#the residential schools were nothing but horror | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

draconicsparkle · 1 year

Text

Family and friend reunion! Wooohooo! Hajime’s been waiting for this for a while. Here you are, buddy!

And of course, our beloved SCP Nagizuru must come with! Doesn’t matter if he’s an all powerful, world ending cosmic horror, you simply must introduce him to your parents, Hajime!

Also, if you haven’t seen it yet, look at this!!!

The red lights began flashing and the sirens were blaring in their warnings. Panicked screams and shouts were audible outside the door. Frantic footsteps thundered by. Who they belonged to, he didn’t know.

By all means, he should have been terrified. It was a containment breach in a place that held some of the universe’s most dangerous creatures and objects.

But instead, Hajime was elated. He threw a chosen outfit on in the bathroom, brushing his hair and making sure everything looked in place. “It’s finally happening. And it’s in the morning, too! We can be out all day!” he exclaimed to his roommate who was waiting on the bed.

He heard a soft laugh from beyond the door. “Indeed. There is plenty of time for us to… make ourselves scarce. And I am most eager to meet my beloved’s family.”

Hajime reached out through the crack in the door to point vaguely in the direction he thought the SCP was in. “And remember! No non-human things for this visit! No shapeshifting, no summoning, no teleporting within sight, no inverting, nothing that a regular human couldn’t accomplish.”

That made Nagizuru laugh more. “I recall your instructions perfectly, Hajime. I shall hide my abilities when in the presence of your friends and family.”

Hajime waggled his finger. “Ah, ah. No trying to use loopholes. Don’t hide them from just my friends and family. Everyone.”

“You know me well. But alright, no one shall know,” Nagizuru relented.

Hajime sighed in relief as he heard the affirmation. He didn’t want to think of the headache a supernatural occurrence would cause for his hometown. He took one last look at his reflection, nodded, then exited. “Okay, I’m ready. Can you teleport us in an area where no one is? So we can slip in easily?”

Nagizuru’s smile widened as he stood up from the mattress in his casual attire. “Of course! Can’t let anyone know our little secret, can we? Just come here and it will be done.”

The brunette did so, approaching the Apollyon class SCP with no fear. He got close, feeling the creature’s arms wrap around his back and embrace him tight. He closed his eyes, feeling the strange sensation soon after. Then, he heard the sounds of cars and muted conversations. Sounds that were typical of a residential area.

Hajime opened his eyes and smiled excitedly. He backed away from Nagizuru just enough to look around. “The park behind the library? Smart choice. I used to come here and read by myself after school. It’s peaceful.”

The SCP allowed him to take a few steps away to look around. “I felt that this was the most ideal place to go. Hidden, and a place that you hold positive memories of. So it was an obvious choice.”

Hajime felt his cheeks redden. He slapped them a few times to try and regain composure. “A-anyways, it’s not far away from the house. I remember the way well.”

“Lead the way, my dear,” Nagizuru purred, clasping their hands together.

The battle to control his blush was a fierce one, but he managed to get it down enough so that he could walk around without anyone noticing. If anything, people were more intrigued by the man with the long white hair, so Hajime mostly went unnoticed. That suited him just fine, leaving him to focus on navigating them to his house.

After a few minutes, they arrived at his childhood home. He hadn’t been back here since he went off to college a year ago. He was happy to see it had not changed at all. He took a moment to send a text to a few of his friends, informing him of his return to the town before pocketing it again. He brushed his hair back, glanced over to Nagizuru to make sure he was also presentable, then finally rang the doorbell.

Familiar voices spoke inside along with footsteps approaching. Then the door opened, revealing Hajime’s mom. She beamed with happiness as she recognized her son. “Hajime! What a wonderful surprise! Come in, come in!” She stepped aside with pep in her step, allowing the two to enter.

Nagizuru kept close and quiet, looking around and observing the home’s decorations. He followed the brunette through the house, taking a seat next to Hajime when they ended up at the kitchen table.

“Well, well! I didn’t expect to see you today! How have you been?” Mr. Hinata said as he sat down across from his son. Mrs. Hinata sat across from Nagizuru, giving him a wide smile.

Hajime nodded with a smile. “Yeah, our place of work is taking a break from operations. So we figured we could stop by to visit. And so you could meet my coworker.”

Then Nagizuru spoke with a teasing grin. “Just coworkers? You wound me, Hajime. Surely you jest.” The white-haired man grabbed ahold of one of Hajime’s hands. “To me, we are far closer. And I think you know this as well, though you have a harder time saying it aloud.”

“Ah, so you are the one he spoke of in his letters. We meet at last,” Mr. Hinata directed at Nagizuru. “Tell us about your work with Hajime! Well, as much as you are allowed at least.”

Hajime sent a silent prayer of thanks that his family didn’t try to pry into the secrecy of his position. It would be a hassle to try and dodge the subject had they been nosy. But his relief turned into something else once Nagizuru began talking.

“Hajime and I have been working together at a location that we can’t disclose for reasons. But we were paired up and grew close while there. He has been nothing but kind, generous, and understanding with me, so it was not hard to fall for him. I consider each day we are together a blessing, and I am so immensely thankful.”

Mrs. Hinata smiled so wide, clearly overjoyed. “Oh, that’s beautiful! I’ve never heard such passionate declarations of affection! Well,” she grinned as she squeezed her husband’s hand. “Besides his.”

Mr. Hinata laughed with some color on his cheeks. “Anyways, I agree with my wife. Your speech is quite flattering for our son. Please keep treating him well for us while you are at work.”

Hajime’s cheeks blossomed with color. “Mom! Dad! Stop! This is embarrassing!”

Nagizuru patted him on the head. “It’s okay, Hajime! We have your parent’s blessings! Isn’t that wonderful?”

“Is there anything that can make you flustered?” the brunette muttered as he sat there, letting the other mess with his hair.

“Oh, I am unsure. Feel free to shower me with compliments to try and find out,” Nagizuru teased, leaning his head on Hajime’s shoulder.

“Oh, you two are precious. Hajime, do try and keep a hold of this wonderful gentleman,” Mrs. Hinata cooed with adoration.

“I couldn’t get rid of him even if I tried,” Hajime replied. His parents nodded approvingly, not at all getting that it was literally impossible to get rid of the cosmic horror on him.

The moment was interrupted by knocks on the door. Ones he recognized instantly. “Sounds like Kaz is here. And I bet he brought Fuyuhiko and Chiaki along,” Hajime guessed. He poked Nagizuru’s cheek. “Up we get. Let’s let them in.”

“If we must,” the SCP said with a faux resigned tone.

“We will get some snacks ready for you all. Don’t worry about a thing,” Mr. Hinata assured, he and his wife standing up along with the other two. They got to work, grabbing food and plates from the kitchen. So Hajime decided to give them some room by exiting the room to give them space. Nagizuru followed close behind, keeping a tight hold on his hand. With his free one, he opened the door, nearly losing his balance with a sudden side hug. The faint smell of oil and grease told him who it was even before the hugger could get a word in.

“Geez Kaz. One would think you missed me or something,” Hajime stated with a grin.

Kazuichi pulled away, also grinning wide. “I can’t help it! My soul friend has returned from his mysterious location! Gotta celebrate!”

“Rein it in, Kaz. You are gonna break his ribs at this rate,” Fuyuhiko warned, reaching out and grabbing Kazuichi’s collar to yank him backwards.

“Hey! Don’t do that, man! And besides, I know you are excited to see him, too!” Kazuichi whined, doing his best to straighten his collar again.

“That might be true. But I know how to control myself. Something you should bother to learn,” Fuyuhiko shot back.

The blonde and pink-haired men then began squabbling, getting absorbed in their argument. That certainly hadn’t changed, which Hajime was happy to see. Then, he felt a small tug on his sleeve. Looking over revealed Chiaki, who sleepily smiled up at him. “Welcome back. We missed you a lot.”

The brunette pulled her in for a side hug. “I missed you all, too.”

Chiaki leaned into the hug before looking over his shoulder. “Is this the one you talked about?” she asked as she gazed at SCP in disguise.

To which she got a greeting from the creature himself. “Good day to you all. I do hope every one of you is well. I have been most eager to finally meet my beloved’s companions from before our first encounter.”

Kazuichi and Fuyuhiko paused their banter once they heard the new voice. “Oh yeah! Now we get to meet the guy! Nice to finally see ya in person! Man, Hajime was right about your hair. Must take hours to brush!”

Fuyuhiko stepped forward, crossing his arms and staring hard at the newcomer. “What’s with your speech? It’s way more elegant than most nowadays. You not from around here?”

Nagizuru chuckled. “Something like that.”

That intrigued Kazuichi and Fuyuhiko, who stepped inside the house and began pelting the SCP with questions. Nagizuru didn’t seem to mind, answering with a smile and evading certain details. Seemed like he was fitting in well enough.

Hajime was prepared to watch how long this would go on for, but he felt another tug on his sleeve. Chiaki was trying to get his attention, gesturing to the side room. He understood, following her into it. They stood in the corner, far enough away from all others in the house to talk without fear of eavesdropping.

“Is something wrong?” Hajime began, curious as to why his friend had pulled him away.

Chiaki glanced back to the doorway before looking into Hajime’s eyes. “That man you brought, he’s different.”

The phrasing of the statement confused him. “Well, I suppose he is different. His hair is insane and his mannerisms can be weird.”

His friend shook her head. “That’s not what I meant. Hajime, please be honest with me. He’s not human, is he?”

Hajime wasn’t able to stop the shock from his expression or his voice. “Wh-what? How…?”

Chiaki brought a finger to her chin. “I think only I noticed. To me, it seems like he’s not entirely genuine in his words and movements. Like he’s something acting like a human, but isn’t quite pulling it off. Well, I feel he could fool most people. But I can read people pretty well, so I saw the signs.”

Hajime groaned, rubbing his hand through his hair. “Okay, I’ll admit you are right on the money. But please don’t tell anyone. This can’t get out to the public.”

Chiaki reached up and patted him on the head. “Of course I won’t. I can keep secrets, you know this.” She lowered her hand, a more serious expression present. “I’ll drop it completely if you answer this one question. Are you safe with him?”

Hajime breathed a sigh of relief, nodding confidently. “I have never been more protected and safeguarded in my life.”

That satisfied his friend, as she relaxed her expression. “Good. Now, I’ll have to test his gaming abilities.”

That triggered a laugh. “Right now? You are insatiable. But I’m not going to deny that I’m curious. Let’s go test it out.”

Chiaki nodded with a determined expression. She then left the room, off to the living room to set up her gaming system for their session. It left him alone for the first time in a while, allowing him to think.

For about ten seconds. He felt a body appear behind him suddenly and warm arms wrapped around his midsection. “Something on your mind, my dear?” Nagizuru whispered in his ear.

Hajime leaned back into the embrace. “What happened to your conversation with Fuyu and Kaz?”

Nagizuru nuzzled into the brown hair. “I excused myself and teleported once out of sight. They will be only a little confused, but not terribly suspicious.” One pale hand found his and settled on top of it. “But your other friend, however, has quite a sharp eye. I am most impressed.”

“You noticed? Please don’t do anything. She promised she would keep it a secret,” Hajime pleaded, a hint of desperation bleeding in.

Nagizuru softly laughed. “Relax. I had no intention of doing anything. I can sense how much you trust her. So I shall put my faith in her as well.” The SCP teleported again, this time next to him while holding out a hand. “Now then, shall we rejoin them? I am intrigued on what challenge your friend wishes to issue me.”

Hajime took the hand, squeezing it gently. “Something tells me you will master these games in a matter of minutes. So yes, let’s go. We have a whole day to enjoy.”

Masterpost

#danganronpa #nagito komaeda #hajime hinata #fanfic #au #nagizuru au #scp au

19 notes · View notes

savbanks · 9 months

Text

part of her mystery is how she is calm in the storm but anxious in the quiet

stats.

full name: savannah jane banks age: 33 date of birth: april 15th, 1990 astrology: aries sun, gemini rising, libra moon place of birth and current location: covington, ga residential area: downtown gender: cis-female pronouns: she/her sexual orientation: bisexual occupation: owner of mystic grill and wedding planner at vision of white.

family.

mother: marion banks ( nee foster ) father: joseph banks significant other:: married but estranged to Hudson Calhoun.

personality.

Savannah was always wild and free from the very beginning of her life. She was the girl that wouldn’t sit still for anything and always on the move. Challenges were her specialty and she never backed down from an adventure. Her energy was unmatched and she was always the one that people talked about. She is completely down to earth and doesn’t take many things to heart but she will always be an advocate for people. She is completely loyal to a fault and even though she may not seem to let things bother her, she has one of the biggest hearts around. This girl will literally give the shirt off her back for anybody and not ask for a thing in return. But don't be fooled with her sweetness because if needed, she has a bite worse than a black widow.

likes and dislikes.

Likes: ballet, the feeling of shaved legs on fresh bed sheets, horror movies, the number 2, stargazing, old pickup trucks, the smell of fresh baked cookies, red lipstick, bubble baths, the color teal, sun rises and sunsets, long baths, white lilies Dislikes: birds, anything vanilla or cinnamon scented, gossip mills, the sound of chalk on a chalkboard, the way her body feels after working out

bio.

Savannah Banks came into this world as a surprise to Marion and Joseph Banks after years of trying for a child. Being the only daughter to an elementary school teacher and a ranch hand at Heartland, Savannah grew up more sheltered than she would have liked. She had always been a free spirit from the moment that she could walk, she was running and she never did as she was told. She wasn't necessarily a problem child, but she had her own ideas and her own adventures that she wanted to have that her parents didn't fully support. For as long as she could remember, she was itching to get out of this small town and into the worlds that she read about in books.

The small town life was something that Savannah had grown fond of especially when her and Hudson had finally decided that they wanted to take their friendship to the next level. Growing up together, they spent a lot of time with each other and it wasn't until they were in middle school that their feelings were confessed to one another. It felt like a movie, their relationship, and she was the happiest that she could have ever been. They were the envy of their friends and being each others high school sweethearts was inevitable; they were soulmates. Quickly after high school they were getting married with their friends and family and their life started. She was sure that this was going to be the love of her life and while he was, they had their ups and downs. When the career that Hudson had worked his life for was taken away from him, he became cold and while she tried to stay through it all it wasn't enough. She eventually fell pregnant with their daughter Alana and nine months later, they were a family of three. It wasn’t anything like she expected but for the first two years it was good.

