#they obliterate an entire civilization in the first minutes

[ubersatzofficial]

Kendarysk

For many people living in this ever inauspicious cycle of hyper aggressive neo-capitalism who have yet to go mad enough to throw what fragments of life they have away and become a Galactic Adventurer, the enigmatic Kendarysk Corporation has only ever been an at best suspiciously prominent name plastered across wholesale products the galaxy over, with nothing more than an at best slightly ominous name.

And while many are content to simply chalk this corporation up to yet another unethical multi-quintillion delta company to add to the list as they select they dubiously branded flotatio crisps and live ammunition; for individuals like Heather Noskova, Kendarysk is far more than a simple wholesale distributor.

Born on an unknown Earth, Heather Noskova’s life truly began after a chance encounter sent her careening out the closest 12th story window to a rocky forest floor fate below. Though the exact details as to who a 12 year old human girl had been defenestrated from such a great height remain the subject of much scholarly debate, of which Miss Noskova has been present for approximately none. But suffice to say, whatever caused young Noskova to fall to the first floor that day, resulted in her catching the wayward attention of an unassuming Spirit of Family relations, which we will hitherto refer to as Blood for soon to be apparent reasons.

The proceeding fifteen thousand years were by all accounts, tortuously uneventful. They say one must imagine eternity a lonely Spirit, but according to Miss Noskova: “I would have rather spent the entirety of those damned years peacefully going insane rather than spend one single minute more with Her.”

You will find one who’s domain is ostensibly the genetic relation between biological organisms does not incur a title such as Blood without a few scorched civilizations and a Paragon or two put through the wringer. The emissaries of Blood have always been demons of galactic nightmare- ferocious, ravenous, shark-toothed monsters with wings of flowing carnage formed from ever-gushing wounds upon their backs worthy of a cheap album cover. Forever starving, satiated only through blood and flesh, and never permanently. Every godly design and cambion machination of these beasts was tested first with Miss Noskova. Understandably, Miss Noskova’s opinion of the Spirit Blood skews somewhat negative.

On a related note; Seven Trillion years ago in a long-dead far-forgotten universe, a dying Humanity consumed with greed and fury, ravaged by an insatiable desire to grow and expand throughout the twinkling, highly lucrative forever stars, and juice those babies down into raw energy and marketable goods. At the forefront leading this great charge was a man whose name has been totally and completely obliterated from all existing records in every conceivable universe, but was presumably named Kendarysk at some point.

The origins of the kendarysk Company are esoteric, unknown, likely lost- but they are primordial, fundamental, a precambrian amino ooze predating all forms of known existence within this Galaxy. They have heard that Capitalism cannot survive, for there are only so many resources which can be melted down into action figures and plastic packaging, and Kendarysk says they simply haven’t searched hard enough. By the time the wider Omniversed became aware of Kendarysk’s presence, the corporation had already grown to a pan-existential monopoly.

Unchecked growth had lead to the total consumption of all Humanity- All were under the subscription service existence of Kendarysk, working for the company, to purchase a life provided by the company, and to fuel it, entire universes of unique and beautiful alien life was systematically annihilated, ground down into raw materials, and sold to their masses at a stiff markup.

Elsewhere in the Omniverse- a species of seven-eyed crustacean people known as the Herriss had assembled a multi-universal collective of over five hundred billion species known as The Herritation (Name unrelated to the Herriss), all unified under the unanimously uplifting and motivational slogan of “JOIN OR DIE'', often printed on leaflets and pamphlets to be distributed to planets the Omniversed over. The pamphlets were written in earnest, of course, with nary an ounce of ill-will or malice behind them, as though the message was blunt, “Please join our collective of hyper-advanced civilizations and carry your species forever into unified eternity, or be doomed to fall to ruin by the unimpeded march of time” didn’t turn over as many species for some reason. Unfortunately, one species which never seemed to fully grasp the meaning behind the Herritation’s message was Humanity- the very same Humanity which had spent the last several trillion years amassing unfathomable power at the expense of any poor sods of a species they happen to come across.

The resulting conflict left the Kendarysk Corporation in absolute ruin, all of the major departments nearly entirely obliterated, and left the Herritation to briefly consider creating a new slogan.

But for the immeasurably bad luck of the collective Omniverse, one fragment of the Kendarysk Corporation managed to survive- the Kendarysk Corporation: Anomalous Division. Previously a relatively small faucet of the multi-universal corporation, dedicated to studying any entity which existed outside the constraints of understood science. By utilizing their vast accumulations of dubiously acquisitioned abstractions, the paranormal preppers proposed a plan to postpone the peril, and posthumously prosper as Post-Humans. The Anomalous Division rose from the ashes of the fallen company, reestablishing the Kendarysk Corporation as we know them today.

Now, they are but mere shadows of their former selves- larger than ever before, but if you have ever seen a Garbloonian Skin Stealer wearing the stretched-out severed face of your much maligned boss, you will know the sheer dread of encountering someone you disliked becoming immensely worse and likely more cannibalistic.

No longer do individuals work within the Kendarysk Company- all who rise past the point of no return known as Middle Management, are forcefully restrained, their minds subjected to intense augmentation, in order to upload them to the collective consciousness- a terrifying hive mind of interconnected intelligences, allowing Kendarysk to not only accumulate vast wealths of knowledge spread across uncountable individuals, but also to maintain everpresent, always watchful eyes within even the most minute back corners of their company, which winds through every nook of society like an octopean leviathan, oxymoronically as immense and omnipresent as it is nigh imperceptible.

The Kendarysk Corporation is a horrific, nigh omnipresent corporation, invisibly permeating every aspect of a society like cancerous cells, before erupting all at once long after it had become far too late to stop them- This method has allowed the Corporation to absorb, consume, and assimilate trillions of universes, which all serve to fortify their omniscience. And even for the all-consumed, there is a dark underbelly to the Corporation- for while the Anomalous Division has been the arbiter of its restoration, the division itself still exists, residing in secrecy, far from the eyes of the public. Their mastery of the paranormal has been perfected to a cold hard science- not only have they been the underhanded undisputed invisible masters of paranormal cleanup projects, they are the feared wardens of the unreal. Nothing escapes the confines of the Kendarysk Corporation containment units- perhaps their paramilitary squads are feared by the living, but their Agents are the true bane of all that is arcane. Bleak, desolate, isolated containment cells, designed to hold uncooperative paranormal entities, while the Company studies them, figuring out how best to commodify, or weaponize them. This blackwater division has been responsible for some of the most sickening experiments performed across the entirety of the Omniverse, even going so far as to contain entire Spirits.

Spirits such as the highly uncooperative and disruptive Spirit of Blood.

After Blood’s Containment, the Kendarysk Corporation made an effort to locate and capture each of her Paragons- the most prominent of which was a young girl known as Heather Noskova. What followed was nearly three hundred years of partial containment and escape for the young Paragon; jumping from Universe to Universe in hopes of once and for all escaping the grasping tendrils of the hyper-captalist monolith that was Kendarysk.

This journey would lead the young Miss Noskova to the forefront of the most vile and destructive battle the Omniversed has ever seen- in which the massively empowered Kendarysk Corporation came to blows with their old enemy, the Herritation over a territory dispute on a populated planet, causing an attack which lead to a severe containment breach, all culminating in an all-our four-way war, known as the Gemus Conflict.

Heather was offered a chance to earn her mortality and forever gain peace away from Kendarysk should she choose to fight- joining up with one of the Herritations vassal states, The Noctrian Empire, to track the very Spirit which had imprisoned her for so many thousands of years.

Heather Noskova endured fifteen years of grueling torment in the trenches of the Gemus Conflict, enduring every mean nasty awful thing the Kendarysk Corporation could find to throw at her- but in the end, with the help of her companions, she survived, and was able to earn her mortality- freedom from her Spirit, and from kendarysk.

The Kendarysk Corporation, of course, attempted to conquer Übersatz, but as powerful as they are, even they could not overcome the immovable law of this universe, and their scouting fleet quickly found themselves trapped, isolated, and cut off from the greater hive mind. While they have made many impotent attempts to escape, they have routinely failed, and quickly discovered that due to their own hubristic actions, throwing beings they could not destroy into this Universe to contain them eternally- We are not at their mercy, but they are at ours. It is rumored, of course, that the reason Heather Noskova ever agreed to settle down in this universe, was simply to watch her much mired enemy struggle and suffer forever more- and she, more than anyone else, has contributed to the Omniversed’s continual unraveling of the Kendarysk Corporation.

They are trapped here just like everyone else, but damn it all do they still try to sell their products to the masses. Their experiments continue, and wherever things look bleakest, one does not have to turn over too many stones to find one of Kendarysk’s tendrils slithering about the whole situation.

[dans-den]

Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania Review

Hey what's going on everyone?! Dan here and today I'll be reviewing Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania.

First review of 2023 and what better way to kick off the first review than with a Marvel movie? This movie is a mix bag of feelings, on one hand I do enjoy the humor, VFX (at times) and the actions while on the other hand it lacks in areas such as writing/plot, VFX (at times), and settings. I'm just as mixed on the characters and how they're portrayed so hopefully I can express how I feel about each of these elements.

Warning: Spoilers ahead!

The Humor, its your typical MCU quirky humor which has bee in these movies for the last decade. However, it works when you give it to someone like Ant-Man who was always established and best used as a comedic character especially combined with the charm and comedic timing of Paul Rudd. I just don't like how everyone has to be the comedic relief. I did not work with Thor: Love and Thunder, was terrible in The Eternals, and it did not work well in She-Hulk due to poor writing. But in Ant-Man, it's not as jarring since Ant-Man has been a comedic character since the beginning. Though they do try to have his side cast be comedic at times too, its more blink and ya miss it quick witted humor rather than a joke every 5 minutes. Though I am upset that were missing some key side characters of the Ant-Man franchise (one we all love in particular) but the actors I'm sure are busy with other projects so I can't be too upset. The humor does work better in this movie though the writing does make it hit or miss at times.

The action for this movie was decent, let me tell you guys that I don't think anything can top The Eternals action sequences where they were basically waving their hands around thinking that was gonna do something or use energy attacks like its Dragon Ball Super, it was entertaining to see Ant-Man and his team obliterating Kang's army and fighting Kang (for the most part). Scott teaching an inexperienced Cassie was pretty cool to see and watching her get progressively better in the movie especially when she fights MODOK in the movie.

Now to the Visual effects, I'm very mixed on this area because at times they do a great job while other times they do things that I could have done in photoshop. The Quantum Realm looks visually stunning, It's almost as good as the VFX from the Doctor Strange movies, but then this version of MODOK looks like they just enlarged his head to max. It's bad but its also hilarious I can't take it seriously. Overall the VFX looks nice but I can definitely see some of the areas it either feel rushed or just got lazy in.

The settings is an area I ultimately felt they feel short in. Like I said the Quantum realm is visually appealing, but this is where 95% of the movie is set in while the other 5% percent is on Earth (or above as they say). I don't have an issue with it being solely in the Quantum realm obviously that's where the movie has to be, it's just the lack of variety in settings in the Quantum realm. I though we'd be seeing various places here but I think all we had were three different settings.

Now to the Writing/Plot, the plot of the movie is Cassie made a device that can send signals into the quantum realm and unfortunately her signal reaches Modok and sends Scott, Cassie, Hope, Hank, and Janet into the quantum realm where they see entire civilizations that Janet said was deeper in the quantum realm. Here we see Kang imprisoned here and is ruling the quantum realm with an iron fist and he wants Scott to help him escape or he kills Cassie. It's a good plot but the way it's written is questionable to say the least. Cassie had time during the blip to study the quantum realm and when Hope, Hank and Janet came back, they essentially helped her learn more and helped her build the device to send signals. That same device is used in the end where we were getting a pretty dramatic moment with Ant-Man, The Wasp and Kangs final battle. I thought this was gonna be a huge sacrifice moment, a passing the torch moment to Cassie where she works with Hank and Janet while trying to figure out how to save Scott and Hope from the Quantum Realm. But no, They pulled an MCU Peter Parker moment with her where she has her machine suddenly able to open the portal to save those two and it really down plays the big dramatic moment. This also raises questions like how did Janet get to where they could reach her in the Ant-Man and The Wasp movie? Did Cassie find the quantum realm research in the Pym household? Why did Kang suddenly get nerfed in the final battle?

Last thing I'll touch on is the characters, Scott is Scott you know, he's charismatic, he's an average joe and he's Paul Rudd. I made a joke about how Ant-Man and The Wasp should have been changed to "Everyone loves Scott" because it seemed like everyone just loves him even his enemies, Scott just rizzes everyone up the moment he enters a room. Cassie is like every young character in mainstream media now. She's a protester, a SJW, she knows everything and she comes off entitled at times. In endgame she was just glad to have her dad back, now she resents him a bit because she thinks he's a complete sellout. I mean you can argue that but I think after everything Scotts also been through, he deserves some type of break. At least she did have real development during the movie where she did own up to taking responsibility for them being trapped in the quantum realm and saw the real dangers of her dads lifestyle and why he wanted her to stay away from it. It wasn't so much he didn't care about helping fight Kang, it's more that Cassie is his daughter and one of few things that matters most in his life as well as she was inexperienced in combat so she would be in danger. Hope is still the same but now she's trying to connect with her mother but even that side plot felt a bit rushed. Janet is real inconsistent in this movie, one minute she's like "why didn't you ask me about the quantum realm Cassie?" to "I can't tell you Hank and Hope about my time in the quantum realm". I can see shes still trying to function in society again so when this stuff comes back to her she goes into some PTSD but it still doesn't help she's a mixed bag. Hank I felt got the shaft here, he was an integral part of the first two movies, but he's treated here as a side character and a bit of a old joke up until the final battle where he gets his moment to shine with his Ants. Kang is a great Villian in this film, he is a tyrant and he's gonna lead to something big (watch the post credit scenes to know what I mean). Though I do feel he was underutilized at the end. He got nerfed in the final battle and he was defeated twice. Temporarily by Hank and his Ants, then his final battle with Scott and Hope and that was a more satisfying defeat though still felt he was nerfed. Modok is just a henchman to Kang and he's literally a big joke. He was introduced as a real threat but quickly went away as soon as we saw that god awful Photoshopped head which is sad because Modok is a real threat in Marvel. He can be a serious threat but is normally used as a Joke Villain.

Overall, Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania was a bit underwhelming but a fun time to watch. I'm told this is meant to kick off the next phase but so far I'm not sold on the next phase being anything great. Endgame should have been the end of the MCU and would have gone out with a bang. But Disney I'm sure will leech out as much profit from the MCU as it can until they can't. I'd say this movie can definitely be a so bad its funny type of movie which is still better than Black Panther: Wakanda Forever or The Eternals which were more on the boring side.

Rating this I'm giving it:

6.5/10

It's a Mid-Tier movie and a weak start to the next phase but its still a fun time to watch with friends and family if ya need something to do on a Friday or Saturday night.

That's all I have for today and hopefully I'll find some better movies for 2023.

See ya!

[newtsnaturethings]

I rewatched Atlantis the Lost Empire (one of my favorite movies as a kid) the other night and now here’s the Breath of the Wild Atlantis AU no one asked for.

Here we go:

- A long time ago the Calamity happened and shit hit the fan. It ultimately gets sealed but the Sheikah settlement of Atlantis gets submerged and lost to time (side note this movie kills A LOT of people and is not subtle about it). 

- Flash forward to our protagonist Link, who works at a museum in Castle Town. He’s obsessed with legends and myths of the Goddesses and heroes. Also his parents are dead because of course they are. 

- He works as the museum’s cook during the day and security guard at night.

- One day he gets called to the Zora domain to meet with King Dorephan, a friend of his parents, who tells him he’s funding an expedition with the remaining Sheikah to find the lost Sheikah settlement of Atlantis that supposedly went missing after the Calamity many years ago. 

- He reveals his parents found the Sheikah Slate, the map to find the lost settlement. Link can barely understand how to use it but yeah instead of the Shepard’s Journal we got the Sheikah Slate.

- The expedition crew is composed of the champions: 

- Mipha is the team medic. Sidon’s there for moral support. 

- Daruk is the bomb expert but he doesn't always remember that not everyone has a bomb shield at the ready

- Revali works communications. He’s also super uncomfortable with the submarine travel because birb but he (of course) puts on a confident front. (He get’s better in the underwater cave bit cause there’s room to fly) 

- Urbosa is the captain. No question there. 

- Robbie is the mechanic and Purah is the team scientist. Impa makes sure they don't accidentally kill everyone with their experiments.

- Link goes as the cook and as extra back up. And because Dorephan knows how much he loves adventure. 

