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softichill · 8 months

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The Sounds of Nightmares unofficial transcript

Chapter 3 - The Theater of the Mind

(Once again made with @queen0fm0nsterz!!!)

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

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[Click]

[Otto sighs, shifting]

OTTO: Noone vanished last night.

[Another sigh]

OTTO: As she slept, I was monitoring her ultradian sleep cycle. There was no REM/NREM oscillation; instead, involuntary spasms grew progressively worse. [shift] As I was about to wake Noone, her… body… evanesced. For a split instant- then returned, calm as can be.

OTTO: [deep breath, loud exhale] Lacking sleep, I can’t be sure I wasn’t hallucinating. Yet the image of her sheets deflating… is imprinted upon my mind. [Sigh] After yesterday’s session, no less, when she claimed to hear this:

[Click, tape plays]

Recording of NOONE: “The faraway drifts near. Tread long, then, sink deep. Two flows from one, and here, is whole again.”

[Click, tape stops]

OTTO: A coincidence? [light clinking of ceramic/glass] Or, synchronicity? …(Scoff) Is that that bloody moth again?!

[Loud smack, Otto sits back down]

OTTO: Riddle piles upon riddle, and answers continue to elude. [Tape rewinding] I’ll sift through every word if I must.

[Intro plays]

[Click]

[Loud clicking and clacking, electric humming, Otto screwing something in]

OTTO: [Humming drops, returns] It’s clear. Noone’s symptoms go beyond parasomnias. [Continuing to build] Her retellings are too detailed, vocabulary too advanced, as if derived from the oneiric itself.

[Humming raises in pitch, clicking]

OTTO: However, what I find impossible to believe is that Noone’s seen who you saw, Cici. [Chair creaks, clattering] If two people, without any contact, shared the exact same observation, is it proof of transpersonal dreaming?

[Otto’s building continues]

OTTO: But such implies concurrence! And these dreams are years apart! Then… no. [buzzing picks up] I cannot be taken to metaphysical backwaters. Sounding like my old professor. [building] I’ve remained balanced over the years by clinging to the notion that my recollection of what happened years ago was wrong. [click, humming gets loud again] But now, those memories are coming home to roost.

[Clicks, electronic humming, building stops]

OTTO: [Shift] Before I began at the CPI I promised to finish this apparatus. I let it fall away, convinced that attempting it was fool’s work. Now struggling to put myself in her shoes, well. Fool me twice.

[Humming gets louder, buzzes out completely as it shocks Otto and he lets out an “Oh!”]

[A small pained noise from Otto before he starts to put the apparatus away]

[Door opens]

OTTO: (Gasp) Noone! [Scoff, he walks away from the recorder] You’re meant to wait outside.

NOONE: (Far away) What are you working on?-

[Audio cuts]

[Click, blank noise]

[Audio starts again]

OTTO: We’ve come to know each other better over the past weeks, haven’t we?

NOONE: Because we’re friends! That’s why. And, friends tell each other things.

OTTO: Friends. That’s right. One of the absolutes I’ve come to realize is that, the more time you spend with someone, the harder it becomes to hide who you really are. The only exception to this rule is with the company of oneself- we willfully hide what we’d rather not face. Like, the Candleman you mentioned seeing, under hypnosis.

NOONE: I don’t like that.

OTTO: What?

NOONE: Hiding things from myself.

OTTO: Nobody likes it. That’s why it’s important to reveal your inner face. “Depth analysis”, we call it. And so, I’d like you to think of this session as a dialogue with your unconscious mind- you are asking the questions, not me.

NOONE: …Asking myself questions?

OTTO: I’ll help! But, as you go, I’d like you to try. So! This… Candleman. Did you see him again?

NOONE: I-I did.

OTTO: And what was this meeting like?

NOONE: …He was much clearer. Not just him, everything about it. My nightmare.

OTTO: Elaborate, please. Was it worse? More vivid?

NOONE: What’s it like- Uhm… as if I’m watching a film, that I’m also the star of. And when I woke… it was here, in the Coppy, that felt more like the dream.

OTTO: Hm, more palpable. The Candleman-

NOONE: I can’t talk about him without the rest. …If this is an interview with myself, might I begin where I want?

OTTO: Of course! Let your imagination run. But don’t be afraid to interact with the dream. This is an important step in our process- the dialogue. Bring together the divided parts of yourself.

NOONE: …The mirror.

OTTO: Pardon?

NOONE: The one off your shelf. If I’m meant to speak to myself, well…

OTTO: [Pause] …Patients aren’t meant to have mirrors, but, here you are, my bright girl.

[Otto gives her the mirror]

OTTO: Begin as you please.

[Pause]

NOONE, Narrating: …In the dark… a hand let go of mine.

[Slip noise, Dream!Noone gasps. Dream ambience begins.]

NOONE: Opening my eyes, I lay on hot concrete, staring up at a sky with- no sun. And… before me was, endless grey, broken by- yellow lines of paint, all the way to the horizon!

NOONE: Standing, in that carpark, I heard a silence. So silent, my own heartbeat was a marching drum in comparison. …It was followed by… a loneliness, so lonely, I could hardly bear it. I had to turn away.

[Dream!Noone walking on gravel]

NOONE: Behind me, I was glad to see a building! A shopping mall, so large I- I felt half my normal size. Its doors opened, [sliding gravel] and I ran to them.

[running footsteps, transition from gravel to tile. Doors close behind Dream!Noone.]

NOONE: Inside the promenade, [lights click on] the lights flicked on, one by one, greeting me as the PA speakers came alive with music.

[Tinny, slightly off-sounding mall music]

NOONE: It had been ages since I’d visited a shopping center. I didn’t know where to start!

OTTO: You saw no need to find an exit right away?

NOONE: I felt like I was in good hands. But many shops were closed, though. There were no doors, and… no displays in the windows. Or, there must have been a private entrance, because- I could see shadows beyond the glass.

NOONE: …A-after passing by several shops this way, I grew disappointed, but that’s when… a cowboy’s voice came over the speaker.

COWBOY, slightly overlapped with Noone: “Sale at Jujube’s Toys! Dolls, games, puzzles, and more! Ground floor by the fountain!”

NOONE: I could see that fountain in front of me! And on the other side, was… a bright green storefront, with bubbles floating out the entrance.

[Dream!Noone walking over, doors hiss as they open. Different tinny music.]

NOONE: Shelves and- shelves of wonders lined the shop! The toys on the first shelf were very old, but… deeper shelves held the same toys I had back home, and deeper ones held exactly those I’d wish for, even Little Lotty Potty! But… these Lotties had black eyes, not blue. And their skin was… yellow, like autumn leaves.

NOONE: The shop owner wasn’t present, so… I grabbed one and began playing on the carpet.

[Dream!Noone humming Six’s Theme. Doll makes automated noises.]

NOONE: But, it didn’t take long for me to grow… bored. That was the first time I… I felt too old for dolls.

OTTO: (distant-sounding) Maturity is natural as you approach adolescence. The brain loses interest in things once held dear.

NOONE: The idea of growing up made me sad. And as if reacting… Lotty’s dress became wet. The doll was doing as its name said, but… [doll chattering] the liquid was- dark and thick. I put her down to find something else. But the choices were almost too many! Towering shelves extending deep in- the gloom of the impossibly long shop!

NOONE: I settled on the games section, but, most were meant for two. Suddenly, a staticky whisper said,

Voice, overlapping with NOONE: “I’ll play with you.”

NOONE: I-I thought it was the shopkeeper, but… nobody was around. My eyes fell upon a jewelry-making kit, with a red necklace on the cover. I took the box back to where I left Lotty, only… she was gone. The shelf above, where the other dolls had been, was completely empty too. I wanted to make the jewelry, I really did, but… I felt weird, so… I put it down. Then, the PA crackled, a woman’s voice this time:

Voice, ov. NOONE: “Jujube’s Toys is now closing.”

NOONE: [Lights clicking off] The lights shut off, bubbles stopped… and, the last thing I saw before exiting… [toy train noises] was the train set crashing to a stop. [quiet fake bell ringing, toy engine stops]

[Dream!Noone walking out of the store]

NOONE: The promenade was empty, still. Each step [steps become echoey] echoed across the walls and floors, which were- pearl white, and had patterns like… veins.

[steps and music continues]

NOONE: I came to three sets of stairs, side-by-side, leading to the next floor. I chose one, and, reaching to the top, I saw another open shop. Mademoiselle’s… (saying it wrong) bijottery.

OTTO: (still distant) Bijouterie. But, regardless- you could read this?

NOONE: Yes. The letters were quite big.

OTTO: …Have you been able to read in your dreams before?

NOONE: I’m not sure. That’s not a question I would ask myself, though, Otto.

OTTO: Apologies.

NOONE, Narrating: The glass case in the center of the room… pulled me in. Full of… gold, and silver necklaces. Hanging in the middle, was… an enchanting red pendant. And before you ask, yes, it was just like on the box at the toy store. T-The PA came on again,

Voice, ov. with NOONE: “A free gift to all little girls 10 and under!”

NOONE: Without asking, I put the necklace on, glowing, like a ruby teardrop. With my gift, I set to leave, but… someone must’ve left the speaker on because… I heard arguing.

NOONE: (overlapping) “Don’t overdo it!” Said a first voice, followed by a second, (overlapping) “One more prize can’t hurt!”

[something being set down, wheels across tile, whoosh]

NOONE: From the back room, a rack of dresses rolled out. All, exactly my size.

[Dream!Noone looking through the dresses]

NOONE: It’d been ages since I’d been allowed to pick out my own dress. The telly people chose them for me. These ones were very pretty, with lace and, and bows and stitching but, one… it… it was the plaid dress I wore the day I arrived at the Coppy. How could my dress be here? [lowering pitch of voice, asking questions to herself] Your real life doesn’t have to mix into your dreams Noone, why now?

OTTO, interrupting narration: (astonished) Pardon?

NOONE: (giggling) I’m asking myself questions. Well, the only explanation is that they could see inside my head.

OTTO: I’m not sure that’s logical.

NOONE: Let me finish! Please. You’ll see.

NOONE, narrating: Back out on the promenade, the shop gates began to slam shut. [Gates slamming] I was worried the mall was closing, but on the floor above, a set of spinning bright lights came on [Lights turn on]. The music stopped and, the PA crackled with a sing-songy voice,

Voice, ov. with NOONE: [music] “Showtime’s patrons! Our daily motion picture will begin shortly. Hot popcorn’s popping and the seats await in the playhouse!”

NOONE: [Lights shutting off] The rest of the mall went dark, making the lights more enticing to follow.

[Dream!Noone walks across the mall]

NOONE: The lobby was- red from floor to ceiling. Buckets of popcorn overflowed on the concession stand. I grabbed one, and hurried to push open the huge golden doors leading into the theater.

[Running steps, doors creak. Slightly off organ music plays.]

NOONE: The velvet seats went for rows and rows, full of people. A spotlight hit the stage, illuminating an organ, but… there was no organ player. Only tall curtains swaying in some breeze. I tiptoed down the aisle, and sat centered with the screen. The chair seemed to hug me, and the room fell dark [crunching] as the first buttery bit hit my tongue.

[Music stops playing, sounds of projector booting up]

NOONE: Without adverts or introduction, the film began. Images of… trees on fire and… white hooves galloping. I recognized the picture instantly because I’ve seen it a hundred times. “The Healing Horn”. [Movie plays] Only the scenes were out of order, and the unicorn… her horn was misshapen, like… a rotten tree branch. The evil prince’s face, too, was… was wrong.

NOONE: Feeling out of place I – I looked around. The audience, I… I realized, was not people but… mannequins.

NOONE: All of a sudden, a familiar scent entered the dream. Ocean. I was no longer alone. The dusty projector light made it difficult to suss, but a few seats over… was the Candleman. His eyes and mouth were… deep black pits inside a mess like a wet gunny sack, sagging down the floor. Without turning, he spoke.

[Growing noise stops]

OTTO, interrupting abruptly: He – what?! [Shifting] What did he say?

NOONE: [Sighing] It was like a – a voice underwater. The words could hardly escape the folds of skin. He repeated them to me.

NOONE as the FERRYMAN, glitching: “The faraway drifts near. Tread long, then sink deep. Two flows from one, and here, is whole again.”

OTTO: And then? [shifting in the chair] What else?

NOONE, as the FERRYMAN: “Here. Here. Here.”

NOONE: He just repeated over and over.

OTTO: There must be more! Try, try! Interact with the dream!

NOONE: There was no more!

OTTO: (raising his voice) Ask who he is, ask what he wants!

NOONE: (raising her voice) It doesn’t work that way!

OTTO: You were right there! Don’t tell me you did nothing?! Not a damn thing!

NOONE: Stop!

OTTO: [farther away] I’m beginning to doubt you’ve seen this Candleman! [Noone struggling] Perhaps you’ve invented the whole story!

NOONE: Please, stop- my head!

[Otto hisses (gets hit?), sounds of something being knocked over, Noone runs out of the room.]

[Otto huffs and stops the tape]

[Click. Blank noise. Another click]

[Various shifting noises. Silence. Door opens and someone walks, then closes it]

OTTO: [far away, stern] What are you doing? With the mirror. [Steps] You’re up to something, but we’ll let it slide. I know girls like you.

[Shifting]

OTTO: You’re upset with me, aren’t you? [plastic clacking] Here. A pill for your headache. (Sigh) Earlier, that was… awfully…[Otto sits] that- that was not how friends act. Sleep has evaded me too. I’ve grown worried, trying to… please, forgive me. I’d very much like to hear the rest. I won’t interrupt, you have my word.

[Silence.]

NOONE: … Fine.

OTTO: So… you were in this theater with him.

NOONE, narrating: … All kinds of pictured* flashed on the screen, and then he was gone, leaving me alone again. Or so I thought. The projector flickered in the booth. I dashed up, and found the door ajar. A new voice came over the PA, angry. “No patrons in the projection room!” The door was stuck, but I pushed and pushed. The PA boomed,

VOICE, ov. with NOONE: “You must not enter!”

[Crashing, door opens]

NOONE: The projector I saw first was shaped like… a deformed eye. Then, my attention fell to… the mass on the floor. [Slimy sound] A brain? A heart? …No. It’s muscles pumped and pumped, and its tubes ran into the walls. The voice came, both from inside the room and over the PA:

VOICE, ov. with NOONE: “Happy day, No One.”

NOONE: It… it knew my real nickname. The ones kids at school scribbled all over my books. How? Because it was in my head. …I asked, “You’re the one who’s been talking? All those voices?”. Then, I saw countless film cans around the room, and understood. It was so alone, it took to imitating. Then it said,

VOICE, ov. with NOONE: “Are you going to leave? Like all the others?”

NOONE: I managed a… “Yes”. The thing began pulsing and, upset, it sort of cried out.

VOICE, ov. with NOONE: “So many, they take what they want and go, or get snatched away or worse!”

NOONE: It paused, then went on,

VOICE, ov. with NOONE: “Whatever you desire, it’s yours.”

NOONE: … But I didn’t want anything from it. The PA belted,

VOICE, ov. with NOONE: “The pendant! You wanted that!”

NOONE: The pulsing worsened until another voice came within the first,

VOICE 2, ov. with NOONE: “You’ve driven another away!” [Not overlapping, repeating: “You’ve driven another away!]

NOONE: I felt bad for it. Or them… this place had been warped by pain, and wanted so badly to keep me. Even the walls began throbbing. What could I do?!

[Noise intensifies, Dream!Noone breathes heavily]

NOONE: I – I ran. Down the stairs, out of the theater.

[Dream!Noone runs away]

NOONE: On the promenade, the lights were flashing so as to be dizzying. The PA screeched,

VOICE, ov. with NOONE: “Everyone needs someone! Don’t leave me alone!”

