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onhirel · 5 years

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The Peace Found Within

My submission for Dianakko Week 2019 Day 1: Soulmates!

Part of my larger What a Decade Brings universe, and it can be found on AO3!

Magic was such a strange thing. There were rules to it, of course…after all, that was how magic spells were cast. But there was so much that wasn’t known, that would probably never be known. It seemed as though the more someone tried to control it, force it to do what they wanted, the more chance for chaos there was. Was that what had happened to her? Had she misused magic? Had she gone too far, bent it too far to her will in order to do what was necessary? Had her actions made it so that there was no rest, no peace for her?

Akko grimaced from where she knelt in the small temple somewhere up in the mountains of China. She was surrounded by meditating monks, and was trying to achieve the same inner peace that they were displaying, the inner peace that had eluded her since the Battle of Arcturus Forest, the inner peace she was so desperate for. It had been so very long since she had known true peace.

First step, center your breathing.

Her eyes drifted shut as her breathing slowed, and somewhere in the distance, a chanting prayer was called in a nasally voice, the Chinese foreign to Akko’s ears, and she focused on the rolling words for a moment before she slipped deeper, and-

Fire. Death. Ruin. Blood that wasn’t hers on the blade that had formed from the sleeve of her dress. Blood that was hers hot and wet against her torn flesh. The inability to breathe. Terror and hopelessness as she stared the embodiment of Death itself in the face. Diana. Sweet, brave Diana. Working in tandem to dispel that monster. And then, slipping away into oblivion, an oblivion she never expected to come back from.

Her eyes snapped open, and she swallowed heavily, mind racing as the floodgates opened, her memories flitting from one trauma to the next, crashing and smashing and spinning like billiard balls in her still damaged mind.

Ambushes and counter-ambushes against Silent Spring members.

Holding a junior witch’s hand as she bled to death in the aftermath of a particularly bad skirmish, the young woman’s wounds too great to heal in time.

The very first time she killed a person. A man, with dark hair that had silver touching the temples. One of the leaders of a Silent Spring cell. He had smelled of cologne and old books and fear and desperation, and she had killed him and watched impassively as his cold, cruel eyes went dim, a woman’s name on his lips as he exhaled one last time. It wasn’t until she got to the hotel she was using that she had come apart under the realization that she had killed someone.

Her breath was coming fast, far too fast, and the dark, candlelit interior of the temple was no longer comforting, it was claustrophobic, the incense infused air suffocating, pressing in against her senses, and she stumbled to her feet. She mumbled an apology as she jostled the monks seated nearest to her, though if you had asked her what language she had gasped the words out in, she wouldn’t have been able to say. No, she was far too focused on getting out, a cold sweat bathing her body as she managed to escape the dark chamber, fairly exploding out into the sunlit walkways of the mountain temple.

She gasped for breath for a moment. Then, almost angrily, she swept the heels of her palms against her eyes, dashing away the tears that had started to gather. How long had it been, and she was still reacting like this? Her head felt like it was full of static, bursting and popping and hissing, and she squeezed her eyes shut, trying to focus on how the crisp mountain wind felt against her sweat drenched skin.

Thirteen months. That’s how long it had been since the battle. A half month from when she passed out to when she woke up, returned to Cavendish Manor, and then departed from Wedinburgh Airport. Five days after that to when she reached Sucy’s home, and then a week to when she began the long journey to try and quell the demons and black dogs that resided in her mind, keeping the peace she so desperately wanted out of her yearning grasp. The year since departing Sucy’s home had not gotten her that peace, not even the five months she had spent with her family in Japan.

It had been nice to see Okaa-san and Otou-san, as well as her grandparents and aunts and uncles and cousins and their children, but…but they had no idea. They could see that the prodigal daughter of the Kagari family was hurt, but they didn’t know how to help her…but they couldn’t be blamed for that. Akko didn’t know how to help herself! But she knew that the quiet whispers, the looks of ill-disguised pity, and the constant pandering would be the death of her. She had found herself distancing herself from her family as each day wore on, retreating to her room to use her crystal ball and phone to talk to her friends from around the world. That had helped some, though she didn’t miss how she spoke to Diana most of all, how she felt the calmest when she was speaking with her once rival, and there were times when the urge to get a plane ticket to fly all the way back to England was almost overpowering, but…

…she hadn’t been ready then, and still wasn’t ready even now. She couldn’t bear to face Diana, not while she was still so broken. Diana deserved happiness…they both deserved happiness, and they wouldn’t find it together, not with the way that Akko was right now. Akko knew that she couldn’t expect to be completely better before returning to England and fulfilling her promise to her…her friend. That was unrealistic. But she just knew, could feel it in her bones, that if she went back to Diana right now, it would only end in tragedy, just like how her visit with her family had.

She had snapped. She hadn’t meant to, she really didn’t, but the counseling services she had tried wasn’t doing anything and she was getting frustrated with how her family was treating her like spun glass. She had PTSD, she wasn’t broken! And always with those looks of pity, of condescension. Our Akko awakened magic, but she can’t get over a battle. Well, fuck you, Aunt Hisako, maybe if you had been there, you’d understand instead of talking about shit you know nothing about!

She was turning into a powder keg, and only needed a spark to be set off, a spark which was provided by one of her cousins, who muttered that perhaps it would have been better if she was normal, if she wasn’t a witch, if she had never left for Luna Nova in the first place, if magic hadn’t ever existed in her first place.

She had screamed at him, words slurring as a cruel reminder of the brain injury she had suffered, but she hadn’t been able to stop, hadn’t been able to hold back. Magic was everything to her. She had worked so hard to be where she was, and if it wasn’t for her, then perhaps Silent Spring would have won, and Earth would have died! The tirade lasted far longer than she had expected, and in the stunned silence that followed, she was aware of just how everyone was staring at her, staring at Akko the Witch, Akko the Freak. Then one of the babies (the daughter of her cousin Hiro? She couldn’t remember…) started crying, and she whirled, retreating to the small room her parents had given her. It didn’t take long for her to pack.

But what really hurt? Her parents didn’t even try to fight when she told them she was leaving. They just accepted it, offering only token words of sad dismay. They didn’t demand that she stay, they didn’t try to keep her home. They knew what she knew: that she didn’t belong. She had seen too much, been through too much. She no longer fit in the mundane world of her family.

“Will you come and visit?” her father had asked, deep voice sad and soft, and she had hesitated at the doorway, backpack slung over her shoulder.

“Hai,” she finally muttered. “After I…yes. I will visit.”

They had hugged one last time, then, the three of them crying, but no more words were said, and she began the next leg of her journey.

Akko’s eyebrows furrowed as she stared out over the lush, green mountains spread before her. The bitter irony of it all was that she hadn’t used the magic she had so vehemently defended once since the end of the battle. Her wand had stayed in her backpack throughout it all. Perhaps that was part of the problem. She felt unmoored, separated from both the mundane and magical worlds. Even when magic would have made things easier, she hadn’t been able to make herself use magic.

After she had left Japan and started travelling through Southeast Asia, she had thought a lot about why she was so hesitant to use the magic that she once loved. While helping plant rice on a small family farm in Vietnam, when she walked her way across Cambodia, as she visited the open air markets in Thailand, and then while she trekked north through Laos into China, she thought about it. She knew it was tied to her trauma, the PTSD that robbed her of any peace, and it was that odd, pervasive sense of looking for something that she was missing that dragged at her feet. She had to find what she was looking for before she returned to Diana or freely used magic again…she had to! So she hadn’t ridden in any car, nor used a bicycle, nor flown in any plane, worried as she was about missing the thing that she was looking for if she went too fast…the only vehicles she ever used were boats when she travelled over open water. But no matter how many miles she trudged, no matter how many people she met and helped, the answer still alluded her.

And now here she was, standing on the walkways of the mountain temple high up in the Chinese mountains, hoping that the holiness of this place would help her find what she was looking for. But here seemed as empty of answers, the same as everywhere else she had been so far. At least the view was nice, with the clouds and mists rolling heavily off the green mountains…

“You seem troubled, my child.”

The voice speaking heavily accented English was startlingly close, for Akko hadn’t heard anyone approach, and she whirled, heart pounding as her body immediately prepared to strike ruthlessly. But it wasn’t a Silent Spring assassin who stood before her, but one of the monks, an old man with skin as brown and wrinkled as a walnut, and he regarded her with calm, kind eyes. Still, she berated herself for letting him get so close without her noticing. Even lost in thought, she should have been paying enough attention to her surroundings to notice anyone approaching…Silent Spring did still exist, even if the majority of them had been destroyed. Those remnants that still existed might very well be wanting revenge. She’d have to pay more attention from now on…as for this man and his statement.