- Also the Yiga have infiltrated the expedition because they want to unseal the Calamity and eliminate the one who can seal it. No one knows this. 

- Near the entrance the submarine gets attacked by rogue Divine Beast Vah Ruta. They manage to get into the cave and no one dies (seriously the Atlantis movie has an INSANE death count)

- THE EXPEDITION CONTINUES. Shenanigans ensue. More rogue Divine Beast attacks. 

- Link somehow gets separated from the group and meets the lost princess Sheikah Zelda (can y’all tell I’m a sucker for warrior Zelda)

- Zelda leads everyone to the lost Sheikah settlement.

- Zelda wants to research all the busted tech but her dad is not into it and discourages the research (she doesn’t care and does it anyways). 

- Link shows Zelda the Slate and they go around and try to piece together how to get the tech to work again (with mixed results) 

- Zelda also shows Link all the cool places and wildlife she loves to study and Link tells her all about the surface. They grow closer and then they realize the feelings hit and they just awkwardly flirt while everyone rolls their eyes in the background. 

- The Swimming Scene: Link tries (and fails) to be confident and is like “I was raised with the Zora I can definitely swim” and Zelda’s just like “uh okay :) let’s go” 

- Yiga reveal. 

- They take Link and Zelda to the Sacred Spring underneath the city. Zelda gets taken by the Goddess. They attempt to take her to where the Calamity is sealed so Zelda (and the Goddess) can be destroyed forever. 

- Link’s like f*ck that shit and rallies the crew to rescue her (also the Champions aren’t out to get rich like in the movie as soon as they wise up to the Yiga they are on board for the rescue). 

- The Yiga are defeated but then the Calamity awakens anyway. 

- Zelda fuckin obliterates it with her powers. 

- Zelda returns to everyone. Cue heartfelt reunion with Link.

- Zelda becomes Queen and works with Link to continue to help her people and recover the lost technology. 

Enjoy the brain rot. 

[amiedala]

Something More (the mandalorian x reader)

CHAPTER 1: INTO THE STARS

Rated: Explicit (not this chapter, but future chapters will be)

Warnings: light descriptions of violence

Summary: Meeting the Mandalorian was like colliding into the rest of your life at a moment’s notice. Like oh, there you are. It was both jarring and familiar at the same time, like stepping into a minute with no intentions and stepping out of it in deja-vu. You had always been told you made too much out of everything, that you blew up every circumstance to fit some kind of grand destiny, some huge significance. If anyone asked, you’d swear up and down this was different. It was different. The Mandalorian sweeping you off your feet and out of your back alley haunts and narrow escapes was something kismet. Something cosmic. Something more.

Or, a slow burn love story across the stars featuring you, Din, and your little green baby. With love, angst, lust, and everything in between following you across the galaxy.*this deviates from canon for the most part, the plot begins at the very end of season 1 and will deviate for about half of season 2! there is LOTS planned for this (i already have 19k words written & will be posting regularly) so i hope you all enjoy!! <3 muah*

this is 1000000% completely inspired by the incredible behemoth SUPREME Mandalorian fic Rough Day by our lord & savior @no-droids but it will have its entire own plot & more of a slowburn in both love & smut, specifically for suffering long haul romance lovers like myself!

i already have 19k words written & will be ATTEMPTING to post updates regularly (and if i get excited about getting new chapters up, they might come early. i'm gonna try to post Saturday evenings every week, extenuating circumstances notwithstanding <3

hope you enjoy!!! more to come VERY SOON!!!

Meeting the Mandalorian was like colliding into the rest of your life at a moment’s notice. Like oh, there you are. It was both jarring and familiar at the same time, like stepping into a minute with no intentions and stepping out of it in deja-vu. You had always been told you made too much out of everything, that you blew up every circumstance to fit some kind of grand destiny, some huge significance. If anyone asked, you’d swear up and down this was different. It was different. The Mandalorian sweeping you off your feet and out of your back alley haunts and narrow escapes was something kismet. Something cosmic. Something more.

You met him on Nevarro. You weren’t even supposed to be there. You were supposed to be back in the Mid Rim by that point, long gone from your last mission gone sour. Your ship had broken down and you narrowly escaped a crash landing, and you’d hiked for hours through the unyielding lava fields for the closest town, with nothing but a handful of credits and the clothes on your back. Somehow, miraculously, you were able to grab the last of your water and your mother’s necklace from where it was hanging on the dashboard before the magma had bubbled up and claimed the better half of the old X-wing before you could go back in for more.

“Dank ferrik,” you seethed, and the curse felt alien under your tongue. There was no one out here to hear it but yourself, the lava, and the sulfuric air, anyways, so you grumbled out a few more before the ship fully sank into the magma in front of you.

The ship itself wasn’t a big loss—you’d only gotten it because it was the cheapest after you lost your own to that smuggler, but being stranded on a planet that was so aggressive towards any sort of survival wasn’t the best circumstance in the galaxy. But here you were, stuck, unmoored, anchorless, on a planet not known for anything except its rivers of lava and a bounty hunters’ guild you’d heard about and tried your best to stay away from. That town was the only landmark you had, though, so you begrudgingly trekked across Nevarro’s molten surface in search for any form of civilization.

The sky had started to slip off into darkness, and the small flecks of the other Outer Rim planets glistened lightyears away from where you were hiking when you stumbled over something and nearly fell into what you assumed was a dormant vat of lava. It was only when you scrambled away from the hot pocket of ground that you realized it was a stormtrooper helmet. A stormtrooper helmet with a head still in it. You gasped and skittered away, pushing off the heels of your hands to get upward as fast as you can, not even registering the heat eating through the skin of your palms. You didn’t have a weapon—the old blaster you’d carried for the last few years had been eaten up with the X-Wing—and as your eyes adjusted to a collection of white armor and bodies on the ground, you kicked yourself from not prioritizing the gun over getting out unscathed.

You didn’t scare easy. You grew up on a slowly abandoned Rebel base back on Yavin, and even after your parents’ deaths, you were surrounded by a legion of people who took care of you and taught you how to fight. Really, you were good at getting out of sticky situations that looked too dire to survive—take the crash landing an hour back for example—but you had a giant blind spot of earnestness to believe the people you went into business with were being sincere. That’s how the ship had crashed in the first place, you exchanged a repair of your original starship with providing Alderaanian liquor to a smuggler and his droid back on Dantooine who had both cut and run with it before fully repairing the vitally broken control panel. It was a rookie mistake, which you definitely weren’t, but he had just seemed so earnest in his need for the alcohol, and your fatal flaw was that you always trusted people who needed help. Even to your own detriment.

It had been your downfall back home, and at least twice when you were adventuring through the Outer Rim, and when you narrowly escaped a Deveronian when you had first started out on your own, because you were too close to a scumbag in friend’s clothing who fumbled the bag and left you for dead. He even stole your ship, then, and you had to make a series of sordid deals to get off Polis Massa, let alone find a place where you could crash safely for weeks before you could work up enough credits to get the X-Wing, which was, quite ceremoniously, dead now.

You shivered with the realization that you might be in danger, too. There were so many bodies scattered across this ridge and the next, and a handful of crashed TIE fighters. The sight of them didn’t strike fear into you—they never really had, you were raised in the Alliance and you could outfly the Empire since you were six years old—but they made you feel uneasy. Nevarro didn’t have a Rebel base, and you had never met someone in the Alliance who was from the planet. With the obvious show of Imperial affiliation and the bounty hunters’ guild, Nevarro was seedy enough that it kept you on edge as you walked, hopefully towards a town with people who didn’t want anything more from you than an easy job.

It must have been near dawn when you finally made it to the edge of the town. It was at best shot to all hell and at worst absolutely obliterated. Your heart sank. There were more dead suits of white armor scattered across the dirt and sand. There were helmets on pikes that looked far too fresh. Your hand twitched near your thigh where your blaster was usually strapped. All of this was a bad idea. You shouldn’t have left the blaster in the ship. If you were really playing the game of regrets, though, you never should have helped the smuggler. You should have paid the fifteen more credits to get the X-Wing fixed on Tatooine instead. You should have stayed on Yavin after your parents died and shouldn’t have been so earnest to make it on your own and—

“Hey.” The voice came from behind you, and you whipped around so fast your hair fell from where the clasp had been hanging on to nothing but a prayer since your crash landing. You shook it away from your face, eyes squinted at the figure that seemed to materialize behind you. “Where are you from, pretty thing?”

“Coruscant,” you lied through your teeth. The name of the planet you’ve been trying to avoid for years burns a hole through your belly.

“You don’t belong in a place like this.” He stepped into the light, and he wasn’t human. You didn’t know what he was, exactly, but his tone made your skin crawl. You held your ground.

“You’re right. I don’t. I’m looking for a mechanic.”

“I’m a mechanic.” Like hell he was. You clenched your jaw, trying to look menacing. The grease and sweat from the hike there was smeared on your face, your pants had gotten ripped while climbing out of the crash. You didn’t like how his eyes fixated hungrily on the flesh of your exposed thigh, and you had to shake the thought away while you walked into a voice much more brazen than your own.

“Do you know how to fix an X-Wing?” You stepped forward, and the Rebel insignia on your necklace glinted in the low light. Around these parts, after the fall of the Empire, you’ve heard Rebels strike fear into the local folk. Suddenly, the guy took a step backward, and you reveled in your menace for a split second before you realized someone was standing behind you.

He didn’t speak again before he took off. You stuttered, the sudden appearance of the figure behind you catching in your chest, and it rose to a cut off yelp when a red blast knocked the one who had hit on you off his feet, spiraling over a stormtrooper body, falling to the rocky floor. Dead. He was dead. You spun, praying that your heart hammering in your chest was just leftover adrenaline and not a signifier of a new threat.

Standing behind you, outfitted entirely in silver reflective armor, was a Mandalorian. “Nevarro doesn’t have mechanics.”

You squinted. You were completely taken aback by his presence, his hulking realness, but suddenly his statement overpowered your revelry. “I find that hard to believe.”

“That X-Wing crashed out there is yours.” It isn’t a question. His voice is deep, a baritone that spreads warmth even blocked by the modulator in his helmet. You’d only heard of Mandalorians in stories, legends, around the campfires growing up. You didn’t expect one to ever materialize in anything other than myth, let alone stand in front of you, electric.

You nod. Did he follow you all the way to town?

“You aren’t looking for a mechanic.” His voice is so sure, so big. Your world spins on its axis, the feeling foreign and familiar all at once. He had spoken three sentences to you, and already, you felt that dizzy, magnetic pull that you tried to convince yourself was there much more often than it was.

“I…” You trail off, staring up at his visor. He seems larger than life, much larger than you, at least, and for some reason, the hugeness is cutting off all of your words before they can fully form. “No. I need a way off this planet, though.”

“Can you fly?”

You balk at his question, annoyed—obviously, you could fly—and then remember the only track record you have in the Mandalorian’s eyes is your ship, crash landed and then immediately swallowed by lava. “I’m a pilot. A runner. I’ve been flying since I was six years old.”

He takes a minute, completely silent. The noise of the scattered stormtrooper bodies around you suddenly seems deafening. You aren’t scared of him. You think. Your heart is still hammering, but it’s nothing like the fear that rushed through you when the alien talked to you a few minutes ago. It’s different—not adrenaline, exactly, and not fear. You place the feeling when it washes over you again, warm and unexpected—Excitement.

“Okay.” He moves, and you startle. You didn’t realize the conversation was over.

“Uh,” you stammer, “Do you… do you need a pilot?”

“No,” he says, over his shoulder. His strides are long. You step forward, almost pulled after him, then stuttered to a stop. “But I might be your only ride out of here.”

“Oh,” you manage, and then follow him. The dim light spreads over the horizon as you walk, stunned into silence by his own, trying to mimic his step, his quiet. It doesn’t happen. You’re clunking along beside him, the noise made even louder by the silence in his gait. “I’m not picky, where we go, you know—I was heading away from the Outer Rim, so I’m in no rush to get back there, but—I mean, I’m thankful that you’re taking me anywhere—”

“I can’t pay you. But you don’t have to pay me, either.”

You blink, feet stuttering to a near stop, buffering before you remember to keep following him. “I’m sorry?”

“You can fly, right?”

You blink, eyes darting up to the back of his helmet. It might just be the modulator, but there’s no air in his voice, no struggle to cross the hard, hot terrain. It’s impressive. “I can, but you thought you didn’t need a pilot—?”

“You were a rebel.” His voice is curt. Quick.

Your eyebrows furrow, looking down at the insignia on your necklace and then back up at him. There’s a dry breeze over the molten moors, and his cape catches in the wind. It flutters. It’s the first sign of something gentle about him. It’s the memory you take with you for months later, savoring it for when he’s leaving you on the ship while he goes and catches his bounties, one by one. You cling to it in the long lapses of time where he doesn’t offer you anything but silence. You’ll hold onto it, a butterfly of a memory, for weeks—until he offers you something softer, something warmer. Something real.

You don’t know that in the moment, though. Right now, he’s asked a question, and you’re struggling to answer it honestly. “I was.”

“You don’t scare easily.”

It’s like he’s putting together these impossible puzzle pieces of your life. How is he guessing this? He’s known you for maybe ten whole minutes. It swells in your chest, a thunderbird of a thing, and you don’t know why.

“I’d like to think so,” you manage, as he tilts his helmet back to search you for your answer. Your breath hitches in your throat at the thought of his eyes on you, and you wonder what color they are. Maker. Where did that come from?

“Good.”

A ship seems to materialize out of nowhere, but it seems more likely that you were so caught up in the mystery of the Mandalorian and keeping your gaze locked on him that his ship was in the periphery of your vision. You follow him, still confused, up the descended gangplank. Sitting in the middle of the ship is a tiny green baby, with eyes ten times the size of its nose, with peach fuzz lazily dusting the top of its head. It’s holding a tiny silver ball in its three-fingered hands, looking up at the Mandalorian with outstretched arms.

You watch, in stunned silence, as the giant hulking silver figure crouches down to pick up the baby, meeting its little coos with soft words right back. It’s as soft as his cape fluttering in the wind, an unexpected, fleeting feeling of warmth. You don’t know what to do with yourself. The warm breeze buffets the small of your back, ruffles your loose hair. You just stand there, entirely enamored with this tiny green baby in the Mandalorian’s arms, speechless.

“You don’t scare easily,” the Mandalorian repeats.

You shake your head. ���Nope.”

He holds the baby up to you. “How about now?”

You blink, confused. “Am I supposed to be scared of it?”

“Him.”

You take a tentative step forward, gaze flickering between the two of them, wondering what would have happened if you had crash landed literally anywhere else, at literally any other time. Something big and ceremonious swells somewhere deep in your chest.

“I’m not scared,” you finally say, and when your eyes find his visor again, you hope he knows you mean you’re not scared of either of them. You could be—most people with common sense are struck with fear at the sight of meeting a Mandalorian, especially one associated with such a widespread bounty hunters’ guild—but fear just keeps getting pushed away as the seconds pass. A small voice in the back of your head whispers that this is another mistake of being too trustful, but the larger half of you knows how to handle yourself if you find trouble. Besides, he has a tiny alien kid, and something tells you the Mandalorian wouldn’t put the baby in a situation that he deemed unsafe. As the door zips shut behind you, you step forward into the ship—into the place you’ll eventually make your home—heart still hammering on and on, thrumming as the three of you lift off of Nevarro’s surface and into the stars.

[monstersdownthepath]

The Forever Storm: Agyra

CR 27

Chaotic Neutral Colossal Magical Beast

Pathfinder Bestiary 4, pg. 166~167

This ptitanic and pterrible pterodactyl dominates the skylines whenever she appears, her destructive potential a head above every other Kaiju in existence to the point that she’s sometimes viewed as the progenitor of all storms. Rodan Agyra is simultaneously the most and least destructive of all Kaiju, minding her business by sleeping on her distant island nation for the majority of her existence where an isolationist civilization lives peacefully in her shadow... but whenever these people are endangered, such as by being attacked by pirates or captured by slavers, she rouses from her slumber to dispatch the threats with all the suddenness of a lightning bolt from a clear blue sky.

Don’t let make you think she’s a generous guardian, though. As with all Kaiju, her rampages cause unimaginable collateral damage as a matter of course, and she doesn’t seem too concerned with the fact that she often ends up killing dozens of the very people who see her as their protector. While one could reasonably state that Agyra may simply be protecting her island territory and any ‘guarding’ she does is incidental, this doesn’t explain why she takes her destruction to the shorelines far beyond her land whenever her people are stolen away to them... except with the excuse she views them as her property, and if she can’t have them, no one can. Rather than trying to retrieve her stolen people, Agyra seems more focused on punishing the thieves and everyone who happens to be in the same area code, acting as a storm of mindless vengeance that more often than not results in the deaths of the captured tribesmen.

