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ecofinisher · 4 years

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Abominable 2.0 - Chap 10

Chapter 10

https://archiveofourown.org/works/22006036/chapters/53651821

https://www.fanfiction.net/s/13463708/10/Abominable-2-The-Fanfic-Sequel

https://www.wattpad.com/833124734-abominable-2-0-chapter-10

At the Qinghai province near the Goldmud airport, Zara sat in front of a small limousine watching a few cars driving on the road up towards the airport at the end of it. Inside the car, the goon leader sat on the driver seat on the phone talking to someone. The man placed his phone away, then he opened the door of the vehicle getting out of it and walked to the redhead.

“They’ll be here in two minutes. They passed with the van without any problem” The man mentioned.

“Have you already located the boy?” Zara questioned making the man shake his head.

“Nope, but I will” The man answered earning a nod from the woman, then he took out his smartphone again to locate the boy. “Do you think they won’t find the smartphone?”

“I made sure, that it would be hidden enough under the urn the boy was carrying. I don’t think he’s going to find it so soon”

“Good. I don’t think he’s going to take the urn out until he’s up at the Himalayas”

“Exactly. Even if they would find it, we have another group landing in Kathmandu the next hours and they’ll be closer to the destination and would encounter them, if the boy and Dave are going the right way….Honestly, what are they thinking about going up to the Himalayas to scatter Burnish’s ashes? This is just ridiculous”

“It might have been, what the testament of Burnish could have said. You know he was so fascinated with the mount Everest, that he might have chosen to have his ashes scattered there when he wrote his last will”

“Most likely. But one thing is for sure” Zara said turning around to the partner. “If we catch Dave and the boy before the mountains, we threat the kid with Dave’s death and the only way to free him would be him going up to the mountain to lure the yeti to him and when we see him, we all aim him with tranquilizer darts to take him down and it’s over. The scientists keep their yeti, we get our money and the two….well they’re useless they can stay alive, it doesn’t matter. Who’s going to believe what happened anyway? No one believed Burnish years ago when he saw the yeti for the first time” “Sounds plausible” The former security leader of the Burnish industries agreed. “Mostly since the other two teens are away” The man mentioned making Zara snicker shortly.

“If they actually would show up, I would have a bigger threat for the boy to go up to the mountains for us”

“This really seems to be easy Zara” The man concurred earning a confident smile of the woman.

“I told you it wouldn’t be harder, than it was back then” Zara mentioned, then watched a white van approach with the symbol of the Hongkonger flag and the symbol of the scientific labor, which consisted of a chemical flask with a dropper over it dropping a black-colored liquid in it. Zara smiled and waved her arm at the conductor, which was a raven-haired woman, which moved the vehicle aside from the road to park vice versa to the former criminal pack.

“Shouldn’t we discuss the plan somewhere else?” The driver asked earning a nod from the redhead.

“Yes and there’s an industrial zone back there. The workers are all busy in the factory, we can park on the outside and discuss it in the van or on the outside without any problem” Zara affirmed earning a thumb up from the woman, which put the blinker of the van on to enter back into the road, then Zara entered along with the man into the black car and made a U-turn to follow the van out of the airport area.

In the afternoon Jin, Yi and Kai were traveling on the train for a few hours. Although it’s frustrating for the two to feel well on the long ride, they tried to motivate each other to suffer less on the ride from boredom.

“Okay I know this comes now out of the blue, but FantasyWorks secretly made the past years hilarious and weird scenes in their movies, so that fans could use it to make memes. This why they also nickname the studio Memeworks” Jin asserted while the friend listened to his story.

“Dolan is a great movie studio and that for many generations, but I don’t know, I could identify myself better with some of the girls from the FantasyWork movies,” Yi mentioned glancing at the tall boy.

“Most of the girls there seem to be tomboys just like you”

“Yes…..I could never become like all the other girls at the school. You know wear makeup, dresses, skirts. I just can’t do that. It’s just not my thing Jin”

“You’re you. And you’re just great the way you are”

“I know, thanks” Yi responded. “But have you ever wondered, why I’m actually like that?” The girl questioned making Jin shrug his shoulders.