She wanted to get out of the small town, feeling suffocated and she wanted to show Hudson and Alana the world. All of the places that she had imagined them going and the memories that they would make were in the forefront of her mind and she wanted nothing more than to live. But he was stuck and when she finally decided that she needed more, she gave him the ultimatum and when he chose this career, she left town and didn't look back. With the savings that she had, she bought a plane ticket to London and back packed through Europe before heading to Paris where she spent most of her time there. After a few years, she headed to New York where her best friend was living and got a job as a wedding planner at her friends company, Vision in White, where she had stayed before she got the call from her mother that her father was sick and they needed help.

Due to his excessive drinking, it was all taking a toll on his body after forty years and as much as her mom could handle, she wasn't able to handle this by herself. Savannah knew that her parents didn't ask her for much in life so when they did, she came back without a second thought. As much as she didn't want go back to Covington, she packed her bags and headed home where she knew she was going to have to face the many demons that she had left behind.

#covingtonintro

2 notes · View notes

kusogamesss · 2 years

Text

Morimiya Middle School Shooting

CW: Murder, gun violence, child death, sexual violence, cannibalism, suicide, gore, eroticism of gore, knife violence, glorification of tragedy and crime, misogyny.

Preface

First, I would like to make abundantly clear this is a heinous work. On a surface level it is reprehensible. Digging into it makes every aspect of it worse. If it could only be played with a critical eye that would be one thing, but as I will get into this isn't just some curiosity to dissect.

The United States has had 27 school massacres since 1927. 16 of these occurred after Columbine. All but two were carried out with the use of firearms. Since 2000, there have been 388 school shootings in the United States.

Canada has had three school massacres ever (ignoring the genocide perpetrated by the Residential School system). One of these occurred after Columbine. It was carried out with a firearm. Since 2000, there have been 8 school shootings in Canada.

Japan has had one school massacre ever. It occurred on June 8, 2001. Eight children were murdered. All but one were girls. The perpetrator used a kitchen knife. There has never been a school shooting in Japan. There have been two multiple fatality shootings in Japan since 1952.

Potential

I think this is important to bring up because, from a Western and particularly an American perspective, school shootings are a dark reality that happens with shocking yet numbing frequency. The Onion's perennial publishing of their "No Way to Prevent This" article is testament to that. While it would be disingenuous to say school shootings have had no resonance in Japan, it is true that they have not happened there. The distance from tragedy lessens its emotional impact.

This is to say that, in a vacuum, Morimiya Middle School Shooting (MMSS) reads as intensely insensitive but not outright malicious. It is, in a vacuum, akin to Postal or Hatred, mimicking real world tragedy without outright reference to any specific event. An argument could even be made that there is some merit to MMSS in its commentary on the why of school shootings. The unnamed player character walked in on her mother's suicide, her father was an abusive alcoholic who disappeared. Her rage turns outward towards those who do not give her the attention she was missing from her parents. It ultimately manifests as a desire to commit murder after the game's fictionalised Japan reports on regional mass killings.

Like Super Columbine Massacre RPG, MMSS appears then to be a work which asks for a societal introspection alongside our abject horror. By not referencing a specific historical event, MMSS has the potential to make commentary without inflicting direct emotional harm. Its gamification and unnamed player character have the potential to instill a sense of being complicit with the act, as with Brenda Romero's 2009 board game Train. Even its arcade gameplay loop, high scores, and unlocks have the potential to increase engagement for some grand payoff of self-disgust that one would invest so much time into becoming good at murdering teachers and children. A part of me held out hope in my few playthroughs that there would be some message at the end of it all, that this glorification of violence would have a point. Instead, MMSS is closer to JFK: Reloaded. It teaches nothing. It has nothing to say. It exists to shock. It exists to hurt.

Play

On a technical and mechanical level, MMSS is something of a marvel. It is an RPGMaker game with gunplay. There is an undeniable element of strategy to it. Suffice it to say that every aspect of school shootings are on display here. If you have seen coverage of new schools in the United States being built to 'confuse and frustrate' school shooters, you can intuit how the prototypical Japanese school might facilitate mass murder with firearms and explosives. The player needs to slow down to increase their accuracy. I leave it to you to put two and two together. The unlocks amount to different weapons the player can use, as well as cheats. The player needs to manage the loaded ammunition between their weapons so as to not end up reloading while students wielding poles lunge at them to stop their advance. The player has a very strict time limit before the police arrive to arrest them. The player gets the most points for killing female students. None of this is particularly fun, even if it were removed from what it is depicting, but that it has been done on an engine meant for traditional JRPGs is impressive. That it is mechanically more than pointing and shooting is noteworthy. It is just barely engaging enough to warrant a couple playthroughs.

Precedent

Discussion of MMSS necessitates consideration of its creator and their niche. MMSS was developed by エリック aka erikku aka eric806359 aka kata235. They are an ero guro artist. Their depiction and obsession with the macabre is not in line with an H.R. Giger type, however. It comes across as more similar to the work of the Marquis de Sade. Reading through erikku's Twitter feed and scrolling through their Pixiv feels like trawling through The 120 Days of Sodom; it is a display of an amoral libertine.

Some choice textual excerpts from their Twitter (roughly translated):

"Drawing muscles makes me want to eat them." "A touching coming-of-age story in which a young girl who has just lost her father gets a gun and grows up to be a splendid mass murderer." "If I'm going to die anyways, I want the human race to perish while I'm still alive." "I'm not a monster. Even for someone like me, I have human likes and dislikes. …For example, what I love is 'Decapitation'"

I think you get the idea.

Their Pixiv is similarly naught but ero guro. Ero guro is not some 'release valve' for erikku, it is their sole purpose.

Perusal

Despite this, MMSS contains zero erotic elements. Without explicit eroticism, MMSS is only a guro work, and thus cannot be said to be primarily for sexual gratification. However, it is also inextricable from its creator's main body of work. His illustrations of MMSS's main character are surrounded by nude women's stomachs being cut open, by school girls being strangled to death, of raw human flesh being consumed next to bare corpses. MMSS is not explicitly sexual, but it is implicitly erotic. The primary demographic is not you or I, but those already familiar with erikku's portfolio. And while not in the game itself, erikku has made numerous animations of the player character shooting school girls, their inflated chests jiggling, their panties digging into their crotches.

MMSS is unable to depict this level of fidelity for gore or lewdness in RPGMaker due to the rapid pace of gameplay. What illustrative art is present shows up in the introduction, endings, and when in the apartment at the start. For erikku's intended audience, however, those depictions don't need to explicitly exist within the game. One's familiarity with those short animation clips, those illustrations allows them to, in part, fill in the gaps during gameplay. In researching erikku and being exposed to the supportive art for MMSS, subsequent playthroughs have been marred by more accurate depictions of the violence and murder rendered in pixel form. Furthermore, I have seen that his illustrations and animation snippets are released in packs with other, non-MMSS related works of an ero guro nature. The mind fills in the gaps, the mind construes all of this as sexual.

Pang

In MMSS, during the news report on recent killings, one scene shows a middle school girl being escorted by police as her victims clutch their stomachs. This murderer committed their acts with a kitchen knife. They primarily targetted girls.

As mentioned at the very start, there has been one school massacre in Japanese history. It involved a kitchen knife. The perpetrator primarily targetted girls.

This is odious enough on its own, this unveiled allusion to the Osaka school massacre as tasteless as anything making light of the mass murder of children. erikku's fanbase will recognise this as a direct reference to his other game, Rouka de Onigokku (Tag in the Hallway). You sprint through hallways and stab students before you can be caught. It operates like an endless runner. The William Tell Overture plays the whole time. While MMSS references tragedy broadly, Rouka de Onigokku references it precisely. In MMSS one can even unlock use of a knife to carry out the game's mass murder in the same manner as Rouka de Onigokku's main character. It is despicable. It gets worse.

Perturbed

There is very scant documentation of MMSS on the English-speaking clearnet. I myself only came across it by chance on Backloggd. What I have found is deplorable.

Following the release of MMSS, erikku started answering fan questions on Twitter. Most of these are in Japanese, but some have been translated by erikku himself.

"Q: […] how do you deal with negative feedback or criticism regarding the sensitive nature of 'taboo' nature of your art? A: […] I try not to care too much about negative feedback and so on :)"

"Q: […] what do you use for inspiration before making a picture? Do you read about some real life murder cases? A: I often read about real life murder cases, and watch a movie and TV series about murder. But I don't use anything for inspiration. I just draw what I want to draw."

His tweets continued in their perturbing statements. Above the aforementioned illustration of Rouka de Onigokku's main character, he writes "I was caught by the Thought Police and was temporarily suspended. It was caused by the cannibalism animation, but I think all the zombies are gone now. …By the way, the situation in the picture is a very, very, very healthy illustration of a student playing a prank with ketchup and being taken care of by the police."

They also started answering questions on peing.net.

"I'm just painting 'imaginary violence against non-existent people.'"

"Murder, abductions, and transportation of body parts over long distances are very hard work, but it's better than repeating the incidents in a nearby area and narrowing the scope of police investigation towards you."

"I think there are various reasons why the culprit in Morimiya didn't commit suicide (including suicide by police). One of the goals is to know the suffering of the victims, including the survivors and bereaved families. It may also be the result of hatred towards the mother who took her own life. No matter how many people you kill, the hatred toward your mother, who took her own life and became a 'suicide statistic' cannot be cleared, but 'I won't die like that!' Is that the result of trying to persevere?"

"I have been drawing pictures of killing people since I was a child, but it was when I was a teenager that I start having interest in killing (anime) girls."

MMSS and Rouka de Onigokku are not just gamified depictions of perturbed minds. They are the machinations of a fucked up pervert. It gets worse.

Perverse

When looking up MMSS, one of the only results is the RPGMaker Fandom wiki. It provides the Google Drive link I got the game from. Far above that download link lies a link to the 'Official Discord,' with the blessing of erikku.

The rules for the 'Morityu Community Server' notably state the following:

"Rule 3. Don't be a weirdo. Keep edgelording to a minimum. If it's TMI, don't post it. You can love seeing girls suffer all you want, just don't tell everyone, because nobody wants to hear about it. Don't be that guy who idolizes mass shooters. It's cringe as hell and a sign that you should probably go outside for once."

"Rule 5. Do not talk about planning any mass murders or crimes of any form. You may talk about previous cases of mass murder, but do not talk about the possibility of yourself or others committing crimes. Even if you're not going to do it and are just posting it as a "what if", it is punishable by a ban. This is the one rule you don't want to break."

The server is a cesspool of racism, homophobia, sexism, and generally making light of school shootings as a topic. Users have /k/ommando avatars and names and banners. They share gameplay clips and compete for high scores. They share links to movie clips of school shootings, they share DOOM WADs for school levels. They pontificate about whether or not women get aroused during shootings. They cheer for Russia's invasion of Ukraine, for police murdering black people. They hide behind the thinnest veneer of respecting Discord's ToS.

Searching for MMSS information led me to a danbooru post making light of the Christchurch mosque shootings. The artist's commentary notes the inefficacy of focusing on the victims of mass murder rather than the perpetrators themselves, particularly when those criminals understand how to effectively use the memetic nature of modern media.

It was also on that Fandom wiki I learned that the art room in MMSS has portraits of several school shooters. Real school shooters. If this is not glorification, I don't know what is.

The citation for that art room tidbit took me further still. A forum dedicated to Columbine and other school shootings and crimes. A thread titled Video games about Mass Murder. Users laud MMSS as one of the best games about mass murder. Avatars depict children holding guns threateningly. The Similar topics at the bottom of the thread ask what games school shooters played.

It's then I decided I had had enough.

Perpetuity

I wish there was a conclusion I could make here. Some hopeful message about erikku realising this is fucked beyond belief. That Discord being banned. The host of the Columbine forum shutting down.

There is no conclusion. There is no takeaway. This is revolting. Researching put knots in my gut. Writing evoked constant self-doubt.

I believe there is room for societal introspection on serious, challenging topics through games. But when the act of playing tragedy is not contextualised, is not condemned, then those games will function as just that, games. Tools for amusement, not for learning. Something to strategise about, not think critically about. A pedestal for amorality, not a mirror reflecting it.

Irredeemable.

23 notes · View notes

thelibraryofeden · 2 years

Text

Written for my high school’s newspaper

“Regardless of what else he is, he is still a child, as they all are. And don’t all children deserve to be protected? To be loved and nurtured so that they may grow and shape the world to make it a better place?”

The House in The Cerulean Sea is an urban fantasy published in 2020 by TJ Klune set in a world with magical people who are separated from non-magical people from a young age. They are either put in orphanages or schools designed for magical people and the main character, Linus Baker, is a caseworker for the Department in Charge of Magical Youth or DICOMY that reviews if orphanages need to be closed. Linus lives a boring life and has resigned himself to loneliness until he gets a highly unusual classified case. He is assigned to investigate Marsyas Island Orphanage, which is home to six dangerous and extraordinary children and a mysterious but charming man that houses them. What he experiences on the island changes everything.

This book is the definition of charming with its witty lines, thought-provoking speeches, characters you can’t find every day, and gorgeous sensory details that ask, “Don’t you wish you were here?” Today, when students are daunted by the prospect of a lonely dull future and are constantly hearing about hate for kids like them and their friends, here instead, is a book about finding the magic in the ordinary and the humanity of all children big and small.

As TJ Klune said in an interview with The Hub, “I think there’s something not only topical about the story, but also universal in its messaging. Fantasy is often filled with grim, dark stories (absolutely nothing wrong with that!), and we don’t get to see a lot of ‘happy’ fantasy these days. I wanted to write a story that reminded me of the cozy fantasies I read as a kid—books that not only made me happy, but allowed me to believe everything could be OK. Hope can often seem like it’s in short supply these days, and while a novel like The House in the Cerulean Sea won’t fix the world’s problems, I hope it can at least serve as a small reminder that we are capable of so much when we stand for what we believe in and lift each other up.”

