#does seem to be just a little less adversarial than it was (bordering even on good humoured) tho i doubt it will last..

[rpgsandbox]

                    Mock up of the book. Cover design not finalized.

Coyote and Crow is a tabletop role playing game set in an alternate future of the Americas where colonization never occurred. Instead, advanced civilizations arose over hundreds of years after a massive climate disaster changed the history of the planet. You'll play as adventurers starting out in the city of Cahokia, a bustling, diverse metropolis along the Mississippi River. It's a world of science and spirituality where the future of technology and legends of the past will collide.

The game is created and led by a team of Native Americans representing more than a dozen tribes and we've built a game that both Natives and non-Natives will thrill to explore and build upon.

More than 700 years ago, a bright purple streak shot across the night sky. Over the coming weeks, the Earth fell into a deep winter, the seas raged and ash rained from the sky. The event became known as the Awis. As resources dwindled, winter became longer and summer shorter, people struggled to survive. Wars erupted, people starved, some fleeing their ancestral homes before creeping ice sheets.

But people survived. Tribes adapted. And in the wake, people began to notice a strange purple mark appearing on people, plants and animals alike. It became known as the Adahnehdi, the Gift, and many took it as a sign that the Great Spirit had not given up on them.

Eventually, the weather began to ease, the Earth began to heal, and new nations arose. New sciences and technologies, born out of necessity, led to a discovery about the Adahnehdi. It wasn't just a mark, it was a path to abilities and powers, beyond normal human limits.

                       The long walk home. Art by Jennifer Lange

Now, 700 years after the world was brought to the brink, a new chapter has begun. Your characters enter a world that is healing but is no less dangerous. The ice sheets are retreating and the seas are calming, but what lay out beyond your borders? The treaties and alliances that made so much sense during the long winters are now eroding and old grudges between nations are not so easily forgotten. New technologies arise almost every day and the rate of change is frightening for some. And then there are the stories. Talk of spirits, monsters, beings of legend. For so many they were just tales to be told around the fire. But now there is talk that these legends may be far more literal than you may have previously believed. Has something awakened them?

                                the northern continent of Makasing.

Coyote and Crow is an original role playing system built around the exclusive use of D12 dice. Outside of the core rule book, all you'll need to play the game is some pencil and paper and some twelve-sided dice. While there is some complexity to the game, we are striving to present a system that will allow players to refer to the rule book during play as little as possible, keeping most or all of the critical information on your character sheet.

           Mock up of the front of a character sheet. Design not finalized.

The basic rule system is centered around collecting a Dice Pool, usually around 5-7 D12s and rolling them to determine either Success or Failure and degree of effect. For example "8" might be the number your Character needs to attempt to do something and every 8 or higher they rolled would be a Success. The more 8's, the more successful they are.

While combat is a part of Coyote and Crow, the game is actually built around the idea of fighting being only one road to story resolution. The game encourages dialogue, building bridges and finding unique solutions to problems that are not always clearly defined by good and evil.

Your Characters have Stats like Strength and Spirit and Skills like Investigation and Charm that are modified by their Stats. In addition, when you create your Character, you choose a Path. That Path determines both certain Stat bonuses you receive as well as which Abilities you have access to. Abilities are powers beyond normal human capability, but not at a level where characters would be comparable to superheroes. There are 15 Paths in the core rule book available. In addition, you'll choose an Archetype (Whisperer, Healer, Scout, among others) that will give you Stat and Skill bonuses and a general idea of your character's profession, but will not force your Character too deeply down a specific progression.

Then you'll choose Gifts and Burdens. These allow you to give your Characters specific bonuses or drawbacks and will help you flesh them out in a way that is flavorful and realistic. It's important to note that the rulebook does not dictate whether something is a burden or a gift for a Player. For example, a Player might choose to give their Character a sister. That might be a Burden or a Gift (or both!) depending on how the Player wants their Character to see that relationship.

Sample pages from the equipment chapter. Layouts and content not finalized.

There are no experience points in Coyote and Crow. Instead, it is built on the Legends system. Your Character will have Short Term Goals, which will increase various numbers on your Character sheets or give them new Skills. But you and your group will also have Long Term Goals. When those are completed your legend will grow. You'll write a short story about your adventures, the kind that can be told around the fire for generations to come. These can change your Gifts and Burdens, give you access to new Abilities and more. As you complete more Long Term Goals, your Character's legend will precede them and your stories will spread.

ARCHETYPES

There are six Archetypes in the game, each acting as a starting point for Character development but not constricting their possibilities. Each Archetype has its own symbol. Here are a few of them.

            The icons for the Tinkerer, Warrior and Whisperer Archetypes

PATHS

In addition to Archetypes, Players choose Paths for their Characters, which are permanent associations they make with an animal and help define what extra human Abilities they'll be able to choose from, among other effects. There are fifteen basic Paths in the core rulebook.

                       The Path of the Badger, the Stag and the Spider

While this game was created by a Native-led team, this game is for everyone. We've taken great care to craft a game that Natives and non-Natives alike will be able to engage in and find themselves immersed in.

For Natives, we've crafted both story and game mechanics that will allow you to integrate your own tribal customs into your play. For those who aren't Native, you'll have a wealth of options to choose from as well as clear guidelines for understanding the differences between this world and our real one.

The game is designed to be your first role playing game or your latest. The core rule book will walk players through every step of how to play Coyote and Crow, but also how to play role playing games in general, including advice on safety and inclusion as well as suggestions on where to find tools outside of the rule book to make your game both easier and more enjoyable.

Everyone involved in Coyote and Crow is deeply passionate about our game and we felt that it was time for Indigenous folks to have a game that didn't see them as secondary, as adversaries, or intertwined with colonialism.

Coyote and Crow is not set in a dystopia. The world went through a dark chapter, but the people of these nations rose to the challenge. There's good food and water, education and meaningful work for almost everyone in Makasing.

But this world isn't a utopia either. It's place that's growing, where old alliances are strained and past slights are not always forgotten. New technology is putting pressure on old traditions. And with the climate becoming milder, there is a whole world of unknowns out there. On top of all of that, there are rumors that some of the old stories about monsters and spirits might just be a little more real than some originally believed. This is a game where science and the unexplained live side by side and sometimes clash.

                              The Wanderer. Art by Kyle Charles.

THE CORE RULE BOOK

We are producing a beautiful 300+ page hardbound book, loaded with illustrations and containing all of the rules you'll need to play Coyote and Crow. Included in the book (and PDF) will be:

Detailed history of this alternate world

Descriptions of daily life and culture in Cahokia, the capital of the Free Lands

Rules for creating and advancing your characters, including 6 Archetypes, 15 Paths and 27 Abilities for a massive variety of options

Descriptions and stats for mythical creatures, infamous spirits, shadowy organizations and dangerous cults that can challenge players endlessly

A group of pre-generated characters if you want to jump right into playing the game

A starter adventure, Encounter at Station 54, that can act as a stand alone adventure or as the start of a larger campaign

So much more!

                              It still hungers. Art by Jeffrey Veregge

We have a diverse team of folks working on this game, most of whom are Native. Additionally, we are striving to bring in other marginalized voices whenever possible. Our team features people from across the LGBTQIA spectrum, including two spirit folks. It's not even a question that this game is political. If you have a problem with a game where there are no people of European descent represented, than this game is probably not for you. That said, we've truly built this game to be played by everyone. It might seem like a big leap, but don't worry, we're going to hold your hand the whole way through and you'll be so happy you stepped off the edge into this vibrant fresh world.

===============================================

Kickstarter campaign ends: Fri, April 2 2021 3:00 AM BST

Website: [Coyote and Crow] [instagram]

[misssophiachase]

For Klaroline AU Week: Day 1 - All Human. This is a continuation of my story, you can read chapter one (Meet the Mikaelsons) and chapter two (Creative Control) HERE

Synopsis: Caroline is the long-suffering producer on America’s number one reality television program “Meet the Mikaelsons.” The wealthy, English family are difficult but Caroline has to stick it out so she can get the promotion she’s been eyeing. Enter arrogant, second-eldest sibling Klaus Mikaelson who has every intention of messing with her plans. Inspired by Keeping Up With the Kardashians.

Reality Bites - Chapter 3: Doctor Feelgood

Flight AA372 - LAX to Los Cabos International

“You should probably put your tray table back in its upright position for take-off,” Caroline’s eyes were closed but the instant she heard the familiar English accent, they flew open. 

“What are you doing here?” 

“I assume you’re not going to bother with the tray table then?” He gestured to it curiously. She rolled her eyes and snapped it back into place, almost breaking it in the process. 

“You didn’t answer my question, Mikaelson?” 


“You’re making a scene, love,” he whispered, looking around the airplane. 

Caroline realised he had a point. She was so used to being able to yell at him on set without prying eyes, she forgot about unwanted, public attention to one of the newest reality stars on television. 

“What are you doing here?” She whispered. 

“I’m in the window seat,” he motioned next to her. 

“You are not.”

“Would you like to see my boarding pass?”

Caroline really couldn’t believe her luck. It was as if Klaus Mikaelson’s job in life was to gradually tip her over the edge.

She stood up, moving slightly so he could pass. As he did, his body grazed hers and Caroline was trying to ignore just how good and right it felt. It didn’t help that his spicy aftershave was infiltrating her nostrils and messing with her composure either. 

“Since when do you travel coach?” She hissed as soon as he’d sat down. 

“Since always.”

“Liar,” she shot back. 

“Fine,” he conceded. “I didn’t want to be stuck on a private jet with my siblings, I’d probably be tempted to throw one, if not all of them, out of the plane without a parachute.”

“Kol, would be the first to go, right?” she couldn’t help herself. 

“There would never be a question about that,” he grinned. 

As much as she wanted to hate him, they’d have these fleeting moments where she wasn’t a producer and he wasn’t rich, reality television royalty. They were just two people enjoying each other’s company. Unfortunately, it never lasted past about five minutes. 

“So, how is it that you are on the exact same flight as me?”

“You don’t own this flight you realise, Forbes?’


“Fine, how did you come to be sitting right next to me then?”

“As co-producers I thought it would be useful, you know in case we needed to discuss anything before arrival,” he murmured. 

“You’re going to crash your ex-girlfriend’s wedding,” she replied. “I think we’re all on the same page about that. You know unless you’re getting cold feet?”

“Why? Are you?”

Caroline was taken aback by his comment and the way he was gazing intensely into her eyes at the same time. There was no denying he was extremely attractive, and those dimples had a mind of their own, but Caroline had to keep reminding herself that he was an egotistical, arrogant celebrity that she wouldn’t be in her life much longer.

For some reason she didn’t like thinking that. Caroline decided to blame it on temporary insanity and his ability to insert himself into every part of her life.

“Why would I be getting cold feet? We’ve only been planning this for the past week.” 

Caroline thought planning this plot line would be just like everything else but for some reason it had irked her more than anything.

Hayley Marshall was a doe-eyed brunette who was the face of an International Cosmetics Company. They had dated on and off during college. Klaus acted like she didn’t mean much to him but the fact he wanted to crash her wedding and instigated the trip to Mexico didn’t sit well with Caroline, although she wasn’t exactly sure why. Maybe there were more unresolved feelings between them than he’d let on. 

“Of course,” he murmured. “I just meant we need to discuss our accommodation arrangements.”

“Our accommodation arrangements?”

“You have this thing about repeating yourself, has anyone ever told you that?”

“And has anyone ever told you that you have this annoying habit of not answering questions, mine in particular?”

“Touché,” he smirked. “I thought it best that we stay together the next few days.”

“Excuse me?”

“Well, I think you heard me.”

“Klaus!”

Given the amount of crew, not to mention privacy required they had booked out multiple private villas on a secluded beach. Caroline had her assistant book her at a resort which was only ten minutes away by foot. 

“I’m not enamoured about staying in the family villa, there’s only so much I can take from Rebekah preening in front of the mirror and Kol singing off- key in the shower.”

“You have your own villa, princess,” she muttered. 

“And it boasts two very spacious bedrooms,” he murmured. “It seems fitting that we stay there together, you know for work.”

“I cannot believe you,” she growled. “First you take half my job and now you’re making accommodation arrangements? I have a perfectly good room booked at the nearby hotel.”

“Well, you did,” he offered. “I had your assistant cancel it.”

“You did what?”

“And given it’s peak season I think you’ll find it difficult to book anywhere else at this short notice.”

“You are unbelievable!”

“As you keep telling me,” he murmured.

“What is going on here?”

“I don’t know what you mean?”

“Yes, you do,” she shot back. “Why are you suddenly so clingy?”

“Okay, just so you know, Klaus Mikaelson doesn’t do clingy.” 

Now that Caroline was thinking about it. Klaus had been acting even stranger than usual the past few days. He’d become less adversarial and more inquisitive. Less arrogant and a little more insecure. Which was completely out of character. 

Then it came to her. 

4 days earlier

“What do you mean you fired the medic?” Caroline hissed, trying to keep her voice down and not alert the rest of the crew. 

“I didn’t fire the medic,” he shot back. “She quit yesterday. Apparently, she didn’t appreciate Kol’s attempts to woo her.”

“Woo her? Who are you?” She muttered. “And you only felt the need to tell me this today?”

“Well, I’m sorry but I’ve been busy wrangling my siblings from almost killing each other. Whoever thought tennis racquets weren’t a lethal weapon never met my family.”

“Welcome to my world,” she growled under her breath. If Klaus wanted to be co-producer, then he could deal with his sibling’s antics too. 

The Mikaelsons were holding their annual mother-son tennis competition. It had begun when Finn was younger and had become one of the main events on their social calendar.

This year, it was Henrik’s turn to be initiated into the tradition. Given Esther’s competitive nature, Caroline felt immediately bad for him. It didn’t help that her sworn enemy, Macy Roberts, one of the famed Housewives of Beverly Hills, was competing with her son too.

Turns out giving two society queens tennis racquets wasn’t the brightest idea, even if it did make for good television. They’d yelled cut as soon as the obligatory cursing had died down but turns out there was no medic to check their injuries.

Macy seemed to have only sustained some bruising, but Esther hadn’t fared as well.

“It’s bloody broken, I know it!” Esther wailed. “I need some Oxy-Contin, straight vodka on the rocks and my lipstick touched up, not necessarily in that order.”

“See, she doesn’t even need a medic,” Klaus shrugged his shoulders. 

“You are unbelievable.”

“You really need to stop complimenting me, love,” he smirked. Caroline was far too stressed then to call him out on that stray endearment. 

“I can help,” Kol offered. 

“Where’s your medical degree?” Klaus asked, raising his eyebrows.

“I dated this girl once, a med student, she used to practice on me by…”

“Please don’t go any further,” Caroline groaned, trying to work out whether it was in their best interests to take Esther to hospital given all the unnecessary interest it would attract, especially given how she came to be injured. They didn’t sign non-disclosure agreements for no reason. 

They needed something more discreet. Then an idea came to her. 

One hour later

The bell rang out and Caroline rushed to the front door. Opening the door, she immediately smiled; he always had that effect on her. 

“Why do I always seem to be bailing you out, Care Bear?” 

“Just lucky I guess,” she grinned. “And what have I told you about not calling me that.” He dropped his bag and she jumped into his arms, excited to see him after all this time.

“Not to do it,” he teased, putting her back on the ground. 

“Care Bear? I’ll have to add that to my repertoire,” Klaus chuckled. Caroline fought the urge to roll her eyes, of course he was eavesdropping. “Who is this?”

Caroline pulled back, annoyed that yet again her annoying co-producer had interrupted. 

“Klaus Mikaelson, this is Enzo St John,” she introduced the two. “Our medic for the afternoon.”

“How do you know each other?” 

“Enzo is my best friend Kat’s cousin, we grew up together, well until he decided to leave the country on us.”

“Duty called,” he smiled. 

“Enzo decided to go and join Médecins Sans Frontières.”

“Doctors without Borders?” Klaus asked, his tone telling Caroline he was clearly impressed but was trying to play it down. 

“I’ve been in Burkina Faso most recently,” he explained. “But came home for some downtime, see what my cousin has been up to and of course to save Caroline, yet again.”

“It was once and you know how handsy my prom date was,” she said. 

“It was my pleasure to punch him out,” he smiled. “How is Stefan Salvatore doing these days?”

“I have no idea and don’t care,” she muttered. Klaus coughed interrupting their chat. 

“Well, maybe it’s best we get to the patient?”

“Can someone please give mother a gag? She is howling like a banshee,” Rebekah muttered, walking into the room. “And who do we have here?”

“I’m Enzo,” he introduced curtly. “I assume I’ll be taking care of the banshee?” 

“It’s only funny when I say it,” she drawled, sizing him up. Caroline could sense the tension from a mile off but she wasn’t sure whether they wanted to kill each other or rub up against each other. 

“Right on that note,” Caroline interrupted awkwardly. “Let’s go outside, shall we?”

“Why do I feel like I’ve entered the twilight zone?” he asked as she led him toward the tennis courts.

“Because you have,” she murmured, attempting not to laugh aloud. 

Enzo was an instant hit with Esther, no doubt due to his nationality, good looks and charm which he possessed in spades. 

She also decided that he needed to come to Mexico and play medic. Klaus and Rebekah thought otherwise and had tried to change her mind but being the matriarch of the brood, they all knew it was pointless.

Caroline had a feeling it wasn’t too much of a hard sell after what he’d come from. Although Caroline wasn’t quite sure he was ready for this type of jungle. 

“This is about Enzo,” she drawled. 

“Excuse me?”

“Now who’s asking the questions,” she huffed. “You don’t want me staying at the same hotel as him in Mexico.” 

They’d arranged their travel together, Caroline hoping to get some downtime to chat with one of her oldest friends. There had never been anything between them, their relationship was strictly platonic.

Also, Enzo loved himself too much to love anyone else but obviously Klaus didn’t know that. 

Caroline put it down to the fact Klaus was determined to ruin her life for whatever reason she had no idea. 

“That is so not true,” he growled. 

“Why don’t you tell me the truth for once, Mikaelson? I’m growing incredibly tired of this arrogant bluster.”

“Says the woman who uses insults as a defence mechanism?”

“Are we interrupting something?” Caroline looked up into the warm, brown eyes of Enzo. 

“Not at all, in fact we were just talking about how excited Klaus is to have you along for the trip,” she smiled, nudging Klaus in the ribs as she said it. “Hold on, what do you mean we?”

