#metacarpal assembly

[sw5w]

[ Excited Beeping ]

STAR WARS EPISODE I: The Phantom Menace 01:09:35

[ravenvsfox]

Rockband AU Chapter 14 (Finale)

That's right folks, the concert is coming to an end. As an homage to my long history of andreil tumblr fic, I'm posting this chapter here, as well as on AO3. I sincerely hope I've served the wonderful readers who have stuck with me all this time 🖤

__________

His face doesn’t even register at first. 

Andrew has become desensitized, defused, having spent months expecting Riko in every crowd, and having trained his own stomach not to revolt at the sight of a threat. He has bracing for the worst down to an art form.

But numbness is the antidote to pain, not fear. The fear still comes. A black hole in the mind, extinguishing cells and sucking down energy until everything and everyone feels stretched thin, fluttering, spaghettified. Andrew’s eyes dart to the slope of Neil’s back, and as he watches, the outline of his guarded shoulders turns to water.

Riko’s smile is hateful; his teeth should be red. Where there are ravens, inevitably, there is carrion. Bad omens yield blood. Andrew has never been allowed the luxury of believing otherwise.

Somehow he manages to keep a steady beat, even with his whole body haloed in outrage. A drumstick cracks in half over a crescendo, and he swipes at the spare strapped to his stool like he’s drawing a pistol.

From the corner of his eye, Renee jerks, and he knows her scan of the room has turned Riko over. She’s pumping on the bass pedal like it’s the brake that will halt this car crash. Kevin hasn’t spotted him yet, or he would surely be regressing by now. The music whines like a kicked dog, because Neil has—briefly—stopped singing. He plays it off like he’s giving the mic some room, taking the edge off a high note, letting the audience plug the gap with their cheering.

His panic is well-suppressed, but Andrew knows its shape well. Every time he’s ever held Neil he’s also held his fear.

(Read on AO3)

Another moment passes, impossibly. Their song, their hard-won anthem, Neil’s song, blows around them like a hot air balloon, lifts them precariously into the atmosphere. He can practically feel the furnace at his back, that wobbling little explosion.

It doesn’t stop the nightmare from unfolding. The movie monster progresses beyond the jump scare and into its next phase: pursuit. Riko is approaching the stage.

The crowd parts for him, bowing and gasping, their seams all ripped. It’s so ugly, their bystander fans, unlocking the door so the bad guy can slither inside. He’s known betrayal like this: thoughtless, grey, stunned and tearful to know it’s done wrong.

Riko makes his progress purposefully measured, darkly composed, hands ghosting across the face of the crowd without ever making contact, mouth curled with poorly concealed malice. Against all logic, he is beloved.

If he turns his attention on Neil or Kevin, Andrew will kill him. It’s not a threat but a reality.

Neil is pooled in light, dripping with sweat, inked and scarred and swallowed by the music he has nearly killed himself to produce. As always, he is such a tidy little bullseye. In a tangential sort of way, he can see the appeal—Neil has been such a problem. It’s just that Andrew and Riko disagree on the best way to solve him.

Before the backseat deal, before cops in his hospital room, Neil had all but begged Andrew to let him run away. He had feared exactly this scenario, his new life bunched around him, foxes and monsters assembled in a barrel to be shot.

I’m afraid that someone else will suffer for my pride, he’d said.

Andrew had replied, it’s not pride, it’s trust.

Stupid. Blind. His eyes have been on Neil’s staggering recovery, distracted by the fibres of their lives grafting together, the burgeoning outline of a future that seemed not only possible but probable. But of course Riko wouldn’t be swayed by his family politics. Of course deals, logic, and fairness are meaningless to him. This is a man who shatters metacarpals for sport. 

The song is nearly over now. Noisy and flush, ecstatic, insisting, even with one foot out the door, even with a parasite lurking in the water ahead. 

As Riko tries to breach the stage, the surface tension he encounters is resilient, difficult to pierce. The whole onstage entourage has noticed him now. Several members have stopped playing, and there is some discord as hands slip from strings, Kevin’s, then Matt’s. Andrew has stopped too, waiting for the drawn breath, drawn weapon. Watching for somebody on his side to crumple, like he’s up on the battlements at the beginning of a war. 

It’s Riko’s move.

Andrew sees him nodding subtly at a member of security, senses the sorry shifting of alliances in the wings. Impossible, with the background checks Wymack pulled. Impossible for anyone but a Moriyama. 

Riko reaches coolly into his jacket pocket for something. What does he think he’s going to do, from the centre of a crowd that is on his victim’s side? A long-distance weapon would be childishly obvious even for Riko, and there’s no easy way up onto the stage. 

Not just because of the crowd control barrier, or the scattered members of security who still seem keen on doing their jobs, but because there’s a whole pack of Foxes baring their teeth. As Andrew watches, Matt casually edges a heavy amp further in front of the only open stairway, enclosing their ranks in a circle of equipment. It’s not much, but every defence Riko has to pass through is another second they can use to rally against him.

There’s a flicker of an altercation offstage, the gesturing streak of a tribal tattoo, and Andrew knows Wymack is fighting for them too.

And as Aaron stares worriedly down at Riko, he takes an unthinking half-step in front of Neil. Something in Andrew’s chest hyperextends in a way it never has before. His vision doubles; his mind is torn in half. He stands, trembling, at his drum kit, feeling eyes ping off of him, hearing nothing but blood.

There are enough of them still going that the song is mostly holding its shape, but it barely matters. The crowd is halfway to another riot over the spectacle of Riko Moriyama with his head tilted back, his hands wringing the bars of the barrier. Evermore, vengeful.

We don’t know how to die quietly, Neil is singing.

strength in numbers, now, don’t you agree?

every day you’re not here is a symphony

out for blood, but there’s no more inside of me

spirit so willing, but the flesh ain’t so weak

I dare you, try taking this key from me

always wondered what it took to end dynasties

if you’re the king, I say long live the queen.

He’s snarling his way through the final verse, and Andrew is helpless not to tear his gaze from Riko so he can watch Neil burn like a terrible, incredible effigy. The likeness of a hero, wreathed in destruction. His voice is a trail of gasoline, and he is shaking, steady, and clear-eyed, match in hand.

The song ends in a stand-off. Half the musicians are holding their instruments like makeshift weapons, half are stunned still. Riko looks poised to strike—but despite his rage carrying him this far, he is not as fast as Neil.

“Wow.” Neil’s speaking voice rises over the final chord, treading on the last hollow hum of sound. Dan’s fingers pinch the piano keys at the root, so that the reverb is cut off. Matt is twitchy, his hands curled into fists. Muscle memory. “It looks like there’s a legend in our midst.”

Nobody moves. As usual, Neil sets the tone, the tenor. The song they just played is still settling into the rafters, the gutters, whispering, try us. If we die, it will be noisy. Neil’s expression doubles down on that promise. His defiance is coiled, hissing.

He wades forward, out of the spotlight, and peers directly into Riko’s eyes as he crouches at the edge of the stage. Andrew spasms violently, and Renee gets up from her own drum kit, predictably, moving to hold him back. He looks at her sharply. He won’t be stopped today. Her lips purse, but she shows him the surrendering flat of her hands. 

“I didn’t know you were such a fan,” Neil goads into the microphone. “Front row and everything."

There’s a gush of laughter. The cracks in Riko’s expression worsen. He looks deeply aggravated to have the power shifted even slightly into Neil’s hands. Like this, it couldn’t be clearer that they are all above him, and he is down in the pit. Whatever weapon he has, whatever threats, he wasn’t expecting to be invited to use them.

“What a big night,” Neil continues. “Three acts under one roof. Or, well. Two and a half.”

Riko’s mouth twitches, and the audience ‘ooohs’ dramatically, laughing, booing, some of them filming the interaction on their cameraphones. They’re watching a drama they’ve only seen play out from afar, now in hair-raising proximity. And it's almost cinematic, isn't it? Riko, a dark focal point in the crowd, untouchable. Up above, the whole retinue of Palmetto Records spread out behind Neil like wings.

“Just joking.” Neil smiles, without an ounce of joy. “We’re always messing around, saying things we don’t mean, aren’t we Riko?” He holds the microphone out, wagging it in his direction. It could be playful, if you didn’t know Neil.

Riko leans in, taking the bait. There’s a brief, cruel whistle of feedback. “I am just here to support an old friend.”

Neil retracts the mic before his sentence is even finished. “Really? So support him, then. Come up here.” The crowd erupts in cheers. 

“What are you doing?” Kevin hisses. Some of the audience titters nervously, sensing his stiffening body language even if they can’t hear what he’s saying. Everybody on stage shifts, uneasy, like they’re waiting for a tornado warning to come to fruition. Riko is the most volatile he’s ever been, a spiralling tendril loosed from the eye of his family’s storm, whipping up fallen underlings and scattering deals.

Neil turns to them all with a staying hand. “Trust me,” he says, low, away from the mic. Andrew catches his gaze and presses hard. Be sure. Neil nods. He looks more self-assured than he has in weeks. “He can’t touch us.”

This seems to be the password that unlocks Kevin’s terrified posture. He nods too.

Riko’s face is sour, but he’s clearly trying to titrate some sweetness into it for the sake of the cameras. He calmly starts moving again, cutting obliquely through a crowd that is tripping all over themselves to defer to his gravity. Black hole physics, again. The curious victims, the hungry phenomenon.

The security he has clearly paid off duck out of his way, flimsy as drawn curtains. Riko climbs the stairs unimpeded, with all the eyes in the room glued to his profile. It should be a powerful display. He should be commandeering the stage as he encroaches upon their circle, but it’s increasingly evident that this tide might not turn for him. Not this time.

As Riko finally punctures the seal, walking out to centre stage, Neil’s weight rocks back onto his hip, hyper-casual. 

“This is one hell of an encore,” he says. A smattering of whoops, in joyful agreement. The drama is intoxicating. Neil’s irreverent MC-ing is the cherry on top.

Riko plucks the microphone from Neil’s grip, as if that will give him the upper hand.

“It feels good to be on stage with you again,” he says to Kevin, sneaking a generous, vaguely bemused smile to the audience. Like he had been humbly hoping for anonymity. Like he’s been caught off guard. “Although it is a little crowded up here.”

“Strength in numbers,” Kevin shrugs, tapping subtly at his own cheek. His voice barely shakes.

“It is good to have a support system behind you,” Riko says, eyes flickering to the bought security and docile, unsuspecting fans. “And it does seem to be working out for you. I just hope you can keep up your lucky streak.” He smiles snidely. Or else, he doesn’t say. Or else Tetsuji. Or else dogs, no leashes.

The crowd reacts again, spiking and levelling as they decide where their allegiances fall from minute to minute: Neil or Riko, Ausreißer or Evermore, the phoenix or the raven. It’s the stand-off of a lifetime, even veiled in niceties.