There is some controversy surrounding the book because the author has stated that the story is partially inspired by the Sixties Scoop, a time between the 1950s and 1980s in Canada where Indigenous children were put in residential schools and adopted into White families. Klune has stated that he had a faint idea of the story beforehand and then hearing that helped him form it more, as well as other instances of children being separated from their families in history and the modern day. Some people feel as if it is overshadowing the horror of the Sixties Scoop by using the concept for a heartwarming story, and for as long as there have been stories where fantastical beings are metaphors for oppressed people there has been the debate about if that metaphor is dehumanizing. There are some aspects of the children in the book that are dangerous, but in real life the indigeous children and all kids taken away from their families because of ethnicity are harmless. Although the characters in this book feel very human, relating real oppressed people to fantastical characters could lead to people not completely seeing oppressed people as normal people like them.

Personally, I can respect this argument, but I feel that this story is a good (but not perfect) metaphor that can help people young and old learn empathy for people different from them, and as someone that is from multiple oppressed groups, I felt seen by the characters and how magical people are treated. This book was the book of the month for the [the high school’s] book club, and you can find it under the fantasy section in our school's library.

“Hate is loud, but I think you'll learn it's because it's only a few people shouting, desperate to be heard. You might not ever be able to change their minds, but so long as you remember you're not alone, you will overcome.”

#the house in the cerulean sea #TJ Klune #book review #fantasy books #queer males in literature #queer rep #fat characters in literature #urban fantasy

19 notes · View notes

pandorasboxofhorrors · 11 months

Text

2023-#2: The Thing in the Fog

Have you ever seen something so scary that you were in shock, almost paralyzed in fear, couldn’t speak, tongue was tied, and all you could do was point? Today we focus on an updated true Halloween tale, a real story, an experience I had many years ago that is steeped heavily in fear…

On a dark and foggy night in 1995, I was lost in the fog near Lake Michigan in Chicago on an empty residential street. It was a very quiet and eerie night, and as I confidently sallied forth, I was self-assured that there would be no strange, terrifying encounters due to the phenomenally thick fog, it was just too improbable. I recalled only one other foggy night in Chicago that compared to this one, and on that night it took me forty-five minutes to find a parked car. I reasoned that nothing was going to happen, it was just thick fog with nothing to fear. I was terribly mistaken, and I was approaching step by step towards something truly terrifying…

The “Silent Hill” film is perhaps the most effective horror film to use fog, and what I was approaching through the fog could have appeared in any horror film as a monster without any makeup whatsoever. I began to hear a disturbing metallic rusty sound, like a large metal blade being dragged down the street. It was only 10 P.M. - doesn’t that sort of stuff supposed to happen later? I ignored the disturbing metallic sounding thing that was approaching me in the fog; it was too improbable to be anything of consequence - it was probably someone’s old bicycle. But it wasn’t.

The street light ahead struggled to radiate a few rays of light filtering down through the fog. In this dim light it appeared, firstly by an outline. It was six to seven feet tall, truly four feet wide, pushing a large metallic object down the middle of the foggy street. As it approached from about thirty feet away, I saw that it had no hands, no face, or any identifiable human features. I was in shock. It was not Halloween. Over the entire thing was a weird rotting sack cloth, covering its face too. Coming down the middle of the street in the fog. Right at me.

And I ran. I ran like Flash to the closest intersection and luckily soon flagged down a police car. I do not recall ever being so unnerved by such a visage before. This really happened. The police car stopped, and the window was rolled down. I was so shocked that I barely could speak. I tried to say something but little could get out, so I pointed and gasped, “Look!” The hulking terror was heading down the middle of the street straight at us, about 50 feet away.

What was even more shocking was that the police were quickly able to identify the unknown entity that stalked the foggy streets of Chicago. Had the police been trained in Emerson’s hobgoblin consistency classification system? It sure wasn’t a hobgoblin, nor anything displayed in any horror film. It possibly could have been classified as a “Shambling Mound,” a Dungeons & Dragons monster, mostly a vegetable matter hulk of similar stature, but it lacked the leafy greens. What was this confusing conundrum’s correct classification?

The police officer identified the foggy figure in a matter-of-fact tone by saying, “It’s Burlap Man.” Feeling as if I missed a day at school in third grade when the legend of Burlap Man was taught, I politely inquired from this knowledgeable police officer on the details of this perplexing puzzle of a person. He explained that Burlap Man was homeless, pushed a rusty, broken cart, only wore entire sacks of burlap somehow stitched together making a full-body burlap suit. It covered his head too like he was a Burlap Jedi. As he approached, under his burlap hood I managed to spy a wild, full black beard bursting forth everywhere, and two beady eyes dancing back and forth, making him appear similar to a Jumbo Jawa. I thanked the police for sharing their knowledge, and I rapidly removed myself from the area, through the dense fog. There can be anything lurking in the fog, I told myself as I sallied forth, except now a bit more slow and alert, and perhaps a bit wiser.

This really happened, and I never saw Burlap Man again. However, one Chicago man encountered Burlap Man that same year, wrote a poem about him, moved to England, and was elected as the president of a poetry council for his Burlap Man poem. But someone else that year in Chicago also ran into Burlap Man, and he became fascinated by him and decided to follow him one night to see where he went, to track him back to his lair. This man wrote about his experiences and posted them online. He said that he followed Burlap Man, looking exactly like when I saw him, and he followed him, indeed, back to his “lair” in the wee hours of the morning…

Burlap Man was pushing the same bad shopping cart with the broken wheel, making the same jarring noise. He stopped on a dark street, made sure no one saw him, and began undressing. He took off the burlap outfit revealing a large and very muscular man under the outfit, like a Navy Seal. He then opened a black SUV with his keys where he picked up and placed the shopping cart. He put the outfit in the back of the SUV and entered the new and expensive vehicle. He looked like a perfectly normal but bearded man, very possibly in the military, and definitely not poor. As Burlap Man prepared to drive away, he saw the man who was watching him who posted this account online, and Burlap Man quickly drove away. This witness of the Burlap Man transformation had the impression that Burlap Man was working undercover, and maybe that’s why the Chicago Police were not fazed by him. However, the witness felt that he may have been working by himself or with some sort of secret organization. Chronologically, this is the last time anyone ever recalls seeing Burlap Man, he completely vanished off the streets of Chicago after this happened, returning to the mythical fog of urban legends, the Jumbo Jawa of Chicago.

#halloween #true halloween tales #chicago #urban legends #jumbo Jawa of Chicago

1 note · View note

freebooter4ever · 2 years

Text

next up is a much more intense and tragic hockey story closer to home :( Indian Horse on ntflx

#if anyone remembers the Graves found during the pandemic #this is one small story in that #the hell and atrocities committed by the catholic church in the name of religion will never be forgiven #or forgotten in the pacific northwest #the residential schools were nothing but horror #journal shit

0 notes

whencyclopedia · 3 years

Text

We’re not responsible for the mistakes of our forebears; we’re responsible for fixing them

Every country has skeletons in its closet that some people would rather not talk about. Canada is currently shaken by the discovery of hundreds of literal skeletons of children in residential schools that used brutal methods to “Christianize” and “Westernize” First Nations children. Shockingly, the last residential school was only closed in 1996!

In the United States, the history of slavery has been brought to the forefront with this year’s celebration of Juneteenth and the government’s decision to make it a national holiday.

World History Encyclopedia now increasingly covers Early Modern history, in particular the early history of the United States, as well as the Spanish and Portuguese Empires. Inevitably, we have published an increasing number of articles on the Transatlantic Slave Trade and the realities of slavery in the New World. Unfortunately, we’ve also seen an increase of negative comments on social media, particularly when talking about slavery.

It would appear that some people feel offended when they are reminded of the history of slavery. Some of our readers attempt to relativize, question and generally diminish the importance of slavery.

For example, we commonly read things along the lines of: “So many empires in history have used slaves, America is not unique!” I think we’ve all learnt in primary school that someone else’s wrongdoing does not justify our own. “But what about the Chinese and Irish, they were mistreated, too?” Of course they were mistreated, and recognizing slavery does not mean we cannot recognize other people’s plight, too. “African kingdoms provided the slaves, the Europeans didn’t steal them!” That’s absolutely true, yet when we talk about human trafficking today, we consider the buyers to be just as guilty as the sellers.

Why is it that to some of our readers the horrors of slavery appear so offensive to their identity? Why would anyone want to minimize the impact of slavery? Let’s be fair, this is not a uniquely American phenomenon: Many Turks get enraged by mentioning the Armenian Genocide and French President Macron faced protests for recognizing (not apologizing) that France’s involvement in Algeria was problematic. All over the world there are people who see history as a threat to their nation… usually the same people who also like to use history to aggrandize their nation’s accomplishments.

I am surprised by this: Growing up in Germany, I have experienced how a horrific period in the past can resonate in the collective consciousness. However, I’ve never seen this horrible past as a stain on my personal or national identity, or something to hide. Quite the opposite, Germany has taken the horrors of Nazism, vowed to work globally to stop them from ever occurring again, and created a new and even more powerful national identity as “the good guys of Europe.”

Some US commentators want us to believe that the recognition of current racial inequalities being caused by slavery is somehow anti-American. Others say: “My family had nothing to do with slavery, why should I feel responsible?” It is entirely true that we are not responsible for the mistakes our ancestors made. That does not mean we should ignore them, though.

For that same reason, we should also not hold historical grudges. I’ve personally talked to Middle Easterners who refer back to the crusades to justify their critique of the West, and Quebecers who hate Anglo-Canadians for the oppression of French culture in Canada’s history. The people alive today are not responsible for past atrocities, so why hold a grudge? We can do better.

All of us alive today are responsible for learning from history and working together to fix the mistakes of the past that still reverberate in the cultural, economic and political landscapes of the present. The true power of history is revealed when we use it to understand the current situation and apply these learnings to build a better future. That means facing historical horrors with honesty, examining how they still affect us today, and acting upon them constructively and with mutual respect.

Jan van der Crabben CEO, World History Encyclopedia

#slavery #history #world history #World History Encyclopedia #race #critical race theory #crt #residential schools #canadian history #us history #history of slavery #transatlantic slave trade

337 notes · View notes

translations-by-aiimee · 2 years

Text

Dig a Grave to Dig Out a Ghost - Chapter 39

Original Title: 挖坟挖出鬼

Genres: Drama, Horror, Mystery, Supernatural, Yaoi

This translation is the product of my limited knowledge of Chinese characters as I attempt to learn the language. If I have made any egregious mistakes, please let me know.

Chapter Index

Chapter 39

The home had grown as quiet as a graveyard because of the ghost's disappearance. Lin Yan didn't dare go home and made various excuses to stay at the hospital. He was a meticulous and gentle person. The old man was satisfied after a few days in his care. He even sighed thinking about how his daughter could have broken up with someone like him.

"Lin, I don't think you can forget Weiwei. How about, when she wakes up, I'll set you two up again. When buying clothes, you get the new ones, but for relationships, old connections are better than new ones. . ."

Lin Yan's hands stopped moving. He smiled good-naturedly at his former would-be father-in-law: "Weiwei is too good for someone like me." Seeing that the old man seemed to want to interject, he continued, "I've been busy with school, and I have an internship, so I can’t ask for someone to wait for me when nothing will come out of it.”

Hearing the polite refusal in Lin Yan's tone, the old man sighed pitifully and refrained from commenting.

For five days in a row, Yin Zhou and the little Daoist priest stayed up all night and went out to look for the lost soul as soon as it got dark. Halfway through, they were reported by an old lady wearing a red armband for disturbing public order because of the loud noise they made while passing through a residential area and had to stay in a police station overnight. After a few days, the dark circles under their eyes were no lighter than Lin Yan's.

Things took a turn for the worse in the early hours of the fifth day. It rained heavily for several days, and the whole city became like a sea. The TV kept broadcasting the news that passersby were trapped, the houses at the bottom of the bridge were flooded, and drivers had drowned in their cars. When the two came back, they looked like drowned rats. The little Daoist rushed into the room wringing a wet T-shirt in his hand, stammering, "I-I found it, this water is gathering yin, and it almost washed into the sewer to some unknown place. "

"The soul is born outside of the body and can be very confused. Usually, it stays in place and won't wander around, but the streams of water carry yin. If it rains heavily, if a soul gets washed away, even if you find it before seven days, it'll be useless, the body and soul won't reconnect. A person without a soul is no different from a lunatic. L-Luckily, I caught this in time."

The little Daoist set up a small brazier and threw a talisman paper and blocks of pine incense into it to burn. The entire ward was foggy, and the surrounding smoke gave off the mysterious atmosphere of an old countryside. A pale blue-green shadow floated towards the hospital bed. Yin Zhou, who knew about the cherished jade, secretly dragged Lin Yan closer: "Just wait until she wakes up and ask for clarification."

"I don't care, as long as she's okay." Lin Yan hesitated before he walked out of the room with a cold face. He looked at the curtain of rain outside the glass door in the first-floor lobby.

There were still three hours before dawn. The foyer was deserted. A mother and daughter in the triage area in the corner were dozed off with a saline drip hanging beside them.

Time passed.

The little Daoist priest and Yin Zhou came out of the elevator. Seeing Lin Yan standing at the door, lost in thought, Yin Zhou pouted and said, "He hasn't smiled since that thing left. It's like he's possessed." Yin Zhou didn't notice the young Daoist's embarrassment. He patted the jade pendant into Lin Yan's palm, "She woke up. She's drinking porridge in bed and recuperating. She also remembered what happened that night. She said that she met a grandmother with her granddaughter burning paper offerings at an intersection in the middle of the night. She was wearing floral print clothes and a red scarf. Do you know who she's talking about?"

Lin Yan was stunned: "Second Immortal Gu?"

Yin Zhou spread his hands: "Dude, your recent evil infection is so powerful that you can't get away from it. Fortunately, my yang energy hasn't been affected."

