#the form resembles his standard fit but it still came off quite strong

[paperclipfanatic]

Ranmarus x outfit change

[void-knights]

Hygge : Chapter One

Pairing: Loki / Original Character,

Chapter Rating: Teen

Tags: Slow Burn, Romance, LGBT Themes, Oc has ADHD, injury mention, Standard Tragic past, Mentions of Loki's past toture, Mentions of past child abuse (OC), Sickness, Near Death, Body Dysphoria, Gender Dysphoria, Prosthesis, Eventual Romance, Eventual Smut, Extremis 616, Starboost Armour, Strangers to Friends, Friends to Lovers, Loki cooks, Loki teaches,

A/N: Right hello! I need to WARN YOU.

This fiction deals with an OFC that eventually realises that they is Genderfluid, using all the pronouns, but is assigned female at birth (AFAB). There will be mentions of body AND gender dysphoria due to a tragic childhood™  under the care of her biological mother/grandparents that occurred before she was in the care of Tony Stark. I do not go into graphic detail with the abuse, but it is mentioned.

This is a slow burn fic planned out to be a LONG story so the OC and Loki will not get together until a little into the story. Instead, I wanted to focus on building their friendship at first. Eventually (if all goes to plan) I intend to have the OC identify as Genderfluid, but unlike Loki the OC won't have magic and therefore will always be female in terms of physical sex.

While this might seem like a bit of a spoiler I like to forewarn people about these things as they can be potential triggers!

Anyway I got the idea of a character in Iron-Man style armour, and then I thought it would be fun to just have a Stark OC. I've got the timeline lined up so the ages to allign with canon. Masterlist | AO3 Link |

The avengers weren’t sure what they should do with Loki, Odin in his infinite wisdom had ‘bestowed’ his younger son upon them in a long-winded speech that left Barton spacing out, Tony disinterested and distracted and Bruce trying to work out how such an old man seemed so strong.

Only Natasha and Steve were paying attention by the end, the TL; DR was that Odin didn’t want to deal with Loki, so now he was the avenger's problem.

Nick Fury suggested locking him up, only to retract the idea a few minutes later, Loki was dammed persuasive, he could seduce any guard sent to keep him under lock and key. They did not know the full extent of his magical abilities and while he was bound (somehow, Odin didn’t bother explaining what they had done to Loki and merely assumed the Avengers wouldn’t care to know the finer points) they didn’t know the limits of the binding.

Thor claimed his brother could shapeshift, so a prison would need to be airtight otherwise a snake or spider could happily slip out. Then there was the issue that he was a god with god strength and probably the second smartest person in the room, or maybe the smartest, but Tony wasn’t about to admit that to the god.

All in all Odin had left them with a mess and the only support came in the form of a confused, angry and betrayed Thor. Which was never good.

This was compounded by the inescapable feeling that they only had half the story, why did Loki invade Earth? Tony had theories, theories that would make Clint punch him, but he couldn’t shake a feeling that something was off about the god of mischief.

Thor would agree, or not. Their relationship was never explained, it turned out communication was not a gift the gods of Asgard possessed much to the chagrin of the Avengers.

So this was the plan, Loki was to stay locked up in the tower, well only on certain floors. He would share a floor with Thor, where he would have his own bedroom with en-suite bathroom, but Fury was rather insistent that Loki shouldn’t be made too comfortable.

Tony was starting to wish he had never gotten involved he would make a poor jailer. He wasn’t responsible enough, Jarvis as amazing as he was would be worse, Loki had tricks, he could trick Jarvis.

It was a fucking mess, made much worse by not having the facts nor support to keep Loki. What were they supposed to do with the god? He was going to outlive them all, did Odin expect them to pass Loki off to other people? To keep him locked away for the rest of his life?

He would rather face the Chitauri again, or Vanko and Hammer or even Stane. Loki was more dangerous than all of them combined and what made it worse was the fact that Soleil was also living in the tower now.

He shouldn’t have suggested she live here, Fuck, he needed a drink or a whole bottle. The billionaire found Natasha and Bruce already at the bar, her with Vodka and Bruce with something fruity looking.

Tony settled for whisky and wondered what the fuck he was supposed to do now.

Loki was still chained up when Soleil walked onto the floor, the god recognised the human mortal from his research leading up to the invasion. He had gathered information on mortals who may pose a threat to his plans and worked to see them brought together (in brief moments of clarity before once again the mind stone seized control of him), Stark’s life was short as it was (by Asgardian standards) was quite fascinating.

Naturally Loki looked into every aspect of the potential avengers lives seeking weaknesses that would bring the avengers to him. The easiest targets were family, friends, loved ones who could be exploited as they had few or no protections. Soleil quite literally was the weakest link in the Stark equation.

Though he had come to realise she could have been a great asset to him should he have had need of an engineer with a deep and vested interest in space. Rather odd that SHIELD would have such detailed files on Soleil, almost as if they had been considering her as an alternative to her father and Iron-Man. Though what use such a fragile human would be was beyond the god.

She hadn’t noticed him, to busy tapping away on a screen and wrinkling her brow at something that vexed her. He watched her as she grabbed herself a bottle of water, she was halfway back to the elevator when she finally paused and turned to him.

“You look like shit,” she said after a moments pause looking him up and down as he remained trapped and bound.

He’d be offended if he had the energy, he felt like shit, months, years? Trapped in the clutches of Thanos and his black order, leading the invasion, not resting or sleeping in weeks, months, his meals just enough to keep him alive but never satisfied, he could not even recall if the paste he had been given (and reluctantly eaten after too long starving) had even had a taste to it.

“As you mortals say, that is pot calling the kettle black,” he attempted to sound above her, casual to the point of nonchalance.

“Yeah but I have an excuse for looking like shit, what’s your excuse?” she asked him sipping her water, he tried not to look hopeful that she might share something with him. Even lukewarm tap water would be bliss compared to whatever liquids the Black Order had supplied him with.

“The beast you call Hulk,” Which was partly true.

“Ooo, that explains the hole in the floor,” she cringed, “How the fuck are you still in one piece?”

“I am a god,” he reminded her.

“I had just assumed that was all a lie, you know psychological tactics?” She paused thinking it over, “Make us believe the gods are real, and you’re one of them, so you can claim dominion over us.”

“That would be a fair assumption to make,” he said leaning his forearms on his knees, “But I can assure you that I am in fact one of your gods.”

“Well you’re not my god, I don’t worship you or any gods,” she shrugged.

“We had noticed the loss of faith from mortals,” Loki nodded.

“Blame the Abrahamic religions, as soon as they went mainstream you pagan lot were more or less kicked to the curb,” she answered, before he could ask what she meant she asked, “So are you hungry? You look like you’re hungry.”

“I am in no risk of starving Stark,” he insisted.

“How’d you know I was a Stark?” she asked him suspicion finally creeping in, for someone who was supposed to be one of Midgard’s greatest minds she was rather stupid.

“SHIELD have files on you,” he said her lack of surprise told him all he needed to know, “That and you resemble your father.”

She brought a gloved hand to her jaw, “It’s the chin isn’t it?” she asked taking a couple of steps towards him, a glass and metal table separated them as she set her glass bottle down upon his surface.

“The general area yes, and you share his eyes,” he confirmed now that he could see her up close he could see the partial heterochromia, showing chocolate-brown flecks in each soft brown eye. She shared his jaw, lip and chin shape and brow colour, her hair was tucked up inside a hat, and he thought that her ears might resemble her father as well.

“But that doesn’t answer my question, never mind I’ll assume you’re hungry, what do gods eat?” she asked.

“You would feed your enemy?” he asked surprised by this, Asgard had a policy of giving their prisoners food, but basic food, food that would keep their enemies alive and nothing more. He was able to empathise with those trapped forever in those dungeons now.

“Yes because I have basic human decency,” she said shifting her weight mostly onto her left leg, “So food, what do you eat? Can you eat earth food being an alien and all that?”

“Of course I can,” now that she had brought the matter up he wondered if he could, there were some things that an Asgardian was told to avoid eating on Vanaheim and Alfheim, not that he was biologically Asgardian.

“Well if you die of an allergic reaction please don’t haunt me,” she said pulling out another device, a phone, a smartphone he recalled one of the scientists under his command using a similar device.

While she typed out whatever it was she needed Loki observed her. She was atypical in her physical body, her clothes hung from her, not because they were ill-fitting but because of sudden loss of weight. They were designed for a woman larger than what she was now, despite her rather cheerful demeanour she looked quite exhausted. She looked how he felt.

The leather right sleeve to her jacket shifted in a most bizarre manner, he watched as a small(ish) serpent poked its head out resting contently on the back of her hand. It flicked it’s slick tongue out at the air scenting Loki, she could taste him, she knew he was there.

“I think it’s safe to just get a range of food,” She said slipping her phone back into her pocket she rose her fist to her eye level, “You doin’ okay?” she asked the snake who slid back into the sleeve. “She’s shy,” she said to Loki who had not asked.

“You carry a snake on your person?” he asked curios, he could not imagine anyone in Asgard doing that. Snakes were dangerous creatures, not pets. Humans however seemed to ignore that rule quite often.

“Yeah she’s my ESA, but I make sure she’s some place warm, otherwise she’ll get ill,” Soleil explained.

“ESA?” he asked.

“Emotional support animal,” Soleil said which did not really answer Loki’s question, she needed the support of an animal for her emotional state? “They are animals to help calm and relax people. I wanted a cat, but dad says a dog would have required to much training and looking after, so he got me Macbeth.”

“How does a snake provide emotional support?” he had to ask, the concept baffled him.

“She’s a reassuring presence when the world is overwhelming,” Soleil answered.

To the god it was still a strange concept, but his curiosity got the better of him, “May I see her then?” he asked.

“Um, sure?” Soleil gently shook her arm, Macbeth got the message, as loathed as she was to leave the warmth of the jacket she was all too happy to slither her way around Soleil’s shoulders until she was hanging lazily.

Gently lifting the snake off her shoulders she set the snake down on the sofa, wise to keep a distance from the god of mischief who remained shackled and bound. Macbeth lifted herself up fascinated by this new thing, this god in her home, she stared at Loki curious to know why he was here.

⸢You are not human⸥ said the snake curios to know what he was, he smelled familiar, like kin yet was clearly more than that, more human, more than human.

⸢No I am not⸥ he answered utterly amused when the snake did a double take, stunned that the god would be capable of speaking her language. He detected the barest hint of offence on her next words.

⸢Then you are a lie, a false thing, I do not like false things⸥ the snake replied studying him closely, ⸢You are a danger to my human⸥

⸢I am a great danger to many a human, yours however has done nothing to earn my anger⸥ Loki replied, the smart little snake thought on this for a while.

⸢You claim that now. But my human has a way of frustrating the surrounding humans, they are so easily brought to anger⸥ came the serpent's response as she finally slithered her way over to him.

⸢There are many creatures brought to anger easily⸥ Loki responded lifting the snake up into the air to prove his point the snake hissed angrily.

⸢Unhand me liar, I shall not be handled by the likes of you!⸥ the snake protested with a rather loud hiss.

Up close, she was a rather pretty thing a mixture of soft pastel colours with the blackest eyes he had seen on a snake. A thick uneven stripe of orange and lavender ran the length of her spine and top of her head. Her belly was an off-white, her most dominate colour a rather fetching shade of yellow. She was indeed a strange patterned creature but lovely to look at.

⸢But you are so pretty, I think I may keep you⸥ he teased the snake who managed to throw him such a filthy look that it took him by surprise.

⸢You, are unworthy of me liar⸥ she snapped back.

⸢I am a good little serpent, far beyond your mortal caregiver⸥ he pointed out.

⸢Indeed? You must be the god of pomposity to say such things⸥ the snake complained turning her head away from Loki, ⸢My human is good and kind even as the sickness weakness her, you cannot compare to such a charitable and loving being⸥

⸢For something so small you certainly have a rather inflated sense of ego⸥ he said lifting her up to eye level, she turned her head away from him.

⸢Says the creature that wreaks of despair, I might be small, god of pomposity but at least I know happiness⸥ he’d never been tempted to toss a snake out of a window before tonight.

Soleil shifted on her feet confused, “Are you talking to her?”

“Of course, I am a god,” he answered petting the snake who recoiled deeply offended by his touch.

⸢How dare you touch me!!⸥ she hissed in discontent before slipping herself free from Loki’s hands and slithering back to Soleil who collected her up into her arms. ⸢You are unworthy pomposity, be gone!⸥

“That is a rather charming pet you have mortal,” Loki answered deigning to ignore the snake and her uppity attitude, “Though she might be pretty she has a rather terrible attitude.”

Soleil looked at Macbeth who looked at her, “Riiight she has the terrible attitude,” smugly the snake turned back to him beaming brightly.

⸢See my mortal understands, she shall not be easily swayed by a false serpent⸥ the snake happily slithered her way back up Soleil's sleeve.

“I have never before laid my eyes on a serpent with such markings and colours, is that typical of Midgardian serpents?” Loki asked leaning back on the sofa which had become uncomfortable thanks to being pinned down in one fixed spot.

“Uh, well ball pythons are kinda common I suppose, they are docile in nature,” Loki did not believe that for a second, “So they’ve been bred as pets for a while, some breeders try to create unique colour and pattern styles. Morphs. Macbeth is a Banana Cinnamon Blade Clown Ball Python for instance.”

Loki knew what each of those words meant individually but strung together like that they may as well have been pure nonsense.

His disbelief or confusion must have been evident on his face because she instantly launched into the details of snake breeding, how morphs came about, what each word meant and the genetic factors that went into selecting the right snakes to breed together to create the perfect offspring.

Trust humans to meddle in things that needed no intervention, he thought as she went into detail to explain a subject he had long since lost any interest in. She was passionate about her pet, about snakes in general, and so she babbled making her obsession quite evident.

It was no wonder her dammed pet was so smug, she probably praised it at every opportunity, it’s inflated sense of self coming from an overindulgence of love and flattery.

“Bee,” Jarvis cut her off saving Loki the indignity of having to amuse her babbling for longer, “The food has been placed in the elevator, do you require assistance in moving it?”

“I’m not that weak, Jarv,” she grumbled half stomping her way across the floor towards the elevator. Loki could feel the AI’s eye roll somehow.

It took her some time to set out the food given the ridiculous quantity that she had purchased. He did not recognise half of what was laid out but to Loki none of that mattered, all he could do was feel his mouth water at the prospect of finally having food that did not taste of grit and nothing.

“So we got Korean, Indian, Italian, Greek, American, Japanese, Ethiopian, Thai, Arabic, Mexican, Balkan, Caribbean, Chinese and Jamaican,”

“Bee,” Jarvis said.

“Yeah I over ordered,” she grumbled slipping her phone back into her pocket, but she hadn’t known what a god might like to eat.

It didn’t seem to matter, Loki was already tucking into a container of whatever was nearest to him.

He almost wept in pure bliss as he devoured the Tokushima ramen without haste, even the strangeness of a raw egg in a soup alongside pork belly and noodles (which he had never had in life) did not slow him down. The god did not slow down even as Tony Stark, Steve Rogers and Thor walked onto the floor slightly confused.

Jarvis had alerted them there would be food and that Soleil was apparently friendly with Loki. Jarvis had been somewhat right, Soleil was keeping a great distance between herself and the god, but she had ordered him a lot of food. Enough food to feed an army in fact.

“I don’t know what gods eat,” she immediately said as defence before her dad could ask, she did the same thing whenever he caught her doing something she wasn’t supposed to be doing. “So I got whatever, if he dies of an allergic reaction you’re not allowed to blame me.”

“You’d be doing us a favour Bee,” her dad joked, she grinned a little unsure while Loki finally slowed down. That was good, just watching him devour container after container was giving her indigestion.

“We do not suffer the aliments of mortals little Stark-”

“Little stark?” Soleil whispered at Steve and Tony both of them grinned sympathetically.

“-This is quite the feast,” Thor beamed at her and all of a sudden she could see what Jane Foster might see in the glorious blonde bastard, though if she had to go for a blonde she’d still choose Captain America.

The avengers and Soleil watched as Thor easily sat himself down beside Loki acting as though nothing was wrong, even Loki was a little on edge about that, Steve and Tony shared a look™ one that suggested they were in on something. Something Soleil was not allowed to be part of.

Thor without hesitation (must be a god thing) dug into the food complimenting Soleil as though she had laboured over the meals, she hadn’t.

“What is this?” Thor asked as the others finally settled, Tony made sure Soleil was one super solider and a father apart from the god of mischief.

“Curried goat,” Soleil answered taking the carton of Tom Kha soup for herself.

The look of betrayal startled her as he was torn between heaving his stomach into the nearest container or eating what was a delicious meal. Loki being the sympathetic brother he was grinned from ear to ear watching Thor have an internal meltdown.

They did not eat goats on Asgard due to Thor’s love of them, they were scared in some strange way. Loki suspected interest in eating them was already so minimal that Odin had no issue outlawing their slaughter and consumption.

“Are you okay Thor?” Steve had to ask as Thor gingerly put the container down.

“Yes Captain, I… find I cannot in good conscience eat a goat,” Thor said picking up another container and studying it.

“That’s chicken,” Tony reassured him passing a box that contained a triple cheeseburger with plenty of onions, “Try this it might suit you.” Thor immediately approved of the burger, it wasn’t easy to go wrong with a good burger.

Though the company was unwanted Loki found a sense of comfort in the noise and activity, listening in as Thor and Steve asked questions about the food for the Starks to answer. If the Starks did not know then Jarvis would provide information, Loki cared not about the province of food or what it contained, food was food and this was the best food he had tasted in a dreadfully long time.

He listened into the varying conversations, Soleil debated baseball with Steve, apparently he took offence at the LA Dodgers, none of this made sense to Loki, what made even less sense was Hockey, even the Captain did not seem to understand her love of Hockey.

The older Stark chimed in once in a while or talked at length to Thor about various things, places the god should see since he would be spending time on Midgard and perhaps the acquisition of a phone – communication device. Loki knew how that would end, Thor had never been great at keeping in touch.

The four talked at length about everything and anything, Loki was more fascinated by the Korean barbecue than what was considered the best dessert.

According to Steve Rogers you could not beat a good apple pie with a dollop of thick cream or ice cream. The older Stark insisted on Tiramisu which combined alcohol and coffee. Whereas the younger Stark insisted that New York style cheesecake was the best dessert, though ice cream (of any type) was a close second.

He noticed that Rogers was rather experimental with his choice of food, wishing to try everything at least once. Thor ate whatever had the most meat, Stark knew what he liked and stuck to that while his daughter seemed filled by the small tub of soup she had half-eaten.

“Jane has mentioned you little Stark,” Soleil did not appreciate Thor’s new nickname for her.

“Okay?”

“You are an engineer?” Thor asked.

“Yup, my main focus is space, aerospace engineering if you will, but I am not confined to one area of study,” She said setting her half-eaten carton down.

“Jane had mentioned that you are attempting to colonise your moon?”

“Me personally no, but I wanna find a way to make the moon liveable, so we can continue our research,” she said taking a long sip of water.

The floodgates were opened up and Thor could only sit uncomfortably as she prattled on about her designs on space, how they might once again reach the moon and this time stay there. She had ideas with regard to terraforming, to establishing a liveable base, not just on the moon but Mars as well. They would be the first destinations in this new space race she dreamt up.

Loki recognised the blank look on Thor’s face, he had long since lost interest and Soleil quickly realised. Twiddling her fingers she fell silent, ashamed even, this made Loki frown. Her father wrapped an arm around her whispering something, she perked up a little.

Thor turned to Steve to start an entirely new conversation, which made Soleil wince. Tony reassured her all was well and rubbed her arm, only to annoy Macbeth who popped her head out to see who it was that was rubbing her.

“Sorry my scaly grandbaby,” Tony grinned at the indignant snake.

⸢Oh another one, what is this one the god of the farm?⸥ the snake complained looking a surprised Thor over.

⸢I am the god of thunder, serpent⸥

⸢I stand corrected oh great and powerful goat fucker⸥

“I do not recommend getting into an argument with it, it thinks anything other than the younger Stark is beneath it,” Loki said trying a slice of pizza, he found the combination sweeter than expected.

“So they’re both Dolittle’s?” Tony asked Soleil who shrugged she didn’t get it either, but apparently they could understand Macbeth in some way. She certainly reacted to whatever they said back to her.

“I don’t get it either,” she admitted.

“So she doesn't like me?” Tony asked Loki while Thor continued to glare at Macbeth, the snake in return glared back at Thor (somehow).

⸢You may tell him that I enjoy his company, the red machine is most comfortable for resting on and he is a delight for a human being!⸥

“She thinks your armour makes the perfect place to rest,” Loki translated.

“Well it’s good to know I’m useful for something,” Tony grinned rubbing the snakes chin as she leaned up to him.

⸢You did not tell him that I enjoy his company nor that he is a delight tell him, tell him!⸥ Macbeth snapped at Loki

⸢It must have slipped my mind dull scales⸥ Loki grinned.

⸢Pompous false serpent⸥ she complained slithering her way onto Tony’s shoulder, Steve wasn’t as sure about the snake, but Tony was used to her by now.

“She’s tame and a pest if you let her loose in a workshop but tame,” Tony assured Steve who still wasn’t sure meanwhile Macbeth curled herself up on top of Tony’s head, she liked to feel tall.

“She’s inquisitive not a pest,” Soleil insisted gently cooing at Macbeth wondering how it was that the gods communicated with her.

“She likes to nap in places she shouldn’t,” Macbeth was not pleased by this, it wasn’t her fault she found nice warm places to rest in his workshop. She slithered her way back to Soleil deeply offended, Tony rolled his eyes.

“Well maybe you shouldn’t leave your workshop unlocked,” Soleil argued as the serpent coiled herself around her right arm once again.

“Dum-E likes to roam the house, you know this Bee,” Tony argued, yes she did know, she had spent a childhood learning to know when Dum-E was out and about. She loved him, she really did but Dum-E was not built to handle fragile things, especially fragile children.

“Yes but should he be trusted to roam the house?” Soleil asked grinning when he failed to find a suitable answer. Everyone knew it wasn’t a good idea, Dum-E lived up to his name and while he was adorable he vastly overestimated his own skill and abilities.

Tony blinked several times, nope a reasonable argument still failed him, there was no good reason why Dum-E should be unleashed within the house, “So Point Break, what’s this about coffee and pop tarts?”

Thor lit up with a glorious and adorable smile, “My lady Jane introduced me to such wonderful refreshments.”

“And you were worried about feeding them actual food,” Tony whispered to Soleil who grinned to herself, “Well Point Break we do have coffee-”

“-Dad you can’t feed Thor your coffee,” Soleil protested as her dad made his way over to the coffee machine.

“What’s the worst that can happen?” Tony joked.

“It comes with a health warning!”

“It’s not that bad,”

“By buying it you accept all the dangers that coffee presents, you have to sign legally binding documents on the website, you can’t give it to an alien!” Tony wasn’t seeing the issue, those aliens were gods, “It literally killed three people last year.”

“You shouldn’t have said that,” Loki muttered at the exact same time Thor lit up, “Let me test this coffee!”

Soleil buried her face in her hands, Steve offered her a spring roll in consolation, she took it, to exhausted to care that she was full up. Trust her dad to find the one alien that would enable his terrible habits. Fuck this was going to be a long year.

