#and then out of those black characters keep track of 1) which ones get mutated and 2) how many are villains/antagonists
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im so mad that Noticing/Noticing Patterns is an alt right dogwhistle bc i really haven't found a better word for when i see interesting patterns in medias i like (i.e. tmnt 2012's Weirdness with black people, or ppl in gravity falls dunking on dipper for screaming/throwing/being "like a girl") and am uncomfortable with them but also recognize that they are part of greater patterns. am i making sense here
#it's probably like microaggressions?#except none of them are against Me and i havent seen anyone else talking about them and they are just little Uncomfortable Oddities#also if u dont know what i mean abt the 2012 thing look up tmnt 2012's character list#then take note of how many of them are black/voiced by black VAs#and then out of those black characters keep track of 1) which ones get mutated and 2) how many are villains/antagonists#it's. a little yikes
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Writing Journal 7/1
So *Taps Notes* I have some work to just place on the table. I have Three Stories I have yet to finish, but I’m really liking their ideas, and now don’t want to lose track of them.
Story 1: “Reapers”
So this is a Story I have writing for a while. I want to turn this into a Video Game, or any form of Visual Media is what I’m looking to turn it into, because it’s very Color themed with the characters. The Main Character is [Blue], and like all of the characters in this Story, their names are censored because knowing someone’s real name is a Powerful tool. The idea is that he and his Partner [C.C.] are traveling up a Tower where each entity is Powered a Given Element. Their names are pertaining to which element it is. The closer to the Pure Color it is, the higher up on the Hierarchy of Elemental they are. [Blue] is the Last Ice Elemental, and he works under Commander [White] who runs the Third Largest Army in this world, filled with refugees from the conquered lands from [Red] and [Black], giving her Wind Element to as many as can hold it. [Blue] stops when he meets [Maroon], who doesn’t know why he’s there, or what’s going on, and [Blue] is forced to take on a Mentor role for him. Except, [Maroon] is a rare Blood elemental, and he’s trying to keep his distance in case he finds out how to properly use his powers. Very cool idea for a world, and I want to fully flesh this out.
Story 2: “Ink-Hearted”
This one I have a bit of crossover from my Sister’s Writing project. They idea is, when someone is born with powers, they hold onto it forever, and their kids and potentially get powers, too. The only problem is that, in death, their powers Flow into another power user who is nearby. The recipient doesn’t just get Power A + Power B... the Power mutates into Power AB, having the aspects of Both Powers at once. One of the characters grew up with the ability to Walk through Walls (Self Teleportation), but after his Father (Distance Reading) was killed, his power became to Teleport to wherever he’s looking at, meaning as long as he can see it, he can move there, so he ends up falling backwards through portals to get somewhere. A lot of the characters have odd powers, but a lot of the Plot of not fully there.
Story 3: Words are Not Enough
This is a Sonic Fanfiction I’ve been writing while I have some spare time. Shadow starts following Tails around because he found him sneaking around in Gerald’s Research files, and he wants to make sure he’s not going “Mad Science” in his garage. Tails, instead, takes him around to show him aspects of his childhood to explain with out saying why the idea of Genetic Research is appealing to him. The First chapter explains the reveal, so I’m not saying it here, but I have this whole lore about Foxes and Why his family in this story (Not fully pulling from the Comics, but just his parents’ designs) didn’t like him tooling around with mechanical stuff when he was little. The First Chapter is going up on my AO3 later today or tomorrow after I get it proofread.
But yeah, I’m still doing Writing, but just not the same type as before, and not on the same sites. I tried going back to those ones, and they are basically dead after not being there for a decade, and I wanted to put them up in a place that I feel people might see. Let me know if you want specifics on the Stories I write, or you want to talk shop about them. I’m (not really) always available to talk on discord at the Same name.
~AG~
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What I Would Add To/Change About: Psychonauts
Howdy! Today is April 19th, and if you don’t know what game came out today, then why don’t you try and read my mind to find out? Go ahead!
So what’s your answer?
...
Why yes, it was Psychonauts! Way to go, you just earned a merit badge, cadet!
...What do you mean you just read the title?!
Anyway, for those of you who know, Psychonauts is a beloved cult classic that unfortunately received not that much mainstream attention, which is such a shame because I loved playing this game! I’ll admit there’s some problems, but I had such a psi-blast playing it, I didn’t really mind! That being said...
I’m still gonna talk about the problems.
This is all just my own personal opinion and if you disagree with me, that’s perfectly okay! If you’d like to talk about a point I made, please let me know, but please try to respect my opinion as I respect yours.
Well, without further ado, let’s open that Psycho-portal!
SPOILERS AHEAD!
As usual, first let’s get out all the things I absolutely ADORED about this game!
The. Voice. Acting. I cannot say enough how much detail went into dialogue and performances, you just have to listen to it. I was talking to/inspecting as many people/things as I could and seeing what dialogues were available when I switched things out. I probably spent more time doing that than actually playing the game! Definitely Richard Horvitz’s best work in my opinion!
The environments. This game is a mixed-up feast for the eyes and the level design is the main course. Things can go from the nice and simple Whispering Pines to the breathtaking and colorful Black Velvetopia to the utter lunacy and ominousness of the Milkman Conspiracy. It’s a masterpiece in artistic expression.
The Milkman Conspiracy. My gosh, this level deserves all the hype it gets. I really wish it hadn’t been spoiled for me, but even then it’s just such a trip that I can’t mind it that much. Also, Steve Blum!
The character design may not be the most aesthetically pleasing, but it fits the messed up and wacky world of the game to a T.
JUMPING!!!!!!
The puzzles can get frustrating (especially at a certain final level whose name shall not be said in respect of those still recovering from it) but they’re really fun to experiment with and find ways to move ahead in.
I really enjoyed Raz as a protagonist. He wasn’t too moody or obnoxious and he was necessarily sassy when he needed to be. He was also really relatable, being a kid who felt ostracized at home and didn’t understand why his father wouldn’t let him do what he wanted. And he was just so nice in spite of how upset he was at his family situation while still being determined to accomplish his dreams and help people. And even when he reached the asylum, it never felt like he was going into anyone’s mind as a means to an end, he genuinely wanted to help these people along with the campers. Also, he’s a total fanboy geek and that’s awesome!
As fast as it happened, the romance between Raz and Lili was really sweet and cute and I’m glad it didn’t lessen their characters or take away too much from the story. It was definitely two kids going through their first puppy love.
I also really liked Raz being nice to Dogen. Their scenes together were just sweet!
All the different abilities were so cool to use and the different types of enemies encourages you to switch things up on the fly which keeps gameplay from getting stale as you progress.
Underneath all of the trippy sequences in the levels there’s a solid moral that not everyone can deal with their mental issues by themselves and sometimes you need someone else to step in and help, and I appreciate that kind of message. Even with all of their eccentricities, the mentally ill are people too and even if you can’t fix their problems like Raz can they still deserve basic compassion and understanding.
With all that being said, I feel like the game could have used a few more things.
ADD:
I really wish Raz got a new look for every mental world like he did in Black Velvetopia.
The game should have been stretched out over more than just one day. It would have given more time to expand upon certain plot elements and develop the characters more, as well as make Raz’s psychic growth a little more believable. I know that the plot kind of relied on Raz only having a day to do everything, but it just made him seem like of a Mary Sue learning all that in one day.
I feel like the game should have explained some things more. I get that video games shouldn’t hold your hand too much and they should be a challenge, but some things took FOREVER to learn the right button for.
A tracker for emotional baggage? I couldn’t find it all.
Maybe make the other counselors seem suspicious so it’s not so easy to single out Coach Oleander as the villain?
Add some side quests around camp to help the other campers: Stand up to Bobby, talk Crystal and Clem out of suicide, show Mikhail he’s being used and knock some sense into Maloof, get a show for Phoebe and Quentin’s band going, and help Dogen control his powers, etc. I feel like they really could have expanded Part 1 at camp more.
Maybe add some flashbacks of Raz’s family life before he ran away to help the audience see through his eyes and understand his thought process better.
More fights with the Nightmares would have been cool. The scrapped plot about them escaping from Milla’s mind and abducting kids while they didn’t have their brains would have been a cool subplot. Or they could have come from the kids themselves or Oleander. I just think they had more potential.
Dr. Loboto boss fight (I did not play Rhombus of Ruin, I don’t do VR!)!
I’d kind of want to see Raz’s dad arrive at camp and how he got to where all the action was. Maybe some scenes of him getting there too to really make the player feel just how little time they have.
A scene of Ford Cruller getting up to go help out and save everyone?
Alright, now it’s time to get to the ugly!
CHANGE:
Oh my gosh, ARREST COACH OLEANDER! I know he was genuinely remorseful and the Psitanium might have had a hand in it and he was unfairly rejected from every branch of the United States army for his height, but that doesn’t change the fact that he lobotomized an entire camp full of children, attempted to murder one, built psychic death tanks, mutated and brainwashed a peaceful fish, brainwashed an asylum patient into covering his tracks through arson without regards to the residents of the asylum, kidnapped and lobotomized two colleagues whom he then tried to kill, hired DR. LOBOTO and tried to take over the world. At least have the guy monitored and put under probation, geez!
Change the rules of the race in Milla’s Dance Party so you DON’T have to win! I don’t care if I lose, I just want to move on already! This is not a racing game!
LESS. FIGMENTS.
I honestly don’t know what to say about the **** ****** except HAVE OLLIE STAY PUT AT THE TOP SO YOU DON’T HAVE TO WORRY ABOUT KEEPING HIS BUNNY-LOVING HIDE ALIVE!!!!!
Maybe the Two-Headed Dad Monster could have been more challenging at the end? As I’ve said, I am not a gameplay expert, but that final boss fight was really easy, and not in a satisfying way. Then again, you did just have to play through the **** ******...
And, that’s about it, I really don’t have much to complain about. Psychonauts is a super fun game and I highly recommend it. It’s colorful and explores heavy themes with respect and humor while going hand in hand with interesting gameplay and plenty of likable characters. There are no dull moments, I genuinely enjoyed this game greatly. I wish more people had given it a chance when it first came out and we could have gotten the sequel sooner, because I am honestly super nervous about it living up to the first. This is nothing on Tim Schafer and Double Fine, I just don’t have high expectations for a sequel made and released after ten years of radio silence as a rule. But, who knows?
Maybe they’ll go in and change my mind.
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The trees are straight and true here, and the help comes without seeming harpoons. I considered some insane things which were ‘above my pay-grade’ and as is my wont reflected on the state and implications of my former profession and what old friends and pharons meant to me. Right now think that my core goal in life is not to blow myself up. As a former would-have-been SecState said, ‘I love so many people.’ I am only sad that trying as I did to uproot that carrot of love just now could have resulted in the demolition of an entire root-network, of at least my own excision therefrom.
‘Some people’ want revenge against life for not going their way or not being the color or fragrance or face shape they like or feel it ought to be - ‘no that is not what I meant at all.’ They will never hold a life reliable which doesn’t resemble their ideal, imago, or ‘soul-idol’ &c. The meaning of the name ‘Cordelia’ as in King Lear is something like ‘heart’s ideal.’ I was driving and considering a novel that I feel touched absolute supreme greatness without knowing it or in a way that could mislead some readers Mrs. Mary HK Choi’s Yolk a novel I looked forward for a very long time. I had all these references and fractal coreferences and forgot about actual birds, like what does the chick eat in the egg.
‘Blood is the life’ - I liked etymologies for a long time and my intellectualism caused me acute trouble in Confirmation Class at Morrow Memorial United Methodist Church in about 1998. ‘Pastor’ Gretchen taught us the word root ‘consacramentum’ which comes from dipping the hand in blood in the concave of a Roman shield - those huge rectangular shields which could be used in formation as ‘testudo’ or turtle to stop projectile weapons and allowed soldiers to make pin-point stabbing attacks from a ‘matrix(?)’ of high protection. I forget what kind of animal was killed to pool the blood in the shield but it might have been a rabbit.
I was reading ‘Revelation,’ I don’t recall what everyone else was talking about. Some kind of community service project, interview your parents, buy a wedding-magazine and make a whole plan for how you would get married and how much it would cost (and while you’re at it describe how you would 1) restore a classic Shelby Cobra using newspaper and Krazy Glue 2) drive foresaid drop-top to the Moon).
The Pastor was a pipe-smoker named ‘Painter’ who used the NY Lotto’s ‘Hey you never know’ slogan to describe sth like Pascal’s Wager; OTOH St. Paul teaches us that everyone is born knowing God exists (Romans). The problem is that people fail or omit to glorify Him or subsequently ruin or betray their own best efforts through blasphemy, turning or falling away, cowardice, denial, attachment to certain sins or being ‘yoked unequally’ with non-believers.
I reflected starting in 2008 that I was shy of my ‘first love’ (rather, the woman I fell in love with at 14); at the time I gloried or reveled in the shyness like a Wallace Stevens poem that ends, ‘And not to have written a book.’ I could’ve written a few books by now or walked away from book-writing or changed my mind / specified which kind of book I might have written and for whom.
I remember always admiring the ‘magic’ of literature and feeling sad I had no characters or world of my own to work magic with. Star Wars and my own life and later much else supplied ‘materia poetica’ and till the point that I began to think in fiction and became addicted to interpreting my own in ‘story-ideas’ although that is not to say that what happened around me didn’t happen.
America is trying to become a better country in numerous valences, loving our neighbors, holding each other accountable. ‘Justice’ with or without the marks is important. It is a divine Judgment that Covid fell on the world even if eventually we all shall learn who devised the virus or leaked it or modulated its mutations. I was eager to rejoin the world feeling I might overcome my mental illness but I mishandled specific questions and tests. I ended up turning people against me and creating monsters more than ever as well as perhaps terminally sabotaging any chance I might’ve had of fulfilling a dream or making good on the past. I have a lot of opinions on the CCP but should’ve focused on love and family and personal responsibilities as in the past or at least held to my long-standing feeling that Chinese people deserve better rather than associating myself with hard-liners and racists or those who would simplify issues in order to bring about ultimate victory without temperance or concern for the side-effects.
In Milwaukee where I lived for far too long everyone’s spirit - electric, intellectual, visory(?), informational et cetera seemed to be militating against everybody else’s. There were fake vaccines, radioactive ice cream (or thermogenic ice-cream), gun-battles as usual, lines crossed, all kinds of scores that people tried to settle. I also realized that the police were probably tracking for years my various attempts to obtain weapons from samurai-swords to handguns though the purpose was defensive and I can only trust at this point that some good lawyer will prevent the bad lawyers and cops from presenting the most damning circumstantial case they could. People in Milwaukee own AK-47′s, automatic shotguns, probably all kinds of explosives, improvised chemical weapons and (’our Black brothers’ - Schopenhauer) biological weapons - the cops don’t stand a chance that I can tell and even the National Guard perhaps could get outclassed by retired military. I had told myself for years that it was only the ghetto’s that bore witness to this paramilitary equipage and that the retired SEAL Team 4 member with the ‘Stop Socialism’ and ‘Jobs Not Mobs’ sign on his front lawn would protect me from the Maoist-Covid Night of the Long Knives but I feel I tempted God a lot in the past.
I read all these books and took to heart that people thought I was just entertaining myself with but now as then I should’ve guarded my heart or not begged the question of what others thought about me or saw in me. I literally felt of late ‘I am the anti-Christ’ - good-looking at times, preach world peace, ‘form of godliness,’ want to be friends with everyone, build bridges - and had to rack my brains to come up with an ‘anti-Christology’ and science / concept of the Whore of Babylon just to make sure it was more than me alone. I also wished to simplify my past and help kids ‘get life right the right time’ doing battle with philosophies that opposed this consciously or otherwise but stepped into numerous minefields and also tried running when I should’ve flown over.
Everyone’s trying to get rich and build back better and I profoundly admired the American President for doing, finally, apparently, what presidents had tried to decades even as I remember ‘Flowers 1881′ a poem that implies that basically teachers can do only so much before turning their kids loose in a world no one has yet fixed and which others keep breaking; from a California almanac that also instructed me that the same old debates and cross-fires and burdens plague teachers as always, not that it is an ‘impossible profession’ but honestly that God won’t let us establish Heaven on Earth or at least not me or at least not America or at least not teachers who savor the experience of being a teacher or the beauty of their students more than the outcomes or commitment or intrinsic value of the work or the confirmed identity / vocation / personhood of the instructor. There are always new and old at any rate and different cultures all describe the teacher as needing to keep both alive; as do descriptions of higher education and scholarship.
I questioned my qualifications / background and wondered about re-training but can’t afford tuition anywhere so I am trying to cling to the core of my capabilities / blessings. ABC and XYZ. The glory of the soul or souls.
I kept theorizing Russian literature as well as weapons-systems and ultimate destiny, sailing ships, noble names, divisions, the flaming sword of Archangel Gabriel, the mission of Russia today with respect to the world order. I am also simply trying to be healthy and stop for a while trying to parse out who was the love of my life or what it still left in terms of action or redemption or justice or surrender or mitigation or meeting new friends or propounding the kind of understand with carefulness I have believed in - ‘saving people from themselves.’ Driving up here I remember being distressed at a gas-station in California when I was about 5 or 6 since the pump was leaking, being very upset with my parents and family. In those days I also disliked animal-cruelty though the world today seems so depraved and deprived with respect to human interests I would make no bones about neglecting most all animals outside of military or police use. When I was about 3 I saw white kids set a frog on fire; my mother has a history of running over cats.
I dislike winging it and taking risks. There is a song I call to myself ‘Run Away’ though its title is ‘Paradise.’ I am not a utopian communist for believing in secular justice and its instrinsic value... I wonder whether when I helped people in the past there were always strings attached or maybe I was just trying to close my case and discharge my responsibilities too rapidly without allowing others to gestate or make an abode in my heart besides and beyond what I could get out of them, glorifying myself, or tell others about.
What is motherhood? What is travail? Is there a kind of problematic ‘female gaze’ as feminists talk of a ‘male gaze’ associated with sadism or fascination / fetishism? It’s psychology which is not my first love at all since it appeared pretentious and distracting and retarding (in the literal sense of slowing down).
I also remembered reading various things about Victor Hugo whose ‘93′ is an important novel today due to its techno-utopianism, feminism or ‘new model egalitarianism,’ fusion of revolution and religion, etc. But I had forgotten ‘Les Miserable’ with its themes of ransom or eventual recompense, genealogies, caution, and more none of which is to negate the various complains against me or death-warrant from China or my parents with their partial private readings of Proverbs (’Let’s stone David for embarrassing us / not doing precisely what we want’ - no mention of witnesses, tribunals, questions, mitigation-hearings, actual counsels of judges etc. but just American-German ‘coalitions of the willing’ ‘run and get my gun’ ‘team-building’ etc. which in my experience ends with tanks on the street and military dictatorships as when at the end of the CultRev PLA regulars were gunning down former justice-fanatics who’d been stripping women, kicking pregnant stomachs etc. as in The Vagrants). Naturally having grown up in a family fascinated with Lee Kwanyew and Arnold Schwarzenegger and conflicted about ‘fascism’ I had reservations about the United States’ ability to suddenly dress up and ‘stand at perpetual moral attention’ but I guess my own problems are just that I am poor with a rich kid’s mind and no one really likes me except strangers and faraway friends who were easily spooked and/or just couldn’t be there. ‘King of South shall attack and King of North shall crush them with chariots &c.’ - in the end righteous will prevail whichever side of the line I end up on in the final assessment. I also remembered today a novel called ‘The Old Capital’ about a bad artist father, a virgin daughter, straight and true pines. Some other aspects of this novel are silly as well as criminally problematic and there's a lot of that going on in new-old old news America / Babylon or at least to quote my favorite lawyer / leave lawyering movie 'First let's get out of Milwaukee.' Miss the land of June snow.
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PLF Advisor Headcanons (’cause why not)
So I’ve been thinking a lot about the PLF advisors, probably more than I should be about characters we barely have faces of. All of this stuff’s probably gonna get flushed down the drain sooner rather than later, and I have been meaning to start actually posting stuff on this site. Might as well share, am I right?
I’m sure I shouldn’t need to tell anyone this at present, but just to be safe, or in case of future readers: the latest chapter was 276 & we know next to nothing about any of these guys except Slidin’ Go, so most of is baseless conjecture. Most of it mine, but I’ll source where I’ve borrowed some ideas. The closest thing to a basis for any of these is “this is probably the kind of quirk I could see someone in this position having” & “these motives and backgrounds sound like what Horikoshi would give to a long-term ally of Shigaraki”. We clear? Everybody got their proper expectations in place? Cool, now let’s get to the fun bits.
Black (Tactics)
Twice Advisor #3 (PLF Granny)
I won’t lie, I’m organizing this list this way to talk about her first.
Contrary to her appearance, PLF Granny actually used to be a super dangerous criminal and wanted hero killer, before disappearing off the face of the country (see Spinner Advisor #3 for more on that).
Now she’s the PLF’s resident mother/grandmother figure (depending on how old you are).
(She’s secretly not that old though.)
Always willing to help a fellow PLF soldier out of a problem no matter how minor, but would also lecture them for the smallest misbehavior.
Greatly appreciated because not a lot of high ranking PLF members have the greatest motherly figures in their lives rn.
Her quirk is something like Overhaul’s, but a bit weaker and a bit more gruesome. She can fully manipulate any human body she’s touching besides her own; allowing her to close up wounds, lock up muscles, contort limbs, or even just blow you up.
Illegally experimenting with her quirk caused her to accidentally kill someone in her youth, and she’s been on the run ever since.
She’s working with the PLF to improve quirk counseling, believing a society more accepting of quirks would allow kids with dangerous quirks to understand them better & know how to use them safely, so none of them will end up like herself.
Twice Advisor # 2 (Scary Canadian)
“Scary Canadian” really sums up his personality. He’s actually quite nice and polite to hid friends & allies, or otherwise in his downtime. But also you really don’t want to mess with him. Or else.
Needless to say, he and Twice got a long real quick once the underlying tension of their 2 groups going to war had (mostly) passed.
His quirk (along with a funky entire-upper-torso) allows him to energize himself with stored up energy, making him a bit strong, faster, and tougher.
He can also use a lot of energy at once for laser eyes. A useful skill, but it usually puts him out of the fight afterwords.
The energy stores up during sleep, which means he sleeps for an extra few hours each night and leaves him uncharacteristically grumpy in the morning.
He can also build up energy while awake, but it leaves him lethargic so he doesn’t do it while he has paper work to do.
He never wanted to be a hero as a kid, but as he grew older he found that meant people didn't like him using his quirk so much.
He joined the MLA for the simple reason of his experiences making him feel quirks should just be treated as a normal part of a person, instead of an aspect only heroes should be allowed to use/acknowledge.
Twice Advisor # 1 (King Bradly looking guy)
You remember in chapter 258, they mentioned a guy named Sanctum; oldest member in the MLA and believing all the League members are just in puppet positions? This is him.
He doesn’t really mean to come across as that unapproachable & rude, but he finds making sure everyone takes their jobs seriously is more important than being friendly.
As a result, while he & Twice come at odds quite often, they actually work quite well together. He keeps Twice on track and Twice appreciates that.
Much like Yotsubashi, his family has been in the Liberation Army for generations. Their cause is all he’s even known, but he has no regrets, especially now that Shigaraki’s livened the cause up.
I used to headcanon this guy’s quirk as making portals, but that might be someone else’s quirk no so...Earthbending, his quirk is earthbending.
He’s pretty good with it to, what with training with it since he was a little kid. The amount he can move is between that of Pixie-Bob & Gigantomachia, but he outshines them both in control.
He could make a perfectly square, finely-detailed hall a foot underground and no one above it would even feel the earth shifting.
Violet (Guerrilla Warfare)
Dabi Advisor # 3 (Ana)
So most of this is borrowed from @possessedfuzzybear
To catch everyone up: he’s named Ana (which means ‘hole’), he’s Dabi’s emo friend, and his hair is neon green.
See their blog for more info, but be warned: Fuzzy is horny AF. 18+ only, understand children?
His quirk has already been shown: It’s either making holes in stuff, or possibly making portals.
Needless to say, he and Dabi combo well together.
When he was a kid, one of his parents were arrested by heroes and he ended up running away from home before he got put in the system. He ended up meeting PLF Granny and some other runaways, and when she joined the MLA, he followed along.
He wasn’t originally a very active member, but when he saw the perks PLF Granny was getting for her hard work, and more importantly that she was spending those perks on himself and the other runaways; he started going above and beyond to earn his room & board.
Dabi Advisor # 2 (Tube Face)
Another emo of the PLF, which is probably why he’s with Dabi. That said, he’s less close to Dabi because he’s the exact same kind of loner as Dabi was before he got put in charge of stuff. So they resonate with each other, but they don’t exactly talk.
This guy’s quirk is that he has a snake for a tongue; full-sized and it talks in place of his normal mouth.
That’s actually what the tube is for, it’s snake armor.
(2nd guess, and this probably more likely if I’m honest, is some kind of gas quirk. if that’s true though, he’s related to Mustard.)
His story is a typical one; ostracized for having a particularly freaky mutant quirk that, while impressive, went unappreciated outside of heroics. Perhaps he even tried to become a hero, but dropped out, and the Japanese school system is yet another harsh mistress of society.
Either way, he then joined the biggest game in town that’s trying to make quirks more accepted, so he and kids like him can be appreciated instead of ridiculed.
Dabi Advisor # 1 (Happy with his piercings)
This guy’s something like Muscular without quite so many murders; generally just happy to be here doing whatever we’re doing as long as he gets to use his quirk to do it.
Dabi puts on airs of hating him, but really he...mostly doesn’t.
His quirk is actually super speed, which he combos with his impressive muscles to be quite the lightning bruiser.
That said, he’s not that fast. Like, he is to the flash, what Sato Rikido is to All Might. Probably somewhere between Iida before and after Recipro Burst.
His motivations are, as stated, pretty similar to why Muscular joined the League, except this guy looked into a slightly more legitimate organization because we was looking to legalize the freedom he was after, rather than simply ignoring legality in general.
He’s not exactly opposed to Shigaraki’s methods though.
Geten Advisor #3 (Pointy Head)
My first though looking at this guy is “His color is Blue”.
Generally, the suit and mouth armor make me think he either has or had ties to big business or heroics. Let’s go with the latter.
He was a humble but fairly accomplished hero, or maybe even just a sidekick, when he took down some socially powerful villain the HC didn't exactly want him taking down.
He and his entire Agency were indirectly ruined, and so joined the MLA in hopes of continuing to help people in their own way. Happily for him, that turned out to be fighting against the HC.
His quirk is a simple one: enhanced sight, hearing, and basically all his senses, as well as the ability to process it all very quickly.
To combos this with his swordsmanship to deadly effect.
Having the title of “advisor”, he tends to give lots of advise to Geten (regardless of if it’s wanted), looks out for him, and generally ignores that fact that Geten is his superior, not subordinate.
Geten Advisor # 2 (Sweater Lady)
The PLF Wine Aunt. And she introduces herself like that to people too.