“I am, sir,” she replied honestly, and he nodded in understanding as he strode up to the wall of the walkway, joining her in looking out over the mountains before them.

“This is good. Noting there is a problem is the first step of overcoming it,” he said, before shooting a glance out of the corner of his eye at her. Returning his gaze to the mountains, he spoke his next words softly. “You remind me of a man I once knew.”

She didn’t say anything, but then, she didn’t have to.

“He, too, came here, only long ago, when I was a very young monk. He was a proud man, but troubled, very troubled. You see, he had served in what the Americans call the Korean War. His unit fought many times against the Americans and the South Koreans, and suffered terrible casualties. He was wounded towards the end, and was brought back home, but could find no peace. He never took a wife, never had any children, for the war and what he had seen weighed too heavily upon his mind. Every night, it seemed as though he returned to the war. Every night, he found no peace.”

PTSD, her mind supplied. He was suffering from PTSD, but it didn’t sound like he got any help for it. “What happened to him?”

The monk smiled softly to himself, the expression melancholy. “He told us how he spent years in the wilderness, unable to be near his fellow man, how he was searching for something he could never find. He finally found himself here. It took him many years and support, but he looked deep within himself and found the peace he had so desperately sought without. He eventually became a monk, and was one of the kindest, most tranquil men that I have ever known.”

Akko scoffed, turning a wry smile on the monk. “So I should wander for years in the wilderness before joining a monastery? Is that how I find peace?”

He chuckled. “That hardly seems fitting of the famed Atsuko Kagari.” At her shocked look, he grinned wider. “We are not so removed from the world that we would not recognize someone like you, my child. You have done great deeds already, and I imagine that great deeds still lie ahead of you, and they would not be accomplished if you holed yourself up in a monastery. No, I believe that what you must do is look within yourself. You are not at peace not because of something in the world around you, but instead because of something within you.” His expression turned grave. “That said, my child…there is no easy solution, there is no one thing that will bring you completely to peace. But knowing what lies within your own heart is an important step on your journey, I feel.”

They spoke for only a few moments after that before he took his leave, leaving Akko with a great deal to think about. Take a look at her heart, he had said. Funnily enough, that was more of a literal reality for witches than it was for the mundanes, but it would require the use of magic. Setting her mouth in a determined line, she made her way up to the small room the monks were letting her use. Barely larger than a closet and only just containing the cot and an old set of drawers, it was still sufficient for her needs. She paused on the threshold before stepping in to the room, grabbing her backpack and opening it, hand hesitating for a moment before she grasped her wand for the first time in many months.

The ease at which the wand’s worn handle fit into the palm of her hand, how right it felt to wrap her fingers around the wand that had seen her through thick and thin filled her with a deep sense of sadness. It wasn’t the wand’s fault that she was the way she was. The wand had done nothing wrong, but even now, with how right it felt to hold it again, she felt like ants were crawling all over her body, fear and anxiety prickling over her.

What if she couldn’t cast magic because of how hard it was for her to speak sometimes? What if magic wouldn’t come for her because of the necessary but terrible things she had done with it? What if it could sense her resentment and bitterness at how the one thing that had once brought her so much joy had brought her nothing but pain, heartache, and agony for most of her adult life?

She frowned. No! She was Akko Kagari! She reawakened magic with the help of one of the most powerful witches of their age when they were only sixteen! She would not shy away from this!

Sitting cross-legged on the bed, she took a deep breath to center herself. It was a long, complex incantation for the spell that she was going to cast, something she learned during her last year at Luna Nova. She had struggled with it then, only able to take brief glances within to her own magical signature, but she had matured since then, gotten better control of her magic. If the monk said that she needed to look within, then look within she would!

The words she needed came slowly, spoken with the utmost care, and she could feel the power growing with each uttered syllable. Shaky, yes, but stable enough for what she was trying to do. Her eyes squeezed shut as she finished the last word and released the built up magic, and it was as though she was struck by an ocean wave…massive, indomitable, a force of nature hard to fight. So she didn’t, allowing it to wash over her, and when she opened her eyes again, they no longer saw her room.

No, the view that greeted her was breathtaking, a studded starscape as far as the eye could see, design whirling and flashing, mesmerizing and almost hypnotic. She remembered some of the older witches saying that this spell had been disheartening to cast before the Grand Triskelion had been activated, that the world had seemed a void save for a brief few brilliant but fading glimmers, Sorcerer’s Stones providing magical energy. Now, the entire world was ablaze with magic, beautiful and powerful, sublime in its energy.

But she wasn’t here to look without, she was here to look within.

She turned her gaze towards herself, wincing slightly at the slight disconnect of her consciousness as, for lack of a better description, she looked at herself from a third person point of view. What she saw was…well, pretty much what she expected. It was hard to describe, this crimson, flowering gem with countless petals and facets that was her magical signature. It wasn’t just sight that she perceived, but also feelings…stubborn and headstrong, playful and humorous, but also worn and tired, frightened and wary. Sharp as obsidian in places, but also fragile as spun glass. This was a magical signature…nay, a soul that had been through a great deal.

But then she blinked as her eyes adjusted and she began to perceive more. Her soul wasn’t alone, there were branches that led off into the darkness, almost imperceptible when looked at directly but noticeable from the peripheral, like a dim and distant light in the darkness. So many of them, too, all connecting her to others, but ten were stronger than all the others. Curious, she reached out a hand that wasn’t actually there, and rested her ephemeral fingertips just above a cluster of three strands that ran close together, and she gasped.

A lime green cord that felt stubborn, playful, and strong, a hazel that shared that strength but also had a sharp wit, and a teal that was gentler than the other two, more caring and supportive but not without its own strength. Amanda, Hannah, and Barbara. Fitting, then, that their signatures seemed so intertwined! It didn’t take her very long to identify the rest of the signatures…Lotte and a much dimmer signature that she suspected was Frank’s…Chariot and Croix…Jasminka, as well as Constanze, even Sucy was still there, though hers was not vibrant with life as the others were. But still it remained, and she couldn’t help but remember the one dream she had while at Sucy’s mother’s house and their final farewell. Sucy may be dead, but she wasn’t gone, not truly…and perhaps she wouldn’t really be gone, so long as there were those that remembered her. A bittersweet thought, and a sharp pang of longing ran through Akko. She missed her friend, dearly.

But for all that sadness, she did feel a bit better, having done this. The spell was a stark and definite reminder that for all its chaos, magic joined people together. She was not alone, and never would be. Though the cords of magical energy that connected her with her friends were the strongest, there was no denying that she was connected with countless others, and had she the time, she would have taken care to actually investigate each one. But no, she had to return to the real world. But even as she began to withdraw from the spell, she couldn’t help but look around for the one cord that should have been brightest of all. Where was Diana’s signature?

She barely caught it out of the corner of her eye, but for the briefest of moments, a pale gold streaked with tea green and a light, clear blue flickered across one of the petals of her own signature, and she paused, confused. It seemed to have come from within her essence, and not from a cord connecting her with Diana. Curious now, she gathered her will and dove deeper within her signature, piercing through the outer layers and diving deep, ignoring the brilliant flashes of feelings and the brief flickers of memories tied to her long years of training and schooling to get to where she was.

Deeper and deeper she went, following the flash of gold that grew stronger and stronger the closer she got to the core of her essence, the beating heart of who she was, and when she got there, she gave a soundless gasp into the brilliantly colored void.

It wasn’t a cord connecting her to Diana. No, instead there was a thick strand of the warmly glowing gold signature that was interwoven with the very center of her magical signature, of her very soul. She raised cautious fingers, but where she hadn’t actually touched any other magical signature, she couldn’t help but touch the strand of gold and green and blue that was very much a part of her signature now. A small part, to be sure, but it was still there, still part of her!

Her fingers brushed the surface, and she immediately felt an indescribable flood of warmth, of acceptance, of serenity, of friendship and something more, something that should scare her but didn’t, and after a brief moment, there was a pulse of curiosity from the gold strand as the one that it originally belonged to answered her touch.

Oh. Oh, this was too much! This wasn’t just a minor connection, this was something more, and for a moment she floundered, confused and worried at what it all meant as a word that meant so much with its depth floated to the fore: soulmates.

Diana’s soul was inextricably connected with hers.

The shock of it all broke the spell and with a rush the real world returned to her senses, and she was suddenly aware of the tears coursing down her cheeks. It had been so beautiful but so very powerful, like a typhoon in the distance. She gasped for breath as her body reacted to it all, shuddering with what she had seen.

She would always be a part of Diana, and Diana would always be a part of her. Not just connected, but well and truly a part of each other.

