#so shadow using a gun is something i was fine with being left in 2005

[sonknuxadow]

im gonna be honest i kinda dont care that they gave movie shadow a gun. like thats the one thing im seeing both fans and haters celebrate as being really cool but i just feel indifferent to it . sorry .

[spindashes]

I really don’t like using this account to argue with people. You’re free to interpret or criticize any part of any part of the series you want, but this is an egregious misinterpretation of Sonic’s character and his moral code. I’ll break down why, talking about the examples you gave before talking about the series on a broader level.

Sonic Mania Adventures

In the Mania Adventures example, he was not under the impression that trap would kill Eggman. It is an incredibly silly, Looney Tunes-esque scenario that both he and Eggman have survived worse than (Eggman survived Sonic destroying his Egg Mobile at the end of Sonic 1, the Death Egg falling from orbit in Sonic 2, and his final weapon crashing from orbit in Sonic 3&K, ect.) Those things are worse than a set of spikes.

He knows that Eggman will be fine. Heck, he was going to free Eggman from the trap until Eggman dropped his device showing his plans for the Chaos Emeralds, which annoyed Sonic enough that he decided to let Eggman fall onto the spikes.

This is part of a wider trait where, while he doesn’t want people to die and avoids killing them, Sonic does not mourn when bad things happen to bad people as a result of their own actions. I’ll come back to this later.

As a counter-example from Mania Adventures, in Episode 6 we are shown clearly that Sonic knows where Eggman lives, and is able to see Eggman and a damaged Metal Sonic unprotected out in the open. Despite the opportunity, he doesn’t kill them.

Shadow the Hedgehog

This one isn’t too complicated. Sonic never actually makes it clear what his ultimate plan to deal with the Black Arms was. He’s defeated armies lead by someone before (see: Eggman), so I don’t think its outrageous that he’d assume he could resolve the situation by defeating their leader or finding another way to banish them from the Earth. We have no clue what he actually would have done, assuming that he’d kill them is a bit of a leap.

Additionally, using the Eclipse Cannon to wipe out the comet was Shadow’s plan, not Sonic’s

With regards to Shadow the Hedgehog 2005, imo the only thing in the game worth talking about regarding this topic is the levels Sonic appears in, like in how Westopolis, he says that he and Shadow should “teach them (the Black Arms) a thing or two”, saying nice job to Shadow when he kills one.

This could be used to talk about, how in fiction the killing of aliens or the “other” is seen as more moral than killing another person, but that’s neither here nor there. He refers to them as creatures, so it’s ambiguous if he actually views them as sentient, or people.

Same goes for the Biolizard, it’s not a person, and thus we don’t know how Sonic’s philosophy extends to it. Regardless, in that game it was necessary that they kill the Biolizard to save the Earth, showing that Sonic will make the hard decisions when need be.

In the same level, he yells at Shadow to stop if he attacks and kills the GUN Soldiers. It isn’t entirely clear how Sonic feels about GUN, (I’d personally hope he doesn’t like them for being a military organization and, y’know, what they did to him in Adventure 2) but he still insists that Shadow not kill people.

Sonic Heroes

The use of Sonic Heroes as a source here is interesting, to say to least. Him having friendly banter with Shadow is not indicative of how he treats his villains. If he was serious about his banter about killing Shadow, either one of them would have, I don’t know, made a genuine attempt at killing the other.

(This also isn’t mentioning the fact that this is not how the text was localized, as they made the effort to demonstrate that the characters didn’t literally mean they were going to kill each other, something that was less obvious if left unlocalized.)

Because at the end of that same game, Sonic lets both Metal Sonic and Eggman go, even saying to Metal Sonic that he’d be fine with a rematch whenever. If he would regularly say “Then you’ll have to die” to Eggman, then why on Earth would he not, I don’t know, kill either of them here or make an effort to capture them?

This is the same game that introduced the “the only thing Sonic hates is oppression” bio, showing that both elements are part of his philosophy and they are not mutually exclusive.

(The only ones to confront Eggman are the Chaotix, purely because they didn’t get paid.)

Sonic and the Secret Rings

One of the ones I don’t gotta address as directly, since it relates to Sonic simply imprisoning a foe. This isn’t exactly contradicted heavily by newer stuff, plenty of villains from IDW are put in jail at points (though how Sonic feels about this is unknown from what I recall. I personally don’t think Sonic thinks highly of punitive justice, but that’s is neither here nor there.)

He’s simply sealing him back in his lamp, like he was in “days of old”. This is Sonic doing what needs to be done to protect the Arabian Nights. He had wishes to make with the lamp, so if he wanted Erazor dead, he would have used one of them to erase him.

But he doesn’t. He elects to let Erazor live out the rest of his days in there. I assume this is also because Erazor is immortal, Sonic knew he wouldn’t be around to stop him forever, so he couldn’t let him be free.

Other Examples

Not gonna go too in-depth on these, but heres a quick lightning round of some examples of Sonics philosophy being showcased in other games

Sonic and the Black Knight

Sonic doesn’t kill any of the knights of the round table, even though Caliburn questions this. He also goes out of his way to save them or stop them from taking their own lives.

Sonic Adventure 2

All of the main cast are on the Ark at the end of Adventure 2, including Eggman. He was without his mech on the observation deck, and given that Sonic had backup, he didn’t decide to do anything to Eggman.

This is also in the same game that Eggman threatened the world with the Eclipse Cannon and tried to detonate Sonic in a capsule from orbit, so it’s not like he wouldn’t have at least some reason to.

Sonic Forces

Despite the fact that Eggman had taken over the world and tortured him for months, Sonic only says that Eggman will be “wondering how he failed so badly” when they’re done, implying he’d still be alive. He could have easily said something with harsher implications like Eggman “Won’t be able to hurt anyone again.”

The bit I was talking about earlier

Related to what I mentioned with regard to Sonic’s actions in Episode 1 of Mania Adventures: Sonic doesn’t mourn when bad things happen to bad people because of their own choices.

Sonic cares about saving people, even bad ones who might deserve whats coming to them, but he’s shown to not sit around hand-wringing if bad things happen to bad people and he can’t stop it. He knows his sympathy is better spent elsewhere, and this is something we see plenty both in the series and in the comic. It shows us more of the nuance of Sonic’s philosophy, he values freedom, and if people use that freedom to make the wrong choices, so be it. He’s not Steven Universe.

Conclusion

You’re free to interpret the character however you want, I’m not gonna hold that against you, but I think its unfair or ill-informed to say that him not wanting to kill people in the IDW comics is “mischaracterization”. The Sonic we see in the rest of the series is one that doesn’t care to take lives.

