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inthedayswhenlandswerefew · 1 year

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North To The Future [Chapter 2: The Distance]

The year is 1999. You are just beginning your veterinary practice in Juneau, Alaska. Aegon is a mysterious, troubled newcomer to town. You kind of hate him. You are also kind of obsessed with him. Falling for him might legitimately ruin your life…but can you help it? Oh, and there’s a serial killer on the loose known only as the Ice Fisher.

Chapter warnings: Language, discussions of sex, discussions of drugs, discussions of murder, very indecent discussions in general, alcoholism, incompetent flirting, taxidermy, Taco Bell.

Word count: 5.3k.

Link to chapter list (and all my writing): HERE.

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The answering machine beeps. “Bitch, pick up,” Heather says through the speaker. And then: “Bitch!!! Pick up!!!”

You dive for the phone on the kitchen counter. Your dad gets there first.

“Hey, Heather!” he booms cheerfully. He takes a bite of a gooey chocolate chip cookie and swipes crumbs from his beard with the back of his hand. Your mom, smiling and sly, sips her Earl Grey tea at the dining room table. “Yes, yes, well I am loath to remind you that I live here too. Uh huh. Okay. Did you want to speak to my daughter? Or were you secretly hoping to get me? I could tell you about my riveting mailbox renovation project. There’s also a cow moose that’s been coming around recently, she’s a princess, I got a big ol’ salt lick and put it out in the backyard for her. No, Heather, no, a cow moose is just a female moose. It’s not a new species or anything. Lord have mercy. Okay, here’s ladybug.”

He passes you the phone. You pretend to glower at him, not very convincingly. “Hi, Heather,” you say.

“I am mortified.”

“I wouldn’t beat yourself up about it. He was in the Marines, he’s probably heard worse.”

Your dad bellows: “I sure fucking have!” Then he guffaws in a baritone rumble as he meanders over to the table, polishing off his cookie. Your mom chuckles and shakes her head as she flips a page in the latest issue of Alaska magazine. There’s a salmon on the front cover. No points for originality.

“Anyway,” you tell Heather. “What’s up?”

“Are you finally going to go tonight?”

“Go where?”

You can hear the hopeful, baiting smile in her voice. “Ursa Minor.”

The bar. The bar Aegon asked me about. He came by the clinic yesterday afternoon to pick up Sunfyre and the Nova, that’s what Jen said; a work friend dropped him off and he dashed inside and left just as quickly. You had been busy in the exam room vaccinating Ms. Finnegan’s Saint Bernard—no Cujos allowed in your neighborhood—and thoroughly unavailable to socialize. Still, he hadn’t bothered to wait around to say hello. This bothers you. This bothers you a lot more than you wish it did. He doesn’t care about me, he doesn’t remember me, he’s too busy being a serial killer to talk to me, the possibilities are truly endless. You twirl the mint green phone cord around your fingers. “Umm…”

“You have to go,” Heather begs. “Everyone’s going to be there. Joyce, Kimmie, our whole clique from high school. And Trent! And Trent’s hot friends! He really wants to buy you a drink. Like really, really wants to buy you a drink. He’s been asking about you constantly since you moved back home. It’s pathetic, actually. Take pity on him. Let him spend his whole paycheck on your Bacardi Breezers, and then if you’re still not interested you can ignore him to your heart’s content. I wouldn’t blame you. I know he’s a dumbass.”

Trent. Heather’s brother is two years older than you and a peripheral figure of your life—like a comet that clips by Earth every few decades—for as long as you can remember. He even called a few times when you were at Colorado State for vet school. He’s tall and popular and buoyant, a long-haired former quarterback who took your high school to the state championships and still holds semi-legendary status in Juneau. And there’s absolutely nothing wrong with him, nothing at all…except that Heather’s right. He’s kind of a dumbass. You don’t feel any particularly ardent yearning to see Trent, no gnawing curiosity. But if Aegon might be at Ursa Minor… “I do love Bacardi Breezers.”

“Yes, I remember,” Heather says, her words warm with the memories: her bedroom floor at 2 a.m. surrounded by Just Seventeen magazines and nail polish bottles, picnics on the summertime shores of Dredge Lake, your parents’ backyard on early-autumn nights illuminated only by the crackling firepit. She’s a thread woven through your life like a vein through flesh.

“Okay. I’ll go.”

“Booyah!” she hollers through the phone. “8:00?”

“8:00.”