“You can’t go to Mexico and take my cousin with you and not expect a few extra guests, Care.” Katherine and Bonnie stood there, bags in hand. 

“You did say there were two bedrooms, right?” She asked Klaus sweetly, happy that she’d beaten him at his own game this time, or so she thought. 

You can read this chapter and follow the story HERE or HERE

[arahul-abyssia]

The Endless Cycle

My second story for @starprincesshlc and @jklantern ’s Nintember event! This one sees another entry in story as ancient as a certain kingdom, but there’s... well, let’s say a few twists...

~~ Treasure, Sword, Adversity, Growth, Evil ~~

All his hard work was being undone right in front of him. As far as the eye could see, the storms were clearing and the waters were brightening, the mountains were becoming calm again and the trees were regaining all their bright colors. The day before, the shadowy miasmas that emanated from his fortress were spread from border to border across the kingdom; now, all that remained of them was a thin mist around the walls, and they were still visibly receding as the sun shone brighter and brighter. It was clear to him that his defeat was fast approaching.

Hmph. As if that’s at all surprising… 

He was no mere would-be conqueror of the Kingdom of Hyrule; he was Ganondorf, one of a long series of incarnations of the ancient Curse of Demise, and it was his destiny to fight against and be defeated by one who bears the Spirit of the Hero and wields the Master Sword and one who carries the Blood of the Goddess. Such was their never ending cycle. Such was the way it always had been, was, and always would be.

It was not as though he had not tried to find an alternate route, but no creature can win against the hands of fate. He had tried to cast aside the shadows that lingered around him wherever he went, he had tried to guide away the monsters that watched him from the wilderness, following him in hardly-veiled secret and prostrating themselves before him when no civilized creature was looking, and he had tried to ignore the dark impulses within him that told him to bring destruction and ruin to the land.

He had tried, and he had failed. Eventually, he realized that it was no use trying to avoid his fate, and so set about casting his incarnation of terror upon Hyrule, so that a Hero and Princess may arise and bring his downfall. If he could not have peace in life, perhaps there was peace in death, or banishment, or being sealed away or turned to stone, or whatever his incarnation of defeat was to be.

To some extent, he regretted the problems he had caused. He knew firsthand the consequences of using tainted waters and having one’s home and shelter destroyed. Were things truly up to him, not one of his blights would ever have been manifested. But, fate and the Curse had other plans for him and the kingdom, and he could only hope that, after they brought his downfall, the Hero and Princess could make things right again.

The steadily loudening tapping of boots upon stone told him that his adversaries had passed every obstacle he had laid for them within the fortress and were now rapidly ascending the wholly unblocked spiraling stairwell that led to his room at the top of the highest tower.

In five… four… three… two… one…

With much unnecessary force, the door to the chamber burst open, revealing the two who were to be his end, their eyes filled with the fires of determination and quiet-yet-righteous fury. In the Hero’s hand, the legendary Master Sword, glowing with a power that could banish and strike down all evil that dared cross its path, and in the Princess’s hand, the mythical Bow of Light, glowing with a divine radiance that could pierce the shadows themselves.

“So, the saviors of Hyrule have finally arrived… to defeat the source of the evil that plagued your land, to bring about the return of peace and prosperity, to—”

An arrow of light grazed his shoulder, exploding into a gleam burst upon the wall behind him.

“Cut the crap, Ganondorf! We didn’t just march our way through your uninventive puzzles and rehashes of dungeon protectors for you to spew some fancy words about what we already know. Shut up and ready your weapons already so we can fight you and defeat you!”

Ganondorf closed his eyes and sighed. It seemed this Princess Zelda had not changed in the slightest. He had come across her once before, on a trip to the castle in the early days of his fall to the darkness. He did not remember the exact details of the event, but he remembered vividly that she did not care one bit to act like royalty, much less one who is said to hold divinity in her veins. Her gait was casual, her language was coarse, and she had nearly no respect for the norms of nobility. Though she cared for her subjects, no one would think her a princess if not for prior knowledge or her clothing.

“If that’s the way you want it, so be it.” He thrust his hands out to his sides, a double-ended trident materializing in his right and a long curved blade in his left, then moved into a fighting stance. Though he had no formal training whatsoever with one-handed wielding or dual-wielding, something told him that he would find no struggle in doing either.

The two heroes shifted their stances as well, and their battle began. The dark powers within him allowed Ganondorf to shift through the shadows in the room, throwing blasts of dark energy at his opponents between profanely empowered strikes of his weapons. However, their skills and coordination far outmatched his own, and within a short few minutes, he could feel their blows beginning to take their toll. He felt a change in his darkness, as though the curse itself demanded a change in his tactics and spells, and he moved to the room’s center, taking a defensive position and wreathing himself in shadows.

“It seems you two are quite powerful indeed. What a shame it is that we must fight…”

“If you’re so uninvested in this battle, why not just admit defeat now and make this a whole lot easier on all of us?”

Ganondorf began channeling dark energy into a great sphere of shadow. “Because fate does not work that way… I have no choice but to stand before you two as your enemy, in another incarnation of the eternal cycle. No Link, no Zelda, and no Ganon in all history could avoid their place in their incarnation, and each and every time, no matter what it put before the heroes, the darkness always fell to the light in a climactic final confrontation. Why should our story be any different?”

Zelda braced herself to dodge or deflect the attack.

“...It already is…”

This was enough to give them both pause. The dark warrior dismissed his spell and the princess loosened her posture as both turned to stare at the latter’s companion, his infamous silence broken.

“What do you mean ‘it already is’?”

“Our story… is very different… from the legends…” It was clear to Ganondorf that this Link was not accustomed to speaking longer thoughts or giving extended explanations. “Like… our bodies… we are not… what the legends… say we should be.”

The boy gestured at the three in the room. The dark wizard looked down at himself instinctually, realizing that the boy was right; in the legends, the Hero and Princess were Hylians, and Ganondorf a Gerudo, with flaming orange hair and skin tinted a sickly green by the evil within. But it was he who was Hylian now, with untouched dark skin and hair the color of the night sky, and his adversaries showed no signs of Hylian blood; the boy before him held the Master Sword in a scaled, clawed, webbed hand, a trademark trait of the Zora alongside the fish-like tail attached to each of their heads, and the girl glared at him down a beak that could only belong to a Rito, her bow held in hands that much resembled the feathers on her wings.

“And… the legends… have little technology… compared to now. Even the times of the Divine Beasts… we have so much more than them.” He turned his head to look out the window at the sprawling Kodai City, its staggering towers glowing with blue and orange lights. Even Ganondorf’s own fortress and tower incorporated some amount of the splendors of Sheikah technology.

But it doesn’t matter… It can’t matter… right?

“So what if things are a bit different from the legends? That doesn’t change the fact that there’s an evil person, right in front of us, that we need to defeat, so things can go back to normal! I’m getting tired of having to be ‘Zelda.’”

Ganondorf stared at the girl. If her name wasn’t actually Zelda, then that meant that—

“Don’t give me that look! I’ll bet your name isn’t even Ganondorf! Mine certainly isn’t ‘Zelda’, and his isn’t ‘Link’!”

The Princess was correct; he had taken the name as a sort of title when he realized what his purpose was, what the shadows of fate wished him to do. It hadn’t crossed his mind that the same would apply to the two sent to defeat him.

“Ugh… now that you’ve mentioned this, all I can think about is all the other stuff you’ve told me from those musty old books of yours. Wasn’t there something about a previous incarnation having the genders or roles all mixed up, or whatever?”

“Yes… one version of ‘Zelda’ was a prince, and his ‘Link’ was a girl. Another one had a Hero who only wielded the Bow, and the Princess held this Sword.”

“And no one talks about this?!”

“People don’t like to talk about the legends these days… they think it’s dwelling on the past…”

The dark wizard stared in awe as his adversaries discussed the history of the Curse, and the many apparent changes from the very first legends that far preceded his own oddities. If the Curse had deteriorated so, then perhaps…

Perhaps I do have a chance… 

The two turned their attention back to Ganondorf. Perhaps they had come to the decision on their own, or perhaps they saw some change in his eyes or posture, but they began to approach him, Link slowly extending his hand. “So, Ganondorf… would you like to return to the light?”

“Obviously you won’t be forgiven immediately. There’ll be a long list of reparations for you to do, since, you know, you blighted every single region in the kingdom and caused harm to countless innocents, and those reparations mean a lot paperwork for me, which I really don’t want to do…” she stopped for a moment and took a deep breath, “...but I was taught to try to avoid solutions that involve violence and murder, so if that’s the trade off, I am all for it.”

Maybe it was as though they had pierced and torn down a veil in his mind, or perhaps flipped a switch he thought broken beyond repair, but he, almost without thinking, stretched out his own hand to the Hero’s, prepared to join them in a life of light.

And then a burning pain filled his chest.

Surprise and panic filled the eyes of the two before him, the Hero’s hand faltering. As a fiery haze began to build in his vision, he was dimly aware of the wreathing shadows beginning to writhe, not only covering his flesh and clothing, but passing into them, too. He collapsed to his knees, dimly aware of Zelda shouting something at Link and him responding frantically in return, but in far too much agony to properly comprehend it.

You will not escape your destiny.

The voice that filled his mind was old and cruel, like the very concept of darkness and evil given a voice. He tried to shut it out, but it wriggled its way through every tiny weakness in his defenses, growing ever louder and drowning out the shouts of the youths. Now on all fours, he lifted his hand toward them one final and desperate time, then collapsed as a golden light, brighter than anything he had ever seen, shone before him, and the haze and voice gave way to utter silence.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

When his senses returned to him, Ganondorf found himself lying prone on the stone floor of the chamber, his head aching. After a few seconds, he attempted to push himself up, but he found that his limbs felt far weaker than they had only moments ago. He tried and failed several more times before other hands, two far smoother than his and two far softer, pulled him into an upright position on his knees. Slowly, he looked up, and found two familiar faces staring back at him, their mouths twisted in bright smiles that anyone could mistake for mocking glee.

“What… what… just happened to me?”

“Well, if the dark stormy figure outside is anything to go by, I’d say we just expelled the shadows from you.”

“...Stormy figure?”

The two proceeded to duck under his arms and lift him to a proper upright posture, supporting him on their shoulders, then guide him onto the tower’s balcony. Above it was a great storm made of darkness, shadows, and evil he could feel permeating the air. A black whirlwind twisted down from it to the field below, where at its base stood a humanoid form with glowing red eyes, glaring up at the three in the tower with nothing but hatred and malice.

Ganondorf looked between the two. “But… how?”

At this, Link and Zelda merely smiled and pointed to his hand. On each of the three was a fading golden triangle composed of three smaller ones.

“The power of the treasure of the Golden Goddesses... the legendary Triforce… it can work miracles when united, and directed, toward a common goal…”

“Most think the power is lost, buuut the versions of us seem to have a knack for stumbling across it again and again and again.”

The former dark wizard looked from his hands, to those of the heroes, to the heroes’ faces, to the storm, to his hands again. He felt like his mind was trying to process this sudden turn of events at high speed while he couldn't even think at normal speeds, and having weakened limbs and a lingering headache was far from helpful.

“Alright, rest here, you’re way too weak to help us in this fight right now--Link, come on, we have an ancient evil to defeat, once and for all!”

And as the two vaulted off the balcony and glided to the field below, Ganondorf--no, that was no longer his name or title--the newly purified man could not help but let his face drift into a peaceful, genuine smile.

[thecatwhogrins]

The Red-Haired Maiden, the Little Wolf and the Firebird

A little Obiyuki firebird au fic for Obiyukimadness20, please enjoy!

Tsarevitch Raji Shenazade has demanded to see a Firebird.

A rumor had been spreading throughout the kingdom, from village to village, till it had reached the glistening towers of St. Petersburg. There, the rumour had spread like wildfire, and soon enough it caught the attention of the grandson of the great Tsar. The young noble was entitled to demand such things, even if this meant that many men would die trying to achieve this. If it is his will, it shall be done.

“Only a spoiled princeling like him would send his subordinates chasing after an old maid's tale", thought Obi bitterly as he shivered in the cold.

Obi was one of such attendants, the son of a skilled hunter, and the best one at that. But he was of a lower birth status, and this could be felt in the way the other young nobles looked at him. Obi simply let them do what they wanted, his attention was all on tracking the god forsaken bird. If he did not find the bird, he knew the princeling would throw out men from the throne room windows and behead the rest. Although Obi didn’t particularly like any of the snobby noble men or spineless servants, he did value his own life and the prize that had been promised if he succeeded in this task.

Freedom.

And so, this was the reason why a pack of young and not so young noblemen and servants scoured the thick forest on the edge of the eastern border of the kingdom, boot-clad feet deep in thick blankets of snow. They walked in a single file, the younger ones were rowdier and made much more noise. Obi stuck to the front, his footfalls as silent as a wolf's, his ears perking at every sound. Tracking a bird that no one has never seen was not an easy task, to say the least. His full attention was on finding a sign, any kind of sign to prove that the bird existed.

“Don’t go too far ahead, Volchonak, we don’t all run on all fours like you.” One of the men shouted, mocking Obi who simply let it go.

Volchonak, little wolf.

That nickname was better than others he had been called in the past. At least this evoked something to be feared, to be reckoned with. Obi simply advanced, leaving behind him the childish nobles.

As night encroached upon the trees, the group set up camp and lit a bonfire to ward off any nightly visitors from surprising them in their sleep. One of the younger nobles called Ryuu Ivanovitch was to be on sentry duty with Obi and had visibly never done such work before. He peered into the only darkness nervously but with a dignified countenance as he sat down next to Obi under a huge pine tree. They sat at the foot of a huge fir, both wearing as many layers of clothes they could, bundled up until only their eyes and noses could be seen. As the other nobles started to go to sleep, one of Ivan’s friends passed him and snickered.

“Ryuu Ivanovitch! Don’t get lost in the forest now, Baba Yaga might just snatch you up and eat you.” He laughed and continued towards the snow hole he’d be sleeping in. Ryuu pouted, displeased, and Obi rolled his eyes while his thumb strokes the hilt of his hunting knife. Obi was less preoccupied with Baba Yaga and more worried about wolves or bears, not that he would tell the young nobleman next to him. The last thing he needed to deal with during the night would be a panic-stricken pup clinging onto him. But it would be funny to tease him.

“Decisions, Decisions...” Obi sighed and looked towards the tree line a few meters away.

Obi's keen eyes suddenly caught something glistening a few meters away. It glowed like the gold that decorated the throne room. He rushed over to the object and found a single golden feather with bright red edges. It looked nothing like any kind of feather he had ever seen. It had melted slightly the snow around it but didn’t look hot anymore. Obi still hesitated to take it. He finally gingerly picked it up between gloved fingers. The feather was still slightly warm and shone brightly. It looked almost like an ornament a skilled craftsman had forged and dropped onto the snowy forest ground.

As Obi looked up a quiet sound resounded above his head. High above him, perched on a tree branch, sat a girl. She wore a necklace made of the same kind of feather Obi held in the palm of his hands. Her hair was a brilliant red, it glowed like a beacon in the frigid night air. She was staring at him curiously and the bonfire added a radish hue upon her face. She looked positively fiery, as though she herself was in fact the fire bird, a notion Obi refused to consider.

“Um...hello there miss?” he called up to her.

Ryuu looked up from where he sat at the base of the tree. His black brows furrowed but he did not utter a word. He suddenly cried out in alarm at the same time as the woman in the tree:

“Volchonak! Be careful!”

Obi barely had time to react as he suddenly was tackled to the ground by a creature, fur and weight and warmth smothering him. A row of sharp teeth snapped near his throat, nearly missing him.

It was a wolf.

How ironic.

He couldn’t make it out completely in the dying fire’s light, but it was huge and fierce. Its paws scratching at him as he grappled with it, avoiding its maw. They struggled in the snow, the beast was snarling, Obi was making almost inhuman desperate noises as desperately trying to get his hunting knife. The other men had also woken up, alarmed by all the noises and by Ryuu screaming.

The wolf suddenly got hold of the arm Obi was using to shield his face, and he hissed with pain. Fortunately, his teeth hadn’t sunk in too deep, but the pain was still intense. Obi glared at him, eyes locking with his adversary’s. It felt like a lifetime had passed when Obi finally grasped his weapon and slashed at the wolf’s eye. It whimpered and let him go, backing away. Obi’s head was spinning, the frigid night air coming out in breathless gasps. The beast turned away and raced into the night.

The other men were also trying to fend off other wolves with their hunting equipment. There was one man already down, his crimson blood spilt over the cold ground. After a few more minutes of panic, they managed to steer them away. Obi observed this all lying on the snowy ground, it thick like a carpet but colder than hell.

From where he was lying down, his gaze met the woman’s as she huddled in the tree. There was a look of worry on her face as he slowly sat up. The knife was still held in his hand tightly, blood from his arm trailing down, warm and wet. Ryuu helped him to stand up completely, asking him if he was feeling well.

“Are you hurt?” the woman asked with a melodious voice.

“I’ll survive,” obi answered, even though he still felt slightly light-headed.

After a few moments of silence, she asked another question:

“Are you here to see the fire bird?”

Obi hesitated slightly before answering.

“Wait, you know of the fire bird? What are you doing here? What is your name?” he asked.

“My name is Shirayuki, I live in the cottage not too far from here and I was out hunting for some herbs. I climbed this tree when the wolf attacked me, but it seems… I can’t get back down again.” She smiled sheepishly.

Obi’s brain worked double time as he tried to detect anything amiss in her story, but everything seemed a little too convenient. And that necklace… those were not normal feathers.

“Let me help you down, miss.” he smiled up at her. The time for questions would come later.

Obi directed her on where to put her hands and feet as Ryuu Ivanovitch watched silently next to him. The other men were all asleep and no other sounds disturbed the night but the wind howling and Obi’s calm voice. Shirayuki was about halfway down when suddenly the branch on which she was standing broke. Snow dropped heavily, her screamed filled the empty air and Obi suddenly found himself with an armful of red head and his arm was screaming in pain once more.

The night air turned silent again and Obi’s arms tightened around the young woman. Her green eyes were wide, still burning with fear and staring into Obi’s golden ones. Their breaths came out in puffs as they both calmed down. The whole camp full of groggy, grumpy men started to circle the three of them. Then, Shirayuki smiled, a small bright thing that grew more and more till she started to laugh. It was a bright sound, clear as bells in the middle of winter.