Sonic Has Been Mischaracterized In The IDW Comics Part 2

Part 1 On top of this Sonic has shown no signs of being opposed to killing. For example, in Sonic Mania Adventures Sonic has left Eggman hanging in a trap that Eggman made that he intended to kill Sonic with. Yes Eggman didn't die status quo and all, but that doesn't negate that Sonic left Eggman in this trap what was intended to kill him. While I don't know a whole lot about the game, in Shadow The Hedgehog Sonic would have to either kill the Black Arms Aliens by either doing it himself, letting Shadow finish them off, or letting them starve in order to protect Earth from them which he seems to have no problem with. On top of this Sonic's response to Shadow in the Japanese version of Sonic Heroes saying "then it looks like you'll have to die." Being "that's my line," which would imply he says this from time to time, probably to Eggman whenever he announces another one of his plans of world domination. Also, Sonic has been shown to be okay with imprisoning his opponents as we see in imprison Erazor Djinn in Sonic And The Secret Rings.

Soooo… Yeah this does conflict with his IDW depiction, but so does Sonic Prime. So here's how I see it. One can deal with some of the things said by Sonic by headcanoning them as misinterpretations through the lens of other characters like Surge, Kit, and Eggman. While he still has a view of restorative justice thanks to Amy and Mecha Sonic, it is not his soul way of going about things.

[clubofinfo]

