#also let me know if you ever want to see evidence or research or theoretical writing about anything I put on this blog

[deada55]

y'know. it's nice that Toki started acting like a real dickhead over time. i know charles gets it (Season 3 finale), and it'll probably heavily contribute to the eventual dissolution of the group if the metalocalypse doesn't lead to their deaths, but it's really nice that Toki feels safe enough to be impulsive. Any moments of non-hypervigilance or active dissociation are opportunities to build social skills and relate to others. Whether they know it or not, being in Dethklok is probably Toki's first "safe" environment to have basic needs met (bodily safety and social interaction are needs, yes), assert wants, and push boundaries.

and that's really, really special

[itsmeevie01]

Bio!Dad Bruce Day 9- Last Name (Wayne)

ok, so, if youve paid attention, the you know that i can’t write dialouge for the life of me lol.so today…i bring you dialouge in the form of texting :)

Marinette didn’t make a big deal about who her father was. Of course, when she had just met the man, she had relied on her friends to help her navigate the tricky situation. Since then, the teen had gotten good at only saying what she needed to. Chloe knew. Nino knew. Kim ands Alix knew. Max knew. They all knew and didn’t bring it up. They knew that she had processed it and moved on. To her, Bruce Wayne was just her father. She didn’t talk about the money, or all the work her father did. Marinette made a point to just be herself, and not worry about what names were attached.

At school, of course, she was Marinette Dupain-Cheng. On her ID? On her ID, she was Marinette Cheng-Wayne. Only those who needed to know knew. That how Marinette liked to keep it, at least, if she could help it.

When Marinette was 14, a new girl joined her class. The girl was sweet, if a little delicate. She said she had a lot of different injuries and conditions, but who was Marinette to judge? When the girl started to cling to one of the boys, Adrien, Marinette got a little worried. It wasn’t the end of the world, if he had offered to help, but he looked uncomfortable. When she mentioned this to Chloe, the girl had snarled. “That leech has been worming her way into his head. If you could hear what Gabriel was telling him to do- “her friend shook her head. “If I step in, want to help?” Marinette felt a smile crawl its way onto her face.

“gladly.”

Over the next few weeks, the girls watched what their new classmate, Lila, did. By that point, Nino had brought up his own concerns at fit far too well with theirs. Finally, Chloe decided it was time to take action. The blond stormed into the class and settled into her seat with a scowl. When Sabrina hurried over to join her, Chloe shook her head. Marinette took pity on the redhead and tugged the girl to the back of the class with her, whispering a quiet “watch”. When Nino and Adrien came in, Nino made his to the back, where he plopped down next to Kim. Alix and Max sat across the aisle, and all of them were ready for the explosion that was bound to happen. As Lila and Alya slipped in together, chatting and giggling over some story, the others exchanged glances. They had all been pretty close for years. Because of that, it was hard for others to join their group. The newest addition was Sabrina, and that was only because of her tendency to hang around Chloe. A ding on Kim’s phone drew the groups attention, making them all glance down at their own phones. In the group chat, Alix had sent a video linked to the LadyBlog.

Alix: saw this, this AM. Might be worth looking into. (video attached from the LadyBlog, Titled The Secrets of the Wayne Family)

Mari: wtf

Mari: what is she trying to do

Mari: her ass will get lawyered so fast

Max: she obviously hasn’t thought this through

Kim: is she claiming to know them????

Chlo: oml

Chlo: SLANDER

Chlo: please Mari, please tell me that she doesn’t know your family?

Mari: I mean

Mari: she might? But I think her family name would have come up when Tim and I were planning world domination if she did.

Max:!

Mari: don’t worry, its been put on the back burner. Dad has a new kid that keeps trying to stab Tim w/ a Katana lol.

Nino: Mari, aren’t you supposed to go visit soon? Maybe you should just stay here, dudette.

Chlo: ITS SHOWTIME

The friends hurriedly stowed their phones away and returned their gazes to the front of the room where Lila had approached a confused Adrien. The boy had been deposited next to Chloe in the first row, confusion evident in his green eyes. The Italian girl leaned over the desk, trying to garner as much attention as possible. “Adrien, why don’t you come sit with me? I was hoping you could help me keep up with the lesson.” The dangerous flash of her eyes was so fast that most would have missed it. Marinette narrowed her eyes in suspicion. It looked like Chloe hadn’t been exaggerating about what was going on behind the scenes. Moving before things could get out of hand, Marinette skipped down to the desk.

“I can help, Lila! Literature is one of my favorite subjects!” the anger that glowed behind Lila’s eyes was worrying, but Marinette wasn’t worried. She grabbed the other girl by her elbow and tugged her towards the seat the brunette usually occupied. “I’m sure that Alya wouldn’t mind sitting next to Sabrina!” as Marinette settled into the new seat, Lila folded herself onto the bench and pulled out her notebook, shunning her new seatmate. As Marinette got her own supplies ready, she mentally prepared herself for an hour of clod anger directed at her.

After the bell rang, Marinette slowly started to collect her things. The girl next to her was moving faster than the noirette expected. For a girl who was supposed to a wrist injury, Lila sure wasn’t trying to avoid the pain. Shaking her head, Marinette finished collecting her stuff and went to join Chloe where she was waiting at the door. As they linked arms, Marinette realized that there was a sharp voice behind her, crying. “Oh Alya, it was awful! Marinette wouldn’t answer any of my questions, and told me that if I didn’t understand it, I should keep my mouth shut!” Chloe sniggered next to her and strode away towards the lockers, pulling Marinette with her.

“Honestly, Mari? I wish you had told the brat to shut up, maybe then she would be scared of you.” Marinette rolled her eyes at her best friend.

“your only scared of me, because you’ve seen me with Tim, and know that we already are on the path to world domination.” Chloe shook her head and closed her locked with a soft thud.

“Mari, you are worse than all of your brothers, simply because you don’t use your fathers name to back you up. If you did that, then you would have the same royal brat rep I do.”

Chlo: so, is anyone going to put a stop to the liar’s yapping?

Adrien: wait what? Chloe, who are the other numbers?

Chlo: Adrien, please.

Chlo: do you really not have these numbers saved already?

Nino: yeah dude, that’s a little mean

Mari: lol yeah, I’m insulted, Adrien!

Adrien: Wait, Nino?

Adrien: who…is in this chat?

Alix: Me!

Max: Markov and myself

Kim: and me, man

Adrien: that…doesn’t help.

Chlo: oh honesty!

Chlo: you idiot, its Mari, Nino, Max, Alix, and Kim.

Chlo: you are Ridiculous

Chlo: UTTERLY RICICULOUS!

Mari: Chloe, chill. I don’t think he’s been in one of our…unique chats before.

Max: affirmative. Adrien usually spends time with Nino, Alya, and Lila if he isn’t with Chloe and Sabrina

Chlo: back to the topic at hand!

Chlo: the brat has to stop

Mari: I mean…she hasn’t done anything we can stop her with yet.

Nino: we need solid proof

Alix: are we just going to forget this AM? (video attached from the LadyBlog, Titled the Secrets of the Wayne Family)

Adrien: is someone going to tell me what’s going on?

Mari: we can’t drag them into this, Alix. it’ll make it worse, not better.

Alix: M, are you sure? we could shut her up real fast. Your fam, mine, Chloe’s?

Max: theoretically, it would be the path of least resistance.

Mari: THEY ARE A LAST RESORT

Mari: I AM NOT LETTING JASON MOCK ME FOR THIS

Mari: bc that ass totally will.

Adrien: ok, but what’s going on?

Max: Lila is trying to use you to catapult herself to fame

Kim: haha yeah, its not going to work if we have anything to say about it.

Chlo: also, very happy Mari never brought Alya into the fold

Mari: fuck no

Mari: do you see the way that girl doesn’t research anything. She latches on and never lets go.

Nino: so, you’ve said, Mari. I still think your over exaggerating on that one, lol

Mari: lmfao

Mari: Nino, she thinks I have a crush on ADRIEN of all people.

Mari: sorry, Adrien, bc you’re my friend? But she latched onto something and won’t let it go

Alix: shit I remember that. She tried to get us to set the two of you up. Those plans SUCKED.

Mari: remember how I kept sabotaging them lol? She just thought that fate was against her

Max: logically, shouldn’t that be a sign that you two aren’t meant to be?

Mari: haha I wish. After that, she tried to set me up with Chat Noir.

Chlo: WAIT

Chlo: that’s what Lady Wi-Fi was about?

Mari: yesssssssss

Adrien: um…should I be concerned about this?

Kim: I mean…no? its normal at this point.

Max: Chloe, plan #3 might work for taking down Lila? We wouldn’t need Mari’s family to join in if we do that.

Mari: if that fails, I’ll call Tim.

Mari: but ONLY if #3 fails, and we can’t make say…#5 work.

Chlo: you got yourself a deal, Marinette.

When the group entered the classroom together the next day, Chloe and Marinette were chattering excitably together. Adrien and Nino were talking about something on his phone while Max was keeping sore for whatever competition Kim and Alix had going on. When Lila approached Adrien and tugged him over to her seat, the others tracked her movement wordlessly.

When Alya came in and found them watching, she smirked at them. “those two make a cute couple, don’t they? Lila was practically glowing earlier when she was talking about the date they went on last night.” The friends exchanged telling glances but otherwise brushed the girl off as they dispersed to their seats. As she made her way to the seat she had claimed at the back at the beginning of the year, Marinette paused by Lila’s desk.

“Lila, do you need help again today? I know that the topics we’re covering are a little difficult if you’re not familiar with them.” The brunette scowled up at her.

“sorry, Marinette, but you can’t really keep up with the help I need.” The smaller girl shrugged.

“I’m sorry that you feel that way, Lila. If you ever need help, feel free to ask.” as she made her way to her seat, Marinette could hear Lila say loudly

“She’s just jealous that I have connections like the Wayne’s and Jagged stone and she’s just a little miss nobody.”

Mari: fuck it, it’s on bitch. I’m calling Jagged and Clara. These are slander charges now.

Chlo: should I expect your family’s lawyers too?

Mari: hell no. Tim is a last resort.

Mari: dad’s friend tho? THEY are defiantly going to be getting a few phone calls.

Mari: hey Jagged, Penny. I have just a tiny question.

Penny: Marinette! We were getting ready to contact you! What’s going on?

Mari: what kind of slander would be bad enough to sue over?

Penny: why?

Mari: this (voice file attached. Label reads SeNd To JaGgEd ASAP)

Jagged: little lady…where did you get this?

Mari: I recorded it during class today

Jagged: this liar is your age?

Penny: Marinette, would you mind if I send this to our lawyers?

Mari: go right ahead.

Tim: so…

Tim: would you like to explain why Jagged Stone is ranting to B in the entryway about a “little lying brat” who is in his “favorite niece’s class?”

Mari: wat

Mari: idk what you’re talking about

Tim: Little Bit, you can’t possibly think he hasn’t name dropped you yet.

Mari: WHAT.

Mari: fuck

Tim: ummmmmm

Tim: WHEN DID YOU START CUSSING?

Mari: tim. Please remember who my brothers are.

Tim: OH neverminded

Tim: why didn’t you get me involved?

Mari: theres no reason for Marinette Dupain-Cheng to know the Wayne fam

Mari: also, we wanted to use #3 and #5 first. If they didn’t work (they are) we were going to rain fire lolz.

Tim: fine. When your ready for the power that comes with the name, lmk

Tim: aslo, I insist on being included in the planning.

Mari: also*

Tim: fuck off

Tim: I wan to be ready for whatever damage control might be needed with the press

Tim: also, I live the kind of chaos that you and Chloe create together lolz

When Adrien turned to Marinette during lunch that day, there was clear confusion in his eyes. “Mari?”

“what’s up, Adrien?”

“who was that guy…Tim? That Chloe kept mentioning?”

“oh? She didn’t tell you?” the blond shook his head, looking worried. Marinette smiled ruefully and sighed.

“he’s my older brother on my father’s side.” When Adrien furrowed his brow, Marinette elaborated. “My father lives in the United States and runs a big corporation. He spends a bit of time in the limelight, but he keeps us all out of the press.”

“the…Dupain family?” Marinette laughed before smoothing over her friend’s confusion.

“no, Tom is my dad, but Bruce is my Father. He lives on the east coast, and I spend most holidays and breaks with my siblings over there.” Adrien nodded and smiled at her.

“I guess that makes sense. Its really cool at you get to spend your time with both sides of your family like that. What is your father’s last name then? I don’t think I’ve heard it.” Marinette winced.

“My father’s last name is Wayne. Anywhere except school, I use the name Marinette Cheng-Wayne.”

ok, thats a wrap. for once, this could be read by itself with almost no context. this will fit intothe overall storyline, but i had to go back and set the stage (this) for when Mari is 15. here, its the begining of the school year that she turns 15. (her b-day is in April bc i want to mess wiht cannon even more than i already do.)

[lilacandladybugs]

hey since youre talking about christianity, i was wondering if you could answer a question ive been curious about. if god cares about people and if jesus died for our sins, then why does hell exist? and if god cares about us then why did he let so much bad stuff happened in his name, and even cause it, like with the noah’s arch story?

sorry if any of this is wrong ive never read the bible, but ive had bad experiences with christianity in the past and the way you talk about it seems much nicer than the way i know it

I don’t think I can answer this question in a way that doesn’t come across as pretentious or like I’m asking for an argument or just being straight up unsatisfying. But I just am going to try anyway because i'm hoping that maybe this will be comforting or helpful to someone. I’m sorry if this is offensive I am really trying my best, please take this all in the best possible way and be gracious with me 

The thing about this ask is that it’s actually a bunch of different questions, and since each of them individually is really hard to answer so I’m going to narrow it down to just one ( im sorry ;-; ) . The one I’ve thought about the most is “Why does God let bad things happen if he loves us?”

When this question first really occurred to me, I was already a believer. So I was already pretty convinced that God exists logically, from the perspective of history, philosophy, science, and my personal experience. I believed in the /existence/ of the God who is represented in the scriptures. (I doubt anyone wants it but I can give you a list of resources if you want to look into any of that.) The struggle for me was whether or not all that evidence held true in the face of this moral dilemma; the problem of evil in the presence of a loving God.

But I just couldn’t turn my back on the concept of a moral grounding in God. I had a philosophy professor tell me that people are mortal and so we shouldn’t grieve them like they’re immortal, that grief is a choice, and that trauma is a choice. I respected her so much, but I just couldn’t accept that. There’s nothing more unsettling to me than suggesting that cruelty and death and suffering are only wrong because you think they are, and not because they’re violating sacred ancient laws. My friends dying, people hurting me, that isn’t just in my head. It’s /real/. They’re really dead, and it really matters. People really did something wrong when they hurt me, and it isn’t my fault for being hurt. It’s their fault for being cruel. And their cruelty is objectively morally wrong.

I realized that if I became an atheist I would have to accept the fact that there isn’t /objectively/ any difference between right and wrong. There isn’t any theoretical “right way” that the world should be. But to me, there is a right way it should be. There is a right way and it was lost because of sin.

It was I guess comforting that Christianity provided the premises I needed to ask a question like this. Evil exists. And love exists. So how can God exist? What a comforting question, in a way. To get to grieve, to be angry, to wonder what’s going on, to want things to be different. It was validating i guess

Don’t get me wrong i was FURIOUS i was so angry. I was so angry and so conflicted I kind of thought I might just like rip apart at my seams but I just felt caught between a rock and a hard place to be either abandoned by God or to not even be able to think about my experiences in a way that felt coherent.

He showed up though. I remember swearing at him, and laying up at night thinking he wasn’t there, I told him I wouldn’t have to have trauma if he would’ve stepped in, that my friends wouldn’t be dead, that he let it happen to me, that he just /witnessed/ it. And man idk he just showed up. He showed up every time. I almost walked away like five times that summer. And every time he sent someone, there was always someone that showed up and talked to me like out of nowhere. Or music, or scripture, or something someone said in passing. 

The night that it was really bad was when I realized that the only person who could save me was God and I cried out to him, and I just idk I’ve never been so desperate. I went to church the next day against my will and the sermon felt like it was written for me specifically. I cried through the whole thing.

If God is goodness, then how can I say he isn’t with me and around me constantly? In the sunrise and sunset, in the stars, in flowers, and in kind words. In sermons. In friends and family. In all the coincidences that stopped me from becoming an atheist, all of the answered prayers and the impossibilities. That’s why my side blog is called @in-the-whisper. Because I felt him there, even though it hurt, he was with me in the quiet and in the silence, in his whisper in a thousand different ways.

I was posed this question by someone who was there for me in one of those moments where I almost walked away from God, “Is sufficiency abundant?” I guess I thought it was. Where was God? In the peace that surpasses understanding. In the knowledge that everything is finished, that he died for us, that he didn’t abandon us. That whatever terrible things happen, he was willing to take all of the consequences for that onto himself in the person of Jesus. That one day he will set things right, even though it isn’t right right now. 

It comes down to the Gospel (good news, core story of the Christian faith); humanity actively chose to walk away from God in an act of rebellion. We had free will because God created us tenderly to be in a loving relationship with him, and loving relationships must be based on free will and they must be two way. So he let us walk away from him, and away from the sustainer of life our bodies break, our world crumbles, and we die. In order to bridge that gap, he chose to die in our place, so that we could re enter that free will relationship with him if we so choose. He died on the cross, descended into hell, and then in three days he rose from the grave, defeating death. And one day he will return on a white horse to rescue us and to take the world back as his own. If I believed that to be true, then I believed in the greatest intervention in human history that has ever occurred. The God of the Bible isn’t a distant God, "God showed how much he loved us by sending his one and only Son into the world so that we might have eternal life through him." 1 John 4:9 He did the unthinkable for us.

Living in light of the gospel helped me to understand the way that God is present in my life, my present, past, and in my future. It gave me peace. When Horatio G. Spafford’s two daughters and wife died in a shipwreck, he wrote this,

“When peace like a river attendeth my way, when sorrows like sea billows roll, whatever my lot, thou hast taught me to say, it is well, it is well with my soul." 

“Though Satan should buffet, though trials should come, let this blest assurance control: that Christ has regarded my helpless estate and has shed His own blood for my soul.

“My sin, oh the bliss of this glorious thought. My sin, not in part, but the whole, is nailed to the cross, and I bear it no more praise the Lord, praise the Lord, O my soul!

“And Lord, haste the day when my faith shall be sight The clouds be rolled back as a scroll The trump shall resound, and the Lord shall descend Even so, it is well with my soul!

“It is well with my soul, it is well, it is well with my soul.”

I don’t have an answer for your question. What I know is that I am willing to rest in the knowledge of my personal experiences and my research that God exists, that he is loving, and that he is powerful, just, and wise. Even the winds and the seas obey him, the mountains are like pebbles to him, thunder rolls at the sound of his voice. He had thought before time began, he gave all knowledge and all wisdom to us. 

