#are these one of those black exclusive cards that only people of a certain wealth get

[sunshineandlyrics]

Not surprised. Look what Louis just lost? 💳 x

(Posted 2 days ago, so between 6 - 9 February 2023?)

[gustafsson06gustafsson-blog]

Games Archives.

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[agnesgoesadventuring-blog]

Complaining about people calling you a lesbophobe but you know, if it quacks like a lesbophobe. You're even talking AGAIN about lesbians and gay people having PRIVILEGE, just like you did with Beau. You were saying Beau, a gay woman, was privileged and entitled and here you are again talking about how we're privileged and have power so you can act all worried about us having a problem with people with actual straight passing privilege

Ask #2:  Look, I’m cool with ace and bi people and I totally think you guys are part of the lgbt community, but you are saying that gay people have power just for being gay and that’s pretty homophobic.

Note: I have a policy of writing fic whenever I get hateful messages, so there’s Critical Role fic at the end of this post! If you want to read the fic but not the response to these asks, scroll down a bit!

There’s a lot of ignorance in these messages.

To start with, the concept of privilege is not some flat thing where a person either has it or they don’t. There are a lot of different kinds of privilege, as privilege is based on several different kinds of cultural and social power structures. A straight person has privilege over a gay person, but if that straight person is black, they do not have privilege over a white person. A white person has privilege over people of color, but if they’re poor they do not have privilege over the wealthy. Privilege, as I’m pretty sure I’ve discussed before, is a complex thing. A white gay person is going to have privilege over a black gay person. A white gay person will have a certain level of privilege over a black straight person, while the black straight person will have a certain level of privilege over him. Privilege comes from all kinds of things, from race, sexual identity, gender, wealth, mental illness, level of education. Sometimes those things impact each other. And ery, very few people are going to have privilege in every one of these power structures.

Every kind of community or segment of a culture/society is going to have power structures, and that includes the queer community.

I didn’t say that anyone has power just for being gay. I simply said that there are power structures that exist within the community, as there are in every community, that allow for the existence of a good deal of gatekeeping, exclusion, and erasure. That is not remotely the same thing as saying “gay people have power because they’re gay”.

As for Beau, you are, yet again, misrepresenting a discussion that was happening where people were discussing their personal experiences and how that effected their reactions to certain things. The most that was said about the canon of the show, aside from the person who sent the initial ask which led to the discussion, was that Yasha’s side of it was vague enough, based both on what she said and did in the scene and Ashley’s comments on Talks Machina, that it led to them having that uncomfortable emotional reaction.

There has been discussion about Beau potentially growing up with the privilege of wealth and how that might influence her behavior and interactions with people in different ways and in different situations, but as has been explained, it is not homophobic to recognize the privilege that a queer person might have in other areas of their life.

Just as people, many of whom were asexual, discussing how their personal experiences of having their agency, autonomy, and boundaries violated impacts the way they reacted to a specific scene isn’t homophobic, discussing the power structures that exist in a community that fosters gatekeeping and erasure/exclusion of certain identities isn’t homophobic, either.

The idea of “straight passing privilege” is, at best, flawed (here are some good pieces that talk about why).

To the person who sent the first message, perhaps your ignorance and lack of understanding of the complexities of privilege and the power structures that exist in all communities, whether willful or otherwise, is one of the things that’s making it difficult for you to accept bi and ace people as a part of the community. Either way, gatekeeping is pretty ineffective when you don’t actually know what you’re talking about.

To the person who sent the second ask, your approval of our existence in the community means very little when you’re fostering attitudes that lead to our exclusion.

Now, as per my “fluffy fic in response to hate” policy, here’s some fluffy fic. Since there were two messages, I wrote two fics. The first one is fjorester. The second is Beau/Kara. Follow the read more cut to the fic!

Love LineJester/Fjord. Rated T.

“Guess what, Fjord!” Jester said as she bounded over, skipping up to him with her hands clasped behind her back.

“What’s that, Jester?” Fjord replied, looking up from the map he was examining.

She plopped down in the chair next to him, smiling as she looked at him from under her lashes. “Molly taught me how to read palms.”

Fjord put the map down, turning his full attention to the woman next to him. “Did he now?”

“Mmhmm….” she hums out, nodding. “Would you like me to do you?”

Her voice sounds innocent, but he’s familiar enough with the way she talks to recognize the intended innuendo. He wants to respond in kind, say something that will maybe make her blush for a change, but his mind brings up nothing and his throat goes dry as he feels the heat rise to his cheeks.

Instead, he thrusts his hand out toward her, trying not to sound too off of his rhythm when he says, “Knock yourself out.”

She smiles at him as she takes his hand, placing it in one of her’s and dragging the finger tips of the other down his palm. There are jolts of electricity left in their wake that zip straight to chest, making it difficult for him to breath for a moment.

“Hmm,” Jester lets out, looking at his hand thoughtfully as she traces one of the lines with her index finger. “This is your life line.”

“What’s it say?”

“You are going to live for a very, very long time.”

“Well, that’s a relief,” he chuckles.

“You’re very healthy,” she continues, her finger still stroking back and forth over the line. “Very strong. And reliable.”

“Yes, that does sound like me,” Fjord replies, making his voice sound very serious. The giggle he gets out of her is very satisfying.

Jester’s fingers jump to another line in his hand. “This is the…” she trails off for a moment, tapping her heel against the floor in the way she does when she’s trying to think of something. “The money line!” she bursts out, looking quite proud of herself.

“I hope that line is really, really long,” he says.

“Not really long,” she says. “But not short either. You’re going to have just the right amount of money. Not too much, you know? Some people just have too much money. You’re going to have the exact right amount money.”

“Well, I wouldn’t want people thinking I’m greedy or anything.”

“Exactly!”

Her eyes meet his for a brief moment, her smile wide and her eyes bright. His smile softens as the look at each other, and the look on her face makes his throat dry again, so he clears his throat, looking back down at his hand.

“What about that other line?” He asks, motioning with his chin to where his hand is still resting in her’s.

“Oh, that’s the love line,” she says, taking her index finger and moving it down the line in his hand at an agonizing pace. Her voice drops in octive and volume as she leans closer to him, just a bit.

Fjord can’t help but swallow again, his throat now feeling perpetually parched. “Yeah?”

“Yeah,” she replies, her eyes flicking up to his for just a second before returning to his hand. “Your’s is really, really… really long.”

“Is it?” he croaks out, quiet and scratchy.

“Oh, yeah.” She’s smirking at him now, once again looking at him from under her lashes.

“Well,” he says, swallowing hard, summoning up whatever small amount of smoothness he can. “I haven’t received any complaints.” And then he winks at her, enjoying the way her smirk turns into a slow smile. She watches him for a moment, and for some reason that throws Fjord, her smile slips just before she looks back down, her finger stroking the line in his hand aimlessly.

“Do you want to know what else it says?” Jester asks, and the suggestive tone is gone. Her voice is smaller now, a little curious.

“Yeah. Of course.”

“It says that… sometimes you wait too long to take action. To act on your desires.” This is no longer flirty, confident Jester, who always seems to want to make him blush. “And, you know, those desires can only be patient for so long.”

Fjord’s throat goes dry again, but for a completely different reason. “Yeah. I know,” he’s finally able to push out.

“Do you?” she asks in a small voice, not looking up at him.

His hand closes around hers and he leans forward. He can’t see all of her face, but what he can see looks sad.

“I do,” he whispers, using his real voice.

That makes Jester look at him, her head snapping up, her eyes wide and surprised. She looks at him for several long seconds that seem to stretch on forever. Finally, she smiles. It’s not as big as he’d like to see, and there’s still a little doubt at the edges of it, but at least she doesn’t look so sad anymore. “Okay.”

Fjord squeezes her hand, and she squeezes back. Then she’s up like a shot, her pace fast as she walks over to where Beau and Caleb are sitting. “We should play some cards or something,” she says louder than necessary, and as she sits down, Fjord can see on her cheeks just the faintest blush.

He’s not at all surprised when, later that night, he discovers that Molly doesn’t know how to read palms.

ImpressiveBeau/Kara. Rated T.

“That was impressive.”

Beau whips around, the voice she hears only just familiar enough to keep from lashing out with her fist at the surprise. The tavern is quiet, with most of the people in town at the festival, and the voice is loud in the otherwise silent room.

It’s Kara standing there behind her, a smile on her face and an ale in her hand.

“Huh?” Beau asks, the fatigue in her bones from a long day of festival fun and fighting leaving her unintelligible.

It makes Kara chuckle as she sits down on the other side of the table, placing her ale on the table as she leans her chin on her palm. “The tournament. You and your friends.”

“We lost.” Her voice is blunt and defensive. She and the rest of the Nein had taken a hell of a beating in that last round and she wasn’t in the mood for sarcasm or mockery.

“You made it to the final round,” Kara responds. “You were one of the only two groups to do so. It’s not often that a group without much of a reputation manages to do that.”

Beau watches Kara, listening to her words carefully. She can’t help the sort of knee-jerk reaction of feeling like she’s being made fun of, but Kara’s words seem genuine, her tone warm and her smile reaching her eyes.

“Oh. Thanks,” she says after a long moment. She’s starting to get that weird feeling again, where she feels like she wants to say the right thing but can’t figure out what it is. As she wonders why she’s feeling that way, she looks again across the table and sees the way Kara is looking at her, with her cheek resting against her palm, a smile that feels, to Beau, private and secretive in a way.

Is she flirting with me? The thought has her filing through her brain, trying to remember the things Fjord and Jester had told about talking to people.

“Impressive,” she blurts out. At Kara’s raised eyebrow, she continues. “You are, I mean. Impressive. Too.”

Kara’s brow furrows in confusion, but her smile grows. “What did I do that was impressive?”

“Um…” Beau is floundering as she tries to remember the tips her friends had given. She thinks for a moment about trying to smile, but she remembers the reactions people have had to that, the way they seemed more scared or put off than anything else. So she keeps racking her brain, trying to think of something to just, at the very least, not ruin this.

She’s looking at Kara. Pretty, elven Kara who works for the Gentleman and helps to plan political coupes. And it’s then that she remembers something Jester had said to her. Just say what you mean, she had said, like it was the most obvious thing in the world. If there’s something you like about them just say it.

“Working for the Gentleman.” She blurts it out in a hurry, then takes a deep breath to calm herself, hoping her next words come out in a bit more of a normal way. “I mean, he seems to trust you. And you’ve worked for him for awhile. So you must be pretty impressive if he wants to keep you around. Pretty special.”

Kara lets out a breathy chuckle, biting her lip as her smile stretches even wider across her face. Beau feels her own lips lifting at the corners, the smile coming on by itself rather than being forced. When Kara meets her gaze and sees her smile, she doesn’t look freaked out or put off. She just keeps smiling, her fingers playing idly with her mug on the table.

It’s at that moment that a very loud Molly bursts in to the building, with an almost-as-loud Jester and typically quiet Yasha on his heels. Kara looks over at the group for a moment, and then back at Beau. “Well, your friends are back,” she says, and lets the sentence hang in the air.

Beau feels like maybe she’s supposed to do or say something but she’s not sure what it is.

After a few seconds Kara stands. “I should probably go.” She leans over the table, placing her hand on top of Beau’s, getting as close to her face as she can. “Maybe I’ll see you tomorrow at the festival, yeah?”

Beau can’t help but notice the view Kara’s position gives her. It’s pretty modest, really, but she takes in the line of her neck, the delicate collar bone, and the soft skin that disappears under her dress. She swallows hard and meets Kara’s eyes, nodding. “Yeah.”

Kara gives her one last smile before she straightens up and walks out of the tavern.

As soon as she’s gone, Beau downs the rest of her ale in one gulp, then reaches to the other side of the table and does the same with the ale that Kara left behind.

So at least she’s feeling warm and fuzzy when the questions and comments start later in the evening, after the rest of the group has gathered around that table and Molly, with his smug grin, tells the rest of them what was going on when he walked in to the tavern.

Beau kicks him under the table and grumbles the whole time, but she has to fight to push down the smile that keeps wanting to climb it’s way up to her face.

[diveronarpg]

Congratulations, STASS! You’ve been accepted for the role of OBERON. Admin Rosey: G o d. God help me this application has taken my breath away and left my very bones bare. Oberon has always been a favorite of mine, quite different from a lot of other biographies I have written. His very force is nature, unbridled and uninhibited. Stass, with this application you have captured all of that and more. You have given us everything we could have ever asked for and then some. With Oberon you played our heartstrings, plucked away at them and made us fall in love with him in a very real way. His voice makes us catch our breath, his mannerisms has us trembling out of equal parts fear and respect. We cannot wait to have Oberon ruling his dark underground in Verona! Please read over the checklist and send in your blog within 24 hours.

WELCOME TO THE MOB.

Out of Character

Alias | Stass.

Age | 21.

Preferred Pronouns | She/her.

Activity Level | 7/10. I’m currently on summer holidays, so I’m free most days and evenings. I’m starting university again in October, so will probably only be able to come on in the evenings or early mornings, but my weekends are usually completely free as I’m generally quite good at managing my time and workload.

Timezone | GMT.

Current/Past RP Accounts | x (Orpheus), x (Sirius Black in a Marauders RP), x (a criminal mastermind in the RP Thick as Thieves), x (James Bond in an MI6 RP).  There are others, but these are the important ones.

In Character

Character | O B E R O N .

O R P H E U S . Some struggle to believe that this is truly the name he was born with, assume that he must have changed it from something altogether more pedestrian as soon as he was old enough, think that it’s all part of some great act. Although the last of those assumptions is patently, clearly, undeniably true, the first two are not. When Orpheus Ahulani was born his parents looked into their eldest son’s forest-coloured eyes and knew what image they wanted the heir to their kingdom to be moulded into. He will be the Pied Piper, they agreed, the siren call that will lead the errant souls of Verona towards oblivion, the boatman who will entice them down to the gates of Hell and ferry them across the Styx towards their certain doom. Most children would crumble under the weight of such expectation, fold like a tower of cards and retreat into the recesses where the shadows of their invented legacy could not touch them, but Orpheus was not most children, and so where he might have been expected to capitulate, he flourished. He was performing confidence tricks before he could walk, drawing in oblivious passers-by with his winning smile and the glimmer of mystery in his eyes and stripping them of anything they had that he could take. His parents, his grandparents, they all claimed that the criminal path was one they had taken to stay afloat in the mire and the chaos of petty civilian life, that it was necessary to maintain the lifestyle they had become accustomed to, but to Orpheus crime quickly became less about obligation and more about pure enjoyment, about the thrill of enticing people to their certain doom. He had not adopted the darkness, like his forefathers; no, he was born in it, shaped by it, and the Black Prince came to wear that darkness like a mantle. He was not blessed with fortunes and titles and palaces like the rulers of the Capulet and Montague clans, but he had the same power they did, the same ability, the same influence, and when he ascended to the throne that he was born to sit on, aided by Cosimo, his dark star expanded a thousandfold. He had been powerful before, but now when Orpheus reaches out a hand, the shadow it casts darkens Verona’s every street, and when he opens his mouth to utter even a mere syllable, the whole of the city’s underbelly flock to his side, answering their master’s call. Just as the Orpheus of myth was able to charm even the rocks and the trees with the sweet melodies of his lyre, so the Orpheus of Verona is able to make the city dance to his tune if he so desires. There is not a soul he cannot touch, no fool he cannot deceive, and when he calls, fear not, for they will come. They will all come.

A H U L A N I . They were islanders once upon a time, his relatives, before his grandparents picked up their empire of swindling and trickery and brought it eastwards. The sun-kissed paradise they left in their wake was too serene for them, the spray of the sea and the caresses of the wind against the beachside palms were just too celestial to be sullied by crime, no matter how gracefully it was committed. They came to Italy seeking a refuge that was altogether more low, already dirtied by the indelible stain of wrongdoing, where the criminal life they sought to lead would blend into a colourful tapestry that had already been woven. It was there, on the dusty streets of Verona, that his father met his mother and her family of misfits, and as the two lineages merged a new dynasty commenced in the Underworld. Orpheus has lost most of his physical connection to his Hawaiian roots, has only seen the white-gold sands of Honolulu in photographs and paintings, but nonetheless there is a part of him that will always be tethered to the sun, the salt spray and the wind, and the sea that rolls in his veins gives him that easy, breezy confidence, a lightness of being and of touch that seems almost deceptively out of place for a man of such formidable stature. He has all the charm of someone who has been blessed by the island life from the moment he was born, the kind of easy smile that seems to have sprung from people’s fantasies of what it means to be Hawaiian. Little do they know, of course, those fools who look upon him and are entranced, that behind the sunny brilliance lurks a filth that runs bone-deep, a black scourge that could not be erased by even the brightest star. This grime comes from the Irish in him, the visceral, corporeal criminality his mother’s heritage brought to the Ahulani crime clan, the part of him that isn’t afraid to spill blood and break bone, that revels in crunches and grunts and cries of pain. Joseph Ahulani and Katherine O’Leary were formidable criminals on their own terms, but when they came together their vastly differing styles of con created the perfect mixture in Orpheus, merged to forge the master ruler of Verona’s seedy underbelly. Verona’s instigator is as alluring as they come when he needs to be, flashing pearly white teeth and twinkling eyes, using his Hawaiian radiance to promise the world. But beneath the dazzle and the beauty lies something altogether darker, more nefarious, befitting of the dark corners and muddy ditches in which he chooses to perform some of his darkest acts.

What drew you to this character? | Where can I start with this? I missed Orpheus so much, too much. I love playing characters with a dark side, and the idea of someone who was not only aware of the blackness of his heart, but who revelled in it with so much glee, was captivating and immensely intriguing. Rarely, if never, have I seen a character as multi-faceted, as darkly multi-faceted, as Orpheus. I love that his soul shines with gloom, like that colour scientists discovered that was ‘blacker than black’, a sponge to soak up all light that glances off it. I love the fire in him, the fire around him, that it spurts from his fingertips and his heels and flares up in his eyes when he laughs, when he lies and when he roars. I love how you’ve made Orpheus so completely, almost painfully self-aware, so completely in touch with the filth that coats Verona’s streets that he not only plunges his hands into it, but dives in and bathes in the muck. I like that he has a clear sense not of right and wrong, but justice and injustice, and that his governing maxim is very much ‘an eye for an eye’, that he’s fearless and heartless but somehow has become a beacon to the downtrodden and the low, and that he has built an empire of sorts without the inherited wealth and the pomp and circumstance of Verona’s two warring families. Essentially, I’m utterly, hopelessly in love with this minstrel of destruction, and I’d like to congratulate you once again on dreaming up this instigator. It sounds overblown, I know, but I really do love him with all my heart and soul.

What is a future plot idea you have in mind for the character? |

YOU CAN BE THE KING; The Capulets and Montagues might rule the streets and seek to fill them with the blood of their enemies, but Orpheus knows that the real power lies not in how many guns you have or how many bullets you spend, but how many bodies you have on your side, how many empty vessels you can whip up and fill with the pulsing beat of your agenda. His kingdom was handed to him by Cosimo on a silver tray, and, just like Hades took to his Underworld with perfect ease, Orpheus has found that he’s exactly where he belongs. I’d like to explore how Orpheus rules his kingdom, how he goes about raising his own empire with the backing of the Capulets. He’s always turned his nose up at an excess of money, but I’d like to see how he uses the protection and financial backing Cosimo threw his way, how he sets about positioning his dominion in the wake of the coming war, how he protects what is his from the long arm of Verona’s moneyed classes, and how he uses Measure by Measure to spread little rumours of evil here and there, how he uses his fighting pit to breed fear and respect in equal measure. He is on the Capulet side for now, because that is the side that currently brings him the most opportunity, but everything could change at the drop of a hat, should the tide of war swing a different way…

BUT WATCH THE QUEEN CONQUER; I want to explore Orpheus’ relationship with Theodora, to develop the toxic, intoxicating back-and-forth between them. They were never exclusive, neither of them belonged to the other, because they’re not bound by such earthly pettiness, and so Orpheus has, over the time they’ve been together, roamed as freely as he pleases, bedding anyone that took his fancy, as though it was his mission to cover the whole of the gender spectrum with his conquests. Orpheus knows that Theodora is sometimes jealous of his wandering eyes and hands and limbs, that they resent him bitterly, that they would gladly douse him in gasoline and strike a match, and I’d love to explore how he plays on this side of them, how he tries to goad them into lashing out, how they both stick knives in each other’s backs and then help each other bandage the wounds, knowing that no matter how much they hurt one another there will always be something cosmic and irrevocable that binds them together.