Her crystal ball chimed from within her backpack, and she froze. But no, if that was who she thought it was, avoiding her wouldn’t accomplish anything. Gritting her teeth as she steeled herself, she retrieved her ball and activated it.

Diana’s face greeted her, sleepy and slightly confused as she politely hid a yawn behind her hand. “Akko?” she murmured in a throaty voice once the yawn ended. “Is everything okay?”

“Yeah, I just…you could tell that was me? How?”

Diana blinked at that, obviously taking the time to think it over. “I don’t know,” she finally answered. “I just did.” Then she frowned, more confused than annoyed or angry. “What was that?”

And so Akko explained it all to Diana who was several time zones away…it must have been very early in the morning for her. Diana didn’t say anything while Akko was talking, and once Akko was done, she still remained silent, face thoughtful. Finally she nodded slightly.

“The Grand Triskelion.”

“Huh?”

“Akko, we awakened magic together…it’s not surprising that our souls are intertwined like that. We were at the epicenter of an event where magic united the world, where everyone with a believing heart supported us in stopping the missile.”

Her tone was calm and factual, and Akko couldn’t stop the question from spilling from her lips. “Being connected like this doesn’t bother you?”

Diana’s head tilted to the side. “Why would it? Akko, you are my dearest friend. You always will be.” A blush touched her cheeks. “Whether as the closest and dearest of friends or…or as something more, I can think of no one I’d rather be so connected to. After all, I don’t lightly make promises to wait for someone to just anyone.” Her face grew concerned, a definite hint of yearning in the lines of her expression. “Akko, I know that I can’t force you to come home any sooner than you are ready to, but it’s been so long already. When are you coming home?”

Going home. Going home to Diana. Going to the one place that she really considered home anymore. The idea no longer seemed as daunting as it was before, but still…

“I don’t know,” Akko admitted. “I’m…I’m still not quite ready.” Diana’s face fell, and Akko’s heart lurched in her chest at the expression. “But…” she started, smiling timidly as Diana looked back up, hope in her blue eyes. “But I think I took a very important step today.”

The truth, she realized with a flash. Her heart and soul still ached, and likely would for a very long time yet. But she wasn’t as alone as she had thought she was, even when she was half the world away from her friends. She was still connected to them, like they were connected to her, and Diana…Diana was a part of her, and now that the shock of that realization had worn off, she took immense comfort in the fact. No matter what, Diana would be with her.

Diana’s smile was soft, but filled with her belief in Akko despite that softness. “I’ll be waiting,” she said, tone unwavering, resolute.

“And I will return to you,” Akko replied, voice just as firm as Diana’s had been. She couldn’t say when, but she would return to Diana. No power in the world could prevent that from happening!

Their conversation ended shortly after that, Diana regretfully informing her that she had to start getting ready for the day, and soon Akko was staring at the blank crystal ball resting on the bed as she processed all that had just happened.

She was connected with her friends, and a small part of Diana’s soul was intertwined with hers, and a small portion of her own soul was undoubtedly a part of Diana’s soul, as well. They would always be connected.

Akko fell back on the bed, smiling at the thought of it. No matter what traumas she endured, no matter what terrors visited in the night, Diana would always be there for her, a silent source of support and strength, a beacon in the dark.

They had been through unbelievable challenges together, had reawakened magic side-by-side, had even stared Death in the face before dispelling its corporeal form. Akko knew that the demons that still hounded her were not gone, and might very possibly never be gone. But they no longer seemed insurmountable like they had before. After all, with Diana’s help?

With Diana’s help, she could do anything.

That night would be the first peaceful night of sleep that Akko had in a very long time. The ghosts and demons still howled in the distance of her dreamscape, but Akko took courage from a steady golden glow that she had only needed to find in order to draw on its strength. Diana’s soul kept her safe through the night, and would do so from then on. In the morning, Akko would thank the monks for their hospitality before leaving the monastery. It would still take her five more months to complete the journey to the patiently waiting Diana, but now the journey had focus, was no longer a hopeless meandering as she looked for serenity. She still helped those she came across, still walked rather than ride in train or car or plane, but now she was motivated more by a curiosity of the world around her and those that lived in it rather than by a sharp, aching desire for peace of mind.

After all, the monk had been right, though she suspected not quite in the way that he expected: serenity was found within her own heart, but it was not her heart that provided her with that serenity, but the heart of her one and only, her soulmate, the one who waited for her:

Diana Cavendish.

#dianakko week 2019 #dianakkoweek #@dianakko-week #what a decade brings #a decade's drabbles #diakko #akko kagari #diana cavendish #mention of all her friends #as well as of hanbarmanda

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lovelyworldesk · 6 years

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An Exception

This is a short story I wrote last year that won a Gold Key in the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards in my region. I hope you enjoy.

A doleful scene sat in front of him- or, what he thought was a doleful scene. Gnarled trees and darkness shrouded the sky above him to the point where he couldn’t tell where he was. Ghastly shadows of a phantom light spider-webbed across the ground without any real source. The air smelled of rotting leaves and icy cold. He was glad he couldn’t feel it.

Those details didn’t matter, however. The part of this scene that made it seem truly dismal was the shaking hand that emerged from the darkness, holding a knife.

This was not an unfamiliar sight for the man. Countless nights had been spent by him lingering in the corners of run-down warehouses and the depths of the darkest forests at night- places where a film of haze fell upon the world, intoxicating those inside of it with the fear of what they knew not. The man himself knew not how he got to these places. When it first started happening to him, he had been standing amongst the itchy sweaters and jazzy music of a Christmas party. One moment, he had been trying his best to ignore the drunken iterations of his uncle, and the next- this.

For a while, he believe the pattern that determined what place he’d be sent to was whatever place was the darkest and most dreary. This, however, was inaccurate. This was proved to him when he found himself in the sunlit hallway of a hospital instead of the comfort of his own bed, where he had been moments before. That same feeling- the unknown fear- hung in that place as well, despite its light interior.

He had grown to know that fear. He was not a stranger to it. He had a purpose in these situations, within this fear; a purpose that was possibly more hated than that of the person wielding the blade or lying in the hospital bed. His dream-like trips were always fleeting; he could remember only was what imprinted itself into his senses. The burn of antiseptic from the hospital still stung his nose because of it.

This time, however, it was not the scene that was unfamiliar to him, but the person behind the weapon that surprised him. The hand in which the knife was held was slight and unsteady. It was connected to a little girl. Her face was as fragile as her hand, with dark eyes cutting into the pale angles of her face in such a way that reminded him of himself. She had a look upon her that reminded him of a feral cat- un-trusting, but laced with thin, precarious lines of melancholy. With his curiosity piqued, he watched the events unfold in front of him.

The girl had been pointing her knife and a small, sickly looking squirrel who had gotten its leg stuck between two tree branches. The man found it ironic that the little girl trembled and whimpered at the prospect of harming this creature, but the squirrel, who was moments away from its own death, had not a clue. It simply tried to free itself without much regard to the other being nearby.

Life isn’t so afraid of death when it closes it’s eyes and ignored its presence.

He gazed at the scene, patiently waiting for it to be finished. The girl had not seen him, and she wouldn’t once this was all over. He was silent and elusive- he would complete his job and move on. Maybe next he’d get to visit somewhere nicer, like the warm interior of a retirement home. Those were his favorite. A certain type of peace pervaded the air of those places. They were places that were so soaked in the acceptance of the old that one couldn’t help but feel at ease.

He could already tell what memory he was going to take away from this one. The sound of the girls footsteps crunching the dry ground below them wavered the silence that had been there a moment before. Perhaps he’d store the memory of that sound away, and think of it a later time. It had the same tranquility of a crackling fire.

“Hello?”

The voice startled him from his thoughts. The girl was staring eerily in his direction, though not necessarily at him; her eyes were focused on a point just beyond him.

“Go away. I’m warning you,” she bit, which was a comedic demand to hear for a girl with such a high-pitched voice. Still, it…..unsettled him. He had always been somewhat invisible to others when he was forced on these little cosmic trips. What was different about this girl?

“Can’t you see I’m busy? I’m busy!” she insisted, and the way she stepped towards the man told him that she was most definitely talking to him. He carefully put his hands up, crouching so he was eye-level with the child.

“Alright- I’m going to stay right here. Don’t worry one bit. Continue on,” the man replied softly. He did not recognize his own voice. It was skewed in a crackly, echoing way that he had never heard before.

The girl hesitated, but then nodded her head vigorously and turned back to the entrapped squirrel

She took a step forward. Her breathing was labored and unsure. The man watched on intently.

She took another step. Her knees clacked together with the cold night air that had seeped into her bones, adding yet another jarring sound effect to the silence.

