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mallowstep · 4 years ago

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What are your opinions on forbidden relationships in Warriors? I've seen people label it as a "trope" because of how common this is. Some find the forbidden romance aspect intriguing, though others find it extremely repetitive and old

I'd like to know your thoughts!

hm. well, it is a trope. i mean, there's an average of one major one a series, right? greysilver, leafcrow (and others, but that's the big one), heatherlion (and implied others), tigerdove, idk i don't remember anything from avos but violetshine luv her but there's probably something, bristleroot. dotc doesn't count bc well it's dotc.

anyway.

definitely a trope.

but that's not a bad thing.

what i think people don't give warriors enough credit for is that these are not all the same forbidden romance. most of them are handled in different ways and bring up different conflicts. i understand why people are tired of them, but let's not discredit one of the only good things in warriors romance: that they make forbidden relationships different.

like, with grey and silver, it's about loyalty and responsibility. leafcrow is just bad idea central, both heatherlion and tigerdove are about responsibilities and young cats, and they have two different answers, and bristleroot is challenging the whole idea from the start.

so like. give credit where credit is due: we're not doing the same (forbidden) relationships again and again. i don't see enough people talk about that.

okay so it turns out i have um. a lot of thoughts about this. idk i just kept writing and now it's over 2k words. so you know. under the cut: matthew does half-baked media analysis to talk about why the code and cats' relationships to it are misunderstood. while actually staying on topic.

anyway from here on i'm just going to say relationship/romance, and understand that i'm generally talking about the forbidden kind. also i'm talking exclusively within the realm of warriors romance, which is, on average, bad. so when i say "X is good," i don't mean "X is good in general," i mean "given what we have, X is good." just to be clear.

right! basically, this is a tool. it creates tension and drama, and that's fine. warriors is a soap opera, remember. soap operas use secrets and relationships and all sorts of plot devices over and over again. warriors is not Serious. it can be dark. it has serious moments. but it is not a Serious Book Series for Serious Kids. it is a soap opera for Future Theatre Kids. yeah?

from that perspective, i'm a-ok with forbidden romance. (also, as a mini-aside, it creates some much-needed genetic diversity when kits are involved.) and again: all of the major relationships are different, so i think that's better than a lot of people give it credit for.

yeah, heatherlion and greysilver and tigerdove are all about the same general idea (loyalty and responsibility), but they all have different circumstances and different resolutions.

so like? yeah. sure. why not?

plus, like, who's reading warriors for the romance? i separate the concept of "romance" from a "relationship" here: i like the relationships in warriors (ivy and dove tension my beloved), but i'm not here to read about tigerheart wooing dovewing. (yes, i do love the tigerdove scenes in oots. no, that's not because i think they're very good at being romantic.)

but i digress.

if warriors was a Serious Book Series for Serious Kids, i'd have a different take here. having been in an IRL forbidden relationship, i have the Personal Insight and Experience to say they're this weird mash of "very much how it feels" and "not at all how it feels."

tigerdove is probably my favourite bc it's the closest to my circumstances, and i think dovewing is a good pov. i like how she breaks up with him because it's a bad idea, but that's not the same thing as not feeling for him.

(heh. twelve-year-old me reading oots like "this will never apply to my life" what did you know)

but to the point, if warriors was serious, i'd point out that the consequences always seem to be internal. we haven't seen characters be punished for their actions. and so on.

but warriors is a soap opera.

and here's my actual thesis: we haven't seen characters be punished for their actions, because "forbidden relationships" are a normal and expected part of clan society.

like no, fandom-at-large, you're kind of missing the point. okay, you know how like. people complain about. idk. ivypool and fernsong being distantly related?

(third aside/very long ivyfern rant, i put a nice big "rant over" after it if you want to skip past it: they're third cousins. they share, max, 2.2% of their genetics. they are fine. do you know your third cousins? do you? yeah. and like. they live in a closed society. there is no one new.

i've never seen someone complain about forbidden romance and ivyfern at the same time, and i do generally agree we should have more mystery fathers, altho for a different reason, but like. idk. this bothers me.

their last shared relative was nutmeg. that's so far back. god. i get it, there was a prophecy saying they're related, but if you remember my rant about how dovewing shouldn't be a part of the prophecy because of how distantly related to firestar is, you know how i feel about that already.

complaining they're related and that's a problem is. deep breath here. it requires demonstrating that warriors has kept track of kinship all the way back to firestar's mother. and even if you wave that requirement, you still have to convince me they would care about that. this isn't a "they're cats, harold" situation, this is a "you would not know your third cousin even if you lived in the same town" situation.

i mean maybe you would. some people do. but my hometown has generations of people who married within its borders. you get as far as "cousin," maybe "second cousin" if you're feeling fancy. i'm not trying to make an always true statement, i just. every time i see someone complain about ivyfern being related, it strikes me as not understanding how extended families work?

i know third cousins isn't technically classified as a distant relative, but you have, on average, 190 third cousins. i feel so strongly about this i looked it up.

like i'm not. okay if you say, "I don't ship ivyfern because they are third cousins and that makes me uncomfortable" you are Valid. in general, you are all valid. i do not think you have to, on a personal level, be okay with ivyfern. you are free to do as you wish.

but. if you want to argue "ivyfern is a Bad Ship because they are third cousins" you have a hell of a burden of proof. simply saying "they share a great-great-grandmother" does not meet that, because like. yeah. we're all pretty damn related.)

(ivyfern rant over)

IVYFERN RANT OVER

right so. anyway. if you remove forbidden romance? you're forcing a lot more of those situations.

i've been messing around with modelling some small-scale fan clan-adjacent stuff to double-check the ratios for wbcd, and it's. it quickly becomes a necessity, is what i'm saying.

but i got distracted like. researching how related third cousins are. my point is not about that, that's like. a different topic. that i crammed into here because i have no self-control.

no, no, what i was trying to get to is: oakheart straight up tells us that cats have half-clan kits all the time, it's not a problem, no one talks about it. and that? that is exactly what we see modelled by warriors.

the only reason greystripe and silverstream have a problem is that silverstream dies and greystripe claims the kits. i feel very strongly that if she had lived, the kits would have been born and raised riverclan kits, that might, maybe, one day, guess who their father is.

we haven't had any half clan kits in a while, which yes! i think is a problem, but like. the fact that the three are medicine cat kits seems to be a bigger issue. which feels right.

and i'm not trying to argue what i think should be, i legitimately believe the text of warriors defends this, even in newer books which throw out a lot of the older world building in favour of more human-like conflict.

as readers, we are naturally following protagonists. we are following the interesting story. but imagine you're just a background riverclan cat. minnowtail, if you will. do you think, do you honestly think, anyone cares about minnowtail?

not in a bad way, just. if she's meeting up with mousewhisker at night, do you think anyone cares? of course not! no one cares. she's not a Protagonist. her kits aren't going to be prophesized about.

heck, finleap switches clans! and it's barely a big deal. it feels like one, but when's the last time anyone bothered dealing with it? that's what i thought.

(also i forgot like all of avos so that very last point might be a bad one if it is my argument stands i just literally do not remember anything in avos but violetshine. none. zero.)

but it's easy to get caught up with characters like hollyleaf and bristlefrost and forget that like. not everyone cares about the code. most of our protagonists do, because it's become mostly equivalent with being moral. and i have an essay draft titled "the code as religion vs the code as law" where i want to expand on this more, but i think like. that idea, that we as readers should use the code as a way of evaluating cats' behaviour, is flawed.

like, i'm not talking about being inconsistent with how that is applied. if you want to say, "the trial leafpool goes through for having half-clan kits is legitimate because of the code," i still think your approach is flawed.

because the cats themselves don't seem to think that way.

the code doesn't, to me, feel like the ten commandments. it does not feel like "you must do this to be a good cat."

rather, it feels like aesop's parables. "here are mistakes cats made and what we do instead of that."

i don't think the cats know the code the way we do. i do not think they memorize a list of rules as kits. i think they know what is and is not part of it, but i imagine they know the stories far more than the rules.

(i'm working on my lore stories to replace code of the clans.)

and even if that's my thoughts, i do think this is supported by the text. no one ever teaches the warrior code, cats just learn it in pieces. "don't waste food because we don't have enough to spare" is taught, not "there's a rule about food and starclan on the code."

that's why the whole arc of the broken code even works: the reason the imposter is able to manipulate things is because cats don't treat the code as a rigid set of rules and commandments, but guiding principles.

the parts of the code that we tend to focus on the most are relationships, apprentices, and battle. or that's my perception. i didn't do a poll to obtain that. there's also the leader's word, but readers don't usually think of that as a good rule, so i'm not including it.

but the parts the cats focus on most are food, territory, and the leader's word. which makes sense: those are basic needs: food, security, and...i don't want to say authority so much as some kind of social system. explaining it would be a whole thing. just trust with me, if you don't mind.

i don't think we have any real reason to believe cats care about half-clan relationships half as much as we do. yes, apprentices are chastized about it, but that's not really the same thing as being punished.

and it's hard to tell, because apprentices being punished has really fallen off, and that's kind of the problem with any argument i try to make about warriors, but.

wow.

i'm actually still on topic? i'm 2k words in and i'm still on topic? a day i never thought would come.

let's wrap this up. cats seem to care about half clan relationships in that: a) they lead to conflicted loyalties, b) they mess with borders and prey, and c) they are in the code as bad. in that order.

and again, if the code was some high and holy religious doctrine, we couldn't have the broken code as an arc. it does not work if the cats are already following it to a t, and know it word for word, because it's signfiicantly harder to manipulate people if they do.

not to the level the imposter does, at the speed he does.

and yes, you could argue that it's more bad writing, but. i think that discredits warriors. yeah, it sure has its fair share of bad writing, but i don't think that's in the way the imposter works. instead, he seizes on a big important doctrine that's nebulous, and uses that to control people.

and that? that feels much more interesting.

so with that in mind, i don't think the cats would care about your typical, non-protagonist forbidden relationship, and i don't think we should, either.

as far as a plot device, i think we're okay with what we have. don't get me wrong, i understand why people are tired of it, but i think we also should remember that warriors is not repeating itself. having multiple forbidden relationships is not repetitive. now, if medicine cats were having half-clan kits every series, i'd make a different argument.

but all of the major forbidden relationships have different outcomes, lessons, and circumstances, and for me, i think that's signficantly interesting.

i didn't really check sources and quotes for this, so like, if you spotted something wrong, feel free to correct me. my overall point stands, but there's a lot of warriors and i have a bad memory, so i could have missed somthing major.

#ask #anon #essay #mine #discourse #not really but you know

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yavannah · 4 years ago

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Possible The Sims 4 challenge idea

I found old notebooks from a time when I was still playing the Sims 2 game and in it I once tried to play with multiple players together in a Legacy challenge. The site was radosims.com, but unfortunately that site / forum no longer exists.

