#Rigby has left the scene-he's seen enough

[also-twi]

does it tickles when benson get his belly rubs

It'd better not!

[plantfeed]

        ok turns out i am 100% that dumbass bitch who still aint posted my intro on main....... so for reference.....  hello! im nora ( she / her ). im a 24 year old creative writing graduate currently residing in sheffield, south yorkshire. when i’m not hunched over a keyboard writing, i enjoy independent cinema, chinese food, and big nights out that i’ll remember only in fleeting snapshots. i currently work as a barmaid and a tutor for a filmmaking project.  

without further ado, here is my interpretation on the skeleton ‘ophelia’, a development of a character who’s been brewing at the back of my mind for absolutely AGES now so thank u for giving me the push to actually flesh her out. 

ive included a full biography, but please feel free 2 skip to bullet points if TLDR because it is LOOONG..... and im so happy 2 be here.... new home.... chefs kiss.... yes lov u all

IN CHARACTER.

skeleton: ophelia name: theresa rigby. (goes by diminutives tess, tessa, tea or thea. the only time she’s theresa is when she’s in trouble.) age: 21, born july 10 (cancer) faceclaim: diana silvers. gender: cis-female. pronouns: she/her degree: comparative literature & ancient history (joint honours)

INTRO.

trigger warnings.

loss of a parent. missing person / disappearance. drugs and alcohol reliance. death.

BIOGRAPHY.

i. narragansett, rhode island.

              1999, an Austrian sunrise, it is the year of the Water Monkey.  A water baby, first screams under the surface, the catch of it gargled in your throat. A birth mark the size and shape of a door handle pressed into your pelvis like a lover’s badge. Born like a clenched fist. Annie always wished you’d be more like an open palm. You still carry that tension with you, an unreadable kind of silence when you slink around the edge of a room or perch on an arm rest like a bird about to startle and fly off. Nobody knows a thing about you and you like it that way. Conceived in the winter, some of that coldness still lingers in you. 

              The only perfect girl is a dead girl. That’s what you learned, last-born runt of the litter growing up in the bedroom of a girl who would be forever cold, young and pretty. In the beginning, they thought you were a blessing — Bet’s soul reincarnate, the same pale face they’d seen as they’d signed her into the pick ‘n’ mix family. You were given her clothes, her room, even her middle name, stripped and rebranded like a toy doll bought after the last one’s head was chewed off by the dog. Four boys, a dead sister, and you who — with your birdlike features and unrelenting eyes — was merely a walking ghost. Tennis skirts, nail varnish, a shag rug, a rotten corsage; these were the staple reminders that you were living in a shrine, the room never quite your own lest you disturb the lingering presence of Bet. Soon, you began to see it as not a room but rather a prison cell caging you in the imprint of a sister you never met.

              Your mothers met at an undergraduate socialist meeting when the fall semester fell into winter, Kath in a mustard coloured beret, Annie in a blood-orange duffle coat, a philosophy major and an art historian respectively. Your childhood was a montage of potato printing eels onto the walls of a Rhode Island boarding house next to the sea. Five children — some adopted, some surrogate — a permanent rotation of rooms and always a handful of lodgers to foot the bill. Travelling salesmen, students on gap years and tinkers in search of odd-jobs became a flipbook of faces etched into your memories like fleeting figures in the wings of a theatre; you sketch them into the body of your work. They become the characters to haunt the pages of your notebooks, stashed beneath floorboards lest they fall into too-hungry flour-caked fingers, scones baking in the oven two floors below. A house that seemed to physically inhale every time a new body entered it, tall and thin, too small to house all that weight. The gaps beneath the floorboards are the only spaces that feel like your own, untouched by a girl who’s shadow you were born in. In your diary, you scribble her name until it tears through the pages thinking that if you wish hard enough, you’ll make yourself her. It’s never enough.

              At twelve, you lose Annie to a boating accident. You lose a piece of yourself with her and stop wearing yellow. Grief makes a better writer out of you though it sounds selfish to admit it. Kath remarries the following spring, a man named Peter. He is ordinary in all the ways Annie was magical and when he sits in your mother’s chair you feel yourself slip out of your skin and into the body of a raven cawing in the woods, scratching at the dustmites. You try to teach yourself how to be a girl, though you’ve always felt more like a wild thing crouched in the attic window of the lighthouse, screaming at the crash of the waves. You wanted to love the sea as closely as it owned you. In the sea you were rewritten into a tide, into a shell, into the swell of a rockpool around the body of a crab. You wanted to be like the ocean —a tangible, changeling thing —making paper boats and setting them out to sea, wishing you could shrink yourself into one, sail away. For a while, you toy with the idea of starving yourself into something the size and shape of an eel; of growing gills in the night and darting into the ebbing current. They’d think you crazy if you told them.

ii. concord, massachusetts. 

              You butt heads with Kath on a daily basis. She tells you you resent her for moving on with her life when you seem unable to move on with yours. That maybe a clean break would be best for all the family. A fresh start. A change of scene. You lock yourself in the bathroom and cry for an hour until your mouth feels raw, like running a cheesegrater down the inside of your throat. The following September, they send you to boarding school, two suitcases and an armful of Annie’s jumpers. Kath has decided they don’t compliment her skin tone, and she’s not twenty-five or studying philosophy any more. New England becomes the best decision for you that your family have ever made. You thrive on the independence of living in a dormitory on a corridor of Alison’s and Margaret’s and Ruth’s. From the names on their doors, you paint them into people in your head, red-haired Ruth who collects birth stones and can count to twenty in Mandarin. They turn out to be nothing like the versions of them you’ve spun. You love them anyway, their rough-softness, the scuffed knee thrill of growing up half-wild. There’s a brightness in their girlhood that you try to capture in your words. 

              Though you never quite find yourself settling into a group, Dr. Franklin becomes the anchor to which you tether yourself to, a little girl leeching onto her Literature professor for a sense of stability in a tempestuous world. The others might think it sad, but she sees something in you — an inner restlessness, a need to analyse and observe and contain everything within poetry and prose — that reminds her of herself at your age. You begin one-to-one sessions after the school day has closed, whisper about Proust and O’Hara over frothed lattes in a campus-run coffee shop, ink blots on the pages of dog-eared copies she’s gifted to you on an indefinite loan. Sometimes, you think you love her. You run your fingers over the buttons of her typewriter, close your eyes, and imagine yourself pulling on her skin like a new coat.

              The woods become your saviour. In Narragansett you never knew woods, only harboursides, seafood restaurants, the smell of the ocean breeze and a lighthouse calling you home. You learn to love the smell of the earth after rain. The feeling of soil between your toes. The sense of belonging you feel trailing through the woods in stark white nightgown, twigs catching on the mud-stained hem. Massachusetts becomes a place of revision. You remake yourself as a fawn, elegance in your limbs and hunger in your heart. You learn how to write yourself into being. There’s a violence in your grace — simultaneously glass and the hammer that shatters it — and despite the ethereal way you move it’s the leonine stature of a tigress, claws bared, teeth sharpened into fangs, but a smile like butter wouldn’t melt. Lady Macbeth was always your favourite of Shakespeare’s heroines. There’s something dark in her that resonates with you, the way when a pimple appears you have to squeeze it until it bleeds. You tell yourself that everybody has a morbid fascination. 

              Each night you take a torch, a book and a bottle of Merlot, and you wile away the hours reading in the woods. At home, sleep never came easy to you. You’d pace the floorboards counting sheep and wake having barely slept a blink. This, on the other hand, seems useful, though when you’re never asleep, you’re never quite awake, floating through the school day like a ghost, part removed, the dark circles pulling your eyes to a close. It’s a tiredness you carry in every aspect of your life, limbs heavier than usual, pen slower when it grazes the page. Soon you start taking tablets each night. Two white ones, no bigger than a baby’s fingernail. For the first time, you begin to dream.

              When February rolls around you take your exams. Pass with the grace of a swan in everything except AP Calculus. You say you’ll try again next semester, but you don’t. You apply for Yale, Cambridge, Harvard, Columbia, Ashcroft. You wait. And wait. And wait until it feels like your skin has shed itself since the letters left your hands, before an envelope comes marked Theresa. No one ever calls you that name. Right from the start it’s been Tea, Tess, Thea, common names in your house as fickle as the tide that swallows it. Billy’s never been a William, and Sebastian sounds all wrong. You can scarcely remember what Brodie’s short for. Rejection after rejection until Ashcroft answers the call, a cawing in the dark of a wasteland you’ve not yet walked. You’ll read literature, follow in the footsteps of Ginsberg who you clumsily try to quote as you bid the girls goodbye, a bonfire and the smell of cinnamon whiskey. 

iii. ashcroft university, edinburgh. 