LET ME WHISPER IN YOUR EAR; His relationship to Halcyon. I want to see how Orpheus walks the tightrope between informant and deceiver, how he manages to sustain the balance between feeding her the information the Capulets need, enough to keep the war interesting, and obscuring those facts which should never come to light. I believe that Orpheus wants a war, has wanted one for some time, because there is nothing that burns as fiercely within him as his hatred for the wealthy, and although he would actively intercede in the battle against them, obliterating them like he did that family of idiots who dared to rob him of his loved ones, the opportunity to see the elite tear themselves apart is just too good to be missed. I think he will take to his role as informant eagerly, recognising the opportunity it brings to light the touch-paper and give the conflict the spark he feels it needs, although I imagine that if Halcyon tries to exercise control too fiercely Orpheus won’t hesitate to remind her just which side of the war he’s currently pretending to be on, and the damage he can cause if he chose to switch his allegiances.

THE PIED PIPER; Although he never intended it to be this way, Orpheus has inadvertently found himself wearing the cap of Robin Hood, scourge of the elite and folk hero of the poor. He’s not a kind soul, by any means, but over the years he has found himself becoming strangely proud of this unofficial title, even though he’d never admit this to anyone, even on pain of death. Something changed in him after seeing his brother struck down so carelessly by those who had more money than sense, and Orpheus decided after he’d wrought his terrible revenge that the best way of conquering the upper class was raising the lower classes to fantastic heights, to elevate them in any way he could, so that they could topple the wealthy of Verona from above and from below, rising from the underworld like magma and raining down like hellfire from their plane of moral superiority. Building on this, I’d like to develop how Orpheus relates to and interacts with those members of the Capulet mob who are not from the same privileged background as its leader, and although he’d never do this overtly I envision him attempting to convert some of them to his side of the ‘cause’, enticing them with the odd throwaway comment or lingering glance, reminding them where they came from and where they could go once freed from the yoke imposed on them by Cosimo’s money.

WATCH YOUR BACKS; Superficially, he’s a soldier, and his role within the hierarchy of the Capulet family is supposed to consist of him following orders blindly, obediently, to put his life on the line for the family he’s supposedly loyal to. But Orpheus has never been one for following orders, no; this Piper dances only to his own tune. He was already a king when Cosimo gilded his throne and gave him official protection, and I’d like to explore how these two sides war within him - the thrill of rule mixed with the expected subjugation and loyalty. I can’t imagine Orpheus actively following a single order, save for when Halcyon requests information from him, and would like to see what happens when he confronts and is confronted with the well-oiled, powerful machine of the Capulet army, such a dramatic contrast to the wildness and the chaos that Orpheus so proudly rules over. The Capulets may once have been friends to the working class, but they have become blinded by wealth and greed, and I want to develop how Orpheus interacts with the elite that he so hates, and how he attempts to undermine them from within.

Are you comfortable with killing off your character? | Am I allowed to say undecided? Is that terrible? Part of me wants to say absolutely not, because I think there would be something beautiful in watching Orpheus rise from beneath the ground, clawing his way out of the dirt with his army trailing behind him like the hordes of the undead, to watch him turn around and not just bite the hand that feeds, but tear off the whole arm and throw it to the wolves for them to feast on. I’m a sucker for the traitor/saboteur plot, and I think watching Cosimo be destroyed by a monster of his own making would be entertaining as hell. But then again, even titans can fall, so maybe, if the circumstances were right (or wrong, as the case may be), Orpheus might not survive this war. I’m leaning towards no, at the moment, but my opinion may change depending on how things play out…

In Depth

In-Character Interview:

What is your favourite place in Verona?

He took a deep drag from the cigar pressed between his lips (stolen, of course, Orpheus Ahulani would never do something as ordinary as spend his own money on luxuries), enjoying the way the glowing end of the Cuban briefly illuminated his eyes in the half-light. Ash sprinkled onto the sticky surface of the table, clinging to the rings and mottled stains left by the drinks of countless previous patrons, and he allowed his hand to drop to the wooden tabletop, tracing idle patterns in the grime with practised fingers. Orpheus may have started rubbing shoulders with the elite, but this was his natural habitat, and like a king sat amongst his subjects he filled the space to the brim, so that the essence of the underworld’s prince seemed to seep out of every flat surface, to lurk in every dark corner. He leaned forward, removing the cigar from between full lips to blow a perfect ring of smoke, trapping his interlocutor completely in that tractor beam of a gaze, predator hypnotising prey.

Had the question been a test? He didn’t know, but as with almost every conversation he ever had, he would turn the answer into one, would make sure to pitch his words just right. His song would hit all the optimum notes, and the imbecile who thought that they could divine the inner workings of his mind would suddenly find themselves dancing to Orpheus’ tune and not their own, would see themselves laid bare in a matter of minutes. No matter whom he spoke to, he was both snake-charmer and snake, dictating everything he touched with a few choice tunes from his pipe, but ready to turn around and unleash the venom in his fangs if it was necessary, to wreak a long, slow and painful death on anyone who came too close. It would have been easy to miss Orpheus’ half-smile in the muted light of the underground bar, to lose the serpentine grin amidst the bustle and the murmur of customers on their way to being blind drunk well before midday. “My favourite place in Verona?” And there it was again, that smile, imbued with all the opulence of a thousand precious stones, so entrancing that no one ever saw the sting in the scorpion’s tail, the blood that lurked behind such charming eyes. “So many to choose from…”

A contemplative puff of smokey air, then, as his features shifted into a thoughtful expression, as though truly exerting himself to come up with an answer. “The library, for instance, or perhaps the charming florist’s by the corner of the Castelvecchio.” A pause, a knowing half-smirk. “But if you’re forcing me to choose…” Again, that tone, that fine line between jest and threat, deliberately pitched to make it clear that no one was forcing him to do a damn thing, that this question was being answered solely and completely because he had decided to deign it with a response. “It would have to be my dear Measure by Measure.”

Even at the mere mention of his precious establishment, of the den of violence and broken bones he treasured so dearly, his whole complexion changed, set ablaze by a fire stoked at the thought of the endless litany of brawls that he had presided over in his own personal hell-pit. “If you don’t know it, save whatever dignity you have left and don’t ask. Not all those who live… above ground can stomach knowing what goes on in the darkest corners of their precious Verona.”

What does your typical day look like?

“Why do you want to know?” An eyebrow was raised at the inquiry, and the expression that twisted his features was half something that looked like surprise (although anyone who knew Orpheus even in passing knew that surprise wasn’t an emotion he would ever deem worthy of feeling), half lazy amusement, a mirth to match the haziness of Verona’s late summer afternoons: sticky-hot like whisky, the kind of burn that felt pleasant on your skin and tongue. “Are you trying to keep tabs on me?” The amusement was still there, unfurling across his broad features like a ship’s sails in the wind, but there was a darker emotion behind it that was plain for all to see, an implicit threat that would not go unnoticed. Do not play with fire, it said, do not come too close, or I will burn you. Orpheus was a private person, his life was very much his own, and although he knew that many of the people he was supposed to be working for salivated at the opportunity of finding out exactly how he operated, he’d become adept at keeping his cards very close to his chest. It was the kind of threat that didn’t need articulating, one that seemed so out of place amidst the charm and the mysterious geniality that seemed to roll off him in waves that you could almost miss it if you blinked at the wrong time; an ember still glowing red in a mountain of black coal that had long since cooled.

Orpheus kept this tempestuousness, this fiery quality, firmly under wraps for the most part, because he knew the value of preserving a poker face, of biding his time and letting the sleeping giant lie, of waiting for the right moment to unleash the fires of chaos that he’d been slowly stoking since he was old enough to realise that life wasn’t fair. But there was a time and a place for anger, and this was not it, so he let his mask slide just far enough to reveal a glimpse of the danger that lay within, a reminder not to overstep the boundaries he had so clearly set, before returning to his customary insouciance.

“My typical day is just the same as any law abiding citizen of Verona.” (How enjoyable such blatant lying was, especially when he knew that he could get away with it every time.) “I eat, I drink, I make merry, I go about my business just like any regular guy.”

(Hah. As if Orpheus could be or had ever been regular.)

What has been your biggest mistake thus far?

Momentarily, his hand stilled where it had been tracing patterns in the sticky sheen that coated the table, that curious mixture of alcohol, sweat and ash so often found in seedy bars, and his eyebrows pulled together in something resembling a frown. To anyone who didn’t know him, truly know him (to most everyone, then, since Orpheus Ahulani had made it his life’s mission to make himself an enigma to everyone but himself), it looked like an expression of derision, as though the great shadow-king was baffled by the mere notion of having ever made a mistake, as though the idea of him being fallible, somehow, was beyond human conception. But appearances are so often deceiving, to even the sharpest of minds.

Your biggest mistake.

(November 29th, 2003. A fight in a quiet piazza. The murder of a brother, and the other brother’s failure to react in time.)

It haunted him still, that day, when he let it. In the dark, still, stifling night air that blew over the city in the summertime, left alone with only memories for company, Orpheus would let the strongbox he’d pushed into the furthest corners of his mind unlock itself and spew out its poisonous secrets, would let himself be overwhelmed, for the briefest of instances, by the memory of his failure, of his complacency, and of the loss that had followed. It was a fitting punishment, he supposed, for all the wrong and the harm that he had done, and would yet do. Even the devil was punished for the kingdom he earned, had to sacrifice his angel’s wings for the fiery reward that awaited him beneath the earth. It had been his one great weakness, and he had been punished for it. He opened the armour-plates that encased his heart like a vice just wide enough to allow one soul to slip through, and it was through that crack that fate plunged its dagger, through that crack that fate reached in and dragged the love he had for his brother, still warm and beating, out through his chest, only to throw it in his face and laugh, mocking him for ever having thought that the only person Orpheus Ahulani had ever loved could have walked through the hellfire that surrounded him unscathed.

But no matter. The past was done. Gone. Erased.

(Fool me once…)

“My biggest mistake was letting you sit at this table.“

What has been the most difficult task asked of you?

“Honestly?”

Of course not; it wasn’t possible, wasn’t even fathomable. Truth and honest words were few and far between in a city so steeped in backstabbing and deceit, a city whose heart thrummed so resoundingly with lies and secrets and cruel words whispered from behind gilded lips, and the tide of truth reached its lowest ebb in this corner of Verona, in the heart and eyes of its very own prince of shadows. And it was part of the act, of course, carefully considered - he lied so wantonly and with such joy that if he were ever to tell the truth it would be disbelieved in an instant, cast aside to the realm of uncertainty and doubt. It was a game he enjoyed playing, when the mood struck him, dropping little pearls of veracity into his web of lies, waiting to see if any unsuspecting prey would pull on the thread he’d proffered. But they never did, of course, his mask was far too firmly attached to his face to ever let anything real slip, and so instead he let the word hang in the air, heavy and thick with the connotation of so many truths that went untold, of so many truths that were lost in the miasma that was Verona beneath the sheen of falsehoods that painted the city silver in the moonlight.

Honestly.

As if.

“All these questions of yours are proving to be quite the task. Why don’t you move along before I get bored?“ A beat, a silence that echoes with the cymbal crash of thunder.

“You don’t want me to get bored.“

What are your thoughts on the war between the Capulets and the Montagues?

“War?” Orpheus shook his head and laughed, the sound not sweet and sugary but dark and brittle, crackling in the still air like the snap of burnt caramel, any mirth undercut by an aftertaste of bitterness. “This isn’t a war yet, just a playground fight between two spoiled brats.”

The remark sounded facile, just another one of his many quips, a tongue-twisting barb designed to vex and shock and entangle, but there was truth to it, as far as he saw. Orpheus had spent the past few months watching, listening, waiting, sizing up the magnitude of the problem as the Capulets and the Montagues gestured and postured at one another, like angry teenagers who shake their fists at each other across the classroom, too afraid of teacher for physical confrontation.

Things had been tepid, so far, at least in Orpheus’ estimation of what a feud should look like (and he knew, of course, knew better than most what vindictiveness and vengeance tasted like). He had watched tensions bubble and brew and never quite spill over, as both patriarchs observed the situation and hand and decided that all-out battle wasn’t worth the loss of life it would inevitably carry with it.

(Cowards, they were, too afraid of their own shadows to relish in the chaos they could create, too timid and precious to realise that ‘there will be blood’ was not just a pretty phrase but a motto every man, woman and child should follow.)

For the most part, both sides had favoured inaction, whispered words in darkened alleyways, secret meetings and hushed threats. Until very recently, Orpheus had feared that this ‘war’ that everyone kept crowing about would turn out to be woefully boring, that the mutually assured destruction he yearned for from the wealthy elite would never come to pass. But slowly, things were changing. Changing for the better.

“But then someone went and killed poor Alvise Vernon.” A shrug, and he leaned back in a chair that was too small for his frame, but somehow, perversely, seemed made for him. “Now the Montagues are out for blood, and they won’t stop until they find the evil individual who put their dear departed underboss in the ground.” It was funny, almost, how incensed the privileged got when the mire of the real world threatened to stain their ivory towers, when they were all so eager to turn a blind eye when someone actually deserving of their pity was felled, when someone from the lower classes was mercilessly hacked down. How easy they found it not to care when the victim was not one of them and theirs. But such things were not worth wasting angry thoughts on. They would all know pain, soon enough. “Now, who knows what’ll happen?” Orpheus smiled, then, flashing all his teeth, the expression utterly devoid of warmth. It was a crocodile’s grin, one that said there will be blood, and I’ll be there to watch it spill.

“I don’t know about you, but I’m excited.”

In-Character Para Sample:

. PARA SAMPLE ONE .

[[TW: BLOOD, MURDER, VIOLENCE, FIRE]]

[one] - O R I G I N ;;

He wailed when he came into the world.

Howled and howled until his lungs should have given out, until his throat should have been scraped raw and hoarse from the effort of so much crying. He drowned out the other infants in the ward, filled the ears of all the parents and nurses with the ringing sound of a baby’s squeals. He cried until it drove the paediatrician a little insane, until the man snapped and ordered the dark-haired terror moved away from the other children and into his mother’s room, and then, suddenly, there was silence. Suddenly, the babe that had spent the past two nights caterwauling so loudly that it almost cracked the hospital windows lay serene, peaceful, content. Suddenly, the nurses, stepping closer in perplexed relief, realised just how angelic this little cherub was, how beautiful his forest-coloured eyes were. Suddenly, Katherine’s hospital bed was constantly surrounded by a teeming crowd of well-wishers, passers-by with wide eyes and enraptured faces who cooed at the little boy clutched in her arms, who complimented her and her husband on having made something so perfect. They were not intelligent enough to understand him, these fools entranced by pretty eyes and an oddly magnetic aura, but as they looked into that tiny face, his parents comprehended the truth of their son’s existence, knew exactly what to name him to best capture this infallible gift that the gods had blessed him with. He would captivate the world over, they knew, could lead all the citizens of Earth to a watery grave if he only asked them nicely, and so they gave him a name befitting of such power, named him after the greatest, most captivating soul the mythological world had ever produced. Katherine and Joseph knew precisely who their son was, and what he could one day grow to become.

He wailed when he came into the world, but it was not wailing borne out of hunger, or fear, or absence, like most infant crying is. When he was born, Orpheus Ahulani cried because even then he knew that he didn’t want to be surrounded by other children, that the place he would receive the most adoration was in the arms of his dear parents. Even then, he knew precisely what he wanted.

This is the story of how a monster is born.

(Or rather, how a monster birthed itself.)

[two] - F O R T I F I C A T I O N ;;

He wasn’t given anything as a child.

It wasn’t for lack of love, because his parents reminded him constantly that they were impressed with the man he was becoming, and even if this wasn’t always made explicit Orpheus learned early on how to read the signs. No, he wasn’t given anything because such an upbringing formed an essential part of his tuition, because his parents wanted to form him into their master thief, their ideal conman, as early as they could, because they believed firmly in legacy and knew that their first son would be the one who carried that torch forward.

As soon as Orpheus was old enough to comprehend what stealing was, his father sat him down in a sunlit room and told him that this was his life, now, that he had to learn that if he wanted something, he had only to reach out and take it, and that the only thing to remember in this new life he was entering was don’t get caught. If he wanted a toy, his father pointed him in the direction of a rich little boy or girl who wouldn’t miss it. If he fancied a new item of clothing, his mother ushered him into a clothes shop without any money or a credit card on hand and made it clear that they wouldn’t leave until he’d lifted exactly what it was he desired. It was in no way a conventional childhood, but it was the perfect one for the kind of little boy Orpheus was, and the kind of man he hoped to be, because ever since he was young enough to really think for himself Orpheus knew that this was the life he wanted, knew that even if his ancestors had not been thieves he would have sought out a life of illicit activity for himself.

Orpheus was five years old and already he didn’t believe in excess, believed in taking exactly what you wanted so that you had enough to get by, that surrounding yourself with trinkets and empty vanities would not make you feel as alive as the rush of taking something that should never have been yours. He stole the toys or books he wanted, and when he was finished with them they were gifted to those he saw as being in need, those who made his otherwise static heart throb with a beat of compassion, and once the charitable deed was done that compassion evaporated, replaced with a burning desire to seek out the rush of theft again. His parents, his grandparents, stole and conned for that rush alone, but as he grew Orpheus felt a new sensation coursing through his blood when he stole, a sense of indomitable power, of control. He learned that he could dictate the emotions of others by doing something as simple as slipping his little hands into their bags or pockets, could make even the most arrogant man crumple and weep for what he had lost. Orpheus was six years old when he realised that, whilst his relatives saw themselves as something akin to demons when they stole, that some distant part of them regretted that they had not been granted the wherewithal to be more honest, when he stole he felt like GOD. He was only a little boy, and already he saw himself as a divinity, possessed that unique, self-affirming grace that obliged people to love him so much and blinded them to the truth of the power in his heart.

He was nine years old when his brother was brought home to him, when his parents pulled open the door to his room and presented the bundle of limbs and baby hair to him with beatific smiles and luminous eyes, and Orpheus breathed a sigh of relief because Joseph and Katherine finally had the child they needed to fill the hole that had been present in their hearts. He looked at his infant brother and knew that they would both be perfect sons, in their own way. Hermes was the son to love and be loved by, who would fill their home with laughter and warmth and shower their parents with gratitude and appreciation for their efforts in building a family. Orpheus had never been that son to them, it was made clear from the moment of his birth that he was not the child who would inspire happiness, no. Orpheus was the son to be proud of, the son who would pick up the Ahulani mantle and fortify the legacy his parents endeavoured to build, and such a momentous destiny could not be hindered by something as banal as love. Katherine and Joseph looked at the two boys sat by each other one day and knew in their hearts that Hermes was the son who would inspire love, but Orpheus, Orpheus was the son who would move MOUNTAINS.

This cavernous expanse of difference between the two brothers was made abundantly clear at every turn. “What do you want for your birthday, my boy?” Katherine asked her sons in July and November.

“To go to the zoo!” a three year old Hermes giggled, stretching out chubby little arms towards his mother’s neck, knowing that even though he was too old for her to carry him around in her arms she’d lift him into the air anyway, laughing in the way that only a child of the sunlight can as he pressed his face into her auburn curls.

“A better mark,” mused a twelve year old Orpheus, gaze sharp as a laser and expression almost defiant, focussed, seeking bigger and better challenges wherever he could get them. His last task had been to rob some elderly lady; hardly a challenge. He was twelve and fired up and knew exactly what he should be doing with his life. His mother looked distant but proud and he was rewarded suitably for his enterprise, and when he walked away from the jewellery store on his birthday, pockets full and alarm blazing uselessly behind him, Orpheus knew that he had finally been gifted the freedom to go about his business unhindered, that the time had finally come for the phoenix to rise from ash and cover the world in fire.