Expert: It’s more than doors between government and the businesses that they supposedly regulate that go round and round.  One of the other swinging doors is between the Democratic and Republican Parties. A second door Perhaps the best known case is when Al Gore ran for president in 2000, he picked Joe Lieberman as his running mate.  Then, in 2008, Lieberman showed up at the Republican national convention to endorse John McCain for president.  Between those two campaigns, John Kerry, the 2004 Democratic presidential nominee, was rumored to be leaning to ask Republican John McCain to be his running mate. Had Al Gore won, Lieberman would most likely have been the subsequent Democratic nominee for president.  Had John Kerry won with McCain on the ticket, McCain would have been the heir apparent to the “Democratic Party” crown.  Whether Lieberman or McCain, Democrats across the country would have been told to bow in reverence to their party’s red-blue nominee for president. This was hardly the first time such a switcheroo blossomed in American politics.  In 1864, Republican Abraham Lincoln dumped his sitting vice-president to ask Democrat Andrew Johnson to be his running mate.  After Lincoln’s murder, US voters, who had selected a Republican to be their president, found him replaced by a Democrat. Though such examples at the presidential level may be enshrined in history books, they happen all the time at the local level.  In 1963, the Texas Young Democrats allowed high school chapters for the first time.  I was 15 years old then and organized the state’s first Young Democrats chapter at Lamar High School in Houston.  We invited a teacher who had been elected to the Texas Legislature to speak to our chapter on “Why Am I a Democrat?”  His answer was simple.  He was a Democrat because that was the only way to get elected in Texas of the early 1960s. The next year, he came out as a Republican.  That was the time of the exodus of southern Dixiecrats from the Democratic to the Republican Party. Fast forward half a century and I was the 2016 Green Party nominee for governor of Missouri.  I participated in the debate with Democrat Chris Koster and Republican Eric Greitens.  Greitens, riding the election on Trump’s wave, has since become internationally infamous for an affair in which he allegedly tied his victim to his basement exercise equipment, hit her, took nude photos of her, threatened to publicize the photos if she ever told anyone what he did, and continued various sex acts without her consent. During the campaign, both the Democrat and Repubican made TV ads showing themselves with automatic weapons.  Besides being partial to gun violence, they had something else in common.  Both had switched parties.  The Republican Greitens was a former Democrat and the Democrat Koster was a former Republican.  Like most others greedy for power, they decided which way the winds were blowing, calculated where they could most effectively hustle votes, and adjusted their public images and party affiliation accordingly.  (Greitens resigned as governor in May 2018.) Flip-flops between the corporate parties are hardly peculiar to Missouri.  Evan Jenkins was the runner-up in the May 2018 Republican primary for the West Virginia US senate seat.  Jenkins had been elected as a Democrat to the West Virginia legislature, but hopped to the Republican side to win the third district US house seat in 2014. During the 2018 race, the former Democrat boasted a perfect rating from the National Rifle Association as well as a 100% “pro-life” record saying, “I am a West Virginia conservative who is working with President Trump each and every day for our shared conservative values.” That was nothing new for the state.  Its billionaire governor Jim Justice started out as a Republican, became a Democrat in 2015 to win the governor’s race and switched again to the Republicans in 2017 to bask in Trump’s glow.  These people are as dedicated to the colors of their party as a chameleon is to staying green when it’s opportune to turn yellow. The original door Do you remember when the “revolving door” was first noticed?  It was due to people like Michael R. Taylor who rotated between regulatory agencies and the corporations they were supposedly regulating.  Taylor began as a Monsanto lawyer.  Then he became a staff lawyer for the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and helped it to hassle Amish farmers for selling whole milk while giving companies like Monsanto the green light to sell genetically contaminated products without labeling them.  Then, he cycled back to Monsanto, becoming its Vice President for Public Policy.  In 2010, he flipped back to being the FDA’s Deputy Commissioner for Foods. The scenario was quite a bit different for Richard Gephardt, former speaker of the US House and darling child of business unions and anti-NAFTA coalitions in the early 1990s.  When I was working with Public Citizen to oppose NAFTA, a friend who had just been to Mexico told me that Gephardt had spoken in Monterrey promising to get NAFTA through the US House.  So I spent several afternoons at the Washington University library until I found the Mexican paper Excelsior recording his comments. I documented Gephardt’s statements in an Op-Ed piece in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch of June 1, 1993 and reported his two faces during the next Public Citizen conference call.  There was stony silence for several seconds.  Then Lori Wallach let everyone know “Dick Gephardt is the best ally in Washington that we have.” Though Gephardt gave clear warnings of his true colors, leftists paid to lobby politicians had a devout faith that an ally scheming to stab you in the back is better than no ally at all.  A few years later, the left did turn on Gephardt – but only after he publicly displayed his contempt for progressives.  In 2005, he abandoned his distinguished career as public servant and formed Gephardt Government Affairs which allowed him to pocket almost $7 million lobbying on behalf of clients such as Goldman Sachs, Boeing, Visa Inc and Waste Management Inc. Of course, Gephardt was not the typical revolving door guy.  Instead of being an agency bureaucrat      he was elected to public office.  And he did not wait to resign from his governmental post to serve industry because he was apparently working both sides regarding NAFTA at the same time. A third door This brings us to a third way the door revolves  – the way that policies and practices get tossed from one corporate party to the other.  When I was a kid, the saying went “The Democrats bring war and the Republicans bring recession.”  But no more.  With rapacious Wall Street increasing its appetite for expansion as its human host decays, the Democrats and Republicans shadow box to see which can simultaneously be more violent and make the quality of life deteriorate faster. Perhaps the old saying stemmed from the way Woodrow Wilson won the presidency with the slogan “He kept us out of war” and then proceeded to take the US into WWI.  A few decades later Lyndon Johnson ridiculed Barry Goldwater’s threat to bomb Viet Nam back into the stone age.  After LBJ won the election, he did his best to carry out Goldwater’s plan. For about half a century, the Republicans won the reputation of being the most anti-Communist.  Yet, it was John and Bobby Kennedy who tried to invade Cuba, went off their chain to pit bull Fidel Castro, and began the very long series of attempts to assassinate him. Years later, the rapidly anti-Communist Richard Nixon ascended the throne, recognized China, and visited Beijing.  In case you missed it, the right-wing Nixon reversed course and realized a progressive idea.  It was hardly the only positive event that happened during the reign of one of the most degenerate presidents of all time.  The following occurred during his presidency: end to the Viet Nam war, beginning of the Food Stamp Program, creation of the Environmental Protection Agency, passage of the Freedom of Information Act, formal dismantling of the FBI’s COINTEL program, decriminalization of abortion, creation of Earned Income Tax Credits, a format ban on biological weapons, and passage of the Clean Water Act. One of the crowning achievements during the Nixon era was the April 28, 1971 founding of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA).  Shaun Richman describes in The Unionist how OSHA “has the authority to promulgate industry-specific workplace safety rules and to fine companies that violate them. The law also provides for workplace safety inspectors, whistleblower protections for workers who report potentially unsafe conditions and legal protections for workers who go on wildcat strikes to put an end to a dangerous situation.” Do Democrats in power provide some sort of assurance because they “call for” more environmental protection than do Republicans?  During the 1990s, St. Louis environmentalists were trying to block the construction of a dioxin incinerator.  There was a Democrat in the White House, a Democratic Governor of Missouri, and a Democratic County Executive.   We persuaded the Democratic majority on the County Council to pass an ordinance requiring dioxin incinerators to operate according to EPA standards, which seemed like a victory since no incinerator can meet those standards. We stopped going to County Council meetings because we thought we had “won.”  Then the Council repealed the ordinance we had lobbied for.  Bill Clinton got his Missouri dioxin incinerator.  When do Democrats stab you in the back?  Whenever your back is turned. In 2018, Donald Trump is justly despised because of his racist hate campaign against people of color, especially his ripping immigrant children apart from their parents and putting them in cages.  But let’s not forget the continuity between Obama and Trump.  As Tina Vasquez writes in Rewire News: When he first announced DACA in 2012, President Obama boasted of ‘putting more boots on the southern border than at any time in our history.’ Obama sought to ‘centralize border security’ on the pretext of deporting violent criminals and gang members—now Trump’s cause … The anti-immigrant zeal that Trump used to get elected is in many ways closely aligned with the history of America’s immigration system, which gave priority to white immigrants and sought to limit entry by other groups. Every administration, Republican or Democrat, has maintained this system’s injustices. A major difference between the two presidents is that press outlets like MSNBC tended to ignore actions by Obama but shrieked in horror when Trump followed suit.  Clearly, the outrage against Trump positively lessens the attacks, but it makes one wonder: If a Democrat replaces Trump and commits the same atrocities against immigrant children, will media again muffle its anger? These examples of Democrats and Republicans swapping platforms and policies do not even scratch the surface.  Their views are so interchangeable that one could write a 10 volume collection of the way they imitate each other and still barely cover the tip of all the stories out there. Progressive Democrats? Does this mean that there is no one running for office as a Democrat who sincerely wishes to move in a more progressive direction?  Of course not.  There are many, many candidates who start out running for local office as a Democrat and stay at the bottom of the Party’s hierarchy because it is structured to keep them there and use them as bait to lure and defang other progressives. Progressive Democrats at the base level do not script the Party’s major directions, which is as firmly controlled by big business as is the direction of the Republican Party.  While they may propose reforms in their communities, they must march in line with candidates for national office if they are to get funding to run at a higher level.  Those higher-up Dems are the ones most skilled at collaborating with Repubs, echoing their policies, and even fluttering over to the GOP side if the time is right. While the Republicans and Democrats are able to twist and turn on any dime lying in the street, there is at least one item for which they have a mind-meld.  The top concern of their corporate benefactors is “How do we reverse the gains of the New Deal?”  Bosses of both parties seek to undo the New Deal – the biggest difference between them is how to pull it off. The Dems generally use finesse with a stiletto, carving out gains one-by-one, weeping and sobbing as they do so.  The public face of the Repubs screams in delight as it whacks off gains with a meat cleaver.  The difference in rhetoric is vastly greater than any difference in the end result.  So many politicians can alternate policies and, at times, party affiliation because they see elections as a thermometer measuring if it is the hour for the delicate blade or the butcher knife. The great virtue of the Democrats is creating hope.  The great virtue of the Republicans is being a bit more honest about their long term goals.  The perception of vice or virtue in either depends on the mood of the observer. Do Democrats and Republicans quarrel with each other in front of TV cameras?  Obviously yes – but it’s merely a mock lovers’ spat crafted for public consumption.  Once the cameras are off, they embrace in excited passion while collapsing onto the bed of cash provided by corporate donations to both parties. In our darkest hour Understanding that the unified goal of both parties is to turn back New Deal gains leads us to ask how those victories were won.  It was because of the massive strikes, exploding labor movement, and unprecedented growth of the Socialist and Communist Parties that made a New Deal necessary.  Key corporate players decided that it was more discreet to allow some demanded changes than to suppress mushrooming mass movements. Hop forward to the Nixon years.  The many accomplishments won during his term were not because that vicious anti-communist fell on his knees, beheld a shining light, and vowed to tread the path of righteousness.  It was due to a strong labor movement, a massive anti-war movement following on the heels of the civil rights movement, and a growing women’s movement demanding reproductive freedom (along with many other more radical movements). Hop forward again to the depravity of the Trump administration.  As humanity faces extermination from increased production of fossil fuels, opposition bubbles up at an equal rate.  Even though Republican state legislatures agreed to continue undermining public schools, in Spring 2018 teachers decided that they had had enough. West Virginia had a Republican governor and a Republican majority in both houses of the legislature.  But West Virginia teachers went on strike anyway and were followed by teachers from Oklahoma and other states likewise dominated by anti-labor Republicans.  Even though illegal, the strike won because teachers stood together with janitors, bus drivers, food service workers and other state employees. As Bruce Dixon laid it out in Black Agenda Report: …successful strikes are possible wherever an overwhelming majority of the workforce is committed to it, whether or not those workers are in a ‘right to work’ state, and whether or not the strike is endorsed by their union if they have a union at all. Neither of West Virginia’s two teachers unions endorsed the strike, and the leaders of both unions initially and repeatedly attempted to ‘settle’ it for far less than the striking workers demanded. The three revolving doors are just other ways that big business manages government while pulling the wool over people’s eyes.  Corporate flunkies transfer between their bosses and agencies to ensure agencies do their bidding.  Professional politicians go back and forth between parties according to their career opportunities.  Parties grab policies from each other to see who can hoodwink the most voters. The Democrats and Republicans are parts of a single gestalt that creates the illusion of meaningful difference when there is none.  If you are part of an organization that gets caught up in the revolving door, don’t keep going around in circles – find another way out.  In times of the darkest despair, solidarity is still the road to victory. http://clubof.info/

[biblicalmusings]

Hiroshima’s Castigation of Humanity’s Best Attempts at Peace

Early one August morning, Tsutomu Yamaguchi was preparing to return home from the town where he had spent the last three months on business. He worked for Mitsubishi Heavy Industries in Japan as a draftsman, and was working over the summer on a shipbuilding project. He was on the bus heading to the station with two of his colleagues when he realized he left his ticket behind. His friends continued on while he returned to the company dormitory to retrieve it. Once he did, he began walking back toward the shipyard. Mr. Yamaguchi remembered the day well: “It was a flat, open spot with potato fields on either side. It was very clear, a really fine day, nothing unusual about it at all. I was in good spirits.”

