Read an exclusive excerpt of "Chapter 5: The Mysterious Cal and Lily" from Tangled Vines: A Complete Investigation of the Vatore Disappearances, the bestselling phenomenon sweeping Sim Nation!
The advent of the Roaring '20s put a new city on the map. Prohibition was in full swing across the nation (though often loosely and selectively enforced), but citizens were more eager than ever to revel in excess. Producers of alcoholic beverages (including the Vatore family itself, having swiftly resumed business operations despite the loss of its future inheritors) transitioned to an outward emphasis on medical spirits while moving recreational production underground. Equally clandestine speakeasys began cropping up by the dozens, but one city's winding sidewalks, grimy storefronts, and labyrinthine system of underground tunnels made it particularly well-suited to hosting these secret locales.
Soon enough, San Myshuno was the pinnacle of glitz, glamor, and elegant debauchery. All who attended a party wanted to be seen. Curiously, though, two of the names most often uncovered in tabloid archives, Cal and Lily, seemed to fully avoid the increasingly ubiquitous flash of the camera. While other frequenters of the speakeasy circuit often found their grainy black and white faces in print, providing endless fodder for the burgeoning gossip rag industry, this pair remained elusive, which of course sold even more papers. Fellow partygoers pitched first-hand accounts to the highest bidders, and readers clung onto every salacious word.
Lily and Cal were always observed to arrive together, but she would soon make a beeline for the gramophone while he settled in at the bar. Nearly every report calls Lily an exquisite beauty with an almost supernatural ability for drawing men into her orbit. In some instances, partygoers describe a herd of suitors nearly erupting into fisticuffs as they competed for her attention. It is impossible to say how many of these accounts are exaggerated or even fabricated. Nevertheless, it is clear she was quite the force. At the end of the night, she would leave with her chosen companion, stupefied by his stroke of good luck, on her arm.
Meanwhile, Cal would watch listlessly from a distance, nursing a glass of whiskey he was never observed to actually drink. The relationship between the two was unclear, as was his reason for accompanying her, as he seemed to have little interest in the raucousness surrounding him. He rarely engaged with other guests or even Lily herself, though there is at least one report of an argument in which he seemed with little success to be dissuading her from leaving with yet another man. One cannot help but draw parallels to a certain set of siblings with suspiciously similar names. Despite being younger, Caleb Vatore was always said to be protective over his sister Lilith's interests, even if she rarely heeded his advice.
Digging into the newspaper archives at Myshuno Meadows Library unearths several more disturbing accounts. Increasingly, there were whispers that the men Lily seduced completely vanished from San Myshuno society after coming into contact with her. While there was a small spike in unsolved murder cases at the time, a concrete connection between the victims and the mysterious Lily cannot be made. In one story, which admittedly reads like a hallucinatory drug trip, Lily is described as a succubus with glowing red eyes and sharp blood-stained teeth. This account was clearly dismissed, for its revelations were never entertained further. All at once, the champagne and glitter dissolved into a more sober era, and these socialites vanished from public life just as swiftly.
In isolation, similarities between Cal and Lily and the disappeared Vatore siblings may seem like mere coincidences. In truth, it cannot even be proven that they existed. No official records matching either individual have been discovered. One could argue that they were works of fiction concocted to boost sales or composites drawn from several individuals. However, considered alongside the evidence to be presented in later chapters, the theory that this duo and the Vatores are one and the same becomes too tantalizingly probable to dismiss.
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sneak peek - warrior nun Alien(1979) au
cw. mild sexual content
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Beatrice rubs fretfully at the smudge, leaning against the spillage of wires from the console on the far side of the room. She has the helmet of Ava’s suit cradled in the crook of one elbow, visor flush with her forearm, and Ava is trying not to laugh or to sob, because she knows that Beatrice is holding it hostage from her.
‘You could refuse,’ Beatrice suggests, rocking from side to side in the small space. ‘Tell him this isn’t your job.’ She’s taking deep, controlled breaths, like at any moment it all might descend into hyperventilation, into screaming or crying or any number of inadmissible actions.
Beatrice frowns. More than that, really, but the expression is beyond Ava’s vocabulary.
‘This was a mistake from the beginning! Sending them out into a dust storm to investigate… what? Some snatch of signal we picked up half a million clicks from anything remotely civilised? You didn’t sign up for this! I-’
‘Bea.’ Ava speaks very softly, but she dips some steel into it. Just a trace, just a slight downturn of the many, many vowels in Beatrice’s name, but it’s enough to make her look up from where her thumb is worrying the hard plastic coating on the helmet.
‘What?’ She sounds aggrieved, and maybe she’s right to be. Their shuttle is sitting, damaged, on a hostile planet, rocks pinging against the hull at 17m/s when the winds are at their highest.
Ava sighs, stands up, the joints in her suit protesting because, like everything on the Nostromo, it’s a piece of crap. She moves over to Beatrice, only glancing once at the cameras lodged in the far corner of the room.
She knows that they offer a sweeping perspective on the bench and the wall behind, where rows of EVA suits are slotted into their cases, helmets sitting on top.
They don’t reach into the alcove where Beatrice has slotted herself. Ava knows the cameras, all the hidden places - and she knows that for now, at least, Beatrice is invisible.