“I never really cared if you were more like the girls or not. At least, when I was younger and we were always hanging out together…..hey probably one of the reasons you’re more of a tomboy is because you were always hanging out with me and Peng most of the times.” Jin mentioned. “We were always doing boys stuff like playing basketball”

“Eventually?” I don’t remember beside I used to wear many t-shirts or shorts, when I went out. I never had the interest to wear any skirts or dresses. Not even today”

“Well, you never needed to wear a dress to look amazing. Like…...any other girl just wears them, cause its a girl thing and all,”

“You don’t sound like you’ve got a good knowledge about girls, Jin” Yi mentioned with a chuckle making Jin roll his eyes.

“The douche Casanova you knew back then is history. Don’t ask me, what’s was going on through my head at that time,”

“Puberty?” Yi added seeing Jin mock laugh at her comment.

“Really funny” Jin grumbled.

“Yeah, I see that. I just wondered how your reputation didn’t get ruined with all the dates you had in that space of time”

“I didn’t have them all at once in the first place. Second, if I would get caught I would really have a bad reputation and it would have ruined my popularity back in high school” “Poor past you” Yi commented making Jin shake his head while smiling amused at the friend. “What?”

“Nothing” Jin pointed out. “I always thought you disliked the fact I was popular back in high school”

“Yeah I did, but mostly how you acted towards me sometimes when you were around your new friends. You know as if I was a stranger or some loser,”

“I know and I’m sorry about it, I….”

“It’s alright Jin, I’m just saying. You don’t need to say anything”

“I know, but I feel like it doesn’t make me feel better” Jin confessed observing Yi take out her smartphone, then she glanced at the medical student.

“Look Jin. It’s been a year since we bounded again after we accompanied Everest back home. We’ve been more opener and honest with each other about our lives as our friendship was restrained. We texted each other once in a while during our courses and we’re here together without the urge to take each other down for silly things” Yi mentioned unlocking her smartphone, then she furrowed her left eyebrow as she saw she had a message from Jin’s smartphone. “I think Peng sent us a message?” Yi said and Jin leaned his head beside Yi’s to check the message.

“What did he say?” Jin asked reading the message. “Hello Yi, it’s me, Peng. I know you and Jin are worried about me, but I’m good. One of Miss Burnish’s employees is here with me. He’s nice and all, but I miss you guys. The trip isn’t the same without you in it. Dave and I are right now in the city called Xining. If you want to know it. I love you guys”

“When was the message sent?” Yi asked, then Jin pointed at the top of the message, which said the date and the time, the message had arrived. “Almost seven hours ago” The Chinese boy mentioned.

“Let’s check his location now” Yi suggested opening the smartphone tracking app again, then added Jin’s phone number on it and pressed the updating button to look for Peng’s current location.

“He’s close to Türpan. Probably an hour away from there” Jin guessed holding his index finger on the phone symbol on the display. “At least we’re on the same route”

“If Peng and Dave decide to overnight at Urümqui we might be able to catch up with them before they continue” The Chinese girl predicted observing Jin press the home button before he handed it back to Yi.

“You’ve got any idea, what we’re going to do when we find Peng?” Jin questioned the friend, who looked up at the boy a little perplexed. “Does it make sense for us to go back with him?”

“We’re on the other end of China. If we take the conventional line down to the borders, we’ll be In two days I guess near the Himalayas,” Pointed out the short-haired girl. “If you still prefer to go back to Shanghai, it’s fine,” Yi said looking at the friend, which thought about Yi’s words.

“I’ll think about that”

“I know you were against it at the start, but I think now, that we’re all out here we should continue our way to Mount Everest to fulfill Mr. Burnish’s last wish,” Yi added watching Jin sink his head down looking neutrally at the floor. Yi placed her hand on the friend’s shoulder bowing down at eye level to the teenage boy, afterward he rolled his eyes at the girl meeting her own eyes, then saw the girl giving him a soft smile. Jin smiled courteously at the girl friend and raised his head up again.

“Thanks, Yi,” Jin said holding out his hand for the friend to shake, but she gave him a hug instead, making him grin and lean his head beside Yi’s enjoying it.

