#dimitri stamatis

[applebunch]

it's interesting to note that leon, to an extent, now considers the crystal ball his "body." it's fair enough; it's the closest thing to a physical form he has. furthermore, it's interesting that he can like, feel through it.

anyway, my point is,

THIS IS HOW DIMITRI HUGGING LEON CAN STILL WIN!!!!!!!

[zolf-loadsahitpoints-smith]

everyone else: politics, confronting institutionalized racism, betrayal, supernatural intrigue, an increasingly complex and interconnected web of lives and stories

dimitri: “leon you’ll never believe this shit”

[somuchbetterthanthat]

This will speak to like maybe three people but listen. I don't know a lot about Samama Khalid right now, but what I do know, he gives me SUCH Dimitri Stamatis vibes. Can't stay put. Have to go explore the mysteries. Might discover the Horrors in the process.

[hephaestuscrew]

Assorted Thoughts about the Greater Boston Season 4 finale

I'd assumed that Leon would 'move on' at the end of Season 5, the end of the podcast as a whole. But now we're going to have a whole season of the podcast without him. It's strange to imagine. There's never been a Greater Boston podcast without Leon Stamatis. There's never been a city of Red Line without Leon Stamatis. We began Season 1 confronting the gap that Leon left behind. We learned that he wasn't quite as gone as we might have thought, but there was still the loss, the grief, the consequences of his death. In an interesting narrative symmetry, at the beginning of Season 5 we'll have to confront him being more fully, completely gone. But I think we'll continue to see the ways in which his life and afterlife have rippled outwards.

~~

Immediately after Nica said Leon had brought people together "like a family", Louisa exclaimed that she needed to call Michael. I can't help wondering if it was Nica's comment that triggered that thought for Louisa. I'm emotional about Michael being family for Leon, Michael being family for Louisa, Michael being someone who was brought into Louisa's life by Leon…

~~

There were two moments of Nica and Dimitri sitting with Gemma in the middle of them holding the crystal ball. First, in the back of Lucia's car, when Nica reached out to touch the ball and Dimitri took her hand instead. Second, on the Ferris wheel as they prepared to say goodbye to Leon. Leon was in the middle between his two siblings - he is what divides them and he is what unites them. They held hands over him, finding awkward togetherness in the presence of their loss, stopping each from succumbing to that loss. Leon was in the middle between his two siblings, but he also wasn't; it was Gemma occupying that space for him.

On a related note, I can't help but wonder whether the Stamatis siblings had habitual positions when they'd sit in the back of a car together as children. I think that's a fairly common sibling thing, and it seems likely that it would appeal to the order-loving Leon. I can't decide if it makes me more emotional to imagine that they usually sat with Leon in the middle like that, or to imagine how they sat on that ferris wheel wasn't their typical childhood order.

~~

The lack of narration and the high number of monologues from a range of characters this episode meant that sometimes I wasn't initially sure whether a scene was an interview snippet from a real person or a monologue from a character. I think there's something significant in that blurring of reality and fiction, in real stories of loss mixed with the fictional. Those interviewees are a part of this story, or this story is a part of our world too.

~~

I loved Michael's mantra being spoken by the group, with each person taking one word. For Michael, that sequence of numbers was a way of asserting his own agency in spite of circumstances and his ideas about his nature. It was a way of saying 'my choices matter, even if I can't change the outcome'. And this moment showed how that idea can be upheld within through community and togetherness.

Michael spoke the word "Eight". And perhaps he wanted other people to take over, trusting that the people around him would complete his mantra, believing that they'd understand what he needed in that moment. Or perhaps he was intending to speak the mantra by himself until Louisa interrupted to support him. Either way there's a uniquely powerful kind of choice made against an indifferent world - the choice for people to stand against that world together. It's a contrast with Michael's often self-isolating tendencies for that mantra to become a shared thing.

[specialagentartemis]

sometimes you listen to some songs and the song = blorbo connection gets increasingly obscure.