She took one more step, this one seeming much more hesitant than the last. She was close enough that she could get the squirrel in one swipe of her knife.

The man waited. He figured it was her nerves, but it’d happen. She’d win in this fight with the squirrel.

Alas, he was not correct. The girl abruptly dropped her weapon and came bounding towards the man, her face now wrapped in that melancholy that he had seen only faintly in the girl's eyes moment before. She buried herself into the folds of the black drapes he had on for clothing, wrapping him in a hug- as best she could, anyway, with her small arms.

“Help me,” she whispered, no louder than the sound of a breath. If he didn’t know better, he would have thought she had said nothing at all.

But he did.

He didn’t move his arms to embrace her back. He didn’t shift his weight to accompany hers- he didn’t even breathe. He simply looked at her, for what seemed like an eternity.

When he did move, however, it was to pick up the child.

“I told you not to worry,” he replied simply, before starting to walk away, the girl now relaxed and curled into his arms.

Death had never been a kind man, but….he decided that maybe, just this once, he could be.

#writing #short story #fiction #writer #writers of tumblr #poetry #poet #I hope you like it!

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architectnews · 3 years

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Lazy House, Zlín Southeastern Moravia

Lazy House, Zlín Southeastern Moravia Real Estate, Czech Building Project, Architecture Images

Lazy House, Zlín

2 Aug 2021

Architects: petrjanda/brainwork

Location: Zlín, southeastern Moravia, Czech Republic

Lazy House

Lazy House is situated seemingly outside the context of Baťa’s urbanism and its constructional and visual principles. However, the perception of Zlín is ubiquitous and defines the horizon of events by mutual visual contact. The composition is designed by a rotation of the interior layout, where the exterior follows the contour logic of the surrounding houses, while the interior turns towards the city in the direction of the plot’s boundaries. The house uses principle of aircraft camouflage. The main living floor is visually connected to the sky by dematerialization through mirroring and moiré facades and “levitates” on the Corten base set into the slope. From above, the green roof with the glass-walled studio merges with the garden city dotted with houses.

The abstract metal exterior is balanced with the soft wooden interior with colourful accents of cast light that blend together during the evening. The layout of the main living floor minimizes corridors and is organized around a central social space connected to the garden in the south and the city in the north. Around it, there are the rooms with bathrooms, protected in contact with neighbours by a stainless-steel membrane. The lower floor contains a garage, a guest apartment with terrace, sauna and technical equipment.

The garden flows around the house, ascends to the cellar with a fireplace and culminates in a residential grotto sunk in the terrain above the terrace with a swimming pool. The house changed owners during construction and was finished thanks to the development of the original concept. The title refers to the name of the locality and to the passive standard of the house. The technological solution uses heat pump with two earth boreholes and low-temperature heating and air conditioning with recuperation.

Idea The idea of the house goes beyond its physical form and is built from the inside out on the principle of spatial connection with the environment from which it grows and which it overlooks. The concept is based on the relationship between the house and the city, the house and the garden, and the garden and the city. The relationship scheme is repeated inside the house. The interior communal part flowing through the entire house continues to the exterior and all the separate private parts have their own extroverted relationships. The visual appearance of the house is defined by its inner nature and the permeability of its physical body‘s (non) separation of the interior from the exterior. Privacy is maintained by facade membranes that allow the maximum view from the inside out, but reduces it from the outside in. To set it in the context of the garden and the city, the house uses material mimicry.

Context The house is seemingly situated outside the context of Baťa’s urbanism and its constructional and visual principles. However, the perception of Zlín is ubiquitous and defines the event horizon of the entire architectural concept through mutual visual contact. The site is part of a new urban area created by the conversion of the former allotment gardens, divided into six building sites and connected to the existing urban structure by a new road. The locality is connected to the Lazy residential district in the highest part on the slope, under the forest and above the Zlín valley. The site’s specific feature is its inverse orientation, with the view of the valley towards the north, and the southern part of the site affected by the slope and forest rising above the house. It offers an excellent view of the year-round sunlit valley. The house overlooks a large area of Zlín with typical green residential quarters, with family homes and the valley surrounded by the hills in the background.

The typological reference buildings the project emotionally draws on are the distinctive solitary villas situated in environments that offer unique views, such as “villa on a cliff” or “residence above the city”. It is the essential archetype of a house that benefits from the uniqueness of its location. In the topographic conditions of Zlín, the view from the house is analogous to the view of Mediterranean villas or Los Angeles residences.

Architectural design The house is designed as a compact solitaire on a square floor plan, with a slightly rotated layout, where the exterior follows the contour logic of the surrounding houses, while the interior turns towards the valley. The house consists of a lower floor base sunk into the slope and the prism of the main living floor attached to it. This makes it look like a single storey house from the south. The lower floor base is sunk into the ground and its wall with the garage entrance is rotated in a direction perpendicular to the longitudinal axis of the site. The upper floor prism creates a dynamic overhang above the garage entrance. The motif of the layout rotation is repeated with the terrace space cut into the building’s volume. The green roof returns the missing part of the garden cut off by the house’s footprint and has a fully glazed roof studio on it. The main living space is concentrated on the upper floor and can be seen through from the garden to the city. Thanks to the layout rotation, it was possible to arrange the rooms around the perimeter while maintaining privacy and their own views.

The concept of the house allows changes in use corresponding to changing needs. The house is divided into individual parts, each with their own intimate relationship to the garden and the view, allowing a multi-generational arrangement with two separate guest sections with separate access on the entrance floor. The house uses the principle of aircraft camouflage; the main living floor is visually connected to the sky by dematerialization through mirroring and moiré facades and “levitates” on the Corten base sunk into the slope. From above, the green roof with the studio merges with the garden city, dotted with houses. The wine cellar, swimming pool with grotto, access area, fencing with entrance gate and dustbin box grow into the slope and merge with the garden. The garden flows smoothly around the house and creates hidden bays protected from the outside that allow panoramic views of the city. The open concept naturally achieves privacy thanks to the vegetation protecting the boundaries of the site.

Layout Access to the house is from the street through the gate and the entrance floor with garage, which allows separate access to the main living floor and to the guest apartment. The main living area is on the first floor and is accessible by a single-flight entrance staircase opening a view of the garden. The layout minimizes the need of corridors in favour of smooth living space. The zoning of the quiet and social parts is led from the centre of the layout to the sides. All of the quiet areas are accessible from the central social zone, and the parts for parents and children are separated. The social zone is a space with a kitchen, dining room and living room running through the house, which, thanks to its location, remains protected inside the layout. Around this central part, there are other rooms in corner positions around the perimeter of the layout so that they benefit either from the view of the city or from contact with the garden.

The house is visually permeable (from the inside out) through its north and south facades, while the east and west facades protect the privacy of the house from contact with neighbours and allow the view out and the sun in through the windows covered with stainless steel membrane and blinds. The parent’s zone consists of a bedroom connected by a walk-in wardrobe and a “secret” door to its own bathroom, the children’s zone has two children’s rooms with a bathroom and toilet between them.

The layout is complemented by a glazed study with bookshelves connected to the living area and the terrace through a glazed indoor garden and a pantry integrated into the built-in kitchen. The lower floor is concentrated around the two-car garage located in the middle of the floor plan, with both entrances to the house on the sides of the garage. The western part of the floor contains a guest apartment with a separate entrance that can be used for grandparents, visitors or teenagers. The apartment is designed as an open layout, centred on the social part, with kitchen, dining room and living room, and a separate bedroom with its own walk-in wardrobe, bathroom and separate toilet. The apartment has its own terrace with a separate garden.

Structure and materials The house uses its load-bearing structure as a skeleton, the insulation as muscles, heating as blood circulation, air conditioning as lungs and trachea, water distribution and sewerage as digestive system, wiring as nervous system and surface layers as skin, protecting the whole body and allowing its surface to breathe. The structure of the house consists of a reinforced concrete monolith insulated with high-performance thermal insulation in a layer corresponding to low-energy or passive buildings, visually faced with materials that naturally support the composition of the house.

The volume of the main living floor has a fully structurally glazed north and south facade with large format metallized triple glazing, while the facades facing the neighbours are made of a stainless-steel fabric covering the windows. Its silky shiny surface complements the reflection of the glass and creates a volatile moiré that blends in with the sky when viewed from the access road. The lower floor, including the garage door, is faced with pre-corroded Corten steel sheets with a distinctive rusty colour, which emotionally connects the house with the garden and materially with the entrance gate and garden elements.

The colours and materials used work with the semantic separation of the outside and the inside. The metal exterior contrasts with the wooden interior, consisting of large veneer facing, built-in furniture and solid floors. The dominant material of the walls, doors and built-in furniture is elm veneer facing, in combination with solid Iroko flooring. The overall impression is that of a continuous flow of space throughout the interior of the house.