But that would change in an instant for him and the approximately 300,000 others in Hiroshima that day, Aug. 6, 1945. “As I was walking along I heard the sound of a plane, just one. I looked up into the sky and saw the B-29, and it dropped two parachutes. I was looking up into the sky at them, and suddenly... it was like a flash of magnesium, a great flash in the sky, and I was blown over,” he explained. (Richard Lloyd Parry, The Times, “The Luckiest or Unluckiest Man in the World?”, March 29, 2005).

The plane he saw was the Enola Gay. It had just completed its mission of dropping the first atomic bomb (called “Little Boy”) ever used in a military operation. He continued, “When the noise and the blast had subsided I saw a huge mushroom-shaped pillar of fire rising up high into the sky. It was like a tornado, although it didn’t move, but it rose and spread out horizontally at the top. There was prismatic light, which was changing in a complicated rhythm, like the patterns of a kaleidoscope. The first thing I did was to check that I still had my legs and whether I could move them. I thought, ‘If I stay here, I’ll die.’

“Two hundred yards ahead, there was a dugout bomb shelter, and when I climbed in there were two young students already sitting there. They said, ‘You’ve been badly cut, you’re seriously injured.’ And it was then I realized I had a bad burn on half my face, and that my arms were burned.”

Mr. Yamaguchi’s story is one of thousands of first-hand accounts of the horrifying devastation that single bomb created. One patient of Michihiko Hachiya, who was the director of the Hiroshima Communications Hospital, recounted this story, which Hachiya kept in a diary along with dozens of other stories he heard from patients at that time:

“The sight of the soldiers . . . was more dreadful than the dead people floating down the river. I came onto I don’t know how many, burned from the hips up; and where the skin had peeled, their flesh was wet and mushy . . . And they had no faces! Their eyes, noses and mouths had been burned away, and it looked like their ears had melted off. It was hard to tell front from back” (Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb, 1986, p. 726).

With one bomb, approximately 140,000 people were killed. Every person who survived had his or her own account of the suffering they witnessed, and those accounts numbered in the tens of thousands. “People exposed within half a mile of the Little Boy fireball . . . were seared to bundles of smoking black char in a fraction of a second as their internal organs boiled away. ‘Doctor,’ a patient commented to [Dr.] Hachiya a few days later, ‘a human being who has been roasted becomes quite small, doesn’t he?’ The small black bundles now stuck to the streets and bridges and sidewalks of Hiroshima numbered in the thousands” [Rhodes, pg. 714-715]. The magnitude of the destruction is beyond comprehension. No words can adequately describe it.

How Could We Do This?

The capacity of people to kill each other entered an entirely new and never before imagined age that day. For the first time in history, the dreadful prophecy that mankind would completely destroy itself if it weren’t for the return of Christ was actually conceivable (Matthew 24:22). Yet instead of being chilled by such destructive power, over the next several decades, ever more powerful atomic weapons were developed across the globe in an arms race between the U.S. and Soviet Union during the Cold War. The most powerful weapon ever tested was the Russian Tsar Bomba, with an explosive power nearly 3,000 times that of the Little Boy bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Today, the nuclear arsenal of just the United States and Russia (to say nothing of India, Pakistan, the United Kingdom, France, China and other countries known to possess nuclear weapons) is sufficient that the inhabited portions of the earth could be destroyed multiple times over.

Why did the United States drop the bomb in Japan that day? To end the war faster. Japan was all but defeated, yet their national pride kept them from surrendering. The American military was gearing up for a massive land invasion of Japan, so they reason that if the bomb could be used and proved effective in forcing Japan to an unconditional surrender first, then the lives of perhaps tens of thousands of American servicemen could be spared. In his history of the Second World War, Winston Churchill summarized the thinking behind the decision: “To avert a vast, indefinite butchery, to bring the war to an end, to give peace to the world, to lay healing hands upon its tortured peoples by a manifestation of overwhelming power at the cost of a few explosions, seemed, after all our toils and perils, a miracle of deliverance.” [Rhodes, p. 697].

A miracle for whom? The men and families of the men who would have been sent to the shores of Japan to fight the enemy in conventional warfare if it weren’t for the bomb, yes. But certainly not those who lived in the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Nor for the billions born since who have lived in the shadow of the Bomb.

This is the peace that mankind produces.

Apocalyptic Forerunner

When trying to picture the events Jesus talked about that will happen before He comes back, I don’t think it’s entirely off-base to imagine the desolation in Hiroshima, and multiply it the whole world over. In that coming tribulation, every citizen of every country of the world will be at risk.

I recommend looking up the book The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes (which I have been quoting from in this article), and reading its final chapter, “Tongues of Fire.” As I read its account of Hiroshima’s devastation—beginning months in advance with the American military preparing an island from which to launch this and other attacks on Japan, and concluding with page after page of firsthand survivors’ recollections of the misery they witnessed that day—my heart began to pound. Rhodes makes a chilling statement:

“‘There was a fearful silence which made one feel that all people and all trees and vegetation were dead,’ remembers Yoko Ota, a Hiroshima writer who survived. The silence was the only sound the dead could make . . . They were nearer the center of the event; they died because they were members of a different polity and their killing did not therefore count officially as murder; their experience most accurately models the worst case of our common future. They numbered in the majority in Hiroshima that day.” [Rhodes, p. 715, emphasis added).

There is only one thing that can give us hope in the face of such unspeakable evil and the fear that ensues from living in an age where to be utterly destroyed remains a possibility: God’s promise of salvation.

“Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the old heaven and the old earth had disappeared . . . I heard a loud shout from the throne, saying, ‘Look, God’s home is now among his people! He will live with them, and they will be his people. God himself will be with them. He will wipe every tear from their eyes, and there will be no more death or sorrow or crying or pain. All these things are gone forever’” (Revelation 21:1-4, New Living Translation).