Why do bad things happen also brings up the question, why do good things happen? Who do we have to thank when we get up in the morning and can see or hear or move or are alive in general? Why are we so blessed as to have two days and not just one? Where do mornings and complexity and beauty and wonder come from? They come from him. Not because we need it, but because he wants to give it to us. Enjoyment, existence, love, laughter, thought, beauty, heartbreak. The world is just as beautiful as it is terrible, and why should it be beautiful? Because he wants it to be that way.

God is so patient. He is so patient and kind and powerful, and he wants to hear your questions. Some of them, like this one, are in my opinion something that you have to talk to him about directly. He gives us thought and logic and reason and wisdom, and he asks for us to engage him. He will answer.

If any believers are reading this, I want you to know that it is enough to cry out to him in pain. It is enough to want to want to believe in him. He would so much rather hear from you in your anger than never hear from you at all. Seek him out, he will find you. He will chase after you.

I bet that he would chase after me, bet my life on it. I might not know the answer, but I am confident enough in what I do know that I’m willing to bet my existence that God will come true on his promises, that he will deliver me, that everything will be okay, that he is bigger than my trauma, and that he will hold me.

“For my thoughts are not your thoughts,     neither are your ways my ways,” declares the Lord. 9 “As the heavens are higher than the earth,     so are my ways higher than your ways     and my thoughts than your thoughts. 10 As the rain and the snow     come down from heaven, and do not return to it     without watering the earth and making it bud and flourish,     so that it yields seed for the sower and bread for the eater, 11 so is my word that goes out from my mouth:     It will not return to me empty, but will accomplish what I desire     and achieve the purpose for which I sent it. 12 You will go out in joy     and be led forth in peace; the mountains and hills     will burst into song before you, and all the trees of the field     will clap their hands. 13 Instead of the thornbush will grow the juniper,     and instead of briers the myrtle will grow. This will be for the Lord’s renown,     for an everlasting sign,     that will endure forever.” Isaiah 55:8-13

And I’m holding him to that promise.

[anonthenullifier]

So…how’s that next chapter of post hoc going?

It’s coming along. I’m 2/3rds into it. Ideally it’ll be done in a week (or so), but until then, here’s a small look at the chapter. 🙂

________________

The composed email lazes on his computer screen, so carefree and unassuming despite the threat inherent in its existence. “Just click send.”

“I am working my way to it.”

Wanda’s raised eyebrows doubt his resolve, the ring on her right index finger clinking out her impatience against his You know what gets on my nerves? Myelin mug. “Want me to do it?”

“No, because then you will see the recipient’s name.” They had established in their original IRB that he alone would have access to the names of their participants, a necessary risk since someone has to code for individual level characteristics and be able to connect the gifts with the RSVPs. Once data collection is completed and all data coded to Wanda’s liking, he will deidentify it all so she can analyze it without compromising any personal information of their participants. Given their current predicament, he even had to remove her access to the email account. Regardless of this agreed upon protocol, it has not stopped her from slyly trying to get him to slip up. “I will have the courage any moment now.”

A pointed sip of her tea actually helps, marginally, his nerves splitting between the email and her undivided attention, though one is more pleasant than the other. “Treat it like a bandaid.”

Not psychologically unsound. The fact he is cogitating so much on sending the email is itself a cognitive issue of impact bias where he presumes (wrongly) that it will be emotionally negative enough that he is now seeking to avoid it. In reality, he knows it will be much like the bandaid Wanda is suggesting. If he just sends it and then seeks out distraction or some other task, the negative emotions will not only be less intense but have a shorter duration. He just needs to trust his psychological immune system. “Very well,” he accepts this is the best path forward but he still reads the email one more time, making sure that the tone is one of sharing information and not desperation given they are informing their participant of the fact that a scheduling error has led them to move their wedding to a state park pavilion an hour away. This will not ruin their study, and even if it does harm the data, they have strategies to ameliorate the impact. The world will not end, even if his heart seems to think it will. “All right...” Vision slowly clicks the send button “here we go,” and there is no taking it back now.

“I’m proud of you.”

The hand patting his shoulder is already activating his coping mechanisms, his right leg crossing over his left as he swivels his chair to face her. “Before I stumble into the depths of rumination,” something she finds far more amusing than he does, “perhaps we can find something not related to our study to discuss.”

Whenever faced with a task, Wanda’s eyes wander in thought. He always imagines she is tracing the threads of topics and trying to find the one farthest from where he thinks she will go. “I’m beginning to suspect my work with Hank is an attempt to rekindle his failed marriage.”

“Fascinating.” Of the core group he spends time with, Vision is always the one absent any gossip. In a way this should be uplifting to his moral standing and staunchness to not belittle others, but then it leaves him in the quandary of wanting to remain aloof while also very much fascinated by what Wanda is dangling before him. Information gathering does not have to be synonymous with gossiping, as one is passive and the other active.  “What makes you reach that conclusion?”

“Okay,” the mug descends onto his desk with an excited thud and Wanda leans forward, hands ready to gesticulate her way through the information, “so Janet van Dyne, his estranged wife, is one of the foremost quantum computing minds and has started doing a lot of work on quantum time travel.”

“Oh I dislike time travel.” Because the rules are never followed and the consequences are rarely sensical.

“You’ll be happy to know she hasn’t achieved it yet.”

“I am much relieved.”

Wanda scrunches her nose for a half second before continuing, “But what she has been working on is a computational model of whether the butterfly effect would actually exist in quantum time travel.”

An effect he knows she dislikes and yet she is invigorated at the thought. “To make sure I am following, you are saying that she is trying to mathematically establish whether going back in time and fiddling with the past would actually impact the future?”

Wanda nods, the sheer enjoyment she gets from the topic leading to an antsiness that shifts between turning her mug a couple degrees at a time, pushing her hair behind her ear, and varying the positioning of her legs. “So far she’s found evidence that if we view time with a quantum lens, it actually might correct itself when small changes happen and that the original timeline might remain resilient enough to outlast the change.”

“Does this not inherently contradict your own work?”

“Not entirely,” an ounce of uncertainty shoulders into her voice, “quantum chaos still exists but she seems to suggest it acts differently with competing timelines and reality could have a self-correcting mechanism.”

It all seems a bit too muddled for his ability to comprehend the difference. “What is it that you and Hank are doing that is meant to fix their personal timeline?”

“He’s been insisting on us doing a lot of different quantum walks,” she explained this to him some time ago, complete with a diagram of a quantum tree. It is all about the pathway photons travel to get from one point to another, but not linearly. All of the branches intersect and so their studies are about predicting when jumps between branches occur and how to determine movement. In his mind it is like the subway, how there are various lines that intersect at any given station and that you could take four travelers from station A and ask them to find their way to Station F. They could all take the same series of trains or switch between lines, maybe even one travels by bus or foot for a time. Most people would only ever consider the start and the end and determine the journey must be linear, even when it might not be, especially if there are delays or lines shut down. No doubt it is far more complicated than that.  “I mean a lot of different ones to try and disprove her findings. I only found out because I noticed he’d been publishing commentaries to her articles and using our data as support for his arguments.”

“How precisely is challenging her work meant to win her back?”

Wanda finishes her tea but doesn’t let go of the cup, her fingers tracing the glossy raised letters, “Hoping she’s intellectually turned on by it?”

There are researchers in his own niche area that have a similar, albeit non-romantic (he presumes) dynamic of obsession to always counter each other, to always craft a study meant to disprove the theoretical underpinnings of the other’s work. It’s why conferences can get dicey when the alcohol is free flowing and debates erupt over empathy and selfishness and how to delineate the two movitations. “I cannot speak for Janet, but it seems a bit more depressing than romantic.”

“At least it’s distracting him from his ant obses—-“ The tell tale chime of their study’s email disrupts her, “What do you think we got this time?”

“Let’s see,” he switches to the tab and in place of the usual notification from their wedding website there is an email sitting there with the sender as Tony Stark. Physiologically his heart remains firmly in his chest, but figuratively it plummets through the floor, “It is from our participant.”

In the time it takes for the comment to be processed and her, “That participant?” Vision has already read the response twice, his eyes going back for a third read through to make sure he has not found himself in some alternative universe created by his neurons firing too quickly.

[full-coverage]

(super)natural Bottle Blonde

The weirder the natural remedy, the more mess it creates in your shared bathroom with your roommate, the better it works, right? Historically speaking, Cleopatra submerged her legendary bosoms in sour donkey milk before driving Julius Caesar, a man normally guided by flawless strategic instincts, crazy. Sylvester Stallone and my grandmother are both unafraid of cracking a raw egg over something that’s not a hot skillet, albeit for different reasons; my grandmother uses it as a hair mask. I won’t ask what the strangest “organic” topical fix you’ve ever used is, because I think I would rather not know. Instead, I would like to travel from the land of failed home experiments into the world of science, where researchers draw inspiration from nature in a methodical, reasoned way. 

Dr. Claudia Battistella and Prof. Nathan Gianneschi are two chemists who don’t reach for the vegetable crisper and a blender when they want to see what kind of tricks Mother Nature has in store for us. Actually, they’re more used to working with tidy synthetic molecules. Claudia joined Nathan’s lab at Northwestern University to study how polymers, or chains of molecules, can be used to deliver drugs in the body for cancer treatment applications. Only recently did she start working with a polymer naturally occurring in our body, which she describes as a “disaster” — elsewhere it is characterized as being “enigmatic” and “mysterious” by science journalists who evidently have a much more leisurely relationship with it. I myself am fascinated by the idea that molecules can have some kind of personality. Imagine, your second-grade best friend Jimmy’s rabbit didn’t have much in the way of vibes, and here is something which can be represented by several sticks and letters on paper, frustrating and fascinating people at the same time.

So can you guess which molecule I’m talking about? Fine, the dead giveaway would be that it is the pigment in our skin and eyes. But melanin doesn’t just sit on top of us like icing on a cookie: it’s swimming around inside us, where it has all kinds of important functions. Moreover, we aren’t the only organism that produces melanin — far from it. 

But before we get to the full spectrum of what melanin can do, let’s find out what use for it Claudia came up with. “What can I do to get closer to this material?” she pondered in Nathan’s lab after seeing her colleagues experiment with its myriad of applications. The answer came when she was discussing the problem of hair graying and losing melanin with age and sun exposure with a friend. In a stroke of optimism characteristic of only advanced scientists and toddlers who have just dislodged an expensive ceramic from a high place, she thought, “well, can we just put it back?”

It turns out that indeed we can. Pigments and dyes in nature “stick like crazy,” says Nathan. “That’s why your hair color is permanent.” The Gianneschi lab developed a series of hair dyes based on Claudia’s idea to use synthetic melanin, from blonde to black to red. In addition to being nifty, by being based on a building block already present in our body, the formula avoids use of a molecule called PPD widely present in permanent hair dyes which causes allergies in some people and is a known carcinogen. 

But having grown up spending more time in the manga section of my local bookstore than with YA books, I’m more interested in crazy hair colors than those with names like “Spiced Amber” and “Chestnut Brown.” If scientists are spending time in a lab formulating hair dye, the result better be something that only a Final Fantasy character designer could come up with. Luckily, the Gianneschi lab researchers had kind of the same idea. 

“Some of the most beautiful things, like throat feathers especially in certain types of hummingbirds, are super reflective. Materials that are that reflective are driven by melanin, which is a black particle… it doesn’t have any color like that, it’s a huge light sink,” Nathan explains. In other words, dark melanin granules, which look like poppy seeds under a microscope, also make some of the most fantastical colors in nature. How is this possible? To find out, physicists were put to the task, which spells trouble for everyone in terms of finding an easy answer to the question. They studied peacock feathers, which are made of basically the same materials that our hair is, and discovered that they were arranged in such precise and regular structures that they bend light to create basically a rave on a subatomic level that we see as the peacock’s pimped-out pattern. This phenomenon is known as structural coloration.

When I asked Nathan if this would be possible on human hair, he admitted that he thinks it would be theoretically possible, but difficult: “We don’t know enough about how to organize the particles in hair. I’m a bit concerned over whether or not we’d ever pull it off.” To set up the molecular light maze that results in a rainbow of shifting colors, they would need very stringent control over the underlying substrate. On top of that, melanin isn’t soluble in water, which means for chemists that studying it in the first place is like trying to recognize a friend without prescription glasses, making everything that much more difficult. “But that would be awesome, right? If you have a permanent hair color that could be iridescent. People would buy that, for sure. But I don’t know how to do that.”

Still, there’s hope for those of us who want to rock a look “inspired by nature” in the most outlandish way possible: Nathan said that he’s working on incorporating his and Claudia’s work with melanin into cosmetic production. Smooth surfaces like eyelids make for a much better canvas for playing with light than hair. During our conversation, he shows me a favorite Instagram account of his, the Gourmet Biologist, who gently pinches tiny tropical hummingbirds and holds them up to the camera to demonstrate how they make peacocks look “like some pedestrian thing.” So while geniuses like Prof. Gianneschi and Dr. Battistella do the hard work, I’m going to scroll through these amazing feats of coloration in nature and put together my next concert look in my head. 🦚

[ionfusionpunk]

Sith, Grey Jedi, and Jedi: What They Teach us about the Force pt1

We all know of the Jedi Code, and we all have our own opinions on its validity and fallacies. Hopefully, we are all also aware of the Sith Code which is, as you might expect, the opposite of the Jedi Code. Since Star Wars: The Last Jedi came out, many more people have become aware of the existence of Grey Jedi, and in their search to understand the lore behind the concept have most likely stumbled on the various Grey Jedi Codes. There are, unfortunately, many of them, and both canon and the EU have yet to choose a single code to represent the beliefs of the Grey Jedi. I think, however, that that is appropriate. Through a bit of research, it’s easy to learn that the definition of a ‘Grey Jedi’ varies based on the individual, the circumstances, and the time period; it’s only fitting that there are multiple codes to reflect this. 

Now, I’m a bit of a Word Nerd; I love to examine definitions, phrasings, grammar, etc. in order to further understand more vague, broad, or obscure topics. The various Codes then, as you might expect, are like a playground to me. But the Codes themselves are not my primary focus in examining them. I am, besides being a Word Nerd, a lover of philosophy, and Star Wars lore, especially in regards to the Force, is ripe with it. Part of my own individual philosophy, and an actual philosophical concept, is the idea that nothing is wrong but that a ‘correct’ interpretation is entirely up to the individual to debate. Another concept is that there is no pure definition because translation is interpretation; in this case, the only true interpretation of the Force is the Force itself - but that leaves all of the Codes to be both correct and incorrect. Well, if they’re all right and wrong, I want to break down the Codes and then compare their individual meanings in order to gain a broader view of the Force. Perhaps, in the end, I’ll even compare each philosophy with familiar characters in order to cross-examine their behaviors and beliefs. 

Let us first consider each code individually - that is, let us interpret in whole each code of the Sith, Jedi, and Grey Jedi. 

First, the Sith:

Peace is a lie, there is only passion. 

Through passion, I gain strength. 

Through strength, I gain power.

Through power, I gain victory.

Through victory, my chains are broken.

The Force shall set me free. 

Now, this seems pretty straight forward. Keep in mind the basic nature of the Sith: that they draw their power from the Dark Side. To more fully understand the Dark Side, it’s easiest to simply view it as the shadow cast by the Light: to access the Dark, one must be a slave to their emotions, their fears, and thus their hate leading them to willingly harm others. Why is this bad? We can’t simply assume the answer to this question to be self-evident; if the Sith were possessed of a black-and-white moral compass, they wouldn’t exist, and they wouldn’t be sentient, cognizing beings. 

The Force, as Old Ben Kenobi explains, flows through all living things, connects all living things, and upon death all living things return to it. Okay. Pause here. This might be a little easier to understand if we take a look at Eastern Philosophy, namely the concepts of Moksha - more commonly known by Westerners as Nirvana. Simply put, Eastern Philosophy states that Moksha is Nothing, the ultimate enlightenment. To be enlightened is to have shed all worldly desires and cares, fulfilled your Dharma, and found Eternal Peace - a peace where nothing changes because all is at rest. As mortals we are born from this nothingness, and, hopefully, we will return to it once we die instead of being reincarnated. The end is the same as the beginning, the beginning is the end, and the only reason we have two different words is because of the time we spend in mortality between those static states. Contextually, this means that all living things are born from and return to the Force; ‘birth’ and ‘death’ then are only the names of the doors that we must pass through. Birth and death don’t mark endings and beginnings because the Beginning and the End are the same destination; Birth and death are simply the bookends of the passage of time. (Side note that this helps explain how/why Force Ghosts are a thing; please also note that this is an entirely different debate about Force Philosophy that I won’t get into here). 

Can we take a moment here? I just - I have a mini-rant about how the Force works. For the purpose of this, I’ll be referring to the scene in Episode V where Luke is training with Yoda. Luke is meditating to lift the rocks. We see that it’s a bit difficult for him especially since he is easily distracted by outside influences - namely his X-Wing sinking into the swamp. Yoda explains that Luke must focus on his connection to the Force. Based on previous extrapolations, we can assume then that the Force does not flow through inanimate things such as rocks, dirt, sand, metal, etc. Luke, then, is attempting to lift the stone - and thus his ship - by wrapping the Force around the object in question to lift it. In this way, Luke is in fact making things more difficult the bigger things become; it would require more, finer control to wrap the Force around a larger object than a small one. Yoda, however, tells him that “size matters not”. To Luke - and his approach to the situation - this, in fact, cannot be true. We must therefore assume that there is another approach. This is where my extrapolations come to be based less in fact and more in theory. 

We know that living things are ‘bright’ when viewed in the Force; this is most likely because they are ‘alive’ in the Force. Force-sensitives are even brighter. As we all know, midi-chlorians determine how Force-sensitive a sentient is. The more midi-chlorians, the more sensitive they are. But to be sensitive to the Force simply and only means that the individual in question is more able to feel and interact consciously with the Force; it has absolutely no bearings on how capable they are. For example, if someone is born with one less limb than I am, that doesn’t mean they can’t function just as well as I can. Just because Helen Keller was blind and deaf didn’t stop her from becoming an author, political activist, and lecturer. She even earned a Bachelor of Arts degree. It stands to reason, then, that someone less Force-sensitive can become just as proficient as someone more sensitive in the use and ways of the Force; it might just take longer or be a bit harder/less instinctive. But the Force flows through all living things. This means that the Force flows through Force-nulls like the Clones even if they aren’t aware of it. They still are alive in the Force. 