“It’s not exactly luck though, is it,” Neil interjects, stealing a new microphone from its stand a little roughly. “Kevin’s a powerhouse.” Cheers, again. “That’s why we keep gaining momentum, even when someone’s trying to take us down, taking cheap shots. You know, an eye,” he points to himself. “A hand.” he gestures to Kevin. A wide ripple of muttered conversation sweeps over the room. Neil cocks his head. “Monsters do have a habit of coming back stronger, you know.”

Riko’s eyes narrow. His smile fades.

“Sorry, I should be letting you speak, you’re our guest,” Neil says. “What did you think of the show?”

The audience hollers their opinions, trying to sway him this way or that. Riko wrings the mic. “It is hard to judge,” he says, wetting his lips. “When I have seen Kevin at his best, with Evermore.”

“Really,” Neil deadpans. “Because a little former birdie told me that sales are down at Edgar Allen Music. I mean, we even beat you to the top of the charts this week.” He pulls back from the mic, and even Andrew can barely hear it over the scandalized shouts when he follows up, “so how does second best taste, you miserable fucking has-been?”

Riko’s face goes ashen with rage. Andrew starts moving before he’s even conscious of forming a plan. The noise is an avalanche all around them, and amongst it, Riko drops his mic to the floor.

“Do not doubt that I will kill you because my uncle is too cowardly,” he hears Riko spit, fast, barely human. “I have always known the butcher’s son was only fit for slaughter.”

For a moment, there is pristine silence.

And then Riko looks behind him, eerily slow. He can see the moment that it hits him—the echo of his words ringing, amplified, around the room. Andrew’s mic-stand levered forward into Riko’s space, just in time to deliver his threat to the world.

Somebody, somewhere, says, “oh my god.”

Another voice— “was that a joke?”

Up on stage, Neil is wide-eyed with triumph. He pretends to frown. “That seems a little harsh. Feels like you might be projecting your daddy issues onto me just a bit. Sorry for your loss, by the way.”

Riko lunges. 

Something flashes, silver, out of his sleeve. 

Gasps ricochet across the surface of the room. 

Before anything can make contact with the vulnerable side of Neil’s face, Andrew has vaulted over a snare drum, scooped his broken drumstick from the ground, and plunged its jagged end through Riko’s hand.

He watches, stone-faced and satisfied, as Riko gurgles in shocked agony, blood pouring out over his gnarled fist. The concealed knife spins uselessly out onto the stage floor. 

There’s an eruption of frenzied terror from all sides as everyone in the room catches up with the bloody five second skirmish. There are flashing cameras, some of them trained on Riko rocking pitifully on his knees, unmasked, some of them swinging to search Andrew for remorse, some of them lingering sympathetically on Neil’s shell-shocked face. 

And then there is movement from the wings as the venue employees descend, and foundation-rattling footfalls as David Wymack flies into the fray.

“Hey, woah, everyone chill out—” Dan starts saying into a spare microphone, but then it’s clear that someone has cut the sound system. 

The evacuation that follows is both frantic and gruelling, a labour of pushing and pulling overly invested fans against underinvested employees. Security staff waffles or escapes, allegiances compromised. The noise is incredible, a pinprick of a fight followed by this balloon pop fallout. As Nicky would say, no one can claim that being an Ausreißer fan is boring. 

Ultimately though, Andrew is uninterested in anything but Neil, who is still frozen, horribly, at the precipice of sudden fear. He calls his name two, three times, but it takes a hand knotted in his hair to urge him down the slope toward relief. His knees unlock, and he slumps into the safety of Andrew’s side. There’s a thin line of blood trickling down his good cheek, a nearly invisible nick from Riko’s blade, and Andrew’s gut twists painfully. Again, he had almost lost him. 

In the crook of his shoulder, Neil starts to laugh, hysterical. 

“Not here,” Andrew grits, tugging again on the ends of his hair, and then getting a proper hold on his nape so he can move him toward the wings. He reaches up with his free hand to swipe Neil’s blood away with his thumb.

A shoulder check yields the rest of the family falling in line behind them, abandoning folders of music, lurching over equipment. He catches Aaron kicking the knife definitively out of Riko’s reach, and his ears ring with gratitude.

“I think we just won,” Neil says, bubbling over in disbelief.

“At least try and look shaken,” Nicky says, close at their heels, hurriedly unplugging his guitar. He reaches back with an open hand, and Kevin, clearly in shock, takes it. He lets himself be pulled along, bass hanging limply around his neck like an albatross.

When Renee and Allison come up from behind, their hands are also clutched fiercely together, but Allison’s expression is wicked. “I love it when my enemies dig their own graves for me,” she says. Renee tuts, eyes sparkling. 

Dan gets an arm around both their shoulders, and says into the space between them, “did we just win?”

The helpless giggles have stopped, and Neil’s responding smile is sharp, vulpine. Against all odds, the nine of them are escaping on this life raft together. 

“Get to the dressing room,” Wymack commands, wild-eyed. “All of you, right now, no fucking around. I gotta clean up this mess.”

Behind him, Riko looks up from his destroyed hand with bloodshot eyes, a sneer twisting his face beyond recognition.

It’s the last time they see him alive.

______

The dressing room is a chaos of uncertainty, premature celebrating and feverish, immediate re-hashing. There are too many of them to fit seamlessly inside a single room, but they refuse to be split into factions right now.

It reminds Neil of his first night back to Columbia after Baltimore: the whole patchwork team of them sleeping in a tangle, quilted together into one piece.

Their equipment is strewn across the room, couches crowded with jackets and hastily latched guitar cases, Allison’s makeup bag sidled up next to Nicky’s backpack with its tinkling German flag keychain, someone’s heavy duty water bottle with a custom Ausreißer logo overlapping an ‘I <3 Exy’ sticker.

Renee is perched on the arm of the couch, deceptively calm as she braids and unbraids a loose piece of Allison’s hair. Next to them, Kevin, Matt, and Nicky are sharing a bottle of Jack, strung between two foldout chairs and a footstool. At some point, Aaron returns with Katelyn clinging to his arm, both of them looking shaken. Wordlessly, they are absorbed into the semi-circle. 

It’s only when Andrew sees his brother that he loosens his grip on the back of Neil’s shirt and crosses to Aaron’s side. He gets close enough to say something brief in his ear, unsubtly scanning him for trauma as he does so. Neil is surprised to see Aaron nod gratefully, and even more surprised to see Katelyn take the last slug of whiskey, wipe her mouth with the back of her hand, and pass Kevin the empty bottle.

Meanwhile, Dan is speaking seriously to their staff and the concert hall’s over in the corner, doing some fast-talking damage control:

No, it wasn’t a stunt.

Yes, it was a shock to all of them.

But no, it’s not the first time Riko has made threats. Hence the security detail, Dan adds snarkily.

Yes, it was self defence. Clearly.

In Neil’s opinion, none of it really matters. The video footage will be damning. By morning, everyone will have seen the deadly arc of Riko’s rage from a dozen angles. More importantly, everyone will have heard the poisonous things he said, and the way he had implicated the family in his violence to boot.

It couldn’t have been a more picture perfect deposition. Set up, knocked down.

Riko’s mistake was believing himself to be the most important person in the room. He thought his pockets were endless, his influence untouchable. He thought his presence was enough of a threat that he would paralyze his prey, and they’d simply lie down and take the killing blow.

The death of his father had stripped away any remaining varnish of foresight or planning, and he had struck wrongly. Maybe he thought, foolishly, that Neil would be equally affected by his own father’s death. Maybe he thought he was hitting somebody already on their knees. (One of Riko’s favourite pastimes, incidentally.) 

One last fatal fucking blunder. Neil has never been more motivated to stay alive.

It remains to be seen though, if Palmetto has gotten off Scott-free. Neil was provoking Riko, after all. He invited him on stage. But bloodless teasing and invitations don’t exactly hold up in court. And not even yakuza money can un-tarnish a legacy.

When the cops show up, the questions replenish. Wymack is there by now, reporting Riko’s retrieval by ambulance, the fans’ immediate campaign for justice on Neil’s behalf. He directs traffic, tiredly, trying to buy his artists some space, some peace, however he can.

Neil is distracted by the sensation that this is all just for show. Kids playing at due diligence, running amok at the crime scene, pretending their badges have weight. The real decider will be Ichirou. The real verdict will come at night.

And just below all that frustration, he’s thrumming with victory, recognizing Riko’s Hail Mary for what it truly was, and satisfied to the teeth that a titan like Riko had watched the full strength of Ausreißer’s performance, of their bonds, their skill, their authenticity, and he had fallen.

Eventually, unavoidably, Neil is summoned. Andrew shadows him to the hallway where they’re taking people for individual questioning, and shows a stunning lack of reaction when the sheriff requests privacy, almost like he hadn’t heard him at all.

“I want him here,” Neil says simply. Maybe his victim complex has bought him some sympathy. Maybe it’s the sunny orange bandaid on his cheek, fetched from the depths of Abby’s first aid kit. Either way, Andrew stays.

He walks through the same song and dance that Dan had, making sure to step tidily in her footprints, repeating her statement nearly word for word. He resists the urge to reveal even more of Riko’s misdeeds; there’s no point in beating a dead raven.

They turn on Andrew for his testimony, and Neil takes private pleasure in how utterly futile those efforts will be. They would be better off trying to wring blood from a stone. At least that might build some much-needed character.

He takes a detour to the private bathroom on his way back from twenty questions, to take off his sweat-streaked makeup and gather his ping-ponging thoughts. As he cleans himself up in the mirror, his eyes travel the fractured topography of his face. The rosy Lichtenberg figure framing one cheek, and opposite it, an unassuming orange bandaid. Survivor’s marks, both of them.

For a moment, he is overwhelmed with gratitude. He screws his eyes shut, waiting for the intensity of the feeling to ease up from his thickening throat. He’s not taking any of this for granted. He wouldn’t have been able to stand up on stage and invite the enemy in, if he hadn’t known for certain that all his bases were covered.

He washes his hands and splashes his face with tepid water, until the weight of the feeling is possible to carry. When he pushes out into the hall, there’s a security guard waiting for him.

“They just have a couple more questions,” he informs him, jutting a thumb first vaguely backwards at the assembled police, and then in the opposite direction, towards the stage door.

Neil rolls his eyes, but follows him further down the hall, already anticipating the moment that all of this mess has been mopped up, and he can climb into bed. Maybe Andrew’s, if he’s lucky.

There’s a larger secondary dressing room, originally intended for the monsters’ use, abandoned as overflow storage in favour of the other room’s good air conditioning and generous stores of liquor. It’s another few paces before he realizes that that’s where he’s being led.

His pace stutters. He watches the slightly stiff set of the guard’s shoulders, and glances backwards to see that Andrew is no longer being questioned by the cops. Probably, he’s looking for him elsewhere. Neil is alone.

The guard raps twice on the door, his hand eclipsing the Ausreißer logo still printed on its temporary placard. He ducks out of the way before the door can swing inwards, taking up his post on the wrong side of the threshold. Neil teeters forward on numb legs, and the door closes immediately behind him. The lock fastens with a click.

The room is soundless. No vacant hum of equipment, no chatter, no movement, no distant signs of life. There are more guards posted in each shadowy corner of the room.

