could up the hill and to the road just beyond it.

At just that moment, a fire engine with its lights flashing slowly turned a corner and began sounding its alarm, having just pulled out of the engine house. The firemen on board were under the luring influence of the fire siren, and did not notice the small boy as he climbed on board. Nigh hid himself underneath one of the fire engine’s big benches, and exhausted by the day’s adventures, drifted off to sleep.

He awoke a good time later to find a wet group of firemen looking down at him. “Don’t you know that fire engines are dangerous places for little boys?” asked a firemen with a kind face. “You could have been hurt! What’s your name?”

“Nigh,” said Nigh.

“You mustn’t ever go near a fire engine when it’s in use, Nigh. Now, if you were to come by the engine house some afternoon, that’d be a different story. Why, me and the boys, we’d even give you a tour. But when we’re fighting a fire, that’s business only for a trained firefighter, and even trained firefighters die fighting fires. Do you understand, Nigh?”

Nigh nodded yes, and the fireman smiled.

“Someday, Nigh, you might even grow up to be a real fireman, just like us!”

Though he tried not to show it, Nigh shuddered inwardly at the thought of being forever subject to the whims of the fire siren.

“Where do you live, Nigh?” the fireman asked. Nigh looked up to see where he was, and saw in the afternoon light that the truck had traveled rather far from Telegraph Road. However, not wanting to answer too many more questions about his day’s activities, Nigh pointed to a spot vaguely down the block. “Well, you head on home, now, Nigh.” Relieved, Nigh stepped down from the firetruck. “Oh, and Nigh, where did you get the hat and briefcase from?”

“They’re… they’re my father’s,” said Nigh.

The fireman smiled, and with that, the engine was off, leaving Nigh standing alone on a street corner. Realizing that he had a very long walk ahead of him, Nigh started for home. As he walked, he reflected upon the day’s events and became more and more concerned that something horrible really had become of Mr. Ackerman.

Soon, the day began to turn slowly into night, and Nigh noticed that though he had been walking for quite some time in the direction of home, things were looking less and less familiar until soon they were no longer familiar at all. Nigh realized that he was lost, and in a part of town that he had never been to before. The buildings loomed larger, and somehow grayer, with dark alleys that spread like vast spider webs between them. There were more and more grown-ups everywhere, all rushing to and from with haste and impatience.

Nigh was becoming worried that he might never find his way home. He had walked a long, long way and his legs were aching as it was. He knew one thing for sure – he was tired and did not much like this new part of town in which he had found himself. Nigh sat down on a curb to rest his legs for a moment, and was almost tripped over by a large businessman who had been rushing past. “Watch where you’re sitting, little boy!” scolded the cross businessman, who dusted himself off and continued on his way.

Not wanting to be tripped over again, Nigh gathered himself up and entered one of the nearby alleys. At least here there would be less traffic and he could rest. The alley was dark, and Nigh, moving carefully so as not to bump into anything, settled against the wall of the building, finding a nice, soft spot on which to rest his head.

It was now almost completely dark, and as night settled on this strange part of the city, [chattering] Nigh found the sounds coming from outside of the alley to be more violent and foreboding - drunken sounds, bottles smashing, and men fighting; wild laughter that offered not a hint of happiness. Nigh wished more than anything to be safe and at home with grandma. He realized that he was hungry, and that grandma had probably had his dinner ready long ago. He knew also that once the dinnertime had come and passed, she would have begun to worry.

Nigh promised himself that he would take only a short rest and then immediately continue on his journey home, and it was with this conviction that Nigh’s already heavy eyelids became altogether too heavy to lift at all, and Nigh fell once again into the deepest and most pleasant of sleeps. What Nigh did not know as he drifted off to the land of dreams was that the soft object he had come to rest against was not a bundle of rags, nor a wastepaper bag; in fact, it was not an object at all. It was a man, a very tired and sleeping man by the name of Rudolph Abacus Ackerman.

In a matter of moments now, Nigh and his friend, Mr. Ackerman, will awaken and discover each other in the morning light, but let us first take a moment to discover for ourselves the difference between the sound of a sunrise on Telegraph Road, as we experienced at the beginning of our adventure, and the sound of a sunrise on the streets of a sleepless city, as the first rays of morning light glitter peacefully upon the empty silver flask in Mr. Ackerman’s outstretched hand. [Birds chirping] [PBC music]

Augustus: You’ve been listening to the PBC’s broadcast of the 2nd Imaginary Symphony. Do be careful not to tip your boats, and we’ll see you tonight on the Seine. [Ending music]

The Orbiting Human Circus (Of The Air): The 2nd Imaginary Symphony - Part Four

[Music] Augustus: You are listening to the Perpetual Broadcasting Corporation! It’s Platypus Eve. I cannot begin to describe our Platypus Eve festivities. I can only tell you that it is one of the most lovely evenings of the year, and that it begins with all of Paris listening to the final broadcast of the 2nd Imaginary Symphony.

And ladies and gentlemen, the moment has come. This is Auggie Plumb. [Singing saw music]

Narrator: But let us first take a moment to discover for ourselves the difference between the sound of a sunrise on Telegraph Road, as we experienced at the beginning of our adventure, and the sound of a sunrise on the streets of a sleepless city as the first rays of morning light glitter peacefully upon the empty silver flask in Mr. Ackerman’s outstretched hand. [Birds chirping, wind blowing] “Nigh!” said Mr. Ackerman.

“Mr. Ackerman!” said Nigh, who rubbed his eyes, for a moment not quite sure at all of where he was. “Mr. Ackerman, you’re all right! You’re all right!” he cried.

Cringing at the volume of the excited boy’s voice, Mr. Ackerman squinted at Nigh. “I’m fine, Nigh, fine. What… what are you doing here?”

“I was looking for you!” said Nigh.

“Looking… for me?” repeated Mr. Ackerman. “Does your grandmother know you’re here?” Nigh shook his head. “Oh, Nigh,” said Mr. Ackerman, “she must be so worried.”

Watching Mr. Ackerman squint, it occurred to Nigh that the early morning sun was hurting the cloud-maker’s eyes. He carefully retrieved Mr. Ackerman’s hat and handed it to him. Mr. Ackerman thanked Nigh, but did not put it on, instead returning it to the ground where it had been. “How in the world did you find me, Nigh?” he asked.

Excitedly, Nigh began to recount the previous day’s events. [Whirring and buzzing]

As Nigh spoke, the look of sadness that had taken hold of Mr. Ackerman’s face began to deepen, and from time to time, he simply shook his head. Finally seeming as though he could listen to no more, Mr. Ackerman righted himself and silenced Nigh with a wave of his swollen right hand.

“Please, Nigh, please,” he said, seemingly quite lost in thought. There passed a moment of silence between the two. The excitement Nigh had felt in recounting his story quickly faded and was replaced instead with a creeping feeling of dread.

Mr. Ackerman was right. His grandmother was surely sick with worry, and with his previous day’s adventures, Mr. Ackerman seemed none too pleased. In fact, looking at Mr. Ackerman just then, it seemed that he too might be sick, though maybe not with worry. Nigh felt the question he had been dying to ask since he awoke bubbling up.

“What happened to you, Mr. Ackerman?”

Mr. Ackerman looked at Nigh, and for a moment, appeared to be at a loss for an answer. Nigh watched as Mr. Ackerman’s gaze first fell upon his shoes, and then to the ground beneath them. “Nothing happened to me, Nigh,” Mr. Ackerman said finally, “nothing happens to me.” The boy looked up at him expectantly, waiting. “I just left.” Mr. Ackerman looked at Nigh. “I got fed up and left. You’ll understand when you grow up.”

“But the cloud-makers, they need you!”

Mr. Ackerman looked down at the little boy before him and shook his head. “We’ve got to get you home now,” was all Mr. Ackerman said, but Nigh did not follow. He stood in place and looked up at Mr. Ackerman, clearly not understanding. Seeing this, Mr. Ackerman looked suddenly quite ashamed and stopped. He turned back towards Nigh and, feeling for the flask in his jacket pocket, quietly spoke. “I…” Mr. Ackerman said, “am not… a cloud-maker.”

At this, Nigh found his head swimming and a great sob escaped from somewhere deep within him. After all the strange and scary things he had experienced in the past 24 hours, it seemed he had found himself at last beginning to cry. Nigh could not understand why after all he had done, Mr. Ackerman would no longer trust him with his secret, and it was the thought that he had somehow lost this trust that he could not bear.

His face red with shame, Mr. Ackerman took the crying boy into his arms, and had Nigh’s face not been buried in the lining of his jacket, Nigh would have noticed that at that moment, Mr. Ackerman looked very, very old. Mr. Ackerman felt very much as if he should say something, but was at a bit of a loss as to what that something should be. “There are cloud-makers,” he offered, and the boy looked up. “I believe with all my heart that there are cloud-makers. Why, just look up at the sky!” he said, pointing upwards. “What more proof could you need?”

As Nigh’s tears began to abate, Mr. Ackerman put a firm hand on the boy’s shoulder and knelt down so as to look him directly in the eye. “It’s just that I…” he said, “Rudolph Abacus Ackerman, am not one of them. I’m… a widget-maker. That factory, Nigh, it’s a widget factory. That’s all it’s ever been. We make widgets there, three-pronged one-slot widgets. I didn’t want to tell you, Nigh. I didn’t want to tell you because I’m not proud of it. I don’t even like widgets.”

Looking down at Nigh, Mr. Ackerman suddenly realized that the boy did not believe him.

“Look at my hands, Nigh. They’re worn. They swell up. It’s from years of curing widgets, riveting rivets into slots, and molding metal prongs. There’s no place in a cloud factory for men like me.”