Like yeah "Burn It Down" by Vixy & Tony is a Renee Minkowski song, that's fairly straightforward, the spirit of the song - self-confidence, claiming who you are, becoming who you are - is kind of a recurring theme of hers.

"I Hope You Don't Mind" (also Vixy & Tony) is a Nica Stamatis song, a little bit more obscure but the idea of waiting and wishing and resenting and being sad at home, being hurt by someone not being here, "find a message in a bottle wonder if it's meant for me," it's very Nica.

"We Are Who We Are" (Vixy & Tony) assumes the subject is an ordinary human nerd in our world but like besides that it is strongly a Murderbot song, about finding solace and strength and self-understanding in stories and then fandom.

"Likho's Lullaby" (I am listening to Vixy & Tony's album "We Are Who We Are" while I do spreadsheet entry okay) is an Alexander Hilbert song. Or maybe, rather, more accurately, a Dimitri Volodin song. I can't justify this it's just vibes. It's sad and suspicious and resigned, for something as sweet as a lullaby.

and then another song I've had stuck in my head for the last several days, "Nobody's Side" from the iconic 1986 cold war musical Chess is about losing faith in your partner while politics spiral out of control around you and everyone is devolving into factionalism and leaving you in lurch and it is sort of a Viktor Arcane song and sort of a Vi Arcane song but deep in my heart I know that it is, truly, an Emma Emmerich/Naomi Hunter song from my MGS4 AU that lives in my head where E.E. survived MGS2 because god damn she deserved to, and then started an inadvisable but very satisfying affair with Naomi Hunter which makes nothing actually better

[leonstamatis]

Dimitri Stamatis 17?

17. boat

It’s best not to ask questions with Mallory. This is a lesson Dimitri learned the hard way, after too many spiraling stories that left him with more mysteries than whatever it was he asked about initially.

There are some consequences to his latest experiment. These are not always obvious, particularly not when setting out on a mission. But today, they get pretty clear pretty early on: just as Dimitri shoves their little boat free of the shaky little dock and they start to drift into the harbor.

“So,” Mallory says, turning to him with hands on hips, “how the fuck do we steer this dumpster bucket, scent wipe?”

Dimitri startles. “I don’t know. Why would I know? Don’t you know?”

“I said I know a guy.” Mallory blows a big enough bubble in her gum to pause the flow of expletives. It is, in fact, all the confirmation Dimitri needs. “You’re the fucking guy, scent wipe. You Irish goodbye’d your way to working for Cap’n mcfucking Crunch, didn’t you?”

“I was in a submarine,” Dimitri corrects. “And I wasn’t the one steering us anywhere. I don’t have any more ideas on how to sail than you do.”

“Well, fuck. Looks like we’re in shit harbor without a goddamn paddle.”

“Oh, no,” Dimitri says. “Do we… have paddles? Or oars? Anything?”

Mallory raises one asymmetrical eyebrow. “Nooooope.”

Dimitri turns to watch the dock as it slips away from them. With every rush of the waves, they get pulled just a little farther away from the safety — the certainty — of land.

“Shouldn’t we do something? To get back on land, or something?” he asks.

As if on cue, a piece of flaming trash floats by them on the waves.

“No fucking offense, scent wipe, but I am not getting in that shit-ass E. coli sewer water or whatever the fuck,” Mallory says.

She plops down onto the floor of the boat, setting it rocking beneath Dimitri’s feet. More to avoid falling over than anything else, he drops down to sit beside her.

The water laps at the sides of their boat. The horizon creeps ever closer. Mallory is already waxing on, as she does, about some relevant story or someone she knows who rowed their way to South America for quality chinchilla dust.

Dimitri waits as patiently as he can for a gap in the story, a moment of stillness in the admittedly turbulent narrative. It does come, eventually, which he supposes is a mark in his favor.

“Mallory,” he says, “seeing as we may be here for the rest of our lives: Any chance you have a deck of cards?”