NOONE: The walls began to cry that dark thick liquid, pooling around me, I looked up. From the floor above, the Candleman stared, pointing at my chest. At the pendant. I flung it down into the liquid, then he reached a hand toward me and –

[All noise stops]

NOONE: And all faded, as the PA sobbed,

VOICE, ov. with NOONE: “Don’t take her! Not this one, too…”

[Narration stops. Silence. Shifting]

OTTO: T-There was um… uh, e-excuse me, a curious phrase. “Warped by pain”. Is that how you feel, sometimes?

[Silence]

OTTO: Noone? Are you still angry with me? Or… distracted by the mirror?

NOONE: Behind my ear… there’s… a sore.

OTTO: Is that why you wanted the mirror all along?

NOONE: [Hum] It’s like the ones I used to get. I need to see it.

[Shifting]

OTTO: Nothing’s there. It’s red because you’ve been picking at it.

NOONE: …I have one more question for myself. Why do I have these dreams? Water sickness, that’s my answer.

OTTO: Noone. It’s wiped out of your system. There have been no known reinfections. It’s in your mind.

NOONE: (with increasing distress) What if the cure is the cause? I never had nightmares or headaches before all of this, before going on telly, before – before this! –

OTTO, interrupting: (whispering) No, no, come, come, come, come here, my girl. [Shifting, Otto hugs Noone] You’re not sick. You’re perfectly fine. You’re a perfectly wonderful little girl. This time I will protect you.

[The mirror falls on the ground and breaks]

NOONE: I’m sorry! I’m sorry, uh, you were squeezing so tight and… it slipped.

[The mirror shards are picked up. Otto throws them away]

OTTO: You asked why you dream. The truth? Nobody knows. My studies always assumed they were more than the brain’s way of filtering unconscious thoughts. But I had no answer either. An old professor of mine thought he did. He believed dreams come from an ever shifting plane, a quiddity of consciousness.

NOONE: Quidd-i-ty…

OTTO: Quiddity. The essence of a thing. In this case, a semiatangible plane outside the mind.

NOONE: Is it the same as mutual dreams? I don’t understand.

OTTO: My colleagues didn’t either. I’ve flip-flopped over the years, but I figured it was impossible to prove.

NOONE: Will I ever get rid of them, then? Will I ever leave the Coppy?

OTTO: You must understand, you are a unique case. I want to let you go, as soon as –

NOONE, interrupting: I’m better?

OTTO: (sighing) Yes. As soon as you’re better. [Otto stands, picks something up] Now –

NOONE: I know, I know. (Lower pitch, mimicking Otto) “Sweets for my sweet”. …Do I have to go back to my room?

[Sounds of plates]

OTTO: I’ve- got to tidy, [wrappers] and, you reminded me there’s something I need to find. On you go. I’ll come by later.

[Shift, audio cuts]

[Audio starts]

[Otto looks through papers, and sighs]

OTTO: Ah, I found it. The paper that stained my professor’s career. Kept it all these years, hoping and dreading there was truth in these words…

OTTO, reading: “We know now that there is no center to the universe. Previously we thought it was the Sun, before that we thought it was the Earth. Our species always insists that ours is the quintessence of experience. Yet scientific observation proves our folly ad nauseum. If geocentrism took centuries to disprove, the question is not if but when the same will happen to reality itself. That which we are equipped to perceive may not be the only world. Let alone the predominant one.”

[Click]

[Outro plays]

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*This is what she actually says. I have no idea why.

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tanoraqui · 1 month

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In Which Space Orcs are Men

[AO3] A "what if humans are space orcs" take on Dagor Dagorath. (Aka the prophecied apocalypse of Middle Earth. Scifi story accessible to non-LotR nerds!)

Elves weren't really supposed to leave Earth. That's what they told us—the Elves, that is, told people thousands of years ago, when Elves could still be found here and there. When I was born, elves were nearly as much a fairy tale as they’d been on Ancient Earth.

Elves weren't supposed to leave Earth, the Elves said in the fairy tales, and in a few old scraps of records scattered around known space. They literally weren't made for it. They could only do it if they brought Earth with them—Arda they called it, leaves or dirt, water or a rare bubble of air, perfectly preserved in a white crystal. There are tons of tales about Elves losing their lifeline jewels—their hearts, their silimirs—and roping people into epic quests to get them back before they—the Elf—faded to nothingness.

Even the jewels weren't enough, though. That's why there are also stories about Elves who fell in love with a person or a place and stayed there until they faded, or Elves who charmed someone into following them back to Fairyland on Earth...because whatever they said, Elves didn't really live on Earth. Humans have maintained their home planet as a monitored nature reserve since like the 40th century, open only to vetted research teams and serious Human religious pilgrimages. The most confirmed accounts of Elves that exist are of their ships appearing out of nowhere, with no trace of any tech that would enable it, at random, always-changing points within 100 miles or so of Earth.

Nobody ever came back from trying to follow Elves home. Mostly Elves tried to dissuade people from trying. But there are always crazy and curious people—and Elves usually attracted those, because any Elf who left the home they were "made" for was usually crazy and curious themselves.

Those were the stories I grew up with. There was a cave near the orphans' creche which was supposed to be haunted by a faded Elf. I didn't really believe it—like I said, the last confirmed Elf was last seen like 5,000 years ago, and not even on my planet. People have met two dozen new sentient races since then. We've discovered that reincarnation is probably real (just functionally untrackable), prompting the Pan-Religious Reform Wars. The last person to see a live Elf was still traveling via natural wormholes—they literally didn't know that you could loop pi.

When the Human natal sun started to turn really red, it wasn’t that big a deal at first. It’s a very important, very sad event for any species, but it happens to everyone eventually. It happened to the Hectort just after we invented interstellar flight. There were some unusual gravatic waves around Earth’s Sol, but nothing worth noting to anyone who didn’t already care for personal reasons.

Then the Elves sent us a message.

The local Parks Service picked it up, of course. I bet the Humans meant to hush it up at first—though the Centaurian government still won’t admit anything—but someone leaked it immediately on the intergalactic net. It should’ve only been famous as a joke of a hoax, but…

It was basically just a metal box with rudimentary fire-thrusters soldered on the sides. It contained two things. The first was a recording/replaying device so antiquated that the only way they got it working is that it was already playing on loop, and didn’t stop until someone disconnected it from its power source.

The message was in Ancient Bouban, which some folklorist soon announced is the latest language an Elf could know, since the last known Elf went back to “Arda.” The voice somehow sounded melodic to every species with a concept of music, from the screeching Vesarians to the deep-sea sub-sonic Thinkers, even when translated through cheap, staticky speakers. And to most species, the speaker was audibly distraught.

They said,

This is the final message from the Firstborn of Eru to the Secondborn, and everyone else. The Battle of Battles has come, and we…are losing. If there are any who remember the ancient love and loyalty which bound our peoples, if there are any heirs remaining of Thargalax the Magnificent, of Nine-Fingered Frodo, of the noble Houses of Haleth, Hador and Beor—

The speaker drew a sharp breath, there.

—by great oaths and greater friendship I bid you now to raise your swords and ride to our aid. Ride as swiftly as you can!

We will hold for another year. We will, they said determinedly. After that, it is unlikely that…

Another, shakier breath. A smile forced into a voice which would rather weep.

Fëanáro and Nienna believe there is a way to destroy the Straight Road. If we must, if it comes to it, we will do so, and trap the First Enemy here in this dying world with us. Though I don’t know about—

Hair-aristocrat! a more distant, slightly less perfectly melodious voice called, in a language so dead that they needed computers to decode it. The walls are falling, we need to go!

If you never hear from us again, and no sudden discord arises among you, you will know we succeeded, the first speaker said quickly. If otherwise…I am sorry. Either way, I bid you all only, remember us! Oh beautiful flames, remember us, as we have ever remembered y—

There was a sudden screech of tearing metal, a defiant, musical battle-cry, and a jarring silence. Then the message restarted.

And that wasn’t even the strangest thing in the box. The strangest thing was the recorder’s power source, which was powering the whole tiny rocket mechanism as well. It was an Elf-jewel right out of a fairy tale, a fist-sized, translucent not-quite-diamond—but instead of rock or water or a much-loved scrap of plant, the only thing it held was light.

...Kind of. It isn’t normal light. It arguably isn’t light at all, as we know it—scientists now think it’s technically some sort of plasmoid aether, except it only acts like a plasmoid aether about half the time.

It has no detectable source within the jewel. It fully illuminates whatever space it’s in, no matter how big. Its visible radiation is a frequency, the scientists say, that matches a hyper-accelerated version of what the universe must’ve sounded like in the split second after the Big Bang.

It makes people remember things, when they see it in person or sometimes even across a holo. Some remember a similar light in a strange traveler’s eyes. Others, dreamily enchanted valleys where spring never faded, or tall castles, bright swords, and stern and glorious lords and ladies. And some of us got hit with a whole lifetime of memories in one go: an identical gem on the brow of a sober forest king, friends who slipped through trees like shadows save for their merry laughter, an impossibly beautiful gold-haired maiden dancing in a glittering cavern...

(And all the pain and loss that came with them.)

And some people just remember the sight of a distant star—in another world, in another lifetime.

Reincarnation was provable but untraceable…until now.

The Thinker ambassador on Astrolax Station 5 was the first to kick up a fuss. Most Thinkers never leave their home planet, they're too huge and aquatic. But like I said, there's always crazy and curious people. The ambassador started bellowing the second che heard the message, without even seeing the light, because, "I know him! My Wisdom! We must send aid!" That made some news, and random other people shared their own, less dramatic revelations, and soon a compilation swept the net with timestamps showing that most of them were organically independent, not just jumping on the bandwagon….

Even that might've gotten written off intergalactically. The Thinkers are big in reincarnationist circles, on account of how they claim that deep in their planetary ocean they can hear echoes of their past lives. But being mostly planet-bound means they're not really influential on a big political level. Or it would've sparked another surge of the Reform Wars, and everybody would've remembered the rock, but not the recording. Or there would’ve been a fight over this potentially infinite energy source (though that is so last giga-annum)….

But first it was shown in person to the current Director of the Admiralty of the Astral Alliance, President of the X-ee Empire and Matron of the House of S,sh, Ch’ees/i’i S,sh. I was actually there—I was Captain of her ceremonial Alliance guards, in a last-ditch attempt to salvage my career after Zanzibus. Very ceremonial, considering the X-eee have laser-proof shells and pincers and I have, what, opposable thumbs? Vestigial tusks?

I wasn’t paying attention at first, too busy being suddenly assaulted by all my own memories. So I missed the President freezing mid-step and gasping (in X-eee), “Mother.” I also missed her rising alarm call of an attempt to speak Ancient Elvish without an Elvish tongue or lips.

I sure didn’t miss her snap back to X-eee for a sharp call to attention, and everything that followed: the call to arms! The rousing of the Alliance! A tour of the galaxy, to find anyone and everyone else in whom the Light could awaken ancient memories! And for the love of X'eeh, why had nobody figured out how to get back to Fairyland with this thing yet, and every warship in the quadrant?!

If I believed in the One Behind, or in any other creator god or gods—I'm not saying I do, but if I did, if there really is something out there all-powerful and all-kind—then it'd be because out of every soul in the entire universe, the probably one in the best position to act on the Elves' message turned out to have, from a past life, two parents and a much-loved twin still in Fairyland. Like, that's insane, right?

I stayed with the Director's ceremonial guards for the whole tour, actually more than ceremonial for once—it was the weirdest mission of my life, and I've been on a lot of weird missions. Or supposedly routine missions that got weird (and usually disastrous). My friends joke that I'm cursed. S,sh requisitioned an Inquiry-class ship, so the science boffins could study the Light and jewel along the way, and we started wormholing at weft speed, hitting a new planet every week. Sometimes every day. In each major spaceport and ground-city, S,sh stood with the jewel on the highest available point and gave a recruitment speech for going to save the Elves and fight the oldest enemy of all reality.

Honestly, it seemed a little redundant? The Astral Alliance was made for this sort of rescue mission (and for escorting trade convoys). But I was...if not happy, then sure as hell more self-certain with my ancient memories restored, and most people who joined up seemed to agree. It was mostly people who remembered, when exposed to the Light, who joined—so before long, we had a whole tag-along trail of mostly civilian ships, trying to get up to Alliance Fleet standard on the road in less than a year.

Three different religious sects tried to kill S,sh for "profaning the mysteries." Five others tried to steal the jewel because we were apparently appropriating a holy object. The boffins announced that, bar the can't-prove-a-negative possibility, the evidently sourceless Light should be counted as an infinite energy source, and at least seven different groups, ruthless financiers and sustainability idealists, immediately tried to steal it for that. And I still don't know what the rival thief-queens of Likkiliani were about, except that I got tied up upside-down from a palmdar tree for two hours trying to stop one, the other paid me 700 cron then threw me off a cliff, and in the end they recognized each other from past lives and just made out on worldwide live-holo before joining our growing fleet.

It turned out they were the Director's past life's great-grandparents, and a Canid pop princess was her niece. The Thinker ambassador was some sort of ancestor, too. Crazy extended family.

Most people who remember just remember the sight of a star in the sky. A buddy of mine from Fleet Academy remembered looking up at it as a Human sailor. The historians—and you’d better bet we picked up some Earther historians on this mission as well!—say this jewel or one like it was probably astrologically conflated with the planet Venus by early Humans.

(The more time I spent around the jewel, the Silmaril, the more I remembered, of my first life and more. Lifetime after lifetime with bad luck dogging my steps, killing loved ones in my arms, destroying cities I was supposed to save… One restless, haunted night, I met a Rigilic in the cafeteria who’d been awake with some of the same nightmares, who’d been my dead older sister once.)

The tour was cut short when word came from the Earth system that there was a black hole growing in the center of their reddening sun.

No, the sun wasn’t compressing into a black hole millennia ahead of schedule—one had just spontaneously manifested within it, like it’d teleported in. No, not literally—that was impossible. We were pretty sure. No, the sun wasn’t falling into it…somehow. Yet. The black hole was only 17 quectometers wide, but it was growing at an erratic but unceasing rate. If their best estimation of the pattern held, it would consume the sun 2 months before the Elves’ deadline, and the Earth 4 to 950 minutes later.

We pulled back to Earth—well, to the dwarf planet Eros, on the edges of Earth’s star system. That’s where the nearest shipyard of any note was, and we were gathering the whole Astral Alliance. This is exactly the sort of thing the Alliance is for.

I was released back to ship duty. Zanzibus was still a black mark on my record, as was Jorab, and really everything on the AAS Endeavor…and that thing in third year of Fleet Academy… But no matter how bad my curse, I was an experienced captain and one of the best pilots in the Alliance. For this, we needed all the best.

The boffins had pretty quickly mastered limited manipulation of the Light, using modified aetheric resonators, and every day they came up with something new for us to test. They focused the Light into a laser cannon like no one has seen before. They laced it through plasma shields until a fully shielded ship glowed like a distant star. They managed to nearly replicate the Silmaril’s crystalline structure, so they could make “copies” that shone like the original for first a few hours; then, with refinement, a full week…

The one thing they couldn’t pin down with any real confidence was how to get to Fairyland. The frequency of the Light resonated with large bodies of Earther saltwater in a particular way, and models suggested that if the Light source moved horizontally along the water within a certain range of distance and velocity, the resonance would create a wormhole-like ripple in space—but wormhole-like, was the key word, and models suggested. The closest anyone had seen to that spatial distortion was in a logbook of dubious veracity from the Delta Quadrant, four hundred years ago. Alteia, my Academy buddy who’d been a Human sailor, took the Silmaril in an M-wing on a series of highly monitored test flights above the Atlantic Ocean, and space did repeatedly start to hollow in front of bom—so bo had to stop every time, rather than risk vanishing with our single, maybe-one-way ticket.