This flow culminates in the individual layout epicentres using glazed elements rhythmizing the surface of the walls by the reflection of light, drawing the views from the large windows into the deeper parts of the interior. Bathrooms form the appendices of a flowing interior and the continuous perception is interrupted by entering into their spaces; each bathroom makes a specific impression. Details are subject to the house as a whole and its perceived “detaillessness” and disclosed tectonics of individual elements is suppressed in favour of the natural flow of the interior skin throughout the house.

The veneer follows the compactness of the wall surfaces, the sheets are laid so that there is no repetition and seamlessly connect on all edges and parts. The direction of the floor and terrace boards follows the house envelope and subtly draws attention to the tension between the two rectangular systems: the exterior and the interior. The atmosphere of the interior works with variability created by the tension between natural and modulated illumination and its intense changeability over time.

The artificial lighting is designed as an integral (and still autonomous) layer of the interior, based on a combination of direct and indirect light combined with the distinctive materials of the interior. The lights combine reflected “iridescent” light diffused by lenses with two-colour diffusion filters reflected from the ceiling and direct illumination with non-coloured light. The ceilings use a subtle retroreflective effect of pearlescent coat in shades fading from the centre of the layout towards its edges, into the individual bays of the interior. The house offers a multi-layer gradual separation of the interior from the exterior using membranes of curtains, drapes and screens, made of fabrics corresponding to the character of the walls with different light transmittance, from fine translucency to complete blackout.

Garden and exterior parts of the house The garden is designed as a smooth carpet. The natural dominant feature is the grotto with swimming pool, creating a covered exterior with a view of the valley. The pool is positioned so that its water level lies above the “level” of the house’s roof, which can be overlooked during swimming and perceived as connected to the garden city in the valley. The curved form of the grotto is composed of gradually rotated massive larch planks joined as formwork for a hidden reinforced concrete shell sunk in the terrain adjoining the grotto, creating a “cave” cut out of the garden hill. The stainless-steel pool uses an edge overflow with a gutter, copying the slope of the adjoining terrain and creating an endless surface effect.

The cover that keeps water temperature when the pool is not in use is hidden under a bench made of stainless-steel rods immersed in the pool. The cellar is an adaptation of the original brick vaulted cellar, a relic of the original allotment colony. It was complemented and equipped with an interior steel waxed shelves for bottles. The cellar’s roof is covered with Irish moss growing through reinforcing slate structure copying its smooth shape. Privacy is maintained by tall bamboo plants and grasses organically connected to the undulating terrain, which is complemented by several solitary woody plants selected with emphasis on their varied appearance during year. A separate thematic layer, which compositionally connects the house with the garden, is the house’s roof with a fully-glazed studio sunk slightly into its surface. When viewed from the studio, the green roof is perceived as its own “infinity” meadow that blends with the remote garden city.

Technical design The house is designed with an emphasis on connecting its architectural and spatial qualities with the currently available technological principles and achieves the parameters of low-energy to a passive standard. This, together with a reference to the topographical name of the site, led to the name Lazy house. The entire house has controlled ventilation with recuperation combined with underfloor heating connected to a heat pump with two earth boreholes located under the foundation slab of the house and reverse operation used for cooling in summer. Heating and cooling are low-temperature and imperceptible to the touch on the floors. Combined distribution with its own regulation heats the bathroom walls with towel rails and steel posts in the indoor garden. The exterior air conditioning inlet is led to the space next to the cellar at a non-freezing depth, which enables air temperature treatment even before the actual recuperation.

Ventilation distributions are led from the engine room under the garage ceiling and in the floor structures towards the exhaust outlets into the plenum boxes with the distribution through almost invisible slits in the edges where the floors meet the floor-to-ceiling windows. The recirculation works through the inlets in the bathroom ceilings and the slits between the ceiling and veneer panels. The glazed roof studio can be shaded using screen blinds and locally cooled by a unit hidden in the stairs to the terrace. The pool technology with filtration is located inside the house and uses free-flowing water collection from the pool gutters and its subsequent back pumping. The garden is irrigated by the subsurface groundwater and from a drilled well and a reservoir hidden in the space above the grotto. The active lightning conductor is located outside the house at the upper end of the garden behind the grotto, and covers the entire site.

Lazy House in Zlín, Southeastern Moravia – Building Information

Studio: petrjanda/brainwork Author Petr Janda, lead architect Contact E-mail [email protected], [email protected] Social media https://ift.tt/3lApPZ9 https://ift.tt/3ii5RjH

Project location: Zlín, Czech Republic

Project year: 2006-2020 Completion year: 2020 Built-up Area: 225 sqm Gross Floor Area: 400 sqm Usable Floor Area: 345 sqm Plot size: 1400 sqm

Products and Brands SUPPLIERS: Structure — AREA ZLÍN Glazing — AZ Glass Interior — EFF Floors — Rajmund Coufal Mosaic tiles — Los Kachlos HVAC — Active Elements Lights — ATEH Fireplace — J.Konečný (Krby Zlín) Gate — ELEKTRIFY Grotto — Truhlářství Obdržálek Swimming pool — BERNDORF BÄDERBAU Cellar — Jiří Stelšovský Cooperation on landscaping — Jitka Tomsová Garden — GARD&N PRODUCTS: Lights — Occhio Switches — ABB Handles Mini-V — M&T, www.kliky-mt.cz Handles — No-Ha Taps — Grohe Sanitary equipment — Duravit, Polysan

About studio We look for authenticity hidden in every task. We always start from scratch, trying to avoid usual architectural cliché and reinvent the core basics in slightly different shades and moods. Our approach is based on interconnecting physical and metaphysical layers of the project, resonating of form and content and engaging sculptural methods with the conceptual tendencies. We consider initiation of projects to be part of our work, reflecting not only architectural, but also programme, content and social aspects. We do not work with usual inspiration or archetypes.

For a long time, we have been using the subliminal method of nomadic thinking, which G. Deleuze and F. Guattari defined with this impressive metaphor: The nomad “sets out to the desert. He leaves the camp and starts a journey through the lands, watching the movements on sky. In the morning he leaves the territory towards a new land and in the evening, he re-settles each time he unfolds his carpet on it… These movements and processes are expressed by the rhythm of walking, which imprints the landscape in the pilgrim and vice versa. The nomad and the philosopher (and the architect), like all people, keep inside the lands in which they grew up, wandered and dreamed of.” Our projects are the result of such work; and our interpretations as authors stays mostly hidden giving space to every visitor for their own reading.

We have a wide range of projects, from art (memorials) to a non-traditional exhibition in the National Museum in Prague, underwater observatory in Norway and individual housing projects. We have just finished a significant project of Prague riverfront revitalisation.

Petr Janda is an architect and an artist. He graduated from the Faculty of architecture at Czech Technical University in Prague (School of prof. Jan Bočan) and the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague (School of Monumental Art of prof. Aleš Veselý). In 2008 he founded his own studio petrjanda/brainwork. He frequently participates in architectural competitions and exhibitions (also as a jury member), he has won several awards (Grand Prix of Architects 2007, BigMat 13‘– Memorial to victims of communism in Liberec etc.). Between 2011 and 2014 he was a member of the board of Czech Chamber of Architects and a chairman of the Promotion of architecture working group. He has been engaged in revitalization of the Prague riverfront since 2009 and in 2017 he became the main architect of this area.

Photographers: Jakub Skokan, Martin Tůma / BoysPlayNice

Lazy House, Zlín Southeastern Moravia images / information received 020821

Location: Zlín, southeastern Moravia, Czech Republic, central eastern Europe

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immobilier-swiss · 3 years

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Tucked away in a private forested oasis, 751 Chestnut Road is a sunlit, contemporary estate with a nod to tradition. Soaring ceilings, bright white walls, and oversized picture windows imbue the interior with natural light.

🛎 Auction Info 🛎

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✔ Bidding Opens: Jul 23, 2021 4 PM EDT

✔ $100,000 bidder deposit required

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tumblersofia · 4 years

Text

My Favourite Places to Buy Prints For My Home

The art of a people is a true mirror to their mind – Jawaharlal Nehru. If interior design is the process of painting our personalities and preferences onto our homes, then hanging art we love on our walls is one of the clearest ways of crystallising that thing we call ‘taste’.

But collecting Real Art can be an expensive endeavour, and rather than keep the rest of the walls bare until we can afford to invest in more, I like affordable prints in cheap frames. There are plenty of these print on demand shops now, but not all are created equally. Below are places I’ve personally bought prints from and can attest to the quality, speed of delivery, packaging and choice. Hope you spot something you just can’t wait to dress your walls with…!