Riko is slumped miserably next to Tetsuji on the couch, who looks nearly as unwell as his nephew, sick with barely contained ire. His other nephew is sitting delicately in a high-backed chair, his reflection watching Neil’s approach in the mirror.

It’s immediately evident that the man is Ichirou, because of the way everybody else’s posture defers to his. Nobody breathes until he does. He is shockingly young, and it matters shockingly little. He is dressed for business: his suit is tidy and black, as are his leather gloves, and the charcoal of his gaze.

Had there been an ambulance at all? Neil wonders, scattershot. Riko’s hand has been bandaged, his fingers bloodless and splayed loosely at his side. He’s actually shaking, awaiting retribution from the brother he’s never really known.

The silence continues to fill the room like a run-on tap. Neil’s thoughts continue to unravel: How did they get to New York so quickly? Were their eyes already on this concert? Were they aware of Riko’s plan? Are they here to enact it?

Neil maintains even eye contact with Ichirou’s mirrored double, waiting for his instructions. In many ways, this man is his boss. This could be a kind of audition.

Still, there’s something deathly wrong about seeing the Moriyama retinue here, where mere hours before a benign assistant had offered Neil sparkling water, and they’d plunked their duffel bags down and squabbled over nothing. Nicky had been microdosing. Kevin had been doing some truly heinous vocal warmups.

And here’s the lord of the Moriyama empire, sitting at a vanity table, cast in the dramatic light from the LEDs.

Whole minutes come and go before Ichirou stands. Neil’s pulse throbs unevenly.

He was so painfully close to living a real life that he’s almost in disbelief, seeing the end approach like this. He’d been ready to die his whole life, and now, in the eleventh hour, it’s coming as a shock.

But Ichirou doesn’t move toward him. He breaks eye contact entirely, and walks over to his brother instead, peering down into his pale face, looking almost curious. Waiting for something.

It’s then that Neil realizes that Riko isn’t slumped in defeat, but in sickness. 

His shaking is actually convulsions, tight rippling spasms, like he’s fighting his own body’s reflexes, defying chemistry.

“Ichirou,” he chokes, garbled. A froth of saliva runs from the corner of his mouth down towards his collar. His weak, injured hand tries to grab for Ichirou as his brother reaches for his face.

Or—not his face. His neck. Two gloved fingers to Riko’s pulse. He glances in Neil’s direction as Riko’s shaking body goes limp.

Neil stares. For a moment, he doesn’t understand what he’s looking at.

Ichirou says something to Tetsuji in light, even-toned Japanese, and he stands, edging away from the cooling body.

Because that’s what Riko has become—a body. Dead in an instant. Something fast-acting had clearly been razing his system since before Neil had even walked into the room.

“Is this what you had hoped for?” Ichirou asks. His English is crystal clear, a cool glass of poisoned water. “The ultimate dissolution of Evermore?” Dissolution implies a whole host of behind the scenes moves much like this one: the liquidating of its assets, the hacking of losses. Even Tetsuji can’t manage what no longer exists.

Neil shakes his head once. Lying in this moment doesn’t even occur to him. “I didn’t dare to hope for it. But I’m not sorry it’s happening. We will both be better off without Riko’s grudges.”

Ichirou tilts his head, neither pleased nor displeased by Neil’s callousness. “There is no band without its frontman.”

“It’s good then, that you have other investments,” he replies carefully.

The twitch of a lip, and then Ichirou is turning back towards his brother, examining his bulging, glassy eyes, his swollen tongue. Monstrous in death, as he was in life. 

“Leave us.” 

The door is cracked open at Neil’s back, and he takes the exit route gratefully, turning and escaping into the velvet darkness of the backstage corridor.

______

The rooftops in New York City are more ambitious than they are back home. 

The skyline is a little toothier, a little more death-defying, more heart-racing. There are hundreds more feet to fall, but the vantage point is undeniable; you can see everything from up in the rafters. There is a fledgling piece of Andrew that wants to see everything. 

The night Riko Moriyama dies, Andrew climbs the eighteen flights of stairs to the top of their hotel, breaks the lock on the service door, and lets the warm night wind of the city buffet him back from the edge. He might have taken the elevator, but he needed the burn of exertion to ricochet his dissociating brain back into his body.

Neil was nearly killed tonight. Twice.

His memory keeps jamming and replaying the image of that knife—glinting so close to Neil’s face that he could see its reflection in his shocked wet eyes. Before Andrew could recover from that first close call, he’d turned from the bumbling sheriff’s half-baked interrogation to find that Neil was no longer behind him. Fresh panic clambered overtop of its twin, and the combined weight nearly took him out at the knees.

Back out on the edge of loss again and again. The dangling precipice, the ten story drop.

The vertigo had only started to subside when Wymack informed them all that the police were delivering Neil back to the hotel. Something about taking precautionary measures—apparently dodging a public execution makes a person irresistible to the paps. Andrew knew there was more to it than that. Neil would have come to them first, unless something else had happened.

He’d been gone before Wymack could finish speaking, Neil’s bag hoisted over his shoulder. And when he hadn’t found him in their room, or the lobby, he had come here.

The thing is, he’d never asked for Neil. 

He hadn’t felt that he’d been missing something, because he’d been missing everything, every important thing, since he was old enough to want. Life had given him instincts and taught him not to trust them. People had swarmed and receded like fickle insects, drawn to sweetness or light, then uninterested in his darkness, his acid. 

He wasn’t made to be stayed with. He wasn’t meant to be understood. But then, Neil.

That old trap, love. Mutually assured destruction.

Neil makes him feel like he is the only thing that Andrew’s life had been missing, like the whole muddled picture makes sense now that it’s completed. Neil clarifies all of the hardship, the close calls, the steel-lined self-preservation. He is the future Andrew couldn’t imagine, before.

Andrew takes a drag of his cigarette and looks up at the moon. The view below is a treasure chest of light, bulbs scattered like shimmering coins into the wilderness of the city. It really is a long way down, but he feels calm, steady. Air whistles through the sleek metal fixtures on armoured skyscrapers. Traffic barks and tussles. Andrew sits, and writes, and waits.

“Careful,” Neil’s soft voice calls on the wind. “I’ve had enough close calls for one day.”

Andrew looks backwards at him, a gust lifting his bangs flutteringly from his forehead. Neil stares at him like he’s only just noticed him, even though he’s the one who had spoken first.

“Whose fault is that?” Andrew replies.

“I don’t know,” Neil says, surprisingly raw. “The universe’s?”

“Come here,” Andrew says, and Neil falls forward at once, like he’d just been waiting for the invitation. 

He picks over the coarse cement to meet him at the end of the roof, settling opposite him on the wide, jutting ledge. Andrew tucks his notebook under his thigh, shakes a second cigarette from the pack, and holds it out.

Neil leans in. Their knees brush, and the leather of their boots squeaks together.

Andrew tucks the cigarette between Neil’s parted lips, and bows his head, the smouldering end of his own nudging up against Neil’s.

Somewhere far below, someone is laughing, catcalling, honking at a friend crossing the street, but for Andrew, all extraneous noise has disappeared. He cups his hand around the meeting place where the fire is reaching, trying to catch. Neil’s undone hair tousles in the wind, ruffling against Andrew’s outstretched fingers. 

He studies the tender flicker of orange light over Neil’s closed eyelids: one bisected, one unbroken. He has freckles now that summer has come again, and a bandaid holding them apart like a dam. Smoke trickles loose from the purse of his lips, and only then does Andrew pull back, with some difficulty.

“You disappeared again,” he accuses.

Neil nods.

“Tetsuji?” Andrew guesses, studying his stricken face. 

Neil takes a long pull from his cigarette, and blows smoke up at the sky. “Ichirou.”

The name whips by on the breeze, whirling out of reach. “You’re alive,” Andrew notes. “The rumours must be exaggerated.”

Neil looks doubtful, tapping ash over the side of the ledge. “Not that exaggerated, seeing as he just killed his own brother in front of me.” Another piece of news that is too big to possibly try and catch. It flies from Neil’s lips and out of sight, barely impacting Andrew at all on its way past.

His thoughts churn. He refills his lungs with smoke—hot, medicinal, clarifying—and stays silent.

“Thanks to you, by the way,” Neil says. “What you did to Riko tonight—what you said to Tetsuji before—“ He shivers. “It changed everything. You honoured our deal, even though it was already forfeit.”

Andrew shakes his head once, precise. “What were my options?” 

Neil’s eyes go terribly soft, memory foam soft—gentle, clinging, claustrophobic. “There are always options. You could let the food chain keep eating. Take care of your own interests.”

“That is what I did,” Andrew says simply. He flicks the sputtering end of his cigarette away, and watches it flutter down, down. Then he hooks two tobacco-grubby fingers in the silk of Neil’s nearest armband.

“Am I an interest?” Neil murmurs, just like Andrew hoped he wouldn’t. He says nothing, and Neil smiles as he looks away, staring out at the horizon to get a handle on his own joy. “Do you remember what we talked about on the roof at Eden’s Twilight? All those months ago?”

He remembers every conversation they’ve ever had. He remembers pinning Neil to that roof, in some twisted bid to earn the right to watch his back. To prove to himself that he could do it and walk away. He’d been so obvious, the same way he’s being obvious right now. He can feel it happening and he doesn’t even care to stop it anymore. Neil doesn't respond to subtlety, anyway.

“You said you were interested then, too,” Neil continues.

“In trading secrets,” Andrew clarifies. “In ending your lying streak.”

Neil’s smile grows. “Sure.” He doesn’t bother arguing. Andrew’s fingers are still stroking his pulse. Almost all their secrets are out by now, chopped and jumbled between them. 

Neil takes one last inhale, and tosses his half-cigarette without looking to see where it lands. He scoots closer, letting his legs fall open to bracket the slab of concrete they’re sitting on. Andrew lets him come.

And when he leans in to kiss him, smoke trailing from his wet lips, Andrew snares Neil with both hands around his jaw, and tilts him up into the moonlight. His eyes are so bright even in the shadows. His pupils crowd his irises. Andrew can’t contemplate them without closing the trembling gap between their mouths. 

He tries to kiss a long-lost feeling into him: desire, without fear. A thornless rose. 

He licks the bitterness of nicotine from his teeth, one hand moving to clench in his wayward curls. Neil starts to make a small, unthinking sound of pleasure, but Andrew gets to it first, when it’s vibration alone, and takes it for himself. His free thumb worries the bandaid, the close call, like he could smooth Neil’s skin back to wholeness.

When they part, Neil says, “I’m relieved,” in a small voice, against his lips. “After all that waiting, and fighting, and running away, I actually get to come home.”

“Tour's not over yet,” he replies, distracted. He kisses the sweep of his cheekbone, feeling the warm, scar-pebbled skin yielding to his mouth. He hoists Neil against him, their heads ducking naturally into the gaps between ear and shoulder, face-to-neck in both directions.

For a second, they just feel the heat of each other, there at the edge.

