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arcticdementor · 5 years

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When I saw him, he was outside Payne Whitney. Nothing about the tall, gray façade suggests it is the university gym, unless there is a new trend of contractors housing athletics departments in Gothic cathedrals. You wouldn’t guess by looking at the frosted glass panes and arches that the third floor hosts the world’s largest suspended indoor swimming pool. It is a work of art, like the rest of Yale’s buildings.

Marcus was smoking by a bench, his face jaundiced from three packs that day. This is atypical for Yale students—most abstain from smoking. There was no reason for him to smoke so much, just as there was no reason for me to ride around campus on a blue Razor scooter. But Yale students tend to have such quirks. His suit-jacket was dusty and smelled of sweat—he didn’t mind lifting weights in a dress shirt and trousers if that meant more time to read Nietzsche alone at the bar.

When I hugged him, he felt skeletal. I asked if he had eaten today. He assured me that his earthly requirements were limited—no need for anything other than alcohol and cigarettes. “I can buy you a sandwich.” He refused. I insisted. A nice one. Bacon and egg. Or steak and cheese. I was testy now. “GHeav is right there. I’ll be back in six minutes.”

He turned his face towards me, warm with friendliness—and with one sentence, he changed our relationship forever.

“You know I’m rich, right?”

“What?”

“You know I have a trust fund, right? I can buy my own sandwich if I wanted it.”

This is the moment when after three years of friendship, Marcus sat down and told me his life story. His cottages in Norway. Sneaking into the family study. Learning about the cost of hardwoods and hearing his boorish, critical father sulk in 5-star hotel rooms.

Marcus did not act this way out of anxiety, grief, stress, or because he had nobody to tell him his habits will kill him. He lived as a starving writer not out of necessity, but for the aesthetic. Out of some desire to imitate the Bohemian 19th century writers. Out of artistry. Style. Intentional choice.

…

This is a story about an institution and an elite that have lost themselves.

…

Over the past decade, elite colleges have been staging grounds for what Matthew Yglesias has termed the Great Awokening. Dozens of scandals have illustrated a stifling new ideological orthodoxy that is trickling down into the rest of society through HR departments, corporations, churches, foundations, and activist organizations. The nation is becoming polarized and its parts disconnected. The right is evil, and the left is stupid. Or is it the other way around?

The campus “free speech” debate is just a side-effect. So are debates about “diversity” and “inclusion.” The real problems run much deeper. The real problems start with Marcus and me, and the masks we wear for each other.

…

Based on statistics from the class of 2013, approximately 2% of students hailed from the lowest income quintile, while 69% came from the top 20%. How did those poor students fare after graduation? Around 2% of students at Yale move from the bottom to the top quintile. In other words, nearly all of them. You show up poor, and you leave rich. Going to an Ivy League school may be the fastest way to join the upper class.

But this low number of 2% surprised me because when I was at Yale, everybody kept talking about how broke they were.

…

Poor people—actually poor people—don’t talk this way. They tend to stay under the radar because they don’t know the rules of the game. But I bought it—at least when I was a freshman. If they were constantly announcing how broke they were, my assumption was that they must have even less money than I do.

This turned out to be wrong. The reality was that they were invariably from the upper-middle and upper classes. I know this because they eventually told me, like Marcus did. But there were tells. These students didn’t act the way my friends and I did growing up. They didn’t know how much pens or flights or cars were supposed to cost. They couldn’t tell when a restaurant was a good deal.

Pretending to be poor is a lot easier than pretending to be rich—just because there are so many different ways to be poor. But there are still small quirks you have to get right. Social class doesn’t just influence how you walk and talk; it influences how you interact with others. The stereotype is that poor people are improper—but sometimes it is the opposite. They try to do things as they think they are meant to be done. Spending a hundred hours building bat wings for a Halloween costume. Renting a limo for their child’s prom.

But lying about anything is tricky—you risk being found out—so what were these people trying to accomplish by acting broke? And this raises the broader question: why pretend to be of a social class you are not?

…

What about the regular rich? Not the children of billionaires, but the children of millionaires. The common impulse is to emulate the people one or two levels above you—so they might also act poorer than they are. But whereas the super-rich learned purposeful discretion from their parents at weekly dinner table meetings, the regular rich did not. They learned it through mimicry—and with varying degrees of success. The less sophisticated copycats end up brazenly proclaiming that they are “broke” and “upper-middle class.”

For some people, this isn’t an act; they actually believe this. After all, they do seem poor when compared to the hyper-rich. They can’t afford spontaneous Spring Break trips to private Bali islands. They see their prep-school classmates’ Facebook photos and realize that they are one, or maybe two, pegs down from that, and so they use the term “upper-middle class” without really knowing what this term refers to. They have no idea how the actual upper-middle class, the middle class, or the poor really live. Those students never went to their prep school, so for all intents and purposes, they do not exist. Like Krasnoyarsk, Siberia—we know it exists. We can find it on a map. But we don’t need to concern ourselves with it. Often, this is what the real poor are to rich people—they are a theoretical construct that exist somewhere else.

…

In another instance, I was privately discussing with a professor the pros and cons of a Food Stamp reform proposal. After some analysis, I commented on my own experience with the program. His response was complete shock. “You don’t really mean you were on welfare. You just mean you were supported by your parents, right?”

In a world of masks and façades, it is hard to convey the truth.

And this is how I ended up offering a sandwich to a man with hundreds of millions in a foreign bank account.

…

On the surface, there is nothing wrong with haphazard and sometimes warped class signaling. But if you put on a façade for long enough, you end up forgetting that it is a façade. The rich and powerful actually start believing that they are neither of those things. They actually start believing that there is not much difference in status and resources between themselves and the upper-middle class, the middle class—and eventually, between themselves and the actual poor. They forget that they have certain privileges and duties that others do not. They forget that the inside joke was just a joke all along.

…

When these kids grow up, they end up at conferences where everybody lifts their champagne glasses to speeches about how we all need to “tear down the Man!” How we need to usurp conventional power structures.

You hear about these events. They sound good. It’s important to think about how to improve the world. But when you look around at the men and women in their suits and dresses, with their happy, hopeful expressions, you notice that these are the exact same people with the power—they are the Man supposedly causing all those problems that they are giving feel-good speeches about. They are the kids from Harvard-Westlake who never realized they were themselves the elite. They are the people with power who fail to comprehend the meaning of that power. They are abdicating responsibility, and they don’t even know it.

…

There is another reason why people might pretend to be poor. This reason is much more serious than fitting in or avoiding hitmen. The rich and powerful are expected to take responsibility for things, and blamed when they go wrong.

“Check your privilege.” Just about every college student has heard this phrase since 2013. What it means is evasive. But like most memes that strike a chord with people—there is some point to it. The rich have privileges. They therefore also have responsibilities. The responsibilities are not always so fun.

…

Would you want to be the strongest man in the village right at the moment when you failed to use that strength properly and the village is dying and rivals are out for blood? Or would you rather be the average person, eating the normal amount of food, without being hated?

But that was just a thought experiment. Those are people in crises—in a hunter-gatherer village at war. We live in America. Certainly things are different during a stable, prosperous period, in a technologically advanced society. Would you want to be exceptional then?

Not necessarily. The elite are faced with certain hard burdens.

The elite are expected—by everyone else, and by each other—to use their power to make sure society works properly. That is, they are expected to rule benevolently. The reason they are expected to do this is that if they don’t, nobody else can or will. The middle class and the poor do not have the powers and privileges that the rich and elite do, and cannot afford the necessary personal risks. But without active correction towards health and order, society fails.

…

In times of political uncertainty, when things are not going well, elites face more scrutiny, and more internal pressure to find people to blame—whether rightly, or as scapegoats. It becomes a bigger liability to be openly elite.

Further, such times are themselves caused by political dysfunction among the elite, when elite institutions forget how to listen to reason (or have decided not to) and forget how to coordinate towards benevolent rule.

At elite conferences, they wonder how to regain trust, or otherwise deal with the rising atmosphere of populist discontent. They acknowledge that something is deeply wrong. But they dare not lay the blame at their own feet, caused by their own overreaches and dysfunction. Anyone who did would immediately be under suspicion. No longer one of us, but one of them. So, those who might otherwise lead the difficult but necessary elite self-critique instead keep their mouths shut, or they say the wrong thing without ideological, psychological, and social preparation for the consequences and get cast out. Only the true believers incapable of self-critique, the incompetent, and the cynics, remain as voices in the public forum. They talk in circles, never quite able to correct course and come to any new conclusions, except the need to double down on current ideological practices.

…

They say that the recent scandals at Yale had to do with racial and social justice. I don’t think that’s what it was really about. When looking at one or two scandals, it’s easy to buy the story that it is just students organizing and using their rights of free speech and assembly to protest what they see as injustices perpetrated by the university. But when looking at all of the scandals together, another narrative starts to emerge.

And that narrative is much closer to this: members of the ruling class are not sure what to do with themselves—and they are not even sure they want to rule.

…

When people think of universities, they think of their local state school, or else Harvard, Princeton, and Yale. And when they think about Yale, it is often when they are reading about a president, a Supreme Court justice, or the editor of The New Yorker. That’s because Yale graduates play no small part in running the world. It is the school the elite want to send their kids to. It is the school the lower classes assume their kids will never go to.

…

What happens when a school with this position is embarrassed about its role as an international trendsetter? What if instead of doing the hard work to set the tone for responsible rule, it abdicates that responsibility?

…

But the appearance of bottom-up protest politics is always a bit of a false narrative. It would be one thing if the students were polled and a majority said they wanted the name changed, or some other process was used. At least the university could say that it was making decisions based on some objective democratic process, and wasn’t just being pushed around. But this is not what happened. No polls were taken. There was no authoritative process. The school said no for a few months, then caved. If the school were actually confident in its position to resist, it could have easily pushed back on the protests. Instead, it folded on demands from a small number of students willing to make noise. Either the university administrators are spectacularly spineless, or the protests just provided a convenient impetus and excuse to do something they already wanted. We can look at several more incidents and notice a similar trend.

…

What do all of these events have in common? Some had student support. Some did not. Some started as public outrage taken to the street. Some were completely internal. What they had in common was an administration and student body coordinated around an ideology that continually mutated to ensure moral entrepreneurship and a continued supply of purges, as new forms of human behavior or commonplace descriptors became off-limits. Some of this energy was genuine, some cynical.

These were not kids protesting the Vietnam war, or graduate students mobilizing for better pay and medical care. Nobody would have had a gun shoved into their arms and sent across the world if Yale had not fired the professors. Nobody would have lost money if they did not change “Master.” In fact—Yale lost money on these changes in the form of alumni donations and administrative time. Meetings, committees, redone paperwork, and brand new “head of college” plaques. These changes were neither meant to save lives, nor to save money.

But what was the point of it all?

…

Thousands of hours of human effort and labor. And for what? What was it for?

If you ask supporters, they will tell you the cost does not matter so much, because this is about creating an ideal world. Of course the professor should be fired—how dare she stand against the minority student organizations? Of course it’s okay that the Yelp reviews were published—she should never have written them. Of course names should be changed if they hint at or honor the wrong ideology. What does preserving history matter if history is racist? The university is handling things according to its proper ideals of empathy and inclusion.

In short, their point was that this was all to help poor people. Immigrants. People whose parents are from distant, impoverished lands. People of color. Changing “Master,” firing the dean, and firing professors was all for this.

Except this did so little to actually help any of these people that this could not possibly have been the main motivation.

None of this was actually to their benefit, except for the few activists willing to invest time and energy into the game. It is not easy to stay up-to-date with the new, ever-more complex rules about what you are allowed to say to qualify as the bare minimum of sociable and sane. It is cognitively and socially demanding. I had to not just study psychology and computer science, but I had to stay up-to-date with the latest PhD-level critical theory just to have conversations.

…

If words like “Master” are deemed offensive based on questionable linguistic or historical standards, then this means other words and phrases can become offensive at a moment’s notice. Under these rules, only people in the upper ranks who receive constant updates can learn what is acceptable. Everybody else will be left behind.

The people best positioned for this are professors at elite universities. They are ingrained in the culture that makes up these social rules. They get weekly or even daily updates, but even they cannot keep up.

…

A cynical observer might conclude that this is all just revolution as usual; a small clique of agitators seizing more and more power, and purging their enemies by virtue of their superior internal solidarity, a bold and demanding ideology, lukewarm popular moral support, and no real organized opposition. In some ways, that is what’s going on. They have the bold ideology, the ambient support, and no real opposition.

But importantly, they don’t have internal coordination by any means other than adherence to the ideology itself. Even members of the clique are never really safe. Anyone who contradicts the latest consensus version of the constantly mutating ideology, even if they have worked to its benefit or are otherwise obviously on side, gets purged. If you don’t keep up, you get purged.

It doesn’t matter that the ideology is abusive to its own constituents and allies, or that it doesn’t really even serve its formal beneficiaries. All that matters is this: for everyone who gets purged for a slight infraction, there are dozens who learn from this example never to stand up to the ideology, dozens who learn that they can attack with impunity if they use the ideology to do it, and dozens who are vaguely convinced by its rhetoric to be supportive of the next purge. So, on it goes.

This is the nature of coordination via ideology. If you’re organizing out of some common interest, you can have lively debates about what to do, how things work, who’s right and wrong, and even core aspects of your intellectual paradigm. But if your only standard for membership in your power coalition is detailed adherence to your ideology, as is increasingly true for membership in elite circles, then it becomes very hard to correct mistakes, or switch to a different paradigm.

And this helps explain much of the quagmire American elites are stuck in: being unable to speak outside of the current ideology, the only choice is to double down on a failing paradigm. These failures lead to lower elite morale, resulting in the class identity crisis which afflicts so many at Yale. Ironically, the result is an expression of that ideology which is increasingly rigid on ever more minute points of belief and conduct.

…

What is the point of this new ideology? This ideology is filled with inconsistencies and contradictions, because it is not really about ideological rigor. Among other things, it is an elaborate containment system for the theoretical and practical discontent generated by the failures of the system, an absolution from guilt, and a new form of class signaling. Before, to signal you were in the fashionable and powerful crowd, you would show off your country club membership, refined manners, or Gucci handbags. Now, you show how woke you are. To reinforce their new form of structural power, people dismiss the idea that they even have the older, more legible forms of status. They find any reverse-privilege points they can, and if they are cis-white-men, they pose as allies. On an institutional level, the old ways of legitimizing power are gone, and the new motto is this: diversity is legitimacy.

There is a deep comedy to this sort of signaling. Only around 2% of the student body was in the bottom 20% of American society, and yet extremely wealthy Singaporean students who had spent just a few years in America marched in the street and referred to themselves as “people of color.” People’s experiences were ignored when they volunteered information that countered the main narrative, because the surface-level debate wasn’t the point. The point was to signal that you were with the program. Only a select and secret group of student “leaders”—who were already savvy enough to engage comfortably with hierarchy—were invited in to chat with administrators.

Shouting from the rooftops that “They aren’t doing enough!” is much easier than following any traditional system of elite social norms and duties, let alone carefully re-engineering that system to reestablish order in a time of growing crisis.

…

But there is more to selling out that nobody talks about. These jobs are the dream jobs of the middle class. They’re not supposed to be jobs for the sons and daughters of millionaires and billionaires—these kids don’t actually need the money. They want independence from their parents and proof that they can make it on their own—and prestigious work experience—but they have wealth acquired through generations that they can always fall back on. These people are generally as harmless as the middle class—which is to say completely harmless. They keep to themselves. They quietly grow their bank accounts and their 401ks. And just like the real middle class, they don’t want to risk their next promotion through being too outspoken. They have virtually no political power. This mindset is best encapsulated by: “I’ll go with the program. Please leave me alone to be comfortable and quietly make money.”

They effectively become middle class, because there is no longer any socially esteemed notion of upper class. They have a base of power, of f-you money, that they could use to become something greater than just another office worker or businessperson. But there is no script for that, no institutional or ideological support. What would it even mean to be an esteemed, blue-blooded aristocrat in 2019? So they take the easy and safe way.

How else do Yale students give up their responsibility?

They go in the other direction. These are the people who call themselves idealists and say they want to save the world. They feel the weight of responsibility from their social status—but they don’t know how to process and integrate this responsibility into their lives properly. Traditionally, structurally well-organized elite institutions would absorb and direct this benevolent impulse to useful purpose. But our traditional institutions have decayed and lost their credibility, so these idealists start looking for alternatives, and start signalling dissociation from those now-disreputable class markers.

…

Who is winning? This question is an important one. Yale administrators had lofty goals. In an attempt to placate their own biases, the administrators and faculty forgot that they are the ones who are supposed to be teaching. Instead of expelling or suspending the small number of people actively undermining the student body and university as a whole, the university does nothing, or actively accelerates the process. The professors are the ones who leave. The radical clique feels emboldened.

Now we can begin to understand the real problem at Yale. It is not free speech—and it is not non-inclusivity. The standards of reality, and the standards of morality not based solely on being woke, are ousted. That’s because the conventional standards of elite morality, based on responsible use of power—actually responsible, not just a convenient feeling of doing good—are much harder, and based on the very self-consciousness that everyone is trying to avoid.

…

The result is an institution increasingly unable to carry out its own mission, as tuition rises to pay for more administrators, and ideological drama makes it harder and harder to actually teach. And now we are back at the original question. What was the point of Yale? What was the point of going to Yale? What is the point of elite institutions?

Is the point of Yale to promote the humanities and knowledge of the West that is hard to learn anywhere else? This is not the full mission. Donald Kagan and Lee Bass’s year-long history of the West program was cut, due to faculty protesting that it was not multicultural enough, despite having large interest and $20 million in funding.

Is Yale’s vision a futuristic, technocratic university? Is the university divesting from the liberal arts for the purpose of committing to the technology of the future? This isn’t the case, either. Computer science enrollment has increased significantly in the past decade. But Yale’s computer science department is lagging behind other schools. The university has taken steps towards improving the department, but in general shows no signs of a visionary commitment to expanding tech or significantly expanding professorships.

…

Maybe the university has lost every purpose other than giving students a social environment in which to party. If the students aren’t educated or visionary, at least they’re networking and hedonically satisfied.

Except they’re not. It would be one thing if they were happy—but even this is not true. They don’t know what is expected of them, or what they should aspire to be. The lack of expectations creates nihilistic tendencies and existential crises. In 2018, around one quarter of Yale undergraduates said they sought mental health counseling. One quarter of Yale students took the “Happiness and the Good Life” course in 2018 in an attempt to find answers. Students are demanding more mental health resources. A new wellness space was created with bean-bag chairs and colored walls. But the real sources of unhappiness are more systemic. They are rooted in uncertainty about the future.

If Yale students are uncertain about the future and their role in it, what does that say about the rest of society?

…

So what if Yale, and Yale students, are abdicating responsibility? We can all just send our kids to Harvard, or MIT, or move to California and go to a state school. I heard UC Berkeley is pretty good.

But the problems present at Yale are present at every other university, and schools outside of the United States look to elite American universities as role models. If things are broken at elite universities, things are broken, period.

…

Yale is supposed to be using its power and reputation to set standards for excellence, but instead it is abandoning its responsibilities and getting embroiled in controversy after controversy. Yale is not special in this regard—other colleges are also often embroiled in controversies. But the controversies of top colleges matter most because they determine what is acceptable for everybody else.

And what’s happening at Yale reflects a crisis in America’s broader governing class. Unable to effectively respond to the challenges facing them, they instead try to bail out of their own class. The result is an ideology which acts as an escape raft, allowing some of the most privileged young people in the country to present themselves as devoid of power. Institutions like Yale, once meant to direct people in how to use their position for the greater good, are systematically undermined—a vicious cycle which ultimately erodes the country as a whole.

Segments of this class engage in risk-averse managerialism, while others take advantage of the glut to disrupt things and expand personal power. The broader population becomes caught up in these conflicts as these actors attempt to build power bases and mobilize against each other. And like Yale, it seems a safe bet that things will continue and even accelerate until some new vision and stable, non-ideological set of coordination mechanisms are able to establish hegemony and become a new ground for real cooperation.