The avengers (well Tony, Steve and Thor) discussed what they should do with Loki, the god of mischief had no say and Odin had decided to leave it in their hands. The obvious answer would be to lock him up, lock him away where he could cause no harm.

There was no place suitable on Midgard that the avengers were aware of, Loki knew of several places but would rather not assist any further attempts at incarceration. He watched them struggle amongst themselves to come up with the ideal solution.

“I can’t keep him here,” Tony protested to Thor who insisted this was the best place, “I have staff and my kid to consider.”

“You have a goat here?” Thor asked.

“Soo, allspeak translates things literally?” Tony asked perplexed, Loki rolled his eyes, no it didn’t, Thor had simply mistaken the context of the word which would have supplied the answer.

“Kid is slang for child, he’s talking about his daughter Soleil,” Steve told Thor who stood there just realising what Soleil was to Tony, “You didn’t know?”

“The big fella showed up in the middle of this mess, I don’t think he got the briefings,” Tony reasoned, “Sol’s my kid, child, offspring whatever you wanna say, point is while Bumblebee’s here I’m not hosting Loki.”

“Loki shall not harm your daughter Stark,” Thor half lied, in truth he might harm Soleil, Loki had done a lot worse in his past though usually that was for the sake of Asgard or the protection of his family.

“Look all you have to do is sneeze at my kid and boom, in hospital,” Tony argued.

“Your daughter is that fragile?” Thor wondered if it were an age thing, Darcy looked to be of a similar age and seemed hale.

“Yep kid’s a medical wonder, impossibility even, so unless I have proof that Loki can’t hurt my kid you’ll have to have him live somewhere else,”

“Why not call SHIELD?” Steve offered, Thor considered this, but Tony had the most peculiar expression one that made Loki take note.

Tony shuffled on his feet, “I’m not saying that… look Loki took out quite a few SHIELD agents, Phil included, everyone loved Phil. I’m not sayin’ he’d approve out loud, but I’m sure Fury would be willing to turn a blind eye if anyone… took advantage of Loki’s situation.”

To Tony’s surprise Steve agreed, “What other options do we have? Thor are there any other territories, realms or worlds that would take Loki?”

“The majority of the nine realms are overseen by Asgard, they would not be willing to risk Odin’s ire by inviting Loki – even as a captive – amongst their numbers,” Thor reasoned.

“Why do I get the feeling when you say overseen what you really mean is-” Steve elbowed Tony in the ribs to get him to shut up.

“Can’t you build a containment around a single floor in the tower?” Steve proposed.

“Yeah and then what happens, he tricks Jarvis or someone else to let him out. Hell Bee would let him out if meant she could learn some weird alien shit, or fuck, she’d let him out to… you said Puente Antiguo?” he turned to Thor.

“Yes?” the god of thunder blinked confused. “I landed there, it so happened that Jane Foster and Agent Phil were also there.”

“Riiiight, well fuck,” Tony ran a hand through his hair, “If he stays here… how much do you two know about engineering?”

“The sciences were Loki’s subjects not mine,” Thor answered.

“We can’t keep him here,” Tony insisted to Steve who was just as confused as everyone else.

“Tony the tower is the best option-” Steve was about to argue, but Tony was adamant against the idea.

“-No it’s not because if Bee finds out-”

“-If Bee finds out what?” Soleil asked, Tony jumped curing Natasha (back when she was Natalie) for teaching Soleil how to be sneaky.

“I do not see why Puente Antiguo is so important to my brothers confinement,” Thor frowned not understanding what was going on at all.

“Did you say Puente Antiguo?” Soleil rounded on a surprised Thor, he did not understand.

“Is this some mythical town I should visit?” Steve asked it had been mentioned a lot in five minuted.

“No, no Bee he didn’t, he said-” Tony tried to correct not realising Thor did not like to be called a liar.

“-Do not make me a liar Stark,” Thor threatened.

“Yeah Dad how dare you make the most venerable god of thunder out to be a liar, honestly have you no shame?” Soleil said placing her hands on her hips, Thor nodded in complete agreement.

Loki rolled his eyes at how quickly Thor soaked up the praise and attention, it was honestly embarrassing how easily the fool could be manipulated and it had taken a mortal one afternoon to discover this weakness.

“Puente Antiguo was where I met my Lady Jane, Darcy, Selvig and your beloved Agent Son of Coul,”

“You mean Coulson, he’s American, we don’t use Patronymic or Matronymic surnames. At least not in the way you’re probably thinking of them,” Soleil corrected, “He was just Coulson, His father was probably not named Coul. Like how I am Stark and not Anthonysdóttir.”

“I see,” Thor muttered, “That explains the oddity of Jane’s family name.”

“Yep so if you and Jane married on Earth, and she decided to take your name, just as an example off the top of my head-” Tony and Steve finally caught on, she was buttering up the god of Thunder, and he was eating it up, “-She would be Jane Odinson, which I suppose would be awkward in Asgard but normal here.”

“That does seem odd?” Thor admitted hating how it sounded, it made her sound his like his sister.

“So you met in Puente Antiguo, I once read it’s romantic to get married where you met your love, but a desert town seems… inappropriate for a wedding to a god, especially with it still in need of repair.”

“Yes, the destroyer created so much damage when it walked through the town,” Thor turned to Loki who sat back utterly amused that Thor had so easily fallen into Soleil’s trap, of course Thor read his amusement wrong.

“The destroyer?” Soleil asked.

“Yes, The Destroyer Automaton is a weapon and guardian of Asgard, it was sent by Loki to kill me,” Thor glared at Loki again, “I wonder if it is still where we left it?”

“You really think SHIELD would have left something called the destroyer alone after what we saw with the tesseract?” Steve asked not understanding Soleil’s interest.

“How dangerous is this thing?” Tony asked.

“It levelled a town Tony, it’s dangerous,” Steve reasoned.

“Hush that’s not important, so the destroyer was sent by Loki to what attack you? Did you defeat it battle then?” She asked.

“Yes, with my godhood and power restored I used my strength and lightning to best the destroyer in combat,” Thor proudly announced.

“That’s sooo amazing,” Loki rolled his eyes the falseness wet unnoticed by Thor, “So like, it’s no longer functioning?”

“No, I knew I could not best it if I attacked the body, so I attacked it’s core it’s power source, rendering it inoperable,” Thor answered.

“Amazing,” Soleil continued, “So, any random idiot can command it?”

Thor laughed at the jab at Loki, Loki just sat deeply disappointed in his brother who allowed his ego to be bolstered like this, “No, it can only be commanded by the king of Asgard.”

“Loki was king?” Tony asked.

“What Asgard’s never had a queen?” Soleil asked.

“How do you go from being King to invader?” Steve asked.

“Expansion of the empire?” Tony proposed, “One land beneath the Asgardian sun and all that.”

“So what, you get named ruler of Asgard, and you’re in automatic control of its weapons? How does that work?”

“Through the Odinforce, Gungier acts as a tool to harness this power and through the Odinforce any ruler can command the destroyer,” Thor answered wondering why she was asking this, “Why do you ask little stark?”

“But I imagine Steel or iron would easily break under the strength of Mjölnir right? So how did the destroyer withstand your combined might?”

It was hilarious how quickly Thor turned from suspicious to eager to explain just how incredible he was.

“The metal from which the destroyer and my Mjölnir is forged is known as Uru, it can only be forged in the megastructure that surrounds Nidavellir. The dwarves harness the power of their sun Nidavellir to forge Uru, they are the only race capable of such a feat,”

“Only because they guard their secrets like paranoid dragons,” Loki muttered.

“Dwarves?” Steve asked.

“Did he say megastructure surrounding a sun?” Tony asked

Soleil vibrated, actually vibrated.

“Soo how does someone get into Nidavellir?” Soleil asked.

“With charm and plenty of gold,” Loki answered

“I can get gold,” Soleil whispered loudly, “How much gold do you-”

“-Bumblebee I know all this is very exciting,” Her dad began to steer her away from the gods, “But this can wait until tomorrow when you’ve had your ten hours now go, sleep.”

“Ugh fine, oh,” She pulled out a piece of paper from her jacket pocket and read out loud, “Pepper says pick up the fucking phone, or she’s leaving you for a man called Seamus.”

“Shit,” he’d forgotten to call Pepper to reassure her he wasn’t dead, he still made sure to push Soleil out toward the Elevator, “Stick him on your floor for now Point Break.”

“My Floor?” Thor asked.

“Oh, oh right, you all have your own floor Jarvis will send you to the correct ones,” that was that. The Starks were gone.

“Why do I feel manipulated?” Thor asked.

“You are catching on much faster these days' brother,” Loki grinned.

Steve sighed, he wasn’t getting paid enough to deal with this bullshit.

[obtusemedia]

Top 25 songs of 2020: Honorable mentions

2020 was not a good year in many respects. But despite the world collapsing around us, there was a shocking amount of great new music.

Some of 2020′s best songs were a good fit for this terrifying year — we’ll get to those ones much, much later in the countdown. But 2020 also gave us gorgeous folk ballads, euphoric dance music and infectiously fun pop and hip-hop that had nothing to do with COVID-19 or any other awful aspects of the year.

Before we get to the proper list, here are 15 nearly-as-good songs that juuuust missed the cut, listed in alphabetical order by the artist’s name.

“Shimmy” by Aminé

Oregon’s most prominent rapper — okay, fine, Oregon’s only prominent rapper — came out of the gates blazing this year with “Shimmy.” 

Aminé may have heavily sampled Ol’ Dirty Bastard’s classic “Shimmy Shimmy Ya” on his second album’s leadoff single, but he replaces ODB’s chaotic vibes with a cold, snarling precision. He almost evokes Pusha T in his gleeful takedown of his rivals over the ice-cold beat. Pair this banger with one of the year’s best music videos, and there’s no doubt it would sneak onto this list.

“Dakiti” by Bad Bunny and Jhay Cortez

I am all about this nocturnal, new wave-y style of reggaeton. The melody is catchy as hell, yet the production has a sinister, chilly vibe that wouldn’t sound out of place on an Italians Do It Better complication. 

Megastar Bad Bunny’s husky vocals and Jhay Cortez’s more nasally voice make for a fun contrast as they trade verses. It’s a winning and charismatic combination!

“Boomer” by Bartees Strange

When you hear the phrase “rap-rock,” you’re likely shuddering at the thought of Limp Bizkit. But that style can work, as promising new artist Bartees Strange — stage name of D.C. alt-rocker Bartees Leon Cox — proves on “Boomer.”

Cox spices up a solid mall-punk banger with some rap verses. And unlike the Fred Dursts of the world, he can actually, you know, rap. 

But it’s the song’s explosive chorus, where Cox unleashes his howling vocals over charging guitars, where “Boomer” goes from an interesting song to a great one. If there’s any justice, he’ll be rising up the indie ranks very soon.

“Kyoto” by Phoebe Bridgers

I think I might be the only music nerd who didn’t adore Phoebe Bridgers’ new album, Punisher. For me, her mix of hushed, mostly-sincere singer-songwriter ballads with snarky lyrics just came off as tonally awkward. Her quips about Scientology and outlet malls in otherwise-sad ballads left a sour note for me.

But Bridgers’ unique songwriting style shines most on the few uptempo songs on Punisher, particularly “Kyoto.” Her goofy non sequiturs fit much better in a driving, anthemic song. And I’m immediately primed to enjoy any tune with a strong resemblance to Sufjan Stevens’ “Chicago.”

“Dynamite” by BTS

I’m not sure what it says about me that I didn’t learn to love BTS, the insanely-beloved South Korean boy band, until they finally recorded a song in English. 

It’s not that I dislike their earlier, Korean-language stuff — “Boy With Luv” in particular is a banger. And BTS’ English-language lyrics on “Dynamite” don’t really have any meaning (they’re basically just a bunch of random catchphrases jammed together ... but they do sound good).

But there’s something immediate and pristine about “Dynamite” that makes it impossible to not adore. It’s a little too cleanly produced to be on the level of the Bruno Mars hits BTS were clearly aping, but the sense of fun is infectious. At the very least, it’s on equal footing with Taio Cruz’s classic of the same name.

“Comeback” by Carly Rae Jepsen feat. Bleachers

Carly Rae Jepsen can knock out wistful synthpop nuggets like this in her sleep. So can Jack Antonoff, who produced the track and provides some backing vocals. 

But just because this isn’t anything new for the duo doesn’t mean the winning formula’s gone stale. “Comeback” is a worthy addition to both of their catalogues.

“Hollywood” by Car Seat Headrest

I can’t, in good conscience, put this song in the top 25. It’s an intentionally abrasive misfire from the Seattle indie rockers, who’ve done much better. Complaining about the vapidness and sleaziness of Hollywood is an overplayed topic, and letting side members of the band rap some of the verses (in goofy voices, no less) was maybe not the best call.

...but at the same time, there’s something to this objectively bad song that I keep returning to. Maybe it’s the embarrassing bluntness of the lyrics. Maybe it’s the forceful guitar riff. Maybe it’s because the aggro, visceral nature of “Hollywood” makes it a perfect workout song. Maybe it’s the goodwill left over from Car Seat Headrest’s last two albums, which were both stone-cold indie rock classics. I’m not sure! 

But even though I know it’s not a good enough song to make the proper list, I can’t lie to myself and leave it out of the honorable mentions. It’s a banger in spite of itself.

“24 Hours” by Georgia

"24 Hours” is the best possible version of a left-of-center synthpop club banger. 

What makes it great — the pulsating energy, Georgia’s yearning vocals, the “whoo!” vocal samples — are obvious on immediate listen. But perhaps what makes “24 Hours” worthy of this list is its replay factor. It came out in January, and it still sounds great 11 months later.

“1985″ by Freddie Gibbs and The Alchemist (song starts at 1:35)

We already knew — thanks to his two collaborative albums with Madlib — that Freddie Gibbs’ gruff flow sounds incredible over dusty samples. So why not team up with another producer who does something similar?

“1985″ is a prime example of knowing one’s strengths. The Alchemist’s production is stunningly gorgeous in his typical style, with a soaring guitar solo and a shuffling, dreamy beat. Gibbs pounces on it with the same ferocious street-life verses he’s been spitting for years. I’m glad to see Gibbs has figured out exactly which production sounds best for him to make Tiger King jokes and tell coke-dealing stories.

“Say Something” by Kylie Minogue

Aussie icon Kylie Minogue has been at it for 33 years at this point, reminding us every decade or so exactly why she’s stuck around.

“Say Something” is one of those reminder tracks — a burbling, irresistible, futuristic-yet-retro disco banger. The production is stellar, from the clanging guitar riff to the bouncy synth bass, and Minogue has a winking confidence on the track like she’s been doing this for decades (which, of course, she has). It’s exactly what you want out of a bubblegum pop jam.

“Right Round The Clock” by Sorry

With their very-British boy-girl dueling vocals, new London indie rock outfit Sorry definitely have more of a whiff of The xx. But instead of hyper-minimalist, whispered tunes, “Right Round The Clock” has a thundering, droll swagger that grabs you by the throat when the chorus comes slamming in.

The thumping, piano-based sound of “Clock” has a bit of a jazzy flair, thanks to the flecks of sax that pop in here and there. And Sorry interpolates Tears For Fears’ classic “Mad World” in a gloriously tongue-in-cheek way on the chorus (at the very least, it’s far superior to that awful gloom-and-doom Donnie Darko cover).

“Brooklyn Bridge To Chorus” by The Strokes

In a year FILLED with improbable comebacks from ‘00s and ‘90s artists (we’ll get some of to them in the top 25!), The Strokes may have been the least likely. The early ‘00s indie rock standard-bearers had been in sharp decline for nearly 15 years before their new album, The New Abnormal, dropped and the group returned to form.

“Brooklyn Bridge To Chorus” is a prime example of The Strokes’ invigorating comeback. It’s a killer new-wave jam that could’ve been been written by The Cars, with its jittery keyboards and impossibly catchy chorus. And of course, The Strokes’ most valuable asset — lead singer Julian Casablancas’ impossibly cool vocals — is here in full force. 

It’s not quite Is This It, but “Brooklyn Bridge To Chorus” is still The Strokes’ best song in 14 years.

“Spotlight” by Jessie Ware

After a career making increasingly dull ballads, “Spotlight,” and Ware’s new What’s Your Pleasure? album, is a refreshing change of pace into sleek dance-pop. 

I don’t know if “classy” has ever been used to describe disco, but that’s the best way to describe “Spotlight.” It’s undoubtably a dancefloor filler, with a funky groove and ‘70s string stabs, but there’s also a stateliness to it. It could fit equally well at Studio 54 as it would at a black-tie affair. I credit Ware with that, using her breathy vocals and charisma to strong effect here.

“Lilacs” by Waxahatchee

Any time you can write a song that sounds like an outtake from Tom Petty’s Wildflowers, I’m on board. 

That’s a bit of a reductive way to describe “Lilacs” — Katie Crutchfield’s vocals are much more fiery, for starters. But there’s something nostalgic and welcoming about this southern-fried folk-rock song with oblique lyrics and catchy hooks for days.

“Mood” by 24kGoldn feat. iann dior

Much of this new wave of emo-influenced rap isn’t really my thing. Maybe I’ve grown out of super-angsty and blunt songs about depression? Although I still love Smashing Pumpkins, so maybe that’s not the case. I can’t really answer why I don’t adore Juice WRLD or Lil Peep like so many others seem to.

But “Mood” — an unabashed sell-out, watered-down version of that sound – immediately clicked for me. I know 24kGoldn is trend-riding here, and that this is essentially a wildly shallow pop song. BUT! It’s a really catchy wildly shallow pop song! With bouncy pop-punk production that sounds like trap-ified Blink-182! (okay, it’s much better than that sounds, but you get the point)

I allow myself a guilty pleasure or two on my lists. “Mood” is one of those guilty pleasures this year. As the kids (presumably still?) say, it’s a vibe.

[pb1138]

A Mission Gone Wrong

I DID IT!!! I FINALLY DID IT!!!!!!!!!!

“”””Hey i was wondering if you could do a data x reader inly if you have time, i loved your other fics!!! If you could do one where he only realises he loves her after she gets kidnapped and tortured but then disobeys orders to save her. Please make it a happy ending Only if you want though  Once again I absolutely loved your fics i keep rereading them Thanks””

Oh my god???? An actual submission??????????????? EEEE!! Sorry if you sent this like…a longass time ago, Ruby. It took me a while to find it, and then obviously a long time to write it. I hope it was worth it! 

ANYWAYS. Data x Fem!reader (I hope the fem is ok. It said “her” in the request. I can change it if you’d like.) 

Gonna put a warning here:  Gonna get graphic up in here.  Like super graphic. Like, it’s a torture story m’dudes. There’s gonna be blood and pain. It’s also 9k words long sooooo. 

The mission had started out so promising. A simple scan-and-sample mission, common place. Scans had shown no intelligent lifeforms or budding civilizations to get in the way, no threats in the surrounding system. In fact, it was meant to be so easy an assignment that half the crew of the Enterprise was taking shore leave on a rather large satellite—a class M planetoid with miles of beaches, warm, sunny weather, and a naturally occurring spring of alcohol. If Picard hadn’t granted the shore leave, you suspected the crew may have mutinied.

It worked out well, in the end. The planet offered some unusual resources, materials never before studied by Starfleet. Of course, Data had jumped at the opportunity to study them. Through your engineering expertise (Riker had once referred to you as a “grease monkey,”) you’d made friends with Geordi and subsequently Data, so when you heard he had elected to go on this mission you volunteered as well. You have a background in geology and xenobotany from growing up on your agrarian home planet, and Picard agreed this knowledge could prove useful. (You suspected Data had also personally appealed to him on your behalf.) In addition to your team were a young, bright eyed lieutenant well versed in xenobiology, and three standard security personnel, though nobody really expected them to be of any use to you. To say you were excited to have this time with Data would be an understatement. Three years is a long time to form a friendship, and if you were honest with yourself, he’d been more than a friend to you for quite a significant portion of that time. Part of you had hoped, however foolishly, that when he got his emotion chip that he might reciprocate your feelings, but unfortunately it seemed you would not have the honor of being Data’s first love. It was difficult to push past, but at least you now knew he actually enjoyed your company. Since his emotion chip had been put in, the friendship between the two of you had only grown stronger, if not deeper.

It was going smoothly, the scans promising, the samples ready for study. The planet itself was lovely—a woodland type environment with a plethora of large, beautiful flowers, vines, even the trees were pretty. The sun shone down through the canopy of the trees in such a way that it almost felt like twilight, despite the sun never setting. It was a little hard to focus on the task at hand in such a beautiful place, but Data’s enthusiasm for the discoveries at hand were enough to keep you working.

The ambush was surprisingly effective. Sensors didn’t pick them up, and they moved easily, silently. There had been an explosion, the others in the team dead upon impact, but from your place a few meters away, Data had enough time to grab you and shield you from the blast. A second hit came, but not an explosion this time, something else, like a shockwave, and suddenly you were being crushed. Data was sprawled over you, eyes unfocused, jaw slack. “Data?” You’d asked, struggling to push his unmoving body off you. A fog was being filtered in from somewhere nearby, and it made your body feel heavy and weak. It was quickly becoming difficult to breathe under Data’s weight. “Data, please, I can’t breathe.”

There was a series of strange clicking sounds a few feet away, and you turned your head to look for the source. Your universal translator kicked in after a moment, allowing you to catch the last of what was said. “…survivors. Wait. Look there. Still alive. Take it. Good specimen.” Your vision was beginning to blacken, but you could make out something moving toward you on multiple unsteady feet. Instinctively, you tried to wrap your arms around Data to protect him, but you could only manage the strength for one. Just before you passed out, a face leaned down into your view, lightly blue skinned with shockingly bright, glowing green eyes. Several of them, in fact. “Intriguing. Protective towards synthetic. May be important.” The creature reached out a spindly talon, long and slender, as if to touch you, and darkness swallowed you.

Xxx

The chains clink softly against the wall, rhythmically, tauntingly. The bite of the cold metal digging into your wrists is the only thing keeping you awake, giving you focus. The small bit of light streaming in through the slat in the ceiling allowed you to watch the slow dripping of water from the wall ahead of you. How long had you been here? It felt like weeks, but it could easily have only been a day. The sun never set on this planet, no nighttime to witness the passing of days. The water was your only source of timeframe, but that was useless given that it leaked down between the stone slats on the cold floor rather than pooling. Seven hundred forty…two? or was it four?… Shit. With a sigh, you adjusted your legs, stretching them in front of you. You’d lost count again, for who knows how many times.

There was no escaping this room. You hated to admit that you’d given up, because a Starfleet officer never gives up, but in truth you’d run out of ideas. The room was small-ish, maybe 3 meters by 3 meters, but tall, well over 8 meters. There were no doors, no windows, only the source of the drip and the slat in the ceiling, and unless you suddenly could turn yourself into goo, that wasn’t even remotely an option. You doubted even your hand could fit through it. The walls and floor were made of thick, dark stone, impenetrable without a weapon. Even your chains were unbreakable, made of some strange metal you’d never seen before, sturdy, thick, no way to break them or break out of them.