She’s dressed in her navy overalls, unbuttoned down to the waist with a grease-stained shirt underneath and another, skin-tight tank top as a base layer.
Beatrice is always complaining about the cold, even when she’s down in the maintenance levels, where thermal engines work to keep their cargo above freezing.
Her hands are always heat-seeking; forever slipping up underneath the hem of Ava’s hoodie when she comes down to drink Bea’s terrible coffee and complain about Duretti and Vincent and the whole goddamn motley crew.
Ava has spent months in transit convincing herself that Beatrice is just a touchy person, that there’s nothing to it beyond her perfect strangeness. Engineers are always a little odd, and Beatrice, with her grease-dark fingers and her habit of sticking a pencil behind her ear, is no exception. She shivers, now, even as Ava approaches, fingers tightening on the crown of the EVA suit’s helmet as though afraid that Ava will simply snatch it away from her.
‘Listen,’ Ava pleads, and Beatrice makes a low noise in her throat. It’s the same sound she makes when she falls asleep in the middle of a holo and twists on the sofa beside Ava, plagued perpetually by bad dreams. It almost steals the rest of what Ava has to say, but she perseveres.
‘I know your contract is, like, basically built around the phrase ‘please hold this piece-of-shit ship together,’ but the rest of us aren’t so… well, lucky.’
Beatrice flinches – she has a habit doing of that; reacting violently to simple speech. ‘I’m not-‘ she starts, but her voice strangles back into silence. She looks down at the helmet, frowning. Doesn’t finish her sentence.
‘I’m just a spacer, Bea.’ Ava tries to make her voice light, but it’s like argon, pressing all the air out of the room. ‘We don’t get to choose what they put in our contract; we get half-shares and we say please and thank you and if by some miracle we make it back home, there’s always another contract waiting. That’s just the way it is.’
People like Beatrice don’t understand.
She’s gifted, and gentle, and to the ship she is sacred. Living down in the belly of the Nostromo with her noise-cancelling headphones and the tang of engine grease and the ceaseless roar of the ship’s heart beating through a maze of narrow ductways and pipes and cargo holds.
Ava’s a spacer, and her whole job is to get spaced. To climb into a cheap EVA suit and go out there, in the emptiness that you can’t imagine until it’s holding you. People like her are just labour, dispatched in droves to go mining in the quick of asteroid fields, to break shipwrecks or plug mineral samples out of lonely planetoids.
She was coming off a two-day bender when she signed this contract, words swimming on the page even more than usual. Fucking with her and she thought fuck it, what could they ask me to do that’s worse than my actual job?
Then the signal, Lilith leaning over her console, rangy and intent and making Ava hungry where she stood, watching with a half-eaten bowl of cereal balanced in her hand. She half-expected Lilith to report yet another shipwreck and start gunning for it, setting the ship on autopilot so that Ava could stroll over and touch her arm or her neck.
She was half-convinced that she’d get to leave her bowl unfinished, mag-locked to the table with the spoon tipping around as the ship changed course.
Lilith leaned towards her console and Ava was already thinking of her naked and familiar, fussing with the strap while Ava lay looking at her. A year should have made her boring – the long lean length of her, the latent strength in her arms and her shoulders and her hips – but Ava was anything but bored.
Trying not to let that frighten her.
But it never happened. Lilith didn’t tap coordinates into her nav-computer. She didn’t click her comm button and tell Duretti that she’d spotted another Class-C ship shattered out in deeper space. Instead, she picked up her headphones – the ones Ava had sneakily festooned in stickers of old soda brands; Pepsi Cola by her left ear and Coke sitting close to the plane of her occipital bone. With her maddening fingers she plugged the jack into her console and sat hunched in her seat, listening.
Then, low, she said, ‘Fuck,’ and whipped up out of her seat. Vanishing, and silent, and very much herself.
Ava left her cereal on the table anyway, standing abject and listening to the treads of Lilith’s boots tapping towards the upper decks. An hour later Duretti sent out a call for all the “EVA-specialists” to gather in the briefing room. Ava shuffled over to where Lilith stood against one wall, tapping a whiteboard marker against her thigh. She reached out, brushed her fingers, and Lilith wasn’t one to flinch but she did stiffen.
‘What the fuck is going on?’ Ava hissed, but it was too late.
Duretti stood and gestured to Lilith, who sighed and tore the cap off her marker. She sketched a rough map of the system as a serious of dots and ellipses and relative distances, wearing her officer’s jacket which was worn at the elbows from the way that Lilith sat with her arms propped on her desk. The half-rainbow patch of the USSCS NOSTROMO stood out starkly on her shoulder, stitched on by Ava, inexpertly.
It was lopsided, but everyone was looking at the map and the dot that Lilith drew a little larger than the rest, muttering that it wasn’t to scale, obviously, but you get the idea. It’s more of a rock than a planet. Some atmosphere, but only enough to make landing the shuttle a nightmare.
Michael raised his hand. ‘And, uh, respectfully Captain,’ he nodded to Duretti. ‘Why do we give a damn?’
‘Because,’ Duretti said repressively, ‘We just picked up a signal on the ground. An SOS.’
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