              You’d read of a boy who went missing there. It happened in the woods. Seventy years and all they’d found was an emptied bottle of wine and one shoe. Newspapers claimed involvement in an elite society, perhaps a hazing gone wrong, and you imagine them burrowed in underground tunnels wearing wellington boots and tweed. This is what draws you to Ashcroft ; to Imperium. It’s not so much the mystery of it —you’ve never seen yourself as a Nancy Drew — but more the idea of living in a place where people can disappear. That’s always been an idle fantasy of yours. One day, you wonder if you’ll write yourself out of the world and into the pages of a book, nestled between a title and contents page.  

              From Concord to Boston, then a ten-hour flight ; for the first time in months, you sleep through the night. A line break cancels your train and you have to take a replacement bus service instead. By the time you reach the school, the open day is almost over. You feel it at the gates, like a tingle on the back of your neck, something crawling down your spine. It only grows as you close in on it. It feels like it knows your own heartbeat. You’ve never known a building to have so much soul. You imagine yourself walking the cobblestones on the quad each day, climbing the steps to a dormitory, sprawled on a library table, scribbling frantically, willing the clock hands backwards. It’s a life you want to lead.

              In a matter of months, Ashcroft has become not only your home but your life. You are utterly consumed by it. You meet Lysander at a poetry reading. You recite Shelley. He recites Keats. He compliments you on the steadiness of your voice, clear as a bell. A voice for the stage. You tell him your father had a powerful voice. It’s a lie. You’ve never had a father, but it’s fun to imagine one slouched on the couch, wire-rimmed glasses on the end of his nose. He invites you to dinner the following week. Grilled sea bass and risotto. You don’t have the heart to tell him you’ve become a vegetarian, swallow each mouthful with your pride. You try out for the orchestra, though your hands shake a little too much and you hear more from the inside of your own head than the keys. You leave without waiting on an answer. It’s too contained for you, anyway. You need something more chaotic, like jazz. You wish for chaos, so Imperium opens it jaws and swallows you whole. They like you because of your voice, a voice that speaks scarcely more than a low whisper in life, but when written wins you a Bysshe-Shelley Prize. In poetry, you give that voice to the voiceless ; bring dead girls buried in the woods out of the ground and into being, like soil in your hands. A voice like that is a powerful thing to have in your ranks. It becomes every page in your diary, every catch of your skirt on a tree branch, every rap of your fingertips against the desktop, imperium, imperium, imperium.

              You’ve never been able to do things by halves — you always let them consume you. One glass becomes a bottle. One paragraph becomes scrawling until sunrise. Obsession takes its form in Hamlet, strong in all the ways you appear weak. You like the smell of his breath when he tells you to stub out your cigarette. That’ll kill you one day, he says. I know, you reply, and your pretty lips curl upwards. One drunken night, you fall into his bed and imagine stitching yourself into his sheets so you can sleep with him every night. Tongues on your thighs like a voice in your throat. Touch me, touch me, touch me. Never been held like this before. Like you’re not glass, but something material and robust. You like the way his hands feel under your skin. Perhaps you’ll keep him there like a splinter. Tall for your age but thin as a rail, he makes you feel like more than an eel of a girl. You like the way he catches on your spindly elbows where others have snagged leaving trails of cotton. At first, it’s only physical, but you get greedy and want more. You’re not sure when a love of beauty became something more than skin deep. You’re not sure if you even loved him until he’d stopped loving you. In October, you find the body. The day all the clocks stop ticking. The day something inside of you snaps like the branch of an elm.

              You become a cocoon, velvet ribbons in your hair and rope around your throat. Or maybe it’s lace, and you’re only imagining it that way. You drink wine, stumble blind-drunk through the woods, lose textbooks to nature and curse when you can’t find them the following morning. Most nights, you appear like a ghost in the wood, a linen nightdress with mud clinging to it’s hem and feet laden in soil. You’re not sure if it’s conscious at this point, or mindless sleepwalking. Everything you do feels like sleepwalking these days. Shadows move in the corners of your eyes at night and you turn to the tarot cards for answers. They tell you only of that which you already know. Death. The Hanged Man. High Priestess. You think of Octavia, of Lysander, and of you pulled like a ragdoll between them, with the intuition that comes from living by the sea but without the evidence to execute it. The pills have stopped working. You wake in sweats, guilt swelling in the pit of your stomach. In a therapist’s waiting room, you watch as a girl scratches the skin off her own arm.

              Soon news of your occultist proclivities becomes gossip on everyone’s tongue. Witch becomes a synonym for your name, and one you’ll happily wear like a noose until you’ve stolen Lysander from the drop. Finding the truth becomes the only thing keeping you sane, runes scrawled on the walls of a dormitory where pages of novels are tacked up like wallpaper. And still, you can’t shake the fact that she hasn’t come to you when the others who scarcely believe in such phantomed are rattled by her ghost on a nightly basis. Competing and girlhood go hand in hand, but the longer it gets, the more it feels like she knows your desperation to absolve Lysander isn’t entirely selfless. Perhaps she saw you lingering in doorways, waiting in the wings for him to change his mind and tell you it was you all along. Or maybe the sight of her corpse is making you search for answers in places they don’t exist. You’re hanging on my a single thread, one glimpse away from fleeing to the woods to plant yourself into the earth.

              The snow is crisp on the November ground when you learn to love melancholy like a dance you were taught as a child. You think it adds depth to being a writer. How can a person write about pain if they live in a state of blissful oblivion? You tell yourself that all of the best writers were depressed; Plath, Fitzgerald, Dickinson, Rice. If you say their names each morning, followed by your own, perhaps you’ll become one of them. 

BULLET POINT SUMMARY.

here is a bullet point summary of theresa, as i understand my writing can get a little dense.

Mother always said that people who grow up near water are different to other people. That there’s something more primal in their bones. A kind of knowing.

In Theresa, the knowing is a kind of silence. She’s always struggled with verbal communication, and it’s rare that she can ever let herself go in a conversation. She’s the one on the outskirts of the group, only speaking up to deliver a poignant metaphor, before fading off again. On a good day she’ll ramble, perhaps, on morbid longings and fascinations, but it’s like she’s always skipping around words she can’t quite pinpoint. 

Writing’s different. When she’s writing, she feels like all the dead souls of Emily Bronte and Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath are all rising up from their graves to possess her. It is, perhaps, a rather egotistical thought -- but it makes her feel less alone. Like writing isn’t so much a solitary pursuit as it is a reigniting of what’s been lost, a way of listening to the dead. She’s militant in the way she writes, has been for as long as she can remember -- every night when the clock strikes twelve. Even if she’s rolling on mandy in an abandoned warehouse or dropping acid in a shipyard with her toes in the sand, she’ll start scribbling at twilight, for as long as she can. Back home, there weren’t too many bars that allowed underage kids, and the ones that did would nail your phone to the wall like you’re living in the eighties, so they made their own fun getting high in places long since infested with rats on baggies bought cheap in the back of the dry-cleaners shop.

Theresa’s always felt more able to relate to dead people than to living ones. That might sound depressing, but she doesn’t think so. Death has never been far from her. She grew up in the room of a foster sister who had died the previous winter. She lost her mother to a boating accident at twelve years old. She lost Octavia last year, found her body in the woods, and was thankful that she -- and not someone else -- had seen her crumpled like a fawn. Because even though it clings to her and burrows under her skin, she knows how to drown it out now. In words. In wine. In pills crushed against the veneer of a sink and snorted through a twenty-dollar bill. She’s getting good at losing herself completely. Theresa herself feels like a girl half-dead, like something ghostly, trapped between two planes. Which is why it hurts so much that she still hasn’t seen Octavia’s ghost. She’s supposed to be the special one. The one who’s vision isn’t clouded by idle dogmatism. The one who believes in all that fate, juju, third eye stuff that the others seem to scoff at. It feels like a personal attack. Like somehow, in keeping hidden, she’s blaming Theresa for her death.

Theresa is the month of November. There’s something mysterious about it, something cold. It’s on the cusp of the end of the year, but it doesn’t quite reach it. I feel like that’s what Theresa’s like. Always reaching for the apples that are just out of her grasp, or perhaps, reaching for apples which aren’t even there. 