And so you sat. And counted. And waited. And despite your best efforts, the worry that had settled into your gut flared back up again, turning your mind to Data. Your fists clenched at your side, biting hard against the restraints. Where was he? Was he still lying there among your deceased colleagues? Was he even alright? That blast had done something to him, basically turned him off, and you’d never seen that happen before. Along with the worry that was overwhelming you came a twinge of guilt. You knew it was ridiculous—you couldn’t have prevented the attack, couldn’t have done anything to save any of them—but knowing Data could be in danger or worse because he was protecting you? It was the worst feeling in the world. Another pang of guilt, because here you sat, worrying about Data, feeling sorry for yourself, when your fellow crewmen were lying dead somewhere. Did Enterprise know what had happened? Would they come for you? Would they even know you were alive? You let your head drop, staring at the pores in the stone, and tears came.

Drip. One… Drip. Two…

Xxx

Data’s systems were rebooted some time after the attack. His internal clock indicated that it had been precisely 13 hours, 53 minutes, and 12 seconds. He pushed himself to his feet quickly and took stock of his systems. .03% slower than normal parameters but functioning nonetheless. He turned to survey the area and frowned. The accompanying away team was dead, a result of the original explosion. The phasers and tricorders were completely unusable, indicative of a strong EMP which likely accounted for his temporary shut down.

With a sudden jolt, a new emotion filled him, made him vibrate with worry and his system’s equivalent to adrenaline. Where were you? Tapping his comm device, he called, “Data to Lieutenant…” He paused, turning on his heel. “Lieutena…” There. He stepped quickly, eyes scanning until he found it. A communicator device, lying underneath a bush. He picked it up and turned it in his hands. Yours. Without a doubt. Upon the back was the nick that you’d accidentally placed in it while working with a laser cutter. Scowling, Data clenched the communicator in his fist and spun around, eyes scanning every square centimeter of the surrounding area. When he could not find you, he set out in search, calling your name. You could be injured, or worse for all he knew.

After nearly half an hour of intense searching without even the smallest of signs, he stopped despite his best instincts and growled, punching a tree. With a trembling hand, he activated his comm device. “Commander Data to Enterprise.”

Xxx

A loud rumbling sound jerked you from your thoughts, and you scrambled to your shaky feet. The wall across from you split apart in the middle, blinding you with a sudden burst of light. Before your eyes could adjust, there were hands upon you, disconnecting your cuffs from the wall, pushing you forward. You stumbled, feet heavy beneath you, but complied. You were taken out into a long hallway, tall and wide. Once your eyes adjusted to the light, you turned to look at your captors, and immediately had to suppress a shudder. They resembled Terran arachnids in a way—standing on four long, spindly legs which connected to a sort of thorax, two arms on either side of their body, their hands holding six long, spindly talon-like fingers, heads held aloft by disturbingly thin and long necks, nearly a dozen eyes embedded in their heads. You’d never seen a creature like them before, never even heard of something resembling their description. Data would be fascinated, you thought dismally, and again he returned to your thoughts. Would he come for you?

You didn’t have long to ponder your unnaturally white knight in golden armor. The creatures brought you to a large set of doors as high as the ceiling which parted slowly. They pushed you into the room beyond, a dark, humid place wherein every little sound echoed violently from the walls. It was too dark for you to see even your own feet, but you could feel eyes upon you from every angle. The creatures threw you down to your knees in what you estimated was the center of the room. There was tugging on the chains that held you before the heavy metal fell to the floor beneath you. You tested it once, a confirmation that they had reattached them firmly to something stationary.

Overhead, a light flicked on, nearly blinding you in the process. You flinched, holding your hand up to cover your eyes and squinted through your fingers. After a few moments, your eyes readjusted, and you were able to make out the general setup of the room you were in. It was like an old earth amphitheater, a large circular room with varying levels upon which about half a dozen of the creatures sat, watching you.

“Interesting.” You turned to see which one had begun talking. It sat on the ring closest to you, an ugly thing which was notably smaller than its companions. “Bipedal. Strange.” It stood up, crossing one set of arms in front of its chest, a note pad of some sort in another of its hands.

You cleared your throat, your Starfleet training kicking in. “My name is—”

“Language. Suggests intelligence. Unexpected.”

You frowned, looking the creature up and down. “I am a lieutenant serving aboard the Federation Starsh—” Before you could finish your sentence, a jolt of electricity emanated from your chains, shooting up your arms and across your body. You yelped in pain and fell off your knees.

“Fascinating. Shows pain.”

You scowled, glaring up at your captors. “I am a lieute—” Another shock, this one longer, stronger, tore a loud shriek from your throat. “—aboard the Federation Starship USS Ent—” one more “—erprise!” You grit your teeth against the pain, doing your best not to give into the pain and cry.

The creatures were whispering all around you, but the leader was sitting, staring at you in silent contemplation. After a long moment, it stood, and a hush fell around the room. It moved slowly and deliberately towards you, its many eyes watching you intently. It stopped a few feet away and leaned its upper body down closer to your level, scrutinizing your features. “Very promising. Excellent specimen. Strong.”

You glared indignantly up at the creature. “State your intentions.” You prayed your voice was as level as you thought it was.

A slow, wide grin spread across the creature’s face, and you had to suppress a shudder when its sharp teeth were revealed. “Intentions? Study.”

A chilly fear settled in your gut. “Study what?”

It leaned down further so that its mouth was near your ear and whispered, “Study you.”

Before you could react, there was an intense pain running from your neck down your arm, and you cried out in pain. The creature was walking backwards now, watching your face. A few tears skimmed down your face when you turned to look at what it had done to you, and bile rose in your throat at the sight of the blood racing down your arm from four long, deep, parallel cuts in your skin.

“Fascinating. Musculature. Circulatory system. Iron-based.” Several of the creatures around the room were jotting down notes, nodding in understanding.

This mission started out so promising.

Xxx

“Scans still show no sign of humanoid life on the planet’s surface, and no vessels in the vicinity.” Data clenched his fist against the helm, a scowl plastered upon his face.

Geordi rested his hand upon his friend’s shoulder from behind. Picard rubbed a hand across his face in exasperation. “No warp trail signatures, no residue, anything?”

Data grit his teeth. “No. Sir.”

“Very well. Number One, Worf, Data, assemble an away team. Do another sweep of the area. There must be something we missed.”

The three men were quick to jump to their feet and join in the turbolift. Worf was already calling for a security team to meet them in the transporter room, though Data hardly heard it. Ever since he awoke upon the planet, a deep sense of…something had been brewing within him, threatening to swallow him whole at any given moment, the only thing on his mind you. He wished with all his might that he could turn his blasted emotion chip off, to focus on the task at hand, but he and Geordi had been unsuccessful in their attempts to de-fuse the chip from his positronic net.

“Data?”

Data snapped out of his thoughts of you and turned to his friends who were looking at him with concern. “My apologies, Commander. I was not listening.”

Riker frowned, his brow furrowed. “Data, are you alright?”

Data opened his mouth to reply, but as he did, the turbolift doors opened. The three men exited and made their way to the transporter room, Riker’s query forgotten.

They landed in the middle of the blast radius, phasers drawn. The corpses of their fallen comrades had been removed, much to Data’s relief. In hindsight, the discovery of their bodies had only worsened his concern for your safety.

“Now, Data, run through what happened just one more time. You were standing here, yes?” Riker pointed to the area that Data had indicated to him earlier.

Data nodded, assuming his position at the location. “Yes, sir. I was standing here, scanning this piece of flora when the sound of an incoming incendiary device registered in my processing system. I calculated the time required to reach the now deceased ensigns and determined that they were too far to help, though Lieutenant Y/L/N was within an acceptable distance. I shielded her from the blast, but soon after an electromagnetic pulse was sent, temporarily deactivating me. When I awoke, I discovered the deceased away team, then found Lietenant Y/L/N’s combadge underneath that bush.” He turned to indicate the bush in question.

Riker paced the area several times while Worf surveyed the perimeter of the blast, rerunning the scans they’d taken before. Riker paused at the bush, then stepped a few feet away, out of Data’s immediate line of sight. Data clenched his fists several times, teeth grinding despite himself. The feeling had reasserted itself when they’d materialized, something he was beginning to believe was intense worry. It was true you were one of his closest friends, so of course it would be understandable that he would be worried about you, but something about it felt deeper than that. He reserved himself to analyzing the sensation at a later time.

They split up and searched for over three hours, spreading out in a circular search pattern which broadened. As the sun came back around to be high over head for the second time that day, Riker called them to a standstill and rubbed his face. “Gentlemen, I think it’s time to call it a day.”

Data frowned. “But, sir—”

Riker patted his friend on the back and looked upon him with pity in his eyes. “Data, I know how deeply this must hit home, but I think we, particularly you, could do more good from the ship than down here. We’ll send out search parties, alright?”

Data pondered his words and looked to Worf. He was scowling at the ground but nodded in agreement. Data clenched his fists twice before nodding. “Yes, sir.”

Riker nodded and patted Data’s arm again. “We’ll find her, Data.” He tapped his combadge and called O’Brien to beam them up.

Xxx

They’d stopped for now, though they continued to watch you. You assumed they were interested in how your species recovered from such pain. Over the past few hours, they’d ramped up the electrocutions before they’d moved on to more…colorful means. Your whole body was aflame with pain. They’d drenched you in freezing liquid (something like water but thicker,) and taken note of your body’s natural reaction to the shock before promptly throwing scalding water at you. Thankfully, your uniform protected you from most of the heat, but your pant leg had been ripped open during your capture, so the flesh there had begun to blister. They’d stretched your bonds apart until one of your shoulders dislocated, something which earned quite a bit of chatter from your captors.

They were watching as you fought to catch your breath, teeth grit against the pain. For what must have been the thousandth time, you croaked, “I am a lieutenant with the Federation Starship USS Enterprise. I demand to know what you want.””

“Enough.”

You looked up at the one who had spoken. She was larger than the others, sat higher up in the theater. The others stopped and turned to look at her. Their queen maybe? You coughed and tried again. “I am a lieute—”

“No matter. Study only.” She moved, stepping smoothly down the stairs until she stood at the lowest level, staring directly at you with glowing eyes. You suppressed a shiver. “What species?”

You narrowed your eyes. “You first.”

There was another shock, causing you to cry out. “Species.”

You scowled. “Human.”

“Human. Unfamiliar. Galactic designation?”

Galactic designation? Planet? Was it safe to give these creatures that kind of information? One look at the queen told you that no, it was not. If their treatment of you was any indication, these beings are less than cordial. You didn’t have to be a Betazoid to know they weren’t just studying you to learn about you. They were having fun.

Another shock. “Galactic designation.”

You growled through the pain. “Bite me.”  

Slowly, a grin spread unnaturally far across the queen’s face, revealing several rows of sharp teeth. You swallowed hard, a deep pit of fear welling up within you. She leaned over the railing, her neck stretching out a ways, so close you could almost smell her. “A pleasure.” She leaned back and looked behind you, the grin still plastered upon her unnatural face. “Prepare it.”

Before you could react, your chains were released from the floor, and the creatures were hauling you to your feet by your agonized arms, eliciting a cry. They dragged you backwards until your back hit a hard, flat surface and your chains were pulled taut so that your arms were above your head. “What are you—” The table was flipped abruptly backwards so that you were lying level. You turned to look at your captors. They were dragging out a cart which rattled sinisterly, and just before a bright light shrouded your vision you were able to make out a long, thin knife. You swallowed hard and shut your eyes. Data, now would be a good time to swoop in.

Xxx

Thirty-six hours, forty-six minutes, and eighteen seconds. That is how long you had been missing. Since their return from the planet’s surface, Data had run eighty-three complete scans of the planet and surrounding space, and still there were no signs of you or of your potential captors. There had been round-the-clock away teams sent to the surface to search on foot for anything that might have offset the sensors, but nothing had been found. Not even so much as a hair from your head had been left behind. Data sat in the astrometrics lab, practically vibrating with anger. As the results of the eighty-forth futile scan came in, he stood with a yell and began pacing, a scowl on his face. The doors opened, and though he didn’t turn to look, he knew it was Counselor Troi. “Please, Counselor, not now.”

“Data, I’m sensing—”

He turned, anger apparent in his face. “What? That I am angry? You are most correct, Counselor. I am angry. One of my dearest friends is missing, and I am powerless to do anything about it!”

She crossed over to him and placed a hand on his shoulder, frowning. “Data, I’m sorry. I know how difficult this must be for you.”

He was trembling now, and he reached up with a shaking hand to brush his hair back out of his face. “I… I am afraid, Counselor. And I am angry with myself. I should have…”

She shook her head and squeezed his arm. “You mustn’t think like that, Data. You could not have done anything. We’ll find her, don’t worry.”

“Captain Picard to Lieutenant. Data, report to my ready room.”

Troi gave him one last smile before she hugged him, a rare display for Data. They separated after a moment, and he smiled weakly at her. “Thank you, Counselor.” He cleared his throat and tapped his comm. “Acknowledged, Sir.”

The bridge was solemn as Data stepped onto it, and if Data had the programming for it, his hair might have stood on end. Riker nodded to him as he passed, and Data locked eyes with him for a moment before continuing to the Captain’s ready room. Picard bid him enter, but as Data stepped through the threshold, he knew something was wrong. The Captain stood, facing the observation window, his hands folded behind his back. “Captain?”

“Data, please sit down.” Picard turned and took a seat at his desk, folding his hands upon it. Data frowned as he sat. “Have you made any progress?”

Data clenched his fist by his side and shook his head. “No, sir. I have run eighty-three complete scans, but I have been unable to find anything.”

Picard nodded solemnly then sighed. “Data… I know you’re close to the lieutenant.”

“Yes, sir. She is one of my best friends.”

He ran a hand over his face. “That only makes this more difficult.” Visibly uncomfortable, Picard stood and crossed to his replicator where he requested an Earl Grey before taking it to his desk. “I have… I have received a communique from Starfleet Command. The Starship USS Abbot has gone silent, and we are the starship nearest its last reported position. It will take us 26 hours at Warp 9 to reach her where all other starships are weeks away. We have been ordered…” He sighed. “We have been ordered to investigate immediately.”

Data stared at his captain, disbelief spread across his face. “Sir… Are you implying that we give up the search? That we leave Y/N for dead?”

Picard looked down at his tea, his own fists clenched upon his desk. “I… I am afraid that is… precisely what I am implying.” Data jumped to his feet, a protestation already on his lips but the captain raised his hand. “Data. I am truly sorry. Believe me, I would stay and scour every leaf for however long it took, but we have our orders. It has been four days. As such…” He took in a deep breath. “As such, I must now presume the lieutenant to be killed in action. We leave orbit as soon as the final search team has returned.”

Killed in action. Killed. In action. Killed. Killkilledkilldkiledkildkilekilled. Killed. As in dead, deceased, no longer living, gone—Data stared Picard for a long moment before he realized the captain was speaking. Picard seemed to realize Data had zoned out because he paused, allowing Data a moment. After another moment, Data whispered, “Captain, may I be relieved of duty until such a time as we arrive at the Abbot?”

Picard hesitated for a minute before nodding once. He stepped around his desk to stand face to face with Data. “If there’s anything I can do for you, Data, please let me know.”

Data regarded his captain with a masked look before nodding. “Thank you, Sir.”

Picard nodded then stepped back. “You are dismissed.”

Data turned on his heel and practically ran to his quarters. He sat at his terminal and scanned over the final environmental scans once more. Something inside him knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that you were still alive, that you needed help, that you needed him.

A plan began formulating in his mind, and he looked at Spot. “I am going to get her back.” Spot stared up at him listlessly, nothing but a single flick of the tail to indicate Data had been heard at all. He reached up and brushed a finger over the pips on his collar. Was this the right thing to do? He looked towards a picture which sat on his desk of his poker group with the two of you in the center, your wide, cheesy grin pointed at him, the cards laid in front of you showing a straight flush which clearly beat his pair of queens. Decisively, he reached up and removed the pips from his uniform, placing them neatly upon his desk. You were more than worth it.

By his estimation, the away team was only minutes away from beaming aboard, meaning he had to hurry. He set about inputing his new commands into the computer. Zipping about his quarters, he gathered a bag, a medical kit, some rations, his tool kit, as well as a phaser. He acted quickly, diverting transporter functions from the main bridge so no one would be able to pick up his departure then tapped his com badge, assuming Geordi’s voice. “La Forge to Transporter Chief, would you come down to Engineering? We’ve found an anomaly in the power flow to transporter room 2. Data is on his way to relieve you now.” The Chief sent back an acknowledgement of the command, and Data set off on his task.

Just as he reached the transporter room, the away team called for a beam up. Data entered and nodded to the unsuspecting lieutenant. “I will take it from here, Chief.”

“Thanks, Commander.” She gave him a quick smile which he blankly returned and slipped past him.

Data crossed over to the transporter controls and beamed the away team to the Enterprise. As soon as the door slid shut behind them, he input the coordinates of the launch site, leapt over the console, and stood impatiently upon the energizing pad.

The transport was successful, putting Data in the center of the attack zone. He scanned the area with several different tricorder settings, waiting. After nobody from the Enterprise beamed down, he had to assume that his plan had worked thus far. Either computer had accurately hidden his transport as anticipated and lied about his whereabouts, or nobody thought to look for him. They must be en route to the Abott already.

He set to work quickly. Who knows how long he had before the Enterprise noticed his absence and came back? Would they return even before they had completed their investigation of the Abott? Unlikely. Captain Picard, though known for disobeying orders when he felt it best, would not put Data’s importance over that of an entire ship. At the very least, Data was counting on it.

Several hours passed before he was finished with his work, and once he had he stood in the same spot he had been when the attack happened. He looked around one final time, looking once more for anything he might have missed, but found nothing. “Very well.” He bent down and activated the short-distance beacon placed near his feet and began his wait.

Xxx

Consciousness eluded you, the pain too much to endure but too much to avoid as well. You drifted in and out like waves lapping against a boat in a sea of agony. You weren’t even sure what they were doing to you anymore. It all blurred together.

You couldn’t scream anymore though you wanted to. You had long since been rendered hoarse, the only sounds coming from you now no more than soft screeching. How long had you been here? Hours? Months? Years? You couldn’t know any longer. The only thing you did know:  Data was coming for you.

Maybe you had dreamt it. Maybe it was a hallucination. You couldn’t be sure. But at one point, amidst the tears and the gasps, the doors had opened, and a creature had scuttled in. It leaned across the counter to whisper in the queen’s ear, and she looked positively furious. “Beacon? Impossible. Undetectable.” Your torturer paused its ministrations to look towards the commotion.

“Synthetic lifeform. Wants attention. Perhaps searching.”

Though your entire body was riddled in agony, you knew you were smiling. The look the queen gave you was positively venomous, and before you slipped out of consciousness again, she crossed the room to you and put her face in your line of view. In a menacing voice, she hissed, “Vessel status?”

“Departed.”

The queen smirked wickedly and reached slowly to touch your forehead. “Retrieve synthetic.” As her talon-like finger touched your skin, a searing pain erupted across your face, sending you back into the darkness again.

Xxx

Data didn’t have to wait long before his hosts found him. He could hear their approach, their hushed chittering, rather like insects. Another moment later, and a small metal ball was rolled near him. It expanded, no doubt another attempt to knock him offline with an EMP. Thankfully, Geordi had analyzed his sensor data and worked to create a sort of inoculation against this type of attack in the future. There was silence after the device was activated before he detected another hushed chitter. Data stood and turned towards the sound of his attackers, hands raised. “My name is Data. I have been abandoned here by my crew due to my failures in your previous attack. I have no choice but to seek asylum with your species.”

The creatures were silent for a long second before one stepped forward. Data was immediately intrigued by them—their insectoid anatomy and how it relates to their language structure, their apparent ranking structure, all of it—but he quickly snapped back to the situation at hand and its stakes. There were three of them, and they advanced on him, circling him, one of them scanning him with a strange device he could only surmise was their equivalent of a tricorder. It nodded to the other two who were quick to advance on Data. He allowed them to take him custody, and as they dragged him through the underbrush, they appeared in a metal hallway, similar to that of a starship. As they walked, Data pondered their sudden appearance here and began working on theories as to how they got there. A subspace transportation device? A controlled worm-hole opening device? While he mused, he took in his surroundings, attempting to identify where they might be keeping you and also analyzing potential exits in the event that his plan failed.

They brought him to a small room with no windows and left him there. He ran some systemic diagnostics while he waited, though nothing took his mind too far from you. After 3 hours, 43 minutes, and 29 seconds, the doors to the room opened again, flooding it with a blinding light. There were hands upon him, dragging him to his feet which he allowed without any resistance.

They dragged him down a few more hallways before finally dragging him into an amphitheater type room. There were six more of the creatures there, gathered among the stands. On the floor stood two more, one smaller than the rest, the other larger and standing proudly. If Data possessed bile ducts, they would be in overdrive right that second. On the floor was a concerning amount of red blood. At least he knew you were here. He was right.

The larger creature on the floor was grinning at him. She leaned forward in a mock bow. “Welcome. Purpose?”

Data tilted his head. “If you are inquiring as to why I have come, it is quite simple. My crew has found me to be inadequate and as such, I have been abandoned on this planet. It logically follows that I would seek asylum with your crew.”

The queen smirked. “Asylum? Not rescue?”

If Data had a heart, it might have jumped. ‘Rescue?’ Then you were alive. He kept his face neutral, however, and forced his voice to stay level. “Any hostages you may have taken have also been abandoned by my ship. As such, a rescue is illogical.”

“Data?”

The voice was weak, trembling, hoarse, but he’d know it anywhere. It was you. You were here, alive, at least alive enough to recognize his voice. The queen’s grin grew sickeningly wide. “Recognition. Intriguing. Perhaps friend? Lover?”

‘Lover?’ The thought did elicit certain…emotions from him, though he’d never considered it before. He shook his head. “The organic life form in question is no more than a simple crewm…” Data’s voice trailed off as the queen stepped aside, and he caught sight of you. How you were alive, he could not say. You’d been tortured nearly beyond recognition, your skin mottled, blood covering not just yourself but the table they’d tied you to and a large portion of the floor below you. You bore over two dozen significant lacerations upon your visible body, and he could only guess as to your internal damage. But your face. Your eyes which he had analyzed on more than one occasion were nearly swollen shut, and one looked as though the pupil had been blown, the sclera surrounding it a shocking red. He could hear your struggling breath from even his distance across the room, and he sounded as though liquid had begun pooling in your lungs.

You didn’t have much time.

“—ember.” Less than .03 seconds had transpired since the queen had moved, and for the moment it seemed as though none of the creatures had noticed his lapse in continuity.

The queen studied his face for a long moment before turning her back to him. “Disappointing.” She walked over to you, her back obscuring Data from seeing what she was about to do. There was a slight rattling as a tool was taken off a tray beside the table. Data’s body tensed and his fists clenched as a simpering sound filled the room that could just barely be recognized as a cry from you.

Data forced his body to relax and made a point to clear his throat, and the Queen glanced at him over her shoulder. “Displeases it?”

“If I may—” he tried to step away but the creatures on either side of him forced him back. He looked pointedly at them then at the queen. “What is your primary objective with the human?”

She snorted as if it were obvious. “Study.”

“Yes, but study what?”

“Pain responses.”  

