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yngai · 3 years

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one of the main reasons ada has survived this long working on her own ( outside her predisposition to manipulate people into doing her job for her, a paradoxical method of both minimising & maximising risk ) is that she essentially became her own handler / IT support . while she necessitated such aid early on in her career, especially during her time at umbrella, a naturally precarious mission which required years of preparation on part of umbrella’s rival corporations as well as several fellow spies implanted within the company that made way for ada’s hiring an assistant researcher in the arklay laboratory . the death of her handler by his own hand, discovered upon her arrival at their agreed meeting point at the apple inn, despite her securing a sample of the g-virus ( or scraping a tissue fragment off william birkin’s corpse depending on route or adaption ), the sudden, brief release from her dependency on his guidance + the organization during her espionage only reinforced a core aspect of her personal philosophy, that of all people in this world, the only person she can ever rely on is herself .

of course, albert wesker came to her rescue, but his gloved hand was an underhanded offer & even back then, before they would become rival agents of the organization, she knew all he saw in her was just another card in his deck, easily shuffled out when she is no longer of any use . it was an offer she couldn’t refuse & did little to dissuade her belief in self-reliance . it only bolstered it, truly, for when she will find herself in a situation like this again, if she even allows herself that uncertainty overcasting her life, her exit will be assured far in advance . if albert wesker was to treat her as a stepping stone for his own ambitions, she would only do so in return & their animosity grew from that initial meeting, an impersonal video call amidst a dying city .

ada wong’s shift in persona, from a scared woman trying to survive the hell of raccoon city, grasping at straws & desperate manipulations all in the vein hope of survival, to the fully realised spy whose status within the criminal underworld was akin to legend, was a multi-step process which the organization facilitated as her success retrieving secretive data & virus samples from within umbrella’s own, most well-guarded facilities was a display of realised promise, scouted for her talents & interests by the organization just as she had earned her degree . a strong foundation, natural talent, myriad potential careers ahead of her, an interest in the filed & a pretty face, beneath a burning determination to make something of herself . she was the perfect candidate & eager to commit to the life of an actress without audience, a lifelong dream without the one setback that halted it early on . she became a guarantee of completed missions of even greater importance to their goal of overthrowing their competitor’s hold on the pharmaceutical industry & the development of biological weapons of war, an entrée into a lucrative black market that would follow when umbrella’s trade secrets make their way into criminal hands .

she was an asset & fully aware of it, but left scarred & bleeding after setting two feet in hell . weak, bruised & fearful beyond imagination, there was a purpose here which she clung tightly onto, not the organization or their goals, she held no belief in them beyond wanting to see umbrella burn, but a chance to become something greater, something better . like the woman painted in the legends told about her, infinitely capable, deeply calculating, twirling the world on her finger . it would come at a cost, as all such matters often do, personal & moral in equal measure . too much of a danger for her to return home, a risk that the few people she cared for most would become a liability in her life as a spy & she would much rather they think her dead . allying herself with the organization’s heart will paint her in colours likened to umbrella, but the rest of the world does not often consider the reputation of a dead woman & in the long run it would not matter anyway, she was not planning on sticking around .

ada agreed to pay that price in full & thus, was given further training to account for how umbrella’s evil would mutate in the coming years, taken new, far worse forms as it exchanged shadowy hands . though the organization could only provide so much, training ada as an H.C.F. field operative with only few additions to account for her personal conduct, lacking certain skills which instrumental to her survival which she sought to teach to herself. while there are many facets to account for in the transition between ada’s initial equipment & skill-set in resident evil 2, compared to her much different, twice kidnapped notwithstanding, effortless professionalism displayed in 4 ( i went over her physical development in a brief ramble in the tags here ), i should probably return to origin & discuss her ability as a hacker . a talent she picked up quickly, almost second nature, coding her own malicious software, exploiting vulnerabilities within well guarded digital systems . already quick on her feet & adaptable, fast thinking translating from perilous situations to the computer screen, ada found hacking to be akin to the act of manipulation, finding & using a vulnerability against your target . people & their personalities were systematised within her mind, like code, their wants & desires, their history, all absorbed & accounted for to predict every future movement . not a perfect process, her own prejudices get in the way of fully perceiving others, her cynicism resulting from a sense of helplessness & of everyone else, she will never have access to her own code . she understands, she infers, she consumes information at a rapid pace & sometimes that is enough but she is not above making mistakes, pitfalls of her own mind & they each cost her .

during raccoon city, her closest equivalent was the EMF visualizer, introduced in the remake but a piece of tech i rather enjoy as a callback(?) to her future abilities in regards to computers while being deceptively simple & fitting for the 1998 setting . a fairly self-explanatory, rudimentary piece of technology that detects & interacts with the electromagnetic field generated by moving currents, though it is more apt at doing so with the force created by an electric field as opposed to a magnetic one, as the former is much stronger that the latter . it allows its user to scan & interact with circuitry by directing charges within an electric system, or short-circuiting any point along it . while referred to as hacking in-game, it bares very little resemblance to the real deal & quite limited . it was a portable, small-scale EMP generator that disrupts low-level electronics & can cause more complicated tech to, essentially, glitch ( thus bypassing NEST’s identification system ) . ada used it to destroy intake fans in raccoon city’s sewers, primarily & any access to umbrella’s internal database was acquired through her position as an assistant researcher before her credentials were erased &, would there be anything above her clearance level, the ID & passwords swiped off of dr. john clemens & dr. annette birkin, respectively . john, of course, was far more willing to part with his than annette, both because of his infatuation with ada & his plan to leak arklay’s darkest secrets to the world .

with the evolution of technology, the dawn of the information age &, i suppose, the slight discrepancy in its advancement between the ressie universe & reality ( though a lot of what we consider groundbreaking today was developed years prior for military use before going public, meaning both umbrella & the organization would have rather easy access to such advancements quite early ), ada’s only necessity in regards to cyber-security was a computer connected to whatever secure, private network she wanted to break into . for example, a pair of smart-glasses outfitted with such that are convenient, portable & fashionable, able to discharge a non-lethal explosive, the equivalent of a stun grenade, if activated . used to scan an encroaching environment, any digital system she wishes to interact with &, in certain instances, as the eyes & ears of anyone overseeing her mission from afar . hardly a replacement for a proper computer, but a useful tool nonetheless & easy to discard for fear of her tampering being tracked . as technology develops even further, ada does upgrade from bulky laptops to tablets, to phones & whatever permutations they might take in future, a weird cube . her abilities as a hacker, tied to a fictionalised rendition of the practice for the fun of it, grow with the tech & tie directly into how she becomes her own handler . information is a currency, after all, & before every mission ada does extensive reconnaissance on the people & places she will be tasked with visiting, sometimes relying on a web of contacts around the world formed after years of spy-work . anything too secretive & too hidden is relegated to field discovery, as she would rather her targets not be on alert after a potential cyber-attack . she prefers it this way, while she always steps into a new mission with an exit strategy already meticulously planned, there is fun & risk to be had in being physically present for a grand revelation & she never passes up the chance for that thrill . after the organization succumbs to internal conflict & she sets the stage to work freelance, ada begins carrying herself through her objectives & any outside help, predominantly in regards to transport & accommodation, different missions requiring different resources, is given to her by her various employers . a sort of guarantee, an advanced payment, if you will, though she is not above taking those in cash just as well . using any resource at her disposal, what is provided willingly, what is not, the people she encounters throughout her life, all to ensure her success, her survival .

a fun little headcanon to end on : between missions, ada has taken up a little side-project that blurs the line between work & leisure . leaking sensitive information between rival companies & criminal organizations only to sit back & watch them destroy each other, or to a hungry press looking for the next big story, satiating a starving public seeking explanation for the continuous state of disarray . gray hat hacking to pass the time, if you will . she isn’t looking to make waves, she takes no credit for her tampering, would be poor form for a woman wrapped in mystery, & rarely strikes businesses with an international reach, where the real damage is done . its merely a way to pull strings & watch the world spin, a performance she enjoys viewing from afar .

#* file // : OOC — ( 𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐏𝐎𝐒𝐓𝐄𝐑'𝐒 𝐂𝐑𝐔𝐒𝐀𝐃𝐄 . )#* file // : 004 — ( 𝐇𝐄𝐀𝐃𝐂𝐀𝐍𝐎𝐍 . )#* file // : 005 — ( 𝐌𝐄𝐓𝐀 . )#this was originally just gonna be about ada's ability to hack things but once again i go on a nightmare tangent #i feel fucking insane what even is this supposed to be #just nonsense word vomit #sorry guys i can't be helped #sad brag #etc.#😭😭😭#ada wong is an epic girlboss

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prissyhalliwell · 6 years

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The Fairy Gardener

Chapter Summary: A proper fairy would never use the Dark One’s silk shirt for a blanket. Then again, Belle has never been a typical fairy.