"She doesn't know why she had this piece of jade in her hand. Even after asking her several times, she said she couldn't remember. It's kinda weird how we kept asking her."

Why did Second Immortal Gu and the girl in red pester Weiwei that day? This matter has nothing to do with her. Why did Xiao Yu's waist ornament appear in Weiwei's hands? He always cherished the things that Lin Yan bought for him. . . Various thoughts twisted together in his head. Lin Yan suddenly remembered what he had deduced before. If the girl in red wanted to stop Xiao Yu from regaining consciousness by killing herself, this whole thing, the reasoning of the temple master, the time of death of Second Immortal Gu that was tampered with, all of it pointed to Xiao Yu. Someone was instigating the conflict between him and the ghost. This hadn't stopped because of the temple master's disappearance. It actually intensified. . .

What if the purpose of "it" was to separate Lin Yan from Xiao Yu?

What if "it" had been waiting for the right moment to kill the ghost that Lin Yan had accidentally led from the grave into the human world?

What if the thing making the ghosts vulnerable was a curse. There was a person pulling the strings of this curse, a person hiding in the shadows. The black hand stretched out in the mist. . . Lin Yan gasped and looked at the dark flower garden. Would he be in the same danger as well?

Yin Zhou wanted to say something, but he found that the look in Lin Yan's eyes wasn't quite right. He kept staring at the dark curtain of rain outside the door. After a while, he turned back suddenly: "Do you have an umbrella upstairs? I'm going out. I can't drive in this weather."

"Are you asking to die? The people trapped outside can't even be saved, what are you doing?"

Lin Yan gritted his teeth: "I'm going to find Xiao Yu." After staring at a security guard's flashlight and raincoat, he couldn't help but want to go out. Yin Zhou was so frightened that he grabbed him and said, "You'll have to wait until dawn. Besides, why do you want to find him? Didn't you always want to send him away? He finally agreed to leave, are you addicted to this ghost?"

Lin Yan cursed him to get lost. His anxiety kept rising. The rain curtain was pitch black. The holly and pine trees in the courtyard were blown to the side by the strong wind. The rain was pouring from the eaves onto the marble steps. Lin Yan forced off Yin Zhou's hand with all his strength. He said anxiously, "You don't understand. He's not from this era. The young master knows nothing, he has nowhere to go..."

Yin Zhou's expression was complicated: "How do you figure that? He's a ghost, where can he not go? Maybe he will be reincarnated as a baby soon." He grasped Lin Yan even tighter, his eyes were unfathomable. "You don't like that gay ghost, do you?"

"Are you also. . ."

"No." Lin Yan turned his face away. "I just pity him."

"Don't be fucking ridiculous. You ran away from home when you were in high school and took a train to Yunnan with two hundred dollars, yet I've never seen you in such a hurry."

Lin Yan was silent. For a long time, he scratched the hair in front of his forehead. He asked the little Daoist priest: "A-Yan, can you summon his soul? I'm worried that something will happen to him. . . You know, your master, he. . ."

A-Yan's eyes suddenly turned cold: "Do y-you think I'm some kind of gadget? He's no longer something I can summon."

Only then did Lin Yan realize that this reaction was because he had hit the little Daoist priest's sore spot. Any concerns about that ghost would undoubtedly be irritating to A-Yan. He embarrassedly apologized. The young Daoist priest shook his head with a heavy heart: "L-Lin Yan, don't look for him. What can you do if you find him? Hanging out with him will drain your yang energy. . . You'll have at most two months, then you'll die. He left for your own good."

"A-As for my master," A-Yan said coldly, "He's not that powerful. Back then, he had to rely on your shadow to kill that ghost. Now it's even more impossible. You can rest assured."

"Will he be reincarnated?"

The corners of A-Yan's mouth twitched. His eyes narrowed to reveal a nervous smile: "It's not that simple. A beast is always a beast. His resentment is so strong but his wish is not fulfilled. He'll probably go back to his lair and continue to harm people. You are not the only one with pure Yin. M-Maybe one day you'll see him already hanging around someone else." After saying this he turned around and walked away. Yin Zhou stared at A-Yan's back in surprise. He said to Lin Yan: "Is he acting strange? That was weird."

Lin Yan shook his head: "No, he's right. I made these mistakes myself."

"This world is nuts. I can't understand it." Yin Zhou rolled his eyes.

-------------

The empty passenger seat in the car, the empty double bed in the house, and the pillows thrown aside were waiting for its master. Lin Yan was lying on the bed tossing and turning. Every time his gaze swept across the empty pillow, he felt suffocated and couldn't help but ignore every other worry and hold it. How long had he even known him? What was he waiting for? He's not coming back.

He doesn't want us anymore. He went to a dark place, waiting for another person who would accept him. Maybe for a year, maybe for ten years, maybe for a hundred years. He can afford to wait, we can't.

It was a waste of time. Lin Yan fetched a cigarette from the bedside table. He hugged his knees and took one puff after another. It was clearly daytime, but outside the window was as dark as ink. The rain poured down, drowning the city until it was a swamp. Bodies swam through the water in different postures. Swelling, rotting, green pus oozing out. With sewers lying on every street corner, the bodies turned into a mass of foul water hundreds of square kilometres wide. Who would have recognized what it looked like?

That night, he had a strange dream. He dreamt of an empty crossroads. Legend has it that the crossroads are where yin and yang meet. A familiar voice came from the depths of the thick fog. Xiao Yu said it's so cold, there's no blanket here.

Lin Yan said wait, I'll burn one for you.

My clothes are still in your closet.

I'll burn them for you too.

Where is my coffin? Where are my burial clothes? I want a set of things for the wedding. I want to get married. I want to marry the daughter of a neighbouring village clerk who just died. I want the dowry and jewelry for the engagement. I want paper money and red candles. The gentleman has seen our horoscopes. We are made for each other and our future will be filled with many children and grandchildren.

Lin Yan stood at the foggy crossroads, shivering from the cold. He was wearing a red satin burial suit with dark 'happiness' characters, a large black flower on his chest, riding a deathly white paper horse with eyes like two deep black holes. He shouted into the depths of the fog: If you marry, what should I do? I'll be there soon. Wait for me.

It's too late, Xiao Yu said. It's enough for you to burn those things.

I got married. The lady next door is good-natured. We'll be buried under the big locust tree behind the village. Don't forget to burn more money and food, and next year, when you come to add soil to the grave, burn some clothes for the children.

Lin Yan woke up at once. The night was dull and dreary, and the rain outside the window was incessant. His face was also cold. He reached out his hand to feel his cheek was wet. His chest was sore and bitter. Lin Yan bit the corner of his blanket. After the corner of his gaze passed over the lonely pillow next to him, he suddenly felt upset and couldn't fall back to sleep.

The subtext behind every "go" was to stay, behind every "goodbye" was the desire to stay, but he was forced by his pride to only leave those thoughts unfinished. The result was that the building was empty, the tea had gone cold, the key was still in its original place, the seat was still reserved for him, but the man refused to cross the boundary marker and return to his world.

Even if the curtains of the world are open, feelings are still private. Lin Yan quietly got out of bed. He walked barefoot into the dark bathroom, moved a small stool and sat down by the bathtub. He murmured: I'll wash your hair for you, okay?

No answer. A cold and silent house. A cold coffin, a silent grave.

Lin Yan looked at the void and smiled. He thought that he must be stupid.

-------------

Weiwei's health was actually not too badly affected. After the little Daoist priest and Yin Zhou successfully found the lost soul, she recovered quickly. In the morning, Weiwei's father called Lin Yan to say that she would be discharged from the hospital tomorrow. Lin Yan was cooking chicken soup in the kitchen with his phone held up to his ear. In the meantime, he cooked noodles for his former would-be father-in-law. He packed them into a thermos and sat down at the table. He breathed a sigh of relief, thinking that he could finally let go of one thing.

The rain poured with no signs of stopping. The news of the torrential rain spread all over the country. Photos of cars submerged in water and pedestrians struggling to keep their heads above water were posted everywhere online. Lin Yan, as a native of the area for more than twenty years, had developed the skills to avoid flooding, freezing, sand, etc. When he arrived at the hospital, his lunch was still intact, but the hospital elevator was underwater and needed maintenance. Lin Yan had to climb the stairs with the thermos and accidentally walked up one extra floor. He turned into the hallway on the sixth floor, and before he realized that the floor number was wrong, he was already being pushed by a middle-aged woman who rushed over and shoved his shoulder, yelling loudly: "It's not easy to come to the hospital when it's raining so hard. I will definitely thank you volunteers on behalf of the community when we get back!"

The older woman's voice was like a bell. She had short hair that looked like a beetle and she wore long-style scrubs with ducklings on them. Two chubby legs were tucked into black pantyhose, but her ankles are too thin. In contrast to wearing boat shoes, the bottom of her shoes were like duck webbed-feet, snapped on the ground. She talked to herself and pushed Lin Yan to go inside, not minding his whispered arguments the entire way.

"Has the team leader given you the rundown? Don't say anything when you get there. The old man isn't in a good condition. The doctor said that it is only a matter of the past few days, so let's let the old man go comfortably." The older woman slapped Lin Yan on the shoulder. "This young man is so good-looking today. I like looking at you."

Lin Yan didn't know whether to laugh or cry. He held the chicken soup and the older woman cut him off again. "I'm off to work. Volunteers haven't been able to come in because of the recent heavy rain, and all the wards are short of people. You cover this area, don't make any mistakes."

Seeing that she was about to leave, Lin Yan finally couldn't help but exclaim, imitating the older woman's breathing technique*: "I-I went to the wrong floor!"

*(T/N: He's being sarcastic because she went on for so long without taking a breath)

"What?" The older woman's thin eyebrows instantly shot up.

"I. . . I mean, I'm going downstairs to see my friend. The elevator was broken, and I went up an extra floor. . ." Lin Yan muttered and held the thermos in front of him. "See, I'm delivering lunch."

The older woman was stunned for a second and then grinned: "Ah, why didn't you say it earlier? You've kept me held up!" She had completely forgotten the fact that Lin Yan had been trying to explain the situation this whole time and raised her hand to look at her watch. Because she was chubby, the dial was pressed into her white skin. "What can I do? My shift is almost up and there's no one left. The old man might finally wake up, ah. . ."

The most sensible move at this time was to quickly flee the scene with the thermos in hand, but Lin Yan should never have spoken up. It was this next sentence that made his life like a radish just pulled out of the mud, not yet washed clean under the faucet before being flopped back down with a crisp thud.

Life itself was seemingly predetermined, seemingly one coincidence after another without any rules. In fact, every corner and fork in the road has already been predetermined, where to stop, where to turn around. No matter how much you struggle, you must eventually follow the predetermined path. And it's our heart that controls all this. It has nothing to do with the event itself.

The only difference was the time you arrived at that fork in the road.

"I'll be free after I deliver the food. If you're really in a hurry, I'll be able to help you later." Lin Yan mumbled.

With a bang, the door to the parallel world opened, and from here, life was divided into two paths. One was full of flowers and sunshine. He happily went home and watched TV and ate oranges. He went home happily to watch TV and eat oranges, slowly forgetting everything related to Xiao Yu, and was finally swept away by a handsome, respectable boy he met by chance; while the other was wet and dark, walking alone with a flashlight in the misty and supernatural world. At this time, Lin Yan, who was standing at the fork in the road, unknowingly started down the second path.

#dig a grave to dig out a ghost translation #dig a grave to dig out a ghost #bl novel #chinese novel #english translation #chinese bl #danmei #danmei novel #yaoi novel #yaoi

8 notes · View notes

religion-is-a-mental-illness · 3 years

Note

Are there any documentaries or history articles that you would recommend for learning about the residential schools in Canada? Its very sad but enlightening at how religious leaders and organizations blame everybody else in the world for all of its evils and cruelties, when its often religious people/institutions themselves that are most guilty of horrific atrocities and violence.

The schools and the impact on the cultures, the individuals, and recognition of them as a national disgrace has been covered in a number of different ways, so if you're looking for general coverage, there's a bit to choose from.

But specifically as far as the atrocity of the deaths is concerned, the most authoritative documentary appears to be Kevin Annett's "Unrepentant," from 2006:

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4451330/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bMjSL2brtuA

The more recent discoveries appear to be too new, and still unfolding, to have significant completed media and publications attached. The most useful resource for those would appear to be the official reports themselves, although they might be a lot to consume.

https://nctr.ca/records/reports/

Otherwise, as far as recent developments, the best I can suggest is Googling up the "canada residential school 2021." These seem to be fairly comprehensive.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/canadas-residential-schools-were-a-horror/

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-57325653

https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/newly-discovered-b-c-graves-a-grim-reminder-of-the-heartbreaking-death-toll-of-residential-schools

One thing to keep in mind though, is that it appears that the churches - both the Catholic Church and other Xian churches - was acting as agents for the government, who had administration and oversight of the schools. Leaving aside whether they should have been conducting those schools at all - the USA and Australia have their own "lost generations" as well - the schools were underfunded, poorly staffed, overcrowded, had poor sanitation, poor medical facilities, poor health and safety standards.

This is not to excuse the churches, since if they were as loving and charitable as they pretend, they would have blown the whistle themselves. After all, they wielded major power and influence at the time, as evidenced by the fact they were tasked with operating the schools in the first place. But they didn't. And the government knew what was going on - it wasn't that the church was hiding it all - did nothing to stop it, and worse.

So, basically the churches and the government collaborated and conspired to torment and kill thousands of indigenous kids in the kids' "best interests."

Yet another reminder that religion does not foster morality. Being that they purportedly represent the knowledge and will of an eternal, divine omniscience from which all morality (supposedly) derives, we should expect that no church should ever have to apologize for anything. A church that has to apologize for its own sins is a false church. A church that continually has to apologize for atrocity after atrocity after atrocity is a church that needs to be banned, shut down and dissolved.