Then Neil presses deeper, dragging lips then teeth over Andrew’s neck, snaking a soft hand up to catch his head when it lolls. “I wasn’t talking about Columbia,” he says—and his face slides down, stopping against Andrew’s chest, and he lays a kiss there too.

It’s almost terrible, the start-stop start-stop of his feelings, the car whining in and out of gear. He wants—he has—so he should lose, next. That’s how the cycle goes. 

But Neil is miraculously un-losable, despite his herculean feats of fate-tempting. He is so far from invisible that he enters a new hyper-spectrum of light. Beyond infrared, warm and glaring.

And if he won’t disappear, then Andrew won’t either. Mutually assured survival. His notebook burns beneath their criss-crossing legs. He peels Neil away from his heart, if only so he can be kissed again.

Just like the first time they were in New York together, at the first show Neil ever played for fun, Andrew knows he will leave the city burdened with more feelings than when he entered it. 

Unlike the first time, he has somewhere to set them down. There is a home here, between them. Two solitary tenants in an abandoned place. A bloody lease, an unpacked duffel bag, a key, a song. A roof overlooking the world.

He will stay here for as long as he can.

______

The rockstar lifestyle, the tabloids report, has claimed another victim.

Riko’s body is found on the bathroom floor of a New York concert hall with a needle in his arm. Overdose. The tragic last resort of a man whose career had self-destructed an hour prior. Scrambling escapism. The spotlight makes the grieving process into a pressure cooker; fame buzzes wrongly in the brainstem.

These are the headlines that Matt recites dramatically over the dinner table at Abby’s. They’re all clustered around the refuse of dessert and spiked coffees, and an old Foxes record is spinning on the living room deck.

“Legendary Raven Sings Nevermore,” Matt quotes, with obvious distaste. 

“Personally, I would have gone with ‘ding dong, the dick is dead,’” Allison says, sipping her coffee. “But there’s no accounting for taste.”

“Do they know that Edgar Allen Poe’s Raven was about the demonic hallucinations of a madman? I looked it up. Like, this wasn’t a chill bird. No one liked it,” Matt says. Dan pats his hand placatingly.

“I can’t believe he’s really gone,” Kevin says. He has that familiar thousand-yard stare going, but at least he looks more haunted than hunted these days. He picks at his peach pie and ice cream despondently until Aaron reaches over and crams a forkful into his mouth.

“I know,” Nicky agrees. “He was our own personal bogeyman for so long.”

“Do you really think it was an overdose?” Dan asks. Kevin scoffs darkly. “Yeah,” she sighs, “didn’t think so.”

Andrew is the only one who knows what Neil saw that night. It had seemed uncalled for, opening that particular closet door to his bandmates. He would tell them if they asked. For now, it feels kinder to give them the distance they’ve earned. 

He would have kept Andrew safe from it too if he could. But he’d taken one look at Neil’s wild, fizzy expression and he’d known. He can't seem to lie convincingly when it comes to Andrew. Secrets chafe these days, and anyway, the truth feels much lighter when it’s carried between the two of them.

“Can we talk about something happier?” Abby ventures. “You all did something amazing. Your song is a hit. You made it here together. Let’s not give Riko the satisfaction of letting him have any part of it.”

“Agreed,” Dan says, throwing a squeezing arm around Abby’s shoulder. Neil notes Wymack watching them with a small, grateful smile.

“I have something,” Renee interjects, “that might lighten the mood.” 

Allison tugs on an electric blue lock of her hair. “Of course you do,” she says fondly.

“Jean sent me a file this morning.” She moves to boot up Wymack’s old laptop, abandoned at the top of a pile of music books by the back door. “A prerelease of his first song with Trojan Horse. It’s kind of magical, I think.”

Neil’s still not totally convinced that Jean is lead singer material, and as Renee’s MP3 file starts to trickle out into the room, his suspicion is confirmed. Because he’s not leading—no one is. It’s just his and Jeremy’s vocals on the track, back and forth, quiet and building. 

It’s also immediately evident that there’s something different about these two when they’re together. They seem to meet seamlessly in a middle ground that Neil couldn’t have imagined until their voices took him there. He thought Jeremy might strengthen Jean’s tone, but they seem to soften each other instead.

It’s surprisingly coherent. It kind of makes Neil want to write something.

“I’m glad they found each other,” Abby says quietly, as the music continues to caramelize—low, slow, decadent.

“They’ve got a good thing going,” Wymack agrees. “I guess we should all be grateful that Knox didn’t sign with me, in the end.”

“That was an option?” Dan asks, disbelieving. “I thought he was a nepo hire?”

Wymack shrugs as if to say none of my business. “I still made him an offer, just in case.”

“Damn. Can you imagine Palmetto with Trojan Horse on the roster?” Matt asks, almost wistfully. “Kevin and Jeremy under the same roof?” “There are enough of us as it is,” Aaron says, rolling his eyes.

“I think we all ended up where we were supposed to,” Renee says serenely.

They all sit with that thought for a minute, as the song trickles to a close. Neil casts a sidelong glance at Andrew, who is quiet as usual, slit-eyed with tiredness. His hair is getting long in the back, curving along the line of his nape. 

Neil is grateful that he gets to see all these little changes happening. It wasn’t that long ago that he was studying his friends’ faces for a beat too long, trying to memorize them as they were.

“Send that to me?” Kevin asks softly. Renee nods, pleased.

“It’s crazy to think that Evermore was just sitting on a talent like that,” Nicky muses.

“Evermore loves to squander talent. It’s their raison d’être,” Neil says.

“I thought we were moving on from Riko talk?” Wymack interjects.

“Oh, come on boss,” Allison says. “Let us curse the man’s name.”

“Hey, do what you want,” Wymack grunts, rising from the table. “I’m getting another drink.”

Neil watches him wander off towards the kitchen, putting his hands briefly to the crowns of Dan's and Matt’s heads as he passes between their chairs. The whole house feels so warm around them, each of its guests well-fed and tipsy. Ending up in a place like this feels like a radical stroke of luck.

Except it wasn’t chance that brought them all here, well past the end of the road, to the winner’s table. It was Wymack. 

Again, Neil feels a stab of gratitude watching the family he earned, the unexpected harmony between them. He can almost hear who fits the bass line, the mid-tones, the shimmering tenors and sopranos. Balance. He downs the rest of his drink, lukewarm coffee and over-saturated whiskey, and follows their conductor into the kitchen.

Wymack looks up from the open fridge door when he enters.

“I don’t know what I’m looking for,” he says, before Neil can call him out on leaving the room for no good reason.

“A new conversational topic?” he ventures. 

Wymack rolls his eyes. “I know you’ll exhaust yourselves of mafia-talk eventually.”

“I don’t know, it’s a pretty rich vein,” Neil says, hopping up lightly on the countertop.

“Sure,” Wymack says, closing the fridge and shrugging up against the opposite counter, arms crossed. “Harder on some of you than others though, I’d expect.” He nods towards the doorway to the dining room. Neil follows his gaze through the conversational crossfire to Kevin, looking down into his empty mug with an unreadable expression.

Neil shrugs. “Easier to talk about it once you’ve survived it.”

“I think I want better for you all than survival.”

Neil frowns, unsure of how such a thing could really be possible. He looks back from Kevin to see Wymack’s brow furrowed, his eyes far away.

“He told you,” Neil guesses, in a stroke of clarity. 

Wymack’s gaze elastic-snaps back to meet his.

His shoulders slump, and he sighs, running a hand over his face. “The night Riko went off on stage.” Of course. Of course Kevin had gone to his father first. “Shoulda known. Only a kid of mine would always be so determined to do something that scares the shit out of them.”

Neil doesn’t know what to say to that, so he agrees, haltingly, “he’s his father’s son.”

Wymack squints. “I can’t tell which of us you’re insulting."

Neil shrugs again. “Either or.”

Wymack scoffs, uncrossing his arms restlessly. “You’re an equal opportunity smartass, are you?” Neil smirks and looks at the floor, studying the speckles in the linoleum, the line of grime where the mop won’t reach. “How are you holding up, by the way?”

He looks up, and something in his chest seems to peer upwards also. “Honestly? I’ve never felt better in my life.”

Wymack’s mouth twitches. He eases himself up onto his own stretch of counter, so they’re eye to eye. “Even after selling your soul to that pack of crows?”

Neil smiles thinly. “You’re assuming I had a soul to begin with.”

“You have a soul, kid,” Wymack says. “Trust me on that.” The conviction in his eyes is almost too much for Neil to withstand. 

“Well,” he starts, looking back out on the dining room. Dan is roping Allison and Nicky into sloppy three part harmony on some old power ballad. Aaron has skyped Katelyn in on the abandoned laptop. From the sounds of it, she’s winning a bet against Matt on something or other. Kevin has stopped staring at his empty cup, and is pouring himself a fresh coffee. “I’m happy to give it up for them.”

“Hm. Just eighty percent of it, last I remembered. Try and hold onto the other twenty, okay?” Now he nods towards the other side of the table, where Andrew is making no effort to pretend that he’s not staring back at them. “Whatever you haven’t already promised to him, anyway.”

Neil doesn’t believe in souls, but he is starting to believe in promises. If souls were real, he thinks they would be like an exchange, not an essence.

Something of his thought process must be showing in his expression, because Wymack sighs. “We’ll make a selfish man of you yet.”

“It doesn’t get much more selfish than becoming the frontman for a band when you have a homicidal maniac on your tail.”

“I said selfish, not stupid,” Wymack says flatly.

“Alright, fine,” Neil says, fighting another smile. He hops down from the counter, eager to rejoin his friends. “I can be selfish. I’ll be selfish for the rest of my life.”

“Within reason,” Wymack calls at his back. “Within reason, Neil Josten.” 

Neil laughs as he retakes his seat at the table, his composure in joyful tatters. Andrew stares. In lieu of an explanation, Neil reaches out and brushes his fingers, selfishly, against the soft hair at his nape. Andrew bows his head, just an inch, and indulges him.

______

With the past finally buried in its unremarkable plot, Palmetto Records begins to climb to new, impossible heights. The future is still uncertain, but it is wide.

Subunits crop up occasionally between Foxes and Ausreißer: unexpected pairings, features, and swapped producing credits. If you strain your ears you might find Dan’s harmonies warming Kevin’s to a simmer, or a lick of violin under a thrashing drumbeat. 

If they’re not working together they’re hanging out together, constantly photographed in each other’s pockets, flipping off the camera at Eden’s Twilight, or sharing smokes in the studio parking lot. The fans joke that the nine of them should join forces for good—someone has to give Jeremy’s all-star crew a run for their money.

More staff is hired, including a much-needed publicist, audio engineers, roadies, and a loyal security team. Even with a heavy tax on their earnings, Palmetto is flying. Aaron buys his own apartment as soon as he can. Andrew buys a Maserati. 

Trojan Horse puts out a record called Le Corbeau Doré, which becomes a critical success, and sweeps that season’s awards, much to Neil’s chagrin. Meanwhile, Thea Muldani debuts as a soloist under Edgar Allen’s label, and her stage presence is so large that it fills both halves of the gap Evermore left in its wake.