“Thank you for saving me, Volchonak.” She thanked him softly once she stopped laughing, “oh no! Your arm! I’m so sorry,” she quickly added, hastily getting out of his arms.

“You’re welcome miss.” He answered as he set her down. His heart was beating fast, but it wasn’t in fear. He gripped his injury, trying to staunch the blood.

“What’s this girl doing in the middle of our camp at this ungodly hour of the night?” asked Alexei Vasiliev, one of the lords on the hunt.

“I’m not too sure”, said one of the older servant men, Andrei Popovitch, “but it looks like she might be one of our men’s women who’s come on the hunt.”

The other men laughed at this but suddenly one of them cried out in surprise.

“My lord, look at her neck, those feathers, aren’t they strange?”

Shirayuki looked down at her chest where the feathers glowed dimly in the light of the campfire.

“They are strange! Speak, girl, tell us where you found them!” exclaimed Alexei Popovitch.

“This necklace is made of the firebird’s feathers. He does not give them out freely, but I saved his life once so to repay this kindness, he gave these to me.” Shirayuki explained. Obi felt surprise and suspicion worm their way into him. Living in the palace, he had met many a man who would spin the wildest tales in hopes of pleasing whoever listened in hopes of a few roubles.

“You know where the firebird is?” Obi interjected.

“I don’t know where he is right now, if that’s what you’re asking me.” Shirayuki answered, “he doesn’t come to my bidding, he has a mind of his own. The firebird assists me when I heal people. He comes to me when I need him. But he is a fickle creature and doesn’t always come when I think he will.” She laughed slightly at this.

“You’re a healer, then?” Obi asked.

She explained how she grew up in the forest with her grandparents. Her grandfather was a woodcutter and her grandmother taught her how to recognize plants and how to use them to heal people. Many people from the surrounding villages would often come visit her grandmother, seeking her skills. She continued with her grandmother’s the family business and cured whoever came to her cottage in exchange of things she could not provide for herself such as food and other rare items. Throughout this story, Obi looked at Shirayuki and she seemed truthful, her eyes shining slightly when she spoke of her grandfather’s passing, her grief still apparent, a small smile nonetheless playing on her lips. A strange sadness gripped his own heart and Obi had to look away from her eyes.

“It’s my turn to ask questions now,” she said with an inquisitive smile, “why do you seek the firebird?”

Obi was silent for a moment, a heartbeat. Telling her the truth was risky.

“We are not seeking it for glory, if that is what is worrying you. In fact, we don’t have much of a say in the matter. Our lord wishes to see the bird. We are simply here to execute.” Obi explained.

Shirayuki cocked her head at him, her brows drawn in a frown.

“What will you do when you see it? Will you hurt it?”

“No, Tsarevich Raji only wishes to see it so we will capture it, bring it before his highness and set it free.” Alexei Vasiliev answered. The lie was obvious for anyone who lived with nobility. Obi tensed up. Shirayuki seemed to not believe the noble man and instead looked at Obi, with a slight tilt of her brow. Obi looked away, under her scrutiny he suddenly felt very small, very much like his nickname.

“Well, if that is all you wish to do, I might be able to summon the bird tomorrow, we simply must find its roosting nest on the top of the mountain.” She explained calmly.

“We shall sort this out in the morning. Everybody will wake up at dawn. Everybody go back to rest and if someone wakes me up again, so help me God, they will get a beating they shall remember.” said Alexei Vasiliev. The men grumbled and returned to their snow holes, shivering and cursing at the cold.

Only Obi, Ryuu and Shirayuki remained, an uncomfortable silence reigning. The next round of night watch brought out two more young hunters to take over. Obi let them take his place under the fir tree and headed towards his sleeping hole he would share with someone else. Ryuu, mostly silent during the whole interaction shuffled off sleepily towards his own sleeping hole. As Obi neared his resting spot, he realised Shirayuki was following him softly.

“Let me help you with your wound,” she said softly, bringing out herbs and other equipment out of a small satchel she wore.

“I’m sorry, this might hurt,” she said as she borrowed the deer skin full of alcohol and used it to drench his wound, disinfecting it. She then applied some herbs that smelled rather strongly, making Obi’s nose wrinkle in distaste. She finished by bandaging his arm quickly with a fresh piece of linen. Her hands on his skin were soft, almost too warm compared to the cold air. Her head was bowed, concentration etched on her features. Obi’s heart was once again racing. He was so distracted, he barely heard her when she voiced her request.

“Can I borrow your snow hole please? It’s too late for me to dig one myself” she asked softly. There was no trace of embarrassment like the blushing maidens back in the village would have had. Her crimson hair was all tussled from the wind and falling from a tree. Obi could even detect a few pine needles sticking out of it. A small smile played on her rosebud lips. Utterly charming. Obi swallowed hard.

“Of course, little miss. Let me just move over, make some space for you. Don’t want it to be too tight.” Obi almost winked and thought better of it. Shirayuki looked rather unfazed, probably missing the double entendre.

“Actually, when it’s this cold, it’s better to sleep closer together to retain the heat,” she said unabashedly. Obi almost choked.

“Yeah…Yes, you’re right! Come on, before we wake up anyone again.” Obi hurriedly said.

Shirayuki settled next to him, the bonfire did not illuminate the hole, so Obi could only see her profile outlined in the dark. The silence was only interrupted by the sounds of the forest and Shirayuki’s light breathing. Obi was known to be a flirt, but he wasn’t accustomed to see a woman this unabashed.

He closed his eyes and tried to get some rest.

[beautyandthewarcanons]

New Theory: What is the truth about Virgo Island's history? Are the four main characters from the Vi clan metaphors of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse?

Hello everyone! I have been doing a lot of brainstorming, so be prepared for a lot of reading. Are you ready? Let's begin! To do this, I'm going to look into the story's origins a bit more. Remember, all of these characters and Beauty and the War belong to @poisonappletales !

In the game, while in prison, Ambrosia gives X a history lesson of the island. Here, we learn that primary conflicts began with two things… the Phoenix being attacked by the Trold, as well as the center territory of the island being in pursuit by the Hulder, the Trold, and the Valkyrie in an effort for conquest. Now, let me interject for just a moment. Another theory I have is that before the war, the Phoenix were the ruling clan. Why do I think this? The Phoenix follow a set of principles in favor of peace and harmony. They are healers, not warriors. They do not condone violence and conquest. In the midst of the struggle between the three clans I mentioned vying for the central territory, perhaps the Trold began attacking and killing the Phoenix out of retaliation, or in an effort to advance their conquest to become the ruling clan. Now, notice that we only have the Hulder, the Trold and the Valkyrie fighting for that land. I already stated why the Phoenix would not pursue this course of action- but what about the other clans? The Cucuy clan also does not seem the type to fight for rule, as their primary concern is the well-being of the animals and nature of the island. The Imugi, though a vicious clan, doesn’t seem to be the type to be power-hungry either. Finally, we have the Vi. Why did they not seek rule before the war?

Because the Vi clan is not native to the island. Um, WHAT?

As the Phoenix are being attacked, it’s possible that they attempted to appeal to the other clans for help, and for one reason or another, the Phoenix did not receive the help they needed. Desperate to save their people, without breaking their condemnation of violence most likely, they were forced to seek aid from beyond the borders of the island. In my theory, this is where the Vi come in.

This is very important. We have a foreign clan coming to the aid of the Phoenix, the ruling clan of the island. It is here that the Vi make a deal that will change the island forever. In exchange for their aid, and making an oath to always serve and protect the Phoenix, they are given co-leadership of the island- being the Vi clan, perhaps they rename the island to what we know as Virgo Island. (It makes me wonder if this has anything to do with the typical tradition surrounding names on the island.) Before they can ascend however, they had a war to win first. Now, the manner in which the Vi triumphed can’t exactly be determined because there is still so little known about the clan as a whole- this fact alone could support that they are non-natives. The player knows very little about them because the natives know very little about them. However, based on certain factors, we can prove a few things that gave the Vi more of an advantage in the battles.

First, for whatever reason, it seems to have been established that the Vi first pursued the Cucuy clan to help them. They may have refused because again, the Cucuy don’t seem the type to engage in destructive activity. This may be what causes a major problem for the Vi down the line, another theory that I will expand upon later.

Now, the Hulder, Trold, and Valkyrie put up a good fight- but a problem which may have further contributed to the Vi’s victory is that, because of the animosity lingering between one another, these clans did not fight as a united front, but separately. This could be a metaphor to the division among peoples and countries in the real world vying for power. Had they fought as a collective, it’s possible that they could have vanquished against the Vi. Again, because we know very little about them, we can’t determine this for sure.

Let’s discuss the scene where Ambrosia is hunted by “wolves.” Now, it is theorized, that these wolves are from the Hulder clan- it is the scene where Arsenik slays them in disguise, and waits with Ambrosia in hiding until the break of morning when it is safe. So, let’s break this down. Why would the Hulder break into the Phoenix village in the middle of the war? My theory is that they blame the Phoenix for calling the Vi to the island and engaging them in war. Attacking Ambrosia was an act of retaliation. If this is so, then why did Arsenik not only refuse to participate, but possibly slayed members of his own clan to save her? Perhaps it’s because he loved her, or he had an ulterior motive. Maybe, he simply did not condone what his clan was doing and decided to be the hero. He could have known beforehand what they were planning, and made his own to thwart them. In addition, how did Arsenik get away with killing his own clan members? Wouldn’t he be executed, or at least excommunicated from his clan? Remember- Ambrosia specifically states that Arsenik was a “Huntsman in disguise.” All his witnesses were most likely slaughtered, and then he was most likely unseen by anyone else as he was in hiding for the remainder of the night. If Arsenik truly did kill members of his own clan to save Ambrosia, then this makes him all the more heroic here. After all, the motto of the game is “men have gone to war for a woman.”

Another event I wanted to speak of briefly is the moment in the game where Ambrosia remembers Chase saying “I’m sorry” to her. In context, perhaps he was “sorry” for being a Trold. Although he could also be alluding to the fact that he is often regarded as less attractive or desirable than other suitors in the game, or it could relate to the fact that it was his clan that began the attacks against the Phoenix, resulting in the chain of events which followed.

It’s possible that Chase feels torn between his feelings for Ambrosia and loyalty to his clan. Depending on how he feels he is treated by Ambrosia, he may lean one way or the other. The second to last scene of act one, which depicts Onyx’s official introduction as he slays several high ranking members of the Trold, could be a pivotal moment for Chase. He already feels resentment for what has happened to his clan- if his relationship with Ambrosia is on the rocks at this point, some unfavorable results may present themselves in later acts.

Now, let’s move on to the last scene of act one- it is here that the confrontation with Thunder plays out. There are a lot of questions surrounding this clan, as well as what is implied will happen to them in the epilogue. If the Imugi weren’t interested in conquest as theorized earlier, and weren’t involved with the main battles of the war, then why did they presumably engage in battle after the fact? If you notice, the wave of Imugi patients come after the Phoenix have already been healing patients from the Hulder, Trold, and Valkyrie clans. This was something that made me think for a long time… and now, I may have an answer. Let’s take the Imugi and the Cucuy clans in perspective to start. The Imugi possess “animal blood in their veins.” The Cucuy can communicate with and have deep respect for animals and nature. With that said, it may be possible that these clans have quietly established an alliance over time. With the events that transpired during the war playing out, it’s possible that the Imugi planned a retaliation effort against the Vi for their slaughter of the Cucuy. This could be the reason why they waited for the dust to settle from the battle with the other clans, to attack the Vi as they are recovering from their victory. However, the Imugi were also defeated, and survivors are then brought to the Phoenix to be treated. This could be why Thunder attempts to attack Ambrosia- same as the wolf attack, they feel the Phoenix are to blame for all the death and defeat the clans have faced. Though Ambrosia knew Thunder personally, it’s possible he didn’t even remember her. All he saw… was red.

If you watch closely in the epilogue, it also may be implied that the Imugi suffer a worse punishment than the Hulder, Trold and Valkyrie clans. From the Vi’s perspective, the Imugi’s motives may seem more malicious than their prior adversaries. In the epilogue, it is implied that the Imugi are forced to become slaves for the Vi, a possible punishment for their attack.

With all this said... I have laid the foundation for the Horsemen theory.

First, what are the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse? They are Biblical figures recorded in the Bible said to be punishments from God. Now, most consider an apocalypse to be the end of the world, but that's not necessarily the case. One of the official definitions state that an apocalypse could be a disastrous event- not necessarily a be all, end all event, or a "prophetic revelation." So, how does this tie into the Vi clan, or the world of Beauty and the War?

In the passage Revelation 6, it is said that God possesses a book containing seven seals. How many clans do we know of so far on Virgo Island? Seven. Of these, four of these seals are summomed to create the Horsemen to "patrol the Earth."

Think about it- in the Bible, the Horsemen were summoned to smite the evil and strife of Earth, to bring things to order. I believe the Phoenix, the "divine," summoned the Vi to do just that. This indeed leads to a "disastrous event-" the war that destroys members of all clans. Though Wildfire's testimonies in War: 13th Day are always to be taken with a grain of salt, she describes the Vi as a mysteriously powerful clan. She witnessed one, for example, with "six arms." This makes this clan even more terrifying, as they are not consistent or carbon copies in their powers and abilities. The strength of one could be the weakness of another. This could be one of the reasons they are so difficult to defeat.

Honing back in on the four Horsemen specifically, however, I can see some strong correlations to some of the main characters hailing from the Vi clan- from what little we know of them, at least.

Let's look at the first one. "And I saw when the Lamb opened one of the seals, and I heard, as it were the noise of thunder, one of the four beasts saying, 'Come and see.'

And I saw, and behold a white horse: and he that sat on him had a bow; and a crown was given unto him: and he went forth conquering, and to conquer."

At first, this sounds much like Barium. After all, he is the King of Virgo Island, right? However, there is another who possesses a "crown-" his brother Alexandrite, the Prince.

Why do I say this? The White horse, in some interpretations, represents pestilence. We know very little of the Prince's nature- is he a vampire, which could be why he never goes out or reveals himself? The one picture we have record of does show him having "white skin." This could attribute to why all his wives seem to die mysteriously- another unpleasant fact we know of him. Most testimony of him by other characters seem to express that he is ruthless, cunning, and "ice cold-" like snow, perhaps? I'll let you think on that a bit.

For the second seal, the Bible says this; "When He broke the second seal, I heard the second living creature saying, 'Come.' And another, a red horse, went out; and to him who sat on it, it was granted to take peace from Earth, and that men would slay one another; and a great sword was given to him."

With this, I thought of Barium, and not just because of his undeniably crimson complexion. The Red Horse is often interpreted to represent war, one of the central concepts of the game and that which Barium leads his clan head first into. Because of the decisions he ultimately made, Barium could say he has blood on his hands, literally and figuratively. In his case specifically, his "great sword" could also denote a sexual connotation in reference to his harem.

For the time being, I'm going to skip the third seal and talk about the fourth first. This is what the passage says about this seal; "When the Lamb broke the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth living creature saying, 'Come.' I looked, and behold, an ashen horse; and he who sat on it had the name Death; and Hades was following with him. Authority was given to them over a fourth of the earth, to kill with sword and with famine and with pestilence and by the wild beasts of the earth."

I think it's pretty obvious who this passage relates most to.

Onyx is the executioner of Virgo Island, responsible for carrying out the death sentences either deemed by the Crown or for those who dare threaten them. For this reason, he is also not well-liked among Virgo Islanders, often feared. The reason I covered this seal first was because of the obvious connection to this character- we don't know much about him either, except that if there was a version of the Bible of Virgo Island and we flipped to the page of this passage, Onyx's signature helmeted head would surely be there.

Now, let's discuss the least obvious conmection of the four characters. The passage for the third seal reads as follows; "When He broke the third seal, I heard the third living creature saying, 'Come.' I looked, and behold, a black horse; and he who sat on it had a pair of scales in his hand. And I heard something like a voice in the center of the four living creatures saying, "A quart of wheat for a denarius, and three quarts of barley for a denarius; but do not damage the oil and the wine."

Okay. This is pretty confusing. Obviously, by process of elimination, the only main character of the Vi left is Night. Again, we don't know a whole lot about him, except that he seems to be a bad boy heartbreaker who thinks everything is interesting. However, I have reason to believe there is more to him than what meets the eye, and I will discuss my reasons for believing so in a bit.

Let's break this passage down. The Black horse is typically interpreted to represent famine. The "scales" are referring to the kind that were weighted, like the scales held by Justice. A denarius is a type of currency used in ancient Rome. This seal is the only one to have accompanied narration, referring to the fact that the proposed famine would affect the price of grain crops, but not olive and grape vines used to make oil and wine; this was because grain crops were more susceptible to the effects of famine.

So, what does any of this have to do with Night?

Again, we don't know the fine details about what transpired during the war- specifically, the distinct role each character played. What we do know, is that for some reason, Ambrosia not only doesn't like Night, she seems to downright hate him. Yes, Ambrosia, the sweet little Phoenix that doesn't seem like she has a drop of bad blood in her body. She doesn't even hate Unknown, who practically considers sexual assault as a typical social interaction, and Onyx, who kills people for a living- something that goes against the deepest rooted principles of her clan.

Perhaps, because in some respects, there are some sins worse than murder. At least, in Ambrosia's eyes.

When interpreting this passage further, it has been interpreted that the narration of the grained crops versus the oil and wine could lead to potential financial manipulation of certain crops over others, raising prices, causing economic toil over the simple folk and funnelling wealth to those in higher positions.

For Night, it is implied that he oversees the captured Imugi working for the Vi as slaves in later acts. The deterioration of the Imugi's quality of life could align with a famine in a philisophical sense- until we know more about Night's true role, I can only speculate his relation to the Black horse.

So, what do you think? Do you agree with my theories? Let me know! If you read to this point, kudos to you! This was a pretty long one.

[workersolidarity]

Does anyone ever question why the US is in Syria at all? Or who is actually in control of the US Military?

We all know we shouldn't be in Syria (or many other countries) to begin with, in direct contravention of International Law. Whereas Russia has actually been invited into Syria and has done the majority of the work battling ISIS. The US however, has mostly used the opportunity to expand it's waning Imperialist sphere of influence in the region. Making moves such as blocking Iran from delivering equipment and weapons to Hezbollah at the behest of Israel.