Then Earth’s moon stopped shining in the sky. Its albedo just dropped nearly to zero, from one night to the next. There was nothing wrong that anyone could figure out—nothing with the orbit, nothing with the surface rock, nothing with the artificial atmosphere. Inhabitants reported feeling colder by several degrees, but no measuring equipment recorded anything.

The black hole slightly off-center in the middle of Sol was now 844.9 zeptometers, and growing more steadily.

We didn’t have time to keep testing. We needed to raise our swords and make our ride, even if we only got one shot at it.

I was given command, for seniority, skill, and because I was the one who managed to talk S,sh out of leading the fleet herself. (If my lives had taught me anything, it was the importance of having someone, anyone, ready to be emergency backup.) Ironically, I was back on the Endeavor, with most of my old crew—though we got permission to rename the ship, in honor of the mission. A lot of people did. Alteia was now commanding the AAS Elendil on my right flank, star-friend in Ancient Elvish. That Canid pop princess had taken over a hospital ship and renamed it Rivendell. An Earth Park Ranger, of all things, remembered being my dad—briefly—and he was leading the Rangers plus my Rigilic drinking buddy on the EPSS Elfsheen.

We weren’t sure if any ship but the one with the Silmaril would get through. The fleet numbered in the hundreds in battleships alone, not counting scouts and scuttlers. Twelve races had sent ships on top of their typical Alliance Fleet tithe, and S,sh had brought about half the full force of the X-ee Empire. We all just locked tractor beams and hoped.

I was piloting as well as captaining, with the Silmaril between my forehorns. It was held in place by about a dozen wires and other connectors to the ship, like an old-timey pilot’s headset. We took off in orbit around Earth, as close as possible to the surface—not very close, in warships of Class S and higher, but within range of the oceanic resonance. A Likkilianian thief-queen stood at my shoulder, ready to advise if anything “Musical” started to happen.

Think about what you’re trying to get to, and why, the boffins had advised, so I did—bright-eyed kings and dancing maidens; lost friends, families, cities, planets and all. The jewel got warmer against my skin and shone brighter with every pulse of the engine, brighter than we should’ve been able to see through.

The silver-gold Light twisted and diffused as space did around us. But there was no familiar rippling wormhole boundary—instead, spacetime thinned to a curtain like driving rain, like Vesarian silver-glass.

A ghost appeared next to me. She looked like the oldest, grumpiest writing teacher at the crèche, though I knew that was only in my head.

“There you are,” she said, impatient and relieved like I’d been hiding in the sandbox again, rather than coming to class on time. Her sewing scissors went snip snip snip as she darted them around my body—and a chain on my soul faded into guiding threads.

Before she’d even disappeared again, I punched the engine and blasted through the silver-glass curtain.

Fairy tales said there’d be a peerlessly beautiful land on the other side, green with eternal spring, full of endless light and laughter. They said there’d be sunlit shores and shimmering waves, with welcoming docks for sea-ships, sky-ships and space-ships all…

We flew into the worst battlefield I’d ever seen, in any lifetime. It was more desperately vicious than Jerusalem V at the height of the Reform Wars, more ruined than Glaurung’s wake, more desolate than Zanzibus after the nuclears fell.

Either a massive supercontinent or a small moon had been shattered, leaving nothing but a roiling debris field. The brand-new meteoroids ranged from pebbles to rocks the size of a small space station, and included space-frozen corpses, forests, and what might have once been city blocks.

I gave the helm back to my Pilot Officer—zer had, I can admit, slightly better reflexes for dodging debris—and focused on captaining.

Most of the life signs were clinging to the larger rocks. There shouldn’t have been atmosphere for them, but walls of thunderstorm wrapped around every shard with even a single life sign—wind and water desperately hand in hand to safeguard the last of the Elves. The only thing visible through the impossible storms was the Light of a second Silmaril, on a meteoroid shaped like half a broken eggshell.

A corpse lay at the epicenter of the explosion—what might’ve been a corpse, if it wasn’t also shattered. The broken pieces of a massive stone humanoid, taller than my ship if it’d stood beside her, still bleeding lava so hot that it burned even in frozen space. Another titan knelt at the shards of its head, a figure of towering bark and leaves, wailing with grief even worse than the end of the world.

A slimmer tree-woman stood with one hand on her shoulder, comforting, and the other wielding a skyscraper-sized club spiked with incandescent wildflowers. Guarding her sister’s heartbreak, she fended off a swarm of bat-sized monsters with wings of darkness and whips of flame.

Bat-sized relative to the gods of Elves and ancient Humans. About the size of an M-wing, in flight.

Countless more of the bat-things flung themselves at the storm-bubbles, like carnivores chasing the prey hidden inside. They were fended off by an equal army of creatures with wings of light and swords of lightning, led by a towering figure who seemed to dance from one bloody battle to the next.

The biggest battle by far was the farthest away, over where the sun had been. In this dimension of stories over science, Sol was another woman-shape, smaller than the others but burning just as brightly as her star. Also just as blood-red. The light was centered on a fist she kept clenched at her chest, and instead of containing the black hole, the unseeable thing that it was here surrounded her, striking at her with a thousand hungry jaws and grasping legs, and she had only a one-handed whip of a solar flare to fend it off—

But she didn’t fight alone. A warrior tore at the Darkness’s spidery limbs with his fists, image on the cameras flickering impossibly between every hero I’d ever heard of. A snarling figure bit at it with jagged teeth, gored it with horns, shredded it with claws and talons, and generally made every ancient prey-instinct in me scream. And a queen with a crown of stars, a shield like the night sky and a sword like a streaking comet, stood dauntlessly at the sun-holder’s side.

With all that, and with the speed of even her most exhausted strikes, I thought the sun-holder could probably have gotten away if she’d tried. But I knew how a person fought when they weren’t willing to leave a friend, and a smaller, silver figure lay at her feet, unmoving and drained of light.

But even the battle for the sun wasn’t what grabbed my eye. No—all my attention, all my guiding threads of fate and the quick temper that always used to get me in trouble, before (and sometimes after) I learned to leash it in an Alliance uniform— All of that took me straight to the fight happening orthogonal to the stone giant’s corpse.

It was another one-versus-many. Morgoth, the First Enemy of Elves and Men— Master of Lies, Maker of Chains, Sonofabitch Curser of Bloodlines—towered over even his fellow gods. His shape changed constantly, sickeningly, but it was always black-armored with eyes like dying stars that hated you personally. His maul dripped with lava and every other kind of blood.

He fought against three great gray figures who moved as one. The tallest wielded a star-studded scythe with swift, efficient strokes, and wore the dark gray of corpse-shrouds. The shortest shimmered with more colors than even a Stamotapadon could dream of, and his weapon shifted likewise. The third was the clear, clean gray of skies after rain or tears run dry, and fought with only a shield—and hit harder with it than either of her brothers.

Around their heads darted the only Elves on the battlefield, in small fliers more like sea-ships than aircraft. But they moved fluidly, pestering the Dark Lord like flies, pricking his skin and threatening his burning eyes.

Until Morgoth swung his maul with a roar of fury that traveled even though soundless space. My ship and heart both shuddered. The gray gods all staggered back, and the Elves fell from the no-longer-sky—all but their leader, more fire than flesh, who wore the third Silmaril. Morgoth caught him in one massive black hand and with sharp claws plucked the jewel away, as easily as a ripe berry from a tree—

“All power to fore-cannon and fire,” I ordered—and the jewel on my brow shone bright again as several stored months’ worth of infinite Silmaril-Light slammed into Morgoth’s chest with all the force that the best scientists in the Astral Alliance could engineer.

He stumbled. He dropped both the jewel and the elf-king (who’d been trying to bite him). The Lady of Mercy tossed her shield to catch them, staying low and out of sight—though she needn’t have bothered. The so-called “Lord of All” had already found his next enemy.

“All ships, move forward and join shields,” I ordered, and met his burning stare though the viewscreen. “Then broadcast me on all external frequencies.”

The wires on my forehead shimmered as we shifted Light-flow to the shields—and to my right, so did the Elendil, and to my left, the Cosmian Blade, and all around us the Minas Tirith, the Elfsheen, the Muse, the Rivendell, the Heart of Zanzi, the Longbottom Leaf… They were still soaring out of the silvery distortion behind me, tractor- and Silmaril-towed: sleek Rigilic eels-of-prey and Centaurian cruisers full of Humans eager to fight for their homeworld, Betan mine-ships and Canid X-M-wings and my own Hectoan starlighters, a full third of the X-ee navy with their X-eee–shaped six-engine dreadnoughts, and hundreds more.

“This is Captain Pel Cinia, once Túrin Turambar, of the Astral Alliance ship Gurthang,” I said. My words were broadcast from every ship on every frequency in every language that the people of Arda might know, as the Fleet assembled from forty-plus different worlds flew into position. Our Light-infused shields blazed and locked together, until we formed a seamless wall right in the Enemy’s face, with the Elves and their other allies safely behind us.

I’ve never felt more proud to recite the most cliché line in the Fleet:

“We got your distress call. We’re here to help.”

#the silmarillion #science fiction #humans are space orcs #fanfiction #my fic #dagor dagorath #not tagging characters bc spoilers (they're listed at the end of the ao3 though)

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webslingingslasher · 1 year

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hi so uh could I request a really short (like less than 1000 words) blurb for Peter of him just comforting reader with physical affection cause she's having a depressive episode please (I really need a hug omfg)

i’m at work but i really think you needed this, call it a gut feeling.

peter’s love language is physical touch to the max.

he needs a hand on you at all times, riding in the car? hand on your thigh, if you’re sitting behind him, his hand is wrapped around your ankle. watching a movie? you’ll be tucked into his side, or he’s resting his head on your chest, at the very least your legs are tugged over his lap so he has something to run his hands over. out at dinner? he’s holding your hand across the table almost the entire time, unfortunately you make him give it back when the food arrives. eating out with friends? his favorite, because then he has a reason to sit in the booth next to you and there’s nowhere that’s off limits. hands on your thighs, knees, hands, elbow, neck, face, anywhere he deemed necessary for his touch.

most times you push him off, and he doesn’t take it offensively because even he can admit when he’s being a little too much. there’s only so much you can take of being trapped under his arm in new york summer weather before you shake him off and tell him not to touch you for ten minutes because you’re about to scream. or when you’re out at dinner with friends because he really does have wondering hands, you can see when it’s getting a little much so you have to take his hand and rest it on the table with a pat or grip it in yours so tightly it’s sent into rigor mortis.

there is one time you don’t push him away, when he doesn’t think it’s possible slump into him further, the one time he truly can’t tell where you start and he stops.

he just wishes you weren’t so sad when you needed him like that.

peter thinks you fell asleep on him and he doesn’t mind one bit, sometime after finding you buried under your covers. which he knows is your hiding spot when things just get a little too rough. you’re good most times, but every once in a while you forget how special you are, and he knows when you don’t respond to his texts or snapchats or don’t show up to school.

you didn’t text him much last night and he figured you were tired or sleeping early, then you weren’t at school this morning and he would’ve thought you were feeling sick until it hit ten thirty and you haven’t responded to anything in over twelve hours. his suspicions were confirmed, you were sick, but not with a bug or virus.

peter did the only thing he could think to do, not that you’d believe him in that moment anyways, and sends you three words.

I love you.

if you were to only look at one message from him he wants it to be that, so he doesn’t send anything else for the rest of the school day.

he went straight to your place and let himself in, heading for your door where he knows you’ll be collapsed in bed and have to fight his own upset that you haven’t ate or drank water today because it’s the wrong thing at the wrong time.

sometimes he doesn’t like being right, seeing you swallowed in blankets, facing the wall with your eyes shut, he sees tear marks and doesn’t have to ask, he stopped asking months ago, it was always the same answer.

“why are you crying, hm?” he’d brush your hair away so it doesn’t stick.

and you’d sniffle and blink more tears to fall and whine, “i don’t know, it just has nowhere to go.”

“what has nowhere to go?”

you’d cry harder, “the sadness.”

sometimes there was no good reason to be so sad and it makes it worse, like you needed to justify how sad you felt.

peter took in the darkness, you pinned blankets over your windows, it was as black as you felt. he doesn’t even think you’re sleeping, just… dreading your existence.

in case you don’t know he’s in here he speaks soft and slow so he doesn’t scare you, also because cheerful doesn’t really fit the mood.

“hey, trouble. feelin’ okay?”

he knows you’re not okay, okay. but it’s not about being fine, it’s about checking in with each other because you’d swore you’d tell him if it ever wasn’t okay.

peter can’t hear you, he puts his knees on the bed and shuffles towards your back. “what’s that, mumbles?”

your fingers claw at the blanket around your mouth, “‘m okay.”

peter is the fixer, he fixes everything, you even call him your little engineer. but this is one thing he can’t and never will be able to fix but he’ll gladly hold your hand and cheer you on from the side while you fix yourself.

“wanna hug?”

and you don’t know why these cuddles, these touches, these actions of love that feel the most warming and comforting to you. he always loves you, that’s his thing, but when it’s times like these when you’re so emotionally raw and vulnerable you want to curl up and hide, peter embreases it and doesn’t tell you to hide it, it’s human and he’s happy you trust him enough to see that side and he’ll never take it for granted.

you nod, peter scoots enough to pull at your hip and pull you on your back, he’s looking down at you and doesn’t take offense when you look away.

“wanna be on top?”

sometimes you wanted peter to crush you with his weight, he used to hold back because he didn’t want to actually hurt you until one night you called him out, “peter, please I just need to feel… i don’t know.” so he let himself settle all the way down on your chest and heard how your breath caught, you gripped at his shoulder when he tried to move back up, you gasped it but you needed it, needed it for a few minutes.

“thank you, just… please stay here.”

that’s when it was really bad, you needed him to drown out the whole world, the thoughts, the insults, anything that wasn’t screaming at your brain for breath, and when he moves that first real gulp of air feels like heaven and even if it’s for one second you have two things to be grateful for.

most times, you crawled high into his lap and looped your arms around him so tight he felt like he couldn’t breathe, your face tucked into the crook of his neck, sometimes you’d dot kisses, sometimes you’d cry, and sometimes he feels nothing but eyelashes every few minutes as you blink and shut them, each attempt of opening them like, ‘you ready yet? no? alright.’

or nights like tonight, when you curl around him and doze off because you had a night where instead of sleeping for fourteen hours you stayed up blinking at the wall.

and because if you’d learned anything about his love language, he wouldn’t let go until you asked.

#peter parker x reader #tasm!peter x reader #peter parker blurb #peter parker fluff #tasm!peter one shot #tasm!peter fluff #my writing

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hooked-on-elvis · 4 months

Text

ELVIS' DEBUT ON TV — 📺 [CBS] The Dorsey Brothers 'Stage Show'

Elvis with Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey at CBS Studio 50, New York, March 17, 1956 [that would be Elvis' 5th appearance on their TV show, out of 6 total.].

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By December 1955 Elvis had still not made an appearance on national television. His manager Colonel Tom Parker negotiated a deal through Steve Yates with CBS's "Stage Show" for four appearances on the show in January 1956 at $1,250 each and an option for two more at $1,500 each.

On the January 28, 1956, Elvis was broadcast for the nation for the very first time, performing "Shake, Rattle and Roll", "Flip, Flop and Fly" and "I Got a Woman".