[tanoraqui]

Other things I like to think happen in the wake of Leon Stamatis’s final death:

The will Uriah Connolly found wasn’t the first anyone had seen of Leon’s will, because of course Leon had updated copies backed up with his lawyer, bank, and a public notary. Instead, it was a draft of his next update, which he hadn’t yet finalized enough to officialize—not fully legal, but clearly intended. To Uriah’s mild embarrassment, it included 6 months of rent and etc. utility payments to himself and other relevant parties on behalf of Michael Tate and/or anyone else who might be sleeping on Leon’s couch at the time of Leon’s death.

Ben Affleck produced a eulogeic biopic of his friend Matt Damon. He considered starring in it as Matt Damon, but eventually decided (on advice of his new friend and formal jail neighbor Nica Stamatis) to direct instead. To Nica’s discomfort, he wrote in Nica in as the misremembered role Matt Damon initially gave her. He offered to let her play her own part; she declined. She asked Nicole if she wanted it and Nicole thought about it seriously but also declined—she likes being a newswoman.

“Matt Damon: The Story of Matt Damon by Matt Damon’s Friend Ben Affleck” may not have been a perfect movie, but it was made with so much obvious love that it won several major awards and launched Ben Affleck back into a real directing career.

Michael invited Autumn and Ada to the premiere. Carrington Vanderbilt, the man Matt Damon died trying to save, had minimal screen time, but in what he had, he was presented as a regretful and loving failure of a husband and father who is robbed of his chance to apologize just as Matt Damon is robbed of his chance to continue being Matt Damon. (Ben Affleck had consulted on the script with Nica, who'd forwarded him to Louisa.) On balance, it was…

Yeah, it was even weirder and more awkward than their first Wonderland date. But in a good way.

Michael and Autumn resumed dating shortly thereafter. He moved in with her and Ada in Providence and they got married in Wonderland. Tyrell was their wedding planner, of course. Louisa broke her own rule to photograph her best friend’s wedding—they were going to hire someone else; they did hire someone else, and Louisa kept telling the other person they were doing it wrong, and taking over. Phil smuggled himself back into Boston to sit on Autumn’s side of the aisle.

There are exactly 2 photos of Phil at the wedding: 1 from the other photographer of him throwing a delightedly laughing Ada (ringbearer ofc) in the air, and 1 clumsy one from Louisa of Phil tripping on a stray streamers and faceplanting in one last pile of cheese. There’s a less clumsy, though still not professional, photo taken by Gemma of Louisa in her Best Woman dress bent over with laughter as she wrestled her camera into place for that shot. Wendell has it framed.

Louisa and Wendell neither get married nor have children, though they do get a beagle. Bagel the beagle helps Louisa sniff out clues (usually food) and likes to harmonize with Wendell. Wendell actually makes this work, musically. He briefly blows up on TikTok for being “the guy who sings with his dog.”

Meanwhile, the Redsistance is still hard at work helping people get by, a task that has alas grown no easier with Emily officially resigned and living in New York. However, typically, it’s MD:TSoMDbMDFBA that really kicks off the downfall of the Bespin regime and everyone associated with it. She basically killed Matt Damon, and that other guy, the loser dad! Legion remains present in everyone’s homes, and its shops are still everywhere, but the people boot out Mayor and elect something like a moderate Democrat, who promptly drops 95% of the exploitative fare and jail things, and un-exiles the Wonderland community…though doesn’t do much to re-provide housing for them…(to be fair, other people do live there, now)…

That’s manageable, because also meanwhile, Dimitri and Mallory have befriended the secret rodent civilization living in a parallel city below Boston (as secret rodent civilizations live beneath most major cities in the world). They—the rats, mostly, but also mice, squirrels, etc—have become allies and business partners with the Wonderland community, much like at the end of The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents (Pratchett).

Btw at some point Dimitri and Nica went on a road trip down the coast, maybe to visit relatives in Virginia. Along the way, they met the Jersey Devil (literally some sort of supernatural creature), and Mothman (a now-old man who played a prank with a good costume in the 60s and felt obliged to keep it up. Dimitri puts him in touch with Darby Cooper and they become happy penpals for the last years of Darby’s life.)