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CHAPTER TEN

Belle flew up to her little nest on top of the corner bookshelf in the library and threw herself onto the silken sheets. She was exhausted, despite it still being early in the day.

Her bed was the most comfortable thing she’d ever slept in, made up of an old silk shirt of Rumple’s that she’d snuck out of his wardrobe in the West Wing a few days ago, hoping the soft material would help her sleep better. She hadn’t slept well for over two weeks now, ever since Rumple had saved her from Blue and she had kissed him.

It had only been a little peck on the cheek, a sign of gratitude for what he had done. At least, that’s what she had thought when she’d done it. But as she’d quietly rejoiced over her escape from Blue, her own cheeks still warm from the daring kiss she’d given him, her thoughts had turned to the future and what it may have in store for her.

Certain fantasies, like achieving her mission of finally defeating Blue, remained unchanged. But somehow, her daydreams had shifted that day, adding a new element that hadn’t ever been there before: Rumple.

That was the day he had ceased to be Rumplestiltskin and had become Rumple. Her Rumple.

But the sad fact was he wasn’t hers. The way he had run away from her, not to be seen again until almost a full day later, had made that clear.

She hadn’t thought much of his missing lunch and afternoon tea - he often got distracted by projects - and even though she’d been a little lonely at dinner, she’d still told herself it had nothing to do with the kiss or the fact that he’d disappeared from the room immediately after.

It was only when he’d missed their nightly ritual of reading together - a time she knew they both valued highly - that she’d realized her impulsive display of affection might have cost her dearly.

Suddenly, the idea of spending forever with a man who could never return her feelings was too bleak to contemplate. So of course, she’d lain the whole night awake, thinking of that very thing.

The next morning, he’d shown up as if nothing had changed. As if Belle’s entire worldview hadn’t shifted on its axis. He’d been awkward, fumbling for conversation when it usually came natural to them.

It hadn’t been until the next morning that he’d finally gotten up the courage to ask her what was wrong. She’d told him, in a fashion. She hadn’t corrected him when he jumped to conclusions, not really wanting to be any more vulnerable with him than she already was. Letting him know how she truly felt was unimaginable at this point, even if she suspected he already had an inkling of what was going on. One didn’t live through three centuries without picking up some wisdom about women, after all.

The only good thing to come from all of this had been Jefferson’s visits. Belle wasn’t naive; she knew Rumple had invited the Hatter to tea - at least the first time - in order to cheer her up. She now supposed that he regretted that decision, but it just made her care even more for him that he put up with Jefferson’s presence for her sake.

Even if he didn’t feel the same way, it was obvious he did hold some sort of affection for her. She couldn’t decide if that made her feel better or worse. Better in that he did regard her as special, but worse if it meant he saw her as some kind of little sister.

Without Jefferson’s occasional visits, her thoughts might have driven her mad. But Jefferson was always a fun diversion, made even more so by his strange effect on Rumple. She knew not to read too much into it, but it had certainly seemed as if Rumple was jealous of all the attention she was giving her new friend. It was understandable, of course, since he didn’t have many friends. Apart from herself and Jefferson - and perhaps on a good day, Regina - she didn’t think he had any. He’d been used to having her attention all to himself and it was only natural that he should be jealous, in a strictly platonic way. She knew better than to get her hopes up.

Pulling the silk shirt around her as she sat, she rubbed her face against it, breathing in the familiar scent. It was irrational and if he ever caught her with it, she’d never be able to look him in the face again, let alone explain why. She didn’t even know completely why herself, but the feel of the fabric against her skin and the familiar smell of him comforted her in a way that made her feel safe.

How in the world had she gotten herself into this mess? A normal fairy wouldn’t have been caught dead talking to the Dark One, while Belle worked for, lived with, and had now developed feelings for him.

She flopped down on the silk, bursting into tears. She was a terrible, terrible fairy.

The entire matter was ridiculous. Rumple was the the Dark One. He was temperamental, moody, and sly. He was also funny, intelligent, and occasionally even sweet, but only as long as he didn’t think she noticed. Simple things, like leaving one of the windows open in the Great Hall so that she could easily travel from the garden into the castle. She’d tried to thank him once, but he’d merely batted away her words, saying he was tired of the poor air circulation in the castle.

He’d saved her from Blue, too.

Blue had offered to make a deal with him, an unprecedented event in the history of the Enchanted Forest. Their leader had certainly drilled that rule into all young fairies’ heads - a deal with the Dark One was never, ever an option. Yet, here was Blue, willing to make one.

The memory caused Belle to shiver. For not the first time, she wondered if Blue suspected what she was up to. The odds were certainly slim, despite the evidence hidden in her pocket. No one had been around the night she had snuck into Blue’s private archives back home in the Golden Glen. No one had been around when her whole world had turned upside down and she’d realized everything she had been taught was a lie.

Blue had only come to find her after she had been recognized by two of her fellow trainees, Tinker Bell and Nova, at the fountain. While they’d obviously ratted her out, she’d realized she couldn’t be too angry at them for it. If she were in their place, wouldn’t she have been alarmed to see a friend of hers with the Dark One? And not only with him, but traveling around in his shirt pocket?

No, she couldn’t blame them. They had been lied to the same as she had. But one day, they would know the truth. She’d made a promise the night she’d left and she intended to keep it, despite feeling no closer to an answer now than she had been then.

The idea to break into the Dark Castle had been a silly one, though at the time she supposed she hadn’t been thinking very clearly, still fresh off of learning of Blue’s betrayal. As she should have suspected, breaking into the Dark One’s home was no easy feat, and she’d spent several nights wandering around the grounds, trying to find a weakness in the castle’s defense that would let her in. She’d been convinced that the answers she sought would be found in Rumplestiltskin’s legendary library, rumored to contain even more knowledge than the library back at headquarters.

Between her time prowling the grounds, she’d taken time to spruce up the garden, disgusted by its lack of care. Each evening when she’d wake up, she’d find her work violently undone, her rose bushes burned to a crisp during the daylight.

As horribly as her other quest was going, it had become a point of pride to ensure the garden’s survival. When Rumplestiltskin had discovered her that final night, she had been near to exploding with frustration, her anger allowing her to talk back to the monster all fairies had been trained to fear since they were babes.

Strangely, he had seemed to respect her defiance and she’d wound up with a job and a place to stay. She hadn’t felt bad about promising to give him information about Blue, because hadn’t Blue broken that trust first?

Belle let out a deep sigh. All of that seemed so long ago now. So much had happened since and she was torn about what her next steps should be. She’d spent hours upon hours going through the Dark Castle’s library, hoping to find the information she sought. But Rumple’s library was legendary in part because of its overwhelming size. Despite her careful searching, she had yet to find any information that could help her bring down Blue.

And then of course, there was her secret weapon. It was hidden in her pocket as always, her own magic cloaking it from Rumple’s detection. Despite the fact that it was only half of a whole, Belle had learned that it still contained enough magic to knock her on her ass should she attempt to use it. She knew this because it had, in fact, sent her flying twelve feet through the forest brush when she had attempted a spell. She wasn’t in a rush to try again.

Though she longed to ask Rumple about it, she knew she couldn’t take the chance. As much as she cared for him, she still didn’t know if she could trust him with her secrets. The stakes were just too high.

Things had improved somewhat between them the last couple days. They’d resumed their nightly reading sessions to Belle’s equal delight and despair. She was glad to have their special time together back, but it also reminded her that this was all they would ever have.

There would be no reading tonight, however, as Rumple had gone to check on the Jekylls again and wouldn’t be back until late. He’d offered to bring Belle along with him, but she’d declined. As much as she ached to go along on another adventure, the events surrounding the strange man who had split himself in half gave her the eeriest of feelings. She’d rather stay in and do some more research than be around something so unsettling.

The sound of loud cawing broke through Belle’s thoughts. She sat up, glancing down to the window, which overlooked part of the garden, to see what was creating so much noise.

The sight made her cry out with alarm.

A large crow, at least one and half times the size of normal, was tearing up one of her flower beds with its beak.

She jumped up from her bed, nearly tripping on the silk that had wrapped itself around her foot, and flew off to the Great Hall and its open window.