But now I got the idea to put here what I myself came up with and remembered this challenge. It’s not even radosims challenges at first, but I guess you’ll find it on some other Sims site too. I don't even remember if it was Mod the Sims or some other similar site.

So the rules and guidelines can be, to put it mildly, confusing, because I don’t fully remember them myself, and it’s actually been quite a long time since I tried this challenge. I thought that with The Sims 4 it could be easier when the challenge sim can be shared through the gallery if needed.

But here come the whole thing. Tell me what you think. :)

Let's play together Legacy challenge

That name may not be right, but I had to come up with a descriptive title, so that’s what it is now. Sure, you can fix me and tell me what it really was.

That is, the idea is to play one Sims family among multiple players as if in a Legacy challenge.

Of course, everyone has so-called artistic freedom and every time the sim moves to the next player it is sent without the downloaded cc, of course everyone gets to use their own downloaded cc and only the defaults could make an exception, even if they don't come, but each player changes own defaults or the game's own genetics/outfits, etc.

The number of generations, on the other hand, can go according to how many players are involved in the challenge, or a certain number is agreed between the players, even if it's a traditional ten generations, or played as long as there is enough enthusiasm and players.

That is, one sim is created initially, gender and sexual orientation do not matter as long as the sim has genetic offspring. The beginner age could be a teenager-young adult or an adult.

Simi should be a basic sim anyway, but of course it can be a special sim (alien / witch / vampire / mermaid) if agreed between the players and if other players have special add-ons that require special sims (Get to work/Realm of Magic/Dream Islands/Vampires).

If not, then we will stay with the basics and we can even develop something for sim that must be passed on to Sim’s descendants. Eye color etc.

And in order for this to remain a bit interesting, as I mentioned at the beginning, the players have so-called artistic freedom and everyone should be able to create some kind of story for their own generation if they so wish. But of course you don’t have to do that if you don’t want to or can’t.

Once the sim of the gaming generation has found a spouse and had children, then as the children grow into teenagers, a choice can be made as to which of the children will be able to continue the family.

It can be done even with a so-called vote among all the players and why not the story among the next and the teen sim who got the most votes moves on to the next player. Admittedly, I was wondering here whether the whole family could be moved with the same effort, so the sim's memories would not disappear, but that too would probably be reconcilable between the players.

And with the scores you actually played (if you want to count your points) it would go exactly according to the rules of the basic Legacy challenge. That is, initially a suitable amount that the sim can move to a suitable lot and even get the basics.

Of course if you have a university, then you can start from university and then after completing it move to live on the lot of your choice or if you want an extreme start on such a sim lot and only necessary, money to zero and the plot to feature off the range.

And a sim can only remove this feature when sim has received, for example, a certain number of handiness points in dexterity, as well as a certain amount of money.

Oh and the sims are only allowed to marry the non-playable sims in the game. I recommend not trying your luck with Mrs. Crumplebottom, she’s not very romantic in nature and she’s especially reluctant to hit everyone with her handbag.

But kids made with ready-made sims might be allowed, but that the sims of the finished families must not change the challenge to Sim's plot, nor the challenges sim must move to their plots. Challenge sims can be related to these sims, depending of course on what kind of goal the challenge sims have.

Of course, each player has a great deal of freedom to wear and make-up the sim to their liking on their own turn, but the character traits and goals set for the sim before sending, as well as genetic traits (eye, skin and hair colors) must be maintained. Of course, this also depends on what add-ons, sets, packs and possible downloads, etc. each have their own use.

And if you use some special mods, then of course it would be advisable to mention them to other players as well, so as not to wonder why some things can or cannot be done in your own game.

Oh yeah, and I'm thinking that if necessary, the plot could also be shared either compressed into a Zip/Rar file (whatever you want to share, simsfileshare, Dropbox, etc.) or through the gallery. The gallery could be the easiest and most direct.

Although I fully understand if someone is not willing to share their own gallery name/nickname with everyone else.

And the challenge is done/completed when the agreed number of generations is reached. Until then, it’s meant to be fun.

In general, according to the Legacy challenge, cheat codes are prohibited, but in some cases they may be allowed. At least in the beginning, when you are supposed to get a sim on the desired plot and deduct money when everything necessary is acquired. I suggest using an already vacant plot.

Admittedly, when using the largest lot of land in New Crest, it must be remembered that after a long period of use of that lot, it may begin to badly bugging, so that you are living there at your own risk.

And of course, sim is allowed to have adventures outside the lot, to attend festivals and community lots, otherwise it would be impossible for sim to face potential spouse candidates.

It is up to everyone to decide whether or not to take money out of their sim for each trip to the community lots.

A sim can only go on holiday (for holiday plots if you have those add-ons at your disposal) when the sim has enough money and the sim is work, of course, and a relatively decent house to live in.

That is, nothing but happy game moments for everyone. :)

I know, looks terribly confusing, so sorry about that. English is not my home language and anyway, the whole thing was written according to what ideas came to my mind and how I remembered to play that challenge.

You can definitely suggest your own ideas and correct me if I have made typos or if there is something wrong or otherwise confusing in the rules.

So now I will let you have your own views on this. I definitely want to know if this would be feasible in The Sims 4.

#the sims 4 #challenge #idea

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roswelldetails · 5 years ago

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Episode 2x04 - What if God Was One of Us

EPISODE SUMMARY:

AN ACT OF GOD — On the verge of a breakthrough in her quest to save Max (Nathan Dean), Liz (Jeanine Mason) turns to Kyle (Michael Trevino) for one last favor that could potentially land him in hot water. Meanwhile, Michael (Michael Vlamis) and Alex’s (Tyler Blackburn) investigation into Nora (guest star Kayla Ewell) leads them to a farm, where they meet a historian named Forrest (guest star Christian Antidormi). Elsewhere, Cameron (guest star Riley Voelkel) confronts Jesse Manes (Trevor St. John) about her sister’s whereabouts, and Isobel (Lily Cowles) uses her powers for good. Amber Midthunder also stars. Shiri Appleby directed the episode written by Steve Stringer & Christopher Hollier (#204). Original airdate 4/6/2020.

DETAILS:

Roy said that he took veterinary training, which is how he was able to help with Louise and Nora's injuries.

"How come it feels like you don't know what I'm saying, but you know what I'm thinking?"

Roy moved the truck (with the pods in it?) to the livery.

"Boss's wife won't let him blame the drought on God so that honor goes to his foreman -- that's me."

Kyle on The Science:

"You're telling me that Michael Guerin used pinball parts and a car battery to cause cutaneous perfusion?

(Cutaneous perfusion...i think it is circulation of fluid/blood through tissue, but it's a bit above my head)

The device Liz needs is a "Personal Genome Machine". She ordered it when she still worked at the hospital.

Before entering the Crashdown, Graham Green tapes a Missing sign on the door for Hank Gibbons (who Noah killed in 1x13). Apparently someone covered it up.

The sign is HARD to read, but I think it says:

"All viable leads reported to Graham Green's UFO Emporium will receive a free keychain. Make certain you subscribe to the Weekly Probe as we dive deeper into the untold stories of Roswell and answer the question on everyone's mind. ARE YOU NEXT?"

Graham Green references that he's the "creator of last week's 39th most downloaded true crime podcast." (Assuming that this is the Weekly Probe, referenced on the poster).

Graham Green is opening a 1947 themed malt shop at the UFO Emporium

U.F. Doughs (the Crashdown's new donuts).

Isobel's been coming to the Crashdown every day for weeks. (Note that this episode is the first one that really doesn't have a clear time context).

"Feliz cumpleanos, mama!" Happy birthday in Spanish, of course, but note Kyle's choice term of endearment for fic purposes! And she responds in kind "Gracias, mijo!" (Mijo = male version. Arturo calls Liz mija = female version)

"A wild Michael Guerin finally emerges from his weeks-long hibernation in a lab and a library."

Again, non-specific time frame.

"When every other farm was struggling, the Longs experienced record-breaking crops. Summer of '47. No one could explain it…till October '48. The day after that photo ran in the paper, the farm was devastated by a massive fire. Foreman, entire staff killed. Whole place burned down."

"What caused the fire?"

"Well the paper called it an act of God. Said it was a freak storm. Bolt of lightning strikes the barn the same night that my mom's caught and locked up in Caulfield."

Wyatt Long's horses are named "Diamond" and "Silk".

Jesse Manes' beer of choice is "Polestaff".

Cam's postcard from Charlie (Likely the reason she came back to Roswell) says:

"See you back in Roswell --Charlotte"

Top left corner says "Greetings from Roswell, NM".

It was mailed to Jenna at the Green Hill Motel in Dayton, Ohio.

Jenna says it's not Charlie's handwriting.

Isobel in the mindwarp: "And what's your dream, Arturo? What would be your miracle? What do you pray for?"

Arturo & Rosa's fight…

"Did that fool give you drugs? I'll kill him!"

"Ow! You're hurting me! That's child abuse!"

"Everything I do I do to hold you up and you see it as abuse. I don't know what to do anymore!"

"Yeah right." Rosa falls down and laughs.

"This isn't funny! Sheriff Valenti won't give you any more chances."

"You should be happy. You wanted me to be on the field hockey team, remember? You said I should make friends and have good American fun."

"Who sold you the pills?"

"I stole them."

"Was it Frederico?"

"You wouldn't believe me."

"Tell me the truth!"

"It was Mom! She's either too high to notice that they're missing, or she knows and she doesn't care."

"You're lying to me. I don't know how to help you."

"So stop trying then. I'm beyond hope anyway, right? That's what everyone else in this town thinks."

"Maybe you're right. I'm going for a drive."

Arturo tried to register with Instagram as PancakePapi!! He ended up with PancakePapi58!

Scene with Steph and her dad...FIRST MENTION OF SOPAPILLAS ON THE SHOW!!! 🤤🤤🤤🤤 (They're the best...in New Mexican restaurants they're like, both an appetizer and a dessert. They're like hollow fried bread that you eat with honey. Delicious.) See here:

Plus it gave the show another opportunity to be authentically New Mexican through food references. (Last season it was in episode 2 when Arturo asked,"red or green?" And Liz replied "Christmas!". In New Mexico that means half red half green chile smothering her plate.) Like so:

1948...unclear how much time has passed, but Louise says months.

The kid's name is Walt. (Walt Long?? Some other last name?).

Nora says that under the tarp is the "pumpkin launcher" and it's a surprise.

Nora says it's not safe for Michael here, "but soon."

"Hey do you smell that? It smells like rain. It's what you smell like under all the grease and bourbon. It's what your workshop smells like. Something alien happened here. Not that I can still smell it 70 years later."

"This is the best evidence I've seen that Max and Isobel's mother survived the initial firefight. This is something that you do with family."

"Nora's my mother. If she was here at the same time as Louise…"

Note - when did they confirm who Louise was or that she was Max & Isobel's mom? This has not happened narratively yet.

Since Walt was a young kid, Alex thinks there's a chance he's still alive (though at the end Nora definitely thought he died when the barn blew up. I suspect that Walt survived and is the key to the story...not fact, just speculation.)