Data nodded. “Yes, I thought so. If I may be permitted, I possess a large quantity of knowledge concerning the human pain response and may be able to provide you with even better results. My presence may also be used to help your physicians keep the specimen alive for more prolonged study.”

This seemed to surprise her. “What purpose?”

“I believe it could be construed as a demonstration of good will on my part. If I am to reside here with you and your crew, I would like to be useful.”

The queen stared at him for a moment before nodding once and waving her hand. The guards released Data, and he righted his uniform. “Thank you.” The degree of difficulty required to keep himself from reacting to the state of you was immensely more strenuous than he had anticipated. “First, a brief overview of human female anatomy. This here—” he began pointing out the various parts of your body and giving quick summaries of their functions. As the queen’s attention was drawn to you with one of his hands keeping her attention focused, the other hand set about discreetly lifting up its thumb nail and pressing the button he had installed moments before setting off the beacon. A trick he’d picked up from his dear brother Lore.

‘Now we can only hope the Enterprise picks up the signal and arrives in time.’

Thankfully, you passed out from blood loss before Data had to actually do anything to you. He wasn’t quite sure what he would’ve done to trick them into thinking he was actually hurting you, how he would’ve signaled for you to put on a show for them. The queen called it a night and left Data in charge of getting you patched up, two guards stood nearby to ensure nothing happened.

He did well enough given their utter lack of actually-useful medical tools. He managed to get a large part of your bleeding under control and kept you breathing, kept your heart beating.

You regained consciousness four hours later, though the guards had long since lost interest and were speaking out of what they assumed was Data’s earshot. Once he noticed you were waking up, he put his finger to his lips and winked at you so you’d keep quiet. He knocked a device on the floor near your head and bent down to pick it up, watching as the guards lost interest again. He kept his voice as low as you could hear. “I have signaled the Enterprise. They should be here soon. Just hang on ok?”

The only response you gave was a discreet tapping of your finger, and you shut your eyes again. Data ground his teeth when he noticed the tears slipping silently down your face.

Xxx

Another four hours came and went, and at some point, you had managed to fall asleep—or as close to sleep as you could get.

Your body felt as though it were made from lead. Hot, burning, molten, electric lead. Breathing was the most difficult thing in the world, and the strain to lift your eyelids was nearly impossible to overcome. Somewhere in the fog, however, you were aware of something touching your hand. No. Not something. Someone. Data. That’s right. Data had come. He was here. He’d called for help. Was he holding your hand? Were they saved?

No. The room was too bright to be anywhere on the Enterprise. The table you were on was still cold beneath you, and you were in far too much pain.

The nightmare continues, then.

You heard the doors open, and a chorus of clicking filled the room, and Data’s hand left yours. Your audience had returned, it seemed.

“Status?” Her voice was beginning to be as much torture as the actual torture.

Data’s smooth voice came from beside you, and knowing he was there was enough to make it bearable. Well, no, that’s a lie. This was hell. But it was refreshing to hear. “I have been able to nearly stabilize her vital signs and stop her external bleeding. Though, the internal injuries are quite severe. I estimate that she will not last more than two hours of your tests.”

The queen was angry. You could feel it in the way the room grew silent and tense, and her voice seemed forced. “Extensive knowledge?”

“I do possess several terrabytes of information regarding human anatomy and medicine, however the specimen was already near death when I arrived, and the medical tools on hand are insufficient to return her to peak condition.”

The queen growled, her voice drawing nearer. “Insufficient?”

His voice lowered slightly, as though meek. “I mean no offense. It is only that to repair the damage done, I require certain tools which are not present. I am able to provide a list, if there are adequate replicators on hand. It is possible to restore her completely, and your examinations may continue anew.”

‘Data, no…’ Though you knew, deep down, Data would never hurt you, the fear of the situation had gone to your head. You hoped your body was as immobile as it felt because you were sure you could be trembling. A whole new round? No. Death would be far preferable. ‘Data, please, no. I’d rather die.’

The queen growled again but did not protest and after a long moment agreed. The creatures filed out of the room again, and you sensed you were now alone with Data.

There was the pressure of a hypospray against your neck and the heaviness in your eyes was alleviated. You opened them slowly, blinking at the harsh light. Data put his hand in yours and smiled gently at you. “I am sorry. I had to make it appear as though you were asleep, lest we be discovered.” He squeezed your fingers gently. “We will get o—”

“Suspicions correct.” You froze, and Data spun on his heel, moving to protect you from view. “Treachery! Guards!”

He was quick to act, scooping you up in his arms, eliciting a scream of pain from you. And then you were moving, running down the halls. Every step he made jostled your body though you knew he was trying to be as careful as possible. From over his shoulder, you could see the creatures chasing you, half a dozen or more of them hot on your tail. You noticed that he had lifted his thumb nail and was wildly pressing it as if desperate for something. The creatures began to tire after a few minutes, and Data was able to give them the slip, stowing the two of you away in a sort of broom closet. He arranged the supplies in the closet to hide the two of you and sat down, cradling you gingerly to his chest. Even though he had been the one running, you were out of breath, and each gasp for air didn’t seem to help. Your entire body was aflame with pain. It hadn’t even occurred to you that you had been crying until Data reached up and very gently and slowly wiped tears from your cheek. “It will be alright…”

Your hands found their way to his arm, and you gripped it with all your strength. “How do you know?” The voice that came from your throat was foreign to you, strangled and hoarse. How long had it been since real words had come from your mouth?

Data’s arms wrapped securely around you, protectively, comfortingly. Lovingly. “Because I will never let go of you again.”

There was no chance to respond, nor even to wonder if you had heard him right. A finger went to his lips and he held you still. Outside the door, they were chittering again. Then the queen’s voice—“Locate them!” and a scrambling noise as they took off pursuit again.

You looked up at Data, his yellow eyes nearly glowing in the light. “Data, I’m scared. If… Don’t let them take me again, ok? Whatever it takes, just… Just don’t let them take me.”

He frowned as he considered your words before nodding slightly. “I will not.”

“Promises. Foolish.” The door slid open with a sudden flash of light, and Data tightened his grip on you, turning so he was shielding you from the queen’s icy stare.

You looked pleadingly up at Data, and he nodded in return. Squeezing his eyes shut, he whispered a slight, “Now would be a good time, Captain,” and pressed the button on his thumb again.

You buried your face in his neck, practically trembling with fear. “Data…”

Your only response was a gentle caress of your hair before his hand went to the crook of your neck and pinched, dragging you into darkness.

Xxx

Tired. Heavy. Warm.

“…awake?”

“Nearly. I’m bringing her out now.”

“And her recovery?”

Voices. But whose? Memories arise, but it’s as though they’re being seen through a fog, a haze. It’s familiar and comforting, a relief like none you’ve ever felt before. But why? Relief from what?

“She’s as good as new, at least physically. I’ll have to run some cognitive tests to ensure adequate cerebral functions, but I don’t expect to find any problems.”

“I am sensing disorientation, primarily. She’s not sure where she is. But it seems she recognizes our voices for now.”

Your body blossomed into your reality, slowly. It started from your toes, just a little too cold. Socks. I’d like my pair of polka dotted fuzzy socks. Then, from your toes it spread up to your legs, heavy as though they hadn’t been used in days. Hadn’t they? Surely. Then your hips, your stomach, your chest, shoulders, arms. Finally, your hands. One felt…fuller than the other. A large weight was held around it, holding it up and away from your body. Part of it was brushing along your knuckles. There was a smile on your lips, or the ghost of one.

“Lieutenant?” The ghost was gone, replaced by something much fuller.

“Data.” It hurt to get out, like sandpaper against the back of your throat, but the implications sent a warmth through your body.

Finally, your eyes. They opened slowly, the light sharp, but you managed. Once you adjusted, you turned to look towards him. He was leaning over you, scanning your face, a hopeful smile in place. “How do you feel?”

“I believe that is my question, Mr. Data.”

The other voice dragged your attention to the other side, and several happy faces formed in your line of view. Captain Picard, Dr. Crusher, Counselor Troi, Geordi, Will, even Worf. The doctor was running a tricorder along your body, but she shut it decisively and smiled down at you. “Well? How do you feel?”

You took in the colors around you—the redness of the doctor’s hair, the colors of their uniforms, the silver of Geordi’s visor, the gold of Worf’s sash—and turned to look back at Data. The strangely champagne hue of his skin, the golden tint to his eyes, the darkness of his hair.

And you smiled.

“This is a dream.”

Data shook his head and squeezed your hand gently. “No, Lieutenant. It is not. We are back on the Enterprise.”

“Do you remember anything about the past week?” Deanna put her hand softly over your unoccupied one, dragging your attention back to her.

A frown spread across your face as your brows knit together. “I…” The floodgates opened, images of the arachnoid creatures filling your mind, memories of the pain, their chittering, the queen’s terrible grin, and suddenly it was as though you couldn’t breathe. “N-No, please, no, I don’t… No…”

Deanna made to put her hand on your shoulder. “It’s alright, you’re safe now, it’s alr—”

You flinched from her touch and into Data. “NO!”

The others all looked at one another, and Dr. Crusher everyone except Deanna and Captain Picard away. She prepared a hypospray and approached you slowly, a hand up in a gesture of goodwill. “Lieutenant, this is to help you calm down. Will you allow me to administer it?”

The images were coming too quickly in your mind, causing you to press further into Data who dutifully wrapped his arms around you. “Lieutenant, nobody here is going to harm you. You’re safe now.” Though the Captain’s voice was normally quite soothing to you, the voice of someone you considered to be a father figure, it did little to soothe you now.

Data lightly rubbed your arm and spoke in a soft voice. “The Captain is right. You are safe. I will.”

You looked up at him with wide, terrified eyes. He nodded, a concerned look on his face. Your fingers dug into his sleeve. “Please don’t leave, ok?”

“I promise.” He smiled, causing you to calm slightly, enough for Dr. Crusher to inject you. It was instantaneous, the fear and anxiety from before almost evaporating, and you relaxed significantly, though you continued to hold onto Data’s arm.

Deanna and the Captain began to debrief you with the help of Data’s comforting embrace. They walked through your ordeal with you, slowly, carefully, starting from the attack onward. Once you reached the end of what you recalled, Data slipped his hand into yours. “She had found us and was going to take you again. I initiated a Vulcan nerve pinch upon you to render you unconscious, and I attempted one final time to reach the Enterprise with the homing device I placed in my thumb.”

“It was this final attempt which allowed us to home in on your position in subspace, and Geordi was able to pull the two of you out and bring you home.” The Captain smiled at Data then at you.

The three of you continued to talk for a while before Deanna and Beverly excused themselves. Deanna promised to see you later when you were better rested to discuss setting up counseling sessions. Something told you you were going to need them.

The Captain was halfway through his tea when you whispered, “I’m sorry, Captain.”

A frown struck across his face, and he set his tea down in its saucer. “Whatever for?”

A tear spilled down your cheek. “For the trouble, the worry, the—”

“Nonsense. You are a valued member of this crew. There are no words to describe the joy I have at finding you alive. If anything…” A hint of shame filled his expression. “It is I who must apologize to you. Had it not been for Data, we may never have found you…” The implication hung heavily in the air and straggled in the back of your mind, long after the others had all left.

Data was sitting at your bedside, a book whose name you hadn’t paid attention to sat in his lap as he read to you. His voice washed over you like warm waves on a sandy beach, lulling you into a peace that until a few hours ago had seemed as distant a memory to you as your first steps.

“Data?”

“Yes?” The book was lowered, yellow eyes looking up to meet yours.

“You…” You looked down at your hands and folded them in your lap. “You risked everything. For me. Not just court martial, but deactivation. Why?”

Data was silent for a long time, causing you to peek up at him. He was regarding you with a strange look, and for a quick moment you wondered if maybe he’d malfunctioned somehow.

“I… The truth is, Y/N, that ever since my emotion chip was put in, I have regarded you differently.” Differently? “I thought it was only a strong sense of friendship and did not know what it was until you disappeared.”

Surely you were hearing things, no? “But you know now?”

The smile was back, and he reached over to take your hand. “I do. This emotion I had been feeling towards you had been immensely pleasurable. Your appearances in my days often became something I eagerly awaited. Your smile and laughter filled my mind for long periods of time after your departures.” The smile slipped away, a new emotion taking its place. “When I awoke on the planet and could not find you, it was as though a piece of me had been ripped away. I was worried for you, for your safety. Then, when the Captain told me we were to abandon the search, I was terrified at the thought of losing you forever. Nothing in this existence has ever come close to that feeling, not even the thought of a court martial or deactivation. Nor has nothing in this existence ever come close to the feeling of having you back, of watching your eyes open, of hearing your voice, of seeing your smile.” He brought your knuckles to his lips. “This is how I know what that feeling is.” You held your breath as you watched the grin spread across his face. “I am in love with you.”

[thesinglesjukebox]

The Singles Jukebox Celebrates 30 Years of Rhythm Nation 1814 (a Janet Jackson retrospective)

Janet Jackson’s had one hell of a career. It’d be glittering even if you were to cut the album she released 30 years ago this week out of history. And historic is what Rhythm Nation 1814 is, not like a war, but like a discovery; it was groundbreaking and influential and so much pop released in its wake owes it a debt of gratitude. The album contained seven top 10 singles in the U.S., each with indelible melodies, state-of-the-art beats and vivid music videos. Janet was always on the radio, always on TV, and welcome everywhere she went. She endured the failure of two albums and the weight of family baggage before reinventing herself, seizing artistic control and having one of the longest and brightest imperial phases of any pop star. Sex positive, romantic, assertive and wise, she’s an icon whose brilliance comes as much from how her songs make us feel about ourselves as they do about her.

Her familial connections might help explain her, but they didn’t define or limit her. She’s a sympathetic performer, an innovator in the development of music video as an art form (someone in her camp needs to fix up her spotty presence on video streaming sites, people need to see these videos in HD) and a smart, underrated songwriter in her own right. There’s a lot of Jackson in Beyonce, in Rihanna, in Britney, and in any woman who makes us smile and makes us dance. Because she did all those things over and over again.

Here’s a bunch of songs by Miss Jackson that moved us, or just made us move:

Katherine St Asaph on “Nasty” [8.14]

Date the quote: “[His] dance cuts have a format-friendly, artificial sheen … but she seems more concerned with identity than playlists.” This is not from 2019, about a post-Spotify pop star (I cheated a bit, leaving out a reference to “Arthur Baker dance breaks”) but from the ’80s. Specifically, it’s from the Rolling Stone review of Janet Jackson’s’s Control, the first half of which is a review of a comparatively nothing Jermaine Jackson album. This was typical: if press didn’t dismiss her as an biographical afterthought who happened to still sing, they wrote about her alongside her family, and specifically her brother. (This continues to this day: Note the sustained attention given to her response to Leaving Neverland, which ultimately was to join her family in condemning it.) The line everyone quotes is “Ms. Jackson if you’re nasty,” but more pointed is one of the lines that precedes it: “my last name is Control.”

The lyric to “Nasty” is full of that sort of role-reversal, like a swordfight where one guy yoinks the other guy’s sword — the sword being the “nasty groove.” But said groove possibly illustrates the lyric even better. Made by producers/former The Time members/future creative partners Jam & Lewis out of big ’80s percussion, plus clanks and repurposed orchestral stabs from an Ensoniq Mirage, one of the earliest sampling keyboards, it doesn’t sound martial exactly, like some of Jackson’s later work, but certainly sounds stark. It sounds like a challenge, one Janet takes up: her past soubrette voice drops to a throatier register, then is stoked into roars. The beat’s not quite its own thing; “Nasty” resembles experiments like Herbie Hancock’s “Metal Beat,” and in turn much of New Jack Swing resembles it. But how Jam & Lewis described it was a rapper’s beat — now standard for pop or R&B singers, from Destiny’s Child to Ariana Grande and Billie Eilish, when they want a tougher image. Meanwhile, Britney took Janet’s soft spoken-word interlude “I could learn to like this” and extrapolated an entire career from it — and covered it, unusually early in her career — but simplified it, mostly collapsing the context of family ties and dignity and creative control onto one axis: sex. But what they’re all doing is asserting this kind of Control.

Part of appreciating songs from the ’80s and ’90s is prying them out of the clutches of the era’s pop-culture jokification– I do like MST3K, but their sort of snappy “Nasty” joke is kind of what I mean. More than one article/restaurant review/listicle attempts to identify, meme-ily, Janet’s idea of “nasty food” (Janet’s answer, dubiously, was whole squid). A certain comment by a certain head of state gave the song a late-breaking sales boost But put on some ’80s radio (or a contemporary playlist of people copying ’80s radio) and wait for “Nasty” to come on. The rest of the radio will flinch.

Kat Stevens on “What Have You Done For Me Lately?” [8.67]

“What Have You Done For Me Lately?” is a sparse, angry snap of a song, the overspill of weeks and months of gradually-building resentment. It’s taken a nudge from bezzie mate Paula Abdul for Janet to fully admit her relationship has gone sour: her once fun-loving, adoring beau has become complacent, content to put his feet up on the sofa and take Janet for granted. Should she leave? She loves him! Or does she? Should love really feel like a heavy weight, pressing down on you? Like your stomach won’t stop churning? Like letting the phone ring out unanswered rather than deal with his temper? Like maybe it’s your fault that he’s like this? “Who’s right? Who’s wrong?” Janet is determined to make a decision with a clear head, but the anxiety and hormones are bubbling underneath (“I never ask for more than I deserve…“). Thankfully Jam & Lewis are on hand with a clinical, whipcrack beat — snap out of it, Janet! The tension manifests itself in her zigzagging shoulders, hunched and strained and contorted, primed to lash out – just as he walks through the door! Janet is wary, but her dude is on his best behaviour, puppy-dog eyes, I’ll do better from now on, I swear. They dance perfectly in time together, remembering the good times: all is forgiven. Surely Janet hasn’t fallen for the same old lines, doomed to repeat the cycle? Paula is rolling her eyes: ugh, not this bullshit again… Then, as the happy couple laugh together over dinner, Janet glances back at us, and the smile falls from her face. The decision has been made. As soon as Mr ‘Not All Men’ leaves for work in the morning, she’s putting her passport in a safety deposit box and setting up a secret savings account to fund her getaway. The plan is in motion. You’ve got one life to life.

Thomas Inskeep on “Diamonds” (Herb Alpert ft. Janet Jackson) [6.80]

After “The Pleasure Principle,” this might actually be my favorite Janet Jackson single (even though she’s technically the featured artist on it). “Diamonds,” written and produced by Jimmy “Jam” Harris and Terry Lewis for Herb Alpert’s 1987 album Keep Your Eye on Me, is, in all but name, a Jam/Lewis/Janet record — with a few Alpert trumpet flourishes. The beats rock hard, and Janet delivers what may be (and certainly was at the time) her most IDGAF vocal: you’re gonna get Miss Jackson (because you’re clearly nasty) some diamonds, aren’t you?

Alfred Soto on “The Pleasure Principle” [8.43]

For all the banter over the years about the cold and steel of Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis’ beats for Control, the coldest and steeliest they had no hand in creating. Songwriter Monte Moir, like Jam and Lewis also a The Time alum, stumbled on the title first: “I had to figure out what it was I was trying to say, I just stumbled into the title and realized it fit.” Sung by Jackson in her airiest, most insouciant coo, “The Pleasure Principle” starts with bass synth and cowbell before settling down into a matter-of-fact tale of a night of sin. To visualize the concept, choreographer Barry Lather put together one of Jackson’s most iconic videos, a masterpiece of athleticism involving chairs. Too cold and steely for the audience, or perhaps the hype cycle for a sixth single had exhausted itself: “The Pleasure Principle” missed the top ten in the summer of 1987, stopping at #14. So ignore the single mix and revel in Shep Pettibone’s Long Vocal Remix.

Kat Stevens on “Let’s Wait Awhile” [6.60]

Can you have an erection-section classic that’s primarily about abstinence? “Let’s Wait Awhile” has all the features of a late-night Magic FM request slot regular: soft electric piano, finger clicks instead of drums, lyrics about promises and feelings and stars shining bright. But this message is about trust, not lust. It takes courage to admit that you’re not ready, and it requires faith in the other person that they’re not going to be a dick about it. I remember the advice columns in Just 17 repeating over and over that as Informed Young Women we shouldn’t be pressured into sex, which was all well and good until it actually came to the act of Doing It, whereupon the fug of hormones and internalised misogyny meant that all rationality went out of the window. It’s the sign of how strong and confident Janet is in her relationship, that she can be ‘real honest’ and discuss her concerns freely with her partner, without worrying that he’s going to a) dump her b) tell his mates that she’s frigid or c) ‘persuade’ her round to his point of view (*shudder*). If he’s not willing to wait, maybe he’s not such an ideal person to be doing this sort of stuff with in the first place? I can hear the dude whining to his mate now: “I took her out for dinner and all I got was a perfectly vocalised key change!” Just 17 would be proud of you, Janet.

Jessica Doyle on “Miss You Much” [7.83]

A little context: in March 1989 Natalie Cole released “Miss You Like Crazy,” a ballad built for Cole to sing wide about longing. In June Paula Abdul released the third single off Forever Your Girl, “Cold Hearted,” whose video made a point of its group choreography. And then in late August came “Miss You Much,” the first single from Rhythm Nation 1814. Did Janet Jackson have beef with her ex-choreographer? Was that the kind of thing people talked about, in the pre-poptimist, pre-TMZ era? Because in retrospect “Miss You Much” looks like a dismissal of “Cold Hearted,” cool and upright where the latter was David-Fincher-directed sleazy. (By contrast, the director of “Miss You Much,” Dominic Sena, had already treated Jackson with respect in the video for “The Pleasure Principle.”) But also “Miss You Much” plays as a broader statement, a refusal of expectations. There’s nothing sad or ballad-like about it. There’s that opening high of “sho-o-ot,” and then Jackson’s on a roll: it’s all about her, the deliciousness of her feeling; she can barely bother to describe the “you” being missed so much besides the blanditries of smiling face and warm embrace. The power in “I’ll tell your mama/I’ll tell your friends/I’ll tell anyone whose heart can comprehend” isn’t in the longing; it’s in how much she relishes being the one who gets to do the telling. By 1989 she was in control enough to not have to utter the word once. “Miss You Much” isn’t a deep song, didn’t set out to accomplish as much as the title track or later songs like “That’s the Way Love Goes” or “Together Again” would. But thirty years later it still looks and sounds like (what we now call) a power move.

Katie Gill on “Rhythm Nation” [8.57]

How does one try to condense the reach and influence of “Rhythm Nation” in a single blurb? Entire articles have been written about this song and video (because really, you can’t talk about the song without talking about the video). It’s influenced singers, dancers, directors, choreographers. It won a Grammy as well as two MTV Music Video Awards when those awards actually mattered. The choreography is perfect. Jackson and her dancers move with military-like precision, flawlessly executing maneuvers and creating a dance that would almost instantly become part of the popular consciousness. The sound is amazing. That bass groove is so tight, adding a layer of funk which the guitar takes to further levels. The tune is an absolute earworm, the chorus is iconic, and Jackson’s vocals are at the best of their game. But I think the most important part of “Rhythm Nation” is that this absolute banger of a song, this masterclass in choreography, has remarkably idealistic lyrics. Jackson’s “Rhythm Nation” yearns towards a racially and socially conscious utopia as it attempts to unite people to join together and create this utopia. In a lesser artist, these lyrics would be out and out corny. But when wrapped up in the final package, the lyrics go from corny to believable. Suddenly, the idea of the whole world helping each other or rising up in protest doesn’t sound so far-fetched.