Does that mean inanimate objects are ‘dead’ in the Force? If that were true, then it doesn’t make sense that Jedi can dodge non-living things moving towards them. ‘But Ion’ you might say, ‘the Jedi are sensing a Disturbance in the Force’. Right. Okay. So, a disturbance in the Force would indicate when something is wrong. Obi-Wan never once said he ‘sensed a disturbance in the Force’ when blaster bolts were flying at him; he only ever used this phrase to indicate something troubling occurring elsewhere - and the other Jedi use the phrase in the same way. You might argue that the blaster bolts, at least, are made of energy, so it could be that the Jedi can sense energy as the Force is basically energy. Okay, so you want to touch on quantum physics here. Einstein tells us that all matter is energy. Using this logic, any object could be viewed as energy through the Force, which in turn means Luke didn’t just know the location of the rock because of where the Force wasn’t; he knew where it was because he could sense it, even if he didn’t know that’s what he was doing. Yoda even says that the Force ‘binds us’. This is where I think Luke begins to go wrong. He’s using the Force as sort of a net: his connection to the Force is a string which in turn connects to a net around the object he is trying to move. Assuming Yoda in fact earned his title of Jedi Master, he must be correct: it shouldn’t matter how big something is when you try to move it; theoretically anyone capable of using the Force should be able to do it. So what is Luke missing?

I really think it stems from what Yoda says: that Luke must unlearn what he has learned. This implied he learned the technique the wrong way because he does not fully understand what it is the theory behind what he is doing. Living things are brighter in the Force, Force-sensitive even more so; this would explain why it’s easier to connect with living things using the Force. But if all matter is energy and thus able to be sensed in the Force, then theoretically you should be able to connect to objects as well. And wouldn’t this, hypothetically, be easier? If, say, the string of Luke’s connection weren’t attached to a net around the object but instead the object itself, then his ability to lift the object would be based only on Luke's connection to a singular object instead of attempting to manipulate larger quantities of the Force. Basically, Yoda succeeds where Luke fails because Yoda is connecting to the energy of the X-Wing and viewing it simply as energy rather than a mass to be moved. This also means that yes, size doesn’t matter, and anyone can do it as long as their own connection to the Force is stable. 

Okay, I just went back and watched those specific scenes again. Yoda even says that Force flows through the rock, too. End mini-rant.

‘Kay. The Force flows through all things - i.e. all things are ‘alive in the Force’. This includes Dark Side users - Dark Jedi, the Sith, etc. - and objects touched by the Dark. By their own understanding, they believe that to act selfishly is not wrong. Their interpretation of the Force is that, through acting selfishly, they will attain their own sort of enlightenment. But they approach ‘enlightenment’ from the opposite direction of the Jedi. Let’s break it down.

“Peace is a lie, there is only passion.” To be static is bad, and in fact nothing is static; all is in motion. 

“Through passion, I gain strength.” If you’re not static, then you’re moving, changing; to change is to gain momentum, and this momentum gives you strength. 

“Through strength, I gain power.” The stronger you are, the more powerful you are because you have more momentum - you are affecting more the area around you, changing things as you will, and you are in control of that change. 

“Through power, I gain victory.” By using your power over your circumstances and surroundings, you can change the outcome in your favor. 

“Through victory, my chains are broken.” When things are in your favor, you are beholden to no man or entity, not even the Force; you are your own being - free. 

“The Force shall set me free.” This line is actually very revealing. Assuming my interpretations of the previous lines are correct, then the Sith believe that the Force isn’t enlightenment, not a goal to be reached but in fact a tool to be used. This is where Sith and Jedi philosophy really diverge. A Sith’s passion controls the strength with which they wield the Force, and the stronger their tool (or their connection to it), the more power their attacks with it are. The stronger their attacks - because defense would be considered static - the more of the battle they control. The more they control, the closer to winning they are. And when they win, then they cannot be controlled. This leads to: the stronger the Sith is, the fewer people that can control them. Their goal is to be their own ultimate masters. The technique lacks finesse, true, but it isn’t inherently wrong, and we can derive a lot from this. Viewing the Force as simply a tool to be used would explain why the Sith view all other beings as tools/pawns/etc. (the Force flows through all things, so naturally ‘I have strong control of the Force’ can be misinterpreted as ‘therefore I have strong control over those things the Force affects - like people’).

Along the way, however, the passion of the Sith comes to control them. In their quest to become strong enough to be their own masters, they come to fear losing that control over their own fate. This leads to an intense urge to control the fates of others, to be another’s master because it is another thing to control, and the more they control, the freer they are. The more afraid they are, the more they hate those they view as being in direct opposition to them - or, in other words, those trying to control them.

But we also know that the Force is not good or bad; it simply is. The Force is energy, and so it stands to reason that the energy of another would affect it. (Duh. We’ve been over this). A Sith lost to their own fear and hate would reach out to the Force using these emotions - negative emotions - and it would give the Force a negative charge, so to speak. This negative charge, as in real life, can be helpful in small amounts, but is in time harmful in large quantities (see: Force Lightning, a predominantly Sith technique). 

The downfall of the Sith is ultimately not about their basic understanding of the Force but that they lose sight of what, exactly, they should be controlling in order to reach that final victory. 

(If you think about it, the Clones would believe something very similar to this being both Force-null and effectively slaves to the Republic; this does not make them bad, only how they choose to act).

(Part Two)

[kunsthalextracity]

The History of Queer Nightlife in Antwerp: Self-Interview in a Convex Mirror

In the framework of the group exhibition ‘Daily Nightshift’, Kunsthal Extra City collaborated with the Urban Studies Institute of the University of Antwerp on a lecture series. Due to COVID-19 we unfortunately couldn’t allow these lectures to take place at our premises.

To replace his lecture, professor Bart Eeckhout wrote an interview with himself.

In his text Eeckhout, board member of the Urban Studies Institute at the University of Antwerp, researches the history of queer nightlife in Antwerp and the spatial shifts that have occurred along the way. Where in the city were sexual minorities able to make contact? In what kind of places of entertainment? How did these change in shape and location? Which material traces of this nightlife remain?

Text & images: Bart Eeckhout

The History of Queer Nightlife in Antwerp: Self-Interview in a Convex Mirror

Q. So, professor, before Covid-19 changed everyone’s plans, you were going to give a lecture about the history of queer nightlife in Antwerp as part of the public program for the exhibition?

A. Well, not quite a lecture.

Q. But you were going to entertain our audience with lots of slides and flashy pictures?

A. Not really. As a matter of fact, I was wondering how to turn the presentation into something more than the delivery of an academic text, something that could satisfy an audience that is drowning in audiovisual information. The thing is that I saw myself forced to talk about a topic that is hard to illustrate, and to do so moreover as an amateur historian.

Q. How do you mean?

A. I actually teach English and American literature. But I happen to be the only board member of the Urban Studies Institute at the University of Antwerp who is simultaneously on the board of A*, the network of colleagues who specialize in gender and sexuality studies. There I have a reputation for being into queer studies and for stimulating the collaboration between queer academics and activists, since I consider myself to be both.

Q. And so the organizers came knocking on your door to ask if you could speak to the topic of queer nightlife in Antwerp?

A. Yes. And I accepted to do so because I have coincidentally been acquiring some expertise on the topic. Last year a colleague with whom I love to collaborate at the university, the media scholar Alexander Dhoest, got an invitation to contribute a chapter on Antwerp for an international book on gay neighborhoods in cities around the world – what used to be called “gay ghettoes.” We remembered that a PhD student of ours, the musicologist Rob Herreman, had spent a lot of time in archives to find out more about the recent history of LGBTQs in Antwerp in relation to music. Though we were hesitant to venture into terrain that should ideally be explored by skilled historians, we’re not aware of any Flemish colleagues doing academic research into recent LGBTQ history, certainly not with a specific focus on Antwerp. In addition, the book for which we were invited was being put together by architects and would thus probably cut us some slack. So we realized that the case of Antwerp would get attention in the collection only if we were willing to undertake the job ourselves.

Accepting to write the chapter has meant that we were forced to immerse ourselves quickly in the materials and sources we had at our disposal so as to develop a critical narrative that would meet the minimum requirements of academic scholarship. We were primarily interested in all the things we might learn from the exercise.

Q. And did you learn a few things?

A. I certainly hope so! One thing we hypothesized from the start is that the Anglo-American way of understanding gay neighborhoods would be only partially applicable to Antwerp, at best. And that is also what we argued at the more theoretical level. If you want to look for queer forms of geographic clustering in a Flemish city such as Antwerp, you should omit a lot of the social functions you find historically in the gay neighborhoods of New York or San Francisco. The “reverse diaspora” of sexual minorities from the countryside to the city that underpinned these metropolitan neighborhoods in the US never took place to the same extent, or in the same manner, in Flanders or Belgium. 

In addition, a historic city such as Antwerp is relatively small by international standards. Getting around, even on foot or by bicycle, is easy, so that there’s no urgent need to choose particular residential areas if you happen to be queer. For these and several other reasons, the first thing to note about gay neighborhoods in Antwerp is that there was never anything more than some spatially clustered nightlife.

Q. Let’s talk for a moment about that nightlife then. How easy was it to go back in time to undertake your investigation?

A. That was one of the difficulties. It’s not as if you can simply fall back on standard published histories of queer life in Belgium or Flanders, let alone histories that deal specifically with Antwerp. The larger context isn’t so hard to sketch, but the specifics are a bit of a problem. When you research the history of public sex in Antwerp – by which in this case I mean the institutional environment for nondomestic sexual interactions among citizens – it isn’t hard to figure out how the first red-light district emerged during the city’s historic heyday in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. As this red-light district catered primarily to sailors, it was understandably located close to the river, in the narrow streets just north of the City Hall that came to be known as the Schipperskwartier or Skippers Quarter.

This much is standard knowledge. But how did same-sex interactions ever figure into that lusting, lawless, lowlife milieu? What might possibly be the historic sources in which you might find reliable evidence for same-sex intercourse taking place in this environment? There isn’t much you can go by. You must hope that somewhere a slight flicker will flare up to evoke a fleeting image of what might have been going on. Let me illustrate this by showing the invisibility of our topic at its most palpable. Here’s the picture of a street in the former Skippers Quarter. Do you recognize it?

Q. Not immediately.

A. Don’t blame yourself. Though I personally love to roam through all the little streets of Antwerp’s historic center, I must confess I had never bothered to walk through this one before my research took me there. It’s called the Gorter Street and it’s a very short, narrow, one-way street that is about as bland and uninteresting as you can imagine. Do you see the red-brick house in the middle of the image? That wasn’t always there, of course. If we can trust the history of house numbers, it stands where previously the Crystal Palace was to be found, a gay bar whose building collapsed, literally, sometime in the 1960s. But before the Crystal Palace was a gay bar, it was a luxury brothel, as far back as the turn of the twentieth century and even earlier. And that’s where we were able to locate our first piece of not entirely reliable evidence for same-sex goings-on – not entirely reliable because it requires a detour via the fictive world of novels and a willingness to fill in the blanks. What do you remember about the Flemish writer Georges Eekhoud?

Q. Not much.

A. He was our own Oscar Wilde, if you like – the first famous gay writer in Flanders who, like Wilde, had to defend himself in court. Unfortunately, he wrote in French, which means we’ve forgotten him even more efficiently than if he’d written in Dutch. Anyway, he published a novel in 1888, La nouvelle Carthage, in which he appears to evoke this particular brothel in great detail as a cave full of mirrors in which “all stages of debauchery” took place. Given his own sexual orientation, it’s very easy to imagine that these must have included same-sex interactions, but in his description Eekhoud preferred to remain coy about the sexual acts, so that it’s really for our own 21st-century imaginations to flesh out the specifics.

Q. So for what period did you find the first evidence of same-sex activities in the Skippers Quarter that didn’t take the form of literary fiction but of nonfictional testimony?

A. We had to jump to the first half of the twentieth century for that. Mainly, what we then find is people testifying to drag performances taking place in the Skippers Quarter. Our favorite example is that of Danny’s Bar, a notorious bar for sailors where both the owner and his male staff were dressed as women and the sailors were being tempted into maximum binging.

On an online forum for retired sailors, we found some very juicy recollections of the kind of ritual that typically went on in this bar – how young sailors were being lured in as a sort of prank by older sailors, how these youngsters tended to be awestruck by the Hollywood-star prettiness of the women, and how they would be made to drink so much (and sometimes be drugged as well) until they woke up in bed upstairs only to find they had been sleeping with a man. It’s fair to speculate that some of the visiting sailors must have known they were going to be able to sleep with a man at Danny’s Bar and must have returned to the place to experiment with sexual desires and gender identities that fell outside the mainstream norms of their day and age.

Q. Are there any signs left of Danny’s Bar?

A. Not unless you have x-ray vision. The street is now almost entirely residential, though there is a modern-day “brasserie” in the house where the bar used to be. If walls could talk!

Q. These recollections of Danny’s Bar take us automatically into the second half of the twentieth century, I guess?

A. Yes they do. On the eve of the Second World War, we know that the Skippers Quarter had acquired a gay connotation to those in the know. Yet it didn’t stick to that area. After the war, its gay nightlife started to spread beyond the city’s traditional red-light district. A few of these new bars were still nearby, in the area around the Cathedral and the City Hall, but the majority sprang up close to the Central Station. This is also when we’re beginning to see some diversification. The Shakespeare, for instance, was a bar in the historic center. On the one hand, it was still occasionally visited by sailors and sex workers. On the other, and more importantly, it had a female bartender and gradually came to attract a female crowd – a niche for which there hadn’t been a market yet in the Skippers Quarter. 

Meanwhile, in the working-class streets leading toward the Central Station, a number of bars were opening that were all operated by men and served a male clientele – places like Fortunia, Week-End (later known as La Vie en Rose), and La Ronde. These were generally small operations. One of the streets, the Van Schoonhovenstraat, would go on to sport more than twenty such gay bars. In this picture I recently took, you get a sense of what this may have been like when you look at the structure of the street front, for instance the houses in the middle painted in blue and mauve (one of them surviving as a sex shop):

But the Van Schoonhovenstraat wasn’t the only street. Even if nearly all of the area’s gay bars have in turn disappeared, you might still recognize this iconic place, the one with the greatest staying power and cult status: 

Q. Ah yes, Café Strange! It’s in the Dambruggestraat, right?

A. Yes, and it still allows you to step into a time machine and take a trip down memory lane. We used it as our prime architectural case study, because its history shows you a lot about such gay bars in the second half of the twentieth century. A few facts and details hopefully help bring this history to life.

Café Strange was started by a gay couple as a gay-friendly “brasserie” back in 1955. The name, “Strange,” was meant to be suggestive without being explicit. In those years, the curtains behind the windows were still systematically drawn so that no passerby could look inside. You couldn’t just step inside either, but had to knock or ring a bell and wait for someone to let you in. To expedite this process, a small porch was constructed so that you could first step into the anonymous porch, close the door behind you and then open the door to the actual café – all with an eye to being as discrete as possible. 

Over the years, the bar became so successful that its interior had to be reorganized and expanded so that it could accommodate not only a buffet at the back but also make some space for a dance floor. The café had a good reputation for many years until one of the owners died in the mid-seventies and his remaining partner got into various kinds of trouble that ended dramatically with his getting killed. It was then that a new gay couple, Armand and Roger, took over – you probably know Armand as the remaining owner. This was in 1980, in the era of early emancipation, and so they decided to be less discrete by painting the building’s façade in a sort of pink and adding a drawing of a sexy sailor on the outside. Inside, pictures of semi-naked and naked men were hung on the walls. The buffet was moved to the front of the room and a professional DJ was hired to turn the place into a small part-time disco. For a while, the owners even produced their own little magazine to inform gay patrons about leisure opportunities – remember that this was before the internet made looking up such information a piece of cake. 

The first decades under the new owners went well: the place had the reputation of being at the same time modern, unpretentious, and laid back. There were a lot of flamboyant theme parties in which patrons could win grand prizes such as a flight to Athens or a weekend in Amsterdam or Paris. What’s interesting to observe also about the history of Café Strange is the shift in demographic over the years: while in the 1980s you could find a mix of gays, lesbians, and bisexuals from a wide range of ages and social classes in the bar, this narrowed down in the 1990s to mostly gay men, and then by the new millennium morphed again into a mix of gay and gay-friendly visitors. Indeed, by the nineties, these smaller gay bars in especially the area close to the station were increasingly being pushed out of business by a new type of venue, such as The Hessenhuis. 

A building with a totally different allure, of course. It’s originally from 1564 and part of the city’s historical patrimony. After undergoing renovation in 1975, it reopened as a temporary exhibition space, and then in 1993 a gay-friendly bar opened that doubled at night as a club for mainly gay youngsters. Soon, the Hessenhuis became one of their two favorite commercial nightlife venues, together with the Red & Blue. This new generation of larger, trendier, more spectacular, and essentially self-contained clubs gradually drove the small gay bars out of the market, and thus also put an end to the sense of a particular neighborhood or area in which many such bars were clustered.

Today, much of the city’s history of gay and lesbian nighttime entertainment has evaporated and become materially invisible in the streetscape. There was a time, during the second half of the twentieth century, that Antwerp contained literally dozens of gay and lesbian bars, but almost none of these survive now. Unfortunately, I’m not aware that anyone is actively trying to honor this material history by installing commemorative plaques or making exhibitions about it. It survives mostly in the memory of an aging cohort of participants, hence my insistence at the outset about the relative difficulty of bringing my topic to life to a younger generation raised on a constant stream of immersive images. But perhaps now that Alexander, Rob, and I have made our first archeological efforts and undertaken a basic form of mental mapping, a curious young historian will come along to flesh out our very schematic findings and dig up all the beautiful, funny, and naughty traces of queer nightlife that may still be hiding in public and private archives. Wouldn’t that be wonderful?

[thecardsimagine]

Vampire!AU where the plague turned people into Vampires

Not sure if anyone did that before but I am currently in AU-Fever and here is my take on an Arcana Vampire!AU! It’s a long-ass post so most of it is under the cut, but there’s also a frequent mentioning of blood which you should avoid if you are sensitive to it!

Feel free to use it for your own writing/art but please link back to this post or @ me if you do because I’d love to see what you guys come up with from it and for the original idea!