There is a day coming when no one will ever have to worry about destruction from bombs, guns, chemicals, tanks, landmines; a day when there will no longer be a feeling of unease that somebody in a different country might come hurt you and your family simply because you are a different skin color, religion, culture or have something they want. God will enforce His law of love, which mankind has so blatantly torn to shreds.

At that time, He will take the earth—destroyed, tattered and burned as it will have been by mankind—and remake it. All the death, the sorrow, the evil, the hatred, the legacy of humankind’s aggression against God and each other will be destroyed and forgotten. He will raise all those killed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki—and all those who have died in every war or accident or by natural causes through all of history—and they will be given a new life. A life free of hatred, sorrow and suffering; instead full of love, service and joy (Revelation 20:5, 12).

Whatever happened to Mr. Yamaguchi? After getting his bearings and finding cover at an air raid shelter that terrible day, his wounds were bandaged, and he spent the night. The next day he and his companions managed to return to their hometown—Nagasaki. Despite his wounds, he reported for work two days later, Aug. 9, 1945. At work, he and his boss were having a conversation when the second atomic bomb detonated above the city, killing tens of thousands more as the first had done in Hiroshima. Mr. Yamaguchi was not injured in the second blast, and he and his wife both went on to live into their 90s. They both died in 2010, and are survived by three children. He is the only person officially recognized by Japan for having survived both atomic blasts, though there were many others.

“The reason that I hate the atomic bomb is because of what it does to the dignity of human beings,” he said in an interview. “I can't understand why the world cannot understand the agony of the nuclear bombs. How can they keep developing these weapons?” (Michael W. Robbins, Military History, “Japanese Engineer Survived Atomic Strike on Hiroshima and Nagasaki,” July/August 2009).

There will be a day Mr. Yamaguchi will have his wish fulfilled. God speed that day.

(A version of this article was originally published at ucg.org here)

[jeremiahdowney]

Squidwards suicide

https://youtu.be/qq1e5dIilJ0

I just want to start off by saying if you want an answer at the end, prepare to be disappointed. There just isn’t one.

I was an intern at Nickelodeon Studios for a year in 2005 for my degree in animation. It wasn’t paid of course, most internships aren’t, but it did have some perks beyond education. To adults it might not seem like a big one, but most kids at the time would go crazy over it.

Now, since I worked directly with the editors and animators, I got to view the new episodes days before they aired. I’ll get right to it without giving too many unnecessary details. They had very recently made the SpongeBob movie and the entire staff was somewhat sapped of creativity so it took them longer to start up the season. But the delay lasted longer for more upsetting reasons. There was a problem with the series 4 premiere that set everyone and everything back for several months.

Me and two other interns were in the editing room along with the lead animators and sound editors for the final cut. We received the copy that was supposed to be “Fear of a Krabby Patty” and gathered around the screen to watch. Now, given that it isn’t final yet animators often put up a mock title card, sort of an inside joke for us, with phony, often times lewd titles, such as “How sex doesn’t work” instead of “Rock-a-bye-Bivalve” when SpongeBob and Patrick adopt a sea scallop. Nothing particularly funny but work related chuckles. So when we saw the title card “Squidward’s Suicide” we didn’t think it more than a morbid joke.

One of the interns did a small throat laugh at it. The happy-go-lucky music plays as is normal. The story began with Squidward practicing his clarinet, hitting a few sour notes like normal. We hear SpongeBob laughing outside and Squidward stops, yelling at him to keep it down as he has a concert that night and needs to practice. SpongeBob says okay and goes to see Sandy with Patrick. The bubbles splash screen comes up and we see the ending of Squidward’s concert. This is when things began to seem off.

While playing, a few frames repeat themselves, but the sound doesn’t (at this point sound is synced up with animation, so, yes, that’s not common) but when he stops playing, the sound finishes as if the skip never happened. There is slight murmuring in the crowd before they begin to boo him. Not normal cartoon booing that is common in the show, but you could very clearly hear malice in it. Squidward’s in full frame and looks visibly afraid. The shot goes to the crowd, with SpongeBob in center frame, and he too is booing, very much unlike him. That isn’t the oddest thing, though. What is odd is everyone had hyper realistic eyes. Very detailed. Clearly not shots of real people’s eyes, but something a bit more real than CGI. The pupils were red. Some of us looked at each other, obviously confused, but since we weren’t the writers, we didn’t question its appeal to children yet.

The shot goes to Squidward sitting on the edge of his bed, looking very forlorn. The view out of his porthole window is of a night sky so it isn’t very long after the concert. The unsettling part is at this point there is no sound. Literally no sound. Not even the feedback from the speakers in the room. It’s as if the speakers were turned off, though their status showed them working perfectly. He just sat there, blinking, in this silence for about 30 seconds, then he started to sob softly. He put his hands (tentacles) over his eyes and cried quietly for a full minute more, all the while a sound in the background very slowly growing from nothing to barely audible. It sounded like a slight breeze through a forest.

The screen slowly begins to zoom in on his face. By slow I mean it’s only noticeable if you look at shots 10 seconds apart side by side. His sobbing gets louder, more full of hurt and anger. The screen then twitches a bit, as if it twists in on itself, for a split second then back to normal. The wind-through-the-trees sound gets slowly louder and more severe, as if a storm is brewing somewhere. The eerie part is this sound, and Squidward’s sobbing, sounded real, as if the sound wasn’t coming from the speakers but as if the speakers were holes the sound was coming through from the other side. As good as sound as the studio likes to have, they don’t purchase the equipment to be that good to produce sound of that quality.

Below the sound of the wind and sobbing, very faint, something sounded like laughing. It came at odd intervals and never lasted more than a second so you had a hard time pinning it (we watched this show twice, so pardon me if things sound too specific but I’ve had time to think about them). After 30 seconds of this, the screen blurred and twitched violently and something flashed over the screen, as if a single frame was replaced.

The lead animation editor paused and rewound frame by frame. What we saw was horrible. It was a still photo of a dead child. He couldn’t have been more than 6. The face was mangled and bloodied, one eye dangling over his upturned face, popped. He was naked down to his underwear, his stomach crudely cut open and his entrails laying beside him. He was laying on some pavement that was probably a road.

The most upsetting part was that there was a shadow of the photographer. There was no crime tape, no evidence tags or markers, and the angle was completely off for a shot designed to be evidence. It would seem the photographer was the person responsible for the child’s death. We were of course mortified, but pressed on, hoping that it was just a sick joke.

The screen flipped back to Squidward, still sobbing, louder than before, and half body in frame. There was now what appeard to be blood running down his face from his eyes. The blood was also done in a hyper realistic style, looking as if you touched it you’d get blood on your fingers. The wind sounded now as if it were that of a gale blowing through the forest; there were even snapping sounds of branches. The laughing, a deep baritone, lasting at longer intervals and coming more frequently. After about 20 seconds, the screen again twisted and showed a single frame photo.