#natalia dashan #palladium mag #yale #read the whole thing #class #noblesse oblige #doesn't exist without actual nobles

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boss-hoody · 6 years

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A Kingdom Hearts 3: world-by-world review I guess

when I say “Area” I mean parts of the world separated by loading screen OLYMPUS Consisting of 3 areas, Olympus had itself a major upgrade from its past appearances. The Colosseum is nowhere to be seen, (same with the underworld), and has been replaced by a large town and Mount Olympus itself. The third area you visit in Olympus is “realm of the gods”, and the presentation of this area’s entrance was a legitimate “Stop and look at how pretty this is” moment The gameplay in this world was pretty varied, as it served as your tutorial world, teaching you the various forms of movement and combat the game has to offer, as well as showing you early that enemies can have elemental weaknesses. Story wise, Sora is there to ask Herc’s advice on how to regain the power he lost and ends up showing up at the wrong (right?) time as Hades has finally put his 18 year plan into action and released the titans (All four of them this time)

The (very nice) cutscene that brings us into this world is also the one and only mention and appearance of Final Fantasy characters (Cloud and Auron) in the entire game’s story, which is extremely disappointing and a mark against the game as a whole. 4/5

TWILIGHT TOWN I was really looking forward to jumping back into Twilight town, exploring the streets, the tunnels, and all that again. But sadly, Twilight town, while receiving an aesthetic upgrade, only consists of 1 area consisting of Tram common (Now called “the neighbourhood), the forest and mansion, and a single tunnel connecting them (the hole in the wall is gone). There is no exploration of the mansion.

Its also home to the cooking mini game

2/5 (1 point for cooking mini game which is surprisingly fun, and 1 point only because of the atmosphere created by the NPCs and music)

KINGDOM OF CORONA This world is where the game really sines for the first time. Olympus was great, but it was clearly designed as a tutorial area, and Twilight Town lacked anything resembling gameplay content, but Kingdom of Corona makes up for that quickly with a vast forest and a small lively town to explore. Rapunzel constantly wanders off to look at things, which create a number of small character moments and not-quite-mini games you need to do to progress and also helps to make Sora seem more involved. The dancing actual-mini game in the town square was pretty fun once I got the hang of it and realized the symbols on the floor corresponded to buttons based on color, not shape.

Story wise it was a bit janky. The story follows the plot of the movie (Unlike Toy Box, which seems to take place somewhere between Toy story 1 and 2), but Sora becomes separated from Flynn and Punz a couple times, and story progresses without him or us present. At some point Flynn told Rapunzel his real name apparently? And Flynn was knocked out and tied to a boat but we never see it happening. He’s just suddenly tied to a boat an unconscious. Rapunzel’s healing hair comes out of nowhere, as does the song sung to make its magic work. When she rubs her hair on his wound and starts singing as he lay there dying, you might be extremely confused if you hadn’t seen the movie. And by “Might” I mean “WILL”

This world did something interesting with its music that I wish Toy Box had done. When you enter a certain area of the forest, the music (and battle music) change to suit the atmosphere of the area. It was a small touch but it was appreciated and missed once I got to Toy Box...

This is also the first world where we encounter the Nobodies.

4/5. It loses a point for the janky story, but everything else was great

TOY BOX Consisting of two areas, Toy box becomes massive as soon as you leave Andy’s room. It was bizarre running around in a photo realistic suburban street as a tiny toy, (and the fact that you’re a toy in this world is the only reason I like it) and the toy store, Galaxy Toys, is a massive 3 floor area full of toy mechs (seriously they spawn in with regular enemies, you can end up with 5 of them on you very fast).

The mech gameplay was surprisingly fleshed out for a one-world wonder. There are three types of mechs, red, blue, and purple, and they seem to work in a rock-paper-scissors type of deal. Purple has an advantage on red, red has an advantage on blue, and blue has an advantage on purple. Each of the mechs has a different amount of health and firing speed to balance them out further.

The world loses points with me however due to the fact that an instrumental version of “You’ve got a friend in me” is playing throughout the whole world. It became grating very fast and its still stuck in my head.

3.5/5

MONSTEROPLOUS Taking place almost entirely in doors, this world feels a lot like Kingdom Hearts 2 in the worst way (Hallway, arena, hallway), broken up by rail segments. The “arena” sections at least try to keep things interesting though, with one becoming a “the walls are a hazard” type of deal. This world introduces us to the Unversed and is actually the only world where they appear, so there’s not many of them.

The battle music in this world was also great. I don’t know, there was just something about it that jived with me.

Story wise, this world takes place after the first Monster’s Inc movie. Sully is the CEO, and laugh energy is the new hotness. Randal is back thanks to his new friend and literally wants to make all children suffer chronic depression forever because, while its not as strong as laughter, sadness is a far more abundant form of energy or something.

Other than that, there’s not much to say about this world. Its not bad, but its not great

3/5 (the fact that it has its own story instead of following the plot of the movie earns it an additional point.

ARENDELLE This was the first world where it really felt like “Disney shenanigans”. Sora was just kind of there while the plot of Frozen happened, and like with Tangled, the story progressed without Sora or us present, and again, if you hadn’t seen the movie, you’d be lost. Unlike tangled, it lacked little character interactions to at least make Sora feel connected in some way.

The boss in this world was a combination of amazing cinematic attacks and a rehash of Scar in KH2, and your Disney buddy for this world was a legitimate surprise.

I enjoyed the reindeer Heartless in this world too. Not only do they take huge damage from fire, but it also melts their antlers, preventing them from using their annoying attacks. However Donald the super-genius would often hit them with Blizzard which would give their antlers back...

2/5

THE CARIBBEAN This world. THIS FUCKING WORLD Its so good. Its perfect. Its like its own game There’s a huge ocean full of little islands to explore, the under water combat WORKS and is FUN. The primary heartless you’ll run into under water is a fish that changes color, and is weak to a different element depending on said color, giving you something to think about while fighting it. You can just wale on it if you want, or you can use magic and work out its weakness to dispatch it quickly.

You get your own pirate ship. SORA FINALLY LIVIN THE DREAM! The pirate ship can be upgraded for more health and canons by finding white crabs (Can’t explain how that works without spoilers), it has its own reaction commands that devastate enemy ships, OH and there are ENEMY SHIPS. SHIP BATTLES. SHIP ON SHIP COMBAT

Again tho, like with Tangled and Frozen, the story likes to progress while Sora is off dicking around. However, the supporting characters do a better job of explaining what happened while Sora was AFK than anyone in Corona or Arendelle did. The fact that Sora is already familiar with most of the cast thanks to KH2 also helps this along a bit tho. Sora doesn’t feel completely tacked on despite being completely tacked on.

This world suffers even more severely from what it suffered from in KH2 tho. That being IT IS EXTREMELY JARRING AND IMMERSION BREAKING TO SEE CARTOON-ASS SORA, DONALD AND GOOFY CHILLING OUT WITH HYPER REALISTIC JOHNNY DEPP AND CO

Despite the negatives, the gameplay of this world makes up for all of it

7.5/5: Too much water

SAN FRANSOKIO The story does what Kingdom Hearts 3 worlds haven proven to do best and does its own thing. Sora arrives in San fransokyo some time after the events of Big Hero 6. Hiro has built a new Baymax but is still torn up about the original his brother built being lost to the void, and now weird robot heartless are attacking (Hint: Bring thunder) Sora makes fast friends with the crew (as he tends to do) and through helping them with the heartless, gives each member ideas on how they can upgrade their gear.

The world consists of 2 areas. Hiro’s garage, and downtown San Fransokyo, which is basically mini spider-man PS4. While in Hero’s garage, you can choose to explore the city during the day or night. Heartless do not appear during the day, so if you just wanna run around and explore, find treasure and hidden mickey’s, hit the town during the day. But if you’re looking to level up (and this is the final world with enemy spawns so you will be) then you should hit the town at night.

While the downtown area is small (especially just coming off the open seas of the pirates world), it makes up for it in both verticality and density.

4/5 (Extra point added for the presence of Thigh queen Go Go Tomago)

100 ACRE WOOD Its a single area with 3 almost identical mini games, it’ll take you about 20 minutes to get through, there’s a keyblade at the end, 0/5

KEYBLADE GRAVEYARD This is the final world of the game and serves as the site for the final battles with the organization. Its basically a series of arena matches where Sora teams up with one or more of his friends to take on multiple members of the organization at once. It dominoes into the final conflict with the 3 main Norts. Young, Heartless, and Nobody all at once while Old man watches and throws Keyblades at you occasionally.

Gameplay is all boss combat. Story is all PLOT

5/5 on both counts

THE FINAL WORLD Okay no THIS is the final world. Literally. Its entirely main plot based so I won’t go into any actual detail. It consists of a single room which is a giant cube puzzle (Not like the movie “Cube”, like you’re standing on a big cube thing). Which would be SUPER cool if it weren’t for the fact that Sora’s flow motion abilities completely break it.

Plot wise 5/5 Gameplay wise 1/5

SCALA AD CAELUM OKAY NO THIS IS THE REAL FINAL WORLD FOR REAL A city located in the past, this is the site of the true final battle with Xehanort and his 12 selves. you go up against the 12 all at once (they seem to share a health bar tho so its not that bad) as they utilize their own weapons (Xigbar’s guns, Marluxia’s scythe, etc, etc) to just honestly beat the hell out of you. A small section of town serves as your arena, making this perhaps the most geographically diverse fighting arena in the game’s history.

Once those naughty bois are shut down, Xehanort is like “Wanna see something cool?” and tosses you into a legitimately disorientating arena for the beginning of the final showdown between peace boy and naughty grandpa

There’s no gameplay here outside of combat and plot but its a 5/5 none the less

FINAL THOUGHTS This game was at its best when it wasn’t rehashing the plots of the worlds it visited (Tangled, Frozen, Pirates), but either doing its own thing (you know, the Kingdom Hearts plot?), creating new plots set in the worlds visited (Big Hero 6, toy Story, Monsters Inc.) or somehow doing a combo of the 3 (Hercules)

I found it EXTREMELY disappointing that all traces of original Square Enix characters are just gone. We get a single mention of Cloud and Auron in an exposition dump at the beginning of Olympus and thats it. And before you mention the main Nomura OC cast: they’re owned by Disney, not Square.

The game wrapped up pretty much all the major plot points and answered a lot of long standing questions, but also didn’t answer one question in particular that I’m sure has driven a lot of us into the depth of insanity. It also posses a couple new questions, such as “Who?” and “How?” and “What the fuck?”

Overall, this game is at its best when its focusing on the main plot, with everything in between feeling more like filler... So a standard Kingdom Hearts game.

In the end, despite the lack of FF, and the falling into disney shenanigans, this was a great game and an excellent ending to the dark seeker saga. Going forward, I hope the future games (and there definitely will be future games, this is by no means the end of Kingdom Hearts) don’t do what this saga did and spread the plot over 200 games on 200 different consoles over 200 god damn years. If thats the case I think KH3 will be my jumping-off point. However, if they’ve come to their senses and choose to release the next saga of games like normal human beings instead of depraved madmen, I am 100% on board. However, seeing as Nomura is a depraved madman (see FFXV development for details) I am extremely cautious in my optimism.

Final score from me is 4.5/5: WHATS IN THE BOX?!

#Kingdom Hearts 3 #Spoilers #Long post #KH3

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miannedomusings · 6 years

Text

K-pop favourites from 2018

ALBUMS (in no particular order):

Hope World - j-hope

mono. - RM

Love Yourself ‘Answer’ - BTS

Sun and Moon - SAM KIM

Don’t Mess Up My Tempo - EXO

honourable mentions

Blooming Days - EXO-CBX

Present : You - GOT7

Wish & Wind - HEIZE

SINGLES:

SoulMate - ZICO ft. IU

Young - Baekhyun & Loco

Getting Closer - SEVENTEEN

Ddaeng - BTS rap line

Is Who - MINSEO (not technically a single... but very good)

CHOREOGRAPHY:

THANKS - SEVENTEEN

honourable mentions

FAKE LOVE - BTS

No Air - THE BOYZ

Getting Closer - SEVENTEEN

MUSIC VIDEO:

Singularity - BTS

If you want to read my thoughts on my choices, they’re below the break.

If you want to, share your faves! I’m curious!

ALBUMS

Hope World : This beauty is amazing. One of the the things that makes for a good album is the story it guides it you through. The order of the tracks is almost as important as the songs themselves. Musically speaking, this album totally does that for me. The way the energy changes over the course of the album always surprises me -- the mood the first song puts me in is so different from the feeling this album leaves me with. The upbeat fun of the first few tracks are exactly the flavour I hoped for from a j-hope album even if didn’t quite know it beforehand. They just felt right, they feel like Hobi. The transition that starts with Baseline totally surprised me, and did such a great job of showing his other hip-hop flavours as it takes us into Hangsang and Airplane pt 1. Blue Side is quite possibly my favourite on this album. For me, it’s such a visual song, and I’m completely transported every time. This album blew me away. I didn’t know what I expected but this surpassed anything I had in mind. And I love that I feel like I know Hobi more from having experienced this -- and isn’t that what a mixtape should do? Now when I listen to other and older BTS songs I feel like I’m better able to hear j-hope’s j-hope-ness in his verses.

mono. : I know I said “in no particular order”, but this album, this is probably the best of the year. This album feels like meditation to me. The whole album is so spacious, and the use of repetition makes this album feels like a series of mantras to help you engage with the sadder sides of yourself. I take a lot of deep breaths listening to this album. A lot like Hope World, I love the order of this album. Each song carries a slightly different mood, a different shade of grey, and it pulls you down to different levels of sadness and quietude. I love the brief relief you get in everythingoes -- it’s able to bring you up again and see the sun through the clouds. When I listen to this album I often feel like each song relates to a different time of day -- part of the journey of this album is through the course of a day. I always struggle to put my feelings for this album into sentences -- it so much a collection of feelings that it seems to defy description (at least by me). Cathartic, Melancholic, Meditative, Introspective.

Love Yourself ‘Answer’ : Answer beat out Tear for a few reasons -- and not because it’s longer. Though I adore many of the B-sides on Tear, I think the weak points are weaker than those in Answer, and I think Answer is more successful as an album -- it told its story better than Tear did and I’m a sucker for a good story. The movement through the 4 phases of the album was pulled off so well! All the Trivia’s were spectacular, and these versions of the vocalists’ songs were all better that any versions that came before. This album is a joy to listen to, and when I start listening I’m committed to seeing it through. I hate being pulled away from it part way. It really does succeed in being cohesive (which can be a rarity in k-pop) and whole.

Sun and Moon : Sam Kim showed up out of no where and smacked me over the head with this album. He is a fabulous song-writer and a welcome breath of instrumentation in the largely electronic k-pop scene. His voice is soulful, perfectly suited for his style, and I’m in love with the way he lets it get rough when the songs needs it. This album is so romantic -- I shouldn’t like it as much as I do. But I actually feel the romance and love it. He brings an contagious amount of sincerity to his songs. Even if this album was full of duds, I think it may still have made it on this list thanks to The One, Make Up, and It’s You -- some of my favourite songs of the year!

Don’t Mess Up My Tempo : Unlike most of the others on this list, I don’t think this album is really telling me a story. That being said, I do still like the sometimes surprising transition from track to track. There isn’t a bad song in the batch. This album has some of the best production I have heard this year (I expect nothing less from SM -- the company is in love with weird samples and unexpected sounds). All of the songs are crazy catchy and enjoyable to listen to. And they’re interesting! The vocals are phenomenal, and most importantly, I am happy when I listen to this album! This album feels out of place on this list when I compare it to the others, but I don’t care because I love it!

SINGLES

SoulMate : I’m sure if ZICO had released an album this year it would have made it onto this list. I adore the way he plays with what Korean sounds like, and him and IU complemented each other surprisingly well. “Delightful” is the first word that comes to mind when I think of this track. Right off the bat you get the jingly percussion that I think must have been coins bouncing around in a glass jar and it makes this song feel so bright. ZICO’s rapping brings an awesome contrast after the first verse and chorus, and the instrumental solos give me wings. Love it.

Young : Baekhyun and Loco play off of each other so well in this song. Hearing Baekhyun out of the context of EXO is a treat, his voice is able to deliver more of an edge than I thought it could. Loco has such a unique voice. It isn’t “pretty” and I never want it to be because it’s roughness makes something gorgeous! Each phase of the song sounds so different from the last, but in very small ways. The way that vocals and rapping mix together, and how the backing vocals vary make this song so interesting to listen to. The cyclical musical elements of the song do an amazing job of communicating the lyrics and the laid back vibes of the song suit the two voices and make it so easy to listen to and enjoy.

Getting Closer: Fierce. Seventeen finally tried a dark concept and pulled it off! I really like this song and I hope that there is an album with a similar tone soon to follow. This song really continues with Seventeen’s minimal style. The song uses monotones vocals and synths to create its dark vibe and make the softer moments so much sweeter. One of the highlights in this song is when they use of layering high vocals on low raps -- still keeping everything very bare, but adding just a touch of interest. And also, the choreography. It’s so powerful. It’s gruff. And it will bite your ear off if you get in a scuffle with its dance break. It almost made it into the choreo section of this post.

Ddaeng : I almost forgot to include this song on this list. This song that I had on repeat for weeks. Shame on me! This song is so BTS, I love it deeply. Besides being infectious and a wicked display of rap skills, any translation worth anything has about a page and a half of footnotes to go along with it. Our bulletproof wordsmiths seriously pulled out all the stops on this one, just to throw some shade. And then Suga mixed it with that gorgeous instrumentation and bitchin’ beat. Solid.

Is Who : This is a bit of an oddball on this list, and it isn’t even technically a single, but this song is a hoot and half. If someone with a voice as lovely as Minseo’s is going to serve me up some pop-jazz-swing with fiddle and ragtime piano and SCATTING, I’m going to eat. it. up. This song is fun! It is bright! And it isn’t what I often hear in K-pop.

CHOREO

THANKS : Seventeen, seventeen, seventeen. Sometimes there music is a little too sweet for me, but their dancing melts my brain every time. They use their numbers so well and their dedication to precision when dancing prevents from their complicated dancing from ever looking chaotic or messy. This song in particular - OOF. Wow. If you haven’t watched the performance video for this song, you should. They manage to have so many moving parts, and it reads as intricate, but always clear. They also do a great job of matching the sad vibes of the song. There are so many dances that could have made this list, but Thanks is so far beyond any of them in my books that I couldn’t have it sharing the title.

MUSIC VIDEO

Singularity : Is anyone on this blog surprised by this? I don’t shut up about this m/v. And for good reason -- it is freakin’ amazing! Aesthetically gorgeous, kills it with the visual metaphors, the choreography is beautiful and surprising given the music, and it’s minimal without lacking anything. Lots of K-pop m/vs are either very visually loud, or “minimally aesthetic” at the cost of substance. Singularity manages to find a balance. Taehyung does a stellar job with his acting and I am sucked into this world every time.

#kpop #review 2018 #bts #exo #svt #sam kim #minseo #zico #iu #loco #rm #jhope #ramblings #song ramblings #music rec

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reconditarmonia · 6 years

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Dear Yuletide Author

Edit 3:10pm Eastern Time 10/23/18: All prompts added now, thank you for your patience.

Hello, lovely writer!

I’m reconditarmonia here and on AO3 (and have been since LJ days, but my LJ is locked down and I only have a DW to see locked things). I have anon messaging off, but mods should be able to contact me if you have any questions.

Far From the Madding Crowd | Harlots | Monstrous Regiment | Simoun | Spinning Silver

General likes:

– Relationships that aren’t built on romance or attraction. They can be romantic or sexual as well, but my favorite ships are all ones where it would still be interesting or compelling if the romantic component never materialized.

– Loyalty kink, whether commander-subordinate or comrades-in-arms, and the trust associated with it. Sometimes-but-not-always relatedly, idealism. I guess the two combined might be, in general, the idea of nobility of character and what that means.

– Heists, or other stories where there’s a lot of planning and then we see how the plan goes.

– Femslash, complicated or intense relationships between women, and female-centric gen. Women doing “male” stuff.

– Stories whose emotional climax or resolution isn’t the sex scene, if there is one.

– Uniforms/costumes/clothing.

– Stories, history, and performance. What gets told and how, what doesn’t get told or written down, behavior in a society where everyone’s consuming media and aware of its tropes, how people create their personas and script their own lines.

– Eucatastrophe.

General DNW: rape/dubcon, torture, other creative gore; unrequested AUs, including “same setting, different rules” AUs such as soulmates/soulbonds; PWP; food sex; focus on pregnancy; Christmas/Christian themes.