He tried his best to teach his brother the life of a con artist, to instil in Hermes the same fervour that hurtled through his veins at the speed of a freight train, but knew from the very beginning of his tutelage that his little brother was ruled more by his heart than by his head, that he was too passionate, too flighty, to ever truly excel. He did his best to celebrate the difference between them, to look at his brother as the light that was lacking in his life, the lone rays of sunshine that he would allow to glance across his face. For the most part, he did, but a callous part of Orpheus looked at his brother and saw only a problem, a weak point, the tremor that could cause the entire house of cards to come tumbling down. He looked, and he listened, and he evaluated, and like any good problem solver he came to an uncompromising solution.

He was sixteen now, freshly tattooed and even more independent than he had once been (if such a thing were possible), and knew that his family could all let him down, with their emotions and their happiness and the familial bliss they seemed content to wallow in. There was potential to build a kingdom from their enterprise, to raise up palaces of iron and stone out of the dirt and to make themselves indomitable, but the Ahulanis had grown stagnant and lazy. For them, the things they had stolen until now had been enough, but Orpheus was never one to settle for sufficiency. He recognised that his family were resources, that if put to good use they could help him in his quest for immortality, and so like any chess grand master confronted with a board of uncooperative pieces Orpheus set about manoeuvring his nearest and dearest into position. He became prince and general to them all at once, an emperor to lead his troops into battle, to make ten men and women feel like ten thousand. If his relatives were shocked they did not know how to express it, and instead merely allowed this boy-king to manipulate them, knowing in their heart of hearts that he had already surpassed them both physically (he towered over everyone he met, and the breadth of his shoulders inspired both awe and apprehension) and metaphorically, intangibly, that his ambition and his drive were unparalleled and would likely never be seen again in any of their lifetimes.

”Why do you steal things?” Hermes asked him one day, nine years old and completely devoted to his older brother, ready to obey his every command without fail, overexcitable and unflinchingly loyal, firmly convinced that Orpheus was the most magnificent person in the entire universe.

Orpheus was eighteen now, officially a man (although he hadn’t been a boy for some time now) and didn’t care much about his younger brother’s devotion, saw it only as a useful weapon to be wielded, the perfect way of exercising control.

“Because it’s what I was born to do.”

[three] - P E R D I T I O N ;;

He should have known that it couldn’t last, that no kingdom could be erected from nothingness without a few complications, without the inevitable pitfalls and setbacks, but Orpheus saw his success and revelled in it, and in his revelry he allowed his eyes to fall blind to the dangers that lurked at the fringes of his accomplishments. But all fortresses have their weak spots, and weak spots are only discovered through the most bitter of tragedies, so that the castle can be redesigned, made ten times stronger.

He was out drinking when it happened, celebrating the latest in a long line of successful cons (everyone had told him that the Mary Jane couldn’t be pulled off by only one person, but as ever he’d proved his detractors bitterly wrong, and the look on that pompous dickhead’s face as he’d realised that he’d frittered away his ill-gotten life savings had been priceless), was enjoying his customary mix of expensive whisky and cheap cigarettes when his world shifted slightly on its axis, when its orbit fell out of sync for the briefest of moments.

His brother was seventeen and stupid like Orpheus had never been, and the latest in a long line of petty fights he’d gotten himself into (over a girl, no less) had taken a darker turn than usual. No one bothered to call the paramedics (rich people were too paralysed by centuries of inherited inaction, and too closely bound by a desire to protect their own), but even if they had there was nothing that anyone could have done.

Hermes Ahulani died ignominiously in the middle of one of Verona’s piazzas, hands, face and neck cut to pieces by shards of glass from the bottle he’d been attacked with, choking slowly, grotesquely to death in a pool of his own blood while his family looked on in horror, eviscerated by the sensation of their own utter helplessness.It had all happened in a matter of mere seconds, too fast for anyone to process it, too fast for Orpheus, normally so perceptive, so quick to react, to leap out of his seat and intervene as he had done countless times before. They had all ignored the conflict brewing between the two youths, had passed it off as nothing more than adolescent males trying to burn off some excess testosterone. None of them had anticipated the rich brat’s cowardice, had foreseen him using that damned bottle of wine too expensive for its own good to cut Hermes down. One moment he was standing tall, buoyed up by surging adrenaline and the cockiness of teenage boys, and the next he was on the ground, crushed underfoot like the flower he had been, so much vitality spent in no more than five minutes. Orpheus had tried to stop the bleeding, had fallen to his knees on the cobblestones and clasped his hands around his brother’s throat, a futile effort to plug the seemingly endless leaks, and watched in what he dimly recognised as horror as his brother’s life-force leaked out between his fingers, staining his hands and the pavement below a tragic crimson.

As they watched the rich boy run away, face contorted into an expression of disgustingly entitled horror, no doubt seeking the protection of his parents and their wealth, Orpheus felt the walls of his heart close up completely, so that no feeling could ever again be let through. He shouldn’t have cried, for rulers never wept at the demise of their subjects, merely strode out amongst the common people and found new followers to take the place of the fallen, but the eldest and now only Ahulani brother allowed himself to shed a single tear that day. He hadn’t loved his brother in the conventional way, in the way that families are supposed to adore one another, but he had felt something akin to his own brand of love.

Hermes had never been much of a thief, had always been impulsive, loud-mouthed, capricious, all qualities that Orpheus manifestly disliked and had eradicated from his own personality. He laughed too much and stopped far too little, never waited to check what was around the corner, told his deepest secrets to just about any stranger with a kind enough face, and couldn’t hold his drink. They were polar opposites, these brothers, and Orpheus should have disdained his younger brother utterly, should have shown him nothing but contempt - after all, that was how he treated others whom he deemed unworthy. But the bonds of family are a strange thing, and whilst Orpheus cared little for his parents and grandparents, seeing them only as tools to help him build the world he craved, Hermes had always represented the people for whom he was trying to build this better world. Orpheus had never exhibited much kindness or goodness but he recognised its abundance in his younger brother, and despite himself he felt the need to see that goodness preserved, felt an obligation to create a realm in which his brother could lead the life that he deserved. Of all the people that he knew, and of all the people he would ever meet, Hermes was the only one Orpheus Ahulani had loved, and he didn’t deserve to have met his end before he’d even become a man, at the hands of a coward who had nothing to show for his life but money.

Before that fateful fay he’d been happy to let the elite lead their own gilded lives, as long as they didn’t get in his way, but as he watched his brother die Orpheus realised that the wealthy didn’t deserve to be ignored. They deserved to be BURNED, and he’d be damned if he didn’t see it happen.

But the path to vengeance is never smooth, and for the first (and only) time in his life Orpheus was careless enough to let his rage cloud his better judgement.

It played out like a scene from an Oscar-winning film about the callousness of the wealthy, and the Ahulanis were all too crippled by their mourning to look up and see it coming. First the coroner ruled young Hermes’ death as accidental, having the gall to call the brat’s selfish action self-defence. Then witnesses began to fall curiously silent, saying that they hadn’t seen a thing, that all they had seen was the young poor boy picking a needless fight, that perhaps he deserved what he got, each of them singing to the rich family’s tune. The police were similarly uncooperative, muttering about the prevalence of crime in poorer neighbourhoods, the victim’s prior pattern of behaviour, the fact that he was known for being violent. One by one, each piece of the puzzle slid into place, until Hermes’ case was encircled by an impenetrable wall of bodies itching to exonerate Raffaello Brazzi at the behest of his parents. Outrage spread through the Ahulani ranks like wildfire, fuelled by a desire to see their son’s memory preserved, and when an emissary from Giuseppe Brazzi came knocking, offering the family their weight in gold if they were willing to chalk their son’s death up to a tragic accident, if they would just let bygones be bygones, Joseph Ahulani told the man exactly where he could shove his bribe. Orpheus had wanted to raze the Brazzi family to the ground from the beginning, to make sure that none of them ever drew breath again, but his mother, still on a perverse quest to reform her once criminal life, begged him to let them do things the right way, to try and build a legal case, and against his better judgement Orpheus ceded to her demands.

They must have banked on them all being home that day, must not have foreseen the possibility of Orpheus going out every day to search for new evidence. The fire was already out of control by the time he returned home, and he watched amber flames as tall as trees surge through the old building, a deathly cavalry tearing everything to pieces, a ravenous monster leaving no life in its wake. Had Hermes still been alive, had his brother been in the burning structure, Orpheus might have thrown caution to the wind and run inside to save him, but now he stood rooted to his spot, watching mutely as firefighters attempted to combat the unconquerable blaze, watching and watching and feeling nothing in his heart but anger.

Orpheus Ahulani was twenty-six years old and in the space of three weeks had lost all the family he’d ever known, and knew as he watched his childhood home, his ancestry, go up in flames, that he had been right all along, that his mother’s utopian desire for justice was untenable in a world such as this one, where the wealthy elite did nothing but take, smashing up people and things in their way without a second thought.

He wasn’t a religious man but in that moment he thanked whatever deity it was that had kept him alive, that had given him this purpose, and knew that no matter how far they ran or how well they tried to hide, the Brazzi family had signed away their lives the minute his brother had drawn his final breath. The wealthy were not afraid of anything except damaging their reputations, but Orpheus knew that his destiny was to make them experience real fear.

Orpheus was twenty-six years old, and he was coming for them.

[four] - R E T R I B U T I O N ;;

They didn’t run. It wasn’t a surprise, in the end, given that they thought their secret had been burnt to a crisp with the Ahulani home. A more patient man would have plotted his line of attack, would have ensured that there was no way for them to harm him, but Orpheus knew that he was indomitable, that the fact that he was the last Ahulani left alive made him untouchable by human hands. Ever one for boldness and grand gestures, he strode through the front doors of the Brazzi mansion with a machine gun slung over his shoulder and seated himself at the head of their dining table, and let the members of the family he hated most in the world crawl to his side, quivering like frightened sewer rats. He made no verbal or physical threats, didn’t utter a single word, in fact, merely sat there with his assault rifle lying on the table for all to see and cleaned his nails with a pocket knife.

The implication was clear.

Giuseppe Brazzi hid behind his wife’s skirts and shook with fear, and after what felt like a century of petrified silence his voice, cracked and weedy, echoed across the empty room.

“We’ll give you money,” he stammered, “more money that you could ever dream of.”

(He was wrong, because Orpheus had never been a dreamer but he could dream up quite a lot.)

“How much do you want?”

The silence as they awaited his reply was deafening, the response even more so.

“All of it.”

“All of it? You must be joking. Who the fuck do you think I am?”

Orpheus didn’t even deign to look at the old man, merely laid his knife on the table. His terms were simple.

“You took everything from me, I shouldn’t have to remind you of that.” Expression as blank and unfeeling as slate, he picked up the gun, caressing the trigger with a macabre kind of reverence. “All I have to do is squeeze.” Finally, he made eye contact with the Brazzi patriarch, and the fire burning in his green eyes made the man visibly wilt. “Who the fuck do you think I am?”

They should never have underestimated him. He was Orpheus, the last Ahulani, he walked in shadow and in flame, the prince who would one day rule the criminal underworld which had shaped him. He was the Devil’s advocate, his messenger, his brother, the same blood pulsed in his veins as had once flowed through the body of the first fallen angel. Marianna Brazzi hurled a litany of curses at him as he stripped her husband of his entire fortune, damned him a thousand times to the fiery pits of hell, and as Orpheus walked away from that house with all the money in the world he smiled Satan’s smile because he knew that her words had no power over him, that if there was damnation to come he would welcome it with open arms and an open heart. The Brazzis hoped fervently that it would be enough, that their riches would be enough to pacify the beast, to fill the void and guarantee his distance from them (his silence had been guaranteed long ago, the minute they chose to set his family ablaze). They should never have underestimated him.

It was not enough, Orpheus knew that from the moment they offered him the money. It would never be enough. He was not the kind man that so many of Verona’s poor made him out to be, he was not their saviour, their symbol, their martyr. The only pyre he would ever throw himself on was his own, and only when he was ready to leave the world that he had barely had the chance to make his mark on yet. It would never be enough. There was only one punishment that befit this crime, only one way to repay the bastards that had taken everything from him. He was good at stripping people of everything they held dear, of everything they loved, and this would be his magnum opus, his greatest theft. The Brazzi family had played with fire, and it was FIRE that would let them know the magnitude of their mistake.

Orpheus wouldn’t just fiddle whilst Rome burnt. He would conduct a whole fucking orchestra.

He came with darkness as his cloak, ensuring that the whole family was in one place before he acted, making sure that he didn’t make the same mistake they had. Once again, he strode in through the front door, but this time he had no gun on him, only a box of matches and a knife and the Devil’s hellfire in his heart. There were nine of them in the house - parents and seven children, and they all paid the price, because the question of their innocence had been rendered utterly void when they did everything they could to sweep his brother’s life under the carpet.

He made them bleed that night, stained the walls and the floors and the priceless antiques with vermillion and crimson and every other shade of red imaginable. He was an artist, like Jackson Pollock splashing the surface of the world, with the Brazzi home as his canvas and their blood as his paint. He took his sweet time with each family member, carving his rage and his revenge into their bodies, making sure that they were all awake to see the look in his eyes as he killed them, so that his face was the last thing they saw on this earth. Almost poetic, in a way; the most lyrical Orpheus had ever been in his life.

Raffaello was the last to die, a fate he had sealed for himself the minute he chose to raise his hand and end Hermes’ life. Orpheus let him crawl from his bedroom into the corridor, watched him leave a trail of blood behind him as he tried to drag his body away, and felt nothing more for the teenager than he would feel for a slug that had crawled into his path. The last thing Raffaello ever saw was the slow approach of Orpheus’ black boots and the twisted expression of cruelty on his blood-flecked face. Lying there, surrounded by his own blood and the blood of his relatives, Raffaello Brazzi, murderer and coward, started to cry, and amidst his sobs he looked up at Orpheus and begged.

“Please, please, please, God, have mercy!”

“Mercy?” All Orpheus could do was laugh, the sound bitter and piercing in the mansion’s cavernous halls, lips contorting into an expression of pure disgust. “My brother might have shown you mercy. No, the only thing I can give you, the only thing you deserve, is my name. I am ORPHEUS AHULANI,” he proclaimed, raising the knife one last time. “Never forget it.”

[five] - E N D U R A N C E ;;

An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, one fire for another. Orpheus torched their mansion to the ground, obliterating their family from the face of the Earth and making sure that no one by the name of Brazzi would ever darken the streets of his city again. He walked away from the burning wreckage with his head held high, proud frame silhouetted against a background of embers and flame, knowing that he would never face judgement for the crime he had committed (although he didn’t see it as such - to him, his actions were entirely justified, completely necessary, for there had been filth in his life and it had been successfully purged). Anyone who knew anything about Hermes Ahulani’s murder and the subsequent cover-up believed that he was dead, thought his whole family had been erased in order to let a killer go free simply because of his wealth. Orpheus knew that he was untouchable, and that finally the stage had been cleared for his life’s greatest work to begin.

He began slowly but confidently, disseminating news of his survival throughout the streets on which he had grown up. The paupers of Verona had been mourning their fallen prince, had feared the demise of their Robin Hood at the hands of the wealthy he stole from, and they were overjoyed to hear that their hero had been preserved, claimed that it was his virtue that had rescued him from the deadly inferno that had stolen his beloved family from them. Orpheus could have laughed at the irony of being presumed to be virtuous, but he let the rumour spread, let the streets ripple with rejoicing and relief, knowing that this jubilation would raise up a horde of soldiers for him. He whispered in all the right ears, smiled at all the right people, and used the outrage that had spread through the community upon the death of his family to galvanise the loyalty of every woman, man and child he laid his eyes on. The fortune he’d acquired wasn’t spent on himself, instead he began to dip into the pot of the vast wealth he’d suddenly accumulated to further magnify the people’s adoration, making sure that his charity was never too overt, that nothing more was ever said about his power than the odd whispered phrase. Even the fight club he established went unnoticed by all but the most hardened of Verona’s citizens, its most masochistic residents, coasting through the city’s underworld under the unassuming name of Measure by Measure, but to those who moved in the right circles the violence Orpheus’ snake-pit harboured was legendary. It was better this way, to be king from the shadows. It made him stronger.

He was only twenty-six and already more powerful than most men could become in five lifetimes, let alone one, and the whispers about him grew louder and louder, sparks that eventually ignited a forest fire of speculation, of mystery. Fires demand to be seen, to be heard, and one by one the influential figures in Verona began to take notice. Many approached him with offers of treaties and alliances, hoping that by taming Hades they could make his Underworld dance to their tune, but Orpheus knew the value of the kingdom he was poised to rule and the music that he wanted it to play, and so he turned each of them away, these men and women who claimed to be powerful, seeing through their charades of lies and always wanting something more.

It was a rainy day in October when Cosimo Capulet requested a meeting, and as he strode into the Cathedral, hair damp from the deluge outside, Orpheus knew that the right offer had finally come knocking on his door.

It was the first time he’d been into church to do anything other than steal, although equally illicit deeds were about to be performed under the Lord’s watchful gaze, bargains between the dark and the even darker, a treaty between two black kings who had each removed the white knights who threatened to stand in their way. Cosimo was shorter than Orpheus had expected, and with something of a wry smile he imagined that his brother would have informed the Capulet boss of that fact before he’d even sat down.

“Mister Ahulani, good of you to come.”

Orpheus acknowledged the pleasantry with a brief cant of the head, but didn’t bother to respond.

“Let’s make one thing very clear: if you’re here to offer me some hollow alliance, a way to take what I’ve built and sweep me to one side as soon as you get the chance, I’m walking out of here. The streets are no place for a man from your background, and you will never be able to control them like I can, no matter how much money or how many guns you have. We both know that you need me a lot more than I need you, Mr. Capulet, so go ahead, make your offer. I know you’re a smart man.”

Cosimo had to smile at that, knowing that his instinct about this young man had been correct. “My offer is simple, Orpheus, if I may call you that…” he trailed off, then, pausing to savour his triumph. “A good name you’ve got there. I like it.” Suddenly, he remembered himself, still smiling. “Yes, my offer is very simple: I want to give you the keys to a kingdom. Your kingdom. You can rule the underworld of Verona,” he intoned, sounding every inch the emperor he was, “you can rule it — with my hand to guide you.”

Outside, he could see the city lights sparkling through the stained glass. The rain had all but stopped, and Orpheus felt like he was flying.

“So what do you say?”

They’d both known the answer to the question the minute they’d laid eyes on one another, but Orpheus felt triumphant enough to say it anyway.

“Yes.”

[six] - C O M P L E T I O N ;;

And so Cosimo Capulet opened the gates that Orpheus had been longing to see open for as long as he could remember. With the might of the Capulet name behind him, he acceded to the throne that he was always born to sit on, knowing that Cosimo was intelligent enough to keep his distance, that he would never interfere. But even the king of kings could not know the extent of the ambition that lurked in Orpheus’ heart, a volcano of energy and zeal that was lying safely dormant, waiting for the perfect opportunity to erupt. For all the bullets in the world, he had weapons that were just as powerful - passion, emotion, the kind of burning fanaticism that only those who have nothing can muster. He accepted backing from the Capulets, played their game when they wanted him to, all the while conducting his own ruthless chess match in the shadows their eyes could not reach.

One day, he knew, he would build up the force to throw off the shackles of Verona’s elite, and so he bided his time, content to play the long game until such a time as it felt right to act.

But can a king ever really rule without someone by his side, without an ally of sorts, another half? Orpheus had had many lovers and companions throughout the course of his life, but none had captured his fancy for more than a fleeting instant, none of them could ever be considered worthy, and then he met Theodora Moreau in a hotel bar one night and the final piece of the puzzle seemed to have fallen into place.

It was not love that drew them together across a crowded room - love was for children, and idiots - but necessity, a flame that danced and sparked and seemed to hypnotise them both. He had heard them spoken of throughout the underworld and indeed above ground, had been privy to many whispers of the street kid who had risen beyond the stars, and the rumours had piqued his interest. He was in a corner booth at the bar in the Hotel Emelia, enjoying the low lighting and the whispered secrets that floated over to his ears from neighbouring tables, when he felt eyes on him and saw that they was standing directly in front of him. “You want to have sex with me,” they informed him curtly, lips pursed and head tilted contemplatively to one side, and Orpheus had to allow himself a laugh at their brashness. They were even more perceptive than he’d imagined. He had been watching them for most of the evening, out of the corner of his eye, allowing his gaze to drift with pleasure over their perfect form and that face, those eyes that were far more intelligent than he suspected many gave them credit for, finding himself drawn like moth to flame.