There’s a cork-board in Palmetto's foyer, streaked with polaroid photos of Wymack’s investments: 

Renee and Allison kissing with Dan cheesing next to them, partway through dragging Matt into frame. Kevin smiling uncertainly at Renee, violin tucked under his chin for the first time. Matt and Nicky submerged to their waists in the lake, with Neil and Aaron hoisted up on their respective shoulders, partway through a vicious chicken fight. 

Kevin sitting next to his newly revealed father, both of them coincidentally pulling the same stressed out, nose-pinching pose. Ausreißer’s original line-up, looking back at the interloping photographer from their circle around the backyard fire pit.

And the new and final line-up: Nicky giving Kevin bunny ears at the same time that he gives Neil a teasing pinch on the cheek, Aaron and Andrew slouched shoulder to shoulder, Andrew’s hand curled casually around the side of Neil’s neck. It was summertime, after a sticky outdoor gig, and their tattoos were out, the whole parade of fierce and gimlet-eyed unmentionables. 

Andrew often stops to look at Neil in this photo, half of his sweaty hair pulled back from his face, auburn with dark tips. His scar was starting to heal up, closer to the clean white reaching prongs he sports today. His piercings glint. His eyeliner runs. He’s grinning with all his teeth. He is so cleanly and entirely a monster. One of theirs. 

In the photo, Neil had just gotten his chest piece, and it’s peeking out from his open collar: the god Hermes in his winged sandals. Thief, trickster, emissary, connector of two disparate worlds. In a tangential sort of way, it suits Ausreißer’s themes: exceptions to rules, fugitive personalities. Some gods are monsters, and vice versa.

And around his wrist, beneath his armband, where it’s almost never seen, there’s a snake in the same style as Andrew’s hydra, and it is eating its own tail. A small, hungry infinity, just for Neil and Andrew to see.

______

Three years after he first stumbled upon the monsters, five years after he drowned the memory of his mother, Neil’s life has become fantastically selfish.

Ausreißer haloes each stage like a sundog, stamping the sky with its circle of brightness, its fiery heart. They banter before they play, stealing the mic, stepping on each other’s jokes, each of them pulling at a corner of the crowd’s favour until the mood parachute-billows above them all.

Andrew still keeps his heartbeat in his drum kit. Aaron starts to care less about appearances, Nicky starts to care more, and they meet in the middle as family. Kevin’s fortitude has its own musicality. He warms each song in the palm of his healed left hand, and faces his second chance with clear eyes. They pass the vocal line to Neil, and watch him herd their wayward melodies home.

Before long, they start playing arenas. Nicky has stopped calling them misfits, and started calling them rockstars.

Tonight they’re playing a sold-out show, and Neil is running down the open runway toward the crowd, freedom racing over his skin in an unbroken current. His in-ears are dangling, and he’s laughing. No shadows can touch him in a spotlight this big.

The camera pans over the audience, a sea of armbands, waving lighters, real and fake tattoos, black and orange merch, and tear-streaked faces.

The panorama shifts, and Foxes comes into frame, hollering from the VIP section. Matt was clearly midway through an air guitar solo, and he doubles over in caught laughter. Allison models her Ausreißer tank top, plucking it away from her chest so people can see the logo in full. Renee is pretending to try and intimidate the camera, armbands crossed. Dan is mid cattle whistle, fingers to her mouth. Katelyn and Erik are cheering next to them, sharing a gaudy banner that says the guitarist is mine.

There’s a gaggle of staff beside them too, including Wymack, who pulls the brim of his cap down to cover his face—but below its curve you can still clearly see his grin. 

Neil points to them all, fizzing with good, clean adrenaline, and says, “the whole family’s here tonight!”

The crowd stomps and roars in approval. The camera switches back to the band, broadcasting Neil’s face in HD, and for a minute he doesn’t even recognize himself. Gleaming black piercings, makeup smudged out into the roots of his scar, hair wild, smile huge. He looks fierce, but he looks nothing at all like his father. Nathan never looked this happy in all his days.

And just like the first full Ausreißer performance Neil ever watched, he is struck with a profound feeling of belonging. He’ll take them to the Grammys. He’ll take them to Elysium.

The perspective on the big screen changes again, flitting to Andrew at his drum kit, golden, sweat-soaked, infinitely larger than life. There’s a flicker of his true expression, tilting upwards, relaxed, before he can register the camera. And Neil doesn’t have to turn around to know where that peaceful gaze is fixed. 

But he looks back anyway.

And across the din of the crowd, across the endless stage that carpets the distance between them, through the rush of music which connects all broken people and lost things—their eyes meet.

[limerental]

ficletvember 2024 - day 23

Driven by her love for Lambert, Keira Metz attempts a forbidden ritual.

As her carefully-researched ritual unfolded just as planned, Keira felt absurdly like a child about to be scolded.

The Brotherhood had had a sprawling list of forbidden magics, dark arts never to be performed by any mage under any circumstance. Necromancy, demonic contracts, all sorts of spells and alchemical applications that stripped intelligent beings of their agency, and of course, fire magic.

In the bloated organization's heyday, something as mundane as an ailing village witch calling up a spark during a blizzard to light her tinder would have tripped some blaring alarm on Thanned Island and have swift consequences.

But despite its all-seeing power, the Brotherhood had not seen the darkness creeping from within, and it could not censure her now. Neither could the Lodge, if any of its members still lived.

The candles around the circle begin to sizzle out one after another, the only light the blue glow that lit Keira's lowered palms. She pressed them flat to the earth as the last wick sputtered and spoke clearly the next line of the ritual.

It had been a tricky thing to find the grave of a man who had not been buried, but fortunately her working didn't require the entire corpse. If it had, Keira would have sucked it up and assembled the whole scavenger-scattered skeleton to the last phalange, but she would've bitched and moaned the entire time.

If there had been a bloated, rotting corpse to drag out of the wilderness, she would have actually told Lambert what she intended to do so that he could be the one to grapple with the body and harvest what she needed.

But he likely would have bitched and moaned the entire time, and there was a reason she'd concealed her plans from him. Men could be so blinded by their emotions, and she suspected he would react poorly.

Thankfully, to complete the ritual, she'd only needed to fish a single bone out of the dust.

What was the true moral distinction, she had always wondered, between curing the terminally sick and raising the dead? Working together, she and Lambert had concocted a plague remedy to hopefully cure the whole fading Continent. If it was moral and upright of her to resurrect a dying populace, why not one man wrongfully killed?

Perhaps death could be seen as simply a deeply advanced sickness and the necromancer a physician with unusual skills.

The little metacarpal resting at the center of the circle seemed far too small and unassuming to belong to a full-grown man. Keira had held it in the cup of her palm and thought how strange it was to look at one small nub of bone and know it had once been a part of someone so significant. 

Not in the grand scheme of things, of course. Not to the Continent at large or really most anyone at all. 

But to Lambert, who in the course of the unusual events of the past year, had become quite significant to Keira, this person had been–

Kneeling, she bent low enough that her forehead kissed cold stone, speaking the invocation louder as the air in the room closed in around her, bright with magic. It was not as ugly and tainted as it flowed through her as she'd been made to believe. Perhaps the same ritual used for more nefarious purposes– to resurrect a dead corrupt king or amass an undead army– would leave a nastier taste in one's mouth.

It did not seem a dark thing at all, not even as the magic began to weigh her down, feeling it in every ounce of her being. A sorcerer of lesser skill may find themselves unraveled by the power that seethed around her, but Keira Metz was no two-bit fortune teller. 

Truthfully, she was morbidly and covetously curious if anyone would ever love her so much. If being her lover or friend had changed anyone in such a lasting way. What she had with Lambert was good, more intimate than she'd ever allowed herself to be with any man, but after this was done, who was to say that he would still–

It happened all at once. The little scrap of bone leapt into the air and glowed backlit by a fierce and blinding light, and as Keira straightened, panting with the release of magic, realizing she had been shouting as it crested, a man suddenly slumped nude before her. 

A strange Witcher, his slit-pupilled eyes narrowing like a cat's.

[girlwonderers]

For Cici: Are they an oldest, middle, youngest or only child? Describe the place where they sleep What objects do they always carry around with them?

OOOOHHHHHHH ty for letting me blab about my Gorl

as far as she knows, Cici is an only child. she was left inside the grand necropolis as a baby—which in my happy little sandbox isn't actually unheard of; i imagine the necropolis functions like a safe haven in the US, where parents can leave newborns anonymously, no questions asked, and they become wards of the state (since the necropolis is always open to the public and always staffed). the only thing she knows for sure is that her parents were elves. she was fostered by a clerk in the city's mason's guid, Marten Ingellvar, until she was nine, at which point her magic manifested and she returned to the necropolis for training.

(Marten also gave her both her middle and last names; Vorgoth gave Cici her first name, since they were the one to take her to the crypt guards after the skeletons found her. her full legal name is Taphodora Cecília Ingellvar. only Vorgoth uses her first name, and only when she's in trouble.)

as for sleeping arrangements, i'm borrowing @crowtoed's FABULOUS headcanon and saying that Cici grew up with a box bed. (although in true nevarran fashion she probably calls it a sleeping vault.) i imagine they're common both for apprentice watchers living in the dorms as well as working-class families, since they're space-saving, private, and warm. after she graduated she was given a permanent residence in the "Watcher's Barrow" (awful wordplay on borough, thank you i'm here all week) on the necropolis grounds (but, crucially, not in the structure itself, which limits people's houses randomly getting shuffled around) and i think she has a four-poster there since it's easier for her to get in and out of with her mobility issues. she was freaked out for a while on her roadtrip with Varric and Harding because she'd never slept in a bed that wasn't fully enclosed either by walls or curtains.

Cici always has her staff with her, which is actually her cane (she uses it both for stability and as a probing cane, because this is fantasy and materials engineering is silly when you have magic and it can telescope out because i said so). sometimes she'll keep a bag with her, like on her roadtrip when she had to carry basically everything she owned, but most days Cici is wearing a split skirt in the style of victorian england.

the victorians did not fuck around with pockets. a non-exhaustive list of Things Cici Has Pulled Out of Her Pockets That Made Bellara Question Her Understanding of Physics:

her magnifier. her old model was just a big rectangular magnifying glass about the size of a box of pocky; Bellara eventually makes her a refreshable night script (fantasy braille) reader that's slightly bigger but still fits in her pocket.

a pair of dragonskin gloves, which can be sterilized by torching them. good for field medicine or Touching Weird Things that Look Sticky.

at least one notepad, a plethora of pens and pencils.

a bar of carbolic soap.

an athame—she doesn't like it for combat magic, but it comes in handy for some rituals.

her waterskin.

a little bag of various herbal chews and powders to prevent migraines.

snacks (varied).

a full set of carpals, metacarpals, and phalanges, for assembling into a Helping Hand (Lucanis threatens to kill her every time she calls it that). the bones were a gift from her fourth-year anatomy professor after he had to have his arm amputated.

a suture kit (for people) and a sewing kit (for clothing), safely contained in little tin boxes.

notably, not much jewelry. Cici left her only grave gold (a necklace from her foster father, which originally belonged to his late wife) in the necropolis when she left.