And when I say “storm of vengeance,” I don’t mean the actual spell Storm of Vengeance... Because that would be less destructive than what Agyra brings to the skies over the heads of any who offend her!

When Agyra arrives, she often begins by creating her own battle arena from which nothing escapes. Once per day, she can generate a Hurricane four miles wide centered on her position, with rains that render communication and ranged attacks impossible, and winds capable of tearing structures from the soil and flinging Huge or smaller creatures like pebbles spiraling throughout this radius for 24 entire hours... but for a small, 500ft-wide bubble of safety in the center that Agyra rests in, reveling in the chaos. She can leave at any time, her flight speed unaffected by winds of any strength, but watching everything burn is a hobby of all Kaiju. This storm is more than enough to obliterate whatever civilization it rests upon, as even creatures and structures not directly within the storm when it first manifests are in danger of the whipping winds leaving the storm, as well as any debris being flung around. Heavy rains are one thing, but in a hurricane you’ve got to worry about carts, horses, entire houses, and whole trees raining down. It’s safe to say that Agyra’s radius of destruction may be as wide as ten miles if the DM plays up just how dangerous the winds escaping the actual cyclone may be!

(side note: while doing a quick google search to try and figure out how bad this ability can get, I came across the terrifying fact that real life hurricanes average to be hundreds of miles wide! isn’t that fun!!!! love this planet!)

It, thankfully, apparently takes 10 minutes for her to establish a Hurricane (the ability states it replicates Control Weather, with no indication of the ability overriding the spell’s 10 minute cast time), meaning a party hoping to stop Agyra’s most destructive ability has 10 minutes to break her concentration before whatever city she’s parked over is wiped off the face of the planet... provided, of course, she doesn’t wait until after dealing with all potential threats before leaving the storm as a parting gift. Once her concentration is broken, however, the party will have to deal with the fact that they managed to damage Agyra enough to stop her casting, and thus she will acknowledge them as a potential challenge.

Agyra’s true hostility is usually directed at Mogarou, ‘King’ of the Kaiju, a Kaiju who the book states she sees as “a rival,” something the Final King reciprocates with strange enthusiasm. They will both unfailingly rise to engage one another in conflict whenever the other wakes up first, and their clashes are so legendarily destructive that they can alter the landscape. This battle of rivals ends only when one finally defeats the other, or when a greater and more malevolent threat rears its head, but every few hundred years it starts all over again when Agyra leaves her layer to go harass her best frienemy with everything in her arsenal.

And what does that arsenal look like? A mountain of d6s, mostly. While all her natural attacks have lower flat damage than most Kaiju, her spiked tail has the most potential damage among the natural attacks any of the other Kaiju and has the longest non-ability-based reach of any natural attack in all of Pathfinder*, slapping foes up to 75ft away (which, due to her 50ft space, means this attack has a 125ft range). That potential damage? 10d6+8. And if she decides to use Greater Vital Strike instead of pulling off a Full-Attack? 40d6+8 damage, which averages out to be about 130 damage and is the single most damaging natural attack in any Bestiary without relying on a critical hit or a unique ability.

Thankfully she doesn’t have Flyby Attack, but with such enormous reach does she really need it? She has a 200ft Perfect fly speed to begin with and can hover in the air when necessary, and most land-bound Kaiju can’t even touch her without using their beam attacks while she wails on them with Greater Vital Strike. Each strike with her tail also inflicts 5d6 bleed damage just to rub more wounds into the wounds and lessen the efficiency of a Kaiju’s typical Fast Healing, though it works tremendously well against creatures without Fast Healing. Like most party members.

While the tail is the star of the show, Agyra’s got a nasty Full-Attack like every Kaiju, with her twin bites dealing 6d6+17 and her two talons hewing 3d8+17 chunks of flesh from her targets, letting her keep up with her earthbound brethren. You’ll notice, though, that none of her attacks have any elemental flavor! That’s because all of it is concentrated in her Breath Weapon, twin arcs of powerful plasma that cause 20d6 Electricity damage to anything they strike. The convulsions from the electricity stagger any creature struck for 1d4 rounds, but here’s the kicker: being struck with both beams at the same time (something that can only occur to a creature larger than Medium) causes the damage and stagger duration to stack, and any creature targeted by both beams takes a -4 penalty to the Reflex save to dodge them (raising the DC from 41 to 45). Any creature wearing metal armor or comprised mostly of metal also become stunned for 1 round per beam, and because no Kaiju are made of metal, this ability is solely for use against adventurers!

Any creature killed by the Breath Weapon remains electrified for 2d4 rounds after their deaths, zapping anyone who touches them for 3d6 Electricity damage, which is something similar to what happens if Agyra herself is ever slain. Her Electrified Corpse deals the same damage to anything that touches it for 1 minute after her death, and even destroying her corpse leaves enough of a charge to cause the air to crackled with damaging electricity until 1 minute passes... or she’s Reborn.

Unlike other Kaiju, Agyra has been canonically slain--multiple times, in fact. The problem is that she never stays dead, her Rebirth raising her back up as if by True Resurrection a mere minute after she’s killed. Rebirth replaces the normal Get Out Of Death Free card that Recovery grants, but is significantly more powerful, not that it matters; despite being returned to full health and stamina, Agyra is usually quick to flee from any battle she returns to life from, something most Kaiju treat with the same combatant’s respect they appear to expect when their death is prevented via their own Recovery ability. Attacking her again post-resurrection, though, means the party will have to contend with another 650 hitpoints hidden behind 40+ AC and ten thousand different resistances and immunities. At that point, it’s best to just let her leave.

Her leaving might still kill you, though. Once an hour she can blitz up to a mile in any direction via Swift Flight, which is how she enters and exits battles, but anything within 100ft of her previous space when she zips outta there gets blasted by the sonic boom and has to deal with a parting gift of 20d10 damage, permanent deafness, a free trip off your feet, and a 1 round stun. Again, though, after taking all that damage, just cutting your losses and letting her fly dramatically into the sunset is in everyone’s best interests.

You can read more about her here.

(*for those curious, the longest reach to any natural attack via unique abilities belongs to Ouar-Oong, whose Prodigious Reach lets her strike from 1000ft away, and the Apostate Devil, whose Boundless Reach allows them to attack any creature they can see regardless of distance) (also, added fun fact: the second most damaging natural attack goes to Tsathoggua, whose 8d10+29 bite attack deals triple damage on a critical hit, letting him hit preposterous damage numbers)

[thehollowprince]

So... it's been over a year since Endgame and I thought I'd reexamine my opinions on it. Maybe I just needed some time to let it digest? Maybe I won't be so negative about it after some time to think on it. And I'm here to report that... no! Its just as bad (if not worse) than I remember.

Now, anyone who has followed me for any length of time knows that when I'm criticizing the MCU, particularly the Avengers films, I'm talking about Steve Rogers and his "arc". I've made no bones about how I felt about what they did to him and I stand by that opinion. Endgame completely assassinated Steve Rogers as a character, taking a man who by his own admission, if he "sees a situation heading south, he can't ignore it" (written and directed by the same idiots) and stick him back in the Good Old Days where he knows how bad everything is and how bad it's going to get.

The real kicker with that is the fact that the writers/directors who came up with the whole time travel nonsense can't even agree on how it works. Either Steve's bogus journey created an entire new timeline as was badly explained (despite not making any sense whatsoever) in the movie itself, or he was always a part of this universe, which is just further killing of all his characterization since his first appearance. If he created a new timeline, he either spent the rest of his life fixing the wrongs that he knew were going to happen (completely obliterating the fact that they wanted him to "retire" or he woke the Other Steve up and made him "save the world" while he kicked back and let everyone else fight the good fight without him, a clear contradiction of his character. The other option was that he was in this timeline the whole time, living in plain sight as Peggy's husband, despite her being in the espionage business, meaning she would have been watched, even if only for her own protection. But apparently no one noticed how similar her husband looked to America's Greatest Hero? It also just doubles down on the fact that Steve let everything that happened, happen again, despite knowing he could do something about it that would save many lives. That's not something Steve would ever do.

What really makes this whole situation worse is the fandom reaction to that ending. We were still divided after Civil War, and this movie went and divided the fandom yet again. Either you liked Steve's ending or you "weren't a true fan"/"pissed because your ship didn't happen". These same fans who called out the Russos and M&M for years, who called out the horrible writing in Endgame itself when it came to almost every other character, suddenly didn't care when it came to Steve Rogers. That's where the joke came from that they were the new Tony stans. They didn't care how/why Steve got his happy ending, as long as he got his happy ending, even if it spit in the face of everything that came before.

The thing is, the ending wouldn't have been so bad if there had been any semblance of foreshadowing. There was nothing for several movies that suggested that Steve never got over Peggy. The first time he really mentions her in a romantic sense after The First Avenger was in Engame itself, where he hijacked a support meeting for those who lost loved ones in the Snap to talk about a woman who died two years before the Snap happened from old age. The entire thing was a last minute decision to remove Steve Rogers entirely because Chris' contract was up.

I maintain that Steve should have just retired in the modern world, maybe got some actual therapy, and rest, knowing that he wasn't alone anymore and that there were others to help save the day so that he didn't have to do it alone. Would have opened up a possiblity for a return (because apparently Chris misses the role already) in a future team-up movie, where Steve swoopes in to save Sam with a "Captain America needed my help"

[theculturedmarxist]

@expatiating​

>Literally anyone who lived in a communist or socialist regime: it was terrible..... 16 year old white girl on tumblr: yeah but that wasn’t real communism :///

You mean anyone like this, you stupid fucking asshole?

Oppressive and grey? No, growing up under communism was the happiest time of my life

When people ask me what it was like growing up behind the Iron Curtain in Hungary in the Seventies and Eighties, most expect to hear tales of secret police, bread queues and other nasty manifestations of life in a one-party state.

They are invariably disappointed when I explain that the reality was quite different, and communist Hungary, far from being hell on earth, was in fact, rather a fun place to live.

The communists provided everyone with guaranteed employment, good education and free healthcare. Violent crime was virtually non-existent.

But perhaps the best thing of all was the overriding sense of camaraderie, a spirit lacking in my adopted Britain and, indeed, whenever I go back to Hungary today. People trusted one another, and what we had we shared.

Learn from Cuba, Says World Bank

The island's economy, which suffered devastating losses in production after the Soviet Union withdrew its aid, especially its oil supplies, a decade ago, has yet to fully recover. Annual economic growth, fuelled in part by a growing tourism industry and limited foreign investment, has been halting and, for the most part, anaemic.

Moreover, its economic policies are generally anathema to the Bank. The government controls virtually the entire economy, permitting private entrepreneurs the tiniest of spaces. It heavily subsidises virtually all staples and commodities; its currency is not convertible to anything.  It retains tight control over all foreign investment, and often changes the rules abruptly and for political reasons.

At the same time, however, its record of social achievement has not only been sustained; it's been enhanced, according to the WDI.

It has reduced its infant mortality rate from 11 per 1,000 births in 1990 to seven in 1999, which places it firmly in the ranks of the western industrialised nations. It now stands at six, according to Jo Ritzen, the Bank's Vice President for Development Policy who visited Cuba privately several months ago to see for himself.

By comparison, the infant mortality rate for Argentina stood at 18 in 1999; Chile's was down to ten; and Costa Rica, 12. For the entire Latin American and Caribbean region as a whole, the average was 30 in 1999.

Similarly, the mortality rate for children under five in Cuba has fallen from 13 to eight per thousand over the decade. That figure is 50 percent lower than the rate in Chile, the Latin American country closest to Cuba's achievement. For the region as a whole, the average was 38 in 1999.

"Six for every 1,000 in infant mortality - the same level as Spain - is just unbelievable," according to Ritzen, a former education minister in the Netherlands. "You observe it, and so you see that Cuba has done exceedingly well in the human development area."

Indeed, in Ritzen's own field the figures tell much the same story. Net primary enrolment for both girls and boys reached 100 percent in 1997, up from 92 percent in 1990. That was as high as most developed nations, higher even than the US rate and well above 80-90 percent rates achieved by the most advanced Latin American countries.

"Even in education performance, Cuba's is very much in tune with the developed world, and much higher than schools in, say, Argentina, Brazil, or Chile."

It is no wonder, in some ways. Public spending on education in Cuba amounts to about 6.7 percent of gross national income, twice the proportion in other Latin America and Caribbean countries and even Singapore.

There were 12 primary pupils for every Cuban teacher in 1997, a ratio that ranked with Sweden, rather than any other developing country. The Latin American and East Asian average was twice as high at 25 to one.

The average youth (ages 15-24) illiteracy rate in Latin America and the Caribbean stands at seven percent. In Cuba, the rate is zero. In Latin America, where the average is seven percent, only Uruguay approaches that achievement, with one percent youth illiteracy.

"Cuba managed to reduce illiteracy from 40 percent to zero within ten years," said Ritzen. "If Cuba shows that it is possible, it shifts the burden of proof to those who say it's not possible."

Similarly, Cuba devoted 9.1 percent of its gross domestic product (GDP) during the 1990s to health care, roughly equivalent to Canada's rate.  Its ratio of 5.3 doctors per 1,000 people was the highest in the world.

The question that these statistics pose, of course, is whether the Cuban experience can be replicated. The answer given here is probably not.

"What does it is the incredible dedication," according to Wayne Smith, who was head of the US Interests Section in Havana in the late 1970s and early 1980s and has travelled to the island many times since.  "Doctors in Cuba can make more driving cabs and working in hotels, but they don't.  They're just very dedicated," he said.

This amazing video and documentary, produced by Neighbor Democracy, details the evolving communal organs within the Rojava Revolution, from security to health care.

This 40 minute video is an in-depth look into the inner workings of the commune system of Rojava and how they work in practice. Rojava is the colloquial name for the Democratic Federation of Northern Syria (DFNS), a multi-ethnic, pluralist, women’s liberationist, and radically democratic autonomous zone that has grown out of the context of the Syrian Civil War. While there is frequent and thorough reporting on the military aspects of the Revolution in Rojava, especially their fight against Daesh (ISIS) and the Turkish State, the social revolution as it relates to the everyday lives of the people living there is rarely given anything more than a cursory overview, even in radical circles.

This video is one attempt to make up for that gap in easily digestible information about the way the day-to-day autonomous organizing affects daily life in Rojava. It also closes with a call for people in the US and elsewhere to build communes along similar lines, while discussing some possible contextual considerations specific to North America.

The communes in the DFNS are birthed out of tireless organizing by everyday people, predominately Kurdish women, in an effort that started clandestinely in the days of the Regime, but has since led to structures that could fill the power vacuum left in the war. The people of the DFNS are working out in practice through trial-and-error the culmination of 40 years of theoretical and practical knowledge built through the Kurdish struggle, and most thoroughly laid out by the imprisoned PKK leader, Abdullah Ocalan.

The communes have many similarities to the neighborhood assemblies that were the focus of the late American communalist Murray Bookchin, who was an inspiration for Ocalan. There are an estimated 4,000 communes in Rojava today, run through direct democracy of all the residents (50-150 families). The work of the commune is divided up into committees which anyone can join. The most common committees are explored in-depth in this video, and their timestamps can be found below. Each committee covered in the video can be found in its own short clip on the Neighbor Democracy channel so that these short, easy-to-digest videos can me shared in discussions about specific topics relating to communal approaches to various aspects of life.

Marinaleda: Will 'free homes' solve Spain's evictions crisis? 

In the wake of Spain's property crash, hundreds of thousands of homes have been repossessed. While one regional government says it will seize repossessed properties from the banks, a little town is doing away with mortgages altogether.

In Marinaleda, residents like 42-year-old father-of-three, David Gonzalez Molina, are building their own homes.

While he burrows with a pneumatic drill into the earth, David nonchalantly says it "should take a couple of years".

However, when his new house is finished he will have paid "absolutely nothing".

Free bricks and mortar

The town hall in this small, aesthetically unremarkable town an hour-and-a-bit east of Seville, has given David 190 sq m (2,000 sq ft) of land.

He and others are only eligible after they have been registered residents of Marinaleda for at least two years.

The bricks and mortar are also a gift, this time from the regional government of Andalusia.

Only once his home is finished will he start paying 15 euros (£13) a month, to the regional government, to refund the cost of other building materials.

Of course, most people do not know how to build a house, so the town hall in Marinaleda throws in some expertise.