She’s brash but wise, tends to look out for everyone in the PLF when she can, but also shares just a few of Geten’s more worrying views on quirks.
So guys like Dabi & Spinner think there might be hope for her if they can get her to knock that prejudice stuff out, and actually have good reason to think they can, but generally steer clear of her when possible.
Her quirk is something powerful, but disfiguring to her face. My current favorite idea being breathing out a gaseous neurotoxin or something to that effect that makes her mouth look weird.
Her sweater actually hides a series of soft but sturdy tubes that expel the neurotoxin from her arms, because she can aim her arms better than her head.
Her reasons for being in the MLA are basically that with a lack of social changes in the advent of quirks, standards of beauty are as BS as ever for women, even as women like her get weird mutations to their bodies, and especially to the head.
She believes a society more accepting of quirks would be more willing to accept mutations as beautiful, although this has eventually developed into a complex about powerful quirks being beautiful in order to convince herself of her own worth.
Hence everyone’s belief that maybe they can fix that complex of hers once they build a more accepting society. (That and, y’know, they have to work with her anyway.)
Geten Advisor # 1 (Stressed Baldy)
Probably one of the most welcoming advisors to the League because due to this quirk, this man generally ties to say cheerful at all times.
You see: his quirk is tied to his emotions. All of his emotions. Only by not feeling anything in particular, like in the picture above, does it not activate.
That’s actually why he’s in the PLF, he finds in unreasonable that those with hair trigger quirks like himself be forced to not use those quirks in public or face criminal charges.
Well actually, he’s also from an MLA family like Yotsubashi, but his ancestor joined for the same reason; so he’s probably the person born into the MLA with the best reason for still being there.
Ah, but I didn’t explain the quirk itself, what he does depends on what emotions he’s currently feeling.
When Happy, or otherwise feeling positively towards himself: a barrier forms around him right above his skin & clothing. While in this barrier, hits to him are diminished, and his own hits hit harder.
When sad, fearful, or other such emotions: that barrier disappears from around him and instead forms around his allies.
When angry, or otherwise directing negative emotions outward: the barriers appear around his enemies, and then lock in place so they cannot move. They also can’t be hurt in this state, but he can work around that.
Carmine (Intelligence)
Toga Advisor # 3 (Muscular tank top guy)
The reason he’s in the Intelligence regiment has little to do with his quirk, and a lot to do with his charismatic and friendly personalty. He get’s a lot done just going out and talking to people, and he teaches his subordinates how to do the same.
His quirk is simple x-ray vision. Nothing all that special, but he has learned to use it well in a fight, seeing how the opponent moves like a certain Jojo stand from part 6.
He was also a part of PLF Granny’s group of runaways who joined the MLA when she did. No particularly dramatic reason why, he was just broke & unlucky and she was just nice.
Before they joined the MLA, he did stuff like convince bakeries to give their left over product to the kids at the end of the day.
They ended up joining shortly before the MLA really started making it’s resurgence, so he made a name for himself helping out the new guys. And since everyone was already looking up to him, the higher-ups gave him a good position to keep doing that.
That’s his job with Toga too, introducing her to the ins and outs of the PLF. They also tend to talk romance and cute things (like I said above, he’s good at talking to people), so they get along pretty well despite underlying tension.
He finds her crushes on multiple enemies worrisome though, for multiple reasons, and is trying to build up the nerve to talk to her about that.
Toga Advisor # 2 (R2D2 Expy)
Little can we tell from the above picture, that’s just his head (and extremely long neck). He has a torso and such below.
His quirk is actually being a cyborg, and most of his body is augmentable.
He has multiple weapons he can attach and detach from himself and automatically control like any other limb.
It wares on him to attach to much to himself though, so he won’t be augmenting himself with any large equipment.
The R2D2 head is a disguise he wears to PLF meetings, and he intends for it to be his official villain outfit once he hits the field.
It’s not his only look though. He has numerous faces and various identities to go with them. It’s how he joined the Intelligence division.
He’s a Star Was fan (obvs).
Toga doesn’t talk to him much, what with him not being very cute. He mostly takes care of managerial tasks with his underlings, and organizes reports for her.
He also works at Feel Good Inc., & only really joined the MLA because he was invited by his boss, Skeptic. He got a promotion out of it and still feels like he’s on the winning side though, so he’s not complaining.
Toga Advisor # 1 (Beautiful Woman)
The advisor Toga most depends on, this woman tends to do all the work Toga’s less than qualified to handle as a 17-year old.
Frankly, Toga kind of looks up to her as a powerful feminine figure in her life, especially since she’s largely not quirkiest (like Sweater Lady), and her past is pretty similar to Toga’s but she managed to bounce back into a powerful position.
Her quirk is the ability to read minds in short snippets by making eye contact with people, usually whatever they’re thinking of in that moment..
It’s not perfect because people can sort of feel ‘something’ when she reads their minds, so people who know what she’s doing can just look away. It’s pretty easy to not look someone in the eye.
Giran caught on pretty quick when he was being held hostage.
She pretended to be quirkless to her friends and repressed it well into adulthood, until her quirk was discovered. At that point, not only did people stop trusting her, she was accused of illegal quirk usage and pursued by the police. This was when she found and joined the MLA.
Skeptic Advisor # 3 (Toad Man)
This guy radiates the best and worst of redneck culture, kinda gross, more than a bit judgy; but also inventive, Integrous, and always willing to throw down with corrupt authority figures.
(That said, he’s toned down the prejudice stuff working with so many different people and also Toga threatening him with knives.)
He’s also good at talking to the marginalized and those out in the boonies, which essentially means he’s got an underworld information network all his own, which is half of how he got his position in the Intelligence regiment. In fact, for better or worse, he’s the one who found Giran.
The other half is his quirk; which is, along with general toad-like characteristics, the ability to temporarily eat anything he can fit in that big ol’ gullet of his and analyze it down the the barest physical detail. (”physical” meaning he could find a finger print on a gun and draw it out, but couldn’t read the data on a memory stick.)
His reasons for being in the PLF are simple: like I said, he’s just always willing to throw down with authority figures. He doesn’t care that his quirk isn’t for fighting, he’ll just punch every HC member in the face.
Actually, he’s even more invested now that Shigaraki’s in charge. He wasn’t really feeling the MLA before, but now he’s gung ho about the cause like few others.
Skeptic Advisor # 2 (Ugh...Slidin’ Go)
Being a well known character, there’s not that much to say.
Hmm...
His reasoning for joining the MLA is surprisingly simple: he feels society’s view on quirks is too simple; praising flashy quirks while also forbidding non-heroes from using them where possible, all for the convenience of heroes and the hero industry.
Being so attached to his quirk, he entered into heroics in order to get a quirk licence, but still felt this thought process was backwards and joined the MLA to turn it around.
He’s responsible for a lot of the heroes in the MLA, having found a lot of like minded people in his industry and got them into the Army. A lot of them were actually old classmates of his.
Skeptic Advisor # 1 (Beautiful Man)
The half-brother of Beautiful Woman, he joined because she invited him and he wanted to help her. Not only because she was family, but because he was responsible for her quirk being discovered & he feels he needs to make up for accidentally making her a wanted woman.
He’s not a wanted criminal, so he got a job at Feel Good Inc. and works closely with Skeptic as a sort of secretary that reminds him of his personal affairs.
(In reality though, he manages contact with the MLA/PLF while Skeptic is running his company.)
He gets along with Skeptic as well as anyone can with that personality. Way better than Slidin’ Go anyway.
This quirk is a form of telepathy like Mandalay. There are 3 differences though. 1) he or a part of him must be touching the person to communicate, which he gets around by making bracelets & other accessories with strands of his hair that can be pressed against the wearer’s skin. On the other hand, 2) it’s got no range limit and 3) allows for 2 way communication.
And on one last note: he can always tell who he’s talking too, as well as who might be trying (& failing) to listen in.
Essentially, he’s a hack-proof human communications network, able to pass along information from key PLF members to each other and Skeptic, who can relay the information to other members through more mundane means.
It’s a good back-up for if heroes try jamming or otherwise interfering with those mundane communication methods.
Brown (Support)
Mr. Compress Advisor # 3 (Compress Cosplayer)
The mask is actually new, and actually kind of is Compress cosplay. when he met Compress they just kind of resonated with each other, and Compress decided to make him his apprentice.
It’s only been a few months, but he took to showmanship quite well. And now everyone else around him hates him. Dude just can’t win.
His quirk is basically being living hammer space; he can store things in his body like Momo in reverse & pull them out like Momo in forward.
The catch is that his whole body looks something like an astral CGI monstrosity; his skin is this gelatinous looking goop patterned like space that caused him to be bullied growing up.
Though his past is similar to Sweater lady, his motives are actually more like Spinner’s: living a lonely life, he kind of just joined the first cause that resonated with him in the hope of finding meaning.
He has yet to really find that yet, but at least he found a hobby & a good number of good friends.
Mr. Compress Advisor # 2 (Natsuo’s happier doppelganger)
A popular base commander, this guy has made a name for himself in the PLF for his managerial skills. He takes care of his people, completes his jobs promptly, and is generally pretty intelligent when it comes to resource management.
His job as an advisor is less stellar though. Except for reports, he tends to leave Compress to himself and/or his other advisors. Compress has tried to talk to him but he made fun of the magician act once and now they keep their distance.
He probably has one of the peatiest reasons for being in the PLF among the advisors & lieutenants.
You see, his quirk is that he’s able to make or dismiss a kind of wooden golem to do what he wants, and he often had it do menial labor for him.
That said, while it’s legal for him to do that in private settings, it’s actually illegal in public, and people have gotten on his case about that since he was a kid. What’s more, the reprimands got worse & worse the older he got, so eventually he got sick of it and joined the MLA.
Yeah, he’s part of a terrorist group because it’s illegal to use his quirk to carry his groceries for him.
Mr. Compress Advisor # 1 (Electric Scar Face)
Another descendant of a mainstay family in the MLA, he was actually a friend of Yotsubashi growing up. They’ve drifted a bit in adulthood since he isn’t exactly the business type, but they still work closely enough and keep in touch.
That’s actually most of the reason he’s not exactly on board with Shigaraki being in charge now. He only really heard 2nd hand about what happened in Daika, and he’s pretty biased in favor of the old boss.
All that said, he & Compress probably have one of the most stable lieutenant/advisor relationships; agreeable enough, healthy but minimal disagreements, actually pretty similar humor & they’ve both got good heads on their shoulders with just more than a hint of eccentricity.
We already know his quirk, absorbing and discharging Electricity.
Spinner Advisor # 3 (Cementos’ long lost cousin)
While not actually related to Cementos (probably), I’ve actually grown attached to the idea that he went to UA himself, so here’ the continuation of PLF Granny’s story I promised.
So one day, while working on his internship, he ended up pursuing a wanted hero killer, who he found out was just an old lady who lost control of her quirk and has been panicking ever since. He realized she needed help, but for her crimes she’d surely be sent to Tartarus for life (which is a redundant statement), so he decided to leave professional heroism behind to help her disappear, as well as help her in general.
In the process, they came across a good number of other runaways, and when the MLA agreed to shelter them in exchange for labor and generally joining the cause, they agreed.
As an advisor, he has a good professional relationship with Spinner, and they often discuss what they believe heroes should really be like and the failings of their current iterations. As such, he’s ended up growing to the idea of Shigaraki as presented to him by Spinner.
His quirk is the ability to turn into a large whale like creature that’s able to move large numbers of forces in it’s mouth through the water. I think it’d be cool if it could move through the ground too, but that might overlap with Machia.
He’s also able to produce and shoot spikes from his skin in either form to defend himself.
He’d probably get along with/relate to Kurogiri if he’s ended up getting some of Shirakumo’s memories by the time he escapes.
Spinner Advisor # 2 (Edgy Spider Guy)
(Just a reminder for those who only remember this guy from the above picture, he was shown to have spider legs in a later chapter.)
Spinner’s gamer buddy among the advisors, as well as the main supporter for his crusade of eliminating mutation prejudice.
Having a spider quirk, no surprise he was bullied in school only to be harassed and marginalized in adulthood. He eventually got a job at Detnarat, and was personally invited into the MLA by Yotsubashi himself.
Along with the extra spider limbs, he can also produce especially strong spider silk, which he can then telekinetically control while close to it. He does’t produce it at a very quick rate, but he’s been able to sew it into his cloak to move it, letting him increase his speed and pull off a few other neat tricks.
The main downside though is a particularly freaky face, which he’s developed a complex about. Thus why he hides his face. He’s got friends working with him about it though.
That said, he’ll probably still keep the cloak after he overcomes this complex because it’s cool.
Spinner Advisor # 1 (Cute Bug Girl)
The last of PLF Granny’s old runaway gang among the advisors.
(there are still others, but they have much smaller rolls, if any.)
She joined after losing her parents to an altercation with the CRC. (Y’know, the Klan looking freaks.)
Her personality is something like a transitioning point between a high school alpha bitch and a wine aunt. Mainly because she looks to sweater lady from Geten’s group as something of a roll model (unfortunately).
Her relationship with her boss, Spinner, is rather tense as a result. She looks down on him for his quirk (though she’s tactful enough to not mention this), but relates to his hardships as a Mutant. As a result, she looks out for him more than she looks down on him, but she’s still kind of waiting for him to prove himself.
Her quirk is the ability to create & control tiny insects about the size of fairy flies (<3mm in length) in vast swarms.
These bugs move pretty silently, so they can act as a fog, fly into people’s mouths and attack them there, or fly into wounds to either stitch them closed or make them worse.
While she doesn’t have an actual PHD, she was trained by several doctors hired by the MLA for many years to make the best of her quirk, and is now the director of the PLF’s medical units, except for small, personal medial units in the other regiments.
General stuff
Just to be clear, though I describe most of these guys & gals relatively nicely, most all of these guys probably have more confirmed kills under their belt than Twice.
(Granted, that’s partially because Twice doesn’t really confirm his kills. We only know of 2, including the guy he murdered after he was himself murdered. But that still means everyone here has killed several people.)
Each of these guys have their own base to watch over, you’ll remember, and part of their responsibilities is either recruiting or eliminating people who learn too much.
Each of them has the job of easing their subordinates into going along with the new leadership, especially the people who weren’t there for Daika. This is kind of tricky because they were also not there for Daika, so they’ve been required to talk with the League members a lot.
It’s helped encourage them to get to know the new management relatively well.
Side note: I’m also willing to bet Trumpet & Redestro have their own regiment; probably an undercover or public relations regiment, and probably have 6 advisors for themselves too. I’m excited to meet them.
And despite how much work I put into all this, I’m also excited to see just how much of it is wrong as we meet these guys for real.
#bnha#league of villains#lov#PLF#paranormal liberation front#twice#dabi#geten#toga himiko#bnha skeptic#spinner#mr. compress#headcanons#I apologize if I come across as overly defensive#my only other experience talking in social media is YouTube comments#still#be gentle I'm new to actually posting stuff
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Dust Volume 6, Number 6
Whatever happens, Bobby Conn will always be fabulous
Greetings from the never-ending sameness! It must be Friday since we’re doing a Dust, but we are not exactly sure which Friday and, indeed, which day of the week comes after that. We have not had a haircut in a while, and we’re wearing the most comfortable, least fashionable things we own, but we have not quite given up, because, you see, we’re still listening to music. Here are short missives from our respective quarantines, covering experimental psych, fey orchestral pop, slow rolling sine waves, disco-glittering satire, solitary black metal and assorted other musical manifestations. Contributors included Bill Meyer, Andrew Forell, Jennifer Kelly, Jonathan Shaw and Michael Rosenstein.
Eric Arn & Jasmine Pender — Hydromancy (Feeding Tube)
hydromancy by eric arn & jasmine pender
Hydromancy is the ancient practice of divining the gods’ intentions by staring for long periods into a pool of water. Eric Arn, an American guitarist who has been based in Austria for the last decade and a half, seems to have picked up at least one message from the cosmos, and he is acting upon it. Feeding Tube Records is his home. Hydromancy is his third release on the label, and like its two predecessors, it carves out a unique zone within a large and ever-spreading field of inquiry. Arn’s spent time playing psychedelic rock, free improvisation and solo acoustic explorations, and worked with players from Texas, New England and Vienna. This time he’s partnered with an English cellist, Jasmine Pender, on two side-long ponderances of resonance. The title is apt; the musicians seem to be regarding the surface of their sound, first letting ripples and reflections guide them, but ultimately peering beneath the surface into darker, persistent currents.
Bill Meyer
ARTHUR — Hair of the Dog (Honeymoon)
youtube
On his sophomore album, Philadelphia songwriter ARTHUR disguises ruminations on addiction, anxiety, pain and paranoia in summery cloaks of experimental pop. The combination of whimsy and woe is nothing new, but it’s a fine balance. In Hair of the Dog, complex arrangements surround naïve-sounding melodies, hinting at inner turmoil.
The album incorporates whispers of disco in “No Tengo,” a low key Caleb Giles rap interlude on “Something Sweet,” swinging 1960s horns on “William Penn Island” and a choir of children on “You Are Mine.” The magpie eclecticism holds together beneath a voice that can err on the side of mannered. It is most effective when direct and unadorned as on “Simple Song” where a woozy waltz and detuned guitar bridge underline the poignancy of the lyrics: “In a couple of years/You lose a couple of friends/You lose yourself and you start over again/I don’t have patience/All that I know is addiction.” There is a lot to like here even if at times ARTHUR treads too hard on the path of whimsy.
Andrew Forell
Gaudenz Badrutt — Ganglions (Aussenraum)
Ganglions by Gaudenz Badrutt
“Connect” is the not the first words that 2020 is going to wear out, but it’s in the running. Veteran Swiss electronic musician Gudenz Badrutt could not have foreseen the present situation when he was making this LP, but it speaks to at least one aspect of it. Perhaps the barrages of commercials dropping the word “connect” by corporations interested in currying your subconscious good will has you pondering the networks by which that state is accomplished and sustained. Badrutt’s music is assembled from sine waves and feedback systems, which he layers and interrupts to make sound that flickers and surges like an audio rendering of your nervous system in various states of load-carrying and overload. Listen closely, and you can ponder your place within the system. But if you’re sick of thinking, feeling, and awareness, turn this shit up and it will blot out whatever offends you.
Bill Meyer
Nat Baldwin — Autonomia I: Body Without Organs (Shinkoyo)
AUTONOMIA I: Body Without Organs by Nat Baldwin
Nat Baldwin is a published novelist as well as a singer and double bassist with several solo records and a long-time stint is a member of the Dirty Projectors on his cv. His versatility does not come at the expense of focus; indeed, Autonomia I (so named because there’s a second, cassette-only volume) show that he knows how to get a lot out of a particular idea. This LP was inspired by a broken bow, which he employs (sometimes in concert with an intact one) on five of the LP’s seven tracks. When one of your tools is unreliable, you have to be ready to scramble, and there are moments when it sounds like he’s trying to recover from or get ahead of his implement’s waywardness. But those also sound like moments of opportunity; whether he’s exploring rattle of a loose part against his bass’s body or using that bow to obtain non-prescribed tensions from his strings, he organizes his instrument’s unusual sounds into quick-moving, provocatively shaped constellations of sound.
Bill Meyer
Bonifrate—Mundo Encoberto (Self-released)
Mundo Encoberto by Bonifrate
Pedro Bonifrate is one-half of the Brazilian psych outfit Guaxe, this solo album (according to Google translate “overcast world”) springs from the same trippy, laid-back but multi-instrumented roots. Lush like the rainforest that surrounds him, playful and full of bright colors, this eight-part composition unfolds in the manner of a particularly vivid dream. “Parte 1” mutates freely over its 11 minute duration, stirring to life in a rush of strings, slipping into beach-y mildly hallucinogenic balladry, trying on a bit of Syd Barret-ish whimsy, crescendoing in clangorous guitar overload. Hard to say if Bonifrate played all the instruments, but the album has an idiosyncratic euphoria, as if it were lifted in one piece from the vivid contours of one person’s mushroom trip.
Jennifer Kelly
Bobby Conn — Recovery (Tapete)
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“It’s a disaster, the one we’ve been waiting for for years, and now we get to see how this thing ends,” croons the one-and-only Bobby Conn in his glam-shuddering, disco-sleek tenor, and sure, 2020 in a nutshell, got it in one, congrats! Who’d have thought that Conn’s arch, satiric performance art could be a form of comfort here at the end of the world? Who’s have supposed his stylized excesses would seem not an iota too much? Conn, as ever, is sharp and topical, pondering all the oppressed sub-groups left out of the “Good Old Days,” (against a swaggering Phil Spector beat), mourning the xxx-rated theaters put out of business by Pornhub in “Bijou,” skewering big data’s intrusions in the synth-operatic glories of “Disposable Future.” But what’s always separated Conn from mere satirists is the elaborate, over-the-top quality of the music he makes. “Recovery” with its scatted bassline, its frenetic syncopation, its funk precision—it all works as music way before you start to chuckle at the lyrics. Conn is as much a character in the long-running graphic novel that plays in his head as a bandleader, but don’t underestimate the bandleader. There’s art underneath all that eyeliner.
Jennifer Kelly
Curanderos — Raven’s Head (Null Zøne)
Raven's Head by Curanderos
If you’re looking for something to cure what ails you in these uncertain times, Raven’s Head might be your balm. You won’t need a prescription, since the tradition of shamanistic healing precedes the AMA, and the particular configuration of healers here — John and Michael Gibbons of Bardo Pond + Scott Verrastro of Kohoutek — models a cooperative approach that more conventional leadership would do well to emulate. The combination of personalities also tips you off to what to expect. Verrastro is a colorist, using the metal parts of his drum kit to keep the listener aware of the dimensions surrounding the listening space, but he also provides just enough forward momentum to keep the music moving at a fogbank-rolling pace. The Gibbons match liquid lead and coarse riff with practiced ease; they’ve spent a lot of time in such cloudy spaces, and they breathe deeply of the inspirational atmosphere.
Bill Meyer
Discovery Zone — Remote Control (Mansions and Millions)
Remote Control by Discovery Zone
“Sophia Again” is a sci-fi mini-story, presenting the conversation between an AI creature and her creator, talking about the self, the meaning of life and the joy of connection, as bubbling arcs of synthesizer sounds jet off into the ether. It is, perhaps, the most literally futuristic of the cuts on this gleaming, synth-centric album, though the whole thing is polished to an other worldly, not quite natural glow. JJ Weihl, the artist behind Discovery Zone, also works in Fenster, a Berlin-based psychedelic pop band of a similarly polished, dance-referring (but not dance) aesthetic. Here, she works solo in luminous abstractions of crystal clear sound. The pleasure comes in the purity and beauty of voices, synths, drum beats, which sound like Sophia might have made them while learning to be human; they are a little too perfect to be wholly man-made.
Jennifer Kelly
Esoctrilihum — Eternity of Shaog (I, Voidhanger)
Eternity Of Shaog by ESOCTRILIHUM
An epic of esoteric demonology from Ashtâghul’s one-man black metal project Esoctrilihum, Eternity of Shaog presents as ten songs, most of which bear titles like “Exh-Enî Söph (First Passage: Exiled from Sanity)” and “Amenthlys (5th Passage: Through the Yth-Whtu Seal).” One gets the sense that there is a cosmology being built—but even Google has a tough time tracking the references to the many, many Eastern mythic systems in the repertoire. The provisionally good news is that Eternity of Shaog is a bit less musically spastic than its predecessor, The Telluric Ashes of the Ö Vrth Immemorial Gods, an even longer record released just last year. Say what you will, Ashtâghul is prolific. On this new record, you get his signature combination of black metal speed and snarl and an ambitiously (that’s the kind word) proggy compositional sense. The transitions this time around are less violent, the riffs are pretty good and plentiful synths build out to lush soundscapes. The musical textures are rich, but the bad vibes dominate. It’s hard to say what malign presences you’ll be summoning into your home if you play this stuff as loud as seems intended. Maybe keep some holy water handy.
Jonathan Shaw
Fire-Toolz — Rainbow Bridge (Hausu Mountain)
Rainbow Bridge by Fire-Toolz
As Fire-Toolz composer, producer and multi-instrumentalist, Angel Marcloid conjures mosaics from such disparate elements that one wonders how the music hangs together. Yet what at first seems like a chaotic, fractured farrago coalesces into a cohesive picture of her world that simultaneously bewilders and awes. Catholic in source and meticulous in construction Rainbow Bridge is an uncompromising and often stunning dash through Marcloid’s mind. Treated vocals that evoke death metal or JG Thirwell at his most outré, passages of twinkling synth and arena guitar, elements of 1980s Japanese ambient music, fusion jazz and Chiptune slot together like Jenga blocks that wobble but never quite collapse.
Marcloid’s project of musical excavation, reclamation and transformation perhaps mirrors her experience as a non-binary transgender person and the atomization of many tracks on Rainbow Bridge read as a meditation on the contingency of identity and the struggle for place within/outside social constructs that define acceptability and “taste”. On the other hand, sit back, push play and prepare to drift along with the ambient flow then be jolted from reverie by glitch and noise. Much like the world really.
Andrew Forell
Jacaszek — Music for Film (Ghostly)
Music for Film by Jacaszek
Music for Film collects the Polish composer Jacaszek’s scores for three movies — the 2019 documentary He Dreams of Giants, the 2008 project Golgota wrocławska and the 2017 film November. Haunted, evocative, disquieting and gorgeous, these ten soundscapes infuse the sounds of electronics, strings and samples with dread. “The Iron Bridge” turns sampled voices and slow throbs of cello into dance with death and memory, while “Liina” picks up eerie vibrations just out of focus, like a camera accidentally recording a ghost. “Dance” hurls electric bolts of tremulous sound—they sizzle with aftertones—then picks out a morose melody in plucked strings. All is dark, subdued, ominous but velvety, sensually smooth. Not having seen the films, I can’t guess the subject matter, but let’s assume there’s no laugh track.
Jennifer Kelly
Kontrabassduo Studer-Frey — Zeit (Leo)
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Double bassists Peter K Frey and Daniel Studer has spent the better part of the 21st century performing as a duo, but they don’t seem to have felt pressured to rush out a recording documenting their music. This CD includes selections from 2004, 2007, and 2018 that were made at home, in concert, and in the studio. But despite the variety of sources and occasions, this album feels quite cohesive, which is a testament to integrity of their partnership. They rarely play similarly at any given moment, but their contrasting techniques and frequency ranges evince a balance makes even the tracks with contributions by clarinetist Jürg Frey and cellist Alfred Zimmerlin feel like the work of one massive, multi-bodied bass.
Bill Meyer
Marlin’s Dreaming — Quotidian (Self-Released)
Quotidian by Marlin's Dreaming
The trick of putting soft, flickery voices in front of raging guitars is not a new one, but it’s still worth trying, especially as well as Marlin’s Dreaming does on “Outward Crying.” This sweeping, soaring, but fundamentally introspective tune blasts and blares in a sensitive way, the guitar noise parting like drapes for the singer’s disconsolate confession that he’s leaving this town. The town in question is Auckland, New Zealand, and you can certainly make connections to antipodal fuzz icons, especially the Verlaines. Yet there’s a bit of romantic swoon here in cuts like “Sink or Swim,” which links Marlin’s Dreaming’s diffident lo-fi pop with the baroque gestures of Roxy Music. This is the band’s second album and rather poised given their short history. Marlin’s Dreaming out loud in soft colors and blistering fuzz, and it’s a good one.