She knows grief like an old friend, but somehow, she still doesn’t trust it. When she was twelve years old she lost one of her mothers. Annie was always the brighter of her parents, and Tessa never really believed that someone so full of life could just disappear. Her soul had to be somewhere. When Kath remarried, Theresa never forgave her. Between grief and anger, their relationship became fractious, and Kath decided to send her to boarding school. She went to a New England college where she learned art, history, literature, english, athletics, the sciences and the classics. Boarding school was probably the best decision for Theresa that Kath had ever made. She became fascinated with the girls around her, so feral and wild in their girlhood. She fell in love with another girl more than once. She fell in love with the freedom of New England, of being in the woods, of a gaggle of girls with bottles of wine sat around a campfire, scared half to death that the matron would find them.

But death’s never far from her. She’s been searching for Annie in the linebreaks between poems, in the chaos of clutter under her bed, under lace and linen in her underwear drawer, but somehow she can never quite find her and never give up.  Finding Annie was perhaps the reason she came to Ashcroft at all. She intended to go to Columbia, read Literature, and clumsily follow in the footsteps of Ginsberg. But Annie had spoken of Edinburgh with such a childlike awe.

Lysander was the first of the society she met, at a poetry reading in the autumn of her first semester. He brought her into the club because he saw something in her, an otherworldliness, a still but powerful voice. Her eyes saw more than they let on, always glinting at something more. She thinks her closeness with Lysander is the reason she still hasn’t seen Octavia’s ghost, and now Hamlet’s out of the picture she’s starting to think she might love Lysander. Or maybe she just needs to be loved by someone, and absolving him of blame is the key.

She was never really sure how she felt about Octavia. One moment they were friends, the next they were rivals. It was something like love and hate combined, but perhaps that’s just the curse of being a woman. A fierce sense of competition in everything you do, even if it’s just competing for air.

She likes old French music, European cinema, art that doesn’t come in her mother tongue. She’s always thought English pointless. The French say things so much better.

Her favourite TV show is Twin Peaks. She likes the absurdist truth in it, the style, the colour, the oddness. She likes the mystery of it all. She loved the woods in New England and it reminds her of that. A kind of home away from home. Tea brings a pocked dictaphone out with her, for she’s so often absent-minded that she misses half the day. That way, she can replay conversations, the sound of a bird in flight, the particular inflection in the voice of someone she loves. She’s obsessive when it comes to lovers. She doesn’t want to be loved -- she wants to be respected, understood, devoured. She thinks love is a kind of mutual lying.

She finds truth in the unusual. In tarot cards and horoscopes, in the position of the planets through a thrifted telescope. She’s a night owl, never in bed before 3 or 4 in the morning. She visits the woods each night to write until her fingers ache. Sometimes with wine, sometimes with mushrooms, sometimes with a tab against the flat of her tongue, imagining herself to be Alice in Wonderland. She feels like she’s getting close to the truth, but maybe she’s just closer to losing her mind.

LETTER TO OCTAVIA.

My dearest O,

I wish I could find an adequate way to write you an epitaph. You saw a poet where everyone else saw a foolish dreamer and yet you’re the only one I can’t put into words. But in truth, there is no word large enough to contain you. You were the ellipsis I was always looking to conclude, and it’s so like you to steal even that from me. Some days, I think I could love you.  

Please know that death cannot touch girls like us. That you’re more than just skin, teeth and bone. Death itself has you only on a short-term loan. As Thomas puts so eloquently, Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Thank you for filling me with life. I’ll see you in the next one.

Tea.

anything else?

mock blog.

 pinterest 

wanted plots.

someone who theresa knows purely from seeing them at the library. recently, she hasn’t been visiting as often. she’s less in the world and more in her head. her schoolwork is suffering. someone who feels this absence like a missing tooth.

unlikely bc ashcroft is in scotland but if they’re from rhode island maybe distant relatives.... ophelia / theresa is adopted so could work regardless of heritage. her family lived in narragansett, but she went to boarding school in vermont. could have met if ur character is new england based??? maybe

give me fellow wanky pretentious art-lovers and poets and historians who will go to museums and galleries with her and listen to the velvet underground on vinyl

people she gets mortally fucked off her tits with at parties bcos this baby is not alright. she drinks at least one glass of wine every night. sometimes a bottle. she’s always a little bit high or a little bit weary with a comedown. she can’t seem to keep her feet on the ground.

theresa was pretty numb after finding the body, as you would be. she stayed in her room listening to enya for three days straight and just eating cereal straight out the box. then thalia broke up with her and that fuckin shook her too, and now she just thinks she’s unlovable. she’s always been pretty bad at sleeping but now she just wanders about in her white nightdress looking for a door with light spilling beneath it so that maybe she can find someone who’ll hold her for the night and make her feel like she’s still alive

she’s currently hooking up with a lot of people. a lot of very detached sex, so if she has any sort of close connection with your character this might not work. could be good for angst or awkwardness though, or she cld get like.... super attached after a one night stand and complicate the shit out of everything. theresa’s kind of obsessive when it comes to her affections, she loves with her whole heart or not at all

people she used to date or unrequitedly likes, but to them it’s just a physical thing, give me all the thirsty angst plots, and maybe some softness too, i need some religion in this girls life jesus 

honestly everything just give me all the plots

[vegetacide]

Whump prompt#4 - part III

Veg-notables - I noticed in some of my older stuff that I tend to write a lot of internal dialogue and thoughts so I decided to push myself to write more about the surroundings and such..for this part I actually looked up the picture of an old, wood mill and I attempted to draw a picture of it with words.. Not sure if I was successful but I think it was good practice..  Let me know what you think.

Thank you to @gumnut-logic for hashing out plot points with me.  

Proofed by me..mistakes.. Blah blah blah .. be nice.

Likes, shares and comments are my motivational fuel and all that jazz

Rating:  M for suggestions of torture.

Characters: Kayo, Scott and John is floating about

Prompt snippet -  no title yet ‘cause I am still lazy and haven’t thought of one

Part I can be found HERE and Part II HERE

Enjoy…. 

oOo

Part III

Kayo approached the ramshackled grouping of buildings on silent feet.  The red rust of the corrugated siding staining its rocky footing as if the dilapidated structure had met its end by exsanguination.  Chunks of decaying metal sat like the curled husk of a dreadful creature across the marred vacant yard that was nestled between the forsaken mill and her bricked siblings. The  bracket space between, a parody of some sick graveyard that lay ragged and open to the sky littered with the fossils of rotten wooden pallets and tipped over oil drums.  

Pressing her back to an ash coloured brickwork of the stubbier of the two outbuildings, Kayo held her breath and listened.  Her eyes ever moving over the landscape of disuse before her, scanning the skeletal remains for any sign of life.  The gaping holes in the main structure absorbing the dying light of the summer sun and obscuring her gaze from seeing anything more than pitted cross beams and the ragged teeth the massive head rig.  

Hearing nothing but the sound of wind through the four and a half story mill and the distant sound of the GDF patrol flyers that had been called in,  Kayo allowed her lungs to once again expand. Alighting along the building’s perimeter she kept the scarred brickwork close to her back, her fingers dragging along its craggy surface as she continued her reconnaissance of the abandoned facility. 

Coming to a wide opening,  she halted her forward motion.  Shuffling along to the very edge of it, she carefully peered around the broken framework of what was once a large, framed window. The mullions broken or missing in the absence of what would have been a rather hefty sheet of glass, the remains of which crunched under foot and glinted dully in the tapering light of day.

The dimly lit mottled interior was in utter ruin, particles of dust dancing about in the shafts of sunlight that filtered in from the ceiling, parts of which had caved in decades ago.  Bits of old roofing tiles lay scattered across the moss covered floor along with support beams and metal fittings. 

Across the large space of what she could only perceive was the main room,  hung two heavy insulated doors. The once pristine polish of their surface now scuffed and tarnished. One sat open, its maw revealing nothing by darkness beyond. If she could guess this was a kiln house. A building that housed the large industrial ovens used to dry out and season newly milled wood.

Stepping out from behind the safety of her cover, Kayo gripped the edge of the decaying sill and made quick work hoisting herself in.  The fact that the large machinery that made up the kiln hadn’t yet fallen through the floor, telling her that the structural integrity was most likely sound enough to support her weight.  

Once within the confines of what was surprising a very large space,  she tapped her comms twice, signalling to John that she was on site and triggered her camera.  Recording everything she saw in case reference was needed later to correctly recall a poignant detail. 

Stepping gingerly around the detritus of wood shavings,  mouse escarpment and bird dropping Kayo began her search.  The tracks she found at the further part of the mining camp some five clicks away had pointed her in this direction. They’d been hastily and haphazardly concealed and she’d picked up the trail easily after going another 30 feet or so into the underbrush.  The snapped saplings and disturbed soil standing out is stark contrast to her well practiced eye. 