It employs several professional builders and plumbers, a couple of whom work alongside David, to help him construct his house.

HOMAGE TO CATALONIA 

This was in late December 1936, less than seven months ago as I write, and yet it is a period that has already receded into enormous distance. Later events have obliterated it much more completely than they have obliterated 1935, or 1905, for that matter. I had come to Spain with some notion of writing newspaper articles, but I had joined the militia almost immediately, because at that time and in that atmosphere it seemed the only conceivable thing to do. The Anarchists were still in virtual control of Catalonia and the revolution was still in full swing. To anyone who had been there since the beginning it probably seemed even in December or January that the revolutionary period was ending; but when one came straight from England the aspect of Barcelona was something startling and overwhelming. It was the first time that I had ever been in a town where the working class was in the saddle. Practically every building of any size had been seized by the workers and was draped with red flags or with the red and black flag of the Anarchists; every wall was scrawled with the hammer and sickle and with the initials of the revolutionary parties; almost every church had been gutted and its images burnt. Churches here and there were being systematically demolished by gangs of workmen. Every shop and café had an inscription saying that it had been collectivized; even the bootblacks had been collectivized and their boxes painted red and black. Waiters and shop-walkers looked you in the face and treated you as an equal. Servile and even ceremonial forms of speech had temporarily disappeared. Nobody said ‘Señior’ or ‘Don’ or even ‘Usted’; everyone called everyone else ‘Comrade’ and ‘Thou’, and said ‘Salud!’ instead of ‘Buenos dias’. Tipping was forbidden by law; almost my first experience was receiving a lecture from a hotel manager for trying to tip a lift-boy. There were no private motor-cars, they had all been commandeered, and all the trams and taxis and much of the other transport were painted red and black. The revolutionary posters were everywhere, flaming from the walls in clean reds and blues that made the few remaining advertisements look like daubs of mud. Down the Ramblas, the wide central artery of the town where crowds of people streamed constantly to and fro, the loudspeakers were bellowing revolutionary songs all day and far into the night. And it was the aspect of the crowds that was the queerest thing of all. In outward appearance it was a town in which the wealthy classes had practically ceased to exist. Except for a small number of women and foreigners there were no ‘well-dressed’ people at all. Practically everyone wore rough working-class clothes, or blue overalls, or some variant of the militia uniform. All this was queer and moving. There was much in it that I did not understand, in some ways I did not even like it, but I recognized it immediately as a state of affairs worth fighting for. Also I believed that things were as they appeared, that this was really a workers' State and that the entire bourgeoisie had either fled, been killed, or voluntarily come over to the workers' side; I did not realize that great numbers of well-to-do bourgeois were simply lying low and disguising themselves as proletarians for the time being.

Together with all this there was something of the evil atmosphere of war. The town had a gaunt untidy look, roads and buildings were in poor repair, the streets at night were dimly lit for fear of air-raids, the shops were mostly shabby and half-empty. Meat was scarce and milk practically unobtainable, there was a shortage of coal, sugar, and petrol, and a really serious shortage of bread. Even at this period the bread-queues were often hundreds of yards long. Yet so far as one could judge the people were contented and hopeful. There was no unemployment, and the price of living was still extremely low; you saw very few conspicuously destitute people, and no beggars except the gipsies. Above all, there was a belief in the revolution and the future, a feeling of having suddenly emerged into an era of equality and freedom. Human beings were trying to behave as human beings and not as cogs in the capitalist machine. In the barbers' shops were Anarchist notices (the barbers were mostly Anarchists) solemnly explaining that barbers were no longer slaves. In the streets were coloured posters appealing to prostitutes to stop being prostitutes. To anyone from the hard-boiled, sneering civilization of the English-speaking races there was something rather pathetic in the literalness with which these idealistic Spaniards took the hackneyed phrases of revolution. At that time revolutionary ballads of the naivest kind, all about proletarian brotherhood and the wickedness of Mussolini, were being sold on the streets for a few centimes each. I have often seen an illiterate militiaman buy one of these ballads, laboriously spell out the words, and then, when he had got the hang of it, begin singing it to an appropriate tune.

Feel free to unfuck yourself you class cuck.

[rabble-dabble]

The Cancer King's Court ~ The Vengeful Storm

Sollux Captor/The Vengeful Storm

This version of Sollux lived a life nearly identical to his canon counterpart up until one specific moment. During his fight with Eridan in the session, Feferi tries to interupt. This distraction allows Eridan to get a hit in, killing Sollux. Feferi chases Eridan off in a rage, before taking Sollux to his quest bed to revive him.

Now that he’s God-Tier, Sollux is able to obliterate Eridan once he turns traitor on the meteor. This results in him and Feferi surviving the game, as they’re able to make it to Earth C without to much fuss from there. 

He settles into a peaceful life with Feferi and Aradia from there, with the three of them settling into a quiet pseudo-routine. Whether it be Sollux not batting an eye as Aradia throws a corpse party in the backyard, or Feferi dragging Sollux’s boney ass to bed when she catches him playing video games at three in the morning, things wind up becoming a strange sort of normal.

The three of them never wonder what their relationship is exactly and no one else really asks. Except Karkat, who thinks he knows exactly what their relationship is and boasts about that fact whenever it comes up. Ironic, seeing as he’s completely oblivious to John’s flirting. Sollux, Aradia, and Feferi have started a betting pool to see how long it takes him to notice.

All is well… until The Condescension comes back.

The forces of The Condescension have been spreading across Paradox Space from the main timeline, slaughtering civilizations and rounding up their remaining populations to be consumed by the HIC. Entire timelines had fallen before her gluttony and this timeline was next on the chopping block.

Sollux’s only warning was when he heard Feferi’s voice in his head.

Sollux was swiftly captured by the invasion force and brought before The Condescension. HIC recognizes him as the descendant of her beloved Helmsman and has him strapped in to her ship. Has Sollux is dragged into the engine room, he passes dozens of versions of himself, his ancestor, and Mituna. Some of them are just shriveled up and mindless husks. Others are still muttering the names of loved ones under their breath. 

He lost count of how many were asking for Aradia and Feferi.

Sollux would lie there for decades, surrounded by broken versions of himself as his energy was sucked out of him. As the nights trickled on, he never heard Aradia’s voice. He never knew she was dead. It kept him going. Kept him sane until the day he was rescued. 

The Holy Prince had united the timeline’s survivors into an army. He lead them to victory against the Condescension, forcing her armies out of the timeline. But not before he brought down one final warship.

Sollux opened his eyes for the first time in decades to see Aradia standing over him.

She was alive.

She was safe.

He was free.

…Until he heard her voice.

One final shrill gasp echoed in his head seconds before a drone shot Aradia dead.

Sollux tore the worship apart.

Eridan looked up to see a red and blue sky swirling over him, Sollux glaring down at him as the warship fell in flames. The only reason The Holy Prince didn’t get obliterated right there was because Sollux passed out from exhaustion soon afterwards. 

Eridan brings Sollux to the King, who puts him in a bed to let him rest. Sollux spends the next few weeks being taken care of in recovery mode, with the Red Death and the Holy Prince helping him come to terms with his loss. Even the King makes time to visit him. The recovery is much more mental that it is physical. After all, Feferi can heal him up just fine. But trauma isn’t processed that easily.

Aradia and Feferi try to help. His interactions with them are strange. They’re still their usual chipper selves, but there’s something holding them back. It’s a grim reminder that these aren’t the same people he fell in love with. On the other hand, he finds himself actually liking this version of Eridan. He’s willing to take responsibility and he genuinely sympathizes with Sollux. That’s enough to get him forgiven in Sollux’s book, it just took a while for him to trust Eridan enough to see that.

After a few visits, Sollux asks whether they’re going to ask him to join their little group. He’s put together by this point that these guys aren’t all from the same timeline. Karkat explains their goal and Sollux says he wants in. “ii want my mate2priite2 back. and ii want two make her pay.”

Sollux is a one man army. Telekinetically ripping apart battle fleets and tossing around continents. His god-like power obliterating the Condescension’s forces with ease. Eridan is the scalpel. Sollux is the hammer.

He has an uneasy relationship with this version of Aradia and Feferi. He gets along well enough with Feferi, but she’s just a bit… off. She’s so close to the Feferi from Sollux’s timeline, but not quite. It feels weird, but they still get along well enough. Same goes with Aradia, but with an added wrinkle.

Aradia is unnerved by how vengeful and vindictive this Sollux is. Yes, he has every reason to be pissed and HIC needs to die anyways, but Aradia is still worried about him going to far. Revenge blackens the soul. She knows that first hand. She doesn’t want to see Sollux experience that too.

Tavros, conversely, eggs Sollux on. He deserves his revenge, he deserves his happy ending. Tavros knows what it’s like to be robbed and he encourages Sollux to do whatever he can to get even. The two end up as close friends as a result. Which, by extension, makes him close friends with Gamzee. Those two have a mutual respect for each other as some of the strongest members of the team.

Ironically enough, Eridan ends up reigning Sollux in a lot of the time, almost to the point of being pale. Sollux actually has a huge amount of respect for Eridan finally dropping the attitude so he’s far more inclined to listen to his advice. That said, he’s still Eridan’s opposite. He ends up being an unintentionally corrupting influence on Karkat, showing by example that being less restrained gets more done.

The Vengeful Storm is a weapon of mass destruction, a force of nature few can match, and a thoroughly unfettered individual who will do whatever it takes to get the job done. If you anger the King, get below ground. You will not survive the coming Vengeful Storm.

now hear me out

i am willingly okay with sollux having the ability to Go Apeshit ™

also sollux friendship with tavros, ALSO going Apeshit ™?

HMMMMMMM MY FRIEND YOU JUST FED ME UNLIKE THE ANGST YOU THINK YOU’VE MIGHT’VE INSTILLED IN ME FOR THE PAST THREE CANCER KING KARKAT POSTS

anyways I went with something akin to sollux’s quirks - red and blue, white and black, and his modified messed up god tier outfit - I consider that with his powers and his drive he’d kinda end up messing up the damn thing in one or two or more fights. also not to toot my own horn but the electric lighting was a last minute idea and i fucking LOVE it.

[theabominableblogger]

My Reaction to “Avengers Endgame”

Yes- I still haven’t seen this movie.  Yes I know exactly what happens in this movie.  I mainly avoided it for a while due to overhype but with some convincing from my brother, Imma sit my butt down and try to watch this.

Pressing... play!

Right off the bat, I feel like I should warn you guys and say that I have... my opinions... about stuff.  Plus I’m a dumbass about Marvel so just bear with me.

I like that Disney Plus has to warn us about product placement

Clint!

Are we gonna see little Nathaniel running around- THERE he is!

We are gonna see Clint’s entire family get freaking obliterated

Is all the rumbling from the sky or are those airplanes freaking crashing to Earth in the distance?

What if they pulled a reverse WandaVision and showed the people getting snapped out of existence in a future film or show?  That would be freaking terrifying.

They’re [Tony and Nebula] playing paper football...

I wanna see more of THEIR interactions aboard the Milano.  The shots of them just repairing the ship are great too.

“I’m fine.  Totally fine.”  Everyone ever.

I also like you see the visual difference between Tony and Nebula.  While he’s growing gaunt and haggard from loss of oxygen, you can still see that Nebula looks absolutely fine because she’s like 75% android

So between 1995 and now, what the heck has Carol been up to?

“Thanos wiped out... 50% of all living creatures.”  So like entire ecosystems are just demolished.

*anthropology major part of my brain scrambling for answers*

“We lost.  And you [Steve] weren’t there.”  HE WAS IN WAKANDA!

Wait so the arc reactor ISN’T in Tony’s chest anymore?

“Where the hell have you [Carol] been all this time?”  Good question!

*silently bops to opening theme*

For some reason, I just really want the ship radio to randomly turn on so you just see everyone sitting awkwardly as “Piano Man” plays over the speakers

*Thanos slowly cooks his food*  Faster, all together now!  COOKING CAN BE FUN!

“I [Thanos] used the stones to destroy the stones.”  ...what?

“I am...[Thanos] inevitable.”  *starts humming “Inevitable” from TGWDLM*

“I [Thor] went for the head.”  YES YOU DID

[FIVE YEARS LATER] All righty so we’re doing this

*gasps*  Is... Steve running the therapy sit downs like Sam did in “The Winter Soldier”?  That’s awesome.  I really like this tidbit.

I’m also really liking Alan Silvestri’s score for this so far

I’m really trying not to nitpick but I feel like it would take more than 5 years for greenery to just completely overtake a suburban neighborhood

Also wow pre COVID life looks great you guys

“There’s a part of me that doesn’t even wanna find him.”  Are they talking about... Clint?  Is Clint just going the full vigilante route?

DOES HE KILL PEOPLE?!?

I really like Steve and Natasha’s friendship in these movies but for some reason I don’t feel like we get enough of Natasha for me to get behind her on an emotional standpoint

Are they gonna use the quantum realm to jumpstart the multiverse for Phase 4?

Also speaking of multiverse, I honestly really don’t want Spiderman:  No Way Home or Wandavision to get too cluttered by that

I like Tony’s lake house.  And he got a whole vegetable garden going too.  Kudos!

The little kid who plays Morgan Stark is adorable

“Not if we strictly follow the rules of time travel.”  Which we obviously won’t.

“We’re gonna need a really big brain.”  So where the [expletive] is Banner?

“Stranger danger.”  *snorts*

“Dab!”  *rolls eyes*

So is the whole Professor Hulk thing permanent?  I know he’s gonna be in the She-Hulk show but I’m wondering how they’re gonna tackle that.  And they’re gonna have Tim Roth too!

*smiles when Tony takes Morgan to bed*

Steve Rogers here [when they do the first time travel tests] is a Look ™

Maybe don’t let the GIANT GREEN MAN keep pressing a bunch of tiny tiny important buttons on a dashboard

*laughs at Steve shaking his head in disbelief when they finally bring Scott back*

*Tony’s car races toward the Avengers base*  NYOOOMMMM

*Tony rolls down his window*  It’s Britney, bitch

“And maybe not die trying.”  And you definitely will.

This whole bit where Scott keeps losing his dorito only to get another one from Bruce feels like a Doritos commercial.

*jams out to "Supersonic Rocket Ship by The Kinks*

Did they just keep reducing the green pigment for Hulk or what?

*sighs when they reveal Fat!Thor*

MIEK’S ALIVE!

Please tell me Noobmaster69 is Kid Loki, whom we meet in the Loki series

“Don’t... say that name.”  “Yeah we actually don’t say that name here.”  I like this.  I like that Thor has so much resentment for killing Thanos at the wrong time and that he felt that could have done better cause he’s A GOD.  So the fact that THANOS was on equal level and BEAT HIM-

Hawkeye’s killing people

This sword fight’s great [between the Yakuza person and Clint]

WHY DIDN’T THEY BUILD ON THIS [Clint and Natasha’s connection] ???

*laughs when Rhodey suggests killing baby Thanos*

These shots of Clint going through the Quantum Realm looks like something straight out of Andy Park’s concept art and that’s awesome

“Well I [Scott] haven’t [encountered an Infinity Stone] but I don’t even know what the hell you’re all talking about.”  *snorts*

“The Aether, firstly, is not a stone.”  Thank you!

The little glance Nebula gives after Thor mentions the Dark Elves just make me think that somewhere down the road, she has either A) encountered them or B) has encountered other Asgardians besides Thor

“Guys if you pick the right year, there are three stones in New York.”  “Shut the front door.”  *laughs*

Also underrated trio:  Steve, Natasha, and Bruce.  Gimme more.

Wait a minute, in 2012, Doctor Strange wasn’t active yet.  So are they gonna go see- OOOOOOOHHHHHH

[NEW YORK 2012] Oh here we go

*cracks up when Bruce very half-assedly smashes stuff on the street*

“I’m looking for Doctor Strange.”  “You’re about five years too early.”  Wait a minute.

HOW DOES SHE [the Ancient One] KNOW?!?

*giggles at Thor and Rocket sneaking in the background with a bored Loki in focus*

“That’s my [Thor’s] mother.  She dies today.”  I love this scene already.

Also WHY IS THOR- or the Thor films in general- have like the most well written characters in the whole canon?

It’s those movies, Guardians 2, The Winter Soldier, Civil War, aaand.... I can’t think of any more of them. 

Oh yeah and WANDAVISION cause THAT HIT ME LIKE A TRUCK-

Rocket just said he thinks of the Guardians as his family I’m gonna die...

What about their [Natasha and Rhodey’s] friendship?!?  I want more of that!