The editor was reluctant to go back, we all were, but he knew he had to. This time the photo was that of what appeared to be a little girl, no older than the first child. She was laying on her stomach, her barrettes in a pool of blood next to her. Her left eye was too popped out and popped, naked except for underpants. Her entrails were piled on top of her above another crude cut along her back. Again the body was on the street and the photographer’s shadow was visible, very similar in size and shape to the first. I had to choke back vomit and one intern, the only female in the room, ran out. The show resumed.

About 5 seconds after this second photo played, Squidward went silent, as did all sound, like it was when this scene started. He put his tentacles down and his eyes were now done in hyper realism like the others were in the beginning of this episode. They were bleeding, bloodshot, and pulsating. He just stared at the screen, as if watching the viewer. After about 10 seconds, he started sobbing, this time not covering his eyes. The sound was piercing and loud, and most fear inducing of all is his sobbing was mixed with screams.

Tears and blood were dripping down his face at a heavy rate. The wind sound came back, and so did the deep voiced laughing, and this time the still photo lasted for a good 5 frames.

The animator was able to stop it on the 4th and backed up. This time the photo was of a boy, about the same age, but this time the scene was different. The entrails were just being pulled out from a stomach wound by a large hand, the right eye popped and dangling, blood trickling down it. The animator proceeded. It was hard to believe, but the next one was different but we couldn’t tell what. He went on to the next, same thing. He want back to the first and played them quicker and I lost it. I vomited on the floor, the animating and sound editors gasping at the screen. The 5 frames were not as if they were 5 different photos, they were played out as if they were frames from a video. We saw the hand slowly lift out the guts, we saw the kid’s eyes focus on it, we even saw two frames of the kid beginning to blink.

The lead sound editor told us to stop, he had to call in the creator to see this. Mr. Hillenburg arrived within about 15 minutes. He was confused as to why he was called down there, so the editor just continued the episode. Once the few frames were shown, all screaming, all sound again stopped. Squidward was just staring at the viewer, full frame of the face, for about 3 seconds. The shot quickly panned out and that deep voice said “DO IT” and we see in Squidward’s hands a shotgun. He immediately puts the gun in his mouth and pulls the trigger. Realistic blood and brain matter splatters the wall behind him, and his bed, and he flies back with the force. The last 5 seconds of this episode show his body on the bed, on his side, one eye dangling on what’s left of his head above the floor, staring blankly at it. Then the episode ends.

Mr. Hillenburg is obviously angry at this. He demanded to know what the heck was going on. Most people left the room at this point, so it was just a handful of us to watch it again. Viewing the episode twice only served to imprint the entirety of it in my mind and cause me horrible nightmares. I’m sorry I stayed.

The only theory we could think of was the file was edited by someone in the chain from the drawing studio to here. The CTO was called in to analyze when it happened. The analysis of the file did show it was edited over by new material. However, the timestamp of it was a mere 24 seconds before we began viewing it. All equipment involved was examined for foreign software and hardware as well as glitches, as if the time stamp may have glitched and showed the wrong time, but everything checked out fine. We don’t know what happened and to this day nobody does.

There was an investigation due to the nature of the photos, but nothing came of it. No child seen was identified and no clues were gathered from the data involved nor physical clues in the photos. I never believed in unexplainable phenomena before, but now that I have something happen and can’t prove anything about it beyond anecdotal evidence, I think twice about things.

[renaroo]

The Dark Half (1/20)

Disclaimer: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were created by Kevin Eastman & Peter Laird and are owned by Viacom. Warnings: Graphic depictions of violence, Psychological horror, Character death Rating: T   Summary: For years Leonardo has vowed to protect his family, but how is one supposed to protect their family from something that no one can see? And how can you tell whether or not the worst danger to your family is yourself? [TMNT 2k3]

A/N:  Of my surviving earliest fics, there was probably nothing that carried the amount of ambition with it that The Dark Half did purely because here I was, some thirteen year old who read way too many Stephen King novels, deciding I was going to completely go against all genre conventions I’d worked with before and make a horror story. And I’m honestly still proud of a lot of the ideas that came out of that. Though, it’s a little embarrassing looking at the past. 

Which is why I wanted the chance to finally go back and revise this old story that honestly did a lot of things for my growth as a person. 

And I’ll also be making fun of mid-2000s A/N’s along the way because hot damn are these hilarious

[[Original Author’s Notes circa 2005] Turtlefreak121: Alrighty, I've been plotting this one for quite some time, so if you would please, this is The Dark Half and I'm not sure how good this story will eventually end up, but I know I have quite the tendency to use cliffhangers (evil snicker)]

Bragging about cliffhangers and using the term ‘evil snicker’. Oh boy. This is going to be a trip haha

Chapter One: Murder in the Big City

Waiting for the night brought Leonardo to the surface at dusk.

Dusk. He always found that word to have a dry, unappealing sound to it that caught in the back of one’s throat. Nothing like the actual atmosphere it portrayed, this beautiful calm better suited by twilight, nightfall, sundown. And dusk certainly didn’t speak to the pleasure and ease that the time brought to Leonardo in particular.

For him, it was the start of his true day, the beginning of the nighttime freedom only granted to him and his family in darkness.

Being the oldest brother, being the chosen leader of their family clan, Leonardo had pressed himself to perform the part of the oldest brother, to be the fastest, the strongest, the most graceful. He had to push himself as the best in every possible way because he honestly didn’t know how else he could be a leader to his equally — or perhaps even more — gifted brothers.

At fifteen, Leonardo’s shoulders were tense and heavy with an unseen weight. He had to seek perfection in the almost futile attempt to earn respect from a gaggle of less self-important, less serious teenagers.

But if he didn’t have his brothers’ respect, if he didn’t lead them correctly, he couldn’t protect his family.

The price of failure was death for them. Leonardo found that unacceptable. Especially in a world where they were absolutely unaccepted.

Even with exceptions — friends who were as close as family, like April and Casey, or allies who they had earned respectful silence from — Leonardo was constantly aware that their enemies and those who did not and would not understand them far outnumbered them. That night alone, Leonardo as leader needed to maneuver his brothers’ surface exercises around the ever changing movements of the rival Foot ninja clan, the Purple Dragon street gangs which had splintered and expanded, and the generally unexpected that they always seemed to fall into.

As Leonardo looked over the peaks of rundown buildings and billow of occasional smoke, he could hear the soft patter of his three brothers landing not far behind him. He could almost anticipate that Raphael would be the one to step up next.

“What’s your call, fearless one?” Raphael joked, joining Leonardo in watching the distant cityscape. “You already rethinking topside training?”

“No,” Leo answered without even looking to the others. “I want us to take about a three block round of shadow tag. No weapons — palms only.”

He could all but feel the eyes rolling behind him.

“Oh pah-leese,” Michelangelo snickered.

“Even Master Splinter would let us use weapons,” Donatello pointed out with a sigh.