Jennifer Kelly
Christian Rønn & Aram Shelton—Multiring (Astral Spirits)
Multiring by Christian Rønn & Aram Shelton
Some musicians stake their claim within a particular locale, and others tour the world. Alto saxophonist Aram Shelton’s done a bit of both. You could say he’s a serial resident; over the past couple decades he’s been based in Chicago, Oakland, Copenhagen, and now, Budapest. But his recording history lags behind him. His latest release is a cassette recorded in April 2018, and it stands apart from anything he’s done to date. Credit for that lies partly with his choice of partner, Danish keyboardist Christian Rønn. Rønn’s instrument here is a Wurlitzer electric piano, augmented with effects that play up its reverberant qualities, but played without much reference to the way people used to play the thing when it was omnipresent in the 1960s and 1970s. Instead of nailing down a groove, Rønn posts reverberant signposts that Shelton can snake through or lays out undulating surfaces that the saxophonist can sail over. Either way, Shelton plays with a darker and softer tone than has been his wont in the past, casting a pall of eerie foreboding over this gradually evolving music.
Bill Meyer
Snekkestad / Guy / Fernandez — The Swiftest Traveller (Trost)
The Swiftest Traveler by Snekkestad / Guy / Fernandez
Englishman double bassist Barry Guy (b. 1947) has been shuttling between free and composed musical zones for over half a century, longer than the similarly versatile Scandinavian reeds and brass multi-threat Torben Snekkestad (b. 1973) has been alive. Catalan pianist Agusti Fernández (b. 1954) traverses similar terrain. And all three shift fluidly between conventional virtuosity and astutely applied extended techniques. The trio’s rapport is so strong that one supposes that however the album got its title, it wasn’t the result of some musical contest. They’re builders, not destroyers. Still, the rapidity with which these three musicians move from event to event is undeniable. Sparse stasis morphs into quick runs up and down the keyboard; a dense, high-velocity onslaught transforms into intricate, three-part counterpoint. The quickness with which the music changes and the completeness that it expresses from moment to moment make this a very satisfying performance.
Bill Meyer
Various Artists — Quilted Flowers: 1940s Albanian & Epirot Recordings from the Balkan Label (Canary Recordings)
Quilted Flowers: 1940s Albanian & Epirot Recordings from the Balkan Label by Canary Records
The word “Balkanized” has the dubious distinction of having acquired extra-regional meaning, to the point where it now signifies a whole divided into smaller, mutually hostile regions. But some of the Balkan musicians who moved to New York City pulled together to play on each other’s gigs and recordings. The Albanian multi-instrumentalist, Ajdan Asllan, who ran the Balkan record label, partnered with musicians from Greece and Bulgaria on both a musical and business level, and kept the company running into the LP age. This collection pulls 11 sides of instrumental and vocal music that originated on his home turf, but if your ears have previously pricked up in response to rural music from Greece or Anatolia, you will want to hear this stuff. A pair of clarinets or a violin usually carry the melodies, sometimes chased by sharp-pitched vocals that spread out in ragged but lusty unison, and always carried by unevenly accented rhythms articulated by vigorously strummed stringed instruments.
Bill Meyer
Otomo Yoshihide & Chris Pitsiokos — Live in Florence (Astral Spirits)
Live in Florence by Otomo Yoshihide & Chris Pitsiokos
Live in Florence documents a meeting between Otomo Yoshihide on guitar and turntables and Chris Pitsiokos on alto sax and electronics at the Tempo Reale Festival in Florence, Italy. This was the final date of a six-day European tour by the duo, and they’re primed from the first crackled sputters and blasts. The two thrive on these sorts of boundary-crushing forays and their seven short improvisations careen along with frenetic, brawny energy. The two deploy jump-cut pacing and shredded attacks from piercing overtones and feedback to frayed overblown sax and turntable crackle to manically angular reed lines and searing electronic bursts to chafed sax amplifications and thundering rumbles. Even on pieces where they start things out a bit more subdued, the two quickly ratchet up the intensity with torrid, barely-controlled vigor. There’s a slight respite on the sixth piece, with Otomo’s chiming guitar harmonics laying a resonant field for Pitsiokos’s breathy chirps and bent tones but even here, they arc to waves of feedback and skirling reed fusillades by the end. The final piece starts with shattered electronics and spitting reeds and mounts into bellowing din, exploding to the finish of the exhilarating 37-minute set.
Michael Rosenstein
#dusted magazine#dust#eric arn#jasmine pender#arthur#bill meyer#andrew forell#Gaudenz Badrutt#nat baldwin#bonifrate#bobby conn#jennifer kelly#curanderos#discovery zone#Esoctrilihum#fire toolz#jacaszek#kontrabassduo#marlin's dreaming#christian ronn#aram shelton#barry guy#torben snekkestad#augusti fernandez#Quilted Flowers#canary recordings#michael rosenstein#Otomo Yoshihide#chris pitsiokos
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ITP: speculating on the rest of Deku’s SIXQUIRKS
(cont.) ...working on the basis that each power is an activator type that doesn’t mutate the body or cause you to grow 3 extra libs to use- based on the glimpses we’ve seen of the past wielders they all had normal body types- and that each power will work in tandem with the others to give deku more options without conflicting with each other’s usage.
similarly to how todoroki’s quirk combines the temperature manipulation needed to generate fire and ice and uses that to offset the drawbacks of each power usage on the other, I think these powers will all interlink somehow into one large powerset that lets deku rapidly switch between fighting styles based on the situation and whether he has to focus on fighting or rescuing- for example, we’ve seen how Deku fights with just the strength boost- using it to increase his speed and recently, fire wind blasts, but when he uses that in tandem with Black whip, he can suddenly create black webbing that lets him hold and restrain his opponents, letting manoeuvre around the battle field with more mid-air control than he did before, and potentially letting him throw them into buildings if he boosts the strength of the tendrils- we saw 20% was enough to throw him around like a ragdoll and tear up the surroundings even with him trying to actively supress it. With that in mind I think some of the powers he may have would be
(1) black whip webbing- no-brainer, since we already saw this- but if he controls it more, he may be able to leave constructs of the restraining tentacles behind that stay active even when not connected to him or in his presence, giving him instant ability to restrain and leave his foe immobilised like spidey does for the cops
(2) combat tentacles- again we saw this, so obvious, but if he still has the tentacles connected to him, he can boost their strength and let him lift and throw opponents or objects even if he’s not physically touching them, plus it may also give me more metaphorical ‘hands’ to punch/restrain his opponents with- this may also be handy for rescue operations letting him lift and safely maneuverer civilians out of the danger zone, or create temporary load-bearing tendrils to lift rubble away from those in need
(3) wall crawl- based on the way black whip plastered itself to the surroundings, if Deku layers it over his hands or body parts, it may allow him to stick to whatever surface or ceiling he applies it to, letting him manoeuvre around the environment like spidey, though it’d probably take more mental control to keep active or to turn off and on to move around, similar to miro’s quirk
(4) defensive capabilities- black whip seemed to cover the whole of Deku’s arm when it was being used, which means it could probably cover more if he pushed it further- I actually have the idea of some kind of black venom/bunny mashup when I imagine the end result of completely covering himself, but regardless, the fact that Black whip can hold and touch stuff means it has physical mass, albeit temporary, so if deku completely covers himself, then he may be able to cushion or soften blows against his body- on those lines, I’m also curious as to how Shigaraki’s decay would work against that- we’ve seen that he can’t affect semi-solid stuff he can’t touch 100% like sand, but we’ve never seen how it does up against energy constructs like a force field or similar- something that’s both solid and lacking a substantial body.
Even if Shigaraki can only count up to 7 right now, I think in future chapters this potential defensive capability could be key to letting Deku fight head-to-head with him- I dunno what makes me so sure of this but I keep thinking their showdowns will somehow include a physical aspect outwith their quirks- we know shigaraki can take some hard knocks, but he needs to be capable of confronting and threating deku’s overwhelming power to demonstrate his own strength as the successor to All For one, much like that last battle nearly had All Might losing in a head-on fight- to me, evil needs to able to match good on it’s own terms to prove it’s a true threat, or there’s always the possibility of the heroes quickly and anti-climatically turning the fight around in an instant if they get the upper hand- the ‘unstoppable force’ of evil needs to prove it can match the power of the ‘immovable object’ of good to bring a sense of danger to the battle.
As for the other’s I’m not so sure, but I do have a few options-
(5) defensive ability- I already kinda covered this with black whip, but this is more of a full-body defensive power like Kirishima’s- I’m thinking Deku hardens his body’s density to the point where attacks shatter and stop against him- though a potential issue with that is that he needs to focus and get in the right state of mind, and initially can’t move whilst using it, also he’s become another copycat of kirishima’s power (sorry dude)- whilst black whip would provide some defence, deku still takes too many hard knocks, and it seems like the high-end nomu’s are being built on a similar power level to OG Nomu, capable of physically wreaking anybody not on all Might’s power level if they get their hands on them. Since All Might, and now Midoira, have a bit of a Superman theme going on, i’m thinking this defensive quirk may let deku imitate the Man of Steel invulnerability for a few seconds to let him keep fighting when realistically the threat’s already liquefied his insides, or he needs to stand in the way of an incoming attack against civilians that he can’t block or deflect, though the drawbacks and stress of maintaining such a power may mitigate it’s usefulness to avoid making him too OP right now
(6) enhanced senses- again, basing this off the superman idea, but deku may gain access to something that enhances all 5 of his sense to superhuman levels, letting him keep track of more of his environment, see different spectrums, and utilises his analysis and predicative fighting style to a greater effect than before, though all 5 of his sense may backfire, if he’s scratched and feels like he’s lost an arm, or get hit with a flashbomb and incapacitated etc
(7) laser eyes- yeah I’m bringing up a lot of superman stuff, I don’t have a large imagination for the potentials beyond what I’ve got right now, but given the energy theme that seems to be common between full cowl and Black whip( it manifested in almost lighting-like black tendrils when he first used it) deku could potentially end up using this power by focusing power in his eyeballs like he does when using All For one on his body parts initially, and getting it to explode outwards as high-energy beams, which can be focused as needed, though using this would temporary blind him due to the intensive light being refracted through his corneas
(8) slow healing- I’m kinda ripping this off from the Dresden Files, but in there it’s explained that Wizards live to a ripe age because their bodies channel magic and are capable of creating absolutely perfect copies of their cells when they get cuts or broken bones letting them heal without scars or damaged limbs, as opposed to inferior copies like our bodies do, resulting in lasting damages piling up over our lifetime- given the damage Deku’s put himself through so far, he’s already in danger of permanently losing his ability to be a hero, so this could potentially mitigate the drawbacks of his reckless fighting style so far, at least in the long run - it’s explained that the healing cant regenerate missing body parts, and can’t be sped up past the speed of normal healing- it’s just keeps healing away at wounds slowly until they’re completely gone, which could take years- the main character gets his hand flame-broiled to the point it’s recommended he amputate, yet several books later he still has the hand and full dexterity, though he’s still got some nasty scarring that’s yet to fade away.
That’s all I’ve got for now, if you can think of any others, or get suggestions for any others, feel free to list them- I’m curious as to what alternative powers you think Deku could use.
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sounds like fun! I’m gonna pass on the possible-combinations thing because I’m not particularly good at that kind of thing, but I like your suggestions, particularly the wall-crawling one. we all know how much Horikoshi loves his Spider-Man.
but the SIXQUIRKS!! speculation sounds like a great way to put off reading the rest of Vigilantes chapter one (lol I’m sorry guys. I’m making my way through it, slowly; it’s just really long, and I’m having trouble staying focused. but I have started it and I also read the preview chapter already, so I’ll have that post ready in a day or two at least), and I’m sure my answers will all be 100% wrong too, so I look forward to seeing just how wrong they are lol.
a couple of notes on my reasoning process:
I agree with you that all of the quirks will likely be emitter or transformation quirks rather than mutant quirks, since it doesn’t seem likely that Horikoshi will make any dramatic alternations to Deku’s basic appearance. after all, one of his most distinguishing characteristics is (ironically) the fact that he’s ordinary as fuck to look at. since a key aspect of mutant quirks is that they’re impossible to turn on and off, and thus any change would wind up being permanent, I think we can safely rule this out.
I still have no idea what’s going on with the Bakusilhouette, or whether this implies that one of these quirks could potentially be Explosion. but I’m hoping not (because get your own quirks, Deku!!), so I’m gonna leave that off of the list.
there is going to be at least one quirk that lacks any constructive use whatsoever and is basically just comic relief. please Horikoshi. I need this.
lastly, Horikoshi is going to have to be very careful to keep Deku from becoming overpowered. he can keep things in check for the most part just by making the powers difficult to control, but even so he’s going to have to be smart about it. we can have one or two more badass powers, maybe, but if all five are as awesome as Blackwhip, Horikoshi is going to end up writing himself into a corner real fast. the last thing you want is for your protagonist to be able to solve every single problem with barely the slightest effort. so for this reason I’ve done my best to keep the rest of the SIXQUIRKS as balanced as I can manage.
now on to it!
1. flying quirk
listen guys. if this doesn’t happen Deku will be fucking heartbroken. he wants to be up in the air so bad. he wants to get away. he wants to flyyyyyy away. yeahhhhh yeahhhhh yeahhhh.
but he really does though. so Horikoshi should just give up and give him an actual quirk for it already so he can stop mooching off of all of his friends’ flying abilities and slingshotting himself off of temporarily elastic steel beams.
2. spidey-sense
disclaimer: this is not my original idea. @interstellar-elf sent me an ask like months ago suggesting this and I think it’s perfect tbh.
I think this one is all but guaranteed. it’s relevant to heroing but not too OP; it pays homage to Horikoshi’s favorite hero of all time (because he hasn’t paid him enough homage already lol); and the power itself has always been a great way of adding dramatic tension to a scene. it’s both useful and highly cinematic -- it’s basically carte blanche to throw in as many close calls and near-death escapes into a scene as you can manage. really, is there anything more shounen than coming within a hair’s breadth of dying horribly but somehow surviving to tell the tale? that’s what spidey-sense really is at the end of the day.
3. psychic shield/immunity
first of all before I continue, this seems like a great time to post another long-unanswered ask from @interstellar-elf!
the problem with psychic powers is that they do tend to be overpowered as hell, though, and given that Deku already has a ton of awesome quirks, that makes me wary of giving him any kind of psychic abilities on top of that.
but! I think there is a workaround for this, which is to give him powers that only work as a defense against other people’s psychic attacks! you know, kind of like Occlumency in Harry Potter, where you can stop someone from reading your mind. or like the power to shake off someone else’s mind control -- oh, wait.
(and then later on...)
hmmmmmm.
I’m not saying Deku already has this power, mind you. but I’m also not not saying that. it would fit, basically.
4. the ability to create extremely specific and totally useless objects at will
okay so remember how I said I’m placing my bets on at least one “joke” quirk that’s basically useless aside from being used for comedic purposes? so I racked my brain for a bit and this is what I came up with. I just think it would make for a really great visual gag if Deku all of a sudden started making a bunch of stuffed kitty tsums out of nowhere and had no control over it and everyone was like, “DEKU WHAT THE FUCK” and he was like “I’M SORRY I DON’T KNOW EITHER I CAN’T STOP IT” and there are just kitty tsums everywhere, just strewn all over the damn place, and for a while every time he panics over something it’s like BOOM! KITTY TSUM. and Bakugou is like “DEKU YOU ASS, I CAN’T BELIEVE YOU GOT MULTIPLE FUCKING QUIRKS, WHICH IS FUCKING UNHEARD OF, AND YOU WENT AND WASTED ONE OF THEM ON THIS BULLSHIT” and Deku’s like “I LITERALLY HAVE NO CHOICE IN THE MATTER IT’S NOT LIKE I PICKED THEM OUT OF A CATALOG” and Bakugou’s like “AT LEAST PICK SOMETHING ORIGINAL ASSHOLE, PONYTAIL GIRL ALREADY HAS THE OBJECT-MAKING QUIRK FOR FUCK’S SAKE” and Deku is like “ARE YOU BREAKING THE FOURTH WALL” and Bakugou is like “HAH?” and so on and so forth.
bonus points if the quirk actually ends up saving their lives later on in some really stupid way.
5. super-op time-stopping quirk that can only be used under Extremely Rare and Specific Circumstances
okay so for the fifth and final quirk, I wanted something that actually is outrageously, insanely powerful and a huge upgrade. but as a check to keep it from getting too out of control, I think it should be something that can only be used if the circumstances are exactly right. like he can only do it during a full moon, or once every six months, or only if he knows the exact year, month, date, and time the target was born, or something ridiculous like that. maybe not quite that specific, lol. but you get the idea.
basically I’m looking for something he can only use once or twice in the entire series, but when he does it’s a game-changer. and time-fuckery seems like the best bet as far as game-changing goes. we have not had any time-fuckery quirks yet precisely because they’re so absurdly powerful, but at the same time, you can’t just write a manga about superheroes and not have someone with a fucking time quirk at some point. it’s gotta happen. you’ve gotta do it. so you might as well do it with the main character then. you’ve all seen that one scene from X-Men: Days of Future Past? technically that’s a super-speed quirk, but hey, same difference. but yeah, to avoid plot holes Deku can only do it during a planetary alignment for thirty seconds at midnight or some shit.
so that’s all five! tbh the only one I have even the remotest bit of confidence in is the spidey sense one, because it just ticks a number of boxes that are too good for Horikoshi to pass up. but for the rest I really have no idea; I hope and expect to be completely taken by surprise.
but I will forever have an AU headcanon now where Deku develops a Kitty Tsum quirk and is just. sitting in a big ol pile of these things like Captain Fucking Kirk while everyone is like “SERIOUSLY WHAT THE FUCK DEKU” sob.
#bnha#boku no hero academia#bnha spoilers#mha spoilers#midoriya izuku#one for all#bnha theory#makeste reads bnha#asks#long post#one bonus that I wasn't consciously thinking about#but that actually works for all of these quirks except the kitty tsum one#is that all of these are quirks which could be easily explained away or kept hidden#allowing deku to maintain his secret#not the kitty one though#that one is a definite 'midoriya has multiple quirks' red flag#maybe he can try to explain it away by pretending he got hit by somebody else's quirk#aizawa wouldn't question it too much because he actually loves the quirk#'omg yes'#'kitties'
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Bad to Worse
Started as a few whump tropes: defiant whumpee, captured whumpee, overly intimate villain is really what caught my attention here, and all the nasty little ways an overly intimate villain can really fuck with the hurt/comfort cycle of torture and human emotions, especially as it relates to a captured whumpee
All these characters are mine. Let me know if you like it - there’s loads where this came from!
This started off fairly straightforward, and ended Very Complicated. I blame Clive Owen. A lot.
TW: Torture, violence, electrocution, broken bones, bleeding, sensory deprivation/blindfolding, dubcon/noncon elements, implied dubcon/noncon
She opened her eyes and blinked as her eyes adjusted to a dark room. A single neon bulb lit a space the size of her bedroom, big and empty enough for the chair she sat on and a person in front of her, could hold maybe five or six people standing around, but not a table for that many. A masked figure sat on a stool in front of her, and still tugged back on her hair to wake her up.
“She’s awake,” the figure said with a smile in his voice. “Can you hear me alright?” His accent was British of some flavor, and pleasant on the ears.
Kathryn nodded, and then frowned as she realized that something was the matter. She knew out of habit that this man’s voice would have been blue-ish green, maybe turquoise but...She couldn’t see his voice on the air, even though she squinted trying to see it.
The masked figure nodded, leaning forward to grab her chin and pull it down, to force her to look at him as he let go of her hair. “That’s right, darling. Got a serum here built just for you, takes away your sound manipulation while leaving your hearing and your healing mutation intact. We’re going to draw your blood and saliva six times a day, and once we get the call, you’ll be on your way, no problems, nice and easy, alright?”
Kathryn stared at him, feeling something hot stir in her gut at his words. She yanked her chin free and spat on him. “You let me off this chair and we’ll see about your nice and easy.”
The masked figure sighed, and she watched him check his sleeve as if to see if her spit had gotten on him. They seemed to be in a repurposed shower, with tile walls and a drain in the floor. He wore dark blue coveralls, a hood drawn up over his head, white latex gloves, black tennis shoes, a white skintight mask that covered his nose, and wide, reflective sunglasses. “Kathryn.”
Kathryn knew it was stupid, but she shuddered at the fact that he clearly knew her name. She considered the fact that he really had grabbed her on purpose, and gritted her teeth. ‘Assume your captor is always lying,’ was a lesson she knew well. Still, he definitely knew what power she was missing, and he knew her name.
Gloved fingers gripped her chin again, drawing her focus back onto him. “Please pay attention. I think it only fair to tell you that if you harm me or any of my people, there will be reprisals. This is not personal, and aside from those conditions, we will feed you and no harm will come to you. Do I make myself clear?”
Kathryn tugged her chin from his grip again and spat on the floor. “Easy for guy who abducted me to set conditions. My people will come for me and you’ll be sorry you grabbed me. If you know who I am, you’ll know they’re very good.”
She couldn’t see any of his features (except the fact that he was white, behind his sunglasses, and his accent right now, at least, was British, but she heard a little smirk before he spoke. “We do know about your people, and are taking great care to keep you from them until the job is done. I have business to attend to. Be good.”
He left, the sound of a door behind her telling her that her cell was locked, leaving her alone in the space with just the empty stool for company.
Kathryn sighed, but there was no use worrying herself sick without anyone present. She helped herself organize the information he’d given her by repeating it back to herself, and also by repeating back what he’d been wearing, and his features and accent. She’d call him British Guy 1, which would help her keep a tally, and keep her mind fresh.
Still, once that inventorying was done, she rolled her neck, and tried to get some rest.
What felt like almost immediately, she heard and felt someone enter behind her.
“Who’s there?” Kathryn called, and she heard that her voice was a little hoarse, rough. She must have fallen asleep, nap length, she guessed, less than three hours, based on how her mouth tasted and her eyes felt.
“Shut your fuckin’ mouth,” an American accented man said, coming in with a shiny metal kit that he opened to Kathryn’s right.
“Calm down,” a light Scottish brogue said, a woman, coming up to stand on Kathryn’s left.
“Open your mouth,” the American man said, glaring down at Kathryn and grabbed Kathryn’s chin. He wore the same ensemble as the British man, with the only noticeable difference being his voice.
She spat a mouthful of spit right into his face, and so he hit her across the face, splitting her lip, her blood smearing onto his white glove.
The Scottish woman said nothing, so Kathryn sprayed the American man with the blood that collected in her mouth. His mask was covered in her blood now, too. Her hands were bound behind her, so she had literally had nothing else to do but spit on him.
He swore at her, his accent sounding Midwestern, or possibly Southern, to Kathryn’s ears, and he grabbed her by the throat as Kathryn tensed her shoulders and neck muscles. She knew from experience that she was very hard to strangle, which meant this was going to hurt a lot.
“I’ll handle that,” the Scottish woman interrupted, putting her hand over the man’s hand. “Just get your samples.” She tutted impatiently, and Kathryn wondered how many more rounds of this they had to deal with that had the Scottish woman so ready to move on.
The American man let go of her throat, and the Scottish woman paused before touching Kathryn. “You’re up to five lashes for spitting, love,” she said kindly. “Unless you want more, don’t make me open your mouth.”
Kathryn decided that was enough for now, if they were going to do this draw five more times today, she had better pace herself in terms of pissing people off. She opened her mouth, and let the man swab her mouth. If he stuck the swab in so far it made her eyes water and made her cough, if that was more than was necessary, Kathryn ignored it.
She also didn’t say anything else as the woman drew a vial of blood from one arm tied behind her.
Kathryn was happy to let bygones be bygones for this interaction, her mind ticking away at what she knew so far, when the American’s voice spoke behind her.
“No, I’ll handle this. You go on ahead, and I’ll meet you there.”
Kathryn sighed. She got the feeling she was not going to get out of this with only five lashes.
The door opened and closed behind her, and Kathryn was not surprised to hear the Amercan man behind her. “Glasgow’s gotta go,” he said, pronouncing the Scottish city “glas-gow,” rhymed with cow, instead of Glas - go. “So it’s me and you, girlie. You fuck with me, I’m gonna make you bleed for it.”
Kathryn sighed, letting her muscles loosen as the clank of metal behind her told her he was unlatching the chains behind her. “Are you, like, Montgomery, or Jackson, or some other hellhole, then?”
She was in thickly padded cuffs, apparently, that he was able to tug on, yanking her off-balance at her commentary.
“I said to shut the fuck up,” he snapped, catching her in another backhand that Kathryn at least this time could roll with to soften some of the impact of the blow.
Kathryn staggered a little, her ear ringing on the side he’d hit. The serum they’d given to block her sound mutation had fucked with her ears a little, it seemed like. “Montgomery, for sure,” she said, gasping a little as he dragged her further back.
He was using some kind of hoist system that he was cranking down, she could hear the gears, or pulley, and he locked her cuffs into the hoist, and was now cranking her back up.
“You’re gonna regret all this talk, girlie,” he hissed, and she couldn’t see, but she could hear the gears of the hoist clank, or grip, as he locked her into place so she could just barely strain to get one toe on the ground to support herself.
Kathryn sighed. “Is this like one lash per word, Montgomery, or syllable?” She thought about that and shrugged. “I hope it’s not syllable or I’m gonna wish I nicknamed you Richmond, maybe.”
She heard the adjustment of his belt, and heard the test swing of the whip, a high-pitched whistling that was impossible to mistake.
“Oh, you better not miss,” she said, raising her voice a little to make sure he heard her. “You want me to count, cause you can’t, or you gonna just make this shit up til you finally manage to shut me up?”
That got him to storm out in front of her so she could see him. He dragged her chair and the British man’s stool away from her and glared up at her. “Fifteen,” he hissed, staring up into her face. “Count out loud. You lose track, I start over.”
Kathryn blanched, and let him see it, but sneered at him regardless. He’d added ten lashes onto the spitting penalty Glasgow had mentioned. That was interesting. She filed the information away for later.
The whistle of the whip was fast, crack as it broke the sound barrier, and Kathryn gasped as it bit into her. White hot searing pain, instantly cutting her open. Her clothing took the brunt of the force, but after one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, her plaid shirt and undershirt were no longer helping her. The pain became so constant it was muted, somehow, like her brain had maxed out its ability to throttle all the way up to 11.
Kathryn didn’t try to stop herself making noises, which were now pained cries at eight, nine, ten, eleven. She heard the door open, dimly, but counted twelve, thirteen, fourteen, and finally fifteen.