“Wear something slutty.” And then Heather hangs up.

~~~~~~~~~~

You don’t wear something slutty. You wear a very uneventful chunky teal sweater. Aegon is dressed in a black crewneck sweatshirt, cuffed jeans, and Doc Martens combat boots. He’s sitting at the bar when you walk in, the bells on the back of the door jingling. Ursa Minor is drowning in an ocean of multicolored lights, tinsel, garlands, tiny ceramic Santas, at minimum three medium-sized Christmas trees; Dale must have gotten into the holiday spirit early this year. The taxidermy deer heads on the wall have ornaments suspended from their antlers. The whole place smells like pine and peppermint. Shania Twain’s Any Man Of Mine is piping from the stereo. You and Aegon exchange a microsecond glance as you hang your parka on the coatrack—there’s a girl perched on the barstool beside him, you recognize her from around town but can’t recall her name—and then you cross the room to join Heather in her booth.

“I don’t know what I expected,” she sighs defeatedly upon seeing your apparel. Heather is wearing low-rise jeans, a chainmail halter top, and no bra. She has arranged her hair with numerous butterfly clips.

“Wow, you’re basically JLo!”

“Wow, you’re basically retired.” She sips her Sex On The Beach and shoves an ice-cold glass bottle towards you, dewy with condensation and conveniently already opened. “I ordered you a Bacardi Breezer. I had to take a guess on which flavor you’d be in the mood for, I know it changes several times per minute. Is coconut okay?”

“Coconut is awesome.” You start chugging. You steal a glimpse of Aegon and his…friend? Girlfriend? Date? Booty call? Fiancé? Wife? She’s chatting away obliviously. He’s nursing a rum and Coke and staring at you with his bleary, black-ringed eyes. “How’s it going, Joyce?”

Joyce is nestled in the far corner of the booth and engrossed in a fantasy novel. There’s some hunk riding a horse on the front cover. “Hey,” she says without looking up. She flips a page.

“Do you want anything?” Heather asks her.

“Yeah, a lobotomy.”

You say to Heather, smiling: “If I’m retired, what’s Joyce?”

“Dead,” Heather replies. All three of you laugh. Then Heather props her elbows on the table and tinkers with her rhinestone choker so it can catch the Christmas lights, glittering and casting scintillations. “You like my new bling?”

“Oh yeah, it’s super, it’s off the chain.” You half-listen to her lament the lack of shopping options in Juneau—Ketchikan has a Walmart now, apparently, but that’s nineteen hours away—while conducting covert reconnaissance on Aegon and his unspecified companion. It is genuinely baffling that you care this much, but that doesn’t make you care less.

“Um, hello? Hellooooo? Earth to grandma? What the hell are you staring at…?” Heather twists around to see Aegon at the bar, very sloshed and very obviously still watching you. “Him?!”

“Do you know him?”

“I know of him. He works on the same boat as Trent. I’ve never really talked to him. But I’ve heard plenty of things. Very…intriguing things. Titillating things.”

“What have you heard?”

“The bottom line?” Heather grins, conspiratorial. “He’s a mattress.”

“A mattress…?”

“Good for sleeping on and not much else.”

This bothers you, it sends hot blood to your face and your stomach into freefall, though if asked you wouldn’t be able to articulate why. Heather notices and backpedals rapidly.

“I mean, he’s cute, I guess. If you’re into guys who look like they live in a dumpster and have scurvy. He sort of reminds me of Kurt Cobain…except I think the hair is real.” She gasps. “He could give you little Kurt Cobain babies! Cobainbies!”

“I don’t want his Cobainbies.” You down the rest of your Bacardi Breezer.

“You are kind of acting like you want his Cobainbies.”

Aegon says something to the girl beside him. You gaze at him morosely. “He’s a drunk.”

“Great, Alaska has one of the highest rates of alcoholism in the nation, he’ll fit right in.”

“He’s not staying.”

“Just because it won’t be a long time doesn’t mean it can’t be a good time.” Heather wiggles her thinly-tweezed eyebrows, then observes your lack of amusement. “Alright, forget it. I’ll shut up. I wouldn’t be your best friend if I wasn’t trying to help you get laid, you know.”

“Go help Joyce get laid.”

“I’d have better luck with Pope John Paul II.”

“Go help Kimmie get laid.”

“Kimmie’s probably getting laid right now.”

As if a demon summoned by a Ouija board, Kimberly Barbieri gusts into the bar. Every friend group has a Kimmie. She is dramatic and irritating and captivating, she is effortlessly carnal, she is forever regaling you with the volatile ebbs and flows of her love life and enlisting you in her schemes: who to ensnare, who to shun. The rest of you are the supporting cast of characters and have been essentially since kindergarten. You all pity her and yet are viciously envious of her.

“Ugh!” she huffs as she throws her Kate Spade bag down on the table. You, Heather, and Joyce peer up at her with anticipatory smiles. The main character has suffered a new development. Aegon tosses Kimmie a casual appraisal and then turns back to his rum and Coke.

“Yes?” Heather prompts.

“I’m so done with Brad. I mean, I’m really done with him this time. Our three month anniversary? And he takes me to Taco Bell? Taco Bell?!”

“As if!” Heather offers, urging her along.

“As if!” Kimmie echoes in vehement agreement.

“Was Brad aware of the aforementioned anniversary?” Joyce says.

“He should have been!”

“I love Taco Bell,” you say, purposefully incendiary. Heather winks at you. This is the game you’ve played since before you could spell your own names.

“Really?” Kimmie has one hand on her hip, the other gesturing erratically through the air. “You’d be happy if your boyfriend of three long months took you to Taco Bell? You’d be real fucking psyched about that? You’d be planning the goddamn destination wedding in Barbados?”

“Oh yeah.” You are stone-faced; you are the best at feigning earnestness. Joyce is biting back giggles from behind her book. “I would do some very unwholesome things to a man who bought me Cinnamon Twists.”

“Are you on drugs?” Kimmie says. “Are you smoking crack? Are you huffing paint? Have you turned into that kid with the LSD stickers that they warned us about in high school?”

You reply, deadly serious: “I’m just a slut for Cinnamon Twists.”

“I can’t talk to you right now. I need a beer.” And that’s something else that guys unfailingly love about Kimmie: she drinks beer. She flees to the bar.

Heather’s smile dies as her eyes drift to Aegon. She sips her Sex On The Beach meditatively. She asks you, her voice low: “You think he’s the Ice Fisher?”

“No,” you say immediately.

“Oh come on, he showed up right before the murders started happening, that’s a coincidence that bears discussion.”

“It’s not him.”

“And how could you possibly know that?”

You scramble for an explanation. “He’s not big enough,” you decide. “The Ice Fisher is someone who can throw a dead body over one shoulder and lug it for miles through the wilderness.” And that’s probably accurate, but it’s not the real reason you don’t think Aegon is a killer. You couldn’t put the real reason into words if you had years to work on it. At the bar, Kimmie is shamelessly flirting with Dale, who is your parents’ age and closely resembles Robin Williams when he was first rescued from Jumanji. Aegon imparts some final words to his companion and she leaves him, not entirely thrilled.

“How did you two ever cross paths?” Heather asks, mystified.

“He has a dog.”

“Oh, right, that makes sense.”

“Why is it so unbelievable that we might have bumped into each other once or twice in this oh-so-charming, close-knit little haven of a community?”

“Well,” Heather says. “Because you’re so freakishly smart and successful and mature and responsible, and he’s…” She smirks. “Definitely not any of that.”

You glance over at Aegon. He glances back. You both look away. “He’s not so bad.”

“You should go talk to him.”

“Is Kimmie somehow not enough entertainment for you?”

“Dayum, he’s watching you again,” Heather marvels. “You should definitely go talk to him. You know, if you’re totally sure he’s not a serial killer.”

“Should I really?”

“Yes.”

You consult with Joyce. “Should I really?”

Joyce speaks without halting her reading. “Yes.”

You look at Aegon. He gives you a teasing little half-smile. Are you gonna? That smile says. And as Kimmie is coming back from the bar, you go up to sit two stools away from Aegon.

“Dale, can I get an appletini?”

“Appletini?” Dale’s brow wrinkles with confusion. You may not be a frequent Ursa Minor attendee, but you know Dale reasonably well. He’s a casual friend of your parents and a familiar face at holiday parties, town events, and trips to the grocery store and post office. “No offence, ladybug, but what the hell is that?”

“An appletini,” you repeat, crushed. “I saw it on tv. It’s a new cocktail, it’s this neat bright green color, they have it in New York…and Los Angeles…and…and…”

“Do you know how they make it in New York and Los Angeles?” Dale asks.

“No,” you admit sadly.

“Then I’m afraid I can’t help you.”

“Forget it. Just get me a mango Bacardi Breezer.”

“That I can do,” he says chipperly, pops the cap off, and slides the bottle across the bar to you. You take a swig.

Aegon chuckles. “Embarrassing.”

“What’s embarrassing?” you fling back, smiling despite yourself.

“Your drink of choice is a Bacardi Breezer, that’s really fucking embarrassing.”

“I like all the tropical flavors! It makes me feel like…” You close your eyes, momentarily dreamy. “Like I’m on a beach somewhere. Like I’m in some gorgeous, warm, exotic place.”

Aegon finishes his rum and Coke and spins the empty glass absentmindedly with one hand. Dale fixes him a new one. “Where’s your favorite beach? Besides that one.” He points towards the harbor. “That one doesn’t count. Nothing in Alaska counts.”

“Then I’ve never been to a real beach,” you confess.

“What!” Aegon gapes at you. “Never?!”

“Never. Not yet.”

“Jesus Christ.” He blinks dazedly and drinks his rum and Coke. He is profoundly, unmistakably drunk.

“Did you drive here?” you ask.

“Nah. I walked.”

“Stumbled, you mean.”

He grins, showing his teeth. “I crawled, like the rat that I am.”

“Maybe you should try being sober sometime.”

“I don’t do well when I’m sober.”

“You work like this?”

He shakes his head. “Just enough to take the edge off. I can’t lose my job. Then I’d be in real trouble.”

“Have you always been a…?” What’s a diplomatic word for alcoholic? Before you can make an attempt, Aegon understands what you mean.

“Since I was fifteen, yeah. More or less.” He shrugs and stirs his drink with the little plastic toothpick with a maraschino cherry speared on it; the ice cubes clink in the glass. He bites into the cherry and slides it off the toothpick with his teeth, chews it, swallows, licks the glistening red juice from his lips. “I’ve been better than I am now. I’ve been worse.”

“How much worse?”

“Why would you want to know that?”

I want to know everything about you. “No reason.”

He evades you. “How’s the mailbox?”

“Mid-renovation. My dad is making a new one that looks like a moose.”

“That’s cool of him.”

“He’s a pretty cool guy.”

“You like your parents,” Aegon says, as if this is something curious, noteworthy. “You get along with them.”

“Yeah.” You pause before continuing, not knowing what he’ll think of it. “I still live with them, actually.”

“Oh, wow.”

“Well, I mean, it makes sense for now, because I just moved back to Juneau over the summer, and their house is right next to the vet clinic, and my dad’s always there when I need advice, and I’m the only child and they’re sort of really attached to me and maybe I’ll start looking for my own place soon but I just figured that in the meantime—”

“Hey, Appletini,” Aegon interrupts, smiling. “I think it’s awesome that you like your parents.”

“Really?” you say, hopeful.

“Really.” He drains his rum and Coke. Dale hesitates; he doesn’t make another until Aegon thumps his empty glass against the counter, wordlessly demanding one. “Why didn’t you take some time off to travel after you finished vet school? California is just a quick plane hop from Colorado. You could have spent a week or two in one of those gorgeous, warm, exotic places you’re so enamored with.”

“I thought about it…but the scheduling didn’t work out. My dad was retiring from the clinic, I was taking over for him, it was more important for me to be here.”

Aegon seems to find this incredibly entertaining, like there’s some joke you aren’t in on. “You took over your dad’s business.”

“Yes, I did.”

He nods, strangely wise, his blue eyes on you. “And you’re kind of happy about that, but you’re kind of stuck too.”

Goddamn, isn’t that the truth. “You see a lot.”

“20/20, baby.”

You study him. His white-blond hair is tucked behind his ears, except for that one undomesticated lock that always seems to escape to rest on his cheek. His eyes are hazy and swimming yet intelligent, almost cunning. He’s staring right back. He’s studying you too. He’s beautiful, you think. He’s sad and funny and magnificent and ruined all at once. How is that possible?

“What were you gossiping about with your friends over there?” he asks, flicking his thumb towards the booth where Heather, Kimmie, and Joyce are currently gawking at you.

Sex, love, drugs, whether you’re a serial killer. “Taco Bell,” you reply.

The front door flies open and a boisterous gaggle of young men flood into Ursa Minor: flannel, cologne, cigarette smoke, heavy thuds of work boots. You recognize most of them. There’s Matt, and Rob, and Gary…and Trent. He spots you and beelines for the bar.

“Hey!” Trent greets you enthusiastically, flipping his lustrous hair out of his eyes with a toss of his head like a horse. Then he addresses Aegon. “Sup, bro?”

“Sup.” They bump fists. Aegon nearly misses.

“Congratulations on finishing vet school,” Trent says to you, beaming a bit too dazzlingly. “I don’t think I’ve really seen you since you got back. How are things? How are your folks?”

“Things are good. My parents are good. Everything’s good.”

“Good!”

“Totally.”

There is an awkward silence. An increasingly awkward silence. Trent is not deterred. “Can I buy you a drink or something? A Bacardi Breezer, perhaps?” His gaze drops to your nearly-empty bottle. “Um, another Bacardi Breezer, perhaps?”

“So Heather has been disclosing all my secrets.”

“I’m sure you still have some,” Trent replies, flirtatious. Aegon’s eyes widen as he gnaws on his plastic toothpick.

“That’s a tempting offer,” you say. “But I’m stopping myself at two drinks tonight. It is a Wednesday, after all.”

“Yeah, a Wednesday,” Aegon agrees, slurring. “What kind of loser gets wasted on a Wednesday?” Then he bursts out laughing and almost falls off his barstool.

“Definitely another time though,” you tell Trent. Like when pigs fly.

“Oh, okay, yeah. Sounds good. See you around.” And Trent, former football star extraordinaire, saunters off to join his friends at the pool table. There’s a massive bull moose head mounted on the wall right above it; it’s adorned with a red Santa hat. That Don’t Impress Me Much plays from the stereo.

Aegon leans over the counter. “Hey, Dale, would you happen to have anything that’s not Shania Twain? Please and thank you.” Dale grunts, then reaches beneath the bar to get his 6-inch-thick binder of CDs. He scans through the transparent plastic pages and eventually makes a selection. CDs, not cassettes. Very high-tech.

“So you go wherever you want to,” you say to Aegon. “Anywhere. Everywhere.”

“Just about, yeah.”

You gulp down the last of your Bacardi Breezer. And next comes your theory: “But you never stay longer than six months.”

He smiles sheepishly. “Exactly.”

“What happens if you stay in the same place for more than six months?”

“My ghosts start catching up with me. One ghost in particular.”

“Is that a metaphor, or…?”

“Oh, I love this song!” Aegon shouts, slapping his palm on the bar and then lurching out of his seat. You listen: it’s The Distance by Cake. He sings along loudly, out of tune. “The green light flashes, the flags go up, churning and burning, they yearn for the cup—”

“This song?! The NASCAR song?!”

“It’s not about NASCAR, it’s about a journey!” His hands reach for you but stop short. They hover in the space between you, open and inviting. “Sing it with me, come on. As they speed through the finish, the flags go down, the fans get up and they get out of town.” He holds up an index finger. “The arena is empty except for one man, still driving and striving as fast as he can. Let’s go, Appletini, sing it!”

“No way, not happening.” But the ice of your face has thawed and melted into a massive, flush-cheeked grin. People are staring as he staggers around the floor: your friends from their booth, his friends from the pool table, Dale from behind the bar, the assorted middle-aged locals from their tables cluttered with Budweisers and bar snacks: peanuts, pretzels, Chex Mix, mini bags of Utz chips.

“The sun has gone down and the moon has come up, and long ago somebody left with the cup, but he’s driving and striving and hugging the turns, and thinking of someone for whom he still burns.” Aegon claps his hands. “Sing it, sing it, sing it!”

You leap off your barstool and join him on the floor. “Yes!” Aegon cheers, pumping his fist in the air. Heather, Kimmie, and Joyce are shellshocked, their mouths hanging open. Who says you can’t be the fun, spontaneous friend on occasion?

You and Aegon sing together, stomping clumsily around the floor: “He’s going the distance, he’s going for speed, she’s all alone—”

“All alone!” Aegon adds, cupping his hands around his mouth like a bullhorn.

“—All alone in her time of need, because he’s racing and pacing and plotting the course, he’s fighting and biting and riding on his horse, he’s going the distance…”

You use your empty Bacardi Breezer bottle as a microphone. Aegon plays air guitar oddly realistically, his fingers scaling an imaginary fretboard. You are reminded of his jade green electric guitar, pummeled and unused and slumbering in his dreary apartment. He stays near you but never touches you, never even tries to. His hair shags over his eyes. His cheeks are pink, gleaming, healthy-looking. The song ends and you stand there together in the sudden quiet, still breathing heavily, your eyes on each other, planning out which places you would touch first if such a thing was in the cards.

At last, Aegon speaks. “You want to go to Taco Bell with me?”

“What, right now?”

“Yeah. Right now.”

“Okay.” After two Bacardi Breezers, you’re probably alright to drive, but you are not in the business of taking chances. Fortunately, there is another option. Juneau’s only Taco Bell is just a few blocks from Ursa Minor; you can easily walk there, and you’ll certainly be fine to drive after a half hour and some food. You fetch your parka off the coatrack. “Where’s your coat?” you ask Aegon.

“Captain Morgan keeps me warm.”

“You are unbelievable.” You leave him momentarily to say goodbye to your friends. They sit in the booth gazing up at you with stunned wonder. “I’m going to Taco Bell with Aegon. I probably won’t be back. I’ll drive him home afterwards.”

“Aegon…?!” Kimmie exclaims.

“It’s Greek.”

“Uh. Okay.” Heather’s words are halting. “Um…have fun, I guess? Use a condom. Be safe.”

“Yeah, don’t get murdered,” Joyce says.

“I don’t think he has the requisite hand-eye coordination for strangulation at the moment. But thanks for your concern.”

You pay your tab, collect Aegon from the bar—he’s guzzling down one last rum and Coke, wiping escaped drops from his chin with his knuckles—and walk with him under dim streetlights and infinitesimal stars to the glaringly florescent, green-red-yellow beacon of the Taco Bell. Aegon insists on paying. His bills are rumpled and stained. Five minutes later, you’re sitting in an otherwise empty dining room doling out menu items like Christmas gifts, the labeled wrappers crinkling: a Mexican pizza and tacos for Aegon, a Gordita and Cinnamon Twists for you, a Nachos Supreme to share, two large Mountain Dews.

“What’s your favorite beach?” you ask him as you eat.

“San Diego,” Aegon replies, drowning his Mexican pizza in hot sauce. “Sapphire water, golden sand, cliffs you can climb all over, sea lions everywhere. They’re adorable, they bark like dogs. But they’ll attack humans. Trust me, I know.” He sucks hot sauce noisily from his fingers.

You consider him, crunching on Cinnamon Twists. “So this is what you do. You get a girl in every city and leave as soon as you’re bored with her.”

He is amused, mischievous. “Are you applying to be my Juneau girl?”

“No. And you didn’t answer my question.”

“You’re half-right.”

“Which half?”

“The girls don’t usually last six months.”

“So more like two girls. Or five, or ten.”

Aegon smiles and says nothing. He shoves a loaded nacho chip into his mouth, never taking his eyes off you.

“You’ve told me a lot of things that don’t paint you in an especially flattering light,” you say. “Why?”

“I’m not honest with many people. Figured I’d try it out with you.”

“How’s it feel so far?”

“Not too bad, actually.”

Seconds tick by. The hushed lull—punctuated only by chewing and straw slurping—is not awkward at all. “You could stay, you know,” you say. “Here. In Juneau. Not forever, but for a while.” Long enough for me to figure you out. Long enough for me to decide what to do with you.

“No.” Aegon is resolute.

“Why not?”

“I just can’t,” he says, then pivots. “Besides, if I was going to stay anywhere it wouldn’t be freaking Juneau, Alaska. There’s nothing here. You have one decent bar, you have one Taco Bell. You don’t have a mall, or a movie theater with more than three screens, or an arcade, or a Barnes & Noble, or a halfway decent beach…for Christ’s sake, you don’t even have a friendly neighborhood scam psychic with a neon sign in their living room window.”

You’re smiling. “So that’s something you’re into. Scam psychics.”

“I’m just saying it adds to the ambiance.”

“Okay, but anyone could do that. I’ll be a scam psychic, there, boom, that box is checked.”

He chuckles, incredulous. “Oh really? You? Reading palms and tarot cards?”

“Yeah, totally. Give me your hand.”

He lays his left hand flat, devouring a taco with his right. Shredded lettuce rains down onto the table. “This is going to be good.”

You trace the lines of his palm with your fingers, skimming them like a whisper. His fingertips are calloused, you notice. Goosebumps rise up on his arm. “Hm. Hmmmm. Yes, yes, I can see many things.”

“Tell me, oh clairvoyant Madame Appletini.”

“Your liver is sad.”

He explodes into laughter, pushing his hair back from his forehead with his right hand. “Truly a singular insight.”

“And! You love dogs because they don’t judge you for your many shortcomings.”

“Right again. Okay you only get one more, you’re cutting close to the bone here.”

You draw a feather-light circle around the perimeter of his palm. He shifts in his seat, watching you, abruptly serious. “You’re not the Ice Fisher. And it hurts you that people think you are, because you’re actually—somewhere underneath all that disturbingly delinquent, self-destructive behavior—kind of a decent guy. In fact, you’ve never hurt anybody.”

“Wrong.” He snatches his hand away and changes the subject. “Here, here, let me do you.” He motions to your left arm. You oblige him, stretching it across the table. He begins by massaging your palm, kneading it with both hands. You are suddenly warm all over, feverishly warm. Then he cradles your hand in his and inspects the lines of your palm, his thumb gliding weightlessly over them. “You possess a supernatural sense of responsibility. This is both a blessing and a curse.”

“That’s probably accurate. Aim for a more shallow observation next time.”

“You would marry a Cinnamon Twist if you could.”

You giggle, almost inhaling a mouthful of Mountain Dew. “Yes, totally. I would take it to Vegas. Elvis impersonator and everything.”

“Now this,” he says, pointing to a crease that cuts your palm in two. “This is fascinating. Groundbreaking. Revolutionary.”

You lean closer. “What does it say?”

Aegon is still clasping your hand, but his eyes are fixed on yours. They are groggy yet bright, so bright. He is smiling. “You want me so fucking badly it’s eating you alive.”

Your jaw falls open, but you don’t say anything. Neither does Aegon. You just stare at each other from across the table, not hearing the wind outside, not feeling the time passing. He’s right, you realize; it dawns on you like a dream remembered from the night before. I think he’s right.

Someone clears their throat. A Taco Bell employee has approached the table with a broom in one hand and a dustbin in the other. He is wearing a psychedelic striped shirt: lavender, aquamarine, pink, white. He looks sick of life. “Hey, we’re closing the dining room in five minutes.”

“That’s fine,” Aegon says nonchalantly. He drops your hand and starts in on his last taco. “We were just leaving anyway.”

Carrying your half-full cups of Mountain Dew, slurping and chatting about the attributes of Juneau, the two of you wander back to Ursa Minor without acknowledging what Aegon said. You drive him home through a sea of cold, black nothingness, everything beyond the Jeep’s windows silent and still. His apartment building is only a few minutes away from the bar. The ride ends much too soon. A lyric from The Distance is wheeling around in your skull: In his mind, he's still driving, still making the grade. She's hoping in time that her memories will fade.

“How’s Sunfyre?” you ask, your Jeep idling outside his apartment. You are genuinely concerned, but also making conversation so he won’t leave yet.

“He’s great. Want to come up and see him?”

You almost say no, because of all those cautionary tales women are told from childhood about men, strange men, drunk men, too-kind men, all men: that they’ll get you alone and off-guard and then they’ll paw at you begging for things you don’t want to give. They’ll lull you into a false sense of security—compliments, feigned vulnerability, hot chocolate, Taco Bell—and then strike like lightning, quick and flare-hot. But when you say yes and follow him upstairs, Aegon doesn’t try anything. He stands in his tiny, drab living room with his hands in his jeans pockets, a whisper of a smile on his face, just watching you as you check Sunfyre’s stitches and tease him about his cone and scratch his soft floppy ears. Sunfyre wags his tail and then rolls over on the scuffed hardwood floor so you can rub his belly.

“He’s in heaven,” Aegon says.

“Yeah, dogs really like me.”

Aegon drags his hands through his strange silvery hair, staring at the wall. “So do alcoholic Greek guys.”

#aegon ii targaryen #aegon targaryen #aegon ii #aegon x you #aegon targaryen x reader #hotd fanfic #hotd imagine #aegon targaryen ii #aegon targaryen x you

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msweebyness · 2 months

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DuPont School for Monstrous Youths- Mona Truffaut

She may be earthbound but their head’s in the clouds! Welcome Mona! @artzychic27 @imsparky2002

Species: Gryphon

Appearance/Attire: Wild, back-length curly dark hair with rust-colored feathers strewn throughout, wide eyes with red sclera and big black pupils, long flared eyelashes (like Stella’s from Helluva), dark skin with patches of rusty feathers, sharp bronze beak for a nose, chipped tooth in front, sharp claws, large white-feathered wings, tawny fur from elbows to wrists and knees to ankles, lion tail, talons on feet, short and curvy build. Golden lion claw clips holding bangs back, eagle feather earrings, maroon hoodie with feather lined hood and eagle decal on back, white t-shirt with black film reel decals, maroon sweatpants with eagle feather piping, gold slider sandals with black lion head decals.

Bio: Unable to fly due to her brittle wings and bound to a wheelchair due to a childhood accident, one could say Mona’s had a pretty rough go at life. But despite this, they maintain an easygoing and cheerful outlook that lifts the spirits of those around them, making them an effective mediator. They have a passion for film and often recruits her friends for her movies, which are fun projects for all involved. They’re also the camerawoman for the school news program! Mona can be as spacey as they come sometimes, often getting distracted, lost in thought and spouting random and cryptic statements galore, but even though they don’t always make sense to their friends, they love her nonetheless.

Quotes:

“Sorry, what were we talking about again?”

“Alright, ready to roll! Let’s get this shot!”

“Do you guys think snakes get sad they have no arms?”

“Alright, let’s all take a breather moment, this is getting heated!”

“I had a dream like this once…”

“They may not help me fly, but my wings make a great speed boost!”

Soar like an eagle, roar like a lion! Leave your thoughts in the comments and reblogs!

#miraculous ladybug #school for monstrous youths #monster high au #mona truffaut #gryphon #mlb ocs #theater kids

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proton-wobbler · 9 months

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Pine Siskin (Spinus pinus)

Chadron State Park - Fall 2023

Pine Siskin feel like a stretched goldfinch to me. Like a lot of North American finches, they tend to be an irruptive species- a species that experiences rapid population booms and busts, and one that will readily move in search of food. Siskin breed in Canada, and as winter falls they move south to the States and Mexico to search for seeds to fuel their very mobile family groups. There are some populations that can live year round in one spot, but those tend to be mountainous regions that can sustain these seed eaters.

One of my favorite things about these birds is one of the noises they make when chatting to each other. There are typical chips of a finch, but there is also this crisp zzzziiiiiiiiiiip! sound they'll make that makes me so giddy. (the clip below also has some American Goldfinch flight calls - "po-tay-to chip! potato chip!")

All banding, marking, and sampling is being conducted under a federally authorized Bird Banding Permit issued by the U.S. Geological Survey's BBL.

#bird banding #pine siskin #without a doubt I'll hear 'vague finch sounds' and try to pin the species #and I'll be like 'oh I think those are siskin- ZZZZEEEET!- aww hell yea got it right its siskin!!'

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illiana-mystery · 8 months

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Okay, so I will admit, this unfinished fic is definitely a little different from my usual writing. I mean it's not that far off the beating path, but it is different.

