#we are both afflicted with the same Setting The Scene disease

[chiseler]

Stolen Faces

Cinema is an art of faces, almost a religion of faces: on screen they loom above us, vast as a mother’s face must appear to an infant. We can get lost in them. The deepest thrill the movies offer may be the opportunity to gaze at human faces longer and with more unabashed, lover-like intimacy than real life regularly allows. Most often, of course, we gaze at beautiful faces, though cinema has its share of beloved gargoyles, mugs with “character” rather than symmetry. But the uncanny power of faces onscreen also anchors films about disfigurement and facial transformations, about masks and scars and plastic surgery. These stories summon all the fears and taboos, desires and unresolved questions swirling around the human face. Do faces reveal or conceal a person’s true nature? Can changing someone’s face change their soul?

Deformity is a staple of horror films, of course, from classics such as Phantom of the Opera and The Raven (in which the hideously afflicted man played by Boris Karloff muses, “Maybe if a man looks ugly, he does ugly things”) to surgical shockers such as Eyes Without a Face. But plot twists involving faces that are damaged or corrected, masked or changed, turn up with surprising frequency in film noir as well, where they are related to themes of identity theft, amnesia, desperate attempts to shed the past or recover the past. One of the grim proverbs of noir is that you can’t escape yourself. There are no fresh starts, no second chances. But noir also demonstrates the instability of identity, the way character can be corrupted, and stories about facial transformations harbor a nebulous fear that there is in the end no fixed self. If noir is pessimistic about the possibility of change, it is at the same time haunted by fear of change—fear of looking in the mirror and seeing a stranger.

The Truth of Masks

Two films about men who literally lose their faces take the full measure of the resulting ostracism and crushing isolation—and what men will do to escape it. Hiroshi Teshigahara’s The Face of Another (Tanin no Kao, 1966) is based on a Kobo Abe novel about a scientist named Okuyama who has been literally defaced by a chemical accident. We never see what he used to look like; he spends half the film swaddled in bandages like Claude Rains in The Invisible Man, ferocious black eyes glinting through slits. Obsessed with people’s reactions to his appearance, he lashes out bitterly, insisting that all his social ties have been severed, including his conjugal ties with his wife. She tries to convince him that it’s all in his head and that her feelings haven’t changed, but her revulsion when he makes an abrupt sexual advance convinces him that she’s lying.

Okuyama believes that a life-like mask will restore his relationship with his wife and his connection to society. He has evidently not seen The Face Behind the Mask (1941), a terrific B noir in which Peter Lorre stars as Johnny Szabo, who is hideously scarred in a fire. This tragedy and the ensuing cruelty of strangers transform him from a sweet, Chaplin-esque immigrant to a bitter criminal mastermind, even after he dons a powder-white mask that gives him a sad, creepy ghost of his former face—more Lorre than Lorre.  The mask is merely a flimsy patch on the horrible visage that spiritually scars Johnny, and though it enables him to marry a sweet and loving (and perhaps near-sighted) woman, it can’t reverse the corrosion of his character.  

The doctor who makes a far more sophisticated mask for Okuyama does so because the project fascinates him as a psychological and philosophical experiment. He speculates about what the world would be like if everyone wore a mask: morality would not exist, he argues, since people would feel no responsibility for the actions of their alternate identities. (His theory seems to be borne out by the consequences of internet anonymity.) Unlike the one Johnny Szabo wears, here the mask bears no resemblance to Okuyama’s original looks, and the doctor believes the new face will change his patient’s personality, turning him into someone else.

When the mask is fitted, it turns out to be the face of Tatsuya Nakadai, one of the most striking and plastic pans in cinema history. With only a little help from a fake mole, dark glasses, and a bizarre fringe of beard, Nakadai succeeds in making his own features look eerily synthetic, as though they don’t belong to him. Sitting in a crowded beer hall on his first masked outing in public, he creates a palpable sense of unease, keeping his features unnaturally still as though unsure of their mobility, touching his skin gingerly to explore its alien surface. As he gradually grows more comfortable and revels in the freedom of his new face, the doctor tells him, “It’s not the beer that’s made you drunk, it’s the mask.”

Abe’s novel contains a scene in which the protagonist goes to an exhibit of Noh masks, highly stylized crystallizations of stock characters and emotions. In Noh, as in other traditional forms of theater that use masks, the actor is present on stage but vanishes into another physical being—men play women, young men play old men, gods, and ghosts. In cinema, actors impersonate other characters using their own faces—usually without even the heavy layer of makeup worn on western stages. Movie actors are pretending to be people they’re not, yet if we judge their performances good it means we believe what we see in their faces. When an actor’s real face plays the part of a mask, like Lorre’s or Nakadai’s, this strange inversion—the real impersonating the artificial—has a uniquely disconcerting effect.

At the heart of this disturbing film lurks a horror that changing the skin can indeed change the soul. Okuyama tries to hold onto his identity, insisting, “I am who I am, I can’t change,” but the doctor insists he is “a new man,” with “no records, no past.” In covering his scar tissue with a smooth, artificial skin he eradicates his own experience, and with it his humanity. The doctor turns out to be right when he predicts that the mask will have a mind of its own. Suddenly endowed with sleek good looks, Okuyama buys flashy suits and sets out to seduce his own wife. When he succeeds easily, he is outraged, only to have her reveal that she knew who he was all along. After she leaves him in disgust he descends into madness and random violence. He has become the opposite of the Invisible Man: a visible shell with nothing inside

Okuyama’s story is interwoven with a subplot about a radiation-scarred girl from Nagasaki, whose social isolation drives her to incest and suicide. Lovely from one side, repellent from the other, she looks very much like the protagonist of A Woman’s  Face. Ingrid Bergman starred in the Swedish original, but Joan Crawford is ideally cast in the 1941 Hollywood remake directed by George Cukor. Half beautiful and half grotesque, half hard-boiled and half vulnerable, Anna Holm spells out what was usually inchoate in Crawford’s paradoxical presence. A childhood fire has left her with a gnarled scar on one side of her face, like a black diseased root growing across her cheek and distorting her eye and mouth. Crawford makes us feel Anna’s agonizing humiliation when people look at her, which spurs her compulsive mannerisms of turning her head aside, lifting her hand to her cheek, or pulling her hair down.

Also perfectly cast is Conrad Veidt as the elegant, sinister Torsten Baring. Veidt went from German Expressionist horror—playing the goth heartthrob Cesar in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and the grotesquely disfigured yet weirdly alluring hero of The Man Who Laughs—to an unexpected late-career run as a sexy leading man in cloak-and-dagger films such as The Spy in Black and Contraband. When Anna turns her head defiantly to reveal her scar, Torsten gazes at her with a gleam of excitement, even of perverse attraction. She is confused and touched by his kindness and gallantry, helplessly trying to hide her sensitivity beneath a tough façade. Her broken-up, uncertain expressions when he gives her flowers or kisses her hand count as some of the most delicate acting Crawford ever did. Anna assumes that Torsten, the penniless scion of a rich family, must want her to do some dirty work, and she turns out to be right, but he also genuinely appreciates the proud, bitter, lonely woman who faces down her miserable lot through sheer strength of will.

People are horrible to Anna, nastily mocking her wounded vanity and her attempts to look nice. “The world was against me,” she says, “All right, I’d be against it.” She has found the perfect outlet, blackmailing pretty women who commit adultery. In one of the film’s best scenes, the spoiled and kittenish wife she is threatening retaliates by shining a lamp in Anna’s face and laughing at her. Anna leaps at the woman and starts hitting her over and over, forehand and backhand, in an ecstasy of hatred. This savagely satisfying moment is derailed by the film’s first grossly contrived plot twist, as the encounter is interrupted by the woman’s husband, who happens to be a plastic surgeon specializing in correcting facial scars. He offers to operate on Anna, and once the bandages are removed, in a scene orchestrated for maximum suspense, an absurdly flawless face is revealed.

The doctor (Melvyn Douglas) calls her both his Galatea and his Frankenstein: he views her as his creation, but isn’t sure if she’s an ideal woman or an unholy monster, “a beautiful face with no heart.” Her dilemma is ultimately which man to please, whose approval to seek: the doctor who believes her character should be corrected now that her face is, or Torsten, who wants her to kill the young nephew who stands between him and the family estate. This overwrought turn is never plausible; it is always obvious that Anna is no child murderer. What is believable is her erotic thrall to Torsten, the first man who has ever shown an interest in her. Crawford is at her most unguarded in these moments of trembling desire; Cukor remarked on how “the nearer the camera, the more tender and yielding she became.” He speculated that the camera was her true lover.

Anna undergoes months of pain and uncertainty for the chance of being beautiful for Torsten, and there is a marvelous shot of her gazing at herself in a mirror as she prepares to surprise him with her new face, brimming with hard proud joy. But he winds up lamenting the surgery that has turned her into “a mere woman, soft and warm and full of love,” he sneers. “I thought you were something different—strong, exciting, not dull, mediocre, safe.” In this same speech, Torsten reveals himself as a cartoonish fascist megalomaniac, which fits in with the film’s slide into silly, flimsily scripted melodrama, but sadly obscures the radical spark of what he’s saying. Anna’s character is shaped by the way she looks, or rather by the way she is looked at by men; the disappointingly conventional ending sides with the man who equates flawless beauty with moral goodness, and against the one man who was able to see something fine—a “hard, shining brightness,” in a woman’s damaged and imperfect face.

A Stolen Face (1952) follows a similar premise, much less effectively, and reaches the opposite conclusion. Paul Henreid plays a plastic surgeon who operates on female criminals with disfiguring scars, convinced that once they look normal they will become contented law-abiding citizens. He gets carried away, however, sculpting one patient into a dead ringer for his lost love (Lizabeth Scott plays both the original and the copy) and marrying her. His attempt to play Pygmalion backfires, since the vulgar, mean-spirited and untrustworthy ex-con is unchanged by her new appearance: she is indeed “a beautiful face without a heart.” That is a succinct definition of the femme fatale, a type Lizabeth Scott often played and one that embodies a fascination with the deceptiveness of feminine beauty. In The Big Heat (1953), it is only when Debbie (Glora Grahame) has her pretty face rearranged by a pot of scalding coffee that she abandons her cynical self-interest to become an avenging angel, fearlessly punishing the corrupt who hide their greed behind a genteel façade. She has nothing left to lose; pulling a gun from her mink coat and plugging the woman she recognizes as her evil “sister,” the disfigured Debbie asserts her freedom: “I never felt better in my life.”

Blessings in Disguise

Sometimes, people are only too happy to lose their faces. Dr. Richard Talbot (Kent Smith), the protagonist of the superb, underappreciated drama Nora Prentiss (1947), sees the bright side when his face is horribly burned in a car crash. He has already faked his own death, sending another man’s corpse over a cliff in a burning car. In a neat bit of poetic irony, by crashing his own car he has completed the process of destroying his identity, and no longer needs to fear he’ll be recognized. Losing his face is a blessing in disguise—or rather, a blessing of disguise. But the disfigurement is also a visual representation of the corruption of his character: his face changes to reflect his downward metamorphosis with almost Dorian Gray-like precision.

Car crashes are a kind of refrain in the film. The doctor’s routine existence veers off course when a taxi knocks down a nightclub singer, Nora Prentiss (Anne Sheridan), across the street from his San Francisco office. Talk about a happy accident: the nice guy trapped in an ice-cold marriage to a rigid, nagging martinet suddenly has a gorgeous, good-humored young woman stretched out on his examining table. Nora may sing for a living, but her real vocation is dishing out wisecracks (her first words on coming to are, “There must be an easier way to get a taxi.”) When the doctor mentions a paper he’s writing on “ailments of the heart,” the canary, her eyelids dropping under the weight of knowingness, quips, “A paper? I could write a book.”

It’s hard to imagine a more sympathetic pair of adulterers, but the doctor is so daunted by the prospect of asking his wife for a divorce that it seems simpler to use the convenient death of a patient in his office to stage his own demise and flee to New York with Nora. It’s soon clear, though, that some part of him did die in San Francisco. Cooped up in a New York hotel room, terrified of going out lest someone spot him, the formerly gentle man becomes an irascible, rude, nervous wreck. When the faithful and incredibly patient Nora goes back to singing for Phil Dinardo (Robert Alda), the handsome nightclub owner who loves her, Talbot becomes hysterically jealous. Unshaven and hollow-eyed, he slaps Nora and almost kills Dinardo before fleeing the police and heading into that fiery crash. He becomes, as the film’s evocative French title has it, L’Amant sans Visage, “the lover without a face.”

When his bandages are removed, he is unrecognizable, wizened and scarred, his face a creased and calloused mask. His own wife doesn’t know him, and when Nora visits him in prison his damaged face, shot through a tight wire mesh, looks like something decaying, dissolving. He’s in prison because, in an even neater bit of irony, he has been charged with his own murder. He decides to take the rap, recognizing the justice of the mistake: he did kill Richard Talbot.

This same ironic plot twist appears in Strange Impersonation (1946), albeit less convincingly. This deliriously far-fetched tale, directed at a breakneck pace by Anthony Mann, stars Brenda Marshall as Nora Goodrich, a pretty scientist whose glasses signal that she is both brainy and emotionally myopic. She is harshly punished for caring more about work than marriage: her female lab assistant, who wants to steal Nora’s fiancé, tampers with an experiment so that it explodes, burning Nora’s face to a crisp. Embittered, she retreats from the world, and when another woman, who is trying to blackmail her over a car accident, falls from the window and is mistakenly identified as Nora, she seizes the opportunity to disappear, have plastic surgery that miraculously eliminates her scars, and return posing as the blackmailer, to seek revenge. She goes to work for her former fiancé, who strangely fails to recognize her voice or her striking resemblance to his lost love.

The plot plays out as, and turns out to be, a fever dream, but this last credibility stretcher is too common to dismiss as merely the flaw of one potboiler. Plots involving impersonation and identity theft rely not only on unrealistic visions of what plastic surgery can achieve, but on the assumption that people are deeply unobservant and tone-deaf in recognizing loved ones. A film that underlines this blindness with droll irony is The Scar (a.k.a. Hollow Triumph and The Man Who Murdered Himself, 1948), a convoluted but hugely entertaining little B noir in which Paul Henreid plays dual roles as a crook on the run and a psychologist who happens to look just like him. John Muller, pursued by hit men sent by a casino owner he robbed, stumbles across his doppelganger and decides to kill him and take his place. All he needs to do is give himself a facial scar to match the doctor’s. Only as he is dumping the body does he notice that he has put the scar on the wrong cheek—the consequence of an accidentally reversed photograph. But the irony quickly doubles back: Muller decides to brazen it out, and in fact no one notices that the doctor’s scar has apparently moved from one side of his face to the other—not even his lover. (Joan Bennett glides through this awkward part in a world-weary trance, giving a dry-martini reading to the script’s most famous lines: “It’s a bitter little world, full of sad surprises.”) The assumption that people pay little attention to the way others look or sound seems directly at odds with the power that faces and voices wield on film, and the intimate specificity with which we experience them. But noir stories often turn on how easily people are deceived, and how poorly they really know one another—or even themselves.

In The Long Wait (1954), perhaps the most extreme case of confused identity, a man with amnesia searches for a woman who has had plastic surgery. Not only does he not know what she looks like now, he can’t even remember what she used to look like. Since the movie is based on a Mickey Spillane story, he proceeds methodically by grabbing every woman he sees, in hopes that something will jog his memory. The film is fun in its pulpy, trashy way, provided you enjoy watching Anthony Quinn kiss women as though his aim were to throttle the life out of them. Quinn plays a man badly injured in a car wreck that erases both his memory and his fingerprints. This is lucky when he wanders into his old town and discovers he is wanted for a bank robbery—without fingerprints, they can’t arrest him. Figuring he must be innocent, he goes in search of the girlfriend who may or may not have grabbed the money and gone under the knife. It’s an intriguing premise, but the ultimate revelation of the right woman feels arbitrary, and the implications of all this confusion of identities are left resolutely unexamined. Nonetheless, there is something in the film’s searing, inarticulate desperation that glints like a shattered mirror.

Under the Knife

The promise of plastic surgery is a new and better self, the erasure of years and the traces of life. Taken to extremes, it is the opportunity to become a different person. Probably the best known plastic surgery noir is Dark Passage (1947), in which Humphrey Bogart plays Vincent Parry, who visits a back alley doctor after escaping from San Quentin. Parry was framed for killing his wife, so the face plastered across newspapers with the label of murderer has become a false face that betrays him. A friendly cabby who spots him recommends a surgeon who is he promises is “no quack.” Houseley Stevenson’s gleeful turn as the back-alley doctor is unforgettable, as he sharpens a straight razor while philosophizing about how all human life is rooted in fear of pain and death. He can’t resist scaring Parry, chortling over what he could do to a patient he didn’t like: make him look like a bulldog, or a monkey. But he reassures Parry that he’ll make him look good: “I’ll make you look as if you’ve lived.”

During the operation, Parry’s drugged consciousness becomes a kaleidoscope of faces, all the people who have threatened or helped him swirling around. His face is being re-shaped, as his life has already been shaped by others: the bad woman who framed him and the good woman who rescues and protects him, the small-time crook who menaces him and the kind cabby who helps him. Faceless for much of the movie, mute for part of it (he spends a long time in constraining bandages), Vincent Parry is among the most passive and cipher-like of noir protagonists. When the bandages finally come off after surgery, he looks like Humphrey Bogart, and the idea that this famously beat-up, lived-in face could be the creation of plastic surgery is perhaps the film’s biggest joke. But Vincent Parry remains an oddly blank, undefined character, and he seems unchanged by his new face and name. In a sense the doctor is right: he only looks as though he’s lived.

The fullest cinematic exploration of the problems inherent in trying to make a new life through plastic surgery is Seconds (1966), John Frankenheimer’s flesh-creeping sci-fi drama about a mysterious company that offers clients second lives. For a substantial fee, they will fake your death, make you over completely—including new fingerprints, teeth, and vocal cords—and create an entirely new identity for you. There is never a moment in the movie when this seems like a good idea. The Saul Bass credits, in which human features are stretched and distorted in extreme close-up, instills a horror of plasticity, and disorienting camera-work creates an immediate feeling of unease and dislocation, a physical discomfort at being in the wrong place.

Arthur, a businessman from Scarsdale, is the personification of disappointed middle age, afflicted by profound anomie that goes beyond a dull routine and a tired marriage. When the Company finishes its work—the process is shown in gruesome detail, to the extent that Frankenheimer’s cameraman fainted while shooting a real rhinoplasty—the formerly nondescript and greying Arthur looks like Rock Hudson, and has a new life as a playboy painter in Malibu. He’s told that he is free, “alone in the world, absolved of all responsibility.” He has “what every middle-aged man in America wants: freedom.”

At first, however, his life proves as empty and meaningless in this new setting as it was in the old; even when the Frankenstein scars have healed, he remains nervous and joyless as before. After he meets and falls for a beautiful blonde neighbor, who introduces him to a very 1960s California lifestyle, he begins to revel in youth and sensual freedom. Yet something is still not right; at a cocktail party he gets drunk and starts talking about his former existence—a taboo. He discovers that his lover, indeed almost everyone he knows, is an employee of the company or a fellow “reborn,” hired to create a fake life for him, and to keep him under surveillance. His “freedom” is a construct, tightly controlled.

Arthur rebels, making a forbidden trip to visit his wife, who of course does not recognize him. Talking to her about her supposedly deceased husband, for the first time he begins to understand himself: the depth of his alienation and confusion, the fact that he never really knew what he wanted, and so wanted the things he had been told he should want. Seconds is a scathing attack on the American ideal of a successful life, a portrait of how corporations sell fantasies of youth, beauty, happiness, love; buying into these commercial dreams, no one is really free to know what they want, or even who they are. Will Geer, as the folksy, sinister founder of the Company, talks wistfully about how he simply wanted to make people happy.

There is a deep sadness in the scenes where Arthur revisits his old home and confronts the failure of his attempt at rebirth—beautifully embodied by Rock Hudson in a performance suffused with the melancholy of a man who has spent his life hiding his real identity behind a mask. Yet Arthur still imagines that if he can have another new start, a third face and identity, he will get it right. Instead, he learns the macabre secret of how the Company goes about swapping out people’s identities. Seconds contrasts the surgical precision with which faces, bodies, and the trappings of life can be remade, and the impossibility of determining or predicting how or if the inner self will be changed. For that there are no charts or diagrams, and no knife that can cut deep enough.

by Imogen Sara Smith

[igirisuhito]

Title: Afflicted Relationship(s): Kamukura Izuru/Komaeda Nagito Hinata Hajime/Komaeda Nagito Rating: Mature Chapters: 1 / 2 / 3 / 4 / ? Chapter Summary: Komaeda weighs his options, Kuzuryuu begrudgingly listens to his worries Trigger Warnings: Panic attacks, mental breakdown, dismissing mental illness, IV stuff

[Ao3 Link]

┈┈┈┈․° ☣ °․┈┈┈┈

Hinata was sprawled out on the floor lying face up. His body was lifeless, save for the occasional twitches of his fingers and eyelids as neurons and muscles misfired in a feeble attempt to keep him conscious.

I knelt down, taking the boy's heated face into my hands and angling it up towards mine. He was incredibly pale, the only colour remaining on porcelain skin the flush of his fever. His breathing was slow and shallow, every little warm breath close enough to taste on my lips as I leaned in close. There was no way I couldn't begin to panic when he was in such a state.

"Hinata-kun! I understand if you're so repulsed by my actions that you've passed out, and I know it's more than I should ask of you..." The words came out of my mouth too rushed and barely intelligible, so I took a deep breath. "But please give me some sign you're okay."

My hands were beginning to shake, enough so that my hold on Hinata’s face became too loose to support the weight of his head. His face slipped from my grasp, his head lolling to the side as a soft gasp escaped my lips.

Did I kill Hinata-kun? No, that's ridiculous. You can't kill somebody by kissing them. I mean, you can, technically, but not like this. Surely not?

I wiped the remaining saliva from my lips, subtle evidence of a possible cause of death. Carefully rising to my feet, I stared down at Hinata’s weakened form. Fear was beginning to take hold, anxiety burning through my bloodstream and forcing me to move.

I can't lose him, not to such a hopeless cause. Hinata-kun didn't deserve to die such a pointless death by my hands, he deserved something grandiose, something exhilarating.

This kind of death would just be… boring. Wasteful.

"Tsumiki-san!!" I called out, my feet setting into motion as I made a dash for the room's exit. For a second, I felt a passing relief that Hinata had collapsed before Tsumiki had accidentally seen the repulsive things I was doing, but quickly scolded myself for thinking such a selfish thought. Hinata’s life was in danger and here I was glad that Tsumiki didn’t see me sucking face with him? How pathetic.

There was no doubt about it. It was my own luck that had caused Hinata to pass out. It was protecting me from being caught preying on him. That realisation caused something deep within my chest to ache with repulsion, dread, undiluted terror.

Despair.

I can only assume it was that same twisted luck that guided me into Tsumiki's arms, causing me to bump straight into her as she was coming into the room. All of the school's advice against running into halls went wasted on the likes of me. We slammed hard into one another with an "Oof."

As Tsumiki went crashing to the floor, the saline bag in her hand was squished into her chest, causing it to burst and soak her clothes with salty water. They stuck to her body damply, clinging to her skin in an erotic way. Her skirt had also flown up in the process, flashing me with an inappropriate amount of thigh along with her white underwear.

"Uwahh! K-K-K-Komaeda-san!!" She squealed, pulling her skirt down in a desperate attempt to save her dignity as her face flushed a bright red.

"A-ah, I'm so sorry you had to even accidentally touch somebody as disgusting as me!" I reached out a hand, offering to help her up. "My apologies for running, but it appears that Hinata-kun has collapsed."

"Wahh?! D-D-Don't worry about me, t-that's what you should be concerned about!" Tsumiki grabbed my hand, allowing me to help pull her up to her feet.

Without another word she scooted past me and into the room, abandoning the spilt saline bag on the floor. She practically pounced on Hinata's lifeless body, throwing herself into her brilliant talent as she pressed her ear to his chest and a hand to his forehead.

“He- he’s burning right up! Wh-why was he even out of bed? What was he doing before he collapsed?!" She began exasperated throwing a flurry of questions at me, all whilst examining Hinata's eyes for any sign of possible head trauma.

"He was…" I paused, teeth teasing unconsciously at my bottom lip. "Kissing me. We were making out."

The nurse's head snapped around in a fashion not so dissimilar to the creepy way an owl's would turn unnaturally. Her grey eyes bore right into me with an expression of rage mixed with shock. "A-are you s-s-serious?! K-Komaeda-san that's so irresponsible! You should know that you'll catch th--"

“Of course not!” I slid my hands up the sides of my arms, gripping at the sleeves of my jacket as I pulled my eyes away from Tsumiki’s. “Don't you know that kind of thing only happens in fiction? It would be repulsive for somebody like me to take advantage of an Ultimate’s illness for my own selfish desires. The very thought makes me want to vomit in my mouth!”

Tsumiki narrowed her eyes for a second, before realisation set in and they shot back open. “O-oh! I see…”

“Ha, hahahah.” Bringing my hand to my mouth, I touched my lips absentmindedly and glanced towards Hinata's body still laid out on the floor.

Was it wrong of me to say that? I can't have Tsumiki knowing of my intentions, she would stop me without hesitation. Perhaps the others would tie me up again, then I would miss the murder and the investigation... how awful. But, I can't shake this odd feeling that this is the wrong thing, that I should tell the truth. There is a possibility that not being honest about the cause of Hinata's fainting spell could lead to complications further on.

It could even be the one thing that leads to his death. After all, his condition is somewhat worse than Owari or Mioda's…

But owning up would reveal our intentions and likely ruin any chance of allowing the Ultimates to shine even brighter…

No. I shook my head free of the thoughts. The silence had dragged on long enough, Tsumiki was going to start questioning my words unless I spoke up soon.

“Well then… should we move him?”

"R-right!" With a few fervent nods, Tsumiki hopped off Hinata's body. "Yes! Please help me get him onto the bed so I can properly tend to Hinata-san's needs!"

Hinata-san's needs… huh?

Nodding in return, I brought myself back to Hinata's side and knelt down to the floor. "Well then, would you be okay getting his legs?"

"O-of course!" Scrambling to his legs, Tsumiki quickly slid her arms under the back of Hinata's knees. "I'm r-ready to lift him when-whenever you are."

I hooked my arms under his armpits, making sure not to take note of just how damp and sweaty he was with fever. There was a moment of eye contact, a quick nod, and then we both lifted him.

Thankfully the hospital rooms were so small, we didn't have to move Hinata incredibly far to return him to his bed. Tsumiki rearranged his sheets, carefully tucking Hinata back under the dull blue comforter as she examined his arms.

"I-I-I was coming to re-replace his IV… but it l-looks like he's p-pulled it out…" With a rather disdainful expression, she glanced over to the IV pole. "Again…"

Just as she had said, Hinata's line was pooled on the floor, the small tube that had presumably been in his arm now having smeared blood on the floor. The machine had stopped infusing, in fact it had been switched off entirely so as to not alert Tsumiki, and now the remaining fluid in the line had drained onto the floor.