Julian

Got turned half-way while researching a cure for the plague, meaning he can die from normal things like breaking his neck or drowning

He’s an insomniac because of it, neither being able to go through a whole night or day sleeping and always up instead, trying to find a way to reverse it. When he doesn’t research new ways, he keeps being a doctor and helping people, especially those who are attacked by vampires and/or a turning into one. It also solves the problem of hunting for food - because he gets his share of blood here and there - and he leaves the safe zone quite a few times, mostly alone but eventually in company of the apprentice as he teaches them the ways of the vampires on their request

The only vampire who will not get hurt by the sun, and yet, wears a full set of clothes, just because he thinks it fits his image. Wears an eyepatch so people wouldn’t recognize what he is, because he can’t turn off the red eyes like other vampires who are not hunting for blood

Doesn’t want anyone to know what he is, not even his own sister or Mazelinka and suffering under the walls he puts up because he never gets to work up the feelings he suppresses. Lives with the resistance, because no one noticed him not being human yet and eventually confides in the apprentice

Still very dramatic and sometimes wishes he was a full vampire so he could dramatically fall down stairs without risking breaking his neck

Asra

Only one to get away before people started to turn into vampires because he left before the plague hit Vesuvia. He comes back and hides within the not-contaminated part of the town, trying to survive alongside the members of the resistance

Is guilty of actually taking in the apprentice, even though they are a vampire and could hurt him and other people. However, he goes as far as to let them drink his blood which somehow makes them less aggressive and satisfies their hunger if they do it regularly

He’d still do everything for them

Provides herbs and support for the townsfolk, while helping to rebuild the city and defend it from vampire attacks at night. Uses his magic to fight off very vicious beasts and together with Muriel sets up magical charms and border so it’s harder for them to attack the sleeping people in Vesuvia

Knows something is up with Julian, though still tries to figure it out and keep the apprentice safe from him for one reason or another

Nadia

Countess and Leader of the rebellion against her husband. Excellent sword fighter and also helps out energetically with forging and importing - from other countries - silver weapons for the defense. Uses her talent for tinkering to build massive traps and support items

Has slept for a long time after the plague occurred due to unknown reasons, only to come back to vampires and beasts roaming the cities of Vesuvia and instantly knows she has to do something. Made it her new cause to get rid of the remnants of the plague

Works close with Asra and Muriel to keep the city save and is even more suspicious of Julian as Asra is, having caught him slipping out of the borders of the safe zone a few times. She is unaware of him being a vampire but suspects him to have something to do with the plague and wants to find out what is up with him and if he maybe is in connection with her husband

Has constant nightmares because of the stress and pressure on her, as she wants to do everything right and save the people, blaming herself for what happened to Vesuvia. Puts her trust in the apprentice to help them,  is however ready to put them down when it’s necessary, but sees them as a strong ally in these desperate times

Lucio

Count and Vampire patriarch. Not only responsible for the plague to have washed over the country, but also for countless hungry and desperate vampires rooming the once so lively streets of Vesuvia

Still has all their respect since he’s the only one with a magical arm which gives him even more power than the average vampire and since no one knows the metal, they are afraid he could slaughter them with one touch

Red eyes 24/7 cause he’s a thirsty man all the time and loves to watch gruesome scenes and blood baths. Probably never needs to drink one drop of blood anymore after having ingested masses of it already, he just does it because he likes to do it

Is still willing to take back everyone that is in the resistance and make them a vampire like himself, so they can be a whole country again. Lately got infatuated with the apprentice because they are a strong vampire himself and he wants them on his side more than anything

Knows about Julian and thus forces him to do certain errands for Lucio - from bringing cake to luring a human or two ever so often -, or he’ll make sure everyone knows what is up with him soon

Muriel

The only to be killing vampires ever since the plague started. Still refuses to live with the resistance, staying in his hut and only comes out to help Asra and Nadia with defending the town

Only living evidence that bites could kill a human but not turn them into a vampire, as he has many, many bites after so incredibly many fights with vampires. He’s outside of the safe zone, so he is most likely to be attacked

Asra never told him what’s with the apprentice but he knows and absolutely despises them for staying with Asra. His main concern is Asra’s safety and he makes it known that they do not belong under the living anymore

Eventually becoming a second blood source in the event that Asra can’t feed the apprentice and pleads with him to help out. On some point, he accepts the possibility of humans and vampires theoretically living together in harmony if they sustain themselves and tries out new ways with the apprentice and even Julian after they sorted out the whole story about him, like drinking animal blood

Highest kill count and he has emotional scars from all the people he once knew and had to kill due to them attacking him, out of their mind and too far gone to safe

Portia

Came to Vesuvia after the plague happened in search of her brother, only to find it in shambles. Had to take a job at Nadia’s side to gain a little bit of protection

Ventured with the countess as she set up the resistance in defense of the vampires and became her right-hand woman in everything. Picked up sword-fighting more and more over the time though she learned the basics already when traveling before

Absolutely aware of what Julian is and tries to defend him at all costs. She is desperate when word gets out and he is supposed to be put down because of what he is

Trusts the apprentice because Nadia does, but has orders to keep an eye on them and to put them down too if they go wild. Eventually feels bad for them though and relies on them for help concerning her brother

The Apprentice

Did nothing wrong. Got caught by a vampire in the fateful night and left behind with many wounds infected with the plague. Eventually survived because of that and roamed the streets aimlessly searching for blood until Asra came along and pulled them out of their monster-thinking

Could smell what Julian was on their first encounter and so did he. They asked him if it was true and he only mumbled some confusing words before departing again. They learned afterwards that he was a regular at the shop to get medicine and so they started to ask him questions about their species, which Asra couldn’t answer them

Asra and Muriel put up with playing blood bank for them, causing them to realize that vampires could regain human sanity if they drank blood regularly. It’s something they discussed in the small circle of them, though the apprentice eventually confided into Julian too and even went as far as to introduce him to Muriel and talk about how bites do not turn a human into a vampire and how they themselves could have turned in the first place

Julian eventually took them with him on his ventures, where they met Lucio too. However, they refused to bow and follow him, upsetting the count greatly. They’d venture out into the plague-ridden part of the city alone a few times and have encounters with him, which irritated him so much that he called Julian and them out for what they are in front of the humans

After that, they have to hide from the resistance too, Nadia no longer being able to support their stay since she needs to keep up the face and they eventually flee with Muriel, thus parting from Asra, while Julian is supposed to be put down but flees into the vampire area instead

General Info

Due to the plague, the city got separated in two parts where the not-infected people set up a safe zone all around the city center, upper flooded district and temple district, barricading them in. Everything near the docks, Palast, Colosseum and the south end is contaminated with vampires and the animals that got infected with the plague (also meaning the lazaret is not available because it’s not possible to get to the docks, Mazelinka’s house and the Rowdy Raven have been relocated to the safe zone and the original ones are not available unless Julian, Lucio or the Apprentice go there. Please see the original layout of the city for references)

Vampire smell, thus the Apprentice was able to make out Julian. However, while they have to put on any kind of perfume or wash frequently so the smell won’t be noticed, Julian doesn’t face the problem as he is not a full vampire. A vampire can regain their sanity after drinking blood and will even lose their red eyes for a while until they need to feed again, but the smell stays. Vampires are still able to think and talk, but are ridden by instinct and will attack if they smell blood close by without hesitation. They do not feel remorse or will overthink their actions before doing them

The only ways to kill Vampires are: 1.) Killing them with an object containing silver (swords, bullets, knives, etc. - Being touched by silver will cause burns on vampire skin, but they need to be put down properly to actually die) 2.) Being killed by another vampire as they have more strength than a human and can rip through the tougher skin of vampires (Unlikely though, Vampires will not get alerted or attack their own species while roaming the streets aimlessly as there is no blood in other vampires that they’d desire) 3.) Killed by an animal either infected or not infected (a bear could probably still rip them to shreds) 4.) Magic

Muriel falls under category 3 and is the only known human to be able to kill vampires

Lucio’s metal claw does not have any silver in it (in this AU), otherwise, he couldn’t bear to have it so close. He just makes everyone think it has to keep his position above them

Magic still exists and can still be used by the cast as normal, with the Apprentice being the strongest magician still and they can still learn under Asra like in canon

Vampire bites do not kill or turn humans into vampires. Only their inhuman strength while they hold their victims down causes fatalities. To turn a human into a vampire, they have to get infected by the plague beetles by ingesting them or them crawling into open wounds on a still living person. Dead people cannot be resurrected, even by the beetles. The only other distributor are the vampire eels that gained this ability after the plague reached them too

To survive, the vampires in the resistance have to eat normal food, which will eventually cause stomach aches and lower the time they have until they have to drink blood again. They do not gain positive or negative effects out of it, a.k.a. Julian can’t get drunk from Salty Bitters anymore and the apprentice would not feel more awake from drinking caffeine.

The people of Vesuvia have a hard time leaving as the gates to other countries have been shut down from said countries to stop the spreading of the plague and the only other way is leaving through the forest which is also ridden with vampires and infected animals. There is an underlying frustration and anger thought they do their best to live their life normally and keep the community safe.

[mst3kproject]

802: The Leech Woman - Part I

I tend to get all social-justice-y on this blog, so it will probably come as a surprise to you that I kinda like this movie.  I won’t pretend for a moment that The Leech Woman is not stupid and offensive, but something about it absolutely fascinates me.

Dr. Paul Talbot, an endocrinologist, is searching for a cure for Old.  This is at least partly because it will make him ludicrously rich, but also because his wife June has turned forty and he’s no longer attracted to her.  An old woman, Malla, tells the Talbots that her people, the Nando, know the secret of renewed youth.  They therefore follow her to Fake Africa where they learn that the Cure for Old has two ingredients: the pollen of a rare orchid, and a human pineal gland, scooped from a still-living brain.  Is June willing to commit murder in order to be young and beautiful again?  You bet your sweet booty she is!

I was kind of surprised when my word processor didn’t underline ‘Nando’.  I googled it, and apparently Nando’s is a South African restaurant famous for their ‘Peri-Peri Chicken.’  You learn something every day.

This movie is gross on so many levels.  It hates everybody.  Its ‘Africans’ are primitive mystics in loincloths and skull headdresses, its women are domineering and predatory, its men abusers, criminals, and dull-ass ciphers. I hardly know where to start.  In fact, the badness of The Leech Woman is so complex and pervasive that I think we’ve got another multi-part series here.  In this review, I’m going to talk about the characters.  Next week, I’ll go on to other stuff.

The Leech Woman is, of course, not the first movie I’ve watched in which there is no hero… but I’m not just talking about this being another film in which the so-called ‘hero’ doesn’t do anything.  This is more like The Amazing Transparent Man in that there is literally nobody in the film who can be described as ‘good’.  It’s not a movie about good overcoming evil, it’s a movie about evil destroying itself.  That’s probably part of the reason why I find it so interesting, as it’s an unusual way to approach a narrative, and The Leech Woman shows an astonishing amount of commitment to it.  We’ve seen a number of movies on MST3K where the good guys really aren’t important but there’s still somebody, usually a dull cop or reporter, who theoretically fills that role.  The Leech Woman doesn’t even have one of those.

Let’s take a look at our cast, shall we?  We’ve basically got six important characters: Paul and June Talbot, David the jungle guide, Malla, Neil the lawyer, and Neil’s fiancée Sally.  I think I’ll start with the men.  They’re all terrible.

The first character who speaks is Paul, and the first thing he says is to insult his wife, sneering at her about her drinking.  The conversation that follows tells us not only that they hate each other, but that Paul seems to have married June primarily so he could experiment on her, and is pissed that she doesn’t want to let him.  Then while June is hurt, drunk, and vulnerable, he goes from insulting her to fawning over her, softening her up so that he can return to emotionally abusing her later.  When, on the trip to Africa, she accuses him of ignoring her, he tells her she’s imagining it.  He’s also deeply unprofessional at work, insulting and scoffing at Malla when she’s there in response to his request for research subjects.

Of course, Paul is a villain in this story.  We’re glad to see him go, and the nice irony of him not living to see June rejuvenated is one of the few things The Leech Woman does right.  His detestable traits are so cartoonishly overblown, though, that it’s really hard to take him seriously as a character.  Paul comes across more than anything else as a plot device, a necessary stepping stone for June to come into contact with the Nando and their youth pollen.  Once he’s served that purpose he’s no longer needed.  Nobody misses him, and June never shows the slightest trace of regret, immediately attaching herself to David instead.

David starts off seeming like a slightly better person than Paul, since he treats June like a human being and attempts to offer her some actual comfort after she fights with her husband.  Then he goes steadily downhill.  He steals the youth pollen and the ring at a moment when he should be worrying about them getting out of there alive, and then when June ages again, he not only refuses to give them to her, he runs away.  I guess he’s supposed to do this because he realizes he’s the only person around she could tap for pineal juice, but at this point we have no evidence that she’s willing to do that.  She didn’t even watch while the Nando killed Paul.  Instead, it looks for all the world like David runs because he’s physically repulsed by her, or because he’s afraid she’s going to infect him with Old.

Finally, there’s Neil.  I think we’re supposed to like Neil… I think we’re supposed to see him as a nice guy destroyed by a scheming woman, but the truth is that Neil destroys himself.  The moment he sees young June, in her disguise as ‘Terri’, come up to him, he throws all decency out the window and practically follows her around drooling for the rest of the movie.  When his fiancée points out, understandably, that this is unacceptable behaviour, he treats her exactly as Paul had treated June, telling her that she’s imagining things. All these things stack up against us liking Neil, and he displays no redeeming qualities to offset then… in fact, other than being easily led by his dick, he has no qualities at all.  He’s a cardboard cutout with ‘handsome guy’ written on it.

Of course, none of these men are a point-of-view character in the story. The Leech Woman is a story about women, so how about them?  Well, unsurprisingly they’re terrible too.  Malla uses the Talbots to get her back to Africa and then tries to have them killed, and clearly has no problem with the whole ‘a man must die to make her young’ thing.  The Nando as a culture are used to this idea, but Malla didn’t grow up with that – she was raised in the west, where people would definitely not be okay with it.  If the men were shown to be willing sacrifices this might not be quite so bad (although it still wouldn’t be okay), but no, the guy we see is struggling as he’s held down and drugged.

As for Sally, the movie evidently wants us to think she’s a nagging harpy.  It doesn’t quite succeed, because of the way Neil drools after ‘Terri’. Sally has every right to be worried, impatient, and annoyed, especially when he brushes off her concerns the way he does.  Instead, what’s terrible about Sally is the way she offhandedly threatens Neil (“you better not try anything like that if you want to stay in one piece”) and seems to view him as a possession rather than a partner.  When he admits he prefers ‘Terri’, Sally’s plan is to send this woman away until she and Neil can marry, as if signing his name to the paperwork means he can never escape from her again.  He belongs to her now.  She has a receipt.

I assume that Neil and Sally met through Paul, but until the point where they turn up at the airport, we never see them together and have no indication they know each other exists. The impression I get is that the Bride of Neil was originally going to be a different character, but they couldn't afford another actress.

Then there’s June.  The Leech Woman is obviously her story – she’s in almost every scene, and is the one with a bit of a character arc.  It’s possible that we see Paul as unsubtly evil and Sally as a paranoid bitch because that’s how June sees them.  If anybody’s the protagonist, it’s her, but she is never, ever likable even in a villainous sort of way. We root for her to destroy Paul because we hate him too, but everything she does is awful and like the other characters, she doesn’t have any good characteristics to offset it.

When we first meet her, she’s a self-pitying drunk. She is so badly-treated by Paul that by the time it looks like she’s going to have him killed and run off with David, we’re all for it.  Then her downhill spiral begins as she murders David for his pineal.  This is supposed to be a surprise and a demonstration that June is irredeemable, and it works as far as it goes, but it leaves us with no interest in her affair with Neil.  We don’t root for them to get together because it’s obviously impossible, and we cannot believe that this is some great tragic love when they’ve only just met. It’s just a couple of selfish idiots being selfish idiots.

After the way Paul has treated June, we understand why she enjoys seeing men doing her bidding.  She’s always been ignored and disregarded, so she derives great joy from being able to make people pay attention.  She uses beauty to wrap Neil around her little finger, and wealth to do the same to the would-be robber.  She knows she’s ruining Neil’s life by seducing him as ‘Terri’, and she seems positively gleeful about that.  The problem is that she’s not really trying to accomplish anything through this manipulation.  She has no long-term plan, it’s just all-out hedonism, and when she finds herself cornered, she commits suicide.  June never learns anything from any of this, and nobody else learns anything from her. At the end, she’s just pointlessly destroyed a number of lives, including her own, and it’s hard to say what the audience is supposed to take from that.

And man, that’s just the dramatis personae!  I have way more to complain about in The Leech Woman, so stay tuned.  Next week I’ll be back in SJW mode with a vengeance.  See you then!

[tes-trash-blog]

Mycosis, Or A Slightly More Scientific Take On How The Falmer Came To Be

(Alt title: I’m Never Eating Mushrooms Again)

Yep. This is happening.

Preface: This essay/rant/overanalysis is focusing only on the theoretical physical and biological aspects Falmer devolution. Expect a shorter rant on the spiritual aspect on a later date, thanks to oyarsas.

Part 1. Just Who Were The Falmer Anyway? A Brief Primer

According to the one surviving Snow Elf in Skyrim, the ancient Falmer were a wealthy and advanced race of Elves that occupied a portion of Skyrim during the Merethic Era. A few shenanigans, some unspeakable war crimes, and a genocide later, the remnants of this race fled underground into the waiting arms of the Dwemer. They laid it down in simple terms:

“Many of your people had perished under the roaring, snow-throated kings of Mora, and your wills were broken, and we heard you, and sent our machines against your enemies, to thereby take you under. Only by the grace of the Dwemer did your culture survive, and only by the fifteen-and-one tones did your new lives begin.”

(Fun fact: If you translate the Stone using Ayleid words, it’s actually a lot more sinister!)

This wasn’t out of the goodness of their hearts, as the Dwarves were, in objective terms, dicks. While they didn’t want tearful songs of gratitude or boot-licking, they weren’t about to let a bunch of homeless and traumatized Elves, y’know, recover. No, they wanted something.

“We only request you partake of the symbol of our bond, the fruit of the stones around us. And as your vision clouds, as the darkness sets in, fear not.”

That something was their sight, and their obedience. Given what very little we know about Snow Elven culture, this looked to have been a bit of a big deal. After all, all the Prelates at Auri-El’s wayshrines implement light and sight in their blessings, much of the surviving iconography depicts the sun and its radiance, and what few surviving accounts remain mention the “dread of night” and “blessed sun”.

This wasn’t a decision made lightly, is what I’m getting at. The fact they agreed at all surely meant the Dwarves could do what they wished. Seeing some of the more elaborate torture chambers and traps, we can safely assume they did.

The Blinding happened in the Late Merethic Era, some hundreds of years before the Dragon War and the beginning of the First Era. Now comes the fun part.

And by fun part, I mean gross part.

Part 2. Can’t We Just Wrap This Up And Blame The Dwarves?

It wouldn’t be an overanalysis if I did, now would it?

There are theories abound as to how the Dwarves corrupted them, or they were part of a failed experiment (Underkiing, Lord_Hoot). This essay is going to ignore these theories, and focus on the more biological aspects of the Falmer transformation. Starting with a quote from the last surviving Snow Elf:

“The blinding of my race was supposedly accomplished with a toxin. Certainly not enough to devolve them into the sad and twisted beings they've become.”

This is further supported with the poem The Betrayed:

“Thrown into the pitch black dread of night.

Living in fear as their minds become lost.

As their eyes began dimming the light.”

This lost book also points to the slow creeping of insanity among the Snow Elves, no doubt from the unspeakable horrors seen above ground and the fancy word that made me write this whole damn essay in the first place: Mycotoxin!