#fanfic #fanfiction #wattpad #ao3 #archieve of our own #Abominable #Abominável #jin abominable #abominable yi #abominable jin #ecofinisher #ecofinisherfanfics #update #fanfic update #ficupdate

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ricardosousalemos · 7 years

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Massive Attack: Mezzanine

“Trip-hop” eventually became a ’90s punchline, a music-press shorthand for “overhyped hotel lounge music.” But today, the much-maligned subgenre almost feels secret precedent. Listen to any of the canonical Bristol-scene albums of the mid-late ’90s, when the genre was starting to chafe against its boundaries, and you’d think the claustrophobic, anxious 21st century started a few years ahead of schedule. Looked at from the right angle, trip-hop is part of an unbroken chain that runs from the abrasion of ’80s post-punk to the ruminative pop-R&B-dance fusion of the moment.

The best of it has aged far more gracefully (and forcefully) than anything recorded in the waning days of the record industry’s pre-filesharing monomania has any right to. Tricky rebelled against being attached at the hip to a scene he was already looking to shed and decamped for Jamaica to record a more aggressive, bristling-energy mutation of his style in ’96; the name Pre-Millennium Tension is the only obvious thing that tells you it’s two decades old rather than two weeks. And Portishead’s ’97 self-titled saw the stress-fractured voice of Beth Gibbons envisioning romance as codependent, mutually assured destruction while Geoff Barrow sunk into his RZA-noir beats like The Conversation’s Gene Hackman ruminating over his surveillance tapes. This was raw-nerved music, too single-minded and intense to carry an obvious timestamp.

But Massive Attack were the origin point of the trip-hop movement they and their peers were striving to escape the orbit of, and they nearly tore themselves to shreds in the process. Instead— or maybe as a result—they laid down their going-nova genre's definitive paranoia statement with Mezzanine. The band's third album (not counting the Mad Professor-remixed No Protection) completes the last in a sort of de facto Bristol trilogy, where Tricky’s youthful iconoclasm and Portishead’s deep-focus emotional intensity set the scene for Massive Attack’s sense of near-suffocating dread. The album corroded their tendencies to make big-wheel hymnals of interconnected lives where hope and despair trade precedent—on Mezzanine, it’s alienation all the way down. There’s no safety from harm here, nothing you’ve got to be thankful for, nobody to take the force of the blow: what Mezzanine provides instead is a succession of parties and relationships and panopticons where the walls won’t stop closing in.

The lyrics establish this atmosphere all on their own. Sex, in “Inertia Creeps,” is reduced to a meeting of “two undernourished egos, four rotating hips,” the focus of a failing relationship that's left its participants too numbed with their own routine dishonesty to break it off. The voice singing it—Massive Attack's cornerstone co-writer/producer Robert “3D” Del Naja—is raspy from exhaustion. “Dissolved Girl” reiterates this theme from the perspective of guest vocalist Sarah Jay Hawley (“Passion’s overrated anyway”). On “Risingson,” Grant “Daddy G” Marshall nails the boredom and anxiety of being stuck somewhere you can’t stand with someone you’re starting to feel the same way about (“Why you want to take me to this party and breathe/I’m dying to leave/Every time we grind you know we severed lines”).

But Mezzanine’s defining moments come from guest vocalists who were famous long before Massive Attack even released their first album. Horace Andy was already a legend in reggae circles, but his collaborations with Massive Attack gave him a wider crossover exposure, and all three of his appearances on Mezzanine are homages or nods to songs he'd charted with in his early-’70s come-up. “Angel” is a loose rewrite of his 1973 single “You Are My Angel,” but it’s a fakeout after the first verse—originally a vision of beauty (“Come from way above/To bring me love”), transformed into an Old Testament avenger: “On the dark side/Neutralize every man in sight.” The parenthetically titled, album-closing reprise of “(Exchange)” is a ghostly invocation of Andy’s “See A Man's Face” cleverly disguised as a comedown track. And then there’s “Man Next Door,” the John Holt standard that Andy had previously recorded as “Quiet Place”—on Mezzanine, it sounds less like an overheard argument from the next apartment over and more like a close-quarters reckoning with violence heard through thin walls ready to break. It’s Andy at his emotionally nuanced and evocative best.