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[ABOVE: the January 28th 1956 FULL PERFORMANCE]

On Elvis' first appearance on American television, Bill Randle, one of the most influential disc jockeys of the time, was the man who actually presented Elvis Presley to the nation. He said:

"We'd like at this time to introduce to you a young fellow, who like many performers, Johnnie Ray among them, come up out of nowhere to be overnight very big stars. This young fellow we met for the first time while making a movie short*. We think tonight that he's going to make television history for you. We'd like you to meet him now - Elvis Presley. And here he is!" — Bill Randle, Disc Jockey, the man presenting Elvis Presley to America for the first time. January 28, 1956.

After this, things would never be the same, specially the society. Such a good beginning for a year, that special day in a January month! ♥

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🎞️THE SHORT-FILM THAT NEVER SAW THE LIGHT OF DAY (for the general public... at least until now...)

The movie short Bill Randle referred to during his introduction to Elvis was "The Pied Piper Of Cleveland - A Day In The Life Of A Famous Disc Jockey" a short film made by Universal pictures about Bill Randle himself. Filmed on October 20th, 1955, at a concert in Brooklyn High School, Cleveland, it featured the stars Bill Haley & The Comets, The Four Lads, Pat Boone, plus the addition of a little-known Elvis Presley.

The original forty-eight-minute film was supposed to be cut down to a twenty-minute "short" for national distribution, but never made it that far. We're in 2024... 69 years went by since this shortcut was produced but the movie remains unreleased.

There is some dispute over whether or not this film actually exists, although it's said it was shown publicly, albeit only once in Cleveland, and excerpts were also aired on a Cleveland television station in 1956. Marshall Lytle, bass player for Bill Haley's Comets, corroborates the existence of the film in his memoir, "Still Rockin' Around the Clock", but he makes the unsubstantiated claim that Colonel Tom Parker, Presley's manager, bought the film and destroyed the existing copies. According to historians, tho, DJ Bill Randle, before his death in 2004, sold the rights to the film to PolyGram (it has been reported that Universal Studios has the negatives of the film in its vaults).

Much uncertainty about this short film, but can you imagine this film being release in Elvis' birthday centenary celebration? We watched, and listened, on Elvis' 89th birthday a few days earlier this year, to them playing during his birthday celebration at Graceland the original "That's All Right" record as it was cut at Sun Records studio in 1954, so who knows? There's always rare things surfacing here and there, so... we better keep our hopes this Bill Randle's 1955 movie, with some new 'baby Elvis' footage, will be release any day now [such as we know there's 'Elvis On Tour' and 'Elvis: That's the Way It Is' never seen before footage coming our way, as confirmed by the "Elvis" 2022 biopic's film director, Baz Luhrmann — finally! We hope it will be released soon].

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But enough daydreaming... Back to Elvis' 1st television appearances.

After the premiere on America's television on January 28th, 1956, Elvis would do five more appearances on 'The Dorsey Brothers Stage Show" for the next eight weeks. Those would take place on February 4, February 11, February 18, March 17 and March 24th, 1956.

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February 4th, 1956 | "Baby Let's Play House" and "Tutti Frutti"

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February 11th, 1956 | "Blue Suede Shoes" and "Heartbreak Hotel" *

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* This is a special arrangement for 'Heartbreak Hotel', so good! Jazzy, dramatic, really rarity. I loved this! ♥

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February 18th, 1956 | "Tutti Frutti" and "I Was The One"

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March 17th, 1956 | "Blue Suede Shoes" and "Heartbreak Hotel" *

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* This is the usual arrangement for the "Heartbreak Hotel" song. On February 11th, 1956, Elvis performed this same song onstage of 'The Dorsey Brothers Show' but it sounded something more… dramatic (I guess it matched the lyrics after all, but I love the usual arrangement better yet).

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And the last one... the 6th appearance on 'Dorsey Brothers Stage Show':

March 24th, 1956 | "Money Honey" and "Heartbreak Hotel" | [FULL PERFORMANCE]

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We can see how on those first TV shows Elvis still looks quite shy. Although he moves the usual lot, he doesn't flirt with his audience as much as he would on the upcoming TV appearances (and throughout his life, actually). It's funny how he grew comfortable with being in front of the cameras so fast tho. As his photographer Wiliam Speer said, "I guess you must really like being photographed."

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Elvis with Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey at CBS Studio 50 in New York, on March 17, 1956. That would be Elvis' 5th appearance on their TV show. 'The Dorsey Brothers Stage Show' (CBS) was the place Elvis debut in his TV appearances, on January 28th 1956. He would appear on the show for 6 times total, from January to March 1956. ♥

Performing on the 'Dorsey Brothers Stage Show' at the CBS Studio 50, New York City, on March 24th, 1956. His 6th and final appearance on the show.

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EDIT: THE BLUE MOON BOYS

I hate it when I forget to mention such important, trivial, facts — and this shouldn't be footnote info and I feel guilty it is now but I forgot mentioning — The Blue Moon Boys. I love them so much! I watch those footage looking at them as much as I look at Elvis.

Like, I love Bill Black's energy onstage! I love him hollering, vibing to their sound, as loud as Elvis (on occasion). I love how he seem to love chewing gum (Bill is chewing gum in some of those footage), because it makes me look at the Blue Moon Boys and Elvis as a unit, real close friend who look alike, just how it should be. We know although EP for obvious reasons can't chew gum while singing, he loooooved gum and kept this - should I say "habit?" - throughout his life. It's sounding silly what I'm saying, I know, but I think this Elvis habit in fact date from back when he was rocking onstage with Bill, Scotty and DJ Fontana and it makes my heart warm how close and similar they seem to be, as friends, real friends. Bill is actually said to be the one cheering the crowds onstage when they first begun performing, when Elvis was still learning how to be the great leading man he became. When EP was still learning how to act onstage, how to manipulate the audience, creating the mad passionate reactions he learned to create whenever he wanted, Bill was the one heating things up, joking with the audience, cheering, hollering. Bill is amazing! His energy is intoxicating, and we can see it clearly on those first TV appearances performances. ♥

I also love how hot Scotty Moore looks! I kinda laughed thinking 'Oh my goodness' ... So this thing about rock and roll bands always having hot vocalists and hot guitar players as a rule, it looks like it all started from the 50s with EP and Scotty! (really, at least the singer and guitar player in most rock bands are hot AF, am I lying? *lol*). I have a thing for Scotty... When he smiles at times on those footage, I'm like: 🤤🥹🥴🫠 And I also love how he's elegant but at the same time menacing looking holding and playing his guitar like the guitar hero he was. Really, if you haven't yet, do yourself a favor and read Scotty's book "THAT'S ALL RIGHT, ELVIS: The Untold Story of Elvis' First Guitarist and Manager, Scotty Moore", by Scotty as told to James Dickerson (1997). Scotty's life story is fascinating and as interesting as Elvis'. ♥

And last, but never least, I love how together, calm and concentrated DJ Fontana looks. Ok, unfortunately being the drummer has it's disadvantages. We can't see DJ Fontana as much as we see the other boys onstage, but I listen to the songs until the very last minute and it's amazing how the music always has the closing, the important and dramatic ending, done by DJ's talented hands. I love that guy. ♥

Elvis Presley and The Blue Moon Boys were the best rock and rollers! I love their energy together. As much as I adore 70s Elvis onstage, the TCB Band, the Sweets Inspirations and all, if I only had one performance of Elvis' I could attend, just one to choose, I would go for - undoubtedly - the 50s ones, when those guys, The Blue Moon Boys and Elvis, were playing together.

That's Rock and Roll royalty. ✨👑 ♥

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

There you go. All the videos together so you can watch of them easily. ♥

#elvis for the first time on America television #imagine seeing this baby for the first time out of the blue and then watching him skyrocketing in less than a year...#and then testify as he only grew bigger and bigger and even when he's no longer walking in earth how people still love him #man how I wanted be an old lady just because i would have lived and breathed Elvis Presley 🥹#all i can do is imagine #elvis the king #elvis #elvis presley #the blue moon boys #bill black #scotty moore #DJ fontana #Youtube #elvis fans #elvis fandom #elvis history #50s elvis #tv history #tv shows

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thesiltverses · 7 months

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any clues on whats next after tsv ends ? :)

No concrete confirmation, but we did put out a Patreon post back in spring with a few draft pitches, to gauge initial interest and see what kind of genre storytelling folks were most excited to see from us.

I'll paste them below, so you can see the kinds of things we've had in mind (#2 and #3 were the most popular, but it was a fairly even spread outside of that). We've had a few more really fun ideas since then that I'll keep schtum about for now.

General feedback was that people were most enthusiastic about seeing ongoing, multi-season projects from us, which makes perfect sense and is much more sensible for us anyway in terms of sustaining a livelihood / retaining audience members along the way.

That said, TSV has been a three-year endeavour which is a big commitment, and personally I think the best horror is often self-contained, short and sweet.

So I'd really love to have the time to work on a few miniseries-type shows as well, but also need to recognise that we likely don't have the bandwidth to juggle two projects simultaneously.

With all that in mind, I think the direction we're hoping to be able to pursue is:

1+ shorter horror miniseries or one-offs with production or network partners (if they want to work with us) where we're largely on writing duties or with a lighter load.

1 longer, ongoing weird-fiction show which is all ours, baby, all ours.

Draft pitches

#1: Manes

Genre: Historical horror, cosmic horror, family drama with murderous stakes

Influences: The Terror Season 1, pretty much.

Summary: In 208 AD, the ailing Roman emperor Septimius Severus travels north across Hadrian's Wall into Caledonia, with the aim of finally uniting Britain under imperial rule.

For Severus, there's more at stake - his two sons are openly at odds over the succession, and it's openly said that civil war will follow the emperor's death.

Severus himself rose to supreme power through violence and the elimination of his rivals. Now, haunted by the possibility of revenge by the shades of the divine dead and dwelling unhappily on his legacy, the emperor hopes to share his final triumph with his sons and demonstrate a different lesson to them - that an equitable peace is a lasting possibility.

But as the Roman column makes its way north into apparently endless woods, surrounded by cronies, schemers, Britons, soothsayers, priestesses of Cybele, and more, the emperor and his family find that their enemy is nowhere to be seen - but they are being pursued by a force that is both strange and terrible.

And soon enough, the Romans realise that they have perhaps strayed not into Caledonia at all - but into a hostile realm of their own imagining...

Why make this show? We adore period horror, and there's far too little of it out there.

Severus and his family are a fascinating set of characters who we'd love to spend some time with - as ethically-compromised participants in a very Shakespearean tragedy, and as individuals whose heritage, religious beliefs and psychologies allow us to explore aspects of ancient Rome that haven't been done to death in fiction already.

#2: I'll Dance In The Deep Shadow

Genre: Weird-fiction noir, paranoid espionage fiction, cosmic horror

Influences: Cold War spy classics, Roadside Picnic

Summary: Across the water from the mainland UK, a vast walled city has come unexpectedly into existence.

The city’s walls are composed of purest shadow; its leaders have not revealed themselves to us, nor have they made demands of us.

Upon its streets, our own dead and forlorn doubles wander; grinning doppelgangers who seem to know something terrible from the future that’s to come.

We call the city Umbra.

Umbra is a bottomless well of shadow and secrets; its darkened landscapes are home to suppressed memories turned savage and monstrous.

Its citizens and its guards are twisted echoes, repetitions, and whispering relics of the world's buried past - and they will not reveal Umbra's purpose to us.

Around Umbra's great walls, representatives from the world's governments gather and plot against one another - mercenaries, guides, spies, black-market traders, scientists and killers - to infiltrate the city, map its streets, and navigate its dangers for themselves.

Why make this show? Less of an Eskew sequel than it probably sounds at first glance, this one.

We'd love to do a paranoid, twist-filled, pessimistic John Le Carre-style spy thriller, with multiple characters who can neither trust themselves nor each other - and we feel like we've got some really interesting horror themes around memory and forgetting here to explore with this concept.

#3: Our Wars Have Ended

Genre: Dark fantasy, New Weird fantasy

Influences: The Black Company, the Bas-Lag series, Gormenghast.

Summary: It’s a strange time to be alive.

Thirty years ago, countless legions of the ancient dead rose from their graves to conquer the living lands; lands which now rest in an uneasy - but peaceful - state of occupation.

Withered corpses sit upon the thrones of the living and play silent courtier in the shadowed halls, acting out the rituals and habits of their past lives while dead men and women keep watch from the ruined towers.

Mortal historians and linguists frantically mediate between our returned masters, trying to keep the peace - which estate belongs to whom? Who shall rule eternal? Which traditions deserve to live on?

But this is a time of wondrous change, too - new technologies, empowered by the revelations of the Dead Reclamation and the will of the Ancestors. Strange machines rumble through the hills and necronautical vessels delve into the unexplored territories of the afterlife itself.

And it has been announced that the Hollowbrow Queen will unite the nation with a powerful gesture, taking on a living consort in a marriage of the fleeting and the eternal.

On one side of the conquered country, an old veteran leads his mercenary company on a reluctant expedition towards the capital, in the employ of a long-dead king on a mission of revenge.

On the other, a young dead-diver and essayer into the realms of the dead is hired to investigate a peculiar mystery, and a conspiracy that may involve both the living and the returned…

Why make this show? Because Game of Thrones had no interest in the (to us) enjoyable questions of 'well, why do the ancient dead want to conquer the living, exactly? What happens once they've done it?' and we'd love to deconstruct that and play with the idea of loathsome undead aristocrats from every period of history squabbling with one another over what their conquered nation actually means.

Because we think we've built up the confidence and the skills to take a big swing at an epic adventure story and a semi-traditional fantasy - it feels like an idea that could potentially appeal to a wider audience while remaining true to our own core values of Weirdness, Horrible Things and More Weirdness.

#4: To Those Who Wait

Genre: Cosmic horror, dark comedy, mockumentary

Influences: Dead Set, Ghostwatch, Savageland, Evil Dead

Summary: Eskew Productions has gone in a surprising direction with its latest production - a new reality experiment and dating-show podcast.

Eight lovelorn singletons have been given rooms in the exclusive Gregory Hotel. Over the course of six weeks, these contestants will go on dates, carry out team challenges, and ultimately try and find themselves a life partner - all without seeing each other's faces.

The aim of the experiment? To prove that good things really do come to those who wait.

As they pore through a mixture of recorded and behind-the-scenes footage, however, it may become very apparent to listeners that something else is waiting in the Gregory.

And one by one, our contestants find themselves at risk of far more than being voted off...

Why make this show? As a great big act of play more than anything else.

We adore horror mockumentaries, but in audio-drama they tend to be faux-journalistic.

Doing a show that instead mimics hokey reality shows to the point of being mistakable for the real thing, but turns out to be a ghost story instead...that's a lot of fun to us.

#5: In The Devil's Counties

Genre: Historical horror, cosmic horror

Influences: Nathan Ballingrud's Wounds, Seven Samurai, Between Two Fires, Dog Soldiers, Aliens…

Summary: As the Magna Carta states: “All evil customs relating to forests and warrens, foresters, warreners, sheriffs and their servants, or river-banks and their wardens, are at once to be investigated by twelve sworn knights of the county, and within forty days of their enquiry the evil customs are to be abolished completely and irrevocably.”

In early-medieval Sussex, a motley group of knights rides out to investigate tales of ungodly horror and acts of forbidden worship from deep in the English countryside - including Ralph Dagworth, 'hell's mapmaker'.

What the party of knights discovers out in the warrens and the forests of the county, however, is far stranger and more terrible than any Christian conception of hell…

Why make this show? Again, because we're itching to have a go at some period horror, and that weirdly specific Magna Carta quote is just too fun to pass up as a springboard for some 'isolated squaddies in enemy territory' storytelling. (Sadly, it does have a more grounded explanation.)