Kathryn sighed, sagging. She flinched as she felt someone behind her. Blood flowed down her back in streams, and she could feel the slightest movements of air on the strips the whip had taken from her flesh.
“Good girl,” Montgomery breathed, patting her thigh.
Kathryn flinched her leg away, and swore at him. “Fuck off, Confederacy,” she said, but her voice was hoarse and tired and held none of the venom it had before.
He had picked up her chair, maybe to put it under her to give her shoulders some relief, and instead set it back down, well out of her reach, shrugging.
He patted her leg on his way out, and left.
Kathryn sighed and spent the worst of the pain (the pain she wouldn’t have been able to sleep through anyway) cataloging what she had learned.
At some point, she must have dozed, because the feel of air on her back and its accompanying spike of pain woke her.
Kathryn bit down on the inside of her cheek to stop herself groaning out loud where they might have heard it, but she heard Glasgow’s voice as a blue figure moved to stand in front of her to her right.
“I’m going to get you out of this shirt, alright Kathryn?” Glasgow said, moving Kathryn’s chair and standing upon it within arm’s reach of Kathryn.
She chuckled. “It’s ruined anyhow, Glasgow, you might as well.”
The woman made a disapproving sound in her cheek, but quickly cut Kathryn out of her ruined plaid button up and her black undershirt, leaving Kathryn in her sports bra, which had held up surprisingly well.
Kathryn held still as the woman put the swab in her cheek, and was interested as the woman just barely ran the cotton swab along her cheek.
The woman then did an upside down blood draw, which would have impressed Kathryn if her back and legs weren’t covered in her own dried blood.
“You guys gonna feed me or try to drain me dry til my friends get here?” She asked, watching as Glasgow filled not just one, but four little vials with her blood.
Glasgow gave a little shrug. “Not up to me.”
Kathryn snorted, but shrugged. There had been no Montgomery at this draw, so she decided she did not care.
Kathryn was interested when Glasgow pushed the chair under her, and her poor shoulders could get a rest. She sighed in audible relief and rested her head on her arms, dozing off more quickly than she had the first time.
She startled awake as air blew on her back again, but there was less pain, more surprise until she remembered that Glasgow had cut her out of her shirt.
“You didn’t fuck up once, so you get a meal, girlie,” a familiar voice drawled.
Kathryn rolled her eyes. “You miss me, Montgomery, is that it?” She asked with an audible sigh, but her tone was still light.
A different male voice chuckled. “She sure has your number, huh Richmond?” This voice was Eastern European, based on the way he treated his vowels and /h/ sounds, and Kathryn couldn’t stop a snort at what Eastern Europe was saying.
Montgomery, who was apparently actually Richmond, the actual capital of the Confederacy, snarled and kicked Kathryn’s chair away, making her legs dangle and her shoulders and wrists support her full weight again. She hissed as her shoulders seemed to catch fire at suddenly having to support her weight again. She breathed through her mouth. Her body would do what it always did, she just had to stay calm.
Kathryn glanced at Eastern Europe and raised her eyebrows at him. “Touchy.”
Eastern Europe didn’t look up at her comment, and she could hear the hoist grinding as it lowered.
Her feet hit the ground and there was enough slack that she could lower her arms all the way down.
Richmond was in front of her, putting a straw in her face.
Kathryn turned her face away, because she didn’t want anything he was offering.
“You want to eat, or not?” Richmond demanded.
Kathryn bunched up her aching shoulder muscles and lunged for him, thinking she could maybe get her shackled hands around him, or at least punch him.
There was a buzzing sound, and Kathryn realized in a split-second that she had miscalculated, that a third person had entered the room, aside from Eastern Europe and Richmond, when that person drove a cattle prod right into one of her wounds, and she dropped like a sack of hammers.
Kathryn moaned as she came to. She tasted blood in her mouth and her limbs tingled. She had a new wound in her head, too, from where she’d fallen and hit the ground. Her head ached terribly, and she left her eyes closed, because it hurt too badly to open them
She winced as she felt someone very close by her, and British Guy was shushing her.
“It’s just me, love. I think this might be a record you’ve set, quickest time to the cattle prod.” His tone was lightly amused, but not harshly sarcastic, his grip the same kind-but-no-nonsense it had been when she’d first woken up. His hand found her chin, and with more shushing noises, something cold pressed against the wound on the side of her head.
She hissed, trying to pull away, but his grip was firm, and the tang of antiseptic told her what he was doing.
She held still, but grumbled, “Doesn’t that defeat the purpose of leaving me my healing mutation?” She wanted to know how much he knew, but she also wanted to know why he was doing this. Good cop, maybe, or maybe he was the interrogator. Glasgow was also sort of good cop, and Eastern Europe was at least decent cop. She’d also pissed off Richmond, but he’d started the whole thing off pretty pissed, so he might have been set up that way on purpose as well.
“If you keep up at this rate, not even your S Grade healing mutation is going to help you, love,” he murmured, and something cool pressed against her split lip.
She’d thought the room was very dark, but as Kathryn flinched from the sensation of something touching her lips, she realized that she was blindfolded, and jerked her head away in surprise and disgust. They must have done when she was unconscious, yes, very brave.
“It’s alright love, it’s the next step since you went after Richmond. Nearly knocked him over, too, and that would have DC’d him for this run. Settle down, it’s just me.” A firm hand pushed her hair out of her face and patted her shoulder.
Kathryn gritted her teeth but did settle as she smelled the antiseptic smell near her face again. “What happens to you if I knock you out?” She asked, and the question helped calm her down, settle her nerves despite having the blindfold on. She didn’t so much as rattle her wrists, had no idea how she was chained. She was seated, and her hands were in front of her, but she knew British Guy was within six inches of her right now, so that was something. He didn’t seem as afraid of her as Richmond had.
He chuckled. “Then they replace me with someone who probably doesn’t mind being round Richmond, whereas I loathe him.”
Kathryn snorted. That could have been a line, solidifying British guy’s place as good cop and Richmond’s as bad, but it felt honest to her, his chuckle and less than professional comment.
She tensed further as he pulled her forward off the chair, she had to be in her chair again, and began to dab at the wounds on her back, but that’s all he did.
“And who’re you?” She asked, more to give herself something to say than really caring about the answer. She thought about his accent, rolling it around in her mind, the way he didn’t ignore his /r/s, but didn’t pay them much attention. “Birmingham?”
He chuckled. “Your accent’s not bad, you know. You’re close, though. Coventry.” He hissed a little, and said, “Sorry in advance, love,” and Kathryn was braced for the absolute wash of pain that overcame her as the antiseptic came into contact with a much fresher wound than the rest, but even so she must have whited out there, because when she came to, she was laying on the ground, her hands all the way out in front of her, superman style.
“Oh fuck,” she gasped, and struggled to sit up, get out of this vulnerable position, but Birmingham was there, gently pushing down on her shoulder. .
“You’re alright love, it’s just me. Didn’t want to put more pressure on your wounds, so I lay you down. I’ll put you back to rights before I leave, don’t fret.”
She rolled her eyes. “If you’re playing Good Cop you’re meant to be a little nice, not all the way nice,” she complained, and if he noticed that her accent had picked up, tilted towards her father’s East London brogue in response to his own accent, he said nothing.
He just hummed in response and patted her hair as she hissed, exhaling pain as he tended to her wounds.
Kathryn had been thinking, anything to give herself something to do, anything to think about except the fire in her back and in her head, the horribly vulnerable position she was in, and the likelihood that she was going to get beaten again in this shit hole, and finally asked, “Is Eastern Europe guy Warsaw?”
Birmingham chuckled and pulled on her shoulder, helping her to her feet as he settled her back in the chair. Kathryn hissed as her bare, sensitive back came into contact with the chair, but there was enough slack in what had to be the chain that ran from the ground to loop around the shackles around her wrists that she could sit forward, in fact her hands were still in front of her. Huh.
She felt Birmingham in front of her, and felt him around her feet, her ankles. A clank of chain there too, and a heaviness round her ankles told her there was a leader chain between floor and ankle restraints.
“Bucharest,” Birmingham’s voice was a deep chuckle as he patted her knee.
Kathryn sighed in frustration. “Fuck those aren’t even close.”
Birmingham was seated near her, she could feel his knee press into hers, and she could feel him chuckle again. “Console yourself with some H2O before Richmond and Glasgow come back in, hm?”
Instead of the straw monstrosity Richmond had shoved into her face, Birmingham pulled one of her hands up and pressed a styrofoam cup into her hand.
Kathryn was so surprised she nearly dropped it, but she brought it to her lips and drank greedily.
Something tugged at her, buzzed at the back of her mind, but it wasn’t until she was clumsily eating a protein bar Birmingham had handed her that she realized what it was, recognized this.
“This isn’t just about the blood draws, is it?” She asked, frowning. “Are you lot recording my rate of healing? Is that why I’m not prone in some bed, that’s what all the sodding steps are for?” She gestured up near her face, the stupid blindfold. “Some kind of scientific study?”
Birmingham was making disagreeing noises. “No, love, that’s not quite-” and he reached up to stop her from yanking the blindfold off.
Kathryn growled at him, tossing her head back in a groan of frustration. “If you’re not trying to condition me and study me, then why tie me up like this?” She wanted to know. “If you’re not trying to interrogate me, why let Richmond add so many lashes?”
As if on cue, the door opened behind Kathryn, and she shoved the protein bar in Birmingham’s general direction. You didn’t need to have experience with something like this like she did to be able to guess she was not going to be able to finish her cement-flavored protein bar just now.
“Good morning, girlie,” Richmond’s voice was a slow drawl that made Kathryn want to put her own eyes out. At least she didn’t have to see his stupid, samey, masked face.
They were still close enough that she heard Birmingham sigh. He ran a hand over her cheek. “Be good, love.”
Kathryn growled at him too, because she did not need that kind of shit right now with Richmond, and at least one other person, whoever it was, in the room.
“Open your mouth,” Richmond drawled, and Kathryn sighed, but did it. She was just feeling almost back to full strength, and hadn’t gotten to eat but half that bar.
Richmond didn’t shove the swab in, just swabbed her cheek, and Kathryn thought they might have had a truce going, as someone else, she didn’t know who because they hadn’t spoken, pulled her wrists out and swabbed the inside of her elbow.
This might have been fine, Richmond snapping the cover on the swab, the other person putting a band around her elbow to get her veins to show up more starkly, if the door hadn’t swung open, and Kathryn hadn’t heard a sharp cry of pain from somewhere outside her cell. It was absolutely a cry of pain, and absolutely female, and the sound of it snapped her right out of whatever warm, hydrated Stockholm Syndrome place Birmingham and her apparent truce with Richmond had left her in.
She knocked whoever was doing the blood draw away from her elbow, driving her palm up into what felt like their nose (they’d been sitting far too close, which made her think it wasn’t Glasgow, who surely would have known better, or even Bucharest, who had also been in the room with one of her lashings out), blood exploding around her hand.
There was a muffled flurry of female curses that were definitely not Glasgow. They sounded Austrailian, actually.
Hands gripped her by the shoulders and slammed her down, trying to shove her into the chair, but Kathryn could tell they were behind her, and drove the back of her head as hard as she could straight back, and heard Richmond swear at her and clip the back of her shoulder with his elbow.
Kathryn drove her knee into Australia’s face as she bent down, stunned and sputtering, but the chain caught her knee before she could do more but sort of collide with Australia.
“Who the hell is that?” Kathryn yelled at them, reaching up and yanking off her blindfold.
She saw a light brown woman’s face near her feet, struggling to right askew sunglasses.
“Melbourne goddamnit get the blood drawn,” Richmond snarled, and before Kathryn could think to raise her hands to defend herself, a blow to the head knocked her out.
Kathryn groaned as she came to. Her back was on fire, felt raw like an open wound and the left side of her temple throbbed with each beat of her heart.
She was hanging by her wrists again, no chair beneath her to stand on, and her ankles were chained and connected to the ground, a blindfold tied over her eyes again. She wouldn’t be kneeing or elbowing anyone like this, that was for sure, and she couldn’t see. Shit.
The door opened behind her, and she flinched at the sound, already dreading it, although if that was for the stirrings of air it caused on her wounds or the fact that it brought people and confrontation, she wasn’t sure.
“It’s alright love,” Birmingham’s voice was pleasant, pitched for her to hear first, but Kathryn could hear him address others, too.
“Nice and easy, lads,” he said, and he moved quickly, followed by two others, to stand in front of her.
“Hello, love, it’s me,” Birmingham said, and he traced a comforting hand down her arm that Kathryn yanked away from.
“How many people have you got here?” She demanded, and her voice was hoarse, like she’d been yelling some more, but didn’t remember it, or hadn’t been conscious for it.
Her stomach twisted and she sneered at Birmingham. “You beat me while I was out? Not really how conditioning works, is it? I gotta be awake for it to matter,” she said, making a disappointed sound in her cheek.
There was a male chuckle, Richmond, at her right elbow, and Kathryn turned her head to spit in his direction, even if she didn’t know exactly where she was. “Fuck off, you arseholes lost the war, didn’t you? So sodding proud of yourselves.” She was furious that one conversation with Birmingham and her thinking about data collection had made her forget she was a prisoner here, that where there was one prisoner there would surely be others. That she was on the Reserve, and her friends were looking for her, so that that meant she had responsibilities to the other people here.
Birmingham swore colorfully and that was all the warning Kathryn got before a blow landed in her stomach.
She vomited, gagging, as she threw up mostly water. She could hear a male voice panting near her, still to her right, and spat another mouthful of bile in his direction. “You hit like a sodding girl R-” she couldn’t even get his name out before he hit her again.
Kathryn had nothing left to throw up, so when her stomach was empty she just coughed, and coughed.
She heard the hoist creak, and that was all the warning she had before she was dumped on her knees, enough slack let out that she could lower her arms. She winced, not having been expecting to need to brace herself, so her knees hit the ground hard, but she was thinking about the next step, about why they might drop her down onto the ground, and so when someone came within arm’s reach of her, she had her mouth open, ready for a bite, or to spit…
But she just felt a hand on her chin as someone crouched very near to her. “Stuff the heroics for thirty seconds, won’t you?” Birmingham’s voice was tight with anger. “You haven’t even been here for twelve whole hours, let them do the bloody draw.”
She tried to yank her head away from his grip, but he moved too quickly, framing either side of her head with his hands flat, forcing her to stay in place.
Kathryn snarled curses at him as she felt hands pull her right arm out and pin it down against the arm of her chair.
Birmingham’s voice was right in front of her face as she growled and tried to pull away from him. “I get that you’re angry, love, but you keep fighting and they’re going to put someone else in charge who’s just going to sedate you until your friends come and pick you up.”
Kathryn heard a chuckle, Richmond, he was holding her arm, and she flinched from his chuckle, from the implication of what that had to mean in context of what Birmingham had said.
She gritted her teeth as someone gripped her cheeks, as a hand reached up and closed her nose.
“You can’t help her if you do this!” Birmingham’s voice called, a little louder over the sounds Kathryn was making to try to dislodge whoever held her nose. “If they knock you out til you’re done, you can’t help anyone!”
That got through to her. She sighed and sagged, opening her mouth.
Whoever was working on getting her to open her mouth stopped suddenly. There was the quick invasion of the swab, then nothing.
She growled as hands still worked at her right arm, disliking the feeling of hands on her.
“Over here, love,” Birmingham said, gently tugging her chin to the left. “You did wonderfully,” he crooned quietly, and when she felt him put a straw near her mouth, she sighed and drank the water, knowing she needed the fluids after throwing up.
Still, when he moved the water away from her, she asked him, “How many lashes they give me when I was out?” Her back felt terrible, one giant wound, throbbing with her heartbeat as she felt the stabbing pinch of the needle in her arm as Richmond and whoever else must have found a vein.
Birmingham ran his hand down her face, smoothing her hair away from her eyes. “Twenty, for bloodying up two people but mostly for pissing Richmond off a second time,” he murmured, just for her, and Kathryn didn’t need her sound mutation to hear the amusement in his voice.
She snorted, and winced as her right arm was released.
She flinched as she felt hands on her right arm again, but Birmingham was making little shushing noises. “Did so good, love.” He murmured, and he was rubbing circulation back into her arm, avoiding the bruises that had been left behind.
Kathryn shuddered and had to choke back a sob that ran through her chest as he pulled her arms over her chest as best she could. She pulled her hands away from him as the full, terrible realization of all of this hit her. “Sod off,” she breathed, ignoring the tears that leaked down her face. “At least the Bad Cop’s honest. Honestly fuck off,” she hiccuped, trying to raise her hands to push him away.
Birmingham snorted, and Kathryn felt the bottom drop out of her stomach as the same voice, changed drastically in tone. “You know love, it’s quite refreshing to see someone going through as much as you are keep her eye on the prize.”
She choked on a terrible sound that was half sob, half laugh. “So glad to entertain,” she said, and at least there was enough length in the chain that she could lean her elbows on her knees and put her head in her hands, trying to collect herself, to get a grip. “So you usually the Bad Cop then, hm Birmingham?” She asked, unable to stop herself. Even knowing what this was, she couldn’t stop from talking. The moment she shut up was the moment she’d start to lose her mind, she knew.
He snorted, and Kathryn shuddered hard as his hand came up to push her hair from her face even in the way she sat, even after her realization. “I’m whoever’s needed,” he said reasonably. He didn’t seem to be upset,that she’d cottoned on, that they were having this conversation.
Kathryn, dimly, recognized his calmness in the face of her realizing the plan as a very bad sign, but she was too busy talking, keeping the conversation going, to notice right then. “Oh yeah?” She asked. “Who are you right now, then?” She asked, her tone twisting, becoming dark and harsh, so much so that even he froze for a moment as he reached up again to smooth hair off of her face.
He recovered after an instant, and seemed to smooth her hair back again, for emphasis, as if just to say he had not, actually, as a matter of fact, been caught off guard by her words, but she knew better, she knew what had happened. “I’m the bloke keeping this site profitable while you’re here,” he said, and he planted a gentle kiss on her cheek as he levered himself to his feet with a grunt of effort.
Kathryn shuddered at his words, but they were honest, at least, which she appreciated, she could work with. He even left her chains the way they were, so she almost slept comfortably, and was asleep before she heard the door open behind her.
She heard another cry from behind her, from the hallway as the soft tread of boots filled her cell, and she flinched, standing in an instant even if her wrists were connected to the same loop that held her ankles, so she couldn’t stand all the way up, but she could twist at this angle to angle her face towards the sound. This cry was deeper, but just as full of pain as the first she’d heard.
She yelled back, the drive to do so completely instinctive. Kathryn didn’t think, just shouted, “I’m Kathryn! I-” And she heard a flurry of sound, a “-Dan!” and then everything went black.
Kathryn gasped as she awoke, because her back was still raw, but she saw stars as the gasp at her back still hurting the same as it has the last time she awoke made pain slice through her ribs. She tried to hunch over, protect her torso, but her shoulders were on fire, she was suspended up in the air again, ankles connected to the ground, but she was hoisted high enough in the air that she couldn’t touch the ground. “Fuck,” she murmured. This was really bad. She hadn’t even realized anyone was in the room with her, and they’d knocked her clean out.
“All you had to do was not shout your name.” Birmingham’s voice was so close she flinched, surprised.
He ran a hand down her arm and her back, carefully avoiding her fresh wounds there.
Kathryn flinched from his touch. “Fuck off,” she breathed, wincing, her tone emphatic but not loud. His touch, his actions, were so different from Richmond, who was surely the designated Bad Cop, that it freaked her out more than her initial realization of their roles had.
He chuckled. “If you hadn’t literally pointed out my role here, or if you stopped fucking around and making such a mess for even a single draw, I would,” he said, and again, Kathryn felt the truth in his words even as she bit back another shudder as he gentled down her other arm and side of her body.
“Why are you doing this?” She asked through gritted teeth, trying to stop her shakes and unable to do so as he ran his hand over her hair, down her back, over her arms. It was all wholly nonsexual, which made it even harder to calm herself down. Why was he doing this? The shaking in her arms made her realize that her arms were tender, that the air hurt her arms as much as it hurt her back. She was bruised to shit, and injured enough elsewhere that the bruises were no longer healing. Dehydrated, malnourished, too, probably, all factors which slowed her healing mutation down to a crawl. She wouln’t die of sepsis, but she also wouldn’t get better with any speed. Shit
“I told you darling, my job is just to keep this place afloat while you’re here. Since you’ve found me out, I’m not going to lie to you any more. Of that, you have my word.” His voice was a quiet lilt, and he chuckled as she swore at him.
He seemed about to say more, but the door opened behind her, and she immediately felt a hard hand press against her mouth.
Kathryn knew this trick, and had her jaw open wide, and found an edge of Birmingham’s hand and bit down, hard.
He swore fluently, and she was willing to guess that his real accent was the Birmingham accent she kept hearing, because it was almost impossible to keep a fake accent when you were in that kind of startled-pain, she knew from experience.
And then a hand hit her right in her solar plexus, and things shattered and broke insdie her and she was writhing and contracting and unable to draw breath like her lungs had forgotten how to breathe and she was gasping, no air, gasping, gasping...and something hit her again, like a freight train she felt things splinter and break but at leastshe could breathe, was sucking in shredded, gasping breaths and then someone grabbed her face.
“I appreciate the foreplay, darling,” Birmingham’s voice was a little ragged, but still amused. She felt his blood on her chin, from his hand where he grabbed her and where she’d bitten him, and grinned at him, knowing how close he had to be, able to feel his body heat in front of her. “And I do hope it’s worth it.”
She hardly had any slack in the chains, but he was hanging onto her, giving her a sense of how far away he was, and so she was able to move in by using his grip on her to pull herself forward, so she could plant a sloppy kiss on his temple. “Thank you for the foreplay, darling,” she mimicked, rubbing his blood from her chin onto him the best she could.
She heard him swear again, and people must have come into the room, but she didn’t hear a whip. Instead, pain exploded around her knees in two white-hot bursts that crunched sickeningly, hotter than the sun and twice as blinding.
Kathryn had not experienced this pain in a long time, and these catastrophic, torrential injuries being added to the injuries she already had, and her central nervous system blessedly tapped out for her. She passed out.
She came to with a sob as pain woke her up. She felt like her legs were being pulled apart at the knee. She still couldn’t see, but she could feel blood dripping down her legs. Fuck.
She tried to make a list, and spoke out loud for the desire to get out of her own head. Not being able to see was awful, and speaking would be something she could set against that.. “Whippings, 35 lashes, I think, over what has maybe been an eight hour period?” Kathryn wasn’t sure about this math, but it was close enough for now. “At least one blow to the head, no actually make that two, no, three, if we’re including the blow that got me here.” She sucked in a breath as she cast her mind back. There was a lot to inventory. “One stun baton, had ribs burised, at lesat, and my knees had been, what, shot out?” She shook her head. There had been no rapport of gunfire. “Fractured at least, no way to know the damage right now, without being able to see them.” She sighed, but she was close to the end of her inventory, might as well finish. “There had been three blood drawings. At six per day, with an organized schedule, that assumes one every four hours, which argues for at least twelve hours.” She sighed, because her arms were even more tender than they had been. “Add at least one more draw, so 16 total hours, possibly several more.”
“It’s the worst beating I’ve ever seen,” Birmingham’s voice was low and interested wasn’t the right word, but it was close. She flinched at the fact that he must have been in the room this entire time.
He was seated below her, in her old chair maybe, as she was still being pulled in two directions, it felt like.
She snorted. “Not even the worse beating I’ve gotten in a place like this,” she scoffed, because it was true, probably, technically. She couldn’t quite remember, but the bravado felt good, helped to ground her and helped her feel more settled, blindfold, injuries, and all.
She felt Birmingham’s hand on her torso, and whimpered before she could stop herself. She could feel the painful flesh under his fingers, practically feel her bones move and grate against each other. “You’re gonna feel like an ass if I puncture a lung,” she gasped, remembering a training session with Miller where they’d nearly done just that.
Birmingham chuckled, and she thought she knew what he was going to say, she’d participated in this play before but then he said, “Doesn’t matter to me if you puncture anything, love,” he said, smoothing back her hair from her face in a way that had become very familiar, but was incredibly jarring as his words shook her entire thought process of why she was here completely apart. “You’re just here til your friends follow all the clues.”
Kathryn gasped, because this had not felt like her last experience with a place...like this, but to hear him say so was very upsetting. “What clues?” She asked, because any words, any questions, were better than the reality of what he implied. She ignored it, it was too terrible even to consider.
She flinched as she felt hands near her face, thinking they were coming for her mouth, but the blindfold was tugged off her eyes.
Kathryn whimpered at the suddenness, at the fact that he was so close to her he could take something off her face, and at the newness of sensation after...however the hell long it had been with that fucking thing on, but Birmingham was running his hand down the side of her face, making little shushing noises. “It’s alright love. I wanted you to at least be able to look me in the eye when I said this, because I don’t think you’ll believe me, and I really dont’ think you ought to take any more punishment right now.
Kathryn’s chest heaved at his words, but all that left her mouth was a choked little laugh. “You don’t, do you?”
Birmingham had her blindfold gathered in one gloved hand, and he used that hand to take off his sunglasses. He was a white man, maybe a little older than Kathryn based on the laugh lines around his eyes, with otherwise healthy looking skin with no identifying marks she could see. He had unusual eyes, which made her breath catch in her throat because they were quite identifying. His right eye was light green, lighter than her own dark green, and his left eye was light blue. The overall effect was grey, but they were not the same color.
He was standing very close to her, to allow her to examine his face, and she saw the corners of his eyes crinkle and wrinkles at the edge of his nose crinkle, in what was clearly a smile, as she seemed to finish her examination. “Very good, darling,” he said, as if they’d come to some kind of agreement, running his hand down her face and brushing his thumb across her lips before turning away from her, seemingly looking for something.
Kathryn shuddered, muttering, “Fuck,” as he seemed to come to some kind of decision, abandoning, what, his search for her chair? She had no idea where it had gone, nor the stool he’d sat on when she’d first woken up here.
He turned back to her, still standing within arm’s reach, still smiling up at her. “You’re not here to be interrogated, or tortured, and although the blood and saliva samples are a helpful bonus, they’re not why you’re here, either, love.”
Kathryn stared at him, her mouth falling open a little, because that made no sense. “What clues?” She repeated the last question that had come to mind, forcing herself to have something to say, to continue to collect information collect information. She watched him hungrily, so grateful to have her eyes back, to be able to process data visually as well as auditorily.
He shrugged, seemingly taking his fill just watching her. He reached up and ran his hand over her cheek and jaw, seemingly just because he could, ignoring the shudder that ran through her at his touch, before dropping his hand again. “Dunno. Our employer was extremely specific about the conditions you were to be held in, though, very specific about other instructions he’s given us about you, darling, but once we hear the message we’re waiting on from your friends, we’re to let you go.”
Kathryn flinched from his words, shaking her head at him. “You’re lying.”