The other outside vocalist was even more of a coup: Liz Fraser, the singer and songwriter of Cocteau Twins, lends her virtuoso soprano to three songs that feel like exorcisms of the personal strife accompanying her band’s breakup. Her voice serves as an ethereal counterpoint to speaker-rattling production around it. “Black Milk” contains the album’s most spiritually unnerving words (“Eat me/In the space/Within my heart/Love you for God/Love you for the Mother”), even as her lead and the elegiac beat make for some of its most beautiful sounds. She provides the wistful counterpoint to the night-shift alienation of “Group Four.” And then there's “Teardrop,” her finest moment on the album. Legend has it the song was briefly considered for Madonna; Andrew “Mushroom” Vowles sent the demo to her, but was overruled by Daddy G and 3D, who both wanted Fraser. Democracy thankfully worked this time around, as Fraser’s performance—recorded in part on the day she discovered that Jeff Buckley, who she’d had an estranged working relationship and friendship with, had drowned in Memphis’ Wolf River—was a heart-rending performance that gave Massive Attack their first (and so far only) UK Top 10 hit.

Originally set for a late ’97 release, Mezzanine got pushed back four months because Del Naja refused to stop reworking the tracks, tearing them apart and rebuilding them until they’re so polished they gleam. It sure sounds like the product of bloody-knuckled labor, all that empty-space reverb and melted-together multitrack vocals and oppressive low-end. (The first sound you hear on the album, that lead-jointed bassline on “Angel,” is to subwoofers what “Planet Earth” is to high-def television.) But it also groans with the burden of creative conflict, a working process that created rifts between Del Naja and Vowles, who left shortly after Mezzanine dropped following nearly 15 years of collaboration.

Mezzanine began the band’s relationship with producer Neil Davidge, who’d known Vowles dating back to the early ’90s and met the rest of the band after the completion of Protection. He picked a chaotic time to jump in, but Davidge and 3D forged a creative bond working through that pressure. Mezzanine was a document of unity, not fragmentation. Despite their rifts, they were a post-genre outfit, one that couldn’t separate dub from punk from hip-hop from R&B because the basslines all worked together and because classifications are for toe tags. All their acknowledged samples—including the joy-buzzer synths from Ultravox’s “Rockwrok” (“Inertia Creeps”), the opulent ache of Isaac Hayes’ celestial-soul take on “Our Day Will Come” (“Exchange”), Robert Smith’s nervous “tick tick tick” from the Cure’s “10:15 Saturday Night,” and the most concrete-crumbling throwdown of the Led Zep “Levee” break ever deployed (the latter two on “Man Next Door”)—were sourced from 1968 and 1978, well-traveled crate-digging territory. But what they build from that is its own beast.

Their working method never got any faster. The four-year gap between Protection and Mezzanine became a five-year gap until 2003’s 100th Window, then another seven years between that record and 2010’s Heligoland, plus another seven years and counting with no full-lengths to show for it. Not that they've been slacking: we've gotten a multimedia film/music collaboration with Adam Curtis, the respectable but underrated Ritual Spirit EP, and Del Naja’s notoriously rumored side gig as Banksy. (Hey, 3D does have a background in graffiti art.) But the ordeal of both recording and touring Mezzanine took its own toll. A late ’98 interview with Del Naja saw him optimistic about its reputation-shedding style: “I always said it was for the greater good of the fucking project because if this album was a bit different from the last two, the next one would be even freer to be whatever it wants to be.” But fatigue and restlessness rarely make for a productive mixture, and that same spark of tension which carried Mezzanine over the threshold proved unsustainable, not just for Massive Attack’s creativity but their continued existence.

Still, it’s hard not to feel the album’s legacy resonating elsewhere—and not just in “Teardrop” becoming the cue for millions of TV viewers to brace themselves for Hugh Laurie’s cranky-genius-doctor schtick. Graft its tense feelings of nervy isolation and late-night melancholy onto two-step, and you’re partway to the blueprint for Plastician and Burial. You can hear flashes of that mournful romantic alienation in James Blake, the graceful, bass-riddled emotional abrasion in FKA twigs, the all-absorbing post-genre rock/soul ambitions in Young Fathers or Algiers. Mezzanine stands as an album built around echoes of the ’70s, wrestled through the immediacy of its creators' tumultuous late ’90s, and fearless enough that it still sounds like it belongs in whatever timeframe you're playing it.

#reviews-albums

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