That being said, this was an idea that I might pick up again in the future. I don't know yet though. I have so many other projects going on, so if I do pick it back up again it's gonna be a minute.

But without further ado, this is the first chapter of a fic I called Blind Ambition. The premise was that it was about the past of Lorraina Maria Amato, the antagonist in my fic, Cloud 9 (that I'm hoping to update soon).

It would chronicle her exploits and run ins with Jameson, Norman, and Otto as a junior reporter at The Daily Bugle. It would eventually end with her leaving New York and finding a new life in Georgia.

(How I picture young Norman and Otto. Read the Author's Note below.)

Today, I'm sharing with you the first chapter of this fic. Enjoy and let me know if you would be interested in reading more in the future! 😉😌

THIS CONTENT IS 18+. MINORS DNI. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.

---

Blind Ambition (chapter 1)

Chapter Summary: Lorraina, referred to as Lori by her boss, is annoyed with her standing as a junior reporter at The Daily Bugle. Especially since she's having an affair with her boss, J. Jonah Jameson. However, her luck is about to change when she finally gets the news she's been wanting to hear. She's finally gonna get to interview Dr. Osborn and Dr. Octavius.

Author's Note: This fic takes place in the mid 90s, so I imagine that Norman would look kinda like John LeTour from Light Sleeper and Otto would look like Stephen Arden from Species. So if I do pick this back up, that's what they would look like in that next chapter. Jameson is starting to go grey, so his hair color is still mostly dark brunette but is the same cut.

Content Warnings: Office Sex, Age Gap, Adulterous Affair, Mention of an ED, Possessive Behavior

It was a boiling hot afternoon in the city known as the Big Apple and while its many citizens were trying to hustle and bustle their way back to their designated offices after their lunch breaks, there was one young and determined junior reporter that stayed behind.

She stared out her window for just a moment, looking down at all of the people scrambling to get out of the scorching heat while trying to stay away from the blistering asphalt that only carried taxi cabs in its path.

She laughed at the sight and went back to the black and green abyss she called her work computer.

Happily, her fingers typed away before she took another bite of her half-eaten tuna fish sandwich. Like clockwork, her fingers traveled to find a bag of salt and vinegar chips but disappointment only followed once she realized she didn't have a bag.

No, she was trying to cut her salt intake and be a little healthier. She couldn't risk gaining weight or that meant she would be kissing her cozy office and her beneficial relationship goodbye.

A sigh only left her lips and instead her hands went around her small Diet Coke that she happily sipped.

The junior reporter was the only person at the office today except for her boss, but she was fine with that. She could finally hear herself think and peacefully write the piece that she knew would knock her boss right off his feet.

She knew it was so good that he would be forced to transfer her to the actual news section of the paper.

Her tranquility between her lips only lasted for a little while before her boss barged in. She jumped, but quickly patted down her stubborn curls and fixed the butterfly clips that decorated her hairstyle.

Her chair slowly turned and she faced her boss for the first time that day.

His short buzz cut hair was gently blowing under the air conditioning vent and he was nursing a cigar between his lips. His baby blues thoughtfully looked her over as a cheeky grin slowly surface in between his cigar.

His inferior just smiled back and twirled one of her curls in her finger before he finally spoke.

"Are you almost done with your piece, Lori?" he asked curiously in his smoky, deep voice.

"Yes, I'm almost done. Would you like to see what I wrote so far?" she softly asked before motioning him with her finger to come closer.

"Hmm, stand," he commanded before she did so.

Happily, she watched as he sat down in her chair and blew some smoke from his cigar. He quickly motioned her to come sit on his lap which she did almost immediately.

Pleased by her eagerness, he put his cigar out and placed it to the side before his lips landed on her neck and collarbone. She was surprised by his sudden affection, but she also enjoyed it.

He knew all of her sensitivities, which made him a much better lover than a boss.

"Hmm, JJ, am I turning you soft?"

"Quite the contrary," he huffed before he slipped her skirt and panties off. "I usually have my own fun at this time, but since we're the only ones here..."

She just rolled her eyes and waited until he slipped off his pants and boxers, to slowly lower herself on his waiting 8 inches. He let out a small whimper as she did so before he started a little rhythm thrusting in and out of her.

"Now let's see your article," he said as he kept his pace up. "Hmm...NYC mayor busted for embezzling campaign funds...wait, wasn't this Cynthia's story?"

"It was," she evilly chirped.

The man beneath her couldn't help but laugh too.

Honestly, he was impressed by her cutthroat nature, but he still had to keep his paper running as smoothly as possible. He just couldn't have the gossip and events reporter stealing stories from the head reporter he worked with for years. Sure, she was his girlfriend and he was fucking her right now, but that didn't mean he owed her any favors.

"No, no, no, this just won't do, Lori. You can't go around stealing stories from Cynthia..."

"Oh, I can't? Well, maybe I'll just..." she started while trying to get off of him. He tightly grabbed her hips and roughly thrusted back inside of her making her moan and yelp in pleasure.

"You're not going anywhere, Lori. I made you and you'll have no where else to go if you leave me," he declared as he started pounding into her harder.

Not a retort or complaint came from her, so that meant she was over her little temper tantrum.

"Are you calm, now?" he asked in her ear.

"I guess so," she moaned. "Oh, you're hitting my G-spot so well."

"No one else will make you feel as good as I do. Remember that."

"Oh, I'm remembering. Damn," she panted.

He snickered in her ear and whispered, "Take your top and bra off."

With no hesitation, she stripped the rest of her clothes off and happily witnessed her superior rub his callus hands all over her perky C-cup breasts. She mewed in delight and leaned her head against his shoulder as he started to knead her milk bags with his rugged hands.

"You're such a good whore," he whispered. "I might need to have you come to my office more...scratch my itch..."

"Yes, JJ," she cooed before he chuckled in her ear.

"Now where was I? Oh yes, Lori, you can't steal stories from Cynthia. She's my top journalist on the team. We've worked together and known each other longer than I've known you."

"So?"

"So? Really, Lori? Stop being a brat. You're my gossip and events reporter. Stay focused on that."

"So you're not gonna publish my story? I worked so hard on this. I even got in contact with Cynthia's contact before she did."

"As much as I admire you tenacity, I won't publish your story. I'm gonna publish Cynthia's original story."

"But...but..."

"Don't do this, Lori. I'm not gonna just let you do whatever you want just because we're fucking. You have to earn your spot in the news section.

"And here I thought sucking your dick and letting you fuck me in my office chair would give me perks."

"Well, actually, I do have one little perk for you."

"And that would be?"

"Remember how you've been dying to interview Dr. Osborn and Dr. Octavius?" he asked, pinching her nipples.

"Yes," she mewed.

"Well, I might have lined up an interview with both of them for you."

"What?!" she exclaimed. "You did? For me?"

"Of course..."

"Now I can ask Dr. Osborn about his business practices..."

"No, no, no," he whispered in her ear. "I already told his secretary why you're interviewing him and Dr. Octavius."

"And what did you tell her?"

"I told her that you're only gonna ask them about their work and the 1st annual Oscorp Gala."

"They're having a gala?"

"Yes, now get up and lean against your desk with your elbows," he commanded. She happily obliged and he followed as they maneuvered into this new position, his cock still deep inside of her.

Once she was comfortable again, he started pounding into her over and over again with vigor. The woman beneath him was panting and moaning from his love making.

"Do you want me to attend the gala too?"

"The gala is invite only," he grunted. "You know for shareholders and employees and their plus ones. But if Norman invites you, I think you should attend."

"What if he asks me to be his plus one?" she slyly whispered.

Her words fell on her boyfriend hard and suddenly he just stopped fucking her. She was about to have a fit, that was until he roughly bit down on her neck leaving a pretty big, nasty bruise on her neck.

She jerked up in pain and as she was about to scold him, he started fucking her once more leaving her words as nothing more than unspoken nonsense.

"I doubt he would ask you to be his plus one, Lori. I don't think foul-mouthed short women are his type."

"Says you," she said before panting like a warm dog.

"Well," he started breathlessly as he quicken his pace inside of her, fucking her like it was his last opportunity to do so, "If he did, hypothetically, then I would still want you to go. But you're mine, Lori. Remember who you belong to."

"Of course, JJ," she whimpered. "Oh, oh, I'm so close."

He just snickered and grabbed her arms, pulling them behind her back as he fucked her to her final orgasm. Her scream of pleasure reached the heavens and soon were met by his grunts of feral copulation as he finally released his seed inside of her abused sanctum.

As soon as he went limp, he pulled out and let go of her hands. Her weak and wrecked hands gently gripped the desk as she caught her breath. JJ just stared at her ass after he threw his clothes back on haphazardly, the view of his seed slowly oozing out of her right in his field of vision.

The scene made him snicker in delight, knowing that only he could enjoy her cave of wonders.

But the sight of her perfectly round ass was also nice, so nice in fact, that he gave into temptation and slapped it. She jumped, but to his surprise didn't say anything back to him.

"Get dressed," he commanded. "You're free to go."

"It's not even close to 5 yet."

"I know. But you're the only one here and I already had my fun with you. Besides, you need to get ready for your interviews tomorrow. Wear something nice and sexy," he said before he left.

Lori just groaned and rolled her eyes before she grabbed one of the tissues from her desk and wiped the access cum off of her legs. Once wiped, she threw her clothes back on and just stared at her almost fully drunken can of Diet Coke and her almost finished tuna sandwich.

However, she didn't have the stomach to finish her meal so she just threw it out and sat back down in her chair, trying to ignore her boss' cum still deep between her legs.

For once, she felt dirty being nothing but a living sex toy for Jameson.

What was the point of letting him use her for sexual gratification, if he didn't let her climb up the ladder faster than her colleagues?

And how dare he claim that she wasn't Norman's type? How would he know? Still, she needed this job so she would just have to stay Jameson's sex toy... for now.

After her thoughts subsided, she packed up her things, locked her office door, and headed for the elevator. Jameson told her to have a good night, but she didn't respond.

Jameson didn't take kindly to that though. She was his...his property and he was not gonna let her be a brat or sassy to him.

The elevator doors slowly opened after about a minute, but before she could step in, Jameson grabbed her arm and pulled her away.

"What the fuck?!"

"I said have a good night."

"Oh, I guess I didn't hear you. You have a good night too," she jeered before turning her back on him.

"Aren't you forgetting something?" he sniedly asked.

"No, don't think so," she remarked before he grabbed her again and forcibly kissed her lips.

She pushed him back immediately though.

"Get off of me. I think you've had enough fun with me for the evening."

"Well, excuse me for trying to be more affectionate to you. I'll see you tomorrow then and I hope you'll be staying the night..."

"We'll see. See you tomorrow," she grumbled before taking the next elevator down.

---

Once she left the building, she was greeted by the same sweltering heat her fellow New Yorkers were suffering though previously. She couldn't help but remember how callously she laughed at them, but now she was suffering through this heatwave.

Shameless Plug:

If you want to read something Halloween related, I just posted the first chapter of my vampire fic, Bloodlust. Check out my masterlist pinned at the top of my blog for the link or just visit my AO3 account. My name is AriesJones for those who don't know. Happy reading! 😉💙

#wip #wip idea #work in progress #spiderman fic #raimiverse fic #raimiverse #spiderman #90s au #j jonah jameson #norman osborn #otto octavius #fanfiction #fanfic

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weyrwolfen · 10 months

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Eidola: Chapter 16- ARC-08-1216 Clip

Rating: T

Characters: Gen, Clone Trooper OCs, Captain Rex, Ahsoka Tano, and other canon members of the 501st/332nd

Warnings: canon-typical violence; references to self-harm, injuries, and substance abuse; PTSD; it’s post-Order 66 and nobody is having a good time (but they’re all working on it)

Summary: The mission was never to bring down the Empire. Not really. The mission was to save every single one of their chipped brothers. But if doing do helped break the Empire’s stranglehold on the galaxy? Well, that was just a bonus.

“What the kriff are you doing now?” Canvas asked, his voice sounding raspy and a little mechanical through the modified vocoder.

Clip would have thought that was obvious, given the display of ship-grade paints in front of them. “Buying paint,” Clip replied easily, making an effort to flatten out his Kaminoan accent. It was fairly recognizable, even with the mechanical alterations.

The green-tinted, reflective lenses of Clip’s disguise weren’t really helping with the other task at hand either. He thought the can he was holding was the right color tan, given the label, but he wasn’t sure. It wasn’t like he could pull the hood off to check either.

“Okay,” Recoil said, dragging the word out in a way that was more than a little dubious, even through the filter.

All three of them were wearing similar sets of modified environmental suits, topped by loose, hooded robes. The Raiders had taken one look at the disguise Clip sometimes used on similar Reaper missions and had all-but thrown him into a set of their own gear.

Which… okay, fair. He was usually acting as bait for the Reapers, which meant he actually did want to get recognized eventually. That wasn’t the play here, though.

Apparently the suits originally had been designed for one of the methane-breathing species, before the Raiders had gotten their hands on them. They had modified several sets at this point, tearing out the rebreathing filters and methane tanks and replacing them with enough stripped out parts from a few discarded stormtrooper helmets to provide well-concealed, semi-decent comms and recording devices. Sure the masks were bulky, with flexible tubing sprouting out of the face and connecting over their shoulders. But the armored paneling worked into the leathery material made Clip feel a little less exposed than his usual getup, and the overlying robes could cover up any number of hidden weapons, which was even better.

He'd kept his woven pack though. It was useful, and besides, actually purchasing things in the markets made their ruse for scouting in the area all the more believable.

“I’ll bite,” Canvas finally said. “Why are you buying paint?”

“Thought it might cheer up our brothers,” Clip said, holding up one can. “Is this the right color?”

They both stared at him for a second, inscrutable under their own, bug-eyed masks.

“Uh, maybe?” Recoil said.

Canvas looked more closely. His lenses were a different shade than the others, reflective, but less green. “Kind of a medium tan?” he said uncertainly. “What even is the right color?”

“You know,” Clip said, eyeing the can again, “The one Nails wears.” Medium tan sounded right, and if it wasn’t close enough, they could possibly mix in some of the colors the base maintained to fix it. They had literal storerooms of white, gray, and black already on hand.

He looked up after a moment when neither of his brothers said anything.

They were both watching him, shoulders a little hunched in the exact same posture of guilty embarrassment. Clip couldn’t help but smile a little in the privacy of his own mask.

So much for not looking like clones.

But still, what was their problem?

“I hadn’t actually made that connection,” Canvas admitted.

Oh. Clip thought everyone had realized that Nails was also 241st, but weren’t discussing it because of, well… Nails.

The medics had all been very upset when they’d realized Nails had been self-medicating into the floor just about every night. There had been lectures. Several, actually. Nobody had been spared, not even the Corries, but at least they all knew what to look out for though, in Nails and in any other brother who might be struggling in the same way.

“Yeah,” Clip finally replied, not sure what else to say.

“Are they going to let him transfer out?” Canvas asked.

Clip didn’t really know the answer to that, but he could make some educated guesses. “Whenever he gets released from observation,” he said, which wasn’t really an answer. “Maybe sooner, if somebody here can take over watching out for him.”

There was more he wanted to say, but they were all having to mind their words while they were out like this, keeping things vague in case anybody overheard them. Recoil and Canvas were in the same boat, postures tense and impatient, even as they stayed awkwardly silent.

Besides, there wasn’t anything any of them could do about Nails’s situation at the moment, so Clip tried to refocus on the task at hand.

He should get one of the smallest cans of paint and then check in with someone on base. If it was the right color, Clip could always return to purchase more. Force knew they were going to need a lot of it once they got all of the base’s Phase II armor out of storage. Apparently Major Ullmann had socked all kinds of interesting things away in guarded warehouses near the base.

A ping went through Clip’s scavenged comms, the prearranged signal that someone on base needed to talk to them.

So, definitely time to wrap this up.

“Did you see anything else you needed?” he asked Recoil and Canvas, who would have also received that alert.

“Not really,” Recoil said with a shrug and a pointed look at the room’s long window, where the shop’s proprietor – a near-human man with green-tinted skin and pupilless, black eyes – had been surreptitiously watching them the whole time, from his position next to the store’s open-air displays.

Which was fine. They hadn’t said anything incriminating. They were just a trio of non-human sentients, new to the neighborhood and purchasing a few innocuous items. Perfectly above reproach.

But speaking of which…

Clip turned his body, so the shop keeper couldn’t see his empty hand, and flashed the signals for ‘door frame’ where only his brothers could see. Then, trusting that the message had been received in spite of their scrupulous lack of reaction, he headed for the shop’s exit, small can of tan paint in hand.

The symbols carved into the doorframe were inconspicuous to anyone who wasn’t actively looking for them, but Clip had been doing his homework. He’d wanted to learn as much as he could once it became apparent that the Raiders were going to keep bringing escaped slaves home to Draboon VIII.

And, well… He and his brothers were escaped slaves too, in a way.

No, not ‘in a way.’ They were. Even if the label chaffed uncomfortably. Maybe Clip hadn’t thought of himself that way before Order 66 had gone out, but he’d certainly realized it after the medics had pulled the chip out of his head. He and all his brothers had been made to specifications, bought and sold like the assorted tools and ship parts filling the shelves of this shop.

That realization still ached. Clip didn’t like examining it too closely, even now.

But he’d learned, despite the discomfort it caused him. And he knew what to look for, sometimes even better than his brothers from the Raider teams.

The spiked oval, split on the diagonal, was familiar. It was used by a smuggling ring who had a long-established policy of not charging when the items they were asked to transport happened to be escaped slaves. The bird they’d also seen before, in a couple of the other shops they’d explored, and it represented a similar network.

The wing with the single star was new, though. Something about it tugged at Clip’s memory, but he couldn’t quite place it. Maybe one of the others would know what it meant.

Clip let his eyes linger on the carvings, trusting that his active holorecorder would capture the details for later.

“Did you find everything you need?” the proprietor asked when Clip and his brothers exited the building, greenish features settling on a neutrally pleasant expression of greeting.

“Yes,” Clip said, placing the can of paint on the table in front of the man. Then he set down his pack and pulled the correct number of credits out of the pouch he’d stored inside it. He slid the credits onto the table next to the can. “Thank you.”

The shopkeeper just accepted them with a nod and nudged the can back towards Clip.

The paint went into his ruck, alongside the partially shattered droid hand, the questionably sourced interface pad and neural tech, and the handful of gameboards he’d purchased previously. Once he’d resettled the pack on his back, Clip, Recoil, and Canvas stepped out from under the store’s orange, sun-faded awning and wandered back out into the streets.

Canvas reached up to his neck, activating the comms switch concealed under one of the breathing hoses. “Where to next?” he asked casually, because that was also safely vague enough to say in the middle of a crowded street.

A burst of quiet static filled Clip’s improvised earpiece, followed by Jesse’s familiar voice.

“Head back to base,” he said. Clip thought his fellow ARC sounded tired. None of the acting COs on Wadj were getting enough sleep these days. “Captain Rex has requested an update at 17:00 GST.”

Fair enough. Clip glanced over at his brothers and said – half to them and half to Jesse on comms, “I think it’s time we got home.”

“The Lasat has a ring of bald patches around his neck,” Clip said, as the largest of the shop’s three employees came into view in the blue holo-footage. The bare patches of purplish skin had looked like scars to Clip, the kind that came from repeated exposure to low- to mid-voltage electrical shocks. Painful, even disfiguring over a long enough period of time, but not fatal. Usually.

After all, a dead slave represented a wasted investment.

But Quad had more experience with that, so Clip let the Raider team leader draw his own conclusions.

“Good spot,” Quad said, frowning to himself. “Flag them.”

Clip entered the correct codes, and a little arrow appeared, floating above the location of the shop on the map of the capital. It joined a host of others, some added by Canvas and Recoil, others gathered from the other patrols who’d added surreptitious scouting to their ‘peace keeping’ roles. The arrows were scattered around the city’s small port and the poorer mercantile districts. Not that any part of Wadj’s small capital city could be called wealthy… not by the standards of the Core at least. But there was definitely a pattern at play.

Jesse leaned against the table, palms resting on the raised lip around the projection system. “Seems like a lot more people than you’d expect to have by random chance,” he finally said, looking over at Quad. “And they’re at least loosely organized.”

Quad nodded vaguely, still lost in thought. “Some of the people we rescued, the ones who didn’t have anywhere obvious to go but also didn’t want to stay with us, still had some pretty specific drop off requests,” he finally said. “They all had to end up somewhere.”

And Wadj would look attractive to any of those groups, for the exact same reason why they had targeted it. Decent climate, far enough out on the Outer Rim to dissuade casual travelers, minimal Imperial presence, and a lack of significant established industries which might interest pirates or cartels. It was just about perfect, if you were responsible for a group of people who needed to quietly disappear.

“Rex is going to want to know how this affects the housing you’ve been scouting for our non-combatants,” Jesse said.

“It shouldn’t,” Quad said after a moment’s consideration. “We were always going to have to be careful around the locals.”

“Get Lena’s take,” Canvas said from behind Jesse.

Everyone craned around to look at the Raider. Both he and Recoil had already given their reports and then waited while Clip went through his remaining footage.

Canvas took a step forward and continued, “Tapping into the local network is risky, but they’d also be a kriffing priceless intelligence resource on the local situation and broader slave networks.” He looked at Quad and shrugged a little, heavy robes rustling at the movement, but the expression on his heavily tattooed face was perfectly serious. “We can’t be the ones making direct contact. It’d have to be a natborn, and Lena is the obvious person to ask.”

Clip wasn’t sure he entirely agreed with that assessment. Hiding from the locals forever simply wasn’t feasible. But Lena would have some useful insights, so he kept his thoughts to himself.

“Ori is going to kill you,” Jesse pointed out lightly, but he was also obviously considering the suggestion.

Canvas grinned, the symmetrical lines of his abstract, geometric tattoo making the expression look more than a little feral. “Oh, has either one of them made it official?”

Jesse snorted, mouth twisting in a crooked, sardonic smirk, but all he said in reply was, “We’ll take that under advisement.”

As much as they all loved giving their brother grief, the situation was actually kind of sad. All of them had difficulties integrating with civilians, but Ori, for all his perfect, practiced composure while on duty, was worse than most when he was off-duty.

“Anything else?” Quad asked, eyes skating over Clip to land on his own Raiders.

“No, sir,” Canvas said, answering for all three of them.

“Alright, then you’re dismissed,” Quad said.

Clip started to follow the others out, but Jesse reached out and caught him by the elbow. “Not you,” he said, giving Clip a sharp, assessing look. “Ridge requested you stand in for him this meeting.”

Clip wasn’t sure what he might have to add beyond the report he’d already made, but as far as orders went, this one was easy enough to execute. He took a position next to his fellow ARC and waited for the comm from Draboon VIII.

“I swear, if this is another one of those spiny scavengers eating trash again, I’m going to shoot it on sheer principle,” Tanner grumbled.

“Agreed,” said Vault.

“Settle down, we’ll know one way or another in a minute,” Clip said, shutting down his team’s grumbling. With Ridge still out on the island with half of his Reapers, Clip had been left in charge of all missions like this one.

If all fairness, if this was another scavenger, Clip was going to be a little annoyed himself. Just a little, though. Not enough to shoot an animal that was just getting food however it could. But the motion sensors had been tripped on the external western wall of the base, and Clip’s team had the bad luck to be on call. Didn’t mean hunkering down in an alley at oh-dark-thirty was much fun, but it wasn’t worth getting mad over, either.

Dart, as usual, didn’t keep them waiting for long.

“Bad news,” their scout said from the roof of the neighboring warehouse. “I’m seeing two sentients. They’re working on something against the wall, but I can’t see what from this angle. They’re tucked up tight against the middle wall support.”

Well, that wasn’t good news. Worst case scenario, they were dealing with some would-be insurgents placing an improvised bomb on the base. Best case scenario? Still nothing good. Not at this hour of the night, so far from any businesses or residential areas. And ARC training had drilled into Clip’s brain the importance of always planning for the worst.

Clip considered his options for a moment, remembering the layout of the buildings on this end of the base. “Are they setting a watch?” he asked.

“Nothing that formal,” Dart said. “One of them keeps glancing in the direction of the wall’s southeast corner.”

Probably assuming that would be the direction troopers might come from, given the position of the main gate. It was an amateur mistake.

“Listen up,” Clip said. “Dart, you stay on overwatch. Comm whoever’s manning base security this evening and read them in on the situation. Tanner and Aura, you’re with Vault. Coins and Dredge, you’re with Hitch. Ash and Rift, you’re with me.” Clip looked around the loose circle of Reapers. “Vault, you’ll move up to this intersection,” he pointed towards the distant, lit street that ran next to the base. “My team will be positioned one block north. Hitch, you’re another block north of that. Blue means you’re in position, green means advance. We’ll move in as one, cutting off their options for escape. We need to be quick and quiet. Blasters on stun. Any questions?”

It was straightforward enough. No one said a word.

“Alright, Dart, you’re cleared for comms updates. Everybody else, hand signs only. Move out.”

It took a lot of training to move quickly in armor without rattling like a dice cup, but everyone managed it admirably enough. The Reapers had been doing the equivalent of covert ops missions together ever since the war ended. They were good. Maybe not ARC-level, but certainly more than skilled enough to pull something like this off.

The HUDs in the stormtrooper armor were more simplistic than regular clone trooper gear and were primitive compared to Clip’s upgraded ARC rig. Updating designation numbers in their gear was an ordeal they’d skipped when they’d been called up mid-sleep cycle by the tripped proximity alarms. So, Clip resorted to just counting as different designation numbers rolled across the bottom of his field of vision. Three blue dots appeared. That would be Vault’s team reaching their marks.