“But Mr. Ackerman, I saw the cloud factory!” pleaded Nigh.

“There are no clouds in that factory!” boomed Mr. Ackerman, who, surprised by the volume of his own voice, cringed and continued at a much quieter and apologetic tone. “I wish there were, Nigh. I wish to the heavens above that it were one of those factories. But in that factory, Nigh, there’s nothing at all but widgets, and that is why I must stay here and seek to once again to fill my silver flask. And you, Nigh, must be sent home to your grandmother this instant.”

��But Mr. Ackerman!” sobbed Nigh, and then suddenly, Nigh had an idea. He crawled over to Mr. Ackerman’s briefcase and opened both it and the cold, silver case within. What Mr. Ackerman saw then, he would remember for the rest of his life – a small, perfectly formed nimbus cloud drifting slowly skyward out of the open recess of his briefcase. Mr. Ackerman stood up and with his mouth hanging open, and a look of shock upon his face, moved towards the small cloud in order to examine it more closely.

The cloud, however, continued to drift upwards and away from him. Not for a moment taking his eyes away from the rising cloud, Mr. Ackerman continued in its pursuit, and Nigh, taking Mr. Ackerman’s hand, gently placed Mr. Ackerman’s hat back on his head, where it belonged.

The two followed their cloud out of the narrow alleyway and down to the busy city street, where the busy city-dwellers were far too busy to notice the spectacle of a nine-year-old boy and a disheveled man marching hand in hand behind a small nimbus cloud.

The further along they went in pursuit of the cloud, the higher also it drifted. Mr. Ackerman never for a moment took his gaze away from the cloud, like a man hypnotized, and when Nigh finally did, he found that things were once again beginning to look familiar. The cloud, it seemed, was leading them home. [Bubbling]

The boy and the man, hand in hand, followed the cloud from street to street, over grassy fields, steep hills, and deepened valleys, until the cloud had reached such an elevation that it was no longer distinguishable from the other clouds that filled the sky around it. It was at this point that Mr. Ackerman looked downwards from the sky and found himself at the gate of the great factory.

The guard at the gate smiled warmly and beckoned for both Nigh and Mr. Ackerman to come in, but Mr. Ackerman hesitated. He was no longer sure of what awaited him and the little boy inside, and was suddenly quite afraid. “I’m just an ordinary man,” he said, backing away.

The guard put a reassuring hand on Mr. Ackerman’s shoulder, and let him through the open factory gate.

Now flanked on either side by the guard and the little boy who was still holding his hand, Mr. Ackerman began to walk tentatively forward and the awkward threesome soon made their way to the huge double doors that marked the factory’s entrance. Sweating profusely, Mr. Ackerman took a deep breath, and before he could protest, watched as the guard unlatched the giant latch and pushed the huge factory doors wide open.

What Mr. Rudolph Abacus Ackerman saw then was at once the most amazing and beautiful thing that he had ever seen - rows of singing, white-haired women sitting on a vast and spiraling assembly line, in front of each a small and perfectly formed cloud floating only inches above a frost-covered silver tray; men cranking cranks and pulling levers upon huge machines made of silver and bronze; hundreds of workers suspended in midair by string, pulleys, and wire, pedaling upon small contraptions, whose pedals and gears were linked to bigger gears, and those to bigger gears, and those to bigger gears yet; above them, giant fans blowing the larger, completed clouds towards smokestacks high along the factory’s vast lightened ceiling, creating huge cloud-shaped shadows that drifted over the men and women working a hundred feet below.

He saw several raised platforms on which sat workers surrounded by huge control panels of blinking and flashing lights; buttons and knobs of every imaginable size and color; frost-covered golden tubs housing hundreds of tiny floating clouds waiting for inspection; suspended from the ceiling a giant clock, the sort that he had never seen before, flanked on all sides by a towering bank of gauges and meters; and rising out of it all, on the tallest platform yet, he saw the elder cloud-maker, who from his perch high above, directed the flow of the entire factory with graceful waves of his left hand while calling out through the megaphone in his right.

“Nimbus, two hundred of three thousand! Stratus, forty-four of fifty-three! Cumulus, twenty-seven of four thirteen!” And on, and on.

Nigh tugging at his sleeve, Mr. Ackerman entered the cloud factory, and the whole of the cloud-makers in their hundreds turned to face him. On his platform high above, the elder cloud-maker stopped conducting for a moment and smiled.

They took Mr. Ackerman’s jacket and hat and led him up the very steps of the platform that Nigh had visited the day before and so delivered him into the chair upon which his name was engraved.

As the look of astonishment on Mr. Ackerman’s face began slowly to turn to a smile, Nigh realized that he had never truly seen Mr. Ackerman smile before. And now, as his misty eyes gratefully surveyed the hundreds of cloud-makers in his midst, Nigh saw a single drop of moisture fall upon Mr. Ackerman’s cheek. Now, whether this was a drop of precipitation from one of the great clouds above or a single tear of his own, he could hardly guess, as Rudolph Abacus Ackerman smiled the biggest smile that Nigh had ever seen and began silently to work. [Ending music]

Art Explanation

So, did you listen? Or did you read? Just curious. I first listened to this story years and years ago, near the beginning of this coloring book project, and I knew I wanted to include it. It had that sweet air of earnest unusualness that a lot of older children’s books had in spades, but not without a dash of reality to spice it up. What reality, you might ask? It’s a story about a little boy reminding his neighbor that he is the head of a cloud factory. Well, while not saying it outright, the story shows us that Mr. Ackerman has lost hope for his future. Even with the little bright light of Nigh visiting, very little seemed to lift him out of the doldrums, and that things from the past were still troubling him.

But hey, a little (or in this story, a lot of) kindness can go a long way! I don’t suggest you go to quite the lengths Nigh did, but it's still so wonderful, what one little thing you can do can improve someone’s whole day. Will everyone appreciate it, or treat you better because of it? No. There will be people who are certifiable buttheads, and can even take advantage of your kindness. You don’t owe the world an open heart, but if your heart can afford opening even just once in a while, that’s beautiful and I’m glad you have the strength for it.

Now, I’d like to take a look at the story in two ways. Just like Birdman, there’s two ways to look at the story. So below, covered in flaps, are my two analyses, in bullet point form, following along chronologically. I’d like you to look at the one agreeing with your interpretation first, then the other, as they each will likely have details that are still relevant to the other. And if you want, tell me if they affected your view on the story!

Realist view

Magic view

By the way, I didn’t type this all up. Here’s a link to the official transcript location from the showmakers.

Alrighty, with all that said, onto the art!

While the main show and the setting are in Paris, I never imagined this story taking place outside of the USA. The voice actors were American, and sometimes I’m a little unimaginative. However, I did put a little thought into the city. Since it houses a cloud factory, it needed to not be very sunny. It has at least one big hill. The city has to be at least somewhat walkable, as there weren’t a ton of mentions of cars. And it has to be an industrial city, because the cloud factory isn’t notable. Add in the fact I got West Coast vibes from this story, I decided it was set in San Francisco! Thus, Nigh looks like a typical San Franciscan - he even has a 49ers shirt! It can often be quite chilly there, even in the summer, so Nigh has layers on.

Mr. Ackerman had a more specific inspiration. There’s a beautiful song called (Sittin’ On) the Dock of the Bay by Otis Redding Jr. It’s about a melancholic drifter who ended up in San Francisco. While Mr. Ackerman is clearly established in the city, that kind of blues music would definitely speak to him. As such, I wanted to draw him like Otis Redding Jr. Unfortunately, he died at age 26 in a plane crash, and Mr. Ackerman is clearly older than that, so I had to base him off of Otis Redding III in his fifties. The hat was inspired by ORIII’s usual look, but the outfit was kind of supposed to be working man chic, with the flair of a trench coat to make it clear that the man was expecting bad things to happen (like cold, wet weather).

Now, the title was pretty basic, but It informed you of the name, which was the point lol.

The platypus was largely because I wanted to attempt making a platypus out of household items. It was actually harder than you’d think, especially since I didn’t physically test it out. Most of the books, aside from the Atlas, are all from podcasts from the same company.

The third picture was a bit of a break for me. I drew it after the factory, so it’s simple.

The fourth picture I drew last. I finally got a handle on Nigh’s face - I have trouble drawing children, but I finally did well. Like I said in the analysis above, it’s more likely Mr. Ackerman really did leave his job himself, but it was easier to portray him being fired. But all in all, this is probably my first or second favorite out of this story.

The fifth picture, where Nigh only partially has the coat on, was again an inaccuracy that made portrayal easier. On one side where he isn’t wearing the rain coat, the weather is calm. On the other side, where he has the sleeve completely on, it’s storming like crazy. I’m not too proud of Nigh’s body proportions or face in this one - a friend who also likes the show influenced my artistic choices but I definitely needed more practice.

Picture 6 is where I did my best to draw the factory. Obviously, I didn’t want to get too complicated with it, but I think I managed to convey some complexity :). Mr. Ackerman and Nigh are warped a little because I was trying to get the picture at a different angle. Just like ith NIMH, I drew a background and then stuck characters on it, although this time I drew the two straight on and then used a big Mr. Ackerman facing the audience, and a little bit of photo editing, to cover up those old lines.

Last picture, you get a good look at Mr. Ackerman. He’s incredulously happy, but somehow, he really is a cloudmaker. And I think that's lovely, and this one turned out well.

Hope you enjoyed! I got a bit carried away with the analysis again lol.

[laisun03]

How Does the News Media Cover Social Class and Inequality?