#ask #canada #residential schools #indigenous children #indigenous child graves #catholic church #christianity #indigenous genocide #canadian government #religion is a mental illness #religious atrocities

29 notes · View notes

horror-bibiru2 · 2 years

Text

[Game Review] Akai Noroi 🇯🇵

Creator: Azaxor - Aza Game Studio

AKAI NOROI is a Asian / Japanese horror folklore inspired journey based upon it's own unique story. You are AKIO a 39 year old man troubled with addiction who recently lost his job as a sales representative for Tanjo Industries. Upon returning home one evening to your apartment in Japan, Tokyo, unforeseen events drag you into a nightmarish world. Explore the abandoned sleeping quarters, delve into the residents past. Investigate an ancient yurei curse and establish the truth about yourself and the mysterious disappearance of all the previous residents.

Akai Noroi is described as a Japanese folklore inspired game. I think Japanese-themed is a little more accurate. Sure there’s a vengeful female spirit in it referred to as a yurei, and some of the characters have Japanese names. Apart from the walls being plastered with artwork depicting various Yokai and other storytelling figures, and kanji being slapped everywhere, they’re not actually tied to the story in any way. Infact, we start off in Akio’s apartment in Tokyo with a view of a flood of neon lights, but once you leave that room, the rest of the set gets very American. I think even the police officer’s badge had the USA flag and eagle.

The biggest issue for this game I’ve found is the storytelling, especially when it comes to Aiko and your sister. Her identity becomes a little bit of a mess, and for the longest time I thought Aiko and the caretaker/sister were the same person. Akio’s sister was a caretaker at the facility where Aiko, Yoko, Claire and even Akio himself stayed. The caretaker/sister was liked by Aiko but passed during an altercation with a burglar when the responding police officer accidentally shoots her in the confusion. Akio was already dubbed insane by his family and moved to the facility, so I can only assume his sister got a job there to be close to her brother. With the help of the steam achievements we know that Yoko is the Pyjama Ghost, Claire is the large monster, and that it is Aiko that has been the guiding spirit that has been popping up to us over the course of the game. I originally thought this was your sister, the caretaker. There appear to be 2 different models for the main antagonist of this game, but only one was shown during the game, the second only pops up in the ending stage. I think introducing us to a model of your sister would have cleared that confusion up (for me at least).

Next is where the Ancient red lady yurei comes in. We learn that she possesses the caretaker/sister as she perishes when she is shot. Apparently the yurei altered her body, her eyes merged into one big all seeing eye, etc. I can’t imagine all this happened to her physical body, but perhaps her ghost? There’s no real explanation why the red Yurei chose her, I was kind of hoping that Aiko or Yoko had somehow summoned her to the sleeping quarters through some artistic means in a bid for revenge on all their shortcomings. I really wish there was more work put into how this curse was born, maybe one of the characters got a little more than they bargained for and now everyone’s in this hell loop but this is never explored.

I’ve talked about Akio, Aiko and Yoko but there’s one final character I have absolutely no clue about. Claire. She’s listed as one of the 3 main residents. We get an achievement for entering her room, the same achievement that gives away that the big monster in the school is her. We know she was married and her husband left her to the residential home when she developed Alzheimer's and put on a lot of weight, but beyond this, nothing. She mentions in her note that she feels alive when she eats, and not long after we see the words gluttony, I also noticed in Yoko’s ending we see the sin Envy written on a bed with legs, considering she was wheelchair bound. Claire feels like she was going to have her own segment but the dev just didn’t follow through on it? Unless I’ve missed a note somewhere, I really think this needs looking at, unfortunately I think I found the game too late for that.

______________________________________________________________

My Rating: ⭐️ ⭐️ ★ ★ ★ ______________________________________________________________

#akai noroi #red curse #japanese #Game #horror #story #review

10 notes · View notes

bookshelf-in-progress · 3 years

Text

Beneath the Surface: A Retelling of “The Frog Prince”

If I’d had any choice, I never would have taken the underground train. I had accompanied Roger to a political summit in the city of Roshen, but spouses leave after the opening speeches, and since I couldn’t leave Roger without the hovercar, I had to use public transportation. The train--built by the natives decades before humanity absorbed Arateph into the Interplanetary Coalition--was a horrible excuse for technology. It rattled me to my destination, jolted me into an underground station, and left me so shaken that I could feel my bones clattering as I climbed up the stairs to the street.

The crowd surged around me as I emerged onto the sidewalk. There were far too many tephans. You know what Arateph’s natives look like—almost like humans, but it’s an unsettling almost. Their eyes just slightly too high on their heads, their ears just slightly too far back, and hands (ugh) split into only three fingers and a thumb. Like a person shaped by a sculptor with a hazy memory of how humans look. I can take them in small doses, but in groups? My skin was crawling. I powered through the crowd as quickly as possible and tried not to let any of them touch me.

I sped several blocks away from the train station before I realized I was nowhere near my hotel. The buildings in this neighborhood were old, made of crumbling stone bricks that had been stacked by physical labor rather than printed by machine. Half the windows were made of colored glass, and half of those were broken. Garbage rustled in the gutters, holes marred the concrete sidewalks, and all the signs were written in an unfamiliar alphabet. I was, somehow, lost in a tephan neighborhood. And not a nice one.

I turned in circles, trying to figure out which way I’d come. Tephans watched me from storefronts and doorsteps and alleyways, and I kept walking to prevent them from figuring out just how lost I was. I was Priscilla Overton, wife of a Coalition finance minister, pillar of this planet’s elite—and human. Some groups violently opposed human rule, and tephan attacks against humans were on the rise. Who knew what these savages would do if they knew how helpless I was?

I rushed through narrow, dark streets until I reached a wider thoroughfare--a residential area with slightly less grimy apartment buildings. Still not a nice neighborhood, but not a place where I suspected otherworldly rats would tear the flesh from my bones or criminals would murder me for my technology.

I pulled my datapad out of my purse to look for directions. Dead.

I unfolded my wristcomm and tried to call for help. No signal.

I put my fist to my mouth to stifle a frustrated scream. Why did these things happen to me?

I stormed further down the street, cursing Roger for ever bringing us to this planet. We’d been happy on Earth. Comfortable. Respected. With no chance of wandering into streets where aliens stared at you with their off-kilter eyes. The rewards we got for helping to civilize this backward planet weren’t nearly enough to make up for this torture.

I turned a corner and found myself in front of a long, low yellow-brick building with dozens of small windows. The window boxes had flowers in them—fist-sized bundles of tiny red and gold petals. Not something you’d find on Earth, but...nice. Nice enough to pull me down from my fury and make me think I could give my wristcomm another try.

I powered down the wristcomm and stood next to a pink metal lamp post (Arateph has strange color trends) while I waited for it to restart. A metal grate was below my feet. These primitives still used storm drains! I shouldn’t have been surprised, since the road clearly wasn’t made of Draincrete, but it was still jarring. Living on Arateph was a strange combination of living on another world and living in the backward past.

My wristcomm buzzed, still powering up. I was ready to explode with anxiety. There were tephans straggling by—not many of them, but too many and too poorly dressed for my taste. To calm myself, I played with my wedding ring—a gold band with a spray of amethysts and pearls. The ring had been in Roger’s family for centuries. Some days, it felt like my last tie to a familiar world.

I kept my life on Arateph as Earth-like as possible, but it could never be the same as living on Earth. Alien things always lingered at the edges. Trees that turned purple in autumn instead of familiar orange. Toothy red-and-purple-feathered birds that rooted through the trash and woke me with their awful screeching. And around every corner, people who looked like grotesque parodies of my own kind. An entire world conspiring to make me constantly aware of how far I was from home.

My sisters were going about their own lives on Earth, and the few times we could afford appointments at synced comms stations, we found little to talk about--we literally came from different worlds. If Roger and I ever had children--doubtful but possible at our age--our families would only know them as data-images.

This was why I hated being alone on this wretched planet. Gave me far too much time to think about these things.

My wristcomm chimed—finally awake. I unfolded the screen and attempted to bring up my list of contact codes. I found Roger’s; he’d be in the middle of a meeting, but I couldn’t help that. I pressed the code and waited.

A discordant note sounded. No signal. I threw down my hand in frustration. My ring flew down with it. The golden band slipped off my finger, tumbled toward the ground, bounced off the edges of the grate, and fell into the drain.

I gasped in horror and fell to my knees. It couldn’t be, not now.

The ring sparkled in the sunlight, caught on a lip where the structure of the drain met the tube of the deeper pipe. I put my purse on the ground and slid my arm through the grate, but my arm got stuck just above the elbow. The ring was still a foot beyond my reach.

I burst into tears. I couldn’t help it. After the day I’d had—lost among tephans, fighting faulty technology, no hope of help from people who looked like me—this was the last straw. This planet had taken me from my home, my family, my friends, everything familiar, and now it was taking my one reminder of it all. Anybody would have cried.

Long before I felt any relief, a harsh voice broke through my sobs. “Are you finished yet?”

I looked up, furious at whoever was rude enough to interrupt my misery.

A tephan girl sat in the stairwell of the long yellow-brick building next to the gutter. I yelped and reeled back, tears still flowing. Have you ever seen a tephan child? They’re ten times worse than the adults; all their slightly-wrong features stretched even further out of shape, their eyes big and bulging in their heads. This girl was gangly. Her skinny limbs dangled out of baggy green clothes, and a wild brown bush of curls frizzed around her face and over her eyes. By human standards, I’d have judged her to be about twelve years old (though I have no idea if these creatures age like humans). By any race’s standards, she looked positively feral.

I couldn’t believe the creature had spoken to me. “Did you say something?” I asked.

She held up a thick book, bound human-style but with blocky tephan letters on the cover. “Can you cry somewhere else? I’m trying to read.”

She spoke Anglese with only a lightly slurring tephan accent. Somehow, this child spoke the Coalition’s language better than most of the tephan diplomats at Roger’s interminable meetings.

In my shock, I blurted, “How do you know Anglese?”

The creature rolled her eyes. “I go to school. With humans and everything.”

Roger hadn’t been in favor of the integration policy, but it apparently had some benefits. Or would have, had I any interest in talking to the child. Before I could decide if I wanted to reply, I glimpsed the ring again and burst into another involuntary round of tears.

The girl closed her book with a sigh. “What are you crying about anyway?”

I couldn’t tell her that I was crying because of her terrible, technologically backward planet and all its inhabitants, but I had to talk to someone and it was so good to hear human words, even from an alien’s throat. I pointed to the drain. “My ring,” I gasped. “It fell...”

She picked up her book, scrambled down the stairs, and peered in the drain. She huffed and rolled her eyes. “You’re making that much noise over that?”

I drew back my shoulders and snapped, “It’s an irreplaceable heirloom! Centuries of human history! You can’t get those stones anywhere but Earth!”

“Then you should have been more careful with it.”

That made me want to scream, but before I could gather enough breath, the child gathered the book to her chest and turned away. “Can you at least try to keep it down?”

As the girl sat on the building’s stone stairs, the wind tore a scrap of paper out of her book and sent it fluttering. She reached up and snatched it out of the air. My gaze fell on the girl’s arms—long, lanky things that were thinner than human arms. With four-fingered hands that could easily slip between the bars of the grate.

“Wait!” I shouted. “Little tephan girl! What’s your name?”

The girl cast me a dark, distrustful expression, but she finally intoned, “Tanza.”

Not bad, as far as tephan names went. I could pronounce this one. “Tanza,” I said, “Do you think you could reach it?”

The girl shifted her hand behind her back, her face becoming a hard mask. “What do you mean?”

I pointed to her, rambling in my excitement. “Your arms are thinner than mine. Just as long. You could probably reach...”

Her brow furrowed. “You want me to dig in a sewer?”

“Not a sewer,” I said. “A storm drain.”

“Still dirty.” She looked at the storm drain with narrowed eyes.“If I get it for you, will you go away?”

I wanted nothing more. “Immediately.”

"What'll you pay me for it?"

I felt like I'd been hit by a train. "What? Who said I'd pay you?"

The child pointed one long finger at the storm drain. “If I get dirty digging in there, it’ll be my tenth laundry demerit and I don’t get supper. I’m not doing it for nothing!”

The building behind her held one of the few signs I’d seen with Anglese translations beneath the tephan words: Alogath Charity Home for Unwanted Children. I could see why this child was unwanted.

“I don’t carry cash,” I told her.

“Do you have a credit stick?”

I put a protective arm over my purse. “It’ll be deactivated the moment you touch it.”

She rolled her eyes. “I don’t need the whole stick. Just buy me something with it.”

A truck—a noisy, clanking tephan thing that actually rolled on the ground—roared past us. The glimmer on the ring shifted closer to the drain pipe. If I didn’t act fast…

“What do you want?” I asked her.

“A lot of things.” Her eyes went blank as she stared at imaginings only she could see. Finally, she declared, “A meal at the High Palace.”

She really said that! As if it were a reasonable request! I don’t know how this urchin even knew about human restaurants, much less the finest of fine dining establishments.

“That’s ridiculous!”

She shrugged one shoulder. “I lose a meal, you buy me a replacement. That’s fair.”

“Do you know how much a High Palace meal costs?”

“A lot less than it’ll cost you to replace that ring.”

I growled in frustration. The child had me backed into a corner and she knew it. I shuddered at the thought of taking this…thing into the sparkling society of a High Palace dining room.

I pointed a fierce finger at the child. “Only if you give me the ring immediately. Understand? There’s not a place on the planet a creature like you could sell it without suspicion.”

“I don’t want your ring. I’ll live up to my end of the bargain. And you’ll live up to yours, or that ring’s staying where it is.”

Of course I couldn’t really take her to the High Palace, but one more street-rattling truck could take the ring forever out of anyone’s reach. I’d have agreed if she’d asked for a hovercar.

“Fine!” I shouted. “I’ll buy you the meal. Just save my ring!”

The child placed her book on a clean patch of sidewalk and returned to the edge of the street. I snatched up my purse and stepped aside while the girl laid face down in the gutter. She slid her arm through the grate, all the way up to the shoulder. I held my breath for an eternal moment and didn’t release it until the girl emerged with a ring of gold and amethyst in her hands.