After a quick call up to 5, John had provided her with an overview scan  of the surrounding area and it hadn’t taken her long to stumble upon the old mill even though the likelihood of this actually leading anywhere was slim but she had to check.  Only an idiot would use something so obvious as a… 

A glint of something out of place brought Kayo up short and she stilled, eyes tracking back and forth along the floor boards. Something had caught the light as she’d been panning her vision around the space in her inspection.Tilting her head, she crouched as the change in angle caused something to catch the light again and her slender browns dipped downwards in concentration. 

Four inches from the floor a fine, silver filament stretched across the expanse of a large archway at the head of a back hallway that appeared to run the length of the building. A tripwire.  It was old tech but given the environment very practical and very skillfully applied.

Stretching her body out carefully alongside it, her eyes traced it length to it terminus, looking for any sort of trigger or devise hidden under the stacks of broken factory paraphernalia pushed off with little care at the base of the archways wooden support pillars.  

Hidden just out of sight and strapped to what appeared to be a heavy old canister of some sort was a small, blinking red light.  Definitely a trigger, though whether it was for a security system or an explosive she couldn’t tell and she couldn’t risk disturbing it to figure it out. Someone was definitely here if the trip was live.. 

Tapping her insignia, Kay opened an audio only channel to 5.  As per protocol for Kayo, John would only be able to communicate with her verbally over the line, no visual holo-cast.  He kept it short and professional, falling back on old CB radio codes on the small chance someone was piggy backing their secure line and eavesdropping. “10-2,”  a short pause followed by “10-18?”  

It was old school but it worked and kept chatter on the line to a minimal. With two short transmissions, John had verified that her channel was securely receiving her communication and had asked if she had anything to report.  That last part she knew John would usually leave out as she wouldn’t have made contact otherwise so that meant that Scott was on the line too and chomping at the bit for anything he could get on his missing brother.

“Possible contact, have the GDF stand by”

“Message received. Alerting GDF to hold at perimeter.”   

“10-4”   Kayo heard a click over the comms as John change over to the GDF frequency but the quiet was short lived as he once again patched back over to her.  Shaking her head as she lightly got back up to her feet and stepped over the tripwire, she should have known with the Defense Force so close they couldn’t sit still.  

She had enough experience with Rigby to know there was good reason for the Colonel to call on her expertise for the more delicate operations. The man was good at his job in the guns blazing, hit them first sort of way that marked his and a lot of the other GDF personnel main character traits. 

“GDF strongly advising use of backup before proceeding.”

“Negative.” Came her blunt, clipped reply.  The GDF were not known for the ability to be stealthy and in this situation that was exactly what was needed.   There was no telling what else she was going to find around here and the last thing she needed was their big boots stomping about the place tripping god knows what.  Virgil’s life could very well be in the balance and that was a risk she just would not take. 

The line went silent again after that and Kayo let out a breath.  John would pass the information on and he wouldn’t bug her about it again.  The GDF would be either mollified by that or not, she didn’t really care at the moment.

Scott on was another matter altogether though, she would prefer to handle this on her own but she knew that despite her hard no on the GDF joining that it wouldn’t forestall the commander of iR from racing over from where he was reconning.  She just hoped she could clear the scene before he got there.

Pausing a moment to mark the hazard on the digital layout her wrist comm was compiling so Scott wouldn’t trip the thing when he inevitable got there, Kayo pulled a small pen light from her pocket and flashed it up the dark hallway.  Light back here was poor with only a small 12 by 8 window every 10 feet or so making the long length a veritable minefield of hazards. A sprained ankle was the last thing she needed or worse if she happened to come across another surprise like the one she’d just found. 

Picking her way cautiously down the hall, eyes alert and ears straining for any sound out of the ordinary she continued on.    

Coming to a blind corner, Kayo glanced back up the hallway and assessed what she’d already seen and heard.  With the skill needed to trick John with a false call,  getting the upper hand on Virgil, left barely a trace and the set up with the trip wire, she knew that whoever was responsible was skilled,  very skilled. She suspicions made her think that whoever it behind it was a pro 

Hearing the tell tale sound of a jet pack, Kayo did her best to keep her internal mental tirade of courses just where they were and double tapped her  comm. 

“Sorry Kayo, Scott is en route.”  

No shit, she thought to herself.  “Be advised,  area is not secure.  Hold position until further notice.” If she could have, she would have added  I will beat Scott’s ass if he doesn’t listen but she left it unvoiced.  She hoped that her tone would be sufficient enough to pass that little ditty along. 

“Understood,  message has been relayed.” Guess it had.

Grumbling at the delay, she carried on until she came to a section of wall that looked like it had been removed with a sledge hammer, the jagged edges of which appeared fairly new and revealed a wooden stairway that descended into the earth.  

Hugging the wall, Kayo took them with care, mindful to place her foot as close to the stringer as possible.  Settling her feet on the first tread she gave a sigh of relief  when the stairs didn’t just outright collapse under her weight. They looked study enough but looks could be deceiving. 

Shifting back and forth she tested the next one down and so on and so forth until she reached the landing and the stairs made a 90 degree turn.  Taking it as a sign when there was no creaking of loose boards or anything else that might result in her broken bones she alighted down the final flight with a bit more haste.  

The tunnel that she found at the bottom was not what she expected.  It was roughly constructed and lined with concrete, the ceiling being held in place by rough cut wood beams intersected by a newer spattering of electrical cords that ran off and disappeared behind a sealed door at the far end Pocked marked between the beams was an errant placement of naked light fixtures, the bulbs of which flickered and swayed.  

It was damp and water had accumulated in several spots along the uneven rocky flooring. The dampness not only felt with a chill up her spine but smelt. It was earthy and metallic and clung to the inside of her sinuses.  

Listening, she could hear the muted pitch of a motor. The faint scent of fuel and exhaust carried along with the wet soil that permeated the air had her picturing a generator, something easy to procure and set up. Her suspicions peaked again that this was anything but a random attack on her family. They were too well prepared for this to have been a spur of the moment, which meant organized and more proof that the perpetrator was not just some run of the mill kidnapper. 

The click of her comm activating, had her cursing under her breath.  Now was not the time.  She quickly shut it off again.  Scott could damn well stay upstairs and wait where she knew he would be safe. She couldn’t worry about him on top of all this.

Ducking into a shadowed alcove, Kayo parked behind a large crate, ears keenly tuned to pick up on any sounds that indicated her infiltration was a bust  Back pressed to the tunnel wall she could just make out the first door.   It was unlatched and moving slightly, caught up in a mild breeze that seemed to originate further down the tunnel.  

The gap was just wide enough that Kayo could catch a glimpse of what lay beyond.  There was a flickering light but by its random movements she guess a gas lamp of some sort was burning.  Crates seemed to line a wall..  They appeared new and from the markings on the side possibly army surplus supplies. So who ever this one, they had been here a while. 

Holding her breath as she waited a beat for some sort of reaction from the other side. A voice, a shifting of shoes, anything to forewarn her that she had been discovered. The small hairs on the back of her neck prickling with sensation as her adrenaline spiked a notch.    

When nothing changed or came charging out, she plucked a small device from her the pouch at her waist and dropped it. Automatically a duel set of miniature rotors unfolded from it and it began to hover in the air. A little something that Brains had supplied her for just this situation.  

The small device carried a micro camera and was easily controlled from her wrist comm.  The magnetic rotors were virtually silent and their independent movement allowed the tiny bot the agility to move about basically anywhere that Kayo required.  

There were some downsides to the tech, like heat sensitive and its range capabilities  and battery life were limited due to its size but overall it was perfect for Kayo’s uses. It had a few other handy add-ons though that more than made of its for what it was lacking. 

With a flick of her daft fingers, her wrist unit sparked to life and an image of herself from the little flyer sprang up on the screen.  With easy, she maneuvered the craft out and around her hiding place. It hugged the ceiling, its onboard sensory preventing it from crashing into any obstructions and zipped easily over to the open door way.   With a quick title on its axis, it breached the gap and entered the room beyond.

Automatically,  data and floor blueprints popped up on Kayo’s display. Geological information followed,  GPS locations and the general makeup of the room, ambient temperature.  Everything that one could possibly need to know about a 10 x 12 space. It was as she had guessed,  a storage room of some sort and from the tiny screen, she could make out an empty rustic seating area, remnants of food containers and even a small cooker.  No bio reading or heat signatures indicative of a person though and a quick glance at the composition of the wall told her she would have to go room by room.

The little flyer made quick work of the tunnel and in a matter of minutes Kay had a good read of the layout of the place.   Four rooms total,  and no trace of any occupants.  The place had been deserted and deserted in a rush by the looks of things. 