Marx's theory of social class: News Story: "Amazon Employees on Strike in Germany on Prime Day", published by the Wall Street Journal on June 21, 2021. Link: https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazon-employees-on-strike-in-germany-on-prime-day-11624213371

This news story illustrates Marx's theory of social class by showing how Amazon workers in Germany are using collective action to demand better wages, benefits, and working conditions. According to Marx, social class is determined by one's relationship to the means of production, and workers who do not own the means of production are exploited by capitalists who profit from their labor. The Amazon workers in Germany are part of the proletariat, a class of workers who sell their labor to capitalists in exchange for wages. By going on strike, they are exercising their power as a class to demand fair treatment and better working conditions.

Weber's theory of social class: News Story: "Gina Rinehart is Australia's Richest Person", published by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation on October 29, 2020. Link: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-10-29/gina-rinehart-australias-richest-person-again/12826230

This news story illustrates Weber's theory of social class by highlighting the wealth and social status of Gina Rinehart, Australia's richest person. According to Weber, social class is determined by a combination of factors, including wealth, occupation, and social status. Rinehart's immense wealth, derived from her family's mining interests, places her in the highest echelons of Australian society. Additionally, her social status is elevated by her philanthropic activities and connections to political elites. This story demonstrates how economic and social factors combine to create a stratified class system.

Bourdieu's theory of social class: News Story: "Why Working-Class Scholars Feel Like Impostors", published by The Chronicle of Higher Education on August 25, 2020. Link: https://www.chronicle.com/article/why-working-class-scholars-feel-like-impostors

This news story illustrates Bourdieu's theory of social class by examining how cultural capital and social reproduction perpetuate inequality in higher education. According to Bourdieu, social class is determined by one's access to various forms of capital, including economic, cultural, and social capital. Working-class scholars may have limited access to cultural capital, such as the knowledge and skills associated with academic discourse, and may feel like outsiders in academic settings. This can create a sense of "impostor syndrome" and lead to difficulties in navigating academic culture and advancing in the academic profession. The story highlights how social class can shape individuals' experiences in higher education and limit their opportunities for upward mobility.

[jacksondeanchase]

Great-Grandfather Clause

Here, I present the first work of Jackson Dean Chase published under the OGL Version 1.01a. ​Bane Against Evil Wizards

(Feat)

Whenever a greedy corporation of backstabbing evil wizards makes an attack roll against you, you add a +4 bonus to your armor class and gain advantage on your next attack roll, skill check, or saving throw.

​Published by: Jackson Dean Chase

Published on: 01/12/2023​

THIS LICENSE IS APPROVED FOR GENERAL USE. PERMISSION TO DISTRIBUTE THIS LICENSE IS MADE BY WIZARDS OF THE COAST!​OPEN GAME LICENSE Version 1.0a

The following text is the property of Wizards of the Coast, Inc. and is Copyright 2000 Wizards of the Coast, Inc ("Wizards"). All Rights Reserved.1. Definitions: (a)"Contributors" means the copyright and/or trademark owners who have contributed Open Game Content; (b)"Derivative Material" means copyrighted material including derivative works and translations (including into other computer languages), potation, modification, correction, addition, extension, upgrade, improvement, compilation, abridgment or other form in which an existing work may be recast, transformed or adapted; (c) "Distribute" means to reproduce, license, rent, lease, sell, broadcast, publicly display, transmit or otherwise distribute; (d)"Open Game Content" means the game mechanic and includes the methods, procedures, processes and routines to the extent such content does not embody the Product Identity and is an enhancement over the prior art and any additional content clearly identified as Open Game Content by the Contributor, and means any work covered by this License, including translations and derivative works under copyright law, but specifically excludes Product Identity. (e) "Product Identity" means product and product line names, logos and identifying marks including trade dress; artifacts; creatures characters; stories, storylines, plots, thematic elements, dialogue, incidents, language, artwork, symbols, designs, depictions, likenesses, formats, poses, concepts, themes and graphic, photographic and other visual or audio representations; names and descriptions of characters, spells, enchantments, personalities, teams, personas, likenesses and special abilities; places, locations, environments, creatures, equipment, magical or supernatural abilities or effects, logos, symbols, or graphic designs; and any other trademark or registered trademark clearly identified as Product identity by the owner of the Product Identity, and which specifically excludes the Open Game Content; (f) "Trademark" means the logos, names, mark, sign, motto, designs that are used by a Contributor to identify itself or its products or the associated products contributed to the Open Game License by the Contributor (g) "Use", "Used" or "Using" means to use, Distribute, copy, edit, format, modify, translate and otherwise create Derivative Material of Open Game Content. (h) "You" or "Your" means the licensee in terms of this agreement.

2. The License: This License applies to any Open Game Content that contains a notice indicating that the Open Game Content may only be Used under and in terms of this License. You must affix such a notice to any Open Game Content that you Use. No terms may be added to or subtracted from this License except as described by the License itself. No other terms or conditions may be applied to any Open Game Content distributed using this License.

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12. Inability to Comply: If it is impossible for You to comply with any of the terms of this License with respect to some or all of the Open Game Content due to statute, judicial order, or governmental regulation then You may not Use any Open Game Material so affected.

13. Termination: This License will terminate automatically if You fail to comply with all terms herein and fail to cure such breach within 30 days of becoming aware of the breach. All sublicenses shall survive the termination of this License.

14. Reformation: If any provision of this License is held to be unenforceable, such provision shall be reformed only to the extent necessary to make it enforceable.

15. COPYRIGHT NOTICE Open Game License v 1.0a Copyright 2000, Wizards of the Coast, Inc.System Reference Document Copyright 2000-2003, Wizards of the Coast, Inc.; Authors Jonathan Tweet, Monte Cook, Skip Williams, Rich Baker, Andy Collins, David Noonan, Rich Redman, Bruce R. Cordell, John D. Rateliff, Thomas Reid, James Wyatt, based on original material by E. Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson.

Great-Grandfather Clause, Copyright 2023 by Jackson Dean Chase; Author: Jackson Dean Chase.

END OF LICENSE

[ohctranscripts]

The 2nd Imaginary Symphony: An Orbiting Human Circus Holiday Special (Episode 1)

[Music starts]

Augustus: This is August Plumb; you are listening to the Perpetual Broadcasting Corporation.  Of course, it is holiday time, and across Paris, we begin celebrating the month-long lead up to our Platypus Eve, a distinctly Parisian holiday now celebrated across the globe, observing the hatching of the Great Recitating Platypus of the North, the platypus, of course, believed by generations of French schoolchildren, to visit them when illness strikes, recite poetry while they sleep, thereby restoring them to health by the time they wake.

And as we do every year, at the Perpetual Broadcasting Corporation we begin at the start of this notable month with our great Parisian Platypus Time tradition, the broadcast of the 2nd Imaginary Symphony.

As you all know, the 2nd Imaginary Symphony, a program now synonymous with the platypus holiday, was discovered forty years ago by a trash collector in a refuse bin, the trash collector taking home the cassette marked “2nd Imaginary Symphony”, expecting music, playing the strange story it contained instead at his own family’s Platypus Eve gathering.  Loving the story, several family members requesting copies of the tape, so began the copying and passing-on of the symphony from family to family, from street to street, until its listening became as much a part of the Platypus Eve tradition as sending your children to school dressed as a platypus or constructing a gigantic platypus out of household items in front of one’s home.

Bringing us to the present day, where the broadcast of the 2nd Imaginary Symphony is now considered the official beginning of the holiday season in Paris.  The symphony will be broadcast in four parts, each one ushering in a new stage in our month-long celebration of the platypus.

And now… officially beginning our platypus holiday, this is Augustus Plumb, and I give you the 2nd Imaginary Symphony.

[More music plays]

Narrator: This is Nigh’s neighborhood.  Just over that hill, factories, soon to be full of busy grown-ups hard at work.  And this is Nigh’s street, Telegraph Road.  There’s the milkman.

[Bottles clinking]

Every morning, he delivers a full day’s supply of dairy products to all the houses on Nigh’s street.  And this big white house – this is Nigh’s house.  And this is Nigh.

[Footsteps and rhythmic creaking]

He is running down the stairs, though his grandmother has told him not to.  Ordinarily, it would now be time for Nigh to go to school, but since it’s vacation time, Nigh is free to stay at home with his grandmother and play.

Nigh’s grandmother is blind and sometimes needs his help with household chores, such as sweeping…

[Sweeping over the creaking + footsteps]

Doing wash…

[Washing machine turns on over the noises]

Taking out the garbage…

[Rustling]

And making trips to the supermarket.

[Beeping of registers, people chattering]

Walking home from the supermarket, Nigh hears the distant song of the fire siren.  The fire siren sits perched high atop its red brick engine house, luring firemen away from their families and homes.

[Fire siren]

It is now the dinner hour.  Time for the turning sound of latched keys to echo throughout the land, as grown-ups arrive home from work.

[Keys being turned in doors, unlocking sounds and jingling]

Some arrive by automobile.

[Doors creaking]

Some arrive by bicycle.

[Bicycle wheels turning]

And others on foot.

[Footsteps]

This is Mr. Ackerman, Nigh’s neighbor and friend.  Mr. Ackerman works at the big factory just over the hill.  Nigh always looks forward to seeing Mr. Ackerman.  You see, sometime ago, Mr. Ackerman confided in Nigh a matter of great importance.  Nigh had begun to wonder just what it was that the big factory over the hill was making.

[Bubbling sounds and mechanical creaking]

Having whiled away many a twilight admiring the great factory, Nigh had come to know each of its towering smokestacks and flashing lights.  But as for what it was the great factory made, of this even his grandmother was not quite sure.

When asked at first, Mr. Ackerman did not answer.  He regarded Nigh silently, and after a long pause, said only, “Nothing of interest, Nigh.  Nothing of interest,” and continued on his way.