#6: Strangling Knot

Genre: Anthology horror

Influences: Junji Ito, experimental 8-bit horror, Black Mirror's Bandersnatch

Summary:

“The rules of the game are simple. This is a place of endless forking paths and one exit.

There’s something terrible in here with you. Get ready."

A Choose Your Own Adventure-style horror audio anthology; each episode is a distinct story with branching paths that may lead to failure (most of the time) or escape (more rarely).

Why make this show? This is likely the only show that we could reasonably produce as a side-project (and we've been chatting to a couple of other talented horror creators about it already, sssh).

We'd like to be able to play with single-narrator horror storytelling again that's relatively quick and easy to produce - but we do want to at least try and ensure it doesn't feel like we're repeating I Am In Eskew.

There's some really fun stuff happening out there already with CYOA-style audiodrama, and that seems like an opportunity that's ripe for playing about with.

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ganondoodle · 10 months

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genuine genuine genuine question- wwwhy do you not like the zonai? (zonau? not sure if thats like. the worlds coolest plural or a translation difference) given your content with more monstery designs i would have thought they'd be up your alley!! however. i have also not played skyward sword (as much as id like to) and i know most of peoples upset with their existence and the totk storyline is because of its conflicts with that plot? i'm very excited to see what you do with your rewrite/botw2!! given their slight presence in faron in botw, it would be cool to see you repurpose the zonai in some way that doesn't conflict with the plot you're going for, something that makes more sense with the cryptic kinda bare minimum we had in botw? sorry if you've explained your stance on the zonai before <3

hhhhhhhh i had ranted alot about it but i hope you are prepared- (also "zonai" is sonau in german but im choosing to write it with a z so people recognize it at least, im pretty sure zonau is also the orignal japanese word for them)

i am fine with their design, in fact, i LIKE their character designs, however i dont like everything else about them.

and no its also not bc it affects skyward sword bc it doesnt affect ANYTHING in skyward sword, bc skyward sword is the VERY FIRST zelda game in the timeline and totk is nowhere near it, totk draws several paralels towards skysw bc its meant a sort of soft reset for this new era but its really just thematic overlap and references bc those are cool (i know alot of people are trying to convince the entire fandom that totk somehow is crammed into the old timeline but trust me its never anywhere near confirmed nor does it make any sense, heres the lil graphic i made last month to clarify how i think its meant to be understood .. quite obviously even -

i dont mean to sound .. mean, but some people read too much into little phrases or references to older titles (like first king of hyrule .. doesnt have to mean the literal firstest of the first ones in all of forgotten history ever, just the first of THIS hyrule for example), and while im not against theories i am very annoyed when people try to say its somehow canon when its NOT)

with that out of the way;

i dont like how they are 'integrated' into botws world, they feel unnatural and shoved in everywhere, they have been everywhere and did everythign better and cooler and no part of (this) hyrule was untouched by them their architecture feels not integrated well either and design wise its rather bland, while the sheikah shrines for example while obviously not natural and very 'techy' they still build a harmonizing contrast while the totk shrines are pretty laughably unfitting compared to them the basically complete disappearance of all sheikah tech related stuff bothers me immensely bc why would you just get rid of it istead of developing it further (i know about purahs towers and think they are just like a worse version of the previous ones; and before this argument comes up again, them destryoing it all -somehow- bc they were afraid of it being taken over again is a dumb excuse bc then they should be even more scared of zonau tech- even MORE unknown and advanced tech literally falling from the sky) you could have done SO MUCH with the ancient shiekah tech it drives me nuts

i also think it tipped the delicate balance of the kinda medival setting + high tech that botw had set up compeltely over, the zonau tech just .. is so painfully obviously only the way it is to give you little lego parts to glue together (i know its a focus of the game ... or at least the gamePLAY but it could have been done better, again i think they managed the balance perfectly with shiekah tech, its weird and isnt natural but doesnt endanger the believability of it ... the zonau tech just throws that out the window rly ... how cool would it have been if you could built lil guardian walk thingies djknhfkd )

in general they just feel like a complete replacement for the ancient shiekah and are so SO desperately trying to make the zonau the COOLER and BETTER versions of what the shiekah were (you COULD have connected them in a cool way, like there being ancient shiekah labs build in the old zonau mining facilities bc they used zonau tech as basis for their own tech etc)

like instead of building on the set up and potential botw had prepared, they just scrambled to make a 'better' version of botw, like oh no forget THAT ancient civilization we have an EVEN MORE ancient, and EVEN MORE highly developed peoples there that were also everywhere before you but also were never really hinted at- and then repeat botws structure .__.

having an old and forgotten civilization of whom only some withered ruins remain gave botw a much more real feeling, a world with a history that you will never know (you know, bc that makes it intriguing and is just .. a good choice of worldbuilding imo)- and then totk comes along and reveals everything and also nothing, we know too much of them to be intrigued by their mystery and also not enough to actually care about them (also them beign presented as the good perfectly perfectestest kingdom of light that can do no wrong other than underestimate the eeeevil guy while they also had their hands on every part of the land and made all other races be their face and nameless servants just ... thats weird man!! i know its a game, even if its only aimed at kids my god they arent stupid either!! you really present me with that and expect me to take it at face value what argh)

again i think they COULD have been integrated into it, but the way it was done completely threw me off, im not mad about them EXISTING but about how it was DONE in the game

the way they were done robs not just totk but also botw of mystery and intrigue, for example i much rather had them stay a mystery, only ever talked about in some text and some old and almost completely withered ruins left, you never get so see what happened there in the past, you can only guess, but you have to deal with the fallout anyway and thats just ONE possibility, there are so many and it feels like they chose the most boring one every single time

sometimes knowing less is better than knowing half

(maybe i can make it clearer when .. or if i can get to illustrate what could have worked -in my opinion- better .... sorry for ranting again ;__; )

#ganondoodles answers #ganondoodles talks #zelda #totk #ganondoodles rants #i WANT to like this game so damn much #but cant with the way it was done #and i didnt have big expectations either #sorry if i sound agressive #the way i type just reads to others like that somehow #im desperately yelling in my cage with tears in my eyes thinking about the potential it all had

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communistkenobi · 1 year

Text

conversations about representation have always felt so navel-gazing to me, in part because those conversations tend to remain at the level of individual characters. the focus is on representing individuals as meaningful examples of the groups they belong to - to have “good” representation is to see some component(s) of your social identity reflected back at you by a character without those being the only traits of those characters. To measure representation you first look to see if there are visual or descriptive markers of identity - skin colour, gender, sexual attraction, ability - and then, once that evidence is established, one looks at how characters interact with and contribute to the narrative. does this gay character have a romantic partner? does this black character have interiority not related to their relationship to white characters? is this woman character motivated by something other than a desire to impress men? The goal is to avoid stereotypes, to be an anti-stereotype.

And so you ‘solve’ representation through the adequate presence of these characters. But I think this is an inherently individualistic and anti-liberatory way to approach representation, because it views minorities as individuals who can be cut from the social fabric of real life and transported into different fictional universes while leaving their identities fully intact. The presence of a disabled character does not also require the inclusion of structural ableism in the narrative, their individual presence is enough to represent disability. And so their presence in the narrative seems to emerge from nowhere - you don’t judge representation by looking at how the narrative represents and thinks about historical structures of race, gender, ability, you judge it by the amount of characters who contain those social markers. It means social identity exists primarily within the individual. There is no historical perspective given to characters, no acknowledgement of the fact that identity is dialectic and socially mediated. to paraphrase Gramsci, history impresses upon you an infinity of traces without leaving an inventory, and I think when discussing representation, people judge the quality of representation by those traces - race, gender, ability, sexuality, religion, etc - but ignores the inventory, the origins of those things, the social processes that produce race, produce gender, constantly and everyday. And so you get these characters that feel dislocated, alien to themselves and other people, because they express an identity that appears to have no origin point in the fictional world, no social backing. They are essentialised to what they “are” deep down inside. Characters are not made racial, not made gendered, not made disabled by the universe they exist in, they simply “are” those things.

And if narratives do tackle those histories, they tend to represent them primarily through misery. You know a character is gay because they get called slurs. You see a black character experience racism. You recognise a character is a woman by the fact that she is sexually assaulted. The history of their identities is represented as individual acts of violence or trauma, as if misogyny or racism are narrative objects themselves that occasionally collide with the characters to remind the audience that the authors take history very seriously. If an author is especially serious, they will get individual sensitivity readers to confirm or deny the authenticity of the social identity being expressed on the page; much less often you will hear of authors who rigorously consult, for example, books like Orientalism to ensure the structure of their work is not reproducing Western (and ultimately racist) conclusions about the world they are creating. Representational politics begins (and frequently ends) at the level of the individual. And so you get queer characters who endure homophobia or transphobia, but whose ultimate wish is to enter into a monogamous marriage and reproduce the social unit of the nuclear family, or the black character who finally finds community in a group of all white people that aren’t racist to their face. That’s not tackling history, that’s just allowing these character to be momentarily exempt from it. the historical norms and hegemonies present in the narrative are disconnected from the characters themselves. this is why you can have “good representation” in stories that are fundamentally racist or misogynistic or heteronormative (see: ofmd). If representation is only housed in your characters, if you view representation as a discrete trait that you can add more or less of, you are not thinking about the social identities that you are representing in a systemic way - you are, in effect, producing tokens.

And I think that sense of dislocation is part of what motivates people to cringe away from stories primarily billed as having “a diverse cast” or filled with “queer characters” or whatever, even when they are otherwise desperate for those things (excluding from this discussion the people who dislike the mere appearance of characters who are not strong white men, a perspective that is not worth entertaining). I do not want to watch stories that smash characters and identities together like barbie dolls, that treat race or gender as something to “tackle” in a B plot or a “police brutality episode” like you get in a show like Brooklyn 99. I do not want a character creation screen. Identity should, ideally, be part of the structure of the narrative, not a thing you merely choose to “include.” Which is much more difficult, of course - it requires a robust political imagination, but it’s a problem that is possible to solve.

#effortpost #media #book club #been thinking about this for a while and it’s slowly being crystallised in my brain #also not bashing sensitivity readers inherently. I just think that thinking about representation as something that can be ‘confirmed’ by #individual members of a minority group creates problems #because minorities are not a monolith #and the realm of personal experience kind of inherently limits your ability to think about these things #at the level of systems of structures

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queen0fm0nsterz · 6 months

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So, if you are accepting any asks, I have a small question.

Who do you think was longer in The Spiral? And which kids were "born" there? Sorry if this is a stupid ask, or if someone already asked it.

Feel free to ignore! I just really like how you analyze and theorize 'bout everything of The Little Nightmares world; you realize things that most people most likely don't notice, and that's admirable to me!

Thank you so much!!! This makes me very happy to hear, I'm very grateful you enjoy my interpretations of the games. Your question is not stupid at all; it's a very good one, and I see there is a few misconceptions about children who are Nowhere born and children who come from other worlds.

I have seen argued that most children we meet must be kids of the Nowhere due to their ability to survive; for example, a child as young as the Toddler was able to survive for at least a while before being snatched away. However this is not an indicator of them actually being Nowhere born.

Noone herself explains how this is possible in episode one of the podcast. Quoting:

"I turned away from the window, which was only a hole in the stone wall of the curved passageway, that stretched on a long ways. This- odd feeling, told me to get up. But I couldn’t stand because the ceiling was so low."

(...)

"That same feeling told me I was lost inside a giant."

They are being guided by this strong instinct. Which explains why children as young as a Toddler can get around without dying near instantly: they inherently seem to know what to do and they are constantly on the move. If anything, children who are stagnant are more likely to be Residents or becoming Residents; they are the odd ones out. Remaining still means certain death, after all, unless you intend to join the Nowhere.

Here's a diagram to show in short who is what based on what we know about the world. The ones with the * are those who are uncertain.

Visitors

These are the most common kind of children one can meet in the Nowhere: the ones brought from outside, either by the Ferryman or from other forces. Remember; the Ferryman is a guide, not the means.

In Episode 3, Noone was pulled into the Mall, an outside force, and in Episode 4 the Ferryman was not present at all. He is not the only way for one to get inside the Nowhere, he's merely somebody with enough power to intercept some of the children coming in to bring them away with him. I don't doubt that his role is incredibly important, as he's the reason why many children even reach the Nowhere alive, but... he's a harbinger of death, no doubt.

All these children are the nameless ones. The ones whose full journeys we'll never get to see: just segments and fractions. We saw the beginning of Noone's, and the end of RCG's and RK's. Nothing more, and nothing less.

The campfire children in particular are highlighted because of two reasons:

The comics were confirmed to be partially not canonical. Obviously not everything was cut from the comics, since the Ferryman and Mirror Man are both physically there and implied to exist, but due to the vague answer we were given, we'll have to take their tales with a grain of salt.

We could only hear two of four stories; as such, only the Humpback Girl's testimony can be counted as her not being a child of the Nowhere. We can attest this because of a few lines given from her friends:

This place is haunted, though, as well as being sealed. Someone locked the mirrors away a long time ago, but! Interestingly enough, they did not break them. Maybe whoever sealed this place away was hoping for someone to come back?

Considering that Low and Alone are also involved with mirrors, I wonder if Mirror Man's abilities are on par with the Ferryman's, meaning he too can cross the bridge between realities. It could be a reason as to why the Ferryman does not intervene until the very end here. This post is not about him though, so moving on!

Nowhere Children/Residents

Now we're getting to the interesting part of the ask. As you can see in the diagram, we only know a few children who are Nowhere born, and of them, only one of them is 100% factual. Let's go through them one by one.

The Pretender was born and raised in the Nowhere. Period. She has her own mansion, pictures with her parents, and on top of that her family at the very least part of the bourgeoisie.

While powers are not necessarily an indicator of one's belonging to the Nowhere (if Low's powers are of any indication), the Pretender herself has quite the number of supernatural abilities that seem to have been present since her youth, making it hard for her to form meaningful connections with others. She's a very lonely child. This means that these powers most likely developed from her naturally rather than being acquired from the outside, like Six's and possibly even Low's.

(Even then, one can make a small argument to counter with Six developing a small power of her own... but there's a reason as to why I set her aside from everyone else.)

Now, here's someone a lot more interesting to discuss (both on this topic and in general): Mono.

He's a real special little guy. Taking into context the etymology of his name, the meanings we get always tie back to the idea of there being one of him. A single, unique little boy. Looking at the descriptions we were given of Mono, we can find out some more about him and his backstory:

Interesting as this is on a character perspective, what I would like to direct your attention on here is the mentions of the world. Here, it's mentioned that Mono is aware that the world outside hates him. Being a single minded child living in the Nowhere this makes a lot of sense; what is interesting here is the wording.

There is never the mention of "another world" in Mono's descriptions, unlike Six's descriptions in which it is directly mentions her not originating from the Nowhere.

For Mono, it's not a world: it's the world. Almost as if there is no other world he knows by now.

His nature is also rather unique. You see, Mono is a glitch. Not in the traditional Glitching Remain way, but still not entire enough to be considered a human being. For one, he quite literally glitches multiple times: we see it happen everytime he is near a Remain and is about to absorb them, whenever he gets too close to the Thin Man, he even glitches as he channels his powers to use them.

The Thin Man causing him to glitch is especially interesting because when he motions to grab him, Mono does not split in two like Six does. There is no body to be left behind: instead, he flies into Thin Man's hand and you can visibly see his body go both entirely glitchy and instantly limp.

(You can see it for yourself in this video; pay attention to him struggling when other enemies grab him vs how quickly he stops moving as soon as the Thin Man gets his hands on him.)

This indicates his nature as not being human the same way Six is, for example, but rather a product of the Nowhere. Due to how his cycle works, this makes sense: for the Tower to have a continuous of energy supply and access to the power of the Transmission, Mono needs to live through this experience over and over for as long they deem fit. This could also explain some other odd factors of his, such as not having to take a break when running and his almost grayish skintone.