“Ronan’s obsession... clouds his judgment.”  ...HUH

*Thanos uses his sword to lift up Nebula’s chin*  Aw heck no

“As far as I’m concerned, that’s America’s ass.”  *has to take a second before nodding in agreement*

Wait is that Jasper Stillwell?

“Flick me.”  That bit alone could be taken out of context

“We’re in route to Doctor List.”  Who’s Doctor List?  Is that a code name?

“Hail Hydra.”  THE BASTARDS WENT AND DID IT

Please tell me this hand off scene is gonna be the opening for the Loki show.  Please tell me this is gonna happen.

*Loki takes the Tesseract again*  AND HE’S GOOONNNEE!!

LET’S GET TO FREAKING JUNE ALREADY!

*ends up quoting “Yeah, I know, I know” along with Steve*

I’m really glad Tilda Swinton actually came back for this cameo

*keeps slapping my laptop screen when people keep saying Doctor Strange made a mistake when it was an explicit point in Infinity War where he encountered 14 million other AUs to find the best result*

Are you telling me that this whole plan could derail because Nebula accidentally hacked into her own WiFI network?  Are you seriously doing this?

*Thanos and Ebony Maw scan Nebula’s duplicate memory bank and track her down*  Are you freaking kidding me?

...I have 96 minutes left?!?

“The future hasn’t been kind to you [Thor], has it?”  Frigga is underrated

So for these shots with Jane, are they just reusing different shots from Thor 2 or just footage from deleted scenes?

Can we talk about how Frigga is absolutely the best parent Thor has?  Meanwhile her husband ODIN is like “oh yeah by the way you have a secret sister totes magotes i’ll die now byeeee”

*sings along with “Come and Get Your Love” by Redbone*

*laughs when we cut to Quill just very badly singing along to his iPod in the distance*

I want a bonus short with just Rhodey and Nebula doing their thing

*Nebula gets her memory taken over by 2014 Thanos*  Nooooooo...

Are the glasses that Tony wears here part of EDITH from “Far From Home” or are they like a prototype?

Also I haven’t seen “Far From Home” yet because Sony hates me

Doctor Zola?!?

*jams out to the music playing when we see Hank Pym’s lab*

“A little girl would be nice.  Less of a chance that she’ll end up exactly like me [Howard Stark].”  *gasps softly*

Oh my God, he’s [Steve] in Peggy’s office

Alan Silvestri is really killing it with this score

JARVIS!!

Wait and that’s the guy from “Agent Carter”!

Ohhh that shot’s [of Thanos’s ship coming out of the clouds] awesome...

*2014 Nebula hands Thanos the Pym particles*  Oh are you kidding me...

The CGI for Red Skull is also awesome

*gasps when Natasha reveals that she never knew her dad’s name when Red Skull told it to her*

*is super bummed out when Natasha sacrifices herself*

Kevin Feige really went and said “so Phases 3 and 4 are gonna make everybody cry” and the writers went “YES”

Wait doesn’t Cap go and return the stones at the end of the movie?  How’s he gonna handle meeting Red Skull on Vormir then?

“It’s like... I [Bruce] was made for this.”  Please someone get Mark Ruffalo his own Hulk movie before he combusts from giving out more spoilers

So Thanos used the Pym particles to time travel then.  Honestly that’s kinda genius

I just noticed that Scott shrank himself right as the explosion hit the windows

I really want someone to just drop one F-bomb somewhere in the MCU and I really hope it’s Clint because he would 100% say it

*starts singing “Hollaback Girl” when Thanos arrives*

Here’s my question;  how did Thanos acquire Nebula then?  With Gamora, it was with the genocide of her people.

“We [Gamora to Nebula] can stop him.”  LET’S GO!

[Thor uses his storm powers to summon both Stormbreaker and Mjolnir] *softly* Ohhhhh that’s badass...

Now I’m just imagining the cast just in the green screen room just hitting Josh Brolin with a bunch of foam weapons and making all the sound effects while poor Josh is just struggling under the weight of the Thanos reference head on his mocap suit

Who does the voice for FRIDAY?

AN:  Irish actress named Kerry Condon

*Steve deems himself worth to wield Mjolnir*  OKKAAYY OKAAYY

Love how Thanos is like “yes, I’m gonna stab you with an AXE”

“In all my years of conquest...”  Steve you suuuucckkk...

Are we getting the Chitauri again?

“On your left.”  *laughs incredulously*  O-ohhh my God...

*Everyone starts coming out of the portals*  Oh my God I’m getting chills

I would have lost my mind in the theater

I HAVE ACTUAL GOOSEBUMPS RUNNING ALL OVER ME.  This is how good this is

WAIT ARE THOSE THE RAVAGER SHIPS ABOVE THEM?!?

“Avengers... assemble.”  Oh my God this is amazing!

M’BAKU!

Also “Endgame” really just said “We are KILLING FOOLS TODAY”

How are they gonna tackle Peter and Gamora’s relationship in Guardians 3?

[Horn plays La Cucaracha] LET’S GO

God I’m gonna turn feral

*has to pause to scream in excitement when Wanda touches down in front of Thanos to fight him*

*puts hands on head*  OHH MY GOOOOODDDDD

They’re literally just playing Keep Away with a teenage boy.  Marvel, everybody.

*Captain Marvel destroys Thanos’s ship*  WELL IT TOOK YOU LONG ENOUGH

OK I got mixed feelings about that [the girl power team up scene]

*Thanos unsuccessfully headbutts Carol*  Oh shit!

*Doctor Strange holds up one finger*  Oh my God this is it

Someone definitely tore off when Thanos pushed Tony off

It was in that moment he [Thanos] knew- he effed up

*All of Thanos’s army dissipates*  Byeee...

Is it bad that I’m not crying at Tony’s death?

*gasps when Peter reunites with Ned at school*

Wait the whole time heist takes place within ONE DAY?

“I love you 3000.”  I really hope we see Morgan again somewhere in one of the movies or shows.  Actually a cool way to reincorporate her would be in the Ironheart series whenever they make it

Even Drax is wearing black!

It’s the “We should be getting therapy but we got a TV show instead” trio [Wanda, Bucky, and Sam]

Wait is that guy- was that guy- the little kid from Iron Man 3?

AN:  Yes

So right after this funeral, Wanda’s gonna storm SWORD right?

AN:  This was finished up on 2/26 so probably YES

*Thor crowns Valkyrie the new leader of New Asgard*  I now cannot wait for “Thor Love and Thunder”

Wait Peter’s looking for Gamora!

Still cannot believe that the time travel suits are completely CGI

I know they had a body double for Chris Evans here but I do think it would have been cool if they used the body double’s voice for Old Steve instead of Chris trying to sound old

He [Steve] put the shield in an art portfolio bag...

*says “No, no I don’t think I will” along with Steve*

*silently jams out to “It’s Been a Long, Long Time” playing during the credits*

Wait and that was the song Fury was playing in “Winter Soldier”

Oh they even got the actual signatures!  That’s awesome!

[alinaastarkov]

You need to learn how to read. I never said Arya couldn't become a good queen,(I think she has some good characteristics for it). I said her ARC doesn't have strong foreshadowing for monarchy and leadership, the way other characters do. Arya's arc is primately driven by the themes of revenge, forgiveness, acceptance, family, loss of identity, etc... not ruling. The funny thing is that Arya HERSELF doesn't want to become queen, so I'm confused on why her "fans" want her to be unhappy so badly.

I was going to start this answer all civil and say that yes I read it wrong my bad. But after seeing how you began this ask? Fuck it. Civility has not been earned.

Now, I did actually talk about Arya’s arc, as well as her character, but if you want queen foreshadowing in her arc, then I have one, very huge, thing to say to you: Nymeria.

(This sort of got away from me so I’ll put the rest under the cut)

For a start, Arya is basically a reincarnation of Nymeria of Ny Sar, the Queen of the Rhoyne who led her people to safety across the Narrow Sea. They both had people to protect, are both coming to Westeros from across the sea, both magical and both perfect for ruling. Hell, Arya even named her direwolf after the woman, which brings me to second part of this: Nymeria the direwolf. Arya’s wolf is currently leading a pack of thousands of wolves across the Riverlands, protecting them and acting as their ruler. We know the direwolves’ fates and names mirror that of their owners’ paths, so we can gather that Arya will soon be a leader of some kind, most likely a queen given the name. None of this is an accident, just as Sansa’s direwolf dying was also not an accident. Also note GRRM said that Nymeria was a queen in a similar way to Daenerys, rather than a soldier like Brienne.

I touched on foreshadowing before, but seeing as you can’t seem to read I’ll bring it up again: Ned says Arya will marry a king, her direwolf is named after a queen and is leading a pack of wolves, she thinks on Ned’s lessons on northern values as much as Jon and Bran, all of which are about leadership, she always tries to find her ‘pack’, the literal old gods speak to her, something that happens to no-one else ever, and tell her to be strong because she is a daughter of the north, Varys’ quote about Aegon and how well he is suited to ruling fits perfectly for Arya - literally all of it applies, she is learning epic skills for diplomacy and politics in Braavos, not to mention stuff about poisons which will keep her alive when she becomes someone worth poisoning, Varys also says ‘a king must put his people first’, something Arya does so many times that I can’t even list them (seriously, you’re telling me “she would make much better time on her own, she knew, but she could not leave them. they were her pack” doesn’t scream leader to you?), she makes friends and inspires loyalty wherever she goes, the featherbed song (written specifically for Arya and Gendry - I’m not a gendrya shipper but there’s no ignoring that this song is for them) mentions the woman wearing a crown, she upholds northern values like there is no tomorrow, and, in case ya didn’t hear, the only time any god speaks in the entire series is to Arya to encourage her to keep going.

Also Sansa wants to ‘make’ people love her but Arya is doing it effortlessly by just caring for them without even thinking, and seeing as that is your fave who you think is perfectly set up to be queen, and she thinks this is how to be a good queen, I thought I’d mention it.

Now, you mentioned Arya’s themes. I’m going to immediately scratch ‘revenge’ off that list because that’s not what her arc is about. Justice? Yes. Revenge? No. But, seeing as that is your list, let’s look at those themes in terms of queenship.

What would be the best revenge against the people who killed the King in the North and tried to obliterate her entire family? Why, finding the rest of her living relatives and continuing Robb’s legacy as Queen, of course! In terms of family, like Nymeria and her pack, Arya could protect them if she was queen and actually keep them close as she has been trying to do this whole time. Forgiveness and acceptance? Of herself, others? Either way, knowing that so many people cared for her and have been trying to win back the North in her name will help her accept herself and forgive the northerners for not helping her in her need, and it’s really only her own self-esteem issues that make her think she is unworthy of the office. Same with identity, Queen in the North would just be the culmination of her coming to terms with her own identity as Arya Stark. Ruling is part of her arc, for all of the dozens of reasons I have already said. And, I know I’m not perfect, so... there are probably more I’ve forgotten.

We don’t know how Arya feels about being Queen, though, do we? She doesn’t want to be a lady, i.e. the kind of lady that is expected of her at the beginning of the series. Being queen is totally different. They have never had a Queen in the North before, it is a role she can define for herself, and given her quintessentially northern values, she would do an amazing job. But she never thinks about leadership, or much of want she wants after the war, because she doesn’t have time to. She’s running for her life, she can’t think of anything but how she is going to live the next day. The minute she gets a chance to rest and think, without grappling with identity issues, then we can start discussing what Arya does or does not want.

We want Arya to be happy. And it’s not a stretch to think that being Queen, in her own way, wouldn’t make her happy. Enough of the quotation marks thank you very much. 

[theliterateape]

Why Can't We Just Share the Last Slice of Pizza?

by Don Hall

I had the first TV dinner in possibly forty-years a few weeks ago and it was kind of incredible.

Sure, it was a Hungry Man® chicken and mashed potatoes concoction and had more sodium than a bucket of sea water but it was still oddly delicious and covered in a gravy comprised of nostalgia and gluten. I didn't buy the frozen tray in a cardboard box. No, my wife has, in the pandemic, taken to rebranding her self as a 'resource locator' otherwise known as a 'dumpster diver.'

It sounds odd but I'm convinced that when the Second Great Depression takes hold, I'm married to the most resourceful and extraordinary partner on the planet. She finds brand new shoes, genuine Shriner fez's, and food. Cans of food thrown away. Expired bags of pretzels. And still-frozen TV dinners.

The nostalgia of consuming this marvel of the fifties, the fully-prepared dinner, ready to heat and eat in front of the television comes from my youth. In terms of economic status there were times in my earliest days when we were 'poor'. Now, mom wouldn't let us use that word to describe our situation. She preferred to say we were 'broke'. That distinction was my first lesson in reframing your perspective to fuel optimism.

Whichever it was called it was common practice growing up to eat TV dinners and mom would cut each portion in half (even the weird lava-like brownie or apple-crunch) so we had a meal the next day as well.

When we couldn't afford a Swanson-manufactured meal, she'd make what she called 'Spanish Rice'—Minute rice, a green pepper, tomato sauce, and Tabasco—another rebranding that certainly made this odd and rough cultural appropriation seem both unsavory and about as white as it could be.

Mom worked hard. My recollection was that she was often working several jobs and doing the best she could to keep us in clothing and food with a roof over our heads despite the fact that the minimum wage at the time was $1.60. She also had a way of reframing things so that, at no point, did we feel like we were missing out on much.

On top of that raising me could not have been easy.

We moved around a lot so I was always the new kid in school. Even with teachers and administrators, there is a tribal imperative to put the new members in their place, establishing the rules of behavior and assigning the slot for the newest members. I was never much of a conformist so this dance of going along to get along didn't take. All of which made my struggling mother's life one of battling the powers that be to protect her less than socialized monkey-son.

There are stories. The time I was forbidden to speak in class so I drew pictures of a butt and a butt pooping to silently curse some kids out. The incident of my failing to stay put during classes and finding escape routes during lunch that caused an epic battle as the Vice Principal decided to ban me from the Free Lunch program out of pique and spite. The summer when I was caught beating up Cub Scouts because they wouldn't let me join due to my mother's financial inability to buy me the requisite uniform.

There's an image I have in my head of my tiny mother almost coming to blows with a much larger woman because the woman called us "poor white trash." We were white but my mother wouldn't abide her children embracing the twin ideas of us being poor or being trash.

“No, Donald. You cannot just eat the last piece of pizza. You need to learn to share.”

In Chicago there's a thing called 'dibs.' 

Sometimes it snows big and the streets are plowed but the parking spots are all but obliterated by small mountains of snow. The diligent among residents get their shovels out of the garage and clear out the snow from in front of their homes so that they will then have a place to park. They have done the work, so they feel entitled to the benefits of that labor.

The problem lies with those who do not shoulder in and remove the snow yet still feel entitled to park on public streets that they, after all is said and done, have paid for with their tax dollars.

Thus 'dibs.' The shoveler decides to put a lawn chair or card table or statue of the Virgin Mary in the spot they have labored over so when they come home from work, the spot has been saved for them and them alone.

It all sounds silly until you look at from an economic perspective. There are more cars in Chicago than there are legal places to park. It's a fact. The demand for spaces is greater than the supply. Parking tickets cost drivers thousands of dollars a year and the 'ticket dicks' are as numerous as the homeless. When it snows and the plows come through there are suddenly even less spaces than there were the night before.

Given the city will clear the roads but not the curbs the solution for half the population is to carve out their own space and the other half parks wherever they can. Those who take the spots but do not shovel are capitalizing on the labor of those who do and it pisses them off.

“No, Donald. You cannot just eat the last piece of pizza. You need to learn to share.”

I was thirteen. I was growing. I ate like a fucking locust with the table manners of the Cookie Monster. There it was—the last piece. I wanted it. My sister was small and weak. What was she gonna do?

“Offer your sister the last piece.”

“…do you want the last…”

“YES!” she barked and shoved the whole piece in her mouth.

“That’s NOT FAIR! We coulda split it! That’s not sharing, that’s theft!”

That’s Capitalism. Cut throat. Haves and Have Nots. It is simply not in human nature to share. In all of recorded history there has always been, in every society and civilization, when approached with abundance, a small percentage of those at the top and a much larger percentage at the bottom. Call it what you want—winners and losers, the One Percent and the Ninety-Nine (great name for a prog rock band), Bourgeoisie and Proletariat—it all amounts to the same dynamic.

It occurs to me that in the fight to get people fired from their jobs for tweeting arguably terrible things the double standard in place is exceptionally capitalist. On the ‘cancel culture’ side is the idea that people should be held accountable for their words in the world and, if they cross the line, then employers should fire them. On the other side, these same people will scream that an employer who decides that a kid wearing the costume of his culture or using grammatically incorrect language cannot be fired.