The ring sparkled merrily at me, grimy but whole. I snatched it from Tanza's hands and tucked it into an inner pocket of my gray blazer. I wouldn’t wear it again without resizing it—and not until I was in a neighborhood where I didn’t have to worry about it being stolen from my finger.

The child picked up her book and looked at me expectantly. Demandingly.

I couldn’t give her what she wanted. She was a complete stranger. I’d made the promise under duress. Not a court in the universe would hold me to it. What right did a tephan child have to make such ridiculous demands of a woman of my stature?

“Thank you,” I said. “You did a very good thing.” Then I sped down the street.

The creature was right at my heels. “The High Palace is the other way.”

I didn’t know if she was telling the truth. It didn’t matter. I walked faster.

She yanked at my arm. “You promised me a meal!”

“Don’t be ridiculous. I couldn’t get you into the High Palace.”

“A human lady dressed like you? You could get me in if you wanted to.”

I yanked my arm away from her. “What a pity I don’t want to.”

She gave a feral yowl. I started sprinting—or as near as I could manage in the heels I was wearing. The girl kept pace with me. I was a foot taller than her; why couldn’t I outrun her? Could I lose her in her own streets when I was lost myself?

Just when I thought I’d never be able to escape, I rounded a corner and saw the green-and-silver uniform of a Coalition policeman. My heart soared as I raced toward him. Help, protection, guidance, all only a few steps away. Something wonderfully human in this alien world.

“Officer!” I shouted to his retreating back. “Please, I need help!”

The officer stopped and raised a hand. A four-fingered hand. When he turned around, his face had the skewed proportions of a tephan face.

I nearly screamed. I’d stumbled into a nightmare.

The officer said, with the crisp diction of a tephan overcompensating for an accent, “Have you a problem, morik—madam?”

I’d heard that a few tephans had been admitted into the police forces, but I’d never thought I’d meet one. This tephan was young. Wiry and blond. Almost insignificant-looking if it weren’t for the uniform and the stolen sense of authority. Would he help a human?

Tephan or not, he had an obligation to assist the public. “Officer,” I gasped. “I need directions to the nearest train station. I’m trying to get home and this child is harassing me.”

The girl stormed up to him and shrieked, “She’s a liar!”

She shouted a stream of gibberish, and it wasn’t until the officer responded with similar sounds that I realized they were speaking the tephan language. Flowing, musical vowels were interrupted by harsh consonants, like rocks in a river. The sounds sent chills down my spine that only grew fiercer as the officer’s expression grew darker.

When the girl finished, the officer looked at me, not like an innocent victim needing help, but like a criminal who needed hauling to one of their barbaric tephan jails. “You have wronged this girl.”

I lifted my chin. “She’s lying! I’ve done nothing to her!”

“She claims she rescued your ring in exchange for a meal at the High Palace, and you are attempting to break your word.”

“I owe her nothing!”

“Did you promise her a meal?”

I threw out my hands in frustration. “It’s not like we had a contract or anything!”

He raised an eyebrow. “Your promise means nothing without a legal document?”

“She had no right to hold me to a promise. I was desperate!”

He put a brotherly hand on the girl’s shoulder. “And she was kind enough to help you.”

I scoffed. “For a heavy price.”

The child shouted, “It’s one meal!”

The officer examined my face carefully. “You are Priscilla Overton, are you not? The wife of the finance minister?”

My jaw dropped. I’m prominent enough in human circles, but I’d never dared to consider that my face was known among tephans. It terrified me, but I knew it could be my ticket out of this. “I am, and when my husband finds out about how I’ve been treated—”

“Your husband is not a popular man. Not among tephans.”

I had never cared about Roger's reputation among the tephans. These primitives didn’t know what was best for their planet. But that wasn’t something I could say when I was alone in a strange neighborhood with two of them.

The officer continued, “It will not help his reputation if his wife is known as a promise-breaker.”

I couldn’t believe it. “Are you threatening me?”

He leaned toward me and said in low tones, “I am helping you.” He gestured to the street around us. “Do you think I’m the only one who heard the girl’s story?”

I shuddered to see a handful of tephans staring at us from among the crumbling buildings.

The officer said, “The Coalition doesn’t care much for tephan opinion, but if there is enough outcry against one man, even a human representative can be released from his job.”

At first, the thought lifted my spirits. Sent home! To Earth! It was what I’d wanted from the moment we’d stepped foot on this planet. But sent home in disgrace? Roger would have no future in government after such a public failure. It would mean everything we suffered here would be for nothing.

I asked the officer, “You really think they’d protest? Just because I didn’t bow to a child’s ridiculous demands?”

“If a person can’t keep a promise made to a child, how can anything they say be trusted?” His tephan gaze raked over me, like he was dissecting my inner thoughts. “Your people may have different ideas, but tephans still value virtue.”

How dare he—this puffed-up primitive in a human position of power—accuse humanity of being inferior?

My opinion didn’t matter. These creatures thought it a matter of morality that I feed this ragged brat finer cuisine than their planet had ever produced, and nothing I could say would change their minds. Now it seems ridiculous to think that those tephans could ruin us, but in that moment, alone in those unfamiliar streets, seeing how these two strange aliens teamed up against me, I could believe their kind capable of anything.

I looked down at the child. Her big eyes. Her frizzy curls. Her long limbs clutching the book to her chest. The grimy, bog-green clothes that fell short of the wrists and ankles. The smug smirk of a spoiled child who knew she was about to get her way. I had never loathed anyone more in my life.

“Do you have a name?” I asked her. “I’ll need a full name for the restaurant register.”

“I told you,” she said, as though she’d expected me to remember. “It’s Tanza.”

“What’s the rest of your name?” Most tephans I’d met had at least three or four names and were obnoxiously eager to explain them.

The girl's face darkened like I’d offended her. “Just Tanza.”

The officer looked at her with new pity, and even I understood why. You know how important names are to tephans. One name was a badge of dishonor--forever marking her as a child who’d never been claimed by any family, who’d never been given anything beyond the minimum necessary label. Tanza would have felt the shame of that, and I wasn’t quite so surprised that she’d turned into such an irritating little brat.

But I had no room for pity. “Do you have anything better to wear?”

She tugged at the cuffs, trying to stretch them over her arms. “Just more green. And all in the wash. Laundry demerits."

The officer said, "It'll do." He knelt in front of the girl, then looked at me and held out a hand. "I'll bet a fine lady like you carries all kinds of cleaning tools."

I sighed and handed him the nanocleanser from my purse. I showed him the power button, then he waved the metal wand over the stains on Tanza’s clothes. After a few seconds, the stains evaporated and the dirt from the gutter fell away as dry sand.

“Good as new,” the officer said, while Tanza gaped at her freshly-cleaned clothes. These primitives were astounded by the simplest things.

The child brushed through her wild curls with her fingers, swept them back over her shoulders, then stood with her hands at her side and feet apart, as if presenting herself for inspection.

I sighed. “I guess it’s as good as we’ll get. Let’s get this over with.”

Tanza tucked her book beneath her arm and her eyes sparkled with victory.

I looked balefully at the tome. “The book’s coming with?”

“Well, I can’t leave it here.”

I considered insisting that she take it back to the home, but I wanted to get this over with as quickly as possible.

“Fine,” I sighed. “Bring the book.”

I was seriously planning on entering the dining room of the High Palace with an alien who thought the proper attire included a set of green work clothes and a giant book. I had gone insane.

The officer stepped aside and gestured for both of us to walk past him. “I’ll escort you there.”

And there went my last hope of escape.

The officer escorted us through winding streets, side alleys and dried up canals until we finally crossed a bridge into a civilized portion of the city with human-designed buildings. One sprawling building of white stone-print bore a black sign with elegant script that proclaimed it The High Palace.

As we approached the building, Tanza suddenly skittered across my path. I almost tripped over her feet.

I glared at her as she fell into step on my right side. “What are you doing?”

She glanced warily to the street corner. “Kids from school.”

I glanced back and saw a pre-teen human boy with short black hair and immaculate clothing. He leaned against the corner of a building while he spoke with a handful of human friends. Well-groomed, friendly, human—why couldn’t that child have rescued my ring? I’d have been glad to take him as a guest to the High Palace.

As I engaged in fruitless wishes, the human children disappeared, and I arrived with my tephan escorts at the entrance doors of the High Palace. Wide glass windows showed a sparkling three-dimensional display of Old Paris in springtime. Tanza studied the images of bakeries and floral shops and fluttering Earth songbirds, as if attempting to dissect the technology. The few people passing by looked askance at the tephan pair with me.

Tanza asked, “Are we going in?”

I looked back at the officer. He just smiled at me and waved us toward the door.

I took a deep breath, put a hand behind the girl’s shoulders and pushed her inside.

The interior was a vision of white and cream: pale artwork on the walls, a glass fountain trickling crystal-clear water, rugs in intricate shades of vanilla, beige and ivory upon white marble floors.

The street sounds disappeared when the door closed behind us. No foot traffic, no rumbling vehicles, no screeching of alien animals. Just the hush of quiet voices, the gentle strings of a European symphony and the trickle of the fountain. It was like we'd stepped into a different world. My world. Except for the alien next to me.

The host standing guard at the dining room entrance stared at Tanza, then looked at me with the horrified compassion of someone trying to tell you there’s a wasp on your shoulder. “Madam, are you aware…?”

The only way to get through this with any dignity was to brazen my way through it. “I’d like a table, please. Two seats. For Priscilla Overton and guest.”

I thought his eyes would pop out of his head. “Your guest? You mean she—?”

“Is my guest. Is that a problem?”

He stared as if incredulous that I didn’t know the problem. I didn’t even blink.

Finally, he put a stylus to his datapad. “Does this guest have a name?”

The girl stood as straight and dignified as I did. “Tanza.”

He poised his stylus over the datapad. “Anythin—”

“Just Tanza.”

After a moment’s hesitation, he set his stylus aside. “Two seats for Priscilla Overton and…Tanza.”

The host led us into a blindingly beautiful dining room. A full wall of windows overlooked a river that glittered in the afternoon sun. The other walls were meshed with holonet that made the room look like a small nook in a formal European garden, with the tables and chairs surrounded by roses, tulips, lilies, and a thousand other flowers whose names I’d forgotten in my years away from Earth. Real potted plants scattered among the tables added to the reality of the image and the string quartet played some of the finest music from Earth's history. The room was a bastion of civilization in this barbaric world. A taste of home. It was more filling than any food could be.

The host led us to windowside tables with an excellent view of the river. My heart lifted. Prime seating—a sign of my place on this planet, which not even a tephan could take away. And it was flanked by two potted gardenia plants that would screen my guest from the handful of other diners.

I took the right-hand seat and motioned for Tanza to take the chair that sat closest to the shrub. Its branches brushed her as she sat down.

The host left us as a waiter handed us our menus. As Tanza sat down, she reached toward the branch above her head, plucked a single white gardenia blossom, shoved it in her mouth, and began to chew.

I froze in terror, then glanced at the waiter. Had he noticed?

If he had, he’d been well trained. He didn’t even stumble in his recitation of the day’s lunch specials.

“Would you like a few minutes to make a selection?” the waiter asked.

“Yes, yes,” I said, waving him away before my guest could decide to take another nibble of the greenery.

He bowed and vanished toward the kitchen.

When he was gone, Tanza spit the flower into a gold-embroidered napkin and wiped her tongue on the far corner. While her mouth contorted in the most disturbing shape, those tephan eyes glared at me. “That’s not a spiceblossom bush.”

“No,” I said, my tone stretched with scorn. “It’s a gardenia. And the blossoms aren’t for eating.”

She wiped her tongue on another corner of the napkin. “Why do they put flowers by the table if you’re not supposed to eat them?”

“For decoration,” I hissed. “And if you can’t behave in a civilized manner, we’ll leave this restaurant, promise or no promise.”

“Well, I’m sorry I don’t know all the fancy human rules of eating.”

Her sarcasm made my blood boil—until I saw her blush. She was prickly, yes, but unless I was very much mistaken, she was embarrassed. Now she was lost in an alien world, and I’d experienced that sensation too recently not to feel a little sorry for her.

But only a little. She had demanded this, after all, at great expense to me. Let her suffer the consequences.

“Rule one,” I said. “Don’t put anything in your mouth unless I tell you to.” I tugged her napkin out of her four-fingered hands before she could run it across her tongue again. “That includes napkins.”

With the napkin gone, Tanza's tongue was on full display in front of her chin as she kept the taste as far out of her mouth as possible. I don’t know if you know this, but tephan tongues can stretch further and thinner than human tongues, and this child made hers come almost to a point. I couldn’t look at that for the entire meal, but I couldn’t have the child destroying all the table linens either.

I waved over a waiter carrying a carafe of water, and I pointed him to our empty glasses. He leaned over our table and filled my glass almost to the brim. Then he turned and saw my guest—her pale skin, green clothes, those big eyes and that long, thin tephan tongue. He yelped, recoiled, dropped the carafe, and knocked over my glass. Water flooded the table and spilled onto my lap.

The child yelped, shouted something in her alien language and scrambled to pull her book out of the path of the water. An old man at the next table dropped his fork and stared at her. Fortunately, the few other diners in the room were too far away to see.

I hushed the child and found myself in the strange position of apologizing to the waiter while I was the one standing drenched. I didn’t know what reznat meant, but I was sure it wasn’t a nice thing for a tephan to say to her waiter.

“Could we...” I asked as I ran the nanocleanser over my clothes, “have another table?”

“C...certainly, madam,” he said, looking at Tanza as if waiting for her to pounce. I half-expected it myself, from the fierce way she curled around that book.

Once my clothes were dry, the waiter brought us to an empty table nearer the center of the room. No window view. No shielding plants. But it was further from the kitchen—where I was certain all the servers would be gossiping about us as soon as this klutz left us.

Once we were settled with new water glasses and dry menus, the server scurried away as if the girl were a poison frog. Tanza muttered alien words while she brushed water from the edges of her book, and gulped water until she got the taste of the flower out of her mouth. Then she glared at me and reverted back to Anglese. “He almost wrecked my book.”