Isaiah and Melissa become a crack political activism team. They don’t always agree on exactly what the best path forward is, but they agree on most of their goals and it sometimes seems like they can almost read each others minds.

Mark Wahlberg starts vengefully stalking the guy who plays Matt Damon in MD:TSoMDbMDFBA, and ends up with a restraining order from Boston entirely. Fuck Mark Wahlberg.

Nica works in the Redsistance but she also goes back to work in Singer’s Sewing Machine and Vacuum Repair. Yeah, she’s rehired partly because of the amazing advertising of MD:TSoMDbMDFBA, but also because she was the best damn sewing machine repairer they ever had. She starts part-time—she’s also busy with the Redsistance; an unnoticeable, forgettable face is a real asset—but it’s not long before she’s full-time, and not long after that it becomes Singer&Stamatis Sewing Machine & Vacuum Repair. She keeps the name when old Mr. Singer finally retires, though she branches out to repairing more odds and ends of common household mechanisms.

It’s an innocuous little store. In the back room, while the proprietress repairs, she also hosts visiting revolutionaries, politicians, and the press, Hollywood directors and local artists, and one famously missing man who always comes home between adventures—who sometimes tugs her out, laughing, onto the road with him. She also welcomes anyone in the neighborhood who needs a good listening ear.

At some point, someone dies. Probably suddenly, maybe violently (they ARE all making trouble for powerful people, after all). Don’t ask me who; I refuse to contemplate it! Instead of moving on, however, they’re caught by Gemma in another crystal ball.

She hunted down the original supplier who made them for Magic Staples, see. “What the fuck, Gemma?” ask multiple people. “So we can say goodbye in our own time,” she says.

“…and it was an incredible tactical advantage for a bit there,” she admits. “Just briefly! Until they’re ready to move on!”

“…and I wanted to see if I could still do it,” she eventually confesses. (It’s all fine, though. Mostly, they all just get that extra chance to say goodbye, then Gemma breaks the ball.)

It turns out that the person who used to bless those crystal balls is the same seer who sold Dimitri those parting puzzle boxes. They’re completely unhelpful, information-wise, but they do advise Dimitri to visit China. Dimitri is still pretty busy fighting omnipresent capitalism in Boston, so he books a flight rather than try to get a job as some sort of sailor again. His plane goes down over the Pacific, but only one passenger is lost…Dimitri, of course.

Nica fights to remain calm. She’d know if he was dead, she’s sure. Somehow. Anyway, it’s Dimitri. Adventures just happen to him. He’ll be fine, and he’ll come home.

She’s right. Dimitri arrives home about a year later having found Amelia Earhart on one of those one-coconut tree islands where time doesn’t really move. (She, too, is Like This.) He brought her home with him. Dimitri and Amelia get married couple years after that.

They try to use Dimitri and Amelia's weird tropiness to bust Ethan's evil necromancy/mind control/cheese robot lab on Coney Island. Surely THAT'S a mystery to reveal to the world! Their attempts at contrivance keep failing, though; eventually they conclude that this sort of thing depends on whatever-it-is being an unsolved mystery to Dimitri and Amelia themselves (until they solve it). And they already know about the evil necromancy/mind control/cheese robot lab.

Fortunately, while Legion did immediately use its massive information-gathering reach and money to purchase as many of those fully functional glass balls as they could, and hired some skilled but unscrupulous psychics to summon ghosts into them, it turns out that it's an incredibly rare ghost who has both the wide-welcoming compassion and clockwork-like mind to function as the massive inter-human connector that Ethan and Legion seek. Leon was, as we all knew, both incredible and unique.

It all comes to a head at last when a young girl's grandmother dies, in one of NYC's many districts of immigrants. The grandmother was special because, among other things, she was strict and precise but always loving, and enough of a witch to own a really good old crystal ball (not one of the half-plastic knockoffs you get these days). The girl is special because, among other things, she, too, has some innate supernatural talent, and she doesn't want to let her grandmother (and sole guardian) go, and also she can talk to animals like the youthful protagonists of the Rescuers movies.