I'm sure that sounds good if you buy the Propaganda that the US Military pumps out of its Corporate Media arms. But the reality on the ground has been that Hezbollah has been the only force capable of defending Shiite Communities near the Syrian, Lebanese border at a time when ISIS along with US/CIA-funded Al-Quaeda offshoots like Al Nusra Front have presented an immanent danger to these communities. Their major crime? Being Shiite Communities caught in the crossfire.

This is, of course, to say nothing of the origins of the Syrian Civil War, of which the CIA/State Department and other arms of US Imperialism played a leading role by secretly funding and training terrorist Organizations to attack the Syrian State.

The US is the reason ISIS exists to begin with. You cannot just destabilize an entire region of the world and expect no consequences.

Then along comes Trump, who claims to despise useless foreign wars. However, despite the supposed hesitancy of Trump to continue with the US involvement in the occupation of Syrian territory, or the training and arming of terrorist groups, he's mostly just made a big show of wanting to get out while continuing, and even expanding many aspects of the Obama era policies in Syria.

Of course there's no way of knowing Trump's sincerity about wanting to extricate the Military from pointless Imperial excursions, but only two options are really possible here.

Either Trump and Obama before him were always lying, and never had any intention of removing US involvement in the region, or the US Political apparatuses have completely lost control of the US Military, the Defense Contracting Industry, and the Security State.

I say this not to absolve US leadership's responsibility in the hundreds of thousands, if not millions of deaths associated with the Imperialist Wars in the Middle East, but as a serious question as to Civilian control of the US Military.

On multiple occasions over the last decade, I've taken notice of increasing incidents beginning in the Obama Administration when the President, or Administration Officials would officially declare a Policy, while the Military pursued a contradictory Policy.

Now of course this could be a typical case of lying to the public about declared Policy, not exactly a new phenomenon. However, these moments of contradiction may actually be an example of a loss of control over Military Policy. This happens in countries all across the World, but to most Americans this notion is unthinkable.

But let's give this a Materialist Analysis.

In many countries that depend heavily on their Military for basic security, continuously relies on the Military to pursue Government Policy, and/or has a massively bloated Military Beaurocracy, it is not uncommon to lose civilian control over their Military apparatus when their interests collide with those of Civilian Governments.

In the US, Civilian control over the Military was a founding principle, though noticeably it hasn't really been tested over the last century. The US Military has never really had any major Policy differences with our Bourgeois Governments.

But perhaps this has begun to change since the beginning of the Obama Administration. For example, clearly the Military never had any intention of ever closing Guantanamo Bay Military Prison, and sure enough, despite a direct Presidential order to do so, the Military successfully resisted, and even convinced Congress to slip a Law into a Budget Bill banning the President from closing the Prison. I took notice.

On numerous occasions in the Syria conflict, the stated policies of the Presidential Administrations have gone completely ignored, or were directly contradicted by the actions or statements of the Military itself.

Pretty soon, this may no longer be just speculation. There might come a time when the Military drops all pretenses and publicly ignores a major Policy or some other Civilian orders.

For decades Presidents and Congresses have allowed the Military to freely pursue its own Imperialist goals with little or no oversight, and largely it's goals have aligned with those of our Bourgeois Elected Officials.

However, now as different sections of the Bourgeoisie's interests have come into conflict with one another and those of the Military, you see what seems to be more pushback and decision making independence by the US Military.

Consider this. The Military and Defense Contracting Interests have normally been most closely aligned with that of the Fossil Fuel Industry, the Chemical Manufacturing Industry, the Metals Production Industries, and the Financial Industry, among others.

But today a divide is rapidly growing between the Fossil Fuels, Chemical Production and Metal workings Industries and those of Silicon Valley, mainly Renewable Energy Production, technology, communication, and others like Synthetic Materials Production and other new possiblities that don't use the same resources that older industries needed.

These newer Industries already threaten to supplant the old ones. The economy is evolving and the Financial Industry is funding all of these changes.

This creates some major divisions within the Bourgeoisie and in some ways the new industries are less dependant on our old allies, traditional Territorial dominance, with a shifting geopolitical alignment. I'm some ways the new Economy requires more international cooperation, non-traditional allies and more foreign investment and cooperation from the biggest adversaries of the older Fossil Fuel based industries that have dominated our economy for over a Century.

That's not to say Imperialism is waning. Far from it, today you see an increasingly aggressive forms Imperialism. However the Geopolitical landscape is rapidly shifting. China's on the rise. Silicon Valley wants a piece of the Action, whereas traditional Fossil Fuel Industries... well, not so much. Likely this will become the biggest battleground for the Bourgeoisie, and within Military leadership.

And it's not as simple as one big divide between traditional production and tech industry production. We may eventually come to see multitudes of divisions and contradictions arising out of the economic evolution.

For now, based on my observations of the interactionsvbetween Civilian Government and Military leadership in recent years, makes me believe there may be a complete loss of control over the Military by the Bourgeois Governments, or at least certain Governments. Soon open vying for Military backing could become a thing, similar to corrupt governments in Africa and the Middle East.

I'm sure everyone's heard of the famous final speech by the Imperialist General turned President Dwight D. Eisenhower about the threat posed by the US Military Industrial Complex??? Today's splintering Economic interests may finally reveal to the Public what that warning really meant 60 years ago.

US Empire is self-sustaining and omnipresent. It doesn't need a Congress, a President or Civilian Beaurocracy to function. It has its own version of all those things within its own infrastructure.

But this also might present Socialists with an opportunity if these divisions break out into the public. If I'm noticing it, surely someone else has.

At some point public sentiment might turn against the Military. But only if they begin to see it as an Organization out of control that's no longer guarding their interests. It will be up to the Socialist Movement to help guide and shape this sentiment overtime by educating the Working Class.

It will be incumbent upon Socialists to educate the Working Class about how the US Military is utilized across the third-world as the guardian of Bourgeois Resources and Private Property. We have to show the people how Corporate America uses the Military as it's own Mafia Enforcer who's number one job is the violent suppression of foreign workers to keep their so low it drives our own down here in the US.

I don't imagine most Workers being very happy to learn that the majority of their tax money is going to the Military, not to keep them safe, but instead to suppress wages in third-world countries using extreme violence. Once people truly understand what this means for them, for the quality of their jobs, and for the suppression if their own wages, then we may be able to change how people perceive the Military Indusrial Complex more generally, and hopefully turn the public against it over time.

This will be no easy feat. The fact is the Military enjoys the highest levels of support of any Government Angency among the US population. Persistent non-stop Military propaganda from the time were toddlers till we die has had a profound effect on people's ability to look at the Military and Imperialism critically. People rarely question the Military or its leadership.

To change this perception will take more than a few rallies and Propaganda. We will need a persistent, Universal effort on the Left to hammer home just how damaging the Military is to the interests of the Working Class.

It will require engagement with the public through forms of media they engage with on a daily basis. That means a steady campaign that blankets Social Media, Public Media, and even finding ways to break out onto the airwaves of the Corporate Media when possible.

As I say in pretty much everything I post, this has to start by aligning all the countless Marxist-Leninist Organizations and Parties, and integrating our efforts into a coherent strategy.

It will require reaching out to Organizations sponsored by the Governments of Socialist Nations like the Republic of Cuba, Venezuela, and the DPRK, as well as any Anti-Revisionist Organizations or Parties in non-Socialist Countries.

Lets see where we can work together on Strategy and Tactics. Let's work to create International Unity by Organizing Rallies, Demonstrations, and Protests across cities, States, and Nations. We should also be organizing Propaganda campaigns similarly, by publishing Propaganda internationally where possible and in different languages. Let's learn how to do these things and get it done. We are only as strong as we are United and Militant.

If you have any clout with a local chapter of Communist Parties or Organizations in your area, convince your Comrades to start reaching out to other Parties, other Organizations and let's get working together. Good Praxis means nothing without enough people to gain attention.

All of this is possible. We have to begin at the very bottom of Organizing efforts and work our way up. That's what happens after many decades of neglect and infighting.

And I believe we have the time to get this done. But only if we begin working on it right now! Slowly but surely, the divisions and contradictions between the different interests of the Bourgeoisie will begin breaking out into public more and more often.

The same goes for Civilian control of the Military. We have to make sure we're ready to go on the offensive as these issues become bigger and bigger in the coming years.

I know we can do this! But only if the Workers of the World Unite!

Solidarity Comrades!

[berniesrevolution]

In the early summer of 2017, a little less than a year after his Presidential campaign had ended, Bernie Sanders spent a few days on a speaking tour in England, to promote the European version of his book “Our Revolution.” The Brexit resolution had passed twelve months earlier, a general election looked likely to consolidate the conservative hold on the country, and Sanders’s audiences—in the hundreds, though not the thousands—were anxious and alert. I was at those events, talking with the people who had come—skinny, older leftists and louche, cynical younger ones—and they were anticipating not just the old campaign hits but a broader explanation of why the world had suddenly gone so crazy and what could be done. Sanders had scarcely talked about foreign affairs in his 2016 campaign, but his framework had a natural extensibility. Under way in the world was a simple fight, Sanders said. On one side were oligarchs and the right-wing parties they had managed to corrupt. On the other were the people.

In the thirty months since Sanders’s 2016 campaign ended, in the petulance and ideological strife of the Democratic National Convention, he has become a more reliable partisan, just as progressivism has moved his way. He begins the 2020 Presidential campaign not as a gadfly but as a favorite, which requires a comprehensive vision among voters of how he would lead the free world. In 2017, Sanders hired his first Senate foreign-policy adviser, a progressive think-tank veteran named Matt Duss. Sanders gave major speeches—at Westminster College, in the United Kingdom, and at Johns Hopkins—warning that “what we are seeing is the rise of a new authoritarian axis” and urging liberals not just to defend the post-Cold War status quo but also to “reconceptualize a global order based on human solidarity.” In 2016, he had asked voters to imagine how the principles of democratic socialism could transform the Democratic Party. Now he was suggesting that they could also transform how America aligns itself in the world.

In early April, I met with Sanders at his Senate offices, in Washington. Spring was already in effect—the cherry blossoms along the tidal basin were still in bloom but had begun to crinkle and fade—and talk among the young staffers milling around his offices was of the intensity of Sanders’s early campaign, of who would be travelling how many days over the next month and who would have to miss Easter. It was my first encounter with Sanders during this campaign. Basic impression: same guy. He shook my hand with a grimace, and interrupted my first question when he recognized the possibility for a riff, on the significance of a Senate vote on Yemen. His essential view of foreign policy seemed to be that the American people did not really understand how dark and cynical it has been—“how many governments we have overthrown,” as Sanders told me. “How many people in the United States understand that we overthrew a democratically elected government in Iran to put in the Shah? Which then led to the Revolution. How many people in this country do you think know that? So we’re going to have to do a little bit of educating on that.”

One condition that Americans had not digested was the bottomlessness of inequality. “I got the latest numbers here,” Sanders said. He motioned, and Duss, who was sitting beside him, slid a sheet of paper across the table. “Twenty-six (Continue Reading)of the wealthiest people on earth own more wealth than the bottom half of the world’s population. Did you know that? So you look at it, you say”—here he motioned as if each of his hands were one side of a scale—“twenty-six people, 3.6 billion people. How grotesque is that?”

He went on, “When I talk about income inequality and talk about right-wing authoritarianism, you can’t separate the two.” No one knew how rich Putin was, Sanders said, but some people said he was the wealthiest man in the world. The repressive Saudi monarchs were also billionaire Silicon Valley investors, and “their brothers in the Emirates” have “enormous influence not only in that region but in the world, with their control over oil. A billionaire President here in the United States. You’re talking about the power of Wall Street and multinational corporations.” Simple, really: his thesis had always been that money corrupted politics, and now he was tracing the money back overseas. His phlegmy baritone acquired a sarcastic lilt. “It’s a global economy, Ben, in case you didn’t know that!”

When Sanders’s aides sent me a list of a half-dozen foreign-policy experts, assembled by Duss, who talk regularly with the senator about foreign policy, I was surprised by how mainstream they seemed. Joe Cirincione, the antinuclear advocate, might have featured in a Sanders Presidential campaign ten or twenty years ago. But Sanders is also being advised by Robert Malley, who coördinated Middle East policy in Obama’s National Security Council and is now the president of the International Crisis Group; Suzanne DiMaggio, a specialist in negotiations with adversaries at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace; and Vali Nasr, the dean of the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced Studies at Johns Hopkins and a specialist in the Shia-Sunni divide.

Few of these advisers were part of Sanders’s notionally isolationist 2016 campaign. But, as emergencies in Libya, Syria, and Yemen have deepened, the reputation of Obama’s foreign policy, and of the foreign-policy establishment more broadly, has diminished. Malley told me, “Out of frustration with some aspects of Obama’s foreign policy and anger with most aspects of Trump’s, many leaders in the Party have concluded that the challenge was not to build bridges between centrist Democrats and centrist Republicans but, rather, between centrist and progressive Democrats. That means breaking away from the so-called Blob”—a term for the foreign-policy establishment, from the Obama adviser Ben Rhodes. DiMaggio said, “The case for restraint seems to be gaining ground, particularly in its rejection of preventive wars and efforts to change the regimes of countries that do not directly threaten the United States.” She and others now see in Sanders something that they didn’t in 2016: a clear progressive theory of what the U.S. is after in the world. “I think he’s bringing those views on the importance of tackling economic inequality into foreign policy,” DiMaggio said.

Since the 2016 campaign, Sanders’s major foreign-policy initiative has been a Senate resolution invoking the War Powers Act of 1973 in order to suspend the Trump Administration’s support of Saudi Arabia’s military campaign in Yemen. Mike Lee, a libertarian Republican from Utah, and Chris Murphy, a Democrat from Connecticut, co-sponsored the resolution; on April 4th, it passed in the House and the Senate. It was the first time that Congress invoked the War Powers Act since the law’s creation, in the aftermath of the Vietnam War. When we met, Sanders said that he thought the Republican support for the resolution was significant, in part because it reflected the strain of conservatism that is skeptical of military interventions. It also demonstrated, he believed, “a significant mind-set change in the Congress—Democrats and Republicans—with regard to Saudi Arabia.” He added, “I don’t see why we’d be following the lead or seen as a very, very close ally of a despotic, un-democratic regime.”

Sanders was warming to a broader theme. Our position in the regional conflict between Saudi Arabia and Iran should be rebalanced, he said. There has been, he went on, “a bipartisan assumption that we’re supposed to love Saudi Arabia and hate Iran. And yet, if you look at young people in Iran, they are probably a lot more pro-American than Saudis. Iran is a very flawed society, no debate about it. Involved in terrorism, doing a lot of bad things. But they also have more democracy, as a matter of fact, more women’s rights, than does Saudi Arabia.” As President, Sanders said, he imagined the U.S. taking a more neutral role in the countries’ rivalry. “To say, you know what? We’re not going to be spending trillions of dollars and losing American lives because of your long-standing hostilities.”

Sanders turned to the conflict between Israel and Palestine, which he described in similar terms; he wanted to orient American policy toward the decent people on both sides, and not to their two awful governments. “While I am very critical of Netanyahu’s right-wing government, I am not impressed by what I am seeing from Palestinian leadership, as well,” he said. “It’s corrupt in many cases, and certainly not effective.” He mentioned the United States’s leverage in Israeli politics, because of its alliance and economic support. (“$3.8 billion is a lot of money!”) I asked if he would make that aid contingent, as some Palestinian advocates have suggested, on fuller political rights for Palestinians. Sanders grew more cautious here. “I’m not going to get into the specifics,” he said. He was worried about the situation in Gaza, where youth unemployment is greater than sixty per cent, and yet the borders are closed. (“If you have sixty per cent of the kids who don’t have jobs, and they can’t leave the country, what do you think is going to happen next year and the year after that?”) But he also said that he wanted to “pick up from where Jimmy Carter was, what Clinton tried to do, and, with the financial resources that we have of helping or withdrawing support, say, ‘You know what? Let’s sit down and do our best to figure it out.’ ” He seemed to want to strike an earnest, non-revolutionary note. “I’m not proposing anything particularly radical,” he said. “And that is that the United States should have an even-handed approach both to Israel and the Palestinians.”

(Continue Reading)

[weerd1]

Star Trek DS9 Rewatch Log, Stardate 1907.22: Missions Reviewed, “Explorers,” “Family Business,” “Shakaar,” “Facets,” and “The Adversary.”

Long one tonight! We took a run at the end of season three starting with “Explorers.” Sisko reads about Bajorans of some 800 years before building solar sailing ships to explore their solar system, and possibly even making it as far as Cardassia. 

 He decides to build one to ancient specification (adding only a gravity web to the floor because weightlessness makes him queasy) and see if he can make it work. He invites Jake, who is initially reluctant to join, but then gets some news that makes him want to hang out with his father.  As they set sail, Jake tells Ben that he has been accepted to a writing fellowship back on Earth. Meanwhile on DS9 Bashir is busy flirting with a new Dabo girl named Leeta when Dax tells him the Lexington is coming to dock.

 Bashir realizes the woman who beat him out for head of his class is on board, and he prepares to meet her.  She walks past him as if she doesn’t recognize him. Ben reads Jake’s story and is impressed, recommending he take the fellowship. Jake says he’s worried about his dad though and may wait a year. Besides, there’s an freighter captain he thinks Ben should meet.  Before they can finish the conversation, there’s a malfunction and the ship seems to slip into warp. On DS9, after a charming drunken session with O’Brien, Bashir confronts the other doctor to find that she thought “Julian Bashir” was an Andorian. She’s excited to meet Julian for real, and is envious of the long term projects he can undertake. Jake and Ben are lost somewhere in space when suddenly three Cardassian warships appear.  Dukat hails them to reveal that tachyon eddies in the Bajoran system have in fact accelerated them at warp speed right into the Cardassian system. Coincidentally, Cardassia was about to announce the have discovered an ancient Bajoran crash site on their homeworld.