Alfred Soto on “Escapade” [7.67]

With solo credits as common as hair metal solos in Janet Jackson music, I often listen to tracks like “Escapade” and wonder: what did Janet Jackson contribute? Lyrics? Sure. But she has to write them around a Jimmy Jam-Terry Lewis melody, no? Or, as is no doubt the case, she comes up with her own vocal melody to accompany their chord progressions. According to Jam, the trio had “Nowhere to Run” in mind: first as a cover song, then as inspiration. “Escapade” hopscotches away from the sense of danger animating the Martha and the Vandellas chestnut; in 1989, into the eclipse of a grim decade for black lives, looking forward to Friday and drinks and friends would have to do. Over Jam and Lewis’ unrelenting thwack, Jackson sing-songs a valentine to a shy boy whom she hopes will join her in — what? The sheer euphoria of the bridge — a melody as bright as a returned smile — suggests worlds of possibilities when the check’s cashed and the night’s young. After all, MINNEAPOLIS!

Leah Isobel on “Alright” [7.14]

Rhythm Nation might have more banging singles, and it might have songs that more directly diagnose the ills of late capitalism, but no song on the record better encapsulates its utopian aims than “Alright.” Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis famously left the high end of Janet’s songs empty to provide space for her delicate soprano; here, they fill the low end with vocal samples, percussion, submerged synth blats, and tense bass licks. Instead of singing high for the whole track, however, Janet buries lyrical references to magic spells and the end of the world in her lower register, where they blend into the rest of the song. It’s only on the chorus, and particularly on her swooping vocal runs as she riffs on the phrase “you’re alright with me,” that she surfaces from the swirl. On a record where she spends so much time and thought discussing what’s wrong around her, here she takes the time to see and acknowledge what’s right. I don’t know that I’ve heard a better sonic analogue for finding relief from chaos: one voice against a wall of voices and sounds, getting lost and being found over and over to the comforting rhythm of a pop song.

Edward Okulicz on “Black Cat” [6.57]

“Black Cat” was never the huge stylistic U-turn it was perceived as. Janet’s brother had dabbled in rock guitars, and this is in that vein too, while still being of a piece with the other songs on the album. Where it succeeds is because it doesn’t just lean into rock, it’s as credible a rock song as it is a dance-pop song — the riff, which Jackson wrote herself, kicks ass, the drums shake a room as much as the cavernous thuds of her contemporaneous singles, and the song’s melody and the fierce vocal performance straddle both worlds. And if you don’t like the mix there’s like 900 different versions with 2000 different guitarists — only a slight exaggeration. Its overall success is testament to Janet’s persona, sure, because nothing she released could have failed at this point, but you can’t go to Number One with single number six off an album without your usual co-writers and producers unless you’ve written something that connects with listeners and performed it with power. The way she slams down on “don’t understand… why you… insist…” is a moment of perplexed, angry humanity in the middle of a song that tries to understand something tragic — the corrosion of drugs and gangs on young people’s lives — and while the soloing is a little hammy, the song escapes being embarrassingly corny. Because in fact the whole song kicks ass.

Pedro Joao Santos on “Love Will Never Do (Without You)” [8.71]

One of the greatest pleasures in getting into Janet is how deliriously bold all of her work is. A story, if you will: how Jimmy & Terry stepped in to support her emancipation and helped her invent new jack swing all within Control, before taking the formula apart in Rhythm Nation 1814, aiming for pop that was both a manifesto against bigotry and, between a balm and a corrective, a rush of love. It was designed for high impact, meaning it would’ve always been a pop juggernaut — the material was there, even if the marketing was oblique, which it was. Instead of a glamour shot in Technicolor and a flirtatious title, the 12 million copies sold feature a stark black and white portrait backed by a call-to-arms; the pop froth is smattered around the backbone of topical anthems.

From single to single, A&M skittered between the two sides and amassed consecutive top 10 singles, but it was the last calling card that proved career-defining. At first, “Love Will Never Do (Without You)”’s hard-edged beats scan identical to “Rhythm Nation”’s sonic matrix: belligerent and completed by Janet’s frontal vox, only in this instance driven through a more feminine marketing (the music video is a blueprint). That’s the first trick: she unexpectedly launches into the first verse in a tentative, lightly hostile lower register (“like a guy would,” said Jimmy Jam, as it was to be a duet) and keeps it until the chorus wraps up. It’s pop as friction. By the second verse, Janet goes up an octave and matches the now-bubbling passion at the forefront. The tiny synth countdown drives it into a perpetual unfolding, each time emerging to add more (vocal) layers to the cacophony and threaten to wrap it up, before coming back in force.

Janet’s head voice soars up to the grand finale, a pop cataclysm of an ending, one of the best in recorded history — which applies to the entirety of “Love Will Never Do,” a simultaneous pitch for chaotic head-over-heels energy and blockbuster status. It’s a bizarre ride and a joyous knockout: the honeymoon phase juiced into one relentless beast of a banger, one that changed pop for good.

Jackie Powell on “State of the World” [6.67]

“State of the World” deserved a music video. At its heart, this is a dance cut with a little bit less of the hard rock that roars in “Rhythm Nation.” In content and in sound, this track is a sequel and that’s not a criticism. It’s an expansion which encourages a foot tap by the listener and includes an absolutely integral bassline that drives this track through and through. While the song clocks in at under five minutes and could have been a bit shorter, its chorus, which crescendos in clarity and volume, makes up for it. In addition to Jackson’s delivery on the verses, which is rather understated, the sound effects which illustrate “State of the World”  aren’t too kitschy. The cries and crashes aren’t as apparent as in brother Michael’s “Earth Song” for instance, and that’s appropriate. The politics had to run as smooth as the bass on this track, and they did. They didn’t serve as a distraction, but rather as an asset. Janet was the master of New Jack Swing, and while folks look to her brother’s album Dangerous as the most successful of this genre, Janet experimented with it first.  The percussive repetition, serves a purpose for Jackson on the record. It maintains the same intensity throughout as it reflects exactly what she has to say. Lyrically, I wish that Jackson explained how her “Nation” would “weather the storm.” To this day, homelessness and poverty are issues that affect people continuously. Jackson states the cornerstone rather than the specifics, and maybe that’s okay. It’s something that in 2019 we need more than ever. While unity appears so far out of our reach, Janet attested as early as 1991 that we can’t stop and shan’t stop.

Thomas Inskeep on “The Best Things in Life Are Free” (with Luther Vandross, BBD and Ralph Tresvant) [7.60]

To soundtrack his 1992 film Mo’ Money, Damon Wayans (who wrote and starred in the critically-derided box office hit) called upon superproducers Jam & Lewis, and they did work, producing or co-producing 13 of the album’s 14 tracks and writing or co-writing 12 of them. The soundtrack’s lead single was very pointedly a “look at all the cool stars we got together” move, featuring superstars Vandross and Jackson duetting, along with a brief rap bridge from Bell Biv DeVoe (credited here as BBD) and their New Edition compadre Ralph Tresvant. Released as a single in May 1992, it’s a perfect summertime smash, simultaneously airy-light and slammin’, with Vandross and Jackson weaving in and out of each other’s vocals effortlessly. BBD and Tresvant pop in with a nothingburger of a rap (Tresvant gets a label credit for literally uttering one line, the song’s title) that at least serves to provide a modicum of grit to the proceedings, but no matter: Jackson especially sounds breezier than maybe ever, while Vandross seems to float above the record. The two are magical on a track perfectly suited for them (credit Jam & Lewis, of course), and the result is a minor classic.

Jonathan Bogart on “That’s the Way Love Goes” [7.86]

A little over a year ago I rather overshared in this space when discussing Madonna’s “Erotica,” released a year before this single. A year makes a lot of difference: by the time I was listening to Shadoe Stevens count this down on American Top 40, the summer it became the longest-running #1 hit any Jackson family member ever had, radio pop was no longer a dirty, soul-damning secret, just a daily companion, a window into a more colorful, adult, and interesting world than the ones I knew from books. I would probably have had a healthier relationship to romance and sexuality, in fact, if this had been my introduction to overtly sexual pop rather than “Erotica” — both songs share the technique of a sultry spoken-word refrain, but Janet’s is actually grown-up, with the confidence of a woman who knows what she wants and how to achieve it, with none of Madonna’s juvenile need to épater les bourgeois. As it happened I didn’t particularly connect to “That’s the Way Love Goes,” having reached the stage in my adolescence when getting a charge out of raspy-voiced men singing about political instability felt like the more gender-appropriate inevitability. It wouldn’t be until years later when I returned to re-examine the radio pop of my youth with maturer ears that the amazing miracle of this song fully dawned on me: those pillowy guitar samples plucked from songs where raspy-voiced men sang about political instability, but pressed into service of a loping, candlelit coo: equal parts seduction and vulnerability, Janet singing with the authority of someone who had already conquered the world about the grown-woman concerns that really matter: love, and sex, and the impossible beauty that results when they intertwine.

David Moore on “If” [8.33]

Janet Jackson sang explicitly about “nasty boys,” but I was, to use a term my son’s preschool teacher used to describe him, a timid boy, and I soaked up the privileges of maleness with a corresponding fear of performative masculinity. My love of women through childhood was paired with a deep-seated self-loathing that snuffed out friendships, made me uncomfortable in my body, and sparked intense, violent fantasies directed toward unnamed aggressors in my mind, all those “bad guys.” I wouldn’t be able to reflect on any of this until adulthood. But there was a point in preadolescence when the contours of the trap started to become discernible, and Janet Jackson’s “If” was both a cherished song — one I would listen to rapt in front of MTV or on the radio, legs haphazardly splayed behind me — and was also the uncanny soundtrack to my discomfort: a muscular, menacing, alien object that completely unnerved me, made me a supplicant to its rhythm, got into my head and into my guts, made me move, if only for a minute, in a world that glanced contemptuously toward — but stood defiantly outside of — that toxic timidity. I was the woman telling the man what I wanted, and I was also the man obeying; I was the dancer and I was the floor, too. On “If,” Janet Jackson and Jam & Lewis tamed the New Jack Squall that her brother unleashed on Dangerous with Teddy Riley, insisted upon its lockstep subservience to her mission and her groove, and pointed to an R&B futurism that was barely a twinkle in pop music’s eye in 1993. The result is simultaneously mechanistic and wild, rolling waves of noise that you quickly learn to surf or risk drowning in them. That same year, I also found inspiration in angry men, many of them likely nasty ones, the same men I would have assiduously avoided in person and fought off in my dreams. But Janet Jackson kept me honest, reminded me that my anger was a tell for my underlying cowardice and shame. There is never a hint in “If” that her hypothetical proposition — too strident for any coyness or the suggestion of flirting — could ever be satisfactorily answered. Not by you anyway. No boy, nasty or timid, could meet Janet Jackson’s challenge; she’s mocking the guy who would even try. By the time you hit that cacophony of a middle 8 break, defibrillation on an already racing heartbeat, you’re defeated, more thoroughly than any bad guy you might have dreamt up. You’re not ready for this world — you’re not, so you can’t, and you won’t. But what if…?

Jonathan Bradley on “Again” [5.67]

It sounds like a fairy tale: billowing keys, Janet’s tinkling voice, and no drums to earth the fantasy. “Again” was from John Singleton’s Poetic Justice, not a Disney picture, but it shimmers with its own magic anyway. The melody is gorgeous: listen to Janet measuring out the descending syllables in “suddenly the memories came back to me” like they’re sinking in as she sings the words. (She repeats the motif on “making love to you/oh it felt so good and so right” — this is a romance where the sex is as fondly remembered as the emotions.) Janet Jackson is such a versatile performer, and for all the bold strokes and blunt rhythmic force of her best known moments, “Again” is a treasure all of its own for being none of these: it is tiny and tender and sparkles with a real joy that is all the more wondrous for sounding like it could not exist outside of a storybook.

Scott Mildenhall on “Whoops Now” [4.83]

Even outside America, there’s a widespread tendency for people, in search of a lifetime’s grand narrative, to define everything that happened before The Day The World Changed – a coincidental proxy for their childhood, youth or adolescence – as a simpler time. It’s a convenient illusion for anyone in the world lucky enough to be able to believe it, whose formative years were insulated from war or suffering and can be instead defined by the most carefree scraps of pop culture. In that respect “Whoops Now” holds great temptation, it being the breeziest brush-off of burdens, with an all-over Teflon disposition. It’s therefore an almost fantastical ideal of ’90s radio (and still one of Janet’s most played in the UK); a warm and fuzzy-round-the-edges memory of which on closer inspection, the details are inscrutable. Janet, aloft in a proletarian reverie, relates a confusing tale of overnight shift work, a hindrance of a boss and the consequent curtailing of her plans for some fun in the sun this weekend with her friends (who, judging by her extended roll call, seem to mostly be record execs, producers and performers, as well as dogs). Narratively, it’s difficult to tease apart, but all you need to know is that hurrah – she somehow ends up on holiday anyway. A story that sounds more like something from an expletive-laden segment of Airline thus becomes the most casual celebration of the apparent inevitability of positive resolutions when you’re a globe-straddling megastar, or perhaps just a kid in the back of your parents’ car with the radio on. With that certainty of happiness and universal balance, and the belief that it ever was or could be, it’s fantasy upon fantasy upon fantasy. But no bother: Anguilla here we come.

Nortey Dowuona on “Throb” [6.86]

I started listening to Janet Jackson as a happy accident. Her songs were on Atlantic Radio, but nowhere else. I barely heard her music growing up and only knew of her massive career, and not the music that made it so huge.

So when I first pressed play on “Throb,” I was kinda scandalized.

Because it was so directly, overtly sexual, and confident about it. Janet was ready to get down and dirty, without all the mind games, patronization and bullpuddy packed all over it. The lyrics are pretty straightforward, and there are only ten lines of lyrics. Its pretty clear what Janet wants, and she’s gonna get it.

Plus, the bass was slamming, it slunk around my neck and just rested there while the air horn synths washed over my eyes, blinding me. The drums then stepped over me and plucked me up, with cooing and cascading moans and grunts swirled around my body, shredding me to pieces —

Then the song ended. And it was over.

I honestly, can’t really say why this is my favorite Janet song, but I can say that you should probably play it while having sex, and while thinking about having sex, and play this late night in the night if deciding to have sex. I know this’ll be the first thing I’ll play if I have sex with anyone.

Thomas Inskeep on “Throb”

In the summer of 1993, I’d just finished my second freshman year of college, in my hometown. (I’d gone to college straight out of high school in 1988, and dropped out without much to show for it, 16 months later.) One of my best girlfriends had herself just graduated from college and was back at her parents’ house, job-hunting. We were both past 21 and looking for a place to go dancing, and we found it in the nearest big city, Fort Wayne, Indiana, about 45 minutes away. It was a short-lived gay bar — so short-lived I don’t even recall its name, sadly — with a dance floor roughly the size of a postage stamp. I don’t remember meeting anyone there, ever. (I didn’t drive at the time, so Julie always had to, so it’s not like I could’ve gone home with someone anyway.) I don’t remember anything about the bar — except its dancefloor, and the fact that they had a decent DJ on the weekends, who mostly played house music, which I loved. And there were three songs that got played, in my memory at least, every single week. (And Julie and I really did go just about every weekend that summer.)

The first was Bizarre Inc.’s “I’m Gonna Get You,” an ebullient diva-house track which topped Billboard’s Dance Club/Play chart in January but was just peaking at pop radio in June. The second was, really, the gay club record of the year, RuPaul’s “Supermodel.” It peaked at #2 on the Dance Club/Play chart in March, but never left gay clubs at all through 1993. When that got played at the club, I would, week-in, week-out, “work the runway,” lip-syncing my ass off. (It’s just that kind of song.) And the third was an album track from a newly-released album (that would, in fact, eventually be promoted to dance clubs at peak at #2 on the Club/Play chart), Janet Jackson’s “Throb.” This song went where Jackson never had before, both musically (it’s a straight-up house jam) and lyrically (it’s a straight-up sex jam). Its lyrics are minimal but to the point: “I can feel your body/Pressed against my body/When you start to poundin’/Love to feel you throbbin’.” No subtleties there! Accordingly, Julie and I would spend the song grinding up against each other on a tiny riser at the back of the dance floor, because why not? And because it’s fun.

26 years later, ‘Throb” still kills. And throbs.

Maxwell Cavaseno on “Runaway” [6.50]

My childhood managed to dodge the oceanic nature of pop thanks to being struck between two extremes. My father usually kept the car full of rap, via cassettes of assorted rising stars of the moment (Big Pun, Nas, Various Wu-Tang Soloists) or whatever was playing via Hot 97. Meanwhile my mother typically wallowed in a realm of AOR pop a la Amy Grant or the likes who you could never remember anything about. If there was anything majorly important in the history of pop music from 89-98, lemme tell you, that shit didn’t happen anywhere near me. However, one of the few memories that did manage to linger on was “Runaway.” It was a record that managed to ethereally sneak up to me like some kind of weird creep that I just couldn’t understand with its weird foreign instrumentation simulating orientalist visions and Janet’s background vocals harmonizing like a bunch of Buddhist Cats sneering a la Randy Savage’s “nyeeeah.” Whenever I trailed along in supermarkets or tried to keep busy in waiting rooms, I could comprehend what happened on other songs I liked in the outer world like “Take a Bow” or “Kiss From A Rose.” But this? How did you rationalize all of these gliding vocals crooning and this swarm of glittery noises when you have barely any understanding of the world around you, let alone music? No matter how much further away and away I’d get from whenever it was meant to be a single, it could still disruptively appear in the wild and send the whole day into a state of disarray. It’s so alarming to know now as a grown adult that I can personally summon this ifrit of a single, rather than think of it as some sort of rare sighting of trickster energy (all the more bolstered by Janet’s ad libbed teasing of supposed imperfection and other-human excess) that isn’t meant to be heard more than once in a blue moon. To be honest, I may just forget altogether after the fact, the same way I never remembered the name of the song even when considering it for review. Just that “nyeeeah” hung around in my memory.

Danilo Bortoli on “Got ’til It’s Gone” [6.17]

In Joni Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi”, a cut from her 1970 album Ladies of the Canyon, she sang of impeding progress as a form of destruction (“They paved paradise/And put up a parking lot”). Often seen as as environmental anthem, actually, she was looking back at the sixties, and then seeing, right ahead, a decade that showcased no promising future, only aching skepticism. This resulted in one the purest, simplest lines she has ever written: “Don’t it always seem to go/That you don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone”. Almost thirty years later, Janet Jackson conjured those same thoughts, conveying, instead, a different meaning. The Velvet Rope was her very own game of smoke and mirrors, and intimate and often misleading look at her private life. Lying at the center of that album, there is a delicate tribute. “Got ‘til It’s Gone” features a well-placed sample from that line culled from “Big Yellow Taxi.” The context is entirely different however. Here, the same words are uttered between confessions of love. It helps, then, that “Got ‘til It’s Gone” is, in reality, a talk. It’s the way Janet asks “What’s the next song?”. It’s the way Q-Tip responds “Like Joni says.” It’s also the way he asserts finally: “Joni Mitchell never lies.” The brilliance of a sample travelling three decades is that it is deliciously meta. The concept of truth, in Janet Jackson’s universe, is interchangeable. That way, she, too, can never lie.

Josh Love on “Together Again” [6.86]

Together Again was originally conceived as a ballad, and no wonder – it’s a deeply sentimental (borderline treacly, if I’m being uncharitable) song about death and angels and reuniting in the afterlife in heaven. Deciding to record it as a surging house jam instead was an absolute masterstroke, and the result is one of the most purely joyous, transcendent moments of Janet’s career. The idea of carrying a lost loved one in your heart and feeling their spirit in the goodness you encounter in the world, and even the thought of one day joining together with them again in the great beyond – “Together Again” makes you feel that joy rather than merely verbalizing it. So many of us say that when we die we want those we leave behind to celebrate our lives rather than mourn our passing, but Janet is one of the few artists to really bring that radical acceptance of impermanence to life.

Thomas Inskeep on “I Get Lonely” (TNT Remix) [7.43]

Allow me to be cynical for a moment: Janet Jackson, in 1998, is still a superstar. But in the past five years, she’s only had one R&B #1, ‘94’s sex-jam “Any Time, Any Place” (assisted greatly by its R. Kelly remix). So if you’re thinking “What do we do to get Janet back to the summit,” what do you do? Well, it’s 1998. How about calling in Teddy Riley? Better yet, how about he gets a helping hand from Timbaland? And the best: how about Teddy brings his merry men of BLACKstreet with him for a vocal assist? Ergo, “I Get Lonely (TNT Remix),” now label-credited to “Janet [she was just going by “Janet” at the time] featuring BLACKstreet.”

And you know what? It’s genius. The idea, brilliant. The execution, top-notch. Riley on the remix, with instrumental help from Timbo, with guest vocals from BLACKstreet: it’s more exciting than the original (which was already quite good), has a little more junk in its trunk (those should-be-patented instrumental tics that Timbaland is such a wizard with, ohmygod, much like Janet’s big brother’s vocal tics), and the duet vocals are superb (especially as it was so rare to hear Janet singing with others at the time, and every member of BLACKstreet save Riley was a great-to-marvelous singer). Presto! Two weeks atop the R&B chart in May 1998, along with a #3 Hot 100 peak. Mission accomplished — and fortunately, it works even better artistically than it did commercially. Everybody wins!

Pedro Joao Santos on “Go Deep” [7.14]

That The Velvet Rope’s party song is so heavy on gravitas and spine-tingling urgency speaks volumes. In an album so hellbent on carnal and psychological openness, the party of “Go Deep” goes deeper, and makes sense. It’s not just the top-20 banger it factually was, and it’s not just hedonism for the sake of it. That is, if you don’t divorce it from the wounds of longing, manipulation, abuse and distress being sliced fresh. Tension lies within this absolute romp, placed midway through the red-hot catharsis of Rope. It might be that the party acts as a salve for the trauma. Though it isn’t put into words, you can hear it subliminally: Janet’s hesitant vocal; the evocative, near-melancholy synth fluctuating about. You can even imagine the words as portals: making friends come together as support; the sexual come-ons not just because, but maybe as physical relief for the pain.

A bare-bones lyric sheet would give you nothing — but music as context goes a long way. And the music itself from “Go Deep” gets me in raptures after all these years, from that ridiculous boing (perhaps best known from “I Can’t Dance” by Genesis) to the bass driving it, all chunky and rubbery, and the dramatic string arpeggios in the middle-8. If there’s got to be a template for urgent, carnivorous Friday night anthems, let this be the one — and keep it in context.