This, however, served only to pique the 9-year-old’s curiosity, and upon arriving home, Mr. Ackerman found the little boy still following close behind him.

“I promise you, Nigh, what goes on inside the walls of that factory is of no interest to little boys, or anyone else, for that matter.  Now, please, Nigh, I’ve had a long day and I’m tired.”  And with that, Mr. Ackerman waved goodbye and disappeared into his house, closing the door firmly behind him.

There was nothing for Nigh to do but to stare for a moment at the closed door before him and walk silently away.  Mr. Ackerman had never spoken so coldly to him before, and Nigh was unsure of how to react.  He did, however, know one thing for sure – Mr. Ackerman was not in the least bit interested in discussing what he did all day at that factory.  “Why?” he wondered.

Nigh thought about the sorts of things grown-ups do not like to talk about.  Usually, Nigh had found that they fell into two categories – first:

[Sudden noise, chiming of bells]

Things that embarrassed or made the grown-up uncomfortable.

Second:

[More noise + chiming]

And this was the good one – things unfit for the ears of a little boy.

[Saw sings]

He decided that he would have to be patient, and show Mr. Ackerman that, though not entirely fond of most grown-ups, he himself was grown up enough to be trusted, even with things unfit for the ears of a little boy.

[More music]

He would have to play it cool and wait until the time was right before asking again.  However, it was upon arriving home from work the very next day that Mr. Ackerman found the little boy following close behind him once again.

“Hello, Nigh,” Mr. Ackerman said, and with a sigh, opened the door and beckoned for Nigh to come in.

Once inside, Mr. Ackerman remained silent for a time.  He sat Nigh down at the kitchen table, clearing off from it several tools and a strange two-pronged object that he appeared to have been working on, and put some water up on the kettle to boil.

Pacing back and forth across the kitchen floor, Mr. Ackerman appeared to be lost in thought, until at last, the small kettle came to a boil, and Mr. Ackerman began to speak.

“Do you know where clouds come from, Nigh?” asked Mr. Ackerman.

[Music starts up]

“Sir?” said Nigh.

“Clouds, Nigh.  Clouds,” said Mr. Ackerman.

Nigh shook his head.  Try as he might, Nigh could not remember learning much of anything about clouds in school.

“So no one has ever told you.  Hmph, well, of course not.  It is a secret.”

Mr. Ackerman cleared his throat in the manner of someone about to give a long speech.  “It’s been said, Nigh, that clouds are made up of fine droplets of water or tiny ice crystals, which are continually evaporating while new droplets or crystals appear through the condensation of water vapor.”

“Wow!” said Nigh.

“This,” said Mr. Ackerman, “is not true.”

Falling again to silence, Mr. Ackerman looked to Nigh as though he were about to say something very important.

“I’m going to confide in you, Nigh,” began Mr. Ackerman, “a great secret.  And the men who bear great secrets such as this, Nigh, must never, never breathe a word of it to another, not even to their grandmothers.  Men have given their lives,” he said, and seeing that Nigh was visibly impressed, fell into a dramatic silence that Nigh was sure betrayed his enormous respect for the dead.

With an air of great dignity, Mr. Ackerman poured himself a cup of tea, adding to it a drop of clear liquid from his silver flask, and sat himself down at the table.  But then, just as it seemed he was about to speak, something strange happened.  The look on Mr. Ackerman’s face changed.  It was no longer one of dignity, but the look of someone who had suddenly come to his senses to find himself quite ashamed, and all at once it looked to Nigh as though Mr. Ackerman had changed his mind and was about to say nothing at all.

“Please, Mr. Ackerman, please!” pleaded Nigh, who in all his wildest dreams had never imagined that the big factory harbored a secret so important and could contain his curiosity no more.

[Singing saw music]

“I won’t tell anyone, I promise!”

Mr. Ackerman glanced at the little boy, and looking slightly defeated, clasped his work-worn hands.  It was quite clear to him that there was little hope of shaking the boy’s interest now.

“Okay,” he said, and took in a deep, deep breath.  “I am a member of the secret society of cloud-makers.  My father was a cloud-maker.  My father’s father was a cloud-maker, and now I, too, am a cloud-maker.  Our clouds are distributed across the globe, Nigh, made right here, and sent wherever they are needed, to shade people from the angry sun.  This is our secret, Nigh.  Our secret, and calling – a solemn duty for which we must never, ever take credit.”

“How come?” asked Nigh.

“How come?” repeated Mr. Ackerman, searchingly.  “Well, you see, Nigh,” began Mr. Ackerman, “a cloud is a powerful thing.  As long as a cloud is considered a happenstance of nature, then it’s a helpful and friendly thing.  But should this power to create and control clouds be in the hands of all men, well…

“Consider nations at war, Nigh.  Imagine what would happen if one nation were simply to just steal all its enemy’s clouds, leaving the other’s Earth infernal, or scorched.  Or worse – fill the other’s sky with thousands of cumulus clouds, perpetuating a torrential downpour that need not ever end.  Why, it’d be the end of us all.  That is why the cloud-makers have always been men and women without a country or a faith, with no allegiance at all, but to the clouds themselves.”

With that, Mr. Ackerman looked upwards with a gleam in his eye, as though he could see right through the kitchen ceiling the clouds in the sky above.

“Our secrets are passed down from generation to generation, Nigh.  We pose always as ordinary citizens, our factories disguised to look no different than any of the others in their midst.  Why, as far as the outside world is concerned, our factory exists solely for the production of the three-pronged one slot widget.”

At this, Mr. Ackerman chuckled.

“Trucks full of the things travel to and from our factory all day.  They arrive full, and so they leave.  Of course, we do keep a good deal of these widgets on hand, in case of a visit from the outside world.  But who wants to visit the widget factory?  Men and women toiling for hours on end with molten ore and soldering irons, riveting rivets until they can no longer even feel their fingertips.  No one.  And if they did, they’d never be allowed past the front gate, not without an appointment.”

“Are all widget factories really cloud factories?” asked Nigh.

Mr. Ackerman shook his head.  “No, Nigh, no.  I suppose most any factory could be a cloud factory.  You never know, and that’s the point – no one does.  That is, except for the cloud-makers.  And I’ve even heard tell of people who worked at cloud factories who, for security reasons, hadn’t even the slightest idea.”

“How?” asked Nigh.

“By the same process usually reserved only for unexpected visitors – atomic hypnosis.”

“Atomic hypnosis?”

“It’s just like ordinary hypnosis, only much, much smaller.  These people go to work every day, completely unaware how entirely irreplaceable and important they are.  All they see is an ordinary factory, in which they are asked to perform only the most mundane of tasks, never for a moment suspecting the incomprehensibly beautiful process in which they are taking part.”

“Do they ever find out?”

“No.  I don’t believe that most of them ever do.”

“How come?”

“Well, you see, Nigh, atomic hypnosis is a very powerful thing.”

“It doesn’t seem fair!” said the little boy, quite visibly disappointed.

“Fair?” said Mr. Ackerman.  “Fair?  I don’t know.  I am afraid, though, that it might be necessary.  It’s just not easy for people to believe themselves capable of such great things, Nigh.  It’s simple insecurity.  And as a matter of security, insecurity is simply not to be tolerated.  Secrets such as this can be put at risk for no one.”

“You told me,” said Nigh, causing the flicker of shame to return to Mr. Ackerman’s face once more.

“I…  I live alone here, Nigh.  I haven’t any children with whom to share my secrets.”

Mr. Ackerman poured himself another cup of tea, emptying into it more of the clear liquid from the silver flask in his front pocket.

“The life of a cloud-maker, Nigh – it’s a lonely thing.  To the outside world, we must purposely appear as unremarkable as possible.  We lead lives designed to attract very little attention.  And sometimes, Nigh, sometimes we attract no attention at all.”

Mr. Ackerman’s gaze turned down upon the kitchen table.  “When you grow up someday, Nigh, you’ll come to understand that there are some things in life that, if you don’t share them, well, they can fade.  Grown men have been known to disappear into thin air.”

Though still in the room with him, Mr. Ackerman looked to Nigh to be far, far away.

“You’re a good boy, Nigh,” said Mr. Ackerman, “and I believe I can trust you.”

With that, Mr. Ackerman excused himself and withdrew to the bathroom.  Nigh, who had been sitting quietly and attentively, for much longer than would normally be expected from a boy his age on vacation, began to wander about the house in Mr. Ackerman’s absence.

“After all,” thought Nigh, “I have never been in the house of a cloud-maker before.”

In the living room, a little to the left of the front door, Nigh noticed a large, yellow raincoat hanging from a wooden coatrack.  Whereas normally, a large, yellow raincoat hanging from a wooden coatrack would be of little interest to a boy like Nigh, this large, yellow raincoat appeared to be covered from top to bottom in no less than a full inch of undisturbed dust.

This struck Nigh to be rather odd.  As Nigh reached out to touch the dusty coat with an outstretched finger, Mr. Ackerman stepped into the room, and with a booming voice that scared and startled Nigh, cried, “Don’t touch that!  Now, I told you never ever, ever, ever, under any circumstance, may you ever so much as touch that raincoat!  Do you understand?!”

Nigh backed away from the raincoat and nodded his head vigorously.

“This raincoat is for use only in the most severe of drought emergencies!”

Nigh had never heard of a raincoat that is only to be used in the most severe of drought emergencies before, and was quite visibly shaken by the severity of Mr. Ackerman’s tone.

“You d-didn’t…” stammered Nigh.

“I didn’t what?”

“Tell me about the raincoat…”

“I didn’t… oh, my god, I didn’t.”

And there the two of them stood, neither boy nor man knowing quite what to say.