Mycotoxins are a broad name for the various types of poisons produced by the Fungi kingdom, specifically those that affect animals, humans, and in this case, Elves. From NCBI’s extensive article on Mycotoxins:

“The majority of mycotoxicoses, on the other hand, result from eating contaminated foods. Skin contact with mold-infested substrates and inhalation of spore-borne toxins are also important sources of exposure. Except for supportive therapy (e.g., diet, hydration), there are almost no treatments for mycotoxin exposure”

“[...] Acute toxicity generally has a rapid onset and an obvious toxic response, while chronic toxicity is characterized by low-dose exposure over a long time period, resulting in cancers and other generally irreversible effects.”

That sounds… bad.

So, there are few if any treatments for mycotoxin exposure, and the Dwarves were not ones to use magic, so the only feasible treatment for the mass-poisoning would have been a good diet and hydration, but something tells me the Dwarves were not keen on giving their slaves either of those. From the Diary of Faire Agarwen, we can reasonably deduce that conditions were cramped, dark, and damp even among those who had political clout:

“Seventh Marking, Tenth Kulniir

[...] Often the surroundings make it impossible to dwell on any happiness. We have been locked together in such close quarters for so long.”

Keep in mind here that a kulniir was a notched basin that functioned as a simple time keeper, using drops of water. The diary also mentions there’s no real natural light, so we see the combination of dark, damp, and cramped. This was from a woman who held some social capital. We can assume that conditions for your average Joe and Sally were much worse.

Even among the best of conditions, the Snow Elves were kept in were prime real estate for molds and fungi to thrive. There is (thankfully) no evidence to support my next claim, but it’s also not exactly a stretch of the imagination.

The Falmer: A Study makes clear that the blinding was a multi-generational effort. Within perhaps two or three generations, the Snow Elves were eternally blind. Adding to the permanent blindness, there very well could have been the more unpleasant, unwanted, and unplanned changes.

I’m talking about mutagens.

To pull a real life example, Fumonisin B1 can cause neural tube defects in utero, which means that the toxin affects the development of the brain and spinal cord, as well as the central nervous system. In extreme, chronic cases of fumonisin poisoning, it can keep the brain from forming into a viable state, causing stillbirths. In a universe where dragons fly around and singing plants can make poisons, it’s not too much of a stretch to say that there is something equally terrifying growing in Blackreach. Already blinded, chronically ill, and hopeless, the next generation of Snow Elves were doomed to an ever lower standard of living without even the knowledge that things could be better. Combine that with whatever mold infected whatever flora that grew underground, similar to how say, fumonisin blights grains and how black mold is generally Really Bad For You.. Well, we can assume that there was a more subtle force that guided them to their ferality than whatever the Dwarves did to them.

In the same way the lead pipes of Rome contributed to developmental problems among their populace, I can imagine the toxic spores creating more violent, more feral Falmer, until finally their very sentience was taken from them. Seeing as all of this culminated into a war that spanned decades, something tells me the Dwarves didn’t see that coming.

Part 3: So… CAN They Be Cured?

The short answer is no. From the words of the Knight Paladin himself:

“I'm afraid that they're well beyond a cure at this point. The twisted forms you've seen didn't occur overnight. It isn't a plague or a disease that ravaged our species. The dwarves may have stolen their sight, but it took many generations for them to become what they are today.”

And as found earlier, there are no effective cures for mycotoxin exposure, and I imagine even less for chronic, multi-generational poisonings like what happened to the Snow Elves of old. I’m assuming, but I really don’t want to ever see that tested in the field.

But not all is lost. Gelebor also notes that the modern Falmer have started to re-develop their intellect. This grabbed me, as the Forgotten Vale is vastly different than the caves and ruins you normally find Falmer in. There’s fresh air and cool breezes, and open spaces for those sad little gremlins to lurk about. In short, they’re away from the poisonous influences of those dark caves and toxic spores.

It’s entirely possible that the Falmer of the Vale are developing, and it’s in part because they’re no longer confined to the dark and damp that was their prison. It’s entirely possible that with enough time, and enough patience, the Falmer could slowly undo the effects of their chronic poisoning. Not enough to become the Snow Elves of legend, those days are long since past, but perhaps enough to break their chains, and finally put a voice to thousands of years of suffering.

Sources, inspirations, and tangentially related articles:

Mycotoxins, from the National Center for Biotechnology Information. A recommended primer on the nature of mycotoxins and their effects on more complex organisms.

Toxic effects of mycotoxins in humans, from the World Health Organization, another excellent starting point if you like reading about poisonous fungi.

Repeating Mistakes of the Past: Another Mycoherbicide Research Bill, a condemnation of using mycotoxins in of all things, drug control. This article also calls the use of mycotoxins against humans for what it is: Biowarfare. An interesting, insightful, and very depressing read.

A review of the toxic effects and mechanisms of action of fumonisin B1, from the journal Human and Experimental Toxicology. Behind a paywall, but the abstract sums it all up quite nicely.

A Wikipedia article on the Mexican Tetra, because I think they’re cute.

UESP, without which I would be even more of a babbling trash gremlin.

[siodymph]

“The Gift to Keep on Giving”

Hey there @the-ill-doctor ! I’m sorry this is getting to you so late but at long last here’s your gift! I had a lot of fun working on your prompt. It was so sweet, it got me right into the holiday spirit lol I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I did writing it! And Happy New Year!

Feel free to read your story under the cut or over on my AO3!

There were a few subjects Stanford didn’t think about when moving to Backupsmore. Or at least things he tried not to think about. The holidays was one of those subjects.

While everyone was packing up their dorms for the semester Stanford honestly didn’t know what he was going to do. He hadn’t gone home during Hanukah. The most he’d done was send the Pine’s family a few cards and some presents to give to Shermie. He knew he wasn’t in hot water with his parents, at least not as much as Stanley, but since he hadn’t made it into his dream school things still felt weird between him and his father. If he were to go back to New Jersey for his holiday break he’d be happy to see his mom and Shermie, but he’d be stuck under the same roof as his dad again.

And if he was honest with himself, Stanford didn’t even want to go home for Christmas. Having it just be him, his parents, the baby, all stuck in a quiet house...

He tried to rationalize his decision with extra evidence. He could better optimize his work if he didn’t waste the time and money going back to New Jersey. He could use the break to study for next semester. Perhaps get a head start with the research program he got into. Maybe even begin writing a paper on theoretical physics for the Backupsmore Science Journal.

But he knew the bigger reason why he didn’t want to go back home. Even if he never said it out loud.

He told himself he was fine, therefor he was fine. He’d spend the winter break at school. Doing work. Doing important work. And he’d be fine.

So when Fiddleford McGucket practically demanded he pack a suitcase and come to Tennessee with him it practically ripped apart his original plans.

“No way I’m letting you stay out here in California by your lonesome!” He’d called out as he shoved the last of his coats and shoes into a duffel bag. “You’re my friend!”

“But I don’t even know your family!” Stanford groaned from his bed. Watching Fiddleford race around their dorm like a headless chicken. “Hell, I’ve only known you for four months! Isn’t that weird?”

Fiddleford actually had the gall to laugh and looked over his shoulder. “Stanford Pines! A friend’s a friend, no matter how long you’ve known’em! Besides, if you knew my folks you’d know they love having guests. They’ll take any excuse they can get to throw a party.”

“And you don’t think they’ll find me… Odd?”

Pausing, Fiddleford turned back from his bags to give Stanford a sincere look. “Trust me, you’ll hardly be out of place. I’m sure they’ll love ya!”

“You really think so?” Stanford asked.

“I know so!” Fiddleford declared.

“I don’t even celebrate Christmas, I’m Jewish.”

“Still no excuse to leave you all alone here. Especially since break goes through all of December and New Year’s.” Fiddleford called back. But he stopped for a moment, talking a little slower. And sighing “Ok wait, hold on. If you don’t wanna go, I shouldn’t be forcing ya like this…”

���What? You seemed so keen on me going with you just moments ago.”

“I know, and I want you to. I mean, I don’t want you feeling left out is all. But if you wanna come or not, it’s entirely your choice.” Fiddleford replied.

As he went back to packing Stanford found himself faced with a difficult choice. Continue with his original plan of staying at Backupsmore? Or go with Fidds?

It was true that he’d only known the other man for four month now. But he was also one of the only friends he’d made at school besides one girl and guy in his history class, and his roommate… Kinda. But of everyone he’d come to know it felt like only Fiddleford ever had the patience to actually talk with him. To talk about the things they liked, and with so much in common between them they hardly ever sat in awkward silence.

And despite not knowing one another long Stanford found that he really enjoyed Fiddleford’s company. Together they felt like this unstoppable duo, that they could do anything if they only set their minds to it. And no matter what they’d always have one another to support their endeavors and have each other’s backs.

Stanford hadn’t had a person like that in his life since he and Stanley were kids…

But would it be worth it to leave school, abandon all the plans he’d made, just to spend more time with Fidds?

Fiddleford actually jumped with a tiny squeak when a duffle bag was suddenly dropped next to his.

“Alright buddy, count me in!”

Fiddleford’s eyes lit up. “You mean it?”

Stanford shrugged “Eh, might as well do some traveling. I’ve never been to Tennessee after all!”

Before he could back up, Fiddleford tackled him in a hug. “Aw, thanks for doing this! You’re gonna love it! And just wait until you meet my family!”

“I hope so…” Stanford said with a sigh. He wasn’t completely sure he made the right choice but at least now Fiddleford was happier once again.

“Let me just call my Ma so she knows I’m not dead and I’ll start packing!”

A few days later Stanford found himself on a cross-country bus alongside his best friend. The ride might have been dull had he been traveling alone. But with Fiddleford there trip was much more enjoyable. It didn’t feel any shorter, but at least there was banjo music, talks of science, stories and plenty of good books to keep both of them busy.

And as soon as they left the station after two days of near non-stop traveling, the McGucket family clan was there to greet them with open arms.

After that the next few days became a blur. The McGuckets treated every Christmas like a family reunion so the old farmhouse was packed to the gills. It was a little claustrophobic at times but in some strange sort of way Stanford found himself almost enjoying the chaos of it all.

True to his word, Fiddleford’s family seemed genuinely interested in him. In such a crowded house people seldom even noticed his hands. And even when he did most of the McGucket’s seemed more interested in his hands than disgusted or disturbed. Though sometimes he did find himself uncomfortable around Fiddleford’s grandmother when she started commenting that perhaps he had been marked by a devil. But Fiddleford could shoo her off easily enough.

When Christmas Eve finally came Stanford honestly didn’t know what to expect. In his house they’d barely cared about the christian holiday. The most interest Stanford and his brothers had in it had been all the presents and the candy and the comfort food. But he’d always seen it on television and advertisings. From what he’d gathered as a kid the rest of America seemed to care about Christmas a lot.

And sure enough Christmas Eve proved to be the big red and white party he’d always seen in movies. Funny enough though Stanford expected Fiddleford’s family to be even wilder than the ones he saw on TV, seeing how excited they’d been already. But come Christmas Eve Stanford swore the McGucket clan actually seemed slightly more subdued than they had every day leading up to it.

They did insist on doing a lot of baking though. All day it seemed like there were people working in the kitchen. Roasts, pies, casseroles, cakes, salads, unique recipes Stanford didn’t even know how to categories! And it seemed like everyone was contributing to a massive dinner platter over-flowing with cookies by the end of the night. All for Santa supposedly. It seemed rather excessive but let the family continue doing it, not wanting to spoil all their fun.

Fun… that was probably the biggest feeling he’d gotten from the McGucket’s Christmas Eve. Everything seemed to be so much fun to them. And when he saw the joy that seemed to radiate off Fiddleford he couldn’t help but agree and smile back.

And later as he got ready to go to bed he couldn’t help but think about it still.

“I know that look.” Fiddleford said with a smirk. “Wha’cha thinking about, pal?”

“Not much, buddy.” Stanford answered back, keeping his voice low. With such close quarters not only was Stanford rooming with Fiddleford, but also three of his other cousins as well and they were already fast asleep.

“I guess it’s just… you and your family are a lot different from my own.”

“You think so?”

“My family is nothing like this, I’ve only seen some of my relatives once or twice. And never all at once like this. They just tolerated each other. But you, you and your family, you all seem so close.”

“I think that’s all thanks to my Dad and all his siblings.” Fiddleford said, looking over to a few of his cousins. “They always believed that family owed it to one another stick together through thick and thin. And if it weren’t for them sticking like that, I doubt I’d see these guys nearly as often. If ever.”

“What family owes?”

Fiddleford shrugged. “You know. Looking out for one another? Caring about everyone? My Granny was sure to hammer that int’a everyone’s skulls.”

“It’s a bit ironic,” Stanford realized. Trying to ignore the bubbling guilt in his gut the more he thought about his family and his brother. “Despite being people with such similar interests our home lives couldn’t be any different. I… don’t really like being around my family that much. I didn’t even go home for Hanukah this year just because I didn’t want to see them so soon.”

“Well next year put it on the calendar! Whether we go to New Jersey or not I wanna celebrate Hanukah with you!” Fiddleford declared. Quickly putting his hand over his mouth when one of his cousins grumbled in their sleep.

“You would?” Stanford whispered in disbelief.

“Of course!” Fiddleford declared, trying hard to keep his voice still a whisper. “It’s been so nice havin’ you here. It’s the least I can do after dragging your butt out of sunny California here in the dead of winter! And I’d love to celebrate more things with you. It could become like a little tradition if you wanted.”

“I think I’d like that very much.” Stanford agreed. “And you know there’s more than just Hanukah… I could show you all our other holidays if you like.”

“I’d like that very much.” Fiddleford said warmly. Then he stood up out of his bed and went to put back on his shoes.

“You aren’t going to bed yet?” Stanford asked, stifling a yawn. Usually when they’d slept over in one another’s dorm Fiddleford had always been the first to fall asleep.

“Oh, I was just gonna go help my Pa out in the stables. Apparently the horses are givin’ him trouble settling down.” Fiddleford rushed to say.

Stanford could hardly hear any commotion outside, not to mention hadn’t seen Fiddleford talk to his father once, but he didn’t think much of it. Yawning he snuggled deeper into his blankets. “Alright then, goodnight whenever you do go to sleep.”

“Night buddy.” Fiddleford said before padding quietly out of the room. “And merry Christmas.”

Wondering what would happen the next day, and already dreaming of what it’d be like the celebrate Hanukah with Fidds, Stanford let himself drift off…

If Christmas Eve had felt like an ordeal at the McGucket household, Christmas day completely blew him away.

When he got up the next day it was like he’d stumbled into a completely different house. There was even more decorations placed along the walls and in every nook and cranny of the house. There were so many gifts placed under the tree they took up an entire half of the living room floor. And somehow during the four hours he’d actually slept someone had managed to eat the entire platter of cookies left out by the chimney. And when Stanford tried to ask who did it, he got the same answer the adults gave the kids.

“It was Santa silly! He sure loves his cookies!” Fiddleford declared.

“But I mean who really ate them all?” Stanford tried again. Keeping his voice low just in case any of the children there heard.

Fiddleford looked at him blankly. “… Santa!”

“Ok fine keep your secrets!” Stanford said. “I just wanted to know who could eat all those cookies. And I doubt they just threw them all out, that’d be a waste!”

“You really have no idea how Santa did it?”

“No and this is going to drive me crazy for the rest of the day. You’d have to be in diabetic shock after eating so many cookies at once!”

“Fine! I’ll let you in on a secret.” Looking around to make sure there weren’t any kids, Fiddleford pulled him aside back to his room and pulled out a cookie from his coat pocket. Letting it fall into Stanford’s hands. He couldn’t believe it.

“Wait, you did-”

“It’s a team effort.” Fiddleford replied in a hushed whisper. “Most the grown-up’s stay up to go decorate the house and along the way we clean off the plate.”

Stanford immediately blushed. “I uh-”

The longer he stayed quiet the more Fiddleford’s face fell. “Did you- Did you think only one person was allowed to eat those?”

“I… I hadn’t considered it.” Stanford replied in a quiet voice. He really hadn’t thought of that.

He could tell Fiddleford wanted to laugh really badly, but the man just clapped him on the shoulder, struggling not to fall over and cackle. “Stanford Pines! You’re a genius but I swear you got the perception of a- of a… I don’t even know!”

While Fiddleford found the situation hilarious, Stanford wanted to crawl away somewhere and hide. How had he not figured that out? He was on track to finish his bachelor’s in two years and yet he couldn’t figure out that more than one person could eat the cookies. Fiddleford thankfully didn’t mock him for long before taking him by the elbow and dragging him back towards the dining room.

“Don’t worry though, your secret’s safe with me!”

“I hope so.” Stanford grumbled. “A mistake like that could ruin my reputation…”

Fiddleford shook his head, “Aw don’t be so hard on yourself it happens to everyone! You look too close at the details and you’ll forget what the big picture’s supposed to be!”

Even with Fiddleford’s reassurance he still couldn’t help but feel foolish. Hopefully this was something he’d keep in mind once he went back to school…

He was pulled from his thoughts when someone called out “PRESENT TIME!” and they were all dragged down to the living room where the tree and all the gifts were. It was quite a scene to watch. There were children all over the floor and adults began handing out presents one by one. Everyone seemed to just buzz with anticipation as the kids began ripping into their presents.

Stanford got so caught up watching everyone else he almost jumped when a present was dropped into his own lap.

Fiddleford was quick to apologize, laughing nervously. “Oh dear! I wanted to surprise you. Not startle you.”

When Ford looked over the package he wasn’t quite sure what to say at first. “Fiddleford I- Well, thank you, but I couldn’t possibly-”

“Aw, don’t you worry none. I already got plenty of gifts from all my folks.” Fiddleford said quickly. “I know you don’t celebrate… but I wanted you to feel included.”

“But I wasn’t able to get anything for you. Not to mention the rest of your family.”

“Hey, that ain’t what the holidays are about.” Fiddleford replied. “I got you a gift cause I wanted to give you one, not cause I expected you to do anything in return.”

Stanford still looked unsure, but he decided to let it go for now. And instead went about unwrapping the gift. For all of Fiddleford’s talent and skills, wrapping was not one and Stanford found himself navigating a strange puzzle of weird folds and a ridiculous amount of tape. He was pretty sure it was a book of sometime. Probably a textbook. It was certainly heavy enough. And he could feel a hard cover of some kind under his fingers.

When he finally pulled back all the paper and could read the cover. It was all navy blue with golden trim with a strange looking beast on the front that seemed almost unreal.

 “Anomalous Phenomena”

 “I thought you might like it. Since you always seem so interested in genetic anomalies. Plus when you mentioned trying to find the Jersey Devil as a kid...” Fiddleford said quietly.

“Fiddleford…” Stanford breathed. “I… I love it! Where did you even find a book like this?”

“Saw at school when they started discontinuing a bunch of books. It seemed like something right up your alley. Thought it’d be a shame if such’a interesting book like that disappeared off the face of the earth.”

Stanford remembered hearing about the library being clear out, but that was weeks ago. Fiddleford had been holding onto this the whole time? Just waiting for the holidays to come, waiting until now to give this book to him. He really thought that much of Stanford Pines?

Ford felt his cheeks start burning the more he thought about it.