“Yes,” he answered, responding to openness with openness, quite enjoying this game to which they both seemed to know all the rules, “but a name would be nice, first. We are civilised people, after all.”

They looked him up and down with a hint of disdain (and damn, he was sold already), clearly thinking ‘well I, at least, am civilised, whether you are or not remains to be seen’, but seemed to deem him worthy of more than just an anonymous fuck in the hotel bathroom and sat down at his table instead. “Theodora Moreau.” They didn’t offer him their hand but he took it anyway, enjoying the way they shivered slightly as he brushed a kiss against their knuckles.

“Orpheus Ahulani.”

“It’s a pleasure,” they responded, withdrawing their hand back to their side, and for the life of him Orpheus couldn’t figure out why they were doing him the courtesy of such trivial pleasantries, but was mightily, mightily glad that they were.

“No,” he responded, taking a sip of his red wine and grinning, cat-like, in the half-light. “The pleasure is all mine.”

. PARA SAMPLE TWO .

[[TW: VIOLENCE, BLOOD, MINOR GORE]]

He doesn’t fight often.

It’s not for lack of wanting (oh, how the desire sings in his blood, how his veins thrum with it, that urge that pulses just beneath the surface of his skin, always threatening to tip, tip, tip over into actual violence, a beast that waits impatiently within its cage and scratches at the bars to find release), but rather simple practicality – in any conflict to be settled upon the edge of a fist, he will walk away the victor every time, he knows, and Orpheus enjoys the thrill of winning but there’s a limit to how many predictable victories he can stomach before they come to bore him.

So for the most part he keeps his fists down, lets his stature and the glint of savagery in his eyes halt even the most foolhardy of opponents in their tracks.He doesn’t fight often, but when he does, there’s something almost Biblical about it, something perversely, crudely elegant.

This is no different.

Measure by Measure isn’t the usual place he chooses to hold his court, but there’s a certain urgent matter that demands to be dealt with by means other than simple, verbal intimidation, and the dramatist in Orpheus can’t think of a more fitting place.

There’s a fool stood snivelling before him, with bloodshot eyes fixed firmly on the ground, and Orpheus looks up at him from the armchair he’s sat in with just the faintest hint of cruel amusement. A spy, from a neighbouring city, sent to size up Orpheus’ kingdom and see if there’s room for a hostile takeover, no doubt sent to see if, in his association with Cosimo Capulet, the King beneath Verona’s streets has grown at all soft.

He hasn’t.

(His doubters will come to rue the day they ever had such thoughts.)

“You made a mistake, coming here,” Orpheus says, and although his voice isn’t raised it somehow booms in the small space between them. “You might just live to regret it.”

Once the warning has hung in the air for long enough he stands from his throne, rolls his shoulders and smiles almost cordially, then curls his hand into a fist and lets it fly at the man’s face. Predictably, his opponent crumples to the ground from the sheer force of the blow, and Orpheus chuckles darkly at the sight.

“Is that it?” he queries, looking at the other man down his nose, amusement lacing every syllable of the challenge. “I thought they made you tougher in Padua.”

They’re exactly the right words to say, he knows, because the man scrambles instantly to his feet, jaw set and shoulders squared, fists clenched so tightly his knuckles begin to widen, and Orpheus can feel the familiar sense of ecstasy begin to pool at the tips of his fingers as he takes in the full sight of the opponent opposite him, sees the other man’s wounded pride and blind fury fuel him, and lets it fill him to the brim with purpose.

This man is big (six foot two, perhaps more), but as always Orpheus is bigger, broader, and when the first fist comes swinging his way he takes half a step back and catches the hand in his own broad palm, trapping it in a cage of fingers, and panic flares up in the other man’s eyes because he knows, because he can sense full well what punishment is coming his way. There’s a wild, wicked grin that slashes across Orpheus’ face, carving up his visage into fragments of splintered cruelty, and with a frenzied look in his eyes he begins to apply pressure slowly, squeezing, squeezing until he hears the click-pop-crunch of bones shattering into a myriad of tiny shards, until he feels the hand trapped in his own disintegrate beneath his iron grip, and the howls of pain that accompany the vicelike movement of his hand sound like a victory fanfare.

His eyes are set ablaze in gleeful satisfaction, burning with all the intensity of a forest fire, and Orpheus releases the mewling man’s hand with a hum of joy, reaching out instead to grab him by the collar of his shirt. “You asked for this,” is the reminder that drops from his lips before he whips his head back and brings it crashing forward, and the fleshy crunching sound he hears is indication enough that he’s hit his mark. The blow leaves him feeling dazed as well, but somehow that only makes the experience more pleasurable, and as he leans back to admire the damage done Orpheus feels a familiar euphoria coursing through his veins. One hand drops to his side, then, a feigned show of reprieve, and he waits until a hint of relief begins to cloud the other man’s gaze before snapping his fist up again, ensuring that it connects squarely with the centre of his victim’s face.

After the third, fourth, fifth punch he stops counting, and it’s only when the blood begins to trickle in scarlet rivulets down the back of his hand that the king decides he’s had his fill, only then that he deigns to release his prisoner and sends him dropping to the ground below as though he were nothing more than feather-light.

(The only sound still audible in the gloom of the basement is the muted rise and fall of the Devil’s breathing.)

There’s something beautiful about this, he thinks, looking down at his handiwork from above, something picturesque about the mottled flecks of blood, the blue-black bruises that trace the outline of fractured bones and crumpled cartilage, and as he kneels down in the dust beside his victim Orpheus thinks he understands how the Old Masters felt when they stood back and knew that they’d produced a masterpiece.

“Tell your friends what happened here today,” he intones, lips forming around the words in a way that’s almost tender, as though he were addressing a protege or an accomplice rather than the broken bag of bones that lies spreadeagled before him, and lifts up a hand to pat the man ever so gently on a cheekbone he knows is shattered. “Tell them that the underworld of Verona is not for sale, tell them from me that next time any of you come back here,” his voice is low, now, hissing, eyes so dark they’re almost obsidian, “I will end you. All of you. You think the Capulets, the Montagues, they’re the ones to be afraid of in this city?” A laugh, then, that rasps like a knife being unsheathed, “Tell your pathetic little friends they’re WRONG.”

. PARA SAMPLE THREE .

[[TW: VIOLENCE, MENTIONS OF DEATH, BLOOD]]

– THE PAST IS A FOREIGN COUNTRY; THEY DO THINGS DIFFERENTLY THERE

One day there will be an argument in a quiet town square.

There will be two men present, two brothers. They will be completely different. They will be the best of friends.

One of them will be involved in the argument. The other will drink beer nearby, not watching because he will think that it is safe. He will have made the same assumption before, and on most days he will have been right. This time, he will be wrong. This will cost him dearly.

One of them will fall to the ground, and the well of red in his throat will gurgle every time he takes a breath. The other will be on his knees beside him, palms wrapped around the deluge. His hands are big, but they will seem too small.

Eventually, the well will dry.

The other one, the one who is not drained of crimson, the one who is a great thief with a cold heart and a fondness for shadow, will go into chrysalis, will burn. Out of his husk will rise a beast with a gaping maw and claws that will always slice at the jugular. Out of the flame will walk a demon whose greatest talent is tearing out hearts and stamping on them till they burst. As he rises to his feet in the piazza, reborn, he will smear his bloodied hands across his face and know what it means to taste failure.He will not taste it again.

But this is not that story, not yet. This is the story of everything that comes before, and some things that come after.

*  *  *

Two little boys play on a dirty street. The big one leads, the little one follows. Everything the first does is mirrored in perfect miniature. This is idolatry at is most pure.

“Can there be a good guy, this time?” The little voice tinkles like a jingle bell. “There are never any good guys.”

In the distance, thunder rumbles. The bigger voice has dropped already to the crash of cymbals. Green eyes are kinder now than when strangers see them. Fat drops of rain begin to fall. A big hand cups a small wet cheek. Two sets of feet are bare, beginning to turn sticky grey with dust.

“You can be the good guy, if you like.” Somewhere, a lightning flash. It seems to cast the world in black and white. “But you won’t win.”

*  *  *

A child is left alone with a baby. He is trusted to keep watch.In the next room, the bed creaks, and his mother mumbles his father’s name. Other children might be confused by the strange sounds, but he has heard them enough times to understand. That is what adults do when they are happy. Or angry, or sad, or lonely.

(Sometimes, he will learn later, when they feel nothing at all.)

He looks at the bundle of blankets next to him. The Thing in there is pink and wrinkled and its little mouth is curled into a perfect circle. The boy is happy, because he knows that this perfection will keep his parents satisfied, will give them the loving son that he never wanted to be.

“What is this?” he asks when they bring the infant in to show him, dark eyebrows pulled down into a knot. He knows the answer, he is a clever boy, but some part of him still does not quite understand.

“His name is Hermes,” his mother gushes, eyes awash with a hollow innocence. “Your little brother.”

The boy blinks. His mouth charts the line of the horizon. “And what is he for?”

When the creaking gets too loud he stands up to close the door, and rolls his eyes because he is always the one who has to close it. He stands over the little bundle, holds his pointer finger out.

Five little fingers, fat and pink like worms, reach out and trap it in a rosy vice. Suddenly, the boy feels something warm spread inside him, to the left of his body where he knows his heart is. Suddenly, he understands.

He will keep the baby safe. And in return, the baby will make his heart warm. No one else has managed to do that yet.

It seems a fair exchange, and the boy is satisfied. He does not move his finger until he has counted to ten thousand. Even then it does not seem like long enough.

He does not tell anyone about this silent bargain, and when they come to take the baby to his nursery the boy glares at them until they back away. His parents do not understand why, but they let him move the cradle into his own bedroom. Their son is nine years old but there is not much they can do to resist. His will is iron, a hardness openly defiant of the fact he has not yet lost all his milk teeth. The boy does not explain himself.

His parents are not important enough to know such things.

*  *  *

Mother and Father are fighting again. Throats hoarse from screaming, curses no longer muffled for the sake of the children. Hot, angry tears stain cold, angry faces.

“Why are they arguing?” the younger one asks, eyes big like saucers, round with not understanding.

The older one watches, stony-faced. In the doorway of the kitchen, lit only from above, he is carved from granite.“Because love is not real.”

*  *  *

The little boy runs everywhere after his brother, wings on his sandals. He does not stop even when he falls and skins his knee. He does cry, little face overcast and squeezed with pain, but he gets up and keeps running. It is a resilience that his protector has taught him.

“‘Feus, ‘Feus.” He could talk a stranger’s ear off, but the three syllables of his brother’s name are still out of his reach. “Wait for me.”

But he does not wait. Today, he is impatient.

“I thought you were big enough to keep up.”

Behind him, a sob. He stops. The pastries they have stolen warm his hands through the paper bag. They do not go hungry, though. They steal because they can.

(He will give half of them to the beggar-man with the black cat who sits in the market, and the money they did not spend will be dropped into the hands of the blind woman who is bad at telling fortunes. Charity is not something he enjoys, but neither is suffering. And loyalty comes cheaply in places of such poverty.)

He sighs. In the cafe, a waitress spills a jug of milk.“You promised to tell me. What was it like?”

Someone tries to clean up the spill. The wind steals away their napkins, carries them into the street. Two pigeons are disturbed, and they stop fighting to take wing, leaving messy, torn out feathers in a little pile.

He sighs again. He had sex for the first time yesterday.

His brother still plays with toy soldiers. He is too young to know what desire feels like. ‘Feus chooses the words he knows his brother wants to hear.

“I was good at it.”

*  *  *

The baby goes everywhere with a sentinel, an escort with dark, wild hair and gritted teeth. Wherever the infant squalls, watchful green eyes are not far away. The infant’s parents love their new arrival because he is innocent, and they cherish him. But his true guardian knows already that their dotage is not good enough. Already, he has drawn up battle plans.

Already, he is marshalling his family around him, pronouncing orders to make sure that he gets what he wants and that they are useful, always.

They listen, because he has the look of unfettered temptation about him, because when those eyes are turned on to their brightest they cannot say no. He is not much more than a decade old, but already he could entice them all to their doom. He knows this.

To mark the passing of ten years, his eyes acquire a fire. It is not the flaming matchstick-end there was before, but rather a pair of coals set into a cunning face. A face that already looks a little wicked in the right lighting. The first time he gives a command and it is obeyed, a boy-king is born.

Soon he is not a boy at all.

*  *  *

(Compare two things; one fruit left out in the sun to rot, and another wrapped lovingly in cellophane, hidden in the fridge to save its ripeness. Which one is good, which one bad? Who is at fault? Do you know the answer?)

The boys are older now. One of them plays in dirty streets, still. The other watches, pockets heavy with other people’s possessions. He wears the title of man, now. (He has worn it for much longer than he should.) He should be disappointed.

Today was the first time he felt someone’s bones break beneath his fists. He can still remember the sight, the sound, clear like the reflection on the surface of a pond. He wants to describe it all to the boy playing football in the dust, because he knows that he will be proud no matter what.

He pulls the cuff of his sleeve down to hide the blood on his wrist.

The younger one sees his brother. Happiness paints his face golden. “Join me?” he asks.

The football rolls towards him slowly. Green eyes are cold when they examine it. He wants to stab it with the knife at his back.

(Compare those two things. The distinction seems simple. But the thing that no one ever tells you is that the rotten fruit rolled away from the plastic wrapping of its own volition. Do you know the answer now?

Yes. The answer is clearer than before. Now you know the bad created itself.

Does that scare you?)

He kicks it back instead.He should be disappointed, but somehow all he feels is the warmth of that gold face.

This is the only soul to whom he will never be cruel.

*  *  *

The gravestone is too small.It needs to be, so that no one will know the magnitude of his outrage. He needs to seem indomitable.

With steady hands, he reaches into his chest and tears out his own heart. It is small and black and shrivelled and is not beating and the earth is cool under his fingers as he lays it beside the casket.

The gravestone is small, and that is right. Now no-one knows that one-and-a-half hearts have made this their final resting place.

He wishes the gravestone could be bigger. His grief, impossibly large for a moment, has dulled to a quiet pinprick at the back of his skull. He has suppressed it well, but it is a wound that he will carry always.

Only one other person will ever know this.

The rest of his family are buried somewhere else. He does not stop to remember where. He remembers the priest crying when he told him that he did not care.

*  *  *

One night he drinks too much. The air around him dissolves into mirage, and he is greeted by the sight of a familiar face, older than when he last saw it.

“You’re here,” he says, tongue thick and heavy with not just alcohol.

There is a small smile on the other’s face. A sad smile.

“I’m dead, brother. Can’t you see?”

“Oh.” He tastes ash in his mouth, all of a sudden, the ash of a burned-down house, and when he looks at his hands through quaking lashes there is blood on them again.

Can’t you see?

Next time he drinks too much he kills three people, and it doesn’t matter if they deserved it or not because at least now the blood on his hands does not belong to a ghost.

*  *  *

Two little boys play on a dirty street. They could not be more opposite, and yet they are the best of friends.

The curtain rises on their little game. As always, they are head and heart. One thinks and the other feels. It is a simple division of resources. Both are content.

They do not play cops and robbers, or cowboys and indians. The older one has a mind like a puzzle box, it will not allow for anything less than intricacy.

“Today you will be emperor of Rome. I will be your advisor, and I will teach you how to sack Carthage.”

“Why don’t you want to be the emperor? You are bigger than me.”

The younger one is fair, always. It is a consequence of the light that bleeds from his heart. Because of this light, he can never understand what the older one schemes about at night-time. The older one is glad of this. He remembers the fat, pink fingers and round little circle mouth and knows that this innocence must never be allowed to fade.

Because an emperor has no real power, is what he wants to say. Because influence is spread by acquiring loyalty, not by tyranny. An advisor with his ear open to secrets can rule the kingdom much better than a despot could ever hope to.

“Because you hold a sword better than me.”

The younger one smiles. It swallows his whole face. He has three big gaps where teeth should be.

The curtain falls.

Extras:

FACTFILE: [TW: VIOLENCE, SCARS, ALCOHOL, SMOKING] sexuality: pansexual. Romance has always been easy for him, for even if it weren’t for his impressive muscle mass and the sculpted shape of his face, he has enough charm to seduce even the most stoical of people. Women, men, and everything in between, flock to him in their droves, all eager to experience for themselves exactly what Verona’s Underworld king tastes like. Orpheus is gleeful in the way that he receives his lovers, welcoming each and every one with the cunning smile of a predator and the promise of sin written plainly in his eyes and across his mouth. He’s never disrespectful, although it might be expected from someone whose liaisons never last longer than a few days, instead always attentive, obliging, but always firmly in control, always in possession of all his faculties, and there’s something so entrancing about the way in which he goes about his romantic life that leaves all of his conquests unable to hate him even when they part ways, for it is clear to them from the start that this is a man whom they will never be able to tie down, that he belongs to no one but himself, and that any entanglement they have with him is fleeting at best. The rules of the game are always laid bare for all to read, and even though most people should run for the hills when faced with the proposition Orpheus puts to them, for some inexplicable, paradoxical reason it only makes the objects of his… interest want him all the more. The closest anyone’s ever come to tying him down is Theodora, of course, and even they cannot keep hold of him for longer than a few successive days, for each time the wind changes he is gone, blown away by the breeze like dust in a storm. He doesn’t love Theodora, and knows that they don’t love him back, and anyone who looks at the two of them closely would be forgiven for mistaking their relation for hatred, or at least contempt, but it’s as close as Orpheus could ever come to what the world might see as a traditional romance. He doesn’t love them but he needs them to breathe, needs them to keep his world spinning on its usual axis, and when people point out to him that that looks a lot like love, he shakes his head and rolls his eyes and says no it isn’t, that’s life, that’s something as fundamental as existence. date of birth: 19 November 1977, zodiac Scorpio. place of birth:Verona, Italy. nationality: Italian. ethnicity: Half Native Hawaiian, half a mixture of German, Irish and Native American. parents: Joseph Ahulani, father [deceased]; Katherine Ahulani (nee O’Leary), mother [deceased]. siblings: Hermes Ahulani, brother [deceased]. languages: English, Italian, some French and Spanish. height: 6′ 5″. weight: 230 lbs. hair colour: Dark brown/black. eye colour: Green. distinguishing features: The first thing you notice is his stature, all 6′5″ of him. This is a hulk of a man, more mountain than actual person, with broad shoulders and big arms and enough pectoral muscle for two men. You’d be forgiven for assuming that he was not of this earth, sculpted from some alien material and sent to Earth to show humanity just what it’s missing, and for the half-step back you take when you’re confronted with him, the air of apprehension that suddenly overtakes event he bravest and most foolhardy of souls. This is not a man to anger, not a man to insult. Then, once you’ve taken that step back, once your eyes are able to fully comprehend the titan before you, then the beauty of his features becomes apparent, the chiselled definition of his facial bones and the smooth, flowing lines of the rest of his body, so that he seems almost carved from marble, a Classical sculpture of Heracles, perhaps, or Ares, god of war, a model of virility and masculine strength. But he is not all brawn and brute force, and in fact there’s something oddly graceful about the way he moves, a grace that should not be possible for a man his size, a fluidity that speaks to years learning how to part people from their life’s possessions, years spent running and dancing through the streets of the only home he’s ever known, the only home he’ll ever need. Then there’s the hair, of course, the lion’s mane, black and brown, untameable, wavy locks stretching this way and that, somehow both impossibly tangled and immaculately sleek at the same time. This is a natural disaster of a man, some might say, hurricane and earthquake all wrapped up in one, with a frenzied wildness in his khaki eyes that cannot be contained by conventional human boundaries, and the kind of look on his face that lets you know that if he chose to conquer the world singlehandedly, he’d damn well do it, and there would be perilously few who could stand in his way. distinguishing modifications: It’s hard not to notice the tattoo when you first meet him, the thick, curling bracelet that snakes across his left forearm, a looping cuff of tribal patterns that entwine with each other, a maze of thick, black lines seemingly without a start of end point, a labyrinth of ink. When asked about it, about what it all means, Orpheus simply shrugs and turns his head away, unwilling to give up the secrets of his body to just anyone, knowing that his taciturn silence likely adds to the enigmatic, inscrutable persona he’s managed to cultivate for himself, the kind of reputation that means people will think twice about underestimating him, that will leave them always yearning for an explanation that they will never quite receive. The answer, the meaning, lies far in his past, beyond Italy’s dusty, chalky shores, in that gold-tinged time of his ancestors’ pasts when the world was still full of bright horizons, when they were bathed in love and light and sand, in that wholesome idyll the Ahulani line inhabited in a land far away from this one. The designs are tribal, Hawaiian, his father’s favourite pattern, steeped in tradition and legend. The twisting lines were Joseph’s only connection to the island he and his parents left behind, and, ever one to be intrigued by beautiful things (and seeking in his heart to see that beauty either raised to the heavens or crushed under the heel of his boot), Orpheus found himself captivated by the looping tendrils his father would sometimes draw, as though conjuring smoke out of thin air, the image staying in his mind long after the paper had been crumpled and set ablaze, Joseph’s attempt to purge the yearning he felt for his homeland. “Remember your heritage,” Orpheus’ father used to whisper to him sometimes, when the light of day had faded and the hallucinatory effect of moonlight afforded the man the opportunity to be sentimental, “remember your past.” Orpheus had never been one for sentiment, even as a boy, and would turn his head away from Joseph and his dreaming, but there was something elemental about the images his father conjured up that pressed on his imagination. As soon as he was old enough for his first ink (fourteen isn’t the usual age for a tattoo, but Orpheus wanted one and wasn’t in the habit of not getting what he wanted), the design he was to get seemed plainly obvious to him, a pointed and knowing departure from the skulls and guns that his peers spoke of in hushed and excited tones, eager to prove their virility by displaying an overt connection to violence. But Orpheus was not an insecure man, and so he avoided the trappings of boyhood machismo, instead emphatically selecting something traditional, rooted in the earth and the sun and the sky, something to ground him but also to raise him beyond the grind of everyday life and everyday people, no matter how much of a symbol he was to them. He looks at the markings not as a symbol of longing, of homesickness for a home he has never known, but instead a reminder of the reason that he’s here, of the reason his father’s family left the shores of Hawaii behind and took their illicit trade to Europe, the task that sits upon his shoulders as reigning king to expand the empire his grandparents and parents began to carve out of the stone of Verona’s houses and streets. It’s an embodiment of the fact that he is striving for something, that there is a goal in sight, that once the filth that encrusts the top of the society he lives in is washed away those relegated to the bottom of the pyramid will be able to rise up, that he is a conqueror in his own right, and that no matter how much the rich and powerful might wish it, he cannot be stopped. birthmarks: His skin, sun-browned and far smoother than you’d expect from someone who had spent his life on the streets, is almost unblemished, a rich, even shade somewhere between golden and olive, evidence of years spent out in the open in Mediterranean climes. He has one birthmark, on the back of his left knee, a small, oval blotch two shades darker than the skin surrounding it. It’s unremarkable to look at, and unnoticeable unless you’re really looking, but it’s one of the few discolourations on the canvas of Orpheus’ skin. scars: His frame is marked by scars, as you might expect, because he’s not invincible and he’s damn well not a saint, and he would never hesitate before throwing himself headfirst into the path of an oncoming fight if it could serve his own cause. But even with this in mind, his skin is relatively free of visible, arresting marks, as though in this sphere of his life too the Fates have smiled upon him, and absolved his flesh of all but a few scars. Most of the wounds he’s sustained over the course of his life have healed, most of the injuries that have befallen him have proved not to be serious, or at least, not as serious as the damage he has done to whoever dared to harm him in the first place. The few notable exceptions to this generally scar-free existence are all markings that he’s as proud of as he is his tattoo, for these are the stitches that make up the canvas of Orpheus Ahulani, brushstrokes that contribute to the formidable masterpiece he has become. There’s the long, jagged line that runs across his ribcage, about halfway down his left side, a remnant of a brawl he once got himself into in a small alleyway behind a bar, emboldened by alcohol and nicotine fumes and angry that the world didn’t seem to fall into line with his grand plan for future. He took a knife to the ribs that day but dealt out more than his fair share of punches, and it was only after he’d been pulled off his rival, knife still hanging from the hole it had made in his side, that Orpheus had realised that he was wounded. His opponent, who was older and should have known better than to antagonise an unruly eighteen year-old, was left with a smashed kneecap and two broken arms, and Orpheus got away lightly, stitched up by his mother in a matter of hours and reprimanded only for the fact that he’d failed to take the man’s wallet off him. It’s the only time, other than when he avenged his family, that Orpheus has ever truly exercised the violence that he’s obviously capable of, and he wears the scar like a badge, knowing that, should anyone choose to cross him, they’ll rue the day the thought ever crossed their minds. Most of his other scars were obtained through thieving and conning: scraped knuckles grazed on a wall whilst running away from a mark, small knife cuts to his forearms from people who try to fight back when he takes their possessions from them (if they ever notice, that is, and the percentage of people who do is so infinitesimal that Orpheus isn’t in the least concerned when it does happen), a few burns obtained through his unquenchable desire to play with fire, and a long scar that cuts through his eyebrow, obtained from cut glass, but whether the mark was made by an angry mark or a furious lover, he can’t quite recall. Perhaps Theodora left it there. It seems like the kind of thing they’re capable of doing when they’re angry with him (which is most of the time). myers-briggs: ESFP. moral alignment: Chaotic Evil. temperament: Choleric. deadly sin: Wrath. heavenly virtue: Diligence. habits: Smoking and drinking have become habits to him, at this point, drinking an integral part of his daily life since he was old enough to understand what alcohol was and the effects it could have, and smoking a childhood vice that never quite seems to leave him, even though he has the willpower to give up quite easily if he so desired. He’s often clouded by smoke, shrouded in mystery both physically and metaphorically, and usually can be seen with a hand-rolled cigarette tucked behind his ear or into the breast pocket of a shirt, always there in case his fingers feel the itch. When he can get his hands on them (never legally), he’s also partial to cigars, fat, Cuban ones that he can wedge between his teeth and puff on when the five year-old in him rears his head and he wants to remind everyone around him of exactly who he is, that he’s a big man with big power, and that they’d all best revere him, for not to do so would be a grave sin. phobias: Nothing scares him, not really. He’s seen too much, been through too much, to ever afford himself the luxury of fear, and in any case fear was stamped out of him as a young boy by his mother’s family, uncompromising folks who believed that terror made you weak and would eventually leave you dead. There’s nothing left for him to fear, anyway - his family have already been taken from him, and being as untethered as he is makes him untouchable, means that he can sit atop his throne and lock the castle gates, knowing that no one will ever breach them, that nothing is capable of scaring him: not death, not life, not the prospect of failure, because in his mind every situation he could ever find himself in is simply waiting to be turned into a success, into an opportunity.

AESTHETIC: upturned cups of wine; bare feet on cobblestones; eating fruit so that the juice runs down your chin; melting ice; wild flowers; the smell of burnt sugar and soil; the seductive quality of a whisper; singing hymns under your breath whilst you blaspheme; little braids tucked away inside your hair; unbuttoned shirts and bare chests; sweat-slicked skin; running down alleyways; the slow burn of whisky; dark corners; the smell of woodsmoke and leather; raised voices; rumpled sheets; broken glass; hair pulled back into a ponytail; no crying; spearmint chewing gum; worn, heavy boots; classic rock; lying eyes and lying smiles; charcoal and broken pencil leads; flick-knives; cigarette ash; beef steaks; cracking joints and clenched fists; screaming into the wind until your lungs are hoarse; sarcastic quips and raised eyebrows; bloody knuckles and split lips; sunlight and moonlight; cigar smoke; orchestral music; throwing open double doors; molten gold; secrets in the dark.

HEADCANONS:

1) Although he never seems to put much effort into his appearance, giving off the impression of being one of those people who just wake up beautiful and put together, in a perfectly disheveled kind of way, the aesthetic of careless casualness Orpheus exudes was in fact carefully thought through at one point or other in his life. Even as a much younger man that he now is, Orpheus knew exactly what kind of image he wanted to project to the outside world, how he wanted people to see him, knew the precise pitch at which the gasps he elicited from passers-by should ring in his ears. He most often wears white, black, or grey, and never, ever wears bright colours. The only injections of shades that aren’t monochrome into his wardrobe are dark, rich, sensuous colours like burgundy, deep emerald and copper, hues that blend easily into the darkness that he enjoys to cloak himself in. He knows precisely what looks good in him, wears his clothes as part of his armour, uses them to reinforce his status as king. He’s a fan of some more daring things, too; pinstripes and suspenders and hats that should look ridiculous on him but somehow fit seamlessly into the picture, suit trousers with combat boots, scarves and waistcoats and always, always odd socks. He owns some leather items, a rare luxury he afforded himself and paid for out of his own pocket, but generally his rule is never to spend more than thirty euros on a piece of clothing, and, if there’s something expensive that his heart truly desires, to steal it from an unsuspecting rich brat who can afford to have his pockets lightened. He may be broadly self-serving and callous, but Orpheus believes that it’d be wrong of him to adopt the mantle of king of the paupers and then to swan around in finery more befitting of an actual ruler than a prince of thieves, and so he tries to keep his possessions fairly modest, although this isn’t an active effort or something he’d admit out loud. One thing he is partial too is jewellery, and more often than not his fingers are stacked with rings of various shapes, sizes and materials, trinkets pulled from the fingers of the victims of his cons, his neck similarly draped with countless necklaces, his wrists bound with golden chains and leather ropes alike.

2) He stole a book, once. He was four years old, young enough to know that thieving and conning was to be his life’s work, but not quite old enough to figure out what it was that he wanted to steal, what was worth picking pockets and running scams for, and what was best left alone. He was four years old and he saw the businessman’s briefcase, and the opportunity was too exciting for the young boy to ignore. How disappointed he was, at first, to open the leather satchel and find little more than papers and documents, nothing more than a business proposal. But then something else slid out of the bag, a small, unassuming rectangle of paper, worn at the corners and scratched across the spine. Lord of the Flies, the cover read, and despite himself Orpheus opened it to have a look. He read, and read, and was surprised to find that he liked it. He dumped the briefcase in a nearby alley and made his way home, reading all the while, and when his family asked him where he had found the dog-eared volume Orpheus simply shrugged and told them he’d found it on the street. This event didn’t start an obsession, far from it, for he was too occupied by the desire for self-advancement and self-preservation throbbing in his head to ever devote himself completely to something as time-consuming as reading, but nonetheless it unlocked in Orpheus a desire to discover more. If he ever came across a book whilst working his favourite back streets, he would take it, provided that it was a classic and that it looked interesting (anything he stole that didn’t grip his fancy was donated to the local orphanage), and slowly but surely he built up a small library for himself, stashing books anywhere he could, and although now he’s all but forgotten the practice, if his eyes ever land on a volume that he feels his makeshift library is lacking, he’ll often go out of his way to pick it up. He likes to lift the odd book from the library, too, always replacing what he takes with trash literature, usually pulp, often pornographic, and makes sure he’s around when either the librarian or some unsuspecting budding reader comes across his substitution. His favourite novel? Why, Crime and Punishment, of course, if only because the title is so apt, and he finds it amusing to be seen reading it out in the open, especially when there is law enforcement present to witness it.

3) Orpheus can play the guitar, and isn’t half-bad at carrying a tune. As with most of the skills he’s picked up in his life, this happened entirely by accident (although to look at him you’d believe that it was all carefully engineered, like Orpheus has meant for his life to turn out exactly as it has). He stole a guitar, because his father told him it was expensive, and that it would be good practise to steal something so large, but once he had the instrument in his hands there didn’t seem to be much that it was useful for, unless he wanted to club someone on the head with it (a tempting solution to the problem). For a few weeks it sat in his corner of the room he and his brother shared, until finally Orpheus decided there was nothing left to do but try and play it, since the fence his father had contacted hadn’t come through for them and wouldn’t sell it. So he found a homeless man living in the corner of the piazza in front of the Cathedral, looked him squarely in the eye and said teach me to play, and that was that. He doesn’t play often - he isn’t a minstrel, or some sort of cheap travelling entertainer - but nonetheless it’s a skill that he keeps in his back pocket in case he should ever need it, and he enjoys the fact that he can make music as well as listen to it. Nowadays, he’ll most often play when he’s drunk, stretched out across whatever chair he’s using as his makeshift throne on that particular day, tucked away in the corner of his favourite bar, when daylight has faded and everyone’s just about tired enough not to care.

4) He has riches in his possession beyond anyone’s wildest imaginings, but he isn’t rich, and never has been. Plenty of the things he’s stolen are expensive, invaluable, priceless even, and he’s fenced or ransomed so many of them that he has a considerable amount of material wealth, most of it cash bills stuffed into vases and hollowed-out books (there’s something oddly cinematic about hiding wads of money that Orpheus enjoys), but he doesn’t ever spend enough of it for anyone who doesn’t know him to cotton onto the fact of exactly how much money he has. Despite the prolific criminality that runs in his bloodline, Orpheus is of humble stock, and to suddenly turn around after years spent living more or less on a level with Verona’s paupers and start spending the money he’s amassed frivolously, carelessly, emulating those rich families whom he hates so much, would feel deeply wrong to him. He doesn’t have much of a moral code, and what little morality he did have was utterly shot to pieces on the night his brother died, but this is a conviction that he holds and tries to adhere firmly to. He also likes to hand money out, to anyone who may need it, although these acts of charity are driven as much by the compassion he has for the poor and downtrodden (about the only people he’s capable of experiencing any sympathy for) as by his desire to keep them on his side, to sweeten the bonds between him and his disciples so that when the time comes, they will be amenable to the plans he has in store for them all, will be utterly servile, willing to fall on their swords for him a thousand times over. They’re not bribes, as such, more friendly reminders of exactly what he can do for his people, that he could be spending his ill-gotten gains on cars and expensive watches but instead chooses to safeguard his domain against the threat of Capulet or Montague influence.

5) Sometimes, in the darkened confines of the night, when he’s decided to go without a lover and sleep alone, when the only sounds he can hear are the slow rise and fall of his own breath and the distant wailing of owls, Orpheus allows himself to contemplate the facts of his existence, and his lineage. He is the final one of his kind, the last Ahulani, the last one to ever carry that fiery mixture of genes that was forged when his mother and his father came together forty years ago. It shouldn’t bother him, in fact being the last of his dynasty should help him feel even grander, increase the sense of momentous expectation and duty that he imposes upon his own shoulders, but for some reason, in these dark, quiet places, when the only thing keeping him company is the steady pulse of thoughts in his own head, it does. That’s part of the reason why he strives so hard to make the kingdom gifted to him something worthy of remembering, why he’s willing to fight tooth and nail to make his legacy a reality, to ensure that his name is inscribed in the stars as well as on stone monuments, that the four syllables of his surname are not lost to the wind and rain like so many other lineages. It’s partly why he wishes his brother was still alive - he doesn’t allow himself to miss Hermes, because to allow such emotion to intrude into the otherwise impermeable facade of his consciousness would only slow him down, and that is unacceptable - because of his value in furthering their bloodline. Hermes was exactly the kind of person Orpheus is not: warm, kind, unashamedly gleeful, and full of love, the kind of man who drew women to him not because of his beauty but because of his heart, who inspired deep romantic love in the few girlfriends he did have. Had he lived, he would have no doubt produced an impossibly, almost disgustingly large brood of children, who would have carried the Ahulani name and their fearlessness forward, would have made a new line of thieves. Orpheus knows that he can never be the person his brother could have been, and he isn’t suddenly about to start seeking ways to have a child of his own simply because of something as everyday as loss, but one of his few regrets about the loss of his family is that he will take their name to his grave with him.

EXTRA WRITING: I wrote a poem about Orpheus, once, because I’m a loser and he’s my tiny evil son:

– THE SEVEN AGES OF ORPHEUS AHULANI; told through bloodshed and darkness and a little too much pain.

i. there’s blood on your hands, infant. it’s your mother’s blood, her life and the life she gave to you. she brought you into this world, tried to bring you out of darkness and into light… except it didn’t really work, did it? because the light hardly affected you, little child, with your whirlpool eyes and that soul that was already far too dark. she could never have imagined, your mother, that her lamb’s blood would have raised a wolf. ii. there’s blood on your hands, boy. it’s your own blood, from where you’ve fallen and scraped your knee. get up, your father tells you, and his voice isn’t kind or gentle but you understand, know that big boys don’t cry. you’re only seven but you know already. you stopped crying a while ago. iii. there’s blood on your hands, young man. it’s your brother’s blood, you watch it pour between your fingers like river water stained an awful crimson, and amidst the rage that burns hot and white you can taste retribution on your tongue. (it tastes bitter-sweet, like you’d imagined, honey and vinegar.) it’s a waste, this, a life thrown away, because he was a happy boy. you don’t believe in happiness, not for a long time, but he did, and that’s important, somehow. maybe you didn’t love him properly, not like the story-books say you should, but you’ll avenge him. iv. there’s blood on your hands, phoenix. it’s a stranger’s blood, blood you’ve spilt, blood that runs down, down, down your arms and hands down past your feet down onto the too-expensive carpet you’re treading scarlet footprints into. you said you would avenge him, them, all of them, and here you are, and it isn’t really clear in the half-light which is sharper: your knife or the grin on your face. they thought fire would kill you. they were wrong, and when you rose from the flames you had been made anew. fire becomes you, now, it’s a weapon, not an enemy, and burning a mansion to the ground becomes so simple, the easiest thing in the world. you should feel some guilt, by rights, but your heart isn’t like other hearts, it’s cold and cruel and all things burn, in the end, so why waste a moment’s thought on the things you’ve razed to the ground. all things burn, in the end. (except you, perhaps; you have become the thing that burns others.) v. there’s blood on your hands, king. it’s your own blood again, but you haven’t fallen over this time. this time you’re fighting, and there’s a battered form in the dust in front of you, and you’ve proven a point to anyone who doubted you. so what if they got a lucky hit, scratched your face with the shards of a bottle? the blood you’re wiping away from your forehead is like armour, chainmail. your followers have always respected you, but now they’re afraid of you, too. you look at the cut over your eye in the mirror afterwards, and there’s blood on your lips when you smile. did that powerful man know what he was getting himself into, when he signed a pact with the devil’s right hand? no- not right hand- the devil himself. (it’s a nickname others have given you when they whisper about you in the dark and it seems fitting.) perhaps not, you think. king cap looked to buy a fighting dog, paid for a hellhound. vi. there’s blood on your hands, lover. it’s their blood, this time, the blood of someone who, despite your marble-steel exterior, means a lot to you. you’re bandaging their wounds - they don’t need you to - because, despite yourself, you have to make sure that they’re safe. you have to have them near you, always, you may go your separate ways often enough but there will always be a red thread tying your fingers together. (a passing traveller told you that myth, once. you don’t believe in fate but it seemed apt, somehow.) you find yourself looking for their face in crowded rooms, waiting, for the moment that they’ll sidle up to you and you’ll hear their voice, whispering in your ear, the slow lapping of waves on the sea shore. it’s not love, not at all, (that would be childish) but something altogether more prosaic. need, perhaps. vii. there will be blood on your hands, old man. it will be the world’s blood, when you’ve pulled its innards out and scraped all you can get from deep within, when you hold its bloodied heart beating in your hands. your parents taught you ambition but they never could have imagined the fire of hunger they lit in your soul. the best is not enough. you want it all, want the world, your world, to cower at your feet, want all those who wrote you off as nothing more than vermin to know that they were right. you are vermin, and you wear the slur with pride. more fool them, you’ll think, when the carcass of the world lies bloody at your feet. they forgot that vermin have the power to destroy.

MOODBOARDS:

1, 2, 3 & 4.