Cheese robots steal the crystal ball containing her grandmother's spirit. Her friends among the secret rodent city underneath NYC reach out to their allies in Boston for aid. The Bostonian rats tip off their trusted humans. Legion is still a massive evil international corporation which may or may not actually be run by humans, but its necromancy/mind control department is broken for good by the power of bildungsroman.

Emily files for divorce.

[felikatze]

Dimitri (Parties Are For Losers): Dimitri is a mutant with telekinetic powers on the run from The Government. He eventually ends up in the company of Anya, a rambunctious young girl with a sense of adventure, and Olya, the totally legit office worker who has no connection to the The Government, promise. After the girl he escaped with ends up captured, he's not keen to follow her footsteps.

Why I like this dude: on god. my prediliction for silver the hedgehog. however, his focus song, Comfort Zone, is a certified banger that expands on his character so much. In Anya's song, Punch It, Punk!, he seems like. Normal. Innocent, even, aided by his baby face. But Comfort Zone shows that he's actually really selfish- not even escaping with the other mutant Katya because he cared for her in any way, but because he knew they were gonna kill him and she was his ticket out. It's seen especially when he ditches her after. Complexity! Woo!

[IMAGE NOT FOUND]

Leon Stamatis (Greater Boston): The story starts when Leon dies on a rollercoaster. Not because of any accident, but because he decided to. It was too unpredictable, see, and Leon was a very orderly man. Now as a ghost, Leon watches as the lives of his friends and family spiral wildly out of the control in many ways. His friend's shitty new job, his sister's downfall into domestic terrorism, and his brother's discovery of Atlantis- since Leon keeps commenting on all these events, the narrator quits. Good luck bucko, you're the narrator now.

Why I like this dude: I haven't finished everything there is of Greater Boston yet, but by god, it's good. Leon is so meta. He made the narrator ragequit. And as he narrates, he's forced to understand how the story works. He can't just comment freely, he's forced to convey what the story needs him to. Sometimes that means narrating the PoV of his sister's shitty new boss when she's right there. He has to understand that it needs to be from this perspective. He's lacking in context in death as he did life, and finally comprehending the order of chaos.

[peterofthedrakes]

this line actually made me start sobbing so of course i had to draw it

[Image Description: a one-page monochromatic comic, split in two panels. The first panel shows many skeletons, jumbled together, surrounding the words "what'd i find?". The second panel shows dimitri crumpled up in the arms of fake nica, who looks shocked. They appear to be in a hallway, and dimitri is saying "what'd i find, after all this?" End ID]

[writingpun-art]

Oh! You're bi!

[applebunch]

oouuughhhh the second-hand embarrassment.........

[greaterblogston]

How to describe our show?

Have you ever tried to describe Greater Boston to a friend? Maybe you’ve written a social media post attempting to summarize what it’s about? Would you be comfortable letting us record or use your attempt to describe us in a future crowdfunding campaign??? If so please DM us!

[somuchbetterthanthat]

I love that the three Stamatis Siblings are all on the aro-ace spectrum, I love that out of all f them it's Leon who has kinky sex and girlfriends and a qpr best friend, I love that Nica probably grew up with tons shit of expectations of what she should want but her big dream was being celebrity (even if it crashed and burnt pretty hard) and she never mentionned or seemed to care about relationships, I love that Dimitri Stamatis probably forget that sex or romantic love is a thing unless abruptly reminded for x or y reasons.

[hephaestuscrew]

I relistened to Greater Boston Episode 1 yesterday and it reminded me that something I think this show does really well is the way it portrays the kind of shared mythology that can develop in families about the family members.

Like just in that first episode, we are told that Leon was the kid who refused to open his own presents because he hated surprises, Nica was the kid who hid the fuses so she could keep telling stories, and Dmitri was the kid who tore the answer pages out of the riddle book to maintain the mystery. And each of those stories have stuck with them and affected how they see each other and themselves as adults. They remember the games they played together as kids, they remember moments from their shared childhood, and they have taken those memories with them as part of their dynamic and their identities as adults.