While it can be argued that at the beginning of this whole mess Mono was a Visitor rather than a Resident, at this point in time many factors point to the version of him we play as being a Nowhere child.

The Refugee Boy is, as for the campfire kids... complicated to expand on due to the dubious nature of his story: nevertheless, I will still bring forth my evidence.

When the children begin telling Six their stories, the Refugee is the first to narrate his tale and he begins doing so by showing her a memento of his previous life outside of the Maw. This comes across as being peculiar on its own as no other child that we know of has anything of the like.

As you can read here, children in his village are given charm against the North Wind that one day suddenly stop working. This implies that, unlike the Mirror Man, the North Wind has always been a tangible threat looming over their birth land.

It could be easy to chalk this up to N.W. being a local legend where the boy used to live and he had a nightmare about him, but it is then mentioned that he and his sister have been running away from him for years. Much longer than any of the dreams Noone ever had.

This was a long pursuit. We know thanks to the LN III trailer that "normal" looking adults and cities existed in the Nowhere; this explains away both the Refugee's village existing and the other groups of people that chased them away when they brought around the North Wind.

While this evidence is good enough to stand on its own, it has a couple of points against it, which is why I marked the Refugee as "unsure".

The narrator could be considered unreliable. In this same screenshot I added right above, the narrator states that the siblings were welcomed everywhere, but we can visibly see them be chased away by the villagers. This can be interpreted as meaning "they were originally welcomed, but when the North Wind arrived as a consequence, they were chased off", but we don't have enough substance to back this up.

^ Supporting the above take, the narrator also says that the children have been running for years, but we visibly see that they remain the same during all this time. The sister not changing makes sense as the Ferryman has taken her place, but the Refugee also doesn't change at all. We don't know how fast time passes in the Nowhere, so it could also be attributed to that, but it must be mentioned for fairness' sake.

The Refugee's words: I'm not running anymore. This sentiment has never been echoed before, nor will it ever be echoed again. As I said earlier, being stale in the Nowhere only leads to two things: death or permanence. His surrendering could indicate that he has chose to remain in the Nowhere after being stuck in it for a long time, thus becoming an official Resident. If this is the case, he could classify as a "Visitor turned Resident".

With this, I suggest we move on to our last and currently final segment:

Visitors turned Residents

This one is an interesting breed. We don't get to see the act of a child turning into a permanent part of the Nowhere all that often; Noone could count as that, but we don't yet know if she ultimately decides to be still in the Nowhere or if she'll regret her choice.

We do have the most importantly character of this narrative as an example to this, however.

Six, my dearly beloved... what a terrible path she's gone down to. I have already displayed the evidence stating that Six is from a different world than the Nowhere up un Mono's section so I won't dwell on it.

Thin Man splitting her in two is what doomed her and, as hard as she tried to fight it, her trip to the Maw was the nail in the coffin. No matter how far away from it she gets: she will never be free from the influence it had on her person. When it comes to the LN I ending, this is what the writers had to say on it:

(From this interview. It's an interesting one; they also confirm that the Signal Tower and the Maw were not places that were "built" but that exist for various reasons, which supports the idea that they are entities rather than buildings.)

I think Six is not leaving the Nowhere anytime soon. If at all. She might have left the Maw, but at this point, she's ventured too far in to turn back to the person she was before. To think none of this is even her fault is saddening, to say the least, but horrifically realistic.

Sisi... is an incognita. I've only put her in this category to be fair, since we don't know anything about her. There is a possibility that she has grown up to become a Resident, but it's just as likely that she may have died off somewhere, like many others before and after her.

I will not be dwelling into the adults for now, but we do have reason to believe that some of them are most definitely Visitors turned Residents. Most notable is the Lady who, in her character description, directly expresses discomfort with how nonsensical the Nowhere is － a sentiment only someone who knows alternatives to it can have.

It also indicates a surprising level of self awareness to some extent; most Nowhere inhabitants do not question the nature of their world, not even important and powerful beings like, say, the Thin Man.

I hope this answers your question!

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hella1975 · 8 months

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HELLA HOW DID YOU LIKE UNREAL UNEARTH?? FAVORITES??

finally finally FINALLY listening to this album im literally sat here laptop open finger on the play button genius page up ready to just spew out any thought i have in real time. let's go!

de selby pt1 - i forgot how much i fucking love hozier's lyricism. he just gets it. he's a master at his craft it's truly an honour to exist in the same time as him. this song is so calm but in a haunting way, like the stillness of fog on a lake in the morning. your reflection cant offer a word to the bliss of not knowing yourself. okay!!! OMG THE IRISH!! absolutely adore how vocal hozier is about his culture and even just how much his accent comes through on this album compared to earlier tracks. also love how the intensity builds in this part of the song this whole thing is stunning

de selby pt2 - THE WAY IT SLIDES RIGHT INTO PART 2! LOVE LOVE LOVE! very different vibe but it works. i love how there's always so many layers to hozier songs. like de selby alone has the actual song meaning AND the references to the third policeman AND its relevance to the circles of hell that we keep throughout the album. as far as media consumption goes hozier has never once failed to deliver an entire banquet. also love the whole 'becoming each other' of it all with de selby. ouroboros love. hannah have u seen this

first time - this feels like he's singing in a pub somewhere u love to see it. the liffey would have been softer on my stomach all the same! unearth without a name! some part of me must have died the first time you called me baby! this is v classic hozier imo just the most gorgeous love song u ever heard. also i love the themes of light/dark he's weaving into all these songs. girls when there are themes and symbolism <333

francesca - YEAHHHHHH i could talk about this song for HOURS there's so much going on it is so far my fave of the album ID TELL THEM PUT ME BACK IN IT! insanity. if a man sang about me this way id throw up blood

i, carrion (icarian) - insane song name. hello. what the fuck. is this about icarus. did hozier himself actually write a song about icarus. one sec. OH MY GOD HE DID WHAT THE FUCKKKK. "this song has tried to imagine that he was so enamored and so breathless and so ecstatic in the moment that he felt the air rushing by him, that he never knew he died" THEY HIT THE FUCKING PENTAGON. beautiful gorgeous im inconsolable cheers for that

eat your young - LETS GOOOOOO. cuntism off the charts. i listen to this at least once a day

damage gets done - circle of greed time! 'we had nowhere to go and every desire for going there' 'being blamed for a world we had no power in' god :')) the HARMONIES!!!! this is exactlyyy what being young is like good and bad. this is such a car song

who we are - I JUST HELD IT TIGHT SO SOMEONE WITH YOUR EYES MIGHT COME IN TIME TO HOLD ME LIKE WATER OR CHRIST HOLD ME LIKE A KNIFE WHAT THE FUCKKKKKK NO ONE FUCKING TALK TO ME. the uncertainty of growing up that he tackles in this, finding purpose, grappling with the fact there isn't always one. the last verse going soft and gentle. what was the NEED for this

son of nyx - another mythology reference! im crawling up the wall. ohhh it's instrumental! just looked at the meaning behind this and wow. this is beautiful

all things end - ADORE this song and the message of it. literally if there was anyone to ever get through this life with their heart still intact they didn't do it right!!!!!! and all things end!! and we begin again!!!! i just know zukka nation is going to go crazy with the parenthesis titles after this one

to someone from a warm climate - this is such a cool idea for a love song. like being from somewhere cold so you know how to stay warm, and saying to someone from a warm climate that it's okay if they don't know those things because you'll do it for them. the domestic, casual affection of that. it's not a bold declaration it's just confirmation that i'll keep the bed warm for you. that's all there is. that's all there needs to be

butchered tongue - ive already read some stuff about this one and ive been really itching to listen to it. the way he alternates between singing about the violence of the english against the irish (particularly the wexford rebellion) and the loss of culture there to how it relates to violence and loss of culture experienced by natives of countries on the complete other side of the world, how he's able to identify with that while still acknowledging that his language at least has a written history that can be recovered, while many native cultures dont even have that. there's no translator left to sound a butchered tongue still singing here above the ground. this whole thing is just. haunting and the fact such a big singer like hozier is taking so much time and care to talk about and spread awareness about ireland is very very cool to see

anything but - VIBE CHANGE! THIS MAKES ME WANT TO DANCE OMG! more water themes too omg i love this 'if i had his job you'd live forever' DAMN 😭 me personally i wouldnt have that. also the repetition of all the things he wants to be sooo true that's the human condition baby!

abstract (psychopomp) - ive been thinking about making a post for TIME about like. the desensitisation to death that you get from growing up in a rural area so listening to this is sooooo. like yeah. you remember the first animal you saw die don't you. you know the smell. the look in its eyes. see how it shines. see how it shines. this is an insane thing to write a song about. and to tie it to love? humanity? and the ongoing undercurrent of the circles of hell? CRAZYYYYY. this song is religious. to me. it's also very coldplay sounding actually? which is only ever a good thing

unknown/nth - HELLOOOOOO YOU KNOW THE DISTANCE NEVER MADE A DIFFERENCE TO ME!!!!!!! DO YOU KNOW I COULD BREAK BENEATH THE WEIGHT OF THE GOODNESS LOVE I STILL CARRY FOR YOU???? THAT ID WALK SO FAR JUST TO TAKE THE INJURY OF FINALLY KNOWING YOU?????? lyrics of all time. caving my own skull. top 3 songs on the album

first light - light themes again!!! dante surfacing from hell!!! the end of a journey quite literally!!! he can't keep getting away with this!! i love how... heavy? this gets in places. like it's got all the instruments and backing vocals all going at once with his voice overarching everything it's amazing. this is a perfect end song <3

#and there we have it!!!! favourites are francesca. i carrion. eat your young. abstract and unknown nth #ask #hozier #unreal unearth

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hedonistbyheart · 8 months

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I'm so obsessed with the eye motif in little nightmares. They're doubling down on it hard in TSON and I love it so much.

The idea of Noone having an eye-shaped growth in her head is so fucking creepy and then Otto basically going through what sounds like Mono's capture there at the end; surrounded by watching eyes.

I also adore the way Otto says "I was just a boy" because you can just see the teeny tiny LN protagonist he was in that sentence and the way he delivers it, it's so desolate.

I love the confirmation that the monsters are changed by their environments too, it's something I suspected, their grotesque appearances a result of the place they've become tied to.

Also nomes! Mushroom fairy is such a cute description of them. I love them♡

The weather in the counties is weird apparently and it sounded very Pale City adjacent in episode 5, which makes me think the two worlds are still connected, even if Otto says the Nowhere isn't a physical place on their plane of existence.

#little nightmares #TSON #the sounds of nightmares #I don't think Otto is Mono to be clear but they do have a lot in common

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verytallfox · 8 months

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Okay, first ever Tumblr post! Not sure if anyone will see this, but this is about the podcast The Sounds of Nightmares, set in the world of Little Nightmares. Specifically I’m looking at Chapter 3.

BIG SHIT

So to those of you who’ve listened or heard what happens, holy fuck right?! There’s some pretty big revelations (stuff theorized for a while certainly but never outright confirmed) in the episode. For one, it knocks the whole “it’s just a dream world” thing out of the park. Noone physically vanished from her world for a moment. I am certain that the Ferryman’s riddle is responsible for that.

Otto’s disgraced mentor published a paper in which he posited the existence of other worlds and other centers of reality. This professor suggests that their own world might be “secondary” in the cosmic hierarchy of existence. This is outright transdimensional or multiverse shit right here and I love it so much! It makes sense to me in that these children who are so alien to this world would end up there, though I also believe that there were regular people there too (and kids), at least formerly.

SMALL SHIT

Additionally, this is one of the first times we’ve heard the monsters of this other place speak, or at the very least coherently. Not just the Ferryman, who is called the Candleman predominantly, but also the shopping mall.

The shopping mall is the third location that we know if that’s suggested to be alive. The Maw is only indicated through reading Word of God stuff from Tarsier and the imagery that it must “feed” or must not perish. With the Signal Tower or Transmission or Flesh Walls or Black Tower, what have you, we see this evidence explicitly.

Back to the abandoned shopping mall, which is what they’ve named it on the wikia for Little Nightmares! It’s not clear if it feeds on anything at all or how. I will also say that I’m a sucker for a tragic beastie, which is the vibes that I’m getting from this being. However, I don’t think it would be good for Noone to have stayed there with it, even if it always treated her well.

The shopping mall appears to be suffering from serious mental health issues and is horribly lonely. It is desperate to have someone else stay with it, and also appears to be aware of the common fate that befalls children outside its walls.

So you know what, I’m gonna choose to believe that while it’s certainly dangerous the mall doesn’t mean children harm. It’s both incredibly lonely and entirely powerless to stop anyone who’d willingly stay with it (or be forced to stay) from being taken.

I’ve wondered if anyone else was somewhat hoping for least one friendly giant to appear in the Nowhere. Alas, this “friendly” giant is miserable, a little unstable, and totally powerless to save the company it desperately craves.

It actually reminds me of Six being trapped and warped within the Tower. There seemed to be no real benefit to that place in keeping her there other than maybe controlling Mono more easily. Maybe the Tower wanted her to stay too. Who knows!

The last thing I wanna cover is (drumroll) THE FERRYMAN! God I love this character. What’s so interesting to me about him is that he doesn’t appear to be running on a single base desire like most of the other adults. That suggests to me that he may never have been human in the first place and that he’s also directly working for the otherworldly entities of the Nowhere.

He’s definitely trying to draw Noone further in and I believe the riddle he told her is part of a ritual or incantation to lure her further in. Either she will continue out of curiosity, a desire to get better (not realizing it’s a trap), or if she resists she won’t a choice once it’s fully taken hold in her. The route I think this is going is that Noone will be pulled over physically for longer and longer, with the world becoming more and more clear, until she can no longer return. Her home reality may now be but a dream that she’s no longer on the same wavelength of to be able to return to.

Anyway, that was a lot of writing lol! Props to anyone who makes it to the end. Please feel to share your own ideas in here and thanks for listening!

#little nightmares #the ferryman little nightmares #the sounds of nightmares #little nightmares 2

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arisu-artnfics · 8 months

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“A trip to Paris”

Danny Phantom crossover with Miraculous Ladybug fanfic.

Notes: This was written when season 3 of Miraculous Ladybug finished but it was never complete until now. For the @invisobang event on tumblr.

Beta and summary by: @the-oaken-muse on tumblr or The_Oaken_Muse on AO3. Future art piece by: @k-beckerart on Tumblr. (Preview art).

Chapter: 1/12 Next Versión en Español

Also on: A03 || FF || DeviantArt || Facebook.

Summary: After saving the world and all the stress of the aftermath, the Fenton family decides to take a nice, relaxing vacation to Paris. Little do they know, it's not the peaceful retreat they were expecting.

Chapter 1: “New beginnings” There are certain universal truths in life that everyone comes to accept. One such fact is that ghosts are real, another is that some ghosts are half human. It all started when those facts were proven on top of all. When the most important fact should have been the asteroid disaster –that most people had named the ‘Disasteroid’. When the end of the world was announced, to say everything devolved into chaos would be an understatement, the reality was much, much worse.

Another fact was that a tiny, almost nonexistent town in the middle of nowhere appeared in the news. The town of Amity Park gained global attention when their crazy mayor proposed a ‘solution’ to the crisis. Vlad Masters aka Vlad Plasmius was the ‘halfa’ that suggested that in order to save the world after previous, seemingly useless attempts, the solution was to simply make the asteroid intangible. Of course, that didn’t work as expected, but no surprise there, he was too preoccupied with plans of world domination to fully think things through.