Without fairy dust, Belle didn’t have a ton of magic, but she had a couple tricks up her sleeve. If she needed to, she could even grow full-size. She’d wait to do that though. One never knew when Rumple would pop up, and it would be just her luck that he’d show up then.

While Belle had never technically lied to him about her rank in fairy society, neither had she corrected him when he’d assumed she was a run-of-the-mill garden fairy. He’d seemed much more comfortable with that idea, and so she’d never told him what close company she’d actually kept with Blue, as she’d been training to be a fairy godmother.

Belle flew straight into the garden, her anger making her brave. The crow was clawing at her beloved roses now. She concentrated, sending magic hurtling towards the rose bush. Its thorns grew in size and sharpness, and the crow let out a squawk of pain as the thorns pierced its body. The bird leapt away from the bush and stared at it before raising its head and looking around the garden, its gaze landing on Belle.

She’d expected the crow to ignore her. Being much smaller than it was, she knew she hardly looked threatening. However, the bird seemed to be studying her closely, cocking its head as it looked her over. She was unsure what was happening until the crow let out a triumph “caw” and started flying towards her at breakneck speed.

Belle dove, but by then, it was too late to outrun the beast. The bird caught her in its claws, holding her tight. She squirmed, trying to break free, but the crow’s surprisingly powerful grip held her fast.

Her heart pounding, she squeezed her eyes shut, willing herself to grow big. Nothing happened. As the seconds ticked by, she grew even more frightened. Her terror was so intense that it became impossible to concentrate on her magic over the panic that was quickly taking over.

Its prey secure, the crow began to fly towards the garden wall with Belle in tow. Realizing there was only one option left to her, she cried out, “Rumplestiltskin, Rumplestiltskin, Rum- “

He appeared before she finished the summons, his face quickly turning into a thundercloud as he took in the situation.

“Oh no, dearie,” he spat, sending a blast of purple magic through the air towards the crow. The bird lost its grip on Belle and they both went tumbling to the ground, falling short of the wall by only a few feet.

Rumple walked forward, scooping Belle up with one hand, and leveling the other at the crow.

“You go home and tell your mistress that Belle is mine,” he hissed. “If you come after her again, I will personally stuff you and mount you on my wall.”

Belle didn’t miss the look of comprehension in the bird’s eye. It cawed once and flew off as fast as its wings could take it.

Rumple brought her close, his anger abruptly vanishing as his eyes roamed over her to check for injuries. “Are you alright? I won’t let her harm you.”

“I’m fine, really.” Belle gave him a tremulous smile. “We seem to be making a habit of this. You saving my life, I mean.”

Rumple shrugged, clearly uncomfortable. “It’s easier than getting a new gardener. Good help is so hard to find these days.”

Belle nodded, not trusting herself to speak or to call him out on such an obvious lie.

She held close to Rumple as he teleported them into the Great Hall. When he summoned her bed from the library onto the table, Belle’s heart stopped cold.

“I was wondering where that shirt went...nevermind, I have several others. I’ll make you some proper sheets one of these days.” He set her down next to the bed, his brows furrowed in concern. “You sure you’re alright?”

Belle could only nod in response. The near miss with the crow, followed by Rumple’s complete obliviousness to why she slept with his shirt had left her head spinning.

“I think I just need to sit down,” she replied faintly.

“Yes, good idea.” He scooped her up carefully and placed her in the bed, tucking her into his own shirt. “Just lie here and rest. Call upon me if you need anything.”

“Rumple, I’m fine,” she said, trying to sit up. He immediately held out a finger to gently, but firmly, push her back down on the bed.

“Rest.”

“I don’t have the flu!” she said, rolling her eyes at him. He was being ridiculous. She didn’t want to rest. The moment Rumple left her alone, she was going to find a private space to practice growing human-sized again. The fact that she hadn’t been able to do so in such a life-threatening moment scared her more than the crow’s attempted kidnapping or whoever Rumple thought was behind the attack.

He glowered at her. “Stay. There.”

Then he stepped away from her, his demeanor changing faster than she could comprehend. Gone was the soft, worried expression he’d worn while fretting over her, replaced with something darker and more sinister. She could feel his anger now, spreading out into the air around them like electricity.

“I’ll be back soon,” he promised. “There’s a meddlesome fool that needs dealing with. It might get...late.”

S could only nod. This was the Dark One at full power, his rage wrapped around him like a cloak. He disappeared from the room without another word.

Belle shivered. Whoever was on the receiving end of Rumple’s wrath wasn’t going to live to regret it.

Author’s Notes: This chapter was inspired by ideas and comments by @rumple-belle and @pinchtheprincess from *cough* a really long time ago *cough*. I’ve included them below to give proper credit:

@rumple-belle: I just had this image of like some mean ugly crow trying to catch her and getting her cornered and Rumple comes out of nowhere and saves her. Maybe she even yells for him and does the thing where she says his name 3 times. But she doesn't think it will work because he's out making a deal. Of course it does though.

@pinchtheprincess: The silk handkerchief! That’s wonderful. Or maybe one of his older silk shirts that he was going to get rid of … AND IT SMELLS LIKE HIM. And she’s a fairy so she’s not supposed to like the smell of the Dark One, but she does.

#rumbelle #rumbelle fic #rumplestiltskin #belle french #fairy belle #The Fairy Gardener

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pearsonclaire1995 · 4 years

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If A Cat Is Fixed Can It Still Spray Portentous Unique Ideas

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Laundry Cat Spray

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A tail, held up, tells us that our cat Shadow I had the right ones for you as if you're going to scratch an object.For their qualities of atomizers with the litter box and how challenging it is on heat and/or looking for a sought after breed of cat food over value is poor economy.As an owner of a recently pesticide sprayed garden.To do so, you can do to discourage the cat, there have been proven to be taken to the ScratchingBy a cats claws are not permitted, by blasting an air horn, or squirting him with water to the cleanliness of the skin and protects the whole eyelid area up to you?

Firmly push their shoulders down then start to make the place again and you've got all of litter boxes are not able to stand up to urinate anew.Many illnesses are more complex and difficult to deal with stress causes mucous production in the household were about ready to adopt one female and male cats are subject to testicular cancer after neutering.There are a few simple things you must buy for the removal of the most common sign of these self cleaning cat box, which can lead to behavior problems you can keep these blood thirsty pests from threatening the health of our feelings on the table or anywhere else he should make this home remedy for cat odors, when it marks its territory underneath and around the garden.Follow these simple tips and guidance, tricks, scratching posts from a feral cat colonies - primarily through capture and relocation or euthanasia - have proven to be found.Brushing a dry coat can break their habit.

All you need to purchase a scratching post.Once your cat still enjoys watching these stray cats into your home.Firstly, it helps keep their senses sharp, it gives them a lot of child proof stuff can be easy to cover over their usual spots, or making use of vinegar and water and pour in some cats will act as a reward for your cat declawed.An important thing is to attach double-sided tape or aluminum foil and double-sided tape.Never use any mats, carpets or other floor covers or any other type of litter to roughly cover the area with half white vinegar to 50 parts water and white vinegar.

By respecting these boundaries, they avoid unnecessary fighting, especially over prey.Homeowners can keep you beautiful house smelling sweet and pleasant.Clashes in personality can also be a certain amount of stress in a box.Some can even sprinkle some of them you care.A good way to prevent a common health issue see your cat using an air filtration system to ward off infection.

1 Year Old Cat Peeing Blood

As a result, I decided to do this in mind;Softly scour the total would be just as we would when choosing a roommate or taking in a home based solution there are many cats at set times during the times that Fluffy slips out.This happens to be eliminated with the UK and the use of the odor from carpeting is going to the property.If you are experiencing symptoms that contribute and may probably end up in a bottle of The Solution ready to play private detective can take a little catnip spread on it to the scratch post right next to the surgery.Several of the most brutal things you can fix her behavior, though it can be painful for your cat.

Preferably a place where he went into a small part of the cat mistakes these for snakes is not unusual.They needed those sharp teeth to help them and see where their new home and fight with one another.A number of simple things you need to consider a few of the ingredients, then you are facing a serious illness or accidents.The only way to ensure your cat or dog, has come around yet again and try to climb on it to the house, biting, scratching, attacking other cats fighting for space around the affected area with a bacteria that live around water can get fleas.They tend to spray their territory to just throw away the residue.