There is a lot of significant stuff going on in this episode. Leeta, who will become a staple of future season and Rom’s wife, is introduced. Though not named, Kassidy Yates is introduced as an idea, and we will see her in the next episode, beginning her long courtship and eventual marriage to Ben. Jake as a writer begins to really flourish setting the stage for his future as a correspondent during the Dominion War. It’s almost enough to make one ignore how little sense the rest makes. OK- 800 years earlier Bajorans built an airtight solar wind sail ship, literally out of lumber. How did they get it off the surface of the planet and into space? But, let’s assume they had chemical rockets that could survive leaving an atmosphere to deliver their wood ships into space, a solar sail would have to be kilometers long.  But, let’s say it’s special reflective material; when the tachyons begin to accelerate them to warp, what keeps the acceleration from crushing them into a thin red paste on the back wall? Ben has gravity control, no inertial dampeners 800 years ago. And assuming they DO survive, I would assume the Cardassian system is several hours at mid-warp from Bajor. Doesn’t take them long here. Then, there’s a crash site on Cardassia; how did the wooden ship survive re-entry? Though, maybe the acceleration DID paste the crew and throw the ship through the Cardassian atmosphere hard enough to crater in.  Holy Prophets that’s tragic.

Quark and Rom have to deal with “Family Business” when a Liquidator named Brunt from the Ferengi Commerce Authority shows up to seize their business because family on Ferenginar is causing trouble. 

 It seems Quark’s mother has been earning profit, illegal in Ferengi society for a woman. She seems to be…ugh, wearing clothes too! Brunt tells Quark he has to get her to confess, and then pay back the profit she made.  On DS9, Sisko meets Kassidy Yates, and they agree to coffee.  While there, she seems restless. Seems she forgot she’s supposed to listen to a broadcast from her brother out on Cestus III. It seems he is part of a league playing an obscure Earth sport called “baseball.” Sisko is smitten. On Ferenginar, Quark has discovered that “Moogie” has made more profit than they thought. MUCH more. He plans to turn her in despite the fact it will ruin him, but she cuts him in on the profits. She confesses and turns some over, but splits the rest with Quark…mostly; she tells Rom there may be some more even than Quark found.

A neat little look at Ferengi society which of course features the marvelous Jeffrey Combs as Liquidator Brunt (one of no less than seven different Trek characters he played). 

SNL’s Andrea Martin plays Moogie here, but will not reprise the role later due to makeup issues. We see Ferenginar is constantly raining, and the traditional house greeting of “welcome to my home; what’s mine is mine” is given. The whole episode will prove to kick off some interesting turns for Ferengi society.

Kai Winn comes to DS9 to see Kira, as her old friend and cell leader “Shakaar” is causing trouble in Kira’s home town.  The minister of the Provisional Government has died, leaving Winn not only as Kai, but as political leader. She makes some changes which will pull some farm equipment out of Kira’s province, and away from the farmer Shakaar. He won’t give it back. Winn expects Kira to talk him into it, but instead she negotiates a meeting with Shakaar to find a compromise. 

Winn dismisses that and sends in security forces to seize the equipment, causing both Kira and Shakaar to gather up the old cell and go back on the run. Sisko refuses to intervene in what Kai sees as a test of her authority. She scrambles more troops into the area, and discord begins to mount, risking a civil war. Shakaar approaches one of the Colonels chasing him, and they realize how futile this is. The colonel brings Shakaar back…with full military support as he decides to run for the position of First Minister displacing Winn.

  I love how Kira can basically start a civil war on Bajor (as much as I hate Winn) and then just come back to the station when it is all over. It is a tight episode though that really makes you swell your dislike of Kai Winn, and gives Louise Fletcher yet another great opportunity to be loathsome.  Shakaar of course is played by Duncan Regehr, once a staple of tv sf and genre: TNG, V the Series, Disney’s Zorro. I thought he had faded away, but it turns out he is in fact now a very successful painter with art on exhibition all over the world.

“Facets” brings us to Jadzia Dax undergoing a Trill ritual where the memories of each specific host are taken from the symbiont and placed temporarily in another host. This allows a Trill to “meet” all the previous hosts. She selects various people close to her on the station to house the various personalities (including sexually coercing Quark into participating…and then assigning him a female host). 

 Things get dark when Joran-the short lived host we learned was a psychotic murderer-goes into Sisko, and tries to kill Dax, but it becomes worse when Curzon enters Odo and they two of them merge into a single entity. One that does not intend to return to the Symbiont. Meanwhile, Nog is working on a preliminary Starfleet exam, and ends up failing. Rom realizes Quark rigged it to keep the boy out of Starfleet, but Rom gets Sisko to administer the test again, setting him on the path to Earth next season. 

Jadzia confronts Odo/Curzon, and realizes that Curzon is ashamed because when he initially failed her out of the symbiosis program it was because he loved her. She accepts his love and tells him she loves him too-as a part of her. An abashed Odo meets her later, admitting that the sensory input of Curzon was tempting, but she thanks him as she now has Curzon’s memory of being part of Odo, and what it is to be a changeling.  

The Dax stuff is fun here, if a little contrived, but we get some great performances out of each of the stars as they assume the personalities of the hosts. Rene Auberjonois is particularly effective as Curzon, though Avery Brooks is downright sinister as Joran. The b-story with Nog is neat, as it is such a great bit of character development for the annoying Ferengi kid from season 1 who is now on his way to a career in Starfleet.  Go Nog!

And season 3 comes to an end when “The Adversary” makes itself known. Sisko is promoted to Captain while a Federation ambassador visits the station. 

The ambassador mentiones a hostile race, the Tzenkethi, have had a coup, and may restart what were apparently rather brutal hostilities with the Federation. Sisko takes the ambassador out on a flag waving mission along the Tzenkethi border with the Defiant, but O’Brien soon notices strange things are afoot. They realize the ambassador is actually a Changeling, and a hunt through the ship starts to try to keep him from his real mission- using the Defiant to attack the Tzenkethi  and occupy the Federation so the Dominion can make its move. The crew becomes more paranoid as they begin to suspect any of them could be the shapeshifter. A very Carpenter-esque blood test scene happens and Commander Eddington is id’d as the culprit.

 They soon find Bashir locked away though, and realize the Bashir who conducted the test was the Changeling. Odo liquefies to chase him down, as Sisko prepares to self-destruct the Defiant to prevent war with the Tzenkethi.  Odo stops the enemy in engineering, and for the first time in history a Changeling harms another Changeling as Odo kills the other to save the ship.  As the invader dies he tells Odo, “it’s too late; we are everywhere.”

The “Thing” like horror aspects of this episode play off pretty well, keeping you guessing who may or may not be the Changeling at any given time. The paranoia we see the crew experience is shared by us as viewers at the end as we realize just how prevalent the threat from The Dominion may be, leaving a very disquieting end to season three. We have to talk here though about Sisko not becoming a Captain until S3. Really? Come on Trek, your first Black commanding officer leading a TV show, and you left him a Commander for three years? At least now Sisko has the rank, he has the goatee, and as we head into season 4, we get the shaved head; Sisko will soon evolve into his final form!

NEXT VOYAGE: Season 4 begins with more Klingons that you can shake a Bat’leth at as paranoia about the Dominion threat leads the Empire to pursue “The Way of the Warrior.” Best of all?  WORF!!!

[spltlippd-blog]

❝ I’m officially off the rails. You should try it.❞  BENJAMIN WADSWORTH? No, that’s actually MADDOC ‘MADS’ BLENKINSOP. Only NINETEEN years old, this HUFFLEPUFF alumni works as a WILDLIFE + ANTIQUES SMUGGLER and is sided with THE DEATH EATERS. HE identifies as CISMAN and is a PUREBLOOD who is known to be ERRATIC, VIOLENT, and IMPULSIVE but also RESOURCEFUL, BOLD, and PASSIONATE. { EL, 22, EST, SHE+HER }

I. A HISTORY

“DEATHS: Barnabus Blenkinsop, 25. Body missing. Reward for information.” ─ The Daily Prophet, 8th February 1999.

Mr. Blenkinsop's presumed death occurred on November 20, 1998 and his obituary appeared in the Daily Prophet. A reward was offered for information about what happened to his body since all that was found in his bed at St. Mungo's was a tin of anchovies.

The Blenkinsop family made their money through “trade” and “exploration,” which are both just codewords for seizing territories and poaching wildlife.

They’ve comparable to the mafia in the sense that the extensive family operates within itself as an organized crime unit with a tendency for violence; everyone knows what they do, but no one has the concrete evidence (or balls) to do anything about it.

Plus… dragonhide clothing is all the rage, yeah? Who do you think is out there getting the resources? Those pickled hippogriff eggs (found only in the highest society establishments and incredibly illegal for consumption) that you like so much come from somewhere, right?

Also deal with antique looting for private collectors and played a prominent role in the original horcrux hunt as they were able to track down founders memorabilia and get it by any means necessary.

Weren’t originally anti-muggle, but since the establishment of the Statute of Secrecy became very much so.

The Statute both hurt their business and seemed incredibly unfair; wix were continuously pushed into the underbelly of civilization as muggles were continuously and freely expanding and wix are just supposed… to accommodate that? Be alright with living in hiding and bending over for a race that can’t even wipe their arse without using their hands? Bullshit.

The anti-muggle sentiment only grew and festered over time as wix were persecuted by muggles and forced into hiding and culminated in the Blenkinsops becoming one of the most prominent pureblood families that actively and politically opposed muggles altogether.

Blenkinsops were part of the Knights of Walpurgis and continue to be heavily involved with the Death Eaters.

II. OVERVIEW

NAME.

↳ Maddoc Anarawd Blenkinsop. Goes by Mads.

GENDER + ORIENTATION.

↳ Doesn’t think of people like that. But for the purpose of clarity, cisman, biromantic bisexual.

BIRTHDAY + BLOOD STATUS.

↳ ?? / ?? / ???? (currently 19 years old). Pureblood.

OCCUPATION.

↳ Poacher + antiques smuggler.

III. DIGGING DEEPER

↳ “Now this looks like a job for me / so everybody just follow me / 'cause we need a little controversy / 'cause it feels so empty without me.”

What they see: expensive robes, even more expensive cologne worn far too young, five languages, silver gold and glistening rings, never without his wand, unwavering loyalty, straight spine and shoulder back, looks just like his mother, a smile that says: you don’t know me at all and you never will

What you see: tattered shirts, salt and sweat, a vicious tongue, silver gold and blood rusted rings, never without his beast, all-consuming obsession, violence violence violence, looks absolutely insane, laughing at his own traumas

The images co-exist.

He’s so pretty, absolutely lovely at society banquets, trained in wix ballroom dancing that’s essentially spinning on air, but there’s always been a darkness inside of him you might glimpse upon a first meeting

Anyone who was unfortunate enough to attend Hogwarts with him knows all too well exactly why he’s called “Mads” over Maddoc

“i’m officially off the rails. you should try it.”

ERRATIC. his whirlwind of emotions are either charming or terrifying, and switch so suddenly and quickly it can give you whiplash. his behavior more so. he operates by his own moral codes that’s yet to be deciphered and doesn’t seem to follow any pattern of behavior whatsoever. it’s got its benefits, sure, but the downfalls include: unfinished projects, dropped conversations, and general confusion.

VIOLENT. you don’t get it: one second, he’s smiling, laughing with you, and the next you’re dazed and wondering what it was you said that caused that punch. mads is known for sudden and intense violence; his family is much the same, as their enemies are far too aware of, and rumor on the street is that they all beat the shit out of each other daily. it’s mostly true. while in hogwarts, he earned the reputation of the “attack dog,” jumping into physical altercations at the drop of a hat if he felt it justified.

and IMPULSIVE. his line of work kind of depends on split-second decision making and he’s fortunate enough to excel at that. unfortunately, he’s impulsive to a fault and will go with his gut quicker than he can think not to.

but also RESOURCEFUL. not even mads’ worst enemy would deny his intellect. kid’s fucking smart and able to process information and spit back results in a second; he’s already gone through all the possible outcomes of a problem, he’s already thought thirty steps ahead, he’s already more than prepared for every single plan to go to shit. he’s got this.

BOLD. mads was never one to hold back, whether it be his thoughts, opinions, or feelings. he doesn’t second guess himself and he won’t ever hold back. why live life wishing you did instead of doing?

and PASSIONATE. whether it be his unwavering loyalty bordering all-consuming obsession, or the fire he pours into his every action, or his ability to laugh through tear-streaked cheeks, mads has so much ambition within him it’s hard to contain at all.

fluent in English, Spanish, French, Italian, and Persian; currently studying Greek

Blenkinsops (illegally) keep and breed manticores and each have their own; Mads’ is called Bully and he loves him

but at the same time “do animals deserve rights” because he’s really out here poaching wildlife without a care in the world (ask him about pygmy puff kebabs he had at a shady pub in Morocco)

IV. MAGIC SHIT

(former) HOGWARTS HOUSE: Hufflepuff.

WAND: Cedar wood, acromantula web core, 11 ¾ inches, unyielding flexibility 

***(Inherited, passed down through generations of Blenkinsop wizards. The wand is incredibly loyal to its original owner─ dead for nearly 500 years now─ and Mads has difficulty using it.)

CEDAR WOOD: “Whenever I meet one who carries a cedar wand, I find strength of character and unusual loyalty. My father, Gervaise Ollivander, used always to say, ‘you will never fool the cedar carrier,’ and I agree: the cedar wand finds its perfect home where there is perspicacity and perception. I would go further than my father, however, in saying that I have never yet met the owner of a cedar wand whom I would care to cross, especially if harm is done to those of whom they are fond. The witch or wizard who is well-matched with cedar carries the potential to be a frightening adversary, which often comes as a shock to those who have thoughtlessly challenged them.”

ACROMANTULA WEB CORE: Those who are determined, stubborn, cold (cool-natured), fearless, and with a mischievous and/or dark disposition would have this wand core. Having such a wand core suggests that you have firm convictions and have a deeply rooted vindictive nature, but this does not at all mean that you are not capable of caring or loving someone or something in your own way. However, your vindictive nature can often lead you towards revenge when something wrong or unjust is done to you. This makes you less likely to forge strong bonds and/or forgive someone easily. This is one of the best cores to use in the darkest of Dark Magic, particularly with The Unforgivable Curses. It is a wand core predominantly found among those of House Slytherin. If one is thinking about having a wand made with an Acromantula Web core, they’re probably a fan of having their wand confiscated by the authorities. Using a wand with this wand core has been illegal in Britain since 1782, after they were discovered that the wielder of a wand with this wand core has particular ability with Dark Magics, especially the Imperius Curse. There are certain diplomatic exceptions, as it is a traditional wand core for Asian wands, but even those are temporary, and many wizard diplomats on long-term assignments find themselves compelled to procure replacement wands during their stay. This was once a common wand core among Dark Healers.

UNYIELDING FLEXIBILITY: A wand of this flexibility finely tunes itself to its original owner’s preferences and doesn’t stray from those preferences, even in the hands of a new owner; the new owner will just have to get used to it. It is particularly good for combative and healing magic. Unyielding wand owners tend to be very confident in themselves and/or in the things they believe in. They tend to be intelligent, somewhat cynical, and usually have well-defined principles that they will not stray from ever. Sometimes, this combination can lead to arrogance because of them insisting on how right they are without considering other points of view or whether or not they might be wrong.

congratulations on making it to the end!!! i would absolutely love some plots for this ferocious little beast so hmu or look out for my plotting call!!!

[impfiltration-archive]

The Victory Garden

Some drabble fun for @ardentsoldier​ because an idea I sprung up with them filled my head up with so many mental pictures that I needed to scrabble it all out

Warnings: Self-indulgent and too many plants

Haxus has never been much of a gardening person; overall, he found himself rather neutral when it came to any matters of botany. 

There were some Galra that were raised on colonies with lush vegetation, and it wasn’t uncommon for the cadets recruited from these lands to try and smuggle ferns or grasses into port. As a sort of momento to remind them of home. Others were raised in the protective hulls of civilian cruisers, and could get anxious when their world opened up to forever-rolling hills and way-too-tall trees teeming with unknown life. 

Haxus, on the other hand, was raised along the banks of Dreia-55. He found beauty in ripples and comfort from the sound of water running over rocks, but the ugly weeds and spindly trees that grew along the shoreline? He never developed any attachment to them, thus his sense of neutrality. 

He has found a new, twisted fascination in gardening, now, though. The Lions, you see, had elemental alignments, and this seemed to be transferred to their paladins.  

Some have asked if that was just an Earthling thing—they’ve come across a number of aliens with peculiar, evolutionary features—but the Champion never bled the sparkling, black goop he does now when first under their care. Which brings us back to the gardening. 

While fighting the Green Paladin, her (As opposed to the “his” they presumed) little drone knocked him over into the engine well. He was plummeting to his death, cursing his ignorance—why had he let himself underestimate an enemy just because of her baby-fat face—when he managed to snag himself on one of the ledges that narrow the drop. All the momentum went straight to wrists, making him keen in a way he hasn’t since interrogation-exposure training, but as the Galra mantra goes, “Victory or death,” so he clambered back up to the catwalk. 

Having lost his sword during his fall, Haxus had nothing but his agility and claws to finish his mission. So.. Actually, scratch that, since it seemed like he also had the element of surprise on his side. He found her running mad down the halls, cycling through the different files on her gauntlet and oblivious to his stalking. He was quick to slink up left and nick her along the side. 

He smirked, already counting down when his venom would make her to keel over with a whimper like a sick yupper, when all the sudden quiznaking plants burst out from her between her ribs—taking them both by surprise.

It started with an ivy-line that burst out before falling into a limp droop, followed by hard stems that twisted together into budding red ends that seal up all her cuts. Most bizarre of all, probably, was the a glowing, purple pulse that slowly seeped up the stalks protruding from the wound, outlining jagged lines of a nonsense pattern as it throbbed out. Likely the toxins meant to murder her, now being leeched out of her body.

It was unexpected (Was there any other word that fit?), but one of them was a child, and the other a solider who has been scarred again and again in learning not to lose focus. The battle was pretty much over by that point.

While she flailed and gawked at the leaves and stems spurting from her side, Haxus brought her down with a sickening thud, heel slamming against her breastplate. 

That seemed to bring her out of her stupor, since the paladin was actually trying to aim her bayard. Unfortunately for her, Haxus wasn’t playing any coy, battle games this time. His boot went crunch against her wrist, and her bayard scattered down the hall before it could take proper form. 

Then, in a fluid motion that could’ve only been trained into him, he brought out a magnetic pair of cuffs from his side-pack and slapped them onto her—ignoring her screech when he mishandled the hand that was very much bent the wrong way, now.

No mistakes this time.

With the paladin properly incapacitated, Haxus can’t help but admit that he finds himself rather.. curious about this strange occurrence.  