Birmingham got right into her face, moving within six inches of her, and even though she was suspended in the air, above the ground, he was still a little taller than she was, just a few inches. “I’m not,” he said, his words crisp, maybe irritated, in a way they had not been thus far. He grabbed her chin. “I gave you my word that I wouldn’t lie to you more, love.” He seemed to think this was a bit too harsh, because he released her chin and ran that hand down her face, thumb over her lips.
Kathryn shuddered, looking away from him, her chest heaving as tears sprung to her eyes. “You said it doesn’t matter, if I puncture a lung. Does your employer want me dead?” There was quite a bit of evidence against this, but she was curious. She wanted as much information on who was actually in charge here. She believed Birmingham, for now. There was just too much that didn’t make sense, otherwise.
He shook his head, tracing the other side of his face with his hand now, running his fingers through her hair, making her shudder involuntarily as his fingers brushed against a wound on her head, making pain shoot down her spine and through her skull.
He muffled a curse. “Shite, sorry love,” he said, and he seemed genuinely sorry, adjusting his hand so the next time he ran his fingers through her hair, he would not hit the wound he’d hit. “No, they don’t, but I haven’t got any more information about what they want, ultimately, just what they needed us to do.”
Kathryn shuddered, a sob fighting its way out of her chest, and did not fight it. It didn’t matter what she did here. She believed Birmingham, and so that meant that all of these injuries had absolutely been for nothing. She shuddered, and then could not stop, and began to cry, huge sobs that made her ribs and back ache, that made her shake so her legs were shaking, and she didn’t know what would happen, if she’d shake herself apart with crying, or if they’d come back in to hurt her some more.
Instead, she felt gentle hands on her face, in her hair, down the undamaged parts of her back, gentle along her arms.
Kathryn automatically felt her crying subsiding under the soothing touch, thought at first she must have fallen asleep, until she heard a muttered, “No, it’s under control,” and realized she was not asleep.
She flinched from the hand that was still running up and down her arm and opened her eyes to see Birmingham talking on a radio of some kind, and she felt like throwing up as she realized he’d very deliberately taken the white gloves off everyone else used here.
“What the fuck?” She demanded, trying and unable to draw her arms away from him, the cuffs were too tight above her, but she could and did move her head away from him as he circled so he was standing in front of her. “Put that shit back on, it’s to keep me disoriented about who my captors are, you fucking idiot,” she snapped, her tone staccato and shuddering. She learned something about why she was here, and he immediately fucked that up with...whatever he was doing. It was making her angry, pissed at him, and she clung to that anger, as it gave her somewhere productive to go with her emotions.
He chuckled up at her, running his hand down her face and thumb across her lip. He showed her his left hand, the clear bite mark in the meat of his left hand, with tidy stitches between his ring and pinky fingers. “I know,” he said with a shrug, “But you’re the most interesting mark I’ve had in ages, and me and you, we’re connected.” He tapped his temple, covered at least by the hood he still had pulled up over his hair.
She shuddered again, shaking her head, turning away from him. “Sod off. This is a psychological trick mean to-” her words cut off as he grabbed her chin and forced her to look at him.
“I said I was not going to lie to you, love,” he breathed, running his thumb over her mouth before letting her go. He drew a knife from the pocket of his pants, and Kathryn couldn’t stop the whimper in her throat. That knife was nearly as long as her forearm, and meant business. Normally, knives could not stop her, but she was so ground up from this place that it could kill her.
He’d also just said his employer did not care what condition she was in…
Birmingham shook his head, shushing her and running his hand down her face and thumb over her lips. “This isn’t for you, darling, look,” he said, and tugged on her chin so she was forced to look watch as he easily, one-handed, opened the butterfly knife, and swiftly drove it into his own arm.
She gasped at the blood that sprayed her and his pristine white mask, but Birmingham had barely drawn the knife from his arm before the wound began to close.
She stared at the wound as it closed, looking for a trick, but all she saw was a very similar hair-thin white scar on his arm where there had just seconds before been a gaping flesh wound. He wiped the knife onto his trouser leg, closed it, and replaced it in his pocket.
“Told you, love, we’re connected,” he said, moving closer to push her hair away from her face, soothe it down the back of her head and her neck.
Kathryn shuddered, but couldn’t help the sob that escaped her lips at the comfort, even if she knew it was false. She felt tears on her cheeks and mucus on her face as she struggled to speak. “I haven’t-” she began, and flinched as he moved quickly in front of her, as something was raised to her face. It was a handkerchief he was raising to her nose, very gently. “Blow,” he ordered, very much in the tone of father to child than captor to captive. She grimaced at the comparison, because how had things gone from worse to better to worse so quickly?
She obeyed, because she did need to blow her nose, after all, and she fully believed, now, that she would not be let down from here until the contract was done. He even moved the hankerchief to a different spot once she’d blown her nose and gently wiped her face and under her eyes.
Kathryn felt a lump in her throat she was fairly sure was never going to go away, but she didn’t ask the question she wanted to ask. Instead, she cleared her throat, not removing the lump there but feeling better about the attempt. “I haven’t met anyone with a healing mutation like me since I was at the last place like this I’ve been.”
A high pitched beeping sound emitted from somewhere below her, and Kathryn winced, but Birmingham quickly silenced the alarm on his watch and moved around on the floor beneath her, rummaging for things she could not see, before returning with a giant plastic container of water with a massive straw.
He held it up near her face and she drank until he took it away, could have had more.
He clicked his tongue, seemingly in sympathy. “I know love, but they’re going to be back in three hours to beat on you some more, and so I’d rather try to rehydrate you in small steps, not big ones, to increase the chances you keep it down.”
Kathryn shuddered involuntarily at his words and the extremely casual mention of severe pain in them, a series of shakes that just kept continuing until she felt his hand on her face, and stilled somewhat at the now familiar movements, thumb on her lips, hand down her scalp, over her shoulders, and the backs of her arms, gently over her sides.
“Are you really this bored?” She wanted to know as he turned back to set the water down and reached for something else.
He straightened with an IV needle and bag, and she flinched from him, but he made shushing noises at her. “You desperately need fuel to rebuild yourself, and you’re not allowed solids anymore, so please let me help you.” His expression was level, and his words about what she was not allowed sounded like they were from his employer.
She sneered at him. “I’m a prisoner here,” she deadpanned, as if he needed a reminder, or as if she did. It was more out of irritation that he’d even asked. “I can’t give consent for anything in this fucking place.” It did feel good, a little, to feel some of her anger kick back in.
The corners of the edges of his eyes were very tender as he moved closer and placed a kiss on her cheek, running his hand down her face and finger over her lips. She shuddered, but not as much as she had done at such intrusions before, which just made her angrier.
She felt the whine of the motor of the hoist, and it took her brain a moment too long to realize what that sound was, what it meant, and she cried out in pain as he feet brushed the floor.
She was choking on a sob as she tried to use her abdominal muscles to pull her legs off the floor as the hoist lowered her all the way to the ground. She relaxed a little as her butt hit the ground, and she could gently lower her abused legs to the ground, but she still winced as her heels hit, because it sent vibrations and radiations straight through her knees, making her eyes water and a sob leave her throat in earnest. Fuck…
She couldn’t even lay on her back, because it was still cut up.
Kathryn didn’t realize that her eyes had closed, or that tears stood on her cheeks, until Birmingham crouched next to her and wiped the tears away, carefully, as careful as all of the touching.
She didn’t try to fight him as he put in the IV and attached the bag to the chain that connected her wrist shackles to the hoist, although she did smile a little as he made a show of not putting his left hand within reach of her mouth as he wiped off her hands and arms.
She swore a little, because her arms looked terrible, like she was a drug addict, were swollen and lumpy, black and purple and blues of deep bruising. She was sure her abdomen, and knees for sure, but her back as well probably, were worse. Kathryn was suddenly ver grateful that she couldn’t see her knees under the jeans she wore, or her back. She wasn’t sure she could handle seeing whatever mincemeat she looked like right now.
He had wiped her hands, face, and feet down when he paused, and frowned at his watch as an alarm went off again. He grabbed the bottle and she drank as much water as he would let her, before he set it aside again.
She felt exhausted, drugged, and struggled to keep her eyes open as she looked at him. Apparently, accusation was clear on her face.
“I would never,” he said, putting a hand on his chest as if offended.
Kathryn snorted rudely.
He shrugged. “I’d never do such a thing without being paid handsomely for it,” he amended, grinning and patting her cheek and rubbing his thumb across her lips.
Kathryn sighed as he pulled his hand away, she grimaced as she recognized the emotion she’d just felt. She glared at him, feeling something like a snarl pull her lips up. “Are you being paid to do this, or just a pervert, taking advantage of a helpless woman?” She hissed as he grabbed a new baby wipe and seemed to be deciding which leg to clean of blood and grime first.
He looked up at her sharply, and he was so close to her, she thought she could hear him give a hiss of protest as he considered her words.
He seemed to think for a moment, eyes flashing, before he swiftly moved closer to her, and since she was no longer chained up, but chained down, her wrist restraints and ankle cuffs connected to the chain on the ground, she had nowhere to go as he loomed over her as she sat with her injured legs straight out before her. He seemed to be thinking hard, patting in his pockets for something with his hand that was further away from her while running his hand down her face and thumb over her lips with the other.
Kathryn heard a clank of chain and realized that without thinking about it, she’d tried to bring her hands up to stop him, stop whatever was about to happen, but the chain was too short. She couldn’t get her hands above her heart.
While she was distracted, Birmingham seemed to have found what he wanted, because he leaned into her space and instead of touching her face like he’d done countless times, he pried her mouth open and crammed something, she choked, it was a piece of cloth, into her mouth, covering her mouth with his right hand this time as she struggled to spit out whatever the hell, yuck...
She swore and tried to stop him, to fight him off, but the attack was too sudden and too forceful. She had tears standing in her eyes as he reached back to the kit that looked a lot like a fishing tackle box she could see sitting on the ground next to him and peeled off a piece of duct tape and placed it over the gag he’d put in her mouth.
Kathryn’s chest was heaving as she stared at him, flinty eyed. She bit down on the cloth in her mouth and glared at him, trying to get the gag out of the way of her tongue so she could speak, but she couldn’t. She didn’t even realize she had tears standing in her eyes as she glared at him, anger feeling like it burned her up from the inside. This was so stupid, what was she even thinking...
He made a little tutting sound, as if he could hear her thoughts, and wiped the tears that had fallen down her cheeks away, glancing down, Kathryn flinched as he seemingly reached for something else in his pockets, but he was just shutting off the radio she’d heard him use.
He made little shushing sounds, wiping away more tears that had spilled, running his hand down her face and thumb across her lips, shaking his head as this made her more upset. “I apologize, but I didn’t want you calling me out for what I’m about to say, as it could get me in fairly serious trouble.” His expression was clear, but she did see the corners of his eyes tighten at the effect his gagging her had had on her. She shook her head a little, not at his words, but at herself, shaking off her thoughts. He had just gagged her, she reminded herself. She did not care what he was feeling, she reminded herself. Get a grip.
He reached forward and ran his hand down the side of her face and thumb across her lips, as if unable to stop himself, before taking a shuddering breath and saying, “Look, I’m not bored, or, or...” he got stuck on the word, apparently, Kathryn was surprised to see, needing two more tries before he could spit out, “a pervert, alright? I’m just thinking you might join us, after all this is said and done.”
She snorted and rolled her eyes at him, calling him terrible names around the gag in her mouth.
He shrugged and smiled fondly at her. “You say that now, pet, but our employer has a lot of plans for you and your friends. Who knows how things turn out after all that?”
Kathryn snorted, shaking her head at him. She had a lot she wanted to say, about the Reserve, and her friends, and what she thought about his stupid employer, but she could articulate none of it with the gag in her mouth, and trying to talk was making her drool.
Birmingham was within arm’s reach of her, but he moved closer, automatically caressing her cheek and swiping tears away from under her eyes. “I know it seems impossible, but I sat where you’re sitting,” he breathed, his voice so low as to be inaudible to anyone who would just be coming into the room, with her body between him and the door.
Her eyes widened in surprise, confusion.
He shrugged, equivocating a little. “Well, not exactly where you’re sitting, of course, but someone hired these people to grab me, before I worked for them.”
She sneered at him, calling him all kinds of terrible names, and he seemed to expect this, patting the air in a placating gesture.
“I know, I wouldn’t have believed it either, but,” he drew in a shuddering breath that Kathryn, watching his face, watching as he drew his eyes away from hers, did not think this emotion on his part was feigned. “Fortunes change fast.” He looked back up at her then, gray eyes seeming to bore into hers. “I just want you to know you’ve always got a place to go.” He reached up to caress her face, running his thumb across her lips, and leaned forward to kiss her cheek, holding onto her face as she tried to pull away, and then he breathed, “New York. 2551 Crescent. Code’s august, 87-67-05” into her skin as he kissed her cheek, then up into her hair as he spoke.
Kathryn’s chest was heaving as he pulled away, smiling gently and running his hand down her face again, his thumb across her lips, as if to seal his words into her mind.
She felt like his words were seared into her brain, like he’d stamped them there the same way he ran his calloused thumb across her lips, but she didn’t know if the brand was the healing heat of a cauterized wound, or the searing fire of agony, had no idea where her thoughts were jumping to, she was so surprised by his words.
The door opened, and she flinched away from it automatically, into Birmingham, a sob tearing its way out of her throat as, unbidden, she imagined getting her elbows broke this time.
“The hell is this?” Richmond asked. “Directives were very specific, Birmingham.”
Birmingham patted her on the cheek as he disengantlged himself from her, thumb swiping across her lips before he was gone, moving around her to stand. “Because you have better things to be doing now, Richmond, is that it?”
Richmond snorted, and Kathryn wondered to what extent Richmond and Birmingham played bad cop and good cop roles out of planning, or out of necessity given their seemingly opposite personalities, vinegar and honey.
(Stop it, Kathryn ordered herself. Stop romanticizing-)
As if he could feel her thinking, She felt a booted foot nudge her in the back. “How’d you feel, girlie?” Richmond wanted to know.
Kathryn swore at him, but froze as she realized Birmingham had not removed the gag from her mouth. Hadn’t wanted to risk her blabbing his words to his coworkers? Or for some other reason? Her heart pounded in her throat as Richmond seemed to realize she was gagged, moving to stand over her to peer at her.
He chuckled, and shrugged, putting his free hand in the air as the other held a kit. “Hey, whatever, man. Do what you gotta do, huh.” He leaned his leg against Kathryn’s back Kathryn as he stepped back over her, and she shuddered away from it, because his tone and words were very different from Birmingham’s, and she did not like it, no matter what she did or did not feel about either one of them.
The door closed, and Kathryn flinched away from movement in front of her.
Birmingham was settling back down on the floor, watching her closely.
She stared back, unable to plead her case that she would keep her mouth shut while she was still unable to speak.
Still, something must have shown on her face, because he rolled his eyes and, while one hand caressed the side of her face, the other eased off the tape enough to let him draw out the gag. She tried to spit it at him, but ended up coughing instead
She coughed once more, then swore colorfully at him for doing that to her. “Ought to gag you while Richmond’s around, see what you think about it,” she grumbled, and as much as she wanted to refuse the water he offered, she didn’t.
“That is the opposite of foreplay,” he deadpanned, and his tone was so serious otherwise that she flinched a little as she looked up at him as she sipped water, but his eyes were dancing. He was making a smutty joke, she realized with jolt, and he suddenly sounded so much like her friend Ollie that Kathryn shuddered, choked a little and nearly aspirated water right back up.
“You’re not supposed to joke that way with your female captives,” she said, coughing a little but smiling nonetheless. “Didn’t they teach you that at asshole captor school?”
He snorted a little, but didn’t take the water in retaliation for the insult like she thought he would. He shrugged. “Might as well not make smutty jokes, especially about Richmond, around any of the captives, regardless of gender,” he muttered, seemingly to himself, as he reached down to pick up something from the floor and tuck it behind him into his kit.
His watch timer went off, and she handed him the water back automatically, but she was staring at him, at the way lines tightened around his nose at the sudden shift in conversation, at the way he himself had shifted the conversation, actually, now that she thought about it, and at the way he looked away from her as he took the water bottle. “He really is a pervert, isn’t he?” She wanted to know, her voice low and intent as she watched what part of his face she could see.
Birmingham looked up at her, sharply, but the door opened before he could say anything.
On impulse (whatever crazy impulse had gotten her here, so whatever), Kathryn reached over and grabbed the gag from him, cramming it into her mouth before pressing the tape back down over her lips.
He ran his hand down the side of her face, running his thumb over her lips as he got to his feet, but Kathryn turned to see that Richmond, and someone else had come in.
She heard someone else moving behind her, and Kathryn sighed as the hoist pulled on her wrists. Richmond moved around and unclipped her wrist restraints from the floor.
“You’re needed in A7,” Richmond said, and Kathryn felt her blood run cold even as she thought, at least this time she was conscious as the hoisting happened, able to stand up, slowly, carefully with the movement of it. It felt good to stretch her legs. The water and the IV were doing her a lot of good. Her knees were painful, but they no longer felt like gravel and ground glass. Her back ached, but no longer felt like ground meat.
Richmond was adjusting her chains, making sure they were connected to the floor, and Birmingham, kit closed and in one hand, caressed the side of her face, running his thumb over her lips.
Did Kathryn imagine it, or did he look at her, glance at Richmond, and glance back at her, before he left? She had no idea, but it set her teeth on edge, the not knowing.
She knew that the feeling she had of trusting Birmingham, whatever his motivations, were false, created, structured. He’d admitted as much. She also knew that Richmond was clearly the bad cop here, and so any of whatever she thought was going on could, and probably was, a set up for that continued psychological payoff, a compelling narrative to lull her into, to assure her compliance while she was here and…
But the good cop bad cop routine was used in interrogations, when intelligence needed to be gathered. Stupid as she surely was for it, Kathryn believed what Birmingham had said about his employer, about this not being an information grab, but a holding pattern until some mystery asshole’s conditions were met.
“What’s the IV for?” It was Australia’s light voice Kathryn heard behind her, who had come into the room.
Richmond reached up, and Kathryn grimaced as he pressed himself against her, chest to thigh, as she tried to lean away from him.
“Hey, hold the fuck still,” he snapped, grabbing her by the face, hand over her mouth, fingers grabbing her left cheek, thumb grabbing her right cheek to get her attention.
Kathryn did, because he was so close to her that his gesture to grab her had made him move against her, all the way down to her knees knocking against his, and it hurt like hell. Maybe she wasn’t as recovered as she’d thought.
“She got beat so bad Birmingham took pity on her,” Richmond called with a snort, looking right down into her face as he said it. He still wore his sunglasses, so she could tell nothing about him except that he, too, was white. Still, something in his tone was not at all nice, made Birmingham’s name and the word ‘pity’ into something foul.
“Isn’t that contraindicated by the directives?” Australia wanted to know, her voice a nervous flutter behind Kathryn. If she picked up on Richmond’s innuendo, she said nothing.
Richmond still held Kathryn by the face as he smirked down at her. He was much stockier than Birmingham, and just about as tall, which was only an inch or two taller than Kathryn, max. “So is the gag, but I’m not gonna fuss, you?”
Kathryn was suddenly glad the gag hid her expression because she knew men like Richmond, knew that outside of his role, this was who he was, what she was seeing.
There was a grimace on her face as she came to this realization, and she was glad he could not see her expression, glad he could not easily see as the lightbulb went off in her head. ‘Got you.’
He was bullying the more timid Australia, bullying her into bending the rules as he was, and he was bullying Kathryn herself because he could, because he liked it. She knew this kind of man, this kind of person, and Birmingham’s comment flashed in her mind, helping her put all the pieces together in a flash of insight so hot it seemed to burn white hot through her mind.
A moment before it happened, as Richmond trailed his free hand up her leg, her abdomen, tracing patterns up her throat, she knew what was going to happen as he traced the shape of the tape across her lips and pressed a hard kiss down over it, pressing his body more tightly against hers as the chains on her ankles and wrists prevented her from moving. But the chains did not stop her head from moving.
Kathryn was ready, could feel his grip on her face go slack as he tensed with other parts of his body. She slammed her head forward into his face, bloodying his nose for what, the second time in as many days? which he had brought far too close to her, lulled by her more vulnerable position since she had been in that chair.
Blood exploded in front of her as she heard, and felt, bone crack, in him. If you had practice headbutting, as she did, it wasn’t hard to mash the very hard plate of bone that was the forehead into the much more sensitive mess of cartilage and bone that was a person’s nose.
He swore and his knee knocked against hers as he backhanded her, and Kathryn screamed as her barely healed knee erupted in agony.
His mask was a mess of blood and gore and his sunglasses had fallen off as he hit her again, and again, and Kathryn was idly interested that he’d gone into punches rather than stay with the backhanding.
He yanked the tape off her mouth, after hitting her in the stomach, pulled the gag from her mouth, and kissed her, bruising her lips before she could bite him.
She swore at him, using every filthy word she’d ever heard in every language she knew, and he promised her terrible things, ‘later.’
It was just punches after that, though, until he caught her once in the face with a huge blow that split her lower lip, her right eyebrow, and cracked her orbital bone.
He must have felt bone crack, or just needed a break, because he paused, chest heaving. He moved forward enough to tip her chin up, to see the damage he’d done, Kathryn guessed he’d want to inspect his work, and so she was ready, spraying his face, and more importantly, his uncovered eyes, with blood.
He sputtered in indignation, tugging up his mask to wipe away her blood, and when the mask now lay too loosely to conceal his face, he just sneered at her, yanking the mask off and throwing it onto the ground.
He was a white man in his late fifties, maybe younger. It was hard to tell with all the blood she’d sprayed on him. He had ice blue eyes and was tanned, with a faint line in a line from the corners of his eyes to over his ears that meant he wore sunglasses often in the sun. He had a scar on his upper lip and another in the side of his neck. He had high cheekbones, and might have been handsome if he weren’t such a black-hearted bastard.
Kathryn was working up to another mouthful of blood, but he moved aside and grabbed her mouth as he’d done before, not letting her spit up on anything but his hand. He dug his fingers into her cheeks, forcing her to spit up her mouthful.
He wiped his handful of spit and blood onto her shoulder, before hitting her again, so hard she saw stars, across the other cheek.
This one wasn’t angled as correctly, so her other eyebrow split and although she could feel that he’d blackened her eye, the bone under that eye didn’t crack. She clicked her tongue at him as he took a step back, out of spitting range, reaching for something in his kit.
Kathryn was panting, but she felt better than she had since Birmingham had told her that there was nothing they wanted from her. That might have been true, Birmingham might not want anything from her, or whatever he did want was confusing to her, nebulous, some future offer, some future promise that one day she would be like him.
But Richmond absolutely wanted something from her, something that had nothing to do with the role he might have been assigned to play, and more to do with the role he played here, because he could.
Kathryn had been dealing with Richmond’s kind of bully for a long time. She scowled as something rose to the surface of her memory and connected with a comment of Birmingham’s. “You do this to Dan, too?” That had been the strangled voice she’d heard, when the door had been opened, whose name she’d heard, who she’d called out to
She was rewarded with real shock, then pleased malice on Richmond’s face at her question. She could see his entire expression, from the slight widening of his eyes as they dartedto something near the door, to a tiny, cruel smile on his lips, and she wasn’t sure if she was pleased or very upset to see that her instinct had been right.
He darted forward and grabbed her mouth again, pulling her towards him into a horrible kiss. Kathryn muffled curses into his mouth as he grabbed her by the back of the neck to deepen the kiss, and she wished her ankle chain were just a bit longer...she was so close to being able to knee him, but couldn’t quite do it, so she settled on trying to yank her body up on the chains so she could drive her elbow into his back when...
A high pitched alarm went off, and she was not surprised when Richmond glanced automatically at the watch on his free hand. He swore colorfully, but let her go and set about packing up his kit.
He kissed her again on his way out, putting his hand over her mouth to stop her spitting on him, but she got in what she wanted to say before he left her line of sight. “I am going to kill you,” she breathed, threat and promise.
He hitched a shoulder, but didn’t comment further. She sighed as the door swung open, letting her eyes close, and flinched with a cry of surprise as a hand ran down along her face and a thumb brushed over her lip, but by the end of the gesture she recognized who it had to be, and she had begun to shake so hard she could hardly see straight.
Kathryn couldn’t help it, she let out a sob of relief at seeing Birmingham’s face, his sunglasses perched atop his head and his gray gaze taking her in. She watched as he seemed to inventory her new injuries, and clicked his tongue at what he found.
He lowered her to the floor like before, but it wasn’t until he was running his hands over her head, arms, legs, that she sobbed again, began to cry in earnest, tension begining to ease from her body. “You should see the other guy,” she said, her head in her hands.
Birmingham shushed her, brushing the hair out of her face.
She felt something against her hands, and flinched, but he just offered the water bottle. She sipped, and there was no alarm this time. She frowned at him, but he shook his head a little so she didn’t ask. She set the water bottle down when she was full, and startled, but didn’t say anything as Birmingham detached the IV line from the empty bag above her, and replaced it with a new one.
He was cleaning her up, running antiseptic wipes along her hands, arms, torso, and face, making little sympathetic shushing noises at the cuts in her face, and he even put a bandage on the cut in her face, helping to close her poor cracked orbital bone, before running gentle, careful hands over her.
He had moved much closer to her over the course of his treatment, and as he wiped antiseptic down her back, shushing her as she made pained noises, he reached up to caress her face, ran his thumb across her lips, and breathed, “You got him to admit what he did to Jordan. His hurting them was not a directive from the employer. Richmond’s in very deep shit, thanks to you,” into her ear.
Kathryn shuddered at his words, because there was a lot to take in there, and she leaned into Birmingham as he murmured compliments and tried to let him assure her that she’d done okay, that something here had not been for nothing.
She must have dozed, but when she woke, Birmingham was still there. He seemed to be reading something on a tablet that was on the other side of his legs from her, blocked from her view.
Birmingham shushed her, running soothing hands over her as she woke, but Kathryn had other plans.”That gag was contraindicated,” she breathed, keeping her voice to below a whisper. There was apparently a camera somewhere in the room, by the door, if she had to guess, based on the way Birmingham had placed himself so far, with her always between him and the door.
He chuckled and caressed her face, running his thumb across her lips. “You’re not going to tell on me, are you love?”
Kathryn gave a shuddering sob of a laugh, because no, obviously, she was not. She was off the deep end, so off the deep end she didn’t know where that left her, so no, she was not going to rat him out.
“I am so susceptible to this shit and I am just so tired of it,” she sighed, not even caring that she rested her head on Birmingham’s shoulder, and that he not only hadn’t prevented it, but was gently rubbing her back in careful little circles that didn’t intersect with any injuries.
He chuckled. “Don’t you reckon those healing mutations make us even more susceptible to this kind of shite than regular people?” He mused, running his hand through her hair.
Kathryn sighed, but instead of answering, she heard herself ask, “Did you hit me in the solar plexus?”
There was a pause, before he simply said, “Yes.”
Kathryn nodded. She’d thought he had, the timing made sense, but she’d been curious if he’d admit to it. It fucked up his ‘good cop’ order.