“Yeah, extreme rules or no rules,” Raphael sneered. He pulled his sai from their holster and quickly began spinning them while looking at Leonardo challengingly.

“We don’t need them out here. We need to work on speed, not weapon finesse. It’ll make keeping to the shadows less of an option—“ Leonardo began to list off his reasoning before his shoulder was whipped by the broadside of Raph’s sai. “Raph!”

“Guess who’s it,” Raphael chuckled before trust falling backward into the alley below.

Michelangelo and Donatello quickly followed, laughing among each other.

With a deep breath, Leonardo resisted rubbing at his temples before joining his brothers in the game of shadow tag.

Three blocks was nothing for them. Child’s play for ninja of their caliber.

Even though Leonardo was the only one to stick to the no weapons rule, there was little to no maliciousness involved between the four of them. A rarity for teenage brothers.

They danced through the shadows, around one another, each faltering in the slightest of steps and leaving an opening. It was constructive, a way of safely identifying weaknesses in their forms and guard. They all needed it, needed the challenge from one another.

Once he was free of it status, Leonardo knew his best plan was to pull ahead and put as much distance between himself and the others as he could. He twisted himself in a leap over Donatello, landing his palms on Don’s shoulders before pushing off and blasting forward. He could hear his brother’s groan of frustration.

His plan was working, Leonardo pulled far ahead from his brothers and reached the designated corner with feet between them. He enjoyed the bit of competitive edge, the rush, the feeling that he could still pull ahead.

Catching his breath, Leo began to turn to face his brothers as they slowed in approach, but raised voices put him on guard.

Ducking back deeper into the shadows, Leonardo watched steadily over the edge of the building where the voices were coming from. He waved to his brothers, almost instantly silencing them.

They followed his lead, falling into line into the shadows.

“Trouble?” Donatello asked in barely a whisper.

“Don’t know,” Leo said, trying to make sense of the distant, but loud, words. He was unsettled, though he couldn’t imagine why. These sorts of issues were not exactly uncommon on their night runs. But there was something about this, it didn’t sit well deep in his guts, where he was beginning to feel hollowed out and strange.

“Uh, Leo?” Mikey stage whispered, a little too loud for Leo’s liking. “You alright, dude? You look… pale.”

“What?” Leo answered defensively raising his shoulders. “No. No, I’m fine. Just… Trying to read the situation.”

Without a second to breathe, the air was interrupted with an ear piercing noise — the firing of a gun.

Raphael spun his sai a last time before holding them ready. “Looks like time’s up for that, fearless.”

Leonardo felt the same sickly, gut wrenching feeling that had suddenly overcome him from before. There was something not right about the situation.

His thoughts didn’t carry for long, however, as a second shot was already filling the air.

“Go!” Leonardo ordered, though all of them were already in motion, and his stomach was completely cold with a dread he couldn’t place.

Big Tony was, admittedly, not the most original monicker.

Perhaps it was all he had earned from one of the least original ways to direct the small block of Queens that had been left over after the fall of the ninja clan and its vice grip on all underground activities. Ruthless, but not particularly ambitious. And so long as he and his crew maintained the hold that they had, he was going to be as ruthless as possible inside of his territory. It was a doomed strategy, especially among mobs and especially in New York, but there wasn’t a soul left in Tony’s operation who would oppose him on it.

That left the bloated, greased up man to smile with veneers to cover his rottenness, and his many stolen rings and medallions to flash to the public at large. He looked like a Dick Tracey villain in his dark purple pinstripe suite, and yet he terrified those underneath the heel of his snakeskin boots into silence.

Dressed as he was, Big Tony looked out of place in a darkened alleyway. But it was his most secure path for himself and his closest working confidante, Weasel — a man who more than fit his own monicker in appearance — to reach the dubious looking former pharmacy that acted as the most recent office for their empire.  

Still, it was a bad time of night, especially when a failed cover up involving a journalist had come to bite them in the ass so recently.

At least that event had taught Tony to no longer leave loose ends. Which was his intention that night before he ended up being on the receiving end of a surprise.

On the other end of the alley, in the shadows by the thick plated door that served as Tony and Weasel’s preferred entrance, stood the pudgy man of the hour.

“The hell,” Weasel muttered, hand already by his secured arm.

“You told him about our door?” Tony snarled, already feeling heat rising to his face.

“No way, Boss,” Weasel answered. “But, you know this guy. He never does anything right. Guess he forgot how to use a front door in between missing his payments.”

A growl rolled its way between Tony’s gnashed teeth, but he was not a man known for his restraint after all. So with bluster and confidence, remembering the sniveling pencil pusher he was dealing with in the first place, Tony began to push his way to the strange man in the bowler hat. “Erlinger! First you have the nerve to demand a meeting with me, and now you’re trying to show your disrespect by not even coming by my terms? The hell’s the matter with you? Do you need reminding of where your place is? Who’s the man that you keep the damn books for? Do you?”

Weasel snickered from behind and lessened the tension that had been built.

They knew this nobody of an accountant, after all.

“Disrespect?” Erlinger answered with a strange lack of stammering. He didn’t so much as flinch, obscured by the overcast shadows. “No, sir. Of course not, sir. A lack of respect for superiors is not one of my vices.”

Taken aback by the words and the sultry confidence Erlinger had in presenting them, Tony stopped mid stride and looked back to Weasel. Weasel seemed as confused by the scene as Tony was.

“The  hell are you talking about?” Tony said flagrantly instead. “You on something? You call this so that we can straighten you out? Because with the heat on me like it is, Erlinger, you better believe that I’ll lay you out as I do it. I don’t need any whack job fucking up my books while I’m still lucky to be on bail, you worm!”

Rather than coil back in fear and regret as most would under the duress of being in Tony’s direct line of sight, Erlinger stood his ground, clicking his tongue. “Wrath. Avarice. Vanity. I see them all so clearly now. How was I ever so blind to the sin that ooze through that gluttonous body. Everything is so much… clearer now. So much… better now that I have been granted his sight.”

“What?” Tony balked, so off guard there was almost nothing else he could have said.

“Hey! You can’t talk to the boss like that!” Weasel cried out indignantly, pressing up ahead of Tony. He was pulling out his gun, face already covered in pure disgust.

From the darkness of the shadows, a simple smile seemed to almost glow. “And there is envy. What sins we wear right on our sleeves.”

“Boss,” Weasel muttered out of the corner of his mouth, “he completely lost it.” Training his firearm on Erlinger. “The only thing I’m seeing on your sleeves, Erlinger, is that same ugly as hell blue suit you’ve had for as long as we’ve known you.”

“What did you want all this for?” Tony snapped. “You called this meeting for a reason. What is it? Stocks down? Pigs banging on your doors already? What brought you here?”

“Land acquisition,” the man responded simply. “An expansion of territory, if we’re going by your rudimentary terms.”