[er-cryptid]

Note Cards (December 2023)

1st Class Lever

2/3rd Down Femoral Shaft Diagram

2nd Law of Motion

Allosteric Fatty Acid Control

Antidiuretic Hormone

Arginase Disorder

Body Lever System

Bone Functions

Chemotherapeutic Mechanisms

Conservation Laws in Physics

Cytosol

Estuary

Extrasutural Bones

Genetic Transformation

Generalized vs Specialized Transduction

Growth Hormone

Hamstrings

Human Papillomavirus 16

Interpreting Bowel Sounds

Long Head of Biceps Femoris OIA

Long Head of Triceps Brachii

Metacarpal 1 - Dorsal

Nucleoside Reverse Transcriptase Inhibitors

Phage T4 Assembly

Physico-

Radius Upper Midshaft Diagram

Re

Rene-Robert Cavelier

Stylohyoid OIA

Submandibular Ganglion

Superior

Terminal Cisternae

Uses of Linezolid

Yucca faxoniana

Zhemaichu Horse

Zygomaticoorbital Foramen

[consult-sherlockholmes]

John is not a veterinarian medical expert, so he has not been trained to recognise the bones of animals (although sometimes it is more than obvious and clear that it's not human). Especially certain bones of small juvenile humans like ulna, radius, tibia, fibula and femur or especially smaller bones like vertebrae, metacarpals/tarsals and phalanges look similiar to that of a medium to big dog, and if we add the stress of the situation and the dark wet location, it's difficult to deduce the species. Of course certain bones are quite obvious like skulls or hips, there it's easy to determine. And most of the time a skeleton isn't complete, you only have some pieces, and of course they aren't beautifully arranged like in the living animal, it can be difficult to determine. If a skeleton is fully assembled everyone can tell if it's an animal or human, but with fragments it requires more skills. Sometimes bones are found in a forest and people think it's a human murder victim, turns out it was some animal. That's why we need osteology experts or DNA tests. For example, which one is human? Just as a little clue, it's a tibia and fibula.

Not that easy, is it? Maybe I should have gotten myself a veterinarian instead of a human doctor. Solving animal crimes, is there such a thing? Must be more difficult anyway, given regular doctors only study one species, homo sapiens, and veterinarians study several very diverse species, already the bones can be so different.

John might be an army vet, but not that kind of vet.

You put in your bio that you’re a medical expert, but when you were in the well you couldn’t identify the bones on the floor as a child’s? Never mind the fact that you were trained to have a level head during intense situations and have lived with SHERLOCK of all people for years, and are thus quite a bit more accustomed to druggings and seeing bodily remains. What have you to say for yourself?

Let’s throw you in a cold, dark, filling well, and tie your feet to chains, shall we?

[highfunctioningflailgirl]

Whumptober 2021

Prompt #3: „Who did this to you?“

With a familiar tingling in his neural network, the EMH materialized in La Sirena’s sickbay. His biosensors kicked into action even before his holographic body had fully assembled and threw a barrage of medical data at him. Adaptive filters quickly cast the obvious, familiar facts aside (human, male, age 42, 6 ft, 80 kg) and prioritized the relevant ones: raised levels of cortisol and adrenaline (in the process of breaking down), elevated blood pressure, a dip in hemoglobin and an alarming level of blood alcohol.

Stress. Pain. Hemorrhage. Intoxication.

“What is the nature of your medical emergency?”

Captain Rios, standing by the hypospray dispenser, turned around unsteadily and used his hip to stabilize himself against the counter. Hunched over, he was protectively cradling his left hand in his right. Beneath the stark ceiling lights, the Captain’s face looked pale, and blood was glistening in his beard.

Potential hand fracture. Epistaxis of unknown origin.

“I need pain meds,” the Captain slurred, his tone hostile. “Can’t get the damn hypospray replicrate… precate…” He grunted in annoyance. “Can’t get the damn thing to work.”

The EMH pulled a tricoder from his coat pocket and pointed it at Rios. Processing its readings, he rearranged his forehead into a frown.

“I’m afraid the application of an acetylsaliciylic acid won’t fix a misaligned metacarpal fracture.”

The Captain gave him an irritated, blurry look.

“What?”

“Your hand is broken and needs to be set.”

Rios looked at the injured appendage in disgruntlement.

“Bullshit. I just need some ice and an aspirin.” He glared at the hologram. “Why isn’t there a single fuckin’ aspirin in here? It’s a fucking medical bay!”

Detecting a fresh release of stress hormones in the Captain’s system, the EMH’s programming switched to a de-escalation protocol. Automatically, his vocal frequency dropped and his timbre softened.

“I can give you something better than aspirin, Captain,” he said calmly. “A fast-acting analgesic. You will feel better immediately. And then we can take it from there.”

Rios seemed to consider yelling at him for a moment - something the EMH had become used to since his initial activation a few months ago - but then, swaying in place, the Captain asked with narrowed eyes: “You’re not going to sedate me, are you?”

“Not unless you want me to, Captain,” the EMH answered, mildly affronted.

There had been several occasions where he’d offered sleeping pills to Rios (all rejected), and one memorable day when he’d suggested an antidepressant and almost been wiped from La Sirena’s mainframe in response, but, unless the Captain’s behavior and brain chemistry scans fulfilled all the criteria for temporary mental incompetence, medicating him against his will would violate the hologram’s hippocratic coding.

“Do you want a sedative?”

“No!” Rios barked. Then he looked at his hand and tried to wriggle his fingers. The EMH’s biosensors detected a spike in pain intensity even before his patient hissed and winced.

“Alright,” Rios relented angrily, teeth clenched. “Give me the pain meds and set the damn hand.”

The EMH’s neural processors lit up in mimicry of human glee.

“Right away, Captain.”

He slid past Rios to reprogram the hypospray console and replicated the medication he needed. Swiftly, he loaded the vial into the dispenser.

“Sit down, please.” He gestured at the biobed.

Captain Rios grunted, but he clumsily did as ordered. The EMH pressed the dispenser to the side of his patient’s neck and administered the analgesic. On the monitor that had self-activated as soon as Rios’ body had touched the biobed, the hologram was satisfied to see an immediate physical response as his captain’s vitals settled down.

The decrease of pain was also visible in Rios’ body language and behavior. His tense frame softened as his muscles relaxed, his mouth unclenched and his eyes lost some of their aggressive sheen.

“On a scale of one to ten,” the hologram asked, “what is your level-”

“It’s fine,” Rios snarled tiredly. “Just fix the damn hand.”

“There is blood on your face. Would you at least allow me to examine your-”

“Madre de dios! I got punched in the face. It’s just a nosebleed. The hand, Emil! Just the hand.”

The EMH didn’t have a limbic system, but his AI coding answered to Rios’ use of his moniker with a quick burst of invigorating energy.

“Certainly, Captain.”

Gently and efficiently, he took Rios’ broken hand and, with a quick tug, realigned the index metacarpal. Rios, now intoxicated and medicated, barely flinched.

Looking at the broken skin on Rios’ knuckles, the EMH reached for the dermal regenerator.

“May I ask who did this to you?”

The Captain scoffed. “Why would that be any of your business?”

“Depending on the species, toxic agents could have entered through your injured epidermis upon contact. The Cal’thra, for instance, produce a toxin that mixes with their sweat when threatened, leading to necrosis in their enemies’ wounds, and in case you-”

“EMIL!“

The hologram shut his mouth. Inwardly, his processors bristled at the rudeness, but if he wanted to finish treatment before the Captain deactivated him (as he usually did at some point), he knew he had to stop lecturing him. He had learned a lot in recent months, and while dealing with La Sirena’s ever-belligerent, moody new owner wasn’t exactly pleasant, he at least gave the EMH ample occasion to execute his intended programming. This wasn’t the first time he’d fixed the Captain up after some sort of altercation, and it certainly wouldn’t be the last.

“If you would now lie down and let me configure the ossifier matrix…”

He began tapping on a holographic screen.

“No.” Rios shook his head.

The EMH stopped, confused. “Excuse me, Captain?”

“I’m not staying in sickbay,” Rios slurred defiantly. “Just splint my hand and I’m out of here.”

The hologram shouldn’t be surprised. Captain Rios had refused proper treatment before, in favor of letting his wounds heal on their own. The EMH’s hippocratic coding, however, still balked at the sheer stupidity.

“Captain, the ossifier matrix will expedite bone fusion. Foregoing micro-repair will prolong your regeneration considerably. You will be in pain, and your hand will be in a cast for weeks!“

“I don’t care,” Rios growled at him. “Just do it and I’m out of here.”

The EMH sighed. After all these months, and with all the knowledge the hologram had at his disposal, he was still unable to understand the Captain’s motivations. He’d browsed each and every of La Sirena’s computer files accessible to him, and he’d dived deep into his-… Rios’ memory base to find the cause for his self-flagellation, to no avail. Every time he came close to an explanation, a hole opened up in the data. A log entry that had been erased, a medical file that was incomplete, a classified Starfleet report, a face without a name.

Resigned, the EMH replicated a splint and bandaged Rios’ hand.

“All done?” Rios asked when he’d finished.

The hologram cast another look at Rios vitals: except for his blood alcohol, everything was back within normal range. He would have preferred to keep an eye on his Captain, here in sickbay. Something beyond the reach of his scanners told him he should. But there was no medical justification. His nosebleed had stopped; his hand would heal; he would survive another hangover in the morning.

“Yes,” the EMH answered truthfully.

“Good,” Rios mumbled and pushed off the biobed, swaying and tugging his bandaged hand against his chest.

“Deactivate EMH.”

Emil disintegrated with a woeful hum.

(You can also read and comment on this fic on AO3:)

[sbknews]

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[vermiculated]

Poprocks

Owen starts talking with Logan pretty regularly, after that.

They're into the same stuff, Logan maybe a little more than Owen, but Logan's got a way of being sure, sure about things, that makes him easy to be with. Owen doesn't spend, and has never spent, very much time figuring out who he is: Logan has. It's still early.

Uncommonly early. Call isn't until nine. They're here because Logan likes to start his day right, and Owen mostly does what people ask him. Not everything is about appropriate assertive behaviors. Owen presses his hands together, palm curling around the fat of a metacarpal.

"Do you like, like." Logan pauses, assembling his thoughts. "Have you ever looked at a Robert Mapplethorpe? He's a photographer." They are in the hotel restaurant. No one else is around. Owen has a glass of grapefruit juice, and Logan is building an arch over the saucer that came with his tea. "From the 1980s. 1970s, maybe."

The arch is made out of packets of jam, with cornerstones of foil-wrapped butter pats. "Uh. What are his pictures like?"