Leonel Manzanares de la Rosa on “You” [7.00]

The Velvet Rope carries a strong and fascinating legacy; It is rightly praised as a predecessor to both mainstream R&B’s exploration of the intimate (the body) and the spiritual (the soul) in the continuing decades, and to the experimental scope and atmospherics later adopted by today’s so-called “Alt-R&B,” and this extraordinary mixture of elements is never more efficient than in the album’s third track “You.” The song is, first and foremost, a triumph of production genius. Jimmy Jam & Terry Lewis’s use of space, and the dynamic at play between the then-cutting-edge electronica ingredients and neo-soul’s earnestness and sensual themes, should itself be a case study for aspiring producers, but it’s the way Janet’s vocals are performed and filtered through the track that take the song to unsuspected levels of greatness. There is something in the breathy, low-pitched verses that exudes unadulterated eroticism, and when the post-chorus harmonies kick in where things really become ecstatic. In several interviews, Janet herself defined this album as “baby-making music”, and I can safely bet that “You” is the song she was thinking about. And its echoes still reverberate today, not only in the sound of R&B to come, but in the fact that thousands of people were conceived to this very beat.

Edward Okulicz on “Free Xone” [6.83]

I remember it only vaguely; it was 1995, and for drama class we had to do a performance based on a social theme using a combination of media and methods. I was in a group with a big Janet fan, who decided to use her music as the basis of a combination spoken-word, mime and dance performance on racism. I only understanding the themes in the abstract because I was young, sheltered, and white. I knew racism was a thing I didn’t like, but it wasn’t an existential threat to me. Two years later, on “Free Xone,” Janet would speak directly to me and tell me of a bleak present with the promise of a better future.  Janet told it like it was, and still is for many: if you are gay, despite the fact that love is love, a lot of people are going to hate you or at least be uncomfortable around you. Homophobia isn’t just violence or hostility, it can be any kind of social rejection, and it can happen anywhere, as it does in the anecdote in the first part of the song, where a pleasant conversation with a person sitting next to you on an airplane sours because of it.

Janet Jackson is a dancer, but she didn’t dance around anything if she didn’t have to. She leaned into her status as a gay icon out of love, not necessity. But she made her social justice songs out of both love and necessity. Hating people is so not mellow. Love and sex are never wrong. Janet Jackson has never resiled from that belief, and never shied away from putting it in song. I’d grown up listening to Janet Jackson, but I’d never thought of her as an ally for myself, and it was intensely comforting to hear that she was on my side when nobody else seemed to be (Meshell Ndegeocello’s “Leviticus Faggot” the previous year had more or less convinced me I’d die in the closet).

In 2019, her funk here sounds a little dinky, the transitions between the soft groove and the raucous party bounce are kind of awkward, and the weird song structure sounds like it was cut and pasted together, but it’s a collage of compelling pieces. It got quite a lot of play on the alternative youth station here, the one whose listeners were at the time generally terrified of a) pop superstars, b) Black artists, and c) dancing. Someone thought the kids needed to hear this, and they were right. “Free Xone” helped my nascent consciousness come to grips with earlier songs that I’d just considered a good time before. Its story is less common in the Western world, now, but it’s still true as history for some, and as present for others.

Leonel Manzanares de la Rosa on “Tonight’s the Night” [4.50]

I’m a sucker for good covers; we usually tend to give songwriting, the cult of the inspired author, and the concept of originality a certain mystique that grossly overshadows the importance of skilful creative interpretation and re-invention. But many of our most important singers are essentially covers artists — Joe Cocker, Tom Jones, Bettye Lavette, a huge number of blues and jazz singers, most of the 50s-60s Greenwich Village folk scene — because of course we need these musicians to give these tunes another dimension, whether stylistic, generational, or purely emotional. Also, a song’s perspective can change dramatically because of who is singing.  “Tonight’s The Night” works with Rod’s gravelly, rugged voice, and, although it can sound a bit creepy by today’s standards, the arrangements carry it beautifully, but in Janet’s sexually adventurous, musically exuberant The Velvet Rope, it acquires a new dimension, a far more interesting one, might I add. From Janet’s view, and the brilliant decision of not changing genders in the lyrics, her version alludes to bisexuality in a way that makes complete sense within’ the album’s core subject matters, and works wonders within’ its production philosophy. Stewart later presented his live renditions of the song by saying “This is an original by Janet Jackson”. No one will refute that. It’s her song now.

Alex Clifton on “All For You” [6.86]

“All For You” is the first Friday night you go out with your new college friends and that utter sense of freedom where you realize the night is yours without a curfew. It’s sparkling fairy lights in the background, a disco ball overhead, at a roller rink or at a club with a fancy light-up dancefloor, maybe a stolen swig of rum on your tongue. It’s the moment you see someone new and your heart falls into your stomach with no prior warning, and you suddenly know you’ll do anything to talk to them. You simply have to; it’s an animal urge, chemicals and hormones whizzing through you and making it hard to walk because you’re giddy. Maybe you’re braver than I am and you go talk to the person who’s snagged your attention, but maybe you hang back with your friends and pretend you’re not watching out for your crush while also dancing stupidly with your new friends. There’s a pure exhilaration in this song that many have tried to emulate but few match the ease with which Janet performs. She’s flirty and sexy like no other, but “All For You” also makes you, the listener, feel flirty and sexy too — something about it worms its way into you and becomes the shot of confidence you need. Lots of people can write songs about dancing at the club, but Janet turns it into a night you’ll remember for the rest of your life.

Jibril Yassin on “Someone to Call My Lover” [7.00]

Does falling in love always feel the same every time? It’s one thing to keep pushing on in life but what’s striking about “Someone to Call My Lover” is how infectious Janet’s optimism is. Built on an Erik Satie riff by way of the band America, Janet recast herself as a woman excited to love again. Let it be on the record – long-term relationships are fucking terrifying. Moving on from the dissolution of a marriage is disorienting and the songs that use Janet’s divorce as inspiration on All For You share a tentative yet firm belief in renewal.

She uses “maybe” on “Someone to Call My Lover” the way one throws out a “lol” after shooting their shot – you don’t even have time to catch it amid her grocery store list of wishes for her future love. “Someone to Call My Lover” hits all the right places thanks to the careful and immaculate production but it’s Janet’s sincerity that marks it as her best twee performance.

Will Adams on “Son Of A Gun” [5.20]

Given All For You’s post-divorce setting, it was only appropriate that after the aural sunbeam of the title track and giddy optimism of “Someone to Call My Lover,” Janet would do a 180 and proceed to rip him a new one. The opening taunts — “Ha-ha, hoo-hoo, thought you’d get the money too” — against the throbbing kick bass set the scene, but the true genius of “Son of a Gun” comes from its sampling and modernization of ultimate kiss-off song “You’re So Vain.” The classic bass riff, once soft in Carly Simon’s original, is now razor-sharp. The cavernous drum beats sound like you’re trapped in an underground dungeon. All the while, Janet mutters burn after burn right into your ear (“I’d rather keep the trash and throw you out”) before Simon launches into the “I betcha think this song is about you” refrain, sounding like a Greek chorus confirming Jackson’s digs. The album version carries on until the six-minute mark, with Carly Simon waxing poetic about clouds in her coffee and apricot scarves in an extended outro. The video version wisely excises this in favor of guest verses from Missy Elliott, whose reliably grinning performance shoves the knife in deeper. In both versions, however, Janet’s menace is preserved. Forming a trinity with All For You’s preceding two singles, “Son of a Gun” showed just how versatile Jackson is, and how adept she is at encapsulating the messy, complex emotions of an ended relationship.

Will Adams on “All Nite (Don’t Stop)” [6.17]

I had been looking away from the television when it happened. By the time I’d heard the gasps from my parents and I glanced up at the screen, the cameras had cut to an aerial shot of the Reliant Stadium in Houston, where the 2004 Super Bowl was taking place. My 11 year old brain couldn’t process exactly what happened from my parents’ concerned murmurs, and having completely missed the incident (there was no YouTube back then, see), it would take years for me to understand the impact that the “wardrobe malfunction” had on culture and Jackson’s career. The greater impact was to be expected — the six-figure FCC fine on CBS (later dismissed by the Supreme Court) and conservative handwringing about the moral decline of the country — but Jackson in particular suffered unduly. There was the blacklist, ordered by Les Moonves, which kept her off CBS, MTV and Infinity Broadcasting. Jackson’s appearance at that year’s Grammy Awards was canceled. Late-night talk show hosts turned it into monologue fodder, usually grossly and usually at her expense. The controversy hampered her album cycles well into the Discipline era. Meanwhile, Justin Timberlake remained entirely unaffected. His career would skyrocket two years later with the release of FutureSex/LoveSounds; he became a Saturday Night Live darling; he performed solo at the Super Bowl’s halftime show in 2018. This alone puts Damita Jo and “All Nite (Don’t Stop)” in a more sympathetic light, but even then, pop radio missed out on a truly brilliant song here. Janet acts as the Dance Commander, taking the opening guitar lick from Herbie Hancock’s “Hang Up Your Hang Ups” and turning it into a lasso with which she throws you onto the dancefloor. The percussion percolates, each sound placed perfectly to create an undeniable groove. Because of the blacklist, it didn’t even break the Hot 100, and the video was also subject to its own asinine controversy — the few video channels that managed to avoid the blacklist edited out the sexual content, including a scene were two female dancers kiss. Even fifteen years later, it feels like we’re still reckoning with how Jackson was treated in the aftermath. But there’s an inspiring resilience in “All Nite (Don’t Stop)” reflected in the smile she bears on the Damita Jo cover; its unabashed sexuality in the face of all the backlash makes it an even better listen today.

Kat Stevens on “Strawberry Bounce” [7.17]

I like Janet best when she takes risks, whether that be controversial subject matter, a new image or a change of musical direction. Old faithfuls Jam & Lewis are still a solid presence on Damita Jo, but on “Strawberry Bounce” we see Janet plumping for a left field choice in the then-unknown Kanye West. The result is an intriguing Ryvita, all brittle handclaps and feathery faux-ingenue whispering, on the verge of crumbling into nothing. It’s so light that there’s no bassline, just a queasy glockenspiel tinkle and Janet’s butter-wouldn’t-melt sing-song. I keep wondering to myself: why have Janet and Kanye chosen to present a song about working a shift at a strip club in the style of an Aptimil Follow-On Milk advert? Is it a subtle reminder that sexy times may eventually lead to night feeds and dirty nappies? It doesn’t help that instead of a proper beat, we have Jay-Z muttering ‘BOUNCE!’ as if he’s grumpily shooing a dog off his lawn. It’s confusing and uncomfortable, yet compelling and convincing, and I’m still listening. The risk has paid off.

Will Adams on “Rock With U” [5.83]

“Just Dance” is often thought of as ground zero for the rise of dancepop and eventually EDM in the US, but it had been brewing for over a year before the Lady Gaga song topped the Hot 100 in early 2009. From 2007 onward, the increased interest in incorporating elements of disco via four-on-the-floor beats and faster tempos created some indelible hybrids, particularly in the R&B world: “Don’t Stop the Music”; “Forever”; “Closer”; “Spotlight”; and “Rock With U.” While most of those songs stuck to traditional verse-chorus pop structure, “Rock With U” proves that sometimes simplicity is best: A house arrangement of arpeggios and basic rhythms. A single verse, repeated three times and interspersed with wordless vocalizing with nearly no variation, save for Janet’s whispers. All this, combined with the glorious one-shot video, creates a hypnotic effect, like the song will go on forever. On a recent Song Exploder episode about “Honey,” Robyn said of dance music: “It’s about putting you in a place where you’re in your body dancing without thinking about when it’s gonna end. It’s more about the moment and how it makes you feel.” This is the heart of “Rock With U”: an invitation to get lost in the music, forget about the outside world, and just rock.

Maxwell Cavaseno on “So Much Betta” [5.67]

The beginning of the 2010s was way too challenging in retrospect and I regret every minute of it. “So Much Betta” was a song I first heard in a mix by Robin Carolan, now best known for founding and guiding Tri-Angle Records, but for a brief period operated a side-blog called “SO BONES” where he’d pontificate about random gems of pop, R&B and rap but in a way that made records feel gross and sinister. Suddenly Cassie’s “My House” was a ghost story, Vanessa Hudgens’s “Don’t Talk” would be compared to Takashi Miike’s Audition, and so on. In retrospect I think of the Capital P Pop songs of the decade that I’ve responded to enthusiastically like “TT,” “Cheyenne,” “Strangers,” “Somebody Else,” “Backseat,” “Lac Troi” or the dozens of others there is at least usually a despair or gloom I can at minimum project onto the record even where it might not be obvious. And that comes from hearing Janet Jackson whisper over a record that sounded like some toxic goo from out of the dregs of the Rinse.FM swamps I’d often thought to be “the coolest” sounds, before cutting through over glistening synths that felt like a phantom of not Janet per se but her brother’s past. It was a song that felt v. strange in 2010 well after MJ had died with the listless echo of the Pop Monarch feeling less like a dream-like invocation and more like a degraded copy of a copy in its grotesquery. Enough can be said about how cool and timeless and bright and powerful Janet at her best can feel. But it deserves an acknowledgement that she could also make a song that was so evocative in all the most unpleasant of ways.

William John on “Unbreakable” [6.67]

“Unbreakable” as an adjective is applicable to those rare, unending, strong relationships between people, whether they be romantic, platonic, familial, or, as has been intimated in relation to her song of the same name, between performer and audience. But it’s also a word that can be used to describe oneself, and one’s ability to traverse adversity with stoicism. The first song on Jackson’s most recent album doesn’t sound defiant – more “stroll to the supermarket on a warm summer’s evening” than an escapade to Rhythm Nation. But courage manifests in different ways. Jackson’s breezy delivery, which takes on an ecstatic form in the song’s chorus, is indicative of her self-assurance at her status; she’s embracing the languor allowed to her as a legend. She may have been removed of her clothes in front of the whole world a decade prior; she may have spent her whole life in the shadow of her infamous relative – but she hasn’t faltered. She’s still here. As she greets her listeners in her inviting whisper at the song’s conclusion, she notes that it’s “been a while” since her last missive, and that there is “lots to talk about”. But her listeners aren’t impatient; there’s always time for Janet. Her story has always been one of control, of poise, of excellence. Long may it continue.

Pedro Joao Santos on “Dream Maker/Euphoria” [5.17]

When I get to delve deep into a legend, as with Janet, I tend to hit the ground running and have them release a new, great album a few months later. Not having heard 20 Y.O. and Discipline, I was shielded from the Janet-isms from the ’00s and viewed Unbreakable as a proper continuation to her legacy, instead of the grand comeback it actually was — hackneyed artwork, halted tour and all. Janet got the upper hand, finding her reunited with Jimmy Jam & Terry Lewis, in a steadfast gaze in a steadfast gaze over airtight, pensive and giddy R&B. An exemplary return to form, incidentally devoid of all the raunch, bathroom breaks and Kioko.

One older Janet-ism survived in a marginal capacity: the penchant for interludes, continued here in only two moments (aside from endearing sneezes and spoken-word outros): one was the bizarre preview for a Target-exclusive full track; the other was “Dream Maker/Euphoria”. A precise inflection point scribed upon the passage from “side 1” to “2” — even if things threaten to get a bit pedestrian and humdrum in the last half. The track itself is a dual mood, yet a continual trek through the glow of a renaissance. A seemingly old groove recalling the Jackson 5 gets dusted from the vaults for the first part. That’s ear candy for ages in itself, a web of vox so intensely feverish and melodically preternatural. It gets looped tantalisingly, then it transcends onto the next level. Full-on rapid eye movement: keyboards and ambience make up the sound of eyelids opening to meet a purple, unreal sky — suspended between worlds, a dream dimension of utopia and the reality where those ideas must coalesce. “I guess the dreamer must be awake,” Janet concludes after envisioning a “perfect place” exempt from “jealousy, abuse or hate,” “war, hunger or hate.”

Janet’s  four peak-era albums alone prove she’s been excelling at world-building where and when the world was far from ready. In “Dream Maker/Euphoria,” it isn’t so much the stark condemnations of Rhythm Nation 1814, but its more hopeful fantasies, articulated through the confident tone of Control, set to the type of innovative musical reverie The Velvet Rope predated, softened through janet.’s sensuous filter. But more than the touchpoints of yesteryear, the essence of “Dream Maker/Euphoria” lives in its manifestation of the future: how tangible and expansive it might just become, if given a chance.

[junker-town]

The most ridiculous, bizarre and sublime sports video games of all-time

Sports are dumb. Video games are also dumb. But dumb sports video games are the best.

You know what’s good? Sports! You know what also can be (generally) good? Video games! It’s also pretty fun when those two things meet, and even more fun when they meet in the weirdest ways possible.

That happened quite a bit more in the 90s and early aughts than it does now (probably because it costs a whole lot more money to make video games these days, but that’s another story) and while they weren’t always good games, they were usually worth it on their novelty factor alone. And I am fascinated by these games.

I have spent hours playing Ninja Golf on the Atari 7800. I don’t really know why, I’m just so intrigued by the process that spawned such things. I’ve played far too much MLB Nicktoons, because seeing Spongebob Squarepants share a field with Carlos Beltran is still hilarious to me. To use a more well-known example: Jerry Glanville’s Pigskin Footbrawl is something I’ve been playing a lot of. It’s a game that doesn’t relate to Glanville in any way, but somehow has his name on it. Discovering why that is and also, you know, playing the games, has been my mission for a long time.

Hopefully that means my bosses will continue to let me write about the cross-section of sports and video games, with some deeper dives and the like. But until then, as sort of a primer, an appetizer if you will, how about we establish a base? Let’s take a brief look at the WEIRDEST sports games for each major sport!

This is part one, where we’re covering American football, basketball, hockey, baseball, soccer and golf — I will cover tennis, auto racing, combat sports and some others in a follow-up article.

American Football: Brutal Sports Football (Atari Jaguar)

Honorable Mention: Jerry Glanville’s Pigskin Footbrawl (Super Nintendo)

We’re starting out hot and heavy with, you guessed it, an Atari Jaguar game. Also released for a number of other consoles, Brutal Sports Football is exactly what it purports to be: football, but more brutal than football already is. I’m somewhat obsessed with this game.

Now, don’t confuse obsession with skill, because I am TERRIBLE at it. Part of that is me not having much experience with the Atari Jaguar, and part of that is the game being crushingly difficult. But it sure is fun, and as you can expect, it’s quite violent.

Featuring teams like the Thugs, Slayers and Goats (actual goatmen, of course), Brutal Sports Football is pretty standard football, if pretty standard football included axes, beheading, repeatedly stomping your opponent into the ground, powerups in the form of rabbits (?) and a surprising amount of backstory to its teams.

No, really. Every team has a brief explanation of their history/what kind of team they are. And they’re ridiculous.

Some of those are just ... whew.

Just how brutal is Brutal Sports Football, you ask? Well, you can use the severed heads of your enemies as a weapon to cave in the head of another. So, it’s at least on par with actual football.

There’s something about the gameplay that intrigues me, even though I can’t get a damn thing done in it. It’s surprisingly smooth-feeling for an early sports game, and the rules are interesting. Aside from the murdery bits, the goal is to get the ball into the end zone, which is an enclosed area a bit closer to a soccer goal. You can throw it or run it in, and when you run one it, it feels a good bit like dunking.

I suck at it (a theme you’ll find on this list), and I don’t think it’s an amazing video game. But it sure is weird.

Basketball: Bill Laimbeer’s Combat Basketball (Super Nintendo)

Honorable Mention: Michael Jordan: Chaos in the Windy City (Super Nintendo)

I’m going to start this one with a declaration: Bill Laimbeer’s Combat Basketball is a bad video game. There, I said it. It’s out in the open. Some people — whom I no longer respect as human beings — claim that it’s a good game and enjoy it immensely. They are horrible people and if you like it, so are you.

Hyperbole aside, WHERE IS BILL LAIMBEER? Much like Jerry Glanville’s Pigskin Footbrawl, Laimbeer has absolutely nothing to do with this video game, and like the game above, it was released under a different title in other regions, Future Basketball. But there is also very little about it that is futuristic, save for the drab, gray arenas, the robots and what the game says are jetpack-assisted jumps, but are actually still pretty lame, standard basketball jumps.

There’s bombs, but nothing about getting them feels good. What baskets do or do not go in seem to have no correlation with where you are and what the opposing players are doing to you, and the “combat” animations are so slight that it’s hard to tell if you’ve hit someone, unless they explode.

The game has bad sound effects, bad music, slow action, a bad camera, and very little excitement. I’m told that some people enjoy it, but as a kid, I’m not sure I’ve ever returned a game faster. That doesn’t make it any less weird though, and the fact that this game exists at all is pretty fascinating. Why does it have Bill Laimbeer’s name on it? Why is he on the cover? Where are the fans?

I’m so confused. I wanted to give this to Michael Jordan’s Chaos in the Windy City, or the fan game, Barkley: Shut up and Jam: Gaiden, but Laimbeer’s Combat Basketball is a little higher profile and I wanted to set the record straight while also pointing out that it’s weird. And dumb.

Baseball: Ninja Baseball Bat Man (Arcade)

Honorable Mention: Nicktoons MLB (Multi)

This is one of those that doesn’t REALLY resemble the actual sport it represents, because it’s not a baseball game so much as it is a 2D beat-em-up arcade game with a baseball theme. And when I say baseball theme, I mean every inch of this game is steeped in baseball stuff.

You fight baseballs. You fight giant catcher’s mitts with faces on them. You’re a robot baseball man who hits other robot baseball men with baseball bats. One of them just uses a giant baseball as a smashing weapon.

The story — yes the game has a story — is that you, the Ninja Baseball Bat Man — or N.B. Batman, as the commissioner of baseball refers to you, have to recover items that were stolen from the Baseball Hall of Fame. You can play as the well-balanced Captain Jose, the speedy Twinbats Ryno, the powerful Beanball Roger or the long-reaching Stick Straw, who stands 7’2’’, officially.

It’s a pretty great game, actually — a fun 2D brawler you can play cooperatively, I definitely played and beat this in multiple arcades with friends of mine.

The game was conceived by Drew Maniscalco, who came up with the idea after reading about the top grossing films of its time — Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and one of the Batman films (speculated to be Batman Returns). So Maniscalco wanted to create his own superhero-influenced game. He also liked the word “ninja”, thinking it felt “mysterious,” which was more than enough of a concept to make a video game in the early 90s.

This is the game on this list I can 100% recommend. You should play it if you can.

Hockey: Mutant League Hockey

Honorable Mention: NHL Hitz 2003

So, I actually didn’t want to include Mutant League Hockey on this list just because the Mutant League franchise is so big. That said, there is a surprising lack of weird hockey games. I went with NHL Hitz 2003 as the honorable mention because I think it works surprisingly well for an NFL Blitz spinoff, but I was hoping for something really nuts for hockey.

That isn’t to say that Mutant League Hockey is sane. No, it’s quite weird. It’s your basic hockey, except with robots, undead skeletons and trolls, and lots of things that are quite lethal, like exploding pucks and spikes on the boards.

Getting checked into them is not fun.

There are also random holes in the ice, and you can hit people with your stick. You can get a powerup that turns your goalie into a giant demon face, and if the opponents score on your giant demon face, it explodes.

And it’s oozing with personality, including fake coaching quotes like the one above. Have you ever seen a sideline interview that was actually interesting? Probably not. But they’re plenty interesting in Mutant League Hockey. Also, one of the arenas is the Madness Square Garden (why not Scare Garden?).