“Thank you Fiddleford. I mean it… Truly. For everything.” Stanford said slowly, running over the book cover with his hand. Letting all six of his fingers brush over the golden trim “I think you may be one of my dearest friends.”

“Aw shucks.” Fiddleford said with a light chuckle. “It’s nothing really.”

“Not to me it isn’t.” Stanford replied. He could still feel himself blushing and hoped no one noticed. “No one’s ever done something like this for me Fidds. You, you probably don’t realize what this means to me. I can’t thank you enough.”

“Well once or twice is good enough for me.” Fiddleford said back with a smirk.

Stanford wanted to say more but one of the McGucket youngsters ran up to them and started pulling Fiddleford away for more presents.

“Sorry Stanford, but duty calls!” He said, pretending he was heavier than he was while his younger cousin dragged him back over to the tree to open more gifts. All around him a few more of his siblings and cousins laughed at his antics before they all settled down back under the tree and Fiddleford began passing out more gifts to the rest of his family.

For those few moments it all seemed so perfect. The whole family there. Together. Happy. And Fiddleford near the center of it all, practically glowing with a beautiful smile, golden brown hair and sharp blue eyes that never missed a thing.

Stanford had always thought Fiddleford was a handsome-looking fella. Sure, he’d never said it to the man’s face but he’d always thought it. But in those few moments as he watched him, practically brimming with Christmas spirit, Stanford thought he was absolutely beautiful.

A soft smile fell onto Stanford’s face as he started trying to formulate the perfect gift to get Fiddleford once they went back to school. Part of him still felt obligated, he had to return the favor. But Ford also found himself holding onto Fiddleford’s words. He wanted to give Fidds a gift because he wanted to give him something nice. But what could he possibly give the other man? A man who was quickly becoming one of the most important people in his life currently.

A book? Perhaps something about robots? He was certainly an admirable engineer…

Stanford also made sure to get a couple extra jars of Mrs. McGucket’s fruit preserves and save them for whenever he noticed Fiddleford getting homesick once they were back in school.

[ouijaban]

ulquihime week day 5

@ulquihimeweek

day 5: partnership

As she sat in the cushy waiting room of police chief Aizen Sousuke, Inoue Orihime could feel the jitters in her stomach congealing into one monstrous butterfly. She’d been waiting for the opportunity to confront him for months – years, if she was counting the period of time when she didn’t know what he’d done – but now that the moment had arrived that she would finally be taking action, it was getting hard to convince herself that she would live to see another day.

Of course, it was only to be expected that she would be intimidated – no one would feel totally confident striding into the most well-loved public figure in Tokyo’s office and accusing him of murder in front of all his employees, who evidently came with their own set of yakuza connections. One step into Kabukichou and she’d probably get sniped even if Aizen didn’t blow her brains out beforehand, which was unfortunate given that she worked in Shinjuku and commuted to her job by train every single day from her modest apartment in Ikebukuro, a trip that was just barely shy of going right into the neighborhood.

Still, even as her palms were sweating and she was fidgeting on the sofa, she knew that she had to do this. For Sora-nii. She owed him that, at the very least.

“Inoue-san?” a pleasant voice called from a nearby desk, making the hairs on Orihime’s neck stand on end. This was it. “Aizen-sama will see you now. You may proceed to his office.”

Orihime’s lip curled over in a disgust that surprised even her as she scooped up her purse and wiped her moist palms off on her skirt, walking through the row of neatly arranged desks to reach the imposing room at the end of the procession. Of course the worst man in Tokyo would force his employees to call him Aizen-sama. It was just like everything Orihime had researched had told her – he really was a raging narcissist on top of being a kingpin.

After what felt like years of walking, she stopped in front of the large door, eyeing the small metal sign resting on top of the doorknob. Aizen Sousuke, chief of police, it read in embossed print.

“Okay, Orihime,” she whispered to herself, pulling down her work skirt and straightening her posture. “This is it.” Grimacing, she raised her hand, and knocked twice, the sound loud in the quiet station.

A few seconds later, the door unlocked with a satisfying click, swinging open to reveal the man Orihime hated more than anyone else in the whole world. Aizen Sousuke looked like he did in all the interviews and TV specials that aired on Saturday nights. His brown hair was perfectly coiffed and his skin was pleasantly tanned, despite it being a rather chilly September. He wore nothing more expensive than the outfit of an average salaryman, but it was completely unwrinkled, ironed out to perfection like the rest of him. To top it all off, a pair of glasses rested on the bridge of his nose, making him seem like ever the unassuming, honest worker. Not like someone who would murder the last close family member of a highschool girl, but appearances could obviously be deceiving.

“Welcome to my humble abode,” said Aizen, gesturing behind him for her to come in. “Here, here, take a seat. Would you like some tea? Hinamori-san would gladly pour you some.”

“No, thank you,” said Orihime, sitting down on the chair nearest to the door just in case she needed to pull off a daring escape. The room was more ornate than she’d anticipated, decorated with several portraits and a really expensive looking rug, though it made sense given his personality. Simple on the outside and decked out on the inside was exactly Aizen’s style.

“Fair enough,” he said, winking in a way that was clearly supposed to be charming in Orihime’s direction. He ambled over to his desk, plopping down in his large seat before turning back to her. “I was quite surprised when you contacted me, Inoue-chan. After all that nasty business with your brother a few years ago, I would’ve thought you would be reluctant to speak with me. You were for good reason extremely upset at the time, but I can’t express how happy I am that we’ve reconciled. Oh,” he said with delight, “and you’re still wearing your brother’s hairpins! How lovely to pay such a nice tribute to him. He would be very proud, I’m sure.”

Orihime suppressed the urge to shudder. There was something so slimy about Aizen despite his unassuming facade – the informal way he addressed her, perhaps, or the calculation behind his words. She just knew he was analyzing her for weaknesses behind his pleasant mask, like a fox sizing up a helpless rabbit. “Yes,” she said finally, managing a weak smile. “I was… wrong, to accuse you. I know that now. But,” here it was, the moment of truth, “the driver of the car – Detective Luisenbaum, I think his name was – died in a car crash too, the same year as Sora-nii. That’s pretty strange, isn’t it, Aizen-san?”

Aizen laughed, and joked, “I suppose that is out of the ordinary. Perhaps we should have a mandatory driving test before we hire people onto the force, eh?”

Orihime’s nails dug a little further into her palm. Though she wasn’t much prone to violence, she wanted to slap the living daylights out of him. What a sick, disgusting man – even if he weren’t selling the Tokyo police out to the yakuza, his callousness in the face of the deaths of his employees was extremely disturbing. “Maybe,” she said, struggling to maintain a level tone. “But the force should also probably invest in better venues, too. I’m not really sure why Sora-nii had to go all the way to Yokohama to pay my father’s bail. He was being held at the Shinjuku Police Station, right? Did they relocate him?”

Aizen’s rakish smile dropped off his face. “Oh, Inoue-chan,” he sighed, massaging his temples seemingly in frustration. “I thought you knew better than that. I don’t mean to rehash this discussion, but exactly what are you implying here?”

Orihime gulped in fear, but jutted her chin out defiantly nonetheless, lacing her fingers together and leaning forwards to say, “Aizen-san, I’m certain that I wasn’t wrong to accuse you of killing my brother ten years ago. And if what I know is right, then you’ve murdered a lot of other people to get where you are today. I might’ve been a child back then, but I had more integrity when I was only twelve years old than you do now. I’m ashamed that someone like you has so much power in our justice system.”

The police chief dipped his head at her, then shrugged. “Alright, Inoue-chan, I’ll play your little game. Let’s say for the sake of this hypothetical situation that I did kill your brother and countless other people. Let’s even say I enjoyed doing it. What would you do to stop me? Would you expose my crimes to a reporter and shock the Japanese people? Don’t think I haven’t noticed the recording device in your pocket. It’s a shame you’re so green; if I really were a criminal of the sort that you allege I am, you could’ve really done a number on me with that one.”

Orihime’s fingers were trembling as they closed around the tape recorder in her blazer pocket, fingering the off switch. It would do her no good now – there was no doubt in her mind that Aizen was about to make her disappear.

He chuckled at her, and shook his head. “Let’s not get to deep into theoreticals, though.” He checked his inexpensive watch and faked a shocked gasp at the time, tutting softly to himself. “Well, I believe our little rendezvous has extended past the allotted time. Let’s wrap this up quickly then. It would be a terrible shame if your brother’s widow and little Mayu-chan found out about his gambling problem, hmm? And since apparently we’re the type to throw around baseless accusations, a horrible rumor about Sora’s indiscretions with women of the night could reach their innocent ears, too. Even worse, Mayu-chan could lose her highschool scholarship! Now that really would be horrible. I heard they were tight on money these days.”

Hot tears welled in Orihime’s eyes, and she averted her gaze to the ugly carpet, blinking furiously to avoid crying in front of Aizen. She couldn’t believe how unrelentingly sociopathic he was. He hadn’t changed at all since he knocked on her door that one fateful day ten years ago and delivered to her the news that would change her life forever.

“But none of those things have to happen if you try to make up for insulting me so badly, Inoue-chan,” said Aizen consolingly. “You interest me. You’re an office secretary at S. corp, that new pharmaceutical company that’s been gaining so much stock recently. As a police chief, it’s my duty to watch over my constituents, and I don’t know how much I trust the CEO to keep the needs of the people in mind. Urahara… Kensuke, was it? Right?” he tilted his head in contemplation before snapping his fingers in a moment of realization. “Oh, no, of course not. Urahara Kisuke, that’s what it is. Well, either way, I’m going to need you to gather me information on him. I’ll give you small tasks, don’t worry, and you’ll be receiving specific instructions from me at various dates. Think of it as a public service!”

Despite herself, tears dripped down Orihime’s cheeks, leaving wet splotches on the blurred ground beneath her feet. Aizen had to have realized that serving as his dog was the most humiliating thing he could subject her to. She would prefer even death to actively encouraging his interests.

“Oh, cheer up,” crooned Aizen. “Here, I’ll even assign you a helper! He’ll have to look after you at home to make sure you don’t run, of course, but I promise he’s a personable man.” He rose to his feet, and pulled open the door, peering out into the office beyond. “Ulquiorra!” he called out, cupping his hands around his mouth. “I’ve got an assignment for you!”

Orihime wiped off her face and tried to reign in her trembling lower lip as she heard a new set of footsteps approaching in an attempt to calm herself down, but even she realized that it came off as hollow. Anyone who looked at her would immediately realize that she’d been crying, especially someone perceptive enough to be a member of Aizen’s staff.

“Which of my services do you require, Aizen-sama?” said a deep voice just beyond the office door. There was something very unnerving about his voice, something unnatural. Though she hadn’t been expecting anyone with the emotional spectrum of Chizuru to be at Aizen’s beck and call, Orihime couldn’t detect even a single ounce of feeling in anything the person she assumed was Ulquiorra had said.

“Probably all of them and then some,” replied Aizen. “Come in, come in – we have a guest!”

He pushed open the door and sauntered back to where Orihime sat, followed by an extremely pale man with the strangest facial features she’d ever encountered. His eyes were a shade of green that by all means should have been vibrant, but were instead afflicted with a peculiar hollowness, the exact same kind that she had sensed in his voice earlier. His lips were thin and pressed together, so dark they were nearly black, and his black hair fell in a quasi-mullet around his thin shoulders.

“Inoue-chan,” said Aizen, pointing a finger at the stranger, “this is one of my top employees, Detective Schiffer Ulquiorra. And Ulquiorra, this is our new business associate, Inoue Orihime. You’ll be working very closely together from now on.”

“Pleased to make your acquaintance,” said Ulquiorra, bowing slightly before extending a hand in Orihime’s direction. “I hope that we will act well together as partners.”

“Partners,” murmured Orihime, bowing her head and touching her hand to Ulquiorra’s. “Right.”

[darkmindsthinktwistedthoughts]

A Different Time pt2

note: I have found a new form of torture that is highly effective and results in my long suffering proofreader shouting various profanities at me whilst trying to get their head around a story I have written about a certain ninja.

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Warning:Scientific Nerdy Ninja

Masterlist

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Chapter 2 - Lacking Data

I guess I should have calculated the possibility that this had maybe happened before and factored that in somehow to my current situation. After successfully proving my theory of a wormhole achieving the ability to manifest itself, along with proving my theory of its possible application for use for time travel. I had evidently neglected to consider a few basic scenarios. The main one being the smiling woman in front of me. What if I am not the first to fall through the space time continuum?

She rose from her position on the log and walked over to the shack returning with a cast iron pan and she poured water into it from a bamboo canteen. “Tea? I have a feeling we might need some refreshment.”

“Thank you. Can I help with anything?” It may have been a slightly stupid question but I have failed to abandon my manners instilled in me by my parents.

“No …  it’s fine! You’re technically a guest so don’t worry.” She smiled as she placed the pan into the fire to boil and retrieved a couple of bamboo cups. I’m impressed she has enough equipment in her pack to cater for guests.

“Yes, I guess I am a time traveller” She shrugged as she poked at the newly lit fire with a stick. “Although it wasn’t planned that way!”

“Wait so how? When? I’m sorry I must apologize I seem to be experiencing heightened levels of adrenaline causing my speech to become erratic.” I was aware that I sounded less than coherent. If I was honest, my pulse rate had increased so much after this new discovery that I was struggling to regain control of it.

“Ha … it’s ok. I felt exactly the same back at the compound. I never thought I would meet anyone from my time here.” She cautiously looked at me. “I suppose you are from my time?”

“Your time?” Seriously Sasuke now is not the time to repeat back to her like a parrot. “Erm, that is to say what time... when did you get here?” This is starting to sound like the plot for an old sci fi movie. I had finally regained some control over my pulse even if my mind was still running faster than the Hadron Collider with bombarding thoughts.

“Mmm... where to start? I’ll just go from the top and if it fails to answer anything else you want to ask then…” Her fingers were tapping on the side of her cup as she thought about what to say.

“I’ll ask after.” My intention to encourage her caused me to interrupt. Luckily, she didn’t appear to mind.

“Precisely. Ok, well for a start I was on holiday, about eight years ago, and thought visiting Kyoto was a great idea. I always loved Japan and well I’ve never been much of a history buff or anything but I still like it. Kyoto just seemed like somewhere with lots of history all in one place, so I got a ticket and arranged my week around seeing old temples and buildings. I was on my way back from museum and thought I’d look in at a temple on the way to the hotel.” Her voice was a little distant as she recalled her past. The smile on her face did falter a little but it didn’t appear to be due to her feeling sad. Nostalgia. It was a weird idea to think of the modern day in a past tense but that was the reality of the situation we were both in and I could certainly empathise with her on that.

“The Honnoji Temple?” My need to answer the questions running rampant in my head was making it more than a bit difficult to keep quiet. She nodded in agreement.

“That’s the one. It was such a nice night and I was enjoying the walk then out of nowhere it started raining so hard I was soaked to the skin in minutes. I ran into the temple to look for some shelter and …” she paused in thought.

“And?” I hadn’t noticed it myself, but I had drawn my body forward from my seating position and was leaning towards her. Her eyes really are a deep caramel chocolate colour. The personal realisation that I have not only moved closer to her but I have also made such an observation that was not in the least bit professional caused me to shift a little uncomfortably back into place on the log.

“Well that’s just it, I can’t remember past that point. I mean there was a loud crack, I think it might have been lightening. I closed my eyes and when I opened them, I was laying on the ground near a road.” If she noticed how I felt, she was gracious enough to not mention it.

This was incredible! Not only was the location exactly the same as the day I predicted it to be for myself, but it seemed that it was a recurring site of manifestation. I wish I had my notebook on me to make notes on this, but I think I left it at the room I’m staying in. I patted my clothing absentmindedly searching for my non-existent writing materials. The woman watched me and suddenly smiled.

“Looking for something?” She had a sparkle in her eyes that reminded me of the look Lord Shingen would have when handed a plate of sweet buns.

“Sorry it’s habit.” I pushed my glasses back onto the bridge of my nose and took a sip of tea.

“Not the only habit I see.” The mischievous smile on her face did something to me I really couldn’t understand.

I paused in my own musings over the space time continuum and lack of appropriate materials to document newly discovered information. Long dark hair, deep brown eyes, pale skin. Her clothing wasn’t in fact tight so much as it was bound. Over the top of her dark blue kimono was lengths of fabric wrapping the layers closer to her limbs. Practical even if highly unusual. Her headscarf gathered around her neck from where she had unpinned it. As if feeling my inquisitive gaze, she shifted her position and looked directly at me.

“I would say take a picture it will last longer but the technology hasn’t arrived here yet.”

I choked a little on my tea at her comment. It had been a while since anyone around me had used a modern-day reference, never mind making a whimsical joke with one and it caught me off guard. Yes Sasuke, you cannot inhale tea. She smiled at my reaction but didn’t pursue it. Instead she opted to move on with the conversation.

“So? How did you get here then?”

“I had been studying unusual weather patterns and created a theoretical formula that I made from my collected data with the intention of predicting the occurrence of an active wormhole. Although technically there is nothing that suggest that a wormhole can…”

- Ha ha ha -

Her laughter cut through the clearing and went straight into my chest like a kunai. It wasn’t really a bad feeling and that surprised me nearly as much as the whole other time traveller thing. I really wish I had my notebook, maybe if I gathered more data I could work out what is happening.

“Oh, sorry … sorry. It’s just when you are talking you get so animated and ...” she paused as she wiped the corner of her eyes with the back of her hand. “I’ve never been brilliant with science and stuff.”

“I look animated?” I know my eyes widened at that. I could even feel my mouth go slightly agape.

“Yes? Has no one ever told you that before?” she inclined her head and her hair tumbled over her shoulder with the movement.

“Quite the opposite really, I’m usually getting told that I lack expression.” I was still a little flummoxed with her honest observation. Do I really become animated talking about my scientific research?

“What would they prefer you do? An interpretive dance in the middle of a mission? Oh, hang on a minute are you hungry?”

As if on cue my stomach rumbled. When did I last eat anything? Yesterday morning then, I was walking around town trying to figure out if there was a different side to the compound that I could get in at… ah. Ok no I completely forgot to eat anything past lunch yesterday. And now my stomach has reminded me and outed me all at the same time in front of the woman. Bug detected: embarrassment exe. Loading.

She pulled out a saddle bag from the shack and then reached in and pulled out two wrapped bundles bringing them both over.

“Got anything you don’t like to eat?” She enquired.

“No, not really I must admit I eat mostly plain food.” That was in fact completely honest. I don’t like lying and avoid it as much as safely possible even in my line of employment.

It’s difficult to cook anything fancy when on the road and I usually just eat in the teahouses wherever I happen to be for work. Yukimura did at one point say he was surprised at my lack of culinary skill as all I ever seemed to make was rice porridge but it had never bothered me even in the modern day.

“Good because I can only guarantee these will fill you up. I only had limited ingredients so flavour may be lacking.” There was a light flush to the pale skin on her face and I couldn’t help but find that very charming.