He walks a wide arch around her left, head tilted curiously before he bends down, glaring absolute contempt into her frenzied, tear-filled eyes. He at least meant to, but after neon-tipped clovers sprouted from wherever he dragged a claw over the girl’s face, there was no hiding his fascination. His fallen contender squirms, panting that sort of huff you only get under immense pain; still, the sprouts running down her cheek is a glaring blemish that absorbs most of the attention. 

Now, it’s important to know that Haxus is not exactly like Sendak. The Commander liked to play around with any of the more challenging adversaries they come across, whereas Haxus prefers his enemies cold and dead wherever he got a hold of them, but this little imp? The idiot child who nearly managed to wreck a 10,000 year long mission of the empire? The brat who almost hung all that humiliation on his shoulders? He’d be lying if he said it didn’t make giddy to watch her struggle and grimace. 

Besides that, he wasn’t quite sure how to kill her yet. Burning or spacing would probably work, but from what he’s observed, anything that could be inflicted right now would just result in more of those fauna-scabs or whatever they should be called. That’s when the twisted idea came to his head: Why doesn’t he start a garden?

He pressed the comm-piece fastened to his wrist before raising it up close to his face, hopefully muffling the girl’s sniffling about family this and help me that. “The saboteur has been aprehended; the mission is back on course.” 

Sendak replied back in a smooth voice. “Good.” Or was that a hint of relief he heard? “Get those engines back online.”

“Aye, Sir.” He waits for just the briefest of pauses. “There has also been a new development I’m sure you’ll find.. interesting.” 

Enter the greenhouse deck of the third fleet, some odd movements later.

A level like this is something you usually only find in specialized shuttles, given all the expenses and resources they require, but after returning the lions to Emperor Zarkon, they could’ve asked for commemorative luxite plates if they wanted to. But no, he was fine absorbing all the glory now fixed to his name (It came with so many benefits, like a bigger pension, a multitude of favors, his Commander’s pride), and requesting a housing unit for his little experiment. 

In there, Katie was more than less in a permanent kneel. Rather than shackles, Haxus had cut along her forearms and introduced the blood-smudged vines—all scrawling and numerous like veins—that spilled from her wounds to the soil covering any sign of metal floors. They had taken root quickly, keeping the girl bound to the ground like the life support system that left a mask strapped across her face, and multiple tubes either stuck into her back or arms. 

It all read her vitals or pumped in one nutrient or another. Whether she needs the oxygen-flow or not is debatable, but the specialists who examined her said it was better safe than sorry. Haxus could agree to that; however, he wasn't so attached to persevering this whelp's life that he'd let her medical needs to ruin this fine aesthetic of torture—meaning that all the blinking lights and vials those tubes are connected to were covered up by a thin layer of dirt, as well as the little viridescent buds littering the room.

One way or another, she was tethered to the ground and kept behind locked doors, where only those with the proper clearance could marvel at this spectacle:

Great big leaves flowing from her shoulder blades like wings, their ivory outline making wrinkles through the middle and enclosing the spry green that runs even deeper along their underside. Between these appendages sits big flower in per-bloom. 

The petals came together like a kiss, colored a pale pink turning fusa along its soft, frilly edges. As if guarding this rare beauty, a thorny batch of navy blue stems that fade into a softer blue around each pointed end circle it; although, some of them flowed past their ward. Several spill over her shoulders, others warp themselves into her remaining hair, while the rest stretch over an iris moss that runs down the girl's spine. Knobbly, bark patches infringe its borders before reaching well beyond her girth, housing all sorts of exotic plants that make up odd colors and shapes like small bushels of flowers with dovetail petals and patterned leaves. 

Even more of her back is claimed by succulents that build up like scales, or the swirling thistles, and while more flesh from her front has managed to survive, it is very much the same—like an overgrown garden bed. It stands much more shielded, though, having Katie’s own shadow conceal it; however, that also just accentuates the purple-ish, glowing outline of the different greenery dotting her stomach. 

Meshed with pale, smooth skin, it was all beautiful until you came to her human face—where green, leafy flakes slowly grew over her cheeks. As long as her mouth and nose were covered by the oxygen-mask, the girl’s eyes stand as her most prominent features, especially with the sad, mournful song those honey hues sang. They lost their watery beat a while ago—there were just too many tears—but they're the type of dim and tired seen on any work camp salve. 

Yet somehow they still manage to be expressive, as seen by the anxiety that filled them when the doors opened up to Haxus.

When she could still talk clearly—because the roots of all those stems and thorns hadn't grown into serrated, overlapping lines through her throat yet—she'd always try to make remark or another. Then, after the mask went on, she relied on her eyes to muster the same gusto or pleading she'd squeal before. Now, she just stared at him with an exhausted, half-distressed look, as if to ask, "What now?” 

That's how Haxus read it, and he responded in kind. "Don't wilt now, little Katerlily," he only called her the plant name he made up for her (Or more likely scrounged from her files) these days, "I brought a new addition for you."

Katie, no, the Katerlily would’ve burst into a sob right then if she still could. She didn’t want anymore, he’s already done more than enough—she can feel all these things growing through her insides. 

Unable to cry, she’s limited to staring insecurely at the potted seedling in his hands. It didn’t look like much, just an ugly, little weed, but where he usually just maimed her in some grizzly manner, then kept whatever grew out of those wounds watered, there were other times that he’d jam in different seeds or sprouts wherever he sliced her up to see what would bloomed. 

That’s how she ended up losing her voice to thorns, and the pads of her feet to sundew buds—perhaps the most excruciating points of her torture.

Haxus could feel her apprehension as she gawked, but that just made him light in the chest. It shows in his smug face, and the spring in every daunting step he takes around the room.

“I’m sure you’re going to love it. An.. acquaintance of mine gave it to me, after gasping on about some hackney metaphor all about how ‘it doesn’t look like much on the top, but the extensive root system underneath is beautiful all on it’s own’.” He paused to roll his eyes, quietly gagging to himself, too. He was never a fan of all the annoying poetics that people try to jam into every little thing. 

Haxus perks up, though, when he sees the Katerlily shuddering and trying to discreetly look over her shoulder to see what he’s doing, as if she doesn’t know exactly where this is going.

Just to goad her even furthur, he lets his dramatic pause swell some more, then walks up right behind her with a click, click, click of his heels. Her shoulders go rigid with how tense they are, and she keeps waffling between peeking or just letting her head hang—still unsure whether it’s better to watch or look away. It’s delicious enough of a sight to make him purr his words. “I’m sure you’d love the priggish sentiment it represents.” 

There’s a quiet shing of a dagger being unsheathed, and the Katerlily finally settles on nestling her chin as close to her chest as she can. It helps, she likes to tell herself, when you count, so she tries focusing on that instead of anything happening around her.

1, 2, 3—There’s a small clatter as Haxus lets the pot for his ugly plant fall, probably holding the newly uprooted sprout in his dagger-free hand—4, 5—What’s that shuffling?—6, 7.... 8.......

All the sudden there’s an eruption of pain from the small bit of space between her kidneys, where Haxus plunges his knife before pulling it back to create a pocket of fat and muscle. 

It feels so unnatural—she can actually feel Haxus’ fingers in her as he jams the sprout into the wound—and oh god, it hurts.

The Katerlily crumples into a series of screams. They’re muffled and strained from her mask and punctured voice-box, but they’re tortured screams all the same, and pair well with the way she contorts, arching her back with trembling shoulders and closing her eyes as tightly as possible.

Haxus watches it all with a cool, relaxed posture, making a quiet, “Oooh,” sound as he watched her skin meld over the protruding head of the weed then wriggle around beneath her first few layers of fat and muscle.

It was slow at first, that extensive root system from before was just starting to take root, then it erupted into fleshy ripples and the squishy sound that comes from guts. At that, the Katerlily thrashed about screeching, almost covering the beeping of monitors from someplace around the deck. If his ears weren’t so sharp, Haxus would’ve missed them, not that he was going to do anything about it. 

The beeping was the monitors indicating one health failure or another, but as far as he’s aware, this is a perfectly acceptable death for a rebel brat.  

Today’s not her day, though, since she’s still twitching when the bulging eventually stops. In another tick she’s limp and panting loudly, shaking like—for lack of better wording—a leaf. 

Haxus imagines she would’ve collapsed into a puddle of her own bile if in the position to do so, but she can only rest on sore knees while her head lolls around from what he presumes is a rapidly fading consciousness. 

Well, there was no fun for him here anymore. He kicks the little pot from earlier to the side and sheaths his weapon, letting his hand graze over some of the Katerlily’s leaves and branches as he strolls past her. “Well, I suppose a creature like you still requires sleep.” 

His claws come up to where her hair and thorns connect as he breaths out a quiet laugh to himself. “Let’s see if that’s still the case after we plant something in the back of your head.” It seems as if his victim is too tired to even try to flinch her head away, so he just tuts and leaves the greenhouse.

The doors slide close behind him, and his garden left to grow.

[perfectly-balanced]

👀 What do you dislike most about each member of your cult?

I assume you are referring to my Black Order? This is a very difficult question to answer and one that has required careful consideration. That being said, I have come to a conclusion, but keep in mind that if any of these issues bothered me enough to overshadow their benefits and good qualities, they would not be my servants. For the most part, these are simply minor nitpicks.

I will begin with Pravus Nox. You may not know of Pravus, as he was more well known among his adversaries by the title of ‘The Other’. Unfortunately he is no longer alive to serve under me, but that will not prevent me from discussing his flaws here just the same. One of the main problems I faced with Pravus was that he was incredibly exhausting to be around. Even though he was a servant, he was incredibly loud and would try to get my full attention any time he was around me. There was certainly nothing subtle about him, and he would rarely leave me alone in peace. Another gripe I had with him is that he was not only hostile to enemies, but also to allies. And not only temporary allies, like Loki or Ronan. His rude and bossy demeanor did not make him very popular among the rest of the Order either, so I’ve heard, and he is rarely included in their ranks quite possibly by his own desire. He did not like them, and they did not like him, the Maw in particular. Pravus, for all his uses, was not a team player, but he was still technically a member of the Black Order.  

In the case of Cull Obsidian, it is important to understand that he places a high value on loyalty, which by itself is certainly a good thing. But because he is the more responsible brother to Corvus, who I will get into in a moment, he has had to become very responsible. This has led to him being overly protective of the rest of the Order, to the point where he takes far too much nonsense from them without standing up for himself properly. Don’t get me wrong, he is very stubborn, which in itself is a bit of an issue for me, but despite his size and strength he is actually one of the least aggressive members of my Order. I would like to see him learn to assert himself more in their presence, and perhaps also to be less trusting and more self-reliant. I’ve also noticed that he can be incredibly literal in his comprehension of what I say, I appreciate when people get directly to the point, but he sometimes has trouble deciphering anything I say that isn’t a direct order. He is very practical, even more so than I, and metaphors are often lost on him.

It took longer for Proxima Midnight’s faults to become apparent to me, and that in part is due to the nature of some of those flaws. She is very secretive, so it takes a more substantial period of time to get to know her than I am used to, and I’ve learned that most of who she truly is isn’t expressed on the outside. I don’t know if she is even capable of letting her guard down or being entirely emotionally invested in anything, I’ve only ever seen her react to emotional obstacles in one of two ways. The first is the most common, and it is driven by her extremely spiteful temper. It is a cold burning that only her enemies will ever see, and when she is in this state no mercy can be expected. However, when she is faced with a similar situation that involves myself or an ally, she will react with avoidance and detachment, which makes it incredibly hard to solve anything. Because of this, she can often come off as arrogant and it has been known to rub people the wrong way. This combined with her controlling nature has certainly caused some problems within the Order.

I have to say, I have had a hard time pinpointing any of Ebony Maw’s imperfections right away because they normally seem nonexistent and I had to think more critically in order to find an answer. But in doing so, it occurred to me that the fact that it is so difficult to speak ill of him could be a symptom of a flaw all on its own. The Maw is such a perfectionist that often times his expectations for himself and those around him far surpass my own. He is just so incredibly cerebral and analytical that not even his own self is spared from that shrewd judgment. Of course, I appreciate his high standards in my service, but there does come a point where it actually becomes counterproductive to fuss over details that really aren’t important, and it can get a little taxing trying to reassure his insecurities about himself and his work that are otherwise perfect. He really should be more confident in himself, he has never failed to deliver or please before so there is really no precedent for such paranoia. Another small issue relates to the fact that while I trust in Ebony to be completely honest with me at all times, he is also not someone I would go to if I needed an entirely objective and unbiased opinion about myself. He is seemingly incapable of critiquing anything I do or could do and will likely just agree with anything I say, not out of dishonesty but simply because he is so eager to please and can’t see me objectively, whereas I could ask Proxima for an outside opinion and expect her to be blunt and get straight to the point, offering me a new perspective and insight while still respecting my authority as Ebony does. Some might also consider Ebony’s clinginess to be a flaw of sorts, and I suppose it could be to some, but it really doesn’t bother me because his presence does not suffocate me in the way that Pravus’ did, I rather enjoy and am endeared to it. Even though he would likely never admit it, I can tell that he is saddened when my attention is drawn elsewhere, but I do not mind giving him as much of it as I am reasonably able to. It may also be worth mentioning that out of all my disciples, Ebony is definitely the most vicious to my enemies and even just in general. If I did not control it and harness that power to be directed at the right targets, he could very well know no limits in his cruelty.

Corvus Glaive, on the other hand…..I have plenty to say about him. Every issue I’ve ever had and likely will ever have with Corvus can be summed up by the fact that he is such a wild card. It’s hard to know what to expect from him from one day to the next, and I often can’t predict which Corvus I will face at any given time, the extremely cunning, strategic and effective war genius whose prowess cannot be denied, or the annoying troublemaker who can at times almost border on insolence and whose puzzling sense of humor sows conflict in even the most stable and peaceful scenarios. Is is the subject of almost all complaints I receive from other members, and even after all this time he is still quite resistant to changing his ways. That is not to say he is disloyal in the slightest, if that were the case he would not be in my Order, let alone the general in command of my armies and one of my most trusted right hand men. But unfortunately, his personality is just set up in such a way where he can be a real pest even when he is not meaning to be and has the best intentions. I suspect his personal issues including his penchant for guzzling large amounts of alcohol play a significant role in this as well, so i am willing to look past his transgressions in order to focus on what he can offer me to make it worth my while putting up with his shenanigans.

There is also Onyx Inferna, who is merely a member in training to take on Pravus’ former role as my personal assistant. I will not go into too much detail regarding her as I have not known her for very long just yet so to judge her qualities in depth would be rather premature as I have not had a good window of context to study her behavioral patterns and shortcomings. However, I do know that so far she is quite volatile and unrestrained, and also appears to have a severe abandonment complex. Nothing that can’t be solved with my guidance, though.

This may sound like a lot to complain about after having just mentioned that it was hard for me to critique anything, but let me just reiterate that these issues are really not present the majority of the time in most cases, and that a lot of these flaws have positive aspects to them that outweigh the negatives. All in all, I am quite proud of my Black Order and I care about them dearly, imperfections included. 

[stoweboyd]

Some Predictions, 2018

I had the thought this morning that I might be better off thinking about the future adversarially, as if I were wrestling with a shadowed but immensely strong and fanged opponent, instead of looking out on a rolling plain filled with slowly ambling herbivorous events and interactions. Alfred North Whitehead said

It is the business of the future to be dangerous.

And maybe I should approach it from a different angle: maybe I should visualize my work as a futurist more like storming a castle than opening the mail.

Some of my predictions have been made in Twitter, already, while others are seeing the light of day for the first time, here. Others have been modified from 2017 predictions or other sources.

I placed these in four broad categories: Technology, Politics, Economics, and Climate. I’ll leave Arts and Culture for a separate post.

Politics

Democrats will regain control of the US House of Representatives, taking a/ all the seats in counties that voted for Clinton now held by GOP reps (23), b/ holding all the Dem seats in districts that voted for Trump (12), and /c targeting districts with retiring moderate GOP reps, districts with close races last election, and some wildcards adding up to 24 wins. It’s going to happen though, I bet. (see great graphics on this at WaPo). Bannon is a big factor, accelerating the splintering of the GOP.

Democrats will take the Senate, even though the Dems have 26 Senate seats up for grabs, while GOP has only 8 seats up for reelection. Bannon is a big factor, accelerating the splintering of the GOP.

Despite campaign rhetoric, Trump has maintained or expanded the wars that he inherited from Obama. Trump has achieved none of his major foreign policy goals. I predict 2018 will just get worse. (via twitter)

European populism will continue to expand, as detailed by Yascha Mounk and Martin Eiermann.

Mueller will find clear signs of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, and will indict campaign officials, including Donald Trump Jr., but not Donald Trump. Pence will resign since he was the leader of the transition team when it all came down, and Trump will appoint Nikki Haley as Vice-President, the first woman and Asian-American to hold that office.

Iran will be struck with on-going protests as a result of a cascades of social and economic problems: drought, water, unemployment, high prices, welfare cuts, corruption, and government policies. The government will start out trying to moderate the protests, but will ultimately ramp up the use of force. The country will move to crisis which will not be resolved in 2018.

Putin will win reelection.

Concerns about Brexit, populism, and anti-EU sentiment in Europe leads to more unstable governments there, and internal policy changes on Chinese debt lead to slowing development there. Both of these trends have negative impacts on the world economy.

Drought and heat wave in Asia, Africa, and india lead to enormous disruption and policy challenges. Nationalist and populist governments of Europe and Asia close their borders to new migrants and climate refugees.

GOP offers of 2018 bipartisanship fall apart after infrastructure discussions reach an impasse: GOP wants to use private-public partnerships, basically granting large sums to major developers, while Democrats favor a broadly-based jobs program coordinated with State governments. As a result, nothing gets done prior to 2018 elections.

#MeToo continues as a potent cultural force with significant impact in the political realm, with an on-going stream of male politicians brought low.

The Syrian civil war will come to a negotiated end, with an agreement for war amnesties for al-Assad’ government and the rebels, excluding ISIS forces. A complex multi-stage approach to the creation of a new government is proposed, but not solidified in 2018.

The standoff in Catalonia will continue into 2018, without a resolution. Rajoy was been massively weakened by the growing perception of intransigence, and his lack of a real resolution to the Catalonia crisis. Meanwhile, the separatists in Catalonia can't rally around a coherent plan for independence in a European Union that seems adamantly opposed to fracturing of member countries, despite the growing movements in Catalonia and other regions.