"He's been rather uncharacteristically troublesome, hasn't he?" I couldn't help but chuckle, glancing over at the restless, almost pained look on Hinata's face. "I'm sorry, it's reprehensible that I would laugh at your struggle, but I could never see Hinata-kun kicking up such a fuss in his usual state."

There was a short moment of silence before Tsumiki giggled as well, clasping her hands together. "Y-you're right! H-Hinata-san is v-very different. But it's okay! We w-will get through this!"

"That's the spirit! Your hope is amazing Tsumiki-san! To still haven't given up on Hinata-kun like that… it's amazing! Truly nobody has a tolerance like that of the Ultimate Nurse!" As I took a rather sharp inhale, I couldn't help the big grin that spread on my face. "Seeing you in action like this has brought a worthless nobody like me hope and distracted me from all my worries!"

Ah.

My… worries.

My smile became a little more strained. Tsumiki was looking at me with a mix of disgust and fear, the enjoyment she had been feeling at receiving compliments far gone.

I didn't let my smile fall as I blinked slowly, realising it was probably time for me to leave her be. Lifting my hand, I waved to her as I began to head towards the door. "Well, I won't get in your way any longer. Goodbye."

As I left the scene, I glanced back one last time at the room. In the place where Hinata had collapsed, the spider lily he had been holding earlier was laid on the floor, likely having been abandoned when he came towards me. It seemed as though it had been crushed among the chaos, red petals scattered and bleeding onto the linoleum floor.

I turned away quickly.

Why do I… feel so distracted? Why am I so scared ?

He kissed me. He wants me to spread it. He told me to spread it. That should be my top priority.

So why do I so desperately want to turn back? To return and sit by Hinata's side, taking care of his every need instead of spreading hope?

As I stepped out into the hallway, I shut the door behind me with a shaking hand. That sensation in my chest only continued to grow as I made my way back towards the waiting room.

I should be putting a plan into place, something that would allow me to spread the disease faster. Something that would perhaps lure someone here, bring them in contact. Or perhaps I could bring the infected into the quarantined hotel? Or go back into Hinata's room to go check on him again? Tell the others that Hinata was dying and that we so desperately needed them to come do something before it became the fault of me and my filthy luck and the blood of an Ultimate coated my hands and I would be so deservedly executed.

Unconsciously, my fingers found their way into my hair, winding themselves around the coarse locks and pulling tightly. There was a familiar sound ringing in my ears, the loud buzzing of a swarm of insects. They filled my ears and mouth and eyes with their filthy touch, tainting everything in sight, destroying the world before me.

"It's your fault he's going to die." They whispered, barely audible beneath the white noise. "It's always your fault. You know this."

My mind was racing, my lungs were burning. It was if a black poison was seeping over my mind, dripping down over my eyes, obscuring my vision and thoughts. I couldn't think straight, everything was so overwhelming it was almost funny.

It was funny, so I laughed. It hurt my chest and wheezed like the final pitiful exhale of a corpse, but I laughed.

And I laughed and laughed and laughed and laughed and laughed and laughed and laughed and laughed and laughed and laughed and laughed and laughed and laughed and laughed and laughed and laughed and laughed and laughed and laughed and laughed and laughed.

Until something hit me hard on the back of my head, knocking me from my daze and causing me to choke on my breath.

"Oi. Stop freaking out, it's fuckin' creepy."

I blinked a few times, my vision beginning to clear as those dark shadows were chased back into the corners of my vision. The hospital's lobby slowly came into vision, along with a very angry looking Kuzuryuu. He scowled, crossing his arms over his chest tightly and forcing himself to sit up taller.

Ah, of course. How unsightly it must be to watch someone like me being so pathetic.

All my attempts to apologise were drowned out as I coughed and spluttered, attempting to regain my breath. The world was much clearer now, my eyes readjusting to the tropical sunshine streaming through the windows. It appeared as though I was now sitting down in the waiting room, yet I had no memory of moving from the wards and into the lobby.

I unballed my fists, my fingers aching from the strain as they unfolded and released my hair. The pain pulling at my scalp faded, and slowly I brought my shaking hands down to my knees. To my frustration, they instinctively gripped tightly at the fabric, clutching tightly until the denim burned into my palms.

Opening my mouth, I attempted once again to say some kind of apology for my misgivings, but all that came out was a rasped "Ah," closely followed by a shaky "Sorry."

Kuzuryuu huffed, his nose crinkling as he prepared to spit some kind of insult, but instead of ripping into me, he paused. There were a few seconds of still silence before he sighed loudly, allowing his body to relax a little and posture fall. "He's fine, don't get so fuckin' worked up about it."

"I'm… sure you're right." A breathy laugh forced itself out, as if squeezed out from the tight feeling in my chest. "After all, you are an Ultimate."

"Wha-? You think being an Ultimate makes me right about everything?" He scoffed, not in a tone as if he were looking down and mocking me, but more one of amusement. "They're wrong about you being crazy, you're just a fucking moron like me. Or maybe I'm the crazy one for even talking to you, who knows?"

It was difficult to think of what to say in response to that. I decided not to think too long on it, instead choosing to laugh along with him. "Perhaps."

The small smile that was on Kuzuryuu's face slowly dropped. The positive feeling in the air evaporated like mist and a heavy silence settled over the room. All that could be heard in the empty waiting room was the sound of Owari sobbing as though her life depended on it echoing down the corridor from her room. Eventually, Kuzuryuu broke the silence as he sighed loudly, leaning back in the stiff plastic hospital chair as best he could.

“I think I’m… starting to get your whole crazy ‘stepping stone to hope’ shit.” He paused to scoff at himself, as if he was in shock that he would say such a thing. “Ever since Peko saved me, it feels like I owe this life to her, or to everyone else. It’s like it’s not my own anymore. Just a spare.”

"If I'm not wrong, you're referring to Pekoyama-san's sacrifice? It’s no surprise you feel that way, but there was very little you could have done to prevent her execution.”

Kuzuryuu still grumbled after I asked, sounding frustrated by the question. It was no surprise, he had reacted rather poorly when I brought it up during Owari’s fight as well, but dancing around the topic seemed pointless. What Pekoyama did for the one she loved was amazing, there was no logical reason to not acknowledge that.

“It’s that stupid fucking Monokuma’s fault! But what kind of fucking person am I to let Peko take the blow for me after all that I said? It’s messed up. The only reason I didn’t die is because she shielded me, a tool ‘til the end.” As he said the last few words, Kuzuryuu slammed his fist against his leg, growing more frustrated as he continued to think about it.

I shrugged. "Pekoyama-san was an amazing person. She died for the sake of your hope, so that you could continue to be a beacon for your family and the Kuzuryuu Clan. There's no point in being angry at her for doing the right thing…"

The right thing, huh?  

"What she did wasn't the right thing! The right thing would have been for her to stay with me!" Jumping out of his chair, Kuzuryuu glared down at me. "No death is a 'hopeful thing' you dumbass!"

Spreading hope is the right thing to do, so that's what I should do, right?

"Hey! Are you even listening to me? Jesus, you really are messed in the head." He scrunched up his nose in a snarl. "I'm trying to be more forgiving and a better fucking person and all that shit but you really piss me off, going on about how everything is great as long as it's for fucking hope !"

I don't need to worry about my feelings. I just need to spread hope, like Pekoyama-san did.

I looked up at him, locking eyes as I smiled widely at the Yakuza. "I think I get it now. Thank you, Kuzuryuu-kun, you are a truly wonderful person. I'm sure Pekoyama-san is proud of you."

"What?! What the hell are you talking about, you bastard? Don't go around saying things like that." In an attempt to hide his reddening face, Kuzuryuu turned his head to the side, looking away from me.

"Sorry, I didn't mean to upset you." I raised my hands in a defensive position, hoping to calm him.

"Whatever… just go take a break or something." Still refusing to look at me, Kuzuryuu grumbled. "I'll take care of things here, alright?"

I nodded. "Thank you, Kuzuryuu-kun, you really do make a brilliant leader."

"Just get out of here!"

Laughing softly, I carefully rose to my feet, still feeling a little dizzy from lack of oxygen. As Kuzuryuu began to head back towards the wards, I realised something.

"Wait! How did you know about what happened to Hinata-kun?"

"Huh?" He stopped, spinning around to face me. "Because you came in here cackling like a maniac. You wouldn't answer my questions so I checked in with Tsumiki about it. By the time I got back you were still out here having your breakdown, just now sitting down and babbling away to yourself creepily about how you were a murderer."

"Ah." Yeah, that sounded right. "Sorry about that."

Kuzuryuu shook his head, muttering something under his breath before pushing open the doors to the corridor and continuing on his way.

I figured it was probably time I did what he said too and took advantage of this opportunity to put my plan into action.

With a wide smile, I headed towards the entrance of the hospital, pushing open the doors before stepping out into the warm sunlight.

[harris-coopers]

‘Riverdale’ heartthrob Cole Sprouse goes for leading man status in ‘Five Feet Apart’

When Cole Sprouse left Hollywood, he didn’t think he’d ever come back. He was 18, and he’d been acting alongside his identical twin brother since they were in diapers. The choice to work as a kid had not been his own: His single mother wanted to be around for the boys and have a steady career, and putting her twins in the entertainment industry seemed like a “lucrative alternative,” he says now.

But then Sprouse and his brother, Dylan, landed their own Disney Channel show, “The Suite Life of Zack & Cody.” By 13 they’d signed a licensing agreement with Dualstar Entertainment Group, Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen’s company, to develop their own quarterly lifestyle magazine, ringtones and cologne. They were full-blown teen heartthrobs.

And yet when it came time to apply for college, the twins decided — unlike fellow Disney stars Miley Cyrus, Selena Gomez or the Jonas Brothers — that they wanted to pursue higher education and enrolled at NYU.

“My brother and I were getting recognized a lot. It became one of those things that we realized we had just sort of taken as gospel since we were little kids, and that there was another path through life,” Sprouse, now 26, recalls. “I was completely content, at the time, to let the Disney shows exist within this little nostalgic bubble and I was ready to move on.”

But somehow here he is now, sitting on the balcony of a ritzy hotel smoking Marlboros, promoting his first leading role in a movie, “Five Feet Apart.” And the film, a romantic drama about two young lovers with cystic fibrosis, is not the only project he’s taken on since graduating with honors from NYU in 2015. For the past two years he’s starred as Jughead on the CW series “Riverdale,” a teen drama based on the Archie comics.

The program, which has already been renewed for a fourth season, has reignited Sprouse’s popularity. On Instagram, he has nearly 24 million followers, many of whom are obsessed with tracking his real-life relationship with his on-screen love interest, Lili Reinhart.

“Riverdale” also rekindled Sprouse’s love for acting. During college he did none of it, opting to study something completely different: archaeology, geographic information systems and satellite imaging. He became interested in the field because his grandfather was a geologist and “it seemed like an academic discipline that was really competitive and challenging. I fancied testing if I could do something like that.”

He traveled to Germany, France and Bulgaria for excavations, and on one dig, after spending six weeks hunched over a 1-by-1-foot trench of dirt with a toothpick, he pulled a 35,000-year-old Aurignacian stone blade out of the ground. Following graduation, he began working in cultural resource management as an archaeological assistant in a Brooklyn artifact laboratory. He was thinking about going into academia: studying at graduate school, researching a specific time period or peoples and becoming a professor.

But then he heard from his acting manager, who, per Sprouse’s request, had left him alone during his four years at NYU.

“He asked me to come back for a single pilot season. I was on this path, but I said ‘OK, if I don’t book anything, I don’t think I want to do acting anymore,’” he says. He did book something — “Riverdale” — and soon began to realize it wasn’t acting itself he had an issue with.

“From a very young age, the industry had been defined as a business,” he continues, “and it took me going away to school for a while and redefining that to find [performing] as a passion again.”

On “Riverdale,” Sprouse’s Jughead is a something of an outsider — an artsy writer with a signature beanie and leather jacket. Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, the show’s creator, initially thought the actor might be a better fit for Archie, the lovable jock. But after reading the pilot script, Sprouse expressed interest in Jughead — even though the character only had one scene in the episode.

“It was already kind of a sign that he viewed himself differently,” says the showrunner. “I think Cole is an old soul. He’s done a lot, and he’s seen a lot, and I think that gives him a little bit of wisdom that other actors his age might not have. When he smiles, he looks like a true 15-year-old kid. But when he furrows his brow, he looks like he has the weight of the world on his shoulders.”

When it came to tackling his first adult movie part — he and his brother were in Adam Sandler’s “Big Daddy” as boys — Sprouse didn’t want to stray too far outside of his comfort zone. Recognizing the persona he’d established on “Riverdale,” he chose to play a similar archetype in “Five Feet Apart”: Will, a brooding teenager whose rebellious spirit attracts his romantic interest, played by Haley Lu Richardson of “Split” and “Support the Girls.”

“This role was interesting in a larger business sense, because a return to film also meant a question of how much of [the ‘Riverdale’] audience would turn out,” says Sprouse. “I didn’t want it to feel so incredibly distinct.”

The CBS Films production, out Friday, follows two CF patients as they fall in love but are unable to physically touch due to risk of cross infection. Cystic fibrosis is a genetic, progressive disease that affects lung function, making it difficult to breathe; the average life expectancy for the 30,000 afflicted in the U.S. is 37.5 years.

Justin Baldoni, who makes his directorial debut on “Five Feet Apart,” is also an actor on a CW series: “Jane the Virgin.” But he and Sprouse never crossed paths at network affairs. Instead, Baldoni began thinking of him for the role after catching some of his interviews on morning talk shows.

“Cole’s a great actor, but I was actually more interested in who he was off-screen,” explains Baldoni. “Cole had to grow up a lot faster than the normal kid. He was surrounded by adults: directors and producers and writers and people that were basically employing him. … When you grow up with cystic fibrosis, you grow up with doctors and nurses. Those are your friends. You learn medical terminology. You have to understand regimens and taking care of yourself in a way that regular kids don’t. You’re forced to grow up a lot faster. So there was an interesting parallel between Cole’s life and Will’s life.”

Baldoni came to “Five Feet Apart” having steeped himself in the world of CF. He had the idea for the film while working on a web series about those with terminal illnesses, “My Last Days.” One of the episodes focused on an 18-year-old girl named Claire Wineland, a CF patient whom Baldoni became so close to that he ultimately hired her to serve as a consultant on “Five Feet Apart.”

Sprouse spent a lot of time with Wineland, who died last September three months after filming was completed, talking about how CF affects both the mind and the body, including how the disease makes it difficult to gain or maintain weight. Together, he says, they came to the conclusion that it would be “a really powerful choice to embody that physicality,” and so with the aid of a nutritionist, Sprouse lost 25 pounds over the course of five weeks.

Sprouse initially told Baldoni he was somewhat hesitant to sign onto “Five Feet Apart” because he knows the scrutiny that films in this genre — “The Fault in Our Stars,” “A Walk to Remember,” “Me Before You” — can face for romanticizing illness.

“But I’m a believer that even if it might feel like the volume is a little bit too high within that genre, it still serves as an amazing platform to discuss something like cystic fibrosis,” says Sprouse. “And the star-crossed lover narrative — this is something that has existed before Shakespeare to Ovid and Pyramus and Thisbe. It’s part of our cultural memory bank. It’s one of those motifs that we just understand so well.”

Sprouse, who has the kind of poster-boy mane that’s perfect for brushing out of his eyes, frequently peppers his speech with these kind of literary references. He and his brother were the first ones on their father’s side of the family to go to college, which is “positive upward momentum” he’s proud of. Someday he hopes to spark a larger conversation about the California High School Proficiency Examination, a test that many young actors take at 16 so they can receive the legal equivalent of a high school diploma and no longer be considered minors.

“It basically cripples young academics who are working children from feeling capable to take the SAT and the ACT,” Sprouse says. “So many of us don’t go to college because our skill sets are not defined enough to be able to take those tests that would eventually allow us to apply. And kids are encouraged to do it because if you’re 18, you can work more hours and hypothetically make more money — and also because as a kid, you always want to sit back in your high chair and go ‘Yeah, I’m an adult.’”

On set, his collaborators have come to value his intelligence. Aguirre-Sacasa says that Sprouse “does a ton of work” on the “Riverdale” scripts, asking questions about the scenes and offering different points of view.

“A lot of times our episodes are homages to different films,” the executive says. “So Cole asked: ‘Can you send me a list of the movies you’re referencing in any given episode?’ And I’m that exact same way.”

While Sprouse no longer dreams of leading excavations in far-off lands, he’s found another non-acting passion that fulfills the “desire for learning and otherness” that archaeology did: photography. A few years ago, he walked into One World Trade Center in New York wearing a button-up T-shirt and asked the receptionist at Conde Nast Traveler magazine, “Hey, can anyone give me a job?”

He was pointed in the direction of former creative director Yolanda Edwards, who was willing to toss him a few unpaid assignments. Since then he’s landed a handful of high-profile gigs for Elle, W Magazine, Adidas and J Brand. He’s planning to spend the majority of his upcoming hiatus from “Riverdale” working as a fashion photographer.

Sprouse showcases some of his work on his Instagram account, which he admits is “very curated.” He’ll often delete old photos of himself, and he’s careful not to post too many photos of his girlfriend, Reinhart.

“I’ve girded my private life very intentionally,” he says. “It’s one of those things that I still sort of grapple with, and Lili and I grapple with.”

Asked if he thought about how much attention dating his costar might garner, he says he had no choice in the matter: “We legitimately could not stay away from one another.”

Beyond Reinhart, he and his cast mates — who film in Vancouver — are exceptionally close, especially of late, as they grapple with the loss of “Riverdale” costar Luke Perry.

“It’s been very, very hard this week,” he acknowledges, referring to juggling his film press responsibilities with his grief. “But the family has asked us all to keep it as private as possible, and I respect them tremendously through this time, so I continue to do so. We go back tomorrow, and it’ll be nice to be together. We all got together and talked it out a couple days ago, and then they gave us a couple of days off of production to acclimate, which was really wonderful.”

As for his future as an actor, Sprouse says he doesn’t expect to leave Hollywood again any time soon.

“It’s easy to forget, because this industry has so many different sides to it, that the act of acting is an incredibly enjoyable thing,” he says. “It’s a really empowering thing to do and it’s all the stuff on the outside of it — the publicity and the celebrity — which I actually had a problem with.”

Source: LA Times

[anotheruserwithnoname]

Thoughts on Victoria Series 3

Some general thoughts on the just-concluded (well, in North America, anyway) Season 3 of Victoria. Obviously spoilers ahead - and I will be talking about some of the season’s major moments, so read on only if you’ve seen the show or don’t care about spoilage!

To start at the very end, the cliffhanger finale appears to have answered two questions: will there be a fourth series and will Jenna Coleman and Tom Hughes be a part of it. Of course we won’t know officially for maybe months to come, but I think it’s relatively rare for British seasons to end on a cliffhanger if there isn’t a follow-up season already in the bag. Maybe some examples can be given of cliffhanger cancellations - The Omega Factor, maybe? Red Dwarf went off the air for four years having left things on a cliffhanger. So maybe I’m wrong, but considering S1 and S2 both had “full stops” (albeit with S2 having a Christmas special as a postscript), if nothing else it suggests confidence.

And as for Jenna continuing - well, they could change the actress on a cliffhanger, I suppose. Maybe we’re going to jump ahead closer to Albert’s death and not directly resolve the collapse. But Jenna is on record as talking about what she wants to do in Series 4. Time will tell.

Looking at the season as a whole, although I greatly enjoyed it, it did feel perhaps a bit uneven. There was perhaps a greater emphasis on supporting characters this year, but with the Francatelli/Skerett arc cruelly cut off midway through the season, and surprisingly Ernst and Harriet being absent completely - there was greater emphasis on Lord Palmerston, who I think deserves a show of his own, and Victoria’s semi-estranged sister, Feodora, who I found was played perhaps a bit too much like a costume-drama villain. Similarly, the romance between Sophie and William the footman was well handled, but at times felt like it belonged in another series - though I loved the verbal thumping that Victoria gives Sophie’s abusive husband, and the Penge-William dynamic was interesting to see. Mrs. Turner, Skerett’s successor as Victoria’s dresser, is also an interesting addition, especially as Victoria starts to use her as sort of her own Baker Street Irregular.

I was very surprised at Ernst and Harriet being absent from the season, especially as I could have sworn David Oakes and Margaret Clunie posted about filming. Were their scenes deleted? Is it possible that, as a consolation for ITV delaying broadcast of Series 3 well beyond the US airing that this time British viewers are going to see the bonus scenes? I don’t know. But we get no more of their budding romance (which might be for the best as it was rather “doomed to history”). Also totally forgotten about is the marriage of Lord Alfred and Wilhelmina Coke that was expected to follow the Christmas season (though Paget is still present). Diana Rigg was also nowhere to be found. We still had  Penge and Brodie, and Lady Portman provided some interesting dynamics with Lord Palmerston. Peter Bowles (who I’ll always remember from his appearance in Patrick McGoohan’s The Prisoner) gets some great moments before bowing out as the Duke of Wellington. As for Francatelli and Skerrett, things seem to be going well ... then they suddenly get cut off in their prime.

I know there are people really angry about what happened to them, but I actually didn’t mind it because, realistically, once they left the palace, there really was no further value to the characters in terms of helping tell Victoria’s story. Plus, it gave real stakes and consequences to the deadly disease that afflicted Londoners at the time. It was a brave choice, and I think a good one. they couldn’t exactly kill off Albert 20 years early, right? There was also a line of dialogue implying that Lord M is no longer with us. Robert Peel’s death isn’t mentioned; instead we have John Sessions as rather undynamic Prime Minister Russell, though he’s undynamic mainly because of Lord Palmerston taking all the attention.

Also new this year were the Prince and Princess of Foreshadowing - otherwise known as Vicky and the future King Edward VII. I thought the storyline involving Bertie’s learning disability was well handled, but I did find myself eye-rolling a little bit when Bertie professes his love for his cousin Heidi. And in Vicky I could sense Daisy Goodwin giving a bit of a wink to today’s audiences; after all, it wasn’t until William and Kate’s first child was nearly born that Parliament finally did away with the “first male is the heir” rule. Had it been in place in the mid-1800s, we might have had Queen Victoria II come to the throne in 1901 (albeit only for a short while as Vicky only outlived her mother by about 7 months). The tension between Bertie and his father - which Victoria later blamed for contributing to Prince Albert’s early death - is foreshadowed pretty heavily.

What kept me truly engaged, once again, were the performances by Jenna Coleman and Tom Hughes. Both approached their roles with renewed confidence. Jenna clearly was still working on the momentum of The Cry, and Tom had himself been busy filming between seasons, and it shows. Tom’s Albert has a drive to him I haven’t seen since the Series 1 episodes about the trains and his speech about slavery; he successfully manages to overshadow Victoria several times. Jenna’s Victoria exhibits the type of maturity expected of someone who has worn the crown for more than a decade and has had 7 children (and the season doesn’t sugarcoat the impact that has on both Victoria and Albert). The show comes back to a recurring theme that Victoria doesn’t like change - in particular when people leave her. Her upset at Skerett’s resignation, her sadness at Wellington’s retirement, and her rather pointed words that may or may not have changed Sophie’s plan to elope. It’s pretty consistent. The relationship between Victoria and Albert is strained this season, less romantic at times - Victoria even comes to the conclusion Albert doesn’t love her anymore - but in the end, their relationship is more mature than ever. They aren’t teenagers anymore; to have them acting as such is perhaps unrealistic. And the result being two people still deeply in love and bonding like never before. In an odd way I could almost compare it to the Eleventh Doctor and Clara Oswald vs. the Twelfth Doctor and Clara. The first relationship was giddy and first-date like; the second was the deep bond of love (that goes “beyond romance” to quote Peter Capaldi) of the type you get when two people mature together and have life experiences together. Still in love, but differently, as Series 3 establishes.

If there is one disappointment, it’s that Series 3 didn’t - for me - produce any standout single episode, the way Series 1 had the train episode and Series 2 the Scottish episode. Perhaps the closest was the dysentery episode, though more because of its tragedy than the heartwarming feelings generated by the first two. The finale was good but it had to deal with resolving several plot thread (or at least setting them up for cliffhangers).

I know Victoria is not to everyone’s liking. I’ve seen people criticizing it for violating history in much the same way that I’ve seen Trekkies going after Star Trek Discovery for violating Trek canon. It even has a bit of Discovery vs The Orville-style rivalry happening as there are those who prefer the harder edge and Netflix trappings of The Crown. But Victoria is, above all, a generally light-hearted romantic drama. It’s not a documentary. And it certainly hews to history closer than, say, the Reign TV series about Mary Queen of Scots or, for that matter, the recent movie about Mary Queen of Scots. (That said, in casting Laurence Fox as the dynamic Lord Palmerston they did try the same thing they did with Rufus Sewell’s Lord M; Palmerston was considerably older than Fox in real life.)

Victoria Series 3 did its job - it was entertaining, it transported me out of a rather unpleasant period of my life for an hour or so, and it was good. Even if I wasn’t a Jenna Coleman fan, I’d still have watched it. I loved it.

So is Victoria done? Well, leaving the series on a cliffhanger (a couple of them) would suggest they hope to come back. Will Jenna come back? They certainly seems to have set things up that she has to return. But then in the new Harper’s UK interview out just today (March 3) she talks about going to LA after her play is finished to look for movie roles. That doesn’t sound like someone expecting to spend 8 months filming Victoria starting in the summer. She could be just covering her bases like any good actor and not assuming that a renewal is guaranteed (there are videos out there of the casts of Magnum PI and Brooklyn Nine Nine being told about their renewals and the sense of relief of continued employment is palpable). Maybe my guess is right and we’re being set up for the most depressing Christmas special ever? Time will tell, the saying goes.

Regardless, I will miss Victoria and if she is indeed finished in the role, I can’t wait to see what Jenna does next (starting with the play which is to have a National Theatre Live cinema showing).

[hookedonapirate]

To Play the Game (and win your heart)

Summary: Some people would call it a job, but to Emma and her sister, Milah, it’s a game of the heart. Play by the rules and you’ll never get hurt.

Whatever you call swindling wealthy men out of their money, this con-artist duo has it down to a tee. Milah sets up an available, rich man and gets him to marry her. Emma seduces and lures the husband into having an affair so he’ll get caught in the act. He then loses his money in the ensuing divorce.

The sisters wear a coat of armor around their hearts to keep them intact, but when they set their sights on their next mark, professional golfer Killian “Hook” Jones, Emma never imagined how hard the game could be and how easily her heart could be stolen—especially when she switches roles with Milah and becomes the one exchanging vows with the gorgeous multi-millionaire. Heartbreakers AU.

Artwork by: @distant-rose​

Rating: Mature for connivery, vixen behavior and sexual themes.

Content Warnings: This story deals with conning and manipulation and also mentions/includes children with various disabilities, and also . 

Author’s Notes: So, over a year ago, I made this post about a story idea I had in my head for a really long time. Well, guys, I am soooo excited to say that I went ahead and wrote the thing! 

Thank you @captainswanbigbang​ and all of the moderators for organizing the event and for all of your help throughout the process.