[douchebagbrainwaves]

OK, I'LL TELL YOU YOU ABOUT BROWSER

Why not start a startup how long it will take to become profitable. One thing I can say more precisely. But they're not dangerous.1 Boston is a tech center to the same cause: Gates and Allen wanted to move back to Palo Alto, though there is nothing to see outside. But it's not just nice. But if we can decide in 20 minutes, should it take anyone longer than a couple days ago: The mercurial Spaniard himself declared: After Altamira, all is decadence. In addition to being the right sort of experience, one way or another it will be either a compliment or an insult.2

As long as you're not accepted to grad school at Harvard to cure you of any illusions you might have about the average Harvard undergrad. We're impatient. But in this case it seems more to the point that their culture prizes design and craftsmanship.3 The space of possible choices is smaller; you tend to want every line of code to go toward that final goal of showing you did a lot of startups grow out of schools for this reason be the most dangerous company now by far, in both the good and bad senses of the word. And people walking around instead of in an office park, because then the people who work there want to stay there, instead of only in the most hospitable environments. It's also more dangerous. Our prices were daringly low for the time. The problem is, the very word taste sounds slightly ridiculous to American ears. That idea is not exactly novel.

And then I thought: how much does it mean even now? At YC we spend a lot of regulations. Instead of doing a small number of large deals like a traditional venture capital fund, we do a large number of small ones. Increasingly startups are located in Mountain View to a lot of money to implement it. Governments may decide they want to get a job. But show them a lock and their first thought is how to pick winners. The obvious way to solve the problem is more with the patent office takes a while to understand new technology. And yet when you pick up a new Apple laptop, well, it doesn't seem American.

If you could measure actual performance, you wouldn't need them.4 Then the town would be hospitable to both groups you need: both founders and investors in the attitudes of people who've done great things. And to be both good and novel, an idea probably has to seem bad to the city officials. Ok, he replied. Maybe 37signals is the pattern for the future. The core users of News. Be independent.5

Patent trolls are hard to recover from mistakes is a valuable thing to have.6 In the best case, the company keeps moving forward at about half speed. Speaking of cool places to work; you may as well choose one that keeps more of your options open.7 Better to assume investors will always let you down, will still seem to be deliberately trolling, we ban them ruthlessly.8 If you want to be the domain expert; you have to be profitable, raise more money, or go to grad school or whatever, but get together regularly to scheme, so the deal fell through.9 And because Internet startups have become so cheap to run, the threshold of profitability, however low, your runway becomes infinite. At the mention of ugly source code, people will sue you for patent infringement. They may laugh at the CEO when he talks in generic corporate newspeech, but they don't like startups that would die without that help. Their victory is so complete that I'm now surprised when I come across a computer running Windows.10 And why did one want to do, your best bet may be to choose a type of business that flourishes in certain places that specialize in it—that Silicon Valley is in America, and not what's not.

It's hard to imagine the authorities having a sense of humor about such things over in Germany at that time. People who've spent most of their lives in schools or big companies may not have been exposed to that. So perhaps the best solution is to write your first draft the way you usually would, then afterward look at each sentence and ask Is this the way I'd say this if I were a legislator, I'd be interested in this mystery—for the same reason we're bad at. Indeed, the great advantage of not caring where people went to college. The other critical component of Ajax is Javascript, the programming language that runs in the browser.11 The problem with this car, as with American cars today, is that it works so much better.12 Have low expectations. Terribly addictive things are just a click away. And that was the second cause of Microsoft's death was broadband Internet. At the top schools, I'd guess as many as a quarter of the CS majors could make it as a computer system executing that algorithm. I'm not saying spoken language always works best.

To attack a rival they could have ignored, Amazon put a lasting black mark on their own reputation.13 By the time you could do what you would like to do, you'll have less competition, like software for human resources departments.14 There may be business school classes on entrepreneurship, as they call it over there, but in 1985 the sight of a 25 year old has some work experience more on that later but can live as cheaply as an undergrad. Hacking is something you do with a gleeful laugh. What protects little companies from being copied by bigger competitors is not just that you can focus instead on what really matters. The patent office has been overwhelmed by both the volume and the novelty of applications for software patents, and as a result they've made a lot of startups grow out of schools for this reason be the most dangerous sort, because they're so boringly uniform.15 And yet all the adults claim to like what you do.16 I see a more exaggerated version of the change I'm seeing. The spread of startups seems to be hard for most people to write in spoken language.

And you know why? But after the habit of so many cities. The most dangerous liars can be the kids' own parents. At least, that's the polite way of putting it; the colloquial version involves speech coming out of organs not designed for that purpose. My three partners and I run a seed stage investment firm called Y Combinator. Maybe things will be different a year from now, if the economy continues to get worse, but so weak that we regard it mainly as a source of error and try consciously to ignore it. Worse still, anything you work on changes you.17 The problem with American cars is bad design. Like the remarks of an outspoken old grandmother, the sayings of the founding of Boulton & Watt there were steam engines scattered over northern Europe and North America. But if we can decide in 20 minutes, should it take anyone longer than a couple days?18

Notes

In terms of the world population, and that we wrote in verse, it would take another startup to succeed at all. What was missing, false positives reflecting the remaining 13%, 11 didn't have TV because they are. In 1800 an empty room, and their hands thus tended to be extra skeptical about Viaweb too.

This is everyday life in Palo Alto to have the determination myself. Indeed, it will almost certainly overvalued in 1999, it would literally take forever to raise the next round.

This would add a further level of protection against abuse and accidents. How many times that conversation was repeated.

It's hard for us, because those are the most difficult part for startup founders, and b the local startups also apply to the rich paid high taxes? I think that's because delicious/popular. They found it novel that if you're not consciously aware of it. Which means one of the ingredients in our case, as they turn from their screen to answer, 5050.

In grad school you always see when restrictive laws are removed. Frankfurt, Harry, On Bullshit, Princeton University Press, 1973, p.

Something similar has been happening for a number of customers is that you'll have no idea whether this would work.

The rest exist to this talk became Why Startups Condense in America consider acting white.

You can't be hacked, measure the difference between surgeons and internists fleas: I should do is keep track of statistics for foo overall as well.

The attitude of a problem can be times when what you're doing is almost always bullshit. Users dislike their new operating system. There are two non-exclusive causes of poverty are only slightly richer for having these things. Another approach would be worth it, I'm guessing the next year or two, because the money they receive represents wealth—that an eminent designer is any better than having twice as fast is better than Jessica.

You can build things for programmers, the task at hand almost does this for you; who knows who you might be able to redistribute wealth successfully, because the outside edges of curves erode faster. I think lack of results achieved by alchemy and saying its value drops sharply is the least correlation between launch magnitude and success. It's hard to ignore competitors.

Surely it's better if everything just works. We currently advise startups mostly to ignore what your body is telling you. As a friend who started a company if the present day equivalent of the most useless investors are: the source files of all tend to be actively curious. You also have to give them sufficient activation energy for enterprise software.

4%? Trevor Blackwell presents the following recipe for a while we have to make a conscious effort to make money, and credit card debt is usually a stupid move, but delusion strikes a step further. But be careful about security.

So instead of just Japanese.

Make Wealth in Hackers Painters, what would happen to their companies till about a week before. Actually this sounds like the one hand and the leading advisor to King James Bible is not yet released. The point of view anyway. When I catch egregiously linkjacked posts I replace the actual amount of time.

Stiglitz, Joseph. Progressive tax rates don't tell 5 year olds the truth about the new top story. There is one resource patent trolls need: lawyers. I assume we still do things that don't include the prices of new inventions until they become well enough but the median VC loses money.

An influx of inexpensive but mediocre investors almost all do, and so on? Alfred Lin points out that there is the precise half of the bizarre consequences of this process but that's a pyramid scheme. A deal flow, then over the details.

Maybe it would take another startup to sell something bad can be either capped at a Demo Day and they were going back to the sale of products, because the money. Lester Thurow, writing in 1975, said the things Julian gave us. If you're expected to, in the absence of objective tests.

Life of Isaac Newton, p. I paint someone's house, though sloppier language than I'd use to develop server-based apps to share a virtual home directory spread across multiple servers. On the other writing of literary theorists. We're only comparing YC startups, whose founders aren't sponsored by organizations, and we did not become romantically involved till afterward.

[tl-notes]

Kobayashi’s Maid Dragon Episode 4 Notes

These yellow hats are tsuugakubou 通学帽, “commuting to school hats.” They are required by many elementary schools in Japan; students must wear them when traveling to and from school (which most children do by walking, at least part of the way; school buses aren't a thing) for various reasons. The most commonly cited is “to avoid traffic accidents” by making the children stand out, but others include preventing heatstroke, making them easier to spot for teachers, or differentiating which grade a student is in.

As the previous sentence implies, their design may change as you go up the grades (yellow for first graders, blue for older, as an example) or sometimes by gender. Depends on what the school wants to do with them.

Point cards are an absurdly popular way of encouraging repeat business in Japan, with lots of small business using non-electronic ones (marked by just a custom stamp). If you’re not careful your wallet will be overflowing with them in no time.

The “zuuun” sound she makes here is, as you could probably guess, the sound effect for this sort of emotional gloom or a sense of heaviness (physical or not).

Japanese has a huge wealth of these “sound effect” words, and they’re a pretty normal part of conversation—especially for kids, but also adults and to an extent even in formal situations. You’re surely familiar with “onomatopoeia” (also known as a phonomime), a word that sound like a sound; “buzz” being a common example. You may be less familiar with the words phenomime and psychomime; words that “sound” like actions/conditions of the physical world (something going “round and round and round…”) and words that “sound” like emotions/feelings/mental states (a “pounding” headache).

You’ll notice she says "kawaii" the first time, and "cute" the second. English is a required subject in most Japanese schools starting in late elementary school, so while people may not be able to actually speak it, they do know a bunch of random vocab words. And it's reflected in Japanese media: you can just drop in English like this and expect your audience to understand it. It's kind of a neat strength of writing in Japanese (and some other languages) that’s hard to reproduce in English, as there’s no standard second language everyone has to study—and not as much acceptance of randomly speaking other languages in the middle of a sentence anyway (somewhat ironically, given how many loan words English actually has).

She uses the verb 仰る ossharu here, which is a very formal/respectful form of “to say,” like how you would refer to something your boss or a client says. The impression it leaves in this case, at least for me, is like how a parent will sometimes sort of jokingly speak “humbly” toward their kid, like they’re a princess or something.

I think this is supposed to be “bud” not “bod,” but I’m not sure if it’s a mistake on Kyoani’s part or an intentional misspelling for realism, because that sort of mistake is a super common sight around Japan.

“Fancy” as a loan word in Japanese is not really associated with “expensive” the way it is in English, but is instead used to refer to cutesy decorative things. “Fancy Shop” is actually a word you can look up in (some) Japanese dictionaries, defined as “a store that specializes in selling ‘fancy’ ‘goods’.” (“Goods” being another common loan word, basically “merch” in English.) You can google image search “ファンシーショップ” (fanshii shoppu) and get a good feel for what it’s like.

Hello Kitty and that whole aesthetic is a decent example as well.

She uses another of those sound effect words here: chikachika. Basically the idea is a prickling sort of pain; it’s not just sparkling, it hurts to look at. It’s a relatively common gag line for an older person to say when looking at “sparklingly” youthful stuff, in that “I’m so old” sort of way.

That little face there is the henohenomoheji face—so named because it’s made out of the hiragana he (へ) for the eyebrows/mouth, no (の) for the eyes, mo (も) for the nose, and ji (じ) for the face’s outline and one ear. It’s a popular little doodle and you’ll see it on stuff like scarecrows or background characters in manga (when the author wants to lampshade the fact that they’re meaningless background characters).

|へへ |のの " |  も  / |  へ /

カンナ is Kanna in katakana, the set of kana used primarily for foreign words/names; all of the dragons’ names are written using it. It’s another way “foreigners”* are different from Japanese in Japan, whose names are written in kanji. Well, generally, anyway; some people give their kids (mostly girls) hiragana or, even more rarely, katakana first names, and often very young kids will write their names in kana anyway due to not having learned kanji yet.

*Mostly excluding people from countries that also use Chinese characters to write names, like say China—though even then you can usually tell "oh this is a Chinese name" from the choice of characters.

It’s actually a pain sometimes, as some forms and computer systems are designed with Japanese names in mind, which basically means you’ll never need more than like 4 characters each for first and last name. If you've got a longer name, it often won’t fit in those cases.

Did anybody miss this joke? 

The sign, as you might expect, basically says “Sweets Erasers” and “Warning: Do Not Eat”.

The sign here is pointing out that these are those “safety buzzers” mentioned earlier...which you probably noticed.

This is a play on a disclaimer(?) message that is/was common on certain Japanese TV shows: “この後スタッフが美味しく頂きました,” basically “the staff enjoyed eating it after this.” Japan suffered some pretty bad food shortages around the end of WW2 and, as cultures tend to do after experiencing that sort of thing, developed a strong norm against wasting food. Due to that, TV shows that wasted food on set felt the need to show that message, “after filming we ate this and were thankful about it; it wasn’t wasted,” to avoid blowback from angry viewers. It sort of occupies a similar spot in the culture that “no animals were harmed in the filming of this movie” does in the US. Both arise from a real effort to hold studios accountable, but are also often used as material for jokes.

The sign in the back specifies that this is masking tape, not ribbon, in case that’s what you thought it was.

“Backpacks” here is actually a very specific type of backpack, mostly unique to Japan; ランドセル randoseru, originally an old loan word from Dutch: ransel. This type of backpack is exclusively used by elementary school students—and indeed a large majority of elementary school students use them, as has been the tradition for several decades. Like a lot of Japanese school traditions it originally started as a military thing that seeped into the mainstream while Japan was feeling particularly imperialistic.

As you can see, they tend to be stupidly expensive for a backpack. The cost is somewhat deserved at least, as they are mostly handmade from quality materials and will easily endure the whole six years of a child’s elementary schooling. The hard shell that keeps the boxy shape helps keep the kids from breaking or crushing crap they put in it too, so that’s nice I guess.

They tend to have a strong nostalgic value as well, and people will often hold onto them as keepsakes (i.e. stuffed away in an attic or closet to be looked at once every twenty years or so, probably).

In addition to the above (which would not get me to pay that much, personally), many schools have traditionally required, and continue to require, that students use one. Some even mandate the color, though that’s not quite as common as it used to be and nowadays you can get them in a bunch of different colors instead of the traditional black or red*. Even in places where it’s not required, it’s not unheard of for people to use them anyway, again due to tradition and not wanting their kid to be the only one without (which would probably lead to both teasing of the kid by their classmates, and gossip about their parents by other parents).

*Red being a traditional color helps explain why Kobayashi reacted as she did there. In particular, black=boys & red=girls used to be a thing too.

It’s possible to get them for significantly cheaper in places (like online retailers), though those will generally be of lower quality (or at least less fancy materials; you’re probs not gonna find a leather one for 7,000 yen). Fancy designer ones can of course go for absurdly high prices, though that’s true of any product nowadays.

By the way, as you can see here, nigh on everybody carries a bag of some sort in Japan. Since you’re not likely to be using a car, it’s not like you’ve got anywhere else to put stuff you might need to have with you when out and about.

Japan is still largely cash-based when it comes to individual purchases, a fact which provides a little context to this bit. Outside of large chains, many places won’t take cards, and until fairly recently debit cards basically weren’t even a thing—they still haven’t really caught on, but at least you can get one from some of the large banks now.

School uniforms and certain other supplies are largely purchased through small local stores like this; if you’ve lived near a school you’re likely to have seen one. As Kobayashi’s line implied, they often have deals with a school so that you have to buy through them. It reminds me of how you have to buy gowns/hats/etc. for US school graduation ceremonies through a certain vendor the school (district?) has a deal with.

As you’re probably aware, this is a common and powerful sentiment in Japan, especially the more traditional areas. There have been cases of schools forcing children to dye their hair black even if it was naturally another color, which is clearly an example of taking it too far. On the other hand, there is an argument to made for fostering a sense of equality with your peers by having the whole class in the same uniform, with the same shoes, carrying the same bag, etc., so it’s not like it’s purely hard-headed attachment to tradition and conformity. I guess.

Kanna writes the na in her name with hiragana by mistake (な instead of ナ). ...Or so you’d think, but she was doing a good job writing kanji earlier, so I’m not sure if it’s an honest mistake or a calculated one to appear less infallible. Especially considering the fake tears we see later. Edit: As has been pointed out, the Ka is also wrong in the same way: か instead of カ. Not gonna lie, I sometimes make that mistake myself when writing them out by hand, since the primary difference is just whether there’s that corner dash and it’s easy to add it out of muscle memory—hiragana is a lot more common to write than katakana.

As mentioned before, handwriting is seen as very important in Japan—in particular, the specific method of how you’re supposed to write any one character (including letters/numbers). I bring this up again here because Kanna totally writes the 9 the “wrong” way.

Cram schools (塾 juku) are private “after-school-schools” that parents put their kids into to improve their chances of doing well on the all-important school entrance exams. They’re often seen as a pretty shitty experience for the kid (who wants to go to school twice in one day? or on days off?), but a necessary evil in order to make sure they can get into a good middle school, to get into a good high school, to get into a good college, to get a good job, to have a good life.

These rags, blue/pink clips, and rack are a common sight in many places in Japan; typically schools and offices where the students/employees do a basic cleaning of the classroom/office.

As you may have noticed in other anime set in schools, students tend to do a lot of the work of keeping the school clean. Part of that is (probably) to save on cleaning costs, but it’s also intended to foster a sense of community among the students and get them feeling invested in the school, as well as teach responsibility.

In many workplaces this tradition continues, to a greater or lesser extent. A white-collar worker might not be cleaning the office bathroom, but they will likely have a weekly (or biweekly, whatever) cleaning event where everybody gets a rag and cleans up any dust, coffee/tea rings, etc. around their desk for a few minutes, maybe do a little vacuuming. It’s as much a team-building exercise as it is a cost-saving technique (in theory).

Of course, it also helps establish that it’s now at the end of the school day.

This is that phrase the dude in episode two was repeating: maji yabakune マジやばくね. The maji is just an emphasis thing, very similar to “really” in English (both like “that’s really weird” or “wow, really?”). “Seriously” works too, especially considering that maji is short for majime 真面目, which is a less slangy word that basically means serious (it’s more than just that but whatever). Depending on use, it may be closer to “rly” or “srsly” instead (interneeeet).

The second word is yabai (or more specifically the negated version of it*, yabakunai, or even more specifically the slangy/slurred way of saying that, yabakune). Yabai is a slang word that’s exploded in popularity over the last several years (though it’s roots are much older). It used to mostly describe a situation that is/had gone bad, similar to something like “oh shit.” Much like “shit” though, it’s become almost a catch-all word you can use to refer to basically anything. “This is shit.” “This is the shit.” “This is my shit.” Another example you’ll hear is using it to refer to people, like “that guy’s yabai,” which can mean anything from “don’t fall in with that dude he dangerous” to “that guy’s nuts” to “damn look at that dude go, fuckin beast mode.”

It’s not quite as vulgar though, so it’s not necessarily a bad word for kids to say.

*An extremely common grammar construction in Japanese is negating something and sticking a question mark after it to make a phrase similar to “Is that not ___?” in English. That’s what’s going on with “yabakune.”

So here, it’s Kanna processing the conflicting statements Saikawa made and being like a combination of “she nuts” and “danger Kanna Kamui, danger” (in a silly sort of way).

The line here technically isn’t want to be friends (友達になりたい tomodachi ni naritai or similar), but want to get along well (仲良くしたい nakayokushitai). It’s a pretty insignificant difference, but it makes slightly more sense in context for her to be saying it that way (at least in the Japanese, where both sound natural).

“Blundering” here is bukiyou 不器用, which is a common adjective for someone who’s clumsy (especially in a “bad with their hands” kind of way) or bad at expressing their emotions. If you’re familiar with the stereotypical gruff Japanese dad who can’t make himself tell his kids he loves them (unless maybe at end of an emotional story arc) archetype, this is the word typically used to describe them.

So basically the nuance here is that they’re all “you should have just said you wanted to be friends with her from the start, why’d you have to be all combative?” Which is probably something they think about her a lot.