Soccer: Inazuma Eleven GO 2: Chrono Stone

Honorable Mention: Battle Soccer: Field No Hasha

If you’re unfamiliar with Inazuma Eleven, it’s a game developed by Level-5, a company responsible for many high profile puzzle and JRPG video games, like the Professor Layton, Dark Cloud and Ni no Kuni series of games. There is also a manga and anime spin-off of the games. I think any games in the series would fit on this list, but I went with this one because it’s my favorite of the bunch.

This is a story-heavy and strategy-heavy video game. The main character (of the series, not this game specifically), Mamoru Endou, is a talented goalkeeper and the grandson of Daisuke Endou, a legendary soccer player. You’re trying to save your team from being dissolved and you do that by progressing a surprisingly deep story, interspersed with bits of tactical soccer gameplay and strong anime cutscenes.

The game centers around the Football Frontier tournament, and includes arenas set throughout time and a final arena in a SKY PALACE. There you play Zeus, another team, who are drinking “ambrosia,” which is basically just a whole bunch of PEDs to make them better at the game. They’re juicing! In this relatively wholesome soccer game!

Gameplay includes scouting, recruiting new players by beating them in battle. In actual soccer games, when you run into one of the opposing players, it initiates a command duel, which has its own series of moves and actions you can take as part of it. Normal soccer rules apply with substitution and number of people on the field. It’s honestly impressive how deep it all goes. It’s not something I would recommend to non-RPG players, but fans of the genre should absolutely give it a spin.

Golf: Ribbit King (Nintendo Gamecube)

Honorable Mention: Desert Golf (Mobile)

Before I get into Ribbit King, a quick note about this honorable mention — Desert Golf is a simple never-ending golf game that came out on iOS and Android and doesn’t have much going on for it ... which is part of the reason it’s weird. The game has no explanations, no anything but a ball and hole, and some hills. I played it through a couple thousand holes. There are things about it that I will not talk about in case readers want to try it for themselves, but suffice to say when the game became a hit, a lot of people had a lot of discussions about secrets or things hidden in the procedurally-generated game.

Now, back to Ribbit King, an extremely under-appreciated golf game where you play as a person, or what appears to be a picnic basket(?), and you’re hitting catapults holding frogs with your mallet to launch said frogs around a course filled with flies, hazards and extra points. When you hit the frog, it will then hop upon landing, and how much hopping is dependent on powerups you’ve used, your swing, and the stamina of the frogs, which you can replenish with items.

Strictly speaking, since I strive for 100 percent accuracy, I will of course note that the game does not refer to it as golf, but Frolf.

It’s a weird game. There’s a full story mode with voice acting, and it’s as weird as you can expect. You play a carpenter named Scooter, and you’re trying to become the Frolf Champion, so you can win the Super Ribbinite, a fuel source needed to save your home planet. There’s also a sentient rock pile, gumball machine and karate-using panda.

The game is a successor to a Japan-only Playstation game titled Kero Kero King, which I played way back when but never knew about Ribbit King until the past year or so. I’m glad to have found it.

There are so many weird games for these sports I didn’t even get to mention — Cyber Baseball 2020, Mega Man Soccer, Blitz: The League, Zany Golf, like 40 other crazy baseball games and so much more. Sound off in the comments on what I missed and your predictions for the next batch of weird games.

[biofunmy]

Martin Puryear, Citizen-Sculptor – The New York Times

“This moment has caught me being as much a citizen as an artist,” said the sculptor Martin Puryear on an afternoon in his studio in New York’s Hudson River Valley early in April. In two days he would leave for Venice to begin installing a solo exhibition at the 58th Venice Biennale in which he will officially represent the United States. Rising to that responsibility can’t be easy in an American “moment” tense with divisive politics, resurgent racism, and gun violence. Yet anyone who has followed this artist’s 50-year career, knows he is more than up to the task.

Now 77, he is widely regarded as one of the nation’s most distinguished sculptors, though one who eludes foursquare categories, including “political artist.” His work, with its large forms, often of hand-planed and carpentered wood, looks abstract, though it is filled with references to things and events in the world. And though it refuses to yield ready meanings, it suggests many — cultural, emotional and political.

“Ensor, Bruegel, Goya,” the tall, soft-spoken artist said. “These are people who looked very candidly at the world they lived in. I hope that that’s what I’m trying to do.”

With two exceptions, one architectural in scale, the eight sculptures in his show at the United States Pavilion — “Martin Puryear: Liberty/Libertà,” organized by Brooke Kamin Rapaport, deputy director and senior curator of the Madison Square Park Conservancy in New York — were already underway in his studio before the Biennale invitation came. Taken together, they constitute a kind of précis of his styles and methods. But they’re also evidence of an intensified response to topical concerns in the present.

Mr. Puryear was born in 1941 and grew up, African-American, in a racially segregated Washington, D.C. His father was a postal worker, his mother an elementary schoolteacher. He was an early reader and, I suspect, an avid, pre-internet surfer-gatherer of information. In fact, he still is, which is why it’s a mistake to try to pin his work down to any one set of sources and influences.

His parents took him to museums when he was very young — the National Gallery of Art, the Phillips Collection, the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History — and for him the line between art, ethnology and science seems to have been loose: Paul Klee, Eskimo kayaks, and ornithological specimens all existed on a spectrum.

Also, he was raised Roman Catholic, and just by being in churches he may have absorbed, at an early point, a sense of the drama generated by mysteriously coded images and hidden interiors. “Confessional,” “Tabernacle” and “Reliquary” are titles he would later give to sculptures.

After graduating from the Catholic University of America in Washington in 1963, where he had majored first in biology and then in art, he joined the Peace Corps and was sent to Africa. There he taught science and languages in Sierra Leone, and studied with local potters, weavers and woodcarvers.

He has often commented on the impact of that two-year stay. As he told the art historian Richard J. Powell: “For most black Americans the connection to the Old Country is blank, erased by the middle passage of the slave trade. So to be able to live in West Africa and experience a tribal culture firsthand was priceless.” Invaluable too was the exposure to living art and crafts tradition, most visible in the production of traditional utilitarian objects.

Existentially, the African stay instilled in him a strong and abiding identity as a world citizen, living here or there, but belonging everywhere. Creatively, it introduced him to the idea that, when it came to the application of technology to art, less could be more; the hand was still the sovereign tool. Politically, it gave him an eye-opening perspective on his own troubled and troubling homeland.

Unready to return to America, he applied to European schools and enrolled in a printmaking program at the Royal Swedish Academy of Arts in Stockholm, where he lived for two years. An encounter there with the Siberian-born master furniture maker James Krenov clinched a commitment to sculpture, which led him, in 1969, to Yale University’s School of Art and Architecture as a graduate student.

The place was an odd fit. The kind of sculpture he was interested in — handmade from natural materials — was out of sync with a department dominated by Minimalism, which favored industrial fabrication, and by Conceptualism, which played down objects in favor of words and ideas. Mr. Puryear has described his outsider status there along class lines: the hands-off Minimalists and Conceptualists were “white collar;” he, with his saws and gouges and planes, was “blue collar.” Yet the divide was not absolute.

His work shares — or at least doesn’t reject — Minimalism’s faith in the expressive force of plain, solid forms, though in his case solidity is often an illusion. One of his best-known early works, “Self” from 1978, appears to be a simple, smoothed-down lump of solid, ebony-black matter, though it is actually a hollow shell painstakingly shaped from layered strips of wood.

At the same time, from privileging matter and form alone, his sculptures are prickly with ideas, some in the form of perturbing conceptual ambushes. A 1980 piece titled “Bower,” constructed from slats of spruce and pine, has the grace of a loose-weave basket, though this basket seems to have been turned upside down to become a trap.

And words, in the form of titles, have always been dynamic elements in his art, a way to bring complex narrative content to it, as in another 1980 piece, “For Beckwourth.”

The reference is to James Beckwourth, an early-19th-century American adventurer and fur trader who was born a slave, lived with Crow Indians, and worked for the United States Army. Over an adventurous lifetime, he managed to transcend the constraints built into a unitary racial identity. Yet he cannot be counted a hero — he assisted the army in massacring native peoples to clear the way for white settlers — and in Mr. Puryear’s dark, floor-hugging, mound of earth and wood he isn’t one.

“I’m not in an ivory tower making my work,” Mr. Puryear said in April. “The ivory tower has been invaded.”

“For Beckwourth” is the work of an artist who counts himself deeply American — “I think I’m a patriot,” he said, with doubt in his voice — but an American who has serious doubts about what, ethically, American means, particularly now. And that’s the artist we meet in the pieces that he’s sent to the Biennale, two of them custom-made for the occasion.

One, “Swallowed Sun (Monstrance and Volute),” is immense. Designed by Mr. Puryear in collaboration with Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects, it’s in two parts, the most immediately visible: a high, white perforated wood mesh that stretches across the Pavilion’s forecourt, like a church rood screen, half-obscuring what’s beyond it. Churchlike, too, is the screen’s openwork pattern, which traces a flattened-out perspectival view of a dome with an open, circular oculus high up.

It’s a beautiful image, perfect for Roman Catholic Venice. And the United States Pavilion actually has such a dome, one based on a quasi-sacred source: the dome on Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello, outside Charlottesville, Va. That building was a model for the American architects who designed the Pavilion in 1930 as a neo-Classical chapel dedicated to art and global democracy.

The work’s second component is quite different in character: a black, twisting tube, inspired by a detail on a Greek column but resembling, in shape and color, a lamprey or snake. With its “tail” end curled on the forecourt floor, the tube stretches upward and entirely covers the screen’s oculus with its “mouth.” Structurally, the tube is a source of support for the screen; symbolically, it’s devouring its light.

The battle between darkness and light continues inside with the show’s other site-specific work, “A Column for Sally Hemings,” conceived to stand, linchpin-like, at the Pavilion’s precise center, directly beneath the Jeffersonian dome. Sally Hemings was an African-American slave owned by Jefferson and the mother of five children by him. She and her story were probably unknown to the Pavilion’s builders, so Mr. Puryear introduces her, strikingly and abstractly, in a monument to her. It’s composed of a single white, fluted Classical column that seems to be melting and is stabbed through the top by an upright iron stake from which a shackle hangs.

I wouldn’t call this a triumphant image. It’s a battle standard, defiant, like a raised fist. And the battle is on, no quarter, in a third piece, “Tabernacle,” the last to leave the studio for Venice. Dating from 2018, it’s in the form of a military cap, six feet high, of a kind worn by both Union and Confederate soldiers. With its striking bulk, it encourages us at first to linger over its surface. But there’s a secret inside. Look through a glass-covered hole cut in its crown and you find yourself staring, through cross hairs, at a siege mortar holding a cannon ball ready for firing. The ball is mirrored and you are reflected in it, a combatant, willing or not, in a political present that has sometimes been called a new American Civil War.

It’s a mistake to view Mr. Puryear’s art through any single lens, but the theme of “war” is certainly there to be found. “I don’t want to see this moment become normalized,” Mr. Puryear said. “We have to dig our way out of this somehow.” In Venice, with a citizen’s concern and an artist’s acute commitment, he’ll be digging deep.

Sahred From Source link Arts

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[fntstory-blog]

These Hallowed Halls (part I)

In which our heroes are welcomed back on solid earth. chapter i | chapter ii 

The next few weeks were spent navigating more familiar seas; the Numanari Approach took the Maiden and her crew around the tip of Vodacce and the Signore Islands and into the Widow’s Sea and past Castille and Montaigne. From there, she swung North from her Westerly bearings and passed through the Montaigne/Avalon Strait which would take her to Wandesborrow’s docks. The Ivory Maiden sailed at a fraction of her speed, the trip stretching into weeks upon weeks, for all the damage she had endured over the course of her far-flung travels. The crew undertook what repairs they could while at sea, working suspended from ropes and using small saws on rope and wood.

Haru, for his own duties, was put on light work to give him a chance to recover, and this last leg of their journey proved to be an idyllic time for conversing and spending time with Owen. He had begun to learn the names of the men, get to know how they lived and how they enjoyed time away from their backbreaking labor. Lord Berek sent letters with every ship that happened by and part of Haru’s work was to ferry the letters back and forth with Mr. Beckett. The small jollyboat was also put out to sea to allow him to learn more of sails, navigation, and seamanship; it was amazing how much Mr. Beckett knew, at such a tender age. The journey even left its marks upon the young lieutenant; his face and frame grew leaner and less youthful as he entered his teenage years. His face, too, had no shortage of acne and he sought Haru’s assistance in covering and ridding himself of the damn marks.

If Haru evoked fraternal feelings within Lannigan, he in turn treated young Beckett much the same outside of their lessons. The lieutenant’s unfortunate spots were treated with natural ingredients taken from the ship’s stores, Haru cursing the lack of green tea which he swore by. He passed along other pieces of knowledge, too, most dealing with personal grooming and care; he was determined to see Beckett pass from adolescence to manhood as gracefully as possible. (Though the art of shaving would have to be learned from someone else; Haru’s face remained youthfully smooth and he felt uncomfortable imparting what he knew of the practice as what he knew he gleaned from watching Hayes at his morning ablutions).

When not placed in near-constant mortal peril, Haru found that life on the Ivory Maiden was quite … comfortable wasn’t quite the word, as the cramped quarters were just that, and enjoyable didn’t fully fit, either, but there was something to be said for the rhythm he finally settled into. Mr. Beckett proved an invaluable teacher and Haru an eager student; the pair might have presented an unlikely, even comical, picture, but that he came into his nautical own in these weeks spoke volumes to the young lieutenant’s ability.

While his days were spent in the company of Beckett and the crew, and with each passing day Haru found himself liking these rough yet honest men more and more, his evenings were devoted to languid hours with Owen and posing ever more questions to Berek during their dinners. Being so close to Avalon, Haru’s curiosity about the place only grew and nearly everyone on the ship was subject to a seeming unending barrage of questions on customs and beliefs, people and places, history and myth. Hayes’ collective of books were voraciously devoured leading the captain to believe his lover never actually slept.

What struck him the most in these weeks, however, was the truth in the adage of things staying the same despite changing. While he gained nautical knowledge and became more comfortable amongst his Thean shipmates, he retained much of his old ways. His hair stayed long, though by now white was giving way to natural jet black, and on the rare occasion he wore shoes he stuck with the familiar wooden sandals he had come on board with. He still practiced his religion, praying in his room and leaving small offerings to kami and Goodly Folk alike. And though his duties were light, the daily exercise saw lean muscle developing on his slender frame; when he did finally catch his own reflection, Haru was struck by how closely he resembled his brother.

When word came that they would be putting into port and allowed off ship Haru went into a near-frenzy, picking through what few garments he had in his possession. Not since his days attending his daimyo’s court had he put so much thought into what to wear; his fretting might have been a point of mockery, but this would be his first time stepping foot on his new homeland and he wanted desperately to present as perfect a picture as he could. That inborn Crane pride and vanity demanded nothing less.

Forgoing his well-worn wear, he retrieved his remaining secondary kimono from its chest (the formal silk was given a longing look before being discounted; it wasn’t made for traipsing through town) and donned along all the accompanying accoutrements. A lacquered comb, rarely used of late, was run through ombre locks, detangling and smoothing the unruly mess which was left, for now, loose. Over this distinctly Rokugani garb went a Thean jacket, a cast-off that had been tailored to better fit, while his wakizashi was tucked into the obi at his waist. It surprised Haru how odd it felt to be wearing the blade once more after going so long without it.

It was an unusual look, to be sure, but it best represented the transplanted Rokugani.

Orderly lines marched off the ship as the lieutenants unleashed the sailors upon the town. Haru set foot on a stone port for the first time in what seemed liked ages, joined by Mr. Beckett. Stepping from gangplank to solid earth, he was surprised by how unnatural the ground felt to legs and feet now long accustomed to the constant rocking of a ship. Though he had Beckett as company, he hung slightly back, waiting for Owen but also to give himself a few moment’s time to take in the alien sights and sounds and smells of an Avalonian port town.

It was, perhaps, fated that a small voice would cry, “Oi, lads! Lookit that foreign lady!” A small crowd of gawkers appeared, with a smallish dock lad pointing at Haru with an outstretched finger, snaggle-toothed mouth open in a gape.

The urchin and his assembled cronies were met with an indignant look from Haru, though he refrained from comment. He just arrived, after all, and he didn’t want to devote any more time or attention to this unexpected bit of rudeness than was absolutely necessary. Instead, he cast a glance about his immediate surroundings, taking in as much as he could.

Of the most interest were the people, but only because there were so many of them. Sailors, merchants, laborers and lords, Haru watched them all, taking in the differences in their clothing and carriage. Beckett, being close by, was questioned mercilessly about the choices passing strangers made and what it all meant. A Swordsman made a particularly strong impression as he had become quite taken with the notion of Thean dueling thanks to the more romantically-tinged adventure novels in Owen’s collection. He knew little of fighting with a cutlass from seeing Owen in action and his lessons with Beckett, but he longed to see another style especially as demonstrated by a master.

As interesting as the mixing of classes was (and how it boggled his mind that the men he took for lords were not given a wide berth as they passed through crowds) the sight of his first Avalonian woman proved downright shocking. In Rokugan, women’s dress covered them from throat to ankle, with geisha only revealing the back of the neck in a show of subtle eroticism. Here, the entire female form was on display for all to see. Small waists flared into wide hips which gave him enough pause as he tried to work out how this was possible, while throats and the tops of swelling breasts could plainly be seen despite heavy cloaks and capes and, indeed, were the focus of fashion and attention. Curls framed painted faces, the Avalonian fashion favored reddened cheeks and lips he saw, though many ladies carried parasols to protect delicate complexions from the winter’s weak sun.

“Do all Thean women look like this?” He quietly asked Beckett, as if the boy was an expert on the subject.

Beckett flushed and shrugged a shoulder. “Well, that, err, is to say, Mr. Haru, that … I suppose it’s the case?” He offered, looking up to Owen as the captain joined them. He had been the last off the ship, as was custom.

“Not all Thean women,” Owen replied, saving his lieutenant from himself. “There are subtle differences, of course, from place to place and woman to woman.” He gave Haru and Edward a crooked, conspiratorial grin “Well, shipmates, shall we find something to eat?”

Beckett offered a quick nod. “Aye, captain, and right away, I should think!”

“Let’s take the long way, shall we, Haru?” Owen suggested, fully intending to tour through the market. Haru fell into step beside the captain and almost immediately fell behind, his attention diverted by a particularly interesting passing pair. Besides the people, now that they were in the market proper, there were stalls and criers to contend with; Haru seemed intent on stopping at nearly every single one, eyes greedily taking in all to be seen.

His neck craned to see a selection of brightly colored fabrics as they wound their way through the market then, again, to catch a display of kettles and teacups and saucers. So distracted was he by, well, everything, that he found himself rather rudely jostled back as he accidentally ran into the broad-backed fellow before him. Looking ahead, now, all he could make out was a frustratingly large and immobile crowd. Another observation he had been quick to make: By Avalonian standards he was rather short.

Still, despite the mass of people, Haru’s eyes found the Swordsman once more and, now, he took in the brightly colored tabbard he wore over his clothes and the small buckler on one arm. So distracted, he was surprised to find himself surrounded by a ring of people who had taken to staring at him. His appearance had begun to create a buzz through the crowd, beginning with the stalls he had stopped at and moving along, following him unseen like one of the kami. Now, it swirled about him, a sea of wide eyes and gaping mouths and hushed voices pierced by the occasional loudly spoken comment or question. The situation was an uncomfortable one and he quickly cast about for an exit.

Beckett straightened in indignation as more snippets of conversation marking Haru as a very striking woman reached his ears. “Mr. Haru, these bloody idiots think you’re - you’re …!” He seemed ready to take a step forward, though Owen’s hand clapped on his shoulder stopping him.

“I’m sure Mr. Haru can handle his own affairs, lieutenant,” Owen cautioned; he had taken in the size (and easily swayed mood) of the crowd, too.

Beckett seemed to want to protest, but he finally nodded, defeated. “Aye, sir.”

Owen gave his younger shipmate an approving smile, then pointed over the crowds to a sign hanging on a wooden post: The Old Bull. “Seems we’ve arrived. Make way, please!” He called in his captain’s voice, causing the crowd to instinctively part for the trio. Beckett kicked the shin of one of the men who’d been speaking a bit too loudly, sending the man howling and hopping back to disappear behind the crowd.

Ignoring those closest to him, though it was a difficult and trying thing, Haru summoned every once of Rokugani bushido bravado he could and pushed his way through the crowd, one hand resting on the hilt of the wakizashi at his side. More than one person gasped and grunted in surprised disapproval and he heard a few variations of ‘foreign bitch’ thrown his way. And though it was sorely tempting, he said nothing to set anyone aright regarding his gender; doing so would keep them rooted to one spot for an eternity and Haru would rather spend that time taking in more of the sights with his lover and friend.

Thankfully, the crowd didn’t follow them inside. Of course, Haru was made uncomfortable yet again as, upon entering the tavern, the music went through a lilt as people gaped at him for a moment, before slowly turning back to their drinks, food, or fiddle playing.

“I see we’ve been beaten here,” Hayes remarked dryly, nodding to Doctor MacMorgan, already drowsing in a corner set, several mugs stacked and tilted down in front of him.

Looking to where Hayes gestured, Haru suppressed a laugh. “Perhaps we should leave him,” he said, his voice low, “I had thought I escaped his awful playing when we left the ship …”

“If you were dismayed at his playing, I’m not certain what you’d think of his singing voice.”

Haru pulled a grimace, showing what he thought of the prospect. Thankfully, Doctor MacMorgan seemed more suited to drowse in the corner of the establishment. He painted the picture of a large slumbering bear, projecting a feeling of ease in his closed eyes and crossed arms.

Hayes found a quiet table to sit at and called for a bill of fare, which a serving girl brought over. She was roughly the same age as Beckett, though a touch taller and smooth-skinned, rosy-cheeked and bright-eyed and no doubt a sight for Edward’s sore eyes. He busied himself with trying to look impressive and well-mannered.

Owen looked over the tavern’s fare, finger tapping his chin thoughtfully as he rattled off the local dishes. “Roast potatoes and lamb … beef and leeks … even Whistwick puddings!” He peered over at Haru with a half grin. “Shall we order them all, so you can try them?”

Haru recognized some of the dishes being rattled off, most of the fare was a mystery, albeit a tantalizing one; he was incredibly curious about Avalon’s cuisine when divorced of the confines of one of Her Majesty’s ships. Surely, no weevils would be found in the bread in what he assumed to be a respectable establishment. He nodded to Hayes’ suggestion, though a sly smile accompanied the gesture. “If I didn’t know better, I would say you were trying to fatten me up with all this food …”

Owen laughed, returning the sly smile. “You’re still rail thin, Haru, and after what we’ve been through, some rich food will benefit us all. Or perhaps I’m letting Avalon’s cuisine entice you even further.”

“I’ll place the order, sir!” Beckett eagerly supplied, nearly jumping from his seat.

Hayes laughed and waved the boy along, “Right, off you go to your fair maiden.”

Beckett flushed. “I … I just wanted to make certain everything befits the captain of the Ivory Maiden.”

“Quite, good Mr. Beckett, quite,” came the captain’s wry retort. He removed his hat, balancing it on one knee, and ran a hand through his hair to brush it back. Beckett nodded and strode to the bar. Once Edward was there, and fully engaged with the serving girl, Owen sighed wistfully and placed a hand over Haru’s. “I’m not ready for him to get any older, Haru.”