A huge shout out goes to @ilovemesomekillianjones​ for all of her help with this fic. She really kicked some butt while beta reading, and if not for her, this story would not be what it is. 

Thank you @distant-rose​ for stepping in as my artist. She is so talented and I can’t wait for everyone to see all of the art she has planned for this fic. She even made me a playlist for this story including Emma’s and Milah’s theme song, Homewrecker by Marina and the Diamonds, and some other great tracks that fit well with the theme of the fic. 

Thank you @onceuponaprincessworld​ for all of her feedback and for her constant support and for letting me bounce ideas off of her during the process. Thank you @teamhook​ for her help and ideas with scenes I was struggling with.

This is the first time I’ve written a complete MC before posting the first chapter, so it feels surreal to be presenting this to you knowing it’s finished. This story has been a struggle, especially when it came to constructing Emma’s character, and I’ve definitely had some ups and downs during the writing process, but I’m really proud of how this fic turned out and I really hope all of you enjoy it! 

There are 12 chapters, and I will be posting every Tuesday, so let me know if you would like to be tagged.

Available on: AO3 FFnet

Chapter 1: Game Tutorial 

~Rule #1: Learn how to play the game like a pro. Learn how to play from the best of ‘em. Learn how to survive and learn how to win.~

 July 9th, 2015—Boston, MS

 “Well, this is just perfect,” Milah sighs, leaning against the car with her prepaid cellular phone in one hand and a cigarette in the other, hazel eyes piercing down at the screen. Chocolatey brown locks cascade over her shoulders in thick waves, lightly affected by the gentle breeze slicing through the muggy, midsummer air. The brunette is wearing a pair of black denim shorts and a bright red t-shirt, showing off her flat, milky stomach as she waits for her sister.

 Emma and Milah are the same age, twenty-four years old, but that’s where their physical similarities end. Emma has fair skin, luminous green eyes that sparkle through her thick-framed glasses, and golden sunshine hair pulled back into a high ponytail, the ribbon curls bouncing with every step as she makes her way to the car from the Stop ‘N Gas. Alternating between scratching off a lottery ticket with the edge of her car key and chewing on the Slim Jim tucked inside the palm of her hand, she’s wearing a white tank top and slim, dark blue leggings. “Damn… I guess it’s back to work tomorrow,” Emma grumbles through a mouthful of the dry meat snack, tearing the losing ticket in half and throwing it into the trashcan next to the gas pump. As she leans back on the yellow bug next to her sister, she swallows the food in her mouth and takes another bite of the Slim Jim.

 “Well that's too bad.” Milah tucks the phone in her pocket and takes a long drag of her cigarette, blowing a puff of smoke out of her mouth and letting it drift into Emma's direction.

 “Come ooo- onn !” Attempting to wave the smoke out of her face, Emma starts coughing as she breathes some of it in. “How many times do I have to tell you that smoking is bad for you?”

 “And Slim Jims aren't? You're eating processed beef that's made up of mechanically separated chicken, and is loaded with salt and preservatives,” Milah points out scornfully.

 Emma cringes and immediately stops chewing, feeling the urge to vomit. “You mean beef, right?” she mumbles with her mouth full.

 “Nope. The meat base is made of chicken,” Milah replies pretentiously, a sly grin crossing her lips. “Sounds appetizing, doesn't it?”

 Emma’s features twist in disgust, she spits the chewed-up remains into the trash can and throws away what’s left in the wrapper with a snide retort. “At least I can't be afflicted with lung disease from eating Slim Jims. I'd rather be clogging up my arteries than breathing through a ventilator for the rest of my life. Besides, it's hazardous to smoke near a gas pump.” Emma grabs the cigarette from between her sister’s fingers and throws it on the ground before crushing it with the sole of her sandal.

 Milah becomes bug-eyed at the gesture. “What the hell, Em?! That was my last cigarette!”

 Emma sighs and rolls her eyes. “So buy another pack.”

 The brunette’s eyebrows are furrowed together as she scolds Emma, arms flailing in the air. “Yeah, I would, except, now we might have to decide on whether to spend our money on food or rent, so how am I going to buy a pack of cigarettes?!”

 Emma eyes her sister warily, her brows crinkling in confusion. “What are you talking about?”

 Milah’s lashes are pressed together as she squints, flashing Emma her famous ‘ are you seriously kidding me right now?’ mien. “Well in case you forgot, sis, we received an eviction notice this morning, and we had to replace the engine of this old piece of crap!” Milah spats resentfully, gesturing towards Emma’s prized yellow bug to convey her point.

 “Hey, my car is not a piece of crap,” Emma argues defensively. She opens the driver's door, hearing the hinges squeak as Milah makes her way to the passenger’s side.

 “I just checked my bank account, and unless you have money I don't know about, or plan on seducing the landlord to get out of paying rent, then we’re completely screwed.”

 “Well, maybe if you hadn’t spent seventy-five dollars on the sandals you just had to have, then we’d have more money.” Emma is all for buying new shoes, but not if it meant they have to live on the streets because of it.

 Milah glowers at her. “They were half off. Besides, you know what they say—give a girl the right pair of shoes and she can conquer the world. And we’re going to need a lot more than seventy-five dollars to catch up on rent. We're going to need some kind of miracle.”

 “Well, I asked for more hours at the bar, and you’ve picked up more too,” Emma reminds her.

 Milah shakes her head as they get in the car. “Still, we’re barely getting by. That engine set us way back,” she points out in frustration, buckling her seatbelt. “We need to make some money quick.”

 Emma nods in agreement, knowing her sister’s correct. “If only one of us could win the lottery or marry a rich man. I really don't want to spend the rest of my life eating ramen noodles for breakfast, lunch and dinner,” Emma mutters, firing up the engine as she fastens her seatbelt. Lifting her eyes, she catches Milah’s big hazel ones gleaming at her, a slow, snide smile crawling across her lips. The hairline on Emma’s forehead rises as she arches a brow at her sister. “What?”

 “That’s a brilliant idea, Em.”

 Waving her head doubtfully, Emma looks ahead as she shifts the gear in drive and starts pulling away from the gas pump. “Eating ramen noodles for every meal? Not really. They're incredibly high in sodium, calories and saturated fat. And weren't you just cutting me down for munching on Slim Jims?”

 “Not that. I'm talking about marrying a rich man.”

 Emma snorts as she turns out of the parking lot, not believing what she just heard slip past Milah's lips. “That would kind of be difficult to do, considering neither one of us is even dating one.”

 Milah shifts in her seat anxiously, excitement dancing in her eyes. “Em, do you remember about two years ago… when we went to visit Mal and Lily for Christmas?”

 Emma thinks about that for a moment, unsure of what Milah is getting at. Mal had taken them in for a short while, after their adoptive mother died when they were seventeen years old. Milah and Emma aren't sisters by blood but they grew up in the foster system together and became inseparable when they were both adopted by a nice woman in Indiana. They had only been out of the system for a year when Ingrid was in a fatal car accident.

 Mal is the mother of Lily Page, who was Milah’s and Emma's classmate and friend, and took them in while they finished high school. When the sisters moved out, they got an apartment together in Boston. Milah had just turned twenty-two when they went back to visit Mal and Lily for the holidays. “Yeah, I remember. She taught us how to play poker. So?”

 “She did, but do you also remember how Mal spoke to us about the con and how we weren't supposed to tell anyone about it?”

 “The con?” Emma tries to recall, but really has no clue what Milah’s talking about.

 “Yeah. Mal told us how Lily's father left when he found out she was pregnant, so after that, she gave up on love. Said it was weakness, and only married her husbands for their money. When Lily turned twenty-one, she got her mother’s husband at that time to cheat on her. Then Mal divorced him and got a huge settlement out of it. The two of them took the money, and moved on to the next poor loser who fell into their trap. And they always used fake names so they'd never get caught.”

 “Yeah, okay I remember now.” Emma regards her sister with a cautious eye. “What's your point?”

 “Don't you see, Em? We could do the same. We could have Mal show us the con, and how to pull it off successfully.”

 Shaking her head, Emma quickly declines while biting back a laugh. “I am not doing that.”

 Milah shifts in her seat, her whole body facing Emma. “Just think—we’ll never have to be broke again. We can get a few good marks, take their money and move to Hawaii and buy our own bar on the beach or something. Come on, what do you say, Em? Let's do something bold . Something crazy .”

 “We do plenty of bold and crazy things,” Emma counters with a laugh.

 “Name one.”

 “What about the time we went skinny dipping in the sea with our former bosses?”

 Milah rolls her eyes. “You just proved my point. If that's the craziest thing we’ve ever done, I think it’s time we change that.”

 Emma stares at the road ahead of her, gnawing on her bottom lip. “But we’re not like Mal and Lily. What if we end up falling in love with one of the marks? I mean, do you really think we can pull this off?”

 “Sure, why not? Neither of us have ever been good at commitments anyways. But, we've been good at one-night stands and sex with no strings.”

 Emma has to admit, Milah’s correct on all counts, yet she still feels the urge to argue her reasons. “Well, yes, but those were only physical involvements and we always go to the guy’s place, making a dash before morning. Now you're talking about one of us going on romantic dates and getting a man to fall head over heels in love and make an actual commitment before ripping his heart in two?”

 “So? I can totally do that. I'll be the primary and you can get them to have an affair; that way you won't have to worry about the relationship part. All you have to do is look good, dress sexy and be your charming self, like when you pick up a guy at the bar. Only he’ll be married and rich instead of single and broke… and he’ll be my husband.”

 This is completely insane.

 Letting out a heavy sigh, Emma can't believe she is actually considering this plan. It seems so wrong to her on many, many levels. “I don't know…”

 Milah pulls one of Emma's hands from the steering wheel, encases it between her own and looks at her sister with pleading eyes, her left wrist revealing the tattoo of a raven's wings spread across the inside.

 “Please? Just consider it, that's all I'm asking.”

 Emma also has a tattoo on the inside of her left wrist, only it’s the wings of a white swan. They both got the tattoos using their fake i.d. cards, just after getting adopted by Ingrid at age sixteen. The wings symbolize their freedom from escaping the various foster homes, and they would never take it for granted. And yet, this little scheme they are contemplating would certainly take that freedom away if they ever got caught and landed in prison.

 Emma turns her head, briefly glancing at her sister, who is making a moue with her lips. “You're insane,” she titters, waving her head in bewilderment.

 Milah grins at her cheekily. “And you love me for it.”

 $*$*$

 May 5th, 2018—the outskirts of Storybrooke, ME

 Emma’s long blonde locks whip through the air, relieved to be free from the confinement of the red-haired wig as she tilts her head to the side and smiles at her sister, Milah. They’re just leaving the outskirts of Maine in their brand new flashy red Corvette Convertible with the top down, wearing designer sunglasses and silk dresses with thousand-dollar Giuseppe Zanotti shoes. And they have eighty thousand dollars to their name which will pay for their living expenses while they sink their claws into their next new mark.

 After Mal’s training, they'd started out small, tricking strangers at grocery stores by convincing them they’d forgotten their purses, or that their cupboards were bare and they needed to feed their starving children when they were using maxed-out cards so they’d be declined. The restaurant pranks were their most popular techniques; they’d plant a strand of hair or piece of glass in their food, or they’d discolor the chicken with red food dye to make it look raw in the middle and receive a free meal out of the charade. Or they’d sit at the bar wearing their sexiest dresses, luring men into buying them all the cocktails they could possibly stand before fleeing to the cab the men paid for when the sisters became too drunk to drive, leaving the poor guys all hot and bothered with no money in their pockets.

 The more cons they played out, the easier it became. Emma was always wary about it and her conscience often got in the way, but she slowly came around because she didn't want to let her sister down. Milah, however, was a natural. She had no problem lying and flirting with strange men to get her way, and always took the lead whenever they were working as a team. Soon enough, it was on to the big leagues.

 Their first real mark was a computer geek from MIT who worked at Google, was a momma’s boy, and had never cooked a meal in his whole goddamn life. The millionaire may have been smart, but luckily he wasn't clever enough to let his brain do all the thinking or let his mother talk some sense into him. Either that, or he was just that desperate when a gorgeous brunette, who was way out of his league, showed interest in him. They were married three months later when Emma kissed him so Milah could walk in and catch them. Emma cried that night for ruining the man’s life. Several more cons and broken hearts later, the consequences of their actions gradually had less of an impact on her due to Milah’s constant encouragement and incessant reminders that it’s better than sleeping on the cold, hard floor in a crowded homeless shelter or a cardboard box on the streets.

 “So how was the wedding?”

 Milah shrugs, a half-hearted smile curving her lips. “It was fine.”

 Even through the dark shades, Emma can tell something is wrong with her sister. She can always read her like a book. “You okay?”

 “Yeah, absolutely. Why wouldn't I be?”

 “I don't know, but I know when something's bothering you. We’re sisters remember?”

 Milah's smile grows as she slowly turns up the radio. “Of course, and you're also my best friend, Em,” she adds, speaking over the music as she leans over and kisses Emma's cheek. “It's just exhausting getting married and going through a divorce, that's all. And I kinda miss my blonde wig,” she says with a small laugh before briefly glancing down and admiring her feet. “But that's okay. Give a girl the right pair of shoes…”

 “And she can conquer the world,” Emma finishes enthusiastically.

 “I promise, sis… everything… is… fantastic.”

 The song Homewrecker by Marina and the Diamonds is playing as the music envelopes their ears. Milah throws her arms up in the air and Emma laughs, raising one hand while the other is still on the wheel. She grabs her sister's hand and they start singing loudly with the words of the song. Emma can't wait to get to their next destination. “Palm Beach, Florida, here we come!” Emma shouts at the top of her lungs.

 “Whoohoooooo!” Milah utters in excitement, both of the them floating on a cloud; nothing in the word could possibly bring them down.

 $*$*$

 Approximately two days and 1,529 miles later—Palm Beach, FL

 “What about him?”

 Emma dismisses the question with a soft shake of her head, grimacing at the idea of having to kiss the old man leaving his huge mansion—he looks as though he’s on the brink of death. She's already had her fill of the previous man with a cane—Milah’s latest ex-husband. “I don't think so,” Emma grumbles, proceeding to cruise through the wealthy neighborhood. The avenue is stretching wide and flat in front of them, a perfectly-aligned row of palm trees on either side as the sunlight scatters through the gaps. They’ve been on the road for twenty-four hours over the span of two days, and regretted the decision of not traveling by plane (Emma is afraid of flying), so it’s a relief to finally reach their destination. And as tired as they are, they’re bound and determined to find their next mark.

 Emma’s eyes are spanning over the nearby houses when she spots a modestly attractive man stepping out of his Mercedes Benz. He appears to be in his mid-thirties, has curly brown hair and is wearing an Armani suit. Perhaps a CEO of a large corporation? “What about him? He's kind of cute.” Just as Emma asks, another man, this one with dark hair who is equally as attractive and young, steps out of the house greeting the other with a hug. “Brothers maybe? That could be fun.”

 Emma receives an eye roll as she stops at a red light.

 “We don't play more than one guy at a time, I can only marry one, Em. And competition creates complications, especially between brothers.”

 Despite her words, Emma continues to observe them as Milah looks ahead, but to the blonde’s dismay, the two men start kissing—making out to be more precise. “Ummm… I take that back… not brothers… and you're definitely not their type.”

 “What do you mean I'm not their type?” Milah asks, clearly offended as she tilts her head to see what Emma is looking at. “Oh… I don't do gay guys either.”

 “Maybe they're bi? You could have a ménage à trois,” Emma teases with a laugh as the light turns green and she gently steps on the gas.

 “No thanks,” Milah replies, her words laced with distaste. “Get real, Em. Maybe you're into that, but I'm not.”

 Emma shrugs. “Suit yourself.”

 Half an hour later, they arrive at the condo they're staying in for the next two or three months, depending on how long it takes Milah to get the next man to marry her. The last one took two, but that was a new record for her. And he was only worth six hundred thousand. His last name was Gold, but he sure as hell wasn't made of it.

 They enter their room, blown away by the accommodations as they take a tour of the place. The beachfront apartment contains a large living space with a tan leather sectional, a matching loveseat and a large flat screen TV in the lounge area. There’s a separate laundry room in the apartment, and the kitchen is equipped with granite countertops and all of the stainless steel appliances they could possibly need.

 The glass patio doors afford a spectacular view of the ocean, and opens to a balcony scattered with outdoor dining furniture and a sunbed.

 In each of the two bedrooms, there’s a full patio window and a four-poster queen size bed adorned with a mountain of frilly pillows and silk drapes surrounding the bed. The en-suite bathroom that joins the two bedrooms contains a jacuzzi tub and shower encased in glass doors.

 Emma and Milah are squealing in delight, completely in awe as they soak everything in. Between all of the crowded foster homes and the studio apartments they lived in which were ran by slumlords, this is by far the nicest place they've ever stayed in.

 After getting settled and unpacking some of their things, Milah decides to test out the bathtub while Emma goes for a walk. It’s still early in the evening and she’s utterly exhausted, but she craves some time on the beach before retiring to her bed. The ocean always calms her.

 $*$*$

 Hook Jones is in jeopardy of losing his world number one ranking this week at the Players Championship in Ponte Verde, Florida. According to the scenarios presented by Twitter user @VC606, there are four players who could overtake Jones this week.–thebiglead.com

 The sun is cresting the horizon, leaving an array of colors across the sky as Killian moors his vessel to the port. He normally likes to start the mornings on his yacht whenever he can catch a break, but watching the sunset is just as calming. It allows him to reflect and plan his game before the tour. Some days are a zoo, with the cameras and crowds following him around on the green; the feeling of being closed in is the worst part about being a golfer. Being on the sea is his escape.

 It’s really quite ironic because ever since he was a child, he's been surrounded by people, even after he lost his family. He’s traveled around the world, and when he’s in Palm Beach he spends a lot of time with the children, who are his biggest fans. As much as he enjoys being around them, he’s always craving to have someone with him while he’s on the tour—someone by his side… someone along for the ride.

 With his vessel securely anchored in place, Killian makes his way from the marina and passes a few patrons, offering a courteous smile and a small wave. Most of them are familiar to him, and some are obviously here on vacation.

 Normally, tourists wear shorts when it’s sixty-eight degrees and end up looking like lobsters after spending four hours in the sun. Locals, on the other hand, wear winter jackets when it’s a touch below seventy degrees and always have deep brown tans. Killian can always distinguish a local from a tourist, not only by the hue of their tan, or lack thereof, and the way they dress, but also by the excitement buzzing in their eyes. Most of them spend their days snapping photos, drinking in the view and thinking of ways to move here, while the residents of Palm Beach spend their lives trying to find a way out.

 Nearing the beach, Killian feels the cool breeze touching his skin and blowing through his hair. This is one of cooler evenings in May, although he’s been accustomed to much more frigid temperatures from all of his traveling.

 His mind is frazzled with thoughts of the new foundation he had spent many years dreaming up and planning, the charity event to kick it off and the Players championship, where he is hoping to maintain his number one ranking. With everything going on, he has to be mentally prepared for the game, but he’s not worried. He’s always hungry for more wins, no matter how many he already has in the bag. Golf is his true love, and the game is all about focus and preparation.

 However, nothing could've prepared him for the vision currently demanding all of his focus when his eyes fall upon a beautiful woman. Well, an angel to be more precise, with skin fair and pure, golden hair shimmering, even in the dim light of the evening air.

 Bloody hell, she is breathtaking.

 She’s walking barefoot along the beach, wearing a white layered mini skirt, a beige sweater and a wide-brimmed sun hat, her long golden hair flowing in soft waves. Her gorgeous legs go on for days, she has high cheekbones and glossy pink lips, and her emerald green eyes are lit up like a firefly in the night. Her creamy skin looks like porcelain, and a calm expression is settled over the beautiful features of her face as she gazes across the ocean.

 She is definitely not from around here. Even if not for all of the evident signs, he would remember seeing a lass like her.

 Killian watches from the shadows of the pier, trying not to be seen. There’s an aura about her that pulls him in like waves of the sea. Before he knows it, she is walking away, leaving him dizzy and discombobulated as he struggles to remember what he was doing. He has to shake his head and collect his bearings, heading for home in his blue Mustang, but how in the bloody hell is he supposed to forget a woman like her?

[healthislit]

Discrimination and Illness

Using both “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” by Ken Kesey and Angels in America by Tony Kushner I plan to outline how patients were treated in the context of both texts during the times they were published in the real world by either those in a medical profession, the world, or themselves. 

BACKGROUND OF MENTAL HEALTH FACILITIES: 

To start, a Psychopathic Hospital as stated by the online Merriam-Webster dictionary is “a hospital for the observation, examination, treatment, or temporary retention of patients showing evidence of mental disturbance”. This was the version of the mental hospital that would have been more accurate to the time the novel was originally published and while this is what it was called on paper,  Kesey paints what could be seen as a more accurate image of mental health facilities during the time because there was also a strong lack of regulations, especially regarding patient rights and as is seen even today with all sorts of medical regulations patients are still treated without the respect they deserve no matter the affliction, except now its behind closed doors and professionals who do this do so with the assumption they won’t have to face any consequences. 

CUCKOO’S NEST: 

The staff of the mental hospital (including Nurse Ratched) were more like guards than those prepared to really assist those afflicted. Because there was little to no proper federal regulation medical staff had complete control over the patients while they were in the facility. And as I pointed out previously even if these regulations existed at the time it wouldn’t have made a difference regarding the patients because Nurse Ratched was very well versed in manipulation tactics. Or maybe it was simply just that easy to manipulate those who were less mentally sound than she was. This could be said because there is evidence in the character of Randle McMurphy who came into the mental hospital with a stable mind and would fight Nurse Ratched on changing things within the hospital. It could be said if any of the other patients were like McMurphy they would have argued about some of the things that were being called “treatments”. 

When the medications were being given to the patients which the reader witnesses for the first time, McMurphy walks up to take the medication. He attempts to ask the nurses what he’s putting into his body and the response he gets is that they don’t have to give him that information and he has to take it. This would very clearly shock anyone if they saw this happening today because no matter what patients or guardians of the patient are required to be given this information. 

Another violation of patient rights if they existed at this point in history would be electroshock therapy. While still practiced in few places today, its become increasingly unpopular as its a procedure where death can occur of the brain or the body. In “Cuckoo’s Nest” this was a scare tactic Nurse Ratchet used when patients lost control, either through a mental breakdown or mindful defiance as shown in the scene above. The scene in the novel differs from this because its both McMurphy and Chief Bromden who get into a fight with the aides due to George’s phobia regarding cleanliness. To further explain, the scene in the book describes the characters who went on the fishing trip coming back. Nurse Ratched tells them they need to get cleaned up and George begs them not to use the salve they sprayed him with. 

When Cheswick stands up to Nurse Ratched the reader is already aware he’s in the ward voluntarily. In theory, if a patient were checked voluntarily into a facility and becomes angry (clearly not having a breakdown or an episode) about something being taken away from him that he has the right to (his cigarettes) he is very outraged by this and gains the courage to stand up to her because McMurphy has set that example. Nurse Ratched responds to this outburst by calling the aides to take Cheswick to the disturbed ward of the hospital so he would receive electroshock therapy and afterward Cheswick is suspected to have killed himself when his fingers got stuck in a hole in the pool. Furthermore, Nurse Ratched’s keeping the cigarettes from them is clearly not about their well-being because not only did people not know just how bad cigarettes were to smoke, if they did in this text it wouldn’t have mattered because the Nurse Ratched didn’t have much concern for the medications the patients were taking. The FDA hadn’t been around that long with its existence only just starting in 1906 and there was sure to be some regulations which needed to be created or upgraded still. 

Billy Bibbit was 31 years old and had a severe stutter which is considered to be a speech disorder, not a mental disorder. Nurse Ratched and his mother were friends and she was able to convince Billy to check himself into the facility where she was able to manipulate him through his relationship with his mother, making him the most vulnerable to her. This was the moment for many readers that we helplessly read the unfolding of just how monstrous Nurse Ratched could really be. Aside from her cold, uncaring stance we see when she doesn’t tell Billy she won’t tell his mother and his resulting breakdown, her decision to have him put in a room with doctor’s equipment he was able to use to kill himself. 

In the 1950′s, the setting of Kesey’s novel, racism was rampant in America. Because of this it surprises me just as much as it doesn’t because the aides in the hospital gave in to the voice that said they could do whatever they wanted to the patients because they didn’t have any rights like African Americans were supposed to. Their same uncaring attitudes for the patients and the pain they helped inflict--both physical and mental--was something they could have said wasn’t right. They didn’t have the rights they deserved just like the patients in the hospital and while the situations weren’t the same they were still all people and deserved better. You could argue because of Racism they didn’t want to push any buttons, but when you see the extents they go to for control that argument is clearly invalid. They could have simply restrained the patients but with them getting into fist fights and taunting them as they often did Bromden with the nickame “chief broom” its makes the reader really want to be in the book themselves so they could be in a position to help. 

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND OF AIDS: 

Jennifer Power states clearly the overall belief when it comes to AIDS before HIV was found was “...that it was contagious and deadly” and that it “...merged with existing homophobic attitudes to produce and image of gay men as diseased and dangerous--guilty not only of misdirected sexual predilections but of their newfound potential to infect and kill...”. Once this further influenced homophobia it was a bigoted ideology that exists in the minds of many still today but was heard outright more from the early 1980′s to at least the 1990′s which would put us right in the era Angels in America was published (1991). 

ANGELS IN AMERICA: 

In scene nine of Tony Kushner’s play, Roy goes to an appointment he has with his doctor where the reader finds out he is having symptoms of sarcoma, which turns into HIV, which turns into AIDS. Roy goes on to insist he’s chooses not to use the homosexual title because its a powerless one but instead he describes himself as a heterosexual man who “...fucks around with guys” (Kushner, 47). Roy is dealing with denial in the worst form: He chooses to continue seeing himself as straight despite being treated for two previous STD’s by his doctor, Henry and he is discriminating against himself out of fear because he’s earned a powerful enough position to where he can call the President directly and doesn’t want to lose this powerful position he’s in. Because Roy antagonizes Henry enough, he snaps and tells him to figure out how to get on the list for AZT, an experimental drug which he can’t even get Roy on. Roy’s doctor after treating him for such a long time (as is insinuated in this scene) clearly cares about Roy and there is no sign of mistreatment here from anyone except Roy himself. Roy is looking to keep it that way, even going so far as to tell his Henry to say its liver cancer if anyone were to ask. Not only will it uproot his entire life, in his mind it will subject him to an overwhelming amount of homophobia. 

Prior and Louis are at his grandmother’s funeral when Prior tells him he’s contracted sarcoma and early warning sign of AIDS. Louis’ immediate concern is getting as far away from him as possible, not because of the illness itself but because he doesn’t know how to be there for Prior through this. Granted you could feel a small amount of sympathy for him considering his grandmother just died, but that goes away when he shows its just in him not to be there for those who really need him during difficult times. Prior doesn’t have the same option as Roy to hide, so not only would he be expected to experience discrimination based on his sexuality, everyone is going to know he contracted the AIDS virus which could make it harder for him to face. 