After watching her lug that book around for an hour, my curiosity—and frustration—were mounting. “What’s that book about, anyway? And why are you willing to curse out waiters over it?”

“It’s a biography of Queen Marastel.” She set the book deliberately on the table, and looked around the room as if daring waiters to spill more water on it. “And it’s mine. I finally have a book of my own, and I don’t want it wrecked by an idiot with a water pitcher.”

The book was thick. What I’d seen of the print was small. It was not a children’s history book. I hadn’t expected this grimy alien child to be the biography type. Was there a developmental disorder that gave children irrational attachments to academic texts?

“Who is Queen Marastel?” I asked.

Tanza showed me the book’s cover. It had a picture of a young tephan woman—in her mid-twenties, to my human eyes—with a pale, narrow face, and deep eyes. The woman's dark hair was covered with an elaborate system of veils, and she wore a dress covered in so many white jewels and so much gray and white beadwork that I almost couldn’t see the ivory fabric underneath.

“Her,” Tanza said. “The last queen of Arateph.”

“Arateph had queens?” I asked in surprise. They hadn’t had queens when humanity had found them. It must have been part of their history.

I’d never thought of this planet as having a history. If I’d considered it at all, I suppose I’d assumed that they’d been muddling along the way we’d found them for the last few centuries, waiting for us to show up and drag them into modern civilization.

Tanza said, “The planet was ruled by a monarchy until about forty years before the Coalition showed up.”

“The whole planet?”

Tanza sat straighter and her diction became crisper—she looked like a little lecturer at one of those cultural symposiums that Roger and I always had to make appearances at. “After Kepha joined the other eleven kingdoms, the entire planet was united under the monarchy for three hundred and fifty-eight years.”

Not just a monarchy, but a planet-spanning monarchy. Such a thing hadn’t happened in all of human civilization, and these people had accomplished it when they were still on their home planet, believing themselves alone in the universe. I hadn’t thought such an archaic form of government could rule an entire continent without overextending itself, yet it had ruled their world for centuries. For the first time, I found myself wanting to learn something from the tephan people. How had such a government come about? How had they managed it?

Why did the woman on the cover look so sad?

I didn’t ask any of these questions because just then, a waiter appeared—not the water-spilling one, thank goodness. (I didn’t trust my guest to look at that one without throwing something at him.) This one was older, with crisp lines in his clothes and face. He looked like he could have won a staring contest with a statue—perfect unshakable professionalism.

“Are you ready to order, Madam Overton?” He didn’t even look at my guest.

Tanza’s eyes brightened as she picked up the menu, flipping through the pages to examine the options.

I asked her, “What you want to eat?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never had human food.”

My jaw fell. “You wanted to come here and you didn’t even know what you wanted to eat?”

She gave me a withering stare, as though I was the stupid one. “I wanted to try it.” She closed the menu. “Besides, you said I can only eat what you tell me to eat. So what am I allowed to eat, Priscilla?”

I picked up the menu and realized with horror that I didn’t know the answer. What could tephans eat? Were there foods that were delicacies to us and poison to them?

I asked the waiter, “Do you have any suggestions?” I doubted these people served many tephans, but food was their area of expertise, and we were on Arateph.

The waiter looked at Tanza for the first time. “I’ve heard that people of her...race...are rather fond of the amphibian.” He pointed to an entry on my appetizer list. “The frog legs are popular. And a specialty of the chef.”

I hadn’t eaten frog in years. But if I could choke it down for Roger’s political dinners, I could manage it to satisfy a petulant tephan child. “We’ll have that.”

“Excellent. Is there anything else?”

I didn’t want to give Tanza any more chances to upset the wait staff. “No. Just get us our food as soon as possible.”

As the waiter walked away with our menus, an afternoon crowd filled the dining room; within a few minutes, we went from being nearly alone to being surrounded by other diners. I could tell by the sideways glances that most of them noticed my tephan guest. And I could tell that Tanza noticed them. She sat silently at first, growing more and more tense as we all tried to ignore each other, but when a bald man at the next table stared at her for several long moments, she finally snapped.

“Can you stop it?” she barked at him. “You’re giving me the shivers.” The man, red-faced, studied his menu as if his life depended on it.

Tanza turned back to the table, muttering, “You humans look so creepy when you stare.”

I was too stunned to scold her. I’d never considered that the distaste for the other race’s looks went both ways. If she’d lived her life in a mostly-tephan neighborhood, a human face would look just as slightly wrong to her as a tephan face did to me. It sounds strange, but the idea that she found us ugly made me like her more. It certainly made her more relatable.

But I couldn’t have her making a spectacle. “Please, don’t bother the other diners.”

She seemed ready to protest, but I spoke before she could argue. “That woman in your book. You said she was the last queen of Arateph. What happened?”

Her eyes lit up, rude diners forgotten, as she flipped open the book. “Revolution. The People’s House took over and had her and the king executed.”

I shivered. “So violent. And so young to die.”

Tanza gave me a confused look, then glanced at the cover and understood. “Oh, that’s from her first years as queen. She was almost seventy when she died.”

I pictured the woman on the cover with hair turned gray, but the same dark, sad eyes, facing an angry mob as they led her to the scaffold or the firing squad or however these people killed their leaders. It was brutal, but humanity had often been equally brutal, so I couldn’t dismiss it as their backward alien culture.

Tanza flipped through the pages. “They say she was weak and self-absorbed, but this book gives her more depth.” She looked at a page near the cover. “Verai’s a good scholar. Uses lots of primary sources. Very readable.”

Now that her interest was unleashed, Tanza talked on and on, taking me through an alien history, the tale of a queen beset by tragedy upon tragedy as she helped her husband rule a crumbling planet and struggled to produce an heir. All the scholars at those Coalition events were nowhere near as enthralling as this alien child sharing her favorite book.

As fascinating as the story was, I was even more entranced by the pictures—dozens were embedded through the text. Tanza condescended to turn the book around so I could see. It was grandeur like I’d never seen, buildings in alien colors and shapes and patterns, but bringing to mind the grandest palaces in human history, from Versailles to the Forbidden City to the red spires of the North Martian Emperor's summer home. The people in the pictures wore elaborate, brightly-colored clothes, and feasted upon vast tables full of unfamiliar food—including blossoms from the potted trees next to the tables. No primitive civilization could have created such a culture. No wonder this alien urchin was enthralled, and no wonder she’d seized the chance to attend the closest modern equivalent to such feasts that she knew of.

The return of the stone-faced waiter snapped me back to reality. He planted himself next to the table, passing blank-faced judgement by how thoroughly he didn’t look at the book or the way we bent over it. Face burning, I sat back in my chair and felt ashamed to be caught hanging upon an alien’s story like a dim-witted child.

Tanza swept the book under the table and sat primly as the waiters placed the food in front of us. First a gold charger, then the crystal plates bearing the food—ten frog legs, crisply fried in butter and lemon, dotted with parsley and surrounded by a handful of greens.

Half a dozen nearby heads surreptitiously craned in our direction.

The waiters set a similar platter in front of me, and after I’d arranged my napkin on my lap, I thanked the waiter, picked up the silverware, and began to cut the meat.

Tanza watched me carefully as the waiters left. She picked up her silverware, examined it closely—did tephans even have silverware?—and tried to imitate me, but when she touched the food, the prim little professor became the feral street child again. She still used the silverware, but that was her only concession to decency as she gobbled her foot, downing the frog legs almost whole. The butter sauce ringed her mouth and splattered on her clothing. She made the most inhuman snorting noises as she swallowed.

Now everyone was staring—the red-faced man at the next table, his three dining companions, the ten people sitting at the other nearby tables, the waiters who'd halted on their way to the kitchen. People murmured to their companions. Diners flagged down waiters and asked discreetly if there was something that could be done.

My face burned in embarrassment, but I couldn’t stop the girl. With all these eyes watching me—watching me, Priscilla Overton, entertaining an animal at the finest restaurant in Roshen—I couldn’t even speak. I wanted to sink into the carpet. I wanted to disappear. I wanted to run from the restaurant, flee from this planet, and return to comfortable, civilized Earth. But mortification left me paralyzed. I just sat and did nothing as Tanza devoured her food and licked every last drop of sauce from the plate.

Finally, she dropped her plate back on the charger and leaned back with satisfaction. Her big tephan eyes were bright. “That was amazing.” She licked all eight of her fingers, so lost in the euphoria of her food that she was unaware of the horrified crowd surrounding us. She looked at my plate with confusion. “You’ve barely touched yours.”

I let my fork drop to the tablecloth. “I’m not very hungry.”

Her eyes brightened. “Can I have it?”

“No.”

She gave me a disapproving look. “You can’t waste food. At least try to eat it.”

After that display, I’d never be able to stomach another frog leg. “It doesn’t appeal to me.”

“Then I’ll eat it.” Before I could react, she leaned across the table, speared a frog leg with her fork, and was chewing it before she settled back in her chair.

I wanted to scream. I could have tried to correct her, but I had no idea where to begin, and by now, it was far too late.

The stone-faced waiter leaned over my shoulder. He was pale and his eyes were wide—apparently there were some things that could rattle him. “Madam, if you cannot eat your food here, we can send it home with you.”

He was offering me a doggy bag. The finest restaurant in the city, which usually recoiled in horror from such vulgar practices, was so desperate for me to leave that the staff were sending me home with leftovers. I was, in effect, being kicked out.

I didn’t even care. “Yes, thank you.”

In seconds, another waiter appeared, carrying a green box that had probably held some kind of produce in the kitchen, repurposed into this restaurant’s first take-home container. I sat in silence as they poured the frog legs into the container, then I handed them my credit stick, and when I examined the payment screen of their datapad, I added on a gratuity that cost twice as much as the food did. Perhaps with a tip like that, they’d let me show my face here again. At the moment, I doubted I’d ever want to.

I gathered my purse and stood. That creature gathered her ridiculous book and followed me, smiling, out of the dining room.

When we reached the lobby, I thrust the box into the child's hands. “Take it. I don’t want it.”

The girl's eyebrows rose. “You don’t? Are you sure? It’s really good.”

“I think it appeals more to tephan tastes.”

She thanked me as though I’d given her all the jewels that the queen on her book was wearing, then tucked the box under one arm and the book under the other.

I put a hand behind her shoulders and pushed her out the door. When we emerged onto the sunlit sidewalk, all my frustration exploded.

“There!” I snapped, giving her one last push beyond the awning of the restaurant. “You’ve had your meal. Take your food and go!”

She stumbled forward, then stared at me in bewilderment. “What set you off?”

My laugh was tinged with hysteria. “What set me off? Maybe I’m just a little peeved at being disgraced in front of some of the richest people in the city by a tephan who gobbles her food like an animal.”

She stood with her mouth open, struck speechless. Those big green eyes showed surprisingly human-looking hurt. “Was it that bad? I know I’m not fancy, but...”

“You can’t tell me you didn’t notice all those people staring.”

The creature turned red. She stammered, “I thought it was because I’m tephan. You told me not to bother them.”

I couldn’t bear to have that creature looking up at me with those big, sad eyes. I didn’t want to feel sorry for her. “It doesn’t matter,” I said. “Maybe in a few years they’ll let me dine there again.” I pushed her steadily but firmly away from the restaurant. “I have more than paid you in full. Thank you for saving my ring. Goodbye.”

Still looking baffled, the girl trudged away from the restaurant. I walked in the other direction.

My anger started fading the moment the child was out of my line of sight. Each step away from the restaurant felt like a step back into a normal world. There were humans around me. I could read the signs. I even knew how to find my way to the train station. I’d be back at the hotel within the hour and I could pretend that this whole horrible afternoon had been a bad dream.

Light footsteps skittered behind me. A green-clad tephan child with a book and a box appeared to my left.

I yelped and reeled back. “What are you—?”

Tanza fell into step beside me. “I’m really very sorry for embarrassing you. I need to make it up to you. Let me show you the way to the train station—”

My previous anger felt like a candle flame compared to the volcano that those words set off within me. “Leave me alone!” I towered over her in my fury. “I gave you your meal! I fulfilled the promise! Now leave!” I stormed away, but at the first sound of footsteps behind me, I whirled around. “I swear, if you take another step toward me, I will see you arrested!”

The child’s face hardened into the petulant mask that I recognized from my first sight of her from the gutter. “Sorry for helping.”

“Helping,” I mocked. “Your help comes at too high a price.” I gave a short, cynical laugh. “I see through your plan. You think you can trail after me demanding handouts all day. Well, I have had enough.” I secured my purse over my shoulder like I was holstering a weapon. “Get out of here!”

Face white and lips tight with anger, Tanza bowed her head and turned away. I strode away in triumph.

An old man looked at me sideways, shaking his head. I made it to the end of the block before the guilt hit me. The old man had reason to disapprove. Tanza had made an offer of help, and I’d responded by screaming at her in a public street. Perhaps she had felt remorse. As embarrassing as it had been to be seen with a girl who ate like an animal, how much worse would it feel to be the one who’d done it? I thought of those pictures in that book of hers. Would I have fared any better at a tephan feast?

I turned around. “Tanza, wait—“

“Hey, Tanza!”

The voice, coming from the other end of the block, was louder, harsher, and younger than mine. A crowd of boys stampeded down the sidewalk—all humans, about twelve years old, and led by a boy with slick black hair and gray and white clothes in the latest crisply-cut fashions. The children Tanza had noticed when we’d first arrived at the restaurant.

Tanza—standing near where I’d left her—tried to move away from them, but hesitated when she saw me standing at the other end of the block. In seconds, the boys had her surrounded.

The ringleader prodded her shoulder. “Escaped from your cage, Tanza? What are you doing among civilized people?”

His yellow-haired friend poked at the box of frog legs. “Looks like she’s looting houses.”

Tanza yanked the box away. “I’m not a thief!”

The ringleader tugged at the book under her other arm. “That’s a big book. Still playing at being smart, small-brain?”

Tanza pulled it back. “Don’t touch that!”

One boy pried up her arm while two others slid the book away from her. “Ooh, it’s a small-brain book!” the ringleader said in mock delight. He flipped through the pages with dirt-stained fingers. “It’s even written in their pretend letters.”