Leaving the alcove, Kay stepped out into the middle of the tunnel and hit her comms.  “Scott,  you can stop your pacing. John,  let the GDF know the place is a ghost town and that they can send in their team now.. Give em a heads up about the trip on the first floor and they should watch out for more.”  

“Roger that”

Within seconds, the tall brunette leader of iR was striding down the stairs towards her. The scowl in place not impressed at being caged upstairs while she did her initial scans. 

“Report?”  His voice was blunt with barely contained anger. 

“Nothing so far,  but the place has been cleared out.  No trace of any electronic signatures that could signal additional defenses but watch your step and stay behind me. If I had a choice you would be back at the island..”

“Tough shit.” 

The made their way through each room.  The storage room was first and proved Kayo’s theory that the facility had been set up for the long run.  The next room was a bunkie with a couple of pallets for sleeping and little else.  There was a generator room, that had makeshift ventilation system that vented exhausted into the mill above, it was heavily padded to reduce noise and the door was actually steel reinforced.

That left door number four.   Pausing outside it,  Kayo looked to Scott and laid a reassuring hand on his shoulder.  The little flyer hadn’t picked up on anything living down here but that didn’t mean they wouldn’t find something else.  

When his blue gaze met hers,  he gave a single nod and Kayo put her shoulder into the door.  

The room was dark and barren.   The only light source the signal bar bulb at her back which swayed lightly, illuminating briefly first one side of the room and then the other as its light cast about in the breeze.   

Like the rest of the tunnel system the flooring was dirt covered but the walls appeared damp with water run off from some unknown source.  It was colder in this room compared to the others as well and the creepy feeling she’d experienced out in the alcove returned, sending shuddered up Kayo’s spine.  

Pulling her penlight out once more she flashed it around the room.   There was a metal chair to one side of the room and discarded lashings strewn about the floor at its base.   Walking over to it,  Kayo did a cursory scan of the floor and didn't like what she found.  

“The chair is fastened to the ground.”  She pointed out, crouching to examine the bolts holding it down.  Picking up one of the lengths of rope she tried her best to push down the fear at the sight of blood that darkened the strong twine, her light once more sweeping over the room.

She could trust Scott to stay out of the way, he knew how she worked and he kept himself over by the door so she could do her job.  “What’s that over there?”  He nodded, squinting his eyes as he tried to make out what it was from across the room. 

Glancing back over her shoulder, she pushed up to her feet aiming her light at what Scott had indicated.  “Not sure..”  Walking over to it, she bent down to take a look and stilled. 

“Kayo?” 

Proof. “They had him here.”  Turning back to Scott as he finally stepped further into the room she held the torn remains of a soft, grey shirt, one she knew that Virgil had put on some sixteen hours earlier. 

In the early hours of the morning she’d been lazing in a tangled mess of bed sheets, languid and completely sated. Happy for the first time in ...she had no idea how long and oh so relaxed. She’d raked her gaze over his fine physique and with a smile watched him pull the soft cotton down over his finger tousled hair before he’d turned and cupped her cheek for a good morning kiss that had once again led to other things..

Clenching her eyes shut she pushed the image from her mind. The shirt in her hand that smelt of his aftershave (the one she’d bought him last Christmas), the irony tang of blood and fear sweat, held tight as she tried to make sense of all of this and couldn’t.  

Drawing in her breath, she gathered her bearing and returned to the task at hand.   Peridot eyes swept around the earthen room that for  lack of a better word it was what amounted to a cell.  Archaic as it was, the place looked like something out of one of the many old war movies she had seen and it was hard to believe that in this day in age people still resorted to them. 

 Eyes narrowing as something caught her attention across the room behind Scott,  she canted her head slightly trying to make out what it was. “Scott,  behind you on the table.” She directed with a head nod towards the far corner. 

Sitting on a small utility table amidst various discoloured rags and  a roll of duct tape rested a folded note address to Scott and a holo-recorder.   “What is it?”

“I’m not sure.” Picking up the note, Scott examined both sides of it. His name graced one side of it with thick block letters but other than that it was blank.  Furrowing his brows he turned his attention to the recorder and powered it up, the small piece of tech casting odd shadows about the cell walls as it started to play some pre-recorded video. 

Within seconds Scott’s face went from confusion to a look of abject terror that found Kayo instantly at his side having no idea she’d even made a conscious decision to move.  The look in his eyes had her heart stuttering and relocating somewhere North of her chest.

“Scott…?”

Instantly everything else in the room suddenly dissolved, like someone had hit the dimmer switch on the rest of the world.  Sound took on a tinny quality and faded into nothingness.  Her panic breath and what she was looking at now the only things that seemed to registered in the vacuum. 

There on the screen was an image of Virgil,  bound to a chair and bereft of his uniform.  He was blindfolded, the dark material obscuring part of his face but she knew it was him. She knew intimately that slumped form and the filthy cloth did little to mask the angry bruises and sluggishly oozing blood. 

Off screen a modulated voice spoke and Kayo heard it as if it was distorted by some great distance. Movement in the back of the recording drew her eyes as a darkly dressed form came into frame behind the battered pilot. The camera at such an angle that the body of the person was cut off above the shoulders masking their identity.   

Virgil’s limp head was yanked painfully back by his matted hair, putting his face in the camera lens as a glint of finely honed steel pressed into the soft skin at his throat.  A small nick with the blade let forth a small trickle of blood but by the lack of response and the lax, bloody mouth it was obvious he was unconscious.

Biting back a growl at the mistreatment Kayo didn’t dare blink or look away as she prayed for Virgil  to show some sign of life. Anything to set the world in motion again.  The poor quality of the holo hampering the search but than the faintest of movements caught her eye and made her breath hitch and her heart gave a mighty kick in her chest.

There, under the ruddy skin along his stubbled jaw, straining awkwardly due to the thrust of his head was a laggy pulse of life at his jugular  

“He’s alive.”  She thought she heard herself say, not realizing as she began to shiver just how worried she’d been that she would have found something else down here. 

The brother beside her cursed and sagged back against her. “Oh god…”

And just like that everything came into sharp focus again and sound returned. Along with it like the rush of a burst dam a surge of anger coursed through her and immediately she registered what the digitally obscured voice was saying.  

The robotic cadence crackled through the little speaker of the recorder.  “Tracy, meet my demands and your Brother will live. No security, no GDF..if not...” The voice trailed off as another unidentifiable figure came into frame and with a rough hand bared down on Virgil’s shoulder. The scream that the action ripped from Virgil’s split, bloody lips and his body’s shuttered contortion of pain had Kayo nails biting into her palm in anger.

The warped laugh that followed the torturous sound was sinister and laced with an edge of madness, “We’ll be in contact.” A chuckle and the screen went dark.   

TBC

[auskultu]

“I Read the News Today, Oh Boy”

Nat Hentoff, Ramparts, November 1967

You see, we haven’t really started yet, the Beatles. The future stretches out beyond our imagination. There is musical infinity as well. We’ve only just discovered what we can do as musicians. What threshold we can cross. It doesn't matter so much anymore if we’re No. 1 or on the chart. It's all right if the people dislike us. Just don't deny us. — George Harrison

As the rush to Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band confirmed, the Beatles are now Art. Jack Kroll, Newsweek’s analyst of Now Culture, proclaimed “A Day in the Life” to be “the Beatles’ ‘Waste Land.’” In the New Statesman, composer-critic-musicologist Wilfred Metiers devoted an entire column to an exegesis of the themes of loneliness that make the album “art of an increasingly subtle kind.”

The Beatles, moreover, are Functional Art. Said the Times Educational Supplement (of London): “Lennon and McCartney’s lyrics represent an important barometer to our society—sentiments which are shared by pupils in every classroom in Britain ... If the record’s understanding were to be reflected in Britain’s teachers, our schools might be more sympathetic institutions than some are now.” In echo, a school superintendent this past July told a conference of music educators in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, how to start their journey across that alarmingly widening generational gap: “If you want to know what youths are thinking and feeling, you cannot find anyone who speaks for them or to them more clearly than the Beatles.” Said Beatles even speak for and to the dead. At the funeral in August of murdered British playwright Joe Orton, the Beatles’ recording of “A Day in the Life” started the decidedly secular service.

And yet three years ago, Paul McCartney insisted, “We have no message and aren’t trying to deliver one.” What is the message now? On one level, it’s not quite clear, even within the company of the four gurus. Tim Leary announces: “The Beatles have taken my place. That latest album—a complete celebration of LSD.” And Paul McCartney, who has indeed taken LSD, says: “After I took it, it opened my eyes. We only use one tenth of our brain. Just think what all we could accomplish if we could only tap that hidden part! It would mean a whole new world. If the politicians would take LSD, there wouldn’t be any more war, or poverty.”