For this purpose there doesn’t seem to be many in medical professions that outwardly discriminate, but can carefully express their disgust anyway as seen with Roy and Henry. At least, this isn’t seen in the screenplay because its not exactly the purpose and it discusses other issues at certain points of the play. Most of the “ discrimination” comes from themselves out of fear and berating which is still highly important. Unlike Cuckoo’s Nest, however, there are still people there for Prior besides Louis, like Belize who time-and-time again calls Louis out when he’s saying all the wrong things in defense of himself from the beginning to the end of the play. 

By this point the Hippocratic Oath was in effect and because of this physicians couldn’t refuse to treat patients with AIDS, but they were in a position where they could make sure the patient didn’t come back to see them for treatment which is what can be assumed to have happened to many patients with AIDS at this time, but its certainly nothing to the emotional distress someone who contracts the illness can impose on themselves. 

Whether caged in your own mind and body or behind sterile walls, the suffering is just as painful in both texts. The improvements we’ve achieved in both fields are immense and were greatly needed. Hopefully conditions will continue to improve for patients suffering from any of the issues suggested through compassion and the world will be an even better place. 

Disclaimer: I own none of the videos or images used. All credit for quotes, definitions etc., go to the authors!s I will add citations to this post shortly, I in no way am taking credit for anyone else’s work, just mine. 

[laceyspencer]

Return to the Spirit of the Athens School (Raphael, 1509 – 1511) and to Humanistic Culture- Juniper Publishers

History

The School of Athens is one of a group of four main frescoes on the walls of the Stanza (those on either side centrally interrupted by windows) that depict distinct branches of knowledge. Each theme is identified above by a separate tondo containing a majestic female figure seated in the clouds, with putti bearing the phrases: “Seek Knowledge of Causes,” “Divine Inspiration,” “Knowledge of Things Divine” (Disputa), “To Each What Is Due.” Accordingly, the figures on the walls below exemplify Philosophy, Poetry (including Music), Theology, and Law. The traditional title is not Raphael’s. The subject of the “School” is actually “Philosophy,” or at least ancient Greek philosophy, and its overhead tondo-label, “Causarum Cognitio”, tells us what kind, as it appears to echo Aristotle’s emphasis on wisdom as knowing why, hence knowing the causes, in Metaphysics Book I and Physics Book II. Indeed, Plato and Aristotle appear to be the central figures in the scene. However, all the philosophers depicted sought knowledge of first causes. Many lived before Plato and Aristotle, and hardly a third were Athenians. The architecture contains Roman elements, but the general semi-circular setting having Plato and Aristotle at its centre might be alluding to Pythagoras’ circumpunct (Figure 1).

Go to

Economy Social Science or Positive Science? The End of a Sociocultural Model

A visit to the Vatican Museums gives a chance to explore the history of humanity through its genius and works of art. The masterpieces found there illustrate the sense of aesthetic and cultural values of that history, the spirit of those who created them, the inspiration and willpower that guided their task. In short, what human beings have been capable of producing is simply amazing.Initially visitors admire the beauty of these works, often without asking themselves what the artist wanted to express, just taking in the exterior image while failing to observe the sense and spirit that breathes through their works. Among these masterpieces, a really outstanding one (and very pertinent to this book) is The School of Athens that Raphael painted starting in 1508 when, aged 25, he was called to Rome by Pope Julius II. Raphael grew up during the Italian High Renaissance and drew on legendary characters who have contributed to creating world history as we know it today, adding his own contribution [1-5].

In that extraordinary, perhaps unique period, artists, poets, intellectuals, scientists, philosophers, mathematicians and physicists met and exchanged ideas in an ongoing dialogue about the essence of man, which was the focus of their interest. A cultural scene free of dogma and intolerance was created, one open to a cross-fertilization of ideas that led to a great leap forward in creative and intuitive thought. A similar cultural scene had previously existed during the golden age of Athens and the thinking of that time can rightly be considered one of the cornerstones of our history and culture [6-8]. In his fresco Raphael portrays the characters with such masterly brush strokes that even their spirit reaches out to fire the imagination and penetrate the heart of those viewing it. The leading lights of that era are all there, gathered around the two central characters – Plato, his finger pointing skywards to indicate the world of ideas and the spirit, and Aristotle, who instead stretches out his hand palm down to indicate the real world and scientific experience [9].

The world of ideas and the spirit can never be divorced from an empirical quest for truth. So, everything must be focused on a search for what is true, for beauty, to promote the primary aim – the fulfilment of human happiness. But the world was by no means a paradise in either ancient Athens or in Raphael’s time. Both were times in which life was generally extremely hard, unrefined, times of trepidation and suffering. And yet despite these conditions human beings managed to achieve moments of sublime creativity [10].

Today we ought to be in a completely different situation from that of Plato and Raphael, thanks to the progress and power of technical knowledge. A knowledge which has become an end for the modern world, one that should have provided answers to satisfy our primary needs, releasing us from our “shackles”, reducing inequalities, freeing us, at least in part, from a life of fatigue and suffering in physical terms. Scientific knowledge should have helped to create a situation in which our free, inventive mind could once again be the driving force of life, leading us to that dimension of spiritual joy we admire in splendid works of art [11].

This is what Keynes thought would happen. In his essay Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren written in 1930 he said: ‘Thus for the first time since his creation man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem – how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, which science and compound interest will have won for him [...]. The love of money as a possession – as distinguished from the love of money to the enjoyments and realities of life – will be recognised for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal, semipathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease’. Sadly, this has not been the case, in fact, the very opposite has happened. Technical-instrumental knowledge has become moral knowledge, an indisputable truth and so in no way open to discussion [12]. It dictates the rules for everyday life to the point that humanity itself has become its instrument. The technical culture of modern times has failed to achieve the aim that was hoped for. However, it is not the culture that is at fault but the improvidence of homo sapiens.

We have failed to redistribute wealth; inequalities, famine and poverty have increased; we have not resolved major health problems afflicting most of the world’s population. Technical knowledge has separated us from our souls, made us sterile and impersonal, incapable of true human relations and the profound sentiments of love and joy. Unless, that is, these are linked to the sole satisfaction of material and fleeting pleasures. We have imprisoned thought, disintegrated family bonds and forced youngsters to roam the streets without hope. All of us have made this mistake, given that responsibilities are always personal, even if at different levels. This modern age needs rethinking if we are not to find ourselves once more facing chaos [13].

The first step we must take is to ask ourselves if all this talk about the economy being the cause of the crisis of these times is true. Can we continue to think that all the misfortunes mentioned previously are the result of the malfunctioning of rules governing the economy? Or should we admit that a cultural model which has produced the opposite results to those intended has collapsed? Our lack of a social and spiritual life, of creative and intuitive thought, the drabness of an existence in which we are no longer capable of questioning the meaning of life itself ‒ can all of this depend on a malfunctioning of the economy? Is economy social science o positive science? We urgently need to review our recent history [14]. We must question the role we have assigned to the economic sciences and methods of study these have been based on for the past thirty years. Methods effectively founded based on the fundamental idea that economic sciences and the underlying choices and decisions involved are “totally” independent from human nature. So, this means our emotions have no bearing on these choices and decisions. The assumption has therefore been that given equal conditions and information the results will always be the same, thereby endorsing a rational approach that cannot be questioned.

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The New “Leviathan” Is Finance as an Unconventional Weapon: The End of Real Economy and Human Spirit. History ‘S Evolution

Instead the technical-rational culture applied to a social science like economics has produced a non-science. Friedrich von Hayek already warned us of this in his speech on accepting the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 1974: ‘It seems to me that this failure of the economists to guide policy more successfully is closely connected with their propensity to imitate as closely as possible the procedures of the brilliantly successful physical sciences – an attempt which in our field may lead to outright error. […] This brings me to the crucial issue. Unlike the position that exists in the physical sciences, in economics and other disciplines that deal with essentially complex phenomena, the aspects of the events to be accounted for about which we can get quantitative data are necessarily limited and may not include the important ones.

Hayek’s warnings didn’t manage to halt the diffusion of a model that we could define as “the mirage of rationality”. Today we find ourselves having to face the failure of a model that has separated the nature of people from the results of their activity. We have ignored six thousand years of history with an arrogance that can only have been inspired by the hubris of technical science and interests that the latter ought to have legitimated. The inseparable bond between the technical culture and economics, as recognized and studied, leaves the door wide open to humanity’s ancestral greed. A limitless hunger for profit realizable only through material goods. It creates the very system we are prisoners of today and is the source of a deadly risk. The risk of a society in which we become objectivised and lose all sense of ourselves, of our life, our feelings and creative ability [15-18].

It is artistic masterpieces that show how our most intimate being is rooted in a sense of creative spirituality as opposed to being concerned exclusively with an obtuse rationality for its own sake. So today the time has come to again make economics a tool and not an end. A process must be launched to humanize it, abandoning the absoluteness of a rational approach that repudiates history. Rethinking our role and the sense of our life is the real challenge we must face all together, for ourselves and for future generations [19]. In this context, some declarations on the non-role of the humanistic (classical) school and culture provide evidence of shallowness, a limited real culture, falling into dangerous demagoguery because in the long run, despite all the good intentions of this world, the lesson that history teaches go unlearnt. In this sense, among the “good” reforms - adjectives do not replace content and must be defined with respect to the ends (good for what?) - the purely technical school certainly has some positive aspects but the debate on the humanistic school and on the uselessness of dead languages explains better than any other argument the aforementioned perception of the incorrect understanding of the real historical moment we are living. The judgement of the futility of dead languages is a dangerous cultural drift of the debate on the best type of school in the world - the classical (in this author’s opinion) - precisely today that humanism is the path to take to overcome the era of barbarians, as Vico defined the extreme limit of the social and moral degradation that marks “the courses and recourses” of a cyclical history. The great G.B. Vico who wrote “New Science” in 1725 had had a stroke of genius on the cyclical nature of history because the nature of its actor has never changed and history is dictated by the emotional nature of man perennially struggling between the path of aggression and that of solidarity - Eros and Thanatos in ancient Greek – which the genius Freud, profound scholar of Greek and Latin, had analysed drawing on the psychic structure of human nature [20-22].

Historical periods alternate according to the prevalence of one or other social model tending to greater or lesser solidarity or aggressiveness, in this case, the conflicting socio-cultural context contributes to enhancing the aggressive part of the human soul, ending up in the pains of war. The pain of confrontation between men then leads to wisdom as the great Aeschylus and the Greek tragedians - Sophocles and Euripides - had foreseen; 2000 years passed before another great tragedian such as Shakespeare joined their ranks. Man is not naturally good, otherwise religions would not state as the first commandment “love thy neighbor Fas thyself”. Vico evidenced the changing of the time of the gods, heroes and barbarous men representing the worst period from which man must try to return to the time of the gods [23].

The long waves that run through the times of history show the drama of human life from the Greek thought whose ancient language is not commonly spoken today but the content has contributed and still contributes to the development of Western civilization and represents its cultural matrix. Is it better to have living languages but dead thought or dead languages but living thought? We are at the end of a socio-cultural model that has raised technical and instrumental knowledge to incontrovertible truth by attributing it purposeful and metaphysical value that it does not have, and so the questions we had asked of philosophy, religion and mythology, today we ask of medicine and the measurable science. The single technical-rational thought has removed from our lives the fundamental rights written in 1948 with the blood of two devastating wars, stifling creative and intuitive thinking. We have returned to a type of Alexandrian, industrious, scientific culture dedicated only to the facts but without the ability to make real and important discoveries for the profound life of man and incapable of creating a single true value [24].

The deification of technology and the principle of utility have as their “nemesis” the increasing aridity in the field of artistic, philosophical, religious and even scientific achievements. Technique becomes an end and man the means. At least since Keynes, a profound scholar of classical studies, no general theory has been produced and precisely in the “The End of Laissez-Faire” he wrote, “A study of the history of opinion is preliminary to the emancipation of the mind. I do not know which makes a man more conservative – to know nothing but the present, or nothing but the past” [25]. In the end, history vindicated him and disavowed the foundations of the Chicago School who helped deify finance. After Keynes, economics and finance took on the role of the philosopher’s stone that solves the problems of life, and economics from a moral and social science has been unnaturally turned into an exact science. This is the great deception of a science devoid of scientific foundations whose deviated nature was first condemned by Aristotle in “Politica”, which students today should read, and not only those in classical schools [26].

Economics - oikia nomos - was born as and remains a social science, only the interested can consider it exact and only in order to use it as a monetary weapon with the power to destabilize social systems. Only a return to the convertibility of money into a real asset -the gold exchange standard -can remove it from the mythological context in which it was falsely issued and return it to a means of exchange and not a value. Today we are in a profound anthropological crisis, a kind of transition between the late Roman Empire and the Middle Ages, as Vico wrote, “historia se repetit”. We do not yet understand the roots of our problems, so we continue to worsen the state of things.

Every single day we see all types of devastation and continue talking about the economic crisis and not the real crisis of man as a person who has given up thinking, leaving us at the mercy of ancient ghost that seemed to have vanished after two devastating world wars but duly reappeared in a global age as the biblical damnation. “… The educational system, which is first and foremost a training school devoted to ‘useful knowledge’ and the crafts. Its chief business is to prepare successful businessmen, craftmen, engineers and technicians, lawyers, doctors, teachers, preachers and so on. Mastery is sought in such arts as amassing a fortune, farming, home cooking, barbering, the invention of machines, research work, teaching and preaching. Elementary, high-school and college education – all are oriented principally in the same direction, paying scant attention, if any, to the forgotten purpose of real knowledge and wisdom: the nature of true reality and true values” wrote Pitirim Sorokin in 1941 in his work “The Crisis of our Age��, which would seem to have been written in the future [27].

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The Role of Humanistic Culture

The humanities school (this from someone who went to a scientific school, yet with great attention to classical studies; but at the time, the school closest to home was chosen) was introduced by Giovanni Gentile in his last book “Genesis and the Structure of Society” where he theorized the humanism of work, anticipating the problems of today and noting that classical culture was crucial to develop thinking and creativity, qualities which today have withered. The history of man shows that knowledge and thought are fundamental to carry society forward over time.

The a priori forms of prevention are harmful and short-term, classical studies marked the lives of many who carried the world forward: Fermi, Rita Levi Montalcini, Maiorana, Dulbecco, only in the sciences in Italy but also Pirandello, Carducci ... But if we look at history, we have Keynes, Hayek, von Mises, Freud, Bertrand Russell, Einstein, Marx, Leibnitz, Heisenberg. Bernard Shaw said, “ Napoleon and other great men were makers of empires, but these eight men whom I am about to mention were makers of universes and their hands were not stained with the blood of their fellow men. I go back 2,500 years and how many can I count in that period? I can count them on the fingers of my two hands. Pythagoras, Ptolemy, Kepler, Copernicus, Aristotle, Galileo, Newton and Einstein -- and I still have two fingers left vacant”, all with the same classical culture as inspiration.

Humanity over centuries has sent little men to appear for us at the edge of the abyss on which the Earth travels, the suns blazes and light parades. All great politicians who extended the Commonwealth studied at Oxford and Cambridge, where the basic subjects were classical from Greek and Latin, they absorbed a more integral vision of human nature and the way in which history evolves. Since the technical-rational cultural model has prevailed, we have lost touch with the flow of history because we only look at the future as a guarantee of success. Thus, “homo sapiens”, as we presume to call ourselves, while seemingly very attentive to understanding the causes and effects of physical ills is no longer able to understand the relationship between cause and effect in his history. He behaves as if the past had never existed and as if history had never shown similar situations to those, he now finds himself before, pushed to a form of repetitive coercion.

The consequences of this historical blindness are before our eyes every day, seeing the disasters of US foreign policy dominated by the idea of technical power and unable to understand history because its ruling class has lost touch with it and has forgotten the cultural lesson of the founding fathers who were accustomed to speaking in Latin and Greek. A cultural model that is also experiencing a dramatic moment of social instability due to poverty, unemployment, inequality, devastating social pathologies, but continuously hidden and masked by the media mystifying reality.

If the principle of utility is the only principle applied, then only that which is useful or instrumental serves, and life itself becomes a means to achieving short-term material desires. If this principle is invoked to denounce classical studies as non-vocational, the ancient languages have died but the thought that lies beneath them shines more than ever, and the study of their structure helps to develop the most important thing that man can do but seems to have unlearned by only studying technical subjects, namely, “thought”. We have lost the ability to think, because thinking takes effort, time, does not pay right away and is dangerous, as Bertrand Russell said, “Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth – more than ruin, more even than death [28].

Thought is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible; thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habits; thought is anarchic and lawless, indifferent to authority, careless of the well-tried wisdom of the ages. Thought looks into the pit of hell and is not afraid... Thought is great and swift and free, the light of the world, and the chief glory of man …. But if the thought is to be held by many, not the privileged few, we must deal with fear. It is fear which stops the man, lest their cherished beliefs are not going to be illusions, fear that the institutions with which they live will not be harmful, fear that they themselves will not be less worthy of respect would have assumed”.

Given what has been said previously it seems we need to rethink our way of being a society. The desire to give space to humanity’s sense of omnipotence again seems to have whisked it back in history – to the myths of Prometheus, of Icarus – and force it once more to face the eternal dilemma of human destiny. A more social vision of life will be needed in order to re-pacify people with themselves, one in terms of relationships and not as single individuals, and to redefine the priorities of their needs. This doesn’t mean curtailing progress but conceiving it in a different way. In this sense the priority becomes to refocus on people’s spiritual dimension, today subordinated to the physical one, which determines choices and priorities of their needs. The spiritual and religious dimension are not closely bound to a religious belief because the ability to “feel” is within each one of us, it is innate. Today it is dormant but not lost, our task is to recover it, starting from each single moment of every day of our life, in relationships that bind us to others.

We need to return to a relationship with the natural world that the real economy can help reconstruct. Contact with this facilitates growth of the social dimension, not only considered as a series of mere chemical but also emotional reactions, which must once more become the subject of economics and other social sciences. All of this doesn’t mean renouncing the vital contribution of sciences in our life, but the acceptance of evidence that they cannot be absolute values, they cannot be considered moral knowledge to the point that we are induced to consider only the material dimension of our life. The return to a more spiritual dimension is a course to follow because it is written in the agenda of our history that, as European philosophy has attempted to describe, seems to follow a continual alternation over time of the predominance of material decadence and spiritual revival. In fact, we cannot renounce our spiritual dimension without renouncing living: we have a permanent nostalgia for our own being beyond material aspects, a nostalgia that is alive in us like embers that lie dormant under ashes.

In his work Homo creatus est written in 1986, Hans Urs von Balthasar speaks of “man’s nostalgia”, reminding us that this need for a spiritual dimension is an innate feeling, first mentioned in Greek philosophy that aimed to explain the sense of harmony of life. Starting from Plato’s Symposium, in which all the participants discuss Eros who has nostalgia and flies off towards the supreme and divine beauty, to Plotinus’ key concept of conversion (epistrophé) and of nostalgia that hastens towards the return (hormé), all of Greek philosophy only considered the issue of the true nobility of man. Man, who must not be content with fleeting pleasures and joys unless he wants to renounce satisfying his aspiration to happiness. The focus of this search for wisdom (philosophia) is always the blissful life as being man’s aim and his ultimate essential form, towards which he tends after his conversion from mere earthly captivity (think of Plato’s allegory of the cave). Given that, as we have said, the difference between the natural and supernatural was unknown in Greek philosophy, it was expressed in the fall of the human soul from the divine heights from which, however, man brings a spark that forces him to feel nostalgia for what was once his country, the paradise lost.

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Conclusion

Begin Again from People, The Sense of Humanistic Culture

Sixty-five years have passed since various premonitory considerations were made by Europe’s philosophers. During this period the facts have borne out their intuitions as to the danger of relying on a technical culture alone to provide guidance for society. Today it would seem that the role of feelings is making headway in people’s hearts ‒ appropriate answers and conduct in the face of change can no longer be postponed. It is time for people to realize what happens to a society when it fails to invest in social relations and the need imposed by history to again make social capital the focus of our interests. We must understand that social capital cannot be replaced by economic capital. A good society is always the precondition for growth of economic values and empirical evidence would seem to confirm this thesis.

But the question is whether we will manage in time to dominate this current, limitless greed and aggressiveness in favour of a greater focus on a sense of fraternity and solidarity expressed by love for others. Homo sapiens really does seem to be rather stubborn as regards understanding its own errors. A species that seems to be very attentive as regards learning the causes and effects of physical ills but that has not yet managed to correlate causes and effects in its history. Conceptually, similar situations to those we find ourselves having to face today have occurred before. Perhaps this explains why history is ignored, as if by doing so erects a kind of barrier to the fear of having to face suffering. Whether Homo sapiens will manage to deserve this appellation is difficult to say, time will tell if intelligence will turn out to be a benefit or a curse. Should it turn out to be a curse, this will only be because of a failure to use a truly precious gift, namely, our “humanity”, in an intelligent way.

The past few centuries have seen revolutions, wars and other tragic events that have ended, even in recent times, with solemn declarations of peace and democracy. But unfortunately, in the brief course of one generation they seem to disappear. And so, the history of progress of civilizations continues a course filled with doubts. Answers to the needs of an increasingly global society represented by a culture that relies on a single philosophy – technical knowledge as an end in itself – is showing it has reached the end of the line with the collapse of society and the very essence of humanity.

The time has come to rethink economic studies, making a move away from the technical-rational paradigm that has proved inappropriate for the aim assigned to it, to a different one capable of broadening the field of studies to include human nature as a decisive variable. An approach that considers human beings as “individuals” in an integral sense in order to provide a complete and constructive contribution towards the development of society. Absolute faith in scientific progress has ended up by creating an exaggerated sense of omnipotence that in the end has turned against us, because our ability to govern this tumultuous growth has not kept pace with it. Humanity has become so infatuated with its conquests that people have lost sight of themselves, ending up by considering their very own lives as if they were just another consumer good. As Guardini said, people must again find the ability to bring the excess of power that has been created over their lives under control by returning to an order of things capable of restoring harmony within themselves and the world

‘In a context of uncertainty unparalleled in history, one that in no way compares to developments in our ability to dominate nature, people now aspire to a valid order that can remain under their power. An order that is both useful and promotes human progress, capable of reconciling humanity with the extent of its scientific knowledge, which today is perceived as an absolute value, placing it at the service of the search for a more widespread common good’ [9]. Now, perhaps, the boundary of the enigma and this hope seem better defined and can therefore lead to a clearer answer for everyone, while remaining fully aware, however, that responsibilities are always an individual concern. Let us hope that in the middle of all this confusion and uncertainty we manage to see the light and find the right path to follow. A path that humanity must find in order to fulfil its destiny and its unique and creative mission on this Earth (Figure 2).

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[scannain]

The New Music is a new Irish feature film currently in post-production. The film aims to shine a light on Young Onset Parkinson’s Disease, a rare and little known condition which affects people under fifty.

Young Parkinson’s Ireland, which was set up in 2016, suspect that there may be at least 500 undiagnosed sufferers of Young Onset Parkinson’s in the country. Sufferers who may be reluctant to come forward due to a self or socially imposed stigma as Parkinson’s Disease has been traditionally seen as a “old person’s” disease.

The film, which is written and directed by Italian native Chiara Viale, follows the struggles of Adrian, a young gifted musician , who leaves home and heads to Dublin in an attempt to deal with the news of his diagnosis. Despite this debilitating condition, Adrian (played by Dublin-born actor Cilléin McEvoy) joins a punk band as a keyboard player and rediscovers his life through music and friendship.

Filming was completed at the end of 2017 and the production team have launched a crowd-funding campaign to reach out to the public to help them fund the post-production expenses of the film – editing, sound, music, marketing and festival entries. 20% of all funds raised will go directly to Young Parkinson’s Ireland in addition to all future income from the film.

Scannain caught up with Viale to talk about about her background in film and her motivations for making The New Music

Chiara Viale- Writer/Director of The New Music

How did you originally get involved in Filmmaking? I started writing when I was very young and I have always been passionate about cinema. After finishing my BA in English in foreign language and literature I moved to Ireland and joined the Dublin Filmmakers Collective where I developed my first scripts and had my first on-set experiences. At the same time, I started developing my own independent projects: in 2016 I produced, wrote and directed my first short film Be Frank which was nominated for the Rising Star award at the Underground Cinema Awards in 2017. Also in 2017 I produced, wrote and directed the short Clown and produced the short Clear The Air  which are currently in post production.

And what brought you to Ireland? I’ve been in love with Ireland since I first visited as a teenager. After secondary school I spent a year in Dublin working as an au-pair to improve my English. I had always entertained the thought of coming back to Ireland and I finally moved to Dublin in 2015. I am in love with the creative atmosphere that can breath in this country and the extraordinary people I met along the way. I don’t believe my dreams and aspirations could find a better place than Ireland to become a reality.

Where did the core idea for The New Music originate? My approach to writing is strongly related to feelings and emotions and more often than not the concepts of my stories are born through an image, which conveys a certain feeling. The New Music is no exception: I imagined a character who is lying to himself and the people he cares about and although he knows that these lies can ruin everything he has and loves, he can’t stop. Telling the truth is simply too hard for him to handle, because it would force him to face his own fear.

I envisioned a character with an incurable illness which he hides from everyone and that is eating away at him from the inside. Then I created a starting environment for him that would completely clash with the situation he finds himself in and I imagined something to cure his fear and give him a new prospective on life. This is a film about friendship and it shows that help can often come from people who are not necessarily trying to understand, but who show a way out of suffering by simply being a good, reliable influence.

I wanted to create a story with believable characters dealing with issues that everyone experiences sooner or later in life. I wanted to paint a picture of Dublin exactly as it is right now, and how it is to live in a shared house where everyone forgets to buy toilet paper or to get lost using the Dublin map. I wanted to tell the story of all the people who are trying to make art and music here while coping with our money-controlled society.

What is your connection to Young Parkinson’s , why did you choose this particular condition? Adrian is a pianist and his talent is expressed through the use of his hands. I wanted his illness to target his ability to play and after a short research, I discovered Young Onset Parkinson’s, a rare form of Parkinson’s that affects people under the age of 50. Parkinson’s is widely considered a disease that affects the elderly, and I was surprised to learn that lots of young people all over the word are suffering from it.

At this early stage I decided that The New Music had to be about this illness and it could contribute to raise awareness and shine a light on this condition.

Together with Philip Kidd (Producer, Director of Photography, Editor) we decided to contact the Parkinson’s Association of Ireland, who put us in touch with Young Parkinson’s Ireland, with whom we’ve been working with ever since. Representatives of Young Parkinson’s Ireland read and approved the script at pre-production stage and we are currently developing the film in association and close contact with them. At the end of 2017 we started a crowdfunding campaign to cover the post-production expenses of The New Music, 20% of which is being donated to Young Parkinson’s Ireland. Furthermore, we will donate any future income of the film to this association and use the film for charity purposes.

I also have a very close personal experience with rare diseases as my father passed away in 2013 after having MSA (Multiple System Atrophy) a rare neurological disease for which, like Parkinson’s, there is no ultimate cure. In this script I dealt with feelings that my family and I experienced first hand. I also attempted to give my interpretation of what someone afflicted by an incurable disease might feel, and how the ensuing feelings and behaviours impact everyone around them. I hope that The New Music will have the power to bring people together and create a space where these issues can be discussed, as well encourage a conversation around both living and dealing with rare diseases.