Forrest: "The foreman, Roy Bronson, was definitely hiding something. But it wasn't Little Green Men. It was Nazi spies."

"This is like Junior Year eraser room, getting caught by Coach Wiggins."

OG callback to the eraser room being the high school makeout spot. OG, "the eraser room takes our innocence."

Rosa in Spanish "¿En serio?" Basically "are you serious!?!" Or "really?" When the blender shorts out (awfully similar to her first Noah nightmare in 2x01)

"...when Charlie told me she had stole classified documents, I reported her. I thought I was doing the right thing and the military put her in prison."

"Right. Where she was safe."

"No. I… I didn't know who she really was when I turned her in. I didn't know what prison would do to her."

"She wanted you to turn her in, Jenna. She set you up to do so. She knew that as long as she was in government custody no one could get to her."

"Charlie fought in two wars. Who was she afraid of?"

"A private securities firm, most likely. You know that I met her? She was working on this genetic sequencing project that had the potential to save lives, but also destroy them. And there were some people out there who saw applications for her research that went beyond her intentions."

"She was doing research that could help save lives, and people wanted to use it to create a bioweapon."

"Well yeah, she created this pathogen that could seek out and dismantle specific sequences. Just think about it -- a smart bomb that could be detonated in the middle of a crowded city, only harm it's intended target. Think about the innocent civilian lives saved while you take out leaders of terrorist organizations."

"Or commit genocide. If her work fell into the wrong hands, it could quietly wipe out entire groups of people because they share a certain genetic code, while their neighbors go about living their lives. Why do you know so much about this? What's your interest in my sister?"

"I believed that I had a use for her pathogen, at one time. But my fight is over now."

A few notes about this exchange.

Clearly Charlie's pathogen is the key ingredient in the smart bomb that Flint was developing, as discussed in 1x12.

Liz's "personal genome machine" can break down the alien genetics and give Project Shepherd what they need to use a smart bomb on the aliens.

Don't forget, her lab is protected by Air Force security set up by "Alex's team". (Badbadbadbad!)

Rosa describing her bipolarism.

"I get these mood swings sometimes. Like, I can be happy and singing one minute, and then, all of a sudden, this darkness just closes in over me, and I have all these voices telling me that I'm worthless."

Jesse gives Cam the name of the security firm looking for Charlie. We don't see the name of it. He warns her to be careful. "I may be hobbled but they are not."

"Now, you were hunting aliens, and I gave you Max's name. Why didn't you lock him up in Caulfield with the rest?"

"I don't know. I guess I feel like there's a story unfolding in Roswell. Has been for more than 50 years. You can't blame me for wanting to see how it ends."

Catherine Zeta-Jones in a laser maze -- Liz is referencing the 1999 movie Entrapment.

Liz trying to science-intrigue Kyle….

"Interesting historical footnote. There was an internment camp in Roswell. Nazi POWs built half this city. Hence the iron crosses. My great-great grandfather BoDean's foreman got busted for hiding a couple of women here. According to him 'A couple Nazi spies escaped and strudeled their schnitzel for room and board right here on this very farm. See, I was never really as into shooting squirrels as Wyatt is, so, when I came out here for summers as a kid, my cousin Kate and I -- we'd prowl the property for artifacts."

"You know, what we're doing you and me -- it doesn't only have to be for Max...once Max is healthy, we could use this genome machine to Target cellular apoptosis. I mean, we could craft polymerase sequencing in human DNA. We don't have to stop. We have no boards, no restrictions…"

Apoptosis is also sometimes referred to as "cellular suicide" or "spontaneous single cell death".

Polymerase is like the building blocks of DNA.

In other words, Liz is really, really smart.

FORREST LONG!!!!!! 😂😂😂.

Alex on the bullet shells: "These match the M1917s the airmen used in '48.

"They were scattered all over the property. Legend has it the Nazis we're building some kind of bomb in the barn. Then one night the Air Force showed up."

"The night of the fire."

"The blaze burned so hot it turned sand to stone. Papers say that lightning struck the barn and everyone died in the flames, but...that's bull. See I think the Air Force covered up the massacre that happened when they discovered that weapon.

A few things on this scene…

Forrest mentions his cousin Kate...Wyatt's sister who was murdered by Noah in 2008. So Forrest is Wyatt Long's cousin.

Substitute Nazi for alien and it's probably all based somewhat based in truth. In the 1940s that definitely would have been a reasonably obvious way to cover it up, especially given the history that Forrest cites and the military culture in Roswell.

Note: POW = prisoner of war

The iron crosses Forrest references…

Article on the German POWs in the Roswell Daily Record…

Walt was hiding in the barn when Tripp made it explode. Explosion looked shimmery, like the alien ship & tech.

Also, more info than you ever wanted to know about the Roswell Army Air Field/Walker Air Force Base/Roswell International Air Center...including some info on the POWs.

Sheriff Valenti's theory on Noah's death:

"I think Max Evans poisoned Noah and left him in the desert the night of the lightning storm, and I think Isobel Evans was in on it."

Kyle says it would take gallons of acetone to poison someone.

Tripp was Alex's great uncle

Nora was working on a ship to take the pods home.

TRIPP MANES!!! Full name is Eugene Manes III.

Alex finally gives Michael the piece of alien ship he's had. He doesn't want to be another Manes man standing in Michael's way.

Cam's voicemail to Liz.

"Got a lead on my sister. Give me a call when you get that tin-star-wearing E.T. awake, so I can curse him out for worrying us all. Good luck Liz. Bring Max home."

Arturo's Spanish to Liz and Rosa.

"Das gracias a Dios. Gracias todos los dias."

Translates generally to "Thank God. Thanks every day."

Isobel's monologue at the end:

"The idea of God always freaked me out. Like, apparently he made people in his own image, which, first of all, get over yourself. And also, does that apply to us? Does every planet have its own God? Let's say that we're all clones of the big guy in the sky. Well then, doesn't it stand to reason that we're all capable of slinging light? Well I guess by that same token we're all capable of tremendous wrath. We're walking contradictions. A never-ending mercurial rise and fall. Darkness and light. I guess the real miracle is choosing the light. Despite the ever-present darkness. Look at us. You're in the middle of a downright biblical desert, galaxies from where we started. I mean, our very existence is a miracle. I'm capable of so much more than I thought I was, Max. I really think that maybe I could do great things. I need you to come back, okay? I need you to be the thing that I can believe in. That doesn't let me down. I just need this one little miracle, and I promise I won't ever ask for anything ever again."

MUSIC:

1. LEN "Steal My Sunshine"

2. Spacehog "In The Meantime"

3. Duke Ellington "Take It Easy"

4. Maná "Como Te Deseo"

5. Oasis "Don't Look Back In Anger"

6. Ben Harper "Waiting On An Angel"

#roswell new mexico #rnm season 2 #episode details #long post #what if god was one of us #rnm 204

45 notes · View notes

madscientistjournal · 6 years ago

Text

The Parts of Him That I Can Help With

An essay by Stephen L. Thayer, as provided by Gordon B. White Art by Errow Collins

My younger brother Cameron never understood what working from home meant, so when he called me at 2:30 pm, I was wrist-deep in a twitching half-cadaver. Normally I wouldn’t have answered, since I was practicing stitching a double set of lungs for an upcoming necromodding commission, but I’d been stymied by what to do next, and I also had to pick Dylan up from school by 3:30, so it was as good a stopping point as any. Besides, what is family for if not to answer your call?

I pulled my hands out of the writhing thoracic cavity and peeled off my surgical gloves. The talc inside always makes me squirm when I rub my fingers clean, so I grimaced beneath my paper filtration mask–which I never remove while in my garage laboratory–and swiped my cell phone to speaker.

“Cam,” I said. “What’s up?”

“I need your help, bro.”

“Are you drunk?” I asked.

He paused. “A little.”

A little was fine. We’re brothers, so how else were we supposed to talk?

“What’s up?” I asked.

“Do you remember my last serious relationship?”

I had to think back. I was pretty sure that was Brandon and that had been a year before? Two? Cam had never been good at relationships, but I’d forgotten how bad he was.

“Sure,” I said. “Tall, dark, possibly rheumatic.”

“You make him sound so sexy.”

“Not my type.”

“Anyway, I was out with Tyler.”

“Who?” I asked as I walked across the room, away from the twitching body and the faint burning smell rising from the wires in its cranium.

“Never mind with who,” Cam said, too quickly. “The point is that I ran into Brandon.”

“With your car, I hope?”

“Nice dad joke, bro.”

“Speaking of, I have to get Dylan soon.” An hour wasn’t really soon, but anything to give Cam a ticking clock. He’s the kind of guy who if you ask him what he did last night, he’ll end up telling you what he did this morning.

“Bro, this is serious,” he said. “Seeing Brandon reminded me of how terrible I am at everything.”

“What about this new guy?” I said, desperate to deflect the conversation. “Clearly you’re not completely unlovable.” Since launching my necromodding business, I’d had enough people calling me up for freebies that I was hoping to stem this off before it escalated. That double-lungs commission was the first paid job I’d had all month, although given how poorly it was going, I worried it might be the last, too.

“It isn’t going to work out,” Cam said. “I’m not good enough.”

“I’m not disagreeing,” I said, but I immediately regretted that brotherly sarcasm as I heard a glass hit the bar on Cam’s end. I could just about smell the booze through the phone. If I were there with him, maybe he could have seen on my face that I didn’t mean it, but what could I say?

“I need your help to get a boyfriend,” he said. “A serious one. A real one.”

“One who calls you back?”

“One who thinks I’m hot.”

“I don’t know any blind and deaf guys,” I said, unable to help ribbing him further. “Besides, I haven’t dated anyone in, well, forever. I really can’t help.”

My wife Cynthia and I had been together basically forever. We’d dated for almost a decade, been married for something like seven years, and Dylan was five, so contemporary hook-up culture or any online presence more than my freelance necromodding website were absolute mysteries. Despite the skills at my disposal and the bodies in my garage, I didn’t know what I could do to help Cam.

“Bro,” Cam said, “I don’t need your dating advice.”

Oh thank god, I thought, although I was also a little offended.

“Then what?” I asked.

“I need to be a different person.”

“Can’t help you,” I said. “Try therapy?”

“I mean, I need a new body.”

The half-cadaver twitched on the table, the crown of electrodes in its skull stimulating it into smearing its coagulating intestines across the metal gurney as its torn throat wheezed through the half-sewn double-set of lungs. Seeing how helpless it was, twitching there in the approximation of life, made me feel bad that I hadn’t had Cam over in a while.

“Fine,” I said. “Come by tonight after dinner. No earlier than seven.”

“Look who it is,” I said to Dylan as we opened the door.

“Uncle Cam!”