—

Fandom: Far From the Madding Crowd

Character(s): Bathsheba Everdene

One thing that always sticks in my mind about this novel is the way Hardy calls Bathsheba “the young farmer” just as he refers to the men as farmers - which, just saying, is more than most people writing about this story can do - and so, that being the case, what I’m most interested in is something about Bathsheba as farmer. One day in the life or four seasons in the life or five plantings/harvests in the life, or pseudo-academic fic about a case study of a woman farmer in the Victorian era, or a conflict between the farm and nature that Bathsheba has to decide how to solve.

Feel free to bring in other characters if it suits what you’re trying to do, but what I’m really looking for is a focus on Bathsheba’s work, determination, and process of learning. Other ideas: something like a merchant ship AU (as the first alternate setting that came to mind where it would be not exactly the done thing for her to captain her inherited ship and make commercial decisions herself - although I do have to point out that contrary to popular belief, there were a lot of women on shipboard in the age of sail, may this be useful - but also where nature and luck/fate are as influential as they are in the original setting); something in which the land, superstition, and ritual are more overtly magical; or interactive fiction!

—

Fandom: Harlots

Character(s): Margaret Wells

So Harlots almost immediately became one of my favorite shows of all time, for its strong and complex female characters, all major plots/conflicts being between women, and the feminist ethos informing both the filming (with this premise there could have been a LOT of actress nudity and titillating rape, in other hands) and the writing - I find the scene in s2 where Margaret leads the crowd in turning their backs on Nancy’s whipping very moving, because it’s one moment that emphasizes that the show’s feminism isn’t just “look, horrible things happening to women, whatcha gonna do” but instead thinks about the next step of women supporting each other against the system. (Kitty’s thoughts about a collective are another one.) I wasn’t sure at first what I wanted to request here, but starting to explain for you why I like the show made me think wherever you take the idea of writing about Margaret, I’d want to see her in the context of other women. This could be pre-canon (I’m not particularly interested in very young Margaret, but Margaret beginning to establish her own house, hiring her own girls for the first time, and contending with Lydia Quigley as a rival, I’d love to see; or deciding to move to Greek Street?) or post-canon (who does she meet? what does she do???) She’s such a powerful character but also so morally ambivalent - what kinds of positions can you put her in where she has to choose how or whether to protect those under her authority, or further her own ambition and that of the people she chooses? What is loyalty, anyway? (I'd be up for post-canon fic with her and Charlotte, but I don’t think I would want to read an expansion of her selling Charlotte in the canon backstory.) Throw in anyone you like if that helps you tell the story - it’s such a good ensemble show.

If you, like me, ship Margaret with Nancy and were psyched when they got to kiss and Nancy told Charlotte she loved Margaret, I have some prompts for the ship in a previous letter. TL;DR: I’m especially interested in Margaret/Nancy as partners-as-family and what that means to them, and in how Margaret fits into Nancy’s relationship to intimacy.

If you’d prefer to write this instead of writing about Margaret, I would also be 100% just as happy with fic about the whole fucked-up relationship between Charlotte and Lydia in season 2 (I LOVE “ultra-loyal and beloved henchman secretly plotting revenge” plots, their scenes together are so good! I was sorry that that plot didn’t carry on for longer - honestly, you could write a canon divergence AU where the secret isn’t revealed so soon and Charlotte becomes more and more compromised and I would be delighted), something focusing on either of those two individually (pre-canon Lydia setting up her house? choosing her aesthetic? post-canon Lydia manipulating her way out of Bedlam?), or something about Nancy (her lifestyle is so unconventional but it works for her and people around her mostly roll with it). Again, preferably with reference to other women, rather than men.

Something that I really like about the show, which would be neat to see in fic somehow, is that it feels real and lived-in. So many costume dramas feel costumed, but at least to me, the sets and costumes of Harlots feel like houses people live and work in and clothes people wear; we occasionally see a shift under the dress, women put on a fichu over a dress or deal with their corsets, they move like they’re used to wearing this. I love daily-life type history, and people being people in history, so those sorts of details would make me really happy. (I have tags “documents” and “history” for stuff that might interest you if you also like that sort of thing.) I also really like the moments of theatricality and ritual like Mary Cooper and Kitty Carter’s funeral processions.

Fandom-Specific Exception to DNW: I recognize that rape and dubcon are endemic to the canon and I don’t expect you to avoid all reference to them, but would prefer not to have them described in detail, or to dwell on specific instances.

—

Fandom: Monstrous Regiment

Character(s): Any (Polly “Ozzer” Perks, Maladict, Jackrum, Mildred Froc)

I’m not going to lie, Polly is one of my all-time faves. I like that this could have been a generic coming-of-age or women-in-war story, where the protagonist learns that she’s brave or worthwhile and then the crisis is past, but instead Polly learns that she’s a cunning bastard and a hell of a sergeant, and being a one-off hero in a country that’s at peace and making slow social progress isn’t good enough for her. That said, just because I’m better able to articulate what I like about Polly doesn’t mean I’d be less excited for fic about anyone else! Honestly, one of the things I like best about the story as a whole is the varying degrees of competence porn - people learning what they’re good at and doing it - and that’s something that could apply to any character here. What are they good at? What lets them fulfill their potential? What do they want when their hand isn’t being forced? So, say, how’d Jackrum go from enlisting for Reasons to being the career sergeant of canon? Any other adventures worth recounting? What are Polly or Mal’s long-term plans, since their original goals seemed so short-term - or, what led Froc to enlist and stay? What can Mal do with the intimidating coolness and/or the potential berserker rage?

There’s a lot of potential for romantic and/or platonic loyalty kink with this character set, and I’d love something that went there. Characters rescuing each other from peril, risking themselves (their safety, reputation, position, ethics, secrets, goals, honor) to defend each other (ditto ditto), accomplishing the impossible or sacrificing things without even thinking twice because one trusts the other’s orders or judgment. Or A not going off the leash or into danger to defend B because B said not to (the "call off your dog" thing), to protect A’s conscience or life or reputation. Polly sends Mal on a dangerous mission; Mal goes off-leash rescuing Polly; something about the post-canon rank difference on top of the class difference (Mal is wealthy and cultured and typical commission material and yet is a corporal under Sergeant Perks’s command); Polly protects Jackrum’s secret/s from someone who could reveal them; an expansion of Jackrum and Froc’s backstory; anything about Froc’s whole relationship to the Duchess over the years as one of the few left who met her in person... Or for Polly/Mal in particular, I’d be into high sexual tension and/or mutual pining whether from near (if they continue serving in the same regiment, essentially together all the time and unable to act on it) or from far (what if the job separated them - LDR, epistolary?).

This is a perennial request for me and I have previous letters in the “dear author letters” tag if you’d like more info.

Fandom-Specific DNW: gender headcanons (I'm sorry, I can't figure out the right way to phrase this, but I'm happy to provide clarification via mod question or whatever); vampire romance tropes (such as turning or immortality) as focus.

—

Fandom: Simoun

Character(s): Any (Aeru, Amuria, Dominuura, Halconf, Limone, Mamiina, Neviril, Onasia, Paraietta, Plumbish Priestesses, Rodoreamon, Yun)

Simoun is another one of my perennial requests. I love how, in the mold of all my favorite epic yuri/shoujo animes, Everything Is Beautiful And Then Shit Gets Real, and that's not just an out-of-universe fact of the show but something that the characters themselves, who are "supposed" to be priestesses and not an air force, have to deal with. (Neviril's scene in the hearing is one of my favorites.) I enjoy that everyone comes in for different reasons - religious, patriotic, ambitious, interpersonal, gender-related - and has different ways of solving problems, their very deep flaws but also very deep nobility, and how everyone gets character development in the sense of growing and changing.

I'd love to see something that worked with that military aspect of the canon and the in-story tension of it - if you focus on more than one character, the way that the superior-subordinate dynamics or comrades-in-arms dynamics, and the different ways they behave under pressure (cheerful Aeru when she encounters the downed enemy pilot), sit alongside other dynamics (like Mamiina and Rodoreamon's childhood backstory/class thing) and don't always develop at the same pace, but single-character fic about the choices they have to make and how they think about them, as their situation changes, would be great too. What about more of Yun's backstory, for example? Hell, what's going on in Halconf's life and mind as someone who used to be a sibylla but now has quite a different role in the war as the sibylla position has changed? Or, what about in the post-canon where war is brewing again but Paraietta and Rodoreamon can't fly the Simoun anymore, and Neviril and Aeru might be able to but Neviril has no one to lead, unless it's a whole new crop of maidens? What do they want to do, and what skills are they still able to use? (Feel free to re-unite characters that are separated by canon - resurrect Mamiina, bring characters back from other worlds - if that's what you want to do with the story, although I think I'd prefer for that to be something that's acknowledged in-story as due to magic or alternate worlds rather than tacitly retconned.)

As with some of the other fandoms I've requested, I'm interested in the different permutations of loyalty - loyalty to a position or an ideal over loyalty to a side, such as the Plumbish priestesses'; something fleshing out the chorus's devoted loyalty to and trust in Neviril in a high-stakes situation where she's able to return it; interpersonal loyalty and how that interacts with love, requited or articulated or not (Mamiina and the braid, Paraietta's everything); loyalty that develops before liking or friendship does. Femslash is great, gen is great. This is a fandom where sexual first times would tie into the canon's themes in a lot of ways, if you're interested in writing that. Other things that would be cool: time loops or other timespace play, to go with the magic and timespace warping in the show? Interactive fiction? Have our leads learn more about Argentum and Plumbum and meet people from there?

Fandom-Specific DNW/Exception: I don't need you to retcon the attempted assault(s), but please don't dwell on them. No Dominuura/Limone, please.

—

Fandom: Spinning Silver

Character(s): Miryem Mandelstam

So there's definitely a common theme in a lot of my prompts and it's that I like hard-headed, practical, ambitious women who get into adventures because of, rather than in spite of, those qualities. I really like Miryem's good sense, pride, and rules-lawyering, and the way her power in the world becomes magic power in the Staryk world. In general, I also really like the way the book integrates various fairytales with one another and with the situation of Jews in Eastern Europe. What happens when Miryem is back in the human world, post-canon? I never got the impression that she'd be happy just avoiding the whole question of the town's contempt for her by finding power elsewhere - what's it like if she comes back a queen? (Can she use the mirror from Irina to do an end run around the whole Persephone setup and travel back and forth whenever she wants, and if so, what sorts of plot would make that fun to play with? If not, that's still fine.) Or, what are some adventures in the Staryk world where she could use her Accounting Powers, other than the post-war rebuilding the book talks about? Or tell me more about Miryem practicing Judaism in the Staryk world, and the application of Judaism to that world and those customs that we get some hints of (that's a hell of a diaspora - what would the rabbis think of it?)

I would be delighted by Miryem/Irina. Two queens with very different kinds of power, and different ideas of where their commitment lies - Miryem's to "her people" whether that's her family/other Jews/the Staryk who have bound themselves to her, Irina's to "Lithvas" - and what's consistent with their own ethics to fulfill those commitments. Widow them both and have the ultimate human world-Staryk world power marriage? A more serious rivalshippy thing where you make Miryem and Irina deal with the fact that they're respectively a Jewish queen of a super-powerful magic country and the queen of a largely anti-Semitic country who's not totally free from those beliefs herself? (I should mention that I am explicitly okay with the story touching on anti-Semitism or having anti-Semitism as a central issue.) What about different court traditions, when they visit each other? I would be delighted by Miryem/Wanda. I liked the early development of their relationship and wished we'd had more of that later in the story. How would Wanda's gratitude to Miryem and the Mandelstams play in a land that views gratitude so differently from the human world? Might Wanda's real-world "magic", like the reading and writing Miryem gave her, manifest differently in the Staryk world too? Do you want to go full Tam Lin and have Wanda rescue Miryem from the Staryk world? Would Wanda ever consider converting to Judaism? What if she's less settling into comfortable forest retirement and more becoming a magical gatekeeper of Miryem's land in her own way? I would be delighted by Miryem/f!Staryk Lord! What changes if the otherworldly monarch who claims Miryem's hand, bringing her into a new world of customs unfamiliar to her and power she hasn't known before, is also a woman?

Feel free to include Wanda or Irina even if it's not a femslash story, Tsop or Flek, or anyone else you need. (Rule 63 Mirnatius could also be really interesting, although I know that's potentially a lot to just throw into the background of a story about Miryem, so male Mirnatius or male Staryk Lord are fine too, if they're not the focus of the story.) Or, ignore all the characters, including Miryem, and tell me another fairytale, or combination of fairytales, about the Staryk and the Jews.

Fandom-Specific DNW: I don't need you to retcon Miryem/Staryk or Irina/Mirnatius if you'd rather not (including if you're writing any of the femslash options - plenty of historical royalty had lovers), but I'm not interested in those ships unless genderswapped to f/f, and would not like fic About them.

#dear author letters #yuletide #far from the madding crowd #harlots #simoun #monstrous regiment #spinning silver

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hour13 · 6 years

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The Tower

A note before reading:

Back in 2015-2016, a few friends and I were planning to work together on writing a serial story about a team of people known as The Scrap Hounds who roamed a post-apocalyptic wasteland. We built an amazing world and a few great characters, but unfortunately things fell apart. Before the collapse, I wrote The Tower, which was originally going to be released in six weekly installments.

The Tower is set in the Durante Desert, a land trying to reclaim itself after being the battlefield between two powerful nations, Myrora (MERE-Ore-Uh or Mai-ROAR-Uh, depending on inflection) and Sideah (Sih-day-uh). The Scrap Hounds are a team of junkers who wander that desert collecting scrap from battlefields, wrecks, and abandoned towns and selling the raw metal to the settlements they come across. The Scrap Hounds travel around the desert in The Land Whale a large vehicle colloquially known as a trawler.

The Tower

Writing by Tim Carroll

The character of Torva is a creation of Miles Rodgers

The world of the Scrap Hounds was a collaboration, see end of story for credits.

Part 1

If you’re of the mind to listen, the sounds of the Durante Desert at sunset can form a sort of symphony. The buzz of insects finding their way home to their hives, the distant howls of coyotes, the percussive rattle of scorpions, the crackle of campfires, and, of course, the slow steady rumble of trawlers moving through the desert.

Tonight, there is one more sound - if you listen closely enough - a quiet hiss, a gasp of compressed air, as an artist presses on his canister of spray paint. His canvas- a tower, hundreds of feet tall- his painting, hardly a painting but a story. A tadpole, swimming out of the flames of hell, to become a frog, live its life, and eventually be reincarnated as something greater.

There were no entrances to the tower, at least none accessible above the shifting sands. The only reason the Scrap Hounds had bothered to stop at all was because a zeppelin had crashed at the tower’s base nearly a week ago.

Unfortunately someone else had gotten there first. The zeppelin had already been stripped down, the crew members buried, and everything of value taken.

Another sound filled the night, a drumbeat, something pounding against the desert sands. Selak raised an eyebrow, but did not turn around, as the seven-foot-tall armored man approached him from behind.

“Hello, Torva.” The artist called, shaking a can of green paint.

“Hello, Selak.” Torva replied, his voice a deep reverberating bass. The armored man tilted his head to the side as he took a long look at the painting. “Reincarnation,” he said, after a short pause.

“You got it.” Selak smiled.

“What did a frog do to merit being reincarnated?”

“Lived a good life as a frog?” Selak offered, leaning against a pile of scrap, “I imagine the bar’s pretty low for them. Eat flies, lay lots of eggs, respect the natural order.”

“Then neither of us would merit reincarnation.” Torva observed.

Selak raised an eyebrow, “You don’t think we’re good people?”

“We do not respect the natural order.” Torva clarified, “Few humans do.”

“Maybe that’s a design feature.” Selak replied, filling in the frog’s body, “If humans respected the natural order, we’d have too many people reaching nirvana and nowhere near enough people being reincarnated as insects.”

“Perhaps,” Torva observed, as he pressed a button on his shoulder blade, igniting a floodlight that illuminated the dark picture. Selak cleared his throat. “How’s Blue doing?”

“I do not believe he will suffer any lasting harm.”

“The scorpion didn’t pierce a lung?”

“That is correct,” Torva replied, stepping forward, “The greater danger is the poison.”

“It was just a baby, right? Painful, not lethal.”

Torva shook his head, “An adolescent.”

Selak bit his lip, “You can cure that right?”

“Our supplies are low. I have done what I can, but we will need to leave at first light to make it to Anodar. There I will be able to purchase the medicine he needs.”

“Sounds good.”

Torva paused. Selak sighed.

“But you need me for something?” The artist asked, “Look I know you want to chew me out, but what happened was a complete accident, scorpions shouldn’t have been inside the main hatch, the kid—”

Torva raised his hand, “I am not here to chastise you.” He cleared his throat, “There is a cave not far from here. The recent winds have cleared away dunes that were blocking the entrance. Initial exploration suggests it may lead to the tower’s entrance.”

“But tomorrow we’re leaving?”

“Correct. At first light.” Torva repeated.

“So if we wanted to know what’s inside this thing, we’d have to do it right now.”

“Also correct.”

“And you’re proposing a night mission, into an unknown, possibly trap-filled tower, in the hopes of gathering information about the old world or finding useful and/or pricy artifacts.”

“For the third time, correct.”

Selak grabbed his paint supplies from the ground and threw them into a canvas bag over his shoulder. “I’ll get my kit.” He said, “Meet you outside the cave in ten. I’m in.”

Part 2

If you’re of the mind to look, there is a beauty to nights in the Durante Desert. The winds tend to die down, allowing one to appreciate the endless rolling dunes, watched over by a thousand twinkling stars. But be careful, many have made the mistake of assuming that night’s reduced risk of dehydration and exposure meant a reduced risk of death. It is night time when the most dangerous of creatures in the Durante Desert hunt – whether they be the giant scorpions out to secure sleeping prey, brigands out to catch their targets unaware, or the mutants lurking beneath the sands, hoping to catch a glimpse of the surface.

There is beauty to be found in the Durante Desert, but there is far more danger.

Selak tried not to get distracted by the scenery as he approached the mouth of the cave. He had tossed away his painter’s smock in favor of his exploration outfit. A black flak jacket – spraypainted with shark scales and an open shark mouth on the torso. Inside the dozen or so pockets were every tool he might need for a night outing: chemical flares, lockpicking equipment, and – his personal favorite – the grapple gun.

Torva was waiting outside the cave, wearing a different evo-suit than before. Although few other junkers noticed – most were too scared of the behemoth to pay much attention – the scientist’s suit varied from day to day, with pieces removed and added as Torva saw fit.

“I didn’t know you liked the mollusk suit.” Selak said as he approached. The suit’s back was painted with a design of a golden crustacean shell, the creature’s appendages reaching so they rested upon Torva’s own arms.”

“It is good for spelunking, and I appreciate the design aesthetic.”

“Was that a compliment?” Selak asked.

“It was.”

Torva touched his shoulder, and an instant later, a floodlight illuminated the path in front of them. The two set off into the cave.

“So I am a mollusk, because I am armored and collect things.” Torva observed, “Do you have an animal for each of us?”

“I believe that each of you have an animal.”

“Fair enough, what is Alexa?”

“A hawk.”

Torva tilted his head to the side, “Is that not the animal you attributed to your ex?”

“First off, she’s not my ‘ex.’” Selak corrected, “And, second, there’s no reason that two people can’t have the same animal.”

“So, I’m a mollusk for my nature. Alexa is a hawk for hers. Why are you a shark?”

“You don’t think it suits me?”

“You are not a predator.”

“Have I not told you this story?” Selak asked, “The origin of my necklace?” Selak reached into the neck of his suit and pulled out a two-inch long shark-tooth attached to a piece of scarlet rope.

“You have not.”

“Really?” Selak asked, replacing the necklace, “Okay, well, brace yourself. Way back – maybe a hundred years ago at this point – my family used to live on the south shore. My great-grandfather was a fisherman and a mechanic, and he was damn fine at both of those jobs from what I hear. Now, one day my gramps was out fishing when he caught the attention of a massive shark. The thing, attacked his boat, damn near destroyed it, and nearly killed my great-grandpa. Luckily, gramps kept a spear lying around and was able to fend off the animal until he made it back to harbor.”

“I see…” Torva murmured, running his hand along the preternaturally smooth cavern walls.

“Great-Gramps and the shark fought at least a half-dozen more times over the course of the next two years. Each conflict was bloodier and more dangerous than the last. Grandpa lost two of the fingers on his left hand, the shark lost several of its teeth and part of its dorsal fin.