Munky- Irish Punk Band

So obviously music plays a huge part in the film, can you tell me more about that? The second constitutive element of my writing has always been music. I consider it a huge source of inspiration and The New Music is fulfilling my dream of writing a story that revolves around music from beginning to end.

In the last few years I’ve been influenced a lot by punk music as a genre but mostly in terms of lifestyle and attitude. The film itself was produced with a strong DIY mindset and the narrative arc of the main character freely represents my own discovery of punk music as a form of liberation and a way to fully express myself artistically. During the writing process I’ve been influenced by bands such as Bomb The Music Industry! , The Smith Street Band, Fugazi, Black Flag, Bad Brains, The Menzingers and Bangers.

Music is the passion shared by all the main characters of the story and it permeates every scene. It firstly represents the desperation felt by Adrian, then it slowly becomes what carries him through the darkness towards the light and a new version of himself. The film shows two types of music that are usually considered opposites: classical and punk. Both play a huge roles in the film and find a way to merge together as the two diametrically different spheres of Adrian’s life find a meeting point. Grand pianos, dusty rehearsal rooms, microphones and wires, music shops and gigs; everything in this film is about music and the love that each character has for it in their own way.

The film features two original songs composed by Zachary Stephenson of Munky and we are currently putting together a soundtrack made of both classical and punk music, featuring mostly unsigned independent artists such as Bangers, Müg (UK) , Antillectual( Netherlands) and Checkpoint, Forgotten Soldier and Declan Byrne who are all from Ireland. Shit Present ( UK) and Irish act Givamanakick are in talks about coming on board.

What are your cinematic influences? I’d imagine Italian cinema plays a big part? I grew up without a TV because my parents were against having one in the house, but we used to have a VHS player attached to a monitor, strictly used to watch films together. Both my parents loved cinema, and I remember watching italian classics of directors such as De Sica, Rossellini, Scola and Tornatore. I also watched cinema classics with my grandparents. I became an avid reader at a young age and soon I started writing my own stories for my friends to read. I took inspiration from books, comics, Japanese cartoons that I would watch with my friends and music. One of my first dream jobs was to write for music videos.

It took a few more years for me to develop a proper taste for cinema, but to this day the vital element of a film to me is still storytelling. I love those films that tell a story the same way as I wish I did, that put an accent on the psychological development of characters and can capture me emotionally. Directors such as Krzysztof Kieślowski, Anton Corbijn, Gus Van Sant, Nicolas Winding Refn, Tony Richardson, Jeff Nichols and Ben Wheatley have been a major influence on me both narratively and aesthetically.

Are there any Irish filmmakers at the moment that you are interested in? I love Jim Sheridan’s films and Martin McDonagh as a filmmaker (and playwright). I also really enjoyed the productions made by Cartoon Saloon. There are a good number of Irish films that I watched through the years and that really stuck with me, such as: Inside I’m Dancing, I Went Down, The Commitments, The Wind That Shakes The Barley, Breakfast On Pluto and Once. I am looking forward to Mark O’Rowe’s The Delinquent Season.

Look out for the trailer for The New Music which is out in the coming weeks. You can follow the cast and crew on their social media channels below and most importantly if you want to donate to the cause just click here.

Follow the film’s progress on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube.

Cilléin McEvoy – lead

Chiara Viale- director

    The New Music- Upcoming Irish Feature shines a light on Young Onset Parkinson's Disease The New Music is a new Irish feature film currently in post-production. The film aims to shine a light on Young Onset Parkinson's Disease, a rare and little known condition which affects people under fifty.

[cwatsonholmes-blog]

‘Hamlet’ starring Andrew Scott    ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ Review

After a desperate struggle with Southern Rail over cancelled trains and the speediest speed walk down the banks of the River Thames ever, I made it to the Harold Pinter Theatre in time see Robert Icke’s production of Shakespeare’s infamous revenge tragedy, ‘Hamlet’. 

The eponymous ‘Hamlet’ in this production, as with any other, is a Prince, heir to the throne of Denmark, who, not long having lost his father, has to watch his mother marry with his uncle, Claudius. Suffering with suicidal depression, the prince is in the depths of despair to discover, by his father’s ghost, that Claudius had committed murder in order to gain the crown. Hamlet swears to “remember” him and sets out on a rather procrastinated revenge mission. He assumes madness to allow himself to investigate his uncle’s culpability without arousing suspicion. The act typically leads the character into true megalomania; this take, however, explores the complex nature of our mentality and questions whether Hamlet’s behaviour is founded on a deeper fragility, leading upcoming Sherlock-star, Andrew Scott, to portray the Prince, not as outrightly “mad” but instead, mentally ill. - A necessity, I feel, when placing the narrative in a 21st Century context.  

Icke’s production was evidently influenced by one of his previous projects in which he staged Orwell’s 1984. The theme of constant supervision is prevalent within this modern adaption of ‘Hamlet’. Hamlet’s paranoia is often attributed solely to his madness, “his wits disease”, but Icke’s introduction of technological espionage, in the form of hidden microphones and extensive video surveillance, allows the character’s otherwise unfounded schizophrenic behaviour to become rooted in something quite real. The decision was refreshing and was uniquely sympathetic to the Danish Prince.

The theme of surveillance was accentuated further in the utilisation of a live feed camera. In the picture below, the cast were sat with us in the audience.

A camera followed them as they entered the auditorium, projecting their every reaction to multiple screens around the space. This coupled with the pre-prepared BBC-style news footage shown at various intervals gave a verisimilitude to the situation and promoted a strong sense of entrapment, making the castle of Elsinore, and Denmark, seem very much like the “prison” of which Hamlet speaks.

The set, in it’s three distinct levels of division, exemplifies the sensation of always being watched whilst also effectuating the confines of Hamlet’s situation. Hildegard Bechtler’s stark, geometric design offers a visual interpretation of the Prince’s mind-set. It portrays well the emptiness experienced by the youth of the court following the loss of a parental figure; the greys, blues and off-whites evoking the isolating insensitivity we feel when we are confronted with death. The quasi-clinical approach to Castle’s decor offers us to consider how Royalty has come to resemble the Institution, whilst the archaic winding passages viewed on the large, central screens depict the maze within Hamlet’s inner mind. 

The lighting, whilst I feel did not always convey severity or intensity of a situation, particularly in the speeches, it was, more often than not, empathetic to the characters’ moods. However, the incorporation of the House lights into the design (to change our mood and attentions) was an old-trick I sorely miss and was glad to experience once more. 

Music in this production was almost perpetual. I think this was a mistake. Bob Dylan seemed to take centre stage in this production and, for me, the jovial key of each song broke the atmosphere the actors had spent 20 minutes trying to claw out of a scene. The music worked fine at the beginning, helping in creating a golden aura in which Angus Wright and Juliet Stevenson danced convincingly in love together as the newly married King and Queen. But as the piece progressed and the mood shifted, the music did not shift with it and it severed the ties the piece, making it unclear how we’re supposed to feel towards this story. - Anything thing at all? I might ask.

So, how were the actors? On this rare occasion, it was the actors who let this production down for me. Had I been judging this piece solely on the actors’ performances, I could just about unwittingly award two stars.  

The piece started strong. It was fast, intense, allusive; we definitely got the impression that something “rotten”, dark, was going on in the state of Denmark. I knew from the first two minutes, we were in for an absolute crystalline treasure of a production. However, the moment scene two begun the pace seemed lag; everyone was operating at a different rhythm. By the time Andrew Scott took a purposeful step forward to begin his first soliloquy, only to fluff his lines, the driving beat at which the play had been leaping forward completely dissipated and stayed in an uneven see-saw motion until the company finally managed to pick it up three-hours later in the final act. What is most prominent in my mind, however, is the tribulation Peter Wight inflicted on his company members. The actor playing Polonius appeared to not pick up his cue, twice, during in the course of the show, staring, transfixed at a random point on the floor, for far longer than was comfortable. It went from a pause to a comedic silence to an awkward silence, going on and on until Wight had sat there for so long the actor opposite him had become fidgety. I began to seriously worry he’d had a stoke or something. This happened again later on in the following act, though this time he did not jolt back into place and so the Stage Manager had to walk on and call a premature interval. If this was an intentional direction of Icke’s it certainly didn’t look that way and certainly didn’t work. 

I’m not unsympathetic, I have been the performer, I know what it’s like in these situations and it was evident enough that this was a bad show for them. Whenever they tried to get the piece off of it’s knees, something else went wrong, such as a curtain falling down, and they ended up knocking the play to the floor rather than getting on it’s feet. I condemn because they let their blunders hinder the running of the show. Being a writer/director, I am sensitive to atmosphere and pace, but even my companion, unfamiliar with theatre and Shakespeare commented that it everything felt “off piste”.

Icke has criticised how actors these days have “poisoned” Shakespeare by over-acting, something I agree with though do not often sees at the higher tiers of the profession. Despite this comment, Icke’s production felt decidedly staged; it was as if the company had not come to agreement of whether or not they were acknowledging the audience, creating uncomplimentary rivalry between the cast and Hamlet. 

This indecision I noticed in most keenly in Andrew Scott’s performance. It seems under-acting also poisons Shakespeare. The jewels of Shakespeare’s masterpiece, the intensely philosophical soliloquies, when normally drawing me avidly in left me shaking me head in frustration, and, at times, switched off to such a degree I took up looking at the faces of the audience instead. There was little, to no, variation in tone or intonation and it was a relief when the star began putting some life back into his words. The pauses, whilst sometimes portrayed Hamlet’s vast superior intelligence, mostly left me wanting to screech in agony as their grandeur and beauty evaporated into absent minded chatter. Perhaps the modern setting, or current level of existential inquest, in which the words were being spoken was part to blame for the loss of soaring intellect, but there is no denying, something was distinctly wrong with Andrew Scott’s interpretation.

What drew me into seeing this adaption was the opportunity to see Scott playing with Theatre’s most intensely mad, passionate character. We all know the actor, from his time opposite Benedict Cumberbatch playing James Moriarty in hit TV-Drama Sherlock, is astoundingly good at playing psychotic intelligence. (He got a BAFTA for it, for Christ sake!) But I was disappointed to find that he did not experiment with the character that much at all, it fact, it felt rather un-revolutionary; almost careless. I commend Scott for wanting to approach Hamlet’s “madness” as  mental illness. It is element I have wanted to see realised for a very long time but unfortunately what “affliction” of the Prince’s the Irish actor was primarily portraying was uncertain and consequently  the portrayal of any sort of illness was lost all together and he, for the most part, came off plainly mad. There seemed to be reactions signifying a PTSD, other quirks suggested an acute situational anxiety; all the while the significant emotions attached to the play, such as depression and betrayal appeared almost non-existent. There were moments, particularly when the character was in the company of Ophelia, and then later on in the Closet Scene, when Scott played the character’s anguish superbly. He captured the raw, almost child-like need Hamlet has for his father in a way I have seen no-one do yet. Disappointingly these attentive, intricate moments were few and far between. 

Jessica Brown Findlay and Luke Thompson, as Ophelia and Laertes, on the other hand did a thoroughly excellent job at isolating their characters’ distress. I found it thoroughly engaging that both brother and sister, manifested the same inclination towards self-harm when dealing with intense grief, hitting themselves over and over in a moment of almost physical Tourette’s. For the first time over the course of the whole show I was able to ask questions outside of the play: What had their childhood been like? Did they suffer a trauma together previously? 

Whilst the principals, most notable, Angus Wright’s Claudius, seemed wholly unmotivated in their intentions, it was the secondary characters that gave the most convincing performances of the cast. The ever present security guards appeared more genuinely concerned for the Young Prince’s mentality than his mother, Gertrude. The fierce Juliet Stevenson appeared to look wholly deflated by the production when playing the Queen of Denmark. Joshua Higgott, attentively embodying friend Horatio, contrastingly managed to look fully engaged within the poorly upheld world. The Player King and Queen, as played by David Rintoul and Marty Cruickshank, were wonderfully caring and expressive characters and I am glad to say that Madeline Appiah as Guildenstern, and Calum Findlay as Rosencrantz, were some of the most three-dimensional characters present, meaning that the poor, fated characters were not mere plot devices. 

Overall, the production was distinctly unique when compared against the past decade’s interpretations. It was refreshingly fast paced for a nigh-on four hour show but was it inconsistent. The show lacked a drive and passion which, in the end, left it feeling lifeless and looking dull. Scott’s performance, whilst littered with moment of comedic genius that made me laugh out loud, was largely unbelievable, mostly in the fact that he himself did not seem to believe in the situation his character was in. Potentially, he was overwhelmed by all there was to covey of the character. Had I been sitting on the stage, I might have seen some more intricacy in his work, the actor being more accustom to playing to a camera. 

Andrew Scott is a stunningly intense, intelligent actor, touching upon the sweetness of the “sweet prince” but, unfortunately, this time, he seemed to miss the mark. 

C Watson-Holmes. July 2nd, 2017.

[araitsume]

The Desire of Ages, pp. 214-225: Chapter (22) Imprisonment and Death of John

This chapter is based on Matthew 11:1-11; Matthew 14:1-11; Mark 6:17-28; Luke 7:19-28.

John the Baptist had been first in heralding Christ's kingdom, and he was first also in suffering. From the free air of the wilderness and the vast throngs that had hung upon his words, he was now shut in by the walls of a dungeon cell. He had become a prisoner in the fortress of Herod Antipas. In the territory east of Jordan, which was under the dominion of Antipas, much of John's ministry had been spent. Herod himself had listened to the preaching of the Baptist. The dissolute king had trembled under the call to repentance. “Herod feared John, knowing that he was a just man and an holy; ... and when he heard him, he did many things, and heard him gladly.” John dealt with him faithfully, denouncing his iniquitous alliance with Herodias, his brother's wife. For a time Herod feebly sought to break the chain of lust that bound him; but Herodias fastened him the more firmly in her toils, and found revenge upon the Baptist by inducing Herod to cast him into prison.

The life of John had been one of active labor, and the gloom and inaction of his prison life weighed heavily upon him. As week after week passed, bringing no change, despondency and doubt crept over him. His disciples did not forsake him. They were allowed access to the prison, and they brought him tidings of the works of Jesus, and told how the people were flocking to Him. But they questioned why, if this new teacher was the Messiah, He did nothing to effect John's release. How could He permit His faithful herald to be deprived of liberty and perhaps of life?

These questions were not without effect. Doubts which otherwise would never have arisen were suggested to John. Satan rejoiced to hear the words of these disciples, and to see how they bruised the soul of the Lord's messenger. Oh, how often those who think themselves the friends of a good man, and who are eager to show their fidelity to him, prove to be his most dangerous enemies! How often, instead of strengthening his faith, their words depress and dishearten!

Like the Saviour's disciples, John the Baptist did not understand the nature of Christ's kingdom. He expected Jesus to take the throne of David; and as time passed, and the Saviour made no claim to kingly authority, John became perplexed and troubled. He had declared to the people that in order for the way to be prepared before the Lord, the prophecy of Isaiah must be fulfilled; the mountains and hills must be brought low, the crooked made straight, and the rough places plain. He had looked for the high places of human pride and power to be cast down. He had pointed to the Messiah as the One whose fan was in His hand, and who would thoroughly purge His floor, who would gather the wheat into His garner, and burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire. Like the prophet Elijah, in whose spirit and power he had come to Israel, he looked for the Lord to reveal Himself as a God that answereth by fire.

In his mission the Baptist had stood as a fearless reprover of iniquity, both in high places and in low. He had dared to face King Herod with the plain rebuke of sin. He had not counted his life dear unto himself, that he might fulfill his appointed work. And now from his dungeon he watched for the Lion of the tribe of Judah to cast down the pride of the oppressor, and to deliver the poor and him that cried. But Jesus seemed to content Himself with gathering disciples about Him, and healing and teaching the people. He was eating at the tables of the publicans, while every day the Roman yoke rested more heavily upon Israel, while King Herod and his vile paramour worked their will, and the cries of the poor and suffering went up to heaven.

To the desert prophet all this seemed a mystery beyond his fathoming. There were hours when the whisperings of demons tortured his spirit, and the shadow of a terrible fear crept over him. Could it be that the long-hoped-for Deliverer had not yet appeared? Then what meant the message that he himself had been impelled to bear? John had been bitterly disappointed in the result of his mission. He had expected that the message from God would have the same effect as when the law was read in the days of Josiah and of Ezra (2 Chronicles 34; Nehemiah 8, 9); that there would follow a deep-seated work of repentance and returning unto the Lord. For the success of this mission his whole life had been sacrificed. Had it been in vain?

John was troubled to see that through love for him, his own disciples were cherishing unbelief in regard to Jesus. Had his work for them been fruitless? Had he been unfaithful in his mission, that he was now cut off from labor? If the promised Deliverer had appeared, and John had been found true to his calling, would not Jesus now overthrow the oppressor's power, and set free His herald?

But the Baptist did not surrender his faith in Christ. The memory of the voice from heaven and the descending dove, the spotless purity of Jesus, the power of the Holy Spirit that had rested upon John as he came into the Saviour's presence, and the testimony of the prophetic scriptures,—all witnessed that Jesus of Nazareth was the Promised One.

John would not discuss his doubts and anxieties with his companions. He determined to send a message of inquiry to Jesus. This he entrusted to two of his disciples, hoping that an interview with the Saviour would confirm their faith, and bring assurance to their brethren. And he longed for some word from Christ spoken directly for himself.

The disciples came to Jesus with their message, “Art Thou He that should come, or do we look for another?”

How short the time since the Baptist had pointed to Jesus, and proclaimed, “Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world.” “He it is, who coming after me is preferred before me.” John 1:29, 27. And now the question, “Art Thou He that should come?” It was keenly bitter and disappointing to human nature. If John, the faithful forerunner, failed to discern Christ's mission, what could be expected from the self-seeking multitude?

The Saviour did not at once answer the disciples’ question. As they stood wondering at His silence, the sick and afflicted were coming to Him to be healed. The blind were groping their way through the crowd; diseased ones of all classes, some urging their own way, some borne by their friends, were eagerly pressing into the presence of Jesus. The voice of the mighty Healer penetrated the deaf ear. A word, a touch of His hand, opened the blind eyes to behold the light of day, the scenes of nature, the faces of friends, and the face of the Deliverer. Jesus rebuked disease and banished fever. His voice reached the ears of the dying, and they arose in health and vigor. Paralyzed demoniacs obeyed His word, their madness left them, and they worshiped Him. While He healed their diseases, He taught the people. The poor peasants and laborers, who were shunned by the rabbis as unclean, gathered close about Him, and He spoke to them the words of eternal life.

Thus the day wore away, the disciples of John seeing and hearing all. At last Jesus called them to Him, and bade them go and tell John what they had witnessed, adding, “Blessed is he, whosoever shall find none occasion of stumbling in Me.” Luke 7:23, R. V. The evidence of His divinity was seen in its adaptation to the needs of suffering humanity. His glory was shown in His condescension to our low estate.

The disciples bore the message, and it was enough. John recalled the prophecy concerning the Messiah, “The Lord hath anointed Me to preach good tidings unto the meek; He hath sent Me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to them that are bound; to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord.” Isaiah 61:1, 2. The works of Christ not only declared Him to be the Messiah, but showed in what manner His kingdom was to be established. To John was opened the same truth that had come to Elijah in the desert, when “a great and strong wind rent the mountains, and brake in pieces the rocks before the Lord; but the Lord was not in the wind: and after the wind an earthquake; but the Lord was not in the earthquake: and after the earthquake a fire; but the Lord was not in the fire:” and after the fire, God spoke to the prophet by “a still small voice.” 1 Kings 19:11, 12. So Jesus was to do His work, not with the clash of arms and the overturning of thrones and kingdoms, but through speaking to the hearts of men by a life of mercy and self-sacrifice.

The principle of the Baptist's own life of self-abnegation was the principle of the Messiah's kingdom. John well knew how foreign all this was to the principles and hopes of the leaders in Israel. That which was to him convincing evidence of Christ's divinity would be no evidence to them. They were looking for a Messiah who had not been promised. John saw that the Saviour's mission could win from them only hatred and condemnation. He, the forerunner, was but drinking of the cup which Christ Himself must drain to its dregs.

The Saviour's words, “Blessed is he, whosoever shall find none occasion of stumbling in Me,” were a gentle reproof to John. It was not lost upon him. Understanding more clearly now the nature of Christ's mission, he yielded himself to God for life or for death, as should best serve the interests of the cause he loved.

After the messengers had departed, Jesus spoke to the people concerning John. The Saviour's heart went out in sympathy to the faithful witness now buried in Herod's dungeon. He would not leave the people to conclude that God had forsaken John, or that his faith had failed in the day of trial. “What went ye out into the wilderness to see?” He said. “A reed shaken with the wind?”

The tall reeds that grew beside the Jordan, bending before every breeze, were fitting representatives of the rabbis who had stood as critics and judges of the Baptist's mission. They were swayed this way and that by the winds of popular opinion. They would not humble themselves to receive the heart-searching message of the Baptist, yet for fear of the people they dared not openly oppose his work. But God's messenger was of no such craven spirit. The multitudes who were gathered about Christ had been witnesses to the work of John. They had heard his fearless rebuke of sin. To the self-righteous Pharisees, the priestly Sadducees, King Herod and his court, princes and soldiers, publicans and peasants, John had spoken with equal plainness. He was no trembling reed, swayed by the winds of human praise or prejudice. In the prison he was the same in his loyalty to God and his zeal for righteousness as when he preached God's message in the wilderness. In his faithfulness to principle he was as firm as a rock.

Jesus continued, “But what went ye out for to see? A man clothed in soft raiment? Behold, they which are gorgeously appareled, and live delicately, are in kings’ courts.” John had been called to reprove the sins and excesses of his time, and his plain dress and self-denying life were in harmony with the character of his mission. Rich apparel and the luxuries of this life are not the portion of God's servants, but of those who live “in kings’ courts,” the rulers of this world, to whom pertain its power and its riches. Jesus wished to direct attention to the contrast between the clothing of John, and that worn by the priests and rulers. These officials arrayed themselves in rich robes and costly ornaments. They loved display, and hoped to dazzle the people, and thus command greater consideration. They were more anxious to gain the admiration of men than to obtain the purity of heart which would win the approval of God. Thus they revealed that their allegiance was not given to God, but to the kingdom of this world.

“But what,” said Jesus, “went ye out for to see? A prophet? yea, I say unto you, and more than a prophet. For this is he, of whom it is written,—

“Behold, I send My messenger before Thy face, Which shall prepare Thy way before Thee.

“Verily I say unto you, Among them that are born of women there hath not risen a greater than John the Baptist.” In the announcement to Zacharias before the birth of John, the angel had declared, “He shall be great in the sight of the Lord.” Luke 1:15. In the estimation of Heaven, what is it that constitutes greatness? Not that which the world accounts greatness; not wealth, or rank, or noble descent, or intellectual gifts, in themselves considered. If intellectual greatness, apart from any higher consideration, is worthy of honor, then our homage is due to Satan, whose intellectual power no man has ever equaled. But when perverted to self-serving, the greater the gift, the greater curse it becomes. It is moral worth that God values. Love and purity are the attributes He prizes most. John was great in the sight of the Lord, when, before the messengers from the Sanhedrin, before the people, and before his own disciples, he refrained from seeking honor for himself, but pointed all to Jesus as the Promised One. His unselfish joy in the ministry of Christ presents the highest type of nobility ever revealed in man.

The witness borne of him after his death, by those who had heard his testimony to Jesus, was, “John did no miracle: but all things that John spake of this Man were true.” John 10:41. It was not given to John to call down fire from heaven, or to raise the dead, as Elijah did, nor to wield Moses’ rod of power in the name of God. He was sent to herald the Saviour's advent, and to call upon the people to prepare for His coming. So faithfully did he fulfill his mission, that as the people recalled what he had taught them of Jesus, they could say, “All things that John spake of this Man were true.” Such witness to Christ every disciple of the Master is called upon to bear.

As the Messiah's herald, John was “much more than a prophet.” For while prophets had seen from afar Christ's advent, to John it was given to behold Him, to hear the testimony from heaven to His Messiahship, and to present Him to Israel as the Sent of God. Yet Jesus said, “He that is least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he.”

The prophet John was the connecting link between the two dispensations. As God's representative he stood forth to show the relation of the law and the prophets to the Christian dispensation. He was the lesser light, which was to be followed by a greater. The mind of John was illuminated by the Holy Spirit, that he might shed light upon his people; but no other light ever has shone or ever will shine so clearly upon fallen man as that which emanated from the teaching and example of Jesus. Christ and His mission had been but dimly understood as typified in the shadowy sacrifices. Even John had not fully comprehended the future, immortal life through the Saviour.

Aside from the joy that John found in his mission, his life had been one of sorrow. His voice had been seldom heard except in the wilderness. His was a lonely lot. And he was not permitted to see the result of his own labors. It was not his privilege to be with Christ and witness the manifestation of divine power attending the greater light. It was not for him to see the blind restored to sight, the sick healed, and the dead raised to life. He did not behold the light that shone through every word of Christ, shedding glory upon the promises of prophecy. The least disciple who saw Christ's mighty works and heard His words was in this sense more highly privileged than John the Baptist, and therefore is said to have been greater than he.

Through the vast throngs that had listened to John's preaching, his fame had spread throughout the land. A deep interest was felt as to the result of his imprisonment. Yet his blameless life, and the strong public sentiment in his favor, led to the belief that no violent measures would be taken against him.

Herod believed John to be a prophet of God, and he fully intended to set him at liberty. But he delayed his purpose from fear of Herodias.

Herodias knew that by direct measures she could never win Herod's consent to the death of John, and she resolved to accomplish her purpose by stratagem. On the king's birthday an entertainment was to be given to the officers of state and the nobles of the court. There would be feasting and drunkenness. Herod would thus be thrown off his guard, and might then be influenced according to her will.

When the great day arrived, and the king with his lords was feasting and drinking, Herodias sent her daughter into the banqueting hall to dance for the entertainment of the guests. Salome was in the first flush of womanhood, and her voluptuous beauty captivated the senses of the lordly revelers. It was not customary for the ladies of the court to appear at these festivities, and a flattering compliment was paid to Herod when this daughter of Israel's priests and princes danced for the amusement of his guests.

The king was dazed with wine. Passion held sway, and reason was dethroned. He saw only the hall of pleasure, with its reveling guests, the banquet table, the sparkling wine and the flashing lights, and the young girl dancing before him. In the recklessness of the moment, he desired to make some display that would exalt him before the great men of his realm. With an oath he promised to give the daughter of Herodias whatever she might ask, even to the half of his kingdom.

Salome hastened to her mother, to know what she should ask. The answer was ready,—the head of John the Baptist. Salome knew not of the thirst for revenge in her mother's heart, and she shrank from presenting the request; but the determination of Herodias prevailed. The girl returned with the terrible petition, “I will that thou forthwith give me in a charger the head of John the Baptist.” Mark 6:25, R. V.