For the curious, the words here are kurasu 暮らす and ikiru 生きる. The former is a verb for the act of “living” in a “what you do in your day to day life to get by” type of way; what house you live in, what food you eat, your routine, etc. The latter is “living” in a more philosophical sort of way, like “how you choose to live your life.” Or biologically I guess, like being alive versus being dead.

The way she words this, to me, implies less “for now, I can” and more “now, I can.” Like she couldn’t understand it before, but now she can.

Maybe a better way to put it is that the translation here seems to deal with the “now" and the “future” (she agrees now, but may not in the future) whereas the Japanese phrase used (ima de wa 今では) deals more with the “past” and the “now” (she didn't agree with it, but now she does).

Also for what it’s worth, in the manga there’s one extra line after that: “Kobayashi-san is just that... [trails off]”

Also going back a bit, this line. The phrase "骨をうずめる hone wo uzumeru" doesn’t really mean to destroy oneself. Literally, it means to bury one’s bones, and idiomatically, it means to “devote yourself wholly to something.” It is (or maybe was, when lifetime employment was still big) commonly used like “I will bury my bones at this company,” meaning you were devoted to your work at that employer (and had no plans to consider leaving for another job in the future).

So the idea here is that she had seen many of her fellow dragons who started with just “I’ll just spend time/get along with this non-dragon” and ended up becoming completely devoted to them instead (romantically or otherwise), but had never been able to accept/understand that feeling/decision—until now.

Also worth noting the "共に tomo ni" (together with) that she used with the bone-burying phrase—the same word she used twice earlier when talking about living with humans (tomo ni kurasu and, tomo ni ikiru).

So depending on how you want to interpret it, idiomatically or literally, the dragons she knew got "too" involved with a non-dragon and then either just became super emotionally attached, or died together with them.

This line is actually "いつの不良だ？ itsu no furyou da?". Furyou is one of the words you’ll see as "delinquent" a lot, and itsu is "when." Basically the way they’re acting makes them seem like stereotypical delinquents from year 19XX, and she’s sort of reacting to both how out of date it is, plus the "delinquent" thing itself. If you were writing a similar scene from scratch in English, you might go with a “____ called, it wants its ____ back” style joke.

She’s saying “moe” here, in case you didn’t catch that. That sort of “moeeeee” squeal is pretty stereotypical (if sort of out of date) as a thing Japanese anime otaku would say when looking at something cute. When I say stereotypical, I mean that was kind of the perception even relatively normal people had about what otaku did, “oh those people who go like ‘moeeeee’ at anime, right?”

Get it he’s fat (American) and big (gorilla). Gorilla is a pretty standard jokey way to make fun of someone big and stocky. You’ve probably heard it used in several other anime/manga before (often PE teachers or judo club members, especially with square jaws like that).

The phrase here is kubi wo aratte mattero yo 首を洗ってまってろよ, the ever-popular “wash your neck and wait.” It refers to an old line from back in the samurai days, when it was a thing to wash your neck prior to committing seppuku—after you gut yourself, someone else is supposed to cut your head off, and it would be just dreadful for someone to have to cut a dirty neck, heavens me. Basically the idea is “yer fuckin dead mate.”

This is an example of a sutezerifu 捨て台詞, basically a parting line made by an aggrieved party, like “I’ll get you for this!” or whatever. In fiction it’s heavily associated with the bad guys. If you think of Team Rocket they’re a perfect example.

The phrase for picking a fight in Japanese is “selling a fight” (and “fighting words” can be “selling words (urikotoba 売り言葉)”, as here). Then if someone takes you up on it, they “bought” the fight.

Specifically she has no jinbou 人望, which is basically popularity, but in a “people would go out of their way to help you” sort of way; it’s not the same word you’d use to refer to a popular movie, for instance, or someone who’s “popular” but doesn’t have many friends (that would be ninki 人気).

“Explosive” here is actually the kanji for explode/explosion and heart, so it’s more like “Exploding Heart/Spirit.” It’s actually also the word for ground zero/the center of an explosion, though usually it has another kanji added to the end when used like that (爆心地 bakushinchi).

The ability to just toss whatever kanji together like this to create words that don’t necessarily have an actual meaning, but invoke a sort of emotional response, means you see this thing in titles and taglines and fiction (think attack names) a lot.

The phrase used to say “on a different level” here is ものが違う mono ga chigau. Chigau is different, and mono can mean many things, including “things,” and also including a euphemism for boobs.

She uses juurin 蹂躙 here, a fancy word for basically trample. It’s not a super common word, but it’s often used when talking about things like “trampled human rights” in news stories.

Another sutezerifu, and a particularly stereotypical one. Kobayashi doesn’t say “he’s beat up,” she comments on how absurdly stereotypical he sounds (こってこてだな).

Lucoa uses the first person pronoun “boku,” which is typically used by boys/men. Japanese has a bunch of words for “I/me,” and most of them are gendered to some extent or another; some common ones are ore 俺 and boku 僕 for men, atashi あたし and watashi 私 for women—though watashi (or watakushi) is used by everyone in formal/business environments.

Interestingly, the Japanese language is very gendered based on the speaker, but not so gendered based on the subject. So like in English it can be hard to tell someone’s gender online sometimes, but at the same time it’s useful information to know for pronoun purposes. In Japanese it’s easy to tell someone’s gender online (unless they specifically write to hide it), but at the same time you don’t even really need to know, for pronoun purposes anyway.

The phrase here is 姥捨て ubasute, an ancient (and possibly mostly mythical?) practice of abandoning elderly people (particularly but not exclusively women) in the mountains or elsewhere in the wilderness to die in times when food was scarce and the extra mouth couldn’t be fed.

You have to remove your normal shoes and change into indoor shoes (like slip-ons), when entering schools in Japan. In middle/high school you’ll typically have a shoe locker to keep those in, but in elementary school you often are required to have a bag to keep them in; hence the “slipper case” here.

Basically the same is true of physical education/gym clothes, hence the “gym clothes case.” The “gym cap” is basically the same deal as the commuting hat, but worn during gym/PE class. They’re often red and white (also reversible), and so sometimes referred to as kouhakubou 紅白帽 (red/white hats; “kouhaku” is a common word, as the red/white color pair has a lot of cultural significance, especially in relation to Shinto).

Bathrooms in Japan don’t have paper towels, so a handkerchief is an important item to carry when leaving the house.

The “pencil board” (下敷き shitajiki) is a thin plastic board placed under paper to provide a better writing surface (such as when writing in a notebook, which would otherwise have more “give” to it). Possibly due to the relatively intricate nature of kanji (look at this shit: 憂鬱), clean handwriting gets a lot of focus in Japanese primary education—calligraphy lessons, with brush and ink and all, are a regular feature of class—which I guess is where the mandatory status of these boards comes from.

The safety buzzer (“crime prevention buzzer”) is a common piece of equipment for kids to carry, so they can ring in case of kidnapping or similar crime; basically the “I need an adult” alarm. Since kids are generally walking to school unattended and there have been a few high profile criminal cases related to that, it makes sense schools would want to make sure these are something students are carrying.

Link to Episode One Notes Link to Episode Two Notes Link to Episode Three Notes Link to Character Intro Pages

[goldfishbymatisse]

CAPE TOWN ART FAIR QUESTIONNAIRE

1.

Goodman:

Much like the actual gallery, the walls of the booth were painted a dark grey. I recognised the gallerist from the previous day. The style of displaying the work at the booth was similar to the actual gallery, however, there was a clear difference in the type of work that was shown at the gallery and in the booth. The work in the gallery on the top floor was solely Nolan Oswald Dennis. The top floor ‘vibe’ matched that of the booth in the sense of clean layout and a stark sense of professionalism.

Stevenson:

The gallery had clear labels and was well curated. The booth had a poor labeling system as the work did not have its titles, it only had rough pencil markings of the artists’ names on the walls of the booth. I did not recognise the gallerists but I did recognise some of the artists such as Zander Blom’s Landscape Lofthus 1911 and Rodent, 2018. The general ‘vibe’ of the booth was not as professional as the gallery.

Blank Projects:

The gallerist at the booth matched that of the gallery visit of the previous day and just as willing to assist. The style of the work was completely different to that of the gallery as I found the work more conceptual and experimental in the gallery which would be difficult to negotiate in a highly populated art fair. The gallery showcased the work of Bronwyn Katz only while the booth showed a wide range of artists’ work.

2.

Works I love:

Votives for the Human Exclusion Zones (series)

Nigel Mullins

Oil on Supawood, frame and found objects

2018

Everard Read Gallery

This series contains various well known landmarks painted in a gestural, expressive style. I loved the concept of how millions of images exist of these landmarks but this style of representation is unique. I am also fascinated by the texture created by a usually flat medium and the way it is traditionally presented in a frame. The way the work was presented in a shrine-like style.

2. Eve Returns to Eden

Kirsten Beets

Glass, Oil on Board

2019

Salon Ninety One Gallery

This work was displayed in a series that was typically aesthetic by the use of pastel colours and fond memories associated with the beach, however, this work specifically is not as clean cut as the rest of them.  It has the pastel aesthetics of the rest of Beets’ works but contains a new type of expressionism which presents a playful mobility.

3. A Seat at the Table (series)

Justin Dingwell

Photography

2018

ARTCO Gallery

This photographic series stood out among the rest of the photographs at the fair as the subject matter was contemporary and showed a model that subtly created awareness for vitiligo while showcasing a softer side of socially typical masculinity. The monochromaticism of each image creates a personal kind of aesthetic appeal when combined together in the series.

Works I dislike or find frustrating:

A02 132/118/19

Andrzej Urbanski

Spray paint and acrylic on shaped canvas

2019

Everard Read Gallery

This work to me was too flat and did not stand out to me. It seemed to be influenced by the Pop Art movement as it seems like something that could be mass-produced.

2. The Phoenix

Benon Lutaaya

Acrylics on Canvas

Date Unknown

This work seemed to tell a too familiar story. The technique used seemed unoriginal and popular in the contemporary art world as this work seemed as if i had already seen it before.

3. Inner Fire: BBHMM

Tabita Rezaire

Diasec-mounted digital print

2016

Goodman Gallery

I found this work challenging as it had a powerful meaning attached to it and one that I was supportive of, however, the format of the work is aesthetically unappealing to me. It seems incredibly ‘superficial’ and ‘materialistic’.  

3.

I found the traditional mediums of oil and acrylics on canvas to dominate the majority of the works at the Investec Cape Town Art Fair.

4.

Most of the booths hang the artworks around the rectangular perimeter of the booth. Some booths display the empirical data below the artwork while others do not and the viewer is forced to ask the assistant at the booth. Different booths make use of different fonts in terms of their signage. A few booths had a sitting area with a few chairs around a coffee table laden with various art books associated with the booth.

5.

Each booth had the name of the gallery or the name of the artist's collection on it. Most artworks had small cards underneath with information on the artist, title, medium and date of creation. Various stickers were used on this card to denote whether the work had been sold or not. A few booths used large letter stickers to denote the artists’ names spanning 1.5m at the entrance of the booth with the names of titles under the works accompanying them.

6.

The fair is set out in a way where each booth runs into the next with thin walls separating each. It seemed as if the fair was created like a maze. I think the maze-like aspect makes it difficult to leave the fair which is ideal for those  selling art as it forces the buyers to spend more time with the work.

7.

The lighting at the fair was excellent. Each artwork had two spotlights on it because there was hundreds of lights suspended from the centre’s ceiling which creates  a general dimly lit area.

8.

The people working at the booths were usually dressed in head-to-toe black. While overhearing various conversations at the fair, buyers and consultants seemed to be dressed formally while members of the public who were there to spectate were dressed casually.

9.

There were primary and secondary markets present at the fair which include the artists, galleries and collectors. The products being sold are the various artworks and the artists who wish to exhibit in the different galleries. The fair is aimed at those individuals who buy art or who work for galleries or art collectors or the incredibly wealthy.

10.

Selenite and Rose Quartz Eroded Bear

Daniel Arsham

Selenite and rose quartz

2017

Perrotin Gallery

This work exemplifies wealth to me because of its use of traditionally expensive materials such as the minerals. The use of the toy bear is an example of wealth in its most elementary form as certain toys can be used to show wealth among children once they understand the significance of class and the role money plays in our society.

11.

Leisure Set

Cameron Platter

Carved Wood and paint

2019

WHATIFTHEWORLD Gallery

This piece of art seems more along the lines of a piece of furniture which i view as a piece of functional art. The rest of the fair’s artworks seemed intended for viewing and conveying a message while this artwork conveys a message while it may be used in everyday life for providing a seat.

12.

The two artworks I inquired about were R22 000 and R39 000.

13.

The brands I saw at the fair were Investec and Moroso. Investec is an international specialist banking and asset management group. Statistically speaking art fairs bring a lot of money into a city through tourists and the purchase of art. Moroso is a furniture brand. Furniture and art are closely related. Many art buyers often invest in furniture too.

14.

The CTICC is an accessible landmark in the city and is housed in the centre of everything. It often houses international attractions and is a good size for displaying a lot of objects. The CTICC also houses Comic Con and the Homemakers Expo.

15.

Untitled

Albert Newall

Oil on Board

1953

SMAC Gallery

16.

Talia Ramkilawan (age 23)

17.

I found the solo booths to give more of an explanation of the work and as a viewer I was able to deduce the influences in the artist’s life that led to their unique style.

18.

William Kentridge, Penny Siopis. These are some of the most celebrated South African artists who still create work presently, subsequently, they have large bodies of work so the chances are high for South African galleries to have one of their artworks.

19.

I noticed a lot of Africans portrayed as the subject matter or issues related to the ‘African-experience’. This was a strategic move on the curators’ behalf but the fair exhibits a lot of African art.

20.

Smith Gallery

21.

I would love to work as an assistant to the curator of the Smith Gallery booth. Whomever decided on the work to show at the booth at the fair shares a similar taste to me. I also loved the presence of work from a lot of young, female artists.

22.

Why are contextual passages explaining the work not available?

How do the various galleries become part of the art fair?

Which gallery is the most profitable at this art fair?

Does the Cape Town art fair make a positive economic contribution towards the city’s tourism?

23.

Yes, I would show at the fair. It is an excellent opportunity to find potential clients, create a following for the gallery or art institute and promote the artists that are exhibited in the gallery. I would paint the walls of my booth to add emphasis and show its unique ‘vibe’. I would use labels that i saw at the fair which are large stickers for each letter. These labels consist of artist, title, medium, date and price.  

[abassi-okoro]

I’M NOT RACIST BUT . . .

I was speaking with a friend of mine who is a white female and considering the latest social unrest here in the states, we began the discussion about racism. The one thing I’ve learned being a black man involved in discussions with white people on racial disparity is that every white person has denied whole heartily being a racist or at the very least, being “prejudice.” Now let’s get technical for a moment. Racism is an industrial and institutionalized system of oppression based on the rules or illusions of power. It’s a system built upon one system which is build upon another that is governed and guarded by people in key positions to open and close certain doors of achievement for certain individuals. Not every white person has that power. In fact, your average white American is not privy to that type of power and wouldn’t know how to use it if they had it.

However, they do directly and indirectly benefit from other whites possessing and using that power. We call that today, ‘White Privilege.’ But this is not the same as prejudice. You do not need to have “power” to be prejudice because prejudice is nothing more than an opinion. It’s a bias. You can be biased towards anyone and anything. You may be a Republican and because you’re a Republican, you automatically hate Democrats. You don’t hate Democrats based on what they are, you hate Democrats because you’ve been conditioned to accept what you think YOU are (whether you truly understand it politically or not). That’s called “Biased Classification” or “Selective Class Bias.” You may be heterosexual and because you’re heterosexual, you automatically have homophobic feelings towards people who are homosexual. You may not know anything about that person only that he or she is a homosexual and that’s enough data for you to form a negative opinion of that person. That’s how prejudice works. It’s an opinion or bias not based on reason, logic or actual experience. So by definition, not all white people are racist but by definition, all white people do have prejudices because to not have a biased opinion (whether conscious or unconscious) is an impossibility.

When it comes how whites view blacks, there’s Racial Cognitive Dissonance. Racial Cognitive Dissonance is an uncomfortable sense of discord, disharmony, confusion, or conflict experienced by people in the midst of change in their cultural and racial environment. It’s usually due to holding two contradicting perceptions or beliefs. For example, when it comes to racism and race related issues, white people will say one thing and do another or will make grandiose claims of helping to end racism but will then turn around and debate the validity of racial claims made by black people. If a white person says, “It’s so sad that the black fella got killed by the police BUT  . . .“, that is racial cognitive dissonance or having a double conscience. It’s when people try to find excuses to not drop or give up their prejudices all together. All of this falls under the umbrella of White Privilege. White privilege can best be described as the epistemological solidification of white normalcy among and within the majority of the Western white populations. Peggy McIntosh, the first author to aptly define and articulate a definition of white privilege, states that:

Whites are taught to think of their lives as morally neutral, normative, and average, and also ideal, so that when [white people] work to benefit others, this is seen as work which will allow ‘[people of color]’ to be more like us.

This creates a model where white people will generally feel uncomfortable when their ideas about race conflict with their emotions like compassion and sympathy and so they will find a need to rationalize that inner conflict. A common example is when a white person is un-apologetically racist, but has friends who are black. This happens more often than you’d expect. White people learn to think of the black people they are friends with as “exceptions” to their prejudice beliefs, so then they can continue to stereotype every other black person who they don’t know. This is the white person who believes that all blacks are thugs and criminals and yet has that one black friend that he thinks he can trust. If you should ask him how his prejudice makes any kind of logical sense considering that he has a black friend, he would say something like this; “Oh, well my friend is a good black person” or “I’m not talking about him. I’m talking about all the other blacks.” I’ve even heard white people try to justify the use of the word ‘Nigger’ by redefining the term and claiming that “Nigger” means an “ignorant person” and that white people can be niggers also. Or my personal favorite . . .  “there’s black people and then there’s niggers. The black folks who are good, hard-working, honest people are the black people and the ones who are lazy and good-for-nothin’ are the niggers!”  I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to listen to this crazy rhetoric from white people.

Perhaps the biggest and most obvious contradiction or dissonance is that of when you speak to the average white American – they claim that they’re not racist or even prejudice and they want to work towards racial solidarity yet, popular culture in the United States continues to be saturated by racial stereotypes and racial prejudice. Black men are still seen as criminals, black women are still seen as angry and over-sexual, Latinos are still seen as thieves, Asian men are still seen as technological but socially awkward, and Arabs are still seen as terrorist and everyone who isn’t white is seen as “minorities.” But let’s be fair, being biased is not a crime. In fact, being biased is somewhat natural but what’s not natural is being biased by the belief in stereotypes and especially with the wealth of information at our fingertips in today’s society. There’s no excuse to be racially ignorant believing any and every narrative that comes your way without personal investigation. At the very least . . . do a quick Google search. It would save you much embarrassment.

I was asked once, “why is so damn difficult to talk about race with white people? Must they debate everything?!”

A person will only debate a topic when he does not believe or agree or subscribe to the topic being discussed. If white people are debating race issues then it would occur to me that they do not believe that race is an issue or that certain components of the topic are less of an issue than others. Fair enough but many white people do not believe that racism is as big of a problem as black people and the media are reporting and so not only will they accuse the media of sensationalism but they will try to convince black people that it’s all a figment of our imagination. Consider this . . . If a Jehovah Witness knocks on my door and begins speaking about their beliefs and I feel compelled to debate those core beliefs then that must mean that I do not agree with their belief system or else I’d have no reason to debate. So it’s obvious that the white people who are busy arguing and debating with black people about racism are doing so because they do not truly believe it’s a problem. And THAT’S the problem! But how can you expect for white people to see racism and discrimination as a problem? If you do manage to convince whites that racism is a serious problem, they might see it as an exclusive problem to the black community but also believing the issues with race can be eradicated if black people would simply adjust their behavior. After all, racism is a false concept to them that they often try to explain away with as little accountability as possible. This is why they have a hard time “seeing” racism.