“Base is read in,” Dart said just as Clip and his team reached the first gap between warehouses and turned up the darkened alley. “No change from our targets.”

Clip signaled for Ash and Rift to slow down when they neared their own positions. Their armor was too white and shiny to risk getting any closer quite yet. He punched the correct button on his vambrace, sending his own blue signal out to the rest of his team. Two more followed in rapid succession.

The three of them waited, listening as Dart checked in once more with a quick, “No change.” Clip remembered being more impatient back before ARC training. He’d get antsy waiting. All he felt now was an anticipatory kind of calm.

Three more blue dots scrolled along the bottom of his HUD. Hitch’s team had hit their mark.

“Still no change,” Dart reported. “They’re not watching the street.”

Okay then. Clip punched the correct code into his vambrace and readied his blaster rifle, snugging the butt of the stock comfortably against his shoulder. The faintest scuff of boots let Clip know that Ash and Rift were falling in behind him, staggered a little to his right and left.

The time delay counted down.

His own, green signal appeared in his HUD.

Clip moved.

He spotted the two figures, exactly where he’d expected them, across the wide street and maybe ten feet to his right. Neither of them had been watching their six.

Both of them flinched and started to turn around at the sound of boot treads, coming up behind them.

“Hands where I can see them!” Clip barked, sights already centered on the figure to the left, knees bent with a low, balanced gait that kept his blaster steady as he advanced. The sentient had short, cropped hair and pale skin. Human male. And young. He was also clearly holding something. “Hands up now!”

The boy’s hands rose. Whatever he was carrying was metallic, cylindrical. Force, if that was a grenade…

The figure on the right spun, obviously looking to run, but Hitch’s team was already there, blocking that escape route. A loose poncho, hood pulled up, gave few clues to their identity, but a pair of slender, dark-skinned hands appeared out of the folds of the fabric. They were empty. And shaking.

Another cannister rolled out next to the second figure’s feet, and they stumbled over it. Their hood fell part-way back, revealing a young, female face, dark complected and wide-eyed with fear. Clip spared one glance down, trying to identify the threat.

It didn’t look like a fragmentation grenade. In fact, it looked a little bit like –

“Hold your fire,” he snapped out, pulling his hand away from his trigger to send up an emphatic, ‘stand down’ gesture with his right hand.

It was a pressurized paint cannister.

“You’ve got to be kriffing kidding me,” Rift said under his breath, just behind Clip’s left shoulder.

Clip was in agreement with his teammate.

Hitch’s team was slowing down, but their blasters were still raised. Still ready. From the sounds coming up behind Clip, Vault’s team was doing much the same.

All nine clones converged on the pair of adolescents, sizing up the situation. Someone snorted. It sounded odd, buzzing and distorted through their vocoder.

“Hey kid,” Vault drawled over external comms. “You misspelled ‘Emperor.’”

The two kids, surrounded as they were by a squad of highly-armed stormtroopers and enough empty paint cannisters to provide ample damning evidence that they were the source of the base’s new artwork, looked like they were both about to piss themselves right there in the street.

“Cut the chatter,” Clip snapped, irritated with his team. Force, these were just kids.

“We,” the girl stuttered. “We were, uh…”

“Yeah, no. Hush,” Clip said, interrupting her. “You’re minors. Stop talking now.”

There were rules about arresting citizens. Some kind of script the Corries had learned and none of the rest of them had put much effort into memorizing. There were also special rules for kids. He was pretty sure he remembered that.

Force, what a mess.

Vault was higher ranking, but Hitch had a more level head. “Hitch,” Clip said, straightening out of his half-crouch and dropping the barrel of his blaster completely. “Check them for weapons. Gently. I need to contact the base.”

“Sir, yes Sir!” Hitch said. He sounded amused.

Amused was better than annoyed. They really needed to not escalate this situation further.

Clip stepped back out of the ring of his brothers. Ash and Rift shifted, filling the gap he’d left behind.

He walked to the far side of the street, far enough away that he shouldn’t be overheard if he only used internal comms. He punched in the code for the communications deck on base and waited.

“Status report?” one of his brothers answered almost immediately. Without a designation number it was hard to tell exactly who it was. It might have even been one of their newest Wadj brothers. More and more of them were taking on light duties around base.

“We’ve secured two civilians, no casualties,” Clip reported, keeping things terse. “Who’s the officer of the watch?”

“Reaver, but he called up Jesse and Agent Weeks when your scout alerted us to the situation.”

Waking up one of the natborn officers was definitely a choice. Not that Clip necessarily disagreed with the call. It just wasn’t where his brain would have jumped to first.

“Right, let me talk to Jesse,” Clip said, wishing he could take off his helmet and rub his eyes. He shot Hitch a quick interrogatory. His response was rapid and negative.

“Talk to me, Clip,” Jesse’s familiar voice said in Clip’s ear.

“Two kids, unarmed,” Clip said, and then sighed. “They were out here painting ‘Kark the Emperor’ on our wall.” He didn’t mention the misspelling. It didn’t seem pertinent.

Jesse snorted. “Dumb move, but uh… Agreed?”

“What am I supposed to do with them?” Clip asked, running through any number of options, and none of them were good.

“You can’t bring them in here,” Jesse said, suddenly deadly serious.

“I know,” Clip replied. They had enough incriminating stuff around base to make anyone inside a major security risk. Just the sheer number of extra brothers running around in non-regulation armor would be more than enough to raise suspicion. “So what are my other options?”

“Hold on,” Jesse said, and the line went dead.

As the minutes ticked by, Clip just let himself breathe, willing the tension out of his shoulders, letting the residual battle-high drain out of him. He knew what they should do, what would be most pragmatic to do… But these were kids. They weren’t Imperial officers.

Clip understood why they couldn’t leave witnesses on Reaper missions, but those were adults. He might not like it, but he could live with it.

He couldn’t live with executing a pair of kids in a back alley.

He couldn’t.

“Send two of your team to get a vehicle,” Jesse’s voice said directly into Clip’s ear. “Consensus is, dropping them off with some local security officers is our best option.”

There was something in his tone that held Clip’s tongue, some hint that Jesse had more to say, if Clip just waited him out.

His instinct proved correct when Jesse finally added, “The new laws punishing political protest are… pretty draconian.”

“So we don’t report what they painted, just the vandalism,” Clip immediately replied.

Jesse breathed out, long and low and loud enough to be picked up by the comms. “That might not be the smartest call,” he finally said, sounding as tired as Clip felt. “But it’s probably the right one.”

“We can make it look like an oversight,” Clip said, and he couldn’t quite keep himself from letting his head drop, just a little bit, in relief. “You know I wouldn’t risk our brothers.”

“I know,” Jesse said, and Clip was grateful that there wasn’t any hesitation in the response. “I’ll send a team out with a pressure washer. It’ll be gone before dawn.”

“Thanks,” Clip said, suddenly weary beyond belief.

The girl still looked gray under her dark complexion, but the boy’s fear had settled into a seething sort of sulk by the time Vault and Rift had returned with one of the base’s smaller armored transports. As Jesse had promised, they were accompanied by three brothers, anonymous in stormtrooper plate. Two of them started to unload a pressure washer from the back.

The third one turned out to be Shark.

Last Clip had heard, Shark was still having hearing and occasional equilibrium issues. Blast-damaged nerves and shattered ear bones just took time to heal, even with easy access to bacta.

Clip took his helmet off in case Shark would benefit from being able to see his lips. “Kix cleared you for this?” he asked. They were lingering far enough away to speak freely. Also far enough away that Clip could pretend to ignore several of his Reapers gathering in front of the drying paint and clearly posing for a quick holo. Tanner held up one hand in an ‘agreed, emphasized’ battle sign.

Shark snorted, glancing over at the group’s antics. “Maybe next time,” he said, holding up a datapad. “Read this over.”

Clip took the ‘pad and flipped it around. It was an incident report form with the Wadj judicial crest dominating the top of the page. The blanks had been filled out. Mostly. There were errors in many places, incorrect codes, very little in the way of details about much of anything. It came across like someone very incompetent or very indifferent had filled it out.

It was perfect.

“I can sell this,” Clip said, glancing up at Shark, who hadn’t taken off his own stormtrooper helmet. The internal comms probably helped compensate for the hearing issues. Shark didn’t give anything away, but this had to be killing him. Staying grounded for so long. Clip wanted to say something else, but he refrained. No ARC ever decanted had ever taken anything resembling pity well.

“You’d better,” Shark just said, bucket tilting slightly to one side. “The plan’s to take them to the station near the spaceport?”

Clip nodded. It was the closest one, driving further would look suspicious.

Shark made a small, considering sound. “Agent Weeks says the security officers stationed there are pretty easy-going. Big fans of trading community service for sweeping smaller infractions under the rug,” he said, but his casual tone of voice was itself suspicious.

Clip eyed his brother and then glanced over the document again. “I take it this isn’t the first time the base has handled something like this?” he finally asked, abruptly wondering if Shark actually had been the one to fill out this form, or if it had been Agent Weeks.

“Apparently not,” Shark said, which pretty much answered Clip’s question.

Reading between the lines, it was pretty obvious that the three natborn officers had been functionally exiled here, kept out of sight and away from whatever political embarrassment Major Ullmann in particular might caught his politician daughter. The whole 241st trusted their officers to an almost ridiculous degree. One of them, Callen, was very clearly in a relationship with Agent Weeks. So really, the question wasn’t whether Clip trusted Agent Weeks, but whether he trusted his brothers’ judgment.

Framed that way, coming to a decision wasn’t so hard.

“Right. Thanks,” Clip said, knocking the back of his gauntlet against his brother’s pauldron. When Shark only grunted a little, sounding almost amused, Clip left to brief a few of his Reapers.

Hitch had already cuffed both of the kids and put them in the back of the transport. Rift would drive up front with Vault as ride-along. Hitch, Ash, and Clip would all be in the back, with the kids. The plan was for Clip to do all of the talking.

Once they got underway, the only sound Clip heard was the rumble of the transport’s engines and the clacking of his own armor, bumping against Ash’s shoulder as they rolled out into the city. The compartment had narrow, slotted windows running down the sides, blaster-height for a standing clone. Clip lifted the hinged cover from one of them, tracking their progress through the city.

There were more signs of life as the transport moved beyond the industrial sector. People were out and about, even at this late hour. They stared as the transport went by, amber-tinted streetlamps casting their faces in shadows. Clip let the armored panel drop back into place, fully blocking his brothers and the two kids from view.

The girl kept her chin high during the entire drive to the station, but Clip didn’t miss the way her hands gripped the fabric of her poncho to keep from shaking. The boy sulked. Clip very badly wanted to talk some sense into him. He couldn’t though. It wouldn’t help their cover story, and he doubted it would work. Someone else would have to take up the task. Someone the kid didn’t view as an enemy.

When they arrived at the station, Rift stayed in the driver’s seat and Vault took a guard position at the rear of the transport. Hitch and Ash manhandled the kids out of the transport as gently as they could while still looking believable.

And they had to make it look believable.

They’d drawn a small crowd, locals clustering together and watching silently from the shadows.

Clip led the way into the station, back straight. The perfect soldier, just following orders.

The police officer staffing the front desk rose to greet Clip, and even if he looked a little pale, he sounded perfectly composed when he said, “How can I help you?”

“Two prisoners, for processing,” he said, producing Shark’s – no… Agent Week’s datapad and its questionable report.

The officer, some faintly-furred species Clip didn’t immediately recognize, took the ‘pad and turned it around to read properly. He glanced over the form, frowning a little. “Where did the incident occur?” he asked, reaching one of the first, glaring problems with the form.

“Sector G, adjacent two of the Altez warehouses,” Clip reported almost mechanically, which was entirely accurate while also completely missing the point. The Altez Co-op owned many of the warehouses in that sector, not just the ones near the base.

The man’s red-tinged gaze shifted from Clip’s blank visor, to the orange pauldron on his shoulder, to the datapad again. His expression twitched a little, an odd flush revealing pale stripes along his cheeks for a moment. He took a breath and his color evened out again, thick fingers slowly scrolling through the incomplete, half-heartedly composed report.

A few additional security officers appeared out of the back, no doubt drawn by the voices. Clip watched them without shifting his position, letting his blank visor conceal the way he was assessing the potential threat. None of the officers looked particularly happy to have found a trio of stormtroopers milling around their lobby, guarding a pair of adolescent locals. They tried to school their expression, but they weren’t terribly successful. None of them reached for a weapon though. None of them tensed in a way that suggested they were preparing to attack their unwelcome guests.

Clip let himself shift a little, angling his body where he could keep all of the security officers in his line of sight, just in case.

When the officer seemingly reached the bottom of the report, he looked up at Clip and asked, “Your commanding officer signed off on this?”

“Yes,” Clip said evenly. The lack of additional questions was a good sign.

“Seems straightforward enough,” the officer finally said, with a casual blandness that Clip had to respect. He might not have Shark’s flair for this kind of mission, but he’d received the same training, both in subterfuge and in recognizing the signs in others. This officer wanted Clip and his brothers gone, but he had enough sense to be subtle and polite about it. “Will you want a copy of our final report forwarded to your base?”

“Of course,” Clip said, because that was protocol, and no chipped brother would overlook such a basic requirement. Reports could be recorded as received and then deleted easily enough. He signaled to Hitch and Ash, who unlatched the kids’ cuffs, Imperial property and all that, and shoved the two kids in the direction of the cluster of hovering officers. The boy staggered, biting back something barely audible and no doubt insulting. “I trust you can handle them from here?”

The transfer was quick and efficient, no doubt because no one in the building wanted stormtroopers lingering around any longer than necessary. Signatures and designation numbers were exchanged. Files were transferred and the datapad was retrieved. Worry still twisted in Clip’s guts though. He got the distinct impression that the security officers were planning on dragging the kids into the back room to yell at them. Clip could only hope that would be the end of it. It was out of his hands now.

On the way out, he did notice a line of familiar symbols, marching above the interior doorframe of the precinct office. A spiked, split oval, a seven-pointed star, a bird, and more. He didn’t pause and couldn’t stop to turn on his record function, but that was interesting. Very interesting.

An investigation team arrived sometime after first light to collect evidence and eyewitness testimony. Except there wasn’t any evidence. It had all been scoured away, leaving only a very clean, fortified wall for the officers to document.

Shark and Agent Weeks had given the interviews. Clip and his team had been sleeping off their interrupted sleep cycle in the Thresher.

A report arrived later that week, threadbare as the one they’d provided in the first place. Jesse let Clip read it before Factor deleted the file and scrubbed the base’s memory of any mention of the incident.

Sixteen hours of community service. Names redacted due to juvenile status.

Clip suggested that they carve Commander Tano’s markings above the doorframes of the safe house they’d procured for their civilians. The structure was positioned in one of the poorer parts of the mercantile district, right in the thick of the network the Raiders had been tracking. Their other options were worse, and the price was right for the amount of space they needed.

Jesse looked at him like he’d suggested taking out an ad on the holonet announcing their presence.

Quad asked him to elaborate on his reasoning.

Their neighbors were going to ask questions and draw conclusions no matter what they did. Better to represent themselves as a mysterious new player in the network than to try and fake a connection to an existing organization, and risk being caught in a lie. They were going to need a symbol, given the local practices, and luckily, they already had one everyone in the know would recognize.

The two officers promised to run the suggestion up the chain of command.

Permission came only a couple days later, along with a suggested name for their false organization: Fulcrum.

The base was in an uproar.

A small team from Draboon VIII had arrived to take over management of the day-to-day functions of the base. Ori was in command of the newcomers, and he had taken up the position with the Corries’ usual attention to detail and utter disregard for reasonable work hours.

A second team had arrived in the civilian spaceport, thoroughly disguised and escorting the majority of their civilians. They immediately moved into the safehouse and started setting up shop. What, exactly, they were going to sell in the space’s first floor commercial space was anyone’s guess. If Cut and Suu’s plans for the island played out, they’d have extra produce to ship back soon. Trip’s team needed to do something with the crates of exotic skins they’d been saving from their hunts. It was all a work in progress.

The final team had gone out to the island itself. From the list, it looked like the Captain and Commander had picked engineering and hydroponics clean, leaving only a couple of brothers behind on Draboon VIII to interface with the Mandalorians. The plan was to start fabricating buildings on site as rapidly as possible. Apparently volcanic soils made excellent aggregates for some of the standard plascrete mixes available on the market. Zinc and Ocher had a plan for cranking out modular blocks, which would speed the construction process along.

The brothers who had been stationed on the Wadj base were being shifted around as well. Some were headed back to Draboon VIII. Others were transferring out to the islands. The medics threatened to revolt if they were forced out of the nicely appointed, well-stocked medical wing on base. In the meantime, all Reaper and Raider teams left on Wadj were to arm up and ship out.

All of them… except for Clip.

He’d triple-checked the assignment rosters. His name and designation number were listed alongside the handful of brothers remaining in the Wadj base. He assumed it had to be an oversight. Apparently nobody had been happy about completely handing over Draboon VIII to the Mandalorians, so a compromise had been reached. Rumors were rampant about what their target might be, but there were very few hard facts. Clip had heard speculation that they were being deployed to hit everything from a star destroyer, to a slaver enclave, to Coruscant itself. No matter the actual target, any or all of those sounded like the kind of mission that would benefit from including all available ARCs. He’d reached out to Ridge for clarification.

Ridge had commed him back almost immediately. “It’s no mistake,” he said, sounding apologetic, but distracted. Clip could hear the sounds of heavy equipment getting shifted around in the background, the team getting ready to leave. “I don’t have the details. You need to speak to Captain Rex.”

That felt like a punch to the gut.

Clip had no idea what he might have done to deserve being removed from his Reapers. Ridge wasn’t unhappy with him. The team’s success rate and casualty numbers were both enviable. Clip maintained his scores and skills in the practice range and the gym. He interfaced well with other teams and had served as second-in-command while Ridge had run his relief mission to the island. He couldn’t think of a single reason he should be stripped of his position.

He asked that Ori pass along his request to be reinstated with his team. He had prepared a number of arguments he felt were sound from a strictly tactical point of view.

He wasn’t expecting an immediate answer. Everyone was busy, shuffling far too many brothers through far too small a base, all arranged in such a way as to minimize suspicions from the air traffic controllers at the capital’s small space port. There were a lot of false transponder numbers being handed out and several nighttime training maneuvers registered with the civilian authorities.

Clip got a rapid response, despite the ongoing chaos. Captain Rex wanted to speak to him at his earliest convenience.

‘At his earliest convenience.’ So, ‘Right now, but you’re allowed whatever minimal amount of time it might take to make yourself presentable first.’

Clip’s stomach sank.

He arrived in the base’s command center dressed in his green-accented ARC gear. He told himself he was only wearing it because he did not need to remain in disguise in the safety of their own base. Certainly not because the prospect of being demoted – of being found wanting and not even knowing why – was making him feel vaguely ill. Not because he found the pauldrons and kamas a tangible, comforting reminder of his own value.

Certainly not.

The command center was only lightly staffed when he arrived, helmet tucked smartly under his left arm. A few brothers were manning the comms and sensor array stations. Ori was standing in front of the holoprojection table looking at a map of Wadj’s capital city. He was speaking to someone, a quarter-sized projection of an armored brother. As Clip closed the distance to the table, it became obvious that the tiny figure was Captain Rex himself, helmet off, looking like he hadn’t slept in a month.

Ori saw him approaching, waved Clip over, and then typed a series of commands into the table which wiped the map and expanded Captain Rex’s holo-projection to half-life-size. Then, Ori excused himself to go speak to one of the brothers on the far side of the room.

Well, at least they were trying to give him some privacy for whatever dressing down he had apparently earned.

Clip straightened his shoulders, told himself to put a little beskar back in his spine, and saluted. “Sir. You wanted to speak to me?”

“At ease,” Captain Rex said waving away the formality. “I won’t drag this out. I know you have requested to stay with Ridge’s team, but I need you on Wadj right now.”

That… didn’t sound like the prelude to a demotion. Still, Clip had points to make. Well-organized, clearly thought-through arguments. “Sir, I’m an ARC trooper. I belong wherever the fighting is.”

“Yes, but you’ve also managed to embed yourself in every effort to reconnoiter the base’s surroundings and interface with the locals,” Captain Rex said dryly. “And you’ve proven to be quite good at it, too.”

Clip wasn’t sure what to say to that. He’d been taking his shifts on patrol, sure. And he’d tagged along with the Raiders a couple times when they’d asked for volunteers. He’d just been trying to make himself as useful as possible in his downtime. He disliked sitting around idle.

“Look, I need someone to step in and work with Ori to manage the base while the rest of us deal with the Mandalorians,” the Captain said seriously. “I think that person should be you.”

So, not a demotion. Not at all.

You didn’t turn down a promotion. It just wasn’t done. Clip opened his mouth, but the words just weren’t coming. Instead of saying something as incriminating as ‘Why?’ he just shut it again.

The look Captain Rex gave him was amused and all too knowing.

“I can’t compromise the top-down command structure of my teams right before we go into battle,” he said, laying out his reasoning with the same inexorable feeling as a landslide. “I know my officers. Ridge will always do the most pragmatic thing, and Jesse will always do the smartest thing. I’ve been reading their reports, and I’m starting to realize that you,” Rex paused, the projection of his eyes became piercing. “You will always do the right thing. That’s why I need you on Wadj right now.”

Clip just stood there, blinking stupidly for a moment. He felt vaguely embarrassed, but he couldn’t put his finger on exactly why. That description just sat wrong with him. But if Captain Rex really felt he was the best man for the job, then he’d try his level-best to live up to those expectations. Finally, he got his brain back on track enough to say, properly this time, “I will do my best, Sir.”

“Welcome to command,” Captain Rex said with a wry twist of his lips. “You have standing permission to curse me for it later.”

AN: I'm all caught up with the chapters I'd previously posted on AO3, so I'll start crossposting on both sites as I finish new chapters from here on out.

Other chapters are available here.

Dividers by freesia-writes using helmets by lornaka. More designs available here.

#eidola tcw fanfic #star wars #tcw #clone wars #star wars the clone wars #the clone wars #clones #fanfic #fanfiction #clone troopers #tcw fanfic #the clone wars fanfiction #the clone wars fanart #the clones deserved better

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tehuti88-art · 3 months

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3/1/24: r/SketchDaily theme, "Free Draw Friday." This week's character from my anthro WWII storyline is a twofer: Sgt. Thomas "Harrier" Harricks, and Flight Lt. Donovan Bradford, in a garrison cap and in a peaked cap. These are two poorly developed British characters from the previous reboot. Donovan (he prefers going by his first name) is a laid-back pilot but now stays on the ground, whereas Harrier is short tempered and unpleasant. There'll be more about them later in my art Tumblr and Toyhou.se.

Regarding their design, Harrier underwent a last-minute drastic design change based on my mistaken memory that HE had been the pilot; I suddenly decided to change him from a rat into a bat, making him only the second non-rat character in the rodent half of the story (Papillon is the other). He's passing as a rat, which is why the pointy tips of his ears are clipped off, plus he wears gloves and avoids shaking hands because of how bat hands are constructed. (This is something I only JUST realized about Papillon recently, his fingers are his wings! He effectively has no hands! I came up with the idea of him having prosthetic hands operated by his thumbs, and this led to more plot development. Harrier of course deals with a similar complication.) Also, I just noticed I really borked up the British garrison cap in my original design--it has earflaps buttoned in front like a German field cap--so my older Liam Morgan portrait will need to be tweaked.

TUMBLR EDIT: Harrier and Donovan both date to the first attempted reboot, and both severely lack character development (similar to characters like Evans and Beaudry); here to be thorough I'm looking to dust them off and flesh them out sometime. This section will be divided among the characters to avoid repetition.

Here is Sgt. Thomas "Harrier" Harricks's original description from the old character list (2002):

THOMAS "HARRIER" HARRICKS: Sgt., serving under Bradford. Excessively patriotic and dislikes both Americans and the Trench Rats, yet has to help them out due to his position. Very gruff and irritable, not easy to get along with; has a perpetual chip on his shoulder. Current storyline

One thing that needs correcting: Harrier can't serve under Donovan, as Donovan is RAF while Harrier is...whatever you call the British army. (See the different colors of their caps.) I've modified this so they're merely good friends, and Donovan likely pulled some strings to ensure Harrier's position in the military (more in a bit).

I decided to draw these two together due to their relationship and shared "forgotten character" status. I originally misremembered Harrier being the grounded pilot...likely due to his name. Harrier is a type of British jet (apparently invented after WWII, so not applicable here, plus I don't know aircraft so I doubt that's the source of his nickname), a type of dog (also unlikely), and a type of bird of prey. I assume I chose the name based on the last. So...why would I name him this, unless he flew...? Yet there's the character list, making no mention of him being a pilot, that's Donovan. 🤔 So I'm left without explanation, unless it was merely implied, in Harrier "serving under" Donovan...which no longer applies. So, there goes that.