PSTR Studio

PSTR Studio sells all sorts of prints, but they specialist in licensing the work of major artists. My absolute favourites are the exhibition posters – like these peach and salmon-toned Matisse posters I hung at the weekend. Just shy of matching, but tonally similar enough to feel cohesive, play off the rattan, and inject some sunset warmth into my grey-green master bedroom.

Their range is wide enough that you can easily construct a gallery wall here – or just pick and choose a few statement pieces. Delivery of these prints took about a week, and they were packaged well in sturdy poster tubes. I’ll absolutely by buying from PSTR Studio again (not an ad, just a fan!)

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Henri Rousseau – Tropical Forest

€34

Buy Now

Bauhaus exhibition – Austellung 1923

€34

Buy Now

Henri Matisse Burned Orange Dance

€34

Buy Now

Trouva

Trouva is easily one of my favourite places online for homewares – not just wall art. It’s a marketplace for independent interiors boutiques, so you can find truly unique and unusual – often handmade – gems.

It’s also great for high quality prints, like this Matisse poster (notice a trend??) I bought last year which arrived from the Netherlands within two weeks, and in great packaging.

Delivery times vary because Trouva retailers are located all over the world, but my experiences have always been swift and positive.

function openUrlInNewTab(url) { var win = window.open(url, '_blank'); win.focus(); } function openUrlInSameTab(url) { var win = window.open(url, '_self'); win.focus(); }

Lee Scratch Perry Records Print

£20

Buy Now

Monstera Plant Print

£40

Buy Now

Get Real Plant Print

£19.95

Buy Now

John Lewis

Old faithful, John Lewis, sell an interesting range of prints. I’m a big of their Pengiun Classics covers (above), and their song lyric prints. And with the advantage of brick-and-mortar stores, you can walk around their art department to see what you like.

A lot of their prints come pre-framed, which makes them more expensive but saves time, effort and the motivation to finally sort out those frames you’ve been meaning to get around to…

function openUrlInNewTab(url) { var win = window.open(url, '_blank'); win.focus(); } function openUrlInSameTab(url) { var win = window.open(url, '_self'); win.focus(); }

DAVID BOWIE LIFE ON MARS LYRICS

£10

Buy Now

Pablo Picasso’s ‘Head, 1946’

£199

Buy Now

Penguin Classics Collection

£22

Buy Now

Desenio

If there’s a one-stop-shop for affordable prints on the web, it’s Desenio. The collection is huge, and you can shop via gallery wall collections, which make it really easy to create a consistent look, even across different media like photography, graphic design and illustration.

I bought these fluid line art prints from Desenio last year. The prints are really high quality with no pixellation. I had some issues with one of the frames arriving damaged, but their customer service was great and they sent out a replacement immediately.

function openUrlInNewTab(url) { var win = window.open(url, '_blank'); win.focus(); } function openUrlInSameTab(url) { var win = window.open(url, '_self'); win.focus(); }

Amalfi Cityscape Poster

£12.95

Buy Now

Geometric Shades No.1 Poster

£23.95

Buy Now

Sunlit Flowers No.2 Poster

From £8.95

Buy Now

Juniqe

In the same mould as Desenio, Juniqe is an online print megastore. With frequent sales events and affiliate discount codes, it’s easy enough to find a bargain. You can also shop their affordable frames in different wood and metallic finishes – just keep in mind they use perspex rather than glass on their frames to keep costs down.

function openUrlInNewTab(url) { var win = window.open(url, '_blank'); win.focus(); } function openUrlInSameTab(url) { var win = window.open(url, '_self'); win.focus(); }

Hot Air Balloons Print

Buy Now

Phases of the Moon Print

From £6.95

Buy Now

Waves In The Deep Print

From £39.95 with frame

Buy Now

from This 1870 House https://ift.tt/2zsZhDg

#This 1870 House #https://tumblersofia.tumblr.com

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fosterloverson · 4 years

Text

My Favourite Places to Buy Prints For My Home

PSTR Studio

function openUrlInNewTab(url) { var win = window.open(url, '_blank'); win.focus(); } function openUrlInSameTab(url) { var win = window.open(url, '_self'); win.focus(); }

Henri Rousseau – Tropical Forest

€34

Buy Now

Bauhaus exhibition – Austellung 1923

€34

Buy Now

Henri Matisse Burned Orange Dance

€34

Buy Now

Trouva

It’s also great for high quality prints, like this Matisse poster (notice a trend??) I bought last year which arrived from the Netherlands within two weeks, and in great packaging.

Delivery times vary because Trouva retailers are located all over the world, but my experiences have always been swift and positive.

function openUrlInNewTab(url) { var win = window.open(url, '_blank'); win.focus(); } function openUrlInSameTab(url) { var win = window.open(url, '_self'); win.focus(); }

Lee Scratch Perry Records Print

£20

Buy Now

Monstera Plant Print

£40

Buy Now

Get Real Plant Print

£19.95

Buy Now

John Lewis

A lot of their prints come pre-framed, which makes them more expensive but saves time, effort and the motivation to finally sort out those frames you’ve been meaning to get around to…

function openUrlInNewTab(url) { var win = window.open(url, '_blank'); win.focus(); } function openUrlInSameTab(url) { var win = window.open(url, '_self'); win.focus(); }

DAVID BOWIE LIFE ON MARS LYRICS

£10

Buy Now

Pablo Picasso’s ‘Head, 1946’

£199

Buy Now

Penguin Classics Collection

£22

Buy Now

Desenio

function openUrlInNewTab(url) { var win = window.open(url, '_blank'); win.focus(); } function openUrlInSameTab(url) { var win = window.open(url, '_self'); win.focus(); }

Amalfi Cityscape Poster

£12.95

Buy Now

Geometric Shades No.1 Poster

£23.95

Buy Now

Sunlit Flowers No.2 Poster

From £8.95

Buy Now

Juniqe

function openUrlInNewTab(url) { var win = window.open(url, '_blank'); win.focus(); } function openUrlInSameTab(url) { var win = window.open(url, '_self'); win.focus(); }

Hot Air Balloons Print

Buy Now

Phases of the Moon Print

From £6.95

Buy Now

Waves In The Deep Print

From £39.95 with frame

Buy Now

from This 1870 House https://ift.tt/2zsZhDg

#This 1870 House #http://fosterloverson.tumblr.com

0 notes

ezatluba · 4 years

Photo

Rainforest is cleared for cattle farming along the Trans-Amazonian Highway. Clearing like this is linked to the spread of infectious diseases like malaria.

Deforestation is leading to more infectious diseases in humans

As more and more forest is cleared around the world, scientists fear that the next deadly pandemic could emerge from what lives within them.

BY KATARINA ZIMMER

NOVEMBER 22, 2019

In 1997, clouds of smoke hung over the rainforests of Indonesia as an area roughly the size of Pennsylvania was burned to make way for agriculture, the fires exacerbated by drought. Smothered in haze, the trees couldn’t produce fruit, leaving resident fruit bats with no other option than to fly elsewhere in search of food, carrying with them a deadly disease.

Not long after the bats settled on trees in Malaysian orchards, pigs around them started to fall sick—presumably after eating fallen fruit the bats had nibbled on—as did local pig farmers. By 1999, 265 people had developed a severe brain inflammation, and 105 had died. It was the first known emergence of Nipah virus in people, which has since caused a string of recurrent outbreaks across Southeast Asia.

It’s one of many infectious diseases usually confined to wildlife that have spilled over to people in areas undergoing rapid forest clearing. Over the past two decades, a growing body of scientific evidence suggests that deforestation, by triggering a complex cascade of events, creates the conditions for a range of deadly pathogens—such as Nipah and Lassa viruses, and the parasites that cause malaria and Lyme disease—to spread to people.

(Humans are clearing forests on a massive scale, mostly for farming. Learn more about deforestation.)

As widespread burning continues today in tropical forests in the Amazon, and some parts of Africa and Southeast Asia, experts have expressed concern about the health of people living at the frontiers of deforestation. They’re also afraid that the next serious pandemic could emerge from our world’s forests.

“It’s pretty well established that deforestation can be a strong driver of infectious disease transmission,” says Andy MacDonald, a disease ecologist at the Earth Research Institute of the University of California, Santa Barbara. “It’s a numbers game: The more we degrade and clear forest habitats, the more likely it is that we’re going to find ourselves in these situations where epidemics of infectious diseases occur.”

Forests cover about 30 percent of the planet, but these habitats are being cleared on a massive scale. What is deforestation? Find out the causes, effects, and solutions.