Great Grampa dreaded seeing the shark, because he knew deep in his gut that the conflict would only end when one of them died.

But that all changed one summer night. There had been a massive storm, the kind where trees are ripped out of the ground and thrown around like toys. And worse, about five miles off shore, an oil tanker was damaged, and was going to sink unless someone intervened.

But it wasn’t just the people that were in danger; everything in the ocean was at risk. If that tanker capsized, the entire shoreline would be devastated.

My grandfather was the only one with the expertise to go out and repair the tanker, but every boat on the shoreline had been wrecked. There was no way they’d be able to get to it in time.

That’s when the shark rose up out of the water near the shore, and allowed my grandpa onto its back. Together they swam over to the tanker and grandpa was able to repair it in the nick of time. Every person on the boat and every fish in the water was saved.

There was no more fighting after that. My great-grandfather and the shark remained friends, and when it died, grandfather gave the shark a funeral, and took several of its teeth in memory of their friendship.” Selak reached for his necklace again, “That’s why I wear this.”

“Do you believe that story?” Torva asked.

Selak shrugged, “It was told to me by people I trust.”

Torva coughed, “So you are not decorated in honor of all sharks, but one in particular.”

“The shark went against its nature, and joined with its enemy for the greater good. Their rivalry, their language barrier, their species barrier. None of it mattered. I think there’s a lesson we can learn from that.”

“The shark went against its nature…” Torva mused, “Per our earlier conversation, neither your ancestor nor that shark would reach heaven, they would both be reincarnated.”

“Maybe that’s for the best,” Selak mused, “The world is a better place with animals like that, no matter what form their in.”

“Or perhaps we were wrong to assume that going against one’s nature was a bad thing.”

“Or maybe we—” Selak stopped mid-sentence as the two came across a stone door.

Torva knelt down and rapped his metal knuckles against it. “Granite,” he muttered, “At least three inches thick.”

Selak ran his hands over the door, engraved into it, at head height, was an insignia. “You recognize this?”

Torva nodded. “Have you ever heard of Dr. Alarus?”

“No…” Selak paused, “Wait. You’ve mentioned him before.”

“Her.” Torva corrected, “Dr. Olivia Alarus was one of the directors of the Myroran militarized science wing, specializing in genetic research. She had many projects, but her most infamous involved modifying humans in the hopes of creating the perfect soldier.”

“How’d that work out?”

“For the subjects: very poorly. Many died in her experiments, many more were crippled. It is said that the few “successes” if you choose to call them that – were used in combat operations, forced to act against their will.”

“What happened to her?”

“One night, there was a prison break at her facility. A few of the mutants broke loose and were able to free their brethren. They captured Dr. Alarus and tortured her to death.”

Selak shivered. “Do you believe that story?”

“It was told to me by people whom I trust.”

“So what’s that got to do with this symbol?”

“It is the insignia of her lab.”

“Could she be here?”

“Unlikely. Even if she had been able to escape from her lab that night, I doubt she would hide in such a noticeable dwelling. In addition to her former test subjects, there are many who want her dead. Those in the public who believe she must answer for her crimes and those in the Myroran military who she has shamed.”

“Fucking Hell.” Selak let out a low whistle, “So what’s the symbol for her lab doing all the way out here. We’re what two hundred-something miles from the Myroran border?”

“I do not know.” Torva replied, as he ignited a blow torch “But it is my intention to find out.”

Part 3

If you’re of the mind to search, there’s a history to the Durante Desert – a tale of heroism, honor, betrayal, and blood-stained sand. But be warned, any investigation into writings about the desert will lead a researcher through a labyrinth of bias, misinformation, and pride. The Myrorans and Sideans both hold each other accountable for the attacks that reduced nearly a third of the land into a wasteland. Even the rare scholars who truly are impartial are confounded by the conflicting reports. Were there two factions in the war, before it was disrupted by the rebels? Or were there as many as five? Was the rebellion truly motivated by a desire for national sovereignty? Or was it, like so many things, motivated by greed?

The answers to many of these questions, like so much of the desert itself, are buried deep beneath the sands.

***

Selak took a few steps back as Torva knelt down and set to work on the door. The acetylene torch in the scientist’s hands lit up the cave like a miniature sun, and even a half-dozen feet away, Selak could feel the prickle of perspiration on his forehead.

“Hey, Torva?” Selak shouted over the tool’s hissing, “How exactly do you intend to melt through a stone door?”

“Stone does not melt, Selak.” Torva replied, not looking away from his work, “But locks are not made of stone.”

“So you’re melting the hinges?” Selak asked, “And then we’ll kick it down. “

“Precisely.” Torva grunted.

“So how is this different than a door made out of metal?” Selak asked, “Wouldn’t that be easier to work with?”

“You, of all people, do not need a lecture on symbolism nor aesthetics.”

Before Selak could reply, Torva turned off his torch, and slammed his armored shoulder into the door, knocking it off its weakened hinges. The stone door toppled forward, groaning like a dying beast as it did so, but an instant before it hit the floor, Selak heard a second sound, one that he had heard far too often in his life: the sound of a bowstring being pulled back.

“TORVA!” Selak shouted. Acting on instinct, Selak kicked at the back of the scientist’s knees, knocking him- along with his exosuit – to the ground. As his partner fell, Selak dove to the earth as well. The two Scrap Hounds hit the ground simultaneously, as an iron crossbow bolt, crackling with electricity, sailed over their heads.

“ROLL!” Selak shouted, as he and Torva tumbled to opposite sides of the doorway, where a layer of stone stood between them and their attacker. Less than a half-second later a second crossbow bolt hit the ground between them, sending a flurry of blue sparks into the air. They had a foot-and a half of room on either side of the door. Room to breathe, but not much else.

Torva reached for his periscope while, Selak reached into his jacket pocket for a compact mirror. The two peered around the corner. There wasn’t a human in sight. Just a large auto-loading crossbow resting on a table, with a tangle of wires attached, some of them leading to a black orb resting beside it.

“What the hell?”

“An automated firing system.” Torva observed, retracting his periscope, “Rare to see one functioning. The ocular technology they used was known to be problematic.”

“Fascinating,” Selak hissed, “You got any grenades?”

“I brought none.” Torva replied, “I was not expecting this kind of resistance.”

“Looks like we’re gonna have to improvise.” Selak muttered, “Problematic ocular technology, right? Is that big black thing its eye?”

“In a manner of speaking.”

“So let’s blind it.” Selak replied, grabbing a spray paint can and a long thin nozzle from his jacket, and fastening them together. Carefully, Selak squeezed the trigger, spraying an arc of green paint over the machine’s electronic eye.

Torva removed the gauntlet of his exo-suit and waved the empty metal arm in front of the egress. No more bolts came out. “It is disabled.” Torva replied, reattaching his glove.

Cautiously, Selak shined his flashlight over the entryway. “You see any other traps?”

“Negative.” Torva answered, as he approached the crossbow. “Exquisite work.” He muttered.

“I like how ‘exquisite’ for you, doesn’t preclude ‘deadly.” Selak replied, running his hands along the metal walls.

“It is good that we did not use grenades.”

“Why? You want to take it home with us?”

“No.” Torva answered, “This device was only able to work because it has spent much of the past decade in darkness. A month out in the desert, or an hour out in a sandstorm, would render it inoperable.”

“So why was it good that we didn’t use grenades?”

“These power cells,” Torva said, tapping two yellow and black squares with his metallic forefinger, “are what kept this system functional for so long. They are Myroran military technology. Exceedingly rare. If disrupted by an attack of sufficient force, they would create an explosion powerful enough to destroy this room, possibly even this cavern.”

“And they decided to attach these to their defensive formation without any sort of protection?”

“Perhaps they anticipated an attack by an opponent who did have grenades.”

“Oh…”

“This was most likely an off-site storage facility.” Torva said, as much to himself as to Selak. “The hidden entrance and defensive machinery would be intended to keep out raiders, as guards for such a far off facility would be unfeasible.”

“But why here?”

“Field testing of Alarus’s mutants must have taken place in the area. This was most likely a facility for holding them and experimenting on them pre and post battle.”

“Would they still be here?”

“Unlikely.” Torva replied, “The mutants used for battle were too valuable to be left to rot and too dangerous to leave to their own devices.”

“So how does this thing differentiate friend from foe?”

“On its own, this device would be incapable of doing.” Torva replied pointing to the half-melted mechanism beside the door. “If a member of the Myroran high command were to have come here, they would have needed a transmitter to ensure their safe entry.”

“Press a button. Open the stone door. Disarm the crossbow.”

“Yes.” Torva nodded, “Although…”

“Something the matter?”

“This crossbow appears to be a recent addition, the security system most likely originally used a firearm.”

“Which leaves us with three options.” Selak replied, “Option one: The scientists here got bored one day, and decided to see if the motion tracker would work with different long-range weapons.” “Unlikely.” Torva replied, “The scientists who worked here were corrupt, but not stupid. Tampering with defensive equipment would have been tantamount to risking their own lives in an attack.”

“Option two. The gun was damaged in a raid, and they replaced it with a crossbow for whatever reason. ”

“Possible, although there is no reason that they would not have replaced the old weapon with a similar one.”

“Which brings us to option three.” Selak said, “Which judging from the lack of bullet holes in these walls, I like best. The gun failed due to mechanical issues over the years. Eventually someone found the weapon and replaced it because they wanted to use this place as their new hideout.”

Torva searched the room. “That would appear to be most likely.”

“You do know what that means?” Selak asked, reaching for his pistol.

“Yes,” Torva replied, “It means we may not be alone.”

Part 4

If you’re of the mind to dig, there’s a world buried beneath Durante. When the first shots of the war echoed over the sands, many of the desert’s denizens fled. Some ran off to the southern shores, and began new lives as fishermen. Others headed north to try their hands tilling the fertile plains. But there were a few who took a different approach; they fled downward.

Lying underneath many towns in Durante is a spiderweb of catacombs. During the war, these undercities had a thousand uses, housing black markets, hiding families, and allowing rebel soldiers to outmaneuver and escape their opponents.

Most of the tunnels have been preserved since the war. Many homeowners enjoy having a secret room beneath their cellar.

And of course, there are the rumored-few, who liked their subterranean home so much, that they chose to never return to the surface.

***

The metal catacombs echoed with each step the pair took further into the lab.

“I guess the stealth approach is out of the question.” Selak shrugged,

“Stealth has never been my strong suit.” Torva replied, as he examined the scratch marks on the walls.

“That’s okay,” Selak replied, “I’ll just be sure to hide behind you if they jump out and shoot at us.”

“That is hardly shark behavior,” Torva observed, “Would it not make more sense for you to charge ahead, so that I could use your corpse as a shield when you die, as my patron animal would suggest.”

“Only if you’re comfortable living in my corpse after this is over.”

“I doubt that I would…” Torva paused in mid-sentence, and knelt down.

“Something wrong?”

“This floor is made of iron.” Torva observed, rapping his knuckles against a section of the floor with four inch-long scratches, “And these gouges were not made by a machine.”

“A wild animal?” Selak suggested.

“Nothing natural could have done this,” Torva replied as he rose to his feet,

“Could a mutant do something like this?”

“If the stories are to be believed, Alarus’s mutants were capable of far stranger things.”

“There are bullet holes in the wall,” Selak said, “You think there was a battle in this hallway?”

“That would seem to be the case,” Torva nodded, “We should continue.”

Less than a minute later, the hallway came to an abrupt end, with a stone staircase leading upwards into the darkness.

“It seems we have reached the base of the tower.”

“Well, let’s get climbing.” Selak replied, walking up the stairs.

The two walked up the concrete steps. Selak listened closely after each step, trying to listen for any telltale signs that the stairs might come crashing down beneath him and his partner. About five steps before the next level, the artist held up a hand, “Hey Torva, you smell something.”

The scientist shook his head, “I do not. What do you smell?””

Selak sniffed the air, “Do you know what hibiscus is?”

“I am familiar with the flower,” Torva responded, “Not with its smell.”

“It smells like that… and…. and sweat.”

Torva shrugged, as the two arrived at the first floor. The pair shined flashlights over the room.

“Holy lord…” Selak muttered as he stared at his surroundings. The room was three-stories tall and looked to be made of iron and stone. Stacked three-high in a dozen rows in front of him was over a hundred prison-cells, with catwalks running back and forth between them.

Selak shivered. Torva turned to his partner. “Are you well, Selak?”

“I’m fine,” Selak said, as he began walking, “Let’s just keep moving, it’s freezing in here.”

There was not much to see in each cell. Nothing more than a cot for sleeping and a large bucket for excrement.

“Strange…” Torva said, as he peered into the nearest of the cell, “All of these cells appear to have been used, but there are different accommodations for different subjects. Perhaps another experiment?”

“I doubt it.” Selak replied, testing the lock on the nearest door. It swung open with a shrill squeak.

“Oh?”

“You’re thinking too much like a scientist, Torva, and not enough like a warden. These weren’t subjects, they were prisoners.”

“Why would that-“

“If you’re in charge of prisoners –” Selak interrupted, running his hands along the bars, “If you keep people in cages for a living, what is the one thing you fear most?”

“Those people breaking out.” Torva surmised, kicking a loose screw into the darkness, “Those people putting you in a cage of your own.”

“An uprising.” Selak concluded.

“And the distribution of blankets prevents an uprising?”

“In order to rebel against a more powerful foe, you need two things: numbers and unity. Historically prisoners have always had the former. It’s just not practical to have an equal number of guards and prisoners.”

“So they take away their unity?” Torva asked, ducking under a low-hanging catwalk.

“That’s where the blankets come in.” Selak explained, “In any group of people, there are gonna be the popular ones. The ones who everyone likes. The ones who could inspire a rebellion.”

“And you take away their blankets?”

“No,” Selak replied, “Those are the people you give blankets to.”

“I do not follow…”

“Imagine you’re a prisoner, and you see that the man in the cell next to you just got a nice warm blanket. What’s the first thing you ask?”

Torva paused, “I would ask “Why?””

“Exactly. Why are they getting special treatment? Are they secretly working with the warden? Can I trust them?”

“Preventing a rebellion with a few square yards of wool.” Torva concluded.

“And that’s just the start of what guards can do with blankets. Give them to obedient prisoners on a cold night. Take them all away as a form of mass punishment if one person starts stirring up trouble…”

“Where did you learn so much about managing prisoners?”

“I…” Selak coughed, “I’ve had a few friends who’ve done their time behind bars.”

“You would think that prisoners would learn that they are being manipulated.”

“Easier said than done,” Selak replied, “To have an uprising you don’t just need one person to go against their nature, but dozens, maybe even hundreds.”

“A mental revolution.” Torva agreed, as the two came across a steel door at the far end of the room.

“Hey, Torva,” Selak shouted, pointing at the walls – which were lined with steel fans, “Is there any reason they’d need to keep this room cold?” What’s with all the air conditioners?”

Torva shook his head, “I have no idea. Perhaps they kept these rooms freezing to improve their use of blanket tactics.”

“Is that what we’re calling it now?”

“What name would you suggest?”

“Blanket tactics sounds a little too whimsical for my tastes.” Selak replied, “I’d call it what it is: torture.”

The pair arrived at a set of double doors on the opposite side of the room.

“No lock,” Selak observed as he pulled open the door.

The next room was also three-stories high, and looked to be an infirmary. Rows of cots lined the walls, with medical devices lying next to them. Everything else seemed to be made of bare metal: The walls, the floor, the cabinets that covered the far wall.

“Looks like they expected to have a ton of wounded.”

Torva shook his head, “These beds are not equipped for emergency care. And if one truly harbored concerns about the safety of the injured they would not put their infirmary so far from the entrance. This was where they gave the mutants their treatment.”

“Treatment?”

“Most mutants are unstable. The genome is a tool for gods, not man. Most mutants required significant medical care in order to survive from battle to battle. Alarus considered it a small price to pay.”

“This woman keeps sounding better and better.” Selak mumbled, wrenching open one of the cabinets. “You think you can do anything with this stuff.”

Torva looked over the contents of the cabinet. “Antibiotics…” he mused, “Blood thinners… bandages… “Torva grinned, “We’re in luck. Not only should we be able to refill the Whale’s infirmary, but we will have a surplus to sell at the next trading post.”

“Looks like the hounds will be eating pretty well for the next couple weeks.”

“Why? Did you see something that would get you off of cooking duty?”

“That’s cold, Torva.”

The scientist laughed, as the two approached the door at the far side of the room. “Wait a minute…” Selak stopped dead.

“What is it?”

“Those prison cells, they were made of iron… just like the floor.”

“Yes,” Torva replied, “Why… oh dear…”

“If a mutant could tear through the floor, why couldn’t he pry apart his cell?”

The two scrap hounds exchanged glances.

“Something is not right.” Torva murmured.

Selak nodded as he opened the final door. A staff kitchen with a large wooden table in the center. In front of each of the dozen place settings was a black metallic box.

“Audio logs.” Torva said, picking up the closest one in his hands. “Numbered one through twelve.”

“Looks like there’s a story here after all.” Selak said

“Not only that,” Torva replied, “But someone here wanted the story to be known.”

“Well then,” Selak replied, leaning against the nearest chair, “How about you and I oblige them.”

Part 5

If you’re of the mind to care, there is a desperation in the Durante Desert. The ceasefire brought an end to the war, but it was only the beginning of the true struggle. For some, every day is a fight to survive. Farmers hack away at the dirt, trying to raise a profitable crop. Junkers search through piles of wreckage hoping to find something to sell. Architects throw structures together praying that they’ll survive the next sandstorm. Some have called life in the Durante desert a constant sprint to stay ahead of the next disaster: A marathon that may never have an end.

---

“Status report: Day 16.” The recorder on the metal table buzzed, “This is Senior Researcher Richard Parvus. Yesterday, Dr. Alarus returned to Myrora to continue work on Centurion III. As of today, I am the director of all operations here at Site 14 and all further status reports shall come from me. Our current priority for all personnel is ensuring the total obedience of subjects. In addition to usual mass humanoid containment protocol, we are using both subliminal and explicit instruction to convince them that they cannot survive in sunlight without regular injections of Pherendalin. We are also using pheromone therapy to aid in containment. The entirety of the prison is filled with pheromone mixture 21-B-epsilon, which dulls the strength and mental fortitude of our subject population.

Field testing will be scheduled when have ensured complete control of our prisoners. Nothing further to report.”

“Disgusting,” Torva hissed, his hands clenched around the steel table.

“Do you have any idea what happened to this asshole?”

Torva shook his head, “His name is unfamiliar to me.”

“Is there any news on what happened to Alarus’s aides after the war?”

“Only rumors.” Torva replied, “It is impossible to separate fact from fiction.”

“What do you believe?”

“I believe that Alarus’s aides were removed from public record and transferred to other projects by the Myroran government. Myrora would not let valuable assets rot in prison or be taken by the enemy.”

“Amazing…” Selak mumbled as he reached to press the play button on the next tape. “Wait a sec,” He drew his hands back. “Pheromones… those are released from sweat right?”

“In many cases, yes.”

“Could that be why this place smells like sweat? Artificial pheromones?”

Torva scratched his chin. Or at least approximated the gesture through his exo-suit. “That would make sense. It would also explain the excess of ventilation in the prison room.”

“Just a thought.” Selak shrugged as he pressed play on the second recorder.

“Status report: Day 29.” Parvus’s voice droned, “This is Director Richard Parvus. Another pair of mutants died today. The fault rests solely with Dr. Bakir, who prescribed insulin at the average level needed for a homo Sapien, not a homo Servus. I have informed him that a similar mistake will result in him sleeping with the mutants.” Parvus laughed before continuing.

“We have lost 7 percent of our mutants since our arrival at Site 14. I have decided to accelerate the schedule for field testing. Our first operation will not be conducted in ten days, as was previously scheduled, but in three. We will also be using forty mutants instead of twenty. That is all.”

Selak and Torva looked at each other. A bead of cold sweat rolled down the artist’s forehead.

“We do not have to continue,” Torva intoned.

“Someone set this up for us,” Selak gestured at the table, “Maybe not us specifically, but someone wanted their story known. We have an obligation to listen.”

“Very well.” Torva replied, pressing play on the next recorder.