She sighed, but couldn’t lean on him again after that. She had more play in the chains than she had before, so she rubbed her eyes with her hands. “I dunno if we’re more susceptible to it, or if I just have the worst decision making paradigm ever.”
He chuckled again, and shrugged, and she found herself almost looking forward to the predictable caress down her face and thumb across her lips in the split second before it happened. “For what it’s worth, love, I’m grateful to you for getting rid of Richmond for all of us.”
She turned to stare at him, her brain racing back through memories. The gag had been his idea, she’d thought to keep his safehouse secret but it had been the trigger that had made Richmond snap. “You,” she breathed, wide-eyed. “You set it up, on purpose?”
He tapped her on the nose, before shifting to remove another empty IV bag and replace it with another.
She put her hands to her lips, frowning as she thought about that, about his tacit confirmation. It wasn’t enough. She wanted to know more.
She glanced up at him, but it was impossible to tell read anything from his expression, which was all covered except for his eyes, which he’d deliberately uncovered. The coveralls and outfit covered up everything else. “How’d you know it’d work?” She breathed as he settled back down, her eyes fixed on him, hungry for any details she could get as he answered her question.
He shrugged as he reached back in his kit. She winced a little, but he offered her a stack of protein bars.
She sighed and tore into one, devouring it as she watched him. If there had been a rule against her eating solids, apparently the issue with Richmond had rendered it a moot point. She did not care.
“I didn’t. But I recognized you, from the Reserve of course, and the dossier our employer gave us, and knew that I’d have Richmond on shift with me…” He shrugged, but she saw his eyes tighten, muscles around his nose crinkle in what might have been a grimace as he picked up tubing or plastic that might have been from the IV bag and tossing them into his kit.
“The odds were decent, if you could push them a little into your favor,” she supplied, wanting more information on him, on Richmond.
He shrugged, reaching out to brush his fingers across the bandage he’d put on her face. She frowned, but he seemed satisfied, with the distraction, maybe, and caressed her face and ran his thumb across her lips.
She was ready, had just been using one hand to eat the protein bar, and dropped it as she grabbed his hand and in a quick twist, had his pinky bent back against the rest of his hand. One twist, and she could break it, easily. Another twist after that, and she could break his entire wrist. She had the leverage advantage, with him leaning forward to touch her, and the wrist restraints just gave her a very solid tool to use as well.
He grinned at her. “You know I heal like you do, love,” he said, as if she could forget him stabbing himself.
She shook her head. “I know you heal like I do, so everything hurts, every time,” she reminded him somberly.
Her mean trick was rewarded by a snarl across his features, a flash of expression: a tightening across his eyes, a flashing there as he looked away, a quick intake of breath, quickly let out. “It wasn’t just you and Jordan he hurt, is that what you want me to say?” He asked, his voice very low, and his eyes locked with hers for an instant, and she felt his gaze jolt through her before he looked away from her. “I can spin you a lovely tale or you can take my word for it that I have not lied to you since promising I would not.”
Instead of releasing her grip on him, Kathryn tightened it for a moment as she processed the implication of his words. “You lied to me before that,” she said, her breathing picking up as she thought back through their interactions. It was hard, given that so much of her time was muddied by injuries and pain.
She hazarded an educated guess. “The blood draws. They’re useless.”
If he smiled, it did not reach his eyes where she could see it. He tapped her on the nose with his free hand. She frowned, and immediately let him go when she realized he was making absolutely no effort to free his hand from its precarious position in her grip. He either did not care if she broke his finger, or wrist, or was doing a very good job pretending not to care. Either way, she did not like it, no matter how she was ‘supposed to’ feel about grabbing one of her captors.
He reached up to caress her cheek, and rub his thumb along her lips, but stopped his hand part-way there, and let it drop.
Kathryn flinched, and did the gesture, but to him, using her right hand, her left clanking uselessly. He was close enough that she could do it, and he did not move away like he thought she might, especially after she’d threatened to break his bones.
She traced her hand up his face, mostly on mask, but let her fingers linger on the skin she could feel by his temple. She ran her thumb over where his mouth pressed against the white mask, and saw his eyes flutter closed at her touch.
Kathryn gasped at this reaction, surprised even by her own daring for touching him in the first place, and they were so close that she watched his eyes open, and then he took her hand off his face and set it back on her leg.
Kathryn sighed, and suddenly this was all too much, too new, too terrible, even too interesting, which was much, much worse than the pain that sparked like wildfires all through her body. She dropped her head into her hands.
When she woke next, it was to Birmingham’s low voice. “C’mon love, you’re all done.”
She flinched, not sure what he meant as he lowered the hoist, not having remembered being chained back up at all, but her legs were able to support her weight, with hardly any pain in her knees at all. She held still as Birmingham made shushing noises at her mutterd cursing as she flexed her shoulders, but he did not reach up to touch her face, which hurt somehow, which made Kathryn angry.
She gritted her teeth as he connected her wrist restraints to her ankle restraints via another chain that he held the leader of. “Not going to lie, love,” she said, mimicking his accent more deliberately now, as opposed to the way her vowels had been elongating, rounding out she’d been doing by instinct, mimicking her long-gone father’s British accent. “This is not my idea of foreplay.”
He chuckled, which almost made her smile, but then he drew black fabric from his pocket. She automatically backed up a step, putting her hands up defensively.
His eyes tightened in sympathy as he made a little clicking noise. “Sorry love. You’re getting out of here, so there’s a bag on your head. Rules are rules.”
She hissed as he drew the bag over her head, every muscle tensing for a fight, and so it took her a moment to recognize the hand on her shoulder as his. She drew in a shaky breath and forced herself to follow along, and to listen as hard as she could.
She was moved up a hallway, turned right, then left, then right again, oh shit were they leading her around on purpose? And then the bag was removed and she squinted in brightest sunlight as she was harried into a van.
Birmingham was there, the only person in the back with her as he threaded her ankle restraints into the loop built there in the back of the van.
“No parting injuries to sell it, huh?” She asked, but her voice shook too much for the joke to land correctly.
His sunglasses were back on, but she thought she could hear a smile in his voice. “No, love. Just a drop off. You’re free to go.”
Kathryn flinched, wanted to tell him to come with her, but she had no onearthly idea how to do that. Instead, she sat in the back of the van, their knees touching, and tried not to think of anything at all.
Kathryn frowned as they hit a bump in the road and she saw a flash of light in her peripheral vision. She flinched, and looked again, but the bag still covered her head.
“Something the matter, love?” Birmingham’s voice was quiet, but insistent.
Kathryn’s mouth had fallen open a little as he spoke. She saw small blue triangles coming from his direction. “What’d you lot give me to dampen my sound control?” She asked, her voice shaking.
She couldn’t see him, but she could feel the muscles in his leg tense from there they touched. “Apparently not enough,” he muttered, and before Kathryn could say or do anything else, he leaned towards the front of the van and banged hard, three times, on the separator between them and the driver.
Kathryn startled as the van began to change direction, and the slight screeching sounds of the tires might have been disturbing, but they were accompanied by the faint yellow sounds screeching tires always made, and Kathryn knew all at once that she had full control of her sound manipulation again.
The van screeched to a halt, and Kathryn did several things very fast. First, she yanked the bag off her head. Then, she gathered up the yellow screeching sound the way someone else might quickly gather tangled up earphones at the bottom of a purse, messy but effective. She twisted that power and slammed it into the metal ring that held her chains to the floor of the van. Free, but still chained, she lunged forward, using some of the light red, tinkling, clanking sounds of the chain to give her movement a bit of bite, she pushed Birmingham’s hands out of the way as he raised them. She stood and leaned over him.
The van was slowing down now, coming to a sudden halt as a result of Birmingham’s signal.
She had the angle advantage on him, and her hands thrummed with the sound she could feel all around her, their heartbeats, the van’s engine, and more sounds, she knew, if she concentrated. But that’s not what she was concentrating on, right this moment.
She reached forward and tugged,yanked his mask down so she could see the bottom of his face. Slightly tanned, dimpled chin, stubble, a cut on one cheekbone. She caressed his face, brushed her fingers across his lips, and then sat back down, hard, on the bench seat across from him.
Less than two seconds later, the door to the van was opened from the outside
Birmingham was on his feet, mask in place, and pulled her to her feet by one elbow. Kathryn moved with him, and stepped down holding up her hand as they were in bright sunlight, the van pulled up on the side of the road. They were at the back of the van, shielded somewhat from passersby by the open van doors, but that would not last for long. One man, masked and covered like Birmingham, worked quickly to unlock the padlocks of her restraints.
Birmingham himself was rubbing his chin as he looked at her, but he reached back into the van and handed her a bundled blue...something. “Parting gift,” he said. He did not touch her as she took the shirt, and pulled it on as the chains on her wrists fell away, but he did say, “Be safe, love,” before he and the other man climbed into the van, and it sped away.
Kathryn blinked in the bright afternoon light as she tried to get her bearings.
“There she is!” The familiar teal voice washed up the street, and Kathryn sighed as she heard it, easing muscles that had not eased since however long ago that she’d been grabbed.
She turned and was nearly knocked over as Ollie hugged her fiercely. Kathryn returned the hug, but hissed a little in pain.
Ollie froze, stepping away from Kathryn, her wide, unnaturally teal eyes bright in her light brown face.
Kathryn just shook her head, and pulled her friend into a hug. “Watch some horror movies while I was gone?” Kathryn asked, feeling her friend shudder a little at the comment.
Kathryn sighed with relief. She could work to put this behind her, but they all had some work to do to figure out what was going on and who was Birmingham’s mysterious ‘employer…’
Sixteen days later, Kathryn found herself in Long Island, on the run from having been framed for the murder of her best friend. No one believed her, she could hardly believe herself what had happened (Ollie, dead…) Some part of her brain short-circuited just at the thought. She gritted her teeth and forced herself up the street, peering at the numbers on the houses.
Crescent street was full of fairly well-to-do places. Old homes, but in a nice place. She hadn’t been found because she’d left all her electronics in her room at home, and because she knew Karine well enough to be able to evade her.
Kathryn found the correct house, 2551, and knocked on the door. It was very late, but she had nowhere else to go. Her family had been gone since she was a kid. The people who had become her family all thought she had killed Ollie. Kathryn drew the collar of her coat further up as she waited.
She finally heard movement on the other side of the old wooden door, and frowned as she realized the door had no peep hole. A voice spoke, nasal, American, small blue triangles that sluggishly filtered from his side of the door to hers.
“When did Japan invade China, sparking World War II in the Pacific?”
Kathryn frowned, but said, “August.”
“When was Spartacus’ slave uprising against the Romans?”
She frowned again, but said, “87, BCE I guess.”
There was a slightly longer pause, then, “In what year did Gagarin make history?”
Kathryn said, “‘67.”
“The Exposition Universelle was held in Paris in nineteen- what?”
Kathryn spared a thought at the fact that the man’s French accent sounded quite good, before saying, “Oh-five,” and there was a pause, and then she heard dark gray thumps of locks unlatching.
She knew he had given her this information, but Kathryn was not at all expecting to see Birmingham barefooted, wearing a pair of jeans and a loose-fitting blue t-shirt, his black hair sticking up at the back. “It’s half past two in the morning,” he said, and the nasal American accent was gone as he looked at her.
She pulled a picture of Ollie from her coat and showed held it out to him. “They killed her,” she said, gritting her teeth as pain seemed to rip through her, trying to hang on so she could finish. “And they said I did it.”
He raised an eyebrow at her, and nodded, crossing his arms over his chest. “I know. Come on in, it’s freezing.”
Kathryn froze as she started just taking her first step towards him. She noticed that he had hair-fine scars on his arms, just like she did, and continued into the house as he spoke.
Birmingham grinned at her. They were nearly the same height, she realized as he opened the door and stood aside so she could enter. “Never got round to talking about my primary mutation,” he said, as if they’d met by chance at the supermarket once. “You ever heard of a power called precognition?” Kathryn stared up at him as the front door shut behind him.
#defiant whumpee#whump prompts#whump community#whump#torture#intimate villian#captured whumpee#violence#broken bones#electrocution#bleeding#sensory deprivation#dubcon/noncon#super hero fiction#super powered fiction#my writing#synnutwritesstuff#Sol city fiction#kathryn/birmingham#i guess yuck
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my endless list of issues with the MCU, part one of whatever
most of this is going to be bitching about Age of Ultron and Civil War because they were honestly the absolute worst and it floors me people don’t acknowledge it more
I have not seen Infinity War yet and I have no intention of seeing it anytime soon.
I’m not especially Tony Stark friendly and a lot of these complaints are Stark-centric because I see his writing as the weakest part of the series
so this being said, let’s start with The Accords:
Tony is initially approached with The Accords by a lawyer who appeals to his sympathy because a teenager got killed from the most recent Avengers battle in uhhh Sokovia, I think? I’ve seen this movie twice which tells you how good a movie it is that I can barely remember it.
Tony spends one (1) day reading about the proposed Accords and immediately comes in with this holier-than-thou attitude as if this is something he came up with on his own or ever spend .02 seconds thinking about. The same kind of insufferable antagonistic stuck-up attitude that makes people hate sociology majors. So understandably the team does not exactly jump up to immediately agree to his condescending demands that he has more or less agreed to already despite never having brought it up to anyone else.
By the way, when exactly did they decide that Tony Stark was team leader? it seems like the fandom and the movie’s writers and Tony himself have decided he’s de facto leader despite no one having discussed or agreed to it at any point in time and him being, honestly, the worst possible choice for it.
You know that “this entire group has one braincell and it belongs to x character” meme? This movie is that entire meme and right now the brain cell belongs to Rhodey.
I know that the Marvel Cinematic Universe is very diverse and that for whatever reason the Avengers and their films do not take place in the same universe as the X-Men and their films or Deadpool or Venom, but it still bothers me a lot that these Accords are set up to treat mutants (and mutates) exactly the way they are treated in the X-Men universe: with legalized discrimination and fear and systemic oppression and Scarlet Witch, as a mutant...really, no one in the writing department thought this through? People thought this was fine? That this wasn’t fucked up? Okay.
The Accords are supposed to keep people from getting hurt by the Avengers by...what, making it an act of Congress to get them on the field? Do they realize how long that will take? Not only that but without proper combat practice in a city arena, there is absolutely no guarantee that Accords Avengers won’t cause the exact same kind of damage as non-Accords Avengers.
Or the fact that the Accords do not apply to the attackers. Obviously.
Steve asks Tony later why he’s really agreeing to the Accords despite Tony in previous movies being very “fuck the law” or “fuck the government” and Tony almost has him in his corner, but of course he has to be a pain in the ass about it once again.
And in this scene Tony says he’s agreeing to them because of....some fight with Pepper? That is promptly never mentioned again. But talk about petty, deciding the fate of the entire team over a tiff with his girlfriend. Yikes.
No one in this entire movie except for Vision gives a shit about how Wanda is feeling or dealing with this despite the fact that she is clearly the most effected party by both The Accords and by the fallout of what happened at the beginning of the movie. She’s already scared of her own powers and demonized for them but the only one who cares is the sentient internet.
I love T’Challa and I adored Black Panther but in this movie, T’Challa is all rage and no common sense. Which is perfectly fine, given what he’s been through in the short time he’s been on screen. He’s only the only reason this movie is worth watching and even then it’s best to just watch his scenes and skip the rest of this dumpster fire.
I love Chris Evans’ Captain America but I’m going to be honest here, he was every bit as petty in this movie as Tony Stark was. He happened to have good and valid reasons to track down Bucky but I don’t at all believe those were his main reasons. His main reason was definitely “this is my friend and so I want to save him”, but unlike Tony, he also had logic on his side, which is probably why T’Challa sides with him in the end and opts to help Bucky instead of killing him or turning him in.
Also Cap has every reason to be wary of the government given how easily SHIELD was infiltrated by HYDRA in the previous movie and like, was Tony just nonexistent for that entire movie? Did he just not exist? Is his memory of that event a void? Did everyone just agree to never tell Tony about it? Because it’s pretty clear that Cap and Sam and Nat were all working off of the events of Winter Soldier while Tony Stark was just...being Tony Stark, I guess?
Despite initially being on the side of The Accords because a teenager was killed from the reckless rampage of the Avengers and their enemies, Tony then goes to recruit a teenager to join him in a fight against Captain America by showing up at his house (very creepy) and hitting on his aunt (extra creepy) and threatening to expose him as Spider-man to her (why did people defend that?). So he went and put another teenager in danger and no one calls him out on this.
Tony blames Sam for Rhodey getting shot down like it isn’t partly (or entirely) his fault in the first place, as if people never get shot down in the line of duty as a superhero or a soldier, as if Sam did it on purpose (when he sure as hell didn’t and in fact admires Rhodey) and didn’t immediately stop and go to check on Rhodey, and then when he puts his hands up Tony still shoots him point-blank. Someone pointed out this cap earlier and I think it’s super uncomfortable that we got to have a screencap of a white dude shooting an unarmed black man who had his hands up. And we’re supposed to sympathise with that guy.
Tony throws a bunch of people in jail for...siding with Captain America? I still don’t get that.
The final fight between Tony, Cap and Bucky makes no sense. Despite knowing now that Bucky was brainwashed and framed he still immediately believes that Bucky knowingly and willingly and like, with glee or something...killed his parents? And I get being upset at finding out that this man killed his parents but this isn’t a recent crime and he knows for a fact that Bucky was brainwashed at the time. Get some fucking therapy, dude.
No One But Tony Stark Is Allowed To Have Weapons.
T’Challa now has control of the brain cell. He is the only one who goes “Hm, now where’s the guy who actually caused all this chaos?” while Tony Stark is beating the shit out of a POW.
Cap trying to appeal to Tony’s sympathy by saying “he’s my friend” is not really a good idea, I mean from Tony’s POV your friend murdered his parents and him being your friend doesn’t take that back, HOWEVER,
see above.
“So was I” - literally, since when? When have Tony and Steve ever gotten along? Ever agreed on anything? Ever referred to each other as friends? The most you can ever say about their relationship is that at one point in time they were civil. and that’s it.
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Interpol (self-titled): 'Success' and 'Memory Serves'
Album: Interpol (self-titled), 2010
(bouncing back to Matador, from Capitol's Our Love to Admire release in 2007)
I'm starting with this album because I think it gets very unfairly overlooked. As far as I can see, critics (and perhaps many fans?), listened to it way too quick, and didn't let it sink it. Mea culpa: I was a fan who initially 'didn't get it' in the first few listens. I think I was expecting OLTA II. I'm pretty astounded at my past self, because now Interpol ranks up at either second equal (on a good day) or a healthy third favourite out of all their albums, and so therefore I'm out to punt for it, bigtime.
Since I'm starting with this album, there's gonna be a lot of context as I build my methodology, and get my keywords straight. Other entries are gonna rely upon a bunch o'stuff I say here, but I'll try to cross-reference when it's helpful to illustrate a point.
'Success'
Instrumentation: there's a deceptively gentle, building start to this song. Mind you, against gentleness is the fact that the kick drum is so subsonic, and I kid myself to think it's mimicking an irregular heartbeat (sort of fits the theme of the lyrics). Piano notes in the left channel, and guitar notes pick out the peaks and strung-along troughs of this ECG. Kick drum moves from gorgeously subsonic low tone (on vinyl, SO GOOD) to a more detailed high tone, the slap of the beater hitting the drum skin now defined, matching the high-tone brightness of the guitar (single notes in left channel, strum in right). Still, there's a lot of space - Sam's in first gear, Daniel's coaxing, taking his time - everything is languid, and Paul's vocals lilt, until "good eye”: these promising words undercut by a slightly sinister confessional-style delivery.
But the song reveals its true self at the 1:09 mark – there's a subtle, urgent and restrained fury to the way the chaps start to play at from this point: a lot of great 'attack' in where the beats land, where the strums shred. Bass and drums are particularly well locked-in to each other (an Interpol calling card), and for the most part sit on the front of the 'one' beat (first, second and fourth are up-front, but third lags behind, calling you to dance). The momentum and attitude of the instruments isn't frenzied, but it's no longer languid, and feels on the verge of violence, threat, or despair. The contrast between the start versus the way the song unfolds has always struck me like the feeling of walking up to the edge of a cliff - view, view, view, vista, vista, vista THREAT!
There are terrifically attractive exceptions to that front of the 'one' beat though – bass (lovely high tone, some tube growl) syncopates in the verse, and the contrast of this dancing against front of the beat draws attention to both aspects. Same goes for some of the lead guitar – where DK is putting the plucks is nicely counterpointed against the main driving rhythm. Interpol are so skilled at this – it means you kinda get two or more rhythms for the price of one – you have the main beat, all monumental and driving and inescapable, but underneath you have eddies that pick out a double-beat alongside the main, or syncopate against it. I think it's my favourite quality of theirs. Even Paul is going all Sinatra on the vocal phrasing and placement – he croons, and then leans towards a staccato delivery at times, picking up on that shudder-flutter the rest of the band flirt with. Rhythm guitar and lead guitar interweave, both alternating between the languid note-to-note slide heard in the initial opening guitar, and the staccato that matches that initial kick drum rhythm. Sam mostly stays on the main driving beat, but adds a gorgeous flutter on high-hats and subtle double and triple hits (almost a shuffle, but with sticks instead of brushes) on the snare. Where he places them is terrific – contrast his restrained, almost agonized beats in the verse against the straight-ahead release of the chorus. YUM. I'm sure I can detect some real subtle hand-claps in the last third (pretty much maelstrom outro) section, but that might just be my imagination :D
Arrangement/structure: Interpol is an album that features a lot of really simple, don't-fuck-with-it ideas – generally the arrangement/structure is one main riff, all the way through, which develops and mutates and evolves, gets more intense, but the band have sagely decided NOT to throw in an arbitrary bridge or startlingly different chorus for the sake of change. Feels to me as if the songs are leading, or at least the musicians are thinking with their hearts and guts, rather than thinking with their heads and over-intellectualizing it. The Interpol album songs tend to be organic: the songs feed upon themselves and grow, and the humans stay the fuck out of the way. Interpol do both modes well, but I prefer the "one riff run into the ground" organic approach that appears in 'Success'. However, there is a delicate difference between verse and chorus here – just a subtle note change, but nothing as distracting as a key change. This minor difference between the sections of the song echo the gorgeous counterpoint in beat/momentum, surge and shuffle, monoslab drive and syncopative flutter. Ah, I love you guys. There's also a sweet sweet attempt at a late bridge in that gorgeous waterfall guitar transition, around 3 min 5 sec (mostly left channel) - it's gorgeously transcendent, and runs the song out into a sort of negative space for me.
Lyrical content: I love the confessional tone to content/delivery of the vocals. That initial promise of "good eye" is empty, even if meant with good intentions, and that reneged claim is backed up later with other half-truths, confessions, and appeals for help: "somebody make me say 'no, no, no'". Paul (in interview, apparently with The Sun on September 10, 2010 - but I've been unable to track this down) talked about basing his lyrics on the topic of people "cracking up and losing the plot”, thanks to a "narcissistic impulse” (ie celebrities, believing their own hype, to the point of destroying themselves as they get more and more disengaged from reality and meaningful connection with others).
Overall context - vinyl version: holy shit the vinyl version of this will blow your speakers, if you have it over a certain volume (and well, it's Interpol, so of course you have it UP LOUD), and I can't think of a better way for speakers to go. Great full-spectrum sound, from the crystalline trebles, through to lush mids, all the way through to those initial subsonic Sam beats in the opening. Terrific vinyl transfer (for the whole album).
Overall context, feel/tone: a little risky to put something so dark and doomed right at the front of the album, but then again, it's fricken catchy AF - you want to dance, despite the doom.
I must admit, I almost always listen to albums on shuffle (on my beloved 160GB black iPod, all tracks 320+ bitrate!), when I'm not listening to vinyl, but whenever 'Success' comes along, it does a great job at telling me, "Hey. I'm the first track. Take me or leave me." And I'm like, "OK, then. BTW, I love you.”
Additionally, the monumental inescapable drive of the song makes me feel as though I'm in the head of someone who's spaced out, who feels stuck on one nihilistic track, a persona feeling divorced from reality. Of course, I don't refer in any way, shape or form to Mr Paul Banks, which is why I say 'persona' – if you can't tell the difference between vocalist and the words, go read up on the literary device of a narrative persona.
'Memory Serves'
Instrumentation: This is gonna be a long, indulgent, rave of deep love :D Bear with ...
Gorgeous textured reverb on the opening guitar (mainly right channel), play style leaning towards Dick Dale tremolo picking. Interestingly enough, this is very slightly heralded in 'Success' - there's tremolo (in play style, not just pedal effect) guitar in the background (see 1 min 25 secs onwards, of mostly left-channel tremolo-played guitar of 'Success'). Back to 'Memory Serves': you might just be able to hear vocals panned over to the left channel - Paul picking out the notes, not pushing his voice beyond talking into singing - nicely spooky (and there are other vocal artefacts throughout this album too, pointing towards quite a "live" recording environment. I adore how the band often decides to leave these "proofs of life" in the track, especially when it comes to pedal jack noise, or the sound of dirty pots [ie the switches and dials of a beloved pedal, as much a part of the character of sound produced as the main function of a pedal]).
But wow, when the vocals croak in - Paul's deliberately keeping his throat part-closed (vocal fry!), especially on the open vowels at the start of the bars (ie "It ... / I"), giving the impression of weariness, of a character that's given up, despite the content of the pleading that this voice gives in this song. PB's backing vocal echoes off to the left - what is it with this album, and favouring the left? The guitar has built up some great tension, and that is released so attractively in the vocals wearily spilling onto the track, the 60± bpm beat which lurches along. It's hypnotic, and on the verge of tears. Add pleading content, and you get a sexy AF tune. I think I'm gonna conclude, after I analyse all the songs, that this album would be shaggable if it was a person :D
Beautifully resonant piano in the verse, picking out the chord notes - oh, how I'd love to hear that piano in that room: makes me wonder if they'd captured a bit of the studio room sound? First verse has that catchy double-beat bass, almost like a waltz, locked into the double beat of the kick. The tension is fed by a held bar (about 16 seconds - 4 x 4?), forcing you to anticipate a chorus, but guess what - VERSE. Subverting expectations. I've heard this song SO often (I think it's my second or third favourite song on the album, so yeah, I've thrashed it), and love the slow churn apocalyptic beauty of the climax, that I really WANT the chorus at this specific point, after the held bar. But no, more teasing ....
The bass sheers away in the second verse; it's a little bit more spare, with less fidelity to the double beat of the kick. It's an unusual choice - usually Interpol amp up the stakes and detail, slowly; but to move away from complexity into something minimal is odd, UNTIL you realise it's done to emphasise what's about to hit - oh yeah baby, it's gonna be a wall of sound, and you know it's coming. How wonderfully this band build pressure, only to let the listener have release. (Note also that Sam adds a small amount of further detail in what he's playing, up on the top half of the kit - slightly more snare hits, slightly more hi-hat taps - the converse of what Carlos is taking away with bass notes. Cool as.)