Herod was astonished and confounded. The riotous mirth ceased, and an ominous silence settled down upon the scene of revelry. The king was horror-stricken at the thought of taking the life of John. Yet his word was pledged, and he was unwilling to appear fickle or rash. The oath had been made in honor of his guests, and if one of them had offered a word against the fulfillment of his promise, he would gladly have spared the prophet. He gave them opportunity to speak in the prisoner's behalf. They had traveled long distances in order to hear the preaching of John, and they knew him to be a man without crime, and a servant of God. But though shocked at the girl's demand, they were too besotted to interpose a remonstrance. No voice was raised to save the life of Heaven's messenger. These men occupied high positions of trust in the nation, and upon them rested grave responsibilities; yet they had given themselves up to feasting and drunkenness until the senses were benumbed. Their heads were turned with the giddy scene of music and dancing, and conscience lay dormant. By their silence they pronounced the sentence of death upon the prophet of God to satisfy the revenge of an abandoned woman.

Herod waited in vain to be released from his oath; then he reluctantly commanded the execution of the prophet. Soon the head of John was brought in before the king and his guests. Forever sealed were those lips that had faithfully warned Herod to turn from his life of sin. Never more would that voice be heard calling men to repentance. The revels of one night had cost the life of one of the greatest of the prophets.

Oh, how often has the life of the innocent been sacrificed through the intemperance of those who should have been guardians of justice! He who puts the intoxicating cup to his lips makes himself responsible for all the injustice he may commit under its besotting power. By benumbing his senses he makes it impossible for him to judge calmly or to have a clear perception of right and wrong. He opens the way for Satan to work through him in oppressing and destroying the innocent. “Wine is a mocker, strong drink is raging: and whosoever is deceived thereby is not wise.” Proverbs 20:1. Thus it is that “judgment is turned away backward, ... and he that departeth from evil maketh himself a prey.” Isaiah 59:14, 15. Those who have jurisdiction over the lives of their fellow men should be held guilty of a crime when they yield to intemperance. All who execute the laws should be lawkeepers. They should be men of self-control. They need to have full command of their physical, mental, and moral powers, that they may possess vigor of intellect, and a high sense of justice.

The head of John the Baptist was carried to Herodias, who received it with fiendish satisfaction. She exulted in her revenge, and flattered herself that Herod's conscience would no longer be troubled. But no happiness resulted to her from her sin. Her name became notorious and abhorred, while Herod was more tormented by remorse than he had been by the warnings of the prophet. The influence of John's teachings was not silenced; it was to extend to every generation till the close of time.

Herod's sin was ever before him. He was constantly seeking to find relief from the accusings of a guilty conscience. His confidence in John was unshaken. As he recalled his life of self-denial, his solemn, earnest appeals, his sound judgment in counsel, and then remembered how he had come to his death, Herod could find no rest. Engaged in the affairs of the state, receiving honors from men, he bore a smiling face and dignified mien, while he concealed an anxious heart, ever oppressed with the fear that a curse was upon him.

Herod had been deeply impressed by the words of John, that nothing can be hidden from God. He was convinced that God was present in every place, that He had witnessed the revelry of the banqueting room, that He had heard the command to behead John, and had seen the exultation of Herodias, and the insult she offered to the severed head of her reprover. And many things that Herod had heard from the lips of the prophet now spoke to his conscience more distinctly than had the preaching in the wilderness.

When Herod heard of the works of Christ, he was exceedingly troubled. He thought that God had raised John from the dead, and sent him forth with still greater power to condemn sin. He was in constant fear that John would avenge his death by passing condemnation upon him and his house. Herod was reaping that which God had declared to be the result of a course of sin,—“a trembling heart, and failing of eyes, and sorrow of mind: and thy life shall hang in doubt before thee; and thou shalt fear day and night, and shalt have none assurance of thy life: in the morning thou shalt say, Would God it were even! and at even thou shalt say, Would God it were morning! for the fear of thine heart wherewith thou shalt fear, and for the sight of thine eyes which thou shalt see.” Deuteronomy 28:65-67. The sinner's own thoughts are his accusers; and there can be no torture keener than the stings of a guilty conscience, which give him no rest day nor night.

To many minds a deep mystery surrounds the fate of John the Baptist. They question why he should have been left to languish and die in prison. The mystery of this dark providence our human vision cannot penetrate; but it can never shake our confidence in God when we remember that John was but a sharer in the sufferings of Christ. All who follow Christ will wear the crown of sacrifice. They will surely be misunderstood by selfish men, and will be made a mark for the fierce assaults of Satan. It is this principle of self-sacrifice that his kingdom is established to destroy, and he will war against it wherever manifested.

The childhood, youth, and manhood of John had been characterized by firmness and moral power. When his voice was heard in the wilderness saying, “Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make His paths straight” (Matthew 3:3), Satan feared for the safety of his kingdom. The sinfulness of sin was revealed in such a manner that men trembled. Satan's power over many who had been under his control was broken. He had been unwearied in his efforts to draw away the Baptist from a life of unreserved surrender to God; but he had failed. And he had failed to overcome Jesus. In the temptation in the wilderness, Satan had been defeated, and his rage was great. Now he determined to bring sorrow upon Christ by striking John. The One whom he could not entice to sin he would cause to suffer.

Jesus did not interpose to deliver His servant. He knew that John would bear the test. Gladly would the Saviour have come to John, to brighten the dungeon gloom with His own presence. But He was not to place Himself in the hands of enemies and imperil His own mission. Gladly would He have delivered His faithful servant. But for the sake of thousands who in after years must pass from prison to death, John was to drink the cup of martyrdom. As the followers of Jesus should languish in lonely cells, or perish by the sword, the rack, or the fagot, apparently forsaken by God and man, what a stay to their hearts would be the thought that John the Baptist, to whose faithfulness Christ Himself had borne witness, had passed through a similar experience!

Satan was permitted to cut short the earthly life of God's messenger; but that life which “is hid with Christ in God,” the destroyer could not reach. Colossians 3:3. He exulted that he had brought sorrow upon Christ, but he had failed of conquering John. Death itself only placed him forever beyond the power of temptation. In this warfare, Satan was revealing his own character. Before the witnessing universe he made manifest his enmity toward God and man.

Though no miraculous deliverance was granted John, he was not forsaken. He had always the companionship of heavenly angels, who opened to him the prophecies concerning Christ, and the precious promises of Scripture. These were his stay, as they were to be the stay of God's people through the coming ages. To John the Baptist, as to those that came after him, was given the assurance, “Lo, I am with you all the days, even unto the end.” Matthew 28:20, R. V., margin.

God never leads His children otherwise than they would choose to be led, if they could see the end from the beginning, and discern the glory of the purpose which they are fulfilling as co-workers with Him. Not Enoch, who was translated to heaven, not Elijah, who ascended in a chariot of fire, was greater or more honored than John the Baptist, who perished alone in the dungeon. “Unto you it is given in the behalf of Christ, not only to believe on Him, but also to suffer for His sake.” Philippians 1:29. And of all the gifts that Heaven can bestow upon men, fellowship with Christ in His sufferings is the most weighty trust and the highest honor.

[starberryghost]

Tellus

Created by Chelsea Boyd

Tellus is a world that was much like our own, with humans and their technologies and their greed. The humans developed nuclear weapons much like the atom bomb, but upon testing it it was much more powerful than they expected and they tore a rift into another dimension, radiation activating a chain of events that turned the benign alien species that lived there into incomprehensible monstrosities. It affected all of Tellus too, speeding up growth and forcing the surviving humans to wear special gas masks. The people were enslaved by the Tulia, the aliens they harmed, though unintentionally, and forced to fix the mess they had made. The world ran wild once again, alien and foreign. Combined of the two dimensions.   Select humans were forced to fall asleep in plant pods and enter into a synaptic world that was much like a massive shared dream or MMORPG or alternate world. There they were guided into evolution of their species. They live and die in this Synaptic world called UnderSpell [or just Spell for short] and reincarnate with new characters. There is magic in this world, and different races to choose from upon entering it.   Spell is where most of the story takes place, because it is the only place where humans now have social change, a voice to speak with and the power to shape their futures.

Timelines

Human Timeline Invasion

Human Timeline Post-Invasion

Human Timeline Pre-Invasion

Table of Contents

ArticlesThe Horror of Human ActionsSummary

Tellus was once a world of humans that was much like our own, except it had slightly more advanced technologies. There were more scientifically minded people in that world than in ours, and though we ended world hunger and cancer, wars became worse and worse with the rise of new technological weapons.   After a weapon testing tore a rift in space-time, a planet in a dimension close to ours got merged with Tellus. The aliens that ruled the planet, the Tulia, were a very highly advanced species that had come to live for the benefit of the land, rather than for their own benefits. Their ethics were just as alien as they were. The radiation from the weapon turned their species into incomprehensible horrors, in appearance. Although, in mind they were unaltered except for the rage they felt towards the Humans for causing such a disaster.   They enslaved the humans, and took control of their now joint world, and set the Human species to correct the mistakes they made, through forced and sped up evolution.   Now the Tulia seek to keep control over the humans, and make them pay for their mistakes. Their goals are mysterious, but they are not quietly staying behind the scenes. They are currently trying to track down the Neuro-Hackers and destroy their faction, as well as the Mercenaries, who search for alien or human weapons and fighting styles and to defeat the Tulia with brute force and war tactics.

Themes

Bio-punk and post-apocalypse themes.

Plot typeStory OverviewSubplots

Fighting for Freedom

The MercenariesSummary

The Mercenaries seek to overthrow their alien invaders with whatever resources they can, outside of UnderSpell. They often free human towns and can be found protecting Neuro-Hackers and the freed humans. They are waging a direct war on the Tulia. They are the remaining human fighters and strategists. They often work in tandem with the Neuro-Hackers, as their goals are the same, even if their methods arent.  Their goal is to find the Tulias weakness and to destroy the threat they pose to Humanity. They prefer to outright destroy the Tulia and regain complete power over the newly fused planet, rather than to get them to leave.

Parent Plot

Fighting for Freedom

The Afflicted

The Afflicted is the name for the humans who have taken ill because of the deadly spores that contaminate the air on Tellus.   There are three stages of the illness from the poisonous spores. First there are terrifying hallucinations, extreme paranoia, and vomiting. Next they will collapse and go into a coma-like state. Lastly, they die painful deaths from a mysterious rash.   There is no real cure, and many die due to not taking the proper precautions.

HumansJumping Spider MountsPoisonous Spores

The mushroom kingdom has grown all around Tellus due to the fusion of both Tellus and the planet of the Tulias planetary conditions. Poisonous spores are so thick from the giant mushrooms that they hang like a fog in the sky, blocking the rays of the sun out.   Humans have to wear gas masks in a lot of places to protect themselves from the spores.

Transmission & Vectors

The giant mushrooms that are growing everywhere give them off.

Causes

The original cause was a sort of chain reaction. First the weapon tore a hole in the rift of time-space, then the two aligned planets were fused into one, and the alien fungi species grew like crazy thanks to the radiation. They absorbed a lot of the radiation, but many of them started producing a lot of dangerous spores which became a more immediate, but survivable threat due to the usage of gas masks.

Symptoms

Terrifying hallucinations, paranoia and vomiting allow people to know who the victims of the fungal poison are. After reaching a certain point in their sickness, they go into a coma-like state, then die.

Treatment

Nothing can be done to stop people from being poisoned to death, that people have found, but there are many supposed cures and remedies.

Sequela

There are a lot of humans that are paranoid about paranoia and hallucinations and vomit.

Prevention

Gas masks and plants that filter fresh air and electric or solar powered air filters.

Cultural Reception

The posion isnt particularly contagious, its just poison. but the effects of the paranoia and hallucinations can turn the afflicted into violent murderers, and so many people are terrified of the Afflicted.

TypeFungalFighting for FreedomSummary

The enslaved humans that were not selected to be Dreamers are forced to work for the Tulia. Their goal is to escape to either become a Mercenary or a Neuro-Hacker.

Parent Plot

The Horror of Human Actions

Subplots

The Mercenaries

Importance of FungusThings such as literal mushroom bombs, with spores of different effects. Mushroom poisons. Lethal fungal infections. Mushroom torches. Mushrooms as food [cheese, alcohol, bread]. Fungal Cures [penicillin] Mushrooms as recreational drugs Musical Instruments made from mushrooms   The Neuro-Hackers hack into the massive Fungal network to gain information and to reach UnderSpell remotely.   The Tulia are rumored to be fungus based alien species as they use a fungus based technology. They thrive a little too well on radiation. They are resistant to fire and disease and dont age.Inventor(s)Humans only dabbled in it. The Tulia mastered it.Access & AvailabilityEveryone has access to Fungal Technology, but there are restricted levels that only the Tulia know about and/or have access to.ComplexityIt requires a certain gene in humans to access the Synaptic Grid from the Fungal Servers.Tulia

The Tulia are a fungaloid alien species that mutated into incomprehensibly terrifying looking abberations. They are an evolved species, and they have the ability to stretch and speed up chunks of time for various purposes. They have an advanced fungal technology which they use to control the humans.   They used to be a relatively benevolent species, but after what the humans did to them they became extremely controlling and violent.

TimelinesHuman Timeline Invasion

The time during the catastrophe that merged two worlds together.

Human Timeline Post-Invasion

The current timeline the story is on. This is after the worlds merged and everyone had time to settle down and power and territory was grabbed. The Tulia rule the new planet, Tellarus.

Human Timeline Pre-Invasion

The state, history, fauna, and flora of Tellus before the Invasion happened.

[topmixtrends]

THE FIRST TIME Leslie Jamison goes to an AA meeting, in a church basement, in the dead of an Iowa winter, she imagines one thing she doesn’t need to worry about is the group circle, where each member sips on burnt coffee and takes a turn telling the story of their addiction. After all, she is a professional writer, with an MFA from the most prestigious writing program in the country and a published novel under her belt. She tells stories for a living. But in the middle of rehearsing her tale, one old-time circle member blurts out: “This is boring!” She is chastened, but the challenge implied in the insult — how do we tell the story of addiction and recovery? Is it possible, or even desirable, to tell it well? — becomes the seed around which she will, eventually, layer the pearl of her stunning new memoir, The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath.

The Recovering recounts Jamison’s tangle with addiction, from the first warm tingle of champagne as an adolescent, through rite-of-passage college blackouts, through the textbook subterfuges of the practiced addict: putting her empties in the neighbor’s trash; brushing her teeth and gums bloody so she doesn’t smell like gin when her boyfriend comes home. But threaded throughout her personal story of recovery is a patient, luminous, encyclopedic exploration of a simple thesis: addiction is inseparable from storytelling — both the stories we get written into against our will, as well as the ones we freely choose. For Jamison, recovery hinges not only on reimagining the narratives she lives by but accepting the limits of narrative itself as a means of salvation.

¤

It is as a young MFA student at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop that Jamison begins to hitch her nascent drinking habit to the myth of the artist-alcoholic-genius, all the “white scribes and their epic troubles” in whose hallowed footsteps she and her Iowa cohort follow: John Berryman, Raymond Carver, John Cheever, Denis Johnson. These men drank themselves silly, bloody, bawling, cracked; drank until they seeped from all their orifices, until their livers bloated, visible beneath the skin of their tender bellies. And yet they prized their descent into darkness as the price to be paid for coming face-to-face with the abyss — awful, baleful, sacred — whose truths they carried back like treasures from the deep to their more timid, earth-bound fellows. They were “diplomat[s] from the bleakest reaches of their own wrecked lives,” bearing “glorious vision[s] of what it meant to be broken.” Steeped in such mythology, wellness could only savor of bourgeois anti-climax. “What role could sobriety possibly play in that glorious arc of blaze and rot?” Jamison wonders.

Nor was it only writers who were attracted by “the allure of the tortured artist spinning darkness into gold.” Literary critics, professors, editors demanded it, as well. Jamison recounts that in 1967, Life magazine ran a profile of Berryman entitled “Whiskey and Ink.” The article featured images of the grizzled poet dispensing wisdom from behind a frothy beer mug in Dublin pubs. “Whiskey and ink,” the text ran, “These are the fluids John Berryman needs […] to survive and describe the thing that sets him apart from other men and even from other poets: his uncommonly, almost maddeningly penetrating awareness of the fact of human mortality.” When Raymond Carver finally got sober in 1977, he started writing stories that included not only the wreckage of drink but, tentatively, gestures toward empathy, hope, second chances. But when he sent the stories to his editor Gordon Lish in 1980, Lish edited out fully half of the prose. It smacked of sentimentality, lacked the signature “bleakness” of Carver’s pre-sobriety oeuvre, he complained.

The truth of addiction, Jamison comes to know — and as every addict, in her more honest moments, knows — is that it is quite simply boring, frequently buffoonish. Addiction “grinds down […] to the same demolished and reductive and recycled core: Desire. Use. Repeat.” Anyone who believes that orphic wisdom is somehow a by-product of the cycle, she notes dryly, clearly “hasn’t spent years telling the same lies to liquor-store clerks.” She cites as confirmation Carole Angier, Jean Rhys’s biographer. A historian practiced in the art of finding narrative arcs, even Angier eventually had to admit defeat in tracing the peripatetic, drunken course of her subject’s life. “Jean’s life […] really did seem to be the same few scenes re-enacted over and over,” she concedes.

Jamison learns to reject the sham logic of endlessly generative, creative addiction. Still, when she finally decides to get sober, everything about the AA meetings chafes against her artist’s sensibility; is reminiscent, in an odd way, of the monotony of addiction itself. AA has its own way of fetishizing the recycled with its attachment to cliché (“Take it one day at a time”; “We have to quit playing God”), the unadorned ordinariness and sameness of the stories. Both in its lived experience and as a foundation for art, sobriety is brittle and tedious. It substitutes a narrative flat-line for the breathless plot pivots of inebriation. As she struggles to stay dry, Jamison sets out on the trail of addict writers turned sober, rifling through archives to find in their life stories — as well as the stories they committed to paper — the narrative potential of recovery. A kind of displaced thirst.

¤

Often, she is disappointed. Sober writing can be bad writing — abstract, or didactic, or sentimental. During one of his many attempts at getting clean, John Berryman began sketching the outlines of a new novel tentatively entitled Recovery. In the margins of an AA pamphlet Jamison unearths in Berryman’s archive, next to the question, “What is the real importance of me among 500,000 AAs?” Berryman had scribbled: “1/500,000th.” The notes for Recovery, not surprisingly, follow its addict protagonist Dr. Severance in his quest to climb outside of his ego, to imagine himself, “as one tiny numerator, a blocked self, above the larger denominator of a community,” as Jamison glosses it. The result is saccharine. When Severance manages to convince a fellow addict to give up his self-loathing obsession with having disappointed his dead father, Berryman sketches the scene: “Cheers from everybody, general exultation, universal relief and joy. Severance felt triumphant.” In the end, Berryman was never able to finish the book. He relapsed, and finally, on January 7, 1972, jumped to his death from the Washington Avenue Bridge at the University of Minnesota.

Jamison eventually finds better models for her own experience of recovery, which is messier than Berryman’s fictional “cheers and exultation.” In David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, Jamison is relieved to find a story that finally makes her “thrill toward wellness,” rather than rooting for the hero to get drunk again. Don Gately’s sobriety in the novel wasn’t “stolid or pedantic; it was palpable and crackling and absurd.” Similarly, she finds that Lee Stringer’s Grand Central Winter “resists the burden of providing a seamless arc,” making room for stammering and relapse. In fact, Stringer relapsed while writing the book, proof if ever it were needed that “his story won’t be over, even after it gets told.” Part of getting ready for recovery, Jamison concludes, is “admitting that you can’t see the end of it.”

This ruthless, patient questioning of the narrative structures by which we make sense of the experience of suffering — where story arcs fall short, where they substitute false certainty for mystery, where they act as cover for more unpalatable or unspeakable truths — is ultimately the most important contribution of Jamison’s memoir, and deepens themes first explored in her earlier, celebrated book of essays, The Empathy Exams. One of the most searing pieces in that collection is “Devil’s Bait,” a reported essay about patients suffering from Morgellons disease. Morgellons is a mystery illness whose signature symptom is “formication,” or the sensation of crawling insects under the skin, and the periodic eruption of what sufferers describe as “fibers” from their sores. Yet mainstream medicine and the CDC have not found objective evidence of the disease. Morgellons patients (or “Morgies,” as they call themselves) suffer doubly as their symptoms are dismissed by the medical establishment as “nothing”: fabrication, mental illness, hypochondria.

Jamison attends the Morgellons Conference in Austin, Texas, where sufferers gather annually to swap medical tips and leads, and to simply share their stories. She finds its denizens pocked and scarred not so much by the disease they believe they have, as by their persistent efforts to try — but unsuccessfully — excavate the wriggling evidence of pain from their bodies. As one attendee tells Jamison, “Some of these things I’m trying to get out, it’s like they move away from me.”

Jamison can relate. While on a trip to Bolivia, she is bitten on the ankle by a botfly, which lays eggs in its host. The wriggling she feels under her skin is finally validated when, weeks later, a doctor pulls a worm — “the size of a fingernail clipping and the color of dirty snow, covered with tiny black teeth that looked like fuzz” out of her flesh. In the days afterward she continues to feel a phantom wriggling; spends hours poking and prodding her wound, scouring “its ragged edges and possible traces of parasitic life.” But where her affliction is stamped as real — she has the tweezed-out larva to prove it — “morgies” lack the objective evidence to support their claim to suffering.

“Devil’s Bait” thus offers a study-in-miniature of themes Jamison develops more fully in her memoir: that narratives (in this case, medical diagnoses) offer containment and closure, and that these narratives also routinely fail or betray the suffering that begs to be told. The Morgellons diagnosis, Jamison observes, “offers an explanation, a container, and a community,” granting “some shape or substance to a discontent that might otherwise feel endless.” And yet the disease lacks a cure, or even official medical recognition, which merely substitutes one open-endedness for another. Once you “know” what you “are,” where do you go from there? “The trouble,” Jamison concludes, “ends up feeling endless either way.”

Jamison circles back to the metaphor of the botfly in The Recovering, now repurposed to reflect on the pain of addiction. The psychiatric-medical drive to find the sources of addiction in brain chemistry, or childhood trauma, or genotype can constitute its own form of wishful storytelling, one that reduces the complexity of causality. It holds out hope for recovering something tangible to isolate under the microscope as a cause — when in fact what we are often stuck with are the rippling effects of an initial cause that may or may not actually be “there.” And even supposing one does dig back into the past — of one’s cells, of one’s childhood — to uncover the source of the malady, knowing doesn’t cure it. “I’d parsed my motivations in a thousand sincere conversations,” Jamison notes, “and all my self-understanding hadn’t granted me any release from compulsion.”

Respect for this unknown x is ultimately what Jamison comes to prize in recovery narratives, and she recognizes herself most clearly in those stories — whether literary or medical — that reject the “syllogisms of cause,” the pretension that one might “source the fabric of the poison coat.” There is no before/after, no “If I do x, I get y,” or “If I find x, then I know y.” In place of the closed-book satisfaction of what she calls “contract logic,” she finds instead the openness of an ongoing story: the endlessness, maddening, and yet ultimately grounding AA mantra one day at a time. In the back pages of Berryman’s notebook for Recovery, Jamison discovers a fairy tale he wrote with his daughter, entitled “The Hunter in the Forest.” A hunter gets lost in the woods; he is captured by two hungry bears and locked in a cage, where he falls asleep. Berryman and his daughter wrote three alternative endings for the story, each offering some form of narrative closure: the hunter breaks out and kills the bears; or he feels remorse for trying to kill them; or he befriends them. But the fourth ending, annotated in the child’s scrawl as “Real Ending,” is much more ambiguous: “The hunter awakened and said, ‘Well?’”

The open-endedness of narrative is one lesson Jamison takes away from recovery. Another is the way each story of personal pain is never truly private, but always inscribed into the wider sphere of public meaning: the gendered, classed, and racialized social narratives that determine in advance whose pain counts, and whose doesn’t. Part of the reason Jamison is able to tear herself away from the idea of art as the product of “beautiful wreckage” is that the protagonists in this age-old story are so relentlessly male. Where drunk male writers are scripted as stoic and selfless, “rogue silhouettes,” their drunk female peers are cast as messy, sad, failed mothers (generating words, a spurious substitute for children).

Jamison devotes a good portion of the book’s early chapters to excavating the intertwined medical and legal history of addiction in the United States, and the ambivalence with which it has been treated: addicts are alternatively ill or criminal, victims or perpetrators, sometimes both. Most often, the placement of an addiction on the spectrum from regrettable illness to criminal deviance is determined by skin color. “It took me years to understand that my interior had never been interior — that my relationship to my own pain, a relationship that felt essentially private, was not private at all,” she writes. “It owed its existence to narratives that made it very possible for a white girl to hurt,” casting her addiction as “benign, pitiable,” even “interesting.” She contrasts this narrative leisure with the constraints of the poor or the person of color, whose addiction has always been cast as nefarious, from the specter of “oriental” opium dens in the early part of the century, through the explicitly raced crack moms and baseheads of Reagan’s War on Drugs, through our modern epoch’s mass incarceration fueled by drug convictions. She cites a 1995 survey in which respondents were asked to close their eyes, “envision a drug user,” and then give a description; ninety-five percent pictured someone black. “This hypothetical drug user was the product of decades of effective storytelling,” Jamison notes.

The story of Billie Holiday floats through the pages of Jamison’s memoir like a recurring blue note, an emblem for the way the addict’s life — especially if she is poor and black — is scripted by forces outside her control. Holiday was lauded by New York’s literati for her astonishing ability to alchemize pain into beauty; New York Review of Books essayist Elizabeth Hardwick confessed herself enchanted by the singer’s “luminous self-destruction.” At the very same time, Holiday became a prime target for Harry Anslinger, commissioner of the Federal Narcotics Bureau in the 1940s, who saw her as a perfect black addict-villain for his anti-drug crusade. He had her tracked and arrested on several occasions, including a 1947 conviction that sent her to prison for one year. Billie Holliday’s story is a brutal reminder of the prison-house of narrative, quite literally. When she was checked into New York’s Metropolitan Hospital at the age of 44, dying from cirrhosis of the liver, Anslinger’s narcotics agents were still on her trail. “You watch, baby,” she confided to a friend. “They are going to arrest me in this damn bed.” And they did: they handcuffed her to the headboard where, six weeks later, she died.

¤

In the end, it is by articulating a collective “we” that, without reducing suffering to sameness, Jamison discovers an adequate narrative form for the story she has to tell, a tunnel out of “the claustrophobic crawl space of the self.” She had been looking for a very specific kind of beauty in the art of addiction and recovery, a beauty modeled on the modernist obsession with autonomy (“art for art’s sake”) and originality (“Make it new!”). But the narrative work done in AA meetings turns this model on its head: sameness, or what members call the “resonance” between stories, is precisely the point. In AA, she learns that “a story was most useful when it wasn’t unique at all, when it understood itself as something that had been lived before and would be lived again. Our stories were valuable because of this redundancy, not despite of it.” AA stories are not necessarily beautiful, but that doesn’t mean they do not, in their own way, perform a function often attributed to art: to alchemize pain into healing. Jamison suggests that perhaps there can be beauty in chorus, in the mundane but also transcendence of repetition. That anonymity — that most antithetical of values in the modernist canon — can shine with its own species of beauty. What matters is less the particularities of each individual voice and more the polyphony of the voices combined to hold one another up, and to make something greater than the sum of its parts.