A direct link

Malaria—which kills over a million annually due to infection by Plasmodium parasites transmitted by mosquitoes—has long been suspected of going hand in hand with deforestation. In Brazil, while control efforts have dramatically reduced malaria transmission in the past—bringing 6 million cases a year in the 1940s down to just 50,000 by the 1960s—cases have since been steadily rising again in parallel with rapid forest clearing and expansion of agriculture. At the turn of the century, there were over 600,000 cases a year in the Amazon basin.

Work in the late 1990s by Amy Vittor, an epidemiologist at the University of Florida’s Emerging Pathogens Institute, and others, suggested a reason why. Clearing patches of forest appears to create ideal habitat along forest edges for the mosquito Anopheles darlingi—the most important transmitter of malaria in the Amazon—to breed. Through careful surveys in the Peruvian Amazon, she found higher numbers of larvae in warm, partially shaded pools, the kind that form beside roads cut into forests and puddles behind debris where water is no longer taken up by trees.

“Those were the [places] that Anopheles darlingi really enjoyed being,” Vittor recalls.

A man sprays to kill the Aedes mosquito that carries the yellow fever virus in Matadi, Democratic Republic of the Congo.

In a complex analysis of satellite and health data published recently in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, MacDonald and Stanford University’s Erin Mordecai reported a significant impact of deforestation across the Amazon basin on malaria transmission, in line with some previous research.

Between 2003 and 2015, on average, they estimated that a 10 percent yearly increase in forest loss led to a 3 percent rise in malaria cases. For example, in one year of the study, an additional 618-square-mile (1,600-square-kilometer) patch of cleared forest—the equivalent of nearly 300,000 football fields—was linked to an additional 10,000 cases of malaria. This effect was most pronounced in the interior of the forest, where some patches of forest are still intact, providing the moist edge habitat that the mosquitoes like.

With the ongoing burning of the Amazon, these results don’t bode well; The latest data, issued this week, reveals an area 12 times the size of New York City has been destroyed so far this year.

“I am concerned about what’s going to happen with transmission following the end of the fires,” MacDonald says.

It’s hard to generalize about mosquito ecology, which varies depending on species and region, Vittor stresses. In Africa, studies have found little association between malaria and deforestation—perhaps because the mosquito species there like to breed in sunlit bodies of water and favor open farmland over shady forest areas. But in Sabah, a part of Malaysian Borneo, malaria outbreaks also occur in tandem with bursts of forest clearing for palm oil and other plantations.

Fever from the jungle

Mosquitoes aren’t the only animals that can transmit deadly scourges to people. In fact, 60 percent of new infectious diseases that emerge in people—including HIV, Ebola, and Nipah, all of which originated in forest-dwelling animals—are transmitted by a range of other animals, the vast majority of them wildlife.

In a 2015 study, researchers at Ecohealth Alliance, a New York-based non-profit that tracks infectious diseases globally, and others found that “nearly one in three outbreaks of new and emerging disease[s] are linked to land-use change like deforestation,” the organization’s president Peter Daszak tweeted earlier this year.

Many viruses exist harmlessly with their host animals in forests, because the animals have co-evolved with them. But humans can become unwitting hosts for pathogens when they venture into or change forest habitat.

“We are completely changing the structure of the forest,” notes Carlos Zambrana-Torrelio, a disease ecologist at Ecohealth Alliance.

Deadly attraction

Diseases can also occur when new habitats draw disease-carrying species out of the forest.

For instance, in Liberia forest clearings for palm oil plantations attract hordes of typically forest-dwelling mice, lured there by the abundance of palm fruit around plantations and settlements. Humans can contract Lassa virus when they come into contact with food or objects contaminated with feces or urine of virus-carrying rodents or bodily fluids of infected people. In humans, the virus causes hemorrhagic fever—the same kind of illness triggered by Ebola virus—and in Liberia killed 36 percent of infected people.

Virus-carrying rodents have also been spotted in deforested areas in Panama, Bolivia, and in Brazil. Alfonso Rodriguez-Morales, a medical researcher and tropical disease expert at Colombia’s Universidad Tecnológica de Pereira, fears that their ranges will increase following the resurgence of fires in the Amazon this year.

Such processes aren’t limited to tropical diseases. Some of MacDonald’s research has revealed a curious association between deforestation and Lyme disease in the Northeastern United States.

Borrelia burgdorferi, the bacterium that causes Lyme disease—is transmitted by ticks that rely on forest-dwelling deer to breed and obtain enough blood to survive. However, the bacterium is also found in the white-footed mouse, which happens to thrive in forests fragmented by human settlements, MacDonald says.

Spillovers of infectious diseases to people is more likely to occur in the tropics because overall wildlife and pathogen diversity is higher, he adds. There, a number of diseases transmitted by a wide range of animals—from blood-sucking bugs to snails—have been linked to deforestation. On top of known diseases, scientists fear that a number of yet-unknown deadly diseases are lurking in forests that could be exposed as people encroach further.

Zambrana-Torrelio notes that the likelihood of spillovers to people may increase as the climate warms, pushing animals, along with the viruses they carry, into regions where they’ve never existed before, he says.

Whether such diseases stay confined to forest fringes or if they gain their own foothold in people, unleashing a potential pandemic, depends on their transmission, Vittor says. Some viruses, like Ebola or Nipah, can be transmitted directly between people, theoretically allowing them to travel around the world as long as there are humans.

Zika virus, which was discovered in Ugandan forests in the 20th century, could only cruise the world and infect millions because it found a host in Aedes aegpti, a mosquito that thrives in urban areas.

“I’d hate to think that another or several other pathogens could do such a thing, but it’d be foolish not to think of that as a possibility to prepare for,” says Vittor.

A new service

Ecohealth Alliance researchers have proposed that containing diseases could be considered a new ecosystem service, that is, a benefit that humans freely gain from natural ecosystems, just like carbon storage and pollination.

To make that case, their team has been working in Malaysian Borneo to itemize the exact cost of malaria, down to each hospital bed, and syringe that doctors use. On average, they found that the Malaysian government spends around $5,000 to treat each new malaria patient in the region—in some areas much more than they spend on malaria control, Zambrana-Torrelio says.

Over time, that adds up, outweighing the profits that could be gained by cutting forests down and making a compelling financial argument to leave some forests standing, Daszak says.

He and his colleagues are beginning work with the Malaysian government to incorporate this into land use planning, and are undertaking a similar project with Liberian officials to calculate the cost of Lassa fever outbreaks there.

MacDonald sees value in this idea: “If we can conserve the environment, then perhaps we can also protect health,” he says. “That I think is the silver lining that we should keep in mind.”

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redvsbluemicrofic · 7 years

Text

RvB Bingo - Recovery Era

“No, that’s wrong, you’ve got it backwards.”

“No, see? If you hold it this way…”

The familiar sound of bickering echoed across to the Blue Team members as they drew closer to the Red base. Wash pushed forward at a jog, Caboose and Tucker followed close behind, all three heads swiveling back and forth across the canyon. Tucker actually turned, walking backwards part of the way, rifle half raised and sweeping nervously back and forth to cover behind them. Ahead, Grif and Simmons finally noticed them approaching. Simmons reached for his Magnum, but lowered his hand as Grif shook his head in exasperation. However, when he spoke, Grif’s voice was anything but friendly. “What do you idiots want?”

Wash ignored his tone. “Have either of you seen anything odd today?” Simmons snorted, but Wash cut through him. “I’m not fucking around - have you seen anything? Anyone? Did anything catch your eye, but when you looked closer, nothing was there?”

Grif stiffened in shock. “What, like the Meta? You think the Meta is here?” Behind him, Simmons whimpered.

Wash shook his head, pausing to look past the Red base before turning back to Grif. “No. Or, at least, I don’t think so.” Behind him, Caboose edged closer until he was nearly at Wash’s shoulder, staring back towards home. “Whatever it is, I don’t think it’s invisible. But it moves so fast, it might as well be - your eyes can’t follow it at all.”

“I think I saw it.”

Sarge stepped from the gloom of the interior of the base, pausing dramatically, sunlit in the doorway. Simmons gave a start of surprise.

“You did? Grif and I have been out here all morning and we haven’t seen anything.”

“You boys were on guard duty?”

“Yes!”

“Well, that explains it. You two are the worst guards in the history of this man’s military. I’d be a better lookout asleep in my bunk than the two of you ever are standing out here.” Sarge half turned in the doorway, yelled behind him. “Lopez!”

“¿Sí?”

“Did you see any movement out here in the canyon today?”

"¿Te refieres al Freelancer en camuflaje adaptativo? Sí, la vi, he estado esperando a ver si ella vendrá aquí y golpeará todos tus culos como la última vez".