As Cam hoisted Dylan up, I took a moment to do my pre-clinical once over. Cam and I shared a party mix of the same genetics, so I didn’t think he’d been too let down, especially because if I’d received our parents’ brain Chex, he’d gotten the pretzel bits of good physique. Decent shoulders and long arms, a full head of hair that was mostly not gray as he pushed into his thirties. While beer had softened him up, his spare tire was a bike wheel at worst, not a full radial. I was noting that his glutes were adequate if not extraordinary when I realized that he was airplaning Dylan into the kitchen with Cynthia.

“Hey, Cindy,” he said, using a nickname she hates, perhaps accidentally.

“Hey, Ron,” she replied, purposefully using a nickname Cam hates. “Can you not steer my child into the Bolognese?”

“Into the Bolognese!” Dylan squealed, and I could envision the downward arc occurring in the other room. Suddenly, I was hit by the pungent tomato sauce simmering over the sweet fat of the beef. It’s funny how you don’t recognize some comforts until you’re just on their periphery.

“Ron,” Cynthia said.

“Cindy,” he said.

“Bolognese!” Dylan yelled.

I joined the family circle just in time and took Dylan from Cam’s outstretched arms. Dylan pouted, but Cam ruffled his hair and then turned to me.

“So, what’s for dinner?” Cam asked.

“Let’s talk in the lab,” I said, steering him towards the mudroom and the locked door to my lab in the garage. “We’ll give Cynthia some room.”

As Dylan latched onto Cynthia and I escorted Cam out, she gave me that look that asked “Are you really skipping dinner?” I shrugged in apology and hoped my eyebrows, wriggling like caterpillars on a hotplate, said “What else is family for, right?”

Out in the garage, the overwhelming smell of antiseptic spray is deceptive at first, but I offered a full respirator to Cam, which he wisely accepted. Whenever I open the storage drawers, the smell usually overwhelms the unprepared. It’s the primary reason that Cynthia made me spring for airtight locks, because while she’s fine with me being a stay-at-home dad doing freelance necromodder work, she doesn’t want to be known as that family.

“How’s business?” Cam asked, looking around at all the shiny equipment.

“Honestly, not great,” I said. “It’s really tough starting out. So far mostly just cranks and perverts.”

“But this is all so, so cool,” he said.

“Clients don’t trust necromodders without a deep portfolio.”

“I trust you, bro.”

“You have to say that,” I said, but I smiled beneath my paper mask. I didn’t know if Cam was being sincere or just trying to butter me up, but it was working.

“What’s that?” Cam asked, pointing to the halo of electrodes I’d been using to reanimate the half-cadaver with the double-stitched lungs. Cam had been in the lab enough to recognize new equipment, even though he didn’t know what any of it was.

“Sort of a test drive system for bodies so I can try new mods before putting them in living clients,” I told him. “The hope is to one day use it to amp up living brains, too, but that’s a long way off.” A very, very long way off, in fact, and not being able to get it to work stuck in my craw as yet another failure.

“No chance you can fix this then?” Cam thumped himself on the forehead.

“Nothing can fix that,” I said. “What’s Option B?”

“Bro,” he said, “I need a boyfriend.”

“Believe me,” I said, “that would make all of our lives easier.”

He ignored that comment, which was bigger of him than I expected. As the older brother, it was always both surprising and fulfilling to see sparks of maturity in Cam. Perhaps I sometimes pushed him too hard to find them–spraying his pants with water in middle school to teach him an ill-defined lesson about humility, for example–but whenever those moments emerged naturally, I could just about cry.

“I want someone to love me like Cynthia loves you,” he said.

I didn’t tell him that sometimes it takes a lot of work, but I was a sucker for romance. If I could help him, at least a little, wasn’t that my brotherly duty?

“So I need a new body,” he said.

“It’s expensive,” I said.

“It can be my birthday present.”

“It comes out of my pocket,” I said, but Cam looked pointedly at me, and I knew what he was being too nice to say about Cynthia in the other room. “Our pockets,” I corrected myself. “Do you really want to take the Bolognese out of your nephew’s mouth?”

“Birthday and Christmas.”

I stared at him.

“For two years,” he added.

I sighed. “And I can use pictures for my website.”

“Fine,” he said, “if I can also use them for my dating profile.”

“Fine,” I said. “I love–”

“Me?” Cam interrupted.

“A challenge,” I concluded. “So of course I will help you.”

There’s a sort of code that we necromodders undertake–whether it’s a full-time modder doing celebrity jobs in a fancy foreign clinic, or just a dedicated freelancer who left the hospital’s daily grind and whose wife supports him while he builds up a portfolio on low-paying commissions–that we’ll do our best to bring our clients’ visions to fruition, despite our own preferences. I’d seen plenty of things on the professional message boards–literal eyes in the back of heads, third arms in places arms don’t usually go–that I personally didn’t think looked good, but which somehow made the end users feel complete. Although I think of necromodding as an art, most clients see it as design, so far be it from me to deny anyone their aesthetic preferences. As a medical professional, however, I did have one other complicating factor.

“I’ll do it,” I said, “but as your doctor–” I trailed off, hoping to prompt him.

“Really?” Cam asked. “Again?” He knew what was coming, since I’d given him a new middle toe a year or so ago.

“Tell you what,” I said, as I punched in the codes to the cold storage. “If you can paraphrase the warning, I’ll consider that informed consent.”

“Let me see,” Cam began as he joined me to watch the various hunks and chunks of cadavers slide out of the freezer. “As my doctor, you have to warn me of potential health effects related to body modifications using deceased tissue.”

“And?”

“There’s no guarantee.”

“That?”

“That the process is effective or reversible.”

“And?” I asked.

“And what?” he asked

“You’re of sound mind to make decisions that could result in your death.”

He swallowed. “Yeah, bro.”

From inside the coolers, corpses and extra bits peered out. I didn’t keep a lot on hand, but I always had a few stock bodies–inoffensive types that were easy to cut and shape for after-market mods–so I could easily do a head swap, then touch Cam up afterwards. With our health care system, there was never a shortage of parts.

“Finally,” I added, “as your brother, and not your doctor, I think you’re great and have a great personality. Don’t fix a thing, blah blah.”

“I love you, too, bro,” he said.

“I never said that.”

I cut off Cam’s head and stitched it to the stock body that most closely matched his skin tone. He’d asked me about maybe trying out a different one, but that would just open up questions of bodily appropriation that I hadn’t the energy to parse with Cam. Nevertheless, we had gone over the alterations he wanted and, once his original body was safely wrapped and secured in Refrigerator B and his head was hooked up to the new one, I was ready to start.

He wanted bigger muscles, and although the stock body was fairly normal, Cam had picked out globs of the red ropey fibers for me to put in. The sizing was ridiculous, but the more I’d warned him, the more he resisted. Then he said it was okay if I didn’t know how to do it, which I’m pretty sure he did just to egg me on. Sure, a procedure of that level was just a smidge outside of my comfort zone, but I wasn’t going to give Cam the satisfaction of thinking he’d asked for something I couldn’t do, so I went to work snipping out the default tendons at the muscle heads and reattaching bigger ones. It was like trying to overstuff a batch of viscera dumplings, but I finally got it done.

When I finished, I brought him back out from sedation and rolled the full-sized mirror over to where he lay on the table. He grinned and flexed, and I worried that the glue in the skin wouldn’t hold, but although he bulged, he didn’t pop. I’d had my doubts, but seeing it finished, I swelled with pride, too.

“Isn’t this a little excessive?” I asked, even as I snapped a picture for the portfolio section of my website.

“You just don’t understand the male gaze,” he said and kissed his bicep.

“Come again?”

“Like, looking at stuff.” He paused. “Also, that’s what he said.”

“That’s so juvenile.”

“You’re the older brother,” he said. “I’m not supposed to be too mature.”

“I need to look more mature,” Cam said, back in my lab after less than a week. “I have a baby face.”

“You have a childish face,” I said. I was already twisting his face this way and that under the light, though, figuring out what I could do with the soft tissues. Normally I wouldn’t have been doing more work so soon after the first procedure, but working on Cam had really energized me. Prospective clients were contacting me, and in a spurt of inspiration, I’d finished the double-stitched lungs and even improved the corpse-animating electrode helmet. Besides, Cam seemed to enjoy coming over for the post-op check-ups, even sticking around to come with me to pick Dylan up from school.

“What do you want this time?” I asked.

“Thinner cheeks,” he said. “And maybe a beard.”

From Freezer A, I pulled out a box of frozen samples. Inside the compartments, little swatches of hair curled like sleeping gerbils in multiple hues of blonde, auburn, ginger, and black.

“You can have a beard of this, this, this, or this,” I said, pointing out some.

“What about that?”

“That’s a dog.”

“That?”

“Pubes.”

He considered it for a moment longer than I’d have liked, but then finally pointed to a nice normal brown swatch. “I’ll take that one,” he said.

“You sure?” I asked.

“Stop second guessing me.”

So I put Cam under again. I made incisions beneath the zygomatic bones, then slit all the way down the jaw and back around. I took extra time to stencil out around Cam’s lips before I peeled away his lower face, leaving him raw from closed eyes to throat. The yolk-colored globs of baby fat clung to his cheeks as I peeled them away, then laid them in the “Base” box to store in Freezer B alongside his original body. We were getting into alterations that weren’t as simple to undo as a head swap, but I’d given him the spiel and, since he’d used up his allotment of gifts already, he’d promised to pay in cash–just later, of course.

I unfurled the main roll of beard and skin, measured off a swatch, and then snipped it. The surface was itchy, and I couldn’t imagine anyone wanting it on their face or anywhere else, but according to the message boards, it was popular among other modders’ clients and, of course, the customer is always right. It was a pain to smooth down and arrange all the follicles the right way, but it felt good getting into the granular work again. The bliss of losing myself in the details reminded me why I’d fallen in love with necromodding in the first place.

Once everything was perfect, I woke Cam up and rolled the mirror over. “This is good,” he said, rubbing his new hirsute jawline while I took a picture for the site. “This is will be the one that does it.”

“The beard isn’t doing it,” Cam said at dinner. He’d shown up unannounced but had become a regular enough intrusion that Cynthia had a plate ready. He was still adjusting to his beard, though, and the egg from the fettuccine carbonara glistened in the hair.

“My problem is that I get too drunk,” he said as he took another swig of Primitivo. He was still adjusting to the muscles, too, and so all of his movements were outsized and reckless. “I need the alcohol to open up, but then it hits me too hard.”

“Drink less?” Cynthia recommended.

“Or he can give me a bigger liver,” Cam said.

“An enlarged liver isn’t healthy,” I said. “It’s pretty much the opposite.”

“I know that,” he said, although clearly he didn’t. “Then give me more livers.”

That might work and, if nothing else, would hopefully keep Cam away for a while. My work had been picking up recently–at first it was new clients looking for muscle and beard work after seeing Cam’s pictures, but referrals and repeats kept rolling in. Besides, I’d been working on my electrode helmet and was on the verge of a breakthrough. Cam just didn’t understand my need to work during the day or the importance of family time with Cynthia and Dylan afterwards. His continued interruptions at dinner and frequent calls just to chat during the day were reminders as to why I’d stopped hanging out with him so much.