But George Harrison, once a trip-taker, tells the Los Angeles Free Press: “Acid is not the answer, definitely not the answer. It’s enabled people to see a little bit more, but when you really get hip you don’t need it.” And John Lennon, who has also journeyed somewhere into himself through acid, laughs when told that hippies, actual and acolyte, take the initials of “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” as a hortatory message. “No,” he says, “my son, Julian, brought a painting home from school and said it was a picture of Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.” So what is the message? Look up in the sky—and live.

On another level, however, the message is clear and Beatles-consensual enough. Writing of the Sgt. Pepper implosion, Paul Williams, editor of Crawdaddy, the higher critic of the new sounds and feelings, asserts: “If there’s a message, it’s ‘Dig Yourself.’ ” With a little help from your friends. It’s getting better all the time, and it doesn’t really matter if you’re wrong or right.

But that’s not all. There is also death. The Beatles are, up to a point, hip to death, more so than any other popular music group has ever been. Eleanor Rigby is dead long before the obsequies. And death grins in “A Day in the Life” of the man who blew his mind out in a car. In the same song, the deaths of miners in Lancaster become “four thousand holes ... and though the holes were rather small they had to count them all.”

The man in the car is bloody well dead, the crowd of people who stood and stared has turned away, the miners are in holes, but “though the news was rather sad / Well I just had to laugh. I saw the photograph.” Thus the auto-anesthesia of us all, who will not see pain, who will not believe in death, and who are disappointed when the news is not of pain and death. But could the song also show the Beatles’ own auto-anesthesia? Having seen pain and having thought of death, do they turn to save themselves—and their friends—through magic?

Magic? Wilfred Mellers finds one common bond in the music of Boulez, Cage, Bob Dylan and the Beatles—“an attempt to return to magic, possibly as a substitute for belief.” In an interview with Miles in the International Times, Paul McCartney says: “With any kind of thing, my aim seems to be to distort it, distort it from what we know it as, even with music and visual things and to change it from what it is to see what it could be. To see the potential in it all. To take a note and wreck it and see in that note what else there is in it, that a simple act like distorting it has caused. To take a film and to superimpose on top of it so you can’t quite tell what it is anymore, it’s all trying to create magic, it’s all trying to make things happen so that you don’t know why they’ve happened.” 

And George Harrison, anxious for serenity, talks about being only 24 “in this incarnation,” and goes on: “We’re Beatles, and it’s a little scene and we’re playing and we’re pretending to be Beatles, like Harold Wilson’s pretending to be Prime Minister . . . They’re all playing. The Queen is the Queen. The idea that you could wake up and it happens that you’re Queen, it’s amazing but you could all be Queens if you imagine it. . . they’ll have a war quickly if it gets too good, they’ll just pick on the nearest person to save us from our doom. That’s it, soon as you freak out and have a good time, it’s dangerous, but they don’t think of the danger of going into some other country in a tank with a machine-gun and shooting someone. That’s all legal and aboveboard, but you can’t freak out—that’s stupid.”

Magic is dangerous to the world, but the world is more dangerous to the Beatles—and to their friends. And so, there is the leap into the magic of the loving community. We all live in our yellow submarine and our friends are all on board. With our love—we could save the world—if they only knew. [But since they don’t know] “Turn off your mind, relax, and float downstream. It is not dying, it is not dying.” In this, the Beatles and the hippies are together in a search for peace.

And so the Beatles no longer speak to the very young who do not yet know how dangerous the world is, how efficiently numbing, how full of little boxes for them. The very young have turned to the plastic Monkees; but the older teens and many in their twenties and beyond are listening. On the other hand, the Revolver disc was dismissed by a class in a large industrially-centered English school with the words: “Aw no, sir, we don’t like that: it’s all Chinky.”

Beatles records are not on the jukeboxes in the black ghettos nor, I expect, are they the food of magic for those in the lower tracks of any of our schools. Those young abandoned magic with Santa Claus. The Beatles are increasingly for the comfortable and afraid—afraid to be lonely, afraid to be Eleanor Rigby. It is true, as Frank Kofsky writes in the National Guardian, “There are millions of devout followers of Dylan, the Stones, the Beatles, and all the rest, who are in opposition to the society that spawned them and are, in the words of a Jefferson Airplane song, ‘trying to revolutionize tomorrow.’ In hippie communities like San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury, they strive to realize the new socialist man (my label, not theirs) who will be capable of fulfilling to the limit the creative potential of the human race, especially in the arts.”

But, even with a little help from their friends, will these revolutionizers of tomorrow-through love, through consciousness-expansion, through digging themselves on their yellow submarine-change what’s happening out there? Even if you could spike LBJ’s root beer with LSD, what then?

However, as for expanding creative potential among those in the beloved community, the Beatles are indeed among the liberators. They started nibbling at Carl Perkins, Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley. (In that incarnation, George Harrison also picked up on Chet Atkins and Duane Eddy.) They were less black-inflected than the Animals and the Rolling Stones; but along with them and other young British rockers brushed by the blues, the Beatles turned millions of American adolescents onto what had been here all the hurting time. But the young here never did want it raw so they absorbed it through the British filter. Oh yes, some later found Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf and now they’re into their own kind of greyboating with Paul Butterfield and Mike Bloomfield and Big Brother and the Holding Company, but that’s a trip, as it has to be, with a return ticket. I mean, Shankar is beloved, but if he put an evening raga on you at high noon, would you know?

Anyway, the Beatles went on—into and through Buddy Holly, the Nashville communion, Bob Dylan, the Who, the Beach Boys. They were getting to where, as Paul McCartney put it, they could be influenced by themselves. And in their wake they left behind the fake imperatives of the 32-bar tune, “consonant” changes, steady tempos. Harmonies shifted vertiginously, their early modalities grew strange branches, voicings continually surprised themselves, and uncommonly ecumenical textures appeared —the sitar in “Norwegian Wood,” guitar tracks running backwards on “I’m Only Sleeping,” sitar and electronic sounds in “Love You Too,” more electronics in “Tomorrow Never Knows.” Writing of the latter, Mellers discovered “a new sonorous experience in amalgamating avant-garde jazz (Mingus-like jungle noises, Cage-like electronics, folk penta-tonicism, Indian sitars).” And in the Mellotron overlay in “Penny Lane,” he wondered if Lennon and McCartney had been digging Charles Ives.

Sgt. Pepper has further disintegrated paper categories and boundaries to get to where the Beatles could hear where they belong at the moment. Their first album had been recorded in one day. This one, with four to six sessions a week, evolved through more than three months, and is the most heterogeneous, heady mix of possibilities in pop music history. Combs and paper over a string octet and harp on “Lovely Rita”; multiple tracks of percussion and strings into which sitar, tamboura and swor-mandel are imbedded, swirling between 4/4 and 5/4 on “Within You Without You.” Three tambouras, a dilruba, a tabla, an Indian table-harp, a sitar (Harrison), three cellos, and eight violins on “She’s Leaving Home”; Lennon on Hammond organ, recorded at different speeds and then overlaid with electronic echoes, while four harmonicas disport in Being for the “Benefit of Mr. Kite.” And on and on to the 41-piece orchestra in “A Day in the Life” with, as Jack Kroll exults, “a growling, bone-grinding crescendo that drones up like a giant crippled turbine struggling to spin new power into a foundered civilization.”

Where now? The next move, says Paul McCartney, “seems to be things like electronics because it’s a complete new field and there’s a lot of good new sounds to be listened to in it. But if the music itself is just going to jump about five miles ahead, then everyone’s going to be left standing with this gap of five miles that they’ve got to all cross before they can even see what scene these people are on ... That’s what I’d like to do. I’d like to look into that gap a bit.” 

As George Harrison says, “You see, we haven’t really started yet, the Beatles. The future stretches out beyond our imagination.” The Beatles are absolutely fre-e-e. “The competition among the best—Bob Dylan, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, among them—is no longer for money,” observes pop chronicler Al Aronowitz in the Saturday Evening Post. “They already have enough of that. The competition is in music . . . The best artists in the business—the aristocracy—are moving into positions of power. They’re making fewer and fewer compromises with commercialism. There’s hardly anything interesting happening outside this exclusive circle.”

Meanwhile Rap Brown tries to find the revolution and the strategists of the New Politics scour the new class for their constituency. But to the Beatles, are they for real? Why be up-tight about anything? “At the back of my brain somewhere,” Paul McCartney says, “there is something telling me now that ... it tells me in a cliche too, it tells me that everything is beautiful.” And so it may be. Who can put down magic that works for the magician?