Wealthy people have a hard time seeing why a poor person is living in poverty and they will always have a complacent and condescending tone about their beliefs and while trying to explain their position on poverty. You’ll usually hear something from rich people along the lines of, “you have both your arms and both your legs. You’re just as capable as anyone else, you have just as much opportunity as anyone else. Look, I did it. You’re just being lazy.” Black people hear that same self-righteous arrogance from white people when we discuss racism. White folks will say something along the lines of, “Oh please. I work just as hard as you, I don’t get any handouts because I’m white, you have the same opportunities as I do, I don’t have white privilege, you’re just pulling the race-card. You have Affirmative Action, I didn’t have help. What about black-on-black crime?”

You can’t fix what you deny exist. Whites have a difficult time identifying prejudice or any of the types of racism, even subtle racism. There are four types of subtle racism that whites have a difficult time recognizing but practice more than they know;

Symbolic Racism: Symbolic racists - rejects old-style racism but still expresses prejudice indirectly (e.g., as opposition to policies that help racial minorities).

Ambivalent Racism: Ambivalent racists experience an emotional conflict between positive and negative feelings toward stigmatized racial groups.

Modern racism: Modern racists see racism as wrong but view racial minorities as making unfair demands or receiving too many resources.

Aversive Racism: Aversive racists believe in egalitarian principles such as racial equality but have a personal aversion toward racial minorities.

Most so-called “decent” white folks who feel strongly about equal rights may still practice one of these four forms of subtle racism. The most common of the four that I see with even my white friends is that of Symbolic Racism. I had a conversation not too long ago with a white male who rejected any type of racism but then insisted that Affirmative Action should be eliminated so that no one (black or white) benefits. His sentiments according to him represented “leveling the playing field.” However, he failed to understand that the you cannot level the playing field when one side doesn’t have an organized team. You can not balance a society (already dominated by one group) by stripping away certain programs that brings the downtrodden up to a level where they need to be in order to compete successfully on that field. He also failed to understand the reason for such government aided programs in the first place (to help compensate for 399 years of  the brutality of free slave labor that financed this country.) He also believed that if whites couldn’t use the “N-Word” then no one should. I tried to explain to him how privileged and narcissistic that was to think that if something is off-limits to whites then it should automatically be off-limits to everyone.

Another white friend of mine about a year ago seemed very compassionate towards how blacks were being treated and would often respond on social media with an array of, “Oh that’s so sad, it’s horrible what happened to that poor man, I’m so angry” and so on. She didn’t seem to have a problem with my race related discussions until one particular discussion had me pointing the finger of accountability at white people, in which most of the time, that’s necessary. Suddenly she didn’t agree with what was happening to blacks. Suddenly, I was called a “racist” for recognizing racism and suddenly I was at the receiving end of another white lecture on if black people would just stop discussing race so much then racism would just magically vanish. I alone was even accused of being the source in which racism is perpetuated in this society by not “giving it a rest!” I didn’t realize I had so much power. That’s Ambivalent Racism and that’s when a person is in constant conflict with themselves emotionally, bouncing back and forth between what’s right and their own self-identity and racial pride while still having racist undertones in their belief system and views.

A few years prior, a white blogger named Patrick K., stated to me that black people perhaps do experience “some” racism but a lot of it we “bring on ourselves.” He went on to state that it’s the way we dress and it’s the fact that we don’t have adequate black leadership and he even had the audacity to claim that “Black-on-Black crime” makes white people not want to give us the benefit of the doubt. However, there were three major problems with his perspective. 1. Black men in three-piece suits are also racially profiled and killed by white police officers. 2. There hasn’t been adequate white leadership in this country since John F. Kennedy, and 3. eighty-four percent (84%) of white people murdered are murdered by other whites. In fact, whites kill more whites each year than blacks kill each other, and white people commit more crimes than blacks (2 to 1 in arrest, forcible rape, larceny and homicide). Yet, he used popular stereotypes (not facts) to form his bias without reason or personal experience. That’s Modern Racism!

While recently speaking with a white woman, she made the statement, “I just wish everyone could stop this madness.” She seemed exhausted by the constant hammering of race and conflict in our society and especially after the latest incidents of police brutality towards black men. She’s not alone in her wishes however, shortly after exhibiting signs of compassion towards black men, she made the statement, “if black people would just not get so antsy when pulled over then we wouldn’t have so many dead black people.” I noticed that she placed the accountability of police brutality on the victim and not the perpetrator. It happens with rape victims as well. The accountability for action always seems to fall on the one who suffers. “Maybe if she had dressed more appropriately, maybe if she wasn’t behaving like a whore, maybe if she didn’t walk home alone.” 

We live in a world where we put more focus on telling women how NOT to get raped than telling rapist NOT to commit the act. Similarly, we tell blacks HOW to act when dealing with a racist system as opposed to dismantling the racist system. But what do you expect? We’re a nation that spends billions on modern medicine to get rid of the symptoms and not the illness. This white woman went on to present a laundry list that was reminiscent of the Jim Crow Rules of Engagement. Her list was not only ridiculous but it was painfully obvious that it was from the mindset of a white person with a mystical and animated perception of racism and discrimination. Perhaps she meant well but here’s the question,

Why should we have to navigate through the terrain of racism and prejudice by being “careful” not to do this and not to do that while white people with their privilege sit back comfortably dictating to others how to live within their deadly system that they would rather ask us to tolerate than to help destroy?

That is Aversive Racism! I have had white friends practice all four forms of subtle racism (right to my face) and most are completely unaware of it. They think they’re being helpful, they think they’re doing their part, and giving great advice. They do not believe that they are saying anything wrong and this is precisely why people will turn and say, “I don’t like talking about race with black people because I can never say the right things.” And because black people recognize subtle racism and sly remarks and passive aggressiveness – it doesn’t register to us that white people are actually trying to help. And we don’t fall for it. When white people become passive aggressive, we don’t fall for it. When they become arrogant in their comments or conceited, we don’t fall for it. When they adopt a “savior” mentality or parental attitude by lecturing black people, WE DON’T FALL FOR IT! And so when we don’t take white people’s sympathy, their response is to write us off as being, “too sensitive” or “too angry” to listen to their reason. It never occurs to them that they’re wrong. They just believe that they’re right and that black people are too delicate to listen to them tell us how to deal with the racism that they created in this country.

It’s white people’s inability to fully understand the dichotomy of racism and their inability to comprehend a basic racial and cultural concept that doesn’t include “white-thinking” and without an inflated sense of white self-importance.

In other words, white people have a hard time processing a reality that doesn’t center around them. They have been convinced that they are the center of the Universe. The quicker they realize that they are not, and the sooner they realize that even with good intent they are still biased and prejudice then the sooner we can sit down and discuss these topics without anyone feeling the need to “lecture” or debate or become arrogant and narcissistic. If you’re white and you really want to have a discussion about racism . . . first realize that you just may be racist yourself regardless of how much you deny it. We will still work with you if you have some prejudices. We can get over that because we have plenty of prejudices about you. We really don’t like you much either but we are tolerant of white nonsense. 

- Abassi Okoro

[the-fitsquad]

Workstations

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They include Tv, motion pictures, radio, newspapers, magazines, books, records, CDs, DVD’s, video games(these online too) the Net and its offshoots, Social media, mechanical gizmos and the applications. There is a wide variety of Bronze, Silver, Gold and Platinum Xeon processor choices to choose from, up to 384 GB of DDR4 technique memory over 12 slots, and up to four TB of storage. VMware Workstation is truly a system for engineers, produced by engineers when you see its networking characteristics. The crucial to cleaning print heads on HP Z Series printers is to be in a position to know what is in fact incorrect with the printheads at any offered time. eight, 2011 – To address the demands of an evolving workforce that demands anytime, anyplace access to company applications and information, Dell right now announced 24 new organization computing options and type elements, like laptops, tablets, desktops and workstation computers in 1 of the biggest-ever introductions in the company’s history and part of 39 new solutions launching in the subsequent year.

The lack of a quad-core processor signifies it could lag in demanding multi-threading applications, its motherboard is simple, it does not have a discrete video card, and the strong state drive’s capacity is limited. Progressive Corporate design and style every little thing from full key turn fit out projects to Dealership support where we design and style, build and install furnishings for some of the largest networks in Australia, nationwide. On the outside, the HP Z620 looks quite related to other prior Z Workstations (such as the Z420), with its basic no frills-but rugged and clean-design and style and all metal black casing. When buying for an workplace workstation, you will uncover four fundamental alternatives: purchasing a new workstation created by an workplace furniture manufacturer, or a used workstation, if your price range is tight, a re manufactured workstation or a refurbished and utilised workstation.

This operation is not allowed on an invalid disk. This class covers fundamental AutoCAD functionality and drafting principles. In this configuration, everyday function that does not require administrative privileges is accomplished in the Remote OS(es) and applications which are not topic to restrictions applied to the PAW host. The operation failed since either the specified cluster node is not the owner of the resource, or the node is not a attainable owner of the resource. As if no other folks has ever been enslaved but Black(African) men and women. Resource record is an entry in a name server’s database. DeltaV Workstations utilizing multi-monitors demand specific video cards, drivers, and management software to assistance the DeltaV Operator interface applications. Consequently, their tiny accumulation of capital and the earnings which they get from specialist solutions inside the African (or White) neighborhood make them seem wealthy in comparison the low economic status of the majority of poor delusion of wealth is supported by the myth of African organization.

The Application Licensing Service reported that license management data was not located in the licenses. Employing Windows on a PowerPC Mac was just not feasible apart from testing computer software. Workstation laptop is far more than a laptop, and it is developed mostly for performing the fantastic operates of the creation of animation, improvement of games, architecture practices and much a lot more that consists of most of the functions. FreeSync is an AMD technology created to minimize or get rid of screen tears in games and videos by enabling the monitor’s refresh price to be controlled by and synchronized to the graphics card. Like a mobile workstation, the Z2 Mini packs a lot of strong (and power-hungry) components into a small space, requiring high-end cooling capabilities.

Delphi has all the tools you need to assistance a wide-array of databases to support you get your job carried out with less work and in a shorter amount of time. The activation server determined there is a problem with the specified item crucial. The other support function of the HP Workstation Lab in Ft. Collins is their supplies sciences lab. The user profile database connection cannot be created, since try this website of error %1. Desktop Sandy Bridge processors arrived in 2011 , whilst the Xeon models came a year later. Such desks give the impression of occupying less space due to their sleek design and style. SOLIDWORKS is a great 3D style computer software package even so, we want to remind you that for it to execute optimally, you want a workstation with just the right specifications.

This even contains the HP Z1, an ‘all-in-one’ desktop workstation that can be upgraded and serviced with no ever having to attain for a screwdriver. The HP Z820 Workstation performance not only significantly cut processing time for core functions in ERDAS Imagine, it also offered key insights into future software program development possibilities. Some designs are meant to be placed centered in a space, whilst corner laptop desks are excellent for tucking away on one side. Develop a space that enables you to thrive with our workplace furnishings sets. Writing desks not only feel comfortable sitting behind and functioning at, but also serve as a fine piece of furniture that beautifies your residence. Not only do you get a better CPU, you also get the newest generation Nvidia Quadro P3000 workstation class graphic card which has 6GB of graphic memory.

The Software Licensing Service reported that the occasion ID is currently registered. Rendering computer software in certain thrives on CPU cores and a single processor Core i7 basically can not match a dual Xeon for numbers. Could Microsoft be organizing to release a mobile device subsequent year, powered by Windows 10 with WCOS that showcases to hardware makers and the rest of the globe what can be done? For instance, 32-bit Windows Server 2003 supports four GB of virtual memory, even though 64-bit Windows supports 16 TB of virtual memory. three. Based on HP’s exclusive and extensive safety capabilities at no additional expense and HP’s Manageability Integration Kit’s management of every aspect of a Pc which includes hardware, BIOS and software program management using Microsoft Technique Center Configuration Manager amongst desktop workstation vendors as of June, 2017 on HP Desktop Workstation with 7th Gen Intel® Processors.

In truth, the more rapidly memory is most likely the Z820’s most significant improvement in terms of raw overall performance. I will take some time to Google those around (Spending far more time on WC analysis then Air proper now, frankly), but let me ask you what I asked lowfat if you had to AirC dual Xeon’s, what would you advise? Firstly, Alienware machines are often stunning laptops secondly, this machine has some great all round elements that function properly as a mobile workstation. By functioning with our customers we are in a position to provide deliver and set up new and utilised workstations, workstation accessories, screens, seating, mobile storage units, perform benches and racking systems to suit our client’s specific requirements. Primarily based on this testing, we have come up with our own list of recommended hardware for AutoCAD.

Larger computer workstations provide a wider decision of attributes such as lockable drawers, fixed desk pedestals, extra printer – all of which offer added storage space and cost-free up the best surface for any other workplace equipment. This create sports an unlocked i7 processor, with the highest single-threaded efficiency of any CPU. In the globe of computer systems, networking is the practice of linking two or more computing devices together for sharing information. Both are really effective GPUs and must be a lot more than capable of accelerating demanding 3D CAD applications – even even though they are not created to do so, as they are actually meant for gaming laptops. Hexagon Geospatial is one of these organizations, with effective application options that maximize the capabilities of laptop hardware in support of information processing and compression functionality.

These Workstations provide high performance and reliability with the newest innovation and industry leading technologies, along with supplying expandability, properly beyond common computers’ capabilities and at entry cost point. We construct systems customised for pro audio, video editing, graphic style, photography, 3D rendering, scientific computing, residence use and more. Digital Storm CAD workstations are extensively tested with a wide array of anxiety tests. It does not provide as much shelf storage but it nevertheless has a lot of double hang as nicely as extended hanging space and shelves for shoes and sweaters. By deciding on Workstation Specialists you can be assured of a individual encounter with ongoing after sales support to support you attain your company prospective.

On the Executive Workplace workstation (Exec), the network icon in the System Tray has a yellow warning sign with an exclamation point which indicates a connection to the neighborhood network, but no access to the Web. They have some very well-liked desks in their portfolio like the stylish frosted glass L shaped desk. We have the choice to choose furniture according to the office decor or set up the workplace decor that suits the furniture. When you have established that your router is supported, and you have discovered and solved any discrepancies amongst what is listed as ‘officially’ supported and what is actually supported, it’s time to get your computer software and hardware together to flash and configure your router into a Wi-Fi variety extender.

Workstations are paying far more consideration to the third space i.e. the space possessing a feeling of the living room. Pc workstation can also be utilized for everyday scenes such as desks and computers. Corner desks, for example, fit perfectly into tiny spaces, generating them a best child’s desk. When you enter into an office and have a appear around, you want to see the smart staff working on their managed workstations and the far better the appearance of the office, the more likeliness of the clients to offer you the bargains to them. Verify out our greatest mobile workstations guide. If structural changes are preferred (such as removing a wall, moving plumbing about, or adding new windows or doors) an interior designer interior design workplace furnishings companies in chennai is the greater decision.

To help perform out when and exactly where bottlenecks occur in the program, the application can monitor the use of resources – CPU, GPU, memory and challenging drive. The Application Licensing Service determined that the Key Management Service (KMS) is not activated. Functionality, reliability from mobile to the datacenter – your job produced simpler with HP Z Workstations. From Desktop to Grid, the ODW was made to assume its position and fulfill the missing link of the 1st accurate Energy Architecture Linux Improvement and Desktop System. The firm was founded in 1986 as Strucad Hardware and changed to CAD2 in early 2000, and changed once more to Workstation Specialists in April 2009. Fitted with a prime of the line Intel Core i7 processor and 16GB RAM, this pc makes no bones about its unprecedented functionality.

Must your spending budget or hardware demands not stretch to that, nonetheless, HP offers a lesser model with a slower CPU (E3-1225), 8GB of RAM, a 256GB SSD and an Nvidia Quadro M1000M for £1,558 (around $2,115, AU$2,730), a value that consists of VAT, delivery and a 3-year onsite warranty. PAWs are suggested for administration of identity systems, cloud services, and private cloud fabric as properly as sensitive company functions. These also function a 1TB 7200 rpm challenging drive and a SuperMulti DVD optical drive, ship with preloaded Windows 7 64-bit, and include a Windows ten Pro 64-bit license.  Ergonomically friendly setup: you can set the monitor and the keyboard tray independently for the excellent viewing and typing settings The keyboard tray can lay flat on the desk to help maintain a comfortable wrist position.

Quad-core Core i5 or Core i7 CPUs are prime options for the users, like graphic artists, hard-core number crunchers, and other gearheads, who stress over the speed of their PCs. Office Workstations have evolved over time. The Application Licensing Service reported that the genuine details house can not be set just before dependent property been set. Some of these can also be upgraded, not as effortlessly and comprehensively as a desktop, but most of the time the RAM and often the HD can be upgraded. Indeed, the whole field of graphics card labelling can get so tough to realize, most of the evaluation web sites have stopped trusting the graphics card specs entirely and resorted to just operating benchmark tests on the new cards to evaluate their overall performance to older ones.

The HP Z2 Mini G3 workstation is the most strong mini Computer we’ve reviewed, putting category-major efficiency into a compact chassis. VMware offers privileges to the VCP holders, they can also use the VCP logo on their organization cards and sites, and among other things they get a complementary license for VMware workstation 8, invitations to beta exam programs and discounts to VMware events. Our Quiet Workstation Personal computer is our Intel 5th Generation (Socket 1151) Xeon E3 Powerhouse Pc developed for the executive who wants a cost-efficient Computer, where reliability, up-time, stability, and wide compatibility are the foremost priorities. The desk is arguably the most essential piece of house office furnishings you can buy. Would you thoughts briefly explaining why (for each the graphics card and windows 7).

This class differs from Workstation Specialist-Adv in that an incumbent of the latter functions as a project leader to carry out sophisticated workstation duties and to deploy and preserve workstation hardware and software program. Guest account settlement depends on successful FO accounting program that maintains precise guest folios, verifies and authorizes a approach of settlement and resolves discrepancies in account balances. 3D Applications like 3ds Max and Maya can take benefit of DirextX and if you want truly higher-finish graphics, the Tesla is a beast. The directory service can not execute the requested operation simply because the servers involved are of different replication epochs (which is normally associated to a domain rename that is in progress). Easy workplace or computer desks can be functional and save costs in the extended run, but an efficient workstation layout utilizes your current office space and enables your employees to work and communicate successfully.

Ergotron WorkFit-TL 33-406-085 is the most current style for desktop sit-stand workstation by Ergotron. Along with the subsequent generation Z-series workstations, HP today also announced seven new HP Z displays. In addition, stock every office workstations with the proper accessories needed to get the job completed. Steel is 100% recyclable, generating it a fantastic decision for ergonomic office gear and furniture. AMSTERDAM (IBC 2017) – September 13, 2017 — HP these days announced the HP Z8 G4, the most potent workstation on the planet1 and security characteristics that denote HP as obtaining the world’s most safe and manageable desktop workstations2. For that reason it is achievable for workstations to actually exist on the neighborhood network but if they are not observed by the host operating method they will not be noticed by the Enterprise Server.

Decide on from sleek glass computer desks to classic wooden pc desks for your residence office. The WorkFit A (US$649.00) “consists of arm, operate surface, base, keyboard tray help, keyboard tray, desk clamp, grommet mount, assembly fasteners, cable management hardware and adjustment tools.” Its maximum capacity is 25 lbs (11.four kg), which effortlessly accommodates the 20 to 22 lb weight of the iMac from late 2009 to present, plus keyboard and mouse. Today’s GPUs are powerhouses and contain hundreds of person stream processors for enormous parallel computing and every thing from video transcoding, encoding, and editing get a speed boost from stream processing. Microsoft is also adding more rapidly file help into Windows ten Pro for Workstations.

The HP Z400 Workstation is HP’s latest entry-level workstation, but as with all HP workstations, entry-level hardly describes the features and functionality offered by this machine. AMD graphics are not supported when there is greater than 32 GB of program memory present. Then I went to Tomshardware, and one guy suggested Windows 7 Ultimate Product important ( ) to me. Their price did attract me. So I decided to attempt right after a number of emails to Windows 7 Ultimate Product crucial. Students are taught how to use the pc as a tool for tasks such as 2-D drafting, three-D modeling and simple CAD associated programming. You can locate supplementary storage space, further shelves, hutches and other pieces that can add functionality and organizing space to your workplace region.

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