“Fine,” I said to Cam. “Whatever you want.”

After dinner, I took Cam to the lab and sliced him open, then clamped the flesh apart to root around. I wasn’t shocked to see the paces he’d already put this current liver through. It looked scaled and pebbled, and oozed like a pickled beet. Even through my ventilator, the rich, briny smell hit me. Gagging, I took the extra livers–my Burke and Hare men had been coming through like gangbusters recently–and started wedging them in. The healthy organs were more pliant, but as I sutured them together, the knot of muscle got less and less manageable. In the end, I had to lean on them like I was packing a suitcase while I stapled the wound together. Despite being pleased with my innovation, this one wouldn’t get a picture on the website. Probably just a text description.

As I brought Cam back around, I told him, “Be careful.”

“I always am, bro.”

He sat up on the gurney, swaying under the new imbalance.

“Should we do shots to celebrate?” he asked.

Cam banged on the front door on a Thursday night at 12:30 am. Cynthia and I were in bed, with Dylan down the hall asleep, and she was none too pleased at the interruption.

“He needs to learn boundaries,” she said.

“I don’t disagree,” I said, but I was already out of bed and pulling on a robe. She wasn’t wrong, of course, but it’s hard to ignore family even when you want to. Besides, if I had to choose which one to deal with at that moment, Cam was probably the easiest.

Downstairs, I barely recognized Cam as I let him in. His body was getting strange; the muscles bulged in odd ways and all the livers seemed to be throwing him off balance. The beard hadn’t been trimmed in days.

“Do you know what time it is?” I asked, dragging him into the garage laboratory. At least the insulated walls would keep his disturbance to a minimum.

“I need one last one,” he said.

“Are you drunk?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he responded. “So? You going to judge me for that, too?”

“Someone has to.”

“Too bad it isn’t someone who ever has something nice to say.”

That stung. It took me a moment to respond. “I can’t,” I finally said. “It’s too late.”

“Please, I need it. You sort of owe me.”

“For what?”

He didn’t answer. “Just please. Do it and I’ll leave you alone. Forever.”

“Don’t be such a martyr,” I said.

“I just need you to make me taller, bro. Just an extra vertebra or three.”

“You dope,” I said. “It’s not your height. It’s not your muscles or your beard. It’s just you.”

“What do you mean?”

There are conversations that need to be had, and there are conversations that need to be had in a particular way. I knew this was the latter, but I was too tired. Besides, someone had to tell him, right?

“You’re a weirdo,” I said. “It’s not how you look or how big your liver is; you’re the kind of person who gets people’s names wrong. You don’t understand that you can’t show up late or that you talk a lot or ask too much.”

“Then fix that.”

“I can’t fix that,” I said. “That’s just you.”

“Zap me then.” He pointed at the electrode crown I’d been working on, the one that let me reanimate half-cadavers enough to test out mods before using them on paying clients. It had come a long way recently and I was sure it was going to launch me out of necromods and into actual biomodding, but it wasn’t ready to supercharge a living brain. Probably.

“I don’t care,” he snapped. “I already agreed you’re not responsible if I die.”

“It’s untested,” I said.

“I believe in you,” he said.

“It’s not about believing.”

“I don’t care,” he snapped. “I already agreed you’re not responsible if I die.”

“You moron.” I’d reached my limit, too. “Of course I’m responsible. I’m always responsible for you.”

“Stop treating me like a child,” he said. “If I could do this any other way, don’t you think I would?”

What was there to say?

“Just zap me,” he said again.

“Stop being so dramatic.”

“I’m sorry I’m not perfect,” he said. “Maybe if you didn’t leave me behind after you went to school, after you got married, I could have learned from you.”

“What was I supposed to do?” I asked.

“Help me,” he said.

“I didn’t leave you behind.”

“I feel like you did.”

“Fuck your feelings,” I said.

We didn’t talk as I put him under. Stewing, I drilled into his skull, then attached the headgear and pushed the little wire skewers in. That was it. If it killed him, well I’d warned him, right?

I pulled the lever, hard. Because he’d asked for it.

The lights dimmed like I expected as it warmed up; but then it hitched. The lights flickered, then everything surged, bathing us in the miasma of green and red LEDs. All the shifting colors made me nauseous and I shaded my eyes, squinting at Cam’s body under the waves of putrescent light.

Then it exploded.

Everything went black. As all the machines whirred to a stop, I couldn’t hear or see anything. I sat there, in the silent dark, wondering if I’d killed my brother. Wondering how I would explain it and wondering, afterwards, just how much worse it could feel.

Those were my first thoughts. My next was that the brain-charger was also an obvious failure. My equipment was a failure. My skills were a failure. Sitting there, unable to see anything, the whole necromodding pursuit felt like a vain delusion. I was a dinner theater actor, alone in the dark among the empty tables and the cold buffet.

Then the red emergency lights came on, but all the monitors were still dead. I wondered if Cam was, too. I couldn’t bring myself to check for life the old-fashioned hands-on way, so I waited by the machinery. Maybe by refusing to check for myself, I could wait and blame the instruments.

It was the longest thirty seconds of my life.

Then the backup generator kicked on. One by one the monitors popped back up, flickering open like eyes. They ran through their reboots. Cam’s heartbeat came up. His breathing levels stabilized. I brought him back around and he opened his eyes.

“What happened?” he asked.

“What do you think?”

He looked around at the red room and then down across his body and all the changes we’d been making.

“I gotta go,” he said, sitting up. “I’m late.”

And that was it. I glanced at the emergency report printouts and data, but I was too tired to deal with any of it, so I sealed the lab and went back to bed.

For the first day that I didn’t hear from Cam, I was fine with it. I needed some space and figured he probably did, too. I took Dylan to the park after school and just avoided the lab all together. After the second day without hearing from Cam, though, and then a third, I was worried. He didn’t answer his phone. He didn’t text me to ask for additional procedures or anti-rejection drugs. The kinds of modifications we had been doing had a fairly a short active life without follow-ups.

I couldn’t stop thinking about Cam. I’d really failed him, and not just as a necromodder–although that blow-up had me wondering if I should just give up, sell everything, and get a regular job again. No, I’d also failed Cam as a brother. It wasn’t the things I’d said, since I stood by those, but that I’d said them in that way. That I’d made him feel that way. That he was willing to risk dying with my half-baked brain overcharger rather than have to deal with me as a brother any more. That I’d been too proud or too stubborn to stop him. It was a dark time.

So I did what I always do when I have serious doubts and questions about life.

“What’s going on?” Cynthia asked as she answered her cellphone. I’d expected her voicemail, but apparently I’d caught her in-between meetings.

“It’s Cam,” I said.

“Not Dylan?”

“No,” I said. “Cam.”

She didn’t hang up. She paused, though, but then continued, “What’s wrong with your brother?”

“I don’t quite know,” I said. “I mean, I know you don’t like him–”

“I like him,” she cut me off. “I think you two have issues, but he’s family.”

“Right,” I said.

“Your family,” she said.

“Right.”

We waited for a second there.

“What about him?” she broke the momentary silence.

“I’m worried,” I said. “He hasn’t called me since that last thing.”

“Maybe it worked?”

“I don’t think so,” I said. “Regardless, there are these anti-rejection drugs that he knows he needs.”

“Shit,” Cynthia said.

“I know,” I said. “What should I do?”

“Go find him, of course,” she said.

I shook my head, even though she obviously couldn’t see it. “He hasn’t asked for my help.”

There was silence on the other end. Then Cynthia said, softly, “What do you think all of this has been about, then?”

“I mean–” I began.

“Go help him!” Whatever pristine office halls she was in must have echoed, because the reverberation carried onto my end of the phone

“But he might–”

“He’s our family!”

She was right.

So I drove to Cam’s apartment complex on the other side of town. I’d been there a few times before to pick him up for family events or to visit someone in the hospital, but it took some poking around and checking mailboxes before I found his building again. The door to his unit was unlocked, yet even before I entered I could smell the rot.

Cam was sitting in the dark, sagging in the center of his rent-to-own couch. The putrescence seeping out from around his midsection was soaking into the fabric. The muscles I could see–biceps, triceps, traps, and pecs–were purple and mustard yellow clots beneath the skin. The edges of his beard were peeling down.

“Hey,” he said.

“Hey,” I said. “Let’s get you back to the lab.”

“It’s not worth it.”

“Don’t start,” I said. “Not now.” I picked my way around empty silver tallboys swimming like fish on the stained blue carpet.

“I’ve just been thinking,” he said. “I can’t do anything but think after what you did.”

“I didn’t do anything,” I said. I grabbed his arm and began to pull, but it was slack and, without his assistance, I worried my fingers would sink in and tear out big chunks.

“You broke my brain, bro,” he said and sunk down deeper. “All that zap did is made me depressed.”

“The machine didn’t do that, you dolt,” I said. It was true: when I’d reviewed the data that night, it was clear that the machine hadn’t worked. It had fried during the warm-up and although it blasted everything in the lab, there’d been no sign that it had any effect on Cam. “If you’re thinking about how shitty things are, then that’s on you.”

He had nothing to say to that.

I sighed. “And on me, too. I guess.”

Cam grunted.

“I’m sorry I said those things. For now, though,” I said, “as your doctor, I need to get you back to the lab before you have catastrophic organ failure.” I pulled again, but although he didn’t actively resist, he didn’t move his bulk to accommodate me either.

“What do you want from me?” I finally asked.

“You could tell me you love me.”

“Well, I won’t do that,” I said. “But, as your doctor–as your brother, I’d be pretty upset if you had caststrophic organ failure.”

The lab door is triple-sealed so that smells don’t seep into or out of the house, which is why it wasn’t until Cam and I opened the door that the wave of rot pushed out past us. The sweet and sick burst curled into my nostrils and even Cam–decaying from the neck down–winced at the ripe odor.

We stumbled into the lab, but I already knew what had happened. The power surge had blown the freezers and they hadn’t reset with the other equipment. When I opened Freezer B, as the smell had foreshadowed, everything was ruined. Cam’s original body was beyond salvage.

“I’m so sorry,” I said.

Somehow in this tragedy, Cam had found equanimity and so he shrugged, one of the seams around his neck popping loose and green pus oozing out. For a moment, I felt that swell of pride in how mature he was acting.

We moved over to the table and I sat him down. All of my lab equipment seemed to be working fine, but there was nothing in the freezers I could use. What a pair our mismatched reflections in the full-length mirror made–me standing there slicked with gore and my younger brother falling apart like a poutine. I was trying to be strong, holding it together, but then Cam had to go and get sentimental.

“It was really nice spending time with you,” Cam said. “But I feel like you’ll be better off without me.”

“I never wanted to lose you,” I said. “I just wanted, you know, less of you.”