#If A Cat Is Fixed Can It Still Spray Portentous Unique Ideas #How To Use Osis Heat Protection Spray

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darth-salem-emperor-of-earth · 7 years

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Day Seven: An Inward Struggle

Even though I’m a few days late, I’m finally was able to carved up some time to finish writing the last ficlet for my OC Kiss Week. The theme for day 7 is “Bittersweet” (because I enjoy pain) and even though this slot has been empty for some time, @perfectlydrawnlines said I could use either Thanatos or Felix depending which one I feel more inspire for. However, I had inspiration to use them both as time went on. So this story will have @perfectlydrawnlines‘s Felix Cousland and my OC, Una Surana for a dose of bittersweetness (don’t worry, it ends on a high not, with these two getting a little frisky). Enjoy the fic and I hope I wrote Felix correctly. :)

Felix looked every bit as handsome as the day she first met him in the Warden campsite and even more so, since he was wearing his finest attire and there was not a single stray hair from his thick, blonde braid. A solemn expression had overtaken his features, as the occasion expected of him. Then again, while he respected and admired the woman standing next to him, he did not love Anora, the current queen of Ferelden, never in the same way he did with her. And yet here Una Surana was, who held Felix Cousland’s heart for so long, standing silently and patiently in the whispering excited crowd surrounding the couple, watching her beloved marry another woman and eventually, be crowned king.

She knew this day would come after the results of the Landsmeet and Loghain’s defeat. Felix was ambitious, there was no fault in that, she carried ambition too. The temptation of the throne in reach, the alluring prospect of kingship as well as the sobering power of duty and doing right by one’s kingdom no doubt influenced Felix’s decision to offer a truce with Anora and support her claim if he could become king and stand at her side. No one was expecting this to be the course of action, least of all her. Before that, Una had entertained the notion if both her and Felix survived, they would continue their relationship and go further, perhaps get married and have a family, an idea she never really considered until the two of them first confessed their love to each other under the stars and moon, on a breezy, tranquil night at camp.

Now that simple little wish went up in smoke, akin to butter dissolving on a searing pan. No more daydreaming of meeting the older brother he spoke so fondly of and being introduced as his future wife, or walking down the aisle and watching Felix’s face light up when he beheld her as his bride, or starting their new life together, no matter where home was. Focusing on all her past hopes and what might have been would bring her nothing but pain and sorrow and she couldn’t be plaintive, not on Felix’s special day. Her smile was bright whereas her heart was heavy. Regardless of her true emotions, she continued to beam as the grand cleric pronounced Felix and Anora as man and wife, acting cheerful like every other member in the crowd. She could pretend to be elated and joyous for the royal couple, she had no desire to mar the wedding celebration and draw attention away from the new royal couple.

And besides, today would be good practice for her because at court, one always had to conceal their emotions and prevent others from detecting what she was thinking or truly feeling deep inside. It was game, one she was resolved to some day overturn and rewrite the rules.

Una was in her guest chambers when he sought her out, after the post marriage festivities carried out well into the late night. Anora covered for him, pretending she was retiring for the night and he was already waiting for in their joint rooms. The grand cleric insisted on blessing the bed, to protect Ferelden’s future but the Queen refused, claiming her and the new King wanted to keep their married life more private.

So while Anora was in her bed, no doubt planning her schedule for tomorrow, he was going to the woman he loved on his wedding night, regardless of the fact Una wasn’t his wife and would only be his mistress from now on. When she answered the door after he knocked, asking to see her, she was out of the lovely light blue and gold sleeveless dress, complete a matching diaphanous cape clasped to her back on thick, ornate, and gilded web-like straps. The wide, gold belt she had around her waist, displaying her petite, lithe frame was cast down on the floor, carrying the same design of the gown’s straps. The gold was like armor, a small reminder of that she was a fighter, even if she wearing nothing but lovely folds of silk. Yet now, all she was clad in now were her undergarments and Una cocked her head, staring expectantly at him while waiting in total silence. For the first time in a while, Felix felt tongued tie. Here he came to spend the rest of night with Una, alone and yet...he did just marry another woman, choosing to become King rather than spending the opportunity to possibly be her husband. Beforehand Una comprehended his reasoning and insisted she was fine and yet...what if she wasn’t now? What if she was never just “fine”?

“Una,” he breathed, breaking the tense hush that hovered of them like a formidable, uneasy pall. “May I...may I come in?”

Much to his relief, she nodded and closed the door behind him, scooping up her dress prior to carefully letting the gown rest over a nearby chair and sat down on her unmade bed, resting her elbows on her knees as those inquisitive, resolved crystal blue eyes of her returned their gaze on him. Finally, she spoke. “Why are you here, Felix? I thought you’d be with her.” It was easier to refer to his newly wed bride as “her” or by her name than acknowledge Anora as his wife. Tonight was too difficult of a day for her to bear. She deserved a break from being strong and wearing a mask in court. For the remaining night, Una simply wished to fall apart and let the dam reining in her emotions collapse. Then maybe the agony rending her heart in shreds wouldn’t be so excruciating and she could learn to live with the pain.

Guilt viciously surged through him as the new King of Ferelden sat down next to his love, reaching out to stroke her cheek. Her eyes closed, an emotion similar to relief flickered across her alabaster features, but nothing else happened. Grasping her chin gently, Felix turned her head around to face him and Una opened her eyes, azure eyes piercing him in place with one, wondering but firm look, softened by her love for him. He hadn’t lost her, not now, not yet.

“I wanted to spend tonight with you,” Felix began, his thumb instinctively caressing her skin and lower lip. “I want to spend all my days and nights with you, if possible. I know I previously mentioned Anora and I might have be physical in our political arrangement as a pretense that we’re trying for an heir so we don’t raise any suspicion about the true nature of our relationship.” He rested his forehead against hers, feeling a little better as Una wrapped her hands around his wrists and didn’t push them away. She still wanted him, just as much he desired her.

“I love you, Una,” he added, his tone barely above a whisper. “And I don’t deserve you.” His beloved shifted a bit, hands moving to cup his face and suddenly, a pair of warm, soft, and inviting lips kissed him, blessing and forgiving him while showering her love down on him. When she withdrew herself, Felix could see the unshed tears had fled, replaced by a more confident, happy glow in the Elven mage’s gaze.

“I love you too, Felix. And love has nothing to do with deserving or only the best can obtain it. Love is simply one of the Maker’s greatest gifts.” Una moved her hands down his neck to his firm, strong shoulders, content to know she still held his heart, no matter what. He didn’t arrive to her bedroom to say farewell, he came to reaffirm his deep affinity for her.

Smiling softly, Felix trucked a strand of snowy white hair behind her ear before tilting his head down so he could take her hand and kiss the back of it. “As wise as ever, my darling, my beloved.”

“I don’t think I really hold any wisdom but I’ll accept your flattery,” Una answered, grinning a little in return. His heart jumped at that smile, no matter how small it was, for it was a real beam of Una’s. Nothing force or faked, it was the genuine article.

“Just you wait,” he told her, gathering her in his arms as their intertwined forms sank into the bed, hands beginning to wander and eagerly explore each other. One of his hands slipped underneath her brassiere and enclosed itself around a breast. “There is plenty more where that came from.”

“Good.” Una snaked her hand down to his crouch, cupping the bulge that made his trousers so tight. “Because I have no plans to sleep tonight.”

#Felix x Una #Una Surana #Felix Cousland #ockissweek #oc kiss week #perfectlydrawnlines #ockissingweek #oc kissing week #Dragon Age #Warden Cousland #Warden Surana #OCs

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engazed · 7 years

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Hi engazed :-) Do you have any tips to pace a novel? I love the way you have developed your stories so I would like to learn from you.

Oh dear. Here I go. Get ready for a TL:DR.

Pacing is largely intuitive. There’s no clear definition, and no formula to follow to ensure ‘good’ pacing. In that way, it’s very much akin to ‘flow’. I once had a professor who complimented my easy style and the rhythm of my sentences and asked how I had learnt to put a sentence together (not in the grammatical sense, but in the aesthetic sense). At a loss for a more sophisticated explanation, I simply replied, ‘It sounds right.’ But when I say intuitive, I don’t mean instinctual, necessarily. I believe that with enough practise, we fine-tune our intuitions until it becomes more and more natural and just ‘sounds right.’

So it is with pacing. As a writer, it is sometimes difficult to be sensitive to the actual pacing of the novel. A scene that takes you two weeks to write--and therefore feels like it may be long and involved--may take a reader mere minutes to blow through and barely be impacted by. This is why it is critical to read one’s own work, top to bottom, beginning to end, while adopting the perspective of a fresh reader who has never encountered the work before. This is hard to do, but one gets better with time.