It's such a good portrayal of the complicated way in which siblings can impact on each others' self-perceptions. Dmitri defines his own love of mysteries in contrast to Leon's dislike of uncertainty (i.e. "Disillusionment has never been a gift worth sharing… That idea probably makes no sense to you, does it, Leon?"). Leon defines his own unadventurousness in contrast to Dmitri's and Nica's different kinds of boldness (i.e. "He’d never been an adventurer, not like his little brother Dimitri, who had disappeared into the mysterious labyrinth of the world, nor a thrill-seeker like Nica, who grinned wider for every inch the line advanced"). Nica defines her (perceived) failure to take decisive action in contrast to Leon's and Dmitri's different ways of taking action (e.g. the whole anecdote in Episode 9 about Leon rescuing Dmitri from the snow while Nica didn't do anything when they were children).

There's this particular way in which some people understand themselves and their family members, where it's like 'I know that I'm not particularly [insert character trait] because my sibling is the [...] one'. I've noticed it in my own family and I think the Stamatis siblings definitely think that way a lot. Those anecdotes from when they were kids are still a big part of how they see each other, and the way each of them see themselves is shaped by the way they see their siblings by comparison.

[specialagentartemis]

The Woman Underneath the Sea

For @podcastgirlsweek (belated) day 6, "Podcast Crossover".

Prompted by @clonerightsagenda and it was brilliant. En route to Atlantis, Dimitri Stamatis finds something else that was lost.

---

Dear Leon,

A postscript to my last letter.  In the thrill and horror of encountering Atlantis, that empty city of death and lost memories, I had completely forgotten about the smaller, equally empty city of death and lost memories that I passed along the way.

“City” is, probably, overstating it.  It was an undersea research station, the fantasy and wonder of it only in the technical feats of engineering for long-term support of human life under the pressures of the deep sea.  I doubt it housed more than a dozen people at its peak, a small scientific endeavor, with the name Tiamat emblazoned on the side, worn down through months or years of salty currents.  But it was unexpected.  And I wondered what its history was, down here in the dark.  I directed my strange submarine to take me there, still not fully sure how to control it, but I managed to have it dock in the station’s entry lock.

The water drained around me, and I exited the vehicle.

This is how I know it was empty.  The lock was automated, and when I stepped out, there was no human life there to greet me, or even see in curiosity who I was.  The only living things I saw were sea creatures, ones that shouldn’t have existed—or shouldn’t anymore.  I recognized some from the books I loved as a child, speculating about Mesozoic, even Paleozoic, creatures that may still exist in the depths of the ocean; trilobites scuttling across the floors, squids in nautilus shells swimming through flooded corridors.  It was a bubble of the deep past, alone at the bottom of the ocean, closed off to the broader ecosystem of modern fish.

Alone, or so I thought.  I wandered through the empty halls, watching the creatures and trying to identify them, until a voice behind me said, raspy and faltering, “Who are you?”

I jumped, imagining—and this is silly of me, I know—a squid-person, an evolutionary descendant of these things evolving in isolation for a hundred million years or more; but when I spun around, it was not a squid-person, but a human woman, with dark, piercing, suspicious eyes glaring at me, and holding a chain in one hand and a very sharp tooth from an animal that must have been terrifyingly large in the other.

“Who are you?” I asked, somewhat stupidly.

“I asked you that,” she said.

“I’m Dimitri,” I told her.  I tried to explain that I was with a submarine crew, that I was looking for Atlantis, which felt very silly to say but in the face of what I found here surely wasn’t any less silly.

She didn’t take that well.  “You’re not here for me,” she said, bitterly.  “Of course.  All this time and of course you’re here for it.”

“Is this Atlantis?” I asked, confused.  This station sat on the sea floor, and there was evidently nothing here.