“Thank you for the meal.” I bowed my head lightly as I accepted the food bundle. Inside was some onigiri and what appeared to be inarizushi. I picked up a piece of the stuffed tofu and enjoyed the different taste of the fried food mixing with the rice. “This is good.”

“Well then you are easy to please.” She seemed to relax after my honest review and let out a little sigh and started eating hers. “After you finish eating you might want to slip back into town before it gets too busy.”

“You’re right.” I had lost track of the time since sunrise as I was engrossed in my search for information on the wormhole.

“You never did tell me why you were trying to get into the Daimyo’s manor.” There was no sign of her trying to pressure and pump me for information. Her tone was natural and in keeping with light meal conversation.

“My employer wanted some information on him.” I couldn’t really say anymore. Careless talk cost lives and I didn’t wish to be on the list of names of people that had forgotten that.

“I see.” She nodded as if she could read my thoughts knowing I wasn’t going to divulge anything further. “Well if that is all it is, then I might just let you enter tonight.”

“Really?” My eyes shot up to meet hers.

“Yes, I mean you’re not going to interfere with my plan so…” She shrugged.

“Your plan?”

So, did she have an employer? Was she some sort of mercenary? What was she doing? A list of possibilities mixed with a train of thoughts all seemingly unconnected like the stars in the sky and yet there had to be a pattern. There was always a pattern, somewhere.

“Ha, you really do love asking questions.” From the look on her face I knew she was not going to say anymore.

“Sorry, hazard of the job and also having a naturally high scientific curiosity.” I tried to laugh it off. Which I suppose might have worked for someone less expressively challenged.

“It’s of no matter. Eat up and I guess I’ll see you tonight.”

---

Her words were still rolling around in my head as I made my way back to town. What had she been talking about ‘her plan’? And why on earth was her wording of ‘I guess I’ll see you tonight’ making me feel light headed like I may be sick.

There was clearly nothing wrong with the food. I can only theorize that lacking in nourishment for so long whilst also engaging in strenuous activities had depleted my body’s ability to maintain a normal functionality.

When I got to the first building on the edge of town I could hear the people moving around starting their daily routines. The air was filled with happily chattering voices as the traders set up and sold their wares and there were the aromas of freshly prepared food wafting through it all tempting passers-by.

I was moving along the towns small but abundant main road when I caught the glimpse of a familiar red kimono and short brown hair.

“Yukimura!?”

---

[stillness-in-green]

i realized mika's the only one of the tekkadan boys to have a specific thing he wants to do outside of fighting- farming- which is kinda ironic considering he's been called aimless. so do you have any ideas of what the other boys could/would like to do as a profession/career outside of fighting (not counting what they actually ended up doing in the epilogue)? doesn't have to be for everybody, just for whoever you can think of. thank you :)

I got this ask ages ago and have been periodically rolling it around in and around other things, but I put it in front of myself again today and finally typed out a response. Below the cut, some thoughts on what these boys would be doing if they had, not only all survived the series, but done so in a way that left them free to pursue whatever ambitions or talents they might desire or discover.  

Most of them.  

Lets start with the inner circle and work our way out.  

I think Biscuit (whose survival is probably the reason everyone else is alive in this hypothetical AU of ours, because he would have an aneurysm before he let Orga join hands with McGillis Fareed) could be good at practically anything he puts his mind to, and therefore, what I think he should probably do is go to school.  He obviously values education–he spent lord knows how much time endangering life and limb to earn the money to put Cookie and Cracker through school, and clearly admires how far Savarin’s schooling took him in life.  As to what he might study, there are a number of ways that could go–agricultural sciences to help his Granny Sakura with the farm, business to pick up where Savarin left off, possibly a social science so he can find a job in all the inevitable restructuring that Mars’ new government will be doing.  

Eugene, more than anyone else, strikes me as wanting to find someone to settle down with. Unlike Shino, who talks about women solely in the context of his sex drive, Eugene is interested in romance. And while he doesn’t seem to have had much luck with that in IBO’s canon epilogue, in a more peaceful time, it’s easy to imagine him devoting more energy to dating.  Without Tekkadan eating up his attention, whatever career he finds a way into–possibly bodyguard work still, or maybe an office job like Zack’s–would, I think, be just a way to help support a family.   

Akihiro, unlike most all of the boys, already has a girl who’s interested in him, and if he survived this show for this AU, I see no reason to not imagine the Turbines did also. Lafter plainly was never going to leave the Turbines to be with him, of course, but if there was no Tekkadan to protect…  I don’t think Naze would be very keen to break his girls-only rule, but every chick must leave the nest eventually–perhaps Lafter and Akihiro might be entrusted with protecting/leading another branch of the business?  Given the size of the organization*, there must be other battleships doing the transport business/transport protection thing.  Or they could just accompany whichever shipment Naze directed them towards.

   That is, though, probably kind of a longshot. Tekkadan Inc. or no, Akihiro has strong feelings about protecting his family, and where I think that’s most likely to leave him is actually in Dante’s place in the epilogue, helping run the orphanage and taking care of children.  While I don’t know that gentleness and empathy will ever come easily to him, he would be able to relate with the stories of the many ex-Debris children that orphanage is implied to be seeing post-outlawing-of-legal-child-trafficking, and it would be a way to both honor and grapple with the memory of Masahiro.

Derma would probably end up in about the same place he does in the show–assuming Akihiro doesn’t get adopted by the Turbines, I think Derma would follow him to the orphanage.  He had been more directly under Dante’s wing in the series, of course, but for a lot of reasons, I don’t think that the same things that would appeal to Dante in civilian life would hold much interest for Derma.  He doesn’t have Dante’s knack with computers; he doesn’t share Dante’s itch for fame.  But he does have a load of self-confidence issues that make him exactly as likely to relate to orphan ex-Debris kids as Akihiro’s losses make him.  (It’s also the case that Derma is the Tekkadan kid who’s the least explored outside of being a child soldier, so I’m inclined to err on the side of what the show points him to rather than make things up wildly, which is essentially what I’d be doing otherwise.)

Returning to the main group, Shino is easy; in a scenario in which he isn’t a paid civilian soldier, that guy has got “stunt show pilot” written all over him.  I doubt Mars’ entertainment industry is so well developed that they need or can afford to hire mobile suit pilots for TV/film work, but I bet the planet can support something more like the Post-Disaster equivalent of monster truck derbies.  They’d probably involve old/restored mobile workers, rather than the expensive military hardware that is a proper mobile suit, but I certainly don’t put it past Shino to showboat around in a decommissioned Flauros from time to time.

Dante, always grouped with Shino in combat, would probably follow him here.  In a peaceful epilogue, Dante easily could have an entirely lucrative (and possibly illicit) career with his computer skills, but I think he’d finding sitting at a computer all day to be unfathomably boring the more like an actual desk job it became.  Compared to the measure of fame Shino would be making for himself, it’s obvious which Dante would go for.  Also, with two people with mobile suits, they could possibly get some kind of MS boxing circuit going.  I think that would be a very longterm project, more suitable for when things calm back down and there are all these mobile suits around collecting dust.  

Yamagi is a mechanic–he’s one of the few characters with job experience other than “soldier,” and there’s no reason to expect him to change streams from the canon to this AU.  However, I think Yukinojo and Merribit would have encouraged him to go work with Shino’s pit crew/show team before too long, if he ever held a job down at Kassapa Factory to begin with.  He and Shino are, almost certainly, dating on the side.  Just, like, fill in Shino and Yamagi for the Special Feeling umbrella meme.

Ride is another gimme.  He has an obvious artistic streak, the evidence of which is painted all over the Isaribi, the Tekkadan complex, and the orphanage building.  If he didn’t need to fight (and while he was pretty gung-ho about it originally, I have to think the trauma from Hashmal and the agriculture plant is going to be long-lived), it’s very simple to imagine Ride getting nudged into pursuing art in a more professional way.  Especially if Kudelia’s new government is subsidizing such things.

Chad is another one that I’d like to see in school.  There are several instances in the series that impy he’s doing serious amounts of research/study on the side–he’s constantly shown asking pertinent questions or showcasing some skillset or bit of knowledge that he has no business having access to based simply on what we’re explicitly told about him.  Given that, it’d be interesting for the others to convince him to set aside the helper ant mentality and go learn something he thinks is interesting.  While Biscuit has family needs to guide his academic choices, Chad could really get into anything.  I would slot him into a field that involves research but also quantifiable knowledge–history, for example, or psychology, rather than e.g. theoretical physics.  I kind of love the idea of Chad getting access to a bunch of banned books via Kudelia or their Teiwaz connections. 

Takaki seems on-track to wind up in politics, if not as a politician himself, then as the sort of lobbyist or aide that any notionally democratic government runs on. Given that he bailed out of fighting by choice, this seems to be his chosen path in any case.  He’s also likely to make a hell of a diplomat when he gets older and picks up more confidence in himself.

Aston is so rooted in his self-image of “soldier” that it’s difficult to imagine what he might want to do outside of that field.  We do know a few things about him that could give us a direction, though: he’s observant (noticing more about Fuka’s schoolwork than her own brother), he’s relatively prudent and cautious (his teamwork with Vito, and his reluctance to wildly charge McGillis), and he’s a mediator (between his quartet back with the Brewers, and again between Takaki and the other Earth Branch boys).  So what kind of career could combine those traits with his gravitation towards military settings?  Personally, I think he’d do really well as a crisis negotiator–a specialist brought in by police to help with hostage situations and other threats of e.g. domestic violence, terrorism, suicide, and so on.  Of course, the trick there is less getting certified for that job than it is finding a group to work alongside–while I can see him joining an Arbrau/Edmonton police force, it’s much harder to imagine him being able to get a job with Gjallarhorn.  In any case, assuming he can manage to find an avenue for said work, he’d be great at it. 

This brings us to our Season 2 newbies.  

Hush I would mostly see following Mikazuki into farming.  Not just to be following Mika, mind, but because Hush’s motivation, beyond a big ol’ chip on his shoulder about the Alaya Vijnana system, is much the same as so many others–to protect and provide for his social circle.  If he’s provided an avenue for that that isn’t constant endangerment of life and limb, I think it’s what he’d go for. And farming is helping to provide for a great many people, some very directly–the fact that he can still be around to help Mikazuki is just a bonus.  

Zack joined Tekkadan because of their fame, rather than out of real necessity–so what exactly did he think was so cool about Tekkadan to begin with?  Given his reticence about actual combat when he comes face to face with it, perhaps it’s more the “spitting in Gjallarhorn’s eye” aspect than the feats of badassity?  Given that, what could he do that would scratch that itch? Well, he’s a hell of a programmer, and has Dante available to teach him anything about hacking he doesn’t already know. I think he’d be very happy being one of those whistle-blower internet Ariadne activist types, finding secret information, info on cover-ups, or details on corruption, and providing proof of such things to the world at large, particularly given how government-controlled the media is in the setting.  

Dane is already living a life free of fighting, so it’s possible that, absent Tekkadan being a bunch of criminals, he might end up working at Kassapa Factory anyway, or perhaps going with Yamagi to Shino and Dante’s venture.  He’s another big mystery as to things he might enjoy outside of work; for example, he evinces little patience with Hush until Hush starts showing some basic empathy/humility, which leads me to think that close work with people would probably not be his thing.  So sticking to work with his hands, I wonder if he, like Ride, would get any mileage out of art?  He could snap paintbrushes like twigs, of course, but I can see him being good at something like pottery, and if his pre-show history is as violent as we’re lead to believe, I can see it being relaxing–probably as a hobby, rather than a career, just something he can do on his own time and terms.  

So, that’s every–mm? A significant exclusion?  A deuteragonist undiscussed? 

Oh, right.  

So, Orga. What would Orga do in peacetime? Well, that’s difficult to even try to conceive.  Orga, like McGillis, is massively defined by both his ambition and his dissatisfaction with the status quo.  He’s never satisfied, never content; he interprets Mikazuki’s intense gaze as a challenge, and it never stops pushing him forward, no matter who else tries to tell him he’s going too fast.  What could Orga ever do in peacetime?  It’s tempting to say that every one of the hypothetical outcomes above was paid for in Orga’s blood, because less than a handful of these people would ever desert Orga if he lived, and while he lived and had people looking to him, he would never stop.  In that way, Tekkadan is in a feedback loop that they can’t get out of without a system-redefining change.  Looking at his skill set, we again find a bunch of things that suggest that Orga works best as a leader–he’s canny, highly charismatic, a quick thinker, and he has killer instincts, albeit with some Mikazuki-sized blind spots.  This is a kid practically fated to be a gang leader–and he’s also oathsworn to the mob, making getting out of that life safely a dicey prospect.

   So what is there for him, if not fighting?  Purely as an imaginary exercise, he’d be a scary effective community leader.  I mean, just imagine being a city representative showing up to a town hall meeting and this is waiting in the front row:

   But that’s still pretty mundane.  Lets try something really different on for size.  

   During the season break, Orga is attending some official function at Saisei, lurking around afterward and waiting for a chance to talk to Naze.  Out of nowhere, he gets jumped by the fashion equivalent of Saisei’s eccentric mechanic, who insists that Orga’s je ne sais quoi levels are off the charts, and he absolutely must grant her at least one modeling session.  Naze, walking in on this conversation, has a huge laugh about it and goads Orga into accepting.  And then the whole of the second season gets derailed because suddenly Orga is faced with the argument that sufficiently famous people are also rich and powerful, rich and powerful enough that he could relocate his entire gang to some private satellite around Jupiter if he were so inclined.  And maybe it feels immaterial, and maybe it wasn’t the method what he expected, but that doesn’t make the paycheck any less real.  The designer tells him in no uncertain terms that if he wants to continue, she will personally talk McMurdo Barriston’s ear off about how he is completely wasting this surly teenager’s God-given personal magnetism.

  Orga immediately has a huge crisis over it, because it feels terrifyingly unmasculine and he has no concept of the term “soft power.” Atra loves it, though, and Biscuit thinks it’s strange but effective.  Things almost fall through anyway when it comes out that Orga has a whisker implant, but the designer is insistent, so they end up just photo-editing it out and limiting his public appearances, which is just as well, because he finds crowds and fans alike to be extremely uncomfortable.  

  Tekkadan still do odd jobs for Teiwaz now and again, like protecting Kudelia from Dawn Horizon, but are mostly out of the line of fire when McGillis starts looking around for allies.   McGillis, deprived of a Tekkadan he can talk around on joining him, is left profoundly annoyed.  How things go from there is a whole new question.

*Allow me to quote from this post: 

In the interest of context for the number I’m about to lay on you, the Dawn Horizon group–a band of pirates who have ten ships and are considered sizeable enough that they fill a niche that’s important to Gjallarhorn, and would also be too much a pain to try to oust entirely, have around 2,500 members.  Wow!  That’s a lot!  

The Turbines have 50,000 members.

Like this post?  Consider throwing a few bucks in my coffee fund via the Ko-fi link on my About page!

[spacebrick3]

Experiment S-80

People have been super curious about Sadie’s backstory, and I’ve been feeling unmotivated for any current WIPs, so…I’ve decided that I’m going to write some of her backstory now!

Tagging some people who might be interested; @lady-redshield-writes, @ratracechronicler, @no-url-ideas-tho, @cogwrites, @ken-kenwrites, @endlesshourglass, and @tawnywrites - this will be a kind-of series thing, so if you want to be tagged in future updates, just let me know!

NEW CHARTER EXPERIMENT S-80

FOR INTERNAL REVIEW ONLY

ORIGINAL GRANT PROPOSAL

SUBMITTED 02.03.2382

Livia Jensky, Nikolai Vukovic, Anna Myrr, Samuel Fostre, Nathi Okeke

Laboratory HYR773, Department of Bioengineering, University of Hrejburg, Hrejburg, Prechemyst, Upper Charter, 06659-132003-3P

——————————————————————————————————

Abstract: We study the possibilities of using wiring which utilizes the optic nerves to connect to the brain in order to create a more natural interface between the integrated circuits of the computer chips and neurological processes. Our research group has modeled the interactions between the data read on crystalline silicon (through the use of gallium-ion beams) and the same data which can be imprinted onto neurons. Our theoretical data can be found in our earlier paper, AKS-899.079.1, but a larger grant fund is required in order to test these processes in a practical matter.

NCSD: 0005-0000.67

——————————————————————————————————

Day 0: 6.10.2382

“Good news everybody! We got the grant!”

A smattering of cheers came from the assembled scientists. Anna applauded with them, feeling a grin stretch across her face. This had been their life’s work, and finally - finally - someone seemed to be taking an interest in it. Their lab had struggled along here for years, barely managing to keep on a quarter of the staff they needed. 

She waved over Jensky, project leader, holding up two of the drinks she had managed to…borrow from the shop down the way. Look - the money hadn’t arrived yet, and what they had right now would barely cover the cost of an actual party. If they spent that, the financial inspectors would see they’d spent their entire budget on one party. Good luck getting another grant if that went down.

Jensky strolled over, glancing around the party. “I wasn’t aware we could afford so many different types of drinks,” she said dryly. “Especially since the shop which sold those said, and I quote, ‘if we ever see any of you lab types in here again we’ll burn your whole bloody place to the ground’. Interesting, is it not?”

“So they don’t see us,” Anna said, offering her a glass. “Come on. Lighten up a little.”

“I am lightened,” she replied with a smile. She raised her glass. “Come on. To funding.”

“To funding,” Anna echoed. Then she spat out the drink. “What the hell is this?” she asked, staring at the reddish liquid in her cup. “What did I just drink? The bottle said it was vintage 2345!”

“Ah,” Jensky said, raising a finger, “if you knew the owners of that shop like I do, then you’d know that back room - the one with the broken door - is actually where they store their batches that don’t quite work out. Using old bottles, of course - why waste time making new ones?”

“Screw you,” she said cheerfully, sinking back into her chair. “When that grant money comes we’ll finally be able to get some real drinks. Hell, we might be able to get a brewery in here if they’ve given us as much as we applied for.”

“Actually…” Jensky glanced away for a second, “we might not be in here much longer. I haven’t had much time to go over the approval form, but it looks like they might be moving us to the government laboratory. It’s the Eyring building, over by the docks.”

“That place? Why would we need something like that?” The Noah Eyring Building, or the NEB to everyone who lived there, was a decommissioned hangar that had been used to build the biggest ships in the fleet. The kind of ships that when you were called somewhere, you had to take a smaller ship just to get there in time. “What do they think we’re going to try to put these implants in? Whales or something?”

“Or something, yes.”

“Well, tell them we’re not. That what we’re going to be working on for the next few years is probably going to consist of zebrafish and mice.” She shook her head. “Government, right?”

“…Right.” Her eyes flicked left, then right.

Anna frowned. “There’s something you’re not telling me about this contract.”

“What? No - there’s nothing-“

“Livia. I have known you for ten years, and you are absolutely the worst liar I have ever met. Why are they giving us NEB, and what’s making you nervous about it?”