I started toying with Harrier also being a pilot, though he's not RAF so this is unlikely. Maybe he once flew anyway...? Or...maybe he WANTS to fly, but can't...? Maybe...he can fly, but has to conceal this fact? Maybe...he's not a rat, but a bat? BOOM. Idea sparked. I promptly changed my idea for Harrier's character design and looked up British species of bats, before deciding to just go with an indeterminate bat species that doesn't really fit any of them. All I knew was he had to superficially resemble a rat, meaning reasonably-sized ears, and no funky weird nose. I struggled to give him a somewhat snubby nose without it being obvious like Papillon's (see HIS ENTRY for example), though it's iffy to me and may be modified in an update; similar with his ears, first they were merely larger (10%) and rounded like mouse ears, then I made them pointy, then not as pointy, then pointy, then decided on the concept of them being pointy BUT the tips were deliberately cropped to minimize the pointiness. This adds to the idea that Harrier is rather reluctantly passing as a rat.

The final design aspect that needs addressing is, of course, the wings. This is a recent character design development I faced for Papillon. And damn am I a moron for taking this long to realize! I even have this in Papillon's Toyhou.se profile, though I'll need to edit it now:

Papillon has very large upright ears which he often folds back/down when interacting with others; a snubby, upright nose; and visible fangs and claws. He dresses in a cobbled-together "uniform" of faded but clean clothes, with special slits in the sides to accommodate his wings (these aren't highly visible, and are often mistaken for part of his outfit, until/unless he extends them); he usually goes barefoot so he can pick things up while flying or hang from trees. He carries binoculars as his eyesight isn't very good in the daytime; he sees better in the dimness, but still makes soft clicking sounds to help find his way. Oddly, many of the people he comes in contact with have no idea he's a bat until he reveals his wings, hinting that rat/bat interactions are rare.

So Papillon has claws...on his fingers...which ARE HIS WINGS? Erp. I was pretty sure of this already, but Googled both actual images of bat wing construction, as well as depictions of how cartoon designers have dealt with the idea of bat hands, previously. (Bartok from Anastasia was the first I thought of, and yeegh they did a lousy job. (He's adorable as a bat, my memory of him helped inspire Papillon's design, but his wing design makes no sense, they actually look like loose sheets in some versions. Here you see he has hands, and no fingers in his wing membranes--illogical!) I didn't even think of the bat from FernGully. (Batty Koda...I just looked him up, and his wing design varies but looks to be rather accurate, he lacks hands but seems to have a visible thumb. Not all art of him shows this, maybe some is fan art?) Only after all this, I found Fidget from The Great Mouse Detective, which is a better design--it looks like they incorporate his wing membranes as fingers--though the designs are vague and they vary. Here my knowledge of animated bats runs dry.) (I have never seen any of these movies, BTW.) I briefly toyed with the idea of just saying, eh screw it, obviously I've already taken plenty of anatomical liberties with these guys, why not here too...? But it niggled at me far too much to take THAT much liberty...so, Papillon's hands had to go.

But Papillon semi-successfully passes as a (weird-looking) rat for a while...how? How can you do this, and be a partisan, without hands?? For Papillon conceals his wings most of the time, and those long unwieldy membranes wouldn't function well as fingers. I wondered about prosthetic technology, how well advanced it was in the Thirties, by which time Papillon would need a way to disguise the fact that HE HAS NO FREAKING HANDS. I know certain wonders were wrought by the many battlefield injuries of WWI. But just how sophisticated would prosthetic hands be? Would they be mainly aesthetic, or functional...?

I went Googling. Prosthetic hand technology, even way back then, turned out to be not QUITE as sophisticated as my story requires, yet better than I'd thought it would be. There are even accounts of functional prosthetic hands from the 1500s...in Germany! Check out this amazing dude!

Götz von Berlichingen

Dude was a 1500s KNIGHT with a freaking iron fighting hand! Granted, the fingers could only be adjusted using his other hand, so had to lock in place--he couldn't flex and extend them independently. And the arm had to be held in place with straps. Still, the level of technology involved here is just...mindblowing, to me. And opened up the possibility of Papillon utilizing something similar.

Now...given the physical constraints of being a bat, and his role as a partisan, Papillon needed: 1. movable fingers; 2. a way to attach the hands to his wings; and 3. a convincing enough appearance to at least superficially convince others he has hands. Here's how it went.

1. There are plenty of other mild technological liberties taken with this story, including Project Doomsday itself. For a near-fully functional prosthetic hand with moving fingers which can perform basic tasks to exist in this world is no stretch, and needs little explanation. The original designer of Papillon's hands (a so-far unnamed man who takes him in when he's younger and on his own) could have knowledge/experience from the Great War to create such advanced prosthetics, so, ready-made explanation!

2. How does Papillon affix said hands to his wings?--there are no readily attachable points for straps. This is a bit more complicated, but can be reasonably fudged. Papillon does have thumbs. Many early prosthetic hands depended on some body part/surface which could manipulate them, even if only the surviving edge of the hand. I figured a functional thumb can not only be the source that moves the fingers, but the "attachment point" that keeps the hands in place. Granted, this heavily depends on Papillon manually grasping the hands in place at all times. I imagine a sort of basic "harness" assisting in this by at least somewhat holding/stabilizing the hands in place around the thumbs, just some straps/buckles around the "wrist" area, cinched to the wing a bit, though limited in functionality due to so little surface to wrap around. (I considered small slits pierced in his wings to slip the straps through but that seems too painful/barbaric.) I just imagine Papillon has to practice to make keeping his hands on become second nature. When removing his hands, he releases his thumb and unbuckles these straps.

3. Papillon's prostheses are covered in a sort of glove which leaves only the fingertips exposed. The fingertips of the hands are designed to resemble real claws. The jointed knuckles and all remain hidden and he merely appears to be wearing fingerless gloves.

Papillon's identity as a bat isn't a secret--he utilizes his ability to fly to serve as a scout and gather intelligence for the partisans (he first discovers Trench Rat Headquarters), and outs himself to the Rats as a bat after he rescues Corporal Drake. He conceals his wings most of the time, however, likely due to some sort of unknown prejudice/taboo against bat/rat interactions--witness the Trench Rats' surprise upon realizing he's not one of them. I haven't fully explored this angle yet, though it's intriguing, given the themes of the story (lots of other persecuted groups in this storyline). In fact it rather goes along with Papillon's adjacent identity of being openly gay--most people know, he doesn't hide it and isn't ashamed, yet he realizes it puts a target on his back, so he doesn't flaunt it, either. Same with being a bat.

I already mentioned Papillon's main role is info gathering, and spying. He's not much of a fighter. This fits well with the fact that he doesn't have proper hands--they would make actions like accurately firing a gun more complicated. I imagine he CAN do this, if needed, he just wouldn't be very GOOD at it. So, that works out. His job doesn't involve much fighting.

And there's one more thing that works in Papillon's favor of lacking hands, as well as nicely tying in with the existing plot: Doomsday Rat. When he's first rescued from Nazi custody and returned to the Allies, he's already been subjected to experimentation, as well as brainwashed by Dr. Kammler. He's one of the Americans, but struggles at first to adjust, as well as to re-earn his comrades' trust. The Rats are reluctant to grant him too much leeway; how do they know he won't betray them? He doesn't even speak English anymore when he first returns. Papillon strikes upon an idea to test both his supposed increased intelligence, as well as his trustworthiness; he goes to D-Day, holds up a hand, then carefully unbuckles the straps and removes the whole thing. Naturally, everyone watching is stunned; D-Day blinks at the hand, then takes it and starts looking it over curiously. Burgundy Rat gestures, and Papillon removes his other hand and gives it to him. "Prosthetic hands," Burgundy muses, impressed by the advanced workmanship. Although the Rats know Papillon is a bat, they never even considered that he lacks hands like theirs; Papillon stretches out a wing to show them his actual fingers, and explains how he got the hands. Earlier in the story, he suffered a hand injury, which is now revealed to have been an injury to the prosthetic; he lets D-Day keep the broken hand, reasoning that he should be able to repair it. D-Day asks if he can dismantle the hand to reverse-engineer it, and Papillon consents. Later, privately, Drake asks to look at Papillon's thumbs; the two of them have since begun a relationship, and he's surprised to only just now learn this. Papillon admits finally to a bit of embarrassment: "I thought perhaps, if you knew, you would feel differently." Drake replies that this doesn't change a thing, except that he wants Papillon to feel comfortable around him, and that includes showing his real hands.

D-Day eventually comes forward with a brand-new set of hands for Papillon to try out. He didn't simply reverse-engineer the old set; he's improved their appearance and functionality. They're lighter, more resilient, less cumbersome, easier to hold on and manipulate with the thumb, and have a much more sophisticated range of motion. Papillon tries them on and starts marveling, smiling from ear to ear, tearfully laughing, exclaiming, "Incroyable! Un miracle!" He grabs D-Day with his new hands and exuberantly kisses him on both cheeks. As far as he's concerned, D-Day has admirably proven that he's mechanically skilled, and trustworthy. Shortly afterward, the Trench Rats make D-Day their probationary chief engineer.

...All of this recently developed background tangentially relates to Harrier in that, being a bat, he faces the same difficulties. Donovan is aware of his true identity, most others are not, so I assume Donovan pulled some strings to keep Harrier's secret. The two of them must be good friends. Unlike Papillon, Harrier is rather ashamed of what he is, thus his overly defensive, unpleasant personality. He's used to others looking down on him, so he thinks, why shouldn't he look down on others too. He's not exactly racist, but he frowns on anyone from another country/nation, which is most characters he comes in contact with. He has no real issue with LC Skye (English/Scottish) or Sgt. Liam Morgan (English/Welsh/Irish), is okay with LC Indigo Rat (Australian), but most of the others he treats with disdain. He's certain they'll all hate him if they find out what he really is, so he heads them off by being proactively hostile. He never shakes hands, in fact, often keeps his arms crossed in a closed-off posture.

Harrier isn't as fortunate as Papillon--he doesn't have a functional pair of prosthetics. He uses a pair of gloves, stuffed and affixed similarly to Papillon's--he can do the most basic things like pick things up, yet not much else. He can fire a pistol with his thumb, but it involves subterfuge, and so he's not too fit for combat. He longs to fly, yet can't (I toyed with him being crippled, but I don't think he is). So he latches on to Donovan, a skilled bomber pilot, and lives vicariously through him. Donovan eventually ends up downed, which hits Harrier harder than it does Donovan. Donovan, meanwhile, is likely the one who gave Harrier his nickname--others see it as ironic, but it's sincere, Donovan has seen Harrier fly before (ah...JUST now occurred to me, maybe Harrier helps save Donovan's life after he crashes?)--and he urges him to own up to his true identity, yet Harrier is too discouraged to do so. Most others he meets assume he's just a particularly ugly rat, which is dispiriting, but tolerable.

At some point, Harrier will have to have a run-in with Papillon. He's surprised, just as the Rats were, when he learns he's a bat, even though Papillon doesn't pass as well as he does (I mean...look at them freaking ears). After finding out about his hands, he reluctantly approaches Papillon to ask where he got them. Papillon is puzzled at first, but very quickly catches on; he says Doomsday is the creator, then adds, "I'm sure he could make you a set, should you ask." Harrier immediately bristles--what makes him think he needs any? In response Papillon nods at Harrier's folded arms: "I assume there's a reason you don't like to show them...you're like me, are you not?" To which Harrier bares his teeth (fangs--only bolstering Papillon's point) and snaps, "I ain't nothing like you, frog! So get that thought out of your skull and bugger off!" As he storms off, Papillon (as usual, not offended in the least) calls out, "He'll be discreet if you ask him, Sergent," which just makes Harrier grind his teeth harder.

He does follow Papillon's advice, however, even though it takes all the nerve he can muster. He hates the Americans even more than he hates the French, and D-Day, according to his mangled understanding of things, actually "went German" for a time so he's even worse (Harrier has surely insulted him prior to now), but he really longs for what everyone else has that he lacks. He fully expects the Trench Rat engineer to rebuff him for his earlier comments, yet when he hesitantly inquires about the prosthetic hands, and D-Day seems more perplexed than anything (like, why are you interested in Papillon's hands?), and Harrier sucks it up and gingerly removes one of his own makeshift prosthetics (grimacing in embarrassment as he does so), D-Day's ears prick forward and he says, "May I--?" Harrier nearly jerks his wing back when D-Day touches him but then holds still as he examines his thumb. He expects to be barraged with humiliating questions, yet all that D-Day asks is, "What size glove do you typically wear?" "Small," Harrier says, and "Aye," when the Trench Rat asks if they're comfortable enough. "I think I can remember the design," D-Day says, letting go of his thumb (Harrier slips the glove back on and meekly tucks his hands under his wings), "though it'll take me a bit to get the supplies and make them. Is a week acceptable?" Harrier blinks, and stammers, "Uh...aye, a week, sounds good," and D-Day tells him to return then and the hands should be ready, now please excuse him, he has to get back to work, and that's it. Harrier heads back to his base, rubbing his thumbs together self-consciously. He's mystified that the request went so smoothly...he can't understand why the American was so nice to him.

Harrier's with Donovan at the base when they receive a visitor a while later: D-Day arrives with a parcel. Harrier forgot the date, so D-Day's come looking for him. He hands Harrier the parcel, saying, "They should fit, though I can adjust them if need be." Donovan looks on curiously as Harrier opens the package and removes one of the hands; its color matches his thumbs. He fumbles a bit to put it on, then can't quite figure out how to operate it; "You use your thumb and wrist to operate everything," D-Day explains, gesturing with his own hand, "Just fit your thumb in the loop and secure it snugly around your wrist," so Harrier does so. He gasps when he flexes his thumb and all the fingers pull into a fist--they straighten out again when he extends his thumb. "It'll take some practice to get them moving right," D-Day advises, "so try not to get frustrated. You'll be relying on your vision rather than on feeling anything, same as with any prosthetic. Everyone's clumsy at first." He acknowledges Donovan, then departs. "Need any help...?" Donovan asks when Harrier pulls out the second prosthetic; Harrier shakes his head, he figures he should get used to affixing them to himself on his own, though he can't quite talk at the moment, as his throat is stuck and his eyes are watery. He awkwardly manages to secure the other prosthetic, flexes all his new fingers, then has to pause a moment to press them to his eyes, his breath hitching. Donovan hesitates only briefly before grasping his shoulder as Harrier snuffles a little.

Harrier still has a pissy attitude, he's just used to being that way, though on his and Donovan's following meetings to the Trench Rats, he really does try not to be quite as obnoxious, especially around D-Day. ("D-Day," D-Day corrects him when he calls him Doomsday; "There's a difference...?" Harrier asks, puzzled, to which D-Day replies that "Doomsday" is the name of the medical project he was forced into while a prisoner of war, and although he doesn't dwell on it when referred to by the same name, he prefers to distance himself a bit by using the other nickname. Harrier afterward refers to him by his preferred name.)

I haven't yet figured it all out but at some point, Harrier does finally out himself as a bat, in a similar fashion to Papillon, probably by flying in and rescuing someone or retrieving something they can't reach on foot. He's embarrassed by the stunned reaction he gets, yet also similar to Papillon, there's not much negative fallout as he'd expected, just curiosity more than anything. He does find himself called up by a superior officer, and responds, full of dread, yet what it is is a new job offer: He'd likely be far more useful with the troops than behind a desk--like Papillon, he can perform surveillance and gather intelligence on the enemy. Harrier finds himself stunned. He's wanted to fly for years, now here is the opportunity. He always assumed it'd be a combat role, but this makes much more sense. He's reluctant to take the job at first, assuming he's too rusty by now--and, frankly, just feeling unworthy--yet Donovan gives him the pep talk (tough love) he needs, insisting he'd be an idiot to turn it down, and he'd regret it forever. Harrier can sense the implication in Donovan's words, that he himself misses being able to fly, something Harrier's envied for ages. He accepts the new job, though there's definitely a learning curve involved, and as D-Day said, everyone's clumsy at first.

The rest of Harrier's details have yet to be worked out. See Donovan's entry for a bit more, though not much yet, on him.

[Thomas Harricks 2024 [‎Friday, ‎March ‎1, ‎2024, ‏‎12:00:05 AM]]

#artists on tumblr #ibisPaint x #SketchDaily #original characters

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arabellaflynn · 2 years

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Advent Calendar 12: The Shiny Frisbee

Greetings, and welcome to Advent Calendar 2022! This year we're being self-indulgent and rambling about video games.

As usual, the Advent Calendar is also a pledge drive. Subscribe to my writing Patreon here by December 15th for at least $5/mo and get an e-card for Ratmas; subscribe for $20/mo (and drop me a mailing address) and you'll get a real paper one!

I hope you're all having a happy winter holiday season. Let the nerd rambling commence!

Picture it: Phoenix, Arizona. 199... uh, 3, ish? It's been a while. As mentioned, my father did a lot of CAD design and sometimes worked at home, back in the days when the brontosaurus stampedes sometimes interfered with his morning commute, so we always had at least one up-to-date PC in the house.

The big purchase that year was a tricked-out '486. For those of you who were not buying desktop PCs when you had to know and care what all the parts were, the CPU (and the motherboard it went on) was usually the single most costly piece, so you figured out your price range and picked that out first. Next up were the RAM and the hard drive. These days you don't need to worry too much about either unless you're building a server or a gaming computer, but back in the day it legitimately mattered. Less in my house, perhaps -- my father taught me how to field strip an ATX case when I was in grade school, followed by the long tedious process of whacking the OS with a hammer until it understood what you'd just done to the hardware, but a lot of people didn't upgrade their PC for funsies.

The most exciting part of this new PC, however, was the "multimedia package". It came with a 17" SVGA monitor that displayed a whopping 1024 x 768 pixels, a resolution today achieved by my dirt cheap LG Rebel 4 phone. It came with a SoundBlaster 16, a sound card with wavetable and FM synthesis playback using a Yamaha YMF262, a chip which can now be purchased for under $2. And, most importantly, it came with a CD-ROM drive.

The idea of using audio media for data storage was not crazy. Computers made the jump from physical recordings like Jacquard loom punch cards and paper tapes to rearranging ferrous particles with magnets at about the same time as the music industry did, in the 1950s and '60s. Home microcomputers used cassette tapes for storage in the '80s. Floppies and hard drives are pretty much the same thing, except the signal is stored in concentric circles on a platter instead of in one long line down a strip of tape. The concept of CD-ROM was first demonstrated in 1984, and drives were on the market by 1986.

No, the crazy part was the idea that any normal person would ever need access to the sheer amount of random crap a CD-ROM could hold. The first drives were expensive bastards sold to the same kinds of educational institutions who bought LaserDiscs full of science to cram into the heads of impressionable children, and the first killer app for it was Microsoft Bookshelf. It was conceived of as a way to not just store millions of pages of text, but to augment that text with explanatory pictures, sounds, and video clips, and to make all of those things accessible at the click of a button, or at least a brief keyword search.

This is obviously not what happened. This is never what happens. Every time we invent something meant to advance the state of our species, the first thing we actually do with it is fuck around. We invented writing to keep accounting ledgers, and immediately used it for graffiti. We invented the printing press to spread spiritual enlightenment, and we used it to print pornography and bawdy shit like Chaucer. So obviously when we created a data format designed to collect and maintain the bulk of human knowledge in an easily-referenced format, somebody looked at it and went, "Holy shit -- do you know how many games we could fit on that?"

Up to this, video games had stayed small out of necessity. Cartridge games were constrained by the size of the ROM chips, which were relatively expensive. Atari 2600 games were around 2-4K; the largest SNES cart that I know of was the 1995 release Tales of Phantasia, which clocked in at 48 megabits (= 6 megabytes). A Commodore Datasette stored about 100K per 30 minutes of tape. Computer games could span several disks, but a single 3.5" diskette held at most 2.88Mb, and that format was relatively rare -- most were half that. A CD-ROM could hold 650 megabytes of (almost) whatever you wanted, and it would just be right there, ready for access, sitting in the drive like it lived there.

The bottleneck at this point was the machine reading the disc. Just because your media can hold 650Mb doesn't mean the computer can choke down all 650Mb at once. The transfer rate for a basic CD-ROM is 150Kb/s, which not coincidentally is also the throughput needed for MPEG-1 video; you can stream MPEG-1 video straight from a CD (which is what a VideoCD is), but you can't get anything else off the disc while you're doing that, and there's a limit to what you can stash in RAM. So most of the very early games for CD-ROM used the space for a few short video clips, and eighty bazillion "high-resolution" pictures instead.

youtube

Behold, the most famous of famous CD-ROM games, MYST. Originally released for the Mac in 1993, MYST almost single-handedly drove consumer adoption of the CD-ROM format. To hell with having a reference library in your desk drawer -- people wanted pretty pictures that you could click on until you got a reward, like a rat hammering on the food lever in a behavioral lab! Except instead of something useful like a food pellet, your reward was a new picture to click on. If the game was really pleased with you, you might get a short grainy video clip. The basic setup is one still used for a lot of mobile games today. So if you've ever mysteriously lost eight hours of your life playing June's Journey, you can thank Brøderbund for reminding everyone that point-and-click adventures existed.

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lawncareillinois92245 · 2 years

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Include Visual Passion To Your Property Along With These Landscaping Suggestions

Have you ever really dealt with how many people see the outside of your home? Merely a small fraction of these people will in fact end up setting foot right into it. Thus now, while you are thinking of this, do you presume that you do enough in order that people can receive the true impression of what your house looks like on the inside? Or even, then take the time to review the following post, in order to get some good concepts on what you may do.

Ask an expert to fall liquid aeration and check your soil before you plant. Soil testing will definitely identify any type of disadvantages or contaminants in your soil, as well as you may either deal with these issues or change your plant selections before you start working. This will certainly strengthen the quality of the plants in your yard or even garden.

Consider water needs. If you live in a place that does not get a ton of rain, attempt to use plants that do not need a lot of water. Grass requires even more water than every other kind of plant, thus replace your lawn with wood chips, gravel, or a type of ground cover that is suitable for high drought locations.

When organizing your yard project, consist of several different species of plants and shrubs. You need to have to make sure that your yard is guarded from possible diseases or even insect attacks. If you use identical plants, all of them will perish if this takes place. If you diversify your landscaping choices, your plants possess a better odds of surviving.

Just before acquiring or planting a given plant, ensure that you know its anticipated height and also its own growth rate. You may determine not to bother with that charming little shrub if you find out how quickly it can become an overgrown monster. Fast-growing plants may need more trimming and maintenance than you imagined, so do your homework prior to you purchase.

Before beginning your own project, check out a fast talk to a pro. An expert will certainly give you vital information that will assist your venture run smoothly. The $29.95 or so that you are going to spend on it could be worth every cent by helping you avoid expensive errors.

It is not important to make sure you receive every grass clipping off your lawn after mowing. This aids your lawn acquire great nutrients. The decomposed grass decreases the amount of fertilizer you will certainly need on the lawn.

Regularly make use of the proper tools when doing any kind of landscape project. If you have a stump that needs to be cleared away, rent a backhoe and remove it properly, do not make an effort to accomplish it with a truck. If you possess a bunch of material that needs to be moved, make use of wheelbarrows to reduce strain. Use the right tools for the job and you will definitely spare yourself some grief.

Perhaps, this article has stimulated the landscaper in you, which can draw out the appearance that your property deserves. Let the beauty on the outside of your home, speak to all the strangers that pass by your property each day. You may transform your home to be the envy of anybody who goes by. To find out exactly which lawn care services are the best for your garden, all you have to do is try this out.

#fall liquid aeration

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elodieunderglass · 2 years

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Hello! I live in Australia and have a very much not native lawn, I would like to remove the species living there and replace it with a native grass that will be a better ecological fit for my area. Any idea about how I'd do this without destroying any topsoil or disturbing healthy ground?

thank you so much for asking!!

I have to say it would be preferable to ask an indigenous Australian person how to manage that specific combination of native plants and colonised land, rather than an American living in Europe who is never planning to visit Australia. It isn’t my ground; I’m no authority; you genuinely know it better than I do. If “returning land to native” is important to you, I’d advise you to base this intention in connecting with what is native. (This doesn’t mean “demand answers of a person of indigenous heritage” unless you have a relationship like that already, but it’s more like: I’m sure this knowledge exists somewhere, and even if it doesn’t, then your plantcraft has at least started with a quest.)

In broad brushstrokes, though: good on you for not being like “hee hee hoo hooo, dig up the lawn!” GOD I hate that. “I’m going to rip out and throw away established biomass and soil so I can buy a random selection of new stuff and terraform! grass bad! soil is meaningless to me, I’m very eco actually, this is the eco thing to do” <- that’s what people sound like, it sounds bad.

I immediately heard you out and wanted to hand you a little cake and say: “I am so glad you asked me about no-dig gardening. Thank you.” But first, being conscious of plantcraft as a land-related discipline, I went away to do a little research into No-Dig gardening for Australia, to see if the whole system works there. Because assuming that Australia works the same way as British allotments is part of this whole mess. “Here’s a cute thing they practice in one part of the world, so you should totally plaster it all over YOUR land” is advice for terraforming and colonisation! Probably won’t even work! Nobody learns anything from this!