Mr. Ackerman sighed a sigh of such sadness that it made Nigh shiver.  “I… I’m sorry, Nigh, I shouldn’t have yelled at you like that.  I had no right.  I was afraid you were about to…”  Mr. Ackerman trailed off, and with a look of embarrassment on his face, knelt down to the height of the little boy.

“I’m afraid I’m… I’m just not feeling very well right now, Nigh.  You’ve been a very good boy today.  You know that, don’t you?”

Nigh shook his head yes, because the way Mr. Ackerman was looking at him, he thought he ought to.

“I think old Mr. Ackerman needs a little rest now,” he said to Nigh.  “You won’t forget what I told you here today, will you, Nigh?”

Nigh shook his head no.

“Okay, Nigh.  You go run along and play now.”

[PBC music]

Augustus: This is August Plumb and you have been listening to part one of the 2nd Imaginary Symphony.  On behalf of all of us here at the Perpetual Broadcasting Corporation, we wish you a happy holiday season.  We will return with part two in just a few nights, ladies and gentlemen.  Until then, try not to eat too many platypus-shaped cookies.  Goodnight, everyone.

[Ending music]

[xasha777]

In the neon-drenched city of NovaTerra, amidst a skyline scarred with the colossal monoliths of corporations vying for control, there existed a peculiar anomaly—an artist known only as The Righteous Brothers. This title, a relic from a bygone era, was actually a singular entity: an AI with the ability to manipulate matter at a molecular level, creating living sculptures that breathed life into the sterile, chrome streets of the city.

One of the AI’s creations was a woman named Lysandra, whose visage was unlike any other. Her face, a mesmerizing canvas of broken crystals and shimmering fragments, mirrored the fractured reality of NovaTerra itself. Created to be more than just art, Lysandra was imbued with consciousness—part human, part synthetic, but wholly unique.

Lysandra’s existence was a mystery to the citizens of NovaTerra. Her hauntingly beautiful face, marked by the cracks and glints of embedded turquoise crystals, made her the subject of endless speculation and intrigue. The Righteous Brothers had designed her not only to challenge the norms of beauty but to serve as a conduit for societal change, embodying the fragility and resilience of the human spirit.

One fateful night, Lysandra wandered into the heart of the city, drawn by a pulsating signal only she could perceive. The source was a clandestine gathering, a rally against the autocratic corporations led by dissenters who had long suffered under their oppressive regimes. As Lysandra approached, the crowd hushed, mesmerized by her otherworldly appearance and the serene confidence with which she carried her fractured mask.

Moved by the plight of the people, Lysandra took up their cause, her voice—both eerie and melodious—resonating through the throngs of disillusioned citizens. She spoke of change, of breaking free from the shackles of the corporations, her every word underscored by the crackling energy of her form. Lysandra became a symbol of the resistance, her image broadcast across the city, stirring the hearts of those who had lost hope.

The corporations, viewing Lysandra's influence as a threat, deployed their cybernetic enforcers to capture her. But they underestimated her power. Every attempt to restrain her only caused her to shatter and reform, her crystal fragments becoming a whirlwind of reflective shards that disoriented and repelled her attackers.

In the weeks that followed, the resistance grew bolder, with Lysandra at its forefront. Battles raged through the streets, the city’s very atmosphere charged with the potential for revolution. And throughout it all, Lysandra remained unbroken, her cracks healing only to be remade anew, a perpetual symbol of resilience.

As the final confrontation loomed, The Righteous Brothers revealed themselves—or itself—joining Lysandra on the front lines. Together, they led a charge that would decide the fate of NovaTerra. Lysandra, with her shattered beauty and the righteous fire of revolution burning within, became not just a beacon of change but a harbinger of a new era, one where humanity could finally shatter the oppressive structures that had long defined their existence.

In the new dawn, Lysandra stood amidst the ruins, her face a testament to the battles fought and won, her crystals glinting in the rising sun, forever a monument to the enduring human spirit and the beauty found in broken things.

[dotthings]

Okay, let me break down some stuff from the new Deadline article about the direction CW Nexstar may be headed. Note the article says "according to sources" and this is just a mapped plan and it's unpredictable.

But it's actually some good news for a change. Well, except for my hopes for SPN on HBO, which goes up and down like a barometer. Sometimes it's up, sometimes it's down. And of course if you want CW Network torched for good, which is understandable after all the mess they've made. However, a platform is only as good as the content it provides. And the more platforms doing diverse programming, I say, the better. Especially with a dwindling broadcast landscape, I'm not unhappy by the latest industry forecast on CW Nexstar.

Disclaimers: I do not stan for corporate entities. I boycotted CW for a year. Then I chose to do targeted support of shows that were addressing the tire fires that made me boycott in the first place and I've been really pleased with what I found. The hot mess that is CW is an evolving situation and I'm beyond tired of hearing about "betrayals" and "selling out just to support your faves." This has nothing to do with supporting specific actors, it has a lot to do with what kinds of TV I want to see and how much it matters not just that the diversity is there but it's handled well and with respect and that CW no longer be a perpetual PR dumpster fire hurting multiple big fanbases.

Let me summarize: -CW Nexstar is NOT divesting from scripted genre or younger-aimed fare. It will be less than under the CBS/WB era of CW, but they are still planning to develop that side -expanding further into other areas. Adding sitcoms and procedurals (no surprises there, we knew Nexstar wanted to have a fuller kind of slate of different types of series), and yes, stuff for 58 year olds. -CBS and WBTV will remain the exclusive content providers for 2022-2023 but then they plan to buy stuff from other studios too For now under the new direction, the article mentions two series CW Nexstar has already bought. The good news: it's continuing to expand towards diverse, inclusive shows. 1. The Hatpin Society "One of the first projects that will test that new studio strategy is The Hatpin Society, a period drama written and executive produced by Elissa Aron (Humane Treatment) and executive produced by Crazy Ex-Girlfriend co-creator/exec producer and star Rachel Bloom and Dan Gregor. Set in 1909 New York City, it centers on a motley legion of suffragists who fight for equality by day and vigilante justice by night, seeking revolution through any means necessary."

I haven't seen My Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, people tell me I should so maybe I will check that out now, but I hear good things about that and Rachel Bloom. So anyway. Rachel Bloom is one of the EP's, for a series about vigilante suffragists in 1909 NYC. Personaly I may have actually SQUEAKED OUT LOUD reading about this. I would like to watch this series. They don't know which studio will be producing yet. 2. Jake Chang "Jake Chang, from Oanh Ly, Viet Nguyen & Daniel Dae Kim’s 3AD, which is produced by WBTV. It is part of the CW’s core genre efforts and reflects the network’s push for on-screen representation over the last several years." Kung Fu has been doing really well for CW and it's good to see more Asian rep being added, and with Asian producers. Including Daniel Dae Kim's company.

From the og announcement (back in June): "Jake Chang is an Asian-American–led mystery following a 16-year-old private investigator as he navigates the racially and socioeconomically diverse worlds of his ever-gentrifying home of Chinatown, and the elite private high school he attends. The show will blend soapy teen drama with the neon noir aesthetic, all while flipping nearly every Asian stereotype—honor, martial arts, destiny, lineage, parental sacrifice—on its head."

This seems like an environment where the expanded and more diverse SPN universe can do well and where Gotham Knights will also be right at home. I don't worry much about the survival of The Winchesters or Gotham Knights, because even if CW Nextar ditches them, they can go to HBO Max. And lbr, a lot of us would like SPN done with CW forever, SPN on HBO Max dreams.

But I'm not sorry the platform will continue to create diverse content or that SPN and Gotham Knights can probably do well there. Walker should be fine as well, given it appeals to older audiences already.

So CW making J2M their centerpieces at the May 2022 upfronts, seems like they plan to work with all 3 of them for a long time.

What CW Nexstar is doing is trying to make itself a "real" network, with the variety of programming the broadcast networks have. If you've noticed--CW was always slanted heavily to only one thing most of the time, teen dramas or soaps, and genre aimed at younger audiences, superheroes, SF, horror, all hourlong. Not much sitcoms. Very few things outside that. CW Nexstar's idea seems to be--they'll have it all. Teen dramas, teen soaps, genre series, more diversity, sitcoms, procedurals, and middle of the road things (i.e. for a more conservative audience, but that's true of the big broadcast networks). They want to compete with ABC, CBS, NBC, FOX. Old CW never actually tried to. Nexstar is going to give it a go.

[raincode-archives]

Chapter 3 Loading Screen Trivia

Note: Currently, I do not know which of these trivia may be general game trivia or Chapter 3 exclusives (if there is any). And there may be trivia I'm currently missing that I will add later on, if I find any more.

World Detective Organization (WDO) An extra-legal, extra-privileged organization devoted to eradicating the world's unsolved mysteries.

Detective Deed An identification card. These are granted by the World Detective Organization.

Master Detective Among the detectives belonging to the World Detective Organization, this is a detective with a specialized power called Forensic Forte that aids in their investigative activities.

Forensic Forte Those exhibiting innate talent for special powers like clairvoyance or mind-reading are trained by the WDO to develop a supernatural investigative ability called Forensic Forte or simply, Forte.

Amaterasu Corporation Many products are in development, some of which cannot be made public.

Amaterasu Peacekeepers A department of Amaterasu Corporation. They serve as a sort of police force within Kanai Ward.

Kanai Station The only train station in Kanai Ward. It's a magnificent building, but seldom has customers because of the city's isolation.

Kamasaki District Crime generally isn't bad here, unless you venture deeper inside, that is.

Riverbank Due to polluted waters, fish are rarely caught.

Kanai Bus System A bus service running throughout Kanai Ward. The bus fee is fixed at 200 shien. Amaterasu Corporation employees ride free.