“Well, you’re in luck. There isn’t much left.” He tried to laugh, gesturing to the pile of meat festering below his neck.

“Oh shit,” I said.

“What?”

“There might be a way.” Less of him. “It might be too complicated, though. I don’t know if I can do it.”

“Bro,” he said, and flopped a mushy hand onto my shoulder. “I believe in you.”

“You kind of have to say that,” I said, wrestling the tears back as best I could.

“Maybe,” he said. “But I feel like you know it’s true.”

I sniffled, just once. “Fuck your feelings.”

Then I cut off Cam’s head.

“Swipe right,” Cam said.

“Don’t yell in my ear,” I said.

“I’m not yelling.”

“Well it sounds like it.”

That was because his head was attached to my shoulder, so his mouth was right next to my ear. Normally he didn’t get this excited, but while we were sitting at the dinner table with Dylan, waiting for Cynthia, Cam had decided he absolutely needed to show me this new dating app. I didn’t really want to see, but I’d been trying to be more supportive lately. It was his life, after all. Mostly.

Cam whispered, “Swipe right.”

“Fine,” I said. “But I’m not taking you on any dates. Wait until your replacement body gets in.”

“Then I’m not doing any more surgeries with you.”

That wasn’t okay. Ever since I’d posted about our successful head graft, the commissions were rolling in. Not only that, but with Cam by my side, I finally felt like a true professional.

“Fine,” I said. “But just one date. Make it count.”

“Fine,” he said. “Now swipe right.”

I swiped right, and the next image popped up. I gasped.

“Can I see?” Dylan asked from across the table.

“No!” Cam and I said in unison.

Cynthia came out of the kitchen, bringing out a bowl of salad. “No phones at the table,” she said.

“Sorry, Cynthia,” Cam said. Over the past week, he’d been making a real effort to get her name right and to be a better houseguest in general. For her part, Cynthia had been much more understanding about all of this than I’d had any right to expect. Of course, she rightly insisted that Cam and I sleep on the couch downstairs. It’s funny, but you never realize how much you might miss some people until you’re just on their periphery, I guess.

“Dinner time is family time,” Dylan chimed in.

“That’s right,” I said, but as I went to put the phone in my pocket it rang, playing “Sunshine of Your Love.”

“Whose ringtone is that?” Cynthia asked.

“Tyler,” I said, reading off the Caller ID.

“Who’s Tyler?” Dylan asked.

I suddenly felt light-headed as the blood from my body rushed to Cam’s face. He’d turned bright red, and I felt the heat of his ear next to mine. I worried for a moment that our sutures might spring a leak.

“Just some guy I was seeing before all this,” he said. He swallowed, and the movement of his esophagus shook my collarbone.

“Just some guy, Cam?” Cynthia said. “I’ve never seen you this flustered.”

“I’ll call him later,” Cam said. “Dinner time is family time.” I could feel him straining, though, as he looked at the phone. I admired his attempt at impulse control, but then I looked at Cynthia, and she smiled wearily.

“What else is family for?” she said.

“No really,” Cam said. “It’s okay, I–”

I swiped the phone open and held it to Cam’s ear. I rose from the table and as we walked out Cam began, adorably, to stutter a hello.

Cynthia was right: What else is family for, of course, if not to answer your calls?

Stephen L. Thayer is a freelance necromodder operating out of his home laboratory in a discrete, secure suburban neighborhood. After receiving his MBA and spending several years in corporate finance, Stephen left the rat race to follow his passion into the burgeoning field of functional and aesthetic bio-enhancement utilizing cadaverous tissues. Although he performs standard cosmetic, muscle, organ, and/or bone alterations, Stephen considers his necromodding a blend of art and science striving towards transcendence. He is always eager to discuss exotic and/or custom commissions. A representative portfolio and anonymous client testimonials are available upon request.

Gordon B. White has lived in North Carolina, New York, and the Pacific Northwest. He is a 2017 graduate of the Clarion West Writing Workshop, and his fiction has appeared in venues such as Daily Science Fiction, A Breath from the Sky: Unusual Stories of Possession, Nightscript Vol. 2, and the Bram Stoker Award® winning anthology Borderlands 6. Gordon also contributes reviews and interviews to various outlets. You can find him online at www.gordonbwhite.com or on Twitter at @GordonBWhite.

Errow is a comic artist and illustrator with a predilection towards mashing the surreal with the familiar. They pay their time to developing worlds not quite like our own with their fiancee and pushing the queer agenda. They probably left a candle burning somewhere. More of their work can be found at errowcollins.wix.com/portfolio.

The Parts of Him That I Can Help With was originally published on Mad Scientist Journal

#Errow Collins #Gordon B. White #Necromancy #Stephen L. Thayer

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lazaefair · 8 years ago

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I SAW YOUR "#cyberpunk baze x chirrut?" TAG AND NOW I'M THINKING -- chirrut as the badass techno-monk still loyal to his destroyed order, baze as a Bodyguard For Hire With A Big Gun, ughhhhh i can see it so clearly in my head and i love it

Star Wars is basically one step away from cyberpunk anyway, just add more neon and stick everyone on one planet instead of a billion, et voilà.

Chirrut works as a technomancer, able to communicate with and manipulate computers directly without needing code or terminals or cybernetic implants. He came by his abilities not through the self-taught survival-of-the-fittest lessons of the street, nor through sinister experimentation by one of the Megacorps, but through good old-fashioned techno-religion. His bond with the very web of cyberspace becomes the stuff of legends on both the mainstream and shadow ‘nets. This flickering presence known as The Monk, who slips through firewalls and cyber sentries like so much tissue paper, who runs his digital fingers through classified archives and top-security files pretty much whenever and however he pleases, whose reported exploits far exceed the number of places he’s actually been in.

Even glimpsing his avatar requires feats of hacking accessible only to the top tiers of hackers, the legends say, and a confirmed Monk sighting goes onto a person’s net profile like an elite badge of honor, good for both reputations and credit accounts. The legends have also embroidered the description of Chirrut’s avatar way beyond the actual mask of bits and bytes that he assumes when he goes into cyberspace - he particularly enjoys the fanfics that feature flames, or improbably giant swords, or improbably glowing armor, or all three at once - but most of them eventually boil down to a few common threads: a beautiful man with Chinese features, wearing traditional robes, disarming your defenses in a single glance of his eerie, blank white eyes.

But as invincible as The Monk may be in cyberspace, commanding the very hardware of its machinery to bend to his will, he has a weakness. Which is simply the weakness of any hacker, down to the most ordinary - when he’s plugged in, he can’t defend his own body.

Company enforcers know that. Rival hackers know that. Anyone Chirrut has ever crossed, from the Megacorp that bought out and razed his religious order, to the most recent two-bit mob boss he humiliated and laid bare to the sharks of the underworld, and continuing on down the list, knows that.

So that’s where Baze comes in.

Baze - to put it in the simplest terms - has a really big gun.

He started life as a fully organic, ordinary genetic human. That’s all ancient history by now, seriously - the reason why his Wuxing IST-Tech 45 plasma-cell cannon has so much concentrated firepower, and why it’s so deadly accurate in his hands, is because strictly speaking, there’s no boundary between the cannon and his hands. Cybernetic implants in his limbs, his body, his eyes - even his brain - turn him into a living weapon, one that maintains the firepower and accuracy even if by some miracle he’s separated from his primary weapon.

His reputation takes longer to grow and spread than Chirrut’s, in part because it’s a fair few years before anyone realizes the quiet-but-menacing mercenary with minor-but-solid street cred operating in a single medium-size city within the Sino-Pacific Trade Group is connected to the much-rumored but somehow even more elusive bodyguard of the internationally-famous Monk. Is, in fact, the same person. (Chirrut still likes to gleefully send him text strings from shadow ‘net forums regarding wild conspiracy theories pulling together highly improbable shreds of evidence to pinpoint the entirely wrong person as the identity of The Monk’s Protector.)

As Chirrut’s daring deeds spread across cyberspace, undermining corporate structures, propping up rebellions, sabotaging exploitative operations, declawing predators and giving teeth to prey, so too does the manhunt for The Monk. Over the years, Baze stops taking as many merc jobs that require him to leave Chirrut’s side, because he simply cannot trust that his partner won’t hook into the ‘net while he’s gone, dancing with wild abandon across the strands of the matrix that runs their world. And, incidentally, leaving himself a completely empty physical shell lying comatose amongst cushions on the floor of their shared apartment. A heavily fortified apartment, but still.

After one particularly long week, which features three highway chases, four days of hopping from safehouse to safehouse, thirty hired hitmen (spaced out over the week), too much expended ammunition to bear thinking about, and a fuckload of cleanup - flesh-eating nanobots do not come cheap, let me tell you, and neither do plasma cartridges - Baze decides to say something.

“You could at least take a few paying jobs, since I can’t anymore,” he grumbles while he takes one of his guns apart for maintenance. “Thanks to you,” he adds, because sometimes it takes many repetitions of an idea for Chirrut to come to grips with it.

“Yes, we will eventually starve. Soon I will be nothing but an insubstantial ghost, just a spirit swaying in the digital breeze, blown wherever the matrix wills it. I think I’d make quite an attractive ghost, don’t you think?” Chirrut says, leaning back from his meditation pose and stretching, tilting his chin up and exposing a delicious stretch of throat that has Baze clamping down on a highly annoyed spark of lust. “You, on the other hand, would make for quite a large lump of a corpse, come to think of it. Hmm.”

Baze snorts. “You didn’t act like you were kissing a corpse last night,” he says, and Chirrut waves a hand.

“No, no, you’re right. I prefer you in non-corpse-form. Very well then,” and he unfolds with the startling grace that he has - the same physical capability that’s stymied more than one assassin expecting an infirm, out-of-shape hacker - and bounds over to fold into Baze’s lap, who hastily retracts the gun into his arm compartment. Chirrut cups his cheek, running light fingers over exposed metal ridges and surgery scarring. “For you, my beloved, I will take a paying contract. How much should the Monk charge for his services, I wonder?”

Baze raises an eyebrow under Chirrut’s hand, not bothering to conceal his surprise at his partner’s easy capitulation. “For you? You could probably ask for anything you want. Couple million creds, to start with, and going up from there.”

Chirrut’s pupils contract in the way that indicates he’s pulling something up on his internal HUD. “I have here a humble request,” he says, stretching out the word ‘humble.’ “From someone designating herself Mon Mothma. Came in just a few hours ago.”

Baze raises his other eyebrow. Mon Mothma of Alliance Corp? Everyone in the shadow world knows by now it’s just a front for one of the many proletarian movements seeking to break the grip of the oligarchy. Ironic that she’s funding it with wealth gained through her own corporation. But she can pay handsomely.

Chirrut bends forward to kiss his eyebrows. “I take it you approve.”

“You’ve vetted it already,” Baze says.

Chirrut scoffs. “You could have left that thought unvoiced and saved yourself the energy,” he says, and Baze rolls his eyes.