And, of course, when this third verse comes in, it's more tense than the preceding two, and features a background swathe of a (slightly left-channel) guitar (am guessing Paul on rhythm - I bet you he does this live; must make mental note to check YewToob, and confirm/deny album-based speculation here) which rings out across its strings at the very start of these verse bars. More is now at stake, and we listeners are told to anticipate incoming ...
Incoming! Delicious, delicious chorus. Sam ups the sibilance by cooking the hi-hat beat: it would be jazz, but he opts for a laboured and tortured feel, to suit the lyrics. The resonant guitar gets more frenetic, choral, and vocal overdubs take the song into wall-of-sound land (my favourite country, I think). The bass modulates into fifths and octaves, some simultaneously strummed/plucked, and alongside the vocal overdubs and extra guitar, there's just so much lush harmony. But wait, it's gonna get even BETTER! Keyboard/organ comes in at the end of the chorus, and carries on through the bridge to the next chorus ... and this is where the song has evolved to. A good time for me to skip over to structure ...
Arrangement/structure: There are some conscious decisions in this, such as the held bar, but it does feel to me as if the band lets the song lead them by the nose - we never go back to the verse. It's done its job. The song evolves into a new beast, as though the speaker has finished one set of thoughts (compromise, trying to keep a relationship going when it's already over), and finds himself stuck between special memories, and "I'll wait to find / it's over" (gorgeously effective enjambment: notice how one half of that thought is in the chorus, the second half falls in the bridge), to the relationship half-restarting: "why is it so hard to stay / a / way?" There's a horrifically discordant guitar in the left can here, 2 min 27 secs, through for a few seconds - it's just under the lush harmonies, and Interpol never do anything out of tune. But here it is, so effectively throwing a spanner in the works. Doesn't matter if you don't notice it - you know something is wrong. It's a flicker of pain.
I hate to rush this next part, as the song doesn't, but where we might expect a held bar, or a tease; the song evolves once again, at the transition from chorus to something new at 3 min 5 sec. What happens isn't verse or chorus; it's stratospheric. Carlos strums multiple strings, and pulls back to single notes and perhaps the odd fifth or octave, the vocals pile up into a choir of multiple choices and regrets (sorry if I'm getting purple in my prose here), and the whole tune soars again at 3 min 33 sec, the soaring really thickened by immense keyboard chords.
This is really rather moving if you happen to be listening through headphones in public :D Two climaxes, two releases, in one song. Ecstasy, even if at 3 min 47 sec the band tries to corral the song back onto the ground by returning to the verse notes and structure. 4 min 2 sec is another liftoff, and this is where hints of outro start to appear (and I get morose that the song is mortal, and will end): see if you can pick up that slow arpeggio bright guitar - wholly DK in style, with his angular sparkiness - it appears just after this last liftoff, and it signals the last guitar you hear in the song; a sad, solo coda, which fades away, while PB's voice moves from a begging tone, to something resigned and uncaring, and the drum beat goes on. Life goes on.
Lyrical content: I especially love the lines:
It would be no price to pay
I only ever lie to make you smile
All kinds of dust are gonna keep me satisfied
But only at your place, only at your place ...
It reminds me of compromise, in a relationship, when it's already over. Tragic and beautiful.
Thanks for bearing with me. I'll put in more links soon, and a section that does justice to the overall album. Next up: 'Summer Well' and 'Lights'.
Last week I was in Sydney, seeing a rocking gig, full of feels and musical expertise, and a band giving it full 100%. Sigh :D
(Note: written back in January, 2019 ... just now ported over this content from a blog, into Tumblr. While I'm swamped with wonderful writing jobs at the moment, this abandoned rave was playing on my mind ...)
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Chapter 19; The two outsiders
And here is where things take an interesting turn as we are introduced to two new characters which I will provide gifs for face cast since I haven’t told you guys who they were gonna be played by. Hope you enjoy this chapter :)
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It had been a year since that day and slowly but surely, I got use to the new arm and Bucky was right there by my side if I ever felt insecure of it or needed a little pick me up. We had also received a facetime message from my mother about her progress in finding all of Klaue’s former business partners. She told us that she was down to the last few but these ones have been proven to be the toughest since they were located in Moscow, Russia, but she hoped she would come home to us soon.
She also explained to us mainly to Bucky about the suit she had rescued him in. Apparently shortly after she left Wakanda for the first time, she settled down in South America for several years and the place she lived in was having some problems with thieves and black market people coming in and stealing not only their supplies and food but some of their women and children as well.
In that moment, she had brought to life the Legend of the “Jaguar Warrior” to the village and defended their keep for almost 10 years until finally the threats stopped and the village was once again at peace. When the village didn’t need her anymore, she left South America and that’s when she found herself in Kamar Taj.
But soon something else would happen in Wakanda that would change myself forever.
Bucky was training with some of the warriors while I was training with the Dora Milaje practicing my bow staff and speak skills when we suddenly got a call from Okoye who was traveling with T’Challa scouting the perimeter of the kingdom. Bucky and I walked towards each other and activated our watches and soon Okoye’s image came up.
“Barnes, (Y/n)”.
“What’s going on Okoye?” I asked.
“We’ve found a couple of intruders in the jungle, you need to come right away”.
“Any idea who they are?” asked Bucky.
“I think the real question is what they are? Take the Eastern passage, it’s the quickest way to where we currently are at, and (y/n) make sure you are in wolf form when you come”. She then ended the message as both Bucky and I looked at each other confused.
“What’s that about?” asked Bucky.
“I don’t know, but it sounds like we don’t have much time, climb on quick”. I phased into my wolf form and Bucky mounted on my back as W’Kabi handed Bucky a spear and soon I took off running out of the sanctuary and into the jungle taking the East passage just as Okoye instructed.
When we arrived, we saw T’Challa in full Black Panther gear and Okoye fighting against these mutated animal/human hybrids. T’Challa was fighting off what looked like a hyena and lion while Okoye was fighting off against a gorilla.
“What the hell?” Bucky muttered.
‘I don’t know but right now’s not the time to discuss this, help T’Challa while I help Okoye’. I took a running start before leaping into the air letting out a mad snarl as Bucky leaped off my back and tackled the lion humanoid and I got onto the gorilla hybrids back and bit down onto its shoulder.
The gorilla let out an agonizing roar while Okoye stabbed her spear right into its heart killing right then and there. T’Challa scratched across the lion’s face much like he did to me back during the Civil War while Bucky punched the hyena square in the face and with that they two of them suddenly ran off whimpering in fear.
“Uhh—okay someone wanna tell us what’s going on? What were those things?” Bucky said.
“We have no idea, hopefully when we get back home we can—”
“Help! Somebody help! Help!” A voice cried out from the jungle. I lowered my head in a snarl as I stood in front of everyone then I said through my collar.
‘Slowly step out from the bushes and put your hands up where we can see them!’ Soon coming out of the bushes were two men. One of them had short black hair, he stood about Bucky’s height maybe an inch or two shorter and was skinny but lean and he had some muscle on him and it was good he had it for leaning against his side was another man with long, curly like black hair that reached his shoulders, a hidden scar along his left eye and well built in muscle.
All over this guy’s body he had wounds probably from those creatures and he was bleeding badly. The man holding the wounded man said to us.
“Please help him…..he’s gonna bleed to death”. I phased into my human form and said.
“What happened here?”
“We got lost, we thought there was a village or a town nearby and then out of nowhere those things attacked us, my buddy Rauri tried to save me but those things overpowered him, please—he’s gonna bleed to death”. I turned to T’Challa and Okoye who only looked at me with suspicious eyes.
We were now on the ship flying back to the sanctuary and Okoye muttered to us saying.
“This is a bad idea”.
“In a way I agree but as King I am responsible for anyone who comes into my kingdom, and if anyone is injured then it makes them my responsibility, especially now since we’ve opened up our borders to the world”.
“But T’Challa we still don’t know about those creatures, what if they are a threat to our kingdom and now that they’ve got our scent they’ll be able to track us faster” Okoye stated worriedly.
“She’s right T’Challa, animals can smell ten times stronger than you humans, and since those things were also technically human, if there are more of them out there, we could be facing another war on our hands”. I said as I leaned against Bucky who was sitting on the couch.
“We’ll keep them long enough for his friend to recover, then once he is we’ll treat them as invaders to our lands, as King that is my final say in this matter”. With no other choice, we agreed to T’Challa’s decree and we continued on our way back to the sanctuary.
In the lab, we wheeled Rauri in and Shuri said to her brother.
“Oh another broken white boy for me to fix then huh? I swear big brother I better be getting paid for this”.
“I am your brother I don’t need to pay you”. T’Challa stated. Shuri then flipped him off but went straight to work on Rauri. The man who was friends with Rauri asked us.
“Is he gonna die?”
“Be patient and don’t talk so loud” Shuri stated as she got the vibranium and began to play it along Rauri’s wounds which healed them right up. Once she was done she said, “He’ll live, given time and rest, there is so much that Vibranium can do for these wounds”.
“Now then, why don’t we go upstairs and talk Mr.—”
“Connor, my names Conner”. T’Challa, Okoye, Bucky and Shuri left the lab leaving me to look after Rauri for a bit. As I sat down beside him I got to have a closer look at him and saw his facial features.
Perfect chiseled face, dark stubble along his face, hidden dimples and his scent was intoxicating and seductive to my nose.
I reached out and brushed away a stray strand of his raven black hair and imagined if he spoke with the same accent Connor did, what color his eyes were and what his voice sounded like.
Wait what the hell? Snap out of it (Y/n)! He’s an outsider and could be a potential threat to Wakanda, both of them could be! The last time you let someone into Wakanda, you lost an arm, don’t make that same mistake again!
*3rd Person POV*
A couple days later, Rauri woke up to see himself in a lab of sorts and almost went into a panic attack when someone came up to him and said.
“Don’t even think about it! I just had my lab fixed, I don’t want to repair it again”. Rauri looked around and said in a thick Irish accent.
“Where am I?”
“Wakandan sanctuary, you’ve been unconscious for 2 days, I was almost beginning to think you wouldn’t wake up”.
“Who are you?”
“Names Shuri, and you white boy are in my lab in my brother’s kingdom of Wakanda, you’re lucky to be alive with those wounds” Shuri stated as she prepared him a glass of water. Rauri slowly sat up and said.
“I don’t feel very lucky, my friend Connor and I got ambushed by those Chimeras”.
“So that’s what they’re called, what exactly are they?” Shuri asked as she handed Rauri the water.
“Big nasty sons of bitches with terrible breath,” he took a sip when he stated, “Wait—there was a She-wolf”.
“A She-wolf?”
“Out in the jungle, a black she-wolf who turned into a beautiful woman, and she saved my life”. Rauri said. Shuri grinned and said.
“I think you might’ve hit your head a little too hard my dear white boy. I would suggest getting some air but don’t speak of any she-wolf for you won’t find one here”. Shuri spoke jokingly at first but by the end of her statement, her voice changed from joking to dead serious. With that being said, Shuri left the lab leaving Rauri to himself.
Rauri left the lab and walked outside for the very first time in days. He breathed in the fresh air and took in the warm sun when he heard a familiar voice call out to him. He turned to see his friend Connor running up to him and the two boys smiled and hugged each other before talking over each other.
As the two of them walked around the Black Panther sanctuary, they soon came upon the training grounds and Rauri soon saw a familiar face of the woman he had seen back in the jungle for a brief second before blacking out from his injuries.
(Y/n) was training with some of the men and easily over-powering them and kicking their butts with just her official Dora Milaje spear and her own two fists and feet. As Rauri and Connor both stared at her, Rauri felt this sudden connection with her that made his heart skip a beat almost.
“What a woman” he muttered.
“Yeah mate, she’s a real fighter that one” Connor said to his friend as he clasped his hand to his shoulder.
*1st Person POV*
After beating W’Kabi and his tribe in combat, I heard T’Challa’s voice say to me in his native tongue.
“You keep this up, I may have to retire my whole kingdom and just let you fight my wars”. I smirked and said back in Wakandan.
“You’d have the whole world trembling before you if they found out about me”.
“Indeed”. He said to me in English as the two of us stood side by side. “My sister relieved Mr. Williams of bedrest”. I turned to see both Rauri and Connor standing side by side looking at us and I said.
“He’s up and walking already? If it were me who attacked him he wouldn’t be moving for at least a month if not be dead already”.
“Now (y/n) I know you have more intuition with your animal instincts but there’s no need to pick a fight with them already”.
“There’s something not right though, not just the fact that they’re outsiders but their scent isn’t completely human”. T’Challa chuckled softly and I asked him, “What?”
“Just something my sister told me, she told me that Mr. Williams told her that he was saved by a She-wolf. A magnificent She-wolf who then turned into a beautiful woman”. I stopped my spear checking and looked towards the two boys to see Rauri looking straight at me. I smirked and leaned in close to T’Challa and said.
“And what did she tell him?”
“You know my sister, she never tells strangers full details when it comes to her friends, but if you’re still suspicious about them, then I give you full permission to beat them into submission if either of them step out of line”. I smirked as I pulled out a mango from my lunchbox and took a bite of it before taking my bag and walking off the training grounds.
Later that day, I decided to take a peaceful walk along the jungle trail just to get out and maybe practice some of my magic since I promised my mother that I’d keep practicing while she was away. As I walked through the jungle though, I could smell someone following me. For a while I chose to ignore it, until I finally stopped and said.
“I know you’ve been following me, I could hear you the minute I left the sanctuary”. I turned to see Rauri stepping out from behind the trees and he said.
“I hoped I would, but I should’ve known better than to underestimate a wolf’s nose”.
“What makes you think it had to do anything with smell? I could just have good hearing”.
“I know you do, but a wolf’s nose is ten times stronger than a normal humans, plus I was approaching you from upwind”.
“And how do you know so much about wolves?”
“Because I know how to recognize one when I see one”. Then something happened that shock me to the core. His eyes quickly phased to wolf gold before returning back to his normal brown ones. “That’s right, I’m one too. My name’s Rauri Williams, and I know who you are. You’re (y/n) (l/n), the Bad Wolf”. I stared at him in shock before I suddenly snapped and tackled him down to the ground and press a dagger to his neck and sneered.
“I. Am not. Bad Wolf! She no longer exists to me”.
“Hold on! I didn’t mean no harm, there’s no need to get so defensive”. I glared down at him and slowly removed the dagger from his neck but kept the blade pointed right at him. “The reason why I know what you are is because I was the first Bad Wolf before you, Hydra came and killed both mine and Connor’s families and took us as prisoners to be the first test subjects for the Bad Wolf experiment. Then once the files of both Hydra and Shield went to the public I read to see if they had used anyone else for the Bad Wolf experiment when I found your name”.
“Just because you saw my name on the Internet doesn’t mean that I have to believe you, in fact why are you telling me this? How do I know you’re not a spy of Hydra or in fact the UN coming to find me and take me to a prison cell?”
“Because my animal instincts say that I can trust you, and I know yours is saying the same thing. We’re both wolves after all, and there is safety within the pack”.
“You’re a fool, Bad Wolves are known for deception and lies until the time comes to strike”.
“Indeed but we’re the only two people in this world that went through the exact same torture that Hydra put us under, same tests and trials to unleash the beast they wanted” Rauri extended his hand out and he said, “You know you can trust me, and I can surely trust you. So what do you say we shake on it, Wolf to Wolf?” I looked down at his hand and told him sternly.
“I don’t shake, that’s not how Wakandans make pacts here”.
“Then how do they do it?” he asked. I thought about the most ridiculous thing I could come up with and I grinned softly before answering bluntly.
“You have to endure a bite from a Makiki spider”. Rauri looked at me and I could see his eyes turn from strength to absolute fear as he stammered out.
“S-say what now?”“
You’ll have a high fever, hallucinations, you’ll say things, lots of things. Wanna hear what’s in your heart, then if your intentions are true, then we have a pact”.
“Spider bite and—hallucinations?”
“That’s right”. I stated as I looked right into his eyes intimidating him with my “Romanoff” stare.
“And if I say the truth you’ll trust me?”
“Absolutely, both you and your friend. Well?” Silence came between us as Rauri debated on his answer when he finally said in the most serious tone I had heard from him.
“I’d say that’s the biggest load of bullshit I’ve ever heard”. I softly smirked and said.
“Maybe you’re not a fool after all”. I backed away from him and walked back towards the sanctuary. “Though don’t get too cocky Irish boy, you step out of line, I have full permission from the king to whip your ass good”.
In the weeks that followed, Rauri just seemed to want to always be around me whether it was during training, in the lab with Shuri or interrupting me and Bucky-bear time and to tell you the truth I was just about to beat his ass in good. I could tell Bucky was about to step in at some moments too.
Like the time I was sparring with Okoye, I had gotten kicked off my feet and banged my head pretty hard on the hard concrete floor and as Rauri was coming up to see if I was alright, Bucky-bear beat him to it and I could hear from my in and out of consciousness telling him along the lines saying.
“Take one more step and I’ll rip your head off!” Or something like that.
After the match, I was in my room being taken care of by my Bucky-bear and when he left the room to prepare me something to eat, I heard a knock at my door and saw Shuri standing there with a flower in her hand.“What’s that Shuri?”
“Found this in the lab at your station from your secret admirer” she teased as she came in and gave it to me.
“What is this flower?” I asked as I took it in her hands.
“That my friend is the rare Violet Wakanda lily. It means “trust and soulmate” I have my suspicion on who it might be from”. Shuri teased as she bumped my shoulder with hers. At her statement I just put the flower aside and she continued, “He really is trying (y/n), he seems to really like you. Don’t you feel at least a little something for him?”
“Absolutely not” I stated bluntly.
#captain america civil war#captain america fanfiction#bucky barnes x reader#bucky barnes x teen reader#bad wolf
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Pandemic Fears: What the AIDS Battle Should Teach Us About COVID-19
By ANISH KOKA, MD
As the globe faces a novel, highly transmissible, lethal virus, I am most struck by a medicine cabinet that is embarrassingly empty for doctors in this battle. This means much of the debate centers on mitigation of spread of the virus. Tempers flare over discussions on travel bans, social distancing, and self quarantines, yet the inescapable fact remains that the medical community can do little more than support the varying fractions of patients who progress from mild to severe and life threatening disease. This isn’t meant to minimize the massive efforts brought to bear to keep patients alive by health care workers but those massive efforts to support failing organs in the severely ill are in large part because we lack any effective therapy to combat the virus. It is akin to taking care of patients with bacterial infections in an era before antibiotics, or HIV/AIDS in an era before anti-retroviral therapy.
It should be a familiar feeling for at least one of the leading physicians charged with managing the current crisis – Dr. Anthony Fauci. Dr. Fauci started as an immunologist at the NIH in the 1960s and quickly made breakthroughs in previously fatal diseases marked by an overactive immune response. Strange reports of a new disease that was sweeping through the gay community in the early 1980’s caused him to shift focus to join the great battle against the AIDS epidemic.
The first reported cases of AIDS were reported in the United States in the 1981 Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. 5 young men, all previously healthy and all active homosexuals were found to have Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia, a disease that prior had been restricted to the severely immunocompromised. An avalanche of clinical reports subsequently woke the nation to a disease that appeared to have a predilection for the gay community. The remarkable subsequent successes of medical therapies that followed to make AIDS a manageable disease to grow old with are now a matter of history, but in the early years this success seemed anything but inevitable.
The charge leveled against the establishment of the day by a public becoming aware of the tragedy of young, previously healthy individuals dying by the thousands was that there was an attempted cover up of a ‘dirty’ disease in a community America would rather not talk about. But from the first description of the disease by the medical community, the activity in the research industry (both public and private) was intense. It took 2 years for two labs to simultaneously identify the HIV virus that appeared responsible for the development of AIDS. Elaborating the mechanism by which the virus destroyed the body’s immune system lead to the discovery of potential therapies.
The first drug therapy with the most promise was AZT, or azidothymidine. Remarkably this wasn’t a drug that was developed from scratch, it had been developed in the 1960’s by a US researcher to battle cancer. The drug failed in mice and was set aside. The problem with the drug wasn’t that it was ineffective, but that it was a solution without a problem. The drug was targeted to retroviruses that affected humans, but at the time of its development, there were no important retroviruses infecting humans.
The HIV virus turned out to be the problem AZT had been in search of. HIV’s genetic information lives in a single strand of RNA that requires an enzyme called reverse trancriptase to transform into a double stranded DNA which then integrates into the host cell. AZT is a thymidine analogue that works by selectively inhibiting the reverse transcriptase enzyme. The company that had AZT, Burroughs-Wellcome, used the agent successfully in an animal model of a retrovirus surrogate, but that was not a specific model for HIV infection. Fortuitously, the National Cancer Institute (NCI) had a model of immune cells (CD4) that they had developed to use as an antiviral assay for potential HIV therapies. AZT was one of a promising group of drugs Burroughs-Wellcome sent to the NCI. The in-vitro results were impressive. The HIV virus was unable to infect the CD4 cells in the presence of AZT.
The year was 1985. It had taken four years since the first clinical report of the disease by the CDC to find a promising drug. The time was intense. There were 20,000 reported cases, and as many as a million people believed infected but asymptomatic. Doctors were helpless, serving as witnesses to the eventual progression to death, rather than agents that could alter the the natural history of the disease.
AIDS hospices were set up. It was a terrible time, encapsulated by a haunting picture taken of AIDS activist David Kirby as he lay near death, cradled in his father’s arms. It turns out that diagnosing a disease with no cure is its own desperate malady.
Identifying a drug that works in a lab was progress, but at the time, the FDA’s usual timeline for a drug to be judged safe and effective enough to be used in patients was 8-10 years. Under intense pressure, the FDA fast-tracked everything. A phase 1 trial where the drug was injected into healthy volunteers to test for safety suggested symptoms at high doses, but a tolerable safety profile. The next step mandated by the FDA was a double blind randomized control trial in patients with AIDS. This meant half of the patients in the trial would get a placebo drug, while the other half would get AZT. The trial was terminated early when 19 patients died in the placebo arm, but only 1 died in the AZT arm. The study was published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1987, six years after the first clinical report of AIDS, and rapidly approved by the FDA panel in the same year.
The trial was criticized for its early termination, and the entire fast-track process was challenged by skeptics who felt the FDA shouldn’t have bent to the wishes of activists.
Fauci was asked about pressure from activists and responded positively.
“No, actually it is difficult to say what was the right or wrong thing to do. It was a situation where there was only one drug available–it was not like trying out one amongst many antibiotics–and the activist community and the constituents were suffering. They demanded that they have access to anything that could give them even a little hope. Pressure was put on the FDA. They responded appropriately for rapid expedited approval of AZT, making drugs available that normally would not have been available for years and years.”
He went on to note that the British were able to complete a long term 3 year study of AZT that could never have been completed in the United States that showed no long term benefit. Apparently AZT blessed patients with a brief reprieve, not a long term cure. The investigators at the time had no way of knowing that the HIV virus mutated in response to the initial single agent therapy and eventually became resistant to the drug. The initial doses used were also very high, and caused patients a number of well described side effects. Investigators since have learned to use lower doses of the drug to avoid the toxicities that plagued patients in the early years.
Many in the scientific community were upset with the early approval of AZT, and prominent critics emerged comparing the drug to aspirin, as well as alleging financial interest in the drug approval. The activists in the United States that pressured the scientific community were eventually proven right. The desperation of the dying patients in the early years is well represented in the movie starring Matthew McConaughey – The Dallas Buyers Club. Unwilling to be randomized to the placebo arm of the AZT trial, the character played by McConaughey flees to Mexico, only to be prescribed a cocktail of vitamins by an unlicensed expatriate US doctor. The movie butchers the actual history by constructing the well-worn conspiracy narrative of a pharmaceutical company terminating a trial early to foist a dangerous drug (AZT) onto the public. What’s correct is that the community wanted hope in the form of some drug, and every day that a therapy was delayed was paid in lives lost. Ultimately the public pressure to get AZT out into the community was the right decision. A longer trial may very well have been negative, and subsequent non-approval may very well have confined the use of the drug to Mexican black market clinics and unlicensed doctors until the biology of the virus was better understood. There would have been no winners in that scenario.
There are important lessons to heed as the global biotech community races to cure doctors of their impotence when faced with a patient dying of the COVID-19 virus. Once a drug proves promising in-vitro, the same FDA will stand guard. Randomized control trials are planned to test these drugs for efficacy against the novel coronavirus. The emergency will certainly lubricate the timeline of approval just as it did with the AIDS epidemic, but a great deal of caution is to be advised in designing and interpreting trials where the patients range from mild symptoms with recovery with no intervention, to severely ill in intensive care units. Use a novel therapy too late, and a drug effective when used earlier may look ineffective. Used too early in the process, and any positive effect may be washed away by the mild natural history of the disease in most.
Part of the discomfort for the medical community lies in an aversion to dead ends in these battles. But as any detailed analysis of medical progress will clarify – the forward march of science is messy. Thalidomide, the drug responsible for the FDA as we now know it, eventually found use in patients with multiple myeloma.
The current approach is also paternalistic to the extreme. Patients dying of their disease may choose to enter a randomized control trial where they have a 50% chance of being placed on a “sugar pill”. But I question the ethics of denying patients an active drug unless they choose to enter this flip-of-a-coin lottery. As Fauci himself noted, the AIDS fight taught the NIH the importance of working with the community.
“When the gay activists were demonstrating, predominantly against the FDA but also against the NIH, and being very strident in their criticism, I challenged them. I said, “Okay, come on in, sit down, and let’s talk about it. What is it that you want?” That was when we developed relationships with them that are now very productive. We have activists who are important members of our advisory councils. We consult back and forth with them all the time. AIDS changed the way we do business at NIH in that, when appropriate, the constituencies play a major role in some of the policy and decision-making processes. You cannot just cave in and let people tell you how to do science the wrong way, but there is a lot you can learn from understanding how the disease is affecting a particular population, somewhat removed from the bench, and removed from the “ivory towers” that we have here.”
Science turns out to be an imperfect war waged with many casualties. Patients aren’t soldiers to be conscripted into this war. If people are to die, they deserve agency if they are to be part of the scientific enterprise. Patients and their doctors deserve the right to choose paths that end up being dead ends. Our job as doctors shouldn’t be to lean into the dichotomonia of positive and negative randomized control trials that frequently guides FDA approval. The AIDS struggle shows the chinks in the armor of the regulatory framework that keeps us safe, but in doing so risks keeping us from effective therapies. While it shouldn’t take grave threats of the scale of AIDS and COVID19 to lower barriers to treatments, it would be stupidity on the scale of the current pandemic to not adapt regulatory barriers to the problems faced.
What the world needs months ago is a therapy for patients stricken with COVID19. This would completely alter the public health response. No need to self quarantine, little need to test the mildly symptomatic since most get better, and cruises would become great again. A COVID-19 illness would prompt the same response as someone found to be actively ill with tuberculosis – not fun for close contacts, but no chance 16 million people would wake up in Italy to a quarantine.