Logan continues to ignore his tea, and additionally leaves off his construction project. "Like, weird. The pictures are kinda famous. They're cutting-edge." Logan bites a hangnail on his thumb, and moves his hand from his mouth to look at where he has bitten. "Or they used to be, back in the eighties. Like, daring. Big news stuff. Black and white, without any greys, the development is so crisp, like. He had these ideas and he does exactly that, not like he has to explore around to see what he wants to look at, like, some kind of military calculation."

"A heat-seeking missile."

"Yeah, yeah, a heat-seeking missile." Logan taps the table with his first finger. The motion makes his arch shake. An explosion. "Like you. You've probably seen one, it's like hearing music at the grocery store."

Owen blinks slowly. "Okay." Logan's cool, and he sometimes says weird stuff. That's part of being cool, that Logan expects Owen to figure out what's going on, instead of explaining it to him. Sometimes, it leaves Owen feeling like he has to look up everything that Logan says, except he doesn't want to be showy about it. He doesn't want Logan to feel that he's too complicated for Owen to get. That's not how to act with someone cool, and Owen definitely doesn't want to write down all the stuff that he doesn't know about where someone else might see it. Not now.

Not in his phone, not on paper. Instead he presses his fingernails into the back of his hand. In between the tendons and all the small bones, Owen digs his nails in: straight line, flexible curve, diagonal line with his index finger, a flexion as a circle with his middle finger, two half circles and a straight line, four fast lines that sting where he digs the nail of his fifth finger into an artery. ROB M.

The trick is one that he learned for memorizing lines. Like walking through a house, and each room is a new set of words, or putting phrases to a rhythm to remember them better. Practical lessons: about how to move through the world, how to be good at this. All he has added is the part where it's only in his hands.

"Like, you have to have seen it, like they're really good. He does these portraits -- did these portraits, he's dead now -- in black and white. They're sort of like, soft? Like, like, you don't feel the pictures, but the way they look is kind of soft. Even when the subject of the picture is hard." Logan scrunches his nose and bites his hangnail again, covering his mouth with his hand for a laugh that's only a breath. "I mean, like, in that way, too. He's the guy who did those like, uh. Like bondage pictures?"

Like bondage pictures, Owen wants to ask, like what. He curls his thumb against his palm, drags his thumbnail down to the bottom of his hand. The scrape aches.

[academicatheism]

Another Evolution Denier

godlike-and-cowering:

1) Darwin defined the mechanism of evolution as decent with modification, and what he hypothesized was a trend in the fossil record showing small changes into speciation. We don’t see that. Archeologists don’t see that. Paleontologists don’t see that. We see punctuated equilibrium. That’s the notion that species arise abruptly at sporadic points in time. Almost as if they might have been placed here? Ponder

I’ll set aside all of the Deepak Chopra-esque woo woo you talked about in our chat and focus on your egregious ignorance on evolution. Descent with modification is precisely what we see. It’s fine to be ignorant of the fossil record, but gradual changes do result in macroevolutionary speciation stemming beyond beak length and girth, fur pigmentation, neck size, and so on; I’ll go over this in detail later. I already discussed whale evolution and human evolution in a previous response. I briefly mentioned horse evolution, but that’s another marquee example of macroevolution:

This isn’t an example of punctuated equilibrium, which you misdefine as species arising abruptly because “they might have been placed there” – so I’ll return to that in a bit; this is an example of evolutionary modification over long periods of time resulting in speciation. Paleontologists have certainly seen what you said they don’t see. If not for being able to see what you’re claiming they’re blind to, we wouldn’t have such clear examples in the fossil record.

Before I go on, punctuated equilibrium is a hypothesis put forward by Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldridge, which states that even over a period of millions of years, species are stable. This much more gradual change is then punctuated by rapid changes resulting in new species. This change is then followed by further stability. Bryozoan have been stable for roughly 140 million years and their fossil record appears to confirm Gould and Eldridge’s hypothesis. As Berkley’s Evolution page tells us, however, punctuated equilibrium doesn’t:

- Suggest that Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection is wrong. - Mean that the central conclusion of evolutionary theory, that life is old and - organisms share a common ancestor, no longer holds. - Negate previous work on how evolution by natural selection works. - Imply that evolution only happens in rapid bursts.

Punctuated equilibrium isn’t a challenge to natural selection. It’s simply another evolutionary model and it isn’t at all clear that punctuated equilibrium occurs most frequently or that it is the dominant evolutionary model. That debate rages on, but there are of course cases that show it to be less prevalent. In fact, homologies and atavisms may show that punctuated equilibrium is uncommon. As Jerry Coyne explains:

The most striking atavism in our own species is called the “coccygeal projection,” better known as the human tail. As we’ll learn shortly, early in development human embryos have a sizable fishlike tail which begins to disappear about seven weeks into development (its bones and tissues are simply reabsorbed by the body). Rarely, however, it doesn’t regress completely, and a baby is born with a tail projecting from the base of its spine (figure 14). The tails vary tremendously:  some are “soft.” without bone, while others contain vertebrae — the same vertebrae normally fused together in our tailbone. Some tails are an inch long, others nearly a foot. And they aren’t just simple flaps of skin, but can have hair, muscles, blood vessels, and nerves. Some can even wiggle! Fortunately, these awkward protrusions are easily removed by surgeons.

What can this mean, other than that we still carry a developmental program for making tails? Indeed, recent genetic work has shown that we carry exactly the same genes that make tails in animals like mice, but these genes are normally deactivated in human fetuses. Tails appear to be true atavisms.

Coyne, Jerry A. Why evolution is true. Oxford: Oxford U Press, 2010. 65-66 Print.

What you miss and clearly didn’t anticipate as a part of my response is the genetic component. All phenotypical traits have corresponding genotypes. A phenotypical trait is what’s observed when genes are expressed whilst the genotype is what results in such traits. Without a clear understanding of the genotype-phenotype distinction, natural selection can’t be understood. I must add that while there is a clear distinction between the two, there’s also a clear causal connection and this is precisely what Coyne points out. We have tail-making genes, but generally speaking, humans don’t develop tails. That’s because the tail-making genes do not express themselves, hence there’s no corresponding phenotypical trait. When they do happen to express themselves, there’s a corresponding phenotypical trait.

For anyone who might be confused, an atavism is not a vestigial trait. The human tail is sometimes erroneously considered a vestigial trait, but it isn’t because it’s not a non-functioning version of a tail. In other words, if all humans were born with tails that don’t wiggle, wag, and so on, then it would be a lot more like an ostrich’s wings. The ostrich has repurposed its wings to help it maintain balance and to add thrust when it runs, but an ostrich notably doesn’t and cannot fly. Their wings are vestigial structures. 

Atavisms, on the other hand, are phenotypical traits that reappear in a modern individual or even within a genomic lineage but not in a population. It is entirely possible for a grandparent, parent, and child to have been born with a tail; this is an example of an atavism reappearing in a lineage. Though that’s possible, there are no observed instances of any large portion of the human population being born with tails. In any case, the tail, unlike the human appendix, is not a repurposed structure and thus, isn’t a vestigial trait.

Homologies may appear to show a so-called body plan by a designer in the minds of some, but homologies, if that view is to be taken seriously, show only a severe lack of imagination. As Francois Jacobs noted, evolution is a tinkerer. It isn’t at all like a designer and this is precisely why this apparent lack of imagination is widespread. As Prothero explains:

For example, the basic vertebrate forelimb has the same basic elements: a single large bone (the humerus), a pair of two long bones in the forearm (the radius and ulna), a number of wrist bones (carpals and metacarpals), and multiple bones (phalanges) support five digits (fingers). But look at the wide array of ways that some animals use this basic body plan! Whales have modified them into a flipper, while bats have extended the fingers out to support a wing membrane. Birds also developed a wing, but in an entirely different way, with most of the hand and wrist bones reduced or fused together, and feather shafts providing the wing support instead of fingers bones. Horses have lost their side toes and walk on one large finger, the middle finger. None of this makes any sense unless these animals inherited a standard body plan in place from their distinct ancestors and had to modify it to suit their present-day function and ecology. These common elements (bones, muscles, nerves) that serve different functions despite being built from the same basic parts are known as homologous structures. For example, the finger bones of a bat wing are homologous with our finger bones, and so on. 

Prothero, Donald R., and Carl Dennis. Buell. Evolution: what the fossils say and why it matters. New York: Columbia U Press, 2007. 105-106. Print.

He goes on to explain that an “intelligent designer” wouldn’t jury-rig these structures using the bones that these individuals inherited from their ancestors. Indeed a perfect and infinitely intelligent designer would design wings in the best way possible. Whale flippers wouldn’t have differed in their bone configuration compared to the flippers of fish and marine reptiles. Though all of these structures have the same function, all of them are configured differently, and though they’re configured differently, they are inherited from the organism’s ancestors. 

While you’re looking for justification in the fact that species arise rapidly “as though they were put there” or created from scratch, you’re paying attention to what’s on the surface. In other words, punctuated equilibrium cannot and doesn’t attempt to disprove the notion that structures like wings, flippers, and hands evolved, and that they evolved from ancestral bones. Speciation isn’t the only evidence we have; genotypes resulting in phenotypical traits aren’t the only evidence we have; we also have evidence of ancestral bone structures being reconfigured to suit modern purposes. If punctuated equilibrium were a challenge to natural selection, atavisms and homologies would be explained alternatively and better, or be explained away entirely; punctuated equilibrium doesn’t accomplish that.

2) two scientists tried and failed to propose a start to the central dogma of biology which is DNA -> RNA -> PROTEINS Even using ribozymes with amino acids and lighting in a shallow bed couldn’t assemble the right order or even close to a viable RNA transcript that could also self replicate. Even under water under pressures and thermal heat, still the same outcome. It’s a “what came first, the chicken or the egg?” Type of equation that still baffles EVERY BIOLOGIST TODAY. You need critical proteins to replicate or transcribe DNA or RNA, and those critical proteins are encoded in the RNA, which is encoded in the DNA. If this isn’t clear please let me know because I want to make sure you understand that this isn’t something any scientist can sidestep. Not now, so let future generations that have better answers use biology to undermine a common architect.

This is a classic example of an argument from ignorance or alternatively, an argument from personal incredulity. Falling short of saying your argument fails because it’s fallacious, which would constitute a fallacy on its own, namely fallacy fallacy, I’m going to point out that your whole argument is a fallacy. It’s as good as Hoyle’s Fallacy. You’re basically concluding that since past and modern scientists haven’t established abiogenesis, that future scientists can’t. That’s a fallacious inductive argument stemming from your desperate need to believe in a creator. There’s that and having the sequence entirely wrong. RNA World actually posits RNA (ribozymes) –> DNA –> Proteins. Ribozymes catalyzed chemical reactions in the earliest lifeforms. These reactions eventually resulted in DNA and more complex protein synthesis. 