Anyway it looks like some of the principles of no-dig gardening actually originated in Australia! This is so exciting. I didn’t know this, I had totally bought into Charles Dowding emerging fully-formed as a sort of archetypal English uncle, earnestly covering the damp green universal grass of England with unlimited cardboard, all very green and pleasant. But no-dig works in Australia! What a big world we live in.

I found this link which takes an Australian-specific viewpoint of no-dig cultivation, linking to other sources and Australians who practice this, and discussing how it works on some invasive grasses you guys face. The idea of no-dig gardening is to replace something like a lawn with something else, repairing and augmenting the soil in the process. First, you exclude light from the base with a biodegradable barrier: brown cardboard. You crawl around unfolding IKEA boxes all over the lawn. Then you alternate whatever biomass you have: compost, kitchen scraps, wood chips, newspaper, herbivore shit (Australians apparently favour sheep poo) lawn clippings, finely minced tree trimmings, small amounts of clean sand, idk what you have. The last topping is compost, into which you plant what you want. Over time, the lawn is cycled into nutrients, its ecosystems and microorganisms continue, the root structure remains in the soil, the cardboard breaks down, and the treated area becomes new integrated soil.

Now, this is a recipe for turning a lawn into, ideally, raised-bed vegetable gardening. It doesn’t replicate the balance of acidity or structure of native soil. It makes everything into rich, ph-balanced gardening soil teeming with earthworms, that in its intensity and richness generates enough biomass to feed a human. Not every plant will want what you’re offering here. (Moss, for example, would hate this. Moss wants acidic, quiet, rather poor soil with trees and rocks to be its friends, and actually, if you’re offering, moss would really like to be growing on the trees.) so, plenty of plants that are native to arid or acidic habitats will be deeply confused by this. They just did not evolve to grow in chocolate cake. But it looks like there’s enough Australian no-dig advice out there to pivot the starting point I can offer to the endpoint you want.

Anyway that’s one way to turn unwanted groundcover into soil! Thank you for asking! Good luck 👍

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theopolis · 2 years

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After some surprisingly enthusiastic feedback on the post in which I talked about it, here it is: My fix-it for Harry Osborn's storyline in The Amazing Spider-Man 2

Things start out as they did in the movie. Harry arrives back in NYC. His uncomfortable conversation with Norman and Norman's death ensue. Harry is bitter and conflicted and begrudgingly takes over Oscorp while worrying about his slowly deteriorating health on the side. The parksborn reunion happens.

Here's where I want things to take a turn.

For one, show us that Harry has a soft core. Having Peter back in his life should make his heart melt a little. Establish that he is very much a loving person underneath all the stress and moodiness and that Peter encourages this side of Harry. That way their eventual falling out will also hit harder.

As for the main gist of his arc, TASM Harry's corruption, much like 616 Harry's, is a matter of succumbing to the idea that he owes Norman something.

Remember that data chip Norman gave him at the beginning of the movie? I want it to contain a sort of diary that catalogues Norman's progress with finding a cure for their illness. That way, there's a more personal confrontation with the memory of his father.

The diary entries reveal that the cure was supposed to be based on Oscorp's cross species genetics studies, composing DNA of different animals in a way that would cancel out the various ailments coming with the Osborn's illness. The spider venom was a crucial ingredient in the antidote Norman and his team were working on. Of course, the spiders have been destroyed, which leads Harry to the entire Spider-Man's Blood plan. (Also I always felt there should be something more obvious pointing towards the connection between the Oscorp spiders and Spider-Man. Like build in a scene of Harry finding out that Spidey conveniently showed up a week or so after the lab containing the spiders was broken into and found with a bunch of them running free)

As in the original movie, Peter refuses to give his blood because he's scared it may have dire consequences.

Throughout the story, Harry grows more guilty over his resentment towards Norman, more obsessed with embodying the legacy of his father because that's what he "owes" him. The digital diary entries play a key role in this. In them, Norman will frequently talk about how much work has gone into building Oscorp and how much hope he puts into the creation of the antidote so that his legacy may continue - if not through him, at least through Harry.

Incorporate a recording that would really tip Harry over. A rare moment of vulnerability from Norman, something that Harry's always wanted to hear, just self centered enough that the audience may catch on that there's still something off, but Harry won't. (Would work well in juxtaposition to the Richard Parker video Peter finds too)

Better yet have Harry watch that clip when he explicitly feels abandoned by Peter. Let's say after Harry's conversation with Spidey went the way it did, Harry vented angrily to an anxious out of his mind Pete and pressured him to talk Spider-Man into helping him. Following that, Peter has been avoiding Harry for weeks because he doesn't know what to tell him or how to resolve the situation

But while Harry fears Peter's fading out of his life again, someone else has been fading in. In this version I want Harry and Gwen to meet way earlier in the movie and start developing a friendship that continues to grow throughout the film. They spend a lot of time together at Oscorp. They bond over shittalking Peter. They paint each others nails. This will have a huge impact on Gwen's eventual death.

As the story goes, Menken eventually frames Harry for covering up Max's accident, leading to him being expelled from Oscorp. However, in this version there's an addition to the scene just before the security storms the room, wherein Menken reveals to Harry that he and the other Oscorp chairmen have been gradually poisoning him, causing Harry's condition to worsen rapidly. (This would require some foreshadowing ofc)

In his expendable secondary villain glory, Menken gleefully estimates Harry may be mere hours from death. The stakes are heightened, but at the same time there's the looming awareness that at this point, Harry doesn't want to survive for himself - he wants to survive for Norman.

Harry breaks out Max and they infiltrate Oscorp together. Harry eventually makes it into the secret lab but instead of containing the spider venom, it contains the unfinished formula. And yes, it is green. Seeing it as his absolute last chance, Harry takes the risk and injects himself with the incomplete formula, causing him to undergo a painful transformation and become the mutated Green Goblin. (Who btw should look more monstrous. I'm thinking ITSV but like, brought down to Venom height)

Goblin Harry is terrified and of course blames his state on the missing ingredient. He flies off - with scales and claws and bat-like wings - to hunt down Spider-Man, finds out it's Peter, big dramatic fight with some really chilling dialog ensues. They start duking it out and Gwen, terrified to see two people she deeply cares for fight to a potentially lethal end, tries to interfere but ends up falling to her death due to all the back and forth.

Neither of them technically killed her, yet both of them did in a way.

Harry blames Peter because that's what he's determined to do, and Peter blames himself because, well, he's Peter. Gwen's death actively impacts the dynamic between Peter and Harry (which is still intact as Harry is far more redeemable and Peter mainly wants to help him) and therefore the story from here on out.

#harry osborn #tasm2 #the amazing spider man 2 #I'm putting it in the tag bc it's not meant to be hateful #I wrote this out of passion for the franchise and out of a wish to improve on certain parts of it #especially bc I always saw a lot of potential in tasm Harry #theopolispost

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snini-9 · 4 years

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Abnormal Behaviour

All information and images can be found on this site. *as by request, some of the videos here were originally from PETA* As seen with other highly intelligent animals such as apes and elephants, cetaceans often exhibit stereotypical or abnormal behaviour. Repetitive in nature, this behaviour has no obvious goal or function and is thought to be a result of boredom, distress, and frustration related to an unnatural environment. As a cetacean’s natural repertoire of behaviours cannot be satisfied in a barren concrete tank, they may try to reduce the resulting tension by developing destructive behaviours such as self-stranding for prolonged periods of time, biting on metal gates/chewing at the environment, vomiting and self-mutilation, or non-beneficial behaviours such as comatose-like states/lethargy, head bobbing and pacing/circling.

Self-stranding is a particularly notable stereotypical behaviour due to its potential to become life-threatening. In captivity, cetaceans are taught to beach themselves on concrete slide outs to present themselves to an audience, or to participate in husbandry behaviours such as having their weight taken. This taught behaviour quickly becomes an abnormal habit as cetaceans have been seen to repetitively slide out and lie motionlessly on concrete surfaces for up to 30 minutes. Killer whales, the largest species of cetacean in captivity, can weigh up to 22,000 pounds. Once beached, the orca’s weight begins to slowly crush its internal organs and damage its muscles, causing stores of myoglobin to be released. Travelling in the bloodstream, the protein reaches the kidneys where it is highly toxic. After a prolonged period of time, the damage to their kidneys is irreversible. Re-entry into the water allows their blood to circulate more freely, and this carries even more myoglobin to the kidneys leading to severe kidney damage.

Photographer Reginald Andreas captured the moment a transient orca stranded whilst hunting elephant seal pups on Sea Lion Island, the Falkland Islands. After vomiting repeatedly, the male died.

Additionally, on top of this risk, beached cetaceans can also perish from dehydration and heat exhaustion. Their thick layer of blubber and the lack of water causes cetaceans to overheat, become dehydrated and dry out. In February 2016, Morgan, a female orca at Loro Parque, intentionally beached herself on a slide out for around 10 minutes.

Morgan beaching herself on a concrete slide-out at Loro Parque. The skin on her melon began to dry out leading to her trainer, Rafa Sanchez, signalling her to return to the water.

Within this time, the skin around Morgan’s melon dried out in 19°C heat. Following this incident, Kelly Flaherty Clark, SeaWorld Orlando’s director of animal training, admitted she’s seen orcas “slide out for 5 minutes, 10 minutes, 15 minutes, even 30 minutes, on their own.” If Morgan’s skin can dry out in 10 minutes in 19°C heat, it’s unimaginable how damaging this abnormal behaviour can be if performed for 30 minutes at SeaWorld Orlando, Florida, which regularly sees temperatures of up to 28°C.

In the wild, only one small population of Patagonian transients in Argentina intentionally strand themselves for hunting purposes. Consisting of around 22 individuals, the whole population was taught how to perform the unique hunting technique by two male orcas named Mel and Bernardo. This cultural behaviour is passed down from generation to generation of Patagonian mammal-eating orcas and, as no captive orcas originate from this population, it’s completely unnatural for the behaviour to be replicated in captivity. Kshamenk, a bull orca at Mundo Marino, is indeed an Argentinian transient but it is unclear whether he is directly related to the stranding orca pod.

Despite not originating from Patagonian transients, orcas at Kamogawa SeaWorld seem to be avid participants in this behaviour, as do various other species of cetacean trapped in Japan’s often horribly inadequate tanks.

https://youtu.be/hJVybEhJGV4

https://youtu.be/CW6-8t_RSyM

Other damaging abnormal behaviours include wearing the teeth by chewing at the environment and regurgitating food. It’s common for under-stimulated and bored orcas to “chew” metal bars and mouth concrete pool corners, like the main stages and concrete slide outs, consequently causing their teeth to become worn, chipped and broken.

Morgan chewing on concrete.

Following feeding sessions, captive orcas have been seen to regurgitate their food and play with it. Although this may provide the orca with some stimulation, obsessive regurgitation can lead to health problems as the corrosiveness of stomach acid can damage the lining of the oesophagus as well as already worn teeth. According to John Hargrove, a former senior trainer, all of the whales at SeaWorld Orlando, SeaWorld San Antonio and Marineland Antibes frequently regurgitated their food, to the point that it became a notable problem. Trainers at Marineland Antibes attempted to discourage the behaviour by mixing spiny mackerel (a fish with painful spikes) into their food to make regurgitation painful, and therefore less appealing. However, unwilling to give up their harmful habit, the orcas figured out how much spiny mackerel was in their food, when they ingested it, and when it was less painful to regurgitate it.

https://youtu.be/Pnj4rvV4htQ

Perhaps the most worrying of all abnormal behaviours witnessed in captivity is self-mutilation. There are various ways a cetacean can harm itself in a captive environment but the most commonly observed behaviour is for a cetacean to ram its head or body into the walls or gates of its tank. A particularly disturbing example of self-mutilative behaviour in captive orcas would be the behaviour of Hugo, a male Southern Resident killer whale who was captured from the wild in February 1968 and housed at Miami Seaquarium. Prior to being moved to “The Whale Bowl” (the tank that currently houses Lolita), Hugo was housed in “The Celebrity Pool” which is so small that it now houses manatees.

Hugo housed in the “The Celebrity Bowl” in the late 1960 – early 1970s.

“The Celebrity Bowl” now housing manatees.

During his stay in this pathetic pool, Hugo developed self-harming behaviour that consisted of him slamming his body into the tank walls. This resulted in a nasty injury on October 1st, 1970 when he slammed his head into the circular ‘acrylic bubble’ feature of his tank and punctured a five-inch hole into it.

The acrylic window Hugo smashed his head into

The acrylic sliced off approximately two-inches of his rostrum. Hugo had to undergo a 45-minute operation without a local anaesthetic for his severed flesh to be stitched back onto his rostrum. Despite his veterinarian’s best efforts, the sewn-on tissue turned completely white, died and fell off completely after seven days, although Hugo did make a full recovery within just four months.

Newspaper clipping of Hugo’s injury.

Hugo’s self-harming behaviour continued when he was placed in The Whale Bowl with Lolita. On March 4th, 1980, his behaviour proved to be fatal as he slammed his head into a tank wall and suffered a brain aneurysm resulting in his death. He was just 15 years old.

15-year-old Hugo being removed from his tank shortly after his death in 1980.

However, self-harming behaviour at Miami Seaquarium did not end with the death of Hugo. As recently as September 2015, multiple bottlenose dolphins who take part in the oceanarium’s “Top Deck Dolphin Show” were seen to repeatedly hit their heads on the bottom of their tank floor. Watch the video below.

https://youtu.be/QpANcUismqU

Just like Hugo, Kanduke, a Bigg’s transient housed at SeaWorld Orlando, was also known to participate in self-mutilative behaviour. According to Carol Ray, a former SeaWorld trainer, Kanduke would ram himself as hard as he possibly could into the cement walls, metal gates, and glass panels in the show pool on a daily basis. He bloodied his chin, teeth, and rostrum so badly on some occasions that he was not allowed to participate in shows because management said he looked too bad for the public to see. More recently, Skyla, a female orca at Loro Parque, displayed similar behaviour when she breached onto concrete, effectively slamming her body onto the stage, prior to a show.

Skyla, a female orca at Loro Parque, slamming her body onto a concrete surface.

Morgan, another female orca at the same facility, repeatedly rammed the gate of the medical pool she was held in after she was separated from her tank mate, Tekoa.

https://youtu.be/JIqmG_PE7kQ

Some captive cetaceans take it a step further and leap out of their tanks, hitting the hard concrete floor below. Kotar, a deceased male orca who resided at SeaWorld San Antonio, reportedly jumped out of his tank twice whilst at the facility, requiring staff to clear and flood the entire stadium so that they could float Kotar back into the pool. In 2002, Hudson, another deceased orca, jumped out of his tank at Marineland Canada during a feeding session. Reportedly unharmed, Hudson was placed on a stretcher and lifted by crane back into the pool. Eight years later in 2010, Kuru, a female false killer whale, jumped out of her tank during a show at Okinawa Churaumi Aquarium. She sustained minor scratches and bruises from the incident.

https://youtu.be/wxzTyQillMQ

As recently as 2015, a dolphin jumped out of its tank at Gulf World, landing directly on its dorsal fin. According to former Gulf World trainer, Ashley Guidry, the marine park’s dolphins would jump out of their tanks so frequently that a metal rail was added to the top of the show tanks to try to discourage the dolphin’s dangerous behaviour. It wasn’t uncommon for trainers to come into the park in the morning to find a beached dolphin lying on the concrete walkway beside their tank.

Other abnormal behaviours, such as comatose-like states and logging, are not necessarily harmful when performed, but do carry risks of their own – risks which have been held responsible for contributing to the deaths of two of SeaWorld’s orcas. In captivity, it’s extremely common to see lethargic cetaceans floating motionlessly at the surface, known as logging, or lying perfectly still at the bottom of the pool.

https://youtu.be/4dHLzWuVvl0

https://youtu.be/A2qhfcTYP8E

https://youtu.be/vkpOzTETYY0

https://youtu.be/RWq7ZxsadAM

These lethargic behaviours are explained to guests who query it as how dolphins rest. However, although this may be the captivity-adapted version, wild dolphins do not stop moving to sleep. As dolphins must be conscious to breathe, they use unihemispheric sleep, in which they shut down one hemisphere of their brain at a time, to rest whilst remaining alert and able to breathe. Whilst in this state, dolphins remain in close proximity to their pod members, slowly moving forward.

https://youtu.be/W8UyuSijYsE

According to Dr. Naomi Rose, a leading marine mammal scientist, it’s “extremely rare” for wild orcas to remain still for a minute or two, unlike captive orcas who log for hours upon hours at a time. Dr. Rose believes this highly abnormal behaviour is the result of “chronic stress, boredom and inhibition of natural behaviours that occurs as a result of inadequate living conditions” at marine parks and aquariums alike. As for captive orca deaths related to this behaviour, Kanduke, a 19-year-old male, died in 1990 with the St. Louis Encephalitis Virus (SLEV) implicated in his death, followed by Taku, a 14-year-old orca, who succumbed to the West Nile Virus (WNV) in 2007. Mosquitoes, who swarm the orca’s exposed dorsal fins and backs when they’re logging, were held responsible for transmitting the viruses.

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there-must-be-a-lock · 3 years

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Flirtation and Fistfights

Supernatural/Criminal Minds

Word Count: ~2940

Warnings: Drinking, pot smokin’, and (in case you couldn’t guess from the title) a fistfight. Somebody is giving a homeless woman a hard time, Spencer and Dean do not appreciate it.

A/N: This is part of the Rockstar AU! It’s also for my Rockstar AU square on my Criminal Minds Trope Bingo card. Convenient, right?

Lemming line inspired by an Ao3 tag. Continued cheerleading for this series provided by @stunudo, who is wonderful.

Spot the “It Takes A Village” reference!

The post-show adrenaline rush is made even sweeter by the fact that there’s a hot tub and a couple easy days in Dean’s near future. The first L.A. show is in the bag. They have another tomorrow — same venue means minimal gear-schlepping and setup, thank fuck — followed by a full day off.

Neither band has played L.A. in a while, and Dean’s seen a few familiar faces milling around already. It’s nice, aside from the small talk, but he’s used to that; the way he travels, he rarely has time to stay in one place and get to know people beyond the basics. He’s perfected the spiel: “tour’s been great, we’re going into the studio when it’s over, how’s your kid/spouse/dog?” etc. There are a bunch of those conversations happening around him, but people are starting to trickle out slowly, friends and acquaintances heading home or closing out.

While they’re here, they’re staying at Casa de Pop Star, and Dean can’t lie, he’s looking forward to some poolside naps, movies on a decent-sized screen, and various other creature comforts.

He’s getting another drink first, though. He leans up against the venue bar and looks around.

At the end of the bar, Spencer is talking to a blonde, and it takes Dean a second to place her: Lila Archer, movie star and all-around hottie. Dean gapes at them for a second. He can’t see Spencer’s face, but she’s clearly flirting, standing close and putting a hand on his arm. Dean had no idea the kid had game like that. Granted, he and Spencer aren’t exactly close, but.

Dean hasn’t figured him out yet. Dean is usually good at figuring out what makes people tick, what they’re hiding behind their masks, but he can’t make heads or tails of whatever the fuck happens in Spencer’s head. He has this way of looking at Dean as if he’s an alien species, or something, all bemused and vaguely perturbed like he can’t make sense of the words that just came out of Dean’s mouth.

Then again, Spencer’s high more often than not, and they don’t exactly have a lot in common, and he’s a goddamn space cadet even when he’s sober, so... maybe he just really doesn’t know what Dean’s talking about half the time.

He’s not like that with everybody, is the thing; Sam and Spencer got along immediately. They have this whole quirky dork thing going on where they talk in half-sentences that don’t make sense to anybody else.

Not that Dean’s jealous or anything. Whatever.

Dean’s drink arrives and he’s distracted for a moment, but when he looks again, Spencer’s shaking his head. Lila’s face falls. A second later, he’s giving her an awkward little wave, and she heads for the door.

Yeah, Dean’s not usually one for gossip, but he really wants to know what the fuck just happened. Maybe Spencer’s one of those geeks who’s just completely fuckin’ oblivious when chicks are hitting on them? Dean can set him straight. It’ll be a bonding exercise.

He weaves through the crowd to where Spencer is downing the last of his drink.

“Tell me you did not just shoot down Lila Archer.”

Spencer makes a face. “I could tell you that, but I’d be lying.”

“Dude, what the hell?” Dean laughs. “Did she just march up and introduce herself? I didn’t know she was coming to the show.”

“I met her at a party a while ago,” Spencer tells him. He’s looking up at the ceiling pensively, avoiding eye contact as he shreds a napkin. “In New York, when she was still in school. I, um. She’d been talking to this skeevy guy, and I saw him slip something in her drink, so.”

“What did you do?”

“Grabbed it and threw it in his face,” Spencer admits sheepishly. “And then I got punched, and she offered to, um, take me home and thank me, but I was kinda bleeding a lot. She gave me her number instead.”

“That’s… actually pretty badass,” Dean comments. Spencer gives him half a smile. “So you guys kept in touch?”

“She moved to L.A. not long after that. We’ve hung out a couple times, when I’ve been in town, but… I don’t think we’re interested in the same thing.”

Dean almost smacks himself on the forehead. “I didn’t realize you were into dick, sorry.”

“Oh, I’m not.”

There’s a pause. Spencer doesn’t seem mad; his mouth is quirked in something resembling a smile, like he’s laughing at Dean for not asking the right questions.

Is Spencer just like that, or is he not offering any more information because he wants this conversation to be over?

Whatever. Dean’s curious.

“So, you’re into chicks but not Lila friggin’ Archer? Are you telling me she’s not your type?

“It’s not that,” Spencer says, smirking.

Dean blinks a couple times. Emily told him the other day that everybody in the band except Hotch was single, so… he’s coming up blank.

“You gotta give me a hint or something.”

“I’m not into sex,” Spencer says, rolling his eyes.

“Oh.” Dean hesitates, taking a drink to hide his surprise. “Huh. Is that… huh. Are you — are you out, or whatever?”

“I’m not not out.” Spencer shrugs. “Most people just assume, one way or the other, and I don’t bother to correct them. I just… don’t really care what people think about me, so if they don’t ask, I don’t bother. I’m not hiding anything, though.”

“Huh,” Dean repeats. He has no idea what to say.

“If I do tell them, most people argue with me anyway,” Spencer says wryly. “Tell me I’ll change my mind when I meet the right person, or whatever. I tell them they’re probably right and change the subject.”

Dean huffs out a laugh. “That doesn’t piss you off?”

“Sorta, but…” Spencer grimaces, fidgeting for a second. “I don’t like confrontation, or whatever. It’s not important. I’d rather just… not talk about myself.”

“Sorry for… y’know.”

“No biggie.”

Dean still feels awkward, but Spencer doesn’t seem bothered. He just sits there, tapping out a rhythm on the bar top, smiling to himself.

Dean doesn’t do well with silences.

It occurs to him that he has a peace offering: “Wanna come outside and smoke a joint with me? Could use some fresh air.”

“Hell yes I do,” Spencer says, brightening immediately.

They make their way backstage and then through the labyrinthine venue hallways until they come out at the back lot, where the buses are idling. Hotch is on his phone across the lot, and a bouncer near the fence is saying something into a walkie-talkie, but for the most part, it’s quiet.

Dean lights the joint and offers Spencer the first hit, leaning back against the brick wall.

“Y’know, nobody’s ever actually asked me about my sexuality,” Dean tells him, and he’s not in the habit of volunteering information like that, but it seems to get Spencer’s attention.

“Really?”

“I didn’t ever think about it, until… recently. But it’s true. A fuckload of interviews, over the years, and like you said, everybody just assumes.”

“Because you don’t contradict people’s ideas of what a man should look like, or talk like, or dress like,” Spencer says bluntly. “As long as you fit within a certain box…” He shrugs, blowing smoke up at the sky.

“Yeah, my dad was big on that box,” Dean says ruefully. “Wouldn’t he be proud?”

“Bet it won’t take long for them to start asking. Not if you keep wearing nail polish.”

Dean takes the joint and frowns at his hands. He hadn’t even thought about that.

“Really? That’s all it takes?” he asks.

Spencer just snorts. Dean’s stomach does a nervous flip-flop.

He’s got an interview with Spin scheduled for next week, and he doubts anybody will comment right away, but eventually... eventually there will be questions. What will he say, if they ask?

He’s still lost in thought, looking down at his free hand, as he exhales and passes to Spencer. With his eyes on the chipped green polish, it takes him a second to realize that Spencer hasn’t grabbed the joint.

Dean looks up. Spencer is staring intently at something off to their side, and Dean follows his gaze over to the chain link fence and roll-away gate that separates them from the road. There’s a homeless woman there, hands over her ears, pacing back and forth. The security guy is saying something to her, his voice raised, as he starts to pull the gate open.

Spencer moves abruptly, striding away from Dean without a word, and Dean hesitates for a second before pinching out the joint and following him.

As he gets closer, Dean can make out what the bouncer is saying, in a loud, condescending voice like he’s talking to a toddler: “Move. Away. From. The. Gate. Jesus Christ, can you fuckin’ hear me?”

The woman is muttering to herself agitatedly, and she flinches away from the guy’s voice, but she doesn’t look up from her feet as she paces.

“What are you doing?” Spencer snaps at the guard. The edge in his tone makes Dean hurry to catch up.

“She won’t get outta the way,” he says, rolling his eyes. He turns to the woman again and shouts, “Hell-looooo, anybody home?”

“Have you tried speaking to her like she’s a goddamn human being?” Spencer says, low and clipped.

“Whoa, hey,” Dean says uneasily. Not that he doesn’t want to head-butt this asshole, but Spencer’s a quarter of the guy’s mass, at best.

“You wanna give it a try?” the guy scoffs. “Trust me, she’s not getting the picture. I’m gonna call the cops.” He directs the last words at the woman, who’s still pacing, more and more agitated: “Crazy bitch.”

“You should apologize now,” Spencer says, sharp and quiet and ice-cold. Dean puts a hand on Spencer’s shoulder, and Spencer shoves it away without looking at him.

The bouncer has the nerve to laugh. “Calm the fuck down, buddy.”

“This is calm, and I’m not your fucking buddy,” Spencer snaps, taking another step closer.

“Dude,” Dean interrupts. “Spencer, c’mon.”

Spencer’s frozen for a moment, shaking with anger, but after a second, he steps back reluctantly. He reminds Dean of a hissing cat with its back arched and its claws exposed.

“There you go, listen to your boyfriend,” the bouncer laughs.

Dean considers him for a half-second, works up some saliva, and spits in his face.