Now, the whole of humanity is thankful that a single ghost, or well, a single teenager, had come up with a plan that worked. Maybe the young ghost was inspired by Vlad because of the general idea but it worked and that’s the most important part, or nobody would be alive now. The world is very thankful for that, for the braveness of Danny Phantom.

As a thank you, the people of the world erected a well deserved statue of the now global hero in each major city around the world. It was all anybody was talking about, that and the sensation of intangibility. Each person had their own story of what happened that fateful day, what it felt like to be intangible. Although that's the main topic of conversation these days, heroes have existed for a long time now. In Paris for example, Ladybug and her partner Chat Noir lead the Miraculous team, although they didn’t really have a team anymore. Closer to Amity Park, New York City is full of heroes, many of them without hidden identities. There are even rumours of heroes in other parts of the world such as in China, Brazil, some parts of Africa, London, Japan and more. The main point is that heroes aren't new or something that would surprise anybody anymore. Now the world has learned about Amity Park, its people, and its ghosts. While there are confirmed heroes and rumours of others all over the world, none of them were able to stop the asteroid hurtling towards the Earth. The world’s largest military powers had combined their resources trying to destroy the source of the end. It was later revealed that they were sabotaged thanks to the not-that-helpful help of Vlad Masters (who intervened without asking). While the whole world finally noticed the small town of Amity Park and learned all about them, and of course their crazy halfa mayor. All of the heroes who wanted to do something to help were too busy fighting the villains who decided to try something in the chaos. The world needed a new hero to step up, instead they got a villain masquerading as a saviour. Nobody could have predicted that he would fail so drastically. In the end, the Earth was saved by a new hero, another halfa, although not many people knew he was one.

In Amity Park, the GIW, known by most people as the ‘Guys In White’, were stopped by real government agents. It came out that they were actually a fake agency bankrolled by Vlad and his shady business dealings to protect citizens of Amity Park and Vlad when he was there. Vlad has them as one of his ‘real’ businesses.

The FBI had taken over the situation in Amity Park, mostly because the villain of the story was an American who lived in Amity and therefore this case fell under their jurisdiction. The other countries had allowed them to handle the whole affair, to keep the process of condemning Vlad contained in one country. The rest of the world washed their hands of it all, the only thing that they seemed to agree on was to make him pay.

After interrogating everyone involved with Vlad’s failed mission and questioning the team that worked with Danny to build the intangibility transfer device, the FBI learned the true identity of a certain ghostly hero. After which, they began working closely with a particular family: The Fenton family.

The Fentons were a family of four, Jack Fenton, Madeline “Maddie” Fenton, Daniel “Danny” Fenton and Jasmine "Jazz" Fenton. As specialists in ecto-science Jack and Maddie were the only ones allowed to work in what was left of Vlad Masters’ lab, since they knew how most of his technology worked. Their children, Jazz and Danny, worked with them, helping them to dismantle it to be carted away by the FBI in the name of public safety.

The FBI also enlisted the help of the Fentons, and possibly NASA, but that was classified, to repair the very same rocket that Vlad had paid for, the one he had sabotaged with the wrong coordinates, so they could use it to fetch him back from space. The people of the world wanted justice, and they wouldn’t be able to get it if he died out there. Now, not even the Fentons knew if he would become a full ghost or just die, leaving nothing but a body behind, and they didn’t want to take any chances.

In the end, he was tried and found guilty of multiple counts of public corruption, including election fraud; terrorism; corporate fraud and theft of intellectual property; as well as blackmailing the entire world. He was sentenced to live out the rest of his natural, or rather unnatural, life in a special FBI facility, complete with a phase proof cell and ghost restraint handcuffs. As for the rocket, the official reports list it as ‘destroyed in a crash landing’.

At the Fenton’s residence, Jack and Maddie had worked hard to reconstruct their previously destroyed lab (most specifically their ghost portal) with the pieces that they got from Vlad’s. After confirming with the FBI their intentions to use the technology and making their case for why they need a functional ghost portal, the Fentons were allowed to make their repairs. They also reverse engineered several of his inventions to better understand how they worked and, in doing so, they discovered even more of Vlad’s evil plans. It was hard to reconcile everything that they had learned with what they thought they knew of their old college friend.

After that, everything in the lab went fairly smoothly, considering the circumstances, but all that changed when they discovered an even more immoral half-finished experiment. While the main information seemed to be destroyed and/or missing they managed to get the gist of it. A clone, and a clone of none other than Danny Phantom. That was the second most shocking news for the Fentons, right behind the revelation that Vlad Masters was a half ghost. It hit Jack especially hard, as he was the closest to Vlad back then, they were best friends, roommates… A good friend? More like an enemy.

Jack and Maddie knew that their son disliked Vlad, hated him even, and the more they learned of the truth, the more they understood why. Maddie specifically knew that Vlad and Danny had a rivalry of sorts. She’d thought it was because Danny didn’t like or even appreciate the fact that he was trying to hit on her. Vlad’s advances had always made her uncomfortable, even more disgusted than what Danny felt. It was personal for her. But that hadn’t been it, or at least not all of it, and wasn’t that an understatement? A clone? What hadn’t that man done? What crimes against nature hadn’t he committed?

They had just finished going over the papers, what little research remained, and determined that those analyses, even unconcluded, were 100% of a clone. A clone of their own son, a halfa himself. They didn’t know how that would even work, how it would be possible to replicate such a unique state of being, and couldn't comprehend what or who they would be if that was complete. The two shared a grim look, they needed to talk to their children about this, there was so much that they still didn’t know.

Danny and Jazz were on the main level helping catalogue some equipment from Vlad’s lab, sorting out even more ghost weapons from the rest of his inventions. That man had so many weapons, of all shapes and sizes, weapons they now knew had been used against their son. They were grateful that they would never be used like that again, neither Vlad’s nor their own. They regretted their actions every day, every shot, every hurtful word they had used against Danny Phantom.

They decided to have their much-needed family discussion over dinner that evening. Maddie left Jack putting together a list of the most important questions from the information they did have and headed upstairs to the kitchen. She opened the fridge and stared at its contents for a moment or two before deciding that it would be better to order pizza instead.

Maddie finished ordering the pizza and after a while, Jack joined her in the kitchen.

Meanwhile, Danny was done with the group that he was cataloguing with Jazz’s help. Jazz was the one that was guiding Danny with the correct order, she is the most organised one between those two after all.

Jazz hovered around Danny as he finished going through a box of weapons, once again repeating the instructions when he cut her off.

“All right, Jazz! I know! We’ve been doing this long enough,” he gestured at all the boxes in frustration. “I know you just want to know how many times he used these on me or if he gave them to Skulker, or another ghost, or whatever. You can stop now.”

“That’s not true, Danny!” Jazz defended, even though she had been wondering about that. Danny just glared at her and rolled his eyes. “Whatever you say, sis.” He picked up the empty box that had previously been full of weapons, “Look I’m done with this one. I don’t know about you, but I’m starving and I think I heard mom and dad talking in the kitchen.” He jerked his thumb toward the door. “Yeah, me too and I get it, all right… but I'll be here when you’re ready to talk,” she said earnestly. She was a bit disappointed with herself for upsetting him, she had been hoping he would be more open about everything now that their parents knew his secret. Unfortunately, everyone was still a bit tense about the whole situation. “Whatever.” Danny rolled his eyes again and headed to the kitchen with Jazz following close behind. “Danno! Jazzy-Pants!” Jack greeted them when he saw them. “How goes the sorting?”

“Fine.”

Jazz elbowed her brother. “He means we’re almost finished.”

“That’s great, kids!”

“We ordered pizza.” Maddie interjected. “It should be here soo–” The ringing of the doorbell cut her off.

“I got it!” Jack shouted, already halfway to the door.

“Now I wonder who that could be,” she murmured.

“I hope it’s the pizza, all that sorting really worked up an appetite!” Danny’s stomach growled as if to accent his point.

“Yeah, Mom,” Jazz added, "it's probably just the pizza.”

“That was fast…” Maddie commented distractedly.

“Ah? Why do you say that, Mom?” asked Jazz, a bit worried. “It hasn't been that long…” Maddie considered the time she thought had passed.

“Pizza’s here!” Jack announced as he brought the boxes into the kitchen. “Actually, Honey, it has been a while since I heard you make the order.” “Oh? I didn’t realise…” Maddie glanced at the clock on the wall again and shook her head to clear it. “I guess I’ve just got a lot on my mind right now, that’s all.” She tried to give her family a reassuring smile, but it came across a bit forced.

“All right...” Danny exchanged a worried glance with Jazz.There were only a few things that could distract his mother like that and none of them were good. He knew his mom came up to the kitchen a while ago and heard her talking on the phone or something but didn't pay that much attention as he was still following Jazz's ideas of cataloguing the last ghost weapons from the box. “Okay… Danny and I will set the table then.” offered Jazz. She understood Danny's worry, anything that knocked their normally highly perceptive mother off kilter couldn't be good. She hadn’t noticed when her mom came upstairs, just when her dad did, as he was the most noisy, so she couldn’t say for sure how long it had been since she placed the order.

“Yes, thank you darling,” said Maddie and she took a seat while the kids started putting dishes on the table.

“You know Mads, we could just ask him...” Jack suggested in a low voice, almost whispering.

Maddie shook her head. “No, Jack, I don’t think that simply asking him would work, it has to come up in the conversation naturally.” She took a fortifying breath and then blew it out slowly. “Alright, I think I'm ready now.”

“Alright.”Jack repeated, nodding solemnly, before finally sitting down himself. Once the whole family was gathered around the table and had pizza on their plates, it was actually Danny who broke the silence.

“Mom, Dad…” Danny began, “I know this hasn’t been easy for you guys, there’s been a lot to unpack, uh, literally and figuratively… But you know I’m okay with it, right? Like, you guys can talk to me about stuff, ask me questions, whatever…”

He knew very well that they had questions for him, he suspected they were about Vlad and his weapons or something similar. He didn’t need to hear it to know. Although, he did hear them. After all, that was an almost-whisper.

“Danny...” Jazz said, concern evident in her voice. She understood that he probably knew the situation better than she did, as she had ignored their parents' quiet conversation, but that didn’t stop her from worrying about her little brother.

“It’s alright Jazz,” he reassured her. “Ever since they found out, it’s been a big help, but…” Danny sighed. There was still a lot they didn’t know, and he was getting tired of walking on eggshells around them.

“I know.” Jazz gave him a small, encouraging smile. She had a better idea of what Danny had been through than their parents, and she still had questions. They had been doing their best to let Danny come to them on his own time, but subtlety had never been their strong suit. The curiosity and the guilt both were eating them alive.

“What is it, son?” asked Jack, wondering if they had been too obvious, hoping they hadn’t done anything to make him uncomfortable.

“I don’t know...” Danny rubbed the back of his neck, glancing nervously at his sister. She nodded as if to give him courage. “It’s just… you looked like something was bothering you, like you had a question, or something…”

Jack took a quick look at his wife and squared his shoulders before turning back to the kids. Sometimes just asking was the best policy. “We may want to know something… ”

“Jack!” Maddie admonished. She looked at her husband in shock, that was not what they had discussed. Then she looked back over at her kids, especially at Danny. He looked nervous, but hopeful, like he was really ready to talk to them. Jack had noticed it already and taken the appropriate action, it was time for her to get on the same page. She took a deep breath, “I’m sorry. You’re right, Dear, we should just ask him.”

“What is it, mom?” Danny’s gaze flickered anxiously back and forth between his parents, “Dad?”

Jazz reached for Danny's hand, squeezing gently, letting him know he wasn’t alone. It was something she had always done to calm him down, she was glad it still worked.

“Look son, I know you say that you’re ready to talk about all this, ready for us to know… and we want to! But for your mom and I… well… it’s hard to imagine how all this was for you, especially because… we... we…” Jack sighed. This was harder to talk about than he thought it would be. After a brief pause, he tried again, “Your mother and I found out about the cloning experiment. There was inconclusive but valid information on Vlad’s lab computer files. We have the backup copies saved on our lab’s computers now.”

“Oh!” Danny’s eyes lit up with understanding. “I almost forgot about that.”

“Danny, dear… you knew?” asked Maddie, concerned.

Danny nodded sheepishly, rubbing the back of his neck once again. He wasn’t sure where to start explaining, filling in the missing data… some of it wasn’t pretty, there was a reason that information was destroyed.

“Oh, God,” Maddie swore. “He actually did it, didn’t he?”

“Heh, yeah...” Danny grimaced, dropping his hand with a sigh.

Jazz took hold of his hand again, silently supporting her brother. She didn’t know the full story, but she gathered that it was something very difficult for him to talk about.

Danny gently pulled his hand out of his sister’s, nodding a silent thanks to her before turning back to his parents and beginning his explanation. “He was trying to clone me to create the perfect son, or something… You know, I never actually let him explain it.” He scoffed, “That’s one of the many reasons why I called him a complete crazy fruitloop, because obviously he is. He had this huge container with the ‘perfect specimen’ or whatever he called it and all these clones–”

“Clones?” Maddie interrupted his rambling, “As in, more than one?”

“Yeah, there were… a few.” Danny bowed his head, voice tinged with regret. “I didn’t realise at first… they didn’t look much like me. Vlad called them failures…”.

“‘Were?’” Jazz asked, picking up on his use of the past tense. “What happened?”

“They… they were killed...” Danny practically whispered, keeping his head down.

“What?” Jack cried out, voice filled with pain, already mourning the children he’d never met. He hadn’t even known about them a few hours ago and already he would give his life to protect them. How could Vlad have done such a thing? Surely he would have considered them to be his own children, in a way. “Vlad… he didn’t... he wouldn’t… would he?”

“Yeah… in a way, he did...” Danny replied. He lifted his head a bit, but instead of looking at his family, he only gazed sadly at his own hands. “But only because he ordered them to attack me... and I didn’t know… we were fighting and they just... they turned to goo.” “Goo?” asked Jazz, a bit confused, it seemed her brother had left out a lot of details when he’d told her this story before.

“Yeah, remember the container I told you about? It was like a long, uh, tube thing, like out of a movie...” Danny began gesturing with his hands, attempting to describe the shape of the strange device.

“All right...?” said Jack, failing to follow along with the explanation.

“But then, if they turned to, um, goo… then there aren’t any...” Maddie was unsure of how to phrase the question, the situation being more complicated than it seemed.

“Clones?” Danny supplied, to which Maddie nodded. “Only one: Dani. That’s with an ‘i,’ short for Danielle.”

“Danielle?” asked Jack, “Isn’t that a girl’s name?”

“A female clone?” asked Maddie, blinking in surprise.

“Yes…?” Danny replied hesitantly. Is that not common for clones?

“Danny, you said that he cloned you, I’m not an expert or anything, but I’m pretty sure a clone of you should be a boy. And probably a baby… just a few months old at most. Clones do start as babies, right?” Even with Danny using his hands to show how big the container had been, Jazz was having trouble imagining anything bigger than tiny test tubes with little babies floating in them. They didn’t seem nearly big enough to hold a teenager like Danny. “Normally, you would be right, Jazz.” Maddie raised her hand to stop Danny from interrupting. “But the information we found in his lab included a way to alter and accelerate the cloning process. He managed to clone Danny, but in a very different way than traditional science has done in the past with dogs or sheep… or any animal for that matter. I hate to give that man any sort of credit, but frankly, it’s impressive.” “How is that possible?” asked Jazz, feeling lost. Her specialty was psychology, not genetics.

“Well, what your mother and I found was very interesting...” Jack began while nodding along to it.

“It was incomplete,” Maddie continued where he left off, “It was almost as if it had been destroyed or perhaps sabotaged.”

Danny grinned at his mother’s knowing look, “For legal reasons, I know nothing.”