She sighed. “Fine. The Charter’s giving us Eyring because they want to be able to keep an eye on us.”

“Keep an-? There’s a war going on and they think that we’re going to be a threat? If we wanted to, we could just have left with all those other-“

“I know,” she cut in. “But talking like that is what actually gets the government after you.” With a grimace, Jensky swirled the brown liquid in her cup and then downed it in a single gulp. “Back room too?”

Anna nodded. “So what is it? Why do we need our very own über-lab just to try to mess with some fish’s brain?”

“That’s the…er, issue. It’s the war, you see. Charter’s looking to…accelerate the schedule, you might say. Get things moving a bit faster and deployed on the field. I don’t think results from fish fit into their view of that.”

“So?” she asked, feeling like she was missing something.

Jensky hesitated, the muscles in her face tightening. “They want us to start experimenting on human subjects.”

“WHAT?” She stood, almost knocking her chair over in the process. “They want us to do WHAT?”

“You heard me. Charter wants human testing to get field deployment. One of the core conditions for the grant.”

“And you ACCEPTED this?” She shook her head, still not quite believing it. “I - you - why?”

“Because I had to. Because our lab was failing and we weren’t going to be able to save it otherwise. Because I wanted us to all be able to stay together and keep doing this work we’re doing.”

“No - no - no, you don’t understand,” she said. “I worked on those models. You remember what we found there, right? What we published?”

“I-“

She ignored Jensky, too angry to care. “Because I know you do. I know you know exactly what that paper says. Exactly who they’re going to get for these ‘human subjects’!”

“Anna, I don’t think you-“

“SHUT UP!” She slammed her fist down on the table. “We said ‘developing brains’! Developing brains! They’re asking you to experiment on children! And you - you - accepted!”

She realized that the room had gone very quiet. Sam and Nick had simply frozen in the middle of their conversation, eyes wide, while Nath glanced back and forth between the two of them, brows lowered. Good. They deserve to know. “Anything you want to tell us, Liv?” Nick drawled after a long pause. “Maybe something we ought to know?”

Jensky slumped back in her seat. “It’s true,” she said with a small shrug. “Make of it what you will, but it’s true.”

“Well then.” Nick strolled over to where the two of them were still staring each other down. “Besides the fact that that’s about eight different kinds of screwed up, as far as I know it’s also that many kinds of illegal. Hell, I’m pretty sure even the damn Geneva Conventions have something to say about-“

“And who, exactly, is going to enforce that?” Sam asked. “The faction currently employing us? Or the one we’re at war with? Come on now. Who?”

“You’re siding with experimenting on children?”

“Hey.” He raised his hands in a not-me gesture. “I’ve worked for this my whole life. And really, what’s the difference? We were always going to be using humans sooner or later - that’s what our model is based on. This is just sooner.”

“There. Is. A. Difference,” Anna growled. “A difference between testing it on people and giving it to people. You know that.”

“Please,” Jensky said. “We’re finally funded. We can finally have a real lab and actual equipment. I did this for you. For all of you. Don’t give it up for-“

“For what? Morals?” Nick did a passable impression of her, although the accent was wrong. “Come on guys, don’t let pesky things like child experimentation bother you. We have money now so it’s okay.”

“Really, Nick? That’s the best you have?”

“If you really need me to debate with you on the ethics of, let me remind you, child experimentation, then I think I’m actually good, thank you very much.”

Jensky sighed. “Then it appears we are at an impasse. Two against accepting, and-“

“Wait,” Anna broke in. “There’s a choice? We can still send it back and say we don’t want their money if-“

“Two against,” she continued, “and two for. Nath, we’re going to need your input.”

He jumped. “Me?”

“Yes,” both Sam and Nick said at the same time. Then they turned to glare at each other.

Nath spoke slowly, choosing his words. “Well,” he said, “as far as I can see, there’s no actual evidence that we’re actually going to be experimenting on children.”

“But our paper-“

“Anna, the government never reads scientific papers. Ever. It’s a war. They’re throwing funding at literally anything they think might help.”

“So you’re siding with them then,” she said bitterly. “I would never have guessed.”

“I’m just going to see how things go. I’ll make my decision once I can get more-“

“You have the information you need, Nath,” Nick said. “Whether it’s children or not, the Charter is still asking us to experiment on people. Will you really stand for that?”

“I’ll stand where I choose,” he replied stiffly. “And right now, that’s here.”

Anna hissed out a breath. “Fine then. Come on, Nick,” she said, turning and walking for the door. She knew she’d probably break down later over this, but she didn’t care. Right now, she wanted nothing more than to get away from these people.

“Wait! Anna!” she heard Jensky say. She ignored her, pushing open the door. Then she just kept walking, down the cold metal hallway and towards the door at the far end of it. “Please!”

Sam shouted something after her, which she dimly assumed was an insult. Nick, catching up with her, turned around and snapped back “See you in Nuremberg!” Then she was outside under the grey and starless night, walking with her head down. Where she was going, she didn’t know. Just…away. Far, far away.

——————————————————————————————————

ORIGINAL GRANT APPROVAL

CONFIRMED 06.11.2382

Livia Jensky, Samuel Fostre, Nathi Okeke

Noah Eyring Building, Cheriel Street North, Hrejburg, Prechemyst, Upper Charter, 06657-132013-3P

[themusicjerk]

Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band - Trout Mask Replica

I was stopped once again on my way to Travis’ house to return his Sex Pistols CD. At this rate, I doubt he’ll ever get it back. He should be thanking me. My friend April saw that I was feeling pretty beaten up, and asked me what the matter was. “A Tribe Called Quest,” I told her. “They’re awful. It’s the same thing over and over again for an entire hour. And don’t get me started on the Sex Pistols.” She was surprised that I was even listening to music - me, the Music Jerk, who only knows three songs and hates all of them, and she said that if I wanted music that wasn’t afraid to try new things and go off the beaten path, I should listen to Trout Mask Replica.

I’m a little more willing to trust April, being of the fairer sex, after all. Perhaps listening to this CD will finally convince me that good music is out there. From my research, it seems that Captain Beefheart, Drumbo, Antennae Jimmy Semens, Zoot Horn Rollo, Rockette Morton, and The Mascara Snake got together because of their undeniable rock star names, and Beefheart locked them all in a mansion until the album was absolutely perfect. “Perfect,” “new,” “good,” I have high hopes for this record. April wouldn’t even tell me what genre it was. So here goes nothing.

...

.........

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What in God’s good name is this garbage?????

So the first track on this album is called “Frownland” which seems to be exactly where I am being transported as I listen to this. Beefheart’s scratchy, off-key pseudoblues singing is a vain attempt to add melody or order to what I can only describe as a cat walking across a synthesizer and a guitar falling down stairs. As soon as “Frownland” ends, Beefheart begins sing “The Dust Blows Forward ‘n the Dust Blows Back,” without any support whatsoever from his Magic Band. Perhaps they all died in the great massacre that was “Frownland.”

I’ve listened to bad music before, but this is insulting. Dom and Travis at least had the good sense to give me CDs that I didn’t immediately recognize as instruments of torture. This is like a conversation with a homeless person that you didn’t know you were starting but that now you can’t escape from.

Off-beat drums and dissonant guitars return as Beefheart attempts to sing “Dachau Blues.” I say ‘attempt’ because the melody and rhythm are all over the place, and I cannot believe that anyone was locked anywhere in an attempt to make this perfect, unless of course they were so malnourished and traumatized by the whole experience that they forgot their original point. Then again, I would think trying to make good music would be akin to spinning gold from straw. The middle of this song has what sounds like the humming of an electromagnet, which I can only imagine is another way in which Beefheart is torturing his band.

Their tortured screams can be heard in “Ella Guru,” in fact even being used as what I can only suppose is supposed to be the chorus of said song. The scary bit is that I’m only seven minutes into this CD and there’s two of them. That’s right, April gave me this torture device and it comes with two discs. It will be a chore and a nightmare to try to even put the second disc in the player, but I will hold out hope that something here pulls back, says “haha gotcha,” and actually lays off my eardrums.

The squealing of elephants and deflated balloons that is “Hair Pie: Bake 1″ is not that, though. “Hair Pie: Bake 1″ is about the exact opposite of everything that a theoretical good music should be. Imagine you’re at the pier, and you hear the foghorn of a ship, but there is a booger caught in the horn and so the foghorn is whistling in and out of its tone. That’s “Hair Pie.” Halfway through, guitar and drums come in as if to try and convince me that this “song” has rhythm, but neither the guitar nor the drums are playing in time with each other. The best thing I can say about this “song” is that at least Beefheart isn’t trying to sing anymore.

Then, there’s about a minute of some guy rambling about an octafish, whatever that is. Dead air, um, dead air. This gives way to “Moonlight on Vermont,” which is the closest thing to an actual song I’ve heard all day. The drums and guitar are actually playing the same rhythm (for the most part) but Beefheart’s incoherent screaming still grates the eardrums like nails on a chalkboard. The guitar meanders and seems to confuse trying to find the right note with artistry. 

“Gimme that old time religion,” Beefheart repeats over and over with no regard to meter or rhythm. I’m having flashbacks to Johnny Rotten’s “Holidays in the Sun,” which, with all due respect is better than anything else on this record.

“A squid eating dough in a polyethylene bag is fast and bulbous, you got me?”

No, Beefy, I don’t got you.

“Pachuco Cadaver” is somehow the most generic song I’ve ever heard, as it sounds like it was written in an elementary school music class. It also sounds like it was played by elementary schoolers, because despite its very basic chord progression, we’ve again returned to none of the instruments playing in time, and Beefheart has given up any attempt to make a melody as he now rants about everything and nothing all at once on top of instruments playing whenever they feel like.

Oh goodness, they have somehow managed to combine saxophones with geese, my two least favorite noises in the world. Next time a fascist regime seeks to take over the world, they should hire these guys as interrogators. I would talk so fast.

To April’s credit, this is unlike anything I’d ever heard. At this point, though, I’m no longer surprised by it. I’m just waiting for it to be over. There is nothing here that could be construed as pleasant or exciting. To call it listenable is an overstatement.

“Oh lady look up in time, oh lady look out of love And you should have us all or you should have us fall”

My favorite bits, if favorite is even the right word to use, are when it sounds like he’s finally shutting up, like at the end of “Bills Corpse,” but the disorganized alarm tones of “Sweet Sweet Bulbs” prove that he’s not done yet.

“Neon Meate Dreams Of A Octafish” makes about as much sense as the title does. Beefy has now taken a step further away from melody. Now, he is literally just shouting gibberish in my ear while the guitar and drums do their own independent things. This is what it would sound like if Jack Torrance made a record. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. We’ve brought back the elephants. Is there no end to this torture?

“China Pig” sounds like it was recorded from a bathroom. Even the recording engineer couldn’t stomach this and had to retreat and record from a distance. Maybe this album would sound better if I retreated and listened from a distance, by which I mean, put the album to continue playing in my room while I run as far away as possible and disassociate myself with my exfriend April.

Maybe that’s a little harsh, but if April, or Travis, or Dom, or any of you had my best interests at heart, you would not be torturing me like this. I’m not a big sports guy, but I “get” sports. I see the appeal of sports. It’s competition, it’s hometown pride, it’s a way for local underdogs to become massive heroes, and it’s exciting to see how it plays out. If music is just people angrily shouting over people who don’t know how to play instruments, like everything I’ve been listening to over the last few days, then I must confess, I don’t “get” music. I was sort of hoping, honestly, that this project would open my eyes, but it really hasn’t. It’s just confirmed what I already knew.

Oh, “My Human Gets Me Blues.” I guess the engineer is out of the bathroom. Let’s see, what can I say about this? Uh. It has no melody and I don’t know what the guitar and drums are trying to do. I could probably fake my way through the rest of this album just saying that about every song. But maybe, I’ll suffer whatever aneurysm possessed the band to record this album later on and suddenly I’ll become a music fan.

“Dali’s Car” is a guitar solo, which is good, because it means that there are no drums or vocals for the guitar to be playing out of time with. Though, I should clarify: “Dali’s Car” is not a guitar solo which is good. Commas are important. It, like everything else on the record, seems to be dissonant chords and random notes at random times. And that’s the first disc.

It didn’t even end. The randomness of the notes means that the last note on the first disc sounds like the middle of a phrase. I just... I have to listen to the second disc. I need to know *what* April could possibly hear in this. Give me a minute.

First disc reflections: It’s awful. This is what schizophrenia must feel like. It should be illegal to call this music. This makes the Sex Pistols look like talented men, and A Tribe Called Quest poetic. Is that what music is? Listening to music so bad that you can apologize for music that is less bad? Seems like a situation with no winners. Is the only way to win to not play the game? And yet I’ve committed to this, and the last note of “Dali’s Car” has not given me any sort of satisfactory resolution. Here I go. Disc two. Wish me luck.

“Hair Pie: Bake 2???” Was the first one not bad enough??? At least this one doesn’t have so many elephants and deflated balloons. Actually, this one doesn’t sound too bad. I think it’s happening. The aneurysm is happening. Maybe I need to go run laps or something. Focus. Wow. That jarring key change just knocked me out of whatever hypnotic trance they just placed on me. Make no mistake: this is bad. It is clear and evident that the band have no idea what they are doing.

If I hear the phrase “fast and bulbous” one more time I swear I’m going to start saying it too.  When a hostage or prisoner begins to develop a friendly relationship with their kidnapper, that is called Stockholm Syndrome, which seems to be developing in my brain in a “fast and bulbous” manner. I did not ask to be here, but here I am, stuck.  

Oh my goodness. “Pena” is the Spanish word for “pain” in the metaphorical “pain-in-the-neck” sort of way. Well, that’s what the song “Pena,” is. Gone is any possible inkling that this music might be good. The tortured squealing of whoever-this-is has returned me exactly to where I was on the first disc. It’s like they knew that prisoners become numbed to torture, so they’re still thinking of new ways to break me.

Beefheart singing “Well” sounds like a song a prisoner might sing - sung by my jailer, it is both painfully ironic and borderline abusive. 

“Thick black felt birds a-flying With capes of solid chrome With feathers of solid chrome And beaks of solid bone,”

Did these words mean anything when Beefy wrote them or were they always word salad?

“When Big Joan Sets Up” is the culmination of everything terrible about the album, with offbeat instrumentals and an extended goosaphone solo. I’m three minutes into this song and it sounds like the guitarist is just trying to end it already, but the bassist wants to keep playing for some reason. The geese are getting angry. I don’t like angry geese.

“Is she a boy?” No. Next question.

“What do you run on, Rocket Morton?” “I run on beans. I run on LASER beans.”

Sure you do.

I will not lie, the bassist on “Fallin’ Ditch” is actually making an effort to play something with a melody. If only the guitarist, drummer, and singer were on the same page. As it stands now, we have a decent bass line - not great, but something you might hear on People’s Instinctive Rhythms and the Paths of Melody - now being tortured by the strangling mess that is the rest of this album’s production.

“Sugar ‘n Spikes” again features an attempt at a hook. I think I know what Beefy’s game is, and why April thinks this is a good album. The first disc is so bad that no matter what they throw at me in the second half, it has to sound better by comparison. “Big Joan” and “Pena” notwithstanding, I must admit that I am much happier than I was half an hour ago. 

But then I think about listening to “Ant Man Bee” on purpose. I think if I ever heard this by itself, on its own accord, I would have post-war flashbacks. The other albums I’ve listened to were bad, this is traumatic. This upsets my brain chemistry. When this album ends and I can see the world in color again, I’ll wonder how I ever smiled listening to the insane ramblings of a man with a terrible name. But even the saxophone has started to become a familiar edge to hang onto for me. Oh, saxophone that sounds like a deflated balloon, we’ve been through so much, you and I. Remember that time on “Hair Pie (Bake 1)” when you were the worst thing ever? Good times, good times.

If I listen to “Orange Claw Hammer,” enough, my vocabulary will become fast and bulbous. Havin’ t’ shine a wallet f’r a hamm’r, ‘llbe my career. Man with olives f’r eyes off’rs me a chicken f’r my troubles, but th’ chicken won’ stop singin’.

Hold on, you mean to say you can’t even pronounce the word “licorice?” No, no, no. I’ve still got one foot in reality, and I will stand my ground. I’ll not be pulled into the vortex that is the gibberish dream of Captain Beefheart. Remember “The Dust Blows Forward ‘n The Dust Blows Back” when this was the worst thing ever? Good times, good times.

No! Not good times. I will not have this aneurysm. Not today. Objectively, there is nothing good about any of this. I should never have started calling him “Beefy.” That’s where this all started. There is no difference between “Wild Life” and “Frownland” except that “Wild Life” has more geese. But it’s become familiar, now. I’ve been trapped here, listening to Trout Mask Replica for so long that it has become the only life I’ve ever known.

You know what, besides Captain Beefheart, is fast and bulbous? Cancerous tumors. That’s the best comparison.

“She’s Too Much For My Mirror,” is introduced as ‘famous,’ because at this point, had I not one foot in reality, I might actually believe that this song is well-known, well-liked, or well, anything. If April is trying to brainwash me, or hypnotize me, or I don’t know what, I swear to Beefy that I will put her in a chokehold and make her listen to an entire CD of me reciting Mad Libs over a Casio keyboard drum loop because only then will she understand the psychological torment that this album is putting on me.

hobo chang ba hobo chang ba hobo chang ba hobo chang ba hobo chang ba

“it’s the blimp, Frank! it’s the blimp!” Time is nothing. My room is nothing. There is no anything. All there is a trout, a mask, a replica, and a blimp. A mothership.

“Steal Softly thru Snow” and “Old Fart At Play” are the same sort of thing. It’s been almost eighty minutes and now I am craving to hear Beefheart talk about farts because it is the only remote pleasure I know in this torture chamber that is Trout Mask replica. When I am finally freed from this war camp, I will need to be entirely reeducated on proper human etiquette and civilization. How April manages to uphold herself as a functioning human being after listening to this, I don’t know.

The only outcome I can imagine where this album does not cause a human to become a stark raving lunatic is one in which the hypnotic spell of the goosaphone does not affect the brain. And if the brain is not affected, how anyone could enjoy or recommend this advanced instrument of psychological warfare is beyond me.

“Veteran’s Day Poppy” slowly decays into a complete wall of noise, before the guitar and drums slow down, and then, if we weren’t hypnotized yet, play the same cacophonous riff over and over again, getting more and more aggressive until the end of the record. And just like that, it’s over. I’m done. I hear birds chirping outside my window.

Whew, boy. I don’t think April is getting this back. I think this is going straight into the shredder where it belongs.

Captain Beefheart died, tragically, in 2010. I’m gonna dig him up and kill him again. One death is not enough to suffer for this crime against humanity. While I’m out, I should probably give Travis his CD back, and apologize for the mean things I said about his music. I had no idea.

If you think music is good, send me music, and I will tell you why you are wrong!