Everything moves quick and blurry after that; the guy shoves Dean back, cursing, and there’s a shout in the distance as he winds up. Before Dean can duck out of the way of the guy’s fist, Spencer steps in front of him — only to go flying, because he’s a fucking twig and should really know better. Dean sees red. He punches back.

Then Hotch has the guy’s arms pinned behind his back, hauling him away, and Sam is grabbing Dean’s wrist before he can take another swing. Spencer grunts something incoherent from the ground. At least he’s conscious.

“Motherfucker,” Dean snaps. “I’m fine, Sam, get off me.” He shakes out his smarting hand and glares daggers at the bouncer’s retreating back as Hotch and Rossi manhandle him into the building. Spencer makes a pained noise; he’s cupping his hands over his nose, and there’s blood dripping between his fingers.

“Dean?” Cas is jogging over, Morgan behind him. He puts a hand on Dean’s arm, looking him up and down anxiously. “What happened?”

“Don’t worry about me,” Dean says gruffly, and turns to Spencer. “You okay, kid?”

“‘M fide,” Spencer mumbles. “Is she still…”

Dean glances over. The woman is sitting with her back to the fence, curled up with her arms around her knees.

“Fuck,” Dean mutters. “What should I —”

“I got it,” Cas tells him, and slips through the gate, approaching the woman with an easy, open smile.

Cas was homeless for a while. Dean hates hearing him talk about it — not because it makes Cas sad, but exactly the opposite; he’s so matter-of-fact about the whole thing that it makes Dean sad. He tells stories, sometimes, and he’s completely fuckin’ blasé even when he’s talking about things that make Dean ache to think about.

Dean hovers for a second. Sam is crouching next to Spencer, holding his balled-up flannel to Spencer’s nose, and Dean feels useless. There’s gotta be something he can do to help.

Then he remembers something Cas said, once, and he turns his back on the scene and jogs off to the bus.

He makes a beeline for the bunk under his, which is designated for storage. He’s got an almost-new backpack he’s been using as an overnighter, when he doesn’t want to lug his whole suitcase into a hotel; he dumps it out unceremoniously.

He grabs a blanket first, the soft fleece one, rolling it up tight to stick it in the backpack. Then there’s a big hoodie, one Dean borrowed from their merch table the other day. He has a whole collection of tiny sealed soaps and shampoos from various hotels, and he runs to the kitchen to put them in a zip-lock bag. In the bathroom, he grabs a pack of wet wipes, the packaged spare toothbrush that Charlie keeps for “emergencies” — aka when she inevitably leaves hers at a hotel — and about half of their first aid kit. Then he ransacks the kitchen: several packs of ramen, a box of pop-tarts, couple bottles of water… he pauses, considering Sam’s nasty-ass granola bars, before tossing them in too. Sam can get more. He fishes the cash out of his wallet, shoves it in a zip-lock, and then closes the whole mess up.

Then for a second he just freezes, looking down at the backpack, wondering if he’s being presumptuous or some shit.

Dean’s always been suspicious of so-called “Good Samaritans.” Everything has strings attached. If it were him, he wouldn’t accept unsolicited help, but he’s been told that’s maybe a psychological flaw, not a virtue.

Cas told him once about a woman named Hannah (he called her an angel) who gave him a backpack of supplies when he first ended up on the street. Said she probably saved his life. It’s one of those stories Dean doesn’t like to think about, but… he remembers.

When he hustles back to the fence, Spencer is on his feet, Sam’s bloody flannel clutched to his face as he talks to Rossi and Morgan.

Cas is still with the woman, who is on her feet, now, looking rattled but much calmer than she did before. Cas is talking to her in that direct, no-bullshit way he has; it’d be off-putting, from anybody else, but Cas is so earnest that it’s comforting instead.

The woman looks wary, when she sees Dean approaching, so he hangs back until Cas comes to him.

“I grabbed some stuff,” he says anxiously. “I didn’t know… is that weird? It’s just, like, shampoo and a blanket and — sorry. I didn’t know what to do.”

Cas just stares at him for a second, his expression completely unreadable. Dean’s stomach sinks.

“You remembered,” Cas says hoarsely, just as Dean opens his mouth to apologize.

The back of Dean’s neck feels hot. “Yeah?”

Cas gives him a quick, fierce, affectionate smile. He reaches out and squeezes Dean’s arm once before taking the bag.

“There’s a shelter a couple blocks away. I’m going to walk her there. I’ll be back shortly.”

He watches Cas go, and then he turns to see Spencer staring at them. Dean clears his throat uncomfortably.

“Thanks, Schroeder,” he says.

Spencer gives him that look again, like he has no idea what Dean is talking about. Maybe he’s concussed. He lowers the flannel, revealing a mess of dried blood and the beginnings of an impressive shiner.

“Y’had my back,” he says thickly. Even through his rapidly-swelling nose, it sounds a lot like “Duh.”

“The venue manager wants to talk to you,” Rossi announces. “Hotch saw enough to make it clear that the guy threw the first punch, so he’s most definitely getting fired, but just in case, they want it in your words.”

“Fan-friggin-tastic,” Dean grouches. “Well, let’s get it over with. There’s a fuckin’ hot tub waiting for us, I’m ready to get the hell out of here.”

“You sure you’re alright?” Rossi asks Spencer. “I swear, kid, you have the self-preservation instincts of a damn lemming.”

“‘M’fide,” Spencer repeats, which is close enough to “fine,” apparently, that Rossi doesn’t push the issue.

“You gotta be more careful with that pretty face of yours,” Morgan says, and Spencer flips him off.

As he falls into step with Dean, heading back to the venue, Spencer mumbles, “Why d’I feel like I’b being sent t’the Princibal?”

Dean chuckles, trying to imagine what a tiny (tinier) Spencer would’ve gotten in trouble for.

“Hey, you mind tellin’ me why you just went feral on a guy who was the size of a fuckin’ hippo?” he asks.

“Don’t like... bullies,” Spencer replies, clearly making an effort to enunciate.

“Weren’t you just telling me how you try to avoid confrontation?”

“S’different.” Spencer shrugs. “Pisses me off. Don’t really care what happens to me, but —”

“That’s healthy,” Dean needles.

Spencer’s not looking at him, but his mouth twitches like he’s trying not to grin. “Takes one to know one.”

Dean stops in his tracks and sputters for a second, turning a snort of laughter into a huff like he’s offended. Then he shakes his head and they keep walking.

“Thanks,” Dean says again. “That was really fucking stupid, but thanks.”

“You would’ve done the same for me,” Spencer says, like it’s a given.

Dean smiles, because he’s right. Maybe he has more in common with Spencer than he thought.

#cmbingo21 #criminal minds #criminal minds fic #spencer reid #dean winchester

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caravagest · 3 years

Photo

Customer Service

5K words - Short story - Sci-fi

Warnings: mentions of homophobia, transphobia and abortions

“I never much liked those Areedans, myself”, Morrey said, not for the first time since Vidan had known him, and probably not for the last.

Vidan, for one, thought Morrey ought to have been used to them by now. He was the oldest worker at the station, and had been there the longest – going on sixteen Vanetan years in service, and, probably, looking down the barrel of another couple decades there. At Morrey’s ripe age of forty-seven, career re-orientation wasn’t exactly an easy prospect. Eventually, Morrey would grow old at the same post he had always held, behind the same stained counter, under the same sickly neon lights. Around seventy, if he had enough money put away, he’d retire, and head back home to Vaneta to die planet-side. Vidan could see it happening, could almost picture Morrey’s face when the still slight wrinkles at the corners of his eyes grew into deep crevices and the skin of his cheeks gave way to gravity and dropped into waxy fat under his jaw.

For now, though, Morrey was still full of just enough youth and energy to brew coffee, hold a broom, wipe down tables, and sneer at aliens, who made up perhaps half of the clientele of the station, maybe even more. Vidan himself regarded them with curiosity, if a safe amount of distrust, but not with the contempt Morrey held them in. Perhaps it had come with his time at the station, or perhaps he’d always been that way. His wasn’t an uncommon stance on Vaneta. Non-reproducibles weren’t popular with the Church, and as such, they weren’t popular with the people. It was bad for tourism, but Vanetans didn’t care for tourism so much as they did for conquest.

“I heard they can listen to your thoughts”, Vidan mumbled, and tried not to stare too hard at the four-armed man browsing the dry snacks on the other side of the station. “So maybe you shouldn’t think that too loud.”

“I heard they see them”, Morrey said, in a quiet tone, but not so quiet that he made any great effort to spare the customer the conversation, should he give it keen attention. “He’s not looking this way, is he?”

“They don’t see or hear thoughts”, Shelvore piped up from his chair. He was on break, but he never did like to take them outside like Morrey, who left the station every chance he was given to smoke a stick and drink a half of coffee away from the clientele. Shelvore liked to stay seated inside and read his books. He was never much for conversation, except for when it allowed him to show off where he knew more than his coworkers. Even though he was a young man, Shelvore dressed like someone twice his age, read printed books far after it had went from retro to ridiculous, and always liked to show off his knowledge, especially when no one had prompted it. Aliens were a strong suit of his; he was from Santina, where the Church had no hold and inter-species exchange was common.

“It’s a sense we humans don’t have. They perceive thoughts in their environment, it’s neither seeing nor hearing. Trying to picture it is like a man born blind trying to imagine sight.”

Shelvore had a strong Santinan accent, with his vees sharp and distinct from his bees and a clipped quality to his thees. It made him sound a bit snobbish, Vidan thought.

“Well, can this one”, Morrey asked, nodding towards the purple-skinned man, “hear what I’m thinking right now?”

“He can’t hear--”, Shelvore started, but apparently decided it was pointless. “I don’t know”, he admitted. “I don’t know if he needs to look your way, or how close he needs to be. It’s hard to understand how their telepathy works.”

Morrey scoffed, and turned his back to Shelvore, digging into his pocket for a candy bar. Vidan, though, kept his eyes on the tall alien. The man had been staring at the same selection of snacks for quite a few minutes now. It made him uneasy. There were only so many types of fried eggs and legume chips. Vidan wondered if the Areedan was, in fact, only pretending to look at the snacks – if he truly was consulting their thoughts, how ever he in fact did it. He tried not to think of anything offensive. Of course, trying not to think of it only brought it up, and he immediately started to wonder if it was true they expelled excrement from their mouths and had no anal cavity. He figured Shelvore would know, but he also figured he wouldn’t much like to casually ask him if Areedans really shat out of their mouths.

Vidan looked around helplessly for a distraction, and automatically gazed down at his wrist, to his data chip. A press of his thumb against it and his retina implant flared up, a blue sheen overlaying his vision. He wasn’t supposed to look at the networks during work, but, well, it was a slow day. He thumbed the data chip to scroll through news articles he couldn’t bring himself to care about. Through the luminescent letters and images, he could still see the Areedan.

The alien had stopped browsing the dry snacks, finally, and had selected a small bag of overpriced vinegar toad eggs – Fried In Adiga Oil, claimed the packaging, though it was really just regular sunflower oil with less than two percent adiga. Now the Areedan was looking at the drink selection, which was otherwise more diverse than the dry snacks. Considering how long his first choice had taken him, he might still be here a while.

Vidan continued to fail to read an article about the Center Council’s new bill on interplanetary animal transport, and, finally thumbed his data chip off. The blue screen on his vision disappeared, with the usual worrying squeak that let him know his ear implant needed changing. He leaned forward, put his forearms down on the counter, and watched the alien.

The Areedan had long, black hair – all of them he had seen did – and two of his arms were crossed behind his back elegantly. Vidan thought, not for the first time, that there was something graceful, something very pretty about Areedans, even the male ones. It was a guilty thought. He imagined it was brought on by the novelty. Vidan had only worked at the station for a month and he hadn’t gotten used to the aliens yet.

Finally, the customer leaned down to grab a soft drink and turned to the counter, and Vidan averted his gaze quickly, as if to prevent him from reading, or seeing, or hearing, or whatever it was they did with thoughts. It was probably useless.

If the Areedan had witnessed anything he’d been thinking about – about how pretty he was, or maybe about whether he defecated from the same hole he ate from – he made no show of it. Vidan figured telepaths probably didn’t get offended that easily; it would take up too much of their time.

Since Morrey was still unhelpfully nibbling on his candy bar (probably on purpose, the bastard), Vidan slid behind the register and put on his best customer service smile, focusing on the thought be polite to the customer, be polite to the customer, be polite to the customer, in hopes it would prevent the alien from seeing any of his less flattering ones.

“Find everything okay?”, he asked. Be polite to the customer, be polite to the customer.

“Yes thank you”, said the alien, very flatly, with no particular intonation to his voice, and handed Vidan his items.

Vidan scanned them quickly – be polite to the customer, be polite to the customer – and returned his eyes to the massive, empty scleras watching him. Maybe watching him. It was hard to tell with the lack of pupils but the general inclination of the alien’s head led him to believe he was being looked at. At least, the Areedan smiled back. Vidan liked it better when there was some overlap in facial expression. Some aliens he’d seen he couldn’t decipher the body language of at all.

“Very nice station”, said the alien, again in this toneless voice. “You are of very good service.”

It occurred to Vidan that the alien probably didn’t get to use much Common Tongue, and wanted to exercise it. Be polite to the customer, be polite to the customer, be polite to the customer.

“We try our best”, Vidan agreed and kept the fake smile stretched tightly on his face.

“You do”, said the Areedan, still smiling, and shot Morrey a look. Morrey stared back, unabashed.

Be polite to the customer, Vidan continued to repeat desperately, trying very, very hard not to picture what said customer’s bodily waste functions looked like.

For a beat there was silence as Vidan realized he was definitely, absolutely picturing it.

“It is more liquid like when your kind vomit water”, the alien said. He never did stop smiling.

Vidan tried to figure out how to apologize, but already the man had grabbed his snack and his drink and was headed out, giving him a polite nod as he walked out.

Morrey scoffed as they both watched him walk back to his transport.

“What was that?” He scoffed again, louder. “Did you see how he glared at me? What, he’s not satisfied with my service? Well, I don’t – I tell you, those nonreps – Well, they don’t have manners like we do.”

“Areedans are always honest”, Shelvore spoke up again, not looking up from his book. “There’s no point lying when you can just read each other’s thoughts, right?” And, to Vidan: “Were you wondering about how he shits?”

Vidan didn’t look at Shelvore. His cheeks, which had started to go hot when the Areedan spoke to him, were burning now.

“They shit out their mouths, don’t they?”, Morrey asked, much like Vidan had himself, in the relative privacy of his mind.

“Like he said, it’s more of a regurgitation.”

“D’you think I offended him thinking about it?”, Vidan asked.

“Probably not. They do it out of their faces, so they don’t really think it’s dirty.”

“I pick my nose out my face and people think it’s gross”, Morrey went, grabbing a sponge and starting on some spare dishes. They usually waited until more piled up before washing them, but it had been an idle day. There was nothing else to do.

“Like I said,” finished Shelvore, “they don’t really keep secrets. It’s not a big deal to them.”

With that, he turned his eyes back down to his book. His break would end in a dozen minutes, and he didn’t seem to want to spend any more of it talking to his coworkers.

Vidan kept thinking about the Areedan even after his transport had taken off and disappeared from the station’s artificial atmosphere. He was only the second one of the species he’d ever seen in real life. It seemed they didn’t come off Areeda very often, especially not to venture into mid-sentient territory, like Vaneta. Shelvore had told him once, on one of those occasions he felt like sharing his wisdom unprompted, that to high-sentients like the Areedans, communicating with humans and other mid-sentients was like a grown adult talking to a young teenager. They might get along well enough, and there was definitely enough comparison in their experiences that they could form some bonds or friendships, but eventually there was too much of a discrepancy in maturity, in experience. High-sentients preferred to remain within their own circles.

“They don’t see us like we see low-sents”, Shelvore had explained. “It’s not like when you see a dog, or a baby that can’t speak yet. You can definitely communicate pretty well with them. But it’s a bit like if you’re talking to a kid who only knows about kid stuff, like school crushes and homework. You always kind of have to dumb things down a bit so they get it. And if you’re a normal adult, you don’t spend your time hanging out with kids.”

It made Vidan a bit uneasy. He didn’t like to think of himself as equivalent to a child in the eyes of other species. To the Church, humans were the superior race – the one chosen by the Eye. Some alien species had a secondary role as chosen – reproducibles, who could bear some offspring with humans, were considered worthy, though still to a lesser degree – but all high-sentient species were non-reps. Shelvore, though, wasn’t of the Church. Human superiority was a risible concept to him.

“Come off it”, he’d once said, rolling his eyes, on a night he and Vidan were alone at the station and engaged in yet another sterile debate. “If you’re so special, why did your god give those ‘non-reproducibles’ abilities you don’t have? It’s so self-centered.” Vidan had given him the general platitude about the Eye reserving some of its gifts only for the ultimate fulfillment of its wishes, keeping the full extent of its power for the truly worthy once they had proven themselves, but he had mostly tried to veer the conversation off the topic. Religious talk with Shelvore never went all that well for him.

He was torn away from his thoughts on high-sents by the chime of the door, sliding open for a new customer.

The new customer was a Cratean. Vidan had seen quite a few of them, and not just because they hailed from Karfue, a relatively nearby planet. In recent months, there had been an epidemic of them, ever since they had won the Center Council debate to establish their medical clinics in orbit around Vaneta. It had been a feverish and drawn out battle. On the one hand, Vanetan government fought tooth and nail to keep them out of its airspace. While the Crateans claimed to offer multiple medical services, there was no hiding that their main attraction was free, anonymous abortions – deemed sinful by the Church, and, therefore, a crime on Vaneta. On the other hand, the Crateans argued that they orbited just far enough off Vaneta – nowhere near the atmosphere – that they remained within the free market range and should be able to operate freely. Vanetan government argued back that a free medical service didn’t qualify under business dealings, but, eventually, Crateans had won the case with a simple loophole: adding a minuscule fee to their service to claim profit.

Ever since the ruling, Vanetan government had doubled down on reminders of the law, of the harsh punishment for baby murderers, of the harsher still judgment of the Eye for those that disrespected its will… And Crateans had been all over the nearby airspace.

Vidan could just about tell them apart enough that he could tell it wasn’t always the same one, but they all still looked very much alike to him. They came in different heights, with more or less fat on their long torso and somewhat diverging shapes to the nubs on their neck, and some of them looked to have lighter skin than others, but overall he felt there wasn’t much diversity in their looks. He figured perhaps it was a result of their parthenogenetic reproduction. When they came of age to reproduce, the tail of a Cratean would fall off and a new, small alien would grow from it. Vidan figured that didn’t make for a lot of genetic changes.

This one was somewhat short for their species, and tall for a human. Lanky, with skin the color of their planet’s desert sand and the same white blouse he’d seen on all the other ones. It seemed they’d taken to dressing up as doctors to legitimize themselves in the eye of the Vanetan population. Vidan doubted it worked very much.

Much like the Areedan previously, this customer had a wide smile plastered on their face, but unlike with the Areedan, this one didn’t seem at all genuine. Vidan knew that Crateans didn’t have natural facial expressions. They’d apparently taken to shaping their face into a facsimile of a grin whenever in the presence of humans, surely in an attempt to appear friendly, but so far the consensus seemed to be that it was creepy and unwelcome. Crateans, who couldn’t hear, see, read, or do much of anything with other people’s thoughts, seemed blissfully unaware of that fact.

“What can I do for you?”, Vidan asked as the alien approached the counter. This time he didn’t try too hard to stop his mind from running free. The rumors about Cratean abortion doctors – that they really were in it to sell human embryos as a delicacy back on their planet – were outrageous, but Vidan thought he might believe them. It was true Crateans enjoyed eggs and fetuses, both of which were a bit of a novelty on their parthenogenetic planet. It wasn’t too far-fetched to assume they weren’t wasting their time, knowledge and resources on providing a free medical service for a smaller, generally xenophobic planet which detested them for it just out of the goodness of their hearts. There had to be something to gain from it. He still couldn’t quite tell what he thought of it.

“45 cubes of oxygen, please”, said the Cratean. They had a soft, bright voice, and nearly no accent. Clearly their Common Tongue was very practiced. The only trace of their own language Vidan could hear was the odd inflection all of them had to the end of their sentences – an inappropriately cheerful rise that hardly fit the context. They handed Vidan a data card, which he took and swiped on the payment terminal.

“Right away”, Vidan said, and grabbed his bright yellow safety vest hidden underneath the counter. Morrey, who had finally finished his candy bar, cracked his neck and went for his coat.

“Well, I’m off for today, boys”, he went, ignoring the customer as he always did when Crateans were around. Morrey wholeheartedly believed the fetus-eating rumors, and he didn’t like them at all.

As Morrey headed for the back door, Shelvore checked his data patch for the time and remarked his break was indeed ending. With a sigh, he closed his book, put it into his messenger bag, and came back behind the counter.

“You still read on sheets”, said the Cratean, again with their same gleeful inflection.

“Yes”, Shelvore said in the curt way of a man who had had this remarked upon many times.

“If you’ll lead me to your vehicle”, Vidan offered. He knew Shelvore wasn’t much for small talk with customers.

“Of course”, the Cratean beamed, or at least appeared to, and the two of them headed outside.

The gas station was an entirely man-made satellite, but still, the owners had seen it necessary to plant grass and trees all over it, to make it look more welcoming – and perhaps also because it helped recycle the expensive oxygen in the costly artificial atmosphere. In the sky, Vaneta hung over them, massive, green and ochre. Vidan was slowly getting used to the sight.

He and the Cratean rounded the building to where their ship was parked in the back. Cratean ships had none of the sharp edges of Vanetan design, and none of its delicate lines, either. They were blunt, purposeful, clean, to the point: large, rounded white things, smooth all over. The lowered walkway was a gentle slope onto the marigold grass.

“What model is that?”, Vidan asked.

“A 3-26.” There were only so many types of Cratean ships, and their Common model matriculations were short and to the point. As Vidan recalled, 3-26s had their gas ports on the front end of the ship, just past the walkway lock.

Thankfully, the ship was parked right next to the oxygen tank, which meant he wouldn’t have to drag its heavy gas tube too far. He found the port easily enough, twisted it open, grabbed the handle of the tube and pulled it out. The Cratean watched, quietly, the forced smile still on their face. It made Vidan feel uneasy.

He had a bit of trouble screwing the port into the oxygen tank, but finally, he managed it. With a swipe of his data chip against the tank’s reader, he accessed the menu and selected 45 cubes.

“It is very costly, all this oxygen”, the Cratean said, apparently hoping to get a conversation going.

“I bet”, Vidan said.

“I am bringing it back to the clinic ship”, said the Cratean. “Your people breathe it so fast. Constantly I need to get more!”

“I’ll say”, Vidan said. He wasn’t too in the know of what Crateans breathed, or if they did, or how they generally sustained themselves, and he didn’t feel like asking either.

“We see many a human, in the clinic. A lot of business.”

“Mmm-hmm”, Vidan acquiesced, watching the number of cubes on the terminal slowly go down as they pumped into the ship.

“It is all that two-party reproduction. So very interesting. Do you have a-” the Cratean seemed to taste the word for a moment “- girlfriend?”

Crateans, who had no genders, always seemed delighted to discuss them with humans.

“I do”, said Vidan automatically. It was more of a lie than it was a truth. He’d met his “girlfriend” in a parlor in the underground of Vaneta’s Capital Island, one of those illicit bars were people partook in all the sin-crimes they could – drugs, excessive drinking and homosexual activities. Erevin was born a girl, he said, but he never felt like one. He never wanted to dress like girls did, or wear his hair like they did, or be pregnant like all fertile women were expected to on Vaneta; but he felt like himself, he said, when he could live a few hours as a man in the bars, where nobody questioned him. He’d told Vidan about it while they drank their souls out in a tiny, cramped booth of the E-767 Area parlor. Vidan didn’t get it, not really, but Erevin chopped his hair really short and wore trousers and men’s blouses, and he called himself a man, and so Vidan saw a man, and a handsome one at that.

But when he took Erevin to his family, he had to show off a girl. There was no other way they could be together in public.

“We don’t have to”, Vidan told him once, in the privacy of his room while they were home alone. “I could say we broke up, you wouldn’t have to act like a girl in front of them.”

Erevin had shrugged, looked at him with that sly smile he had sometimes.

“It doesn’t matter. I can’t be a man on Vaneta. No matter how I dress, or how I wear my hair, they can see it in my data chip, in my records… Someone would find out if I tried to pass for a guy anywhere but in a parlor. If I have to call myself a chick I might as well show you off.”

And then, leaning closer, and putting his hand on Vidan’s, he’d told him:

“When we make enough money, we can go off Vaneta together. We could go to Santina. They have – those hormones, there, and surgeries. I could look proper.”

And, surely, Erevin had to know he didn’t need Vidan to do that. He could make his own money, and go to Santina himself, get the treatments he needed, live the life he wanted. But he had to know, too, that Vidan wasn’t where he needed to be either. Because he liked men far more than he ever did women, and he’d never had a real girlfriend, only the fake girlfriend Erevin played out, and if Erevin left without him, in a few years he’d be miserable with a real wife in a pretend marriage. Maybe Santina was a way out for him, too.

So he’d taken this job at the gas station, while Erevin worked at a daycare planet-side, and they were putting away their money, biding their time. Soon, Erevin said when they met on their rare common days off. Soon.

“Is she” - the Cratean started, paused, again tasted the word - “pretty?”

Vidan hesitated – looked back towards the station, saw Shelvore still behind the counter, at a safe distance – and, in confidence, before he could try to stop himself, he said:

“Yeah, he is.”

The Cratean elongated their neck, in the way they did when they were pleased by something.

“I thought”, they said, curious, “that your girls people used the she, and your boys people used the he.”

“Typically so”, Vidan said, failing to find how to explain the situation he himself didn’t quite understand, but the alien just bobbed their head, seeming pleased with his answer.

The tank chimed the end of its delivery, and Vidan unscrewed the gas tube and brought it back into the ship.

“Well, here you go”, he said. The Cratean bobbed their head again, their neck elongated far enough that they were rather looming over him. He never liked when they did that. “You’re all set. Anything else I can do for you?”

“Nothing”, said the alien.

“Thank you for coming to the Mercurial Air gas station”, Vidan recited with his best customer service smile, “we hope to see you back soon and bid you a fair trip.”