“Status report: Day 34. This is Director Richard Parvus. All subjects have been returned to their cells. Confirmed Sidean casualties: 436. Confirmed subject casualties: 22. Field testing indicates that our mutants’ lack of ranged weaponry was a hindrance on the battlefield. However, as-expected, hormonal injections did insure the complete obedience of subjects. Our next testing date is set for a week from now, we will use 60 mutants on the battlefield. That is all.”

“Hey Torva, not sure if this is outside of your expertise…” Selak turned to his partner.

“Yes?”

“How the hell do you control someone with injections?”

Torva cleared his throat, “There are certain brain states that can be induced with the right combination of hormones and neuromodulators. If one had been mutated or conditioned to have one of those brain states associated with complete obedience, then it would be possible to use hormones as a form of mind control.”

“Injectable obedience…” Selak mused, “And just when I thought these bastards couldn’t sink any lower.”

“They would most likely have needed some sort of pheromone failsafe to prevent the mutants from taking orders from the enemy. Possibly there was--”

“I know I brought it up,” Selak interrupted, with a shiver, “but is it okay if we end this conversation?”

Torva nodded, and reached for the next audio log.

“Status report: Day 42. This is director Richard Parvus. Our latest field expedition was an overwhelming success. Confirmed Sidean Casualties: 286. Confirmed Subject casualties: Merely 8. Unfortunately, a new problem has arisen. Some of our subjects appear to be developing a resistance to pherendalin. This has led to six of our mutants developing severe UV burns on the battlefield. We will increase dosage, from 20 ccs to 25 for those showing signs of acquired immunity.

I have consulted with command and they are interested in a more aggressive pace of field testing. Recent reports have come in of a Sidean Motor Pool, 60 kilometers to our north. In three days’ time we will deploy 80 mutants to that base. If the ensuing massacre doesn’t convince command we’re deserving of more funding, nothing will.”

Torva and Selak looked at each other.

“Funding?” Selak hissed, slamming his fist into the table.

Torva took a step back involuntarily.

“Winning a war? I get it.” Selak said, pacing back and forth, “Advancing science? I get it. But just earning funding!? I can’t fucking believe—" Selak’s words were interrupted by the sound of pounding coming from the wall next to him, “What the hell was that?”

“Machinery?” Torva suggested.

“Why would it still be running?” Selak asked.

“Perhaps they left more equipment than just their defenses running on advanced batteries”

“Perhaps…” Selak said, “But the war ended—what a decade ago? Did they just forget about this place?”

“If these logs are anything to go by, then this seems to be a place well worth forgetting.” Torva tapped the play button on the next recorder.

“Status Report Day 45. This is Director Richard Parvus. We deployed seventy-six of our mutants to the field today, along with twenty-eight of our guards and scientists. We are currently running on a skeleton crew of scientists. I remained behind to supervise experimentation of the seven mutants who were deemed unfit for battle.

Unfortunately, due to being understaffed, we were unable to stop Subject 44 from escaping before her third injection of Nafaltin. Subject 44 broke from her restraints and self-terminated by throwing herself into the metal gears of the ventilation machinery. As a result…” Dr. Parvus paused,” Oh… shit.” The doctor nearly screamed, his voice notably higher “The vents are down, that means…” A crash sounded on the recording.

A second voice – a man’s - rang out on the recording, “Forget something, Dick?”

“Stand back!” Parvus shouted,

“Or what?” The second voice asked, “Richie, I’ve watched dozens of my brothers and sisters die slowly and painfully at your orders. So for the sake of science, I think it would be best if you experience that—”

A gun shot rang out on the recording, and then a sound like a body being thrown to the floor. A second later a crack sounded – the unmistakable sound of a bone breaking- and then another- and then another. An agonizing minute later the screaming stopped. Followed by the sound of someone standing up.

“Is this thing still recording?” The second man said, “Did this guy honestly do daily monologues... How did he end them? There was a few second pause on the recording. “Uh…. That’s all folks.”

Torva and Selak stared at each other in silence.

Simultaneously, they reached for the next play button.

“Status Report,” The voice of the man from the last recording began, “Day uh… yesterday plus one. This is Markov Karazden.” Markov paused. “Uh… Updates: Richard Parvus is dead. Seeing as this is a science report, I would like you to know that, according to the very scientific experiment I conducted yesterday, he lasted nearly a dozen bone breakings before dying.”

“For those wondering how this miraculous escape occurred, well there’s only one person to thank. Melanie knew that she was dying -- only had a couple of days left. Yesterday she broke free during testing and jumped into the vents. She – her body – clogged up the machinery. Since our blood has the vish- visco- stickiness of resin, they weren’t able to clean out the machine fast enough. Without the vents they didn’t have the damn pheromones to keep us contained. Tomorrow night, they’ll be bringing our brothers and sisters back in groups of about a dozen at a time. They’re expecting that this place will still be run by Parvus. Oh boy, do we have a surprise in store for them.

The recording clicked and the two scrap hounds stared at each other.

“An uprising.” Torva not-quite chuckled. “Blanket tactics appear to have been insufficient after all.”

“You think this is funny?” Selak asked,

“Funny? No.” Torva replied, “But it is fitting.”

“Fitting?”

“After all he has done, do you truly believe that Richard Parvus deserved to go gentle into the good night? That he deserved anything less than what he received?”

“What he deserved was to learn the error of his ways and try to amend them.” Selak responded. “His mutilated corpse doesn’t serve any purpose?”

“And how would you ‘show him the error of his ways,’ Torva asked, “Mind-Control Hormones of your own?”

“Torturing people to death isn’t something we should be cheering on.” Selak replied, “Violence just begets more violence.”

“Said the ex-mercenary.”

“Said the human being.” Selak corrected.

“That is even less of an argument.” Torva responded, “I have spent years watching humans kill each other over minor slights and insults. This is perhaps the most just killing I have ever witnessed.”

“Saying that it’s the ‘most just killing’ is like saying that you’ve seen ‘the smartest buzzard’ or ‘the strongest housefly.’ A killing being more just than usual doesn’t suddenly make it justice.”

“So you would prefer Parvus to be alive?”

“No,” Selak shook his head, “I just wish things could have been different.”

“Things are as they are, Selak.” Torva replied, “Now shall we listen to the next recording.”

“Please.”

Torva tapped the play button.

“Status report day 1.” Markov’s voice rang out, “Yes, we restarted the calendar. The battle for research facility 14 is over. Confirmed shithead deaths: 29. Confirmed mutant deaths: 2. Damn, I went ahead and spoiled the ending. So sorry, let me set the scene.

The scientists and guards were coming back from the Sidean motor pool. There had been a massacre there, a ton of vehicles and equipment stolen. They even managed to lift a few crates of champagne for the lab. I don’t know why there was champagne at the motor pool… is champagne something people keep at military bases… whatever… probably not important. Anyway, they figured this was their big break; three ‘victories’ couldn’t be a coincidence. They figured a grant – you know, money for scientific research - was coming that would make them all filthy rich… oh yeah, and it would help their research, but I think we all know where their priorities were lying.

Anyway, they had already started drinking the champagne when they walked the first group of mutants back, and you could tell that they were hurrying things along. Ten guards and scientists escorted the first group of fifteen mutants in. They’re so busy talking and hi-fiving that they don’t notice how faint the smell of pheromones was. They only realize what’s going on when we jumped on them from above. We went straight for arteries and vein just like they had taught us. A few managed to grab their guns, but let’s face it, they designed us too well. Two bullets hit me in the solar plexus and I didn’t even feel it.

Maybe twenty minutes later another group of guards came in, this time without any mutants, I could tell they were worried. One of them had even ripped the big-ass gun off of the security device they have behind the stone door. If we had had more time, I would have loved to have cleaned up all the blood, but we didn’t have that so the second they walked into the room, they saw the bodies of their comrades, and then we shot them before they could run screaming back.

We weighed our options after that. We could either wait to see if any more of them would walk in, or we could head out to where the rest of our brothers were being kept outside. Alicia had the bright idea to put on the clothing of some of the guards, before we left the building. It worked out well enough. We were able to get the jump on the last few scientists, and escort the rest of our brothers inside before sunrise.

There are 58 of us remaining. Tomorrow we’re going to make plans for how to free the rest of the prisoners across Myrora.”

The recording ended.

The pounding in the room next door resumed, louder than before. The two looked at each other.

Selak turned to his partner, “You sure you’ve never heard of this place?” He shouted over the din.

“I have not.’ Torva replied, “Though there is another possibility.”

The pounding stopped.

Selak shrugged, trying to look more casual than he felt, “Go on.”

“Earlier I told you the story of Alarus.” Torva continued.

“But she wasn’t here. At least not during the uprising.”

“What if the two stories-- Alarus’s death and the prison break - have become conflated over time?”

“It’s possible,” Selak scratched his chin, “But then we have to acknowledge another possibility.”

“Which is?”

“That Alarus is still out there somewhere.”

Torva shivered, “I pray, for the world’s sake, that that is not the case.”

A silence descended, as the two looked at each other.

“Shall we go on?” Selak asked, gesturing towards the next recording.

“Please.” Torva replied. Selak nodded and pushed the button.

“Day 3. Markov Karazden. You know the drill. Yesterday we took it upon ourselves to clean up the bodies. All of us know damn well what happens to those who hang around rotting corpses. We burned the lot in the incinerator and mopped up the blood. We then proceeded to celebrate, seeing as the doctors were kind enough to supply us with shitloads of champagne before their passing.”

Markov sighed. “We have a problem though. Because of my medical training, I’ve been put in charge of inventory. It doesn’t look good. In fact, it looks like the reason the reason the doctors were sending us out to fight so much was that they were running low on medical supplies.”

Markov sighed again. “We don’t have enough to last us the month.

The other problem is Pherendalin – which is spelled with a P-H, by the way. Pherendalin is a chemical compound with a unique folding… you know what, I won’t bore you with details. It’s an injection, and we need it if we want to step out of the compound without being cooked alive by the sun. They gave it to us every time we left the base, and now it looks like it’s losing its effectiveness. Even if it was at full strength, there’s not nearly enough for us to all leave together. We’re looking into jury-rigging some exo-suits for some of our more resistant brothers, but those aren’t exactly easy to make.

Honestly, even without the guards, this place might still be our prison.”

Selak shook his head… “Goddammit…”

Torva reached a hand out. Selak batted it aside.

“God Fucking Dammit.” Selak hissed, “Why the hell would they do that. The scientists. We’re in a fucking desert. Why would you want troops that burn in the sunlight?

“It’s like you said earlier, Selak.” Torva replied, “The one thing all jailers fear is prisoners getting out of their cage. It makes sense to have a last resort—”

“And their government funded this? A project that would leave them broken for the rest of their lives? How can you be okay with this?”

“I am far from okay with this,” Torva growled and Selak flinched. “I am merely inured to the horrors.”

“You…”

“Believe me, If I had had the chance, I would have been happy to kill Alarus and all her ilk with my own hands. If the Rebels had ever managed to eke out a victory on Myroran soil, I would have been happy to go there, hammer in hand for the chance of breaking the bodies of anyone who has abused science for an atrocity like this!”

“Torva…”

“I understand why the rebels accepted the terms of the ceasefire, but every day there is a part of me that wishes they had not.”

“You wish that we’d attacked Myrora!? Do you have any idea-- ”

“You have travelled with me for less six months, Selak.” Torva interrupted, “Do not presume to understand my reasons.”

“I’m sorry,” Selak said, stunned “I--

“I accept your apology,” Torva interrupted, “Please play the next log.”

Day 7, Markov said in a defeated tone, “There was… another fight today. It was worse than yesterday’s. Christine… dammit… she killed Kaine, bashed his skull against a wall.

I… We don’t know what to do with her. Some of us suggested killing her, but I’m not willing to institute capital punishment. Others suggested locking her in a cell, but unless we use the doctors’ pheromones it’s not gonna keep her in.

It wasn’t her fault. Not entirely. We were designed to be aggressive, and without any sort of balances we’re slipping. We’re losing our minds. All of us. Little things are making me angry, and I know I’m not the only one. If we don’t come up with a plan soon, we’re gonna end up killing each other.

Some of my brothers are suggesting we take as much pherendalin as we can, and see if we can make it to the Myroran border. ‘A few massacres’ they say, ‘and they’ll never mess with mutants again.’ I told them absolutely not. I’m not going to have the blood of children on my hands, Myroran or otherwise. We need to maintain control. We are more than living weapons”

The recording clicked off.

Torva turned to his partner, “I should not have yelled at you.” He said somberly.

“I understand.” Selak said, “But thank you.”

Torva tilted his head to the side. “This may be the ultimate test of our earlier conversation.”

“How do you figure?”

“The nature of these people is clear. To kill without end. Now, they have to choose, to rise above it or to give in.”

“I don’t see this as a contest.”

“How you see it is irrelevant.” Torva said, “What matters is how it is.” Torva clicked play on the next recorder.

“Day 8,” Markov’s voice crackled, it sounded almost as if he were crying, “Christine’s dead… she… she shoved a metal pipe into her heart. I tried to give her a second chance, told her that we would trust her, but the others… they wouldn’t stop giving her shit about Derek… I mean, I know she killed him but...”

Markov sniffled, “I guess it doesn’t matter now. We need to get out of here, there’s no other way. The others and I have been through our supplies. Food is no concern of ours, as a result of our “condition.” Markov spat the word like a curse, “But our medical needs can’t be met forever. There’s not enough pherendalin for us to leave, but there is enough to stock an away party. We’re going to draw lots tomorrow for eight of us. There’s enough Pherendalin to last them each three weeks, more if they’re able to find caves to hide in during the day.” Selak reached for the next recorder, but Torva grabbed his wrist.

“What the hell?” Selak asked, jerking his hand free.

“I’m curious,” Torva asked, “What would you have done with Christine?”

“The murderer?”

“Yes, would you have allowed her to go free or would you have done something else.”

“I’d have killed her,” Selak sighed.

“Why the sudden change of—“

“It’s not a change of heart.” Selak replied, “It’s a change of situations. Us junkers, we’re privileged. If a fight breaks out between us and a rival team, we don’t have to end it with killing, we do have other options.”

“And what if it’s not a fight between the Scrap Hounds and another team. What if a Scrap Hound kills another Scrap Hound?”

“We’d have to look at the circumstances.” Selak said

“And you’d feel that way if you were the one that were killed.”

“I don’t know what you guys are going to make of my death,” Selak replied, “But I hope to God it never gets used as a reason to hurt others.”

“Fascinating,” Torva replied,

“Fascinating?” Selak asked, “What am I, a test subject?”

“Not everything has to be an experiment for me to find it fascinating.”

“Is that what my life philosophy is to you?” Selak asked, “An idle curiosity?”

“No.” Torva replied, “What’s curious to me is that you have managed to survive so many combat encounters with such a philosophy.”

“Not everyone wants to kill, Tor.” Selak said, “Some people will take any opportunity to avoid killing. They’ll make a deal with anyone to have one less face staring back at them when they close their eyes.”

“Is that what you see when you close your eyes?”

“Just play the damn tape.”

Torva nodded and pressed the play button on the penultimate recorder.

“Day 10. This morning everyone wrote their name on a scrap of paper and we threw them all into a bucket. We shook it up and drew eight names. Sylvia, Raith, Colin, Esther, Jacob, Noah, Nina, and Reggie were chosen as our team. They left this afternoon. Markov sighed. Some people wanted to draw it out, to throw them a goodbye party. But let’s face it, if we waited any longer we wouldn’t have been able to send them away.

Their departure was emotional anyway. Esther was sobbing when I hugged her goodbye. I told her that I would see her again, but deep down, I don’t know if that’s true.

And then, before they could even walk out the door. Another fight broke out. I don’t even know what the cause was, but it was ten times more violent than the one a few days ago. Three more of us were killed. Nobody from the away team. Thank God, I don’t think we can draw any more lots. I don’t know what to do. I’m not going to force martial law on my own people. My brothers and sisters…” A sound rang out like Markov punching a wall.

“God Fucking DAMNIT! When we sealed the entrance – replaced the turret with that electric crossbow, I thought it would keep us safe. But it won’t... I don’t think anything will.” The recorder clicked off.

“Before we go on,” Torva said, “I thought I should tell you something.”

“What’s that?”

“Selak, you said a few minutes ago that you hoped that no one uses your death as an excuse to kill someone.”

“Yeah?” Selak replied, “Is that so weird?”

“I will not honor that request.” Torva said, “If someone kills you, I will kill them. I will break their body with my hammer, slowly and painfully, until they at last exsanguinate.”

“You wouldn’t honor my last request?”

“The desires of the dead should not outweigh those of the living. As such, your desire for me to show mercy will not trump my desire to not live in the same world as your killer.”

“It’s more than honoring my last request.”

“How so?”

“If I die, and you guys go on a roaring rampage of revenge, we’re gonna need someone who keeps the Hounds from becoming a full-on mercenary outfit. And that someone’s gonna have to be you.”

“You think I would be a good choice for that?”

“Good? Hell no,” Selak grinned, “Best… probably. But don’t worry about it. I don’t plan on dying anytime soon.”

“No one ever does.” Torva replied, as he pressed down on the final play button.

“Day 17.” Markov gasped. “I am leaving this message with claws covered in blood. I’m pacing through the halls of this prison, praying that I’m not alone, praying that just one of my brothers or sisters survived that fight. I’ve been dragging bodies to the incinerator, washing away the blood stains as if removing the evidence will make them all come back. That last fight… it wasn’t even intentional. Kylie stepped on Sam’s foot. That was all it took. We’re powder kegs. FUCKING POWDER KEGS!!!!”

Markov took a few deep breaths “Sorry… I can feel myself slipping. I’ve burned the last of the bodies, washed away the last bits of my brothers’ blood. But I’m still searching. Praying.

Every time I turn a corner, I see ghosts, my brothers, my sisters, the scientists, the soldiers, my family, my classmates, the people I killed, all of them screaming at me, sobbing, wailing in agony…

It’s too much.

I’m locking myself in the inner sanctum. I’ll take the books, the supplies, and a healthy dose of sedatives to keep my aggression in check. Maybe there’s a cure for our condition. I don’t need to eat; as long as I can inject myself with those hypernutritional supplements I should be able to last for years. I’ll last for as long as it takes to find the cure for our condition. I WILL see the sun again. No matter how long it takes.

Before I lock myself in, I’m leaving some recording on the table in the meeting room. This one and ten others. Mostly mine, but a few of the asshole’s as well. I’ve labeled them 1 through eleven.

Come to think of it, if you’re hearing this than you probably know all that by now.” Markov gave a weak laugh, “Well that’s how the recorders got there, whoever you are.

You know, I suppose I should give you a message, if I’m not there to greet you in person.

If you’re a member of the away team, coming back after days, weeks, maybe even yeas. I’m sorry. I’m sorry, that more of us couldn’t survive. But I want you to know that from the bottom of my heart I am happy that you did.

If you’re a member of the FUCKING MYRORAN GOVERNMENT.” Markov caught his breath before continuing, “I hope the atrocities committed here have made you realize…” Markov gasped, “Made you realize how horrific mutating human beings truly is. I know how important the war is to you, but if you continue down this road, there will be a day of reckoning. Someday there will be an uprising that you can’t contain. And when that day comes, there will be hell to pay. Stick to non-living weapons.”

Markov sighed,” I suppose there’s a possibility that you’re just a stranger. A man who wandered into a secret lab, or a Sidean raiding an enemy facility. I’m sorry, I’m not here to greet you, but I implore you to learn the lesson of what happened here.

PEOPLE… AREN’T… WEAPONS.”

The recorder clicked off and the two Scrap Hounds eyed each other in silence.

“Lord…” Selak said, after a couple of seconds, “I can’t believe it...”

“It’s—” Torva’s words were drowned out as the pounding resumed in the next room, louder and more insistent than before. Selak’s mouth fell open as the realization dawned.

“Torva?” Selak asked rising to his feet, “Is what he said possible? About not needing food?”

“Theoretically, yes,” Torva replied, “Although it would not be pleasant.” Torva paused, “You don’t think…”

Selak nodded, as he reached for his pistol, “What if that’s not a machine that’s making that noise.”

Part 6

If you’re of the mind to feel, the Durante Desert is a wounded land. The war cut a bloody swath across the landscape and the people of Durante, leaving a scar that may never truly heal. For three decades, blood and fire poured over this land; culture, landmarks, and scientific advancements, were all destroyed in a mad quest for victory.