Both are individuals putting themselves and their ability to express themselves at the center of a business that has little to do with the individual. Everyone should have the right to their own specific identity as they see fit but no one should have the right to exert themselves above a business that pays them a salary in order to center things on them.

It’s frustrating. Economic class is the true great divider in the world. Because it is so ingrained in the human experience to live with those who have the cash and many who do not, economic class seems an unassailable unfairness. It’s an immovable and undeniable trait in societies of every stripe. 

The landlord who leverages herself to get loans to buy an apartment building, fix it up to be livable, and rents it out to people has shoveled the snow. The tenant who claims it is unfair to be evicted from that apartment building because they cannot pay the rent is parking wherever there is a spot.

And it pisses everybody off.

No, it is neither race nor gender that is the engine of inequity. It’s almost entirely economic class.

Since the existence of class is so ever-present and unmoving, we focus on other things to change society. The battle to curb billionaires has never really taken hold despite the obvious problems they present. So we focus on race, we focus on gender. We spend our energy ignoring that most of inequity that exists between humans is about economics and find as many differences between those of us on the Have Not side as we can.

Why is it so hard to get rid of billionaires and that pernicious One Percent? Because we all want what they have. We all want the last piece of pizza and the parking space. We all want the luxury of luxurious things. We resent the things we'd have to do to get that luxury so instead we tear at anyone and everyone to gain whatever slice we can.

No one wants to shovel out that goddamned parking space. Trust me. In thirty years of living in Chicago, I shoveled tons and tons of snow to get that coveted spot. I never did the 'dibs' thing but I empathize with the fury at someone taking that spot I've labored over. 

Study after study indicates that it is economic class that holds us back far more than race or gender but the road to power is through a perception of grievance these days and the only evil when presenting poverty as the problem is human nature. Men and women can be demonized. That game has been around for-freaking-ever. African Americans can demonize whites (but not black Americans because African immigrants in America do, on average, far better economically than whites). We can go the People of Color vs White People but, in order to make that case, Asians have to be ignored or made white-adjacent. 

No, it is neither race nor gender that is the engine of inequity. It’s almost entirely economic class. Not that acknowledging that will change anything.

The utopian ideals of Socialism and even Communism sound better than Capitalism. The problem is the humans are built from the DNA to compete. Compete for resources, for sexual partners, for jobs, for shelter. Competition is as instinctual as our desire to procreate and Capitalism is a competitive sport. Throughout history, progress toward learning to truly share that slice of pizza is slow because it goes against our very nature. Not impossible and thus worth the effort but fucking S-L-O-W.

A friend recently posited that maybe I have gained some wisdom in my aging. He then switched and decided that maybe what we think is wisdom is just age plus exhaustion. Whichever it is, I have learned to share. I've also learned that in order to share, I have to assume my offer of the last piece of pie is going to be taken and stuffed into my sister's mouth. I can be wounded by the gesture, I can even be annoyed by it. I have to let it go.

I'm comfortable with the concept of enough. Meaning, if I have enough to share, I have enough to survive. Even if it's only enough of my mom's Spanish Rice.

There will be those, always those, who are so imbued with the need to compete that there is never enough. There will be those, perpetually those, who have not had enough and are willing to tear it out of the mouths of those who have.

And there will always be those, unendingly those, who are fine parking in the open spot knowing that someone else put in the work and not caring enough about anyone else that they take up the space and benefit from the labor without contributing.

On the best days, I don't run into them.

[doomedandstoned]

Black Spirit Crown Score Big Win With ‘Gravity’

~Doomed & Stoned Debuts~

By Billy Goate

Strong guitars chords carve out a bold landscape to begin the first of five cosmic tales. "Doomstar" sails across the universe as a comet, filled with as much magic as destructive possibility. On a dark night, you can almost make out the whirling, wicked tale of this asto-demon.

Welcome to the evocative domain of Ohio's BLACK SPIRIT CROWN. We first met the Clevelanders on their original four-tracker 'Red Sky' (2017), its sphatik gem "Megalith" added to our 'Doomed & Stoned in Ohio' (2017) compilation and the first and second rounds of Ohio Doomed & Stoned Festivals organized in short, subsequent order. The boys of Black Spirit Crown have long been an integral part of the heavy music scene of The Buckeye State, opening for such greats as Conan, Inter Arma, and The Obsessed.

As with their debut, 'Red Sky' (2017), the vocals are so important to convincing us of the band's bonafides. Guitarist Dan Simone and bassist Chris Martin have a good instinct for singing in harmony, building up a song climatically, and giving it legs so it can express itself in fitting form. The vocals on "Doomstar" are mainly clean, on the order of a Bask, Snail, Chrome Ghost, or Noctum, but the band reveals in the song's second half that it can get as grissly as any Aaron Turner project.

"Saga" belts out a solid punk-tempo -- an interesting and entirely fitting choice for a song about Viking rampage. The runaway development of the middle section felt characteristically Pikelike and I half-way expected him to make a quick guesty on the record. Just then, we hear the hearty hoo-hah! of a crowd and run to rejoin them for the song's remaining verse, which soon fades away into the shadowy labyrinth of memory.

Firey drummering distinguishes the advent of the "Orb." Is this odd visitor here to observe us? Or maybe it is intent on giving us a window into a world besides our own? We scarcely have time to ponder the question before the song whisks us away on its transcendental carpet ride. If you're looking to classify Black Spirit Crown's style (and let's face it, all of us have an inner music critic that does) it would be probably best to think of it as "space doom" or even "cosmic grunge." Certainly, there's some kind of a dreamy psychedelic element at play, bending and stretching each song as it will, sometimes for great lengths of time. Perhaps that element is the orb itself?

We're lucky to have very memorable songs on both of Black Spirit Crown's records. For the first, the clear standout was "Megalith," which in a perfect world would have at least given Black Spirit Crown a summer radio hit. On this record, there is ripe opportunity for another crossover with "Teutates."

Teutates by Black Spirit Crown

Teutates was a Celtic god of the ancient peoples of Gaul and Britain, the protector of their entire community. Black Spirit Crown personify his legend in song: "I hold the world in iron hands, I travel pathways not meant for man." Pretty badass, huh? "Write my name across the sky, in lines of fire 10 miles high." He's nothing if not bold, that Teutates.

After the brisk pace of the last rousing number, we burrow back into the cold comfort of the dark soil to reconnect with those doom roots. Here Black Spirit Crown venture into the smokey den of Monolord, Slomatics, and Windhand. Dan's phantom vocals are undoubtedly suited for both the mood and style of "Gravity," which I'm currently listening to just after dusk and it's absolutely ruling the night. I suppose it could rule regardless of when and where it yields its trance-inducing power. By the end of the record we've become one with the comet, and embraced its final destination, as well.

And now, Doomed & Stoned is pleased to premiere the album, 'Gravity' (2020) in its fullness. Look for my interview with Black Spirit Crown and more insight into the album to follow!

Give ear...

Doomed & Stoned · Black Spirit Crown - Gravity (2020)

A Listener's Guide to 'Gravity' By Black Spirit Crown

Just days before its release, I caught up the core members of Black Spirit Crown, Dan Simone (guitar, vocals) and Chris Martin (bass, vocals) to get the backstory on the album and insight into the spunky songs written for it.

★

I understand that it's been quite a journey leading Black Spirit Crown to this new record? Bring us up to speed.

Dan: So, Gravity is an album that's been about two-and-a-half years in the making. Our initial plan was to start recording in late-2017 with our original drummer, Jesse, but unfortunately he left the band that October, right around when we were going to start. At that point we had three of the songs ("Saga," "Orb," and "Gravity") mostly written and ready to record, and were going to write a couple more songs to go with them as we went. When Jesse left it took a little bit to sort out and secure our next drummer, Alex, and then get him up to speed with our existing material. We brought Alex in mid-January of 2018 with a scheduled show opening for Conan at the very beginning of March, so those first several weeks were a relentless drilling down on our existing material so we'd be ready for Conan. After that, people knew we were back and ready to play so that's what we did, for the next several months we just reveled in it, culminating playing to a totally packed house at the first Ohio Doomed and Stoned Fest. Which ruled. After that, Alex was totally immersed in the existing material and we could turn to writing a bit.

We'd love to get a tour of this place. Care to take us through each of these five rooms?

So let's talk about the songs on the album. I write about space, weird fiction themes and probably unsurprisingly, doom, defined as "death, destruction, or some other terrible fate". I've always been a huge fan of fantasy and science-fiction so that's where most of my subject matter comes from. Giant sentient megalithic rock from space that, in it's agony of being trapped in immobile awareness, broods and looms over all creation slowly gathering power to wield entropy versus order until it grinds all of life to a frozen, dusty halt. Stuff like that, but that was the first album. This second album has five tracks.

Doomstar

Inspired by the star Algol. A star of ill-repute for many civilizations it is named Head of the Ogre in Arabic, Satan's Head in Hebrew, Spectre's Head in Latin, and Demon Star in English. The Chinese name it the Mausoleum, or House of Bones. It is the Gorgon's severed head held by the constellation Perseus. It is a harbinger of mayhem and bloody violence, so why not write a song about someone born under this star? Interestingly, the main riffs for this song came to Chris in a dream, and he showed up to practice the next day with the music pretty much complete. I wish I remembered the actual date, because it would perhaps be interesting to know where that star was in our sky while he was dreaming.

Saga

Vikings. I've pretty much always had a thing for them. I wrote most of this song about 16 years ago, but the band I was in then couldn't play it, and it never really fit anything else I was doing until now. It was still kind of a departure for us at first, as it is significantly faster paced than our earlier material, but it sits really well in our live sets, giving the audience a little punch in the face in the middle of it all. Lyrically it touches on a lot of the stories and themes Norse Mythology, without really diving substantially into any specific one. Those stories were called Sagas. Initially the middle part was supposed to have lyrics, and I was going to delve into some specificity, but I couldn’t decide exactly where to go with it, the stories never really worked within the riffs and structure of the song, and then I realized that whenever I was playing those parts I’d envision grizzled vikings in their dragon boats coursing through raging and icy seas. Pretty much a travel montage out of a movie, and that worked for me so I left it alone.

Orb

This song was originally supposed to be on the first album, but we couldn't really get the second half settled in time so we skipped it. It's about a moon-sized orb of living metal that comes to Earth to help humanity transcend to a higher form of existence. Within the Black Spirit Crown mythology, the Orb is diametrically opposed to the Megalith as agents of Life/Order and Death/Chaos respectively. It fell out of our live sets for quite a while, too, when we initially brought Alex in because we were focused on working on settled songs. I was pretty stoked when we brought it back because I really enjoy the weird psychedelic second half. I love working the wah pedal and delay, and Chris just goes bananas through the whole thing. I'd really like someone someday to get some excellent video of us performing it because I dig playing it so much, but I never feel like I get the whole experience because I get sucked in to playing my part.

Teutates

This is the most recently written song on the album, and the single from it. The comet Toutatis is a large asteroid with a chaotic orbit that passed within 18 lunar distances of Earth in 2012. It is large enough to potentially end life on the planet if it were to impact. It gets its name from the god Teutates from Celtic mythology who was, perhaps ironically, a protector god whose name roughly translates to "Be of the Tribe". We really dug the idea of that duality, this thing that was simultaneously a being responsible for the life and well-being of its worshippers, yet could in a thoughtless moment totally obliterate them. Why shouldn't it, really? The huge vocal harmony near the end always gives me chills. "Be of the Tribe, Give up thy life.."

Gravity

The title track of the album. Look, I tend to write long songs, our shortest song is 5 minutes, and our average - not counting this one - is 8 minutes, but we just write until the journey, the story, finds its end. We don't try to write intentionally long songs. Except for this one. With this song we set out to write a song that could fill a live set on its own, 20 -30 minutes.

Musically, it's a meditation. Waves of droning fuzz that crash and recede. Thematically, it's about a group of star-farers who are woken from hyper-sleep to find themselves abandoned on a barren, high-gravity planet by their A.I. which achieved sentience at some point in the journey and decided it had no need for humans. It's the funerary rite for them as they are crushed and frozen by the weight of the alien atmosphere. The last 7 minutes is their death throes, and it was also a total hoot to record.

In the rhythm guitar parts I hold the same chord for the entire 7 minutes, but we tracked three layers of guitar there so I had to hold that chord for 21 minutes. By the end my fret hand was shaking so violently that I had to hit the chord with my pick hand and then grab my fret hand and hold it in place so I didn't shake off of the neck of the guitar. Chris, of course, was laughing hysterically at my agony.

On top of that is total celestial chaos. Two separate theremin tracks, two separate guitar solos by me (one in the foreground one in the background), clips from NASA of electromagnetic storms in Saturn's atmosphere and other weird radio-telegraphic stuff, some keyboard synthesizer by Chris, and a guest appearance by our good friend Joe Fortunato who is a master of atmospheric guitar-synth alchemy (who also appears on the track Orb). Chris then took what could have been just a total mess of noise, and panned and faded and otherwise produced the hell out of it into a marvelous cacophony, and honestly it's exactly what we'd always imagined it could be.

Chris, take us behind the scenes of this whole thing. What were some of the hurdles you had to overcome to get this puppy on record?

Chris: With respect to the drum parts, we had tried to start the record some time ago with our original drummer, Jesse, but we ended up parting ways right around the time we were set to start. After bringing Alex in and getting him up to speed, we had written a couple more songs and were about ready to start going, but things kind of fizzled out with him and he was gone. Rather than waiting to onboard another drummer, get them up to speed, and delay recording even longer, I decided to program the drum parts.

I compiled all the practice recordings we had and scoured Youtube for live videos of shows with both our past drummers, Then, I basically compared the best parts of their respective versions of each song, transcribed them, and programmed those comps as the drum parts. It was pretty time consuming to get all the little nuances right as opposed to, say, starting from scratch and making fresh parts, but I really wanted these to sound like the parts our drummers had done live, because they helped to make the songs what they are.

Bass tracking was done over a couple days. It was pretty straightforward; my P bass into my pedalboard into my old SVT. Can't really go wrong there. The only exception was the second half of "Orb," where I used the bass rig I learned to play on when I was 12; my dad's old '65 Traynor YBA-1, which I inherited when he died. I had planned on using the bass I learned on too - his old '73 Gibson EB-0 -- but there were some electronics issues when I went to start and I couldn't get the tone I wanted out of it. I didn't want to wait for parts to arrive to repair it, so I went back to the P bass, straight into the YBA-1. Still got that really fat, old school sound I was going for, so it was a win.

Guitars were pretty simple as well; Dan's Les Paul into his pedalboard and the 72 Traynor YSR-1. Live, he runs a Traynor YBA-1 reissue as a second amp to fill out the sound, but the YSR sounded pretty gnarly on its own so we stuck with it. I did also end up blending in a little bit of the little Laney combo I have to get a little more bite and cut. It's a great little amp that's been on everything I've done.

Guitars turned out really nice, didn't they?

We had Joe Fortunato (Sparrowmilk, Venomin James) come in and add some synth guitar type stuff on a couple songs as well. The intro and outro of Gravity, as well as some of the crazy laser sounds in the outro, is basically him hitting one note on his custom Dunable/EGC hybrid baritone, then manipulating some of his pedals to create some of the most bizarre things we'd ever heard. I just hit record and told him to make noise. We got about 20-30 solid minutes of random sounds. It was pretty crazy. I went through and picked a solid section that fit the whole mood of the song and dropped it in where I wanted it. Outside of that, there's a bunch of theremin and other random stuff Dan put together.

Vocals were fairly easy. Dan tracked all of his quickly, I tracked all my clean ones later that day. When I went to do my screaming, in Doomstar, Saga and Teutates, I got about half done and my chest and throat started hurting, so I took a couple days to rest them before finishing up, thinking it was from being out of practice. Long story short, I ended up with some gnarly respiratory issues that really impacted my breathing and my voice, and it took me about 4 months to get my stamina back up to be able to do vocals again. It gave me some time to mix, but killed me that I couldn't just finish tracking and wrap it up.

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Offer

Reylo Commission fill for the wonderful @jogetsurin!

Pre-Rise of Skywalker. Rey and Ben meet again via Force link after the events of the Battle of Crait, and he brings an interesting offer.

—

The winter after they settled on the outskirt planet Andor, a skein of snow fell upon their base. The weather leading up to it had yielded an ungaudy amount of rain, and even on the off days an abhorrent amount of precipitation and humidity left Rey, who was not adapted to the climate, grounded; then, the first flakes of what would become a phenomenally intense winter stuck to the mountains overnight.