The irony is, of course, that Jamison’s 500-page narrative is nothing if not classically beautiful: implausibly so, almost ludicrously consistent in its fierce freshness and poetry from page to page to page. Her language manages somehow to be simultaneously lush and piercing. It is richly imaged, delighting the senses with its descriptive texture. Jamison describes her time in a Nicaraguan market, threading her way through “street vendors selling fried dough and dishwashers from tarp-covered stalls clustered in a system of old storm drains, hawking tubs of lizard-skinned custard apples and pale and salty cheese in sweating blocks the size of dollhouses.” But just as the enumerative descriptive bounty of her prose seems that it might flood the narrative, she pivots to an ongoing debate about Jean Rhys, about whether her “monstrous” life was worth the art she produced. Cutting through the rich street scene with the steely tip of a perfectly turned philosophical observation, hard and compact as an aphorism, Jamison writes, “Her life was. The work is. We can’t trade either back. There’s no objective metric for how much brilliance might be required to redeem a life of damage — and no ratio that justifies the conversion.”

There is some repetition and overlap in the weave of the narrative, its rowdy and eclectic cast of characters, from narc agents to jazz singers to psychiatrists to gin-blind poets, popping in and out at unexpected intervals. A story line is taken up, dropped, then revisited again just when the reader had begun to let it go. But if this ruminative, polyphonic mode may be cited by some as a weakness of the book, it is also necessarily its greatest strength. It embodies the aesthetic of resonance, of echo and call and response, that Jamison finds best fits the collective story of addiction. It mimics the rhythms of recovery itself: two steps forward, one step back; recovery and relapse; commitment and abandonment, then commitment (again?) again.

¤

Ellen Wayland-Smith is an author and associate professor of Writing at The University of Southern California. Her essays and reviews have appeared in Signature Reads, Catapult, The Millions, and Longreads.

The post (Again?) Again: Reading Leslie Jamison’s “The Recovering” appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

from Los Angeles Review of Books https://ift.tt/2w0Zonb

[mindpenis]

'Malcolm Deeley via yahoo.com 'anagrams to'A homely, moody, comical leave.' From: Iason Ragnar Bellerophon <cavemanrobot@gmail.com>

First Chapter of Abyss

Inbox

x

Sep 4

to me: Iason Ragnar Bellerophon, World’s Greatest Living Thothist.

Here you go...Chapter One of "Abyss", with a few quotes preceding it to set the mood. Chapter Two will go back to the beginning of 1887, diving deep into Ruha, Grace, and Captain Wilder AKA Doc Talos.

Just sent along the Slavepal payment as well.

ABYSS

I am fond of them, of the inferior beings of the abyss, of those who are full of longing.

Richard Wagner

He struggled with himself, too. I saw it -- I heard it. I saw the inconceivable mystery of a soul that knew no restraint, no faith, and no fear, yet struggling blindly with itself.

Joseph Conrad

And I have known a deathless queen in a city old as Death, where towering pyramids of skulls her glory witnesseth. Her kiss was like an adder's fang, with the sweetness Lilith had, and her red-eyed vassals howled for blood in that City of the Mad.

Robert E. Howard

And still the Weaver plies his loom, whose warp and woof is wretched Man. Weaving th' unpattern'd dark design, so dark we doubt it owns a plan.

Richard Francis Burton

1887, The Congo, Central Africa

She stood there in the firelight of the burning camp, smiling as if all the death surrounding us prompted her to the most consummate pleasure.

The swamp would claim the corpses in a matter of days, devoured by insects, dragged away by scavengers, bones scattered and sunk in the grasping mud.

“So James, at last you are Talos.”

How she could speak with such calm irony was beyond my comprehension. Had she not just witnessed me put a bullet into the head of her own daughter? Was there not blood oozing from the wound in her own chest, which I would have judged fatal to anyone else?

Talos. The man of bronze, tireless guardian against those who would destroy and despoil, until brought down by a witch, the nail holding in the flow from his one great vein of holy blood pulled out so that all animation left his metal body.

I glanced down at the dead woman lying in the mud. Grace's pistol lay in the muck near hear outflung hand. The dark glasses she had worn in both night and day had been jarred off when the bullet had entered her forehead. Her eyes had ceased the roving of their affliction, settling in a death stare that had a more normal aspect than the one she had worn in life.

Ruha inclined her own gaze downward. She crouched then, roughly grasping Grace's hair in one fist, lifting her head and giving the corpse a passionate kiss. With her teeth, she tugged Grace's tongue out slightly from between the slack lips. She used her own tongue to toy with it briefly, then raised her head and regarded me with another smile.

“You're in the abyss, James. In my order, we fuck the abyss.”

I could not shrug off my own bullet wound with the ease of which Ruha seemed capable. Grace's final shot had grazed my temple, gouging a furrow that burned like fire. Jagged lances of pain made it hard to think. My finger twitched on the trigger-guard of my own gun. Would Ruha, impossibly, survive if I put a bullet in her head too?

I remembered her prediction, made in the elegant surroundings of her London drawing room, that I would someday slaughter a string of women in an orgy of bloodlust. I had dismissed her “vision” as a manifestation of what I had come to believe was her cruel insanity. How things had changed.

In my half-delirious state the desire pounded in my brain to kill her and flee from her abyss of twisted passion with the desperation of a criminal. She was monstrous. To execute her would do the world a service. No one would question any story I chose to give if I should succeed in struggling back to the coast alone. I could go back to London, return to my practice, try to forget, attempt to atone.

The scene before me seemed to blur, sliding back into focus only as I concentrated on the smooth metal surface of my pistol's trigger.

Ruha released Grace's hair – the woman's death stare returning mercifully to the mud.

“Captain Wilder...” for a moment I thought the dead woman was speaking, and only with effort did I recall the words to be Grace's as she had left England to follow Ruha to Africa. “When what one seeks is eternal life, all acts are justified.”

I blinked, shook my head, and realized Ruha was now standing right in front of me. She stared at me with her disconcerting grey eyes. Knowing her distinctly unholy skill with mesmerism, I tried to wrench my gaze away.

How long had I been standing there, semi-frozen? Obviously an interval of at least some minutes had passed. Ruha had shed her clothing. Flashing my eyes around, I discerned her ensanguined blouse near our feet, her skirt and boots flung down carelessly beside it. She took one of my hands in an incongruously gentle grasp and guided it to her breast. Damp with sweat, the curve of her flesh was also stained with wet blood. As she led my fingers to caress her, I encountered the ragged circle of torn flesh where Grace's bullet had struck her.

In another abrupt realization, I became conscious that the hand being manipulated by Ruha was my gun-hand. Had she simply stepped forward and lifted the weapon from my fingers? In a semi-panic I scanned the ground for it, finally seeing it in the mud a few feet away.

She lifted one of my fingers, now crimsoned with her blood, to her mouth. She sucked it, her tongue flicking behind her teeth against the fingertip. She then withdrew the finger, her other hand reaching for the buckle of my belt.

“The reptile regrows its tail,” she said, showing me her tongue again as she licked her lips.

“I shoud snap your neck.”

The threat prompted her to grin.

“The owl's neck turns all the way around,” she answered.

Having deftly undone my belt, she opened my trousers, yanking them down to expose my suddenly-tumescent shaft. She sank to her knees in the mud, opening her mouth as if to receive me. But instead she spoke again.

“What an idiot prick your father is. What we do now will quite literally be the death of him.”

Why would she say that now? The huge old man with one eye, called by the false name Saklas, who in one breath had acknowledged me his son, and in the next dismissed me as irrelevant.

What we do now...

The sweat and blood-smells on her incited my erection to even greater intensity, and I feared for my sanity. Perhaps the parasites and predators of this godforsaken place were even now keying on those aromas, instinctively sensing that in their conjunction with the musk of sex lay the marks of potential prey, vulnerable when reeking of lust. As Ruha's tongue began to emerge from between her lips, I witnessed an illusion of its length extending grotesquely, wrapping in tight coils around my phallus.

My own sweat had dripped into my eyes, stinging. I shook my head, blinked, and looked down at the dark crown of Ruha's head, now gliding forward and back in the movements of fellatio.

I must reach down, pull her from me, twist her head, break her neck.

But I could not. I had dealt death in battle, I had returned death when attacked, as when Grace had attempted to shoot me. But I could not snuff out a life as an act of merciless judgment.

Ruha took me deep in her throat, then in withdrawing, angled her face upward to me. Like a fool, I looked into her eyes.

My mind blanked. I did not know where I was. Arousal manifested as a mindless force in me, imbued with a strengthening of the impulse to do murder that I had just rejected – though now instead of stemming from anger, fear or even desperation, its engine was lust.

I was conscious of wearing dark clothing, of my hands being fitted with gloves. The air, rank with dampness, was not that of a Congolese swamp, but a fog-laced miasma that was surely London.

Before me, hands pressed against the bricks of an alley wall, her skirts lifted, was a woman I knew must be a prostitute. I had squired numerous women from the upper tiers of the erotic trade in my time in London, but from her disheveled appearance and crude clothing, I perceived this to be a woman of the lower echelon. I had always felt sympathy for such women, often pressed by poverty to sell their bodies for pennies...I had never solicited their services, instead offering my own services as a doctor to try and ease suffering caused by privation and venereal disease.

The rush of raw lust filling me now held no vestige of compassion. This was a vessel for me to fill, from which I would extract an ecstasy both primal and esoteric. To release her lifeblood during the act of copulation would exalt her, while bathing me in energies brimming with the potency of life.

I had a scalpel in my hand. I took hold of her hair, yanking her head back. As I entered her from behind, I reached around and placed the blade against her throat.

My mind seemed to explode, and the gush of her hot blood penetrated even my gloved hand, burning with a mystical heat.

“Now, envision your ejaculate filling her with life, James,” this was Ruha's voice. “What you feel now is the true source of all human power. Cast out the illusion of spirit, experience and reject the lie that is the gnosis, recognize the ascendency of all that is carnal.”

My senses returned, though the reality was no less insane.

I was engaged in intercourse with Grace's body. Her clothing had been torn away – by Ruha, or had I done it? Her milk-white skin, the inescapable mark of her albinism, was tinted in lurid shades by the light of flames in the still-burning camp. Her hair, dyed to the purest black while in London, had grown out to show its snowy roots during the days she had crossed the Congo in pursuit of Ruha.

Her corpse had been propped on her knees, arms trailing back, face down still in the mud. The triangle, the pyramid, the submission of a female submitting to mating. On my own knees behind her, I stroked in and out, my body feverish with the same overwhelming lust I had been filled with in the vision of the prostitute.

Grace, however, seemed now a goddess to my perception – a dead goddess, but one still surrounded by auras of the escaping essence of life.

“You are not to come,” Ruha's voice continued. “She is the catalyzer only, finally fulfilling a role suitable for her inferiority.”

At the moment of deepest penetration I ceased my thrusting, holding all my muscles rigid. Was this by Ruha's command, or was my body responding to some knowledge of the deepest secrets of violent eroticism? Grace's energies were no longer dissipating into the African night, no longer sinking into the hungry mud of this death's-head continent. They were pouring into me.

It began to rain – a warm spray that became a torrent, turning the ground into a flowing, sucking expanse.

Ruha, behind me, pulled my phallus from Grace. I looked down – her hand, wrapping my rigid member, seemed to hold a hard ingot of alhemist's gold.

“Now you are ready, James,” she whispered in my ear. “Time to fuck me. Time to create a new incarnation of the Primal Man.”

She circled in front of me and lay back into the mud, taking a moment to shove Grace's corpse to the side. She pulled me down atop her.

“Give me what you've taken, James...then kill me too.”

“What?”

“You're afraid of death, like a little boy, like a mewling pussy. You're going to fuck me, then shove my head down into the mud and hold me there until I stop twitching. Then indulge in the first real climax of your life, into my corpse.”

“In-insane...”

“Yes, that's exactly right. Do it darling, or I'll tear off your cock and fling it to its fellow serpents in this swamp, then rip out your throat.”

As a display of her ability to do exactly that, one of her hands surged upward and clutched my neck. My breath immediately stopped. I grabbed at my throat, trying to dislodge her. Her strength was incredible. I could not loosen her grip.

“That would be disappointing,” her voice was as richly seductive as it had ever been, where I half-expected the gutterals of a demoness from hell. “but I've served other prospective lovers that way, when their potential failed to materialize.”

What possessed me then – animal panic, anger, or a final wave of mind-destroying lust – was a tranformation. Her taunts and threats echoed in my brain. I pushed my phallus into her, and did everything within my power to hammer her into the mud. I let the whole weight of my body drop onto her. My hip muscles pistoned, and I felt I was fucking the female embodiment of the earth itself.

She released her hand from around my throat, and I spastically flailed my hands downward, gripping her neck in a turnabout that felt equally horrifying and empowering. I pushed her down below the surface of the mud, until all I could see above her shoulders were straggling wisps of her black hair, writhing from both her convulsions and mine.

I don't know how long it took for her to cease thrashing, but eventually she did. As she had predicted, my climax came then, with brutal intensity that blacked my mind with more soot than in any furnace in London. I wept, the tears swept into the deluge of rain, and shouted threats of my own at her lifeless body, pounded now into the swamp and filled with my seed.

My atheistic brain rejected every glimpse in this of her ridiculous, sacred and scorned gnosis. Her ravings, about a future that would now never arrive, had been meaningless. I struggled, my body still deeply rooted in her corpse, to deny to myself that like Talos, the bronze man, every aspect of true life had been drained out of me.

Have safe travels today!

And here is Chapter 2:

December 1886, West End, London

A light snow began to fall as we exited the carriage outside of the Narcissus.

I took Catherine's hand, guiding her as she set her booted foot on the carriage step, and from there to the cobble street.

“Why Jimmy,” she said, tilting her face upward as snowflakes caught on her eyelashes, “we may just have a white Christmas.”

I smiled, offering her my arm, and we moved into the shelter under the theatre canopy. The Narcissus Theatre, no stranger to scandal, was actually dark. Its reputation for staging productions designed to outrage the West End's affluent and aristocratic denizens was something of a legend. Earlier in the year they had been threatened with closure over a particularly lurid production in the Grand Guignol tradition, using copious amounts of pig and lambs-blood gathered with unseemly glee from district butchers. Threats from civic authorities to shutter the theatre had prompted an impudent response, as they'd promptly made use of their remaining sanguine inventory in a production of Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus.

But even that reputation would be exceeded tonight, and so no footlights or marquee showed; this production would be a private affair.

The Hellfire Club, whose company I indulged in as a means for socializing with London's most abstruse intellectuals, was staging its annual rite of Isis and Osiris.

I was providing the Isis. Catherine, nominally an “actress”, was in fact the highest paid erotic hostess in the city. Had this been ancient Rome, she would have been courtesan to an Emperor.

I had been seeing Cathy not only as a bed partner, but with more serious intent. Beyond the everyday ebb and flow of my medical practice, I was composing a treatise on the emerging science of genetics. Cathy had two children, a boy and a girl, healthy and both mentally gifted, despite being the scion of disparate client fathers. I was exploring the concept – sneered at by small minded colleagues – that qualities like intelligence might be carried primarily through a dominant female gene. Cathy herself, though lacking in formal education, was intelligent to a degree I considered exceptional. The clients she had identified as the children's fathers, though well moneyed, had the intelligence quotient of blocks of oak.

She stamped her boots lightly as we entered the Narcissus' foyer, freeing them from their snow-dusting. A hired man, amusingly outfitted in an art nouveau version of Egyptian livery, appeared to take our coats. Though the lights of the theatre's facade had been unlit, a warm gas-glow filled the interior.

Serving as greeter, the Club's White King, publisher and underground pornographer Hugh Dulcey accepted Cathy's proffered hand and kissed it decorously, then nodded greeting to me.

“Wilder,” he said, “thank you for bringing our radiant Isis. Far off by the furthest Rosses, we foot it all the night, weaving olden dances, mingling hands and mingling glances, till the moon has taken flight.”

“You're a shameless promoter, Hughie,” Cathy winked. “Is Bill here tonight, then?”

“Of course. He wrote your lines. I'm going to steal him from the Hermetic Society if it's the last thing I do.”

I'd early realized that the mystical aspects of the Hellfire Club's activities were indulged in with a measure of cynical disbelief. But that, if anything, had appeal for me. I had no use for mysticism either. However, it provided an intriguing bridge to concepts better interpreted through science. The minority of earnest mystics in the group often had the most fascinating ideas, and the transmutation of those concepts into hard medicine formed another sidelight of my independent researches.

Cathy tossed me a private smirk as we moved past him into the theatre proper. “Hughie does have airs for a cock-and-pussy purveyor, doesn't he?”

“He thinks that wrapping coitus in a cloak of occultism elevates it to transcendence.'

“I'm not sure I completely disagree with him,” she laughed. “If I'm going to be hayrolled, getting it from Osiris has a certain appeal. I wish you could have been prevailed upon to play the godly, horny, rebuilt-husband, Jimmy.”

I leaned down to give her an affectionate kiss. “I would have enjoyed it. However, Hugh will have his camera in the wings.”

“I know. He's a commercial creature under the esoteric folderol. I can see that might put a crimp in your reputation, Jimmy. Though naturally it will just enhance mine.”

We entered the stage-and-audience area of the theatre, the gaslight a little dimmer here. Other Hellfire Club devotees had arrived, some seated, some chatting in the aisles. The usual array of bored, thrill-seeking aristocrats, blended with those of more Bohemian and societally rebellious nature. Not every individual was known to me. The Club was always recruiting new members, or attracting the curious through gossip passed along the sluice of London's outré underculture.

Cathy, who had raised herself on tiptoe to accept my kiss, gave my arm a squeeze as our lips parted. “Time I headed backstage,” she said. “When next you see me, I'll be a goddess.”

She made her way to the stage steps, ascended, and turned back for a moment to smile at those gathered in the theatre. In a very non-philosophical manner, a few whistles and catcalls rippled through the assembly. With more dignity than flamboyance, she inclined her head toward the seats with a slight smile before disappearing behind the curtain. Really, Cathy was a delight.

I picked out a seat for myself near the orchestra pit. No musicians had been hired for this performance, so this area of seats offered a little semi-privacy. Tonight I found myself uninterested in small talk with other Clubbers.

Relaxing in the seat, I let my mind wander. I thought of Cathy's two children – bright young minds, filled with potential. Though their social status would forever be limited by the notoriety of their mother's career, what they could ultimately achieve when adults might be notable.

In addition to my scientific interest in the mechanisms of genetics, the concept of positive societal change sparked by the influence of select, superior individuals also held great interest for me. My belief was that civilization was in fact driven by the exceptional few leading the prosaic many, and I had a degree of zeal to be a part of that ongoing process. In this burgeoning era of inventiveness and industry, what a few remarkable and gifted individuals might accomplish offered an enticing vision of an improved and ever-improving world.

With mild surprise, I became aware that a woman was moving toward me along the line of seats. With my chosen placement away from other members of the Club, her intent could only be to join me.

A moment later I was on my feet, accepting her extended hand, which was somewhat daringly ungloved.

“May I join you, sir?” Her voice had a unique cast, very rich, with an accent which was certainly not that of a native Londoner. This impression was further enhanced by the dusky tone of her skin. She might have been Arabic, her complexion reminiscent of women I had met during my military service in Northern Africa.

I was certain I did not know her. I would unquestioningly have remembered her piercing grey eyes, her long, straight black hair, her unique height. She was wearing an expensive gown of burgundy silk; a glance across her body assured me she was not wearing a corset – an outrage against current fashion.

“Of course,” I answered, though in fact slightly annoyed at the intrusion. Nevertheless I gestured toward the seat beside mine.

When she was settled there, I reseated myself. She regarded me with a smile, quite brilliant, its only flaw a narrow gap between her front teeth, though that furthered a certain aspect of feral energy she exuded.

“Are you newly joined?” I asked.

“What, your Hellfire Club? No. I crashed your little gathering, if the truth be told.”

“Remarkable. Dulcey let you pass?”

“You mean the pornographer?” she laughed. “I simply told him how much I enjoyed his artistry, and he was putty.”

“Hm. And how did you come to know about us?”

“I know a great many things, Dr. Wilder.”

“You have the advantage of me.”

“Call me Damaris. So, to herald Christmas, we are to see Osiris fucking Isis?”

And I had considered Cathy to have a streak of bluntness.

She went on. “A much older depiction of life's power than a baby born in a stable. Appropriate, I suppose. Tonight's Isis is an acquaintance of yours, is she?”

“In a professional sense. But I respect her very much. Her successes as a person are well earned, and defy any stereotype one might be tempted to give because of her profession.”

“A worthy answer. And what I would have expected, as you have the reputation of being a worthy man.”

“You seem to know a great deal about me, madam.”

“Damaris.”

I nodded. “Damaris. Are you and I acquainted in some manner I'm unaware of?”

“Indirectly. It's actually your father that I know quite well.”

“My...” So her intimacy with the details of my life that she seemed to be flaunting had gone astray. I was a lifelong orphan.

“I have no father,” I responded.

“You're alive, aren't you? That means you have a father. Ah,” she leaned toward the stage, “but I see our little divinity play is about to begin.”

Dulcey had noisily mounted the stage, and waved for attention. The murmur of voices around the theatre hushed in slow stages, until finally settling into quiet.

“Welcome fellow devotees of the occult and the carnal,” he immediately launched into oratory. “The Hellfire Club recognizes the arrival of Christmas in one way only: as a signpost of ancient power, and our own ability to commune with that power.”

“Charming,” Damaris leaned close to my ear to whisper. “He's an idiot, but more correct than he knows.”

“Before recorded time,” Dulcey went on, “the god Osiris was betrayed by his brother Set, cut into pieces, and his mutilated body scattered. But his wife the goddess Isis gathered the pieces, stitched them together, and through intercourse with her husband, restored him to life long enough to conceive the god Horus, who in time would exact revenge, and clear the world of ancient evils.

“We are not so narrow as to judge evil by Christian standards, or even those of the Egyptian pantheon. But we do recognize the power of life's passion. I give you Osiris and Isis.”

Dulcey quit the stage, undoubtedly to man his camera. The curtain rose, and there stood Cathy in faux Egyptian finery. She was actually quite magnificent. She launched into her own oratory – good poetry, which she delivered flawlessly. Further exposition along the lines that Dulcey had offered, though more moving when spoken by her. The ultimate power of love...its expression through the hungers of the body...the immortality of passion.

I glanced at Damaris, who watched and listened with a look of amusement. I considered what might be the motive of this woman for her imposition upon me. The comment about my father exposed her as a poseur of some kind...but to what purpose? Men and women of the Hellfire Club – even if she professed to be an outsider – were distinctly addicted to all manner of vices. Her intent could be anything from some sort of clandestine business or social proposition, to a desired seduction, to blackmail for my simply being present during what would soon be a semi-public fornication.

The latter did not overly worry me, there were far more affluent targets available in this theatre should she desire that. The former possibilities, given her unique charisma, might be intriguing.

On the stage, a secondary curtain had been raised, behind which, atop a dais, was the prone figure of a naked man. A well put-together specimen, Dulcey had hired him for the evening from a brothel catering to homosexual men, the very existence of which the authorities denied. Thankfully his lack of costume had not been supplemented by something as garish as painted-on stitches to portray Isis' skill with a needle in thread in putting her husband back together.

Cathy approached the “corpse” with impressive reverence, and after speaking a few more poetic lines, began the process of his resurrection, which was accomplished by energetic fellatio.

Harsher lighting came up, less for artistic effect than the necessary brightness for Dulcey's sequential daguerreotype to capture marketable images. An interesting machine, it burned a sequence of pictures to plates fairly rapidly, and when transferred to prints, they could be played in a device called a magic lantern, which flipped quickly from one image to the next to produce the illusion of motion.

A pornographer's dream; Hugh would reap significant dividends from this performance when it was made available to fanciers of underground eros.

Osiris showed that he was not only prompted to sexual excitement by male attentions. Cathy's fellatio raised him to an impressive erection.

I glanced again to my side to see Damaris' response to this. Despite her jaded manner, she clearly found the sight to be a thrill; she watched with what I would judge to be arousal trumping her somewhat-mocking attitude of amusement.

Having prepared dead Osiris to father her falcon-headed son, Isis mounted him for the consummation. Her skirt had been designed to open fully, and she completely lacked undergarments, so the coupling could be viewed clearly by all.

I received no mystical exaltation from the intercourse of the entwined divinities, but I did find it in its way to be beautiful. I did not find sex degrading, as common morals dictated it was. All of Dulcey's brazenly transparent claims to artistry aside, I found the acts of sex to naturally possess both animal vitality and a kind of grace. Having privately experienced the nuances of Cathy's passion, I could see that her expression of transport was genuine. She raised herself up from her consort at the moment of his climax, to fully allow the spurting of his restored life to be witnessed, though had Isis done so in the legendary climactic moment, Horus' conception might well have been jeopardized.

The curtain dropped.

Damaris took a deep breath, licked her lips, then turned toward me again.

“A fine fuck,” she said.

I did not answer, but regarded her silently. Whatever she had accosted me to propose, I suspected now would be the time for it to come out.

“Do you find this sort of thing pleasurable, Dr. Wilder?”

“To a degree, yes.”

“I do too. A game, of course, but enjoyable.”

“So you're not one to seek for occult gratification in sex? That's what the Hellfire Club attempts to provide, or at least claims to attempt that.”

She smiled. “They have no idea.”

“And you do?”

“May I call you James? James, the esoteric power in sex is, quite literally, limitless. Are you familiar with concepts like the Anthropos, or Primal Man, the Fullness, the Pleroma and Kenoma, the Aeons and the Archons?”

“I am not. A belief structure of some sort?”

“A very old one. But very potent.”

“That's interesting.”

To my surprise, she did not pursue the topic, but stood, clearly intending to depart.

“I'm glad you find it so,” she said. “I'd enjoy discussing it with you in greater depth. You have a liking for secret societies. Perhaps I can introduce you to one that makes these effete debauchees look like the mindless pricks and cunts they are.”

I stood also, at a loss for words.

“No need to see me out, dear James. We've started the weave of a crimson thread between us. I'll call on you. For now, a merry Christmas to you.”

She began moving along the row of seats toward the aisle.

“What is your last name?” I called after her.

“I have quite a few,” she turned her head enough for me to once again see her sardonic smile. “I think in time you'll come to enjoy calling me Ruha.”

To: Malcolm Deeley <admin@gromagonpress.com>

Sent: Sunday, September 24, 2017 7:33 AM

Subject: Re: Abyss Chapter 3 and payment

Dude Mal, thanks We are traveling today will read this tonight. I have Chapter one, but I don't see Chapter Two in my gmail, can you resend?

Can't wait to read this...