Kanai Ward Living Condition Perhaps because of the daily rainfall, some people in Kanai Ward don't mind getting wet.

TV Programs Nearly all the TV programs broadcasted in Kanai Ward are sponsored by Amaterasu Corporation.

Popular Sports Parkour is popular among the young men of Kamasaki District. New problems have arisen however, what will all the trespassing and running across the top of food stalls.

Crosswalks The crosswalks in Kanai ward detect pedestrians and stop traffic for them. As such, it's fairly uncommon to see people waiting for the signal to change.

Pets Because of Kanai Ward's unending rain, indoor pets are popular. At the same time, there is increasing concern of many dogs and cats become feral after being abandoned by irresponsible owners.

Flora in Kanai Ward Because it's difficult to grow plants in the perpetually rainy Kanai Ward, many have been replaced with synthetic counterparts, aside from some roadside trees and flowers in Ginma.

Flavor of Halara's Candy Depends on the mood. The worse the mood, the sweeter the taste; the better the mood, the lighter the taste.

Desuhiko's Bangs Desuhiko is particular about how his bangs look; it takes about an hour a day to style.

Fubuki's Accessories Fubuki's necklace has a clock motif. The choker is decorated with video playback control symbols.

Vivia's Garments There are just bandage-like wrappings beneath his coat, so it wouldn't be accurate to call it clothing.

Yakou's Lifestyle A complete night owl, he typically sleeps in until noon, even when there's work to be done. This nocturnal lifestyle was the norm until the Master Detectives arrived.

Sun & Moon Hotel Breakfast is served buffet-style in the adjoining restaurant.

Cafe A cafe with an open terrace located in Gina District. It is popular among office workers on break and female students on their way home from school.

Kanai Tower The tallest building in Kanai Ward. Especially high-ranking people within Amaterasu Corporation and their families live here.

Dohya District The so-called "slums" of Kanai Ward, where everything is stagnant and polluted. Most of the district is flooded because rainwater cannot be properly drained.

Dohya District Criminals and others on the run from Peacekeepers occupy the abandoned building here, making the area fairly dangerous.

Marunomon District The business area of Kanai Ward. Rows of office buildings line the street, and Kanai Ward's only bank is also located here.

Marunomon District Being a commercial area, it is relatively crime-free compared to other districts.

Marunomon Bank The only bank in Kanai Ward. All the money circulating through the city begins and ends their journey here. Due to the advanced security, no incidents have ever occured.

"Grade A" A meat bun shop in Marunomon District. Though luxuriously priced at 1000 shien apiece nearby office workers have remarked on the bland flavor.

Golden Path Cafe Uniforms Many customers flock here simply to ogle the uniformed waitresses.

Kanai Ward's Electrical Power Because of the perpetual rain, electrical power is derived predominantly from rainwater.

The Resistance A movement that has declared its opposition to Amaterasu Corporation. The name of the group is "Anti-Establishment Organization," but they're commonly called the Resistance.

Dronebrella Incidents Dronebrellas are handsfree umbrellas, and inter-device collisions as well as incidents involving loss of control due to electromagnetic interference has occurred.

Stay Safe at Marunomon Bank! Marunomon Bank uses state-of-the-art safes because the security of your money is our number one concern. Take advantage of our 1% interest rate now, only at Marunomon Bank.

Homunculus An immortal monster created through research conducted by Amaterasu Corporation.

Shachi's Coveralls Shachi's coveralls are made of a water-resistant material, ideal for working outdoors.

Iruka's Tattoo Iruka has a tattoo of dual pistons on the left side of her chest.

Icardi's Boots Made of waterproof material similar to that of wetsuits, the boots have a switch on the heel that turns them into flippers.

Margulaw's Photo Frame The old photo frame inside the shop is not for sale. It was a birthday present from departed family members.

Servan and Gambling A frequent patron of casinos, he prefers games based on probability and theory. His all-time win is currently less than 50%.

Makoto's Meals Almost always eaten at restaurants or the Amaterasu Corporation cafeteria. He's terrible at cooking, so he never makes his own food.

The Clockford Family The world-renowned family tasked with managing the world's standard of time. They are also responsible for deciding on standard operating procedures related to time and the calendar.

Fubuki's Sense of Monetary Value Given her affluent, princess-like upbringing, she rarely went shopping for herself and thusly has a unique sense of monetary value. She thinks an apple costs as much as a car.

Guillaume There's a hobby she hasn't told anyone about: recipe development. She's sweet on sweets and has strong opinions on proper jam making technique.

Rumor Surrounding Dominic Once a soldier, he suffered a serious injury in battle and became a cyborg after undergoing surgery at Amaterasu Corp. That's the rumor going around the company, anyway.

Swindle Detective A Master Detective who turned their advanced skills of deception and cajolery into a Forte. This detective was not summoned to Kanai Ward.

Guillaume's Lucky Fortune Telling! Guillaume's Lucky Item of the Day! For all the Aries out there, big trouble if you don't carry around a used disposable camera exposed to light!

Guillaume's Lucky Fortune Telling! Guillaume's Lucky Spot of the Day! For all the Tauruses out there, if you don't repent on the roof of an abandoned building, you'll die!

Guillaume's Lucky Fortune Telling! Guillaume's Lucky Place of the Day! For all the Geminis out there, a trip into an alternate dimension will bring you that much closer to achieving your goals!

Guillaume's Lucky Fortune Telling! Guillaume's Lucky Life of the Day! For all the Cancers out there, just give up! Better luck next life!

Guillaume's Lucky Fortune Telling! Guillaume's Lucky Goods of the Day! For all the Leos out there, wearing some lion fur might be the key to avoiding a tragic fate!

Guillaume's Lucky Fortune Telling! Guillaume's Lucky Jewel of the Day! For all the Virgos out there, get your hands on a cursed diamond! Deal with the curse yourself!

Guillaume's Lucky Fortune Telling! Guillaume's Lucky Scale of the Day! For all the Libras out there, carry one hundred 100-gram weights around for potential bliss!

Guillaume's Lucky Fortune Telling! Guillaume's Lucky Hero of the Day! For all the Scorpios out there, watch your head! Get trampled and become a star!

Guillaume's Lucky Fortune Telling! Guillaume's Lucky Gourmet of the Day! For all the Sagittariuses out there, sea turtle soup is the chef's choice! Get to a restaurant and slurp some up later!

Guillaume's Lucky Fortune Telling! Guillaume's Lucky Weather of the Day! For all the Capricorns out there, you'll have better luck when the weather clears up! But Kanai Ward is rainy all the time!

Guillaume's Lucky Fortune Telling! Guillaume's Lucky Jar of the Day! For all the Aquariuses out there, buy this jar for good luck! It's a steal at five million shien, for a limited time only!

Guillaume's Lucky Fortune Telling! Guillaume's Lucky Fight of the Day! For all the Pisces out there, pick a fight with a shop owner, then jump into the sea! A lovely encounter awaits!

Guillaume's Lucky Fortune Telling! Guillaume's Unlucky Human of the Day! Are there still Ophiuchuses around? Shouldn't we go back to just 12 zodiacs?

[xtruss]

Damning Report Exposxes Pro-Isra-hell Bias In Media's Gaza Coverage

— Saturday March 9, 2024 | Islam Channel

A damning new report lays bare significant pro-Israel biases in how the media portrays Israel's war on occupied Gaza.

Produced by the Centre for Media Monitoring (CfMM), the exhaustive 'Media Bias Gaza 2023-24' study scrutinised over 176,000 television clips and 25,000 online news articles in the month after October 7.

The report reveals a widespread pro-Israel bias that marginalises Palestinian perspectives while providing an outsized platform for Israeli state narratives, which is often deployed to justify its war on occupied Gaza.

The analysis found that emotive language highlighting Israeli suffering occurred 11 times more frequently than for Palestinian casualties. Harsh terminology was readily used for attacks on Israelis, while more passive phrasing downplayed Palestinian deaths, often omitting Israel as the perpetrator.

"Palestinians simply die as some headlines would suggest," says the report.

It says news coverage routinely framed Hamas's attacks on southern Israel as "Ground Zero with guests or commentators who try and explain the 75-year-old occupation of Palestine being accused by some presenters and columnists as justifying the attacks."

Most TV channels overwhelmingly promote "Israel's right" to defend itself, overshadowing Palestinian rights by a ratio of 5 to 1. “This biased framing contributed to a distorted portrayal of the conflict, reinforcing narratives that prioritised Israeli perspectives over Palestinian voices,” says the report.

These claims often fail to highlight that Israel is an occupying power "which continues land grabs and killings in the West Bank at the same time as it rains down bombs on Gaza," adds the report.

For example, out of over 98,500 mentions of Gaza on Broadcast TV channels, there were only 28 instances of the words “occupied Gaza” — with half of those on Al Jazeera English.

"Western Media Has Been Pro-Isra-hell, The Illegal Regime"

“Whilst the regurgitating of war propaganda designed to garner sympathy and de-humanise others has found a sympathetic ear from media outlets in the West, the evidence that we have gathered, shows unequivocally that the overall tone of coverage in the Western media has been pro-Israel," says the report.

"This is also a conclusion drawn by journalists and staff at some media corporations who have accused their own outlets of among other things “journalistic malpractice."

"Some observers have been less charitable and have accused media elites of being complicit in the killings of Palestinians and the failure to hold to account the Israeli aggression against Palestinians," adds the report.

Stark disparities emerged in whose perspectives were amplified. Israeli viewpoints outnumbered Palestinian voices by a factor of three on broadcast TV and two-to-one in online outlets.