Haru’s eyes followed Beckett as he made his way to the bar and commenced in an innocent fliration with the girl. Though not very many years separated them in age, he found himself looking on the scene with a bit of wistful nostalgia; to be so young and just discovering oneself and love … Hayes’ hand on his own brought his mind and attention back to the present. Placing his free hand atop the captain’s, he gave him a reassuring smile.

“You sound like a wistful parent … Our Mr. Beckett won’t remain a child forever, but he’s had an excellent mentor and role model in you, Owen. He’ll be a fine young man to make anyone proud.”

“I hope so. The navy is a brutal profession, despite all our pomp and circumstance. Sometimes I wish Beckett’s parents had steered him into politics or …” He stopped, smiling and shaking his head. “But wishes are nothing but phantoms, aren’t they? The Beckett we have now is still a dear friend of mine … and I’m entitled to mourn the passing of his youth.”

Beckett returned, assisting the giggling serving girl with a large platter of bread, hard cheese, and beer. Apparently this would be a dining style much like Jeremiah Berek preferred, one in multiple courses. Haru was relieved, however, that the use of a fork and knife seemed to only be a suggestion.

In mixed company once more, Haru carefully extracted his hand from Owen’s and assisted in the passing around and placement of dishes and mugs. Owen did the same declaring, “Now here’s a proper feast!” He gave Beckett and the young miss a grateful smile; she missed it, all her attention on the young lieutenant. She remained thusly enthralled even after she returned to the bar.

Everything smelled wonderful, Haru was pleased to note, and as the three tucked in, he looked to Beckett.

“Will you be visiting your family while we’re in port?” Owen’s earlier comment had sparked a thought and that was that Haru knew next to nothing about the lieutenant’s life outside of the ship they shared. “Or has your young lady taken all your attention?” This was said with an affectionate, mild teasing. “She is very pretty, after all …”

“Hm?” Beckett was distracted, but quickly recovered. “Oh, well, no. My family’s estate is outside of Carleon. I’ll visit them after we’re done with the admiralty.” He flushed bright red and Owen chuckled, hiding a grin behind a soft roll. “She — she probably sees ten better than me every moment, Mr. Haru. Besides, my father would never approve …”

Owen’s grin faded slowly and he tilted his head. “Lord Beckett isn’t *here*, Edward. Talk to her.”

“I know something of dispproving fathers, Beckett-san,” Haru said, gently, “And I can give you this advice: Your father need not know every detail of your life. Talk to the girl, take what happiness that comes to you when it comes without question. And do not doubt yourself so; she’s casting eyes only at you.”

Beckett took in the advice, poking and prodding thoughtfully at the food before him, before he asked them both in a whisper, “Should I — should I ask her to dance?”

Owen smiled. “That would be a good start, Mr. Beckett. Here.” He dug into his pocket and came out with a shilling, handing it over to the young lieutenant. “For the fiddler,” he explained.

Beckett beamed at him. “Thank you, sir, Mr. Haru.” He nodded to them both, almost tripping his gawky legs over the bench in his hurry.

Of everything that had been prepared and was laid before him, Haru’s favorite remained the simple, soft rolls. The other fare, while delicious, was still too rich and heavy for his taste (and stomach) and, Owen’s comment on his thinness notwithstanding, he had no desire to put on an abundance of excess weight. With an air of grace, he buttered one of the rolls, his skill in handling knives and forks much improved, and directed a question to Hayes.

“Do you ever wish your father had … dissuaded you from joining the navy?” The topic was carefully broached; for all his traveling ‘round the world to be with the man he loved, he knew precious little of Owen’s background and family.

“My father and mother …” Hayes began, taking a moment to dab a napkin at his mouth, “They let me explore. I didn’t join the navy on their insistence. I was only a boy when they were lost at sea. My uncle moved in after that and stands currently at the manor. He wanted me to join the army, I think. But I wanted to understand the thing that took my parents. He never truly agreed with my appointment in the navy.” There was a pain in his eyes, but it was a scar, not a fresh wound. “I’d have made a terrible soldier, all that marching …” A lopsided smirk crossed his face.

Looking up, he met and held Hayes’ eyes, one hand coming to rest briefly against a rough cheek. “I’m sorry for your loss, truly. And just as truly, I’m glad you went to sea …”

“Such things happen, Haru, beyond anyone’s control … but thank you. I’m glad that I was swept along to Rokugan.”

Both had more to say, but the sound of a fiddle interrupted, turning their attention from conversation to what passed for a dance floor in the tavern. Haru had heard some fiddling aboard the Ivory Maiden, from what he could gather the Innish were particularly fond of the instrument, and he much preferred its sounds to the doctor’s contraption. The dancing, however, was completely new to his eyes. Again, on the ship, he had seen singular jigs performed, but never had he seen a couple moving in time to music. In Rokugan, there was no concept of social dance; it was a performing art, reserved for theater or a geisha’s skilled entertainment, and never done with as much earnestness as Beckett and his lady displayed.

The unfolding scene soon brought a smile back to Haru’s lips and, with a touch more enthusiasm than previously shown, he sampled all the foodstuffs that mysteriously made its way onto his plate.

Hayes smiled warmly, thumping his foot on the floor in time to the tune and, suddenly, the entire inn was doing the same. There was something liberating about the closeness of it all, none of the silent pretense of a Rokugani theater, each person a different, solitary mind. This was a riot of good will, people hopping up to join in the dance, laughing.

On a whim, Hayes took Haru by the arm, tugging him up and out of his seat. “Let’s join them, come on!” He said encouragingly, all smiles and good cheer.

Haru squawked slightly in surprise. He would have been content to sit and act as a silent observer; for as inviting as it all seemed, a part of him clung to Rokugani ideals of reservation and decorum. And though he remembered the captain’s boast of being an excellent dancer, he hadn’t thought the man would have them both join the crowd. “Owen, I don’t know if this is a good idea …”

“It’s a terrible idea!” Owen conceded, still grinning widely and leading Haru to where the fiddler continued his playing. “It’s no different than those kah-tahs that Ishoya used to perform,” he said, trying to assure his lover’s worries.

Haru doubted that the dance was anything like Ishoya’s katas, but he kept this to himself. His wooden sandals clopped on the slotted floor, marking a different time than the heavy leather soles on everyone else’s feet. Coming to the edge of the crowd, he cast a somewhat nervous glance at the spinning, stepping pairs. Up close, the movements that had seemed so simple now looked incomprehensible, feet flashing too fast for him to make sense of anything. Looking up at Owen, he said, “I hope you have as much faith in your teaching skills as you do in your dancing, Captain Hayes …”

“I need none of that, Haru, I’ve faith in *you.*” Hayes took his hand, pressing their palms together, his other hand resting at Haru’s waist. The movements that followed were obviously meant for flat-heeled shoes and not sandals, but the pattern behind them began to emerge. This wasn’t courtly dance, it was something done by the peasantry and, thus, it was easier than a nobleman’s affair. Still, Hayes knew the steps well and imparted them with impressive ease. Owen had patience and seemed to know where Haru would snarl the steps and he helped him untangle his feet time after time before the movements became natural.

At first, Haru kept his eyes glued to the floor, trying to mimic the steps Hayes so effortlessly made. It was a slow and, at times, frustrating, process, punctuated with repeated sheepish utterings of “Sorry” and “Gomen” as he accidentally stepped on toes or bumped into another body. However, with enough repetition and warm encouragement from Hayes, he did eventually pick up on the thing. Not for the first time, he marveled at how freeing it was, to be in a place, and amongst a group of people, that had no concept of Face or the rigid social structures of Rokugan. He was free to make mistakes, learn from them, even laugh at his own bumbling.

Owen’s hand at the small of his back, the closeness of their bodies, at times pressed closer if an over-eager pair spun too wide, this, too, was an exhilarating, freeing thing.

“Here’s the fun bit …” Hayes grinned wickedly, taking both of Haru’s hands and stepping back, forming a peak as Beckett and his lady danced through the bridge of arms with a few shouts of joy from the assembled dancers. Out of the corner of his eye, Haru saw Doctor MacMorgan come to life, sitting up and fetching his awful concertina to stand at the fiddler’s shoulder. Both instruments seemed to be made to function in league with each other and the box didn’t sound quite so terrible. Eventually, it was Hayes and Haru’s turn to rush under the expanse of arms, though they had to duck lower to it through Beckett and his companion’s bridge. Once they ended their travel, the song began to die down and people applauded each other and the fiddler.

Haru was approached several times for a shake of hands as they mingled freely with the patrons of the tavern and, after a while, he began to feel more comfortable and he was fairly sure that at least in this place people had caught on that he was indeed a man. They were curious, of course, asking question after question, which Haru answered graciously. He felt less pressed by this group than he had by the crowd in the market. His accounts of Rokugan, and his journey to Avalon, were heavily edited, but he did not leave out the high regard he held for the crew, to a man, of the Ivory Maiden.

After some time, Hayes appeared and Haru apologized for leaving so much unanswered, though he doubted he could answer every question put to him (and in this moment he felt a pang of sympathy for what he must have put Lord Berek through). He followed Hayes and Beckett back to their table and reclaimed his abandoned seat. Picking up his mug of beer, he smiled over the brim of it at Beckett, saying, “You’re positively beaming, Beckett-san. Having a sweetheart suits you …”

Beckett smiled, his face a-glow, and sighed dreamily, “Her name is Annie …”

Owen shared a clandestine smile with Haru at their love-struck’s friend expense. “Well done, Beckett,” he remarked, settling back against the wooden wall of the tavern. Haru had a feeling they would be hearing much of Annie and her various charms in the coming days and weeks.

The music eventually died down, with the fiddler making his rounds and accepting a pittance of coins from each table. Doctor MacMorgan chastised those who didn’t loosen their pursestrings sufficiently and, once the fiddler made his exit, he joined Hayes and Haru and Beckett at their table.

“Ah, gentlemen, what a wondrous afternoon it was. Hopefully the night will be just as lovely.” He eyed Haru with a chuckle. “And you, Mr. Haru! Did you enjoy the little tune we played? The Handmaiden’s Basket it was called; one of the very first songs I did learn on my poor concertina.”

“I did, indeed, doctor!” Haru said, speaking honestly for once on the man’s playing. “Your concertina plays much better on land … The fiddle complimented it beautifully.”

“Yes, yes, but I was told of a good fellow who will look at it … If, that is, we’ll be staying in port until the next noon?” MacMorgan eyed Hayes seriously, pulling down his glasses a hair.

Hayes laughed, nodding. “We’ll take on supplies and we’ve a mizzenmast that needs to be fixed. It should keep us busy a few days before we depart for Carleon.”

MacMorgan thumped a fist on the table. “Brilliant! I’ll obtain a surgeon for my concertina and perhaps inquire about some fresh medical supplies of my own …”

“What are the day’s remaining plans?” Haru asked, glancing about at his companions. “Will we see more of the city?” He tried not to sound overly eager, but it was plain he desired to see as much as possible of this new place.

“We’re free of duty for the time, Mr. Haru,” Hayes answered. “I should get a letter to my uncle while I’m in port.” His tone gave away the fact that this task wasn’t one he much relished the thought of.

Beckett cleared his throat. “Annie will be showing me the sights, so I’m afraid I’ll be indisposed …”

Doctor MacMorgan shook with laughter. “Oh, go on, ye young rogue!” Beckett turned scarlet from his collar to his ears.

Haru weighed his options, teeth catching and worrying at the inside of one cheek; he wasn’t ready to retire just yet, but the prospect of exploring on his own raised some internal concerns. Still, if he didn’t stray too terribly far he should be safe enough …

“I think I’ll strike out on my own,” he said with a decisive nod. “There’s still so much more to see and I would rather not waste the opportunity by going to bed early and alone …” That this course of action would change if Owen were retiring as well would not be missed by the captain.

“I’ll be careful,” he continued, warding off any words of friendly warning. “Though … Should I return here or to the ship? I have no money to pay for a room and it’s been explained I can hardly demand free boarding …” He felt more than a little silly asking the question; surely, the answer was an obvious thing to his more seasoned companions.

“If that’s what you decide, Mr. Haru.” Owen smiled and nodded and he got the feeling that the captain would probably come along once his duties were seen to. “I’ll book the officers’ rooms here in the Old Bull. If you’d like, Haru, you can return here.”

Doctor MacMorgan scoffed. “A crime! Captain, to send a sailor into the city with not even a shilling to his name? For *shame*!” He dug into his coat, producing a few large silver coins. “I’ll donate to this poor man’s warchest!” He slid the coins over to Haru. Mr. Beckett smiled and produced coins as well, followed by Owen.

“My tyrant’s hand, shown to be false, I suppose,” Owen drawled dryly, casting a sidelong glance to Haru.

The small pile of silver in front of Haru wasn’t much, but it was enough to enjoy himself, certainly. He balked, initially, at his companions’ generosity, but finally accepted the coins with a deep, albeit seated, bow. It felt strange, rude, to accept the gift upon its presentation, but he had learned that this was the Thean way of doing things. Early in his and Owen’s romance, the Avalonian had given him a small token and his initial refusal of it had lead to a gross misunderstanding and hurt feelings that had taken days to soothe.

“Domo arigatou gozaimashita,” he said, slipping into the formal words of his native tongue. “Thank you very much, I am greatly humbled by your generosity …” The Avalonian words didn’t seem, to his ears, to convey just how grateful he was. With great care the coins were collected, Hayes explaining each one’s worth, and placed in some secret pocket in the interior of his kimono; Haru knew enough to not carry money in the easily picked pockets of his jacket.

“Think nothing of it,” Doctor MacMorgan assured him, as the trio made their goodbyes.

Owen smiled and nodded. “Perhaps I’ll see if I can find you once the doctor and I have our discussion.”

MacMorgan held up a finger, “… about that advance … the concertina, you see …”

Beckett quickly weasled his way away from the table, disappearing among the tavern’s crowds to be with Annie.

Leaving the others to their own devices, Haru bid them farewell, thanking them again for the gifted money, and made his way out of the Bull to the streets beyond its front door. Looking down the way they had come, through the main vein of the marketplace, he could recall the route that took them from ship to cobbled shore. It was an enticing thought, to revisit the market, but more appealing was the prospect of streets yet unseen. Heading in the opposite direction, then, he set out to see what else the port town had to offer.

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Sports make us fit, fight stress and give us an overall feeling of well-being. We play sports because they’re fun, and because our brains tell us to! Scientists have found that sports help our minds cope with future conflicts and unforeseen circumstances, as well as develop our social skills. That’s why both kids and young animals engage in so much playtime. Modern sports have strict rules and regulations, and they’ve become a multimillion dollar enterprise for grownups, but at heart they’re still an adult version of goofing around. People have been tossing balls around for centuries, and today we’ll learn how these activities went from simple child’s play to national pastimes.

#1 Basketball Basketball came into being as a necessity, rather than by evolving from an existing game. The inventor, Dr. James Naismith, had to come up with an indoor sport capable of replacing the outdoor activities at the YMCA Training School in 1891, and he had to do it in a hurry. Being a sports coach and having a great interest in physical activities and athletic psychology, Dr. Naismith drew inspiration from his childhood memories and came up with a sport that requires the accuracy and dexterity of football or lacrosse but can be played on a small indoor court. Basketball had 13 rules and looked quite different back then. Players weren’t allowed to dribble or run with the ball in any way, while the actual baskets had bottoms and were made out of wood. It instantly caught on around the country, and Dr. Naismith was able to see his creation become part of the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin.

#2 Soccer / Football Here’s a subject of endless debate! Why do Americans call it soccer while most of the world knows it as football? First, Americans already had a sport called football, and second, because of the British. Up until the 19th century, before strict rules and regulations were imposed, people were playing all sorts of games involving a ball, and almost all of them were called football. Then, in 1863, the Football Association was established and a standardized form of the game was created. The term “soccer” derives from the word “association,” plus the suffix “-er.” Association football, or soccer for short, was the official name of the sport until it became more popular with the British lower class and changed its name back to football. Its true beginnings are shrouded in mystery, as people all across the globe were playing a variation of the game in one form or another. Evidence can be traced back as far as 1000 BC, but in Europe the Celts were the first to introduce it. Over the centuries the game was banned by several English rulers, including Edward II, Edward IV and Oliver Cromwell, for being a catalyst of “evil behavior.” That sounds absurd, but football back then was very different, and much more violent, from what it is today. Teams made of entire towns and villages competed to bring an inflatable pig’s bladder to markers within a town’s square by any means possible. Any means.

#3 Sumo The popular Japanese national sport of sumo can trace its roots back 2000 years. It began more as a ceremony than a sport, a form of celebration to appease the gods and generate a good rice harvest. Its strong ties with the Shinto religion filled sumo with symbols and rituals that usually go unnoticed by the average Western viewer. These rituals include stomping the feet right before the beginning of the match in order to fend off evil spirits, and salt being thrown by the wrestlers to purify the ring and prevent injury. The canopy over the arena resembles the roof of a Shinto temple, while the four tassels hanging at each corner represent the four seasons (green is spring, red is summer, white is autumn and black is winter). By the coming of the Nara and Heian periods (794-1192 AD) in Japan, sumo began to be performed at the imperial court in front of the Emperor. During the Edo period (1603-1868), the sport began to evolve to resemble present day sumo. That’s when the official 48 wrestling moves were established and the circle ring was introduced. It’s also the time when sumo went from being a ceremony to an organized and professional championship.

#4 Rugby The historical origins of rugby are very similar to that of soccer. However, sources indicate that the Chinese were playing a similar type of sport almost 2000 years ago, and so did the Greeks and Romans. But the year when rugby branched off from other football-like pastimes in Britain and became a separate sport was 1823. That’s when a young school boy named William Webb Ellis, studying in the town of Rugby, England, first picked up the ball in his hands and started running with it. This only became a written rule years later, in 1845. By 1871, the Rugby Football Union (RFU) was created and rules were made standard nationwide. The modern RFU named their rugby world cup the William Webb Ellis Trophy, in memory of the game’s “discoverer.” The American version of football has its origins in a combination of both rugby and soccer.

#5 Hockey Nothing screams Canada more than hockey, but historical evidence dating back to the 1600s shows Dutch people playing a sort of golf-like sport on ice. In the Americas, northern Indians were engaging in an activity similar to present day lacrosse, but on frozen ponds and lakes. Hockey isn’t the invention of a sole individual or a small group of people, but rather an accumulation of local pastimes from both the Old World and the New. Hockey as we know it originated in Canada — in Nova Scotia to be exact, in the small town of Windsor around 1800. Kids had modified the game of hurling (a cross between soccer, baseball and lacrosse) and made it playable on ice. Soldiers stationed in Windsor liked the game and took it with them to Halifax, and from there it spread throughout the entire country. By 1875, ice hurley became known as ice hockey and was exhibited in Montreal on March 3rd. Two years later, firm rules were put in place. Many people acclaimed the new sport, while others were appalled by its violence.

#6 Curling Curling is also known as the Roaring Game, not because of its fans or pace but because of the noise made by the 44 pound stone sliding on the ice. Obviously, curling has its origins in the northern hemisphere, mainly Scotland. The earliest stones discovered date back to 1511 around the towns of Stirling and Perth. Parish ministers from 18th century Scotland make mention of curling as one of the most anticipated and respected pastimes amongst themselves and their parishes. Around 1830, curling arrived in the United States and spread like wildfire from Michigan to Wisconsin, Minnesota and North Dakota. Today over one million people curl, and 90% of them live in Canada.

#7 Baseball If we could trace back baseball’s origins to whenever the first round-ish object was thrown by one man and hit with a club by another, we would go back as far as the dawn of mankind. Evidence of a specific game played with bats and balls can be found in ancient Egypt, dating back more than 2000 years. A more recent ancestry of the sport can be found in Europe, from where it most certainly immigrated to the United States. Baseball bears a significant resemblance to English pastimes such as rounders and cricket. We also know of a similar game played by French monks around the 1330s, and the sport of oina played in Romania. And in the United States, similar games like town ball, stool ball and old cat are known to have been enjoyed by children as early as the 1700s. The first ever mention of baseball in an official document was found in a dusty courthouse archive in Massachusetts. It’s from the small town of Pittsfield and dates to 1791. The document was a bylaw prohibiting people from playing “Wicket, Cricket, Football, Baseball, Batball or Cats and Fives” within 80 yards of the new Meeting Hall to prevent broken windows. Baseball as we know it evolved from many of these  games during the middle of the 18th century on America’s east coast.

#8 Boxing Historically speaking, men have always been punching each other. And other men have always gathered around to cheer them on. Boxing could easily be called the most natural sport known to man. The earliest form of organized boxing can be found on Mesopotamian clay tablets dating back 7000 years. The Greeks and Romans were also famous for their love of combat sports. Homer mentions it in the Iliad, and boxing was introduced to the ancient Olympics in 688 BC. Back then the fighters wore nothing but leather straps on their knuckles and forearms, and matches could be fatal. For unknown reasons, boxing disappears from references and historical documents and only resurfaces in England in the late 17th century. James Figg, born in 1684, became the first boxing champion in recorded history. It’s reported that he only lost one fight in his entire career, and in 1992 he was introduced into the Hall of Fame as the Father of Boxing. However, real credit must be given to Jack Boughtonis, as he’s the man who introduced the first rules to the sport in 1743, making boxing significantly less dangerous while still retaining its fundamental violent appeal.

#9 Tennis Nobody really knows how far back tennis goes. Some frail evidence suggests ancient Egypt or Greece, but stronger facts point to 10th century France. When French monks were playing the game of jeu de paume (game of the hand) over a rope or against monastery walls, they would shout out “tenez” (to take) every time one of them served the ball. By the 13th century the game became very popular among the French, who built over 1800 indoor courts throughout the country. When played indoors, je de paume looked a lot like present day squash, but players were facing each other and not standing side by side. It became so famous that King Louis IV and even the Pope tried to ban it, but to no avail. From France, the game crossed the English Channel and became an instant hit with the British as well. Before the discovery of rubber, tennis balls were made out of wool, wrapped in string or leather and were struck with bare hands. By the 1500s the first racket was made out of wood and sheep guts. Since the balls had little spring in them, courts were quite small compared to what we’re used to. All of this changed in 1850, when Charles Goodyear discovered vulcanized rubber and the game finally moved its venue outside. In 1874 Major Walter C. Wingfield established the rules of tennis (very similar to present day ones) and the sport began to go international. The first Wimbledon tournament was held in 1877, with women joining in 1884.

#10 Golf Early forms of golf were played by the Romans and the Chinese as far back as 100 BC. The Dutch, the Belgians and the French were also known for engaging in different activities involving “sticks and balls.” In fact, it’s possible they were the ones who introduced the game to the British Isles via trade. The origins of the term “golf” can be found in the Scots language in different variations such as goff, goif and gowfe, which meant “to strike.” All of these terms find their roots in the Dutch word “kolven,” meaning “club.” The term “golf” has been in use since at least 1457, when King James II of Scotland banned it because it was a too big of a distraction for his soldiers. Golf as we know it today was developed by the Scottish. They dug the first hole, and it was in Edinburgh in 1744 where all 13 rules were written, most of which are still in use today.

Source: TopTenz