The UK and EU come to agreement on a timetable and logistics for Brexit, although myriad details remain to be tacked down. However, the possibility of an amicable and close relationship -- not as close as Norway -- but an agreement that allows for Britain to participate on trade in the EU as a slight disadvantage but under EU law while limiting free immigration.

North Korea fires a low-yield (5 kilotons) nuclear missile to the middle of the Pacific and detonates it as 'proof that North Korea is a nuclear power that can't be trifled with', says Kim Jung-un. This is less than half the yeild of the Hiroshim bomb, and causes no direct injuries. Trump rattles his saber, but ultimately the world accepts the notion of a nuclear-armed North Korea joining Pakistan, India, Israel, Russia, China, France, UK, and US.

Israel's aggressive stance toward annexation of West Bank territory leads to international condemnation, but Trump's administration does little aside from calls for moderation. Many critics begin to call the Israeli model Apartheid, and European support for Israel, in particular, plummets. The US blocks UN resolutions calling for sanctions against Israel.

Technology

Amazon will pick Denver or Toronto as the site for its second HQ.

Amazon will acquire Slack for $15B. Work chat will continue as the dominant theme in work technology in 2018, although they is considerable pushback on its negatives, too.

Apple will acquire Tesla for $75B. Tim Cook will retire, and Elon Musk will become CEO of the merged Apple/Tesla, to be called Apple.

Microsoft will buy Salesforce for $100B. Benioff will retire to philanthropy.

Driverless fleets by various companies will be launched in 2018 – GM in NYC, Lyft taxis in Boston, Ford, Waymo in Phoenix.

A growing number of major corporations will deploy AI intended to augment or replace frontline and middle managers, leading to tens of thousands of managers being reassigned or let go. This will be the result of AI-to-AI communications, where narrowly- and deeply-focused AIs will collaborate with other complementary AIs at a pace that humans can’t keep up with. Employee engagement rises.

Amazon Alexa technology dominates the home, with Google a strong second, and Apple as a distant also-ran.

Netflix acquires Spotify for $10B.

The ability to run Android apps on Chromebook devices will lead to growing migration from Windows, Mac, and iOS devices.

Google will acquire Twitter for $20B. Jack Dorsey will step down, and Google will redesign Twitter in a crowdsourced process, looking ahead to integration with Google Photos, Google Maps, Youtube, AdSense, DoubleClick, Google Home, and Google Assistant.

Facebook, Twitter and other social media systems will mobilize a combination of human and AI-based filtering to counter the deluge of fake news directed by Russia and other malefactors during elections in 2018, having increased but not perfect success.

Google will acquire Medium for $2.5B.See 10, above.

Amazon will release Alexa Glasses, which allow wearer to communicate with Alexa services by voice, and get audio response by bone conduction and video response projected on the glasses. They will sell millions.

Economics

Major stock indexes will continue their growth of recent years, led by technology stocks, like Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and others. However, the rate of growth will slow in the fall, as concerns about Brexit, populism, and anti-EU sentiment in Europe leads to more unstable governments there, and internal policy changes on Chinese debt lead to slowing development there. Both of these trends have negative impacts on the world economy, as does the drought and heat wave in Asia, Africa, and India.

Growing instability in Europe, due to the rise of nationalism and populism, will lead to a decline in European growth, and the return of problems with overly indebted countries and central banks. 

China’s growth rate will slow because of internal and external concerns about deep debt overhang.

Sustainable energy will continue to drop in price, forcing energy systems to shift to battery systems to capture excess. As a result, coal and oil will continue to trend downward, and the energy sector will shift investments to sustainable sources.

Automation will increase worldwide, but the productivity paradox -- where those investments do not lead immediately to increase in productivity -- will continue, although many occupations (like financial services, IT, and retail, not just manufacturing) will start to see a decline in jobs.

Creative and freelance workers will begin to unionize as a means to counter the precarious nature of work in the gig economy, mobilized in part by the #MeToo, #Resistance, and #fightfor15 movements, and the leftward lean of the Democrats in the 2018 elections. 

The concepts of ‘flexicurity’ and ‘fluidarity’ begin to form a central aspect of a new US labor movement.

Climate

2018 will be the hottest year on record.

The US will be hit with a record number of hurricanes.

Asia will be hit with a record number of typhoons.

The atmospheric levels of CO2 will reach a new record in fall 2018.

Africa, Asia, and India are confronted by extreme heat and drought, leading to famine, disorder, and heightened tensions. Hundreds of millions attempt to migrate from stricken regions, leading to reprisals, border wars, and growing catastrophe.

Puerto Rico is hit by several hurricanes, and its power is again knocked out. An additional million citizens emigrate to mainland US.

New York City is hit by a hurricane and large portions of the city’s already straining subway system are flooded. The prognosis is grim: it will take years and tens of billions to recover.

[mypoorfaves]

Salient Symptoms

Salient (adjective): standing out conspicuously :  prominent; especially :  of notable significance

Summary: Seung-gil comes down with a cold. It’s not a big deal, but it sure is annoying. (Largely inspired by my sick life.)

I gift this to @just-another-sickfic-blog because everyone deserves to have sickfic content for their faves

1800~ words

～～～

Seung-gil is not a people person.

It’s not that he doesn’t like people per se, he just prefers to avoid interacting with them if at all possible. Given the fact, he can’t help but appreciate the common cold and the natural barrier it creates between himself and those who would rather not get sick.

He wakes up slowly, alone in his house save for the company of his loyal husky who lays curled up asleep at the foot of the bed. Just minutes after being awake and Seung-gil can already tell his body isn’t at it’s peak condition; something just feels slightly off.

It starts with a sore throat, there but not terrible. He knows that will likely change by the end of the day though, gradually growing worse as the hours go on, no matter how much water and tea he drinks. Other than the lingering pain, there’s a general sense of fatigue despite being well-rested.

It doesn’t stop him from going to the rink for training. He brews a cup of tea and whips up a light breakfast before dressing in his jacket and wrapping a scarf around his face as an extra precaution.

As predicted, practice goes alright. He’s had better days, that’s for sure, but his symptoms aren’t throwing off his focus any more than a stray thought would on a normal day. He takes more frequent breaks even if he doesn’t really feel like he needs them. He drinks lots of water and nearly empties the tissue box with how frequently he needs to blow his nose.

He’s gone through the two travel mugs of tea he brought with him (both sweetened with honey to soothe his throat), and much more water, yet he can feel the burn steadily getting worse. By the next morning, though, his sore throat should be gone completely, if this cold is anything like his last one.

He can feel the beginnings of a cough starting. It’s a subtle itch in the back of his throat that begs to be scratched every time he fills his lungs to their full capacity. He can ignore it for now, knowing the coughs will be dry and unproductive. What’s less difficult to ignore is how congested he’s starting to become. He doesn’t talk much to his rinkmates on any given day, and they seem to avoid him even more now that he’s showing signs of coming down with a cold. He only speaks to his coach to acknowledge the critiques and criticisms she has to offer, and when Seung-Gil does speakーshort and to the pointーhe can definitely feel the congestion there, along with the faint but not terrible thrum of a headache.

He turns in early once he gets home, opting for at least an extra hour of sleep to help his body fight off this illness as fast as possible. He takes his temperature but finds no fever, which is to be expected; he was never really prone to them. His congestion is more prominent now, making it hard to breathe through his nose. He’s been sneezing multiple times throughout the day, and despite the large amount of liquid he’s consumed his throat is still aching.

This is about how it’s always been for Seung-gil with every cold he’s gotten; he feels physically fine for the most part but his symptoms are enough to catch the attention of the people around him, usually pushing them away. Not that he really minds that, though. It gives him an extra excuse to avoid social interaction. He much prefers his own company, laying in bed with his dog and resting (save for when he needs to get up and make himself a meal).

That’s not to say he wouldn’t want someone fussing over him, taking his temperature, bringing him food and drinks on a tray, whispering words of comfort and delivering tender touches. His mother would often do such for him as a child, and it made him feel loved and cherished. Perhaps if he let her know that he’s getting sick, she would send him a care package. He smiles at the thought.

Even without a caretaker, this cold is not devastating. Seung-gil has always been independent and self-reliant, knowing well the signs of his body and being smart enough to listen when it’s had enough. Even with the extra hour of sleep and the additional self-care, he knows he’s going to have to take a day off to recover. It’s inevitable, as it is with every other cold he’s managed to catch in the 21 years of his life. It’s a little frustrating, but there’s not much that can be done about it. He changes into a light pair of pajamas and climbs into his bed, wrapping himself up in the covers. Tomorrow is another day, and he’s determined to make the best of it until his body forces him to do otherwise.

The next day at practice is a little more rough than the previous. The extra sleep Seung-gil got the night before has certainly helped him stay energized, but it’s impossible to breathe through his stuffed nose. There’s many times when he’s running through his routine, breaths quick and bordering on pants, and he can feel a small trickle from his nose; it’s ridiculously annoying how that can still happen even despite how congested he is. All he can do is wipe at his nose on the back of his gloved hand and do his best to sniffle, and carry on.

He’s executing the components sub-par, and now he’s starting to cough on top of it all. They’re dry and they aren’t fits, but it still catches the attention of his rinkmates, particularly his coach. She calls him over to the side and insists he rest if he’s unwell, to which he responds plainly and with complete honesty that he really does feel fine despite how bad his symptoms make his illness appear. He doesn’t even have a fever, and he fights a blush when a hand is placed on his forehead just to double check.

His other rinkmates continue to avoid him more than usual, and Seung-gil can’t help but appreciate the fact. He wants to get lost in his skating, in the sharp sound of the blade cutting across the ice, the cool air running through his hair and filling his lungs. It feels invigorating, even if the chill does cause him to cough more. His coach doesn’t comment on it again, but something in her expression gives away her concern. (Or if it’s not concern, then at the very least her reluctance to keep him at the rink and further worsen his condition.)

Much to the skater’s disappointment, his cough is getting worse. Still not quite fits, but getting deeper and sounding more harsh as the day goes on. It must be the cool rink air. It doesn’t help that he still feels overly congested. His headache isn’t torturous, but still aches when he goes for spins, specifically combinations. It’s all still manageable though, and he successfully makes it through to the end of practice. He’s more than aware that his rinkmates have been hearing his constant coughing and sniffling, knowing full-well that he’s sick with a cold and to keep their distance so help they come down with it too.

Seung-gil is just in the midst of putting on his skate guards, momentarily interrupted by another bout of coughs, when his coach approaches. She tells him sternly to take tomorrow off, and maybe the next day too if he hasn’t significantly improved. Seung-gil nods his agreement, knowing it’s for the better. Plus, he doesn’t want to infect his other rink mates (if he hasn’t already done so). His voice is hoarse as he agrees, promising to take good care of his body to recover as quickly as possible.

His voice is gone almost completely the next day, a shell of what it used to be. He has nobody to talk to at home all alone, so he considers it a blessing in disguise. His coughs have worsened and are a thing to be reckoned with, causing him to wince with a small moan after each fit. He still has no fever, body temperature maybe .4 Celsius over what it normally is, if that.

He has nothing to do but sit in bed, browsing various forms of social media. He doesn’t post anything about his cold, as so many of his international competitors often do. Why they would even consider such a thing is beyond him. Broadcasting to their adversaries that they are weak and not currently practicing, might not be at peak condition for their next competition, is just foolish if you ask him.

He pauses in his scrolling to catch a set of sneezes with some tissues from the box he’s keeping next to his bed. It helps loosen the congestion enough for him to blow his nose after, and he cringes at the feeling and also at the disgust. He quickly balls up the used cotton and tosses it into the trash can, then flops back with a sigh. He’s not really sleepy but he knows he needs the rest. He locks his phone and puts it down, turning onto his side and lets his eyes fall closed as he tries to sleep.

After ten minutes of laying still and unmoving, and another five of tossing and turning to try and get comfortable, he throws off the blanket and heads for the medicine cabinet. Once in the bathroom, he takes a moment to scrutinizes his own reflection in the mirror. His hair is a bit mussled with bed head, and his nose is a bit red and chapped from the rough tissues. There is no red to be found on his cheeks though; still no fever.

The worst part about this illness is he doesn’t really look nor feel sick. He certainly sounds sick, what with all of the constant coughing, sniffling, sneezing and congestion. And also the fact that his voice is nowhere to be found. He supposes the “feeling bad” part of his cold will likely come later, and he should get some proper rest to prepare for it.

He opens the cabinet behind the mirror, rummages through the bottle of pills, finds some melatonin, then takes two under his tongue. He climbs back into bed, momentarily startling his dog. She moves from her spot at the foot of the bed to lay closer to Seung-gil’s head, as if sensing her master is unwell and wanting to provide a comforting presence. He can already feel the medicine kicking in, making him sleepy. He strokes her fur gently, and it only takes minutes before he falls into a deep sleep.

～～～

(End)

This was my first fic that wasn’t Victor, Yuuri or Yurio! I actually find it harder to write for side characters because we don’t know much about them; there’s too much freedom. I like having set character traits as guidelines so I’m still gonna try and stick with the main three (mainly the two) because it’s much easier for me to write. That being said, if you guys really liked this fic then I would be open to writing more in the future!

I am open to requests, so feel free to send in prompts! I am also accepting donations via ko-fi if you want to make my day :)

[bloodandwinemuses]

The Hierophant: What is one rule or law your muse would never break? [I'm curious about this for all your muses, actually]

Nolan: 

Admittedly, there is no singular response to this in his case considering that his individual background vastly differs along with his respective goals. In his researcher verse, his wish to complete his parents’ life work is an amalgam of everything: an excuse used to run away, a sense of direction, and to rekindle memories of them in the process, however scarce his time spent alongside them might have been. Based on this, it is incredibly unlikely for him to prioritize people over his meticulous process of ensuring his parents won’t be forgotten. Being somebody who is most loyal to family regardless of a strained or a largely harmonic relationship, the aforementioned need to chase after ghosts equals not only a sense of direction, it likewise constitutes as the most essential - no exceptions. Naturally, he might indulge in the idea of settling down with somebody he is romantically interested in, but sooner or later Nolan showcases a tendency to repeat history: namely to shoulder his backpack and to walk the path anew. With this in mind, it is no surprise that while he is able to care deeply about others, Nolan will not place their needs or wants over what he must do. 

Or so he tells himself. In Truck’s particular case, for example, he somehow finds himself coming back - provided he can find him - for something really quite simple: company. Regardless, I don’t believe Nolan would be so foolish as to abandon everything he’s ever wanted. This is not a rule, per se, but it’s important to him as a character nevertheless. 

Alexander: 

I’ve posted his section separately. It can be found in his character development tag here. 

Espen: 

Although he is barely a month old - not even a month, actually - I have a feeling, whether premonition or something else entirely, that the only rule he’s really set for himself is to enjoy life freely. This, of course, comes at the expense of others ( which he is often not quite aware of, as his ability to emphasize with somebody else seems quite low) but it’s not borne out of purely selfish motivation either. As somebody whose childhood was unmistakably linked to death and, once a child who lost people dear to him in a string of unfortunate events, he’s really quite uncompromising about pursuing whatever pleasure he can get. Hell, his entire tattoo collection is a homage to that. I don’t think there’s anything he values more. At least not based on what I do know about him right now. 

All in all, it’s escapism. Where Alexander seeks to hide in fiction, behind a book or emulating a character from a play, Espen copes with his past by living without compromise, seeking distraction and gratification in materialistic things and moments rather than make believe worlds. Afraid, naturally, to let anything other than hedonistic endeavors mean anything lest it has the potential to hurt him. 

Lin: 

See, she is a hard one to narrow down, much less bind to one specific rule she would never break. First and foremost, she’s an opportunist, completely unperturbed by this fact. Sure, there’s duality to her personality, for she is not just this bitch or bully willing to fight dirty to remain in control, nor is she necessarily ravenous for power at the expense of all else. But she can be, to the point of where there’s little concern for her own well-being or that of others. It just matters that she gets what she wants ( which can be anything that’ll satiate her needs. She wants to mess with your mind because you insulted her pride? Well, too bad, because that’s exactly what she will do until she’s achieved what she has set her mind to, and don’t you think she isn’t efficient at what she does. This is somebody who has had to fight in every verse to get to where she is, to become the woman many respect, yet avoid on more intimate terms. )

And yet, there certainly are maternal aspects about her: the family away from home at the shop, all of whom are misfits in their own right. Surely, Avery wouldn’t have been given a chance by anybody else, what with the cantankerous demeanor he cultivates and the not so infrequent, obscene slips of the tongue. But she saw potential in this asshole and took him in, even though there was hardly anything for her to gain at the time. It is true, all vices notwithstanding, that she has an eye for talent, no matter if society would much rather not deal with the likes of them. Perhaps this is ultimately borne out of her wanting to prevent others from feeling the way she did as a wee lass - powerless, helpless - so, for all her adversarial tendencies, she is not without principles. It begs the question of whether or not she would put this instinct, this wish for kindness and the willingness to extend it ( however particular her brand of benevolence might be) above her need for control and the feeling of being on top to fuel her spirits, which she would not. Her pride always comes first, and it is a rule of sorts - for her - to guard what she’s accomplished with whatever methods she sees fit. Of course, her animosity towards others borders on the ridiculous sometimes, and her ability to suspect others of making her look like a fool ( or a stupid girl) has been really quite amplified by the amount of dim-witted assholes and teeth she’s had to pull out. 

Besides, she wouldn’t know what to do with kindness - genuine, of the altruistic kind - if it hit her square in the face. 

Avery: 

I’ve said it times and times again; I will never tire of repeating it: Avery is a good person, but not a nice one at that. See, it would take paragraphs to really drive home the point of how important it is for him to feel safe and secure - moreso than anything else. His childhood and consecutive years have wired his mind to always be in a state of alarm, to feel as if there’s danger just round the corner. As such, his own experiences and environment have instilled in him a deeply-rooted fear of people, leading him to mask his anxiety as blatant, raw aggression. More often than not, he is likened to an animal being backed into a corner - and not without reason. 

Simultaneously, the one rule he would never break is his own sense of morality. He will never look away when another person is harmed,picked on, ridiculed or in a situation in which they’re obviously at a disadvantage - his own safety be damned. He’s tiny, yes, but he didn’t survive simply by taking on dodgy jobs. Underestimating him is about the last thing you should do. 