“You disappoint me, Lopez. I thought you at least would be paying better attention than these two.” Sarge turned back to the Blues. “It’s not like Tex or the Meta, though. It’s not invisible - just blends in.”

“Like a chameleon?” The words came out of Wash slowly, as though he was reluctant to say them out loud.

“Sure, that’s one way to put it. Sound like a Freelancer whatsit to you?”

“Yes, it does. Shit!”

Tucker’s helmet inclined towards Wash. “But you said you didn’t think the Meta was still alive!”

“I don’t. But the Meta wasn’t the last Freelancer left alive. There were still others.”

“Who else?” Tucker’s voice was high with panic.

“Well, there was--”

“Me.”

There was the sound of a woman’s voice, and a figure stepped around the side of the base, forest green armour dissolving into aqua. The Reds and Blues all stepped back, shouting and swearing, but Wash stood his ground and was already raising his rifle. “Freelancer!” he roared, and was answered by the sound of even more fervent swearing and guns lifted behind him.

The fight was silent, but ferocious. The soldier in aqua armour closed the distance between them before Wash could bring the rifle fully to bear, knocking it to the side. Wash kept his grip on it, and using the motion from the soldier’s strike, brought the gun around in an arc like a club. The soldier ducked low, catching ahold of the gun with one hand, and Wash’s wrist in the other. One twist sent the gun tumbling down the slope of the hill, and in the same movement the soldier bent, and used Wash’s momentum to send him flipping over her shoulder. Wash twisted midair and hit the ground on his feet, already sprinting back to re-engage.

They met in a fury of movement so fast it was almost impossible to follow, but it was all over in a matter of seconds. The aqua soldier blocked a punch from Wash, then stepped aside so quickly that his next met only air. Wash was off balance for only a fraction of a second, but it was all the soldier needed. The first blow sent Wash staggering sideways, the second bent him double, and the third would have laid him out, had the soldier not spun him on his knees, twisting his arm behind him, and ducking behind his back to snake an arm around his throat. The soldier bent Wash backwards to rest against her chest, to both support and subdue. They faced the Reds and Blues who now, to a man, all had their guns raised.

“Who are you?” Wash was wheezing, but his voice carried real venom. He struggled briefly, but the other soldier tightened her grip and he stilled again.

“You know who I am.”

“Bullshit. Carolina died. She died the day the Mother of Invention crashed. Who are you?”

“I didn’t die. But it was better for people to think that I had.”

“Bull. Shit.” Wash sounded calmer, but there was a brittleness in his voice. “South had a voice modulator. The Project had that technology. You could be anyone. Who are you?”

“Do you want me to prove it?”

“Even if you did, what good would that do me? What could you possibly be here for, except to kill me? The Director already tried. Are you here to finish the job?” Wash jerked his head, tried to wrench his shoulders away from his captor’s armour.

“If I was here to kill you, do you think we’d be talking right now? You would be dead before you even knew I was here.”

“Then why are you here?”

“Alpha.”

Wash went perfectly still. “Alpha is dead. All the AI fragments were destroyed in an EMP blast.”

“Not all of them. I know you were there. I know that you helped Epsilon escape. I know that later you tracked him, you and…” The soldier’s voice faltered, but only for a moment. “I know that you know where he is now, and you’re going to take me t--”

Wash surged upwards so unexpectedly that he actually lifted the aqua soldier off her knees before she hauled him back down. There was a gunshot and turf exploded only a foot away from the Freelancers, yanking their attention back to the Reds and Blues, whom they had nearly forgotten.

“Hold your fire!” Sarge bellowed, and Wash saw Simmons’ head duck in embarrassment, but Wash turned his attention right back to the soldier behind him.

“I would rather die than ever help you put Epsilon back in the Director’s hands again. There is nothing you could do to ma--”

“I am not going to give Epsilon to the Director.”

Wash’s head swung to the side, but the aqua soldier didn’t bother to rein him back in. “Then what--”

“We are going to kill the Director.”

For the second time, Wash went completely still. There was a moment of silence, and then the aqua soldier released her grip. Wash was up in an instant, swinging around to face his opponent, but he didn’t attack. The soldier got to her feet calmly, appearing completely at ease. Wash still held himself as though he still expected a fight, but his voice was quiet, almost a whisper. “Take off your helmet.”

With a deliberate slowness, the soldier removed her helmet and bright red hair spilled out. She held it two-handed in front of her, as though to keep both hands visible, to show she was no longer a threat. Wash’s breath came out in a rush, and after a moment, he removed his own helmet. Blue-grey eyes regarded green.

“I thought you were dead. All this time. I heard you went over a cliff.”

Carolina’s mouth twisted wryly. “I carry a grappling gun. You of all people should remember this.”

Two bright spots appeared in Wash’s cheeks and he opened his mouth to respond.

“Uh, Wash?”

Wash gave a start at Tucker’s voice, turning back to the Reds and Blues, who still had their weapons at the ready. “Stand down.” When they hesitated, he let out a deep breath. “It’s okay. It was just a… misunderstanding.”

“A misunderstanding,” Grif repeated flatly, as the group lowered their guns.

“Yes.” Wash faced Carolina again, regarding her in silence another moment before replacing his helmet. “Okay. So when do we leave?” There was an uproar behind him, but he didn’t turn around.

“What do you mean, ‘leave’?” Tucker’s voice was nearly a shriek of indignation. “We just got back here, and you want us to leave again? No fucking way!”

“Why would we help you? Blue team problems aren’t our problems.” Sarge’s words were met with fervent approval from Grif and Simmons.

“She tracked us down in less than a week. How much longer do you think it will be before the Chairman does? The Director? You want to be here when they come looking for me and the people who have been harbouring me?” As he spoke, Wash watched Carolina replace her helmet, then retrieve his rifle from further down the hill. She handed it to him without a word and disappeared again around the corner of the base.

“Wait just one damn minute here--”

“We’re going to rescue Church?” Caboose stepped forward, his voice soft and hopeful. Wash clapped a hand on his shoulder.

“Yeah, Caboose. We’re going to go rescue him right now.” Wash grinned widely in his helmet as he felt the other soldiers consider a future with a disappointed Caboose.

There was a beat of silence and then--

“Fuck!” Grif threw his hands up, paced back and forth in a burst of frustration, then buried his face in his hands. “Fuck!”

“We’re going to do this, aren’t we?” Simmons asked leadenly. Sarge rumbled a sullen wordless reply.

“We’re going to rescue Church! We’re going to rescue Church! C’mon Tucker, let’s go back to our base and pack…” Caboose took Tucker by the arm to lead him away.

“Church?” Carolina appeared back around the corner, carrying a rucksack. Her voice was sharp, aggressive in a way it hadn’t sounded before. “What did you say?” His teammates froze, and Wash saw Caboose look from him to Carolina and back in desperation.

“Caboose calls Epsilon, ‘Church’ - it was the name the Alpha had while he was stationed with the Blue Team in Blood Gulch. Caboose finds it easier to just keep using the same name,” explained Agent “Church” Washington, “and it’s easier for us just to let him.”

Carolina stared at the group and a different kind of silence fell between them. Just as the other soldiers began to shift uneasily, she finally turned and walked off, heading for the nearest Warthog. The Red’s watched her warily before peeling off one by one, heading into their base to pack, Grif still swearing under his breath with feeling. Caboose kept hauling on Tucker’s arm until he got him turned around and finally moving back toward home.

Wash stood a moment longer, feeling himself pulled in two different ways at once until he finally jogged after Carolina. She had set her rucksack on the passenger seat of the Warthog and was rummaging through it. She glanced up at him for a moment and continued her search. “I only came here for you. I don’t need them.”

“Well, you’ve got them now. They come with me, all of them.”

“You found yourself a new team then?” Wash could hear the acid in her words, the bitterness in the way she spit them out.

“No,” he said quietly, “they found me.”

Carolina snorted and closed her bag without finding whatever she’d been looking for. “Go get your things, Washington. We leave in fifteen minutes. Anyone who isn’t ready will be left behind.”

“Yeah, I wouldn’t want that to happen again.” He grabbed the strap of his rifle, yanking on it to position the gun more comfortably on his back and began to walk away.

“Wash.”

He paused, turned at his name spoken so softly, but she didn’t speak further, just stood there with her back to him. She offered no apology, and neither did he. Finally, he walked off, following the figures of Tucker and Caboose as they passed through the Blue base doorway and out of sight. He picked up his pace. There was a lot to get done.

He was ready in fourteen minutes.

#rvb bingo wars #blue team entry #red vs blue #rvb #agent washington #agent carolina #red team #blue team

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