Must everything be related constantly to the non-psychedelic world? I keep thinking about the Beatles as “an important barometer to our society,” and I remember Donald Michael predicting in The Next Generation that the control centers “will be able to tolerate groups living at different paces and styles, if they show no deliberate intent to alter significantly the drive or direction of the prevailing social processes . . . Isolated and insulated from major and majority preoccupations of the society, and thereby offering no threat to the status quo, these enclaves will provide opportunities for more whimsical, personally paced styles of life.”

But what the hell, like the rest of us with stereo, the Beatles get by with a little help from their friends and they do live up to their promise: “A splendid time is guaranteed for all.” The music’s getting better all the time as the indignant desert birds hover about the shape with a lion body and the head of a man.

[pomegranate-salad]

Seeds of thought : Wicdiv 455AD

Hey everyone ! Fair warning, this month’s analysis is a bit heavy on the History lesson side. I try not to go all nerdy on here because I want to emphasize that this is only my opinion/thoughts and not “10 things you need to know to understand this issue” but the further we go back in time, the harder it gets to analyse things without putting them in context first. So yeah, sorry about that. Anyway, as usual spoilers under the cut. Enjoy !

FOUND ROME IN MARBLE, LEFT IT IN SHAMBLES

 What in G-O-D’s name did poor Eleanor Rigby have on her face that made Ananke so pissed ? Because let’s face it, between 1831’s wannabe necromancer and 455AD’s emperor in training, her double murder ranks maybe a 3 on the Lucifers-are-a-pain-in-the-ass-o-meter. Having been a main character in the comic and both specials, Lucifer is at this stage the god we’re the most familiar with in the grand scheme of the Recurrence. And while our data is inevitably skewed because we haven’t seen enough incarnations of the other gods, it means that using him, we can begin to talk about gods not only throughout one specific incarnation, but as a succession of incarnations, and analyse their recurring traits – and their evolution – both as a character and a religious/mythological figure.

 A few hours before the special came out, I wrote this short analysis of the various wheel symbols of Lucifer in which I saw a common theme of both religious inadequacy and performative value. I observed that according to their symbols Lucifers were not mystic leaders, but performers, closer to the popular idea of themselves than to themselves. Turns out I was accidentally dead on, at least when it comes to the 455AD special. This time, Lucifer is literally an actor, and although it’s unclear whether or not he was one before becoming a god, I think we can assume it is the case, seeing how vindictive “Julius” is about making people respect actors.

Contrary to Greek traditions, actors in Rome were considered the lowest part of society, barely superior to slaves ; in fact many of them came from families of former slaves. A lot of them were basically courtesans who occasionally acted. And of course, the profession was associated with “shameful” sexual practices, homosexuality first and foremost.

Furthermore, Roman theatres are not a place of worship. It is rare to see gods in plays, and there is no religious meaning behind attending a play – something that is hinted at in Dionysus’ choice of calling himself Bacchus. So when “a catamite actor boy” reveals himself to be a god, should the tables turn ? Not as much as it would have seemed : in his flashbacks with Dionysus, Lucifer’s clothes and housing remain shabby, his tone bitter. Divine or not, Lucifer is just an actor. He cannot make History, only resurrect it onstage while Rome is falling. He is loved, but not respected, hated but not feared, brilliant but not enlightening. Who he was is in constant tension with who he became and what he wants to accomplish. Can you blame him for deciding to put on his stage costume permanently ?

In fact, this entire pantheon seems to have faced the same problem : who must you be to inspire people when you have so little time ? In later centuries, and especially in modern times, the answer will be much easier : be a performer. But in 455AD, inspiring figures are not onstage, they’re in the forum or on a battlefield. Those are political times. The answers the gods gave are varied : Baal is a city leader, Inanna arranges a political wedding, Mithras is a general of some sort, Minerva is linked to a place of knowledge. But as for Lucifer, a roman actor, who better to be than the ultimate junction of man, god, acting and political power ? He will be emperor.

 But adding a third facet to himself – actor, god, and now emperor – doesn’t solve his paradoxes and inadequacies ; it aggravates them. This special weaves a complex web of references linking all those facets, all of which ripe with tragic irony. There is of course the figure of Julius Caesar, who never technically became emperor and died trying, which Lucifer turns into some grand saviour of Rome. Then we have the usual suspects, Caligula and Nero, the madman and the artist, both of which wanted to succeed to the “great” emperors Julius Caesar and Augustus only to fail, finding a new incarnation in Lucifer. But I see two more emperors eluded to in this issue. First there is Tiberius, who started the practice of throwing criminals in the Tiber, and also famously forbade higher-class citizens to entertain relationships with actors. And even more interestingly, there was another emperor who straight-up forbade his priests and senators to set foot in a theatre : Julian the Apostate, the last pagan emperor.

 Holding Christian beliefs became legal in the Roman Empire in 313 under Constantine, who also became the first emperor to convert. Christianity then quickly became the dominant religion all over the empire, extending to the various Germanic tribes who had started integrating themselves to Eastern territories in search for cultivable lands, and had adopted roman culture for sometimes more than a century at the time of the special (if anyone was confused by Genseric being a Christian, here’s the explanation). But in 362, Emperor Julian briefly tried to restore paganism before dying from a battle wound. Only a few years after his death, paganism was outlawed for good in the Roman Empire.

 If there’s one invader hovering over this entire special, it’s not Genseric, it’s Christianity. A subject I find fascinating but hadn’t been touched much before by the comic is the relationship between the worshipping of the pantheon and the status of monotheistic, worldwide religions. In modern times, the two seemed to coexist in relative peace, as the cult of the pantheon didn’t seem able to transcend its members’ death. The Pantheon is an event, Religion an institution. But here, four centuries after the birth of Christianism, we are at the end of a cultural shift : Christianism has become the dominant religion while paganism is quickly disappearing. What this means is that this generation of pagan gods is experiencing, maybe for the first time, what it’s like to exist in a world that no longer worships you. Paradoxically, as these gods get farther away from the times they were actually dominant figures, they’ll have an easier time drawing from those sources and adapting them to match the current taste. But in 455AD ? The Pantheon is suffocating in the shadow of the Christ, not relevant enough anymore to sustain a cult on their own, not syncretised enough to resonate within the context of Christian culture.

 And this brings us to our poor Lucifer. Of all the members of this pantheon that we know of, he’s the one that will be assimilated most directly and most textually to Christianity. You could argue that Inanna found some sort of syncretism with the Virgin Mary, but if only by their names, all of them save for Lucifer will remain decidedly more pagan than Christian. Lucifer, on the other hand, will see his pagan origin completely erased by his Christian recuperation. From a minor god presumed to be the divine incarnation of Venus, he will gradually become one of the most important figures in Christian iconography, a position that will allow him a degree of changeability in concepts and role that will make for an incredibly rich series of incarnations. Eleanor drew from the evolution of mores and morality to create a supremely cool and even areligious devil, yet one that had the tang of a crisis of faith ; XIXth century Lucifer was both the devil of Romantic artists, a tragic incarnation of creativity and also the remnants of popular beliefs, the grotesque figure of evil philosophy quickly being replaced by higher concepts.

But in 455AD, Lucifer is a difficult one, “this time most of all”, because he finds himself in the middle of an identity crisis. He is being robbed of his traditional divinity and turned into something else. Something that, according to most interpretations, is not even divine, just “a dog shivering from the Divine’s whip”.

Taking the mantle of the emperor is not just an act of hubris, it’s an act of desperation, not only to stay alive as a member of the pantheon past two years, but as a divine figure past his time of worship. It’s interesting to note that if some emperors were indeed deified, they were so after their death ; to Lucifer, they are the proof you can retain divinity even after your time is over.

 But of course, you cannot escape programmed death, in more ways than one. Christianity is pertaining at every corner of this issue, dooming the gods to obscurity. The final destruction of the library of Alexandria is said to have been ordered by Pope Theophilus ; the figure of Ildico, the wife suspected to have assassinated Attila, will get overshadowed by Saint Genevieve, said to have stopped the Huns’ march in Gallia. As for Mithras feeding his army with his own flesh, I’m afraid we’ll only remember its famous precedent.

Ananke herself seems to incarnate the unstoppable march of Christianity : draped in a blue shawl reminiscent of the Virgin Mary herself, she is referred to by Lucifer as “the most necessitous mother”.