Hate burns in this land as brightly as the sun above. For some, the anger is concealed: The shopkeeper whose price raises by the slightest of margins whenever a Myroran enters his store. For others the anger is a badge, proudly worn: The veteran who sits at the Sidean border, sharpening his knife, and waiting for the day the ceasefire wavers.

***

The artist and the scientist stood on opposite sides of the steel door that led into the lab’s final room. Selak held a pistol in one hand and checked the door’s handle with the other. “Unlocked,” Selak half-whispered, “He’s not sealed in there.”

Torva nodded as he flicked the switch on his electrode hammer. An instant later it’s metal tip crackled with electricity that made the hairs on Selak’s arm stand on end.

“Okay, Torva,” Selak hissed over the sound of crashing on the opposite side of the door, “No matter what state he’s in, we should try and talk things out first. There’s no need to spill any more blood here.”

“I am ready to negotiate if he is mentally stable.” Torva replied, “Are you ready to fight if he is not?”

Selak sighed.

“Are you?” Torva repeated.

“Yes, Torva,” Selak said, “I am.”

“Good,” Torva replied, “If I make contact with my hammer, he should be stunned. It will not last long, but while his muscles are seizing, you will have time to shoot him in the head. Any other bullet wound will not be able to stop him! Do not attempt an incapacitating shot!”

“I know!” Selak grimaced.

“Good.” Torva answered, “Then let’s go in.”

Selak nodded and pushed open the door. The second his hand made contact, the metal clanging on the other end stopped. In silence, the two Scrap Hounds entered the next room.

It was a chemical lab, or at least it looked like it had been one once. The dilapidated shelves clinging to the walls were covered in beakers and broken glass. Textbooks, their covers and pages shredded. Torva eyed a few of the stray pages with interest.

“Think we could put off reading till later?” Selak asked, “Maybe a time when we’re not in danger?”

Torva nodded, as the two walked into an adjoining hallway. At the far end of the hallway was a man-sized scientific instrument, with three of the batteries they had seen at the entrance attached to it. Selak looked at the machine, and tilted his head to the side.

“So what does this—” Selak jumped, back as the machine sprung to life, releasing a flurry of sparks into the air as its metal innards ground together filling the hallway with the pounding drumbeat from before.

“It is an industrial-grade pestle.” Torva shouted over the din, “It is used for crushing medicines that are stored as minerals, but administered as powders!”

“So this is what’s been making the pounding?” Selak shouted back.

“It would seem so,” Torva replied as the two rounded a corner, “But if that is the case then where is—” Torva stopped midsentence.

“Well…” Selak cleared his throat… “Fuck…”

The man was shirtless, exposing his grey skin under the dull fluorescent lights. He was propped up against the wall, a recorder in one hand and a pistol in the other. His shoulder-length greying hair did little to conceal the olive-sized hole in his head, a wound filled with a grey-black mixture of dried blood and congealed brain.

Torva knelt down beside him.

“How long has he been like this?” Selak asked.

Torva shook his head, “Difficult to say given his mutations. Several years at a minimum.”

Selak reached for the recorder in Markov’s hands and rested his finger on the play button. He glanced at Torva, who nodded solemnly.

If you’re listening to this… well… If you’re listening to this than I guess you can see for yourself what’s happened. Markov’s voice was raspy and far weaker than before, as if every word was a challenge for him to force out, I… I found a cure for the Pherendalin problem. I’ve developed an injection to make my body fold proteins differently. I’d essentially be able to produce Pherendalin naturally. I’d need semi-regular injections, but I’d be able to make a lifetime’s supply with just the materials in the lab.

I’d be cured… Markov let out a soft sob.

But I know that I can’t do that. I know what I’m like unsedated. My anger isn’t a flame in my chest anymore; it’s a wildfire, uncontrollable and deadly. I wouldn’t be able to return to polite society. I wouldn’t be able to return anywhere.

Markov cleared his throat. I am done fighting the inevitable. Out of the corner of my eyes, I still see my brothers and sisters, but they are no longer angry. They are calling me home.

I realize that these are my last words. Another sob escaped from Markov, “So I guess… I guess I should make it count.” A weak chuckle. “I remember back – was it weeks? Months? Maybe even years ago, when Regis suggested we take what was left of the Pherendalin and go on a killing rampage. Get to the border and kill as many Myrorans as we could before the sun cooked us alive. Markov let out a wet hacking cough.

I don’t regret telling him no. And I hate the Myrorans. I hate them so damn much. But more than anything else…

I hate the war. I hate what it made this broken world into. An orgy of blood and violence.

Whoever you are. Thank you for listening to my story. The story of my brothers. Do not let it die here. Let it be free. This war is a cancer on the land. Do not take part in it. Bring it to an end. Markov let out a weak chuckle and flicked off the pistol’s safety. I guess that’s all I have to say. It’s time for me to move on to the next life. I hope that when I get there, I’ll get to see the sun again. Or, at the very least, I hope that it’s warm.

The recorder clicked off, Selak and Torva glanced at each other.

“What now?” Torva asked.

“Now,” Selak sighed, “Now, I think it’s time to head home.”

***

It took the artist and the scientist nearly a dozen trips to get everything they needed from the tower. Together they sorted through the medical supplies, dragged out the most functional machines and batteries, sorted through the remnants of the textbooks, and pried as many armloads of iron bars as they could from the prison cells.

The prison incinerator was broken beyond repair. So as Torva removed the last of its functional parts, Selak returned to Markov’s body and carried him away from the lab. The emaciated corpse was uncomfortably light in the artist’s arms as he walked out of the cave into the desert night.

As Torva sealed away the last of the supplies in the Land Whale’s storage, Selak found a rocky outcropping at the base of the mural he had been painting earlier, where he laid out pieces of dried wood, rubber, and strips of old bandages from the tower. He laid down Markov’s body, and sprinkled it with gasoline, before igniting a match and pressing it against his dried skin. It ignited instantly, the crimson flames illuminating the mural like a flare.

“Did the others approve your appropriation of the Whale’s gasoline?” Torva asked as he approached from behind.

“They can take it out of my next paycheck,” Selak replied, “Markov said he wanted to be warm, I think we should honor that.”

Torva nodded, and for a moment the two stared in silence at the crackling flames.

“You have been uncharacteristically quiet since we found him.” Torva observed.

“I thought you’d be celebrating.” Selak replied.

“I like to think that I am not as cold as the metal exo-suit lets on.”

Selak sighed, “It feels… hollow.”

“What does?”

“Tonight.” Selak said, “Everything we learned. The mutants broke free, they escaped their imprisonment, but still they all died. They never got to be free again. Even Markov, he kept his sanity all those weeks alone, even managed to find the cure. But then he killed himself for the benefit of people who will never know his sacrifice. ”

“What about the away party?” Torva suggested,

“It’s been years, Tor. If they ever came back they would have moved Markov’s body. They’re either dead or living in a cave somewhere in fear of the sun.”

Torva rested a hand on his friend’s shoulder. “There were good things about today.”

“Such as…?”

“The batteries we took will be useful to us for years to come.” Torva replied, “The medical supplies will save lives in every town we come across for the next month. The textbooks we salvaged will make worthy additions to the libraries in Dura. And that is to say nothing of the value of the scrap we took from the prison cells.”

Selak shook his head, “Forgive me if I still feel sad.”

“I would never hold that against you,” Torva replied, as he walked away from the pyre, “After all, it is your nature.”

---

If you’re of the mind to listen, there is a story in the Durante Desert. A tale of junkers and jailbirds, love and loss, brotherhood and blood. A story of a broken world and its denizens. A story of murder and manipulation, of greed and guilt, of hedonism and heartbreak. A story of those who gave their lives for causes greater than themselves and those who lost their lives for reasons they couldn’t comprehend. A story of exploration and exploitation.

A story as dark as the desert night.

�� But as bright as the sunrise that comes after.

Notes on the Scrap Hounds

As said in the opening, the world of the Scrap Hounds was a result of a five-part collaboration. The five of us (in alphabetical order) were Talia Loeb, Derek Mull, Karlo Panganiban, Miles Rodgers, and myself. I won’t try and piece together who is responsible for what or whose vision is most clearly represented.

Each of us created a character for the Scrap Hounds that we would take creative control over. Torva was designed by Miles Rodgers and Selak by myself. If you want to read up on how Torva met Selak and some of their early adventurers, let me know and I’ll see about asking Miles to let me put up a few of his stories on here.

I have a few extra short stories set in this world that I may put up just for the hell of it, but I should specify that they’re all 2-4 pages, nothing on the scale of The Tower.

Champagne – the bubbly wine – is referenced several times in the story. I went back and forth as to whether or not to change it since this story takes place in a world where the Champagne region of France never existed. I eventually decided that it wasn’t a linguistic rabbit hole worth going down. They drink Champagne in Durante. They also speak English. I offer neither excuse nor apology.

#tim carroll #fiction #short story #scrap hounds #prose

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bleep-blop-lizard-hop · 7 years

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Femslash February 2018 #1

Well here you go, my first entry for Femslash February of twentyGAYteen! Technically this was a last minute Christmas story idea that I had loooong after Christmas is over, but better late than never I guess. Enjoy!

@idemandaspinoff Especially written with you in mind, my friend =)

Jenny’s first Christmas in 13 Paternoster Row was significantly different compared to her previous experiences as a child. Instead of being with her family in their small dingy tenement flat, she was now co-inhabiting a large luxurious townhouse with an ancient lizard woman from the dawn of time. Ever since her parents threw her out into the streets after they discovered her “preferences in companionship”, Jenny had spent several Christmases desperately huddling inside a hovel to protect herself from the severe winter weather, while fighting hunger and disease. Fortunately, things eventually changed when a fateful series of events led to her being rescued from the squalor of homelessness by a Silurian called Madame Vastra, who begrudgingly hired Jenny to be her resident maid at the urgings of a strange man known as the Doctor. Jenny was utmost grateful to have a roof over her head once again, but it was difficult to adjust in the beginning due to the fact that her new reptilian housemate was the equivalent of a raging racist, towards humans at least, and would always treat her like an inferior animal. The Silurian had also loudly expressed her intense disdain regarding the human holiday of Christmas, which was the reason why Jenny had opted to celebrate it privately in her own room with a miniature Christmas tree, some tinsel, candles, and cookies that she bought from the local bakery. This year, however, it was the complete opposite as the rocky relationship between Jenny and Vastra gradually became smoother to the point where Vastra finally granted Jenny her permission to openly practice the traditions of Christmas. So with the entire house freely at her disposal, it was with great gusto that Jenny dedicated all of her time and energy to setting up the necessary decorations on Christmas Eve. Firstly, she erected a real genuine Norwegian Spruce tree in the middle of the sitting room before strewning it with abundant ornaments and tinsel. Secondly, she then got to work hanging intricately woven wreaths on the walls of the house, attaching stockings to the fireplace, and lining the whole length of the stairway banister with shiny glittering garland. Next, she went into the kitchen to mix batter from scratch for cookies, and popped them into the oven before heading off to another task. The last remaining thing on her list was to hang a piece of mistletoe at the very top of the living room doorway, which she was able to accomplish using a wooden ladder and a hammer. Jenny smiled triumphantly as she looked around at everything she did to successfully create a proper festive and joyous atmosphere in their usually drab home. Fully satisfied, Jenny then figured that she deserved a reward and walked back into the kitchen for a glass of delicious, refreshing eggnog.

It was close to noon when Madame Vastra herself emerged from her bedroom, adorned in her typical attire consisting of a sumptuous dark purple taffeta gown with black lace trimmings that was well suited for a lady of her stature, and began to make her way downstairs to the ground floor. Moving down along the stairway, the keen-eyed detective’s attention soon got caught on the vast array of jubilant decorations that was displayed throughout the house; Bright tinsel, green wreaths, golden bells, red bows and holly, it was unlike anything that the culturally unaware Silurian had ever seen before. Truth be told, Vastra had no idea what to expect when she gave Jenny her consent to beautify the house for Christmas, but was nonetheless delightfully curious at what she found that morning. She was also greatly pleased by all the visual evidence of her young maid’s stellar work ethic, as she was most certain that Jenny had been awake since the crack of dawn to get everything in correct ready order. Vastra then reached the bottom of the stairs just in time to spot Jenny as she was leaving the kitchen, and immediately proceeded to approach her.

“I see that you’ve been awfully busy this morning, Miss Flint,” said Vastra genially, which was a marked improvement from her earlier hostility toward the human girl. “I must say that I’m rather impressed.”

Jenny was quick to greet her mistress with a warm smile, and replied, “Aye, and good morning to you, ma’am! I’ve already put the kettle on in the kitchen and tea should be ready any minute now.” Suddenly, for a brief moment, the girl’s cheerful demeanor faltered as she nervously bit her lip and fiddled with her fingers as if contemplating something. There was a note of reserved hopefulness in her tone when she said, “If you don’t mind me asking, ma’am…..what do you think of the Christmas tree I brought?”

Vastra merely responded by slightly tilting her head aside and raising a hairless eyeridge in puzzlement at her maid’s question, before following Jenny into the sitting room where the fully bedecked Christmas tree was standing in all its splendid glory.

After soaking in the dazzling sight, Vastra then turned to Jenny and regretfully spoke,“Hmm, well, I must admit that I really don’t have the first clue as to what dictates a proper, or improper Christmas tree.” The Silurian could see the acute desire for her validation clearly written on Jenny’s face, and decided to try her best anyway. “However, from what I can observe of it, this particular tree is of the ideal height, with proportional symmetry throughout its body, and possesses a faintly pleasant aroma of spruce. I will also add that you, Miss Flint, have a very keen eye when it comes to decorating and the strategic placement of ornaments for maximum aesthetic beauty,” concluded Vastra while giving Jenny a broad, indulgent smile.

“Thank you….I’m so glad you like it, ma’am,” proclaimed Jenny who was practically beaming with pure joy at receiving her mistress’s approval. She had prided her haggling abilities in order to get the tree for a good bargain at the market. “ This would’ve never happened if you didn’t allow me to…..I’ve missed this, Christmas and everything.”

A wistful expression flitted across Jenny’s face as she found herself reminiscing about old memories of long gone Christmases from her distant childhood past. Jenny’s parents were deeply religious, god-fearing people who raised their brood of children with a strict and disciplinary hand. Christmas was the sole exception, however, as it was always the one time of year where her parents became more lenient and affectionate with their children in the spirit of the holidays. Jenny and her siblings would spend an entire day crafting makeshift ornaments with various spare materials that they scavenged from around the house, which they then hung on the modest sized Christmas tree that their father would bring home. They also had to improvise by using their own dirty tattered socks as stockings, but it never failed to excite them when jumping out of bed on Christmas morning to discover that their socks had been stuffed with treats of tangerine and peppermint candy. Soon, the real fun began with the arrival of numerous different relatives who would come bearing gifts, food, and interesting stories. All packed tightly in the Flint’s small tenement apartment, Jenny’s family feasted and drank the night away while uniting their collective voices into loudly singing Christmas carols, with varying degrees of pitch quality. Although her family didn’t possess much wealth, it was Christmas that provided them with an opportunity to simply forget about their worries and celebrate the positive things in their lives. A painful aching sensation occured within Jenny’s heart as she remembered the simpler, happier times of her former life before losing everything that she knew and loved. It was too late to change the past, and the scars will remain forever permanent.

Expertly sensing her young maid’s somber mood, Vastra reached over to gently hold her hand and said, “Oh my dear girl, who am I to play the….”, the Silurian momentarily paused to search for the right term before continuing with, “.... Scrooge, and prevent you from celebrating your own sacred holiday? I will apologize for my misguided and prejudicial remarks about your human customs of Christmas in the past.” Vastra’s gaze never left Jenny with every word that she spoke, as she was genuinely remorseful and willing to make amends. “ I’ve learned the error of my ways, and only want you to be happy in your festivities.”

Visibly touched by her mistress’s kind words of reassurance, Jenny was able to produce a watery smile as she replied,“Thank you, ma’am, you have no idea how much this means to me! Let me go to the kitchen and pour you a cup of tea with breakfast, eh.”

Before Jenny could step foot outside the sitting room, Vastra commanded her stop after noticing something peculiar on the doorway.

“Not so fast, Miss Flint….,” exclaimed Vastra, who then moved forward and craned her neck to get a better view of the doorway. “That is mistletoe, if I’m not mistaken?”

Jenny’s eyes subsequently followed Vastra’s line of sight before she answered,“Umm….er, y-yes it is, ma’am.”

“Mmm, how very interesting…..the Doctor once told me about your people’s strange tradition of engaging in romantic physical contact under these mistletoe,” remarked a newly intrigued Vastra, whose curiosity prompted her to ask Jenny, “Why is that exactly?”

“I-I don't really know, ma’am, that’s just how things have always been done,” responded Jenny to the best of her ability, being not quite sure of it herself. Suddenly realizing what the presence of mistletoe entailed, Jenny hastily scrambled to explain her mistake. “ I….God, that was bloody stupid of me to put that up there…..It’s not as if anybody in this house is going to walk underneath it….Except for us, you and me, I reckon,”acknowledged Jenny in a quiet tone, her mouth becoming surprisingly dry.

Confused by her maid’s strange behavior, Vastra tilted her head at an angle and inquired, “Miss Flint, are you trying to say that this rule doesn’t apply to two women standing under the mistletoe?”

A part of Jenny knew that the liberally inclined Silurian would ask that question, coming from an exceptionally more tolerant and open-minded society that held none of the Victorian stigma against same-sex relationships. Ever since Jenny had confessed to Vastra about her “preferences in companionship”, the lizard woman would often express her frustration at how backwards and foolish the rest of humanity was to be offended by something as trivial as homosexual love. Although Vastra had already proven herself to be a trustworthy ally, homosexuality was still a highly sensitive subject that Jenny would prefer to avoid discussing with her employer.

“I...um...that...Aye, ma’am, it’s simply unheard of, I’m afraid,” Jenny haltingly uttered.

“Ah, I should have guessed! You primitive humans and your equally limited definition of love,”Vastra hissed indignantly before boldly declaring, “Poppycock….I suppose that we have no choice, but to start our own tradition and tear down that wholly unnecessary gender barrier!”

“W-What?”

Jenny could hardly believe her ears at what her mistress was suggesting! Here was this ridiculously eccentric lizard woman, who had the absolute gall to demolish centuries of formally established societal conventions in the name of what….sexual equality? Furthermore, what really worried Jenny about this whole scenario, was the fact that Vastra had just basically implied the idea that the two of them should kiss under the mistletoe. Jenny hadn’t forget how much trouble that got her in, the last time she did that with another girl; She had been forced to carry that heavy burden of shame and self-loathing everywhere she went, but she couldn’t stop her relentlessly unnatural attraction to the fairer sex of her species, no matter how hard she tried. Then Madame Vastra came along, and despite her shockingly alien appearance, Jenny had considered her to be extraordinarily beautiful. Indeed, Jenny could feel herself being inexplicably drawn to the mysterious Silurian from the very first moment that they met. The memory of a green, sword-wielding reptilian humanoid charging into an alleyway, and slicing through a gang of violent thugs to rescue Jenny was like something straight out of a fairytale. Jenny’s admiration for Vastra continued to grow with each passing day as she got to learn more about her elusive employer, being able to witness the strength, intelligence, and honesty of her character firsthand. Although Vastra eventually dispelled her anti-mammal prejudices to truly respect Jenny as a human, and accepted her queer identity as a “Tom”, the realist within Jenny was convinced that there was absolutely no chance of Vastra ever reciprocating the same feelings for her. However, now that she know Vastra wouldn’t be opposed to the prospect of kissing her, that caused a small yet precious sliver of hope to form in Jenny’s mind. On the other hand, Jenny was also certain that she wouldn’t be able to handle it if Vastra actually kissed her, and the mere thought of it was enough to make her face blush crimson with embarrassment.

Picking up on her maid’s apparent bewilderment, Vastra acquired a benevolent smile as she moved closer to Jenny’s side, and held onto both her hands.“I want to share this holiday with you, Miss Flint, and it would please me immensely if you could bestow a kiss upon me.,” clarified Vastra in a smoothly earnest tone.“It wouldn’t do us well to defy the bidding of the mistletoe, don’t you agree?”

The Silurian’s superior height enabled her to effectively crowd Jenny within the doorway, whose body was becoming increasingly hot and bothered in her flustered state.