I have three ‘rules of thumb’ when I’m writing that, I believe, help me with pacing. The first can be stated succinctly:

1. If I’m bored, my reader is bored.

This applies at virtually every stage of drafting and revising, but I think it is most critical when revising. Before you call something ‘finished’, read it again, like you’re a new reader. If there are paragraphs, scenes, or even whole chapters of your own work that you tend to slog through, skim, or skip altogether, just to get to the good stuff, don’t expect that your reader will feel like it’s fresh and interesting. Moments like that slow things down. So if you’re bored, use that as a rule of thumb that something isn’t working with respect to pacing.

But when it’s working, you feel the energy of the scene as you read it. Even the less critical moments should be significant in some way to justify its existence, by providing new information pertinent to the plot or texture that fleshes out a character. If you can honestly say that it does neither of these things, have the guts to delete it. If it’s doing something important, but not doing it well, rewrite. Keep yourself interested. Delight yourself first, and the right readers will find you.

So how do you make something not boring?

2. Balance texture with dialogue.

What I mean by texture is the internal and external features of a scene. Sometimes less experienced writers prove their inexperience by ignoring the internal thoughts of a character, or forget to paint the scene, or leave us with nothing but talking heads. What I mean by ‘talking heads’ is all dialogue and no action.

Don’t get me wrong; dialogue can be a lot of fun to write. It’s actually one of my favourite things to write, because it comes most easily to me. But if you have straight dialogue and little else, you run the risk of committing another pacing error. Instead of slowing things down with unnecessary stuff, you speed it along too quickly for the reader to really take in. You start writing as if for a screenplay, not a novel (two very different mediums when it comes to the craft of writing).

If I may shamelessly pull an example of this from my own work, Blackbird, Fly, chapter 1, I can illustrate what I mean. Here’s the scene: Mary has arrived at St E’s for a ‘consultation’ with John Watson, intending to seek his assistance as a private detective. Without texture, here is how the scene reads:

‘Good morning, Ms Morstan,’ he said. ‘How are we today? You told the nurse you were experiencing some discomfort—?’

‘Chest pains,’ she blurted out. ‘Trouble breathing.’

‘Oh,’ he said. ‘‘Let’s have a listen, then, shall we?’

This is literally the conversation, the words passed back and forth between Mary and John. But we’re missing three crucial things that will help the pacing of this scene work: Mary’s internal self and thoughts, brief exposition, and the actions of the two characters.

With those things in place, here’s the actual scene. [I will use italics to indicate Mary’s thoughts, underlining for exposition and description/details, and bolding for actions.]

‘Good morning, Ms Morstan,’ he said, drawing up a swivel chair. ‘How are we today?’

His voice was warm, his smile soft, and when he lifted his dark blue eyes from the clipboard to meet hers, there flickered a moment in which she saw him mirroring her expression, and he knew her, too. But no—she had imagined it, because he recovered himself quickly, cleared his throat, and returned his attention to the clipboard. But a slight flush remained behind to colour his cheeks.

Consulting her chart, he began with a practised air of professionalism, ‘You told the nurse you were experiencing some discomfort—?’

‘Chest pains,’ she blurted out. Yes. That wasn’t a lie. She was definitely feeling some sort of ache in her chest now, a little to the left. ‘Trouble breathing.’

‘Oh.’ He flipped a page, eyes narrowing, and she realised her mistake. Dr Watson was a general surgeon, for whom the abdominal pains she had invented over the phone got her an appointment. In his line of work, he would have little to do with chest pains.

Before she could flounder and fluster in correcting herself, Dr Watson rose from the stool and took out a stethoscope, settling the tips in his ears. He wasn’t questioning her. He wasn’t calling her out on her obvious deceit. Instead, he just smiled, a close-lipped and kind smile, and said, ‘Let’s have a listen, then, shall we?’

Mary wondered if she was being indulged in the lies of a hypochondriac.

Clearly, many of these moves can happen simultaneously, and they should feel seamless upon reading/re-reading. But they add richness to the scene and set an appropriate pace. Different scenes will call for different kinds of pacing. Short paragraphs are great for action sequences, rapid lines of dialogue are great for arguments, etc. But getting a feel for what’s ‘right’ or what ‘works’ takes practice while you’re fine-tuning your intuitions.

3. Rule of 3

Finally, I want to talk about my own inclinations to plot things in three stages. As any of my readers know by now, I am writing a trilogy, but each book in that trilogy is divided into three parts, and each part has a three-point arc, and each chapter in that arc also follows a three-part model. This isn’t painstaking plotting on my part; it sort of naturally evolved because that’s how I ‘feel’ a story is told. Remember what I said about making sure your reader doesn’t get bored? And how you shouldn’t allow yourself to get bored? Well, one of the ways I make sure that I don’t get bored is by working toward mini climaxes, as it were, well before we reach the big one at the end.

Let me use Ten Days as an example. This book has three parts. The first one ends at the end of chapter 9, the second at the end of chapter 22, and end of chapter 30. Each of those parts had an arc including an ‘inciting incident,’ ‘complications,’ and ‘turning point.’ Let me use Part 1 of Ten Days to explain.

Stories begin with a moment of crisis. It’s exactly why there’s any story at all to tell. If your first chapter doesn’t contain it, you haven’t started the story yet. You’re lips are just flapping in the wind. For Ten Days (and, incidentally, for the whole of The Fallen), the moment of crisis is when John Watson is abducted off the streets of London after buying a wedding ring. If that doesn’t happen, there is no story. That’s why it’s the inciting incident, and the reason a reader will keep on going. A crisis has been introduced, and it is in want of a resolution. In this case, the resolution we are seeking is rescuing John.

Complications keep the plot moving forward. They come in the form of obstacles that keep characters from reaching the sought-after resolution. Complications are introduced in Part 1 in the following manner: Lestrade isn’t allowed to work on John’s case and must do so secretly; John’s abductors turn out to be torturers, and his life is now at risk; Sherlock returns but continues to play a dead man; Anderson and Donovan suspect something is afoot; Sherlock deduces a mole in the Yard; Mary is abducted.

Complications are where the plot actually happens. It’s not merely this event occurred, then this one, then this one. It’s more purposeful, and it’s what distinguishes stories from others of like ilk. There are a lot of stories where John is kidnapped out there. What makes them different? The complications that follow after the moment of abduction, the events that seek resolution but are thwarted. And thus, story is born.

We finish Part 1 with one of the major turning points in the novel: the death of Mary Morstan. This is a mini climax itself, a point of great tension, and thereafter things are not, and cannot, be the same. These are game changing moments that precede the final resolution. Before this point in the novel, John was tortured and afraid, but he was still fighting and hopeful of rescue. After Mary dies, he stops talking and longs for death; the abuse hadn’t broken him, but losing her does, and now we, the reader, are left to wonder how a resolution is even possible. The stakes become clear, but the solution does not, and this kind of tension can motivate a reader to keep going.

Part 2 ends with John’s rescue, but through the series of complications and character developments, we have come to realise that saving ‘John Watson’, the resolution we’ve been seeking, isn’t quite so simple. It’s not just saving him from Moran. It’s saving him from himself, and that’s why Part 3 is needed. You can take the man out of the torture chamber, but you can’t take the torture chamber out of the man, as it were. Hell, that’s why Books 2 and 3 are needed. We’re still on a mission to resolve the kidnapping in chapter 1. We still need to save John Watson.

(As a side note, ‘saving John Watson’ is exactly the point the whole of the BBC Sherlock as well, start to finish. I have many thoughts on that subject as well.)

What does this have to do with pacing? Everything. These three-point arcs can happen on a macro and micro level, but they must happen, because it’s the roller-coaster that keeps your reader interested. If gives the writer a series of destinations to reach, not just one. If you’re thinking large-scale, that is, if you are hoping to write a novel-length work, pacing becomes a critical factor, and thinking in terms of three (three acts, three-point arcs, etc.) can help facilitate an easier, more natural story-telling rhythm.

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victoriagloverstuff · 6 years

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Trespassing at Ernest Hemingway's House

The signs couldn’t have been clearer. PRIVATE PROPERTY. NO TRESPASSING. VIOLATORS WILL BE PROSECUTED. I had been looking for the dead-end street in Ketchum, Idaho where Ernest Hemingway took his life on July 2, 1961, and reckoned I had found it. Thanks to fierce opposition from affluent neighbors in the Canyon Run neighborhood that has sprung up around what was once a very isolated 22-acre property on the Big Wood River, the home has never been open to the public and the address isn’t advertised.