“When’s the verification meeting?”

“Tomorrow, in the Prosperity District. At a very nice café for the finest tea in the region, the reviews tell me.”

Right in the heart of downtown, in the shadow of every major Megacorp skyscraper in the SPTG. Baze sighs. “I’ll get out your good suit. Try not to get yourself killed.”

“Mon Mothma asked for you, too. By name.” Chirrut smiles radiantly, inordinately pleased for no reason Baze can think of.

He grunts and wraps his hands around Chirrut’s waist. “We’ll have to pull the rich-asshole-and-his-bodyguard act again.” Baze’s visible modifications aren’t unusual in the bowels of the city, down at street level, but would stand out as unspeakably gauche if he tried to pass himself off as a plutocrat on the 200th floor of some shiny fuck-off corporate complex.

“If we must,” Chirrut dismisses. Then he pushes Baze flat on the floor and slides down, grin glittering wickedly, and proceeds to make Baze prove - repeatedly - that he is very much, definitely, decidedly not a corpse.

(Sidenote: Baze does in fact own a super rad cyberpunk motorcycle that leaves neon streaks in the darkness when he and Chirrut ride through the rain-soaked alleys of their city, because the Rule Of Cool turned the knob up to 11 on this pair, and everyone knows it.)

#spiritassassin #baze x chirrut #chirrut x baze #cyberpunk AU #rogue one #star wars fanfiction #by lazaefair

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ljf613 · 4 years ago

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Tales from Earthsea and Whisper of the Heart for the Ghibli asks?

🐉 Tales from Earthsea: What is your favorite mythical creature?

Probably phoenixes, although I am also obsessed with dragons.

📖🖋 Whisper of the heart: What is something you’ve always wanted to write? Would you like to share anything you’ve written with us?

Well, there's an original (seven book) series I've been wanting to write since I was eleven years old, tentatively refered to as The Trackers.

The basic premise is that people from a realm of magic sometimes fall through the veil to our world-- losing their memories in the process. It falls to a group of part-human, part-fae people known as the Trackers-- whose unusual bloodline grants them unique abilities-- to locate these lost souls, return them to their home realm, and restore their memories.

I've done some extensive worldbuilding for this story, as well as fleshed out several of my main characters.

The reasons I've never finished it are proably because a) I'm only now getting the hang of writing romance, and the relationship between the main character and her husband is SUPER important to the story, b) there are a few elements of the magic system I've never quite figured out, and I still only have a vague idea of who the main antagonists are and what their motivation is.

Excerpts from various drafts under the cut (bear in mind that I haven't really touched it in nearly three years-- I'd love to get back to it at some point)

Send me another Ghibli Ask!

No. NO. NO! It was Ben. Captain of Green West Junior High’s basketball team. The guy every girl who was any girl was crushing on. Every girl but me. I had no interest in his muscles, or whatever it is the other girls saw in him. I mean, he wasn’t an idiot, but he was a bit self-centered. He was walking over to my locker. I knew what he wanted. This was bad. “Hey, Rose,” he said casually, as if he knew he didn’t have to try very hard to get what he was after, “Want to go to the Spring Fling with me?” “No.” “You must have misheard me. I asked you if-” “I think you misheard me. I said no.” “Why not? You busy that day?” He was giving me an out. I could say yes, and avoid suspicion. But that would just feed his ego, and he didn’t deserve to be let on like that. “Not really.” “Then why won’t you go with me? We’d-” “No means no. I don’t like you.” “Whatever.” He walked off with his friends, and I heard him muttering a few choice words about me. Whatever. Less easy to ignore were the people in the halls who were staring and whispering. No doubt rumors about me and ben would be widespread around the school by the end of the day, and all of them would be about how I was hopelessly in love with him. Why was it so hard to grasp that a girl might not like Ben?

That scene is from one of the earliest drafts of the story-- I was probably about twelve years old. As you can probably tell. It was scrapped in later drafts.

I just stared. Why was there a butterfly in a library? It wasn’t any species I recognized, I could tell as it got closer. It had scarlet wings with parchment-white undersides, and ever-moving black swirls that resembled words on both sides. As it flew even closer, it began to change. The wings remained the same, but got larger, until they were probably only a little shorter than I was. meanwhile, the body changed from black, to a paler but indistinguishable color, the middle legs shrunk to nothing, the bottom legs moved lower on the body, and the four remaining legs grew. By the time it landed on the floor, it was a vaguely humanoid shape, but I couldn't make it out, as it was across the room from us. Rosebelle ran to help the figure up. I figured it was this Gunan guy. Probably some crabby old geezer who’d be deliberately vague and make us leave. “Frank,” said Rosebelle, while I stared in shock, “This is Gunan, the best historian and cartographer this side of Perola. A butterfly animalia.” “Stop it, Rosebelle,” said Gunan, “I’m not all that. You aren’t too bad yourself.” “Gunan, this is Frank. My Lost.” “Hi,” said a high, sweet voice. Gunan was not what I expected. She had pale pinkish-red irises, a long black braid that touched the floor in front of her, wore a red t-shirt made out of another strange fabric, light blue pants, and parchment-white sock-boots with black stripes made of words. I just stared at her, open-mouthed. “Oh, sorry,” she said, “It’s the wings, isn’t it? I like them, but I’ll get rid of those too, if they bother you.” “N-no,” I stuttered, then blinked and shook my head, “They’re fine.” She also looked to be about eight years old. - I almost laughed at the expression on his face. He just couldn’t understand, couldn’t connect the face of the little girl in front of him with the legendary historian I’d spoke of. I probably would’ve had the same reaction the first time I met her, but I’d been five and just wondered if the big girl would be my friend. Then I frowned. I didn’t like to think of those moments, because they reminded me I didn’t have many more left. Never mind.

This scene is kind of clunky, but it introduces one of my favorite characters-- Gunan, the mysterious librarian who never seems to get older and whose true age is a complete enigma.

"Hey, do you have any food?” “Food?” “Yeah,” he said, “That stuff we eat to re-energize ourselves.” “Very funny,” I replied dryly, “We’ll eat when we camp out tonight.” “Camp out?” “You didn’t think the long way wasn’t even a day?” “I haven’t eaten since last night!” “Oh well,” I said unsympathetically, “You’re such a guy.” “What’s that supposed to mean?!” “You’ve got your mind on your stomach.” “Girls.” “Girls? I think you mean boys.” “What do you have against boys?” “What do you have against girls?” “Honestly.” “No kidding.” “Girls.” “Boys.” We didn’t talk for a while after that.

I did mention that these early drafts were written when I was in middle school, right?

Reyne was gone and I was never going to find him. Poor Marc. I hadn’t seen my brother in nearly two years, ever since he went off trying to find his best friend. He’d dropped everything: assignments, Lost, contact with his worried parents and sister… and Marc had been the most promising Tracker in hundreds of years. Everyone had thought that eventually, when he matured and stopped being such a dare daimon, he’d take a seat on the council. I wondered if my brother had died. He couldn’t have. He wasn’t even forty! Calm down! I had to believe that Marc was fine, that he’d find Reyne and come home.

My subtle way of foreshadowing the plot of one of the later books. (Yes, Rosebelle's brother is in his late thirties-early forties-- their average lifespans are around 200-300 years, so he's basically the equivalent of a college kid.)

“You’re a wizard, remember,” I said, still smiling, “Wizards use a lot of rune magic.” “Runes,” he said, curiously, “What are runes?” “Runes are symbols, usually traced with a finger, into the air or against a surface. You can think of them like spells. Most fae can use at least a couple, but it’s hard to get the shape exactly right, or to remember more than two or three. Wizards, aside from the fact that many have eidetic memories, have a natural instinct for them. All wizards naturally know a couple, and more reveal themselves to them as they get older. There are runebooks, of course, but most are on a really high level and I wouldn’t recommend even looking at one until you master your magic a bit better.” “Wow,” he said, “That’s really cool. How many kinds of fae are there, and what are their special magics?” “Well, they say that there are six, which is why the Realm is ruled by the Council of Six. There are Animalia, like Gunan. Animalia can turn into animals, but only one kind. As you saw, Gunan is a butterfly. They can also turn partially, which is where stories of centaurs, werewolves, selkies, angels, and the like come from. Animalia all have eyes in some shade of red. Elves, such as Wiln, are extremely intelligent and secretive. Their magic is related to gravity. Most fae have some, if limited, telekinesis, but theirs is much stronger, among other things. They have eyes in some shade of orange, and ears even more prominently pointed than the rest of us. Trackers like me are really rare, and we specialize in portals, as well as being able to detect magic. Also, we can create and use relics, which let us use a small amount of another race’s ability. We have green eyes. Wizards like you mostly use runes, and tend to be extremely inquisitive. They say that the Seers were all wizards, if they existed at all. You guys all have purple eyes. Elementals use element magic, although most focus on one element and learn only a little bit of magic from the others. It’s a really hard branch of magic. They have yellow eyes. Most Fae can use various spells, and have a ‘trunk’.” “A ‘trunk’?” “A space only you can access. You can put anything you want there, and then summon it at anytime. That’s where the tents came from. Snapping isn’t necessary, but it helps me focus. Anyway, those are the different species. No one is quite sure how someone is born a certain species- if it’s genetic or not, Trackers being the exception.” - “Didn’t you say there were six,” I asked, confused, “That was only five.” “The last one either died out or are in hiding, if they ever existed. No one can remember what they’re called.”

Like I said, I did a lot of worldbuilding. (Yes, the difference races have eyes that are Color-Coded for Your Convenience.)

This was what I’d seen. Rosebelle was slipping. She couldn’t hold on, and she clearly didn’t have the power to transport herself up. She was going to fall. She would slip, and fall into the water, and then she was going to die. I didn’t know how I’d known, but I could guarantee that was what would happen. No. One thing was different from what I’d seen. I was here. I could change it. Before I could think, I reached out and grabbed her wrist. “Oww! Frank, let go!” “No! You’ll die if I do!” “We’ll both die if you don’t! Frank, you have to let me go!” She was right, I knew. The Spark was shocking us, trying to pull us apart. I could tell if I didn’t, it would send such a fierce electrical shock through us, we’d probably both die. But I didn’t care. I would pull her up before that happened. I didn’t have a choice. “Rosebelle, don’t you trust me?” “No! Let go!” “Grab my wrist and I’ll pull you up! Please!” “Why? Why would you do this?” “Because- you saved me! You brought me to a place I belonged, a place I didn’t believe existed! Because you have to find your brother and I want to help you! I want to help you with whatever you need! So please! Just grab my arm and let me pull you up!” I winced. The shocks were getting stronger. We didn’t have much time. Rosebelle grabbed my arm, intensifying the shocks tenfold. I pulled her up, but it was too late. One final shock rippled between us, and then it was so bright I couldn’t see anymore.