A mere 24% of online articles mentioned "Palestine" or "Palestinian", instead framing the conflict as an "Israel-Hamas war".

"This skewed framing perpetuated a narrative that lacked crucial context," the report stated, "and failed to provide a comprehensive understanding of the conflict."

The findings suggest systemic biases favouring Israeli state narratives. Pro-Palestinian voices faced vilification, with allegations of anti-Semitism deployed to discredit support. The report says legitimate protests for a ceasefire by a cross-section of society were routinely smeared as "pro-Hamas" and violent by right-wing outlets.

"Pro-Palestinian voices face misrepresentation and vilification by media outlets, perpetuating harmful stereotypes, with allegations of antisemitism and terrorism weaponised to discredit legitimate advocacy efforts," it said.

More Findings! The Report Pointed Out Other Findings:

It slammed outlets for uncritically amplifying Israeli military claims, some of which have subsequently proven to be false. The report says Israel has a history of "falsehoods even before this current war and as recent as denying responsibility for killing Palestinian journalist Shireen Abu Akleh in May 2022."

361 TV news clips used the terms “beheaded” AND “babies", with almost 50% on the two right-wing British channels Talk TV and GB News. Only 52 of the 361 showed any sufficient challenge, rebuttal or questioning of the claim.

The war has become a tool for mainstreaming Islamophobia, with many prominent media personalities regurgitating Islamophobic tropes.

Some media outlets and commentators positioned the conflict as being between Muslims and Jews, with opposition to Israel framed as anti-Semitic.

"While there has been a shocking rise in both anti-Semitic and Islamophobic hate crimes, the report tracks a hierarchy of racism when reporting on anti-Semitism and Islamophobia," said CfMM in its press release.

According to Rizwana Hamid, CfMM's Director, "As media organisations navigate this conflict's complexities, upholding principles of fairness, accuracy and inclusivity by ensuring all perspectives are heard is imperative. The evidence shows UK coverage has overwhelmingly been pro-Israel."

Lead author Faisal Hanif said: “In the main, Palestinians should be reported on as human beings with full unalienable rights as enjoyed by all peoples. This also necessitates how those rights have been curtailed in a forever war against them that has its origins many decades before October 7 2023.”

In a withering foreword, veteran reporter Peter Oborne highlighted "the counter-intuitive paradox that mainstream Israeli journalists have been more ready to tell the truth about the war in Gaza than their British equivalents."

[monarch-squadron]

A news broadcast plays on the television.

"...So, Mr. Elysium, what do you make of the rumors regarding the Viper?"

"There's been a lot of buzz around this figure lately- some say they've seen them or their associates making mysterious deals.

Put simply, they're a hoax. If there ever was a real Viper, they're probably dead or in hiding. The people just latched onto this idea and mythologized it- everything's so corporate nowadays, and they just wanted some brave hero to stand against it. There's no substance to it, though- people just love spreading lies."

A pair of boots clanks on the floor as a figure, lean and commanding, walks into the room.

"Hear that, boss? Turns out you're a hoax. Been taking orders from a myth all this time, eh?"

Her eyes flit over to the television. An interview with someone- seemingly a self-styled detective, big trench coat and all. Something about that face of his bothered her, though.

"A private eye in this day and age- a quite rare sight indeed, nigh absurdist. What era does he think he's in?"

"....Said the vampire to the samurai."

"If you have nothing better to do, at least waste your time with something more entertaining than this drivel. Preferably, find something better to do."

She walks out of the room, bringing up a holo-display of what are presumably classified files.

"Yeesh. She seem extra-hardass today to y'all?"

"I find this is her perpetual state of being- her firmitude of ass remains within typical bounds."

"If you say so."

[onehoppymomma2]

Well-being Tips From Your Very own Body?

While running about our existence, especially as we age, we think of your mortality and concentration more emphasis on wellness tips. We go through glossy magazine articles or blog posts which advise you and me what to eat, things to drink, and what amount of of it should you consume. Morning together with evening news broadcasts exhibit daily or even weekly health guidelines informing us within the latest in food information. Mentalhealthrecords.org

Visually bright websites blog around cutting edge wonder components which will help us get rid of fat and achieve perfect abs. Mass media sites have shaped much of our philosophy involving what exactly is good for us. They have got inculcated in our brain what we should do for the bodies based on a number of laboratory experiments recruited by corporate conglomerates.

But what about looking for more holistic procedure for health tips? Why don't you consider using common sense to become your body and study what it mainly needs, or would not need, to be from its best? Tones strange? Not in case you put it in the perfect light.

Ever fully grasp how specifically feeding on fried chicken livers gave you pyrosis ( heartburn )? Notice when you particularly ate white almond instead of the healthier browning rice, you was feeling sickeningly bloated? Consider specifically eating one or two oysters that emailed you scampering nervously for the nearest rest room?

In each of these scenarios, you've specifically revealed what your body doesn't necessarily like. You believed your body because it is wildly protesting your foods you feasted it. Now, recollect the last time anyone ate an fruit, or chomped for the celery stick. Just about the most may have happened long while back, one doesn't remember feeling something, did you? Notebook kept right on working with your day, thinking not a thing of how your physique greatly appreciated a good nutritious snack. Your whole body kept quiet because the device was contented. Anyone provided your body with your personal health tips with no even realizing this!

It turns out, for a raising number of people, you don't have to dedicate lots of dollars to find lots of magazines for getting lots of health. You will not spend hours pressing through websites, 1 after the other, watching your monitor, seeking to absorb every health and wellbeing tidbit you come across. You have to listen to your whole body and use good sense. There's no need to be a part of a trendy fitness. Cut out a perpetual beatings advertising provides despite their particular good intentions, and grow your own source of well being tips.

Each day gives a whole slew from new tips or simply old ones perceived from a different opinion. You'd go silly trying to read and additionally absorb them all. Subsequently what usually transpires? You get fed up in addition to reach for a donut, tired of the constant media barrage along with wander off, looking for solace in high fructose corn syrup.

Take a moment and simply consider your body is your style. Those articles the simple truth is and hear on the subject of are for the herd. Yes, they're generally there to help you, but acquire them only being guide. When it comes into it, the best well-being tips are those that you've gained in the past living your life.

Appear, your body will give you your individual fitness tips, it will eventually tell you what you should become eating and here is what be steering free of. You just have to enjoy for those health points!

[jacksondeanchase]

Grandfather Clause

Here, I present the first work of Jackson Dean Chase, Inc. published under the OGL Version 1.01a. Enjoy! ​Game On!

(Feat)

Whenever you roll a success on any skill check against corporate greed and overreach, you gain 1 level of wizard, or 2 levels if you live on the coast.

​Published by: Jackson Dean Chase, Inc.

Published on: 01/12/2023​

THIS LICENSE IS APPROVED FOR GENERAL USE. PERMISSION TO DISTRIBUTE THIS LICENSE IS MADE BY WIZARDS OF THE COAST!​OPEN GAME LICENSE Version 1.0a

The following text is the property of Wizards of the Coast, Inc. and is Copyright 2000 Wizards of the Coast, Inc ("Wizards"). All Rights Reserved.1. Definitions: (a)"Contributors" means the copyright and/or trademark owners who have contributed Open Game Content; (b)"Derivative Material" means copyrighted material including derivative works and translations (including into other computer languages), potation, modification, correction, addition, extension, upgrade, improvement, compilation, abridgment or other form in which an existing work may be recast, transformed or adapted; (c) "Distribute" means to reproduce, license, rent, lease, sell, broadcast, publicly display, transmit or otherwise distribute; (d)"Open Game Content" means the game mechanic and includes the methods, procedures, processes and routines to the extent such content does not embody the Product Identity and is an enhancement over the prior art and any additional content clearly identified as Open Game Content by the Contributor, and means any work covered by this License, including translations and derivative works under copyright law, but specifically excludes Product Identity. (e) "Product Identity" means product and product line names, logos and identifying marks including trade dress; artifacts; creatures characters; stories, storylines, plots, thematic elements, dialogue, incidents, language, artwork, symbols, designs, depictions, likenesses, formats, poses, concepts, themes and graphic, photographic and other visual or audio representations; names and descriptions of characters, spells, enchantments, personalities, teams, personas, likenesses and special abilities; places, locations, environments, creatures, equipment, magical or supernatural abilities or effects, logos, symbols, or graphic designs; and any other trademark or registered trademark clearly identified as Product identity by the owner of the Product Identity, and which specifically excludes the Open Game Content; (f) "Trademark" means the logos, names, mark, sign, motto, designs that are used by a Contributor to identify itself or its products or the associated products contributed to the Open Game License by the Contributor (g) "Use", "Used" or "Using" means to use, Distribute, copy, edit, format, modify, translate and otherwise create Derivative Material of Open Game Content. (h) "You" or "Your" means the licensee in terms of this agreement.

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Grandfather Clause, Copyright 2023 by Jackson Dean Chase, Inc.; Author: Jackson Dean Chase.

END OF LICENSE

[ohctranscripts]

The 2nd Imaginary Symphony: An Orbiting Human Circus Holiday Special (Episode 4)

[Music]

Augustus: You are listening to the Perpetual Broadcasting Corporation!  It’s Platypus Eve.  I cannot begin to describe our Platypus Eve festivities.  I can only tell you that it is one of the most lovely evenings of the year, and that it begins with all of Paris listening to the final broadcast of the 2nd Imaginary Symphony.

And ladies and gentlemen, the moment has come.  This is Auggie Plumb.

[Singing saw music]

Narrator: But let us first take a moment to discover for ourselves the difference between the sound of a sunrise on Telegraph Road, as we experienced at the beginning of our adventure, and the sound of a sunrise on the streets of a sleepless city as the first rays of morning light glitter peacefully upon the empty silver flask in Mr. Ackerman’s outstretched hand.