Aside from that, you act as though abiogenesis is limited to RNA World. You say nothing of panspermia or what the Uray-Miller Experiment attempted to show, namely that life started with an electric spark. You also say nothing of the prevalence of hydrothermal vents in the oceans of ancient Earth, a place where chemosynthetic organisms are known to thrive. Panspermia is especially enticing given that the building blocks of life have been found on meteorites and that, in fact, the building blocks are ubiquitous not only in our solar system, but in the universe. Life here might have been seeded from elsewhere and far from pushing the buck back, it’s a matter of probability. 

What’s more probable – an invisible, incompetent designer making life from scratch or organic matter arising from inorganic matter? What’s more probable – an incompetent designer using organic matter to animate life or organic matter going through gradual chemical evolution and eventually resulting in life? The probability favors the idea that well-established inorganic to organic reactions eventually resulted in organic compounds resulting in life. RNA World is simply one way that might have happened, but certainly not the only way that’s been proposed. 

In any case, god used to be the widespread explanation for everything from storms to earthquakes to volcanic eruptions. Since these have been thoroughly explained without requiring supernatural agency, what’s next is to relegate god to what remains of human ignorance. Specifically, since we don’t yet know in full detail how the universe and life came to be, god is the placeholder explanation. Given your penchant for inductive arguments (faulty ones at that), I’ll present a much more compelling and likely inductive argument. 

This is where you point and laugh and say the predictable: “taking notes from a comedian…LOLz.” Well, it’s quite telling that a comedian, not a scientist, has a better grasp of reality than you do. He makes a valid point anyway and pointing out that he’s a comedian is ad hominem. Philosophy is a human endeavor and as such, everyone has the potential to do good philosophy – and here, Minchin is presenting a solid inductive argument and thus, doing good philosophy.

God or supernatural agents used to be a primary mode of explanation. That simply isn’t the case anymore. People like yourself have relegated god to the posts of our ignorance, but as history has shown time and again, the god explanation will be decisively supplanted by a better, more objective explanation. Moreover, that explanation will be replicable and falsifiable. The god explanation obviously lacks basic scientific criteria in that it isn’t replicable; it’s merely false consensus. It also isn’t falsifiable because apparently, even the notion of a multiverse doesn’t cancel out the god explanation for some believers. Believers don’t allow the god explanation to go away because they’re intransigent individuals who have a desperate, deeply rooted need to believe. 

They have projected their ego and psychological fragility onto the whole of the universe in stating that the creator must look like and favor them. Aside from that, the god explanation has been regressive and stagnating rather than progressive. The god explanation leads to no proliferation of knowledge, breakthroughs, and solutions. It leaves us completely and utterly without sound explanation for our current ignorance. There once existed a woo woo believer like you that said that scientists and natural philosophers will never figure out x or y; once they did figure out x or y, the matter became a and b; then they figured out a and b, and so the matter became w and x, and so on. “God is the ever-receding pocket of scientific ignorance”, as Neil deGrasse Tyson so wonderfully put it.

3) you must be thinking of micro evolution because that is something that biologists do all agree on. This is the notion that evolutionary changes can occur selectively within a species especially over a short period of time. This is the example of Darwin’s finches, and the break of the polar bears, all these examples I’m sure you would have hoped to fuck me with. Especially changes within the gene pool. But you would see that even polar bears and grizzleys would have a viable cub. You would see that darwin’s finches would be in fact fertile and viable. They’re the same species. There’s no speciation. What defines speciation across the board is the ability for two organisms to provide a viable fertile offspring. Would you call every dog a different species? When we can cross breed every one like we have for centuries? See, evolution is one species giving rise to many. We don’t even have a clean example of a definitive species giving rise to another completely. That’s macroevolution. That’s something the scientists of tomorrow also need to investigate to substantiate your take on evolution. So until then, hold those arguments also.

My “take” on evolution has already been firmly substantiated. Apart from the two fossil records I summarized in my response to that other evolution denier, I briefly went over another one above. Aside from that, I went over evolution at the genetic and phenotypical level, something you failed to anticipate. What’s more is that we do have clean examples of one species, over a long period of time, giving rise to a completely different species. In fact, the emergence of polar bears is a macroevolutionary example! All you show here is a misapprehension of evolution.

You don’t understand macroevolution. You’re not thinking one species branching off into two or more distinct species. You’re thinking pokemon; you’re thinking Dratini becoming Dragonite with one intermediary barely explaining how the thing went from a sea dragon to a bipedal dragon with wings! That’s not macroevolution. Dogs are, first and foremost, the product of mostly artificial selection and any difference in breeds is selected, directly or indirectly, by humans.

Macroevolution, on the other hand, has been observed repeatedly. You gave an example in the emergence of polar bears. There’s also the example of homo antercessor splitting into homo neaderthalensis and homo sapien, and perhaps even Denisovans, homo floresiensis and homo naledi. Whales, dolphins, and porpoises are cetaceans with a common ancestor and apart from the many distinct whale, dolphin, and porpoise species we have today, there are many that have gone extinct. Again (!), we have plenty of fossils. So pronounced is this macroevolutionary change, that the criterion of interbreeding is no longer met. A blue whale wouldn’t even attempt to breed with a say, an hourglass dolphin or a clymene. Heck, it wouldn’t even attempt breeding with a humpback or beluga. 

The issue with what you’re saying narrows down to scientific illiteracy. You limit speciation to sympatric speciation and utterly ignore allopatric speciation. What you describe, namely two species that are geographically close enough to interbreed, is sympatric speciation. What you don’t even mention is allopatric speciation, which occurs when species sharing a common ancestor are geographically isolated or vicariant and therefore, can’t breed. Vicariance prevents gene flow and therefore, interbreeding. As PBS explains:

An example of vicariance is the separation of marine creatures on either side of Central America when the Isthmus of Panama closed about 3 million years ago, creating a land bridge between North and South America. Nancy Knowlton of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama has been studying this geological event and its effects on populations of snapping shrimp. She and her colleagues found that shrimp on one side of the isthmus appeared almost identical to those on the other side – having once been members of the same population.

But when she put males and females from different sides of the isthmus together, they snapped aggressively instead of courting. They had become separate species, just as the theory would predict.

You also didn’t mention parapatric speciation. Though it occurs a much lesser frequency, it has been observed. Parapatric speciation is being observed, in real time, in Anthoxanthum odoratum. A portion of the species lives in contaminated soil and have developed tolerance for heavy metals whilst another portion lives in the same soil and has not developed this tolerance. The tolerant plants and intolerant plants are geographically near to one another and yet, they don’t fertilize with one another because their flowering times differ. We are observing, in real time, the permanent end to gene flow within a continuous population.

I strongly suggest that you get a handle on what you’re looking to deny before speaking on the matter. I promised not only to put your ignorance on display, but also to correct it – not so much for you, but for people who share your views. It is a known fact that the person receiving correction tends to double down. It is also known that minds are changed indirectly and in private. I’m not so much concerned about you correcting your ignorance; I don’t see that happening anytime soon because it appears your need to believe is tied to psychological changes resulting from frequent narcotics (ab)use. 

Exchanges like this do present good opportunity to communicate to them who are currently ignorant but have no stake in this particular game. My point isn’t to demean them, but rather to get them to understand that they don’t actually understand what they purport to understand and that, in fact, they lack even a perfunctory grasp of the topic. You don’t get evolution and that much is clear by a failure to understand the genotype-phenotype distinction and connection, the micro-macro distinction, and the types of speciation there are. Apart from that, you lack a basic comprehension of what constitutes a scientific theory, which explains why you think the god explanation holds water. You also show a lack of depth in the topic of abiogenesis, pretending to debase merely one theory (RNA World) whilst also demonstrating a poor understanding of the theory. 

Read more; take some courses; use the internet; most importantly, stay far away from pseudoscientific, apologetic sites defending creationism and intelligent design. One thing is clear, if one wants to give a designer credit for the diversity of life on this planet, they credit a demonstrably incompetent designer that repurposes existing material in a haphazard way – the same process that can be achieved by blind chance. The evolution of life on this planet is a statistical process, a process of trial and error that doesn’t present to us any opportunity to give credit to or cast blame on a designer.

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Causes, Symptoms And Treatment Options

Erosive Osteoarthritis. (Above). Frontal radiograph of the hand demonstrates an arthritis which impacts mainly the DIP and PIP joints (white arrows) and carpal-metacarpal joint of thumb (yellow arrow). There are small osteophytes and erosions (white circle). (Below) The characteristic Health Journey lesion of erosive osteoarthritis is shown in shut-up. There is a central erosion of the proximal part of joint (yellow arrow) and bone overgrowth peripherally (white arrows) resembling a seagull’s wings.

The body mass index (BMI) allows estimating the quantity of extra fats in the body to outline corpulence. The larger the BMI is, the upper risks related to obesity change into. Animal reproduction research have shown Health Center an antagonistic effect on the fetus and there are not any sufficient and nicely-controlled studies in humans, however potential benefits may warrant use in pregnant ladies regardless of potential dangers.

There is a robust must assemble early put up-injury cohorts prior to OA growth. Rigorous long-time period randomized trials that consider surgical and conservative strategies of treatment are required. In addition to established patient-reported outcomes, validated neuromuscular and biomechanical measures should be used since structural radiological change is a late sign. Of specific curiosity, given the success of neuro-muscular programs in altering risk elements and incidence of knee injury, is whether or not related train strategies could possibly be used to switch OA development and progression after injury. Similar trunk, hip and knee management methods may very well be applied to knee-injured people.

E.)? Radiographic adjustments typical of rheumatoid arthritis on posteroanterior hand and wrist radiographs Patient self-assessed incapacity. Free Information Booklets. Karena Wu Speaks about Physical Therapy and Arthritis at TRIARQ. 2013 update of cjuvenile idiopathic arthritis recommendationsd (1). Reactive arthritis refers to ache stiffness redness or swelling in a joint resulting from a previous an infection.

Be careful with your daily actions. Some actions put stress on joints. For instance, it is much safer to carry heavy baggage of groceries close to your body in paper or fabric luggage as a substitute of utilizing fingers and arms on plastic bag handles. Schiller, A.L. & Teitelbaum, S.L. (1999). Bones and Joints. In E. Rubin & J.L. Farber (eds.) Pathology (third ed.) (pp1337-1413). Philadelphia, PA: Lippincott-Raven Publishers. Li S, Micheletti R (2011). Role of food plan in rheumatic disease. Rheumatic Disease Clinics of North America, 37(1): 119-133. Difficulty respiration, swelling of the face or throat. These could possibly be indicators of a severe allergic reaction.

Overall, the best way to achieve OsteoArthritis pain aid is with a multi-pronged strategy that makes use of a mixture of the above remedies (or others) to maximise your outcomes. Furthermore, the healthcare crew overseeing your OsteoArthritis treatment ought to have a clear understanding of your life-style and which therapy options would be the most sensible for you. Professional actions which provoke or preserve pain should be temporarily or definitively stopped. In some cases, a job reclassification may be necessary (see the article on Osteoarthritis and work). Vas J, White A. Evidence from RCTs on optimum acupuncture therapy for knee osteoarthritis-an exploratory overview. Acupunct Med. 2007;25(1-2):29-35.

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