Realizing that she had been trapped between the advances of a lizard woman and a hard place, Jenny had no choice, but to comply with her mistress’s request. “Err, yes, of course….if you’re really sure about this, ma’am,”said Jenny, which earned her an affirmative nod from Vastra who then closed her eyes. Lavishing her parched lips with her tounge, it took Jenny several minutes to muster the courage that allowed her to lean over and plant a quick, chaste kiss onto Vastra’s scaly cheek.“There, was that good enough for you, ma'am?”

“It would seem that you’ve missed your mark, dear girl,”spoke Vastra cryptically with a mischievous gleam in her blue eyes.

“P-Pardon, ma’am?”

Vastra didn’t say a word, but gently raised her hand to the back of Jenny’s neck before suddenly pulling her into a sensuous kiss that could be described as a firm press of their lips. As soon as their mouths made contact, Jenny could’ve sworn that the entire world had abruptly stopped rotating on its axis, along with her heart.The young girl herself was equally as frozen, a wide-eyed expression of pure shock on her face while her muddled brain struggled to register her reptilian mistress’s brazen action. In truth, Jenny had often dreamed about this exact situation during those especially restless nights where her longing for the Silurian would manifest into visual fantasies within her subconscious. They were supposed to only be hopeless fabrications of her imagination, and Jenny would’ve been a fool to label them as more than that. Never in a million years did Jenny expect that Vastra would make such a bold move towards her when she was just a human, seemingly unworthy of the proud Silurian’s attentions; Surely this didn’t mean anything other than a platonically enthusiastic gesture of goodwill for the Christmas holiday. The fog that clouded Jenny’s mind eventually disappeared within minutes, thus allowing her to actually feel how cool and smooth Vastra’s lips were against her own. The wet tip of Vastra’s forked tongue slipped out to briefly tease the entrance of Jenny’s mouth, which resulted in a pleasurable sensation of heat spreading across Jenny’s chest as her eyes fluttered shut, and she began to simply enjoy the moment for what it was. The two women remained in that blissfully intimate position for a little while longer, before Vastra withdrew her head and they became separated.

“That was a rather….enlightening experience,” Vastra surmised, sounding most delighted as she observed her young maid’s countenance. Wearing a charming grin, she then extended her hand to tuck a loose strand of dark hair behind Jenny’s ear, and lightly spoke, “This tradition of kissing under the mistletoe, I think I actually quite like it. We should certainly partake in it again next year, if it’s alright with you, Miss Flint?”

Still considerably lightheaded from the kiss, Jenny could only respond with a vigorous nod of her head, secretly craving to repeat the gratifying experiment with her mistress.

Pleased with that answer, Vastra’s eyes twinkled as she exclaimed,“Excellent! I’ll be looking most forward to that.”

That said, Vastra then exited the sitting room to embark in the direction of the kitchen, leaving a stunned and speechless Jenny standing there in her wake. Slowly, the girl brought up her hand to graze her fingers over her tingling lips, while the warmth of a fire continued to linger within her belly. Realization soon dawned upon her that celebrating Christmas with the lizard woman of Paternoster Row was going to involve one hell of a twist that she never saw coming…..not that she’s complaining, of course.

#västra and jenny #madame vastra #Jenny flint #dw femslash #paternoster gang #Femslash February 2018 #My fanfic #My story #My writings #13 Paternoster Row Oneshots

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talenlee · 7 years

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Here’s a one-part diary, one-part itinerary, one-part aspirational documentation of what I did this past year as best I can explain it and we’ll see how well we go as we go with it. This wrapup is at least in part to look at what I did, but also to try and get a handle on my own feeling of yawning lack of accomplishment. If you didn’t do a lot this year and you get overwhelmed by lists, please don’t read this because it might make you upset. On the other hand if you want a wrapup of the kind of things I do and try to do… well, hey, checkit out.

Writing

I got back into writing daily in July, and did so consistantly throughout the year. Part of what let me get onto that schedule better was the use of a Bullet Journal, a tool I found very handy for tracking my progress as I blogged and recorded my mental health and wellbeing. A material object is very satisfying to handle, so I recommend it to anyone struggling with frantic feelings of impermanence.

Of the things I wrote, it seems the things people were most interested in were the articles on Jace, and my Amerimanga covers, with a late-year run-in for Perry’s Lock story.

Study!

I finished my honours thesis, and did well enough to get an almost-but-not-quite top rating mark. The research was considered interesting enough to serve as the basis of my PhD, which I then applied for, and my application was approved. This was a really harrowing experience – I thought writing and applying would take a few weeks at most, but it took almost two full months of work.

My Honours thesis is listed under my government name so I’m reluctant to share it as is, but the basic gist was to try and tackle the idea that when critically engaging with games, play is a paratext, rather than text. That is, there is no true textual analysis that can be done of play without recognising the input of the player, but, you can examine the play the player brings if you recognise what the player means to the reading. This wound up forming the basis of my Making Fun videos.

Reading!

I don’t read enough, I tell myself, so I did my best to read more. When I found myself reading, I made sure to share it and indulge in it, which helped me focus on reading more. Interestingly when you share reading you’re necessarily framing it, which means you’re sort of explaining it, a thing that made approaching some books a lot easier. I’d wind up at the end of a book realising I’d explained it and understood it, without noticing that’s what I was doing.

The Grasshopper: Life, Games and Utopia, by Bernard Suits

Alien Phenomenology: What It’s Like To Be A Thing, by Ian Bogost

Paratexts: Threshold of Interpretation, by Gerard Geanette

Game Play: Paratextuality in Contemporary Board Games, by Paul Booth

Understanding Media, by Marshall McLuahn (SUPER dense)

I also read some manga and comics, and some of those I’d recommend are:

Sense Art Online

Lumberjanes

Irredeemable

Top 10

I also reread Nation, by Terry Pratchett, which isn’t at all interesting because this is merely one of my favourite books and just one of the best things he ever wrote. Also, one final note to Blades in the Dark, a game book I really liked and makes me very excited.

Robots!

I made a bunch of twitter robots, which are basically an automated way of playing with text. They seem like they’d be harder than they are – and you’d be surprised once you get past a certain threshold how well they do things you forgot you told them they could do, or never realised. You can look at all of them here.

Media!

This year I made a protracted point, as well, to actually watch some TV! That may sound like a really minor thing, but TV these days is such a vast thing that there is some cool stuff there. What’s more, TV you can’t interact with and you can’t be expected to get wrong – which can make it good for relaxation and trying to diminish anxiety. I know I watched all of the first two seasons of American Horror Story back to back while in the grip of The Worries, and you would think that would be distressing but it was kind of the opposite.

This also broadened my palate and gave me more ideas for stories. As a nearly non-stop Youtube watcher as well, I’m already in the market for short, informative videomaking, which I also got into, so longer-form, higher-production stuff – even stuff like just Bob Ross was good to watch.

I also took this chance to catch up on some TV series and movies that are part of ‘the zeitgeist’ that for some reason or another I never really watched. I tried watching more anime, too, which is like TV but you can’t multitask during it, unless you watch it dubbed. And on that note, I watched Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood, dubbed, and didn’t hate it. In fact, my thesis and FMA Brotherhood, as well as the work of Sideways, is what convinced me to try making Youtube videos on the subjects that interest me.

What I’m saying is I have a FMA Brotherhood video in me, but we’ll see how I go with this new editing software. Anyway.

Shirts!

I made at least 36 different t-shirt designs this year – holy nerts, that’s a lot more than I expected. My original goal was something like 1 shirt design per month – and thanks to the practice doing graphic design, I wound up making three a month.

In case you were curious, yes, these don’t really sell.

Playing Games!

I did a lot of work on my backlog of games. At the last accounting, I have 559 games in my Steam Library, and of them I have marked 229 as Completed. Note that to me, a game is completed when I’m done with it – I don’t need to slog through a game that bored me in the first hour.

Making Games!

And here we have an absolute bumper. Partly because my thesis required a lot of game design and partly because I cannot resist the joy of merely making, I spent a lot of time this year creating card and board games, including our first proper release of a board game.

I planned to make a game a month for 2017, based on 2016, and that arc follows here, but.

January – D-73C7, a hidden movement game on cards

February – Chin Music, a memory game of punching

March – Pie Crimes, the prisoner’s dilemma, with cake

April – Dragon’s Favour, a voting game of hidden roles

May – Queer Coding, a cooperative communication game

June – Fabricators, an economy game of 3d printing futuristic factories

July – You Can’t Win, an impossible trick taking game

August – Cafe Romantica, a handsome boys builder game

September – Good Cop, Bear Cop, a hidden identity accuse-em-up

October – Sector 86, a space station builder

November – Escape Code, a bluffing conversation game

December – C-QNS, a pattern matching number game

In addition to this, there were some extra games we released, Push Pins, Nobeard’s Treasure, Skulk, Camp Osum (Alpha) and Yes Chef. In my thesis I had to complete preliminary design for two more games, Mystery Machine and The Coins Of Tarim, and I did prospective work for Kinksame and pushed through stage one of The Comissioner’s Game. I also put out a prototype concept for a VHS-style wrestling game. So far none of these games have proven to be world-beaters, but I’m happy with all of them, in no small part because I love the process of making them. There are stories about each one, stories about how they improved or changed and that may wind up going up over on the main Invincible Ink website.

I also collaborated more and made more games solo. I made D-73C7 entirely on my own (and incidentally, that number is 881,607, in decimal), and continued this with some of our games – Fabricators and You Can’t Win, for example, were entirely solo projects. Yet at the same time, this year featured Skulk, which has art by Alex Zandra, Sector 86 uses some of our first paid stock art, and Cafe Romantica is a game whose entire visual aesthetic is made by Fox.

In addition to this, games that were complete in 2017, but not released include LFG (releasing Cancon 2018), Black Jack’s Dungeon, Bag O Pipes, Domains of Meh, and Winston’s Archive. There were also revisions and second editions for Crowdfund This, Murder Most Fowl and Chin Music. As I write this, in another window, I have a document open for what I’m hoping might be yet another complete game, which I’m super excited to get my hands on.

Anything Else?

I attended six conventions this year – Cancon, Comic-Gong, SMASH, MOAB, GaymerX and LFG, with varying degrees of success. Cancon was an absolute corker, as was Comic-Gong, with GaymerX surprising us with their interest in our ares, and MOAB and LFG a bit more low-key. Still, contact was made with vendors and FLGS, so here’s hoping going forwards there will be more.

I tweeted a lot, and had a handful of tweets go viral, including a new Most Viral tweet of mine, about Vincent Price. This year that was less annoying – the new twitter feature ‘mute this conversation’ does its job.

Emotionality!

This year featured a few big changes for me. One of them is that I spent some time this year making the conscious decision to minimise my interaction with people who actively make me feel bad, and to instead focus my emotional energy on improving the lives of people I really care about. Something in my family life has come up that I simply cannot deprioritise – it’s too important – and that means that I’ve had to ask myself if the emotional distress of a stranger is really my business, even if I do want to live in a world where people will randomly be kind to you. I acknowledged that there are some people, even queer people, who are just jerks, and I don’t need to spend my time listening to and ceding to them, because they are not immune to basic social consequences. I still take the hit when I can, as my privilege armours me pretty well.

I’ve taken to offering random instances of kindness to people, as best I can, to simply tell people hey, here’s a reminder the world doesn’t suck so bad, and being okay when they drop it.

I admitted to some of my trauma. I opened up and shared with some people about my stress. I watched as my parents recognised that their best intentions have had problems in both my life and my sister’s life and started to learn how to forgive them. And I started to face things about myself that make me miserable and sad and feel inadequate, and start to try and develop a framework for them.

Here’s the big thing: A member of my family is getting divorced. It is not a nice divorce. There are kids involved. Abuse is involved. This sucks. This straight up sucks on toast. There is no cutesy way around it.

What’s next?

Tune in tomorrow.

The 2017 Self-Examination Roundup Here's a one-part diary, one-part itinerary, one-part aspirational documentation of what I did this past year as best I can explain it and we'll see how well we go as we go with it.

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voxrepulsori · 7 years

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The French Origins of « You Will Not Replace Us »