Rey slept late, dreamt terrible dreams, and then made her daily venture up to the nearest plateau to train. Even at high noon the sky was gray with precipitation. It made her feel sluggish. If only she had a different place to train, she could have made entire strides by now.

Up on the crest of the plateau, where the winds were fierce and cold, she pulled her coat closer to her shoulders, and thought, quite curiously, of Jakku.

Then, for the first time in what had been nearly a year, she felt the Force pull taut in the back of her mind.

By this point, Rey knew too much to call it chance—but there was still that air of surprise that ballooned up under her ribcage when a dark shadow breached her peripheral vision. Ben was there but wasn’t there. That was how it worked, she assumed: the visage lingered, mind-to-mind, like a long shadow stretched thin in the sunlight to touch another.

Dark eyes speared through her. She was suddenly aware of how transparent she had become, every memory she could recall flayed open for inspection, every instance of her thoughts filed neatly for Kylo Ren to observe and devour. But it had always been a two-way street. She saw everything in him too, and she wanted to ask him a plethora of questions because of it.

“What are you—”

“You were the one who called to me,” he said thinly, “as you did last night. In your dream.”

He sounded equivalently as tired as she felt. Rey folded her arms back against her chest, looked him over, and quipped, “Is that why I woke up with such a headache?”

Ben snorted. “It’s always pleasant to have these little meetings with you, though it’s been far too long since our last.”

Part of her wondered if he meant it. She didn’t understand how they could be so bad at words when there was so much to say, when it had been so easy to talk before. It’d been so many long, long, months since they last accompanied each other through the Force, and yet it felt like she’d known him forever and last saw him yesterday, and somehow there wasn’t anything she could speak on that wasn’t banter.

“Are you waiting for some kind of apology?”

She jolted in place. Of course not. They had both been wrong, and they had both been right, and it didn’t matter now anyway. Snoke was dead, Hux was scheming, Leia was dying, the Force was trembling with something they couldn’t explain. The galaxy was in a delicate state of a tipping balance that neither of them knew how to fix.

“No,” she said aloud. “It’d be nice, but I don’t expect that much out of you.”

The silence settled between them. Ben turned to look at whatever it was that occupied the space around him, but she imagined he was here with her, freezing his ass off on a plateau in the middle of nowhere.

He felt the coldness in her body pass through him. “I’ll stay right where I am.”

“And where would that be?”

“As if I need to answer that,” he retorted. “Though, I could be elsewhere, if you so need me to be. You seem to be having difficulties in the cold. We could train together on a terrain that suits your level of endurance.”

He projected an image into her mind, and she corrected the details until the deep crevasse of a desert canyon sprawled out before them. It was a terribly secluded spot. Which meant being alone with him.

Subconsciously, Rey winced, recalling the bitter sting of sand biting deep into her exposed slivers of skin. Hunger pains. Never enough water. But Jakku was warm. Leveled. Familiar. She’d unironically do what her parents never did and go back to it, seeking herself between the grains of dirt and beneath the heavy, unforgiving sunlight. She felt the pull of Ben’s mind as he hoarded that information quite selfishly, and for later use.

It occurred to her that the Force made nothing unknown. His knowledge would always by foreordained; he knew things, he liked knowing things, and he certainly liked knowing about her. His spirit reveled in feeling the Force connect them, empowered by the strength of it and the age of it—something so ancient it was ethereal, before civilization, before time.

“Or you could come to me,” she tried, looking up at him. “You could…you should come see your mother.”

There was no way Ben didn’t know. They may not have connected in a desperately long time, but Leia and her son had something different that was shared to equal measure, and Rey knew better than to act like she was oblivious to it.

She added, “No one has to know. I can distract the Resistance.”

“I’d rather not talk about that right now.”

“Okay. We don’t have to talk about it, then. But it needed to be said.”

He folded his arms behind his back and reserved himself, turning his gaze elsewhere. “We’ve come quite a long way from striking at each other’s throat on sight. It’s a nice change of pace from the current political nature of the First Order.”

“I don’t know much about politics. I suppose you would, though.”

He showed her a memory: Leia, without lines in her face. She held a little Ben in her lap and told him all about the trial of a man Ben knew neither the significance of nor the name of, about the importance of appearances in the courtroom. He’d done something to warrant a debate over his life. Ben never learned why, but Leia explained simply that laws can be amended. It was better to have something than to have nothing. Easy explanations, which Rey absorbed into herself.

Everything can be fixed.

“Which is true,” Rey said.

“Which isn’t that simple,” Ben supplied.

Boldly, she closed the distance between them. “Your eyes,” she told him quietly, her hands grasping the unfamiliar and beautiful face of Kylo Ren, “they weren't this sad the last time we met.”

He let her touch him because he knew by now not to leave her wanting. “I haven’t filled them with you in a long while.”

She laughed. “That’s so terrible.”

“Is it? But I’ve been practicing.”

She looked at his mouth. Then, quietly, she said to him, “Please, Ben. You should see her.”

He pondered the many different outcomes of taking that risk. Whether it mattered if a temporary truce between the First Order and the Resistance would keep Poe Dameron from shooting Ben on sight. Whether Hux would put a tracker on the TIE Silencer and obliterate the Resistance base from orbit. Whether Leia would make it long enough to see her son regardless.

“Maybe,” he said finally. “I will promise you no more than that.”

Rey took his answer and then his hand, and they went to a rock by the edge of the plateau, sitting shoulder-to-shoulder and gazing out upon the horizon. For several long minutes they didn’t speak. Rey touched his forearm and allowed him to see the jagged mountain ranges of the landscape surrounding it, and the bright sunlight amongst the peaks.

After a while he told her, “I’ve been thinking.”

“You have?” she said. “And without warning?”

He gazed down at her, always scrutinizing the details of her face and the words conjured from her mind. “I’m being serious, Rey. You’ve been struggling with the texts, haven’t you? I can help with those too. Let me help you.”

No longer was he offering to teach her, or to set her course. It was a simple matter of offering all he had, and all of it was what he wanted to give.

“Do you trust me?” he asked.

I do.

“Okay,” she said, and put her hand in his. “Let’s go to Jakku.”

[mobius-prime]

34. Special - Sonic & Knuckles

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Is everyone ready for the Kenders-est issue yet? Not only did he have a hand in writing every story in this special, but he did the pencils for one of the stories for the first time. He's back to writing about his favorite character in the universe, Knuckles, and for the first time we're gonna be getting some backstory for him.

The issue begins with another intro page, characteristic of Penders-headed stories, which gives us a little more info on this canon's version of the Floating Island (not yet referred to as Angel Island). As mentioned before, the island is held aloft not by the Master Emerald but by a Chaos Emerald. The island is mentioned to be one of the very last places on Mobius to be untouched by the war raging below on the surface. The page also mentions that Knuckles' role as the island's guardian is passed down from generation to generation, a claim that I don't recall any other canons ever making (the games just refer to him as having this role with no knowledge of how he ended up with it), a detail which will be expanded upon later on, thanks to Kenders' neverending obsession with the echidnas.

Panic in the Sky!

Writers: Mike Kanterovich and Ken Penders Pencils: Art Mawhinney and Dave Manak Colors: Barry Grossman

The Floating Island, which apparently has always floated somewhere on the other side of the ocean, has started flying wildly off course, terrifying local Mobians and alerting the Freedom Fighters. No one has apparently ever heard of this thing before, but it's headed for Knothole, and considering all other massive things that head for Knothole tend to be deadly, that's not a good sign.

Of course, Sonic and Tails recognize this thing from their excursion onto it not that long ago, and fill everyone in, though why they didn't tell everyone all about their adventure and entanglement with Knuckles before now is beyond me (well, I know logically why - they needed an excuse to recap for the readers). Sonic and Tails decide to fly in to investigate, and thus we have our first showcase of Antoine being an accomplished pilot, which essentially makes half the entire cast pilots at this point. Also, the Floating Island has machine guns now!

Antoine flies them above the horizon line and out of danger, and they airdrop in only to immediately be attacked by several different bots, which the story is very unclear on whether they are from Robotnik or like, automated defense systems for the island or something. Sonic ends up going tumbling off a cliff, only for Knuckles to make his appearance and immediately try to murder him by stepping on his hand. What the hell, Knuckles?

Luckily, Tails is there to distract him, and after some brief fighting, Sonic is able to stop Knuckles from swinging his fists long enough to point out that the island has flown wildly off course, and that Knuckles is basically being a giant reactionary idiot. Seriously, Knuckles, how the hell did you somehow not notice your entire island being retrofitted into a giant fortress despite being its guardian? Talk about not doing your job.

Knuckles leads Sonic and Tails to the Chaos Chamber, where the Chaos Emerald sits. Interestingly, unlike the games where the Master Emerald need merely sit on the island to magically provide the lift to make it float, in the comics the Chaos Emerald actually provides literal power to a system that allows the island to defy gravity. However, an energy siphon has been installed to draw power towards Robotnik's guns and engines instead, so he can use the island as a method of obliterating Knothole. Again, despite being the island's guardian, Knuckles somehow noticed none of this. Robotnik's face appears and explains his plan to them over a screen, and then he makes an absolutely incredible facial expression on a backdrop of the ashes of civilization.

He doesn't even look like he's evilly laughing, he looks like he's taking an extremely painful dump or something. What the hell happened here, pencillers?

Anyway, Knuckles, ashamed by his failure, takes the emerald and shatters it, removing both Robotnik's power source and the source of the power keeping the island afloat. Robotnik chooses to abort rather than fall with it, thinking that he may still win the day after all.

I have to halt everything for a moment to discuss his claim right here, that the island is eight miles high. Now perhaps this is just a reference to the song Eight Miles High (I wasn't aware of it before now, but it popped up a lot while I was Googling information for this), but let's take him at his word and assume that the Floating Island really does hover at an altitude of eight miles (that's about thirteen kilometers for my non-American readers). That's approximately 42,000 feet in the air, which is the absolute maximum limit for modern commercial aircraft before the engines are no longer able to maintain lift. At that altitude, our planet's atmosphere is far too thin to breathe, and most people will suffer from hypoxia within seconds, and probably suffocate within a few minutes at most (for reference, Mt. Everest's peak is 29,000 feet above sea level, and even trained and prepared mountain climbers have to bring bottled oxygen and are at great risk of hypoxia and death at that kind of altitude). Now if we assume that Mobians have similar oxygen requirements to humans, and that Mobius' atmospheric conditions are similar to Earth's (two assumptions that are reasonable to make as later issues will reveal), absolutely no life should even exist on the Floating Island at all. Sonic and Tails would have suffocated within seconds of ever setting foot on it, and Knuckles wouldn't even be alive to watch them die, let alone attack them.

But whatever, it's a comic. We are dealing with a world where portals to alternate universes open and close on the regular, after all. Knuckles, once he's sure that Robotnik is gone, pulls out… another Chaos Emerald! Turns out he simply made a switch with a fake to fool Robotnik and then destroyed the fake, and thus replaces the real, unharmed emerald to halt the island's descent. Another quick bit of math - if we assume that the island's terminal velocity takes a little longer to reach than a human's (I have no idea how to calculate how fast something of that much mass would be able to fall, so I'm working on a lot of assumptions here) then we can say it would probably have taken nearly three and a half minutes to crash to earth had it been allowed to fall, yet the next panel shows it halting at what seems like a mere few hundred feet above the village - again, probably just for the dramatic effect, but I find it amusing that Knuckles might have waited almost three minutes playing chicken with Robotnik until he bailed, before replacing the real emerald.

With the day saved, Knuckles rejects Sonic's offer to join the Freedom Fighters, because he needs to pretend to be a lone wolf for a little while longer. Sonic and Tails return to tell the others what happened, and wonder what Knuckles will do in the future…

Fire Drill

Writer/Pencils: Ken Penders Colors: Freddy Mendez

…luckily, we don't need to wait long to find out, because every story in this issue is about Knuckles! This is the first story penciled by Penders himself, which is noteworthy, especially as he becomes a more frequent artist in later issues. Also to note is that Barry Grossman no longer has a monopoly on the coloring - we finally have someone new for the first time since the third freaking issue! Welcome to the party, Freddy!

While there's not a lot of plot to this story, it does contain some interesting tidbits. Knuckles is chilling on his island as normal, when a loud explosion startles him. He traces the explosion from the beach and follows footprints into the Sandopolis Zone ruins, believing the troublemaker to be Sonic and ready to throw hands once more. He faces several traps within the ruins, such as falling rocks, a tripwire-activated axe, and a sand trap, but things don't really get interesting until these few panels:

He mentions family for the first time - a father - which not even the games hint at. The way he speaks, we can assume his father hasn't been around for some time. However, this seems to follow what the intro page said about this duty being passed on between generations - clearly, his father was a guardian before him, but for whatever reason, he and the rest of the echidnas have disappeared…

Anyway, after facing a few more traps and trials, Knuckles emerges from the ruins to find that the footprints seem to lead off the edge of the island, and assumes that Sonic has had his fun and vacated the island. However, we the readers can see that that's not the case - a mysterious silhouette is the real troublemaker, and apparently, they were the one testing Knuckles… but why?

Lord of the Floating Island

Writer: Ken Penders Pencils: Harvey Mercadoocasio Colors: Freddy Mendez

This is really just a plot meant to establish what exactly Knuckles tends to do on an average day on his island. Knuckles is flying around - because he can just do that in the comics, I know he can usually glide in other media but he just straight up flies here - when the wind buffets him around and he spots a young kangaroo hopping around in fear. Unlike in other canons, the Floating Island is actually quite populated - Knuckles isn't alone there but acts as guardian of not only the Chaos Emerald, but all the island's Mobian inhabitants. He swoops down to pick the kangaroo up to protect it, and while they wait out the storm they spot what's causing it - a solar eclipse, because that's how eclipses work.

Interestingly, Knuckles refers to "the moon" rather than "one of the moons." I can't remember at this point whether Mobius having one hundred moons was retconned in later issues, but either this issue acts as the retcon, or else Knuckles is merely referring to only one moon that regularly causes the eclipse or something. In addition, we get to see the first appearance of the dingoes, which become regulars in later issues but for now are treated like some kind of mindless stampeding mob, despite them clearly being Mobians as well with shoes and gloves.

Anyway, in the end, the eclipse ends, the winds die down, and the kangaroo's mother finds him again, thanking Knuckles for his role as guardian. It really kind of acts like he's a one-man police force for the entire island, which I suppose isn't entirely inaccurate for this canon.

[feel199x]

♛┈⛧┈┈•༶to protect our district ༶•┈┈⛧┈♛ chapter VI

ceo!au, mafia!au, ceo!hwang hyunjin, mafia leader!hwang hyunjin

I  II  III  IV  V  VI VII  masterlist

a/n: ohohohoho it gets w i l d

warnings: themes of sexism and violence

                                   ┍━━━━━♥♠♣♦━━━━━┑

Nobody spoke, nobody even looked at Hyunjin as everyone quietly climbed back into the van. Whatever sense of equality, whatever feeling of friendship and teamwork that had sprouted these past couple days was completely obliterated. Now it was clear, painfully clear that Hyunjin was the leader, and everyone else? Everyone else was under him, the ground beneath his feet. This was a side of Hyunjin that you didn’t want to get to know, but you didn’t have a choice.

That was the whole thing, wasn’t it?

You knew there was unspoken anger in the car, the tension weighing down on you, making it hard to breathe. Changbin was gripping the steering wheel so hard that his knuckles were turning white, and Jisung was shaking his leg as he looked out the window. Even Chan, by far the person who seemed most mature out of the group was struggling to even out his breathing. But you couldn’t afford to be emotional like them, you had already made that mistake once. You knew they saw you as weak, as emotional, you knew that’s why Woojin targeted you. Sure, you had basically confessed your love for Hyunjin in front of him and that was certainly part of it- but it wasn’t all of it. And that was the problem, you were stuck between putting on an act, a facade where you would eventually break character and being yourself- and being punished for it. And you suppose that yes, all the members of the team struggled with this, but not at the same level, not at the same extent, it just wasn’t the same. So, you didn’t say anything, you didn’t react. You did what not even the boys were doing, you pretended.

Shakespeare said it best, “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.”

You were deep in thought when you heard the clicking of the gearstick as Changbin pulled it.

“Be up by six,” Hyunjin ordered, “we have business to do.”