“Hey, Tony’s business is his own business, you pen pushing cockroach! Keep your noses in the books!” Weasel ordered harshly.

“I don’t have any investment in your crude criminal dealings anymore,” Erlinger clarified coldly. “I’m speaking of my own territory.”

That actually made Tony laugh. The man had surely reached some sort of psychotic break. “You ain’t got no territory, stooge. I own you, remember?” He chuckled and looked to his loyal lieutenant. “The nards on this guy, am I right? Who’s got envy and greed now?”

Weasel placated Tony with an immediate laughter, true if not bolstered for emphasis a bit.

“You laugh at my sins,” Erlinger said almost somberly, “but I wouldn’t. There isn’t any shame in sin. Those of us involved with the more nefarious side of life should know that. Accept that. What we should allow ourselves to do is bathe in it. To accept it and live by it. I hear that calling now. I know it to be something that will last beyond any mortal, beyond any means. It’ll have the most lasting impacts, the greatest legacies.”

“What a whack job,” Weasel muttered in astonishment.

“Putting it lightly, Weasel,” Tony responded, brows reaching for his hairline.

“I’m speaking of greed, gentlemen,” Erlinger elaborated more. “Greed, something the three of us are no small strangers too, of course. Greed… and its stupendous possibilities once we’ve given ourselves over to it. Over to him.”

“Him? The hell you talking about?” Tony tried again.

“You see, he understands greed, is avarice. And I say that with no small amount of exaggeration. And, because of that, because of that need to grow and to be taken care of so that the empire may continue to grow, I must provide to him territory. Land acquisition, after all, was the first greed of all. The one that built his empire to begin with. That’s why he calls me. And he calls me to do this.”

Before the bizarre rant could even sink in, there was an earsplitting pop, and Tony felt a numbing cold in his chest. He began to sink just as a second bang echoed and it could truly set in that he was shot. Weasel was shot.

And he laid on the floor of a dark alley in the small bit of the Queens he had loved to rule aggressively so much. And he did so until darkness consumed everything around him.

When they landed in the alley there was nothing. Wisps of gun smoke were still in the air, two fresh bodies on the ground — but there was no life. Leonardo somehow sensed that the instant his feet touched the ground.

Somehow, impossibly, the shooter was not there in an instant after shooting two victims.

Raphael passed them all in order to be closer to the two fresh bodies, watching the blood pool between them. “Hey, I know these lowlives — they’re those mob doofuses from a while back. We saved that kid’s mom, the reporter, from them.” He sneered at the men. “Couldn’t have been to two nicer guys—“

Judgment.

“Raph,” Leo said in a warning voice.

“What do you think? This one’s got a gun by him, think they shot each other?” Mikey asked. “Case closed?”

“No, case definitely not closed,” Donatello corrected, squatting down to his haunches to examine the scene better. “They are both l saying on their backs and facing the direction of their entrance wounds. Which means they were both shot from the same direction…” He looked over his shoulder toward the end of the alley where Leonardo was currently standing. “The shooter would have to have been right there.”

Leo squinted and looked around him for a hiding spot, high in alert with his twin swords readied in each hand. There was no dumpster, no pile of debris — nothing for someone to hide behind. Just a large, metal door. He walked toward it and tested the knob. It was locked up tight.

“There’s nowhere for the shooter to have gone,” Leo confirmed out loud.

“Oh, sweet! Are we about to play detective on this? I totally call being Batman,” Michelangelo said exuberantly. “Donnie, you’re Robin. Raph, you’re Alfred. Leo’s Commissioner Gordon.”

“Knock it off already, will ya?” Raphael snapped.

“Okay, Batman,” Don humored, “if the shooter was where Leo is now, and isn’t there by the time we jumped down here, who did it?”

“Don’t play along, that’s only going to encourage him,” Raphael admonished Donatello. “Leo, wrangle everybody up like you usually do. Y’know. Do your Leo stuff.”

“Huh, would Leo stuff include shooting gangsters in an alleyway? Because that’d make this case way easier to solve,” Mike joked with a shrug.

Immediately, every muscle in Leo’s body tensed up. He turned and looked in offense toward his brother. “Why would you say that? I didn’t do anything. Why would you even joke about that?”

The panic built and built through his body, Leonardo could feel it choking him, clawing at his every nerve. The mere thought of being suspected, the coiling distrust, the hateful injustice. And then beneath it all, most hauntingly, a slight tinge of guilt. From nowhere, from nothing. Leo felt it all the way down to his own bones.

“Whoa, bro, I’m only kidding, calm down!” Mike laughed awkwardly, holding up his hands defensively.

“Leo’s right, we should be treating this situation with more respect,” Don huffed, standing back up.

Raphael was staring at Leo in confusion and suspicion. “We were with you the whole time, Leo, calm your tail.”

“I know that,” Leo snapped.

The defensiveness in Leo was only building and his brothers were beginning to look at him in more concern. After all, this wasn’t the first crime scene they had come across. Which was also why, when they heard the sirens nearing, they knew to leave.

“Quick! To the sew…er…” Leo ordered, pausing as he glanced to the nearby manhole.

His brothers caught on rather fast.

“I’m popping it open, you guys be ready to duck if someone’s sitting down there with a revolver, alright?” Raph volunteered, readying his sai as he came to the manhole then swiftly slipping the blade between the cracks and cracking it open.

Leo, with the rest of his brothers, were at the ready.

But, nothing happened. Raphael opened the rest of the manhole and even stuck his head in before giving the all clear.

“I don’t get it,” Mikey said, hopping down into the sewers in line with the others.

Leo hung back to close the cover behind them. His whole body still felt unsettled. “You don’t get what, Mikey?” he pressed.

“Where’d the killer go?” Michelangelo asked, scratching at his cheek in thought.

“Not our problem anymore,” Raph shrugged off in disregard.

“The police will figure it out,” Donatello answered confidently.

“Maybe,” Leo said lowly from the back. It didn’t feel like it wasn’t their business, Leo couldn’t shake it for some reason.

Especially the admittedly comedic suggestion that it was somehow Leonardo himself responsible.

The others mostly overlooked Leo’s comment and overall dour change in disposition.

“Man, I’d at least like to know why, that’s the question that always is the most interesting on Forensic Files and stuff,” Michelangelo continued to push.

“They were mobsters, dude,” Raph snapped. “What’d’ya think was the cause?”

“Simple,” Leo said, getting his brothers’ attention unintentionally. He blinked as he caught all of their looks, and then cleared his throat to clarify. “It was probably greed.”

Raph rolled his eyes and Don nodded slightly before looking forward. Mikey took a breath and sighed but none of them really reflected on the sentiment.

But Leonardo did. Because it felt so unnatural on his own tongue.

Like the guilt that had been building strangely within him managed to evaporate in an instant as he was overcome with a sense of rightness to that blame, a questioning of ethics that poured out from between his own teeth.

It didn’t necessarily feel bad.