I've always had a flair for the dramatics. I also needed a scene where the these two were forced to maintain physical contact for a significant amount of time, preferably in a situation that Rosebelle couldn't reasonably get angry at Frank for-- I figured saving her life would do it.

The wizard hadn’t believed she would ever have a child. Most fae couples couldn’t have more than one or two children- the only reason the population wasn’t rapidly decreasing was because of the fae’s longevity. She hadn’t even bonded until she was nearly 150- far past the normal child-bearing age of most women- so, when she and her mate had found out she was pregnant, they were overjoyed. He’d been worried that childbirth would take a toll on her nearly 180-year-old body, but she promised him she’d be okay, and she was. Once she gave birth, there was an even bigger surprise. “Twins,” she’d exclaimed, in absolute shock, “Are you sure?” But twins she had and twins it was. The wizard (who still didn’t look more than about 100 (35-40 to humans) had gained a lot of fame in her life- she’d thought that would be her legacy. But as she stared down at the cradle her daughters- daughters!- lay in, she knew nothing would make her happier than a legacy of being remembered as their mother. “What should we name them,” asked her mate, from the doorway. She whirled around, as she had not realized he was there. The woman had many incredible skills, but she was not a very exceptional Seer. Being a wizard,though, she did have a drop of seer ability, and newborn children were known to be very easy to read, since they hadn’t yet put up the mental shields fae instinctively put up to protect themselves. She picked up the firstborn, a ginger-haired girl with blue-gray eyes- an animalia. She couldn’t see much, but she could tell what animal the girl would be. “Kitsonia,” she said, and he nodded. Normally, the tradition was for the child’s name to begin with the final syllable in one of the parents’ first names (most often, the father’s for a boy and the mother’s for a girl), but the wizard had long decided that if she ever did have a child, she would not force them to bear her name- she’d let them forge their own path, which is why, as she handed Kitsonia to her mate and reached to pick up the second child, she wondered if it might be prudent to name the this one after him. But them moment she touched the girl, a raven-haired child with eyes such a pale blue they were nearly clear, all such thoughts flew out of her head. With her weak skills, she would not have been surprised if she saw nothing- but it was just the opposite. She saw so much- too much. She couldn’t understand a bit of it, and as she tried to piece it all together, it vanished, and she couldn’t see a thing. The wizard didn’t really understand, but she new that her daughter had a hard fate. However, she knew better than most that destiny was not set in stone. Her name will come from Gu a Non: ‘a change of fate’. She looked at her mate and said, “How about Gunan?”

This excerpt's from a much later volume, when I finally go into Gunan's backstory. (Yes, her eyes are blue here, at some point I changed the color scheme for the different races). You'll notice that her mother considers Seer ability to be a fairly normal wizardly skill, even though Rosebelle considers Seers to be the stuff of myths. Gunan was born in a very different time.

I have more, of course, but I'm not going to subject y'all to this trash.

Someday, I'll come back to this story and write it properly, the way it deserves.

#ask game #studio ghibli #the trackers #it really has been a while #i forgot how much i love my rosebelle #and gunan remains the beloved child of my heart

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type2diabetestreatments-blog · 8 years ago

Text

Genetics in Action: Researcher Watches His Own Body Develop Diabetes

New Post has been published on http://type2diabetestreatment.net/diabetes-mellitus/genetics-in-action-researcher-watches-his-own-body-develop-diabetes/

Genetics in Action: Researcher Watches His Own Body Develop Diabetes

According to the American Diabetes Association, seven million people have undiagnosed type 2 diabetes, and a staggering 79 million more have pre-diabetes. Early detection of type 2 diabetes can save lives, which is what drives the ADA's recent Diabetes Alert Day. But Dr. Michael Snyder, a geneticist at Stanford University, has taken early detection to a whole new level.

Dr. Snyder and his team have spent the last three years of their lives years working on analyzing genomes (a person's hereditary DNA info) as a way to predict an individual's future health. The changes in a genome can sometimes predict the early onset of disease, such as type 2 diabetes, which has several genes linked to it. Called an integrative Personal "Omics" Profile, or iPOP, the analysis examines all sorts of nitty-gritty details about a person's body.

What's fascinating is that Dr. Snyder unwittingly became part of his own experiment! Over the course of about a year, he and his team watched as his body slowly developed type 2 diabetes. He was diagnosed last year at age 55, and because he caught his diabetes so early, he's been able to manage it so far with just diet and exercise. This is the first documented instance of anyone watching their own body develop diabetes at such a detailed level, so we were especially intrigued to talk with Dr. Snyder — to find out what impact this research could have on both diabetes care and on the future of healthcare in general.

DM) What exactly were you and your team working on when you discovered your own case of type 2 diabetes?

MS) The nature of our research is in characterizing genomes and doing large-scale analysis of genes and proteins. We were interested in learning how much your genetic information can be integrated into your healthcare. Your health is a product of two things: your genome/ genetics, and also a product of your environmental exposure, like pathogens, chemicals, things that you've been exposed to over the years. That's really what determines your health.

Although people talk about genetics in health in general terms, no one has really done much in how it exactly works. Now it's possible to get your whole genetic code sequence from all 6 billion bases. There are still issues with accuracy, but it's possible to do it. So the question is, can you do that and get useful information and incorporate it somehow into your healthcare?

So genome testing would become commonplace — something people do all the time?

When you think about it, when you go to a doctor, you'll get a physical exam, get your blood pressure done, and you'll also get a blood test. That test measures 15 or so different things in your blood. But there are technologies out there that can measure tens of thousands of things. The idea is that instead of measuring so few things, we should measure as many things as possible.

Our project was designed to sequence genome and see if that process is useful in healthcare, and can we follow the genome and see if it would be useful for disease diagnosis. So that's what launched the study.

How were you involved as a subject in the study?

We've now been profiling me for two years, and we've done it extensively when I'm sick. Because I have two kids, I've been sick four times. When I'm healthy, we do a genomic scan every two months, and when I'm sick we do it more often, between seven and nine times. We see what kind of things we can learn.

So what kinds of things did you learn?

There were several surprises, including that I was found to be at risk for type 2 diabetes based on my genetic sequence. I had several known genes that put me at risk. A lot of people know they have a family history of a disease, but this was a surprise because I didn't have a family history. We started tracking my glucose levels, which were normal and then started going up. I signed up for a very fancy glucose metabolism test. They found that my blood sugar was high, but they wanted to do it again. It was still high. Then they did an A1c test and sure enough I was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes.

The genome can in fact predict disease from your genome sequence. Because of that, I can actually follow the relevant things that are happening, and I could catch it early. Once I could see my blood sugar levels spike up, I essentially completely changed my diet and exercise routine and started taking baby aspirin. Gradually my blood sugars came back down to normal levels. My genome turned me on to something I should be aware of before anything (negative) happened.

Because we're could see the "signature" of these processes, I could see biochemical pathways were changing in away that no one had ever seen before. There were some very interesting changes. It was basically following a type 2 diabetes onset in a way that it wasn't ever seen before.

What was your initial reaction when you found out that you had type 2 diabetes?

I was surprised. I thought maybe it was just a transient glucose spike that would go away, but it happened over several months. That's why I took action by switching my diet. That was something I had to deal with. I tend to be pretty pragmatic about things. I saw something and I dealt with it.

What kind of impact do you think this could have on the diabetes community at large?

My own view is that genomics and genetics should be integrated into healthcare and that we can be carefully following things. I think some type of information is actionable, but some isn't, so you have to be careful what you return to patients.

For example, when I went in for this glucose test, the woman said, 'There's no way that you have type 2.' I agreed, but said that my genome says I'm at risk. I didn't know a lot about type 2 diabetes. They repeated the test, and I was elevated to the point where she said, 'You have type 2 diabetes.' The data spoke for itself!

I don't believe that type 2 diabetes is a heterogeneous disease. Even amongst type 2s, there are many many different types of this disease. there are many reasons why someone is at risk. I'm not overweight, I'm not the stereotype. I'm hopeful this will tease out the different types of diabetes. Some respond to metformin, some don't. Some respond to anti-inflammatory medicine, some don't. Diabetes is really hundreds of diabetes, and they just have one common characteristic which is a high level of glucose. We need to be able to classify that better. I'm hoping this improved classification can help us in treatment.

We hope to extend the technology to test all the different variants from the same drop of blood. You should be able to get 5,000 tests done with one drop so we can get a better idea of what's going on in your body. I think people who are at risk for certain diseases could do a simple home test. You could probably monitor yourself every month so you can catch diseases early. Most diseases, if you catch them early, can be prevented or treated. But if you catch them late, it's a real problem. By then there's a breakdown in the body, and things can be quite irreversible. The key is to catch it earlier.

With the help of genomics, medicine of the future should be completely transformed. It will be different than today.

You mentioned caution about giving certain information to patients. Do you think they would be able to understand their own genomic sequencing?

It's nice to give the patient the opportunity to be an important part of their health care. The information is more than one physician can handle anyway. People should take responsibility for their healthcare, so I think it's important to give them that option.

Of course, some people are worriers and getting all their genomic information wouldn't be a good idea for them. They need to perhaps work with a genetic interpreter to help them decide what kind of information they can return to you. The patient should have control over that decision, as in, 'I don't want to learn this or I do want to learn that.'

There could be something like increased risk for breast cancer, and my own view is that people would want to know that. It's probably a good thing to learn because then you would know to monitor yourself closely. But perhaps not Huntington's disease, because there's nothing you can do about it if you're at risk.

Diabetes is definitely one that you should know about because what you eat and do can affect it. It definitely should be a dialogue between the patient and the doctor and the geneticist. I think the more you can empower people with their own health, the better that is.

You mentioned in an article that your life insurance premiums went up because you now have diabetes. Patients aware of health risks through genetic testing might also end up paying higher insurance premiums, no? So do you think documenting those risks is really worth it?

Right now, the testing itself is expensive, but in some areas, I think you can make a strong case. For example, for people who are at risk for cardiovascular disease, or something with an immediate health risk that runs in their family. Having a stroke is incredibly expensive, so knowing you're at risk and making some changes to avoid it is worth it.

Ultimately, the scans would be sufficiently cheap. It would be as just as cheap to test the whole genome, rather than doing these individual tests.

People need to be careful if they want this stuff shared. They may not want to know or may not want to share this. These are all relevant issues. I do think it can be argued economically, at least in some areas, saving peoples lives is something you can't put in economic terms.

There is still lots more to learn. I think my case is a very first, but hopefully the first of many case studies where your genome is part of your health. Hopefully this will help not just the diabetes community, but all health communities.

Thank you, Dr. Snyder, for volunteering yourself to science and helping us understand a little bit more about how genome sequencing may transform healthcare in the near future!

Disclaimer: Content created by the Diabetes Mine team. For more details click here.

Disclaimer

This content is created for Diabetes Mine, a consumer health blog focused on the diabetes community. The content is not medically reviewed and doesn't adhere to Healthline's editorial guidelines. For more information about Healthline's partnership with Diabetes Mine, please click here.

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