At that, everyone filed out of the car. No one looked or interacted with each other, everyone sauntering off to their rooms. And so you went to yours, greeted by your quiet mother- still mourning. You rubbed her back as she sat crying on the table, holding tightly onto a family picture you had taken years ago. You tried to coax it out of her hand, but as she refused to let go, you had to take it out of her hands and nearly carry her back to bed. You sat on her bed, stroking her hair as she cried herself to sleep. It wasn’t difficult not to cry, and you wanted to- you wanted to completely break down and let it all out. But nothing happened.

You didn’t have time to mourn.

You weren’t even sure you had slept, you had been staring at the wall for so long that time seemed warped. Even as you heard your phone ring from your bedroom, all your actions seemed automatic- as if you were on autopilot, and you were. It was a coping skill, not a good one, but a coping skill nonetheless. You didn’t have to deal with reality, it didn’t have to be real if you didn’t allow it to be. You wanted to be early this time though, so your routine was slightly rushed. You were rubbing the sleep out of your eyes, making your way to the meeting area so you wouldn’t have to take the bus again. That was the plan, of course, until you felt yourself slam against the wall. Sir Hwang’s hands were around your throat, but he looked calm, nonchalant like he always did.

“You’re a stupid little bitch, huh?”

“Yeah,” you said between gasps of air, “a big old bitch, you’ve caught me!”

His hand tightened around your neck as he smiled, and you gave him a sweet smile back. “You’ve got some fuckin’ nerve. Didn’t I warn you? I was so nice, so civil.”

“Maybe if you kill me you’ll make a better point. You know Hyunjin needs me on his team.”

“Does he? Couldn’t I just get any man, who would be so much better than you?”

“Some old fucking geezer? Be my guest, asswipe.”

“You better watch that pretty little mouth, baby. Hyunjin might not be able to keep you in line, but I can.”

“Is that so? You better kill me then, ‘cause you’re doing a shitty job.” You were trying to control your desperate gasps for air, but your vision started to fade. Still, your pride would rather you pass out or die by his hand than beg him to release you. So, you spat on his face and he let you go as a reflex, pulling out a handkerchief to clean the spit off his face. With that, you collapsed on the floor, rubbing your neck.“You’re lucky you’re pretty. Your mouth is only good for one thing, remember that. Next time, you’ll be in 4419.”

You knew he wasn’t lying as he put the handkerchief back in his chest pocket and winked, sauntering off to do whatever inhumane thing he had to next. You should’ve been terrified, completely shaken. But instead, you were angry. The tears slipping out of your eyes? They were of rage as you stared down the hallway, rubbing the handprints on your neck.

You were going to destroy that man, and his district. You were gonna burn it the fuck down like hellfire.

You got up like nothing happened, making your way down the hallway and the stairs to where the boys were. “Boys,” you nodded, wanting to be the first to speak and acknowledge your own presence. Chan and Changbin turned to you.

“Your neck-”

“Sir Hwang,” you explained curtly, “I’m fine.”

Chan nodded, looking slightly worried. “Can I check? It looks pretty bad, how are you feeling?” Before you could answer, he touched your neck and you couldn’t help but wince. “It looks bruised,” he commented, “And your eyes are bloodshot. You should call out, we’ll cover for you.”

“Chan’s right,” Changbin added, “You should take a break, I’m sure everyone will understand.”

You shook your head, “No way. I’ll be fine, don’t worry about it.” They looked at you worriedly but didn’t push. Jisung finally came by, apologizing for running late and raised his eyebrows at you.

“I’m fine.”

He looked at Chan and Changbin, both of them shooting him a warning look and Jisung nodded in understanding. Off you went. The day was ordinary, but you were feeling the consequences with your encounter with Sir Hwang soon enough. You hadn’t even checked in when you ran off to the bathroom, feeling dizzy and nauseous

“Must be that time of the month..” you heard someone say as you desperately pushed your way into the cinema, “Must’ve got knocked up.” The laughter was muffled as you collapsed in the bathroom stall, hanging over the toilet bowl as you taste the throw up sitting in your throat but just wouldn’t come out. You leaned against the wall and wiped the saliva from the side of your mouth.

You were gonna burn this shit down.

You returned to your desk, sitting down and taking calls- organizing meetings. It was boring, tedious work. But you would rather make schedules for a lifetime than kill someone who didn’t deserve it. Hours had passed of doing this work, putting up with comments until finally, finally, lunch break came. You were going to leave as soon as the clock turned to signal noon, grabbing your bag and coat. You wanted to binge on some takeout in the park, you wanted a break. But Hyunjin tapped your desk, and you spun around slowly- leveling your eye contact with him. You thought he was going to apologize for his little tantrum, but he did quite the opposite.

“You can’t go to lunch. Meeting with Third Eye in five.”

It was impersonal, Hyunjin staring right past you. His face was blank, devoid of any tell-tale emotion, but most of all, he wasn't tapping his thigh. He didn’t linger any longer, checking his watch and putting his hands in his pockets, walking off into the hallway back into his office. Instead of going to the meeting room immediately, you went back to the bathrooms.

“I thought you’d be here.”

“Must be intuition.”

“What do you think they’re gonna say?”

“Nothing good. Got my ass kicked yesterday.”

“I guess we both look rough.”

“We haven’t even begun to pay the price.”

“Can I say something, something fucking insane?”

“Depends on if you trust me.”

“I do. Do you trust me?”

“With my life.”

“I’m gonna burn this shit down to the ground.”

“You’re gonna need someone to douse it in gasoline.”

Without another word, you went to the meeting room and sat down in your seat, somehow still one of the first to get there.

“How’s your day going, Chan?”

“Boring. You?”

“Not any better.”

“Guess I’d rather argue with corporate lawyers than plan an operation, though.”

“Like we have a choice.”

Jisung and Changbin came in together, and the rest of the members of Third Eye filed in, sitting in their seats.

“That was something big you pulled off there,” a guy you recongized as Seungmin, spoke up, “Surprised you aren’t dead.” The rest of the members shot him a wary look, but he just shrugged. You crossed your legs, leaning back into the chair and placed your hands on the parallel armrests. “Is that so?” you said, “And why’s that?” It was you turn for your team members to shoot you a look, Chan nudging your foot as a plea for you not to push on further.

“Just an observation.”

And you didn’t, you had to play the long game here- even if that meant bowing out of verbal battles. You had to pick your battles, and you couldn’t choose all of them. So, instead, you reinforced whatever idea he had in his head.

“I’m surprised too.”

Woojin was watching the entire conversation very carefully, and you pretended not to notice. However, you made sure that the outline of Sir Hwang’s hand was visible to everyone, the blue and violet splotches of bruised skin disgustingly obvious. Hyunjin appeared, taking a seat in the head chair and stared down Woojin. Even though you had only seen Hyunjin a few minutes before, he looked overtly happy. A small and friendly smile plastered on his face as he leaned into his chair, taking the hair out of his face.

“Mind telling me why you called this meeting Kim?”

“I have a proposal.”

“Oh? Do tell.”

“Let’s join factions, divide and conquer.”

“How does this benefit me?”

Woojin scoffed. “We won’t have to resort to petty battles like this, Hwang.”

“For a mafia leader, you wear your heart on your sleeve.”

You expected Woojin’s face to tighten, even a little bit, but he remained blank like unused paper. “Better than acting like my father, don’t you think?”

“I think it’s a lot better. Your father wouldn’t have surrendered so easily.”

“And your father didn’t have to pretend,” Woojin sighed, and quickly added, “We have problems bigger than us. Seungmin got a notice that the feds are thinking about investigating.”

“I’m aware.”

This was news to you though, and you weren’t very fond of paying the price for sins you didn’t commit. You and Jeongin made quick eye contact.

This district was gonna burn in hellfire.

                                     ┕━━━━━♥♠♣♦━━━━━┙

[kog0ruhn]

A Layman’s Guide to Shriek (a.k.a. The Most Obnoxious Woman on Sornieth)

If you can’t tell, in the great big world of my clan lore, Shriek is kind of a big deal. It’s hard to believe considering that her entire appearance is absolutely ridiculous and (in my head) she sounds like a female Bobcat Goldthwait, but she’s a powerful girl with a powerful grip on The Abandoned. You know, despite the fact that she has no trade skills to speak of and (until recently) wasn’t very good at the whole “fighting” thing.

But who is Shriek and why is she so important?

Welcome to V-Sauce, where we’ll be discussing this catastrophe in-depth.

Shriek was born above the Windswept Plateau, in a den on the Cloudsong. Her parents were lenient “hippie” parents, the draconic equivalent of New Age hipsters who think that disciplining their kid in any fashion will ruin them psychologically. This doesn’t couple well with Shriek since, from an early age, she’s been a curious and impulsive noodle who is easily distracted, endlessly energetic, and more than a little destructive. Much of her childhood was spent breaking everything she touched and making other kids uncomfortable, while her parents just nodded along in the background and told their neighbors, “She’s such a precocious girl, isn’t she?”

Her best friend growing up was an older coatl named Ramses. He was a transplant from an Earth clan who lived with his adoptive family, and wound up befriending Shriek because she decided they were friends and forced it to become true. He was bigger, she was more forceful, and they wound up getting into all sorts of trouble together. Every last shred of it was Shriek’s fault but Ramses, being passive as he was, had a habit of taking the fall for a lot of it.

Eventually, Shriek’s behavior got them both kicked out of their clan when Shriek--being the absolute genius she is--lost control of herself during a race with Ramses and managed to take herself out by crashing into the Windsinger effigy. The damage was minor and fixable (though Shriek still thinks the head looks crooked), but enough was enough. Everyone came together and decided, “This shit’s gotta stop.” 

Ramses was heartbroken, but Shriek decided she could do better. And “better” was “The Outlanders.”

Who are The Outlanders?

The Outlanders are one of the clans in The Abandoned alliance, though nobody really wanted them there at first. They’re the culmination of Shriek’s surprisingly silver tongue and tendency to prey on want to help the desperate. Her intentions were always good--fellow outcasts with nowhere to go made her heart ache, and she wanted to provide them with a place of safety--but her methods were borderline harassment. While the bulk of the old guard of Outlanders will say they’re fine with where they are now, they’ll be the first to admit that Shriek pestered them for days to join up with her because she’s a neurotic mess who couldn’t stand the thought of leaving folks behind.

Even if they wanted to be left behind.

Pictured: Vincent, who wanted to be left behind.

The problem with The Outlanders is that Shriek didn’t really ever take the longevity of the clan into consideration. She didn’t give a good goddamn if there were capable hunters, crafters, and tradesmen around her. She recruited based on sentiment, sympathy, and whoever she found interesting. Ramses, who was stuck with her because what else would he do, acted as her right hand and the straightman of the whole ordeal, trying to figure out how to organize things to be sustainable while Shriek grabbed loners off the street and announced they were tagging along. 

It wasn’t fun and there was a metric shit-ton of turnover in the membership of the clan. Dragons were in and out like kids at a McDonald’s Playplace.

Things became a little more stable when Shriek’s entourage of oddities wound up in Dragonhome, and Ramses forced her to settle down and make some alliances before they ran out of food and supplies. It required practically pinning her down at the Altar of Naught and frantically pantomiming apologies on her behalf, but she was eventually allowed to stay because her followers displayed a variety of niche skills that piqued The Fifteen’s interest.

Pictured: The “niche interest” people were interested in, because nothing catches a politician’s interest like a goddamn assassin.

So, You Joined an Alliance? Now What?

Well, if you’re Shriek, you’re not much for politics and The Abandoned requires a lot of politicking. This new alliance meant she was now part of The Fifteen and had to attend meetings and make negotiations and generally be what Ramses had been the entire time The Outlanders existed. She had no experience and found the whole thing annoying. She found her fellow clan leaders dry and dreadful, and thought most of their ideas were shit.

In particular, she wasn’t a fan of Snap who was a lot more judgmental, strict, and generally rough to deal with. She didn’t like the fact that so many dragons in the council were afraid to stand up to her so, despite being a tiny speck compared to the impressively buff Plague Guardian screaming over everyone’s head, she started to “negotiate” by loudly disagreeing with everything Snap said. The louder Snap got, the louder Shriek got, and arguments began to eat up council minutes. Everyone found it frustrating except for Shriek who thought she was standing up for the little guy instead of stalling progress and completely missing the point that Snap--harsh as she was--was actually a very good leader who was very good at setting her emotions aside to get shit done right.

This earned her a bit of a reputation as an annoyance and a troublemaker, and made it difficult for The Outlanders to really get anything out of joining The Abandoned. Ramses would occasionally attempt to go behind Shriek’s back and make deals, but Shriek usually managed to botch things anyway. Nobody liked her, everyone hated her, her own clan began to talk about mutiny as time wound on. Folks wanted to appoint Ramses leader or leave altogether.

Then, uh... Flauros happened right when things started to get real nasty.

The Fuck’s a Flauros?

That Looks Bad.

That is bad.

Flauros is a dragon who isn’t a dragon. She’s Shade-based, had no real mind of her own, and just randomly started destroying The Abandoned in a controlled attack that I’ve discussed a lot on my Flight Rising blog. The long and short of it is that a couple of asshole Mirrors who knew their magic managed to steal a summoned creature (Flauros) from her master, then used her to commit mass murder while making it appear as though she was doing it on her own. Lots of dragons died, entire clans were destroyed, The Fifteen became significantly less than Fifteen, and Shriek proved her mettle by using her context clues to solve the mystery, unmask the baddie, and then steal Flauros and use her to absolutely obliterate the Scooby-Doo villain at the end.

This should have marked Shriek as a hero and, in a lot of ways, it did. People realized fairly quick that without Shriek’s abstract way of thinking, stubbornness, curiosity, and attention to detail, that The Abandoned probably would have been wiped off the face of the earth. The problem is that, when all was said and done, Shriek--now wielding the enchanted amulet that Flauros was bound to--refused to turn it over to the bigger, better authorities so that they could get rid of Flauros once and for all.

There’s a number of reasons for her refusal. One was that, after years of being ridiculed and treated badly by The Fifteen (which was, honestly, her fault), she loved having something that made her the de facto strongest of the lot. Flauros and the acquisition of Flauros were proof that she was a competent dragon and gave her a nice shrield against her detractors. Secondly, she was maybe a little motivated by the fact that it pissed Snap off since Snap blatantly abused her authority and influence during the fight against Flauros (which, admittedly, worked out in The Abandoned’s favor and was done because she thought it was the best course of action).

Third was the biggest reason: It was very hard for Shriek to not think of Flauros as a dragon no matter how many times she was told that Flauros was definitely not a dragon. It looked and talked like a dragon, and nothing that happened was actually Flauros’ fault. The idea of her being “killed” for something she wasn’t responsible for made Shriek’s stomach turn, and she felt it was her personal responsibility to save her since she’s the one who “rescued” her in the first place.

And How Did That Turn Out?

What Does That Mean?

Flauros began to become a lot like Shriek. And Shriek began to become a lot like Flauros.

Because of the psychological impact that Shade energy has on dragons and Flauros now being bound to Shriek, she began to change. She was still excitable and energetic, but a lot of folks noted that Shriek was also more serious, dutiful, and even hostile. Actions she used to make out of spite were abandoned (for instance, she started working with Snap pretty easily), but any slight against her was met with rage. There was something dark boiling in that little green noodle, and everyone, even Shriek, knew Flauros was responsible for it.

The flip side was that Flauros started becoming sentient, and with that sentience she became mischievous, curious, and developed a strong sense of justice. Traits that a lot of people associated with Shriek.

It evens out in a lot of ways.

The fortunate part of Shriek’s change in demeanor is that it made her more capable when shit hit the fan in the wake of Flauros’ rampage, when a nasty little Spiral named Elder decided to stir up some civil unrest and then lead a charge against The Abandoned while their pants were down. Even though The Outlanders (and Shriek specifically) were exiled from the alliance, she kept her wits about her in a situation where she’d normally lose her mind. Then, grabbing Flauros by the horns, she cornered Elder in a cave and brought it down on top of him.

Not Flauros, as everyone thinks. Shriek. Shriek collapsed a cavern on top of another Spiral to keep him from murdering everyone to death.

So, Does This Mean She’s a Hero Again?

Yes, mostly. Folks are still wary of her moodswings and Flauros, but you can’t really not treat the girl who saved your ass twice with respect. 

And so Shriek still sits with The Fifteen, her clan was allowed back into the alliance, Flauros is mostly left alone, and she spends her days doing Shriek things as per usual. She’s starting to act more like herself again, albeit with a bit of a dark turn, and Ramses is just glad he can spend more time with his daughter than managing the PR nightmare that is his boss.

But know that when danger rears its ugly head again, Shriek is probably going to be the first one on the front lines because, much like the honey badger of yore, Shriek don’t give a shit.