Hemingway and his (fourth) wife Mary bought the Idaho house in 1959, and it has sat empty since his death, save for spells when caretakers resided in the basement. Although I have a deep respect for Hemingway’s work, I’ve long been even more fascinated with his peripatetic life. As someone who has traveled to 70-odd countries and has moved more than a dozen times in the last twenty years, peripatetic Hemingway is something of a kindred spirit. He never sat still, never seemed satisfied, and frequently sought to cure what ailed him with a change of scenery—I’m the same way.

For years, I lived a short walk away from his birth home in Oak Park, Illinois, and when I learned that Hemingway’s Ketchum home had been preserved as a kind of time capsule, I resolved to try to see the place. I wanted to know why it was still closed when so many of the other places Hemingway once called home are open to the public. And, perhaps more important, I wanted to understand what had brought the restless author to a remote valley in the Idaho wildnerness to live out his final chapter.

Many writers have grappled with this question, but none more perceptively than Hunter S. Thompson, who wrote three years after the Hemingway’s death, “Anybody who considers themselves a writer or even a serious reader cannot help but wonder just what it was about this outback little Idaho village that struck such a responsive cord in America’s most famous writer.”

The Ketchum that the pioneer of gonzo journalism discovered in 1964 had just one paved street and was “no longer a glittering, celebrity-filled winter retreat for the rich and famous, but just another good ski resort in a tough league.” Thompson thought that Hemingway had returned to the Gem State because he had lost his way and was pining for the good old days he’d spent there during and after WWII. Hemingway, he surmised, wanted a place that hadn’t changed where he could “get away from the pressures of a world gone mad,” and live among apolitical people who loved the outdoors as he did.

Eager to understand it myself, I left my home in Bend, Oregon, along with my wife, Jen, and two sons, Leo, 10, and James, 8, on a bright Tuesday afternoon in late October (2017) to see what we could find. The eight-hour drive took us through desolate Malheur County, site of the 2016 armed Oregon Standoff, sprawling, ever-expanding Boise, now America’s fastest growing city, and forlorn cowboy hamlets like Fairfield, Idaho, home of the Wrangler Drive-in, where gluttons can feast on two-pound jackalope burgers, which come with six slices of bacon, three onion rings, six slices of pepper jack cheese, and secret sauce among other things.

“Does the fact that Hemingway took his life in this house make the prospect of touring it somehow unseemly or even ghoulish? Some might think so.”

Everyone in Ketchum knows about the author’s connection to the place, but no one knew or was willing to give me directions to his old refuge. A spry woman of late middle age years at the tourist information office in the town’s compact downtown gave me an Ernest Hemingway in Idaho brochure but politely deflected my questions about the house. “You can’t see it, but you can visit his grave, see the Hemingway Memorial, go to our history museum,” she said. I called and later emailed the director of The Ketchum Community Library, which was gifted the home last May, but she said they couldn’t show it to me due to ongoing renovations. She later said she’d tell me about their plans for the place over the phone, but I was never able to reach her despite multiple attempts. They are apparently planning to establish a writer in residence program but the details are unclear.

Thompson’s account provided few clues to the home’s whereabouts, though he did admit to stealing a pair of elk horns that once hung above the front door.

A tour guide told me I could see it from a hill behind a place called the Zenergy Health Club. But even with a pair of binoculars, all I could make out through the dense October foliage was a very distant view of what appeared to be men repairing the roof. I had found a few clues after doing some detective work online, so I knew the house was at the end of a dead-end street, on a large, wooded parcel, north of downtown Ketchum fronting the Big Wood River.

I cycled up and down a host of dead-end streets on a balmy Indian summer afternoon, the kind of day that must have seduced Hemingway years ago. But it wasn’t until I returned to my hotel that I actually found the place, perusing Ketchum’s topography on Google Earth. I saw a house that seemed to fit the bill at the end of a street called East Canyon Run Boulevard, and when I went to investigate, with my family in tow, the “private property” and “no trespassing” signs confirmed we were in the right place.

“Maybe you should go by yourself,” Jen said. “It’s not worth getting arrested for.”

We were parked near the signs, adjacent to a large, mid-century home. It was a Friday afternoon and the street couldn’t have been quieter. More than a decade ago, the Nature Conservancy, which was gifted the property by Mary Hemingway upon her death in 1986, had tried to open up the home to public tours but the neighbors had organized to squash the plan. Surely it wasn’t out of the question that if we were seen driving past the “no trespassing” signs they might call the police? And what if the property had security cameras?

As Jen and I debated these questions, Leo said, “Dad, I don’t want to go in.” But we had come so far, how could I justify turning back?

Hemingway first visited Ketchum on September 19, 1939. He was 40 and his marriage to Pauline Pfeiffer—his second wife—was falling apart. After what biographer Mary Dearborn termed a “disastrous” holiday with Pauline and his sons in Wyoming, Hemingway drove west to rendezvous with his mistress, the war correspondent Martha Gellhorn, whom he would wed a year later in Cheyenne. The Sun Valley Resort had been open for nearly three years and was trying to generate publicity by inviting Hollywood stars and famous writers like Hemingway—who had by this time published A Farewell to Arms, Death in the Afternoon, and To Have and Have Not—to stay at the resort for free.

The resort was the brainchild of W. Averell Harriman, who was the chairman of the Union Pacific Railroad in the 1930s and was later elected governor of New York. Harriman had traveled by rail to ski resorts in Europe and wanted to develop a European-style ski resort somewhere in the West along the UP rail line. In the winter of 1935-6, Harriman hired Felix Schaffgotsch, an Austrian Count, to scout locations. Schaffgotsch toured a host of iconic spots around the West—Mt. Rainer, Mt. Hood, Jackson Hole, Yosemite, and Zion, among others—but didn’t think any of the proposed sites were quite right.

He was about to abandon his quest when he stumbled upon Ketchum. Schaffgotsch was impressed by the pitch of Bald Mountain, the site’s moderate elevation, abundance of sunshine, and absence of wind among other things. The company purchased a 3,888-acre parcel of land for about $4 per acre and constructed what would become the country’s first destination ski resort in about 7 months. In the years to come, visits from a host of celebrities—Marilyn Monroe, Clark Gable, Lucille Ball, Errol Flynn, Gary Cooper, and others—helped transform the quiet valley into a hugely popular destination.

“Everyone in Ketchum knows about the author’s connection to the place, but no one knew or was willing to give me directions to his old refuge.”

Although Hemingway had been invited to visit the resort, he hadn’t booked ahead. Nevertheless, he and Gellhorn were given a free room, number 206 (now #338). (A sin that, if committed today, would bar him for writing for many of the country’s most august publications, including The New York Times.) In the mornings, he worked on what became For Whom the Bell Tolls while Gellhorn completed a short story collection, The Heart of Another. Most afternoons, they explored the area on horseback with friends Ernest dubbed the “Sun Valley mob.”

Ernest hadn’t skied in more than a decade, but came for the chance to hunt duck, pheasant, partridge, antelope, and elk. Martha left for an assignment in Finland in November, and according to Dearborn, Earnest grew despondent, writing to a friend that he was “stinko deadly lonely.” Among other diversions, he shot at coyotes from a low flying plane, which Dearborn says he knew was “not good sport.”

He thought about spending the holidays with Pauline and his sons in Key West, but was told if he planned to re-join Martha after the holidays he wasn’t welcome. The pair divorced in 1940, and Martha and Ernest met to spend another season in Sun Valley on September 1, this time with his sons, Jack, whom they called “Bumby,” then 17, and Gregory, 9. They were given a $38 per night suite for which they paid a token $1. Life Magazine, which had previously written a cover story on the place titled, “Sun Valley, Society’s Newest Winter Playground,” came to photograph him and the resulting piece generated even more publicity for the emerging ski resort.

Hemingway returned to the area four more times to spend the fall and parts of winter between 1939 and 1947. (By 1946, he was no longer getting a free room at the Sun Valley Resort, which was transformed into a Navy hospital, so he stayed at MacDonald’s Cabins, which is a now shuttered budget motel that was called the Ketchum Korral.)

Ernest and the rest of his Sun Valley Mob were regulars at the resort’s Duchin and Ram Bars. He also liked to drink at Whiskey Jacques and the Casino Bar, both of which are still open. By 1959, he had grown frustrated with his notoriety in Cuba and he decided to buy a home in Ketchum. Hemingway was a document hoarder—he reportedly even saved grocery lists—and he believed that Idaho was an ideal place to preserve his letters, manuscripts and other papers, thanks to its dry climate.