Sím: 

Sím is a gentle, soft-spoken soul in spite of toxic environmental factors which could’ve contributed to his resorting to defense mechanisms and coping styles which certainly wouldn’t earn him any cookie points. What is essential to understand here, however, is the fact that he still indulges in extremely unhealthy habits and mechanisms that are ultimately destructive. He has this stupid self-sacrificing tendency to the point of where he disregards his own needs completely, getting involved in affairs that are really none of his business. In the best of times, he will drop it, yet more often than not he can’t help himself. It’s an ever present, consuming need to be needed by others. 

He is not without flaws however, which come in a variety of selfish indulgences Sím is not proud of. What ultimately is a rule a rule breaker like him would never break, is his insatiable want to help, even if it might be a fool’s errand. (E.g. letting an abrasive asshole into his life out of sheer sympathy and shared shitty backgrounds…when you can barely manage to be a responsible dad…because of your damn questionable decisions. Smh.) 

Zacharie: 

He’s an egomaniac asshole with no concept of morality. He’s a god damn hedonist who’ll try to get his greedy little hands on anything he wants, all previously held beliefs be damned. In short, he’s malleable, which is highly dependent on what he’s currently pursuing. You just can’t know if there is really anything, like a law or rule, that he will not break under any circumstances. Because he lies through his teeth without breaking a sweat or even the faintest twinge of a bad conscience, ready to tell you whatever you want to hear. 

[anthonybialy]

Broken China

China is less popular than the zombie plague they inflicted on the globe. The prototypically brutal cabal's biggest export is a virus, which should bring great shame to the 100 percent untrustworthy power that contains about 20 percent of people. A bordered inveterate liar decided to go the obnoxious route by blaming everyone else for their germ warfare, and you almost have to admire the boldness.

Who wants to deal with such jerks? Daring other nations to take their business elsewhere is a sign grouchy commies still don't grasp commerce. Take some of the ample alone time the disease-spreaders provided to call their bluff and illustrate how markets work. Give them a struggle session.

Purchasers get to consider everything about a product. Sometimes, there's a low price for a reason. China's de facto disposable products aren't the value they appear. The lack of cash deducted from debit card use isn't the only factor. Each transaction requires someone else willing to purchase, and there may be too much of a discount.

Free trade means the chance to decline. Chinese adversaries don't appreciate how liberty means pondering every option possible. Price is merely one consideration. Subway might put their horrifying animal feed in a roll on sale, but the coupon savings aren't enough to justify a lunch of sadness.

Smart shoppers turn their carts away from false economy. Bargains can get costly if a confrontational regime acts up on behalf of their appalling interests. Supply chain disruption is the downside of buying goods from an austere hellhole that quite aggressively bitches about wholly valid criticism. China thinks they're getting away with something by threatening to cut off the endless supply of cheap goods, and not just in the sense they're inexpensive. Totalitarian impulses can't contain a virus.

Decline to deal with rotten commies who attack anyone pointing out their putzing aggression. The juvenile desire to lash out at truth is particularly appalling from such an ancient civilization. Mao's descendants have done everything they can to live in the past. They're not mining simple wisdom from elders, either.

Aggression is the professional authoritarians' only skill, and they can only appear to be semi-skilled at that through overwhelming quantity. It’s too bad China can’t be as efficient at anything as they are at attacking those who notice cause and effect.

The virus makes certain people think it's prejudiced to point out a country is ruled by horrific tyrants who are as diabolical as they are inept. A useless evil regime rather obviously attempts to compensate for glaring inadequacies. It’s apparently now bigotry to dare note just where our globe's biggest present concern began and spread.

The only way to make today’s circumstances worse is to conflate being ruled by a monstrous cadre of putzing villains with the individuals forced to live under it. Those who think the biggest victims of a pandemic are aggrieved staffers at the Beijing branch of the Legion of Doom will be shocked to learn who the real racists were all along.

A contagious disease originated under totally not suspicious circumstances before it became the opposite of contained. The outbreak is a sadly perfect example of how central planners can only maintain the appearance of control for so long. Basic competence is the one thing that eludes sadists obsessed with controlling lives. The only consolation prize is showing that communists aren't even good at lying.

Trade's tricky because of how hard it is to find something that meets every factor. We're relying on what companies offer, which only seems infinite if you're bored and on Amazon.

Even a world of seemingly limitless options features some drawbacks. Why can't things be closer to free? I'm typing this on a MacBook that I'd prefer Apple would have found somewhere else to manufacture. But there's a balance to principles not yet being fully realized in a rather imperfect world. It's fine to collect Social Security after getting socked for it even if you think it's a horrid retirement plan.

We could try choosing to buy items from a country that hasn't committed the most murders in human history. Corpse piles are the one thing the virus hub is good at creating. The world's most populous country should feel true pride for its ability to eke out a little cash from the simplest assembling.

Churning out someone else's goods is a good start, sort of. The best case for limiting our stupid government to its proper role is what China does with its pocket change. A widespread disease offers an ideal time to stop selling debt to a schemer that can at best be classified as an antagonist.

Unlike paying people to bring us food to tables in their decorated spaces, there are some things we don't want to bring back. Complaining that America doesn't manufacture things anymore ignores our high-quality output.  We can surely afford to find someone else to perform menial tasks.

Those who twitch while referring to globalism are upset about products made with skills so low that even communists can perform them. Trade frees up Americans to do more useful work. Of course, we could buy from non-China nations. Otherwise, find robots or penguins that have undergone three weeks of training to assemble our simplest goods.

China should just be starting to suffer virus effects. They're going to be shocked when customers go elsewhere. It’s time to make control freaks pay for not learning the lessons of open commerce.

This is the perfect time for a slightly less tyrannical nation to offer factory space and entry-level workers. China has never grasped the basics of competition despite their superficial moves toward exchange. Anyone who misses the outside should give the Middle Kingdom the middle finger.

[dangkynhanhieusanphamcom]

We Should Firmly Shut the Open Door – Law & Liberty

  Walter McDougall is a great historian and a superb writer. It is thus hardly surprising that he won a Pulitzer Prize, which he did for his book on the space race. Many foreign policy observers, though, would rate Promised Land, Crusader State: The American Encounter With the World Since 1776 (1997) or The Tragedy of U.S. Foreign Policy (2016) as their favorite in his corpus. Few would disagree that these books and his many shorter works have made McDougall one of our most thoughtful voices on U.S. foreign policy.

McDougall doesn’t disappoint with his Liberty Forum essay, an “anticipatory elegy” for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization on its 70th anniversary. Indeed, there is little to disagree with in this pre-mortem of sorts that fingers NATO enlargement, “especially in its ‘bridge too far’ on the Baltic Sea,” as a significant cause of the alliance’s problems. Therefore, I’ll largely use this space to build off McDougall’s elegy and touch on a few issues related to NATO’s future.

The Wisdom of NATO Enlargement

McDougall rightly questions the wisdom of past NATO enlargements that brought the alliance from 16 members in 1989 to 29 today—and a 30th on the way, with North Macedonia having just signed an accession agreement. The architects of expansion erected a signature folly in 2004 by creating a Baltic wing composed of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia.

These small states added little power to the alliance and a lot of problems. First, they sit right on Russia’s doorstep, bringing NATO into direct contact with the main part of Russia and surrounding the Kaliningrad enclave by land. This only heightened the security dilemma in Russia stimulated by the earlier round of enlargement in 1999 that brought in Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic.

Second, these states are extremely difficult to defend. As James J. Coyle of the Atlantic Council has noted, “There is no strategic depth, and the states are only connected to Europe by the 65-kilometer-wide Suwalki Gap. The entire area is covered by Russian Anti-Access Area Denial (A2/AD) capabilities. It would be suicide to try to fight a war with the Kremlin on this territory.”

Indeed, Rand analysts who war-gamed the problem of defending the Baltics noted in 2016 that “if Russia were to conduct a short-warning attack against the Baltic States, Moscow’s forces could roll to the outskirts of the Estonian capital of Tallinn and the Latvian capital of Riga in 36 to 60 hours. In such a scenario, the United States and its allies would not only be outranged and outgunned, but also outnumbered.”

While they and others have proffered solutions, it remains a difficult problem to say the least and thus the alliance is putting a lot of weight on the power of extended deterrence.

This brings us to a major third problem: credibility. For deterrence to work, the threat to make good on defending a commitment has to be believable. But as the alliance expands to take in states that are very costly to defend while offering little value in return, it is harder to convince the target of deterrence that you’ll make good on your deterrent threat. While enlargement may not undermine NATO’s ability to deter an attack on Europe’s most important countries, it does threaten the alliance’s credibility to take in those states that raise doubts about our willingness to stand up to direct or indirect challenges from Russia.

McDougall isn’t the first person to wonder whether the Americans or our other allies will want to die for Tallinn.[1] Any doubts the adversaries might entertain about allied commitment gives an opening to those who might want to challenge the status quo. But given the presence of tripwire forces and the feeling in some Western corners that the commitment itself will need to be defended rather than risk the entire future of NATO, the inclusion of the Baltics unnecessarily raised the risks of war between nuclear powers.

We are left with the problem of the dog who caught the car: What do we do with it now?

The answer from “the Blob” seems to be that we ought to double down on risky alliances by keeping an “open door” policy” to try and meet the idealistic goal of “a Europe whole and free.”[2] Georgia and Ukraine are two cases in point: American and NATO officials keep talking about bringing these states into the alliance despite many serious marks against the idea.

During a visit to Georgia in 2017, Vice President Mike Pence declared, “President Trump and the United States stand firmly behind the 2008 NATO Bucharest statement which made it clear that Georgia will, someday, become a member.” Pence then went further: “The joint military operations that are taking place today we hope are a visible sign of our commitment to Georgia’s sovereignty and to her internationally recognized borders.” Likewise, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg visited Georgia recently during joint military exercises between that country and NATO, boldly exclaiming: “NATO Allies have clearly stated that Georgia will become a member of the Alliance.” He added: “we are not accepting that Russia or any other power can decide what neighbours can do.”

As for Ukraine, the United States might be a bit more shy about its addition since Russia annexed Crimea in 2014 and fighting broke out in eastern Ukraine between separatists and the government. (Despite ceasefires, the conflict is still warm, with two Ukrainians killed in fighting this week, adding to the 13,000 killed since the conflict began.) But the United States and NATO are still rhetorically holding the door open. For example, a joint statement from last fall declared: “The United States welcomed Ukraine’s NATO aspirations, reaffirmed by the 2008 Bucharest Declaration, and looked forward to one day welcoming Ukraine into the Alliance.”

While talk might be cheap and there are admittedly hurdles to ultimate accession (most importantly, active territorial disputes), it isn’t helpful to raise expectations in these countries or stimulate additional fears in Russia that could have unintended consequences for us and those we are ostensibly trying to help. Indeed, one could argue that NATO’s approach to these countries formerly part of the Soviet Union has already contributed to “reckless driving” by the Georgians and more than bad behavior from the Russians.[3]

I have elsewhere made the case (at greater length) for why Georgian entry into NATO would be a bad idea. In short, while we should wish that country well and hope for its liberalization, we certainly ought not allow it to join NATO since it isn’t necessary for U.S. security. As I noted previously, “Georgia is a weak, vulnerable, and strategically inconsequential country. Committing to defend it would unnecessarily risk American lives and even nuclear war with Russia.” And even more so than with the Baltic countries, our deterrent threat would be less than credible. Furthermore, we shouldn’t forget that Georgia too has a territorial conflict with Russia that only increases the risk of the United States’ getting dragged into a conflict over something that doesn’t matter to our safety.

Ukraine, while bigger and stronger than Georgia, would also be a net negative addition to the alliance. Most importantly, it is, as mentioned, involved in a war in eastern Ukraine with separatists supported by Moscow. Even should that end and territorial disputes be settled, the possibility of a flame-up—especially should NATO accession engender moral hazard for the Ukrainians (leading perhaps to future attempts to get back any territory lost)—will not go away. We shouldn’t yearn to step into that situation given what Article V could mean.

Nor is Ukraine any more critical to American safety than is Georgia. It would be hard to defend absent a massive prepositioning of troops and arms, given Russia’s geostrategic advantages. We won the Cold War with Ukraine part of the Soviet Union, so even a renewed cold war with Moscow would mean we don’t need Ukraine.

Of course, as McDougall pointed out, Russia today isn’t even close to the strength of that communist power; it spends on its military less than 10 percent of what the United States alone does. Not to mention that we have wealthy and populous allies in Europe, like Germany and France, who could balance against the Russians and defend themselves ably  if they wanted to. And Russia has other problems, both internal and external (not least that the rise of China threatens not only Japan and Taiwan but Russia).

Future enlargement would be a serious error. The United States and our other NATO allies have no moral obligation to add new entrants (especially those that would be security wards) and no strategic need to bring them into the fold. We should firmly shut the open door. As McDougall notes, Article 10 of the Treaty of Washington alone would seem to demand shutting it tightly in these cases.

Burden-Sharing and Built-In Dependence

If the United States and NATO should stop admitting new entrants, what should we think about its current members? Our allies aren’t sharing enough of the burden of collective defense, something brought to the fore by candidate and then President Trump. McDougall thinks that this is “really the least of NATO’s worries” in comparison to the Damocles sword of defending an overextended alliance. Be that as it may, Americans shouldn’t avert their eyes from this problem just because it isn’t the biggest challenge or because they might disagree with how the President has raised the issue.

The military spending figures of our wealthy and populous allies clearly show the free-rider problem—or more accurately, the “cheap rider” problem, as Professor Barry Posen of MIT has put it—in action.[4] Germany, the economic powerhouse of Europe, spends only 1.2 percent of GDP on its military. Very few NATO countries actually do meet their agreed-upon target of 2 percent. NATO reported just last month that only seven out of 29 countries are currently meeting this goal.

Of course, there are also concerns not only about how much these countries are spending but about whether they are spending it well to create effective power. The United States also faces the problem that how Europeans spend their money ensures their dependence since they  build, not full spectrum capabilities, but annexes to our forces. While hectoring from this side of the Atlantic has paid off in the form of some European spending increases, it isn’t nearly enough. McDougall is probably right that “No matter how much abuse they get, the Europeans are not going to relinquish free security so long as Americans remain willing and able to provide it.”

But this situation shouldn’t be acceptable to us. It places an undue burden on American taxpayers and our troops while freeing Europeans to spend on other priorities, all while we pile up debt and deficits here at home. This imbalance could be justified on the grounds of enlightened self-interest in the aftermath of World War II and in the face of the postwar Soviet threat. But that specific context long ago disappeared. The United States should not be played for a fool here, particularly with little prospect that any one state, even China, could become hegemonic in Eurasia, and given the fact that the nuclear revolution changes how we need to think about overseas commitments.

Another more fraught question raised by recent friction in the alliance and the talk of burden-sharing is whether it would be good for the United States (and Europe itself) for Europe to develop a strong common foreign and defense policy, or even to evolve into a “super-state.” Margaret Thatcher used to employ the term derisively, and more in the context of a stifling Brussels bureaucracy. But others, such as Syracuse University’s Glyn Morgan, have made the case that such an entity would be good for Europe. (See Morgan’s 2007 book, The Idea of a European Superstate: Public Justification and European Integration.)

McDougall brings up the issue of a common foreign security policy; but he quickly shifts away, only noting that the United States has poured “cold water on the idea” whenever it has been brought up and the European states are likely to remain security dependents. But this ought to be a salient issue given the U.S. pivot to Asia—for realists and restrainers in particular, given their vision of shifting responsibility from America to Europeans for peace and security in that neighborhood.

The Advantages of a European Super-State

Some realpolitikers might worry that a European superstate would be just the sort of regional hegemon that Americans have traditionally fought to prevent. They’d instead prefer a continued division of power in this important industrial zone, and they might say that this is (and has been) our most important security goal there. Of course, there are big differences between the Europe of today and the states that, throughout history, have striven to grab the hegemonic ring. But realists aren’t known to trust the intentions of others, focusing instead on power. And here we’d have a power with greater combined wealth and population than the United States—one that would only face , as a balancing force on the Continent, a diminished Russia to the east.

Other realpolitikers might not be so concerned. They’d see the advantages for the United States of being able to safely trust regional and nearby (meaning North African and Middle Eastern) problems to Europe such that we could bring our troops home or pivot them more fully to deal with a rising China. They’d see the key centers of the Eurasian heartland as a whole still divided—between Europe, Russia, and China—and thus not the geopolitical menace that has always concerned us despite our geographical advantages. These countries would, after all, have good reasons to balance each other rather than bandwagon against us.

Perhaps most importantly, they’d acknowledge that the nuclear revolution diminishes, if not eliminates, the geopolitical concerns their American ancestors had about bigness abroad. And if liberals and constructivists are right about the role of shared values and history as well as economic interdependence, a European superstate would be just the exception to the rule about fearing the rise of regional hegemons.[5]

Another alternative for Europe would be for its major powers to take more responsibility for their own defense and the security of the region, but without necessarily developing a common approach or a superstate (which could be undesirable for non-geopolitical reasons). In other words, Europe could return to something more like it was before the great conflagrations of the 20th century. But this time, the security competition would be diminished by the fact that France (not to mention the United Kingdom offshore) and Russia have nuclear weapons that strongly buttress their security against the traditional German threat in the heart of Europe.

As things stand, the United States isn’t going away any time soon as the dominant global power. But a different future for Europe is worth pondering given important changes that are occurring there, in the United States, and in Eurasia more generally—as well as in the international system and its balance of power—that will impact NATO’s future and the future of our overall military engagement abroad. We’d be wise to think creatively rather than rely on a stale status quo that is increasingly disconnected from the world as it is coming to be.

  [1] I have a quibble with McDougall’s analogy of Tallinn to Danzig. It was more than reasonable for the great powers to view Nazi Germany as a threat to the balance of power that required the painful choice of asking soldiers to die for the safety of their country. It is absurd given the relative weakness of Russia and the geostrategic strength of the United States, for American leaders to ask young men and women to die for Tallinn unless one stretches the definition of the national interest well beyond our safety, prosperity, and our way of life here at home.

[2] On “the Blob,” see Stephen M. Walt, The Hell of Good Intentions: America’s Foreign Policy Elite and the Decline of U.S. Primacy (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018). See here for only the most recent of many examples of this type of thinking.

[3] See Barry Posen, Restraint: A New Foundation for U.S. Grand Strategy (Cornell University Press, 2014), pp. 35, 44-50.

[4] Posen, p. 35.

[5] Thanks to Professor Josh Shifrinson for helping me think about this last point.

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