Tanza snarled, “Give that back!”

He slammed it shut and pulled it toward his chest. “Why? Scared it’s too complicated for me?”

“It’s mine!”

He looked at it thoughtfully. “Is it, though? I don’t think a charity case like you can afford a big book like this.”

“It’s mine!” she repeated, nearly shrieking now. “Teacher gave it to me!”

“Bet she stole it,” said a voice from the crowd. “She’s just a grubby little nameless charity house thief.”

Tanza, driven past the breaking point as the ringleader held the book just beyond her reach, shrieked in outrage and pounced. She tore at the book while the boys yanked it away from her. The individuals disappeared into a storm of arms and legs and paper. Five against one. I watched in terror for a few moments before thinking to call for help. I had my wristcomm. I could hit the emergency button….

It was over before I could lift my wrist. Tanza was sprawled across the sidewalk, surrounded by the shredded, dirty pages of her book. Her box had been torn open. Fleshy frog legs were scattered on the ground as though the animals had been thrown against the wall.

The boys, barely scuffed, loomed over her, mocking. They lifted the empty binding of the book like a trophy, cheering over it and slapping each other on the back. Then, satisfied with their destruction, they ran off the way they came, leaving their victim on the ground.

Numbly, I shuffled toward her, feeling lost in a different sort of nightmare--one where I was one of the monsters. Those boys had been waiting for her. If she’d had an ulterior motive for coming after me to apologize, she had been hoping for protection, not handouts. And I’d thrown her to the wolves.

Tanza pushed herself onto her knees and pulled the pages toward her, like a mother hen gathering up chicks. She looked more vulnerable than I’d ever seen her, eyes wide and glistening, her face slack with horror. Her emotionless mask was gone. She pressed an armload of shredded pages to her chest, curled into a fetal position, and cried.

Curled up like that, face and hands hidden, she didn’t look like a tephan. Not like the rude negotiator at the gutter. Not like the little professor or even the animal at the table. She was just a friendless little girl, surrounded by the wreckage of her most prized possession.

I thought of the last time I’d seen her lying in the street, arm threaded through a storm drain while she reached for my ring. The ring was in my pocket, safe and whole. How had I thanked her for her service? Tried to duck out of the promise, treated her like a savage, screamed at her in the streets, and left her at the mercy of bullies.

The ring I loved so much was one of dozens that I’d brought from Earth, and my day had been destroyed at the thought of losing it. This book was the only one she owned, and it was gone forever. I couldn’t imagine her distress.

How had I thought her the savage?

My stomach twisted with loathing, and for the first time all day, it was directed toward myself. I could fool myself no longer; I’d done nothing to be proud of today.

But that could change.

Approaching Tanza with soft, careful steps, I crouched next to her. “Tanza?” I brushed a finger across her shoulder.

The girl recoiled from my touch and turned away. She came up on her feet, but stayed scrunched into a ball, protecting her pages and hiding her red eyes.

“Are you all right?” I asked.

Her voice was thick with tears. “Go away.”

I grabbed one of the pages. “I can help—“

She whirled her head toward me and snapped, “I said go away!”

I stumbled back, and for a moment I was ready to do as she wanted. This was not my problem and she didn’t want my help.

Then my good sense returned, and I barked, “Don’t be stupid. I’m not going to leave a child in the street.” I started gathering pages. “Are you hurt anywhere?”

I looked around for help. The crowd had merely started taking a wider berth around us, but after a moment, I saw the green and silver flash of a Coalition policeman’s uniform—on a policeman with tephan hands.

I’d never thought I’d be glad to see that officer again. I waved toward him, shouting, “Officer! Please, can you help?”

My voice startled the officer, and his surprise turned to concern as he neared and saw the devastation. He crouched next to us and asked me, “What did you do to her?”

“Nothing,” I said. The twist in my stomach reminded me that those words weren’t the complete truth, so I amended, “I didn’t destroy the book. There was a group of boys...”

The officer had already turned his attention to Tanza, speaking low-toned words in their tephan language. When they finished, his demeanor toward me was less hostile but more disappointed.

“Now you want to help her?” he asked.

That now was an accusation that cut like a knife. I deserved it, but I met his gaze boldly. “Yes,” I said, daring him to deny me.

He spoke a few more words to Tanza, then told me, “Gather pages.”

He helped Tanza to her feet while I gathered what I could of the paper. Torn edges, smeared alien words, and pictures of long-dead royals who stared at me with accusing eyes. The queen providing food to the poor, shelter to the homeless, clothes to shivering orphans. She’d done all that and wound up executed; looking at Tanza and the tephan officer, I couldn’t help wondering how much worse they thought I deserved.

When I’d gathered all the pages I could into a crinkling, crunching mess, I followed in silence as the officer led us along the route we’d taken, every block seeming as long as a mile. When we reached the familiar yellow building where everything had started, I gave the pages to the officer, and he motioned for Tanza to go toward the stair of the building.

“Is there anything else I can do?” I asked Tanza, almost desperate.

Tanza just turned her head away.

“I think you’ve done enough,” the officer said. The words were soft, but I heard the condemnation in them.

I shouldered my purse more firmly, avoided Tanza’s eyes, then asked the officer, “Can you tell me where to find a train station?”

The officer pointed down the street in the opposite direction from where I’d originally approached the building. “The nearest one is just beyond the Killing Square.”

The words shocked me out of the numbness I’d been feeling. “The what?”

But the officer was already rattling off directions, and I was too busy memorizing the steps—left, then right, past the purple tower, turn two blocks after the bridge—to ask what exactly a Killing Square was. I didn’t think a uniformed police officer would purposely send me to my death, so I assumed something had been lost in the translation.

“Thank you, officer,” I said when he finished. Then I looked at the girl and added, “Thank you, Tanza.”

Tanza's green clothes—now scuffed from battle—hung loosely off her slumped shoulders. After a long moment, she raised her head and looked at me from beneath lowered lids. “Goodbye,” she said.

Her tone meant, “Good riddance.”

My pride flared at that. I thought I'd been rather compassionate--helping her gather the pages, hailing the officer, even trailing her all the way to her home to make sure that she arrived safely. Surely she could show a little gratitude.

But as I walked through the narrow, battered streets, it was my own rudeness that haunted me. Snatching the ring from her fingers as though afraid she'd contaminate it. Fleeing from her rather than fulfilling the promise. Leaving her to fight five against one when a moment's action on my part could have saved her. All day, I'd thought myself better than her because I was human, but my actions had been inhumane.

I tried to put it behind me. There was nothing else I could do. The book was gone, beyond repair. Tanza probably never wanted to see me again. It was best to move on and forget all about the tephan girl and the dark-eyed queen that so fascinated her.

Then I turned the corner and came face to face with Queen Marastel. A picture on the gray stone wall, larger than life, showed the woman whose face I’d seen a hundred times in Tanza’s book. I stopped in my tracks, mesmerized. The image was a photo, more or less, but not like any photo or holo-image I’d ever seen from human technology. The colors were more muted than reality, while a strange vibrant shimmer added depth to the image, so it looked as though I could walk inside the pictured scene with a little effort.

The queen’s hair had gone completely gray, her jewels were gone, and her vividly colored gowns had been replaced by a white fabric sheath. What I noticed most were her eyes—they were striking in most of the book photos, but here, her gaze knocked the breath from me. Surely no human gaze could show that much sorrow.

How was she here? Would this queen haunt me wherever I went on this planet, reminding me of my sins against the child?

I noticed a small plaque next to the picture, with a tiny Anglese translation at the bottom, which explained that the image showed Queen Marastel in front of this very building, moments before she was led to death in the center of the square. “Oh,” I said aloud, turning slowly to examine the streets and buildings around me as understanding struck. “The Killing Square.”

This was the center of the revolution that had ended this planet’s monarchy. It was a hauntingly bland neighborhood; no sign of the violent destruction that Tanza had told me of, not after more than eighty years’ worth of repairs. But pictures and plaques decorated almost every building I saw, telling the story that time had erased. Seven brothers from Kepha stood scarred but proud before a jeering band of executioners. A red-haired older woman tried to cheer up three children as armed rebels escorted them all to prison. The king himself stood tall and white-haired, every line of his face showing his fierce love for his planet even as his people tried to kill him.

I could list examples all day, but I could never make you understand the feeling of being there, gazing at these people in the moments before their deaths. They were young and old, tall and short, had hair and skin in every imaginable shade. They came from regions I hadn’t known existed--desert wastes and mountain ranges and snow-covered tundras. These people had families they’d hated to lose, homes that were as familiar to them as the cottage by the Atlantic had once been to me. They’d made mistakes and suffered for it. They, too, had regrets.

Fear, anger, hatred, love, bravery, cowardice--every possible human emotion filled those alien faces, and it didn’t take long for me to stop seeing them as alien at all. They were people, who’d lived on this planet just as I did, who had loved it the way I’d loved Earth.

I’d never even wanted to know about this world before, but now I was desperate to understand every story these pictures presented. Without Tanza’s book providing context, would I even have paused to look at these pictures? Would I have cared about these people? I doubted I would have. Tanza's childish enthusiasm for a book had upended my world--as I’d upended hers.

With that thought, I found myself back before the picture of the queen. Her sorrowful eyes pinned me in place. It seemed, to my overworked imagination, that she was disappointed in me.

I glared at her. “What else do you want me to do?” I demanded. “What’s done is done. I can’t fix it. I don’t even know what book it was.”

In that hall of death, it seemed a pitiful excuse.

I tore my eyes away from the picture, and my gaze landed upon a door I’d wandered past in my history-induced daze. It was brown and wide, with a sign above proclaiming it the entrance to the Museum of the Alogath Execution Center. I wandered toward it, then froze in my tracks only a few steps away. Next to the entrance was a window—and through the window, I saw books.

This was a museum! Museums—even tephan ones—had gift shops! If there was one place in this world that sold books about Queen Marastel, it was likely the museum that displayed her face on a public street.

I raced into the building, almost giddy, and found the shop just beyond the main entrance. The tiny nook held pamphlets and trinkets, and at the front of the room, a big, silver BookVend machine printed and bound volumes with lightning speed.

I raced through the door. The tephan woman behind the counter dropped her book in surprise as I leaned, panting, against her counter.

The woman asked in smooth Anglese, “Can I help you?”

I stood up and tried to look less like a maniac. “Yes,” I said, in my best politician’s-wife voice. “I need you to help me find a book.”

The door to the charity home loomed large in front of me. I hesitated with my hand before the door. Was I doing something stupid? The freshly-printed book under my arm might not change the fact that the child would want nothing to do with me.

This wasn't about me. I had to try.

My knock was answered by a pale, knobby tephan woman with wisps of blond hair hanging around her face. She stared when she saw my face and clothes. “Madam?”

“Excuse me," I asked, "but does a girl named Tanza live here?”

The woman's eyes glazed over as she struggled to translate my Anglese.

I tried again, speaking more slowly. “Is Tanza here?”

“Tanza…” She trailed off in confusion before her eyes lit with understanding. “Oh!” Gently, she corrected, “It’s pronounced Tanza.”

It sounded exactly the same to me. I was starting to believe those people who said tephans could speak and hear sounds that humans couldn't.

The woman called into the building, and after a storm of voices and footsteps, a slight tephan girl in green clothes came to the door, her curls making a curtain over her still-puffy eyes.

Tanza scowled when she saw me. “What do you want?”

I took a deep breath and stepped forward. “I wanted to apologize,” I said. “For what happened. How I treated you. You saved my ring and I treated you like an animal. That was wrong.”

Tanza crossed her arms. “Glad you noticed.”

This child kept finding ways to irritate me, but I swallowed my words before I snapped back in response.

I pulled a book from under my arm. “I know this doesn’t erase what you went through, but I wanted to undo some of the harm that I’ve done today.” I handed her the book, which had the same cover as the book she’d brought to the restaurant. “This is for you.”

Warily, Tanza examined the queen on the cover. “It looks the same.” She flipped through the pages, and her eyes brightened. “It is the same!”

“I printed a new copy. There’s a BookVend down the street. You rescued my ring; it was only fair that I replace your book.”

"Yes, but I didn't think..." She examined the book in amazement before turning that astonished gaze upon me. "This is really mine? To keep?"

“Yes, of course,” I said.

Tanza clutched the book to her chest and smiled at me, positively radiant. That smile transformed her from a feral orphan into a polite little princess.

I couldn’t keep from smiling back.

“Thank you,” Tanza said. Then she saw the other book under my arm. “What’s that one?” she asked, as though hoping it was for her and not daring to ask.

I pulled it out and showed her the cover. It showed the same image of the queen, but this time above an Anglese title—The Queen of Sorrow. “The Anglese edition,” I explained. “This one’s for me.”

If I’d thought she was happy before, it was nothing compared to her radiance now. “You’re going to read it?”

I shrugged. "I couldn't resist. You made it sound so interesting."

She bounced on the balls of her feet. “Wait until you get to Chapter Five. That’s when she first meets the king, and you would not believe the uproar it causes."

She set down her book, grabbed mine, and started flipping through the pages, desperate to show me the start of the story.

From down the hall, an adult voice barked, “Tanza! Don’t bother the woman. I’m sure she’s busy.”

Embarrassed, Tanza closed the book. She pushed it back into my hands. “Sorry. I don’t get to talk about it much.”

“I don’t mind. You’re an excellent instructor.”

Her eyes brightened with hesitant hope. “I could show you more. If you want.”

“I’d be grateful.”

Tanza called over her shoulder. “Garsa! Can I have a visitor in the study room?”

The tephan woman appeared in the entryway. She blinked, taken aback. “As long as she leaves before supper."

Tanza looked up at me. “Do you want to stay?”

No tephan had ever asked me that question before. In all my time here, I’d been an outsider. An invader. I’d never had the desire to be anything more. But those words, coming from Tanza, felt like a welcome.

I was glad to receive it.

I put a hand on Tanza’s shoulder and smiled. “I’d love to.”

#arateph #fairy tale retelling #sci-fi

48 notes · View notes