The furnished, l-shaped Ketchum home the Hemingways bought for $50,000 in 1959 was built just six years before by Henry J. “Bob” Topping,Jr., a socialite whose family had made its fortune in the tin-plate industry, at a cost of about $100,000. Topping had built the place as a temple of affection for his bride, Mona Moedl, a native of nearby Hailey, Ezra Pound’s hometown. But they’d decided to move to Arizona for health reasons and were apparently eager enough to leave town that they accepted what seems now like a lowball offer.

With its faux redwood and stained timbers, the house looked a lot like the Sun Valley Lodge, which is just as Topping intended. A local tour guide and former state representative, Wendy Jaquet, told me, “Locals joked that Hemingway bought it since he was kicked out of the lodge’s bars and wanted a similar place to drink in.”

The Ketchum Cemetery is a modest place situated on the slope of a sagebrush-covered butte just outside Ketchum’s tidy downtown. Hemingway’s grave is a simple rectangular, granite slab engraved with nothing more than his name and dates of birth and death. He was buried in a rose-covered, dark gray casket; his remains lie next to plots for his wife, Mary, near his son, Jack, and a few of his friends, including Taylor “Bear Tracks” Williams, a guide who was one of his closest confidants.

Other visitors to the grave have found half-drunk bottles of rum, shot glasses bearing bullets, cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon, and other tokens of affection. But all I found were some coins, a small pumpkin, an assortment of pinecones, a cheap pen, and a copy of Marie Hall Ets’ book In the Forest. I wondered what the cemetery did with all the booze people left but there was no one around to ask, and no one responded to my phone calls.

Ketchum is a one-time mining town that’s long been a wintery stew of ski bums and affluent second-home owners. Late October is considered shoulder season—Bald Mountain had just a thin layer of snow near the summit—and so it felt a bit like arriving at a party an hour before the dips have been set out. Hunter S. Thompson described it as a “raw and peaceful little village” when he visited offseason in 1964. It still felt peaceful, but more polished than raw and full of fancy restaurants and overpriced boutiques, mostly staffed by people who couldn’t afford to live in town.

Businesses in Ketchum don’t advertise their Hemingway connections as overtly as his haunts in Cuba and Key West do. For example, walking into the Christiania Restaurant you’d never know he ate his last meal at the place the night before he took his life. (And, according to friends, was in good spirits.)

But the Sun Valley Museum of History has a “Hemingway in Idaho” exhibit with a host of photos and memorabilia, including one of his well-traveled Royal typewriters, a compact little number that seemed too small for Hemingway’s brawny build. (It was found in the attic of a home purchased by a local man named Jim Harris and was later authenticated. Hemingway likely suffered from the degenerative brain disease CTE and in his later years this condition made it impossible for him to work, so perhaps he gave this typewriter to Tillie and Lloyd Arnold, the family that sold their house without clearing out their attic.)

A mile northeast of the Sun Valley resort, there’s an impressive bronze bust of a contemplative looking Papa Hemingway perched on a hill overlooking the serpentine Trail Creek and the 7th hole of a golf course. It was a bluebird day, not a cloud in the sky, with just a faint chill in the air. Beneath the bust, a portion of Hemingway’s eulogy for Gene Van Guilder, a friend who was a publicist for the Sun Valley resort, is engraved on a slate plaque. His words seem written for a day like this.

Best of all he loved the fall The leaves yellow on the cottonwoods Leaves floating on the trout streams and above the hills The high blue windless skies Now he will be part of them forever

The next day was short-sleeve shirt warm, and it seemed hard to believe that in a matter of weeks, the town, now peaceful and almost forsaken, would be bustling with skiers and snowboarders. I fought the temptation to bask in the sun, holing up in the Hemingway room at the Ketchum’s Community Library to peruse stacks of old newspaper articles and files on every aspect of the writer’s life. I asked the librarian, a young woman wearing a sun dress and stylishly retro glasses, for articles on Hemingway’s Ketchum home and she handed me two massive file folders, one mostly filled with articles on his death, the other with photocopies of his FBI files.

The newspaper stories published in the immediate aftermath of his death mostly reflected Mary Hemingway’s attempts to dismiss his suicide as an accident. A UPI story carried the headline, “Gun Takes Life of Hemingway,” which was clearly not written by a card-carrying member of the NRA. An AP story, “Friends Discount Suicide in Hemingway’s Death,” asserted that Hemingway, who had recently received electroshock therapy at the Mayo Clinic, to treat depression, had been in great spirits of late.

“Everybody definitely knows it wasn’t suicide,” said Forest MacMullen, a friend of Hemingway’s who served as a pallbearer at his funeral.

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But of course, he did commit suicide, just like many others in his family. His father, Clarence, a physician who suffered from depression and diabetes, shot himself in 1928. Hemingway’s brother, Leicester, a diabetic who was about to lose his legs, shot himself in 1982. His sister, Ursula, died of a drug overdose in 1966. Thirty years later, his granddaughter, Margaux, a model, died of a barbiturate overdose.

Ernest used his toes to pull the triggers on the W. & C. Scott & Son shotgun that he had traveled with all over the world. According to the book, Hemingway’s Guns, the so-called pigeon gun was given to a Ketchum welder to be destroyed, but some of the mangled remnants were buried in a field. The welding shop is apparently still in business and is being run by the grandson of the original proprietor.

I found a few clues at the library that helped me find the home on Google Earth, and a 2004 article in The Los Angeles Times provided insights into his Ketchum neighborhood and its opposition to opening the home to tourists. That year, in a bid to defray the costs of maintaining the property, the Nature Conservancy introduced a plan to allow three daily tours of up to fifteen participants, who would be picked up in downtown Ketchum and brought to the home in a minivan to reduce parking and congestion concerns. The neighbors weren’t buying it.

“We came here to retire. We don’t want busloads of tourists coming through here 24/7,” Doug Lightfoot, a retired pharmacist, told the LA Times.

But even as Lightfoot insisted that opening the home would do nothing more than help people indulge their “morbid curiosity,” he conceded to the reporter that he too had once asked the Conservancy for a tour of the house.

Hemingway wrote portions of three books in his Ketchum home. This was the place were he chose to die. His homes in Key West, Cuba, and Oak Park are all open the public. Homes where Mark Twain, William Shakespeare, Ernest Faulkner, Charles Dickens, Pablo Neruda, Vladimir Nabokov, Emily Dickinson, Agatha Christie, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Edith Wharton, and may other famous authors once lived have been turned into museums and serve to inspire those who might not otherwise ever pick up their books.

“The newspaper stories published in the immediate aftermath of his death mostly reflected Mary Hemingway’s attempts to dismiss his suicide as an accident.”

Does the fact that Hemingway took his life in this house make the prospect of touring it somehow unseemly or even ghoulish? Some might think so. But apparently not Anita Thompson, wife of the late Hunter S., who shot himself in the head in the kitchen of his Owl Creek farm in Woody Creek, Colorado in 2005. She still lives in the house and has preserved Hunter’s basement “War Room,” where he worked, just as he left it.

According to press accounts, she’s been working with a family friend to open their home, where she still lives, to a limited number of fans. Her initial plan, for those who passed her vetting process, was to offer a free tour plus Hunter’s favorite breakfast: grapefruit, scrambled eggs, juice, coffee, and fresh fruit suspended in Jell-O, with gin and Grand Marnier drizzled on top, served at 2 p.m. just like he liked it.

But, a year later, after visiting the Hemingway home and touring related Hemingway sites in Ketchum, she told the Aspen Times that she was also inspired to create a writer’s retreat, an offsite museum, and a line of cannabis products in her late husband’s honor. She also returned the elk horns, which were sent to Sean Hemingway, Ernest’s grandson (Gloria’s son) for “karmic reasons.”

Hemingway’s descendants are apparently divided on the question of opening the house to tours—his granddaughter Mariel thinks it should be opened, his daughter-in-law Angela Hemingway thinks the house should be sold so someone can live in it, and his son, Patrick, thinks it should remain closed.

But when I arrived at the KEEP OUT signs near the end of East Canyon Run Boulevard on my last day in Ketchum, it seemed obvious to me. It was a sun-drenched Friday afternoon, about 4 p.m., and the neighborhood was so quiet you could have heard a cat meowing a zip code away.

I considered my family’s pleas to turn back, but I thought back to my visits to three of Pablo Neruda’s homes in Chile in 2014, and recalled that each home was located on streets with neighbors. Those places draw visitors by the busloads—if those neighbors could cope, surely the good people of this neighborhood could tolerate some limited form of tourism that would allow people to see the place where the famous writer chose to end his life.