THE NEW YORKER | 04.12.2017 | Thomas Chatterton Williams

The European thinkers behind the white-nationalist rallying cry. The Château de Plieux, a fortified castle on a hilltop in the Gascony region of southwestern France, overlooks rolling fields speckled with copses and farmhouses. A tricolor flag snaps above the worn beige stone. The northwest tower, which was built in the fourteenth century, offers an ideal position from which to survey invading hordes. Inside the château’s cavernous second-story study, at a desk heavy with books, the seventy-one-year-old owner of the property, Renaud Camus, sits at an iMac and tweets dire warnings about Europe’s demographic doom. On the sweltering June afternoon that I visited the castle, Camus—no relation to Albert—wore a tan summer suit and a tie. Several painted self-portraits hung in the study, multiplying his blue-eyed gaze. Camus has spent most of his career as a critic, novelist, diarist, and travel essayist. The only one of his hundred or so books to be translated into English, “Tricks” (1979), announces itself as “a sexual odyssey— man-to-man,” and includes a foreword by Roland Barthes. The book describes polyglot assignations from Milan to the Bronx. Allen Ginsberg said of it, “Camus’s world is completely that of a new urban homosexual; at ease in half a dozen countries.” In recent years, though, Camus’s name has been associated less with erotica than with a single poignant phrase, le grand remplacement. In 2012, he made this the title of an alarmist book. Native “white” Europeans, he argues, are being reverse-colonized by black and brown immigrants, who are flooding the Continent in what amounts to an extinction-level event. “The great replacement is very simple,” he has said. “You have one people, and in the space of a generation you have a different people.” The specific identity of the replacement population, he suggests, is of less importance than the act of replacement itself. “Individuals, yes, can join a people, integrate with it, assimilate to it,” he writes in the book. “But peoples, civilizations, religions—and especially when these religions are themselves civilizations, types of society, almost States—cannot and cannot even want to . . . blend into other peoples, other civilizations.” Camus believes that all Western countries are faced with varying degrees of “ethnic and civilizational substitution.” He points to the increasing prevalence of Spanish, and other foreign languages, in the United States as evidence of the same phenomenon. Although his arguments are scarcely available in translation, they have been picked up by right-wing and white-nationalist circles throughout the English-speaking world. In July, Lauren Southern, the Canadian alt-right Internet personality, posted, on YouTube, a video titled “The Great Replacement”; it has received more than a quarter of a million views. On greatreplacement.com, a Web site maintained anonymously, the introductory text declares, “The same term can be applied to many other European peoples both in Europe and abroad . . . where the same policy of mass immigration of non-European people poses a demographic threat. Of all the different races of people on this planet, only the European races are facing the possibility of extinction in a relatively near future.” The site announces its mission as “spreading awareness” of Camus’s term, which, the site’s author concludes, is more palatable than a similar concept, “white genocide.” (A search for that phrase on YouTube yields more than fifty thousand videos.) “I don’t have any genetic conception of races,” Camus told me. “I don’t use the word ‘superior.’ ” He insisted that he would feel equally sad if Japanese culture or “African culture” were to disappear because of immigration. On Twitter, he has quipped, “The only race I hate is the one knocking on the door.” Camus’s partner arrived in the study with a silver platter, and offered fruitcake and coffee. Camus, meanwhile, told me about his “red-pill moment”—an alt-right term, derived from a scene in the film “The Matrix,” for the decision to become politically enlightened. As a child, he said, he was a “xenophile,” who was delighted to see foreign tourists flocking to the thermal baths near his home, in the Auvergne. In the late nineties, he began writing domestic travel books, commissioned by the French government. The work took him to the department of Hérault, whose capital is Montpellier. Although Camus was familiar with France’s heavily black and Arab inner suburbs, or banlieues, and their subsidized urban housing projects, known as cités, his experience in Hérault floored him. Travelling through medieval villages, he said, “you would go to a fountain, six or seven centuries old, and there were all these North African women with veils!” A demographic influx was clearly no longer confined to France’s inner suburbs and industrial regions; it was ubiquitous, and it was transforming the entire country. Camus’s problem was not, as it might be for many French citizens, that the religious symbolism of the veil clashed with some of the country’s most cherished secularist principles; it was that the veil wearers were permanent interlopers in Camus’s homeland. He became obsessed with the diminishing ethnic purity of Western Europe. Camus supports the staunchly anti-immigrant politician Marine Le Pen. He denied, however, that he was a member of the “extreme right,” saying that he was simply one of many voters who “wanted France to stay French.” In Camus’s view, Emmanuel Macron, the centrist liberal who handily defeated Le Pen in a runoff, is synonymous with the “forces of remplacement.” Macron, he noted acidly, “went to Germany to compliment Mme. Merkel on the marvellous work she did by taking in one million migrants.” Camus derides Macron, a former banker, as a representative of “direct Davos-cracy”—someone who thinks of people as “interchangeable” units within a larger social whole. “This is a very low conception of what being human is,” he said. “People are not just things. They come with their history, their culture, their language, with their looks, with their preferences.” He sees immigration as one aspect of a nefarious global process that renders obsolete everything from cuisine to landscapes. “The very essence of modernity is the fact that everything—and really everything—can be replaced by something else, which is absolutely monstrous,” he said. Camus takes William F. Buckley, Jr.,’s injunction to stand “athwart history, yelling Stop” to the furthest extent possible, and he can be recklessly unconcerned about backing up his claims. On a recent radio appearance, he took a beating from Hervé le Bras, a director emeritus at the Institut National d’Études Démographiques, who said that Camus’s proclamations about ethnic substitution were based on wildly inflated statistics about the number of foreigners entering France. Afterward, Camus breezily responded on Twitter: “Since when, in history, did a people need ‘science’ to decide whether or not it was invaded and occupied?” Camus has become one of the most cited figures on the right in France. He is a regular interlocutor of such mainstream intellectuals as Alain Finkielkraut, the conservative Jewish philosopher, who has called Camus “a great writer,” and someone who has “forged an expression that is heard all the time and everywhere.” Camus also has prominent critics: the essayist and novelist Emmanuel Carrère, a longtime friend, has publicly reproached him, writing that “the argument ‘I’m at home here, not you’ ” is incompatible with “globalized justice.” Mark Lilla, the Columbia historian and scholar of the mentality of European reactionaries, described Camus as “a kind of connective tissue between the far right and the respectable right.” Camus can play the role of “respectable” reactionary because his opposition to multicultural globalism is plausibly high-minded, principally aesthetic, even well-mannered—a far cry from the manifest brutality of the skinheads and the tattooed white nationalists who could put into action the xenophobic ideas expressed in “Le Grand Remplacement.” (At a rally in Warsaw on November 11th, white-nationalist demonstrators brandished signs saying “Pray for an Islamic Holocaust” and “Pure Poland, White Poland.”) When I asked Camus whether he considered me—a black American living in Paris with a French wife and a mixed-race daughter—part of the problem, he genially replied, “There is nothing more French than an American in Paris!” He then offered me the use of his castle when he and his partner next went on a vacation. Although Camus presents his definition of “Frenchness” as reasonable and urbane, it is of a piece with a less benign perspective on ethnicity, Islam, and territory which has circulated in his country for decades. Never the sole preserve of the far right, this view was conveyed most bluntly in a 1959 letter, from Charles de Gaulle to his confidant Alain Peyrefitte, which advocates withdrawal from French Algeria: It is very good that there are yellow Frenchmen, black Frenchmen, brown Frenchmen. They prove that France is open to all races and that she has a universal mission. But [it is good] on condition that they remain a small minority. Otherwise, France would no longer be France. We are, after all, primarily a European people of the white race, Greek and Latin culture, and the Christian religion. De Gaulle then declares that Muslims, “with their turbans and djellabahs,” are “not French.” He asks, “Do you believe that the French nation can absorb 10 million Muslims, who tomorrow will be 20 million and the day after 40 million?” If this were to happen, he concludes, “my village would no longer be called Colombey-les-Deux-Églises, but Colombey-les-Deux-Mosquées!” Such worry about Muslims has been present across Europe at least since the turn of the twentieth century, when the first “guest workers” began arriving from former French colonies and from Turkey. In 1898 in Britain, Winston Churchill warned of “militant Mahommedanism,” and Enoch Powell’s 1968 Rivers of Blood speech alleged that immigration had caused a “total transformation to which there is no parallel in a thousand years of English history.” Anxiety about immigrants of color has long been present in the United States, especially in states along the Mexican border. This feeling became widespread after 9/11, and has only intensified with subsequent terrorist acts by Islamists, the Great Recession, and the election of the first black President. Meanwhile, white populations across the world are stagnant or dwindling. In recent years, white-nationalist discourse has emerged from the recesses of the Internet into plain sight, permeating the highest reaches of the Trump Administration. Attorney General Jeff Sessions and the White House senior adviser Stephen Miller endorse dramatic reductions in both legal and illegal immigration. The President’s former chief strategist, Steve Bannon, has returned to his post as the executive chairman of the far-right Web site Breitbart. In a 2014 speech at the Vatican, Bannon praised European “forefathers” who kept Islam “out of the world.” President Trump, meanwhile, has made the metaphor of immigrant invasion literal by vowing to build a wall. In Europe, which in recent years has absorbed millions of migrants fleeing wars in the Middle East or crossing the Mediterranean from Africa, opposition to immigration is less a cohesive ideology than a welter of reactionary ideas and feelings. Xenophobic nationalism can be found on both the left and the right. There is not even unanimity on the superiority of Judeo-Christian culture: some European nationalists express a longing for ancient pagan practices. Anti-immigrant thinkers also cannot agree on a name for their movement. Distrust of multiculturalism and a professed interest in preserving European “purity” is often called “identitarianism,” but many prominent anti-immigrant writers avoid that construction. Camus told me that he refused to play “the game” of identity politics, and added, “Do you think that Louis XIV or La Fontaine or Racine or Châteaubriand would say, ‘I’m identitarian?’ No, they were just French. And I’m just French.” Shortly after Trump’s Inauguration, Richard Spencer, the thirty-nine-year-old white nationalist who has become the public face of the American alt-right, was sucker-punched by a protester while being interviewed on a street corner in Washington, D.C. A video of the incident went viral, but little attention was paid to what Spencer said on the clip. “I’m not a neo-Nazi,” he declared. “They kind of hate me, actually.” In order to deflect the frequent charge that he is a racist, he defines himself with the very term that Camus rejects: identitarian. The word sidesteps the question of racial superiority and co-opts the left’s inclusive language of diversity and its critique of forced assimilation in order to reclaim the right to difference—for whites. Identitarianism is a distinctly French innovation. In 1968, in Nice, several dozen far-right activists created the Research and Study Group for European Civilization, better known by its French acronym, GRECE. The think tank eventually began promoting its ideas under the rubric the Nouvelle Droite, or the New Right. One of its founders, and its most influential member, was Alain de Benoist, a hermetic aristocrat and scholar who has written more than a hundred books. In “View from the Right” (1977), Benoist declared that he and other members of GRECE considered “the gradual homogenization of the world, advocated and realized by the two-thousand-year-old discourse of egalitarian ideology, to be an evil.” The group expressed allegiance to “diversity” and “ethnopluralism”—terms that sound politically correct to American ears but had a different meaning in Benoist’s hands. In “Manifesto for a European Renaissance” (1999), he argued: The true wealth of the world is first and foremost the diversity of its cultures and peoples. The West’s conversion to universalism has been the main cause of its subsequent attempt to convert the rest of the world: in the past, to its religion (the Crusades); yesterday, to its political principles (colonialism); and today, to its economic and social model (development) or its moral principles (human rights). Undertaken under the aegis of missionaries, armies, and merchants, the Westernization of the planet has represented an imperialist movement fed by the desire to erase all otherness. From this vantage point, both globalized Communism and globalized capitalism are equally suspect, and a “citizen of the world” is an agent of imperialism. When Benoist writes that “humanity is irreducibly plural” and that “diversity is part of its very essence,” he is not supporting the idea of a melting pot but of diversity in isolation: all Frenchmen in one territory and all Moroccans in another. It is a nostalgic and aestheticized view of the world that shows little interest in the complex economic and political forces that provoke migration. Identitarianism is a lament against change made by people fortunate enough to have been granted, through the arbitrary circumstance of birth, citizenship in a wealthy liberal democracy. Benoist’s peculiar definition of “diversity” has allowed him to take some unexpected positions. He simultaneously defends a Muslim immigrant’s right to wear the veil and opposes the immigration policies that allowed her to settle in France in the first place. In an e-mail, he told me that immigration constitutes an undeniably negative phenomenon, in part because it turns immigrants into victims, by erasing their roots. He continued, “The destiny of all the peoples of the Third World cannot be to establish themselves in the West.” In an interview in the early nineties with Le Monde, he declared that the best way to show solidarity with immigrants is by increasing trade with the Third World, so that developing countries can become “self-sufficient” enough to dissuade their citizens from seeking better lives elsewhere. These countries, he added, needed to find their own paths forward, and not follow the tyrannizing templates of the World Bank and the I.M.F. Benoist told me that, in France’s Presidential election, in May, he voted not for Marine Le Pen but for the far-left candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who shares his contempt for global capitalism. Benoist’s writing often echoes left-wing thinkers, especially the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, who wrote of “hegemony”—or the command that a regime can wield over a population by controlling its culture. In “Manifesto for a European Renaissance,” Benoist argues that white Europeans should not just support restrictive immigration policies; they should oppose such diluting ideologies as multiculturalism and globalism, taking seriously “the premise that ideas play a fundamental role in the collective consciousness.” In a similar spirit, Benoist has promoted a gramscisme de droite—cultural opposition to the rampaging forces of Hollywood and multinational corporations. The French, he has said, should retain their unique traditions and not switch to “a diet of hamburgers.” Despite Benoist’s affinity for some far-left candidates, “Manifesto for a European Renaissance” has become a revered text for the extreme right across Western Europe, in the U.S., and even in Russia. The crackpot Russian philosopher Aleksandr Dugin, who promotes the ethnopluralist doctrine “Eurasianism,” has flown to Paris to meet Benoist. “I consider him to be the foremost intellectual in Europe today,” Dugin told interviewers in 2012. Earlier this year, John Morgan, an editor of Counter-Currents, a white-nationalist publishing house based in San Francisco, posted an online essay about the indebtedness of the American alt-right to European thought. He described Benoist and GRECE’s achievement as “a towering edifice of thought unparalleled anywhere else on the Right since the Conservative Revolution in Germany of the Weimar era.” Although Benoist claims not to be affiliated with the alt-right—or even to understand “what Richard Spencer can know or have learned from my thoughts”—he has travelled to Washington, D.C., to speak at the National Policy Institute, a white-nationalist group run by Spencer, and he has sat for long interviews with Jared Taylor, the founder of the virulently white-supremacist magazine American Renaissance. In one exchange, Taylor, who was educated in France, asked Benoist how he saw himself “as different from identitarians.” Benoist responded, “I am aware of race and of the importance of race, but I do not give to it the excessive importance that you do.” He went on, “I am not fighting for the white race. I am not fighting for France. I am fighting for a world view. . . . Immigration is clearly a problem. It gives rise to much social pathologies. But our identity, the identity of the immigrants, all the identities in the world have a common enemy, and this common enemy is the system that destroys identities and differences everywhere. This system is the enemy, not the Other.” Benoist may not be a dogmatic thinker, but, for white people who want to think explicitly in terms of culture and race, his work provides a lofty intellectual framework. These disciples, instead of calling for an “Islamic holocaust,” can argue that rootedness in one’s homeland matters, and that immigration, miscegenation, and the homogenizing forces of neoliberal market economies collude to obliterate identities that have taken shape over hundreds of years—just as relentless development has decimated the environment. Benoist’s romantic-sounding ideas can be cherry-picked and applied to local political resentments. The writer Raphaël Glucksmann, a prominent critic of the French far right, told me that such selective appropriations have given Benoist “a huge authority among white nationalists and Fascists everywhere in the world.” Glucksmann recently met me for coffee near his home, which is off the Rue du Faubourg SaintDenis, one of the most ethnically diverse thoroughfares in Paris. The Nouvelle Droite, Glucksmann argued, adopted a traditionally German, tribal way of conceiving identity, which the Germans themselves abandoned after the Second World War. The Nazi theorist Carl Schmitt argued that “all right is the right of a particular Volk.” In a 1932 essay, “The Concept of the Political,” he posed the question that still defines the right-wing mind-set: Who is a people’s friend, and who is an enemy? For Schmitt, to identify one’s enemies was to identify one’s inner self. In another essay, he wrote, “Tell me who your enemy is, and I’ll tell you who you are.” The Nouvelle Droite was fractured, in the nineteen-nineties, by disagreements over what constituted the principal enemy of European identity. If the perceived danger was initially what Benoist described as “the ideology of sameness”—what many in France called the “Coca-Colonization” of the world—the growing presence of African and Arab immigrants caused some members of GRECE to rethink the essence of the conflict. One of the group’s founders, Guillaume Faye, a journalist with a Ph.D. from Sciences-Po, split off and began releasing explicitly racist books. In a 1998 tract, “Archeofuturism,” he argued, “To be a nationalist today is to assign this concept its original etymological meaning, ‘to defend the native members of a people.’ ” The book, which appeared in English in 2010, argues that “European people” are “under threat” and must become “politically organized for their self-defense.” Faye assures native Frenchmen that their “sub-continental motherland” is “an organic and vital part of the common folk, whose natural and historical territory—whose fortress, I would say—extends from Brest to the Bering Strait.” Faye, like Renaud Camus, is appalled by the dictates of modern statecraft, which define nationality in legal rather than ethnic terms. The liberal American writer Sasha Polakow-Suransky, in his recent book, “Go Back to Where You Came From: The Backlash Against Immigration and the Fate of Western Democracy,” quotes Camus lamenting that “a veiled woman speaking our language badly, completely ignorant of our culture” could declare that she is just as French as an “indigenous” man who is “passionate for Roman churches, and for the verbal and syntactic delicacies of Montaigne and Rousseau, for Burgundy wines, for Proust, and whose family has lived for generations in the same valley.” What appalls Camus, PolakowSuransky notes, is that “legally, if she has French nationality, she is completely correct.” Faye’s work helps to explain the rupture that has emerged in many Western democracies between the mainstream right, which may support strict enforcement of immigration limits but does not inherently object to the presence of Muslims, and the alt-right, which portrays Muslim immigration as an existential threat. In this light, the growing admiration by Western conservatives for the President of Russia, Vladimir Putin, is easier to comprehend. Not only do thinkers like Faye admire Putin as an emblem of proudly heterosexual white masculinity; they fantasize that Russian military might will help create a “Eurosiberian” federation of white ethno-states. “The only hope for salvation in this dark age of ours,” Faye has declared, is “a protected and self-centered continental economic space” that is capable of “curbing the rise of Islam and demographic colonization from Africa and Asia.” In Faye’s 2016 book, “The Colonisation of Europe,” he writes, of Muslims in Europe, “No solution can be found unless a civil war breaks out.” Such revolutionary right-wing talk has now migrated to America. In 2013, Steve Bannon, while he was turning Breitbart into the far right’s dominant media outlet, described himself as “a Leninist.” The reference didn’t seem like something a Republican voter would say, but it made sense to his intended audience: Bannon was signalling that the alt-right movement was prepared to hijack, or even raze, the state in pursuit of nationalist ends. (Bannon declined my request for an interview.) Richard Spencer told me, “I would say that the alt-right in the United States is radically un-conservative.” Whereas the American conservative movement celebrates “the eternal value of freedom and capitalism and the Constitution,” Spencer said, he and his followers were “willing to use socialism in order to protect our identity.” He added, “Many of the countries that lived under Soviet hegemony are actually far better off, in terms of having a protected identity, than Western Europe or the United States.” Spencer said that “clearly racialist” writers such as Benoist and Faye were “central influences” on his own thinking as an identitarian. He first discovered the work of Nouvelle Droite figures in the pages of Telos, an American journal of political theory. Most identitarians have a less scholarly bent. In 2002, a right-wing French insurrectionary, Maxime Brunerie, shot at President Jacques Chirac as he rode down the Champs- Élysées; the political group that Brunerie was affiliated with, Unité Radicale, became known as part of the identitairemovement. In 2004, a group known as the Bloc Identitaire became notorious for distributing soup containing pork to the homeless, in order to exclude Muslims and Jews. It was the sort of puerile joke now associated with alt-right pranksters in America such as Milo Yiannopoulos. Copycat groups began emerging across Europe. In 2009, a Swedish former mining executive, Daniel Friberg, founded, in Denmark, the publishing house Arktos, which is now the world’s largest distributor of far- and alt-right literature. The son of highly educated, left-leaning parents, Friberg grew up in a wealthy suburb of Gothenburg. He embraced right-wing thought after attending a diverse high school, which he described as overrun with crime. In 2016, he told the Daily Beast, “I had been taught to think multiculturalism was great, until I experienced it.” Few European nations have changed as drastically or as quickly as Sweden. Since 1960, it has added one and a half million immigrants to its population, which is currently just under ten million; a nationalist party, the Sweden Democrats, has become the country’s main opposition group. During this period, Friberg began to devour books on European identity—specifically, those of Benoist and Faye, whose key works impressed him as much as they impressed Richard Spencer. When Friberg launched Arktos, he acquired the rights to books by Benoist and Faye and had them translated into Swedish and English. Spencer told me that Arktos “was a very important development” in the international popularization of far-right identitarian thought. Whether or not history really is dialectical, it can be tempting to think that decades of liberal supremacy in Europe have helped give rise to the antithesis of liberalism. In Paris, left-wing intellectuals often seem reluctant to acknowledge that the recent arrival of millions of refugees in Europe, many of them impoverished, poses any complications at all. Such blithe cosmopolitanism, especially when it is expressed by people who can easily shelter themselves from the disruptions caused by globalization, can fuel resentment toward both intellectuals and immigrants. The philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy, who has long embodied élite opinion on the French left, sometimes falls prey to such rhetoric. A 2015 essay, which attempted to allay fears of a refugee crisis in Europe, portrayed Syrian refugees as uniformly virtuous and adaptable: “They are applicants for freedom, lovers of our promised land, our social model, and our values. They are people who cry out ‘Europe! Europe!’ the way millions of Europeans, arriving a century ago on Ellis Island, learned to sing ‘America the Beautiful.’ ” Instead of making the reasonable argument that relatively few Muslim refugees harbor extremist beliefs, Lévy took an absolutist stance, writing that it was pure “nonsense” to be concerned about an increased risk of terrorism. Too often, Lévy fights racism with sentimentalism. Lévy recently met with me at his impeccable apartment, in a sanitized neighborhood near the Champs- Élysées. In our conversation, he offered a more modulated view. “I’m not saying that France should have received all two or three million Syrian refugees,” he said. “Of course, there’s a limited space.” But France had involved itself in Syria’s civil war, by giving support to opponents of the regime, and had a responsibility to help people uprooted by it, he said. Recent debates about European identity, he noted, had left out an important concept: hospitality. “Hospitality means that there is a place—real space, scarce, limited—and that in this place you host some people and you extend a hand.” This did not mean that he wanted an end to borders: “France has some borders, a republican tradition, it is a place. But in this place we have the duty to host. You have to hold the two. A place without hosting would be a shrinking republic. Universal welcoming would be another mistake.” A necessary tension is created between “the infinite moral duty of hospitality and the limited political possibility of welcoming.” When I asked Lévy why the notion of the great replacement had resonated so widely, he dismissed it as a “junk idea.” “The Roman conquest of Gaul was a real modification of the population in France,” he went on. “There was neversomething like an ethnic French people.” Raphaël Glucksmann made a similar critique of the idea of “pure” Frenchness. He observed, “In 1315, you had an edict from the king who said anybody who walks on the soil of France becomes a franc.” This is true, but there is always a threshold at which a quantitative change becomes qualitative; migration was far less extensive in the Middle Ages than it is today. French liberals can surely make a case for immigration without pretending that nothing has changed: a country that in 1900 was almost uniformly Catholic now has more than six million Muslims. The liberal historian Patrick Boucheron, the editor of a recent surprise best-seller that highlights foreign influences on French life throughout the ages, told me that he had little patience for people who bemoan the country’s changing demographics. French people who are struggling today, he said, are victims of unfair economic policies, not Muslims, who still make up only ten per cent of the population. Indeed, only a quarter of France’s population is of immigrant origin—a percentage that, according to Boucheron, has remained stable for four decades. Boucheron sees identitarians as manipulators who have succeeded “in convincing the dominated that their problem is French identity.” For Boucheron, it’s not simply that the great replacement is a cruel idea; it’s also false. “When you oppose their figures—when you say that there were Poles and Italians coming to France in the nineteen-thirties—they say, ‘O.K., but they were Christians,’ ” he said. “So you see that behind identity there’s immigration, and behind immigration there’s hatred of Islam. Eventually, it always comes down to that.” But to deny that recent migration has brought disruptions only helps the identitarians gain traction. A humanitarian crisis has been unfolding in Paris, and it is clearly a novel phenomenon. This summer, more than two thousand African and Middle Eastern migrants were living in street encampments near the Porte de la Chapelle; eventually, the police rounded them up and dispersed them in temporary shelters. “We don’t have enough housing,” the center-right philosopher Pascal Bruckner told me. “The welfare state is at the maximum of its capabilities. We’re broke. And so what we offer to those people is what happens at Porte de la Chapelle.” Many liberals have downplayed the homeless crisis, rather than discuss potential solutions. “We turn a blind eye to this issue, just to look generous,” Bruckner said. At one point in my conversation with Lévy, he flatly declared that France “has no refugees.” Far-right figures, for their part, have relentlessly exploited Paris’s problems on social media, posting inflammatory videos that make it seem like marauding migrants have taken over every street corner. Jean-Yves Camus, a scholar of the far right in France (and no relation to Renaud Camus), told me that there is a problematic lack of candor in the way that liberals describe today’s unidirectional mass movement of peoples. “It depends what you call Frenchness,” he said. “If you think that traditional France, like we used to see in the nineteen-fifties and sixties, should survive and remain, then certainly it will not survive. This is the truth. So I think we have to admit that, contrary to what Lévy says, there has been a change.” But what, exactly, does the notion of “traditional France” imply? The France of de Gaulle—or of Racine— differs in many ways from the France of today, not just in ethnic composition. Renaud Camus recently told Vox that white people in France are living “under menace”—victims of an unchecked foreign assault “as much by black Africa as it is by Northern Islamic Africans.” Yet feminism, Starbucks, the smartphone, the L.G.B.T.Q. movement, the global domination of English, EasyJet, Paris’s loss of centrality in Western cultural life—all of these developments have disrupted what it means “to be French.” The problem with identitarianism isn’t simply that it is nostalgic; it’s that it fixates on ethnicity to the exclusion of all else. The United States is not Western Europe. Not only is America full of immigrants; they are seen as part of what makes America American. Unlike France, the United States has only ever been a nation in the legal sense, even if immigration was long restricted to Europeans, and even if the Founding Fathers organized their country along the bloody basis of what we now tend to understand as white supremacy. The fact remains that, unless you are Native American, it is ludicrous for a resident of the United States to talk about “blood and soil.” And yet the country has nonetheless arrived at a moment when once unmentionable ideas have gone mainstream, and the most important political division is no longer between left and right but between globalist and nationalist. “The so-called New Right never claimed to change the world,” Alain de Benoist wrote to me. Its goal, he said, “was, rather, to contribute to the intellectual debate, to make known certain themes of reflection and thought.” On that count, it has proved a smashing success. Glucksmann summed up the Nouvelle Droite’s thinking as follows: “Let’s just win the cultural war, and then a leader will come out of it.” The belief that a multicultural society is tantamount to an anti-white society has crept out of French salons and all the way into the Oval Office. The apotheosis of right-wing Gramscism is Donald Trump. On August 11th, the Unite the Right procession marched through the campus of the University of Virginia. White-supremacist protesters mashed together Nazi and Confederate iconography while chanting variations of Renaud Camus’s grand remplacement credo: “You will not replace us”; “Jews will not replace us.” Few, if any, of these khaki-clad young men had likely heard of Guillaume Faye, Renaud Camus, or Alain de Benoist. They didn’t know that their rhetoric had been imported from France, like some dusty wine. But they didn’t need to. All they had to do was pick up the tiki torches and light them.

Thomas Chatterton Williams

This article appears in the print edition of the December 4, 2017, issue, with the headline ““You Will Not Replace Us”.”

Thomas Chatterton Williams, a contributing writer for the Times Magazine, is a Holtzbrinck Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin. He is at work on a book about racial identity.

#France #US #USA #Alain de Benoist #Renaud Camus #Guillaume Faye #Identité #identity #idenditarian #Immigration #gramscisme #gramscism

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