And as for Lucifer himself… he might try to be an actor, a pagan god, an emperor all at once, but at every turn, he is Christian. I joked that his own symbol, the upside-down Chi Rho, has never been associated with him, but indeed, his own symbol has never been associated with him. Upside-down or not, a Chi Rho is a Chi Rho, and it only ever refers to the Christ. In 455AD, you cannot even signify Lucifer anymore without using the Christ. And then we have Lucifer’s last moments. Like the actor he is, the builds his scene to evoke both his pagan origin (with Jupiter as his father) and his chosen personality Julius Caesar with his last words a direct reference. But while Caesar’s last words “Et tu, Brute ?” were addressing his son, in this context “Et tu, Jupiter” is addressing the father. A father who has abandoned him while he was trying to sacrifice himself for a people. Father, why hast thou forsaken me.

 Lucifer dies closer to a failed Christ as he does to his own pagan roots. But how could he have not failed ? It wasn’t that he was bad, or powerless, but he was inadequate. As an actor and as a god, in a time that had no use for the old him anymore and no use for the new him yet. More than anything else, Lucifer is battling the invincible push and pull of History. Being born in the wrong time and place, practicing the wrong profession, loving the wrong person. Being the wrong god. When you’re out of place in History, there is no changing the stage. You can’t create your own atmosphere. When you’re not in tune, you’re not in tune.

And through Lucifer, it’s the death of Rome itself that’s told. Deified emperors were not just additions to the pantheon ; they were the divinities most closely associated to Rome as a political entity. In pagan times, when they invaded other regions, Romans famously let people keep their religion, but all had to be present on the days of celebration of deified emperors. They served as a unifying cultural fabric throughout the Empire. The emperors were the gods of Rome. Lucifer, like Julian the Apostate, tries to reinstate paganism, but with a particular target : the very spirit of the greatness of Rome. He vows a cult to the idea of the Empire more than its gods.

 But the Empire is done. And so will be, in barely 70 years, the Vandal kingdom, reconquered by the Eastern Roman Empire. As for what vandal will come to mean… In her final speech to Genseric, is Ananke purposely lying or is she just as ignorant of the future as he is ? Most of all, I think she does not care. In her own words, gods are meant to burn bright to light humanity’s path, but each and every god of this pantheon accompanied the end of an era. If the gods serve any purpose, they do not ensure that the path will remain the same, only that there is a path to continue on. Failure is just as significant as victory ; the pantheon walks alongside History, they do not shape it. The 455AD pantheon’s purpose was to bear witness to the fall of the old world, of their world, and Ananke would not let them deviate from it.

In fact, we are two specials in, and so far have we witnessed anything but endings and falsification ? The events of the summer of 1831 did not just remain a mystery as Ananke destroyed Inanna’s journal, they also coincided with the end of the golden age of the Romantics. 455AD does not simply marks another step towards Rome’s rapid fall, but what really happened is now mere “wilder theories” according to David Blake. So far, it seems a successful pantheon to Ananke’s standards is one she managed to almost erase from History. Once again, ironically, this special IS our Sulla : we’ve seen Ananke rewrite History once, we know she can do it again. How many times HAS she done it ?

“Lucifer was only an actor made great by History” and, as Ananke hints, so is everyone. But Lucifer in the History she rewrote is neither great nor part of History. If truly we are all actors on the stage of History, then every generation is playing for the future ones. The actors do not know their role and the audience does not know the truth. And if the play goes wrong, Ananke will there to sweep the stage after each performance. Alea falsata est.

  WHAT I THOUGHT OF THE ISSUE

 So, before anything else, can we agree that if Wicdiv ever gets to make figurines of its characters, Lucifer with his homemade harp needs to be one ? Because I have a figurine of the Hieronymus Bosch knife-penis from The Garden of Delights that needs a friend. Cool ? Cool.

 I do admire the wicdiv team’s will to have the special be their own thing instead of a simple extension of the normal wicdiv canon. They read like a completely different series, with its own language and rhythm. This one had even fewer kieronisms than the last one and the style is almost antithetic to McKelvie’s. But what this also means is that this reads like the issue #2 of a series more than an outgrowth of the main one. Meaning, it’s a series that’s still finding its footing.

Wicdiv 455AD is much better than its predecessor Wicdiv 1831, but as part of its series I have a feeling it’s not quite what it has the potential of being yet. The story 1831 was trying to tell simply didn’t work for the one-shot format : it felt rushed, with stakes minimal, and its referencing didn’t seem to add up to anything. 455AD, despite technically happening on a grander scale, tells a much more personal story. The limited number of pages certainly works better with one character and a straight timeline than it does with four on multiple storytelling levels. And if the references forced me to take maybe one too many trips by Wikipedialand, it felt purposeful, adding to the text instead of subtracting from it.

So the most obvious problems from 1831 have clearly been fixed. The story of 455AD works wonderfully as a one-shot, albeit one that requires a decent baggage on both the Wicdiv canon and ancient History. This is one of those “the less you know about the character, the better” cases, and reading the reviews I find it very telling that everyone seems to have different levels of empathy for the main character. Over the course of the one-shot, he appears both extremely sympathetic and insufferable. But the shortness of the plot never allows us to form a meaningful connexion with him, meaning we always keep a certain distance from the story, which in this case is a good thing : this special is about the movement of history, the towering feeling of hindsight, the spectacle of failure. Having such distance to the characters allows us to seize the foolishness of his quest while also finding room for sympathy ; if we were more involved, we’d resent his failure. In that perspective, we are more on Ananke’s side than his. We come from a place so far away in History that we cannot possibly root for his success, because we cannot envision the dramatic change that would mean for our own history. Just like Wicdiv #27 took a time limit and turned this limitations into an asset by embracing frenzy and confusion, Wicdiv 455AD took its limited number of pages and used it to tell a story on ineluctability. It had just the right level of story not told to get us just as involved as we need to be.

 However, the format of the one-shot still feels a bit too short for its story. It focuses on the character, which was the most important element, but to the detriment of the rest. Rome is falling, but we barely see it ; the most we get is burning rooftops and murdered courtiers. It’s hard to feel the toll and stakes of it all when the camera is zooming so closely on the main character. And call me greedy, but I would have liked to see more of Araùjo’s depiction of Rome. I just love this style so much. I’m not sure if that’s a common type of style in Anglo-Saxon media, but for me in Europe it’s a huge nostalgia bomb. I grew up on French/Belgian comics and this kind of super detailed, expressive and somewhat cartoonish style is basically my childhood. Plus, coincidentally, this type of comics was obsessed with Ancient Rome. Here however, the story happens mostly in geometrical interiors, and save for the triumph scene, the city feels almost empty. Of course, part of it is intentional : Ananke’s walk to the Tiber, from the magnificent streets though walls too small to be intimidating, to a dirty river under dirty stone exudes maybe the most powerful pathos Wicdiv has ever wrung out. But as a whole, the setting lacks scale and life. I think I’ve already said before that locations are maybe the least interesting graphic aspect of Wicdiv, but goddamn, if you give me Rome before the fall and I don’t get a little bit whiplashed by the setting, I feel robbed. Clearly the décor had to be kind of sacrificed for the characters, and the expressions here are just fantastic. They achieve a level of ugliness that’s completely foreign to McKelvie’s style ; even when his characters are pissed, they never stop looking like perfect cut-outs from magazines. The expressiveness of Araùjo’s drawings immediately plunges us in something realer, more tangible and grounded. I just wish there had been more of a balance between character and background.

As for the writing, it still occasionally feels like there was way too much going on in those scripts and what made it onto the pages is what won at eeny meeny miny moe but as a whole there’s much more breathing room in the dialogues. Lucifer and Ananke’s discussion is the one bordering the most on overbearing, but it’s too much of a delight to see Ananke’s manipulative ways to really mind. Of Gillen’s habitual writing style, this special retains its disjointedness (which as usual works when it works and lets you roll with it if not) but adds a substantial touch of natural that’s not that common in the main wicdiv run : bizarrely, despite the complex speech patterns of Antique Rome, this special feels more intimate and direct than the average Wicdiv issue.

 Overall, I did really like this special. I think it was starting with a bit of an advantage given how interested I am in Ancient Rome. The Art is to die for, even though it still felt like it could have been showcased even better. The story is purposeful and all the googling didn’t feel like a waste of time. Still, I feel like there’s still some wiggle room to make a truly great one-shot in which the limited space and the conceptuality won’t hinder the emotional connexion. I’d also like to see the specials mix it up by maybe getting away from the “end of the pantheon” motive, and given the next special should be the modernist pantheon and we’ve already seen their end, it feels like the perfect place to do it.

Yeah, I’m aware my opinion is not all that interesting this time, as for me this special falls in the “very good but not great” category, and I’m not that clear on what could have been done to make it great. Most of all, I think it tells us that standalone issues are hard, and when they have to do with a completely different historical context and revelations on the main canon to cram in somewhere, it’s not every day you’ll get something as rich and enjoyable as this.