Maddie just shook her head, “As I was saying, the information we did manage to recover seems to indicate that he was able to create a genetic accelerator that would allow the clone to be aged up very close to Danny’s age, if not the exact same. Danny, how old would you say this… ‘Dani’ is? And do you have any idea where she might be?”.

“Ohhh… Oh!” Danny gasped as if something had just clicked in his mind, as if that was something that he had never considered.

“You haven’t thought about it, have you, little bro?” asked Jazz, easily understanding her brother's reaction.

“What? Pshh! No… I totally, definitely… possibly, maybe… thought… Actually, how do you know about clones, Jazz?” Danny asked, quickly trying to change the topic as he didn’t know where Dani was.

“Hey, that’s just common knowledge, we learned about it in biology class!” Jazz defended herself.

“Danny,” Maddie’s voice held a warning, “You did learn about that, didn’t you? I believe Mr. Lancer explained it to us, and all the parents, in a parent–teacher meeting about grades and school activities a couple of months ago… It was the same with Jazz when she was your age. Like your sister said, it was part of the curriculum. Superhero or not, we expect you to keep up with your lessons, young man.”

Jack nodded along looking very serious.

“Oops...” Danny muttered, realising his distraction plan had backfired.

“We should probably go over your textbooks, or review some of your old lessons if you don’t remember that...” Maddie said thoughtfully, they still had so much catching up to do to get Danny back on track with his schoolwork.

“I should ask Sam or Tucker about it, compare notes… I may have slept through it… sorry.” Danny brought a hand up to his neck sheepishly.

“It’s all right son,” Jack placed a large, comforting hand on Danny’s shoulder, “We know you had a lot going on, but now you have help.” He knew now that Danny was probably staying up late fighting ghosts and not getting enough sleep at the time.

“We’re sorry, sweetie, if we had paid better attention, we could have helped you sooner. We promise to do a better job of helping you with your time management and catching up with your studies.” Maddie wondered if she and Jack would ever truly understand what being a halfa had meant for their son, how it had impacted his whole life.

“I know, I know… and I do appreciate it, I do…” Danny looked around for a way out of talking about his poor grades, “Um, hey… shouldn’t we really be focusing on Dani right now? You know the uh, missing, like, 12 or 13 year old girl? She could really be anywhere you know, probably just wandering around...”

“I see what you’re doing and this conversation isn’t over young man, but yes, finding Dani is more important right now… So, 12 or 13 years old?” said Maddie, getting back on track.

“Well… she was, like, two years younger than me… or at least that’s how old she looked...” Danny thought back to the last time he saw her.

“But you don’t know for sure.” concluded Maddie, it was easy to get confused about someone else's age without asking, after all.

“No, sorry. When I met her… well she almost ended up like the others… But hey! Dad helped her!” Danny snapped his fingers, remembering the occasion.

“I did! Wait, I did?” asked a confused Jack.

“Well… your invention did. But that counts, so yeah, you did!” said Danny with a smile, especially knowing what a close call it had been.

“Well, son, I’m glad to hear it!” Jack boomed. “But, uh, how exactly did that happen? Why didn’t she turn into ‘goo’ like the others, and, uh, what invention did it? Because well…” His inventions weren’t really designed to help ghosts. Now it was his turn to look sheepish.

“Oh, well… ” Danny looked up at the ceiling in thought, “It happened a couple of months ago, when I first met her…”

“She tried to attack you, right?” guessed Jazz, “You said the others did that, so...”

“Yeah, she was the most stable one, so her ‘father’ sent her to gain my trust, or whatever,” Danny put as much venom into the word as he could muster. “He called her his daughter and still considered her disposable. Unfortunately, she had to learn that the hard way, and now she doesn’t even care what happens to him… ”

“Oh, Danny...” Jazz murmured, she could imagine the frustration that he was feeling.

“It’s alright Jazz. Please go on, Danny-boy.” Jack needed to know more about which of his inventions was used to save Dani, he needed to know more about the daughter he’d never met.

Danny sighed, “No, it’s not alright… She’s her own person, but she still deserves someone who cares about her… and well, he did create her...”

“I know what you mean, Danny, but it is okay,” Jazz spoke with a calming voice. “Yes, he may have created her in his lab, but that doesn’t automatically make him her father. You said it yourself, he doesn’t really care about her, so it’s completely understandable for her to reject him like that...”

“Thanks Jazz,” Danny said softly, understanding what his sister meant by that.

“You know, your sister is right,” Maddie added proudly. “Vlad created a clone of you, Danny, but that’s it. He hasn’t put in any of the emotional labour, he hasn’t earned the right to be her father. There are a lot of families that aren't related by blood, but those relationships take work just the same.”

“He hasn’t earned it, has he?” said Danny, the implication that Dani basically didn’t have parents setting in. She was rejecting Vlad after all, her creator.

“Of course not, son! Vladdy may have been the person responsible for her existence, and even though he did an amazing job with the genetic acceleration and all that…” said Jack, very impressed with that part of the information.

“Jack! Focus.” Maddie scolded, even though she also was impressed by the work, it wasn’t the time to say so.

“Right! Sorry! He may be a genius, but he’s still evil! An evil, evil genius…” Jack stopped himself from saying more, even though he was still very impressed by how smart his ex-friend was.

“I admire his work too, Jack. But I’d admire it even more if he didn’t throw ethics out the window.” said Maddie. “But that’s a discussion for another time.”.

“I know, I know…” Jack muttered. “Our priority right now is finding Danielle–”

“Dani,” said Danny, correcting his dad, as none of them like to be called by their full name.

“Right… And to think that before I thought that a ghost and my son having the same first name was confusing...” Jack laughed.

“It’s ‘Dani’ dad, not ‘Danny’ there’s a difference,” said Jazz, exaggerating the pronunciation even though there wasn’t any difference in reality, it was more for them.

Jack was astonished and blinked at the confusing pronunciation a few times, whispering both names under his breath as he tried to hear the difference.

“Jack?” said Maddie, raising an eyebrow, she knew that there’s nothing going on with the pronunciation but she wasn’t going to spoil the kids’ fun.

“Right… the point is that Dani exists and, well… we have to find her!” Jack smacked his fist into his palm for emphasis, “She’s technically a Fenton, and Fentons stick together.”

“What?” asked a confused Danny, he hadn’t expected that much support from any of them.

“That’s true little bro, think about it… she’s basically you, right?” said Jazz, liking where this was going, she would love another little sibling, especially a sister.

Maddie hummed. “Well, theoretically Jazz is right. She is a female clone of you, and before anyone asks; yes, it is possible for her to be you even as a girl. That could be an anomaly caused by the acceleration process that Vlad used to create her.” she explained, preemptively answering any questions that might come up.

“That actually makes sense… I think...” said Jazz, even though that wasn’t in her questions at all. “I haven’t thought about it. Last time I saw her, like I said, your experiment helped me stabilise her, even though the fruitloop kept saying he needed a ‘mid–form sample’ or something like that. He was planning on using that to fix his main clone, a male one.” Danny added as an extra explanation.

“Of course! It all makes perfect sense now!” Maddie’s fist struck her palm as she made that claim. “What does, mom?” asked Jazz, not understanding what their mother was getting at. “Well, Danny said that the other clones turned into goo, right?”

Danny nodded in confirmation.

“And that Vlad had a special container for a male clone...”

Danny nodded again.

“And Dani was the only clone that survived long enough for Danny to stabilise because she is a female one.” Maddie explained matter-of-factly. “Okay, you lost me.” Danny was… not expecting that at all. “Think about it, sweety. Vlad, as you know, had a thing for me and an obsession with you. He wanted the perfect little family. From what you told us and what we obtained from his lab, as well as the disturbing AI hologram of… myself,” Maddie made a disgusted face at that. “I still can’t believe he– well actually I can. Anyway, he wanted you to be his perfect son, but you told him no. So just like he made a hologram copy of me, he wanted a perfect clone of you, and that meant it had to be male. Why couldn’t he just take ‘no’ for an answer?” she sighed.

“It’s alright now Maddie, he’s long gone.” Jack said sadly. It had been hard for him to accept everything that his ex-friend had done. If they had known before, if he had talked to them about what had happened, maybe they could have worked things out and they could even… who knows, hunt ghosts with him or something along those lines, the way they did with Danny now. But he wasn’t about to forgive him that easily, not after what he’d done. “I know, I know…” Maddie said more calmly. “And now, to think that there is a little girl just wandering around all alone… Wait! Danny, where did you say she was again?”

“I… I don’t know… I’m sorry” Danny hung his head in shame. “I only know that Vlad… well, he tricked the Huntress–”

“Who?” asked Maddie.

“Uhhh… it’s complicated?” Danny said with a sheepish grin.

“Danny...” warned Maddie, they had agreed on no more secrets. He sighed, “It’s not my secret to tell. Although I know she’s probably looking for an opportunity to speak with me since, well… she was there when it happened.” He really wasn’t going to tell them about Valerie, not without talking to her first. He knew well enough that she only accepted his apology for revealing her identity to her dad because what she had planned was a suicide mission. “So she knows.” Maddie stated.

“Yeah, she does now, but up until that point she didn’t… and Vlad convinced her, I don’t know how, probably with money –she only knew him as Masters, not Plasmius– and he sent her to find Dani to… well, to destroy her. But didn’t tell her that! The lie was that Dani wanted to kill Masters… and, well, she– the Huntress wasn’t just going to let that happen. So she managed to get Dani, but it wasn’t a fair fight ‘cause Dani was in pretty bad shape, that made the Huntress stop and plan ahead, creating a trap for me, but I knew the truth, and well, I told her ‘C’mon, does she look like she’s gonna do anything?’ Then the Huntress realised that Dani and I couldn’t be lying… But at the same time she was a ghost hunter first… so...” Danny explained in a rush, barely pausing for breath. “She didn’t try to, um, destroy... you?” asked Maddie, she knew that a lot of people had tried that, including them. “Well… maybe. But just like you guys, she didn’t know!” Danny hurried to stop his parents from feeling guilty about hunting him again. “Oh, honey…” Maddie started, Jack nodding along apologetically, ”We’re so sorry for all–”

“I know, I know… You’re sorry for everything, the shooting, the hunting, the hurtful words, blah, blah, blah. Can we please move on?” said Danny testily. The long apologies were really getting old.

“They’re not going to stop any time soon and you know it, Danny.” Jazz teased. She knew her little brother was getting tired of the long speeches asking for forgiveness, but they had a long way to go before their parents’ guilt waned. “I know.” Danny sighed.

“Right, right. Sorry sweety. Anyway, I suppose you managed to convince the Huntress to help you, then?” said Maddie, getting back on track. “Yeah, that’s right,” Danny picked up the story where he left off, “and I figured that you guys probably had something in the lab that could help Dani and I… I brought the Huntress here–”

“Wait, you came here and we didn’t notice?” Maddie cut in. “I mean, I get it, your father and I get distracted sometimes… but you came here with another hunter to look for something that could help ghosts….” She was beginning to see a theme in their house, and she didn’t particularly like it. “Uh, sorry?” said Danny. He wasn’t really sorry, but still felt the need to apologise.

“No, no… it’s all right son, you did what you had to do.” Jack chimed in. He was mostly letting Maddie do her thing, ask the right questions, and get the information they needed.

“It’s all right, Danny. You have always done the right thing, and we trust you. So what did you use to help her?” asked Maddie, she was very curious as most of their inventions back then didn’t work in favour of ghosts. “It was, uh, that serum that dad was working on, the ‘Ecto–Dejecto,’” Danny said, remembering that day. “It wasn’t working right, it was making ghosts stronger instead of weaker.” “Oh, that one!” Jack brightened in recognition, then sobered, “But it does work, it just took time.” “What? But all the samples were… bigger.” said Danny, getting worried.

“That may have been true at the beginning, but as the Ecto-Dejecto ran its course, those specimens, well, they just… gooed?” said Maddie, unsure if saying ‘goo’ would help in this case.

“WHAT???!!!” Danny exclaimed, imagining the worst case scenario and for a brief moment his eyes flashed a toxic green before returning to their normal blue.

“Calm down, Danny, it wasn’t your fault, you didn’t know. You did your best and believed that it would be enough. I’m sure we can come up with something to help Dani. We just need to know where she is...” said Jazz.

“I… I don’t know where she is… I think I saw her helping during the Disasteroid, with the other ghosts. She must have travelled there, when she heard what he did.” Danny said, unsure of himself. It had all happened so fast, he hadn’t paid attention to every single detail. “But… I don’t think she stayed, she just… kept travelling.��

Maddie hummed, “In that case, we– Wait…! She came here to Amity when she needed help, right? That’s the last time you know for sure that you saw her, and the first time she was in Wisconsin with Vlad, right?” she asked, trying to understand the whole picture better.

“Well, actually– Wait, Mom, do you think she would come back here when she feels weak again?” Danny asked hopefully.

“Considering she’s done it before, it seems likely. And maybe, if she was indeed there in Antarctica, and she knows that we know who you are now, she’ll feel more comfortable coming to us for help. She may also have heard that Vlad revealed his secret to the world and well...” Maddie was hoping that Dani only hid because of the whole ghost secret identity thing. “Yeah, she came to Amity looking for me, she really believed I could help her… but if the Ecto-Dejecto won’t help permanently, then what? You aren’t gonna let her just turn into goo, right?” asked Danny, wringing his hands subconsciously. “Of course not, Dann-o! She’s a Fenton after all! Even if she wasn’t, she’s still a kid, a halfa, but a kid first,” said Jack, nodding.

“That’s true,” said Maddie. Suddenly she snapped her fingers, “I know what to do! You said that Vlad was trying to force you to give him a “mid–form” sample, right?” “That wouldn’t be dangerous for Danny, right mom?” Jazz glared pointedly at her mother, worried about what she was getting at. “Of course not, darling, and we would get Danny’s permission before we extract the sample. But if we can correctly use the scans and diagrams Vlad created, we can use your DNA to help stabilise little Dani permanently!” said Maddie with confidence, after all, there had to be a reason he needed the mid-morph sample.

“Really?” Danny asked hopefully.

“Of course, son!” Jack’s voice boomed with the same confidence as Maddie’s, then he also snapped his fingers, “She is a clone of you, that may mean she also shares the same ghostly signature as you!" “Oh, I see where you’re going with that, honey! That could work!” said Maddie, looking at her husband excitedly. “What would work?” asked Danny, glancing back and forth between his parents. “A way to find her,” said Maddie, smiling. “How?” asked Jazz, a bit lost, it’s like their parents had started communicating telepathically, or something.

“Simple, we use the Booo–merang!” Maddie said proudly, her smile growing wider.

“But mom, that always just hits me...” said Danny, unsure of this plan.

“Normally, yes, but we’ve been working on ways to avoid that, now that we know why it was happening. We’ve actually been modifying all of our weapons to ignore you, to ignore your ghostly signature,” Maddie explained. “We have that information, we could use it to track down Dani! But first, son, we will need to scan you down in the lab to get the mid-form sample as well as both... um, sides…” She was unsure how to describe the change.

“Both sides?” Danny asked for clarification.

“From human to ghost and vice versa.” said Maddie, feeling a bit more secure with the term.

“Ah! Okay,” Danny grinned, glad they were on the same page. “And that would help her, right?”

“That’s right. With your help, we can permanently stabilise her and she’ll never have to worry about turning into goo again,” Maddie said with a small, but sincere, smile.

“What are we just sitting around for? We have a new family member to help!” Jack smiled wide and finished his piece of pizza, gone cold at this point.

The Fenton family had a lot of work ahead of them. They continued their conversation over the rest of the cold pizza, planning and deciding and hammering out the details. All they needed was to put everything in motion, it was only a matter of time until they could find Danielle and bring her home. To be continued… :D :D

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