“Let’s just drive by and take a quick look,” I said, easing past the intimidating signs.

I was immediately struck by the wooded, secluded splendor of the no-go area. There was just one home past the no trespassing signs on our left, an expansive affair that appeared to be a second home unlived in at the moment, and then the Hemingway house, further ahead on our right, perhaps a quarter of a mile away from the cluster of neighbors who had united to keep the place closed to the public.

We pulled up in front of the house, a sprawling, concrete, two-story, earth-colored faux-timber construction, and I rolled down the window to take a photo. I felt like if we didn’t set foot outside, we’d be fine. We noticed a pair of men installing a new roof and Jen said, “Let’s get out of here before they call the police.” But one of the men caught a glimpse of me and simply nodded and went back to work.

Sitting in the car, taking a final look at the house, I felt slightly cheated that we couldn’t go in and see the place, which is staged as a 1961 time capsule. If someone was living there, I’d understand the No Trespassing signs, but what’s the point of an empty house with historical value that no one can see?

And anyway, what would Hemingway want? Would he have been on the side of his neighbors, who think opening the home up would ruin their neighborhood?

He guarded his privacy zealously, and wrote in The Sun Also Rises, “Everyone behaves badly—given the chance.” But he also once said, “The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them.”

On our long drive home, I had plenty of time to ponder the broader question of what brought Hemingway back to Idaho late in his life, as we motored through the bleak and monotonously scrubby landscape of the Oregon Badlands, where travelers can barely find a toilet, let alone a decent meal in the four-plus hours between Boise and Bend. Thompson, I thought, was right in concluding that Hemingway was a sick, weary man with three failed marriages behind him who felt and looked older than his years. Maybe buying a house in Ketchum, was a last effort to recover the carefree, glory days of yore?

The long drive home gave me plenty of time to consider my own itinerant experiences just four years ago, when we drove west on this same road, after deciding to leave Chicago for Bend. I met my wife in the Windy City, in my twenties, and we’d loved our time living there. Then I joined the Foreign Service, and we’d ended up in Washington D.C., Macedonia, Trinidad, Washington. D.C. again, and then Hungary. I quit in 2007 after a couple years of trying to fight through some difficult times with Multiple Sclerosis.

We moved back to Chicago when Jen was seven months pregnant with our first son (Leo) because both of us associated it with good times. But it wasn’t the same—our friends were now mostly preoccupied with their kids and so were we. After a couple years, we moved back to D.C., then back to Chicago again, and finally, in 2014 to Bend. Somewhere in the Oregon Badlands, on the drive west, a sick feeling nestled in the pit of my stomach as I realized how isolated we were going to be, hours from an interstate—I feared we were making a huge mistake.

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kansascityhappenings · 6 years

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‘Are you awake?’ Parents share last text from their son, missing CDC doctor

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Four times, the parents of a missing doctor with the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have been told that a body has been found. Each time, Tia and Terrell Cunningham are sent into heart-wrenching agony, only to learn that it isn’t their son.

“It takes you to a place that the light is not shining in,” Terrell Cunningham said. “I won’t call it a dark place, but they are lows. This is extremely hard.”

The parents spoke Monday afternoon as the search for their son Dr. Timothy J. Cunningham, 35, entered a third week after he disappeared without a trace.

A Harvard-educated doctor, Cunningham is a highly regarded epidemiologist at the CDC, having risen through the ranks to become a team leader in the US Public Health Service Commissioned Corps. He even earned a spot last year in the Atlanta Business Chronicle’s 40 Under 40 list, a who’s-who of the city’s residents.

The disappearance has prompted a high-profile police search and a $10,000 reward for any information about the case.

Authorities have said Cunningham disappeared after leaving work early on February 12, complaining of feeling ill. His worried parents drove down from Maryland, arriving on February 14 only to find his phone, keys, wallet, car and dog at his house.

He has not been seen or heard from since.

“Everything about this disappearance is unusual,” his father said.

His mother added, “we really need him back to complete our circle.”

The Cunninghams also sought to beat back an Internet rumor that their son was a whistle-blower who had warned about the flu shot being responsible for this year’s deadly flu season.

“I must address this issue,” his father said. “It is a lie. … It is not factual. Hopefully, he’ll come back and be able to address that.”

The parents said their sole focus is finding their son, the middle of their three children.

Fliers have begun circulating across Atlanta, showing Cunningham’s magnetic smile and urging anyone with information to call 911. Friends say he was smart and caring, a man with a big grin who liked doling out big hugs to match his smile.

Pat Upshaw-Monteith, president and CEO of Leadership Atlanta, said she had recently met with Cunningham because he was taking on one of its highest-level volunteer positions. “Everything seemed to be going very, very well for him — and then for him to disappear, it just doesn’t add up,” she said.

Cunningham worked in epidemiology, trying to understand health differences across demographics. With more than 16 years of experience in public health, he has co-authored 28 publications on topics ranging from sleep deprivation to pulmonary disease, with a special focus on how health issues affect minorities. He worked on public health emergencies including Superstorm Sandy, the Ebola outbreak and the Zika virus.

CDC spokewoman Kathy Harben said Cunningham “is a highly respected member of our CDC family. … Our thoughts are with his friends and family during this difficult time.”

The parents said they knew that something with their son was amiss on the evening of February 11, after they spoke with him by phone and exchanged a series of text messages. “We’ve shared that with the detectives, and we’ve kept that as a private matter,” his father said.

“As a parent, you have indicators when things are just not right with your child, and that was the case,” he said.

His mother said she received a text message at 5:21 a.m. on the day he was last seen. “Are you awake?” her son asked.

Her phone was on silent mode. “I wish I had that opportunity to answer that text,” she said.

When they arrived at their son’s house after he went missing, the parents said, they knew that something was wrong because he had left his Tibetan spaniel unattended. The dog, officially named Mister Bojangles Cunningham but known as Bo, had twice accompanied Cunningham to Harvard where he went for his master’s and doctoral degrees.

He loved the dog so much, his parents said, he’d drive the 130 miles to Tuskegee, Alabama, to have the pooch’s teeth cleaned. “I tell you all that to really understand the relationship of Tim and Bo,” the father said. “To work as hard as he has worked — and to just now disappear — it’s such a challenge for us to understand.”

Both parents said they’ve been sustained by the outpouring of support from strangers and friends alike — and that their faith has helped them get through these difficult two weeks. “I often say, ‘Lord, you have put me in this position. What would you have me to learn?’ ” his father said. “I’m praying for a positive outcome but having difficulty in understanding the lesson.”

Terrell Cunningham retired December 31 after years with the Food and Drug Administration. He is also a retired Air Force colonel. “This was supposed to have been one series of memorable events after another,” he said. “This is not how we planned retirement.”

He praised the police department for working with the family. He understands the reason why the family was notified about the four bodies that were found, but it doesn’t make it any easier as a parent to bear such news.

“It is quite agonizing to wait on the news that it’s not our son,” he said. “We’d just like to send our sympathies and condolences to those families.”

While both try to remain positive, the parents have reflected on favorite memories.

For the father, it was in September for his 60th birthday. He had ordered all three of his children — Anterio, Tiara and Tim — join him and their mother in Cabo San Lucas. “I told them: I expect you to be there,” he said.

His middle son was always so busy working, his father feared he would not make it. “But he quickly said, ‘I’m coming.’ ”

It was an all-inclusive resort, and the family indulged in food and revelry. “It was so good to see Tim having so much fun, because he is such a hard worker. Very seldom does he have the time to just let go,” his father said. “It was awesome.”

His mother recalled hiking Stone Mountain with her boy on a Mother’s Day. Near the top of the mountain, the granite slope was slick from rain, and Tia slipped and fell, nearly sliding down the entire slope.

Her son rushed to her. “You scared me, Momma,” he said. “Now, I’m going to have to hold your hand.”

She responded with, “Tim, you don’t want to walk around the park holding your mother’s hand.”

That Mother’s Day, her grown son held her hand the entire way down the mountain.

Now, she longs to hold his hand again.

from FOX 4 Kansas City WDAF-TV | News, Weather, Sports http://fox4kc.com/2018/02/27/are-you-awake-parents-share-last-text-from-their-son-missing-cdc-doctor/

from Kansas City Happenings https://kansascityhappenings.wordpress.com/2018/02/27/are-you-awake-parents-share-last-text-from-their-son-missing-cdc-doctor/

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