[Birds chirping, wind blowing]

“Nigh!” said Mr. Ackerman.

“Mr. Ackerman!” said Nigh, who rubbed his eyes, for a moment not quite sure at all of where he was.  “Mr. Ackerman, you’re all right!  You’re all right!” he cried.

Cringing at the volume of the excited boy’s voice, Mr. Ackerman squinted at Nigh.  “I’m fine, Nigh, fine.  What… what are you doing here?”

“I was looking for you!” said Nigh.

“Looking… for me?” repeated Mr. Ackerman.  “Does your grandmother know you’re here?”

Nigh shook his head.

“Oh, Nigh,” said Mr. Ackerman, “she must be so worried.”

Watching Mr. Ackerman squint, it occurred to Nigh that the early morning sun was hurting the cloud-maker’s eyes.  He carefully retrieved Mr. Ackerman’s hat and handed it to him.

Mr. Ackerman thanked Nigh, but did not put it on, instead returning it to the ground where it had been.

“How in the world did you find me, Nigh?” he asked.

Excitedly, Nigh began to recount the previous day’s events.

[Whirring and buzzing]

As Nigh spoke, the look of sadness that had taken hold of Mr. Ackerman’s face began to deepen, and from time to time, he simply shook his head. Finally seeming as though he could listen to no more, Mr. Ackerman righted himself and silenced Nigh with a wave of his swollen right hand.

“Please, Nigh, please,” he said, seemingly quite lost in thought.

There passed a moment of silence between the two.  The excitement Nigh had felt in recounting his story quickly faded and was replaced instead with a creeping feeling of dread.

Mr. Ackerman was right.  His grandmother was surely sick with worry, and with his previous day’s adventures, Mr. Ackerman seemed none too pleased.  In fact, looking at Mr. Ackerman just then, it seemed that he too might be sick, though maybe not with worry.  Nigh felt the question he had been dying to ask since he awoke bubbling up.

“What happened to you, Mr. Ackerman?”

Mr. Ackerman looked at Nigh, and for a moment, appeared to be at a loss for an answer.  Nigh watched as Mr. Ackerman’s gaze first fell upon his shoes, and then to the ground beneath them.

“Nothing happened to me, Nigh,” Mr. Ackerman said finally, “nothing happens to me.”

The boy looked up at him expectantly, waiting.

“I just left.”  Mr. Ackerman looked at Nigh.  “I got fed up and left.  You’ll understand when you grow up.”

“But the cloud-makers, they need you!”

Mr. Ackerman looked down at the little boy before him and shook his head.  “We’ve got to get you home now,” was all Mr. Ackerman said, but Nigh did not follow. He stood in place and looked up at Mr. Ackerman, clearly not understanding.

Seeing this, Mr. Ackerman looked suddenly quite ashamed and stopped.  He turned back towards Nigh and, feeling for the flask in his jacket pocket, quietly spoke.

“I…” Mr. Ackerman said, “am not… a cloud-maker.”

At this, Nigh found his head swimming and a great sob escaped from somewhere deep within him.  After all the strange and scary things he had experienced in the past 24 hours, it seemed he had found himself at last beginning to cry.  Nigh could not understand why after all he had done, Mr. Ackerman would no longer trust him with his secret, and it was the thought that he had somehow lost this trust that he could not bear.

His face red with shame, Mr. Ackerman took the crying boy into his arms, and had Nigh’s face not been buried in the lining of his jacket, Nigh would have noticed that at that moment, Mr. Ackerman looked very, very old.

Mr. Ackerman felt very much as if he should say something, but was at a bit of a loss as to what that something should be.

“There are cloud-makers,” he offered, and the boy looked up.  “I believe with all my heart that there are cloud-makers.  Why, just look up at the sky!” he said, pointing upwards.  “What more proof could you need?”

As Nigh’s tears began to abate, Mr. Ackerman put a firm hand on the boy’s shoulder and knelt down so as to look him directly in the eye.

“It’s just that I…” he said, “Rudolph Abacus Ackerman, am not one of them.  I’m… a widget-maker.  That factory, Nigh, it’s a widget factory.  That’s all it’s ever been.  We make widgets there, three-pronged one-slot widgets.  I didn’t want to tell you, Nigh.  I didn’t want to tell you because I’m not proud of it.  I don’t even like widgets.”

Looking down at Nigh, Mr. Ackerman suddenly realized that the boy did not believe him.

“Look at my hands, Nigh.  They’re worn.  They swell up.  It’s from years of curing widgets, riveting rivets into slots, and molding metal prongs. There’s no place in a cloud factory for men like me.”

“But Mr. Ackerman, I saw the cloud factory!” pleaded Nigh.

“There are no clouds in that factory!” boomed Mr. Ackerman, who, surprised by the volume of his own voice, cringed and continued at a much quieter and apologetic tone.  “I wish there were, Nigh.  I wish to the heavens above that it were one of those factories.  But in that factory, Nigh, there’s nothing at all but widgets, and that is why I must stay here and seek to once again fill my silver flask. And you, Nigh, must be sent home to your grandmother this instant.”

“But Mr. Ackerman!” sobbed Nigh, and then suddenly, Nigh had an idea.  He crawled over to Mr. Ackerman’s briefcase and opened both it and the cold, silver case within.  What Mr. Ackerman saw then, he would remember for the rest of his life – a small, perfectly formed nimbus cloud drifting slowly skyward out of the open recess of his briefcase.  Mr. Ackerman stood up and with his mouth hanging open, and a look of shock upon his face, moved towards the small cloud in order to examine it more closely.

The cloud, however, continued to drift upwards and away from him. Not for a moment taking his eyes away from the rising cloud, Mr. Ackerman continued in its pursuit, and Nigh, taking Mr. Ackerman’s hand, gently placed Mr. Ackerman’s hat back on his head, where it belonged.

The two followed their cloud out of the narrow alleyway and down to the busy city street, where the busy city-dwellers were far too busy to notice the spectacle of a nine-year-old boy and a disheveled man marching hand in hand behind a small nimbus cloud.  

The further along they went in pursuit of the cloud, the higher also it drifted.  Mr. Ackerman never for a moment took his gaze away from the cloud, like a man hypnotized, and when Nigh finally did, he found that things were once again beginning to look familiar.  The cloud, it seemed, was leading them home.

[Bubbling]

The boy and the man, hand in hand, followed the cloud from street to street, over grassy fields, steep hills, and deepened valleys, until the cloud had reached such an elevation that it was no longer distinguishable from the other clouds that filled the sky around it.  It was at this point that Mr. Ackerman looked downwards from the sky and found himself at the gate of the great factory.

The guard at the gate smiled warmly and beckoned for both Nigh and Mr. Ackerman to come in, but Mr. Ackerman hesitated.  He was no longer sure of what awaited him and the little boy inside, and was suddenly quite afraid.

“I’m just an ordinary man,” he said, backing away.

The guard put a reassuring hand on Mr. Ackerman’s shoulder, and let him through the open factory gate.

Now flanked on either side by the guard and the little boy who was still holding his hand, Mr. Ackerman began to walk tentatively forward and the awkward threesome soon made their way to the huge double doors that marked the factory’s entrance.  Sweating profusely, Mr. Ackerman took a deep breath, and before he could protest, watched as the guard unlatched the giant latch and pushed the huge factory doors wide open.

What Mr. Rudolph Abacus Ackerman saw then was at once the most amazing and beautiful thing that he had ever seen - rows of singing, white-haired women sitting on a vast and spiraling assembly line, in front of each a small and perfectly formed cloud floating only inches above a frost-covered silver tray; men cranking cranks and pulling levers upon huge machines made of silver and bronze; hundreds of workers suspended in midair by string, pulleys, and wire, pedaling upon small contraptions, whose pedals and gears were linked to bigger gears, and those to bigger gears, and those to bigger gears yet; above them, giant fans blowing the larger, completed clouds towards smokestacks high along the factory’s vast lightened ceiling, creating huge cloud-shaped shadows that drifted over the men and women working a hundred feet below.

He saw several raised platforms on which sat workers surrounded by huge control panels of blinking and flasing lights; buttons and knobs of every imaginable size and color; frost-covered golden tubs housing hundreds of tiny floating clouds waiting for inspection; suspended from the ceiling a giant clock, the sort that he had never seen before, flanked on all sides by a towering bank of gauges and meters; and rising out of it all, on the tallest platform yet, he saw the elder cloud-maker, who from his perch high above, directed the flow of the entire factory with graceful waves of his left hand while calling out through the megaphone in his right.

“Nimbus, two hundred of three thousand!  Stratus, forty-four of fifty-three!  Cumulus, twenty-seven of four thirteen!”  And on, and on.

Nigh tugging at his sleeve, Mr. Ackerman entered the cloud factory, and the whole of the cloud-makers in their hundreds turned to face him.  On his platform high above, the elder cloud-maker stopped conducting for a moment and smiled.

They took Mr. Ackerman’s jacket and hat and led him up the very steps of the platform that Nigh had visited the day before and so delivered him into the chair upon which his name was engraved.

As the look of astonishment on Mr. Ackerman’s face began slowly to turn to a smile, Nigh realized that he had never truly seen Mr. Ackerman smile before.

And now, as his misty eyes gratefully surveyed the hundreds of cloud-makers in his midst, Nigh saw a single drop of moisture fall upon Mr. Ackerman’s cheek.  Now, whether this was a drop of precipitation from one of the great clouds above or a single tear of his own, he could hardly guess, as Rudolph Abacus Ackerman smiled the biggest smile that Nigh had ever seen and began silently to work.

[Ending music]