“I will be back!” the Cratean confirmed, before they turned to the walkway, head still bobbing.

Vidan walked back around the station to the front, went behind the counter, and put the safety jacket back in its place. He felt a little dazed from his admission – to a complete stranger! To a customer! To an alien! - that his girlfriend wasn’t really a girlfriend. Perhaps it wasn’t how the Cratean had interpreted it – still, it felt like it. Never had he said it to anyone – certainly not his family, or any of his friends, but not anyone else either – no one he talked to on the data networks, and not even the people in the parlors who, surely, wouldn’t mind at all.

The expression on his face had to have been off, because Shelvore noticed.

“Did they say something weird to you?”

“Huh?”

“You’re making this face.”

Vidan considered it. On Santina, he knew, homosexuality wasn’t a sin-crime. Nothing was a sin-crime there, in fact; the government was separate from the Church, or any religion for that matter, and the crimes there were were only crimes, cut off from the notion of sin, of a god, of a judgment above humanity. Vidan sometimes wished Vaneta were the same. How good it must feel, he thought, to commit a crime and know the only wrong is a human moral, decided for human reasons, that you may freely disagree with, that you may debate.

“You have homosexuals on Santina”, said Vidan, tentative.

“Here we go”, Shelvore sighed, rolling his eyes. “Listen, I’ve had this conversation with Morrey already, alright – yes, it’s legal, no, I don’t have a problem with it, no, I don’t get why you do, yes, I think it’s dumb that you do. I don’t want to fight about it, so we can just go back to work.”

“I didn’t want to fight.”

“That’s what you Church people always say, but you always do want to fight. You just don’t want to yell.”

“I have a boyfriend”, Vidan said, very fast, like if he spit it out fast enough Shelvore wouldn’t hear it, or wouldn’t really get it.

There was a pause, a moment of silence in the empty station. Vidan’s heart fell into his stomach, and for a moment he knew – he knew Shelvore would report him to the station management, and they’d report him to the Church police back on Vaneta, and then he’d be investigated, and they’d find out about Erevin, and the two of them would be prosecuted, and they’d never go to Santina, and he had ruined it, not just for himself but for Erevin too, just because he couldn’t keep his big mouth shut--

“You do?”, Shelvore asked.

“I – Yes.”

“You told me you had a girlfriend.”

“I lied.” He looked down at his feet. But Shelvore didn’t seem upset, or disgusted – mostly just intrigued.

“No shit. How long has it been?”

“A year in two weeks.”

Shelvore nodded, thoughtful.

“What brought this up, then? Why tell me?” The remark we aren’t exactly close hung just under the surface.

“The – The Cratean, they asked about him. I told them.” And, so Shelvore could understand the gravity of the situation, he added, “It was the first time.”

“Congratulations”, Shelvore said, gave him a gentle clap on the shoulder. Shelvore wasn’t much for physical contact, typically. “I’ll buy you a soda.”

“We’re going to leave Vaneta.” Now that he’d started to tell, he had to get it all out. There was a gleeful need in him to spill it all out, to make it exist outside of the little sphere of Erevin and him and their lonesome intimacy. “We’re going to put money away and move to Santina, and he’s going to get those surgeries he needs to look like a guy.”

“Where are you planning to move?”, Shelvore asked as he made his way to the drinks selection. It felt like he was being too casual – like he didn’t get how enormous, how life-changing, how incredible it was to tell someone all this. He probably didn’t.

“I- I don’t know, yet. Wherever we can.”

Shelvore nodded. “You have my data, right? If you need… Well, I could help you find a place to stay.”

He hadn’t expected Shelvore to be anything but grossed-out – supportive hadn’t even crossed his mind. Vidan had thought they were only coworkers, perhaps friendly ones, but no more. Suddenly he found he was getting teary-eyed, and he tried to blink it away.

“You like Fizz-Risk, right?”

“Can I get an ice cream sandwich?”, Vidan said, instead of bursting into sobs.

Shelvore looked up at him, and smirked, and nodded again.

“Yeah, I’ll get you one.”

He grabbed one out of the freezers, and came back behind the counter, handed it to Vidan. It was very cold in his hands and he couldn’t resist the urge to press it to his burning forehead. His eyes were still wet, but thankfully his cheeks stayed dry.

“Thanks”, he said. Shelvore nodded, sat on the counter (they weren’t supposed to, but no one was there).

“No problem”, he said, and then he paused, looking for words. Finally, he gave Vidan one of his rare smiles. “Thanks for telling me, anyway.”

Vidan wanted to thank him for listening, and for being nice about it, and for wanting to help, but he knew he’d garble up the words – so he unwrapped the sandwich, and started eating.

#Writeblr #ofcolourtracking #wtwcommunity #writersociety #Sci-fi writing #LGBT writing #Short story #My writing

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vrokhakan · 3 years

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Another day away from his homeworld- away from his life and all his accomplishments. Back on Mido he had been somebody. Not famous or rich. But somebody. Field commander of a prominent private military contractor. And he'd worked very hard to get there. But here fresh on Sigma Rhada he had less clout than a two year old. The only meaning the name Vrok Hakan held here was a monthly lease in a ratty apartment building and a growing tab at the liquor store. At least the people were familiar. There were pockets of midoans scattered throughout the planet- most of the ones in this community were made up of refugees. People who were tired of the skirmshes between the city and forest dwellers or had lost everything because of them. Back home the two sides fought incessently. Here they were just happy to have more of their kind around. A midoan of either side was better than none at all.

Vrok pushed aside the front door of the low quality apartment building and climbed up the steps. The sounds of each room bled out into the hallway into a racket that made him miss the street noise. A hand planted onto his chest and broke through the fog of alcohol that kept his mind dwelling on the differences from his homeworld. Fingers snapped in front of his eyes and he craned his head down at the man who'd stopped him in the hallway. The man was older than Vrok- he'd been an adult more than half his life by this point- and dressed way too loudly to live in this part of the neighborhood.

"Hey. Did you hear me? I said: Do. You. Live. Here."

He pushed the man's hand away from his face, "Why do you care?"

"It's collections time," the man said, speaking in a way he might to somebody who was either simple or didn't understand their language.

"I already paid rent this month."

"What? No not rent- Oh I see. You must be new here. This isn't for rent. Everybody in the building chips in a small fee each month for security. It helps keep the bounty hunters from moving in here."

"Let them come here. What are they going to do? Steal the refrigerator out of my apartment? Because that's the only thing in there worth taking. And even then the damn thing rattles all night."

The man shook his head and spoke with a waning level of patience that already seemed low to begin with. "Look, bud, don't make this hard. Everyone here pays."

"Not everyone," Vrok said and pushed his way passed. The haze returned and when it cleared Vrok was climbing onto the couch of his living room with an old itchy blanket tugged over the thick orange and red-tipped fur of his arms. A thankfully dreamless sleep took over until being broken by a loud knock on his door. He sat up and took a deep breath, pinching between his tired eyes then turning to look out the window. Mid-day from the look of it. The day had started without him and it looked like he'd have to play catchup.

He groaned and tossed the blanket aside, unraveling where his wifebeater was bunched from a night of tossing and turning. "Just give me a minute, fuck," he muttered and grabbed a dark bottle on the table across from the couch. He shook it about and sighed. Empty. He'd have to do another beer run once he was done with whoever this was. The midoan took a deep breath and sighed standing up. Another knock, "Yeah I hear you. I'm coming, shit."

He walked across the room to the door and pulled it open. Vision flashed white and a shock of pain shot through his nose. He stumbled backwards and fell to the floor.

Through the pain he could hear voices, "Yeah that's the one."

Another pain the size of a boot flared up in his stomach and then another in his back.

"Let's just see if you've got more than a dying refrigerator in here."

Another hit to the face left Vrok curled into a ball and covering as much of himself as he could. But no matter where he covered they always managed to find an equally bad spot to hit.

"Well damn I guess he wasn't lying. Look at this shit. The most he's got is a bar's worth of empty bottles."

"Hey, Arn! Take a look at this."

"Hoho. Maybe I spoke too soon. This armor should be worth quite a bit."

Vrok's ears perked up and his eyes opened wide. The pain flaring up through his body seemed to dull down and the heat flushed from his face. "Don't you touch that armor!" he yelled out.

"Think of it as a late fee for missing your security payment."

The midoan scrambled to his feet, barely even registering the kick to his mouth on his way up. One of the men caught him by the fabric of his shirt and held him in place. The alien was much stockier than a midoan and even if Vrok was strong for his species it was still too much to overpower him. The one holding him spoke something that went unheard to Vrok as the man from the day before came into view carrying pieces of white and red body armor. His eyes widened at the sight of his last connection to his previous life went strolling out towards the door.

His hand lowered down to his side and fingers wrapped around the neck of the bottle he'd checked earlier. Vrok swung it up and into the alien's head. Glass shattered and left the man reeling back. He charged the alien to their side who'd helped with the beating and drove the remnants of the bottle up into his throat. Vrok held the dying alien up and looked to his belt. If there was one thing Sigma Rhada had plenty of it was cheap guns like the one he found nestled in the waistline of the alien's pants.

He pulled it and turned to find the glassed alien charging at him. He fired two shots into him and side-stepped the falling body. Another of the men was caught mid-draw and Vrok fired three rounds into him. The clatter of his armor could still be heard over the ringing in his ears and he turned to see it all in a pile on the floor with the man from yesterday running out of the room and down into the hallway. Vrok fired a shot that clipped him through his gaudy jacket and left a red spray on the wall. The sound of hurried footsteps told him the man had lived. The ringing of his ears couldn't mask the gurgling of the man beneath him squirming around with the remnants of a bottle still in his neck and Vrok fired the last shot of the weapon into him.

The midoan adjusted his armor where he had re-placed it on the mannequin in his closet. It was all squared away now. His eyes glanced outside of the bedroom where the gunsmoke had tripped the smoke detector. Vrok shut the door and sighed, moving back to wave the smoke away from the chirping machine. At least he knew the landlord hadn't cheapened out on faulty detectors.

He dropped back down to the couch and took a deep breath. He glanced over at the two... three bodies on the floor and the gun on the table. He tested another bottle on the floor beside the table. Empty.

"Holy sh- You killed them," came a bewildered voice from the hallway.

"Nah, they were like that when I got here," Vrok said dryly and tossed the empty bottle back to the floor. He turned to look at the voice through a quickly swelling eye. "Don't tell me you're going to miss them."

"No. No not at all. Those Rever thugs have been shaking us down every month for years."

"Yeah? Surprised this didn't happen earlier then."

"Nobody here's a fighter," he said shaking his head. The white-furred midoan stepped in over the bodies. "In fact, I was a doctor back on Mido. I work in the clinic over on 53rd. I could take a look at those gashes if you want."

"Veda, is everything okay over there?" another voice called from the hallway.

"Yeah! It's all fine! Hey, could you go grab the medkit from my bedroom?"

Soon a small crowd of the apartment tenets had gathered around, some coming by to chat about the ordeal or to catch a glimpse of the fiery midoan who had put an end to the long time thugs. The stronger stomached ones hepled scrub away the blood and glass. A handful of off duty 'cleaners' even helped take the bodies away. By the end of the day Vrok had been introduced to nearly every tenet there. His room was full of gifts from various foods to new decorations and even a new blanket. The bottles were cleaned up, stains were gone, and there was a standing fan cooling the place down and thinning out the thick humid air. Vrok didn't understand it but he wasn't about to refuse a few upgrades to his living situation. Even if it was only making a dead end life somewhat more comfortable.

A few days had passed by and Vrok had become more familiar with the people living around him already. The man didn't try to be social but he would get stopped now and again by his neighbors for a conversation and over time he started to learn their names. They were nice enough but didn't quite seem to understand that Vrok just wanted to be alone. If it weren't for the need to visit the liquor store then he would have merely held himself up in his room. But there was no avoiding it.

Given how fast the news traveled about his run in with the thugs he shouldn't have been surprised the day he returned to somebody waiting for him. One of the women from the floor above him was surrounded a few of the tenets. All outside of his door.

"Vrok! Thank the gods you're here. These men came to my husband's store. They started asking about money and smashing things and they started to attack him! He told me to find help- a couple of the people from here went to help but you're the only one of us who has actually fought these people."

He didn't know how to respond. He merely stared at her blankly and shook his head. "Why do you think I want to get involved with all that?"

"We don't have much but we could pay you.. something at least."

Another voice chimed in from the group, "I'll throw something in too."

"Me too," came from the other side of the crowd.

Vrok opened his mouth to respond but the desperate eyes of the woman and the crowd all on him caught the refusal in his throat.

"I guess I could use the money. Alright. Hold on," he said and squeezed his way passed them and into his room.

"Fuck me man," he mumbled and pulled a handgun from a holster on his armor. "Don't get me mixed in with this shit," he checked the chamber and tucked the weapon into his waistline. "I just want to lay around here in peace until I fucking die, is that too much to ask?" He popped the top off of a bottle and took one quick mouthful before hurrying back outside.

The store was easy to find. He could hear the commotion from a block or two away. When he arrived the windows had been smashed out and the inside wasn't much better. The store looked like a bomb had gone off inside. Shelves were on their side, products were smashed and strewn all over, and the group who had set off to help were shouting at three aliens. Two of the aliens were holding off the crowd with their weapons drawn while the third had a midoan by the throat against the wall. The man who must have been the woman's husband looked dead already- if he wasn't then it would be a roll of the dice if he pulled through.

Vrok ran his fingers through his mohawk and took a deep breath. He hadn't taken any money yet. He could just walk away.

At least until eyes had turned on the new arrival.

"We don't need any more of a crowd in here. The store's closed, get out," one of the lookouts said.

"I'm a friend of his," Vrok nodded to the bloodied midoan. "I'm not leaving until you do."

"Hold on. Doesn't this guy look like the one Arn was telling us about?" the other one asked with his eyes squinted over at Vrok.

The other one started to nod, "You know what, I think he does."

Vrok saw their weapons turn towards him.

"Hey, why don't you come a bit closer so we can talk a little," one said.

Vrok looked between the two of them. Eyes met. Vrok drew his weapon in a way he'd trained to hundreds of times before. Unlike before he wasn't reliant on the bottom tier garbage of Sigma Rhada. This was his weapon. A mounted sight settled on the first guard's head and he fired two shots. Before he'd even seen the result he had already switched to the other. They had fired already but weren't ready for it and their rounds went into the floor. Vrok's hit home.

It had only been a second or two but the men were dead before the crowd even began to scatter. The third thug dropped the midoan and held his hands up. A shocked expression was plastered on his face and he looked between the two and then up to Vrok. "Woah woah. Hold on. Don't do anything stupid-" A shot blew through his head.

"Get him to the clinic," Vrok said motioning to the beaten store owner.

Two days went by. Vrok heard through the conversations going around the building that the woman's husband survived even if he still hadn't woken up. True to her word she'd paid a small amount- he hadn't expected much. Not from anybody who had to live in that dump but especially not a near-widow with a decimated store. The crowd funding had made it worth while, though. Apparently all together the building could come up with a nice little sum. Suddenly Vrok understood why somebody would run a protection racket on it. If he made that kind of money each month he'd have nothing to worry about.

A knock on his door broke his concentration. This was starting to become a trend. He wasn't about to be taken by surprise again. He picked his gun up off the table and checked through the peephole. It was one of the more active midoans around the building. One of the few who had at least made the effort to show up to the store. Even if he hadn't done anything meaningful in the end. Vrok remembered him as Kino.

Vrok answered the door, "Yeah?"

"Vrok. Those guys you killed a few days ago? Word finally got around to the Reavers. People are saying they're on their way to the store and they're going to burn it down."

He shrugged at him, "And where do I come into this? It's not my store."

"Please, Vrok. These people left everything on Mido. That store is all they have. And if it burns down the fire's going to spread to the other buildings. Other people's lives are going to be ruined too."

"Well... I guess last time I got paid.."

"We gave you everything we could spare for that, Vrok." He glanced side to side, desperate to come up with anything. Then his eyes widened, "A bounty! A lot of those Reavers probably have a bounty on them. You could make much more than what we paid you last time- maybe even triple if you're lucky!"

"A bounty, huh?" Vrok rubbed his chin. He always had a rule back on Mido. Never take a job where payment is a gamble. But this wasn't Mido and he couldn't just hop over to another city to get a better contract. "Alright. But you guys are going to actually help me this time."

He sent Kino off to go collect the others. When they returned weapons in hand they found Vrok standing tall in a suit of red, white, and black armor. He slid a cigar out from a plastic wrapping and ran a knife around the back of it.

"We're all here, Vrok. You ready?"

Vrok lit the cigar and blew a puff of sweet wood smelling smoke. He nodded, "Yeah. Let's go put out a fire."

#drabble #beginnings

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arda-tourism-board · 4 years

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My writing (part 1)

I know nobody wants to hear about it, but I've been writing the same stories but slightly to the left each time since 2013 so I may as well share them. I haven't published anything, but i’m hoping to one day.

Also every time i do “quotes” it’s not a quote it’s just words to that effect.

Lillith (part 1)

Lillith (More/many) and Lucian (either enchantment or indebted) (the names were a joke about chosen ones that got out of hand), twin descendants of Arwen and Aragorn, recieve a Silmaril in their parent's will and they now have to hide it. An accident throws them back to the year 2000, before they've even been born, and they suddenly have to navigate the year in a new country, discovering the truth behind their long lost heritage while dodging the unawakened reborn Fëanorions and their "father", Kane Fey.

They start this by almost being run over by Nimrodel, who takes them in for some reason without question.

They don’t recognise them at first in the slightest, and Lucian (now Lukas) strikes up a friendship with “Tyler” before Nimrodel strikes it down.

They manage to befriend them, but things get more complicated when the eldest, "Russell," begins to remember who he was, and seems to recognise Lillith and her real name.

Without the binding of the oath, the Fëanorions are friendlier, less rageful, but their past life haunts them.

Lillith is apparently almost identical to someone they knew in Aman, who had a long affair and children with Caranthir, and disappeared with them around three years before the death of Finwë.

Lillith, who remembers nothing of this, and is most definitely human, is confused to say the least, but they just chalk it down to coincidence.

She and Caranthir - Matt - get closer anyway, but it doesn't work out because she feels he's trying to replace her with her apparent double.

Lucian gets involved with Idrillien - explain later - and begins getting involved with rediscovering their heritage even more. Lillith avoids them due to the political issues surrounding the Silmaril, opting to hide it instead.

Cut to 2020. Lillith has the Silmaril, and an accident occurs where she, her younger self, and her brother, are thrown back in time. This completes the 2020-2000 loop, and starts an 80,000 year loop.

Lillith (part 2) girl falls into middle earth is like, my brand.

Lillith is under a land with only starlight, the desert surrounding her and the only thing in her possession being the Silmaril.

In a fit of madness she eats it (yes I know the plot point is weird but stick with me). This connects her to the two trees, and gives her youth.

She eventually finds her way out of the desert and reaches the path of Eldar heading to Aman.

She joins them, learning the language with them and realising that she's in Arda. This is confirmed when they encounter Oromë, and he points at her and goes "wtf you're not an elf."

She ends up living in Alqualondë, but when she meets a young Morifinwë, she realises that the person she'd been jealous of and thought he was trying to replace her with was herself.

They have three children. Lillith refuses marriage. Marriage would bind her to stay by his side, and she knows what's coming next.

She steals her daughters away to Ennor, and spend the rest of her days in Rhûn, avoiding watching the inevitable.

In the end she falls in love with a Lindi (Nandorin) elleth, Ovranen (abound). Together they travel the world, visiting the most Eastern and Southern continents, eventually returning to Arda and Lillith finally meets Arwen and Aragorn, and finds out the fate of her daughters.

The first, named Helleneth (Sky Maiden), went to Doriath, and met and married Thranduil, a Sindarin Lord. She met her fate to grief from the loss of her fourth child, stolen from the crib (plot point for later on). At this, she confessed her heritage and was banished from Eryn Lasgalen, but an incident meant that everyone thought she was dead. She travelled to the Grey Havens under a new name, Lalyanon (traveller), and sailed home.

The second, named Kemeninya (Earth maiden), stayed in the North, living in Gondolin for a time, but when it fell, ran Northwards, eventually joining with the rangers of the North.

The third, named Rúnanen (freer), eventually rejoined with her father, and joined the Ñoldorin cause. She met the same fate as her father, run through with a sword, but instead dying at the gates of Sirion.

Lillith visits Kemeninya, now going by Dolenath (hidden), and they reconnect.

Lillith and Ovranen then recount their travels for archive, and then continue to travel, never settling down.

80,000 years old, Lillith calls on Nimrodel, and asks her for a favour. Take care of her brother.

Lost

I know crossovers are literally the worst thing in the world but I don't care so you can pry this one from my cold, dead, hands. There’s some romance in this one, but it doesn’t come until much, much, later.

Haruka, a Jedi master, on the run from the Empire, discovers a backwater world where she can disguise herself perfectly. Almost too perfectly. The customs throw her at first but she’s trained to adapt to anything.

She clips a translator to her ear, and she gets a job as a servant in Imladris.

Everyone thinks she's really young, and they're right. She's 32, and elves aren't fully matured until they're 50, but nobody told her that. She wasn't even aware she shared a species with them. Or anyone.

She's more concerned about the fact she needs to hide her left leg because it's made of metal and could rat her out to one of the very criminal merchants that could know about the Empire’s very large bounty on her head.

She does manage to evade the merchants, but when she leaves her leg on her bed at some point she has to explain that,,, maybe she isn’t local.

A diplomatic visit from Eryn Lasgalen in the form of the Crown Prince does change things though. Celeberyn points straight at Haruka and goes “you look exactly like my little brother. That’s weird.”

She’s panicking now because she actually has no idea where she came from, and just nods, and goes, “cool.”

Internally she’s freaking out because he mentioned that said brother had a missing identical twin (yes, you heard me, identical) and now she’s trying to figure out if she’s ok to exist here, cause she’s come across a lot of cultures and there isn’t a 100% track record with that.

After a long day of asking people random questions, she figures out that she’s fine here.

Her translator chip finally breaks (one of the twins stepped on it) and she just doesn’t talk to anyone for a month straight.

She turns 50, and offhandedly mentions it to someone because she’s kinda surprised she hasn’t aged yet and they just go what

Turns out she’s meant to go to school and stuff. And learn to write. That isn’t a class thing here, so they’re super concerned because this is a baby and she only has one leg and can’t write who did this to her

Turns out going “oh yeah I was a general in this war” when prompted to explain the situation has so many questions raised.

Everything is pieced together between her and Lisbeth, the youngest after her, in a clearing.

Turns out Haruka is the long lost twin “prince” of Eryn Lasgalen, stolen by someone looking to make a quick buck by selling her to the Jedi because of her hypersensitivity to the force. (elves are born very far and few between)

She swears Lisbeth to secrecy, but it all comes out when Legolas visits Imladris and demands to speak to her.

Turns out they’re linked, even across galaxies, and whenever she went through great physical or emotional trauma, he felt it, but Haruka learned to block out her emotions a long time ago, so never felt any of his. (Turns out that’s why her phantom pains are so realistic, because she was feeling the sensations on his leg to compensate.)

She is unable to deny the fact of her identity now, but she (rightly) refuses to go by her birth name, mainly because Haruka has been her name from the start anyway (it’s gender neutral).

She decides instead of facing her family, she’ll go back into space (because flat earth arda for elves is a mindset and she’s never even heard of it).

She manages (somehow) to find a merchant, and doesn’t realise she’s been followed by Elrohir until she’s dropped off on Lothal and he taps her on the shoulder like “hey where are we and what are all these creatures i’m scared”

She drags him with her to meet with the new Republic, and she gets a new translator chip, leg, and dyes her hair for fun (this is stressful she deserves the dark blue hair).

They eat lunch at a street café, and have a long conversation about Haruka’s torrid backstory. They don’t bond, but they do become friends.

Before, their dynamic was “random servant number 5″ and “lord” but now it’s “jedi master” and her “friend who only knows three words.”

She offers to take him home, but he declines on the basis that home will be there a lot longer than this will.

They start working together at the new republic. Turns out Elrohir makes an excellent fake body guard (he can fight but that’s not the point), and Haruka helps bring some of the old Jedi practices into the new order.

When the new jedi order falls, Haruka steals as many of the students away and takes them and Elrohir back to Arda.

They chill out in Imladris, hiding out for a few years before Haruka remembers that she left because she was avoiding the whole family situation, and has to confront the fact that she is royalty, and finally meets her dad (her mother’s fate is discussed above).

It goes a lot better than expected. The first thing he asks about is why she’s a woman, and it’s awkward, but they eventually fall into a good conversation.

Haruka thinks, “hey, maybe I can exist here in a family.”

But at the same time she’s got her found family in Imladris (cause you know she basically got adopted the minute she, a child, mentioned that she’d been in a war) (have i read too many salvage fics? yes. will i now compare elrond to hakoda? yes. you saw it here first folks only in this story she’s adopted by the entire serving staff.)

Haruka doesn’t venture to the stars for another for hundred years. For now, she’s just content on Arda. She takes to the stars again sometime after the end of the third age, now bored and eager to explore again. Elrohir comes with her. Together they build a new found family and crew, exploring the galaxy.

Part 2 coming soon

#my writing

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