The story of AIDS is a story of human ingenuity that should inspire hope for the COVID-19 pandemic. Effective therapies will take time. Patients will die, but the deaths will not be in vain. Skeptics will rightly cast doubt on claims of success. They will be right most of the time. Regulatory frameworks will be appropriately challenged by the desperate. Conflicts of interest will be raised to question data. The process will be messy and documented in a hypercritical manner by the Monday-morning journalists of the day. It will seem hopeless. But we will prevail despite the long odds because in the end, it will be those that remember the patients at the center of the storm that will show us the way forward.
It is always darkest just before the dawn.
Anish Koka is a cardiologist in practice in Philadelphia. He can be reached on Twitter @anish_koka
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Pandemic Fears: What the AIDS Battle Should Teach Us About COVID-19
By ANISH KOKA, MD
As the globe faces a novel, highly transmissible, lethal virus, I am most struck by a medicine cabinet that is embarrassingly empty for doctors in this battle. This means much of the debate centers on mitigation of spread of the virus. Tempers flare over discussions on travel bans, social distancing, and self quarantines, yet the inescapable fact remains that the medical community can do little more than support the varying fractions of patients who progress from mild to severe and life threatening disease. This isn’t meant to minimize the massive efforts brought to bear to keep patients alive by health care workers but those massive efforts to support failing organs in the severely ill are in large part because we lack any effective therapy to combat the virus. It is akin to taking care of patients with bacterial infections in an era before antibiotics, or HIV/AIDS in an era before anti-retroviral therapy.
It should be a familiar feeling for at least one of the leading physicians charged with managing the current crisis – Dr. Anthony Fauci. Dr. Fauci started as an immunologist at the NIH in the 1960s and quickly made breakthroughs in previously fatal diseases marked by an overactive immune response. Strange reports of a new disease that was sweeping through the gay community in the early 1980’s caused him to shift focus to join the great battle against the AIDS epidemic.
The first reported cases of AIDS were reported in the United States in the 1981 Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. 5 young men, all previously healthy and all active homosexuals were found to have Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia, a disease that prior had been restricted to the severely immunocompromised. An avalanche of clinical reports subsequently woke the nation to a disease that appeared to have a predilection for the gay community. The remarkable subsequent successes of medical therapies that followed to make AIDS a manageable disease to grow old with are now a matter of history, but in the early years this success seemed anything but inevitable.
The charge leveled against the establishment of the day by a public becoming aware of the tragedy of young, previously healthy individuals dying by the thousands was that there was an attempted cover up of a ‘dirty’ disease in a community America would rather not talk about. But from the first description of the disease by the medical community, the activity in the research industry (both public and private) was intense. It took 2 years for two labs to simultaneously identify the HIV virus that appeared responsible for the development of AIDS. Elaborating the mechanism by which the virus destroyed the body’s immune system lead to the discovery of potential therapies.
The first drug therapy with the most promise was AZT, or azidothymidine. Remarkably this wasn’t a drug that was developed from scratch, it had been developed in the 1960’s by a US researcher to battle cancer. The drug failed in mice and was set aside. The problem with the drug wasn’t that it was ineffective, but that it was a solution without a problem. The drug was targeted to retroviruses that affected humans, but at the time of its development, there were no important retroviruses infecting humans.
The HIV virus turned out to be the problem AZT had been in search of. HIV’s genetic information lives in a single strand of RNA that requires an enzyme called reverse trancriptase to transform into a double stranded DNA which then integrates into the host cell. AZT is a thymidine analogue that works by selectively inhibiting the reverse transcriptase enzyme. The company that had AZT, Burroughs-Wellcome, used the agent successfully in an animal model of a retrovirus surrogate, but that was not a specific model for HIV infection. Fortuitously, the National Cancer Institute (NCI) had a model of immune cells (CD4) that they had developed to use as an antiviral assay for potential HIV therapies. AZT was one of a promising group of drugs Burroughs-Wellcome sent to the NCI. The in-vitro results were impressive. The HIV virus was unable to infect the CD4 cells in the presence of AZT.
The year was 1985. It had taken four years since the first clinical report of the disease by the CDC to find a promising drug. The time was intense. There were 20,000 reported cases, and as many as a million people believed infected but asymptomatic. Doctors were helpless, serving as witnesses to the eventual progression to death, rather than agents that could alter the the natural history of the disease.
AIDS hospices were set up. It was a terrible time, encapsulated by a haunting picture taken of AIDS activist David Kirby as he lay near death, cradled in his father’s arms. It turns out that diagnosing a disease with no cure is its own desperate malady.
Identifying a drug that works in a lab was progress, but at the time, the FDA’s usual timeline for a drug to be judged safe and effective enough to be used in patients was 8-10 years. Under intense pressure, the FDA fast-tracked everything. A phase 1 trial where the drug was injected into healthy volunteers to test for safety suggested symptoms at high doses, but a tolerable safety profile. The next step mandated by the FDA was a double blind randomized control trial in patients with AIDS. This meant half of the patients in the trial would get a placebo drug, while the other half would get AZT. The trial was terminated early when 19 patients died in the placebo arm, but only 1 died in the AZT arm. The study was published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1987, six years after the first clinical report of AIDS, and rapidly approved by the FDA panel in the same year.
The trial was criticized for its early termination, and the entire fast-track process was challenged by skeptics who felt the FDA shouldn’t have bent to the wishes of activists.
Fauci was asked about pressure from activists and responded positively.
“No, actually it is difficult to say what was the right or wrong thing to do. It was a situation where there was only one drug available–it was not like trying out one amongst many antibiotics–and the activist community and the constituents were suffering. They demanded that they have access to anything that could give them even a little hope. Pressure was put on the FDA. They responded appropriately for rapid expedited approval of AZT, making drugs available that normally would not have been available for years and years.”
He went on to note that the British were able to complete a long term 3 year study of AZT that could never have been completed in the United States that showed no long term benefit. Apparently AZT blessed patients with a brief reprieve, not a long term cure. The investigators at the time had no way of knowing that the HIV virus mutated in response to the initial single agent therapy and eventually became resistant to the drug. The initial doses used were also very high, and caused patients a number of well described side effects. Investigators since have learned to use lower doses of the drug to avoid the toxicities that plagued patients in the early years.
Many in the scientific community were upset with the early approval of AZT, and prominent critics emerged comparing the drug to aspirin, as well as alleging financial interest in the drug approval. The activists in the United States that pressured the scientific community were eventually proven right. The desperation of the dying patients in the early years is well represented in the movie starring Matthew McConaughey – The Dallas Buyers Club. Unwilling to be randomized to the placebo arm of the AZT trial, the character played by McConaughey flees to Mexico, only to be prescribed a cocktail of vitamins by an unlicensed expatriate US doctor. The movie butchers the actual history by constructing the well-worn conspiracy narrative of a pharmaceutical company terminating a trial early to foist a dangerous drug (AZT) onto the public. What’s correct is that the community wanted hope in the form of some drug, and every day that a therapy was delayed was paid in lives lost. Ultimately the public pressure to get AZT out into the community was the right decision. A longer trial may very well have been negative, and subsequent non-approval may very well have confined the use of the drug to Mexican black market clinics and unlicensed doctors until the biology of the virus was better understood. There would have been no winners in that scenario.
There are important lessons to heed as the global biotech community races to cure doctors of their impotence when faced with a patient dying of the COVID-19 virus. Once a drug proves promising in-vitro, the same FDA will stand guard. Randomized control trials are planned to test these drugs for efficacy against the novel coronavirus. The emergency will certainly lubricate the timeline of approval just as it did with the AIDS epidemic, but a great deal of caution is to be advised in designing and interpreting trials where the patients range from mild symptoms with recovery with no intervention, to severely ill in intensive care units. Use a novel therapy too late, and a drug effective when used earlier may look ineffective. Used too early in the process, and any positive effect may be washed away by the mild natural history of the disease in most.
Part of the discomfort for the medical community lies in an aversion to dead ends in these battles. But as any detailed analysis of medical progress will clarify – the forward march of science is messy. Thalidomide, the drug responsible for the FDA as we now know it, eventually found use in patients with multiple myeloma.
The current approach is also paternalistic to the extreme. Patients dying of their disease may choose to enter a randomized control trial where they have a 50% chance of being placed on a “sugar pill”. But I question the ethics of denying patients an active drug unless they choose to enter this flip-of-a-coin lottery. As Fauci himself noted, the AIDS fight taught the NIH the importance of working with the community.
“When the gay activists were demonstrating, predominantly against the FDA but also against the NIH, and being very strident in their criticism, I challenged them. I said, “Okay, come on in, sit down, and let’s talk about it. What is it that you want?” That was when we developed relationships with them that are now very productive. We have activists who are important members of our advisory councils. We consult back and forth with them all the time. AIDS changed the way we do business at NIH in that, when appropriate, the constituencies play a major role in some of the policy and decision-making processes. You cannot just cave in and let people tell you how to do science the wrong way, but there is a lot you can learn from understanding how the disease is affecting a particular population, somewhat removed from the bench, and removed from the “ivory towers” that we have here.”
Science turns out to be an imperfect war waged with many casualties. Patients aren’t soldiers to be conscripted into this war. If people are to die, they deserve agency if they are to be part of the scientific enterprise. Patients and their doctors deserve the right to choose paths that end up being dead ends. Our job as doctors shouldn’t be to lean into the dichotomonia of positive and negative randomized control trials that frequently guides FDA approval. The AIDS struggle shows the chinks in the armor of the regulatory framework that keeps us safe, but in doing so risks keeping us from effective therapies. While it shouldn’t take grave threats of the scale of AIDS and COVID19 to lower barriers to treatments, it would be stupidity on the scale of the current pandemic to not adapt regulatory barriers to the problems faced.
What the world needs months ago is a therapy for patients stricken with COVID19. This would completely alter the public health response. No need to self quarantine, little need to test the mildly symptomatic since most get better, and cruises would become great again. A COVID-19 illness would prompt the same response as someone found to be actively ill with tuberculosis – not fun for close contacts, but no chance 16 million people would wake up in Italy to a quarantine.
The story of AIDS is a story of human ingenuity that should inspire hope for the COVID-19 pandemic. Effective therapies will take time. Patients will die, but the deaths will not be in vain. Skeptics will rightly cast doubt on claims of success. They will be right most of the time. Regulatory frameworks will be appropriately challenged by the desperate. Conflicts of interest will be raised to question data. The process will be messy and documented in a hypercritical manner by the Monday-morning journalists of the day. It will seem hopeless. But we will prevail despite the long odds because in the end, it will be those that remember the patients at the center of the storm that will show us the way forward.
It is always darkest just before the dawn.
Anish Koka is a cardiologist in practice in Philadelphia. He can be reached on Twitter @anish_koka
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Welcome back, faithful readers!
Last Time we talked about the elevator pitch for Deviant: The Renegades, the newest Chronicle of Darkness game. Deviant will be the eleventh main gameline in the CofD, the third to be written entirely for a second edition ruleset, and if you include every monster, faction and creature ever published in the “blue” books like Changing Breeds or Second Sight… Well, it’s a lot. Any new game has to do something to make itself stand out from the crowd. Unique points of interest, compared to its big siblings. Why should you play Deviant, rather than a “mortals” game using the Lost Boys in Hurt Locker? What does Deviant have to say about the fallout from trauma that Changeling doesn’t? Demon had the God-Machine, all the way from the original 2004 corebook, as an antagonist. Beast flipped our usual crossover assumption from supported in a supplement, maybe, to talked about throughout the core. Mummy brought back player-Storyteller knowledge separation and inverted our usual character progression.
When we pitched the game to White Wolf, we included the following key points, our design goals that would make Deviant stand out.
Simplification and Clarity
Chronicles of Darkness games have become increasingly complicated over the last decade (and as Awakening Developer, I know of what I speak,) with lots of moving parts and descriptive traits (things like Virtues, Aspirations, and Conditions) for players to keep track of above and beyond the visually-easy dot ratings on the character sheet.
Deviant is designed to be easier on a troupe than our other games. The Remade Template condenses several things; no Virtue or Vice and only one Aspiration, as their mechanical functions (willpower renewal and beat generation) are supplied by other traits. Deviant’s powers are dot-rated, bought individually, and mechanics like Supernatural Tolerance (which for everyone but Demons is supplied by a 1-10 trait like Blood Potency or Gnosis) derived from those powers rather than being bought and recorded separately. Our goal here is to have a clean character sheet that’s easy to read and understand.
Chronicle-specific Settings
And I don’t mean settings as in “LA” or “Moscow”. I mean as in dials and switches.
We’ve spoken here and there about how Deviant will, for the most part, be the lowest-powered game bar Hunter, as the Remade’s opponents are mostly ordinary, if organized, human beings. Well, a troupe can change that. A troupe can change a lot about the game.
Deviant characters buy their powers with Experiences, same as everyone, but how strong those powers are – their dot-rating, if you will – is entirely up to the troupe. The total badassery of a character then feeds into other mechanics, informing how bad her Scars are, how potent her opposing conspiracy is, and other things. While isolation and instability brings further Scars and, as the character rebalances, more powers, that initial setting is entirely up to the troupe. A bare-minimum Deviant character is slightly more potent than someone with a Supernatural Merit, an everything-and-the-kitchen-sink Deviant is a walking timebomb. Where you sit on that curve at chronicle’s start is up to you, divorced from Experiences and beats.
It’s not the only thing.
The Remade template itself is somewhat more variable than our other games. The splats alter how many powers, Scars, and Conviction and Loyalty dots a character receives at creation, but that’s a game design element dating back to Werewolf: The Apocalypse. Where Deviant stands out is the support in the game for what we call Forms, modifications to the Remade template as it applies to a particular character. Imagine if Kiths were much more involved, but not every Changeling character had one, or if Vampire presented things like postmortem embraces, clanless vampires, and hollow Mekhet as the game’s customisation option rather than bloodlines. Forms allow us to handle things that require extra rules but don’t fit our splats, like Symbiotes.
Build Your Own Powers
In keeping with the last point, one of the big draws of b is how open-ended the powers list is going to be. All Variations have one of a set list of activation mechanics (I’ll explain this in a later blog) and then the player picks a Variation and “skins” it according to his character’s aesthetics. Creating a Deviant character feels like assembling a custom monster from building blocks, which when combined with the fact that how potent Variations are is divorced from Experiences, gives the game a unique niche among the Chronicles of Darkness, akin to Exigents in Exalted. Mage has the free improvisation of effects within guidelines in play, but Deviant has a power workshop. Our intention is for it to be the go-to game for building playable one-off monsters.
Chronicle Planning / Antagonist Systems
Deviant isn’t just about body-horror; it’s about a struggle with your enemy. A Remade’s Progenitor is not necessarily a member of the Conspiracy hunting them. Many Deviants are self-made, but their antagonists are looking to acquire them just the same. As you’ll see when we get around to blogging about Instability, without some external force to rail against a Deviant’s broken soul metastasizes and inflicts more debilitating aftereffects of their change.
Here’s something I don’t think we’ve spoken about anywhere – at some point between now and Deviant being released, dedicated Chronicles readers will see a ruleset we’ve been working on across several gamelines over the last few years for organization-level play. In the book they’re coming in first, they’re used for player-controlled groups, treating them almost as characters. Deviant will use them, but for the antagonists.
What this means is that the conspiracy hunting Deviant characters will have a character sheet of its own, filled out by the Storyteller from facts established by player choices in character creation and collaborative questions. The more Variations a Remade character has (and how powerful they are) is a key factor in how many points the Storyteller has to spend on their Conspiracy, and multiple players can pool their Conspiracy creation together.
In Deviant‘s Storytelling chapter we’ll have an optional system (in so much as the ST can override it at any time) for determining the Conspiracy’s “actions” in response to what the player characters do in a Story, how active the Conspiracy is in hunting them, and other factors determined by the Conspiracy’s “stats”. This isn’t new ground for rpgs in general, but for a Chronicles of Darkness game we haven’t tried it before.
Tap into Unused Source Material
After two worlds of darkness and 25+ years, there can’t be any monsters we haven’t done a game for before, right?
Wrong.
While inspirational media for some of our games is thin on the ground or requires a sideways view, Deviant taps into horror stories we’ve all seen and read but haven’t had a place in White Wolf games yet. From the last remaining famous gothic horrors – Dr. Jekyll, Dr. Moreau’s creations, and the Invisible Man are all comfortably within the game’s remit – to 1970s and 1980s stories of isolation being linked to mutation and metamorphosis like the works of Cronenburg (especially the Fly), Japanese horror featuring monstrously transformed protagonists like Guyver, Akira, and Tetsuo, to the 1990s and early millennial trend for “minor supernatural beings versus the conspiracy” like Dark Angel, Gargoyles, Beauty and the Beast, and Roswell, to modern classics that draw from all of the above like Orphan Black and Fringe. You’ve all seen a Deviant story, you just didn’t know it.
A Toolkit
To summarize, Deviant is going all-in on the tendency for Chronicles of Darkness games to be “toolkits”. Some of the CofD games have a firmer idea of “canon” than others – compare, for example, the just-as-setting-heavy-as-a-WoD-game Mage and Changeling to the every-Chronicle-is-different Hunter and Beast, but in Deviant no two Chronicles will use exactly the same rules. Within that wide-open customisation, it’s still a Chronicles game, laser-focused on the inner journey of the players’ characters and the story of isolation, revenge, and mutation they tell.
And that story – Deviant‘s themes and mood – will be the subject of our next blog.
Until then!
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The 100 - 4.x03
How fucking good was this episode!?! OMG I am loving this season so much!
Spoilers below:
Gaia is Indra's daughter!? That was awesome! I'm so glad I wasn’t spoiled for that. Gaia seems really great, I like her a lot, and I loved the dynamic between her and Octavia. Indra’s two daughters – her blood child who left to follow her own path, and an adopted one who followed in Indra's footsteps. My daughter was meant to lead armies. That whole scene was amazing. I hope we get more Indra/Gaia/Octavia. It was obvious they wouldn’t really destroy the flame, but it was so sad to watch the looters destroy the temple. I'm intrigued to see what role Illian will play going forward. (Spoilers say he'll accompany Skaikru on a mission in later episodes?)
LUNA! I am so happy she is alive! The other Floukru deaths were heartbreaking! Especially that little girl. Poor Luna. She really is the last of her kind now. I loved Nyko comforting her though, he's so wonderful. AND OF COURSE THE NIGHTBLOOD CURES RADIATION! It makes perfect sense! Becca knew she needed to survive on earth so she must have engineered the black blood not only to be able to host ALIE 2.0 but also to overcome the effects of radiation. That’s why the Grounders she met in the flashback we saw in 3.07 were able to survive, because she cured them with nightblood. And presumably they passed that immunity on to the next generation and the next etc. I wonder how the nightblood gene is passed down though? It must be a mutation, otherwise all Grounders would be nightbloods (presuming only those Becca treated survived Praimfaya and are the ancestors of all current Grounders?) The mutation theory is supported by the fact that the Grounders send scouts to look for nightbloods, if it were a typical dominant/recessive gene surely they would just track the children of the commanders? (Or those who survive the conclave). Anyway, I am excited to see what they are able to do with this discovery. Surely if they can engineer more nightblood, they can save so many more lives, including the other clans.
#teamabby FTW! She is so compassionate, I love her. Raven has been bugging me so much this season. I know she is the logical one who is making the practical choices, and she's struggling with her new role as a leader, but she is being so harsh to EVERYONE. From Clarke and Bellamy (and Jaha) last week to Abby and Floukru this week. I still love her, but I am annoyed with her.
ABBY AND MURPHY!!! Who knew he had it in him? - I did. Awwww! I know Murphy says he’s playing her, but I still think he was genuinely moved to help because of his father. Murphy has a heart deep, deep down. Can Abby be his maternal mentor please?
THE MILLERS! So brief but I am thrilled Miller and his dad are reunited and on guard duty together. I hope they get more scenes.
(Spoilers) Based on Marie's interview, it seems Octavia is going to move on romantically this season. If she really has to move on from Lincoln, I hope it's with Roan. I think they would be a good pair. Although it will be hard to see her with anyone who is not Lincoln.
BELLARKE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! You keep her centered. Bless you Jaha! That was 100% accurate. But Bellamy was also right when he said you have that backwards, because Clarke DOES keep him centered AS WELL. They are each other’s anchors, they both are made better people by their relationship. Which is so refreshing in fiction, because usually it’s one character who ends up trying to save the other, one character who bares the emotional burden of being the good influence. Here it is genuinely both Bellamy and Clarke who lift the weight and support the other.
I loved the Bellamy/Jaha scenes not only for the commentary on Bellarke but also because Jaha raised some really wonderful points about Bellamy’s redemption that he desperately needed to hear (even if he is reluctant to accept it) How many people do you have to save before you forgive yourself? Say what you want about Jaha but he is insightful. I can’t believe I am enjoying Jaha this season. He finally reminds me of who he was in season 1 (when I actually liked him).
THAT INCREDIBLE FINAL BELLARKE SCENE! Clarke was literally watching Bellamy sleep and she SMILED and then added him to the list! After he basically said he was going to sacrifice himself and not be one of the surviving 100, she was like, no babe, you WILL be on that list, and then she fucking makes it so. She loves him. I'm sorry but she does. But then my poor girl can’t bring herself to add her own name to the list. She struggles with the same issues as Bell – do they deserve to survive after everything they've had to do? The tragic and beautiful thing about these characters is how easy it is for them to forgive each other and see the good in one another, but they can never see it in themselves. That’s why they need each other – they balance each other out, THEY CENTER EACH OTHER (thank you Jaha). So Bellamy tells her if I'm on that list, you're on that list because whatever they do, they do it TOGETHER, and then he tells her to write it down, and I swoon, but she still can’t so he does it for her, IN FUCKING ALL CAPS NO LESS. Then he puts his hand on her shoulder, offering her physical and emotional support and she grabs it and nuzzles him because she loves and needs him so fucking much, and then I die. You still have hope? – We still breathing? They are perfection, they are in love, and they will be together-together by the end of the season or I'll be a monkey’s uncle.
SPOILERS based on next week's promo: ugh Jasper. I really dislike him. (don’t @ me). He has never been a leader (apart from the rebellion in Mount Weather) but he feels like he can be a total judgemental asshole to Clarke all the time. I am so sick of him. But if my speculation is correct, I think he'll threaten to release the list to the public, then if he succeeds it will cause a riot and he'll realise the error of his ways, but more likely I think Clarke and Bellamy will stop him and be forced to lock him up in solitary confinement – paralleling what Jaha did to Clarke on the Ark.
Man, this show is back to season 2 levels of perfection. This season is everything.
#The 100#Bellarke#The 100 commentary#Luna kom Floukru#Bellamy Blake#Clarke Griffin#Abby Griffin#Thelonius Jaha
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Working on a Thoughtful Representation of Drug Addiction for Masks
Hello! Things have been a little quiet on the Masks RPG front lately, because the end of summer is bananas for all my players. We haven’t been able to play face to face, but each player is getting a little Play-By-Post action in (which I’ll figure out how to share), and in the meantime I’m also working on some mechanical stuff to deal with some action that came out of our “Silver Masque” homecoming session.
Inspired by a ‘homecoming’ article in the Masks Fan Favorite fanzine, I added a plotline where alien agents of Vanquish (a looming threat in our Outsider’s backstory) were introducing a super-drug called Invictus into the city’s black market.
As a point of reference, here’s the original “when you first consume Invictus” move from The Fan Favorite fanzine.
When you consume Invictus, roll +Freak.
On a hit, describe the first thing you realize you can do with the powers from the drug.
On a 7-9, the GM will lay out how the power has an unexpected complication or danger.
On a miss, the drug doesn’t (seem to) take, but you’re wracked by an uncomfortable sensation. Mark an appropriate condition. [Doyce adds: Give Invictus influence over you.]
(I also add Invictus influence as a possible 7-9 consequence, but only if the “unexpected complication or danger” side effect is ignored by the players and allowed to run its course. Not to be too cold-blooded about it, but from a manufacturer’s point of view, a drug isn’t any use if it isn’t addictive.)
Anyway, a couple of the NPCs and one PC were exposed to the drug. One of the NPCs (a powerless ‘beacon’ character who’s dating the Outsider) got powers that seemed to ‘stick’, permanently.
A couple sessions later, the players discovered that it wasn’t that the powers had become permanent; Colin was still using the drug.
So. That’s now a big plot for the team – getting Colin away from the drug, and tracking down the supplier/source.
Since the PCs are working to get Colin out from under Invictus’s influence, I worked up a more in-depth look at long-term use of the drug.
(Some of this isn’t relevant, since Colin is an NPC, but I’m messing around with the move, just so I have some idea of what’s going on.)
When you’re addicted to Invictus, either physically, psychologically, or both, Invictus has Influence over you.
It can use its Influence to shift your labels by making you believe you know how the world works.
It can and will use its Influence to Provoke you to rash action.
The roll to reject Influence against Invictus is always -Conditions.
Per the original Invictus rules, you may have super powers while Invictus has influence over you.
To retain those powers, Invictus must be given influence over you at the end of every session, instead of giving influence to someone on your team. If you do so, keep your powers. If Invictus already had influence over you when you do this, Invictus shifts your labels (always Freak up, Mundane down, even and especially if this would give you a condition for shifting something that can’t shift).
You never keep your powers if Invictus does not have Influence over you. The rumor that you can is a lie told by Invictus dealers – the powers never ‘stick’. Ever.
You can choose to remove Invictus’s Influence as the result of successfully rejecting its influence, but that influence can (and probably will) come back as the result certain 6- rolls (or even a 7-9, if you ignore the impending threat). The only (mechanical) way to permanently remove the threat of Invictus Influence is using a “permanently remove someone’s influence” playbook advance – assuming that advance is also reflected within the fiction.
Somebody can help you remove Invictus’s influence (again, not permanently – only you can do that), if you are currently free of Conditions. The roll will probably be either +Freak or +Mundane, depending on the fiction, rolling against Unleash Your Powers results. If they successfully help you remove Invictus’s influence, they mark potential, and you gain Influence with them.
You can always give Invictus influence over you for a +2 on any roll, including a roll you have just made. If Invictus already has influence over you, it will shift your labels instead (1 up, 1 down), and then give you a condition.
You can give Invictus influence to use any other playbook’s move you don’t have, “just this once.” Take a condition.
Certain special moves (Alien tech, Moment of Truth for appropriate powers or if used personally) can also permanently cure Invictus addiction in a target, if curing the addiction was the specific point of using the move.
There were also two other parts of the move that I removed for now:
If someone Comforts and Supports you while Invictus has influence over you, on a 6-, Invictus may now have influence over them. (You can roll to Defend them from this.)
If someone get s 6- while using their powers/influence to remove Invictus’s influence, the consequences might extend Invictus’s influence to them.)
I tabled these two parts of the move for now, because they’re deprotagonizing and maybe problematic. I think we’ll talk about this and if the Invictus plot gets “big”, we can talk about the drug mutating and these two threats evolving into the move. I’m not doing it if everyone isn’t on board with that threat.
And that’s where we are right now. Palacine is about to dive into the challenge of getting Colin clear of Invictus.
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