On Sat, Sep 23, 2017 at 10:57 AM Malcolm Deeley <admin@gromagonpress.com> wrote:

Hey Jace,

I just sent along the Chapter 3 illustrations payment, it should be in your PayPal now. And without further ado, meet Grace X:

The snowstorm grew stronger in the night, with windblown flakes sweeping against my bedroom window and gathering in the interstices of the panes through the passing hours. Cathy would indeed have her white Christmas. Tired from her performance as Isis, and desiring to have an early start to Christmas morning with her children, she’d preferred not to indulge in a second bout of lovemaking after our departure from the Narcissus. So I had escorted her home and left her with a fond kiss goodnight, after which I returned to the apartment I kept above my medical office.

Lacking in family and uninterested in religion, Christmas was usually a solitary holiday for me; I was comfortable with that. I would often pass the day reading or writing. So upon waking, I dressed, went downstairs, pulled a few tomes from the shelf of my small personal library, and settled in with a hot cup of coffee in the receiving room of my office.

Not a day for going out in any event. Before I had left my bedroom, a look out the window at the alley behind my building showed it to be heavily drifted with the new snow.

I thought about Damaris and the strange, brief conversation we had shared. I gave no credence to the allusion she’d made to knowing my father; I’d come to the conclusion that had been a shot in the dark which had gone wide, part of the woman’s attempt to work her way closer to me for reasons yet unknown. Her hit and run technique of introducing herself had been equally odd, as had her speech, which had seemed to hold equal parts aesthete and gutter-dweller. I thought it quite likely I would never see or hear from her again. Hellfire Club members were eccentrics par excellence, given to sometimes bizarre methods for amusing themselves.

By the time I reached the bottom of my coffee cup, I was deep into a volume articulating the tenets of various Christian and non-Christian fringe religions, seeing if I might strike a reference to any of the names she had tossed off in parting. The terms Aeon and Archon were vaguely familiar…and Anthropos suggested roots in primitive humanity. But nothing presented itself to give framework to such concepts.

I was about to rise and reheat the coffee pot for a second cup, when to my great surprise, I heard a knock at the door. A caller, on Christmas Day, in a snowstorm?

I had no footman or private secretary, I was a firm believer that a man should answer his own doors. So a few moments later I pulled open the door to an unusual vision.

On the stoop stood a woman, bundled like a Cossack in a hooded greatcoat. I saw no carriage – she must have walked through the storm, and had done so alone.

“Come in, come in please,” I ushered her into the foyer and closed the door against the snow.

For a moment she stood there silently, her snow-coated outer attire almost immediately beginning to steam. Then she turned toward me and lowered her hood.

“Dr. James Wilder?”

For a few long heartbeats I simply stared. Her skin was milk-white. Not just the pallor affected by aristocrats to display that others performed labor in the sun for them, but completely stark; I realized she was an albino. Her hair, long but tied back at the nape of her neck, was jet black; it must have been dyed. She wore smoked glasses, round rimmed and also black, so I was not actually able to see her eyes. The glasses gave me a brief thought that she might be blind, but she had no cane, and was clearly, by her movements, sighted.

“Yes, I’m Dr. Wilder. This is extraordinary, considering the holiday and the storm. Let me take your coat.”

She submitted readily to my removing her greatcoat, which I hung on a stand beside the door. She bent to brush snow away from her high-laced boots, then took off her wet gloves, handing those to me also. Once again, I was struck by the pale white of her skin as her hands were revealed. She wore no nail polish, which made her fingers seem spectral.

I placed the gloves on a drying trivet beside my own, which I’d put there after coming in last night.

“You’re most kind,” she said. “Please forgive the unorthodox timing. You have holiday guests, perhaps?”

“No no, Christmas is just another day for me. Please, would you join me in my receiving room?”

“Thank you, doctor.”

I indicated the direction, and allowed her to precede me. Looking at her from behind, I tried to form an impression beyond the striking quality of her albinism. A woman of perhaps forty, with the appearance of good health; only a few inches shorter than me, though some of that height could be attributed to the heels of her boots, which were severe, considering she had just been walking in a snowstorm. She moved with purpose and confidence, displaying none of the tentativeness that women sometimes either consciously or unconsciously fell into when visiting a doctor.

I guided her to the chair before my desk, then circled around her, closed the book I had been reading, and picked up my coffee cup. The room had no fireplace, but the gaslight contributed to a gentle warmth. As the room had no windows, the storm and cold were closed off.

“Please, make yourself comfortable. I was about to heat coffee, may I bring you a cup?”

Her lips curled in a very slight smile. “I have a weakness for African coffee.”

“I’m not sure of the source, beyond my grocer,” I answered. “Black? I have sugar, if you wish.”

“Black is fine.”

I left her for a moment, to put more coal into the iron stove and reheat the pot. When I returned with two steaming cups, I noticed her rebuttoning one sleeve of her blouse. Perhaps it had twisted or bunched under her coat, becoming uncomfortable, and she had smoothed it while waiting. I gave that no thought.

She accepted the coffee, cradling the mug with both hands, then brought it to her pale lips and sipped.

“Good,” she acknowledged.

“I’m glad,” I said, seating myself behind my consulting desk. “Again, it’s quite extraordinary that you should be out on such a day, Miss…”

“Mrs. Grace Xavier. Though my husband is deceased, I retain the title from our marriage for the sake of remembrance. I felt some urgency in seeing you, Dr. Wilder. Christmas has little meaning for me either…I live in a world of realities, rather than fancies of God and his machinations.”

“You have an interesting way of phrasing things. But urgency in what way? Are you suffering in some manner I might help to ease?”

“Perhaps.” She smiled again, taking another sip of her coffee. “Though I’m in no pain requiring immediate attention, doctor. My urgency stemmed from a rumor I’ve heard of your imminent departure from London…I did wish to see you before you took any form of extended leave from England.”

“Departure? I have no such plans, Mrs. Xavier. Where would you have heard such a thing?”

“Really. Perhaps I’ve been misinformed.” She looked at me with some intensity, though her dark glasses made it hard to judge the nature of that intenseness. The black lenses were perfectly opaque, presenting a wall between myself and her eyes. As I sipped my own coffee I returned her gaze, studying the lines of her face. Her features had a patrician quality which would by anyone be considered quite striking, in a way actually enhanced by her alabaster skin tone.

“I assure you, I’ve no upcoming business outside of London.”

“Well then, I’m glad my intrusion finds you not immersed in holiday festivities, at least. I had inquired in the medical community after noted researching-physicians, where your name features prominently.”

I raised an eyebrow. “Does it? That’s gratifying, though I was not distinctly aware of it.”

“Our conversation is at sixes and sevens, doctor. Round and round…I wouldn’t have taken you for a dissembler.”

Between Damaris last night and Grace today, this seemed to have become a season for the company of odd women.

“Well, you’re here, and I’m glad to be of assistance in any way I can.” I offered.

She pursed her lips slightly, then nodded. “Though you display a personal diplomacy in not mentioning it, my condition can hardly have escaped you.”

“Your albinism.”

“Yes. All kind gentility aside, doctor, do you find it freakish, or disturbing?”

“By no means. I’m not an expert, but I would hardly consider possessing a genetic condition which makes you unique, to prompt any kind of negative impression. You’re clearly a woman both articulate and discerning, you display a personal dignity in manner. I have no doubt your husband found you beautiful.”

Her smile at that was broader. “Your repute for charm also precedes you, Dr. Wilder. I see it’s earned.”

“May I ask who specifically referred you to me?”

She seemed not to have heard the question.

“I gave up all thoughts as a very little girl indeed that being an albino might be a curable condition,” she continued. “But there are subsidiary aspects to it that perhaps an ardent researcher might be conscious of.” She tapped her glasses. “Photophobia being one. Light is difficult for me. And beyond that, nystagmatism.”

I had heard of both conditions, the first not uncommon even in normally-pigmented individuals, the second much rarer. Called “wandering eye”, or its cruder appellation, “crazy eye”.

“Your pupils drift, Mrs. Xavier?”

“That they do. These glasses assist practically with my light sensitivity, but they also help in preventing people from running in screaming fear when I give them the eye, so to speak.”

“Does their movement impede or confuse your vision?”

“My world slides and lurches and is given to convulsions and distortion, doctor. Perhaps that is the true nature of the world, when you consider it. In that sense your steady eyes may be the ones deceiving you.”

Interesting notion. Despite her strangeness, I was finding myself taken with her calmly philosophic erudition.

“I wish I could offer something in the way of new procedures for approaching nystagmus,” I said. “The eye is not a specialty of mine, though I would be happy to inquire for you among my circle of colleagues. May I see?”

“Of course.” She leaned forward, setting her coffee cup on the desk, inviting me closer.

I set down my own cup, circled to her side, and as she tilted her head upward, I gently removed her glasses. Her eyes were not the red hue often attributed to albinos, but had a grey-green color, though very pale. As I looked, the pupil of the right eye slid distinctly to the inward side, as if she was trying to view the tip of her nose. With rapidity that was almost alarming, the left pupil traveled upward, quite at odds with the right.

“I see.”

“In moments when I am passionate or excited, they will sometimes move in circles,” she said. “Quite a sight. For me as well as anyone witnessing it. Were they doing so right now, to my view you would pulse and throb as if you were gripped by a cyclone, doctor.”

“Despite that, you move with very great poise, Mrs. Xavier.”

“Thank you. One adjusts. As a young thing, I was given to falling down and banging into things. My mother considered me stupid.”

I stepped back, even as the pupil which had raced upward re-centered, then dropped abruptly down. I handed her back her glasses, which she put back on.

“Stupid? Why should she think that?”

“She is not an accepting person. Nor a kind one. She considered me thoroughly defective.”

“I’m sorry. That’s just a form of ignorance.”

“Oh, she’s anything but ignorant. Simply of the opinion that any child of hers should have been perfect. I’m surprised she didn’t dump me out of my cradle into an alley, or the river.”

I was unsure what response to give to that. I imagined, in the light of such intolerance, her childhood must have been something of a nightmare.

She however, did not seem disposed to leave the subject.

“I’ve never been quite sure of how much she really believes of her own stated philosophies. She touts the pursuit of perfection, as if any such thing really exists.” Once again from behind the obscuring lenses, she took a long look at me. “I can see why she would be taken with you. You’re a good-looking creature, well-muscled if I’m any judge, which I would expect…formed with a certain natural power. Your own skin-tone is rather a unique bronze, doctor. A man cast in metal would appeal to her greatly.”

She had quite lost me. I still stood right in front of her, and she surprised me slightly by digging one hand along the side of the seat cushion. As if when she earlier had adjusted the sleeve of her blouse, that had been a result of removing something from concealment and hiding it for easy access beside the cushion. I looked down at her hand even as she stood up.

In it was a blackjack, a sight more likely to be seen in the hand of a cheapside thug bent on murder. As I opened my mouth to speak she brought it up with remarkable speed and cracked it across my temple.

I awakened with pain lancing through my head.

At first I could not remember what had happened, and in that moment of disorientation I tried to sit up, but to my shock I found myself to be restrained. With a degree of wildness I pitted my strength against those restraints, but to no effect. I was in bed, but my arms and legs had been stretched outward so my body was in the shape of an X, spread-eagled and tied to the headboard and lower bedposts. I had been stripped naked.

Standing by the bedside, looking down at me, was Grace.

She had also removed much of her clothing, leaving on only her white laced corset, her boots, and her dark glasses.

“What…” I began to speak, but she reached down and put a finger to my lips.

“I probably should have put sand instead of buckshot into the blackjack,” she said very matter-of-factly. “But I was unsure what degree of force it would take to put you down.”

I yanked at the straps around my wrists. She had used belts from my own wardrobe to do the tying. She removed her finger from my lips.

“Why?”

“For pity’s sake, no more dissembling, Dr. Wilder. It will gain you nothing now. Though it was foolish of Ruha not to warn you against me. She has underestimated me for my whole life, however. Why should she change now?”

“Ruha.” The name the woman at the Narcissus had used. “Do you mean Damaris?”

“Or whatever name you feel like applying to her. Despite your denials, what could she have been doing but preparing to spirit you off to Africa?”

“Africa? This is insanity. I’ve exchanged perhaps a dozen words with the woman, and most of those were nonsense.”

“You’re not convincing me. Give it up, doctor. You were a captain in the English army, were you not? Call upon the resolve inherent in such a position, and show some courage.”

I pulled again at the belts around my wrists.

Watching me, she nodded. “Better,” she said. “I prefer you angry and fighting, rather than filled with pleas or deceit. I take no pleasure in this, doctor.”

“What is it you think you’re achieving?” I glanced at the bedroom window, to see the snowstorm was still raging. No one could be expected to come to my office below. The next house in the row abutted this one closely, but the walls were thick; I had no expectation that shouting or crying out would bring any form of assistance.

“What I’ve always striven to achieve. You might think it selfishness doctor, but unlike the Archons, who extend their lives in a state of perpetual, monstrous greed, I extend mine with a desire to forestall their greater cruelties. I use their methods out of necessity.”

“I’m at sea, Mrs. Xavier. Nothing that you say makes any sense.”

She sighed. “Now you are going to make me angry. My personal issues with my mother aside, what she and the rest of them stand for is repugnant. Are you just her puppy-dog, then? Or has your own animosity toward your father led you to throw in with her?”

“Again, my father. She spoke about that too. I’ve never known my father.” I thought about the rest of her statement. “Your mother? You are claiming Damaris is your mother? Surely she is of an age with you, or even younger.”

She raised a fingertip to the fine lines around her eyes. “Yes, her techniques of vitality are more refined. But I had to steal what knowledge I have. Or extract it from servants like you. I’m guessing you don’t even have the elixir in your blood yet. But even at that, the ritual remains efficacious.”

“Ritual.”

“Yes doctor. The very same, with a few omissions, that you were on your way to Africa to experience. Normally what you would take from your partner in it would a key to long, long life. But I have no intention of giving you my pearl. Long life may be a reach for you, at this point.”

“Why should you want to do me harm?”

“I don’t want to per se. But I am the antithesis to the Archons…I prey on their servants as a form of disruption and opposition. I’m the heroine in this penny dreadful, doctor.”

“I’m no one’s servant.”

“Their toy then, their chess-piece, or perhaps in your case, their prince. Is that how you see yourself?”

“I don’t even understand your use of ‘Archon’. Damaris said it too.”

“Good for you if you reject all of the Gnostic mummery. Ruha seems to believe in it, but as I said, I never know how much of what she spouts she really believes.”

I opened the fingers of each hand, despite the restraints around my wrists, in a gesture of conciliation.

“You’ve made some very great errors in this, Mrs. Xavier. Whatever matters you are talking about, I know nothing of them. Release me, and let’s talk about it with some measure of sanity.”

She smiled. “Within five seconds of my undoing those belts, you would doubtless put those strong, lovely bronze hands around my throat and throttle me, after which perhaps you would ravish my corpse…an act Archons seem to enjoy greatly.”

“I assure you…”

“Enough.” She had set something on my bedside table, and reached to pick it up. By twisting my head, I saw that she had in hand one of my own scalpels. “I brought my own knife, but your medical instruments are far superior, Dr. Wilder. Though their use likely won’t lessen your pain, it will probably speed things along so you won’t have to endure it quite so long.”

“Again, what reason do you have to kill me?”

“You may survive, doctor. I may be rightly called a murderess a number of times over, but I’m going to presume your own soldier’s experience inured you to guilt over death meted out in the course of war, which at its heart this certainly is. Nevertheless, I prefer not to leave pure slaughter in my wake. I’ve instructed an agent of mine to, in about an hour’s time, heave a brick through a window of Ruha’s townhouse, wrapped with a message explaining your current distress. If she truly cares one whit about you she may come to your rescue, as you’ll still be alive when you and I are done here.”

She placed the scalpel on the bed near my hip. She then went to the small writing desk I kept there in the bedroom. I saw that she had brought her greatcoat up from the foyer and draped it across the desk's chair. Reaching into a pocket she produced a small flat pouch. Inside of that was a syringe. At the sight of it, I once again strained at the belts.

“Men I've placed in positions similar to yours often have difficulty achieving the erection I require,” she said, tapping the central vial of the syringe, which was filled with a pale green liquid. “Understandable. Though interestingly, terror produces immediate arousal in some. For all your posturings toward being masters of the world, I've found you gentlemen to be primitive beings. At the core, either sadists or masochists. I'll take you for the former, doctor, more likely to raise a hard length were I the one tied to the bed, at your mercy.”

She used the plunger to coax a few drops of the green liquid from the tip of the needle, removing any possibility of producing an air embolism in my bloodstream. She then brought the needle to my groin.

“One of the Archons' concoctions,” she continued. “A blood stimulant that should also produce pleasurable sensations in you. It will blur your ability to think, doctor. Count that a blessing. You'll have difficulty differentiating pleasure and pain.” She smiled slightly. “Now, you'll feel a prick.”

I raised my head to see her apply the needle's point near the root of my cock. The brief pain of its insertion almost immediately changed. A heat surged into me, quickly radiating outward from my loins.

“Did she describe the archetype of her precious Gnostic Primal Man to you? As a precursor to his death, a fire will supposedly burst from the genitals of the Anthropos. In that moment he is a being of exquisite power. Even if you find that all as absurd as I do, allow it to reach an atavistic place in your brain, doctor. It may prompt you to a somewhat primeval, but nonetheless intense state. Again, a mercy for you, which will also enhance the quality of what you yield up to me.”

Toward the end of her speech, her words slurred in my ears. Her movement back to the writing desk to return the now-empty syringe to its pouch appeared to transpire across an elongated passage of time.

As the fire in my cock spread, poking hot needles into my every extremity, I watched her remove her dark glasses and come back to the bed.

I blinked my own eyes, raised my head again and looked down the length of my body, seeing that I had raised a towering erection. Though no stranger to sexual hunger, I had never felt it rampage through me as it did now. Grace, as she approached, appeared no longer human, which echoed he own words about the Primal Man; she had become a feminine absolute. The raw need to possess her was overwhelming. My fingers opened and closed, clutching at her, and I heard myself growling in frustration because of the restraints.

I bent all of my strength to breaking those bonds...I felt the leather of the belts stretch...

Grace slapped my face hard, snapping my concentration from the goal of ripping my arms loose from the bonds.

“Yes, I can see why Ruha wanted you,” she said. “A man of metal for her, to own and control. Like the Greek automaton Talos. Beware of Medea, O Talos.”

She climbed onto the bed, swung a leg over my middle-body to straddle me, and sank down, impaling herself on my cock. I gasped, the pleasure-messages rushing to my brain causing a further weakening of my resolve to break free. She leaned down and kissed me, withdrawing almost immediately – and well for her that she did, as a vision raced through me of darting my head upward and sinking my teeth into her, tearing out the great veins in her neck. Madly, I longed to feel the spray of her blood on my face.

“You are Death now, aren't you?” she breathed out, her words ragged with her own passion. “That's what Archons and would-be Archons lust for, under it all.”

I stared up at her face. Her obscuring glasses absent, I saw the phenomenon she had described: the movement of her wayward pupils in circles. Drifting in tiny orbits, as if stirred by the energies of a soul that whirled like a maelstrom.

She raised and lowered her hips with ever-increasing violence, taking my shaft to what felt like an infinite depth inside her body. As the distortion of my perceptions increased, I veered between lucid moments of attempting to convince myself that these were hallucinogenic perceptions, while alternately surrendering to them with a crazed fervor that bordered on revelation.

I actually witnessed an effect around our bodies – an emanation of boiling tendrils of heat and light, my own energies fleeing from my body to enter hers. They gripped her, wrapping around her arms and legs, her neck, probing into her mouth. To my own horror I willed those palpable energies to kill her. To hold her pinioned, to choke her, believing in my fever that as she died, both my essence and hers, heightened to unmeasureable potency, would flow back into me.

She picked up the scalpel.

My whole body tensed, but at first she did no more than cut a rough swatch of fabric from my bedcovers, which she promptly stuffed into my mouth.

“I'm not concerned with screaming,” she said. “Your teeth are gnashing, and I'd hate to see you bite through your own tongue. Should you live until tomorrow, I'd prefer you to be able to speak.”

She then pivoted to face away from me, without at any time allowing my phallus to slip free from the cleft of her sex.

“Bite down on the cloth, doctor.”

She reached downward beyond my vision, and pain exploded from my groin. In the same moment I ejaculated, equally ravaging my senses with pleasure. I felt a wet heat splash my inner thighs, but my cock was still inside Grace, so I had not expelled my sperm onto my own flesh.

The horrific pain increased. Wrenching my head upward in a desperation to see, I observed a jet of blood fountain from the area of my genitals beyond Grace's obscuring body.

My lust to kill her doubled and redoubled with every wave of mixed ecstasy and pain. As those homocidal desires raged, eyes seemed to burst out across the expanse of her back. Grace's crazy-eyes, endlessly roving, but also seeming to look deep, deep into me.

I felt shame in the knowledge that she must surely see, and recognize, the violence in me.

The bloodlust eased...I quieted, my convulsions lessening, though I was still engulfed in almost incomprehensible levels of agony.

Grace's form returned to something like normalcy, its only strangeness being that which would never leave her. She had been hunched over to work with the scalpel, but now her back straightened; the ghostly-white skin smooth again. I could indirectly see her masticating something, which she finally swallowed.

She raised herself up from my erection, and in so doing turned slightly to the side. There was blood on her mouth, blood on her hands. The scalpel, when she dropped it back on the bed, left a spreading bloom of red on the covers.

I could not control my mind enough to attempt comprehending what she had done. Slumping as if every string in my body had been cut, I ceased all struggling.

Perhaps I lost consciousness. What I did know, when next I opened my eyes, was that more than a few moments had passed.

Grace, now standing over me, pulled the wadded fabic out of my mouth.

“If you sleep, it is very likely you will die.”

She was dressed in her greatcoat, her dark lenses again over her eyes. With the scalpel, which still showed crimson stains, she cut the belt away from my right wrist. She then put the blade in my hand.

“You have several choices. If you lay there you may bleed to death, or in a few moments more, burn to death. If all of this has been too much for you, the scalpel can give you a quick end.” She began moving away from me, toward the bedroom door. “If you choose to live, do me a service when next you see Ruha. Tell her Saklas is irritated with her. And had she been wise, she should have drowned me as an infant when she had the chance. Instead, the day is not far off when I will feast on her instead of her servants.”

[briangroth27]

Scream Queens Season 2 Review

Scream Queens proved to be a funny, witty, and sometimes bitingly socially-aware show in its first season and I was very happy to get a second year of this insanity. It’s absolutely bonkers at times, but it knows exactly what it is and revels in it. The show is undeniably campy, but the fact that it fully commits to that style is what makes it work. I love fun murder mysteries and slasher films, so I’m absolutely still hooked!

Full Spoilers…

Right off the bat, I was very impressed with how they revamped all the characters into the new hospital setting. That’s something that could’ve ruined the show as soon as it started—putting these characters into a medical school seemed like a lot of hoops to jump through just to rework the show—but the writers and actors stuck the landing perfectly. I'm glad the bogus charges against the Chanels (Emma Roberts, Billie Lourd, and Abigail Breslin) from the end of the first season were dropped: they were absurd even for this show. Their “redemption” and success in normal jobs (both between seasons and after season 2) was believable and worked well. Chanel Oberlin, #3, and #5 have always walked a razor-thin line between being absurdly awful people and likable protagonists, and that’s due in large part to the considerable talents of all three actresses. Dean Munsch’s (Jamie Lee Curtis) ascension to head of a hospital was improbable, but that first episode made it feel realistic (if heightened, of course). Curtis always seems like she’s having a blast on the show (as do most of the cast) and lends a sense of stature to the proceedings just through her presence. It’s been great to see her doing such funny work in the genre that gave her her start! The reason she set up her hospital—to cure incurable diseases in hopes of curing her own—was a great hook and reason to bring in new characters. I thought all of their cases worked well, though they could’ve at least mentioned laser hair removal as an option in one instance.

It was great to have the utterly ridiculous (in a great way) Chad Radwell (Glen Powell) back, and I loved that the Red Devil stinger from the first season was him being an idiot. It never made sense that the original Red Devil would strike again when she’d won, so revealing it to be Chad was perfect. I was shocked when they actually went through with killing him this year…I admire the show for having the guts to really kill off beloved characters (and his death felt like it mattered to several characters), but I’ll definitely miss his absurdity. I enjoyed the new characters, particularly Doctors Brock Holt (John Stamos) and Cassidy Cascade (Taylor Lautner). Lautner was great at delivering some of the most emo lines I’ve ever heard (“I envy ice. At least if you give it warmth, it melts.”) in the funniest way possible, and Stamos’ role as every improbably handsome TV doctor was perfect for him. Their horror-tinged afflictions—Cascade believed he was dead and Holt had the hand of a murderer—were fun, but I think it may’ve been a mistake to walk both those things back. I preferred it when Cassidy was “really” dead and Holt’s hand (formerly part of a serial killer) sometimes controlled him—those campy 50s/60s horror elements fit perfectly into the world of the show—to the more “real world” explanations that Cassidy had a psychological issue and Holt really just wanted to kill and needed an excuse. Along those lines, I wouldn’t have minded if the Green Meanie were an actual swamp monster instead of another human killer. I thought Kirstie Alley (Ingrid Hoffel) was another strong addition with a surprisingly legitimate reason for hating the Chanels and thought she was the killer from the beginning (she’d later join up with them). I didn’t think that Cassidy was the killer, so kudos to the writers and Lautner for not tipping their hand!

The only part of the season that fell flat for me was the “the baby’s a murderer” plot—that felt too repetitive coming on the heels of the first season. While Hester’s (Lea Michelle) accidental confession to the season 1 murders was hilarious, I thought she was wasted once she was released from her cell. It seemed like there were too many characters to service and she got the short end of the stick when it would’ve been better to leave her in prison for later use instead of having her hang out at the hospital doing next to nothing. Zayday (Keke Palmer) and Denise Hemphill (Niecy Nash) suffered similar fates, especially in the second half of the season. At least Hemphill’s sidelining was explained in the plot (in an attack I didn’t see coming!), though these were two of my favorite characters so it was a bummer to see them both largely taken off the board. I thought Grace’s (Skyler Samuels) dad Wes (Oliver Hudson) appearing was a little unnecessary for this season—him wanting revenge because Grace was driven insane didn’t have the same intensity or logic that Hoffel wanting revenge because Chanel killed her sister did—but I’m glad we got to wrap up his plotline from season 1. His return also gave us a fun scene where Hester helped the viewers figure out which killer killed what victim and doled out future murder assignments. I’m not sure why Cassidy couldn’t have just pushed Hoffel into the acid vat after they killed Wes, though; it would’ve looked like they both died in a struggle and he’d have been in the clear.

The second season may have been a little repetitive in terms of one of the killer’s motivations, but it was strong nonetheless and gave all the characters an appropriate sendoff in the final moments. It was fun, suspenseful, and I’m going to miss this weekly dose of hilarious insanity if the show’s cancelled. The declining ratings don’t make a third season likely, but I hope we get some resolution to that final attack. I don't think we need a full season to cover where the finale left us; a miniseries to wrap up the show would be fine with me if we can’t have a full-blown third season (though I would definitely love one!). It was totally Grace under the Red Devil mask, right? I hope we get to find out!