“No,” she snapped.  “No.  There is nothing here for you.  Do not keep looking here.  It isn't Atlantis.  It isn't anything humans should have!  It should never have been found, it should never have been used, and of course they would come back to look again anyway.  Not for me, not for any of us, let us all just die down here so no one else knows what they have, then come back again looking for it.  Colin got it, or it got Colin, I don’t know which, and if nothing else in this place I’ve been keeping him, and it, contained.  How did you get here?”

I scrambled to explain about the expedition, the submarine, but she hissed in anger.  “You have a submarine?”

“Yes.”

Her eyes got frightening at that.  “Where?”

“The airlock,” I said, and she nodded.  Her body was very still.  And then she lunged at me, with the sharp tooth, and I admit that I screamed, and ran.  She was certainly fitter than me, lean and strong from who knows how long of living in this place and hunting ancient fish to survive, but terror gave me speed, and I ran back to the airlock.

This is how I learned that this undersea station was not populated solely by the small, benign seafloor-scuttling beings of the past.  (Though maybe the tooth was my first clue.)  The sound of our voices or the pounding of our feet must have attracted the larger predators, because the woman was on the verge of overtaking me, desperate to get to my submarine (or to stop me from getting to it), when an animal roared through a broken wall.  It was large—monstrous—a sea monster from nightmare.  It opened its jaws, and it seemed to be the thing that the woman had taken a tooth from.

She stopped short, and skidded sideways to avoid the creature.  But instead of screaming or running away, she hesitated, and looked at it with an expression that seemed at odds with the imminent threat of getting eaten.  It was scared, but also… sad.  I ran.  She didn’t.  The last thing I heard her say was “Captain…”

I heard her run.  I heard her footsteps run away, heard a clang of a door or a hatch.  I don’t think the mosasaur ate her.  But I didn’t stop to look.  To find her or make sure she was all right.

I never even learned her name.

I got back to the submarine.  I left that haunted, empty station.

That almost-empty station.

I hope she’s all right.  I don’t think she belongs there.  I don’t know what she’s guarding, or what she thinks she’s guarding, but I hope it never gets out.

With love,

Dimitri

[leonstamatis]

[ID: A tweet from Greater Boston (@InGreaterBoston) that reads, “Do you have any Greater Boston headcanons? Like, what’s something that you just KNOW in your heart has to be true?” /End ID]

i’m not on twitter in any (public/substantial) way but this got my brain buzzing like a damn chainsaw. ask and ye shall receive, @greaterblogston.

when nica stamatis was younger, she had a habit of bringing home stray cats she found around the city. she wanted it to be some grand air bud type situation where she found the most talented cat to ever exist. these cats’ primary superpower, however, was making her brother dimitri sneeze. (leon was the only one who fed and looked after said cats — despite his distaste for them — in the day or two before the stamatis parents took them to a shelter to find proper loving homes.)

dimitri stamatis has the stomach of a wet paper bag. lactose intolerant, can’t handle spice, spent his entire early adulthood living off peanut butter and jelly unless someone else (usually leon, occasionally nica) brought food to him.

leon’s strong affinity for watches comes in part from his father, who had a collection of antique pocket watches that needed to be wound by hand to run. his love of chess, on the other hand, is from his mother.

charotte linzer-coolidge is the type of parent who would paint an intensely detailed mural on the wall of monty’s nursery. she kept saying she would do it, when they lived in redline, but couldn’t figure out the best paint for the interior of a subway car and honestly just didn’t have the time. she’s got a pinterest board of inspiration, mostly from classic children’s literature. one day…

mallory got her penchant for curse words and long-winded, rambling stories from debate club in high school. she never won any debates but she definitely said the most words per minute; no one can argue with her on that.

the olive garden food truck still sits, abandoned, at its old post. some people now believe it to be haunted. others say that’s a misunderstanding and it’s actually an outpost for pizza ghost delivery people trying not to be spotted. who’s to say!

this is not so much a headcanon as it is a wish and a hope and a prayer. andy wood needs to be a mostly normal guy with one just supremely unusual hobby. he collects haunted dolls, or perhaps potato chips that vaguely resemble celebrities. chuck celebrates every single new find.